Mesozoic Miscellany #15

Welcome to the fifteenth installment of my (mostly) weekly digest of dinosaur news, Mesozoic Miscellany. With my attendance at ScienceOnline2011 last week, I've got a couple weeks worth of dinosaur news to round up. I'm going to try something a bit different, gathering links to major stories, then sharing posts from around the dinosaur blogosphere that deserve your attention. I'm not sure if it will work this way in slower new weeks, but this week it certainly does. Onward, then!

The Big Stories

It's always exciting to flesh out the murky beginnings of the dinosaurian dynasty, and the discovery of the small primitive theropod Eodromaeus helps out a lot. As significant as the description of Eodromaeus is, the paper made an equal splash for putting forth Eoraptor as a basal sauropodomorph. It makes sense that the earliest dinosaurs would be so easy to interpret differently, as subtle differences between them are used to try to ferret out the beginnings of the distinct branches of the dinosaur family tree we know so well. More: Video coverage from Science Friday and Discovery, Chinleana, Faster Times, Pterosauria, Dinosaur Tracking, 80 Beats.

Also exciting are new pterosaur fossils, especially when they add to the stock of specimens of existing species. The new Darwinopterus fossil described this week in Science is really special, as it is apparently a mother who was killed just at the moment she was laying an egg. The egg is similar to the soft-shelled sort laid by alligators rather than the hard-shelled kind we eat for breakfast. More: Dinosaur Tracking, 80 Beats, Discovery News.

Snaggle-toothed theropod Masiakasaurus recieved some attention this week with a monograph published in Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology [PDF]. Matthew T. Carrano, Mark A. Loewen, and Joseph J. W. Sertich's 53 page paper provides an overview of the noasaurid clade within which Masiakasaurus fits, though because the fossils known are so fragmentary, they hesitate to draw any broad conclusions about the group's evolution. Also notable is Lukas Panzarin's wonderful restoration of Masiakasaurus.

Last week, Victoria Arbour's description of the small pterosaur Gwawinopterus was released in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. It's outside of her usual focus on ankylosaurs, but a significant find in that it's the only Late Cretaceous pterosaur with teeth found thus far. More: Arbour's guest spot at Archosaur Musings, Arbour's blog Pseudoplocephalus, and my look at the unique restoration accompanying the press release.

Around the Dinoblogosphere

The "Dinosaur Wars" episode of The American Experience, which aired on Monday (my review here) is now available to watch in its entirety at PBS. If you're not familiar with the Bone Wars era of paleontology, it's a fine place to get started.

Jeff Martz, who writes the always-entertaing Paleo Errata, has made the leap to the science blog network Lab Spaces. The new blog is called House of Bones. Stop by and wish him well! We need more paleontology writers in the blog networks.

At Pterosauria, Taylor muses over whether Spinosaurus bore a sail or a bison-like hump.

Carl Zimmer's feather evolution article in the February issue of National Geographic is available at the NatGeo website, accompanied by breathtaking photographs by Robert Clark. As noted by Matt Martyniuk, the Anchiornis fossil featured is absolutely stunning. Along these same lines, PBS's Nature is airing an episode about the birds of paradise this Sunday.

Though his favored fossil hunting site Quarry 4 has been shut down, Saurian continues to chronicle the ups and downs of his time there.

Ichnotaxonomy? Get the scoop on how researchers classify trace fossils in another insightful piece by Tony Martin at the Great Cretaceous Walk.

Twit Picks
Stuff I've linked to from Twitter recently.

• Original Godzilla movie poster. Splendid.
• At Archosaur Musings, Dave Hone offers advice for paleo-folks doing filmed interviews
• Adelie penguins at Cape Denison by Frank Hurley
• Dinosaurian elegy for Kodachrome
• WitmerLab hits the small screen, with a cameo on CSI.
• There's a melancholy quality to the postmortem contortions of this Gorgosaurus. Darren Tanke's series continued.
• A look at how James Gurney conceived of one of his pterosaur riders

Tumblin'
I Effing Love Dinosaurs featured this incredibly cool t-shirt this week.


Paleoart of the Week
With the new Masiakasaurus monograph coming out, I thought it would be cool to look at an older image from around the time it was first described by Scott Sampson. This, shared by the Madagascar Ankizy Fund at Flickr, was done by Bill Parsons. Check out the skeletal and you'll see just what I meant by the word "fragmentary" above.


Outrageously Off-Topic Indulgence
I'm thrilled to little tiny pieces that Parks and Recreation has returned, after an absence of several months. This is easily the funniest show on TV right now, by my estimation. Ron Swanson is an all-time great sitcom character.

ScienceOnline special: Gwawinapterus

Gwawinapterus by Victoria Arbour, used with her permission.

When I checked in with Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings yesterday morning - a daily occurence for me as it is for many other paleo folks - I felt like a gift had been dropped square in my lap from the Olympian heights. Here I was, organizing my thoughts for ScienceOnline, and staring back at me from Google Reader was the fellow above: Gwawinapterus, a new istiodactylid pterosaur from British Columbia.

The pterosur's describer, Victoria Barbour of the University of Alberta, wrote a guest post at Archosaur Musings which discusses the critter itself and the scrappy fossils (are there any other kind) she had to work with. But I was entranced by the drawing. I emailed Victoria straight away, asking her who drew it and telling her how much I loved the native art influence. I took a stab and guessed at a Tlingit influence. Why Tlingit? Because that's the Pacific native culture that I'm most familiar with. I readily admit that it would be like someone hearing "Whip It" and remarking, "that's a rather nice Beatles song." I'm basically that dope.

I wasn't the only person to ask her about the illustration. Shortly after I sent my email, Arbour posted a nice, long piece about it on her blog, Pseudoplocephalus. It turns out that she drew the critter herself. About the distinctive style, she writes:

Based on comments on some of the news articles that came out yesterday, people seem to either love or hate the colour pattern I chose. That’s ok. The pattern I chose was inspired by the art of the Kwakwaka’wakw, who live on the northern end of Vancouver Island. The name Gwawinapterus is partly derived from the Kwakwala word for Raven, Gwa’wina, because the skull of many istiodactylids remind me of Raven masks.

If you read my recent SciAm Guest Blog post, you might guess that I dig what she's done with this pterosaur's name. I love it when paleontologists draw their nomenclatural inspiration from local history and culture. This doesn't just stem from some progressive desire to see science reach underrepresented people. It's also that inluding a cultural reference in a description of a fossilized animal's bones is a tacit acknowledgement that the cultures we create are part of the environment around us and the Earth under us. Pretending that they're separate is foolish.

I find Arbour's choice refreshing. An illustration of a prehistoric creature is a hypothesis. Given the power our visual sense holds over us, it's all too easy for the viewer to come away with the impression that it's based on more than it is. When people think "sauropod" they envision the Brachiosaurus of Jurassic Park or the Diplodocus herd of Walking with Dinosaurs. They don't think of the sparse collection of bones from which those visuals are built. The truth is, the brachiosaur Alan Grant gawks at on Isla Nublar is about as close to the real thing as the most whimsical children's book illustration.

Working with what little she had, Arbour made some conservative morphological guesses based on the relatives of Gwawinapterus. The choice of such a culturally resonant pattern of color, while not entirely implausible, steps boldly away from the notion of accuracy. It grabs the viewer's attention, makes an emotional impact, and draws them into the story of the animal that inspired it, the far-flung member of a small tribe of pterosaurs. The only pterosaur with teeth known from the late Cretaceous. The speculation this inspires is an important aspect of science, and I imagine that Arbour's fanciful representation of her raven-winged pterosaur will invite many readers to do just that.

Special thanks to Victoria Arbour for allowing me to use her artwork here.