Raptor Conservation

Indiana is currently experiencing a growing trend in shootings of raptors. This is a serious federal offense, carrying huge fines, but nonetheless my friends at Indiana Raptor Center are admitting more and more birds of prey suffering from gunshot wounds. They're usually fatal. Updates on the Facebook group for the center invariably gain many hopeful comments, only to be dashed with news that euthanization was necessary.

I'm hard at work on a poster which will be part of a multi-organizational public push to stop this awful trend. There's one telling bit of copy that haunts me as I work. I can't get it out of my head:

"70% of all raptors die withing the first year of their life. Rehabilitation centers report collisions, shootings, electrocution, and pesticide exposure as common causes for admissions."

Today on Twitter, I had a brief conversation with Sharon Wegner-Larson about conservation efforts, and the cynicism of appealing to peoples' self-interest in these matters. It is cold and calculating, but it's also necessary. In fact, it's been a strong through-line in much of my work over the last few months. This poster, inspired by a similar one used a few years ago in the State of Wisconsin, has that strategy in mind, making the point that while raptors may claim a few chickens, they more than pay their way by keeping potentially costly rodent populations down. If you can't hit the heart, aim for the wallet. It's often a larger target.


Illustration of Microraptor and Sinornithosaurus by Emily Willoughby, used with her permission. Click to big it up.

So, when I look at evocative pieces of paleontography like the above Liaoning scene by Emily Willoughby [blog], I have to wonder: even if the asteroid hadn't done the trick, who's to say that previous generations wouldn't have wiped out surviving non-avian dinosaurs by the time our current generations arrived on the planet? Our endless appetite for fictional dinosaur carnage doesn't speak well of their chances, certainly. Maybe it's for the best that so many are gone: it allows us to keep them alive in idealized worlds of our own choosing, safe from our baser instincts. Perhaps these fantasies of lost worlds can help us appreciate our own, and protect the avian dinosaurs with whom we still share the planet.

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.

Evidence For Dinosaurian Warm-Bloodedness

A very neat study came out today in the open source on-line journal PLos ONe. The matter of dinosaur metabolism has been long-debated. For a long time, dinosaurs were characterized as sluggish reptiles, cold-blooded and dim-witted. That thinking changed with the work of paleontologist John Ostrom in the sixties, and by the mid-nineties, pop culture had warmed to the idea of active, warm-blooded creatures. Just remember that signature moment in Jurassic Park when the raptor exhales and fogs up the window on the kitchen door.

This study, led by Washington University anthropologist Herman Pontzer, draws on the biomechanics of living animals to determine the metabolic cost of walking and running in bipedal dinosaurs. Why would an anthropologist have a unique insight into this issue? Pontzer has had previous experience in the energy cost of bipedalism and was the lead author of a 2008 study seeking to shed light on the evolutionary pressures that led to increasing bipedalism in hominids. As it turns out, the length of the leg - or distance of the hip from the ground - is a great way to determine how much energy a biped uses when walking about.

For this new paper, Pontzer and his colleagues analyzed dinosaurs ranging in size from tiny Microraptor up to giants like T. rex. In addition to the rather simple leg-length measurement, they also used a more complex method which figures up the amount of energy that would be needed to activate leg muscles for walking and running. For all dinosaurs, it was found that a slow run required more energy than cold-bloodedness can provide. To walk slowly, the results for the smaller dinosaurs were more ambiguous. But for the large ones, they still pointed clearly to warm-bloodedness. This doesn't necessarily mean that the dinosaurs possessed the kind of warm-bloodedness you and I do. It may very well be that there was a uniquely dinosaurian method of regulating temperature. But it certainly distances them from cold-blooded, sun-bathing reptiles even further.

Plateosaurus (big guy in the middle) by Luis Rey, from A Field Guide to Dinosaurs by Rey and Henry Gee

What's really interesting here is that this result doesn't just apply to the most bird-like dinosaurs, or the ones we might expect to have the most active lifestyle, such as T. rex. In fact, it held true for Plateosaurus, a familiar early ancestor of the giant sauropods from the Triassic era. this would indicate that warm-bloodedness, or something very much like it, was present down low on the dinosaur family tree. This issue is much like the bird origin issue: there's an ever-growing heap of evidence. It makes sense, really - consider that dinosaurs were the dominant form of large land-dwelling animals on the planet for nearly two-hundred million years. They occupied all kinds of niches in a great diversity of habitats. To be that widely successful, they had to have been very adaptable. Warm-bloodedness is a basic requirement for being able to take advantage of so much opportunity.

Check out Palaeoblog and Dinosaur Tracking for more info.