Monster Families at the Horniman

While everyone knows the few 'big name' museums in London (the NHM among them), the city also boasts a surprisingly large number of more low-key institutions, some of which are well worth seeking out for the nuttier natural history enthusiast. One of these would be the Horniman Museum, located a stone's throw from Forest Hill station in south-east London. Currently the Horniman is home to the travelling exhibition 'Dinosaurs: Monster Families', which is naturally what drew Niroot and I in (for the second and first visit, respectively). Here's the skinny, y'all.

Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei, an Australian Mystery

Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei is one of the mysteries of dinosaur-kind, lurking Gollum-like in the shadows, threatening to overturn everything we know about the ceratopsians, sowing doubt and confusion. Well, maybe not everything, but possibly their origins and certainly their geographical distribution. In March of 2004, National Geographic News posted a story about the Dinosaurs of Darkness traveling exhibition curated by Monash University paleontologist Patricia Vickers-Rich, and the story briefly mentions the strange new dinosaur from Australia:

Other dinosaurs from southern Australia include Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei, one of the oldest horned, or frilled, dinosaurs known, which suggests that horned dinosaurs may have originated in the southern polar region.

"That group is most well known from Mongolia, where Protoceratops occurs in the very late Mesozoic/late Cretaceous. The material of Australian origin is early Cretaceous," Vickers-Rich said.

Nat Geo's reporter, John Roach, may have misunderstood Vickers-Rich; her quote doesn't claim that horned dinosaurs originated in Australia (and I've been unable to find any quotes from her that do), but refers specifically to those ceratopsians to which Serendipaceratops is most closely related. It's still a puzzling story.


Leptoceratops by Peter Trusler, via Wikimedia Commons.

Known only from a single ulna - and possibly another pulled from the nearby Dinosaur Cove fossil locale - Serendipaceratops is a huge question mark. Initially skeptical, Vickers-Rich and her partner-in-paleontology, Thomas Rich, decided that the ulna belonged to a ceratopsian based on its strong resemblance to the corresponding bone of Leptoceratops, a well-known Late Cretaceous dinosaur from North America. Lepto is closely related to the more famous Protoceratops, also known only from the Late Cretaceous. Therein lies the problem: if you accept the protoceratopsian nature of Serendipaceratops, it lived tens of millions of years before anything that resembled it. What the heck is it doing in Australia?

It may not seem like a big deal, but consider the following:

• Yinlong, the earliest confirmed ceratopsian, hails from Jurassic China.
• Every other ceratopsian known to paleontologists comes from Asia, Europe, or North America.
• The vast majority of protoceratopsians come from China and Mongolia.

At the time of Yinlong, the continents we know today were still mashed together into the supercontinent Pangaea (click for map). Pangaea was a great C-shaped landmass, with the areas we know as Australia and China at opposite ends. It's possible that ceratopsians might have ranged between Australia and China; it simply would have required populations to travel between those terminal points of the "C" via Africa or South America, and possibly India. You would expect to find something similar to either protoceratopsids or primitive ceratopsians somewhere in these places. To date, none have been found (save for one dubious jawbone from South America that has been lost), but there also aren't many rich, temporally relevant dinosaur-bearing deposits in those regions.

In the recent description of Sinoceratops, the only non-North American ceratopsid, Xu Xing wrote that the apparent endemism of ceratopsids to North America probably reflects gaps in the fossil record rather than actual limitations on the family's Cretaceous range. The mystery of Serendipaceratops is complicated by much larger gaps. And at least Sinoceratops has the decency to have been contemporary with its ceratopsid kin.

It seems simpler to me that the ulna's resemblance to that of Leptoceratops is a coincidence. That's where my money would be, if gambling on paleontology was a sane thing to engage in. Hopefully, the notoriously stingy Australian strata will give up more related material. At the very least, if Serendipaceratops is not a ceratopsian, it's a totally unique Australian dinosaur. That's a pretty good resolution, and still a worthy tribute to the man it was named for.

Griffins

"Now the place where the griffins live and the gold is found is a grim and terrible desert. Waiting for a moonless night, the treasure-seekers come with shovels and sacks and dig. If they manage to elude the griffins, the men reap a double reward, for they escape with their lives and bring home a cargo of gold—rich profit for the dangers they face."

—Greek author Aelian, c. AD 200, courtesy AMNH

Paleontology is a young science. It required quite a bit of set-up; the long history of the Earth and the workings of its rock strata had to be established by geologists. But the subjects of its study, the fossilized bones of ancient animals, have been around millions of years, exposed by the implacable processes of erosion. So before the first paleontologists took to the field, what did we humans make of these odd, bone-like rocks sticking out of the ground, gazing down at us from cliffs?

In historian and classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor's The First Fossil Hunters, she posits that fossils could be the source of some of the great mythological beasts we've conjured. One of the classic examples, which Mayor describes in this Humanist Network News interview, is the origin of the Cyclops myth may have originated when Greek sailors discovered mastodon skulls. As Mayor says,

[The mastodon nasal cavity] looks like a gigantic eye socket. And so, you find the skull inside of a cave when you're shipwrecked. Sailors probably told these tales, and they said, "We found not only the skull of the giant ogre, but there were all sorts of bones throughout the cave! It obviously preys on shipwrecked sailors like us. We were lucky to escape."

She also notes that until Alexander the Great's conquests, the Greeks would not have been familiar with elephants at all. Nor would the ancient Scythians have known what a dinosaur was. But, as Mayor explains, they certainly used fossilized dinosaur skeletons to their advantage:

It turns out that just by following that story from the Scythians who lived in Central Asia back to its source, I did discover that that area where they were mining gold was also perhaps a nesting ground of protoceratops dinosaurs. When I look at the skeleton of a protoceratops dinosaur, it's about the size of a wolf or a lion; it's got four legs. But its head has a beak. There is a frill on the back of the neck that could be taken for wings in and profile. These fossils are found just before you reach the gold which is eroding down from mountains. That could be said to be guarding the gold.

Pretty cool stuff. But you know, for as much mythology has contributed to our culture, and though mythological stories can be deeply resonant... I'll take a scientific understanding of dinosaurs any day.


Image from Dinosaur.org

Anatotattin'

I am not a tattoo dude. There are plenty of reasons that people like marking their skin. While I understand the desire, none of the reasons are worth the procedure or its permanence of its results. But I suppose that if I was of the tattooing persuasion, I would do something like this:

A pachycephalosaur and (Flickr Image since removed by user) a Protoceratops couple. Admirable in that they're not the classic five or six dinos. The only problem with this approach is that as paleontologists make further discoveries, I might be stuck with an obsolete piece of paleoart on my skin. Not attractive. It might be best to play it safe, like these folks:

I think my ideal dinosaur tattoo would be something like a Troodon on my tummy, and my chest hair would be a cute little hairdo. I would also need to solve the problem of growing hair on my chest.

Also: Face to face with dinosaurs, via virtual reality - Video from Scientific American. It looks like a big ViewMaster toy. Speaking of which...