Mighty Bones: Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

Berlin's a fascinating city and all, drawing people for its rich, tumultuous history as much as its present-day reputation for 'cool' (whatever that is. Like I'd know). But in the end, dinosaur enthusiasts will only have one destination in mind upon arriving in the city - the Museum für Naturkunde, home of the certified Tallest Mounted Dinosaur Skeleton in the World™. I visited on my second day in the city, and let me assure you, man-sized humeri were just dancing in front of my eyes before that. No amount of refreshingly inexpensive beer was going to distract me on my pilgrimage to the holy hall of bones on the Invalidenstraße. It doesn't disappoint.

The City Museum

The other major stop of our weekend trip to St. Louis was the utterly wickedly wondrous and splendid City Museum. I won't get into the whole history of it; suffice to say that it's a giant indoor playground made of salvaged building materials, and is completely bananas. I didn't go expecting a lot of Mesozoica, but I figured there had to be at least a little. I was happily surprised at what I found.

First, there's this great sauropod staircase, leading from the entry level to the mezzanine and second floor. You can barely make out her head in the first shot...

...so here's a close-up.

On the second floor is a small room of natural history type stuff, presumably from other institutions' defunct displays. I was thrilled to find a glass case containing a bunch of fossil casts, including Tapejara, Velociraptor and Masiakasaurus skulls, and some others I didn't get good pictures of. Not that these are hot stuff; I've never been good at snapping photos through glass.

Opposite the display case is a diorama containing various reconstructions, including Bambiraptor, Compsognathus, Sordes, and Anurognathus. They were created by Missouri's Fossilsmith studios; unfortunately, it doesn't look like they've done a lot in the last few years (or maybe they're so busy they haven't had time to update their site). Their work here is excellent. Seeing that extravagantly feathered bambi when I walked into the room was such a great surprise.





The room also has a case full of other assorted fossils and casts, including various pterosaurs and a reproduction of Archaeopteryx. Really, its a lot of paleo crammed into a pretty small room. There's also a Pteranodon hanging from the ceiling on the ground level, somewhat out of place as the rest of the area has an undersea theme. But I'm not complaining.

Seriously, this is a must-see if you're ever in St. Louis.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: More Rudolf Freund

A pair of Archaeopteryx by Rudolf Freund. From LIFE Magazine, October 19, 1959

Yes, more of old Rudy Freund, also featured last week. Not that I don't have a huge pile of other deserving pieces... I just haven't had much time to scan them in lately! Plus, I couldn't resist posting this lovely reconstruction of this Archaeopteryx couple. The piece was included with the sprawling Lincoln Barnett-penned "Where Evolution Stands Today" in a 1959 issue of LIFE. It was the final chapter in another of the magazine's serial epics. There are plenty of other great Freund pieces as well, including Seymouria, Icthyostega, and a particularly entertaining illustration of an australopithecine putting the hurt on a pack of baboons.

I also have to ask, though I may be betraying my ignorance of botany: WTF is that flower doing on that cycad in the background? It sure seems all kind of wrong to me. The Jurassic is way too early for flowers of any kind, and I've never heard of a flower on a cycad. I'd be deeply grateful if someone could set me straight, if set straight I need to be.

UPDATE: Ian of Other Branch had a good answer: It's not a cycad, it's a Bennettitale. I found a terrific illustration of one on this page. It's from the University of Maryland, and comes from a class taught by Tom Holtz, a paleontologist of some note. Scroll down to the bottom; it's the second to last image. Thanks, Ian.

Hell Bent for Feathers

Helmut Tischlinger's photo of Microraptor gui holotype specimen under UV light. From PLos ONE

The wave of feathered dino research probably isn't cresting any time soon. Beyond the fact that China's bounty of feathered dinosaurs doesn't seem to be abating, science is using new ways of examining them. The study of fossilized melanosomes is exciting, as is the use of UV light to reveal details our eyes can't discern unaided.

Dave Hone has written a series of posts at Archosaur Musings to accompany the paper he co-authored describing new UV photographs of the remarkably well-preserved holotype specimen of Microraptor gui. The photos grab you first with their simple beauty, then with the knowledge they impart. The feathers of "four-winged" M. gui are indeed attached to the body and oriented as they would have been in life: a small revelation, Hone admits, but the greater good is the publicity this will hopefully give to the UV photography technique in studying the Chinese feathered dinosaurs.

The use of UV light to examine fossils has a long history of slow progress. It's been advanced considerably by the work of Helmut Tischlinger, a German researcher. He's dedicated most of his time to the Solnhofen limestone of Bavaria. This limestone bears witness to a Jurassic lagoon. It consists of fine layers, some of which were deposited very quickly - possibly during a cycle of storms. The water at the bottom of this lagoon was very salty, and a lack of oxygen retarded bacterial decay. It's a good recipe for a high-res fossil. If you've seen Archaeopteryx, you've seen a Solnhofen fossil. If you've seen a Tishlinger photo of Archaeopteryx, you've seen a whole 'nother bird, so to speak.

Dave Hone has extensively written about Tischlinger, and was instrumental in bringing him to China. I've got to say, Tischlinger's work is pretty inspiring. It's another reminder that behind the big "names in lights" of science, there are many creative, hard-working people behind the scenes. Obtaining scientifically useful images with UV photography involves many variables, and requires long exposure times. But it's worth it, and we may very well have Tischlinger's dedication to thank for some important coming discoveries. The feathered dinosaurs are still relevant to the modern world. so it's only proper that they all be photographed in this manner, so critical details that look to the naked eye to be part of the matrix aren't lost in preparation. Hone reports that at least one museum is using UV lights in the preparation of fossils, minimizing the risk that this happens.

ReBecca Hunt-Foster has come through again with a long interview with Hone at Dinochick Blogs. More at Dinosaur Tracking as well. More of Tischlinger's images at Archosaur Musings, as well as in this paper about the pterosaur Jeholopterus from the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, available free online.

Anchiornis

Anchiornis huxleyi, from the Nature paper.

A strong piece of evidence for the theropod origin of birds was announced last week, in an early online version of the current issue of Nature (click for original paper by Xu et al). From the fertile Jurassic strata of northeastern China comes Anchiornis huxleyi. This extravagantly feathered theropod of the troodontid family predates the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, and is a blow to the "temporal paradox" argument against the theropod origin.

There are three groups that make up the clade Paraves. The Troodontids, which include this new find; the Avialans, which include Archaeopteryx and later birds; and the Dromaeosaurids, which include those dinosaurs popularly regarded as the "raptors." Paleontologist Xing Xu and colleagues note that with this discovery, basal members of each of these groups have been found which feature a "four-winged" body plan. It appears that long feathers first evolved on the outer (distal, in anatomical terminology) end of the limbs, meaning that the scales we see on the feet of most modern birds was a later adaptation.

In all this further points to the idea that the first flying vertebrates evolved from an arboreal, gliding ancestor. I'm interested to see if a future study extends the climbing function recently attributed to Cretaceous dromaeosaur sickle claws to earlier, Jurassic maniraptors.