Dinotopia at Delaware Art Museum

Jenn Hall at Dot Dot Dinosaur reports on the Dinotopia exhibit at the Delaware Art Museum. Eastern seaboarders, I'm wagering that it's worth tunneling through the snow to go to there (Jenn also scores 3 ChasmoPoints™ for using my favorite quotable line from 30 Rock). The exhibit lasts until May 16, 2010.

If you weren't aware of it, Dinotopia's James Gurney writes a blog. And if you're so inclined, turn your bedroom into Dinotopia, too.

Dino Friday Repost: Centrosaurus Bone Beds

Before LITC, I used to devote Fridays on my general purpose blog Gentleman's Choice to dinosaurs. It was what gave me the notion to just write about the buggers all the time: eventually, they couldn't be contained, and started spilling over into other days. I figure I'll start salvaging some of those old posts every once in a while. This one, from last July, reminds me: I never bought this print! Silly me. Better snap to.

Paleoblog has posted some photos of a Southern Alberta Dinosaur Project dig over the last week. They're pullin' big hunks of Centrosaurus out of the ground. Centrosaurus was a ceratopsian, not as famous as Triceratops or as gloriously adorned as Styracosaurus, but certainly deserving of its fair measure of respect. Its "nose" horn is massive, making up for relatively diminutive "brow" horns. A good journeyman ceratopsian, certainly preferable to old raptor-bait Protoceratops. Though it's admittedly foolish of me to diss one of the stars of my favoritest fossil.

Anyway, there's a beautiful print being sold by the Southern Alberta Dinosaur Research Group to fund their efforts. It's by Mark Schultz, and it bears repeating: It's beautiful.Dino Friday will be continuing until I get my new dino-blog up and running, by the way. I'll announce it when it's ready to be announced. Still working on a title, then I'll be designing it. Then it will be ready to fly.

Workin' on the Railroad

Last week, on his Whirlpool of Life blog, Dr. Scott Sampson took some time to write about his work with the PBS Kids program Dinosaur Train. It stands in stark contrast to the debacle Matt Wedel experienced with Clash of the Dinosaurs recently.

As Sampson writes,

...Dinosaur Train goes beyond the names, sizes, and dietary predilections of dinosaurs to address the way life works, both then and now. Kids are encouraged to think like scientists, making observations, generating new ideas, and even testing those ideas. In most episodes, Buddy states, “I have a hypothesis,” and he and his siblings then set out to test it through additional observations.

I haven't seen the show yet, and the last I'd even thought about it was in the blizzard of press that greeted its premiere. But Sampson makes Dinosaur Train sound suspiciously... legit. Almost as if it's kind of trying to educate kids, rather than running glorified "Primal Rage" animations and chopping paleontologist's comments to conform to what the producers deem entertaining.

I know that's a pretty broad generalization of something that has a whole constellation of people pulling in their own directions, from those who want to teach, to those who have primarily aesthetic concerns, to those who are just looking to boost the quarterly numbers. But it's what we've come to expect. Dinosaur Train is an exception.

Trying to think of the shows I liked as a kid, there wasn't much in the way of solid scientific, critical thinking content (although I'm still pretty impressed with Dr. Mindbender's intellectual rigor) There is one that stands tall, though. I suppose if I was younger, it might be Beakman or Bill Nye. But I was born during the Carter administration. So my guy was the late, great Don Herbert.

Dr. Sampson, I say this sincerely: I hope you're Mr. Wizard to a lot of little dudes and dudettes.

Dr. Kiki Goes Dino

Dr. Kiki's Science Hour, a podcast I only just discovered, devoted its most recent episode entirely to dinosaurs. Convenient!

It's a great conversation with Dr. Mark Goodwin of UC Berkeley, dealing with his specific research interests as well as the and work of paleontologists in general. Anyone curious about exactly how paleontologists find fossils, study them, and figure out how dinosaurs lived should find the hour pretty illuminating. Clickity-click the above link to give Dr. Kiki a whirl.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: New Mexico Postcards

A little bit of a "left turn at Albuquerque" this week. My wife started sorting through some of the old postcards we've picked up at yard sales and the like, and found some great ones from New Mexico. She also found this book of "miniature album prints." I figured it would be fitting to post these this week, in celebration of Bistahieversor.

This one features "famous dinosaur rock," which does indeed look like a sauropod. A sauropod who's either sinking in mud or reclining. Heck, could sauropods even sit down? I've certainly never seen them depicted sitting. Suddenly, this is a burning question and I'll have to look into it.

And here's a rare glimpse of the avian theropod Geococcyx californianus, known for its advanced cursorial capabilities. It's rumored to fly as well, but the debate is pretty heated right now, and I'm not holding my breath for a consensus.

Anchiornis Gets Gussied Up

Um... awesome. An international team of researchers have examined the fossilized melanosomes of Anchiornis huxleyi, and this is the result.

I already dug you, Anchiornis. But now you're definitely in my top ten. Yale's press release notes a resemblance to the Spangled Hamburg chicken, but I definitely see a Pileated Woodpecker. Critics of last week's announcement of the orange-feathered Sinosauropteryx noted that there just wasn't enough data behind the findings. You can hear a bit of scientific one-upsmanship when a member of the team behind this new study notes how much more careful and thorough they were with Anchiornis, building an accurate picture of the plumage covering the entire animal.

I must say, I kind of wish the Anchiornis color would have come out first. The little troodontid is already one of the most important fossils in recent history, with its implications for our understanding of bird origins, and it's frankly prettier than Sinosauropteryx. C'est la vie. This is wonderful stuff, and I'll take it as it comes.

Carl Zimmer has a written a terrific story at the New York Times and you can check out a 3-D model of the pretty little critter Nat Geo, which better make damn sure to put A. huxleyi on its next cover.

This has been a great year so far!

UPDATED: Added more thoughts, sorted out some of the details, and added links.

Bonjour, Bistahieversor

The badlands of the Bisti/De-na-zin Wilderness, by flickr user westernskies_de_2. More shots of the region here.

Multiple choice time. The "Bistahi destroyer" is:

A) A Pokémon
B) A guitar particularly well-suited to shredding of the most brutal kind. Crafted of polished obsidian.
C) The brand new tyrannosaur from New Mexico
D) All of the above

In a perfect world, the answer would be D. But this is a dinosaur blog, holmes. So C it must be. Paleontologists Thomas Carr and Tom Williamson, of Carthage College and the University of New Mexico, respectively, have published an introductory description of Bistahieversor sealeyi, a mid-size Late Cretaceous tyrannosaur from New Mexico. It appears in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Bistahieversor sealeyi is the first new species of tyrannosaur discovered in the western US in thirty years, and the first top predator paleontologists have definitively identified in this region. There have been other bits and bobs identifiable as tyrannosaur pieces found in the area, but the two specimens of B. sealeyi, a juvenile and an adult, are the first well-preserved skeletons. In a great interview with ReBecca Hunt-Foster at Dinochick, Dr. Carr promises a longer monograph on Bistahieversor later this year, and says that he's working on projects dealing with both Daspletosaurus and T. rex. It looks like the tyrannosaur news isn't going to let up just because we've passed the arbitrary temporal boundary called "New Year's Day."

Also, it would behoove you to check out the beautiful illustration of Bistahieversor at the Hairy Museum of Natural History.

I can't pass up mentioning this little gem. It's the very first sentence of the B. sealeyi press release put out by the SVP: "New Mexico is known for amazing local cuisine, Aztec ruins and the Los Alamos National Laboratory."

Aztec ruins in New Mexico? Really, SVP? You really want to stand by that?

Hello, Haplocheirus

Illustration by Portia Sloan, courtesy George Washington University

There is a whole lot of dinosaur news going on right now. Predictably, the dinosaur feather color story has made the biggest splash in the general media. But there have also been two new species described in the last week or so.

Here's that new alvarezsaur I posted about last week. It's called Haplocheirus sollers, a basal member of the group, and the only one known from the Jurassic period. The discovery of Haplocheirus is one of those lovely instances when scientists make a prediction about evolution and it pans out. Many features of Haplocheirus are transitional between the later, more specialized alvarezsaurids and their common theropod ancestor. And it was found exactly where an early member of the group should be expected - in Jurassic rock dating to when theropods were diversifying into their myriad Cretaceous forms.

The hand in particular is remarkable. When I was in high school, the cool program we all loved messing with in art class allowed us to morph two faces together, an effect used to great artistic success in Michael Jackson's "Black and White" video. Take a look at the theropod hand comparisons used by Jonah Choiniere, lead author of the Nature paper describing the find, in his latest guest post at Archosaur Musings. It's like he took the hands of Allosaurus and Shuvuuia and morphed them, and ended up with Haplocheirus. Maybe not exactly, but close. Haplo looks a lot like a generic theropod, showing that the things that made its later descendants look so birdish really were examples of convergent evolution - separate lines that arrive at similar bodily features because the pressures of natural selection happened to favor them. The deeply keeled sternums of alvarezsaurs and birds allow for powerful arm muscles - muscles that evolved for digging and flying, respectively. Imagine I'm writing "cool" several hundred times, so I don't have to do it.

Another new species is a tyrannosaur unearthed in New Mexico, Bistahieversor sealeyi. I'll post on this one tomorrow.

Therizinosaurs Through the Years

Here's a cool drawing of the changing perceptions of those odd therizinosaurs by Tricia Arnold, a cartoonist with a heavy paleo-influence. Tricia seems to share my interest in the way artistic conceptions of extinct critters evolve as new fossils come to light. Evolve, get it? Science joke.



Here, she looks at three views of therizinosaurs that have been put forth as paleontologists tried to fit the existing fossil evidence into the dinosaur family tree. First, the "predatory prosauropod," that rather docile looking, almost sloth-like fellow in green and tan. Next, Tricia uses an idea inspired by the Dino Crisis video game - a nasty, blood-thirsty carnivore. Finally, she presents our modern idea - a largely herbivorous, pot bellied, bird-like oddball. Check out more of her artwork at flickr.

LITC Interview: Mark Witton

A feeding frenzy surrounds a fallen azhdarchid pterosaur. By Dr. Mark Witton. Used with permission.

Today's interview subject is Dr. Mark Witton, a research associate with the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of Portsmouth, currently working on a project which will bring life-size models of various pterosaurs to London. He is also one of the main contributors to the brand new Pterosaur.net, the first comprehensive website dedicated exclusively to pterosaurs.

Witton has become well known in the paleo-blogosphere for his striking illustrations of extinct critters, primarily pterosaurs. His are some of my very favorite reproductions of ancient life - images that reflect a strong personal style and depict animals interacting with their surroundings in unique, yet plausible ways. A new image popping up on his flickr stream is always a welcome shot of joy in an otherwise gray and suffocating day.

Right then. Witton provided thoughtful, generous answers to my questions. I should have expected such candor - his illustrations are always accompanied by colorful descriptions of the ideas they depict, often pulling in anecdotes from his personal life and references to pop culture. They're as fun to read as the art is to look at. His writings exemplify what I love about the science blogosphere (a world it took me too long to find, honestly), providing a personal dimension the journals simply cannot. One of the things that really excites me about the future of science education is this increased interactivity; I can imagine how thrilling it would have been as a youngster to be able to discuss The Dinosaur Heresies on dinosaur blogs as I read it for the first time.

Anyway. Enough appetizer, let's get to the meat. Most of the images used here are from Witton's aforementioned flickr stream, which warrants a good, thorough perusing by anyone interested in really cool stuff.


Pterodaustro, a bunch of them. Or is it a gaggle?

Were you the kind of student who would doodle in your school notebooks when you should have been listening?

Sort of, but I was quite snobbish in my approach to doodling. Drawing pictures on file paper or in a school jotter meant that your images would always have lines printed beneath them, and I couldn’t stand that. Instead, at the age of 13 or so I started carrying plain paper around with me, starting with small bits that would fold away to be stuck inside my school blazer pocket and eventually bits of A4 or A3 that I would keep in a folder carried around school for that purpose alone. I still have the folder now, though it’s not looking quite as snazzy as it once did, and it’s still being carted around and doing the same job.

At school I drew at every available opportunity. People thought I was pretty strange as I regularly sat on my own, doodling away. Come to think of it, they’re probably right: most people don’t do that. Still, I didn’t really ‘gel’ that well at school: I wasn’t bullied or anything, but I certainly didn’t really feel like I fit in. On occasion, I would draw through classes too and, yes, the teachers assumed I wasn’t listening. Thing is, I genuinely was: although generally useless at multitasking, I can draw and listen or talk simultaneously. So, while my Year 9 English teacher was talking about Romeo and Juliet I was really, truthfully listening whilst another part of my brain was in a Cretaceous swamp with a Lambeosaurus. There can’t be many people who has memories of Shakespeare forever intertwined with giant hadrosaurs, but there you go.

Your artwork and interest in science certainly appear to go hand in hand, each influencing the other. Were you ever conflicted between going into art or going into science?

When I was growing up there was never any question about it: science reigned without question. My two big interests – drawing and palaeontology – have stuck with me since before I can remember and, at about age nine, the two became so linked that no other career paths – art or otherwise – were considered. With few exceptions, virtually every picture I drew between the ages of 9 and 23 were of some sort of prehistoric beastie and, yes, you’re absolutely right: the drawings fueled my desire to learn more about the animals, and what I learned fueled more ideas for pictures. It self-perpetuated, I suppose, and that momentum carried me, without question, towards my Ph.D. studies and my current job.

About halfway through my doctorate studies, though, other thoughts crept in. I started drawing non-palaeo-based topics: strange scenes of grotesque or anthropomorphised animals, deformed landscapes made of twisted, humanoid shapes, entirely mechanised people doing very human activities… that sort of thing. I really enjoyed it, and still draw similar things now. In fact, if I’m idly sitting in a café or pub with my sketchpad, I’m far more likely to draw a headless, overweight and naked man throwing consumables into a bottomless basket or a chain-smoking, boozing lion than I am to draw something palaeontologically related. Hence, it’s taken a while to develop, but the last few years has seen something of a personal conflict between art and science and, while I think I’ve made the right decision to stick with science, I can’t help wonder where I may have ended up if I’d gone down the arty route. I was walking through a workshop in our university art department this week and I reckon I could be quite happy there, frolicking about in a paint-covered smock, listening to weird, abstract tunes and conversing in melodramatic tones. That said, my current job is so heavily based in palaeoart that I have little tand, sad as it is, I miss the research-focused days of my Ph.D. I guess I wouldn’t be able to do just art, then: there needs to be some science in there somewhere, too.

Have you had any experience with the "generation gap" in the paleontology community, between younger folks who are comfortable with the open-source movement and blogging and older folks who came up through the journal-centric world?

I’ve certainly seen a divide in opinion over this, though, in my experience, it’s not strictly a generational divide. Many academics I’ve spoken to about open-source journals recognise their undeniable utility and future role in science, but these opinions aren’t shared by folks that are trying to ensure that their university or museum is recognised as a world-leading research institute. Some open-access journals are not counted towards university research league tables, so the folks worried about the academic brownie points of their establishment would prefer to
see research to be published in classic, recognised journals that will gain kudos with those rating the university. As such, my personal experience of this divide reflects the weight of The System bearing down on specific scientists, and I can understand it to an extent. Institutions need money for research and more money will go to places with good research records. Until things change, the folks snubbing open-access journals people are merely doing their jobs by ensuring their institutions are highly thought of. I’m sure that this divide will close eventually as the big open-access journals are given the recognition they deserve as important scientific organs, though. The increasing number of high-profile papers being published in open-access publications will help this, so I’m optimistic we won’t have to endure it for long.

Similarly, I’ve not seen a generational divide over the opinions on blogging despite the strongly differing opinions of academics over whether data published on personally moderated sites should be recognised in scientific literature. I know some academics that would happily publish data or pictures they’ve seen online, whereas other folks stand resolutely by peer-reviewed literature and will cite little else in their work. Personally, while I think the supplementary data placed on personal websites or blogs to support scientific papers is a good idea, I’m firmly sided with the crowd that says peer-review is essential to the scientific process: it’s the primary agent in maintaining the integrity of scientific literature and we need to stand by it. Don’t get me wrong: some non-reviewed information on the ‘Net is provided by well-informed, reliable individuals that clearly reference their sources and provide accurate information, but plenty of it isn’t.

How do you police which sites can be cited and which ones can’t? The obvious way to keep such dubious facts out of scientific literature is a blanket ban on citing personal opinions expressed on the internet, but of course, this creates a confusing situation area where academics happily cite non-peer reviewed scientific books and articles, but not things they see on the Web. Why cite these but ignore internet postings? There’s no easy answer to these questions, but I think the core of any solution has to ensure that we don’t lose the integrity of scientific publishing. After all, without the vetoing of ideas surrounding scientific publication, there really is no point to having distinct scientific literature at all.


Tupuxuara and an unfortunate frog

Many of the animals you draw seem to have "personality" without being overly anthropomorphized. Almost as if it sets aside the strangeness of pterosaurs and emphasizes the way they interacted with their environments, and how their adaptations made sense for the way they lived. Is this a conscious balance you try to strike?

Of course, maybe it's in my head...

Yup. All in your head.

Well, that’s not strictly true. When looking at pterosaur skeletons I find it hard not to imagine the animals moving around with their own characteristics: rightly or wrongly, the stumpy little wings but massive hindlimbs and head of Dimorphodon make me imagine it like a little yappy
pterosaurian dog, the sort of thing that would squawk at the postman, rip the upholstery off your sofa by climbing all over it and then sit in the mess of fabric, wagging its tail and looking innocently at you when you came in front work. Anuroganthids look like nervous little critters that would have a heart attack when handled but, by the same token, try to stroke a male Pteranodon and he’d tear at your clothes, chase you around the room, snap at your arms and then stab you with his overbite before he got really mad. Giant azhdarchids, by contrast, are the wise old beings of the pterosaur world: at that size, they move relatively slowly compared to other pterosaurs and are unconcerned with the matters of animals scampering around their feet or beneath their enormous wings. They did, after all, have a lot to think about: as virtually the only pterosaurs left at the end Cretaceous, they were trying to figure out how to carry on the pterosaur mantle through the impending KT extinction event. That’s a lot to think about.

Er… where were before we ventured into Mark’s Plastic Fantastic Fantasy Pterosaur Theatre? Ah yes: it’s worth noting that many characteristics of expression are universal across animals - cocking the head to the side and looking closely at an object can suggest inquisitiveness; large, exaggerated movements of the limbs but a rigidly held head and neck can suggest uncoordinated, panicked movement – and these can be applied to pterosaurs as much as anything else. Thing is, they very often aren’t because, nine times out of ten, pterosaurs are drawn lazily flying over oceans or clifftops: that doesn’t leave much room for expression. I make efforts to show that pterosaurs were diverse, existing in a variety of environments and interacting with their surroundings and other animals. Hence, if my pterosaurs do have any personality, it’s probably because I depict them engaging in rarely shown activities that give them more dramatic scope. I don’t think there’s much more to it than that, but it’s very nice of you to comment on it!

What aspects of pterosaur evolution do you think have the most potential to add to our general knowledge of evolution?

Broadly speaking, the pterosaur fossil record is probably too poor to tell us much about evolutionary processes. I mean, there’s Darwinopterus, the pterosaur that shows us that pterodactyloid evolution was a very modular process – and this is, in itself, an important demonstration that evolution can work in this way - but we don’t really know many specifics about its evolution. How quickly did its pterodactyloid features occur? How many genetic modules are represented by different body parts? These sort of questions are very difficult to answer with the patchy pterosaur fossil record. Studies have shown that we really know bugger all about trends in pterosaur evolution: current pterosaur diversity curves correlate precisely with the abundance and richness of pterosaur localities for a given geological level, so our diversity curves are entirely artificial. Our relatively recent discovery of azhdarchoids, a major clade of Cretaceous toothless pterosaurs, is a great example of how little we know about pterosaur evolution. Pterosaurs were first unearthed in the latest 1700s but, prior to the late 1980s we knew of something like three genera that would eventually be termed ‘azhdarchoids’. However, in the last few decades, we’ve amassed more than 20 new genera that can slip into this group. Who knows what other pterosaurs await discovery? There are plenty of scrappy remains that don’t fit neatly into any existing groups, so I’m sure some surprises are still to come. With such an incomplete record, we’re hard pushed to even talk about pterosaur evolution let alone what light they can shed on evolution itself.


A Dimorphodon steals his meal.

What questions about pterosaurs are the most compelling to you right now?

I really, really want to get to grips with basal pterosaur terrestrial locomotion. There’s three reasons for this: 1) since Kevin Padian’s ideas of bipedal pterosaurs were dismissed in the late 1980s, no-one has looked at basal pterosaur terrestrial locomotion despite plenty of research focusing on the terrestrial competence of pterodactyloids; 2)there’s a lot of diversity in basal pterosaur limb bone structure, phalangeal development and pelvic girdle morphology, suggesting they weren’t all moving around the ground in the same way and, 3) there really is no current consensus on how basal pterosaurs stood or walked – all people will tell you is that they were a bit rubbish at walking, and that’s it. I’m sure we can work out a little more than that!

That aside, there are lots of other things I’d like to do. I’d like to follow up my work on pterosaur mass estimation with a more precise method of estimating pterosaur skeletal mass, which can then be used to work out overall body mass. There’s buckets of work to be done on non-flight related aspects of pterosaur functional morphology: analysis of stress distribution across their skulls when biting, suitability of their pterodactyloid anatomy for climbing and so fourth. In addition to the quandary of basal pterosaur locomotion, there’s clearly lots of diversity in locomotory styles across pterodactyloids: there’s good evidence that azhdarchids were columnar limbed ultra-efficient walking machines, but what about the fingerless, limb-disproportioned nyctosaurs? How did they get about? Actually, the more I think about it, the more projects I can think of starting. I’m busy enough as it is: best stop this train of thought here.

Besides the Mesozoic, which era or eras of the Earth's history most interest you?

The Cainozoic (known to Americans as the Cenozoic - ed.) is undeniably interesting because you can really trace the development of modern ecologies and environments across the fossil record. You can watch mammal lineages bed-hop between different ecological niches – different feliformes vying for the hypercarnivory niche, hyena-like dogs, hippo- and horse-like like rhinos, tapir-like elephants, giraffe-like camels, that sort of thing. Cainozoic fossils haven’t had so long to be chewed up by destructive geological processes and this means we have a much greater insight into what was going on and this allows surprising glimpses into even epochs of 20 million years ago. Plus, mammal teeth are very identifiable, hardy and abundant anyway, so we can get a really good idea which groups were around in different places and times. As such, while the familiarity of some fossil mammals means that they may be somewhat less spectacular or intriguing than the more outlandish Mesozoic and Palaeozoic forms that preceded them, the depth of information available about them makes them equally compelling critters to learn about. The Cainozoic is, therefore, a particularly detailed chapter in Earth’s history and it’s hard not to be really sucked into learning about it once you start digging around.