Today is National Fossil Day in the US, and I prepared for it with a recent visit to the geosciences building on the Indiana University campus. Students walking to the nearby schools of business or informatics may not realize that just through the building's doors, a treasure trove of fossils are available for viewing. So, I once again snapped some photos of some of the fossils available for the IU community to enjoy. Though there aren't any dinosaurs, I'm sure this blog's audience will appreciate these collections. These are all phone shots, taken through glass in suboptimal lighting conditions, but they cleaned up reasonably well in Camera Raw, so I'm not ashamed to share them.
First up, the collection of the late Dr. Bruce Masters, a micropaleontologist who bequeathed his wide-ranging fossil collection to the university a little over a decade ago. Here are a couple of teeth from a mastodon and mammoth, respectively.
A nice specimen of the tabilate coral Halysites...
A eurypteryid from New York...
A beautiful Hoplocrioceras ammonite...
Some nice Crawfordsville, IN crinoids...
A delicious Diacalymene trilobite...
The Eocene perch Priscacara...
Near the Masters collection was a display featuring a "Rock of the Month," in this case a delta slope siltstone from the Mississippian featuring ichnofossils: burrows attributed to the ichnotaxon Zoophycos.
A prominent local trilobite, and Ohio's state fossil to boot, is Isotelus, and another display case featured a mess of specimens of Isotelus iowaensis of varying sizes and states of preservation. They were all collected by Indiana's first state geologist, David Dale Owen, in Missouri in the mid-19th century. Not the flashiest trilobite, but a good, workmanlike build. It's nice to sit and gaze at such a nice assemblage of them.
If you ever find yourself in Bloomington with some time to spare, I highly recommend strolling over to the geosciences building and enjoying their collections. They've all been nicely labeled, and as with this Isotelus display, feature interpretive diagrams and historical information. We really deserve a small natural history museum, but in the meantime it's good to know that the workers in our geosciences department remain dedicated to sharing their collections.
You may remember that I went a bit batty over Scaphognathus crassirostris this year (here, here, and here).
In the Vintage Dinosaur Art post about S. crassirostris, I featured several reconstructions that used the same pose. It's rare that it's repeated nowadays, but I was mighty tickled to see this shared on Twitter today:
Yup, that's the pose. It's a light painting by artist Darren Pearson. Read more about his work and his series of dinosaur light photos at Petapixel.
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.
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.
Amber's ability to exquisitely preserve bits of prehistoric ecosystems was forever implanted into the public consciousness by Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novels and their film adaptations. I remember first reading about Ingen's use of blood from insects preserved in amber to clone dinosaurs; I felt a rush of excitement to imagine the organic material locked in chunks of ancient tree resin. While it turns out not to be a totally plausible way to populate an island full of dinosaurs, but to thirteen year old me, it was a striking idea that remains one of the most memorable parts of Jurassic Park for me. "Dino DNA!"
When a piece of amber contains an insect or other piece of the biome, it's called an inclusion. The inclusion photographs in this post are the work of Danish photographer Anders Damgaard, whose website and Flickr stream contain many more examples of his work - the 3-D image on his site is especially cool. They come from his set of New Jersey amber, dating to the Cretaceous period. Enjoy, and be sure to leave some kind words in his photo comments at Flickr.
Flickr user jeffs46h3 has shared a batch of found photos from the sixties depicting the Sinclair "Dinogirls." After the 1964 World's Fair, Sinclair took the dinosaur models on a promotional tour. At some point in 1967, they stopped in Paramus, NJ, and locals had the chance to see them on flatbed trucks in the Garden State Plaza shopping mall parking lot. Someone with shaky photographic skills was on hand to document the raging fun that was had, and we're the beneficiaries!
I'd imagine that the models were hired locally, as I haven't found any mention of them elsewhere, and Jeff is the only one to use the term "dinogirl" to describe them. If you have any more details (or were a "dinogirl" yourself), feel free to let me know!
If you've been following this blog for a while, it probably won't come as a shock to learn that I collect old magazines that feature dinosaurs. Many antique shops have stacks of vintage magazines, and those covering dinosaurs in some way make up a decent portion of my "to scan" stack.
One of these recent acquisitions was an issue of Discover from March of 1989, featuring a profile of Stephen Czerkas by long-time dinosaur writer Don Lessem, roughly coinciding with the publication of Czerkas's book, My Life with Dinosaurs. Czerkas was an up-and-coming dinosaur researcher and sculptor who had done creature design on the 1978 B-movie Planet of Dinosaurs. Lessem's article focused on Czerkas as a paleontology outsider, one of those researchers who has knowledge, but not the degrees to show for it.
Plenty of paleontologists arrive at their profession by unconventional routes within or without of academia, and have made valuable contributions to the science. As in any field of study, those scientists have an uphill battle and face greater scrutiny - and occasionally bias - when presenting their ideas to their peers.
Preceding the article is the above photo of Czerkas in his workshop. It's striking just how similar these Deinonychus models are to what, just a few years later, would be called Velociraptor in Jurassic Park (a subject Brian Switek touches on today at Dinosaur Tracking). The movie wasn't even in production yet, and I can't find any connection between Czerkas' work and that of Stan Winston Studios, who created the movie's villains. But as Czerkas is not listed as a consultant on the movie, this may be a simple case of convergent evolution.
Reading this article in 2011, it's impossible not to view it through glasses stained by the "Archaeoraptor" fiasco of a decade ago. Czerkas's place in the history of paleontology will forever be connected with the controversy; google his name and you'll turn up droves of creationist blogs and websites that attempt to discredit evolutionary theory with "Archaeoraptor," the faked "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds.
Czerkas and his wife, Sylvia, bought "Archaeoraptor" for their Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, UT, promoting it to National Geographic, who had an exclusive story planned about its impact on our understanding of bird evolution. The problem was, the fossil was a mashup, eventually revealed to have been composed of Yanornis, Microraptor, and another critter. What makes the Czerkases' championing of the fossil infuriating rather than sad was that they didn't listen to Phil Currie and Tim Rowe's concerns about its legitimacy. Apparently blinded by the coming glory, they pushed on. The story was published. The fossil was analyzed further. It was discredited, and Czerkas ended up apologizing for his "idiot, bone-stupid mistake."
"Archaeoraptor" was an avoidable controversy, and one of its most annoying consequences was that it offered another arrow for the creationist quiver. It's a flimsy arrow, as all of their arrows are. The problem is the size of the quiver and the amount of time it takes to demonstrate the weakness of their many arguments. That "Archaeoraptor" is used at all baffles me. It's a clear indication that many creationists simply don't care about the rules of logic. "Archaeoraptor" was embarrassing for the paleontological community. For a minute. Once other scientists took a good look at it, it became a victory which shows why science is such a powerful tool for understanding our world: it has built-in mechanisms to remove bias and to correct mistakes. Want to poke fun at "arrogant evolutionists" for a mistake? Fine. I understand schadenfreude. It's fun. But it seems counterproductive to slam a group of people for their human fallibility when your own faction happens to be populated by fallible humans, too. That's the kind of thing that comes back to bite you on the proverbial rear end.
"Archaeoraptor" also serves as a lesson in the dangers of the black market fossil trade. In a 2002 article about "Archaeoraptor," paleontologist Kevin Padian explained to National Geographic how the tragic tale started, and it's such a perfect summation of the thorny issue, it deserves to be quoted at length here.
"The lesson in this should be the importance of conserving fossils and protecting them," said Padian. "Chinese villagers who found the specimen don't make a lot of money, and they don't know what these animals look like. There was no hoax. These are poor people trying to make a little extra money by selling fossils on the black market."
It's illegal to export fossils out of China, but a thriving black market exists, driven by poverty, powered by bribery, and feeding a seemingly inexhaustible desire for fossils among hobbyists.
Huge quantities of fossils are illegally excavated and smuggled out each year. And no wonder; the Archaeoraptor fossil sold in the United States for $80,000.
This is an internationally important region," said Padian. "The workers there are very poor; if they were better rewarded for working with scientists there would be no need to enhance the fossils, or for a black market at all. The international community needs to take steps to protect these fossils."
Looking back on Lessem's article twenty-odd years later, Czerkas's career has unfortunately done little to raise the general respectability of non-credentialed paleontologists. Oddly enough, even though "Archaeoraptor" never became the crown jewel in his museum and was a source of great embarrassment, it is featured prominently in Cerkas's anti-BAD* essay at the museum's site [PDF]. It lays out his view, which holds that dromaeosaurs aren't dinosaurs at all, and the fact that the opposite is the consensus is a figment dreamt up by cladists.
I suppose I should close on a happier note, though. Czerkas may not have been involved with Jurassic Park, but he has stamped his name on celluloid history. The early 80's Harryhausen-esque B-movie Planet of Dinosaurs included his model work. Here's a sample of it.
As the Houston Museum of Natural Science undergoes a major expansion, including a new Paleontology Hall, things naturally need to be moved about. Some of these things are quite large, such as the Ankylosauruscreated by Louis Paul Jonas for the 1964 World's Fair and extracted from the museum last Friday, January 21. More photos of the museum's expansion are available here, with more Ankylosaurus photos here.
If you've got a bit of spare time, the library of the Field Museum's flickr photostream is well worth a look. It features a nifty set of photos from the days before the institution moved to its current home on the Lake Michigan Waterfront. During its first couple decades, it was located on the spot where the Museum of Science Industry stands presently.
Those were the days before the well-populated dinosaur halls we're lucky enough to wander through today. One Mesozoic denizen of the Field was a reproduction of America's first complete and mounted dinosaur, Joseph Leidy'sHadrosaurus foulkii, towering over a pair of Cenozoic mammals, as if to boast, "I'm basically a Mesozoic cow, y'all!"
Besides the simple enjoyment of old photos, online galleries like this one sometimes contain unexpected glimpses into paleontology as it happened. One of the photos shared by the Field library is this sauropod leg found in 1899, identified as Morosaurus impar.Morosaurus is probably one of the most hilariously awful names ever imposed on a dinosaur, meaning "stupid lizard." This was a flash of genius from the Great Dismal Swamp himself, O.C. Marsh.
Much of the plate was painted white to mask out the leg for photographic reproduction. That reproduction was then used for a 1901 paper written by Field geology curator Elmer S. Riggs. Besides describing this forelimb, Riggs briefly touches on the taxonomic status of Morosaurus and another sauropod, Atlantosaurus. In the kind of taxonomic bloat that characterized the Bone Wars era, Marsh had assigned about a dozen specimens between the two genera to their own species (see Morosaurus and Atlantosaurus at the Dinosaur Encyclopedia). Having visited with Henry Fairfield Osborn recently - who was preparing a monograph on E.D. Cope's Camarasaurus - Riggs foresaw the demotion of both of the genera, writing,
"In his original description Cope predicted the unusually long humerus which the Museum specimen has so well demonstrated. The three specimens may thus be regarded as representatives of a single genus, which, in view of its priority, should retain the generic name Camarosaurus [sic]. The description of the type specimen promised by Dr. Osborn will doubtless throw further light upon the relationship of this interesting group."
Though he produced a few works on sauropod anatomy in the years after Riggs wrote this, it wouldn't be until 1921 that Osborne's great monograph would be published. A mere four years later, it was topped by Charles Gilmore's monograph on Camarasaurus, starring what is still considered the finest sauropod skeleton ever excavated. Gilmore's monograph also spelled curtains for the stupid lizard, synonomizing it with Camarasaurus, which took precedent. Though "chamber lizard" isn't exactly glamorous, it's quite a step up from the demeaning epithet thought up by Marsh.
The famous Carnegie Camarasaurus, star of the Gilmore monograph. Photo by Kabacchi, via flickr.
For more on the Camarasaurus monographs of the early 20th century, check out these twopages at the wonderful Linda Hall Museum Paper Dinosaurs digital exhibition.
As another winter storm bears down on Indiana, I feel for poor old Uncle Beazley, the subject in this 1977 photograph shared by the Smithsonian Institution on their Flickr photostream.
Image courtesy the Smithsonian Institution, via flickr.
Uncle Beazley has led quite the picaresque life for a fiberglass archosaur. He's even been an actor. In 1968, NBC aired an episode of "NBC's Children's Theater" called The Enormous Egg. It was an adaptation of Oliver Butterworth's 1956 children's story, in which a 12 year old farm boy's life is made a bit more interesting when one of his chickens lays a Triceratops egg. The dinosaur is played by Uncle Beazley, and as F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre writes in a wonderfully thorough review,
The most interesting thing in this TV adaptation is, of course, the triceratops. 'The Enormous Egg' could be sub-titled 'The Microscopic Production Budget'. I think they spent about 29 cents on the dinosaur ... and yet all of the dinosaur sequences are very impressively done. The triceratops in this film is 'played' by a huge dinosaur-shaped piece of moulded fibreglass which does NOT have articulated limbs, so the individual portions of the triceratops cannot move separately. The thing is like a child's toy plastic dinosaur (all in one piece) except that it's life-size.
I haven't found any video of it, unfortunately. The review also mentions that Uncle Beazley is one of the Sinclair dinosaurs from the New York World's fair.
Image from Jordan Smith, via Flickr. There's Uncle Beazley in the center of the exhibit.
Garland Pollard of BrandLandUSA confirms that he is indeed from the World's Fair. The fate of the dinosaur models from the various world's fairs is something I'm pretty interested in, and it's really cool that Uncle Beazley has survived, now residing at the National Zoo, while his brethren enjoy a Texas retirement.
Uncle Beazley at the National Zoo. Photo by Mo Kaiwen, via flickr.
I'm stretching the boundaries of this blog today to the wider topic of geology, but you can't really avoid an appreciation of geology if you care about the deep history of life on earth.
I've been following the photostream of Jake Sargeant for several months now, and it's always a bright spot to a day when he uploads a batch of photos. Recently, they've been coming from New Zealand.
These photos capture exactly what I love about geology. More specifically, what I love about rocks: they tell a story. Not a day goes by that I don't dream of getting away to the desert or the mountains, that I don't have some tactile memory of the granite monoliths of Joshua Tree or imagine my bare feet on some distant stretch of sandstone.
All are copyright Jake Sargeant, natch. If you like these, let him know.
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