paleontology
gregladen | May 16, 2008May 18, 2008 -- A tiny abalone specimen 5.9 mm in length and approximately 78 million years old (putting it in the middle Campanian Stage of the Late Cretaceous) has been documented from rocks in the Garapito Creek area of Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles County by Lindsey T. Groves and John M. Alderson of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in the latest issue of the molluscan journal The Veliger.
Fossil abalone of the Late Cretaceous Epoch are extremely rare, previously known from two species: one from San Diego County (approximately 70 million years old) and another from Puerto…
laelaps | May 15, 2008
As regular readers of this blog know, I have an extreme affinity for museums and always welcome the news of a long-lost specimen that was locked away in storage turning out to be something new and significant. In 2006 one such discovery occurred when Mike Taylor (seen left, holding the specimen) came across a sauropod vertebra named BMNH R2095, a fossil that would turn out to be something so entirely different that one year later it was assigned the name Xenoposeidon. Mike Taylor has done much more than bring Xenoposeidon to light, however, and I caught up with him to ask a few questions…
laelaps | May 15, 2008Later today I'll be posting the next installment of my series of interviews with paleontologists, this time asking Mike Taylor to tell us a little about PhyloCode, strange sauropods, and the present "Aetogate" controversy (just to start). It's another long, detail-rich interview, so be sure to check back later today to have a look.
laelaps | May 13, 2008Our understanding of dinosaurs today is a far cry from the massive, crocodile-like beasts envisioned by Richard Owen and William Buckland, but the way in which ideas about dinosaurs held by earlier paleontologists are presented has been troubling me lately. In many documentaries it is fashionable to say that dinosaurs were traditionally viewed as big lizards, making them slow, dumb, and cold-blooded animals, but the more I have read about the early days of paleontology the more I've come to doubt that such generalizations can really be maintained.
I should probably preface my remarks by…
laelaps | May 12, 2008
Standing in front of a small tank of mudskippers in the special "Water" exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, I heard a gentleman next to me comment to his friend "You know, if evolution is true, it's really amazing how many different kinds of animal there are." I have to admit that the first thought to pop into my mind was "If?" but after my twinge of arrogance passed I had to agree; it really is fantastic that evolution has produced such diverse forms of life.
Present diversity is only half of the evolutionary equation, though. Without an understanding of common descent we…
laelaps | May 9, 2008Not only does the commercial dare to mention evolution, but it also features a prominent paleontologist and (gasp) some actual science. I have no idea whether it has been broadcast in the U.S., but I would guess not;
laelaps | May 8, 2008
The articulated skeleton of Gorgosaurus (AMNH 5428) found in the Belly River Formation near the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada. From Matthew & Brown 1923.
In 1913, an American Museum of Natural History expedition led by Barnum Brown (with P.C. Kaisen and George Sternberg as assistants) searched the Cretaceous Belly River Formation in Alberta, Canada for dinosaurs. Although there had been an expedition to the same area the year before, the 1913 trip yielded "more exhibition material," including the articulated skeleton of Gorgosaurus*. When it arrived in New York it was prepared by…
laelaps | May 6, 2008In case you missed it, my post on paleo-art "'What Rules the World?'" is up at Science Creative Quarterly. I wish I caught some of the typos, but I still think that it's a pretty good piece.
Coincidentally, Reverend H.N. Hutchinson's Extinct Monsters arrived in the mail today and a battered copy of William Flower's An Introduction to the Osteology of the Mammalia came yesterday, so I've got plenty of old books about bones to look through.
laelaps | May 5, 2008On May 17 I'll be hosting the 20th edition of The Boneyard, but rather than just collecting a group of links from whatever might happen to pop up on the web I've decided to do something a little different. I want to run a contest for anyone who might be interested, and the theme of the competition is going to be "Meeting a prehistoric creature."
You could write some fiction about coming across a dinosaur in the woods or a Neanderthal on a subway, relate a real-life experience digging up fossils, talk about an early trip to the museum, or anything else that might come to mind on the theme of…
laelaps | May 3, 2008The latest edition of the Boneyard is up over at Familiarity Breeds Content. The next edition will be back here in two weeks, but it isn't going to be your usual collection of links. The next edition will bring with it the potential to win a copy of Ralph O'Connor's The Earth on Show, Edwin Colbert's Men and Dinosaurs, and a few other books from my own library. I'll divulge all the details this coming Monday.
laelaps | April 30, 2008
The skull of Paranthropus boisei (AKA "Zinj," "Dear Boy," "Nutcracker Man," etc.). From Ungar et al. 2008.
Ever since the discovery of the hominds we call Paranthropus robustus in 1938 and Paranthropus boisei in 1959, the dietary habits of these "robust australopithecines" have been controversial. With skulls that seem to have more in common with gorillas than with Homo habilis, another hominid more closely related to us that lived during the same time, it has long been thought that Paranthropus was a dietary specialist. The saggital crest, large and thickly-enameled teeth, and huge jaws…
voltagegate | April 29, 2008
If I was given three wishes, I have always said that one of them would be to watch the evolution of life at my leisure, being able speeding things up and slowing them down at will. Of all the time periods we've designated, the Ediacaran and the Cambrian periods would be a frame by frame analysis. Were these organisms really that much different from modern organisms, and if so, did their ecology reflect these differences?
PLoS One published a paper today that attempts to make my pipe dream a reality by taking the well known geological snapshots of Cambrian life, the Chengjiang and Burgess…
gregladen | April 28, 2008Food webs --- the network of trophic (eating) interaction among the many species sharing a habitat or biome -- is a much studied aspect of ecology. Food web and other similar phenomena such as dispersal syndromes are epiphenomena of evolution, resulting from the negotiation of competitive and cooperative interactions among many individuals. Indeed, the food web is the gross-level movement of energy within the ebb and flow of entropy and life-based energy capture. This flow of energy is fundamental to all life systems.
The delicacy or vulnerability of a particular habitat ... the potential…
gregladen | April 27, 2008Some of my colleagues are downplaying the recent paper in science showing a: that mastodons are elephants and b: that birds and dinosaurs ... in particular Tyrannosaurus rex and turkeys ... are related. (See here and here, for instance)
Yes, it is true that these phylogenetic findings are wholly uninteresting, being exactly what we expected. But that is WHY these particular phylogenies were carried out.
You see, the research is being done with organic material that is very very old, and is amazingly, remarkably, unexpectedly and astoundingly preserved. The point of using this material to…
laelaps | April 27, 2008After the success of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the minds behind the franchise were in a bit of a fix. Tyrannosaurus and "Velociraptor"* had the run of the fictional islands for the past two movies; something new was needed to up the ante. The decision was made to make Spinosaurus the new villain in Jurassic Park III, the strange theropod being said to possess an 8-foot-long skull and stretch 60 feet from the tip of its crocodile-like snout to the end of its tail by the creative team. As if this weren't enough, the writers of the film had Spinosaurus kick the tar of of Tyrannosaurus,…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, dinosaurs, birds, Tyrannosaurus rex, ornithology, paleontology
The Tyrannosaurus rex femur from which researcher Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University recovered soft tissue.
Image: Science.
It wasn't too long ago that paleontologists thought that fossilization was a process where all biological material was replaced with inert stone. However, in 2005, Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University rocked the paleontological world when she recovered a still-elastic blood vessel from inside a fractured thigh bone fossil of…
laelaps | April 25, 2008
The Apatosaurus mount at the AMNH.
Every person who loves paleontology has their own story about how they became fascinated with strange creatures and ancient world. For me it was solidified by a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York when I was only knee-high to a Ceratosaurus, but everyone has their own story to tell. What's more, there's more to suffering PNS (Paleo-Nerd Syndrome) aren't just impressed with ancient life but utterly enthralled by it; there are always more questions and amazing discoveries to think about. I always ask professional paleontologists…
laelaps | April 24, 2008
In the first two installments of this series I had the chance to interview two of the most famous paleontologists in the field today, but there are many, many other skilled scientists that you may never have heard of. Dr. Jerry Harris, Director of Paleontology at Dixie State College, is an outstanding scientist (and friend) who has studied a variety of fossil vertebrates from Mesozoic bird tracks to enormous sauropods. Even though I botched some of the questions, Dr. Harris took the time to come up with some excellent responses about his work.
[Brian Switek] What fascinates you about…
laelaps | April 23, 2008I am proud to announce that tomorrow I will be posting an interview with paleontologist Jerry Harris as the third installment of my Paleontological Profiles series. It's a good one, so be sure not to miss it!
voltagegate | April 21, 2008A comparison of carbon/oxygen isotope ratios from the tooth enamel of two early proboscideans, Moeritherium and Barytherium to other animals of the same era (circa 37 mya) revealed to researchers the possibility of a ancient, semi-aquatic animal, linking the speculated split of dugong and elephant from a common ancestor. "The scientists" (as the article begins; that's some lead) said that they have:
...substantial evidence to suggest that modern elephants do have ancient relatives which lived primarily in water. The next steps are to conduct similar analyses on other elephant ancestors to…