paleontology
laelaps | March 5, 2009"Caught in an asphalt lake." From the November 1919 issue of The World's Work.As much as I love visiting the American Museum of Natural History in its current incarnation I sometimes wish I could have seen the institution in earlier eras. It has undergone its own evolution and while plenty of classic and remarkable specimens remain on display there are many that have been removed, put in storage, or lost.
One such exhibit was the "asphalt lake" habitat group meant to portray the famous La Brea tar pits. I have no idea what became of it, but when on display it showed a Smilodon and a dire wolf…
laelaps | March 4, 2009The Burlington County skull. From Hrdlicka's Skeletal Remains Suggesting or Attributed to Early Man in North America.By 1859 it had become established that humans had a more ancient history than had previously been known, but just how old was Homo sapiens? This was a pivotal question, for the area of the world that could claim the oldest vestiges of humanity could provide crucial clues about the evolution and dispersal of our species. Asia, with its open plains and "vigorous climate", seemed like the best place to look for the stock from which humans arose but traces of prehistoric humans…
ddobbs | March 3, 2009Carl explains this:
After death, brains that do not simply disappear sometimes get smaller. In this particular fish, Sibyrhynchus denisoni the brain must have gotten a lot smaller. Check out this image, in which the braincase is in red, and the brain is in yellow. (The scale bar is 5 millimeters.)
The subject is a paper in PNAS that's available to journalists but no one else so far, yet not still embargoed ... a policy I sort of like for selfish reasons but still can't figure out. This means this link to the paper won't work for a few more days. Paper is on a 3M-year-old fossilized brain,…
laelaps | March 3, 2009I had initially intended to write this post to coincide with my birthday last week but my research unexpectedly set me on the trail of Saartje Baartman. Below is the essay I had originally set out to write;
What to do about Charles Lyell? In September of 1859 he had announced to the scientists assembled at the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting that , contrary to previous belief, "it [was] probable that man was old enough to have coexisted, at least, with the Siberian mammoth." He also knew that the arrival of Charles Darwin's abstract on evolution by natural…
clock | March 2, 2009Archy does an amazing detective job on who stole what from whom in the old literature on mammoths, going back all the way to Lyell!
Then, as much of that literature is very old, he provides us with a history and timeline of the ideas of copyright and plagiarism so we could have a better grasp on the sense of the time in which these old copy+paste jobs were done.
clock | February 27, 2009You may be aware that PLoS ONE has started making Collections of papers in various areas of research. The older PLoS journals have been making collections for a long time. PLoS ONE is just starting. Last month we put together the first such collection - Stress-Induced Depression and Comorbidities: From Bench to Bedside.
Today, we are happy to unveil our second collection - the PLoS ONE Paleontology Collection!
It is important to keep in mind that there are two types of collections: the first type is a one-off, closed collection, often associated with a conference, where we ask for or are…
laelaps | February 25, 2009The skull of Gomphotherium, from Barbour's paper.Regular readers of this blog are well aware that the "March of Progress", a depiction of the single-file evolution of humans from an ape ancestor, is a biological bugbear that refuses to go away. Even though the Great Chain of Being ceased to be useful in explaining the natural world centuries ago vestiges of it still remain in illustrations that depict evolution as "onward and upward." We have long known that evolution is a branching process yet the straight-line version is frustratingly difficult to dig out.
I was reminded of this while…
laelaps | February 23, 2009Moropus, a chalicothere. From The Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History.Suppose for a moment that you are walking across a dry, wind-swept landscape known to be rich in fossils. During your perambulations you notice a large fossilized claw sitting on the surface; what sort of animal could it be from? There is a lot you would have to know about the area, like how old the rock in that spot was, but it would seem reasonable that the claw belonged to a large predator.
Nature, of course, is not so straightforward. Panda bears have teeth and claws that reveal their carnivoran…
laelaps | February 20, 2009The "Newberg" (or Warren) mastodon. From Elements of Geology. Note the claw-like restoration of the feet.How did the mastodon, Mammut americanum, feed itself? It is a fairly simple question best answered by looking to living elephants, but things were not always so straightforward. Early discussions of the mastodon focused, in part, on whether it was an herbivore or a carnivore. That its teeth were more rough and pointed surely meant that it had different dining preferences than mammoths or living elephants, both of which had flat molars for grinding plants. (If you want to learn more about…
laelaps | February 18, 2009There are a number of things I have been meaning to blog about during the past week but for whatever reason they kept slipping my mind. Here's a brief collection of some neat stuff that I should have written about earlier;
Michael Barton, author of the Dispersal of Darwin, was interviewed for the the BBC's Pods and Blogs! I am certainly envious. You can listen in here.
A number of paleo-artists active in the blogohedron have started a new carnival, ART Evolved. The first edition will be posted at Prehistoric Insanity on March 1, and I certainly encourage you to check it out (if not submit…
laelaps | February 16, 2009An illustration of the Yale mastodon mount.While planting corn on his Iowa farm around 1872 a farmer named Peter Mare found a curious carving. It was a smoking pipe in the shape of an elephant, a very odd item indeed, and he used it for its intended purpose until he moved to Kansas in 1878. At that time he gave it to his brother-in-law, but soon after a Reverend Gass came calling. Gass, an amateur archaeologist, wanted to purchase it, but the pipe was not for sale. Even so, the owner of the pipe allowed Gass to photograph it and make some casts, which he shared with the members of the…
gregladen | February 15, 2009"The Giants' Shoulders" is a monthly science blogging event, in which authors are invited to submit posts on "classic" scientific papers. Information about the carnival can be found here.
The last Giants' was hosted at The Questionable Authority, here. The next issue will be hosted at The Evilutionary Biologist: All Science, All The Time, which resided here.
Since this is Darwin Month in Darwin Year and almost, indeed, Darwin Day, we start with ... Paleontology. We'll get to Darwin at the end.
Early palaentologists and the Giant killer lungfish from Hell as well as the Revenge of…
clock | February 14, 2009John McKay has been blogging his research on the early days of mammoth discoveries in Asia and it is an amazing read! Who ever said that academic writing has to be dull!?
Fragments of my research - I:
Studying early knowledge of mammoths presents two problems. The first, is that the people who found mammoth remains were almost never literate and the people who wrote about mammoth remains were so far removed that they almost always got their information second or third hand or worse. The second problem is that, lacking a common name for mammoth remains, it is a huge task to sort out…
gregladen | February 12, 2009And hominids.
We know the fossil record underestimates diversity at least a little, and we know that forested environments in Africa tend to be underrepresented. Given this, the diversity of Miocene apes may have been rather impressive, because there is a fairly high diversity in what we can assume is a biased record.
But I'd like to make the argument from another angle, that of modern ecological analogues. Let us assume that the greater apparent diversity of apes in the middle and late Miocene compared today can be accurately translated as a modern reduction in ape diversity. Not…
laelaps | February 11, 2009
Brought to you by the very talented Scicurious (if you're not reading her posts, you are really missing out). Dare we start an LOLFossil competition?
[And wouldn't you know it, another one of my photographs has wound up in the 'Upcoming' section of icanhascheezburger.com. It is one of my favorites; two snow leopards I photographed at the Bronx Zoo in the summer of 2006.]
laelaps | February 10, 2009A restoration of Dunkleosteus, from Fishes, Living and Fossil.About 370 million years ago, at a time when creatures like Tiktaalik were wallowing in the muddy shallows of freshwater lakes and rivers, the sea covered much of what is now North America and Europe. These waters were home to a diversity of fish, but among the most fearsome was Dunkleosteus, a 20-foot long terror with sharp plates around its moth that created a shear that could slice through the body of any animal unlucky enough to be its prey.
The creature we now call Dunkleosteus used to go by a few different names, however. Back…
laelaps | February 7, 2009Now this is pretty cool. Since 2007 the Australopithecus afarensis skeleton AL 288-1, that's "Lucy" to you and me, has been on tour in an exhibit called "Lucy's Legacy - The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia." I don't know if the exhibit is going to come close enough to me to allow me to visit it, but thanks to the website eLucy, I can look at the skeleton from home.
Hosted by the University of Texas at Austin, the website allows you to compare Lucy's bones with those of a human or a chimpanzee. This is a great resource for anyone who has been aching for a closer look at the fossils than is often…
gregladen | February 4, 2009Or, more accurately, did these dinosaurs either engage in intraspecific combat (such as territorial or mating contests among males) or fight predators such as Tyrannosaurs, like in the movies?
Well, one thing we know for sure: If any folklore, belief, or 'fact' related to a fossil species sits around long enough, eventually someone will come along and study it. This usually involves reformulating the idea as one or more testable hypotheses, then attacking the hypotheses ... much like Tyrannosaurus might or might not have attacked Triceratops, to see if it can be killed, or alternatively,…
clock | February 3, 2009When I was a little kid, almost nothing was known about evolution of whales. They were huge, they were marine and they were mammals, but their evolutionary ancestry was open to speculation. Some (like Darwin himself) hypothesized that the terrestrial ancestor of whales looked like a bear. Others favored the idea of a hippo-like or even a pig-like ancestor.
Over the decades, two things happened. First, the revolution in molecular biology and computing power allowed scientists to compare many genes of many mammals and thus infer genealogical relationships between whales and other groups of…
gregladen | February 3, 2009An article released moments ago in PLoS ONE, by Gingerich et al., describes one of the more interesting fossil discoveries ever.
To cut right to the conclusion: We now have reason to believe that the proto-whale Maiacetus inuus, a true transitional form, gave birth on land, not in the water.Artist's conception of male Maiacetus inuus with opaque skeleton overlay. Credit: John Klausmeyer and Bonnie Miljour, University of Michigan Museums of Natural History
Maiacetus inuus is a newly described member of a larger group of proto-cetids (proto-whales) that are believed to be largely aquatic.…