paleontology
laelaps | July 21, 2009Even though I regret dropping it due to time constraints I am glad the paleo carnival The Boneyard has taken on a life of its own. The latest edition, which is quite excellent, is up at The Dragon's Tales. I especially liked the chronological sequence of this one, and many thanks to Will for including so many of my posts!
clock | July 17, 2009As you may remember, a beautiful mammoth fossil was discovered in Serbia a couple of months ago. I promised I'd try to go and see it myself on my recent trip to Belgrade. And I did get to see it. But the story is more fun than just that.... ;-)
First, I tried to get in touch with Dr.Miomir KoraÄ, the Director of the Archaeological park Viminacium to ask for permission to photograph the fossil as well as to interview him. After a couple of e-mail addresses bounced, I got what I think is the correct address...but got no response.
Once I got to Belgrade, I asked my contacts there about this and…
laelaps | July 16, 2009A traditional restoration of Platybelodon as seen in H.F. Osborn's 1936 elephant monograph. From Lambert (1992).Whenever I visit the American Museum of Natural History in New York I make sure to at least pass through the fourth-floor fossil halls before I leave, and one of my favorite displays features the shovel-mouthed proboscidean Platybelodon. In a glass case in the shadow of a mammoth skeleton is a growth series showing the development of the Platybelodon jaw, from juvenile to adult. Like many AMNH displays, however, this series was not a product of the renovation of the fossil halls in…
laelaps | July 14, 2009An illustration of Albert Koch's reconstructed "Missourium", or an American mastodon with a few extra bones.Even though I find modern creationism to be intensely aggravating I occasionally like to browse older creationist texts. It is amusing to see how old creationist arguments have been recycled ad naseum, refitted for new uses (i.e. acceptance of evolution is responsible for [insert social ill here]), or given up entirely over time. In this latter category falls the assertion of the 19th century biblical literalist Mary Roberts that God had purposefully created, and subsequently destroyed…
laelaps | July 13, 2009Hippopotamus amphibius, photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo. Have you ever tried to walk along the bottom of a pool while fully submerged? It isn't easy. Keeping your feet on the bottom is enough of a task, and you would probably need a weight belt to take an underwater stroll. Hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius), though, walk and even prance along the bottom of lakes and rivers with ease. How do they do it?
When compared to a whale or even a manatee (the latter of which I will address a bit later on) a hippo does not look especially well-adapted to life in the water. It has a low, squat body…
laelaps | July 10, 2009Life restoration of the head of Armadillosuchus. From Marinho and Carvalho (2009). When I was trying to come up with a title for this post I almost went with "Armadillosuchus: An armored crocodyliform you wouldn't want to mess with." Obviously I changed my mind. Not only was the title too long, but it was redundant to boot. All crocodyliformes (which includes living crocodylians) are "armored" in that they have little bony plates called osteoderms (primarily on the dorsal, or top, side of their bodies) beneath their scales, which in turn overlay a layer of bony plates called osteoscutes.…
laelaps | July 8, 2009A beautiful artistic reconstruction of Indohyus by Carl Buell.During the last 30 years paleontologists have uncovered a startling amount of fossil evidence which has illuminated the early evolution of whales. The earliest members of the cetacea looked nothing like the marine mammals we are familiar with today, and in December of 2007 a paper in Nature identified a small hoofed mammal called Indohyus as one of the closest relatives to the earliest whales. This hypothesis was supported by a subsequent study published a few months ago in the same journal.
One of the most interesting aspects of…
laelaps | July 7, 2009Parts of the skull, including the upper jaws (maxillae), of Eritherium azzouzorum as seen from the front (top) and below (bottom). From Gheerbrant (2009). Yesterday I blogged about the ~27 million year old elephantimorph Eritreum, a creature that stood only about four feet high at the shoulder, but there were once even smaller proboscideans. About sixty million years ago in what is now Morocco there lived a rabbit-sized (~5 kg) hoofed mammal that is one of the earliest known relatives of the modern behemoths of Africa and Asia. Called Eritherium azzouzorum, it was a small mammal that could…
laelaps | July 6, 2009A restoration of Eritreum compared to the larger Gomphotherium. From Shoshani et al. (2009). Before I loved dinosaurs, I loved elephants. I would run around the backyard with my little pith helmet on, firing my "elephant mover" to herd the imaginary pachyderms. (At the time I did not understand what guns did. When they went off in the documentaries I saw that the elephants moved, therefore guns were "elephant movers.") It would only be much later, when I could properly appreciate the stout bones I saw in the halls of the American Museum of Natural History, that I would more fully appreciate…
clock | July 5, 2009As I was traveling, I only briefly mentioned the brand new and exciting paleontology paper in PLoS ONE - New Mid-Cretaceous (Latest Albian) Dinosaurs from Winton, Queensland, Australia that was published on Thursday. Bex has written an introduction and will post a Media/Blog coverage (of which there was a lot!) summary probably tomorrow.
The fossils were discovered, cleaned and analyzed by the Australian Age Of Dinosaurs non-profit organization, with a help of thousands of volunteers - the 'citizen scientists'. You can learn more from their press release.
The importance of the publication of…
laelaps | July 3, 2009
On the 31st of May, 1984, the late evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith appraised the field of paleontology in the journal Nature. The report was a critical summary of a series of lectures Stephen Jay Gould had given at Cambridge, and Gould considered it "the kindest and most supportive critical commentary I have ever received." Smith wrote;
The attitude of population geneticists to any palaeontologist rash enough to offer a contribution to evolutionary theory has been to tell him to go away and find another fossil, and not to bother the grownups.
In the last ten years, however, this…
clock | July 2, 2009I am running to the Lindau Harbor for the last day's trip and will be offline for the next 12 or so hours. So I don't have time for a long post right now about this cool new dinosaur paper we just published in PLoS ONE.
So please check it out - see what it is all about and read the paper itself.
gregladen | July 2, 2009previously reviewed
Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic is a children's book for kids in third to fifth grade or, in my opinion, a little younger. Certainly this is an excellent choice, because of the cool illustrations, of a book to read aloud to the pre-literate little ones.
Author Gregory Wenzel does a good job in few words explaining life in the Jurassic, how bones get to become fossils, and something about how they are found. Most of the riveting several hundred words in this 32 page book are about the real stars of the show, the dinosaurs themselves.
Not every single dinosaur in this book…
laelaps | July 2, 2009During the past month Andy Farke of The Open Source Paleontologist has been considering the rise (and fall) of paleontology-oriented mailing lists (like the Dinosaur Mailing List and the VRTPALEO Discussion List). These lists are good for a lot of things, like quickly disseminating news to a large audience of specialists or requesting papers/information, but more and more in-depth discussions of paleontology are moving onto blogs. Andy has already covered some of the major points, but I wanted to add a few thoughts of my own.
There are advantages and disadvantages to science blogging vs.…
laelaps | July 1, 2009A somewhat tamarin-like restoration of Ganlea megacania. By Mark A. Klingler of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. It seems that almost every time a new fossil primate is announced the first question everyone asks is "Is it one of our ancestors?" Nevermind that it is all but impossible to identify direct ancestors and descendants in the vertebrate fossil record (including primates). If the fossil can be construed to be a human ancestor it gets plenty of attention and if it is not the reports are left to wither. For a primate fossil to be seen, it must be promoted, and this often leads…
laelaps | June 30, 2009At the end of the day today the University of Wyoming Geological Museum is going to be closed. The museum and the paleontologists who worked there are victims of state budget cuts, and the spirited effort to keep the museum open did not get top-level administrators to change their minds. The closure of the museum is still a shock to paleontologist Brent Breithaupt, who worked hard to make it what it is now. He recently told the Laramie Boomerang:
I can't fathom the concept that I'm not going to be coming in every day to see the dinosaurs. ... I can't fathom the concept that the dinosaurs won'…
laelaps | June 30, 2009A few months ago I had the opportunity to sit down with a professional paleontologist and pick his brain about a few things. One of the questions that I most wanted to ask was about the changing nature of paleobiology. Molecular biology, genetics, evo-devo, and other disciplines appeared to have an increasing presence in discussions of ancient life, and I asked the paleontologist if students of paleontology should strive to receive training in these fields to further expand the scope of paleontology.
I could hardly have been more disappointed by the answer. The gist of his response was that…
laelaps | June 29, 2009Against all hope I brought my camera along with me. Special exhibitions do not usually let you take photos, and soon after I arrived at the Discovery Times Square Exhibition with Amanda and her boyfriend J I was forced to hand over all my equipment. No cameras, no cell phones, no food, keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times, &c.
Despite my disappointment, however, it was hard to be sad. I was going to see "Lucy", perhaps the most famous hominin fossil ever discovered, and the B-slab of "Ida", a much older fossil primate that kept me rather busy during the past month. I…
laelaps | June 26, 2009I have been thoroughly enjoying my copy of The Paleobiological Revolution (edited by David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse), so much so that it has inspired me to get to work on some new academic papers. I will post a review of the book sometime this weekend, but here is a quote that is going to be very important to my discussion from G.G. Simpson's 1944 masterpiece Tempo and Mode in Evolution:
The attempted synthesis of paleontology and genetics, an essential part of the present study, may be particularly surprising and possibly hazardous. Not long ago paleontologists felt that a geneticist was a…
laelaps | June 25, 2009Richard Owen's restoration of Glyptodon. From Brinkman (2009). Perhaps one of the primary reasons that there is so much to say about Charles Darwin is that he left us so much material to scrutinize. Outside of his famous printed works there are numerous notebooks and a staggering amount of personal correspondence which are constantly being parsed for insights into how he formulated his evolutionary ideas. Indeed, there is still scholarly debate about when Darwin embraced the idea of evolution and what observations spurred him to that intellectual turning point, and a new paper by Paul…