Last August, when I was at the Sci Foo camp, Paul Sereno brought along the skull of one of his latest discoveries…and whoa, is it ever a weird one. This is Nigersaurus taqueti, an herbivorous dinosaur with specializations for ground-level grazing. Look at this picture; in reality, it's even more striking.
Those jaws and teeth—they are so neatly squared off and flat-edged. In addition, the skull itself on the spinal column is turned habitually downward. This is a creature that kept its face pressed to the ground as it nibbled its way across the landscape.
Another feature that was apparent is that the skull is awesomely light — it's mostly empty spaces with a delicate webwork of bony struts holding it together. It's so specialized it's almost comical, and you can imagine something like this appearing on the Flintstones as a lawn mower or hedge trimmer.
Bora has more, and you can read the original on PLoS.
Sereno PC, Wilson JA, Witmer LM, Whitlock JA, Maga A, et al. (2007) Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur. PLoS ONE 2(11): e1230. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001230
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Very strange. I don't see any molars...how did it chew up the vegetation, I wonder?
No molars. The whole skull is so delicate that it's clearly not a grinding machine -- it's a nipper. The big guy must have had a gizzard full of gastroliths to do the grinding.
Ohhh... Neat...
Cool critter.
Maybe gastroliths?
A very extreme and cool bit of adaptation. Our girl may have had a complex gastro-intestinal tract somewhat along the lines of a cow as well as or instead of a gizzard full of gastroliths. The rarity of soft tissue fossilization does leave a lot open to speculation.
Thank you PZ for this bit of cutting edge science.
This is what was predicted for a low, or ground grazer to look like by many people. This is another find that was predicted by one group, that is already being used by another group to back its ideas, despite the fact it contradicts them...
The extreme long neck sauropods simply do not require all that neck to feed, and the prediction was that you would get a much shorter neck oriented downwards, with a mouth well selected for a ground surface, if and when you found a true low grazer...
The idea that this animals neck-skull joint indicates all diplodocids to be grazers is ridiculous, as the same angle would be used for an animal that reared-up to feed in the trees, and this has always been the position of those stating high feeding strategies.
Put wheels on that thing and a comfy seat and it looks like a nice riding mower!
So, now that we've found more Flintones-related fossil evidence, what's it going to take to admit that we all co-habitated several thousand years ago in the town of Bedrock? A bird with a beak specialized to play 1960s-style LPs? Evidence of massive callouses on the feet of prehistoric men from their use as car brakes?
Wow, that is strange. Is there anything alive today with a jaw like it?
My, what big EYES it has.
I hope to hear more about how this thing likely fit in.
@1, etc.
This critter is a sauropod, so no molars and no chewing. There is some (equivocal, admittedly) evidence of gastroliths (and thus a gizzard) in several other sauropods, so that's probably pretty likely.
The adaptations we see here--the broad muzzle, small teeth concentrated at the front of the mouth like a living garden rake, naturally down-turned head--are common (not synapomorphic, but very, very common) in other "low-browser" sauropods like _Diplodocus_ and its kin. Its just that these other sauropods do not take it to the extreme seen here (i.e., the muzzles of these other sauropods are broad and blunted, but not THAT broad and blunted).
This critter took the trend and ran with it.
5 bucks says this will be used to support "evidence" of design... a higher intelligence obviously wished their lawns to be properly groomed and thus, designed the lawnmowersaurus.
Was there already much grass when that dinosaur lived?
My previous understanding was that grass as a dominating plant
only developed after the dinosaurs were long finished.
Or was he only limited to a limited habitat which had lots of grass
early?
How do they know it was specialized for grazing and not other plants anyways?
By remarkable coincidence (and it really was that and nothing else), a second very odd sauropod was also published today - but it's known from somewhat less complete remains than Nigersaurus (to put it mildly). It's called Xenoposeidon and has been sat in a museum collection for over a century: more here.
Recent work indicates that sauropods didn't use gastroliths after all (Wings 2007), but mostly relied on hindgut fermentation.
Ref - -
Wings, O. 2007. A review of gastrolith function with implications for fossil vertebrates and a revised classification. em>Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 52, 1-16.
re: #12
Nope, no true grasses yet. Some monocots, some of which may have been grass-like (protograss?). Low-growing ferns, cycads, and conifers would have been the groundcover (and likely this guy's diet).
@10, actually, no other diplodocoid even approaches the cranial specializations in this thing, particularly the orientation of the muzzle with respect to the ground.
@12, no grass, not at ~110Ma in Gondwana (at least not that we have found evidence of thusfar...).
The orientation of the head alone points rather strongly at grazing. It has wear facets on the teeth that aren't the result of tooth/tooth contact (though it has those as well), and there is such a ridiculously small amount of bone mass in the lower jaw and in the front of the cranium versus the rear, that it doesn't seem feasible that Nigersaurus was going after anything other than pretty soft fare (maybe ferns and such).
For a moment there, I thought you were a racists. Otherwise, pretty cool.
Sereno is speaking at the National Geographic Society headquarters in D.C. tomorrow (Friday) at 7:30 p.m. Possibly already sold out -- check Event for information.
But...how did it manage to graze while it was on the ark?
Lawnmower? I dunno. According to the authors it is unlikely that this animal ate grasses as its family predates the appearance of grass. Besides, without molars, grasses would be very hard to eat. They think it ate mosses and ferns. Makes much more sense.
Re #14/#15. Thanks for the confirmation. I was starting to doubt myself.
Perhaps I'm weak on terminology. Doesn't "grazing" imply
that there is grass available?
So either term is not correct here or if it was really grazing
it would be evidence for enough grass like plants existing already
at 110Ma, right?
BTW while googling on this I found a vague reference on some Indian
scientists having discovered grass in dinosaur feces. Surprised me again. Is that possible?
Here is an excellent educational website on this 'saur, lots of pix, movies of rotating skulls, braincasts, etc. etc.
In there somewhere is the term "fern-mower."
"...complex gastro-intestinal tract somewhat along the lines of a cow"
As mentioned above, elephant-like hindgut fermentation is more likely for sauropods than cow-like foregut fermentation.
Darren (#13): Surely gastrolith use and hindgut fermentation are not incompatible...may I ask why the reference cited dismisses the possible use of gastroliths in sauropods?
Grazer isn't plant-type specific. It's a mechanism of feeding, like browser, which isn't specific to any one kind of foliage. So no, that we hypothesize a given extinct form was a grazer doesn't imply that there were grasses around at the time to graze upon.
I'm not familiar with the grass/coprolite paper you're referring to. We've found bone bits in certain coprolites that we've been able to pin to the "family" level and plant fragments to which some taxonomic identifications have been pinned (within some error bars of course). So yeah, its possible.
What's the age we're dealing with in the Indian paper?
Yes, the term "grazing" usually refers to eating grass. People often use the term for any low-to-the-ground herbivory, though (I prefer the term "low-browsing" for that behavior, but that's just me).
I take it you mean the "grass" phytoliths in the (sauropod, I think) coprolite from a couple years ago? Yeah. As I mentioned above, monocots are known from the Cretaceous, and there is some evidence (these phytoliths included) of grasses, or closely related grass-like monocots at least, in the Cretaceous. Grasses certainly were not dominant in any way until well after the Cretaceous, though.
Re #22 Haven't found the actual paper or an age, just vague references
(no real cite) somewhere else. Prillotashekta might know something
more concrete.
Sigh...I was just being lazy...hoping to avoid a GEOREF search for a paper I should have already frickin' read... No worries.
Nork,
Check a dictionary, from Merriam-Webster online:
"intransitive verb. 1: to feed on growing herbage, attached algae, or phytoplankton. 2: to eat small portions of food throughout the day. transitive verb. 1 a: to crop and eat in the field b: to feed on the herbage of. 2 a: to put to graze 'grazed the cows on the meadow' b: to put cattle to graze on. 3: to supply herbage for the grazing of"
Nothing just about grass in the definition of graze. As my English 102 Prof advised, never assume you know the definition of any word. Best essay assignment I had in that class was about a definition of just one simple word, I was assigned scram.
Should I presume from "hind gut fermentation" this is not a creature one would want to be downwind of?
Etymologically, graze is to grass as glaze is to glass.
But I had a glazed doughnut for breakfast yesterday and I'm pretty sure there was no glass in it.
@28
brilliant
noncarborundum, now I worry why my wife wanted me to eat all those glazed doughnuts last night.
This was the phytolith in dino coprolite paper:
Vandana Prasad, Caroline A. E. Strömberg, Habib Alimohammadian, Ashok Sahni "Dinosaur Coprolites and the Early Evolution of Grasses and Grazers" Science 18 November 2005: Vol. 310. no. 5751, pp. 1177 - 1180.
The paper indicates Phytoliths from 5 taxa of Poaceae subclades identified in coprolites from the latest K of India.
Josh, still no real cite, but this popular article summarizes
the paper (and also incidently answered most of my earlier questions;
should have googled first)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1118_051118_grass_dinos…
@True Bob:
I'm still working on why KevinC's prof assigned him the word "scram". ;-)
Very cool. I just have a question about the paper (not about the work). It ends with an "author contributions" section in which the specific contributions of each author are enumerated. Is this common in biology? Is it a requirement of the journal? I've never seen anything like that.
I've been on a couple of (CS) papers where one or two co-authors probably wouldn't have been included if their contributions had to be explicitly identified.
Nigersaurus taqueti, an herbivorous dinosaur with specializations for sending 411 scam emails...
:)
KevinC, are you sure you were assigned 'scram', or were you assigned to scram?
It was the process. He assigned common words that one would assume one would know the definitions of. I even found one for scram the professor did not know and he had assigned that word before. A nuclear reactor can be scrammed, i.e., an emergency shutdown.
@31 and 32. Yeah...thanks. I just grabbed that article finally. Huh...lastest Maastrichtian. ~65Ma. Maybe I do recall that. Depending on whose reconstructions you pay attention to, Indo-Madagascar was already separated from Antarctica at 110Ma or was just about to pull away. Says some interesting things about the possible evolution of grasses, but regardless, probably no grass in North Africa at 110Ma. Not that it has anything to do with Nigersaurus browsing, but pretty cool nonetheless.
Is it a requirement of the journal? I've never seen anything like that.
It isn't that common, but some journals want it.
It's way, way beyond all descriptions. The lower temporal fenestra is in front of the eye. The upper temporal fenestra is gone. All teeth, without one exception, are part of the precisely straight toothrows that are broader than the rest of the skull. The snout points almost vertically downward. The vertebrae are hollow -- not foamy, but hollow. It boggles the mind!
Not going to fossilize, but we can expect specializations in the ankles and knees, at least...
Nope -- neither alive nor dead.
Fig. 4 of the paper is a tree.
The paper says ferns and horsetails and doesn't mention mosses... that said, horsetails are actually ferns... :-)
No.
ARGH! I mean predictions.
ancient car of Steve Urkel
http://www.fresh99.com/images/steveurkelscar/iz2003-04.jpg
..proof of ID:)
Isn't there an animatronic Fred Flintstone mowing his lawn with one of these at the creationist museum while Wilma vacuums with a mini-mastodon?
I am really struggling to remember my botany/biochem but doesn't the fact that it is eating non-grasses mean that a strict comparison with modern grazers like cows is not that helpful? Grass has a high celluose content which means it stores high energy amounts but requires a long or complex digestive tract to break it down (e.g. 5 stomachs in cows, specialised enzymes/bacteria). Ferns and mosses will require some form of fermentation/maceration but it may have different consequences for digestive layout. What would be a modern equivalent?
Ooh.
Any guess how big the eyes were, from the skull shape?
I'm imagining big brown horse eyes with eyelashes (nocturnal animal).
@44. It isn't that strict a comparison.
There are some press photos on the National Geographic website. Included are some reconstructions. There are sclerotic rings preserved in some diplodocoids and so Sereno et al. used one to infer eyeball size.
RE: Graze
Just to show that I did pay attention in historical geology:
The advent of herbivorous gastropods caused another dramatic event: the final decline of stromatolites [Fig. 10.20]. Although these cyanobacterial mats were first grazed in the earliest Cambrian...
Dott, R.H. and Prothero, D.R, 1994. Evolution of the Earth, 5th ed.
It's funny, in a strange and geeky way, that I just dug out my old text the other day in response to the post on Donald Prothero's new book, Evolution and Fossils. I guess that good writing is timeless.
http://projectexploration.org/nigersaurus/index.htm
has all the artist's conceptions one could ever want. It's shown with small eyes.
#44: for an herbivore, cellulose is cellulose.
Modern tortoises and iguanas are pretty good hindgut fermenters.
"Those jaws and teeth--they are so neatly squared off and flat-edged."
...that they MUST have been designed by a Creator!!1!
;)
Just back from the press conference. Here are soem of the details:
* Nigersaurus (named after the country Niger, not the country Nigeria) has a skull that faced downwards in natural position (as can be reconstructed by the position of the lateral semicircular canal)
* Since this predates the Maastrichtian Stage grasses (oldest currently known), and since its adaptations are enhancements of those already present in Late Jurassic diplodocoids, they aren't for grazing per say (i.e., grass-eating). They do seem to be for ground browsing (i.e., grazing on non-grass). Sereno et al. peg the likely candidates as ferns, horsetails, and (by the Early Cretaceous) basal angiosperms.
* This critter is very weird by shifting most of the temporal region (the bones and structures normally on the side of the skull just behind the eyes) onto the backwards-facing (occipital) part of the skull.
* It's a little guy: only the size of an Indian elephant!
Very cool stuff.
*Josh smacks the other Josh*
Follow up to question #1:
While dinosaurs don't have distinction between incisors, canines, premolars, and molars, the maxillary teeth (that is, the teeth that are normally lining the sides of the upper jaw) are all up front! That is one of the superweird aspects of the dino: the tooth row that would normally be aligned parallel to the length the skull has all been moved up right to the front. Sereno mentioned how puzzling this was when they found the isolated bones, and how it took them awhile to realize they were oriented the way they are.
Its not "an herbivorous dinosaur" its "a" herbivorous dinosaur. You don't say "an horse" or "an hat", its "a horse" and "a hat". "A" before a word that starts with consonants like "h" and "an" before words that start with vowels like "e".
Ah, I was wondering where Holtz was on this one.
"It's a little guy: only the size of an Indian elephant"
Do you know how funny that sentence looks to a herpetologist (or pretty much any neontologist, for that matter)?
Not our problem that all of your data are stupidly small :P
No more research needed on this .. obviously it is intelligently designed :)
Randi, "herbivorous" can be pronounced with or without an initial aspiration. If you choose to pronounce it without, then "an" is the appropriate article.
If you disagree with this, check back here in a hour and we can discuss it.
Not sure what you mean by an aspiration, but in any event you're wrong.
Randi
The rule in proper English grammar is to use the article "an" if the "h"is silent eg you would say "an hour". The article "a" is used when the "h" is pronounced eg a horse.
Using that rule we'll allow the term "an Herbivore" because we realise you Yanks don't pronounce the "h" at the start of the word herb like the rest of the world does.
But then we also pronounce the second "i" in aluminium. Just saying.
By aspiration he means pronounciation of the dominating letter, in this case the "h". He is making my point that some people pronounce the "h" in herbivore and some do not so if you do not( and you are very likely to be North American is you don't) then "an" is the correct article.
You are the one that is wrong.
Randi,
Let me get this straight: you don't understand what I wrote, but nevertheless you're sure I'm wrong.
Need I comment on this?
You can't get eyelashes on an animal that has neither hair nor feathers, so eyelashes are unlikely...
Ouch! The whole thing is Latin: per se "by itself".
You missed the sentence in the paper that says its neck is so short: only 13 vertebrae, only 130 % the length of the back!
Americans don't pronounce the h in herb and therefore, apparently, not the one in herbivorous either. Must be because it's (of course) silent in French herbe "grass".
Nope. Aspiration is a slightly misused technical term for saying [h].
Bride of Shrek:
If you look carefully at any proper dictionary, you'll see that there is no second "i" in "aluminum".
Just sayin'.
P.S. And by "proper" I mean, of course, "U.S.".
You're right David (of course!).
I was trying to make that point but I didn't explain it very well.
It's not hard. If I were speaking aloud, I'd say something like 'erbivore, not Herbivore, so of course I'm going to precede it with "an", not "a".
"A 'erbivore" just sounds clumsy.
DM, note the first definition of "aspiration" from the Online Merriam-Webster:
The Cambridge International Dictionary of English defines "aspirate (v)" as "to pronounce a word with the sound 'h'" and "aspiration" as a noun derived from this verb.
If I'm slightly misusing technical terminology, I look to be in fairly good company.
And if you look at any Periodic Table you'll see otherwise.;-)
http://www.dayah.com/periodic/
I think noncarb, David, PZ and myself are all in agreement on the same thing here. While you're on though can I clarify is pronounced P Zee or P Zed (as us onon-Americans would say )?
Any?
It's still the coolest looking dinosaur I've ever seen though. Imagine the offspring of mating between it and the "toothy" octopus/squid thingy from few threads back. Awesome.
Sorry, wrong link.
Any?
Wah, not fair, trumped! I shall get you noncarb, someday, somewhere (and when I'm not disadvantaged by a squirmy six month old on my lap).
Re #48: Cool reference. Now that you mention it I remember reading
about Stromatolite grazing also in one of my history of life
books. I don't have any from Prothero, so it must be a reasonable
common term used by multiple writers.
Straying from the linguistic pedantry (of which I am often accused, so I'm not necessarily complaining) can someone please explain to (not-educated-in-the-finer-details-of-paleontology) me why the depictions of nigersaurus in the flesh show them having spiky things down their toplines?
Look at the image of nigersaurus at http://projectexploration.org/nigersaurus/meet.htm for an example.
Might I also inappropriately note that the photo of Dr. Paul Sereno, team leader of the group who discovered the fossil, confirms yet again my long-held belief that scientists are HOT!
Canadians also may pronounce herb as 'erb and herbivore as 'erbivore, but like so much of Canadian English, the phoneme is in free variation between the US and UK pronunciations.
But, back to grasses if I may. If this critter was grazing early grasses, they were likely not as siliceous as later grasses were. Then again, would a dino like this be worried about tooth wear or would it just keep replacing teeth as they wore out? Permanent teeth are a mammilian adaptation, aren't they?
I just had a very boring meeting, so my brain's all fried.
re: #76
There is some "soft-tissue" preservation for those midline "spines" in some Sauropods (Diplodocus, I think), so the artist is inferring that other related sauropods had them, too.
And Sereno was named among the "Most Beautiful People" by, Time was it? Life? Eh, it was some magazine back in the '90s. We tease him about it (both behind his back and occasionally to his face).
Bride of Shrek, Noncarborundum, assuming you can pronounce herb without the "h" and then it would then be correct to say "an erbivore". If the English pronounce herb without an "h" sound you are correct, otherwise you are wrong - I'm not sure how they pronounce it. Also, Noncarborundum, you said " by "proper" I mean, of course, "U.S."." - you are clearly wrong this time. This language is called English, because it comes from England and the English are the ones who decide what is proper pronunciation. The proper pronunciation is P-zed. Where americans differ from the english in pronunciation they merely bastardize the language.
Yep. That's the non-misused version. Aspiration of [p] produces an English p (as opposed to a French one). Aspiration of nothing produces [h]. The English p contains a [h] sound, sort of. And that's my point.
Because they were found in a particularly well-preserved fragment of a relative of Diplodocus. Nigersaurus is fairly closely related, so there's a reasonable chance it had those spikes, too. (They don't contain bones.)
Highly unlikely, because it's much older.
Yep, and as the paper says, Nigersaurus had sped up the rate of tooth replacement to once per month.
He's already married, to one of his coauthors (Gabrielle Lyon).
Brownian: horsetails are, and probably were, exceedingly silaceous too. And these 'saurs definitely had tooth replacement--check out the tooth- battery photo here!
Randi,
You have no idea what you're talking about and obviously have very poor grasp on the concept of linguistics and its evolution. As an English speaker( who is not North American) I guarantee American English is a valid recognised language and correct in its own determination of pronounciation as it is an evolving language. English wasn't "invented" by the English by the way, there was no such thing as "England" when the language first took its roots from a hybrid of Roman, Norse and early British tribal languages(to be technical there was no concept of "Britain" at that time either just groups of tribal kingdoms such as the Iceni). The English spoken today here in Britain would be far less recognisable to someone of 600 years ago than American English is to English today so unless you're prepared to say that current spoken English is also a "bastardisation" oif the true original language then I'd give up that argument.
The posts between noncarb and myself were good natured gibes at each others version of English. I think its pretty obvious noncarb was just giving me one in the ribs when he said that only Americans have proper dictionaries.
And finally, as PZ is his own name he can pronounce it however the hell he wants. I'm being considerate in asking because I would pronounce it PZed but its terribly rude to mispronounce someone elses name because we consider it "proper" to do so.
I'm not getting into a flame war here with someone who doesn't know linguistics so lets just all shut the hell up about a stupid, pedantic point that Randi brought up and get back to the dinosaur.
The skull reminds me of a Volkswagen Bug.
Yes, right, the dinosaur!
So do the experts in England pronounce that generic epithet with a hard or soft 'g'? 'Cause I'd hate to mispronounce it now that I know that only the English pronounce good.
I myself will endeavor to speak like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins from now on!!!
Thanks Sven. As soon as I hit 'Post' it occurred to me that they would of course replace their dentition (as most if not all reptiles do.)
I didn't know that horsetails were silaceous though. I just know next Sunday there'll be a new Simpsons episode with Lenny saying "Ow! My eye! I'm not supposed to get silaceous horsetails in it!" and then I'll feel really stupid.
As for Randi's comment: I'm still pissed at the way Indo-European bastardised Nostratic.
By the way Randi, in proper English, 'bastardise' is spelled with an 'S', not a 'Z'.
I know a couple of people who've been there and they use the soft "g".
On the herbivore/'erbivore debate the brits would normally pronounce the "h", unless they were a Londoner, in which case the "h" is often dropped from many words. In this accent "t"s are also lost from the middle of words, (a glottal stop), thus "an 'ot wa'er bo'le".
You wouldn't write it down like that though.
Brownian, are you saying that's the way they spell it in England? That is proper english, Bride of Shrek's rant notwhithstanding.
"an 'ot wa'er bo'le"
ahem.
"I myself will endeavor to speak like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins from now on!!!"
It's a nasty killing machine, what it is. Poor little plants.
Sven: According to Sereno's presentation, there is evidence that at least some of the Mesozoic horsetails were less siliceous, although he didn't go into details.
folderol: Sereno was one of People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People" back about 10 years ago...
Although I would be amiss in failing to point out that he & I were one sixth of the "Hunks of Vertebrate Paleontology" 2005 parody calendar. Sadly, this was a parody with a very limited run, and consisted of photoshopping heads of paleos onto various bodies: Kevin Padian onto Tom Cruise (from Top Gun), Hans Sues onto Arnold Schwarzeneger, etc.
I got stuck on the body of... er... ick... Dubya... (shudder).
Ouch. My heartfelt condolences.
David,
I call your attention to the words "accompanies or comprises" in the definition you and I have both cited. The word "accompanies" covers the aspiration of some (not all) English "p"s, or the classical pronunciation of Greek phi. But what of an "audible breath that comprises a speech sound"? I submit this is, in fact, an [h].
Brownian,
If "bastardise" is the proper English spelling, why does the Oxford English Dictionary insist on spelling it "bastardize"?
Randi,
What odd opinions you have. And no discernible sense of humo[u]r.
Not true, I find farting to be absolutely hilarious.
Re: "Hunks of Vert Paleo"
Heh. heh. I've heard stories of that calendar.
My advisor actually got blamed for creating that calendar (he didn't), apparently because a thong with our departmental logo was part of the same lot at the auction.
Okay, that guy is WAY COOL.
Well, I'm out of here. Take a valium Mrs. Shrek.
Randi: Got a source for your assertions about the supremacy of one particular region's dialect of a given language?
(The conjunction of nationalistic fanboyism and micropenis doesn't count.)
Interesting...the PLoS article indicates that head position was assessed primarily from orientation of the lateral semicircular canals, rather than from the structures of the occipital region of the skull and first cervical vertebra. This isn't my field, but I got the impression that the microCT on the semicircular canals was pretty innovative in this context.
Modern mammals that browse or graze, and that must sort through or move inedible debris (horses and giraffes, for example), have very mobile and sensitive upper lips. From the reconstruction, it doesn't look as if this is the case for Nigersaurus; what's the current thinking (if any) on facial muscle structure and function in sauropods?
(Modern) horsetails are indeed full of silica, but they're not ferns (though they're in a group sometimes called "fern allies").
I could've sworn I saw something similar to that years ago, in Dougal Dixon's "The New Dinosaurs"...
Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins may have been trying to do a cockney accent, what he actually produced was closer to an Australian accent in the end. It is in fact most disconcerting to listen to it if you are familiar with both cockney and Australian. He was not however speaking Strine, cobber.
BTW does anyone know why Russell's Teapot is down?
http://russellsteapot.com/
It's "an herbivorous dinosaur" in both US and Commonwealth English. In the US, they pronounce the word as "erbivorous". They also say "an herb", since they pronounce "herb" as "erb".
In the UK and elsewhere, the rule is a bit complicated to spell out. It's "a" before a single-syllable word with a sounded "h" or a word of more than one syllable with a sounded "h" and a stress on the first syllable.
But it's "an" before a word of more than one syllable with no stress on the first syllable, even if the "h" would normally be sounded.
Thus, in Commonwealth English it's:
"A horse"
"A hyphen"
"A hippo"
"A hippopotamus"
"A history of atheism"
BUT
"An historical novel"
"An hysterically funny joke"
"An herbivorous dinosaur".
EASY!
Well pointed out and explained Russell. It also explains why there is variation around hotel, it being pronounced with a or an depending on which syllable the speaker stresses.
Why are its bones so lightweight? There must be some good reason for that?
Maybe the horsetails grew in really swampy ground?
Maybe it liked to float about the sea chomping duckweed?
Maybe it was the first 'wind assisted' feeder?
Dunno.
Barn Owl: The use of the lateral semicircular canal to find the normal orientation of the head is relatively new in paleontology. It has been done before with pterosaurs (Witmer et al. 2003. Nature 425:950-953, free pdf available here) and in tyrannosaurs (papers forthcoming). To be fair, Sereno et al. also did look at the (disturbingly ventrally positioned) occipital condyle, but wanted to remove the contentious issue of habitual neck orientation in figuring it out.
As for facial muscles in sauropods: examination of the bony surfaces and of nerve openings (e.g., this paper) suggests that sauropods didn't have them (or at least not much).
Astromcnaught: The extremes of the pneumatization of Nigersaurus are difficult to explain: in part, because even in modern birds the biological function of the diverticula of the air sac system isn't entirely understood, and in part because Nigersaurus isn't exactly a big sauropod. (If it were a true giant, than such extreme development might make sense purely as weight reduction, but sauropods ten times as massive show nowhere near this degree of pneumatization.) For an excellent overview of sauropod pneumatic vertebrae, I suggest this post at the wonderfully narrowly oriented and highly informative Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blogsite.
Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins is most disconcerting to listen to no matter what one's dialect familiarity may be. Which was sort of my point.
kc, they are ferns now. I know, it surprised everyone. Damned phylogenetics.
Don't take the ruminants too seriously. They lack upper incisors; they gather plants with their lips and then rip them off with their lower incisors and a horny ridge in the place where the upper incisors would be. Not so in Nigersaurus, which seems to have done the gathering and the cutting at once, as usual. Like a lawnmower.
But in "hippopotamus" the stress is on the third syllable...
IMHO the use of "an" in front of pronounced h is just a failed effort to make English look even more like French than it already is. Or does anyone natively speak according to this rule?
Caption for the Nigersaurus: "Nom Nom Nom"
The two unanswered questions at this point: 1) Is there anything like this today? and 2) Why was the skull so light?
1) African white rhino (Ceratotherium simum) may have had a similar ecology with respect to 'grazing.' (How can it be related to a Diplodocus- there are no transition forms. Just anticipating a future DI leaflet)
2) Just try circulating enough blood to and FROM a skull (and voluntary muscles) 20 feet away from your heart. All sauropods are disproportionately small headed (possibly they had their own religion).
Correction/modification: also "light headed" as in light weight skull- the post was accurate but could have been misleading with respect to this wonderful beast. Sauropod skulls are among the rarest of dino fossils.
Thanks for the answers, Thomas Holtz @ #106. A grazing horse can readily move aside grit, dirt, twigs, and dried leaves with its upper lip, but of course horses are prone to gastrointestinal ailments such as sand colic. Perhaps sauropods weren't so sensitive to grit and debris in their diets!
Also, I'd guess that the lack of facial muscles to move the upper lip would limit the flehmen response, observed in many mammals, which is used to facilitate transfer of pheromones to the vomeronasal organ.
#109-
Don't take the ruminants too seriously. They lack upper incisors; they gather plants with their lips and then rip them off with their lower incisors and a horny ridge in the place where the upper incisors would be.
Unlike giraffes, horses are not ruminants, and most certainly do possess both upper and lower incisors. Watch a horse graze some time...it pushes leaves, sticks, and other debris away with the upper lip, and shears off grass blades between upper and lower incisors.
There's a secondary stress on the first syllable in the five-syllabled "hippopotamus", David. But if you can say it with no stress at all on the first syllable, it'll get an "an". I doubt that anyone says it that way, but perhaps I'm wrong.
Sure. But then, birds lack the vomeronasal organ... I'm not sure if it leaves traces on the skull bones...
Dinosaurs generally seem to have done without that. (Especially the beaked ones, of course.)
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So secondary stress counts, too... I see.
It's way, way beyond all descriptions. The lower temporal fenestra is in front of the eye. The upper temporal fenestra is gone. All teeth, without one exception, are part of the precisely straight toothrows that are broader than the rest of the skull. The snout points almost vertically downward. The vertebrae are hollow -- not foamy, but hollow. It boggles the mind!
Not going to fossilize, but we can expect specializations in the ankles and knees, at least...
Nope -- neither alive nor dead.
Fig. 4 of the paper is a tree.
The paper says ferns and horsetails and doesn't mention mosses... that said, horsetails are actually ferns... :-)
No.
ARGH! I mean predictions.
You can't get eyelashes on an animal that has neither hair nor feathers, so eyelashes are unlikely...
Ouch! The whole thing is Latin: per se "by itself".
You missed the sentence in the paper that says its neck is so short: only 13 vertebrae, only 130 % the length of the back!
Americans don't pronounce the h in herb and therefore, apparently, not the one in herbivorous either. Must be because it's (of course) silent in French herbe "grass".
Nope. Aspiration is a slightly misused technical term for saying [h].
Yep. That's the non-misused version. Aspiration of [p] produces an English p (as opposed to a French one). Aspiration of nothing produces [h]. The English p contains a [h] sound, sort of. And that's my point.
Because they were found in a particularly well-preserved fragment of a relative of Diplodocus. Nigersaurus is fairly closely related, so there's a reasonable chance it had those spikes, too. (They don't contain bones.)
Highly unlikely, because it's much older.
Yep, and as the paper says, Nigersaurus had sped up the rate of tooth replacement to once per month.
He's already married, to one of his coauthors (Gabrielle Lyon).
Ouch. My heartfelt condolences.
Don't take the ruminants too seriously. They lack upper incisors; they gather plants with their lips and then rip them off with their lower incisors and a horny ridge in the place where the upper incisors would be. Not so in Nigersaurus, which seems to have done the gathering and the cutting at once, as usual. Like a lawnmower.
But in "hippopotamus" the stress is on the third syllable...
IMHO the use of "an" in front of pronounced h is just a failed effort to make English look even more like French than it already is. Or does anyone natively speak according to this rule?
Sure. But then, birds lack the vomeronasal organ... I'm not sure if it leaves traces on the skull bones...
Dinosaurs generally seem to have done without that. (Especially the beaked ones, of course.)
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So secondary stress counts, too... I see.