paleontology
laelaps | August 12, 2008
Amphicyon
Welcome to the 22nd edition of The Boneyard, marking the long-awaited return of the blog carnival all about paleontology. Much has happened since the last iteration, so there's plenty of new blogospheric specimens to peruse;
Are there different "rules" of classification at work for fossil mammals than for. non-avian dinosaurs? Zach considers lumping and splitting at When Pigs Fly Returns.
Traumador reports on a new bit of titanosaur discovered in New Zealand.
Mo presents a specimen of one of my favorite "early birds," Confuciusornis, along with some new artwork.
A DC…
greengabbro | August 12, 2008The Scibling meetup weekend included free passes to see the ponies at the American Museum of Natural History. OMG PONIES... but I found the exhibit depressing, for the following reason:
I don't understand why more organizations don't give out press kits to bloggers. We make such good use of the material.
Anyway, the horse exhibit was nice, as far as exhibits about squishy living things go, but I ran off to see the rocks as quickly as possible. I wish I'd had time to do more than a quick jog through the earth science exhibits; there are ultra old-fashioned displays asserting that geologic…
laelaps | August 7, 2008 Hadrosaurs are often called the "cows of the Cretaceous." They were common, had few defenses compared to their armored ornithischian kin, and were a favorite prey for predatory dinosaurs. Natural selection appears to have applied sufficient pressure for at least one genus of hadrosaur, Hypacrosaurus, to change, however. It did not develop horns or spikes or a club, but instead ontogenetically outpaced their predators.
The key to determining how theropods and Hypacrosaurus grew can be found inside their bones, and a new study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B using histological…
laelaps | August 4, 2008On Saturday it was announced that Polish paleontologists have uncovered the remains of an ancient predatory animal, heralded as an ancestor to Tyrannosaurus in the mass media accounts. Nicknamed "the Dragon" the fossil remains were recovered from Lisowice and are of Triassic age, the large size of the animal (~16 feet) suggesting that it ate almost anything it wanted. Yet there are some questions about this fossil, especially since it has not yet been published in the technical literature. Is it really a Triassic representative of the Tyrannosaurus family tree?
If you take a look at the…
laelaps | August 2, 2008When I was a kid remembering "all" the dinosaurs was pretty easy. In the Jurassic you had Allosaurus going after "Brontosaurus" and Ceratosaurus trying to take a bite out of Stegosaurus, and the epic battles between Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops were the "main event" of the Cretaceous. As I sunk deeper into dino-mania I learned more and more names but there still seem to be more than I can keep track of. Thankfully Thomas Holtz has just issued an update to his list of dinosaur genera (a supplement to his lavishly-illustrated encyclopedia, Dinosaurs, released last year).
I think I learned more…
gregladen | July 30, 2008Austrian Franz Sikora was a fossil hunter and merchant of ancient bones working in the 19th centuyr. In 1899 he found the first known specimen, which was to become the type fossil, of Hadropithecus stenognathus in Madagascar. This is an extinct lemur. To be honest, I'm not sure when this lemur went extinct, but I think it was not long before Franz found the fossil.
The bones found in 1899 as well as other material have been sitting in an Austrian museum since.
Excavations at the same locality in 2003 recovered much more material from this species. Now, a team working mainly at a lab…
laelaps | July 30, 2008In 2005 the unexpected occurred; researchers reported what appeared to be preserved soft tissues inside the femur of a Tyrannosaurus rex excavated from the Hell Creek Formation. Structures that looked like blood vessels and blood cells were seen under the microscope, and although it is still unknown whether this is original organic material or material that has somehow been preserved the structures provided some tantalizing clues. What the researchers have been more confident about, however, is that they were able to detect the presence of preserved collagen proteins in the material. (Indeed…
grrlscientist | July 30, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, dinosaurian soft tissue, fossils, bacterial biofilms, paleontology, endocasts, formerly pyritic framboids, collagen
Figure 1. EDS spectrum of framboid. EDS spectrum of framboid showing an iron-oxygen signature. Pt is from coating for SEM. Area in red box was scanned for elements. [larger view].
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002808.
Some of you might remember a paper published in Science that rocked the paleontological world by revealing that a broken thigh bone from Tyrannosaurus rex contained soft tissue. When this soft tissue was analyzed, it was identified as…
gregladen | July 30, 2008 Sabertooth Cat, Megantereon nihowanensisl There are two kinds of "true cats." Cat experts call one type feline or "modern" partly because they are the ones that did not go extinct. If you have a pet cat, it's a modern/feine cat. This also includes the lions, tigers, leopards, etc. The other kind are called "sabercats" because this group includes the saber tooth. It is generally believed but not at all certain that these two groups of cats are different phylogenetic lineages (but that is an oversimplification).
It has been suggested for some time that the bite force mechanics for at…
gregladen | July 29, 2008 An ugly fact killing a beautiful hypothesis I'm not mentioning any names, and don't ask me any details. In fact, don't repeat this story.
Some years ago, when I was a mere graduate student, a fellow student working in an unnamed country in Africa discovered a very very old stone artifact. To this day, this bit of chipped stone debris, representing the activities of an ancient very pre-human hominid, is one of the oldest well dated, in situ objects of its kind known.
The stone had some yeck on it, and for giggles, this stone got passed on to a physicist who had invented a new way of…
laelaps | July 26, 2008
A female Majungasaurus as envisaged by the creators of Jurassic Fight Club.
Imagine, just for a moment, standing in the middle of a Cretaceous forest 70 million years ago. The sunlight streaming through the canopy catches dust motes in the hot Madagascar grove, the calls of birds making the scene feel familiar despite being from another time. Suddenly, almost imperceptibly, they cease, the undergrowth just beyond your line of vision creaking and cracking with the footfalls of something monstrous. The predator slowly comes into view through the trees, a male Majungasaurus with a bright red…
laelaps | July 26, 2008I haven't interviewed Paul Sereno (yet) but there are a few short interview clips up on YouTube where he reflects on his career as a professional paleontologist;
laelaps | July 24, 2008
The skeleton of a young Tarbosaurus. From the LiveScience article.
Poor Tarbosaurus. Even though it was a top predator during the Cretaceous most people have never heard about it, the theropod from Asia being a poor man's Tyrannosaurus. (Some people think that Tarbosaurus = Tyrannosaurus, but I side with those who hold that they are distinct.) Still, even though it is not as famous as it's North American cousin it is still pretty cool that the recovery of a nearly complete skeleton of a juvenile Tarbosaurus has just been announced. Discovered two years ago in the Gobi Desert the fossils…
laelaps | July 24, 2008In working on one of my projects I've run into a little snag; I need to get my hands on three papers by E.D. Cope and Rutgers does no have access to them. They are all in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, although the only reference to them I've found is from an old paper by H.F. Osborn in which he reproduced only a single page number from a multiple-page article. The references are;
A helpful reader was kind enough to send these to me. Thank you!
1866 Cope, Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, p. 317
1867 Cope, Proceedings of the Academy of Natural…
gregladen | July 24, 2008Notice how I put "complete skeleton" in quotes. A paleontologist's idea of complete is not exactly the same as everyone else's.. But this Gobi Desert Tyrannosauris-like Tarbosaurus has a lot of its bone. It was recently extracted from sandstone blocks dug up a couple of years ago.
Another nice thing about this fossil is that it is a youngster, roughly the size of Barny the Dinosaur. The five year old dinosaur dates to about 70 million years ago. (more info)
What is even more intereting is that the research was conducted by a natural history museum owned by a private high tech company,…
laelaps | July 21, 2008John and Chad both have updates about their books, and even though I'm tempted to join the club I figure there's been enough meta on here lately (I wrote two different posts about the current status of my writing but scrapped them both). Instead I thought I would ask what you have been reading lately. It is the summer, after all, and I hope that those inclined to do so have had some time to take in some good books.
This past weekend I polished off Rex Appeal and Tyrannosaurus Sue, a bit of a digression from what I should have been reading but it was difficult to resist. Reading Tyrannosaurus…
laelaps | July 21, 2008For a long time feathered dinosaurs just looked weird to me. Seeing fuzzy Deinonychus or some other dromeosaur with a splash of plumage never looked quite right and I didn't understand why in the course of a few years predatory dinosaurs went from being scaly to being covered in down. Most of the books I had seen didn't explain it beyond "These dinosaurs were closely related to birds," something I didn't dispute but was not enough to make me feel comfortable with feathered raptors. Even after I started taking a greater interest in paleontology I still had problems with reconstructions of…
laelaps | July 18, 2008Over the course of the past year I've had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of many paleontologists and illustrators of prehistoric life, people who have helped me with their comments, criticism, and support. One such person whose work I admire is Matt Celeskey, the artist (and blogger) behind the Hairy Museum of Natural History.
A few months ago I asked Matt to come up with a brand new banner for this blog, something unique that would capture the character of Laelaps. Although I gave Matt some initial direction, that I wanted an articulated skeleton Dryptosaurus (previously known as "…
laelaps | July 14, 2008
The type skull of Velociraptor mongoliensis. From Osborn, et al. 1924.
By the summer of 1993 Velociraptor had become a household name. Although Deinonychus had long been my fleet-footed favorite the olive-green "clever girls" of Speilberg's film soon outshone all of their relatives and gave Tyrannosaurus a run for it's money.* Velocriaptor is hardly a new dinosaur, however. It was discovered during the famous expeditions to Mongolia made by the AMNH in the 1920's, the team setting out to find the "birthplace" of all mammals and coming back with loads of new dinosaurs. Velociraptor…
laelaps | July 12, 2008Majungasaurus is one cool theropod. Not only does is have a neat, knobby skull but the numerous remains of this dinosaur allowed for an entire series of papers on it to appear in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoirs. Although it is hardly a household name quite a bit is known about this predator from the ancient sediments of Madagascar, and the Witmer Lab has recently put up some really cool 3D animations of cutting planes through the skull of Majungasaurus;
There's also some cool video of sagittal slices through the skull of Majungasaurus;
You can expect to be hearing more…