paleontology
grrlscientist | July 10, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, melanosomes, plumage color, feather color, fossil preservation, birds, dinosaur, Jakob Vinther
Male Red-bellied woodpecker, Melanerpes carolinus.
Image: Ken Thomas (Wikipedia) [larger view].
When looking at paintings and reconstructions of fossil birds and dinosaurs, people often ask "how do you know what color they were?" Well, we didn't. However, a new paper was just published in Biology Letters that explores the possibility of deciphering the actual color of fossilized plumage and makes a startling discovery: scientists can identify at least some of the…
laelaps | July 9, 2008It's getting to be that there are more transitional fossils than I have time to blog them. Back in February I wrote about Aetiocetus, an ancient toothed mysticete whale that also had baleen. Then, just a few weeks ago, I put up a few words on Ventastega, a genus that confirms the origin of tetrapods as a branching process.
Now there's a new paper in Nature by Matt Friedman proposing that the fossil flatfish Amphistium and Heteronectes represent intermediate forms between flounders and their more symmetrical ancestors. Carl Zimmer has already done an exceptional job discussing the study (…
laelaps | July 9, 2008Is the National Geographic Society hurting science more than helping it? In December of 2007 the group launched a media blitz (including two books, a documentary, and a speaking tour) surrounding the exquisitely preserved specimen of "Dakota," purported to be an as-yet-undescribed species of Edmontosaurus. Although the NGS released a supplementary news report in March to keep everyone's interest going, I don't think I'm alone in expressing my frustration that this dinosaur has been widely promoted yet we're all still waiting for something, anything in the technical literature.
Those of you in…
laelaps | July 7, 2008
Oh dear. I guess the History Channel decided that the U.S. needed an equivalent to "The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs" and will soon be featuring a show called "Jurassic Fight Club." Here's the synopsis;
JURASSIC FIGHT CLUB
They were the ultimate fighters -- prehistoric beasts who walked the earth millions of years ago. With cunning and strategy, they hunted their prey -- transforming the prehistoric world into a battlefield. Today, archaeologists are uncovering these battlefields -- and are gaining startling new insight into how quick thinking, maneuverability, and striking at the exact…
laelaps | July 7, 2008Last summer I started up the paleontology blog carnival The Boneyard, a bi-weekly gathering of links featuring the best of blogging about fossils. Sadly the carnival has now become defunct, and outside of Will (who has admirably tried to kick me in the butt to get it going again) not many people seem to miss it. Even when the carnival was active there were frequent delays, few actual submissions, and other problems. Many of these complications were my fault as I did not manage it as attentively as I should have, but it was always difficult to gauge just how interested everyone was when hosts…
laelaps | July 4, 2008
Edouard de Montule's 1816 painting of the mastodon reconstructed in the Peale Museum. Note the down-turned tusks which were later turned the right way up.
Thomas Jefferson had an axe to grind when he wrote his Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781. Twenty years earlier the French naturalist Buffon had published the 9th volume of his epic series Histoire naturelle in which he compared the great, ferocious beasts of the Old World with the pitiful creatures found in the New World;
In general, all the animals there [in the Americas] are smaller than those of the old world, & there is not…
laelaps | July 1, 2008It seems that today is going to be a big day for science bloggers. Although updates were scheduled to go up yesterday, both Carl Zimmer and Phil Plait have delayed their announcements until sometime today. I've got a big announcement, too, something that I am definitely excited about.
My abstract on T.H. Huxley's thoughts about dinosaurs & birds has been accepted for the Dinosaurs: A Historical Perspective volume.
I truly am honored to be allowed to contribute to the book, and have to thank Mike Taylor for his advice and encouragement. I've got a lot of work to do this month but I am…
laelaps | June 30, 2008Of the few courses of value I have enrolled in while at Rutgers, one of my most favorite was the paleontology class taught by William Gallagher from the NJ State Museum (which, coincidentally, has just re-opened!). Much of the course dealt with invertebrates, the lectures being more oriented towards geologists than paleontologists, but there were still a few juicy lectures towards the end that involved vertebrate diversity and evolution. During these lectures he briefly mentioned the Permian temnospondyl Eryops, and he noted that it was probably an aquatic ambush predator, or "crocodiling…
laelaps | June 25, 2008For those of you who love sauropods, you'll definitely want to check out the latest issue of Paleobiology. I don't have enough time right now to give each a full treatment, but here's a brief summary of each;
"Modeling growth rates for sauropod dinosaurs" (Thomas M. Lehman and Holly N. Woodward) -
Sauropods were the largest of dinosaurs (and among the largest animals to have ever lived), but how quickly they attained their huge sizes has been hotly debated. Determining how quickly sauropods attained adult size has major implications for considerations of dinosaur metabolism and body…
laelaps | June 25, 2008
I'm not much of a fan of the Walking With... series/Dinosaur Planet/When Dinosaurs Roamed America documentary format. (And don't get me started on the Chased by... and Prehistoric Park stuff.) The visuals are ok and it's hard to say no to reconstructions of some of my favorite prehistoric creatures, but most of the time I just end up being bored. I want to know about the science and hear what paleontologists have to say, not see a "Just so story," and I'm sorry to say that the IMAX film Sea Monsters falls into the same, dull storytelling mode.
The film starts out with a group of "…
laelaps | June 24, 2008The American Museum of Natural History Research Library has recently put up a website ("Picturing the Museum") containing hundreds of black & white photos of museum exhibits, dioramas, and behind the scenes prep. It is a treasure trove of photographic information; I just wish I could have seen some of these exhibits first hand! The behind the scenes photos are some of the most interesting, though, like this photo of the cleaning of an elephant skin;
American Museum of Natural History Library http://images.library.amnh.org Image # 280023
Here are a few links to some other favorites,…
laelaps | June 18, 2008
An illustration of Koch's reconstructed "Missourium."
On January 12, 1839, an interesting article appeared in the pages of pages of the Philadelphia paper the Presbyterian. Written by Albert Koch (although it appeared in the paper as unsigned), the article made the bold claim that the remains of a mammoth had been discovered along with stone tools in Gasconade country, Missouri, proving that Native Americans had lived alongside the extinct animals. Looking at vestiges of the ancient hunt, Koch proposed that the mammoth had sunk into mud or some other trap and keeled over at which point the…
gregladen | June 16, 2008The first dinosaur bones (that we know of) to have been discovered in British Columbia, Canada, are now being reported. These are bones found in 1971, eventually making their way to the Royal British Columbia Museum, and now being reported by V.M. Arbour and M.C. Graves. The bones were initially found by Kenny Flyborg Larsen, a geologist prospecting for thorium. He was drawn to these bones because the bones themselves are radioactive, and his instruments led him to them.
(This is an update on this, as Arbour kindly sent me a copy of the original paper.)
Arbour and Graves go through great…
laelaps | June 16, 2008If you were to ask someone walking along the street what a fossil is, they'd probably tell you that fossils are the bones of ancient creatures that have turned into stone (or something similar). This isn't wrong, prehistoric bones that have been replaced by minerals are certainly fossils, but bones are not the only kind of fossils. Fossils are any trace of prehistoric life found in the strata of the earth, from the bones of vertebrates to the shells of brachiopods to body impressions. Within the last category footprints and trackways are abundant trace fossils, and a new paper published in…
gregladen | June 12, 2008Giant 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 is truly giant,…
laelaps | June 12, 2008In 1864 Jules Verne published the book A Journey to the Center of the Earth, and although the book is a classic the various TV & film versions (1959, 1967, 1976, 1977, 1989, 1993, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2003) are anything but. This summer will see the release of another interpretation of Verne's novel, this time starring Brendan Fraser;
After seeing the trailer for the new film in the theater, I had to turn to my wife and ask "But where's Gertrude the duck?"
Although the show involved time/dimensional portals, both iterations of "Land of the Lost" involved undiscovered mysteries…
laelaps | June 11, 2008When I was 7 almost every smooth, oval stone was a dinosaur egg. I would spent hours in my grandparent's backyard hacking away at the dirt knowing that there just had to be a Triceratops or a Tyrannosaurus just beneath the surface. (I even got in trouble once for trying to clear out some of the tiny maple seedlings with a hatchet that I found in the shed.) I never found anything, but the hunt for fossils was a helluva lot of fun. My interest in paleontology waned a little as I got older, but I thankfully have rediscovered that interest and aspire to be the "dinosaur hunter" I felt like as I…
laelaps | June 11, 2008
When I wrote about the new sauropod Futalognkosaurus dukei last October, I noted that the authors of the paper describing the animal also included a brief summary of the other animals found nearby. Remains of crocodiles, fish, and pterosaurs provided some clues as to the paleoecology of the area about 90 million years ago, but one of the big surprises was a big honkin' claw from Megaraptor. At first the remains of Megaraptor were thought to represent a coelurosaur, but the complete hand has shown that it is probably either a spinosaurid or carcharodontosaurid. A recent study of the hand,…
laelaps | June 10, 2008Paleontologist Xu Xing is featured in a long USA Today article, covering his inspiration in becoming a paleontologist and his current work. Although it draws comparisons with Indiana Jones and Roy Chapman Andrews, the article is careful to separate the facts of Xu's work from popular fictionalizations and is definitely worth a look.
laelaps | June 9, 2008
This past fall my friends Julia and Neil were kind enough to obtain a signed copy of the new book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters for me from the annual SVP meeting. Although I had not heard of the author, Dr. Donald Prothero, prior to reading the book I was certainly impressed with the wide selection of subjects he ably covered in the text. Little did I know that he is been a prolific author and researcher, some of his other recent published work being After the Dinosaurs and The Evolution of Artiodactyls. From microfossils to mammals, Prothero has studied a wide variety…