paleontology
laelaps | March 26, 2008Over the course of my relatively short blogging career, I've had the pleasure of being in contact with a number of working paleontologists, people who are actively contributing to our understanding of ancient life. Although I'm always a little intimidated talking to professionals in paleontology, I've been thinking that I'd like to start up a series of interviews paleontologists active in the field today. What do you think? Is that something you'd like to see? I can't guarantee everyone that I have in mind will respond, but I think it would be a neat feature to run.
awild | March 26, 2008
The famous Cambrian Explosion- a rapid diversification of animal groups about 550 million years ago- assumes a rather diminished significance when mapped to the full Tree of Life.
update: yes, I made the diagram myself, by modifying this.
laelaps | March 26, 2008Among the phrases that are most likely to make my hackles rise, "missing link" has to be among the most irritating. There is no good reason to continue to use it, the idea that evolution is a "chain" of progress being closely associated with the terminology, but this seems to be of little concern to some journalists. Even if we put accuracy aside, the phrase "missing link" is terrible because it has a sort of "half-joking" connotation to it, often being associated with bigfoot and cartoons rather than the remains of ancient humans.
Maybe they feel like they're trying to help by creating a "…
laelaps | March 26, 2008
The mount of Brontotherium on display at the AMNH. Notice the healed rib.
During the field season of 1892, J.L. Wortman found the front half of an absolutely monstrous mammal. Entombed in the South Dakota sediment was the exquisitely preserved front half of a Titanotherium (now called Brontotherium, as far as I've been able to tell), an odd-toed ungulate that looked something like a rhino despite its closer affinity to horses. Much to the disappointment of Wortman and his assistant O.A. Peterson, however, the hips, hind limbs, and tail of the creature seemed to be eroded away, and a…
laelaps | March 25, 2008The study of the evolution of avian dinosaurs is one of the most active and exciting areas of paleontology (if not science in general) today, and I've been fortunate enough to see a revolution in this field during my own lifetime. When I was first learning about dinosaurs as a child, a few documentaries and books mentioned that dinosaurs and birds were probably related to each other, the overall tone being very cautious, but now there is little doubt that ornithology is really "extant dinosaur biology." Still, some old hypotheses die hard, and even though I greatly appreciate the beauty and…
laelaps | March 22, 2008
In nearly any film that involves dinosaurs, the main problem facing the people making the movie is determining how to get humans and dinosaurs together in the first place. Some films have opted for genetic experiments, others hidden refugia, and still others nuclear tests (although these films usually feature mutated dinosaurs rather than the animals themselves), but a solution is usually found through time travel, the existence of the lost world, or (more recently) fiddling around with DNA. Once the monsters have been securely brought into contact with humans, though, a hero needs to…
voltagegate | March 21, 2008There's a neat study being published today in Science discussing the reproductive potential of ecological systems 570 mya. The findings are based on the new discovery of a "tube-like" organism (so say the PRs) called Funisia dorothea, which apparently was able to reproduce sexually and lived in a complex ecosystem despite the apparent absence of predation. The researchers have taken this to be an example of a much more complex world during the Neoproterozoic and periods before. From the PR:
...in describing the ecology and reproductive strategies of Funisia dorothea, a tubular organism…
laelaps | March 21, 2008
The skull of Nichollsia borealis.
Update: As Nick has aptly pointed out, this plesiosaur is going to need a new name. The genus name Nichollsia is occupied by an isopod, arthopods once again trumping prehistoric creatures. I wonder how many times this has happened; I'm sure an interesting review paper could be written if all the changes could be tracked down.
According to a press release issued by the University of Calgary (and adapted for ScienceDaily and redOrbit, with another summary at Palaeoblog), Patrick Druckenmiller and Anthony Russell have just released a paper describing a…
laelaps | March 18, 2008Remember "Dakota," the exquisitely-preserved hadrosaur that was the selling point of a book that barely featured it? (See here for more gripes) It turns out that it's an Edmontosaurus, although the species name is left off so I have no idea whether the specimen represents a new variety of Edmontosaurus or not.
There is some distressing news, though. According to the man who found the skeleton, Tyler Lyson, he's planning on taking "Dakota" on a world tour, eventually finding a home in a museum Lyson hopes to create in his hometown of Marmath, North Dakota. "Dakota" will first go on display at…
laelaps | March 18, 2008The Cambrian "explosion," the enigmatic phenomenon in which many of the phyla existing on the planet appeared in a relatively short period of time (at least 20 million years), remains a difficult event to study. Fossils are rare, intricate, and often represent creatures that are difficult to fit into one group or another. There are fossils of earlier creatures (and there may have even been an earlier, Ediacaran "explosion"), but at present it is the Cambrian event that is the most famous radiation of diverse forms of life. A relatively recent paper published in the Annual Review of Earth and…
laelaps | March 17, 2008
The lower jaw of Megalosaurus, presently the only fossil that can accurately be attributed to this enigmatic genus.
Although it was one of the first dinosaurs to be scientifically described during the early 19th century, the theropod Megalosaurus remains one of the most enigmatic (and problematic) large dinosaurs known. Even though an entire family, the Megalosauridae (established by Huxley in 1869), bears the name of this famous dinosaur, the group has come to be seen as a taxonomic wastebasket with no real meaning. Indeed, a new paper in the journal Palaeontology advocates dropping the…
laelaps | March 11, 2008
An itchy Malayan tapir.
As was the case with many other animals I learned about when I was younger, I believed that there was only one kind of animal called a tapir. Most popular books aimed at children don't spend much (if any) time on taxonomy or diversity, so there was no need for the authors of such books to explain that presently there exist four species of tapir in the tropical regions of the world; Baird's tapir (Tapirus bairdii), the mountain tapir (Tapirus pinchaque), and the Brazilian tapir (Tapirus terrestris) in South & Central America and the Malayan tapir (Tapirus indicus…
laelaps | March 8, 2008
Smilodon
It's been two weeks since the last Boneyard weathered out of the blogosphere. Here's a look at what present excavations have revealed over the past two weeks;
Carnivorous mammals have evolved saber-teeth many times in the past, but just how they used their teeth to kill prey has been more difficult to ascertain. Nimravid presents a short review of how creatures so equipped may have caught and killed their prey.
Paleontology isn't only focused on nightmarish creatures that ripped other extinct animals to shreds; the Ethical Palaeontologist reports on an amazing fossil of a…
laelaps | March 7, 2008There must be some unwritten rule that if you're going to face off against a prehistoric predator, you'd better make sure there's some heavy machinery nearby to even the odds [from an episode of Primeval];
The first time such a confrontation between "monster" and machine on film (that I know of, anyway) was in the film Dinosaurus!;
More recently the low-budget gore-fest Carnosaur pulled the same trick;
Of course, nothing says cheesy b-movie like recycling action sequences; Carnosaur 2 rehashed the climax of the first film using a forklift (Beware: Clip contains gratuitous gore near…
laelaps | March 5, 2008Yesterday the Department of Cultural Affairs announced its conclusions in the ongoing academic integrity case involving paleontologist Spencer Lucas. According to the panel, which included two "objective" scientists (both of which have collaborated with Lucas in the past, one of which had issued a letter three days prior to the hearing expressing that he had already deemed Lucas innocent) Lucas is not guilty of claim-jumping research being carried out by Bill Parker and Jeff Martz on ancient archosaurs called aetosaurus (see Darren's original posts for more information on these animals).
The…
laelaps | March 4, 2008The next edition of The Boneyard will be right here this coming Saturday. The special effects-driven movie 10,000 BC also comes out this weekend, and although I'll post anything paleontological that is submitted, I would encourage those interested in submitting to write something about any of the creatures featured in the film (sabercats, terror birds, mammoths, etc.).
I can already tell that the film is going to be absolutely horrid, but much like Jurassic Park III I'm mostly interested in it to see the restorations of the extinct creatures. I may use the film to resurrect the "bad…
laelaps | March 4, 2008The New York Times has two new articles out today, one involving dinosaurs in Argentina and another about the social life of the spotted hyena. The article about the southern hemisphere dinosaurs is another reminder of the controversy between private collectors, academics, and the public, and the hyena article is a must-read piece about social intelligence by Carl Zimmer. (This piece is even more relevant given that the Berkley hyena research program is in definite danger of being dismantled.) Each of the articles is also accompanied by a slide show.
There is one mistake in the dinosaur…
laelaps | March 3, 2008
The evolution of giraffes has been on my mind quite frequently as of late, although it's been difficult tracking down information about the evolution of the group (it was once much more diverse than it is today, a trend also illustrated by elephants and horses). Along the way, though, I've turned up a few interesting papers involving the ever-vexing question of how the long neck of the giraffe evolved, the first being a letter to Nature by Chapman Pincher published in 1949. Criticizing Darwin's hypothesis that giraffes evolved long necks to reach higher levels of vegetation during droughts,…
laelaps | February 28, 2008Paleo-blogger Nimravid has put up an excellent summary of (surprise!) nimravids. It definitely outshines my earlier, feeble attempts to write about this extinct group of carnivores, and I highly suggest that you give it a look!
laelaps | February 27, 2008
It is often accepted that science and the humanities have long been in conflict with each other, science providing a cold, objective look at the world while having read the entire works of Shakespeare (or similar equivalent) represents the true hallmark of a cultivated mind in the humanities. This disjunction was identified in 1959 by C.P. Snow in his book The Two Cultures, and in a 1963 follow-up he described the idea of a "third culture" in which science and the humanities could support each other and no longer be seen as entirely opposing forces. The development of a Snow's idea of a…