The Captain Marshall Field Expeditions for Vertebrate Paleontology

The Field Museum Library has shared a collection of photographs from the institution's expeditions to South America in the 1920's. The expeditions were undertaken with the goal of finding Cenozoic mammals and comparing them to their northern hemisphere counterparts, but at least a couple dinosaurs popped up, as well. Not just any dinosaurs. Huge dinosaurs. Enormous Argentinian sauropods like Antarctosaurus and Argyrosaurus, which to this day aren't well-understood or studied.


Geology preparator John B. Abbott with Antarctosaurus femur


Argyrosaurus femur in situ

Some mammals turned up as well, of course, including Megatherium, Scelidodon, and Panochthus.


Elmer S. Riggs excavates a Megatherium


Unidentified worker digs up Scelidodon


Robert Thorne with Panochtus, a glyptodont

The bulk of the collection, however, is made up of photos taken during the groups' travels, capturing snapshots of life in Argentina in the '20s. See more.

Dinosaurs in a Trash Heap

Earlier this year, The National Archives UK released a collection of photographs as part of a project called Africa Through a Lens. Originally held by the Colonial Office, a government agency that handled the affairs of British colonial territories, they document a hundred years of British involvement on the continent. The photos have also been shared at Flickr. The sets are organized by country, and in the Lesotho set, I found this 1955 photo depicting an excavation in Triassic rocks in a village called Mahputseng.



In his essential 1968 book Men and Dinosaurs (republished by Dover in 1984 as The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries, Edwin Colbert touches on this dig briefly. He writes,

One of the most interesting of recent excavations in this part of the world was carried on at a locality known as Maphutseng, in Lesotho. Here, in the very backyard of an African house - a typical Basuto house with walls of mud and a thatched roof - a shallow quarry was developed by two French residents among the Basutos, the brothers Ellenberger, with [AW] Crompton and his associates participating in the dig. Many bones of large Triassic dinosaurs not unlike the bones excavated by von Huene at Trossingen in southern Germany were dug up...

The brothers he refers to are François and Paul Ellenberger, who would later erect the name Thotobolosaurus for the Maphutseng bones. It's likely that it's one of the brothers in the photo. The name Thotobolosaurus is derived from the Sesotho word for "trash heap," referring to the village refuse pile near the spot where the fossils were found.

In the early sixties, the Ellenbergers wrote that the bones "represent nearly all parts of the skeleton except the skull, and come from 7 to 8 individuals of variable size but, it seems, a single species... The preparation of all this material and the reconstruction of the skeleton evidently will be long-term." (PDF). Long-term is right; unfortunately, they still have never been formally described. They describe the dinosaur as being something close to Plateosaurus or Melanorosaurus, another basal sauropodomorph from South Africa. Considering all of the work recently done at the bottom of the sauropod family tree, it would be interesting to see some serious attention given to the Ellenberger's refuse pile find, especially since there's some doubt about whether any of the bones are sufficient to support a unique genus.

As an additional bit of colonial African history, notice the name in the lower right corner, Alwyn Bisschoff, presumably the photographer. Formerly an aircraft technician for the South African air force, at the time this photo was taken he was an agricultural officer for the British government in Basutoland, Lesotho's colonial name until independence in 1966. As it turns out, he's also a bit of a hero among the Land Rover off-roading crowd.

A Little Book for Little Boys

The first World's Fair was 1851's Great Exhibition in London, housed in a grand structure known as the Crystal Palace. After the exhibition's original run was over, the palace moved to its current location in Sydenham and became home to Waterhouse Hawkins' sculptures of prehistoric beasts, including famously inaccurate statues of Iguanodon and Megalosaurus (I'm smitten with these sculptures, and have written about them here a few times).


Queen Victoria opens the Great Exhibition, shared by World Expo Blog via Flickr.

Idly perusing the halls of Google Books recently, I came across a unique perspective on the exhibition's promise. It comes from a time before the dinosaurs were introduced, but as a Victorian artifact of the Crystal Palace I thought it was worth posting. As the Great Exhibition was set to begin in 1851, the James Nisbet company published The Crystal Palace: A Little Book for Little Boys, which is exactly what it says it is. It tells the story of Frank and George, two little boys who await their chance to visit the Crystal Palace with fevered anticipation. While Frank is a good, obedient child who minds his elders and trusts in the wisdom of his grandmother, George is unashamedly greedy and impatient, often shocking his friend with the depth of his selfishness. He sneaks out when he's told to stay in. He thwarts his governess Mary's attempts to discipline him. He bullies younger children and throws tantrums.

The exhibition, organized to show off the wealth of England as the industrial revolution gained steam - excuse the pun - was seen as a way to showcase the potential of technology to pave the way to a better future. The Crystal Palace is a pious work, clearly written to remind the adult "Georges" of the world that their technological wonders could not offer true peace. It closes with Frank's dying friend Harry using the glass that encloses the wonders of industry as a metaphor for people reshaped by the hand of God: "...in this very furnace of affliction has my heart of flint, and my loose sand of character, that would not fix itself to any good, been melted down by God, to what you see."

It's basically an eighty page tract, and a nice little peek into the changing Victorian world.

Of all the precociously articulate language put in the children's mouths, my favorite bit by far is this mama's-boy fantasy, dreamt up by Frank. He's just become aware of just how put-upon George's mother is, and imagines himself switching places to serve as the doting son she so richly and desperately deserves.

"I should like to sit upon a stool beside her," said he to himself," and read some pretty book, and talk it over afterwards, and put her pillows smooth, and watch when she seemed tired, and then hold my tongue awhile, and let her fall asleep. I would walk on tip-toe in her room, and never talk too loud to make her head ache, and run of all her errands, and so try to save the servants trouble. Mary would not grumble then, I hope. I must persuade poor George to turn over a new leaf, and see if he is not more happy by it."

The fate of George is left open at the end, but I bet he snuck out of the house the first chance he had once the Hawkins dinosaurs were unveiled.

Happy Birthday, Joseph Leidy

Statue of Joseph Leidy at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. Photo by Kerrins Giraffe, via Flickr.

Thanks to the always dependable Palaeoblog for reminding me that today is 19th century naturalist Joseph Leidy's birthday. I've been meaning for a long time to talk about him here, so I think I'll do a bit of that today.

Leidy, a central figure in the history of American paleontology, is sadly overshadowed by the outrageous stunts of Cope and Marsh in their bitter, public feud over the newly discovered fossil fields of the American west. Certainly, Leidy had an interest in dinosaurs; he was the first American scientist to describe a relatively complete skeleton, Hadrosaurus foulkii. A diligent scientist and by all accounts a reasonable, fair-minded man, Leidy seems to have been exhausted by his colleagues' antics. The obituary of Leidy in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences demurely mentions the bone wars without naming the names its readers would have easily recognized. "Great rivalry and many acrimonious disputes regarding priority and nomenclature arose so that rather than become entangled in controversy, Dr. Leidy gave up this work in which he had achieved such success and devoted himself to other fields of scientific work..."


A portrait of Leidy as a young man. Handsome devil, ain't he?

In her biography of Cope, Jane P. Davidson notes that the decision to yield to Cope and Marsh likely had to do as much with practical concerns as with personal distaste for the rivalry: they simply hogged the bone beds and the resources necessary to access them. Whatever the ultimate reason for backing off of paleontology in the 1870's, Leidy's interest in the natural world was such that choosing a single field to focus on must have been nearly impossible. A wide-ranging naturalist in the truest sense of the term, Leidy collected over 1500 specimens for the herbarium at the University of Pennsylvania. His mineralogical work led him to amass an impressive collection for the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences which later was purchased by the Smithsonian. He's a huge figure in the history of parasitology as well, a proponent in the burgeoning use of the microscope in scientific research. There is no way I can do him justice in this space.

Cope and Marsh were talented scientists in their own right, of course. But the fact that Leidy didn't take part in their drama (nor in any other drama, from what I can tell) elevates him above the both of them, in my mind at least. Does he have as many named taxa under his belt as Marsh? Nope. But he also didn't have the advantages of The Great Dismal Swamp's* family fortune and political clout. Maybe it would have been advantageous to have Marsh on your side if you were a Gilded Age scientist. Maybe it would have been a kick to scheme and curse the scientific establishment with Cope. But Joseph Leidy's the guy I would have wanted as a mentor and a friend.

The Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, of which he was president, has a great online exhibit of Leidy's life and work, which you ought to visit. The introduction page closes with this quote from Leidy, which perfectly demonstrates why I hold him in such high regard.

"The study of natural history in the leisure of my life, since I was 14 years of age, has been to me a constant source of happiness; and my experience of it is such that independently of its higher merits, I warmly recommend it as a pastime, than which, I believe, no other can excel it."

* With a nickname like that, who wouldn't want to knock back a few brews with O.C. Marsh?

A Mantellisaurus Rampant, or Coo-Coo for Kukufeldia

On Thursday of last week, I wrote about the coat of arms for Maidstone, the small town in Kent where a quarry owned by W.H Bensted yielded important Iguanodon bones in 1834.


The Maidstone Slab. From wikimedia commons.

In the comments, Matt Martyniuk questioned whether those bones would still be considered Iguanodon. It was a good question, because Iguanodon happens to be one of those genera that is a taxonomic cluster... well, you know what I'm getting at. Check out the Iguanodon page at Wikipedia for a daunting list of putative Iguanodon species later reassigned to other genera and others currently considered dubious.

A paper published in the latest Zootaxa is another attempt at resolving the mess, reaching far back to teeth described by the father of Iguanodon, Gideon Algernon Mantell, in 1848. Andrew McDonald of the University of Pennsylvania with Paul Barrett and Sandra Chapman from the Natural History Museum in London have erected a new genus, Kukufeldia tilgatensis, after analyzing a collection of teeth assigned to Iguanodon by Mantell in 1848. The authors justify the new genera on the grounds that the teeth are sufficiently different from any other Iguanodon teeth (incidentally, Mantell never assigned his teeth to a species, only working on the level of the genus - that was how he rolled).

This naturally leads to the question: With the genus such a mess, what's the basis for comparison? Well, we're really lucky to have the three dozen Iguanodons discovered at the mine at Bernissart, Belgium in 1878; the skeletons provide a solid mark by which to measure other Iguanodons. Because of the quality of these specimens, Iguanodon bernissartensis was named the type species for the genus in 2000.

The teeth studied by McDonald et al originated from the same geological formation as the original teeth discovered by Mantell, and it's possible that those belonged to their Kukufeldia as well. There's so little to go on, they may never be positively tied to a valid species. However, Kukufeldia may be disputed in the near future. It comes from a geological formation called the Wealden supergroup, which was the subject of a recent overview by veteran Iguanodon researcher David Norman, also published in Zootaxa. Norman maintains that there are only two iguanodontians that can be named with any certainty from the Wealden's Upper Cretaceous deposits: Iguanodon bernissartensis and Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis, which was named by Greg Paul a few years ago. At the end of the abstract, Norman promises more work to come on providing further clarity to the genus.

So, you see why I called Matt a "sick, sick man" in response to his comment. Taxonomy would be a good candidate for an episode of "Dirty Jobs." I bet it would break Mike Rowe's spirit.

What of the Maidstone coat of arms? It's up in the air, but I'll hazard a guess. In the early nineties, David Norman reevaluated the Maidstone slab and noted that the dinosaur it most resembled was Iguanodon atherfieldensis (see page 234 of this volume). That species was the one which Greg Paul renamed Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis. As Norman supports Mantellisaurus in his latest writings, this looks to be a decent candidate for Maidstone's patron dinosaur. To revise the title of my original Maidstone post, the coat of arms features a Mantellisaurus rampant. I'm sure the fair citizens of Maidstone would find that most agreeable.

UPDATE: Check out Darren Naish's three-part series on Iguanodon at the SciAm Guest Blog. Part one is here.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Iguanodon Juan

The famous Waterhouse Hawkins Iguanodon at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham. By Willm23, via Flickr.

Yesterday's post dealt with the small town of Maidstone in Kent, whose civic coat of arms bears an Iguanodon. The first of the herbivorous dinosaurs known to science, a specimen discovered in Maidstone in 1834 was a boon to the young science of paleontology. For today's Vintage Dinosaur Art post, I figured I'd share some of the earliest Iguanodon restorations.

Dr. Gideon Mantell, a physician, natural historian, and the first truly dedicated dinosaur paleontologist, published his Wonders of Geology in 1838, which included a full description of the Maidstone beast. It also included an incredible illustration by John Martin, depicting Iguanodon in Mantell's conception of its natural environment.


John Martin's frontispiece for Mantell's Wonders of Geology, 1938. From the Linda Hall Library's Paper Dinosaurs online exhibition. Click to Megalosize.

The Megalosaurus preying on poor, wailing Iguanodon is quite the striking figure, blessed with bulging goggle-eyes and a cleft cranium. I can't help but be reminded of "Uncle Scrotor" from This Island Earth. Clearly, Iguanodon just should have hugged the guy, and he wouldn't be in such a sticky situation. At this time, I should also point you toward Mantell's own go at restoring Iguanodon, which is a true classic.

Here's a similar illustration, published in 1863 in french scientist Louis Figuier's The World Before the Deluge. The artist is Édouard Riou, whose Megalosaurus is decidedly unlike Scrotor. In this depiction, Iguanodon is a bit pluckier, deciding that if he's going down, it won't be without a morsel of sweet Megalosaurus meat.

Édouard Riou's Iguanodon and Megalosaurus, from El Bibliomata, via Flickr.

So when did these early conceptions of Iguanodon taste the bitter fruits of obsolescence? They would be served by Louis Dollo, a Belgian paleontologist who oversaw the excavation of Iguanodon skeletons discovered in 1878 in a mine in his home country. It was Dollo who proposed the upright, bipedal posture that would come to dominate depictions of ornithopods for the next century or so. A notable exception is the work of Gerhard Heilmann, who in the 20's drew ornithopods in a posture more or less like the modern bipedal/ horizontal-backbone/ stiff tail image the scientific evidence has constructed.

More: The banner at the site Paleoartistry features a nice line-up of Iguanodon's evolving image, and the rest of the site is well worth a thorough browsing, including incisive criticism of many paleoartists' work. Strange Science is also an invaluable resource for learning about the evolution of paleoart. A Vintage Dinosaur Art post from last May features John R. Jones' representation of Iquanodon's changing posture.

An Iguanodon Rampant

Photo from Boxley, via Flickr

You would think that a civic coat of arms featuring a dinosaur, the only one in the world, would be fairly well-represented on the web. Not so. The above photo, taken from the side of a bus, is the only one I could find of the coat of arms of Maidstone, a small town in Kent. A British site dedicated to collecting images of civic heraldry does feature a drawing of it, but angry red letters warn me not to use it without permission. I'm neither inclined to write to the borough government for permission nor to invoke their wrath by ganking it, so feel free to take a look at it here; scroll down approximately 2/5 of the way down the page to view it.

Sure enough, what you're seeing is an Iguanodon on the left hand side of the crest. In 1834, the bones of an Iguanodon were discovered in a local quarry owned by W.H. Bensted, who proceeded to collect the bits that had been blasted out by his workmen and chisel the rest out of the limestone encasing them.

Thought to be the remains of an antediluvian giant, they were properly identified as belonging to Iguanodon by the world's foremost authority on the creature, to whom Bensted summarily sold the bones. Dr. Gideon Mantell, who had described and named the giant herbivorous saurian nearly ten years earlier, paid £25 for the bones, which he then described. Mind you, at the time of the Maidstone discovery, eight more years would have to pass before Sir Richard Owen would name Iguanodon and its Mesozoic kin the Dinosauria. The Maidstone find was the one that positively connected the titular teeth of Iguanodon with other skeletal remains, adding much to our knowledge of the animal, though there was still a long way to go. In a correspondence to the American Journal of Arts and Science, Mantell himself estimated that in life, his great herbivore would have been 75 feet long, a measurement which has been cut down by more than half since then.

Soon after this discovery came one of the earliest literary references to a dinosaur I've found. It comes from the poem Poetical Epistle - The Grand Kentucky Balloon, published in New Monthly Magazine in 1837. It tells the tale of a balloon flight that goes awry; after "piercing... night's topmost atmosphere," the narrator falls asleep and dreams that the constellations come to life:

The roaring Lion, rushing from his lair
Lifted his paw and bared his snarling teeth;
Up, with a growl appalling, sprung the Bear;
The hissing Serpent darting, from his wreath,
Transfix'd me with his eyeballs' fiery glare;
And all the forms I saw--(I'm here beneath
The mark) were ten times bigger, every one,
Than Doctor Mantell's famed Iguanodon

A smidgen more than a century later, Maidstone would commemorate its place in the history of paleontology by placing its famous dinosaur on its coat of arms.

The Opisthotonus Argument

The Annals of Medical History published an article by Dr. Roy Moodie in 1918 entitled Studies in Paleopathology. He wrote of a condition called opisthotonus (alternatively, opisthotonos), which is when muscle spasms cause the neck and spinal column to hyperextend into an arched position, observed in many dinosaur skeletons.

Opisthotonos and the allied phenomena, pleurothotonos and emprosthotonos, are quite frequently seen among fossil vertebrates. It has been suggested elsewhere that these attitudes represent possible cerebrospinal infections or other neurotoxic conditions, and they must be considered in connection with the study of disease among fossil animals. The skeleton of the small dinosaur, Struthiomimus altus, described by Osborn, shows a very well-developed condition of opisthotonos, with the head thrown sharply back, the tail strongly flexed, and the toes contracted and appressed. The whole attitude strongly suggests a spastic distress, possibly brought on by some form of poisoning of the central nervous system, from infection or the deglutition of some poisonous substance.

The fossil Moodie referred to, a nearly complete specimen from Alberta described by Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History.



Moodie's idea, while not embraced by many scientists, was still around in 1968, when W.H. McMenemy referred to "the wretched Struthiomimus altus that perished in opisthotonos in the humid epoch of the giant saurians" in his review of the book Diseases in Antiquity. The more widely accepted explanation for what caused the skeleton of this dinosaur to constrict like this this was taphonomy, not pathology: it was believed that rigor mortis caused the muscles of the neck and back to tighten, pulling head and tail together.

Then, in 2007, paleontologists Cynthia Marshall Faux and Kevin Padian published a paper supporting Moodie's view. After studying rigor mortis in extant creatures, including horses and red-tailed hawks, they saw no evidence that it would have caused the opisthotonic position in so many dinosaurs. Instead, they proposed that the posture might occur at the time of death, the result of poisoning, perhaps by volcanic gas released at the time of an eruption. Then, a fast burial preserved the animals' last moments of agony. If you want to kill a bunch of things and bury them quickly, volcanoes are a great way to make it happen.

There hasn't been much done on this since the paper was published three years ago. A page at the university of Bristol refers to it in an overview of the exquisitely preserved Jehol Biota, bringing up the good point that Faux and Padian's explanation requires rapid burial, and that isn't necessarily the case with some dinosaurs found in the opisthotonic position -- notably, the famed Archaeopteryx specimens of Solnhofen which lived near a shallow lagoon in Germany and evidently did not receive a quick post mortem interment.

I'm also intrigued by what Kenneth Turnbull, a self-described amateur paleontologist who also has owned an ostrich ranch, had to say on the subject. He had an interesting comment on the expansive Laelaps post on this topic. He describes a phenomenon that is neither due to a problem with the nervous system or rigor mortis.

When ostriches die, the opisthotonos position is “normal” in about 90+ percent of natural deaths – disease, illness, impaction, starvation, etc. It is not an “agonizing death”, it is a very peaceful death. The birds first go into their normal “sleeping” position; and as they get closer to death the neck goes into the extreme “curled” position while they are still alive. They drop into unconsciousness many hours (12 to 24?) before death; but retaining this position...

Considering how similar in form Struthiomimus was to ostriches, this seems like an interesting place to look - they're separated by a wide gulf of time and came upon their similar body plans independently, but it's not totally implausible that this could effect both of them. If it hasn't happened yet, hopefully someone will take him up on his offer to provide access to ostriches for this purpose.

Can't get enough paleopathology? Read about an interesting study from last year that linked lesions found on a number of Tyrannosaurus rex mandibles to a disease similar to Trichimonas, which infects modern birds, primarily raptors.