Long necks

These fellows from the Toronto hydroelectric company are way up in a "cherrypicker" crane. They are attaching some cross-connections between power lines.

Below is a look at the new barosaurus at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Hadrosaur haunches!

I've often thought that the reconstructors of dinosaurs should give their back legs a little more muscle, more like the legs of a cow or a horse (or the drumstick of a chicken) instead of making bony outlines like a lizard's legs. Old style:

(Hadrosaur picture is from ������������������, �������������� ���������������� �� ���������������� [diozavr.org])

The wildly unllkely discovery of a mummified hadrosaur has given us its skin impressions and bodily outlines; and Voila!


The hadrosaur's haunches have about 25% more muscle than we thought. The dinosaur was stronger and faster than we expected.
(The picture is from National Geographic's Dino Autopsy, which is not showing up on the Canadian schedule now. Maybe it has been and gone.)

Barosaurus in ROM's new dinosaur gallery

The Royal Ontario Museum* in Toronto has opened its new dinosaur gallery. On display is their skeleton from the attic, the giant diplodocoid Barosaurus.

The Barosaurus was restored by Peter May.

*The designation "Royal" indicates a significant resource in the British Commonwealth.

New bone beds are found near Grande Prairie, Alberta

New "bone beds" of dinosaur fossils are found near Grande Prairie. From the article:

The Grande Prairie area was one of the few above water during many parts of the Cretaceous period.... A bone bed at Pipestone Creek, discovered in 1974 about 30 kilometres from Grande Prairie, has long been the region's best area. Horned dinosaurs and other plant eaters have been the most common finds in the bed, where bones of many species and specimens are being excavated from stone.

It's believed to be the remains of a river where many dinosaurs died at once, and has as many as 150 bones per square metre -- five times that of Dinosaur Provincial Park, near Drumheller.

ROM finds skeleton in its closet

You have to admit this is funny - and a real warning about the loss of "folklore" information in organizations. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto has a new display hall for its dinosaur fossils. The new curator of dinos, who just started this year, was told that he could go out and get a big one. While researching in the U.S.,he found a reference to a really big skeleton that the ROM already had -- but nobody back home knew about it.

The museum traded for a large dinosaur skeleton thirty years ago - but there was no room to put it up. Over the years, the bones were stored separately and everyone forgot about it -- except for the old curator, but he retired and eventually died. I think that there's a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment for the museum in finding that they have a large Barosaurus specimen that is more complete than most. It is being lovingly assembled, the missing parts duplicated if left-right or copied from other specimens, and will be mounted at the museum by December 15 It's particularly nice since the museum has a tyrannosauroid, has a duckbilled dinosaur, and has a stegosaurus - but no diplodocoid until now. That they knew of.

The picture of Barosaurus is from Wikipedia commons.

T. rex footprint may have been found

A fossil hunter, Dr. Phil Manning from Manchester, England, has found what might be the first footprint of Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered. The print is at Hell's Creek, Montana, in rock that is 67 million years old. The print is 76 cm (30 inches) long.

Giant dinosaur unearthed in Svalbard

A marine dinosaur, the largest of its kind, has been excavated in Svalbard, Norway: Pro-Science: Giant dinosaur dug out in Svalbard. There's more about the Pliosaur here.

Tyrannosaurus fed on Edmontosaurus

A feeding ground for Tyrannosaurus rex has been found. Evidence here shows that T. rex travelled in packs and hunted Edmontosaurus.

The new bone bed is near a suburb of Edmonton, Alberta, on Whitemud Creek.

Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth, Letter 5

In this letter, Twain describes how Noah collected the animals for his Ark and set sail. I'm printing it as an antidote to Ken Ham's creation museum:

Noah began to collect animals. There was to be one couple of each and every sort of creature that walked or crawled, or swam or flew, in the world of animated nature. We have to guess at how long it took to collect the creatures and how much it cost, for there is no record of these details.

When Symmachus made preparation to introduce his young son to grown-up life in imperial Rome, he sent men to Asia, Africa and everywhere to collect wild animals for the arena-fights. It took the men three years to accumulate the animals and fetch them to Rome. Merely quadrupeds and alligators, you understand -- no birds, no snakes, no frogs, no worms, no lice, no rats, no fleas, no ticks, no caterpillars, no spiders, no houseflies, no mosquitoes -- nothing but just plain simple quadrupeds and alligators: and no quadrupeds except fighting ones. Yet it was as I have said: it took three years to collect them, and the cost of animals and transportation and the men's wages footed up $4,500,000.

How many animals? We do not know. But it was under five thousand, for that was the largest number ever gathered for those Roman shows, and it was Titus, not Symmachus, who made that collection. Those were mere baby museums, compared to Noah's contract. Of birds and beasts and fresh-water creatures he had to collect 146,000 kinds; and of insects upwards of two million species.

Thousands and thousands of those things are very difficult to catch, and if Noah had not given up and resigned, he would be on the job yet, as Leviticus used to say. However, I do not mean that he withdrew. No, he did not do that. He gathered as many creatures as he had room for, and then stopped.

If he had known all the requirements in the beginning, he would have been aware that what was needed was a fleet of Arks. But he did not know how many kinds of creatures there were, neither did his Chief. So he had no Kangaroo, and no 'possum, and no Gila monster, and no ornithorhynchus, and lacked a multitude of other indispensable blessings which a loving Creator had provided for man and forgotten about, they having long ago wandered to a side of this world which he had never seen and with whose affairs he was not acquainted. And so everyone of them came within a hair of getting drowned.


They only escaped by an accident. There was not water enough to go around. Only enough was provided to flood one small corner of the globe -- the rest of the globe was not then known, and was supposed to be nonexistent.

However, the thing that really and finally and definitely determined Noah to stop with enough species for purely business purposes and let the rest become extinct, was an incident of the last days: an excited stranger arrived with some most alarming news. He said he had been camping among some mountains and valleys about six hundred miles away, and he had seen a wonderful thing there: he stood upon a precipice overlooking a wide valley, and up the valley he was a billowy black sea of strange animal life coming.
Presently the creatures passed by, struggling, fighting, scrambling, screeching, snorting -- horrible vast masses of tumultuous flesh! Sloths as big as an elephant; frogs as big as a cow; a megatherium and his harem huge beyond belief; saurians and saurians and saurians, group after group, family after family, species after species -- a hundred feet long, thirty feet high, and twice as quarrelsome; one of them hit a perfectly blameless Durham bull a thump with its tail and sent it whizzing three hundred feet into the air and it fell at the man's feet with a sigh and was no more.

The man said that these prodigious animals had heard about the Ark and were coming. Coming to get saved from the flood. And not coming in pairs, they were all coming: they did not know the passengers were restricted to pairs, the man said, and wouldn't care a rap for the regulations, anyway -- they would sail in that Ark or know the reason why. The man said the Ark would not hold the half of them; and moreover they were coming hungry, and would eat up everything there was, including the menagerie and the family.

All these facts were suppressed, in the Biblical account. You find not a hint of them there. The whole thing is hushed up. Not even the names of those vast creatures are mentioned. It shows you that when people have left a reproachful vacancy in a contract they can be as shady about it in Bibles as elsewhere. Those powerful animals would be of inestimable value to man now, when transportation is so hard pressed and expensive, but they are all lost to him. All lost, and by Noah's fault. They all got drowned. Some of them as much as eight million years ago.

Very well, the stranger told his tale, and Noah saw that he must get away before the monsters arrived. He would have sailed at once, but the upholsterers and decorators of the housefly's drawing room still had some finishing touches to put on, and that lost him a day. Another day was lost in getting the flies aboard, there being sixty-eight billions of them and the Deity still afraid there might not be enough. Another day was lost in stowing forty tons of selected filth for the flies' sustenance.

Then at last, Noah sailed; and none too soon, for the Ark was only just sinking out of sight on the horizon when the monsters arrived, and added their lamentations to those of the multitude of weeping fathers and mothers and frightened little children who were clinging to the wave-washed rocks in the pouring rain and lifting imploring prayers to an All-Just and All-Forgiving and All-Pitying Being who had never answered a prayer since those crags were builded, grain by grain, out of the sands, and would still not have answered one when the ages should have crumbled them to sand again.


See also:
- Letters from the Earth: God's personality, or why God needed a fly
- Letters from the Earth: Report on a rumor or facts vs. miracles

"Dinosaurs Make an Impression"

Speaking of Kevin Padian, as I just did in the "Macroevolution primer," here's a tidbit from the past.

The cover article for Nature (May, 1999) describes how StudioTools^TM computer modelling and design software from Alias|wavefront is used to analyze dinosaur tracks and to explain a mysterious, apparent "spur" mark in each track, sometimes supposed to be from a "reversed hallux" or backward-facing toe.

At that time I was at Alias|wavefront helping to document a new version of StudioTools^TM. I attended a talk by the author, Kevin Padian. He described how used the software was used to model a mud surface and a dinosaur's foot, then trace its motion in three dimensions, discovering that the "spur" was an artifact of how the foot entered the mud. I'm pretty sure that our resident scientist, Bill Buxton, found the research opportunity and donated a copy of the software.

See also "How Dinosaurs Walked the Walk."

Related book: It's ten years old, but the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, edited by Philip J. Currie* and Kevin Padian,** still looks very interesting.

*Curator of Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta
**Professor of Integrative Biology and Curator of Lower Vertebrates in the Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley

I always spoil things

Years ago, when I visited the Museum of Nature in Ottawa, there was a fascinating "humanoid" dinosaur sculpture, life-size I guess. It had green skin, big yellow eyes, and dinosaurian haunches with an upright posture. Clearly it was someone's guess at how dinosaurs might have looked had they evolved into something intelligent. You could tell because of the shoulders. Intelligent critters in fictional images almost always have human-like shoulders to show that they're "people." So did this fascinating critter.



I turned to someone in a museum uniform. "Shouldn't this have narrow shoulders like a cat? We have flattened shoulders because we went through a period of brachiating, but this one never did. It's not built for it."

And you know, the next time I went in, some years later, that pretty sculpture wasn't on display. I hope they just wanted to rotate something else into view and it wasn't my fault!

Feathers and filaments in non-avian dinosaurs

Tetrapod Zoology has a lovely couple of articles about feathered dinosaurs, courtesy of Darren Naish.

Thanks mostly to a series of wonderful fossils from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Liaoning Province, China, we now know that feathers first appeared in non-avian theropods, and were - later on - inherited by early birds..

I've see the fossil that is the first image in his article, when the Royal Ontario Museum had its Feathered Dinosaur exhibit in 2005.

Dinosauroid cave art

Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology shares some speculation about the appearance of hypothetical intelligent dinosaurs, complete with their art.

Also see El PalaeoFreak (El asteroide no cayó).

Dinosaur eggs are discovered in India

Scienceblogger Grrlscientist has a nice summary of this discovery of more than a hundred dinosaur eggs and an associated trackway near Indore, a city of Madhya Pradesh state in central India.

Flight of the Microraptor

Sankar Chatterjee and R. Jack Templin have an article in PNAS about how the four-winged feathered dinosaur Microraptor gui held its wings.
Abstract:

Microraptor gui, a four-winged dromaeosaur from the Early Cretaceous of China, provides strong evidence for an arboreal-gliding origin of avian flight. It possessed asymmetric flight feathers not only on the manus but also on the pes. A previously published reconstruction shows that the hindwing of Microraptor supported by a laterally extended leg would have formed a second pair of wings in tetrapteryx fashion. However, this wing design conflicts with known theropod limb joints that entail a parasagittal posture of the hindlimb. Here, we offer an alternative planform of the hindwing of Microraptor that is concordant with its feather orientation for producing lift and normal theropod hindlimb posture. In this reconstruction, the wings of Microraptor could have resembled a staggered biplane configuration during flight, where the forewing formed the dorsal wing and the metatarsal wing formed the ventral one....

Another piece of evidence is the existence of other fossils which pretty clearly show a nestlings with claws arranged for swinging from twigs.

Darwin exhibit at American Museum of Natural History

Go! See it! You have until August 20th. See, I'm giving you much more warning than you got for the Feathered Dinosaurs exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. So no excuses!

It gets high marks from P. Z. Myers of Pharyngula:

...how good it was.

It follows the development of Darwin's thought and demonstrates the evidence that led to his conclusions. It is completely uncompromising. It makes a few nods to the modern evidence at the end, and does mention the creationist objections briefly, as the nonsense they are…but it's amazing how solidly the case can be made for evolution using just the 19th century data.

And then, or course, there are the artifacts. Darwin's microscope. Annie's box. Bits of his notebooks. Darwin's walking stick. It was glorious stuff.

Dinosaur lungs

The Creationist fairy tale proposes that "Dinosaurs died after the Biblical Flood because their lungs were too small." Left unexplained is the assumption that dinos used most of their lungs and mammals used less of their lungs so they had excess capacity to spare. Or why reptiles used less of their lungs than dinosaurs. Those assumptions are made—with no explanation as to mechanism—to give the fairy tale the desired ending.

Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

In contrast, science has a detailed and clear explanation of how birds' respiration is more efficient than ours and how closely it resembles that of dinosaurs.

For the basics, see avian respiration.

For the research, see "Study Documents Bird-like Breathing Systems in Long-extinct Dinosaurs".

See also wacky Creationist news.

Dinosaur-to-bird cladistics

At the Royal Ontario Museum's exhibit on "Feathered Dinosaurs" we weren't allowed to make drawings nor take photographs of the exhibits , but I did take notes, on which I base this diagram. I am no scientist and any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine, but this is how it looked to me.


NOTES:

• Testudina = anapsids, possibly including Testudines. Maybe this should be "Anapsids = Anapsids, possibly including Testudines." It's unknown whether turtles and their relatives are basally anapsid or developed the trait secondarily.


• Pterosaurs = flying reptiles


• Ornithischia = bird-hipped, plant-eating dinosaurs


• Saurischia = dinosaurs with gizzard stones


• Sauropodomorpha = long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs


• Theropoda = bipedal dinosaurs, predatory, with wishbones, possibly feathered


• Allosauroidea = allosaurs; hollow bones. All have wishbones


• Coelurosauria = tyrannosaurs, Oviraptor, Velociraptor, & birds


• Ornithomimosauria = ostrich-like dinosaurs


• Pygostylia = birds with reduced stump of tail


• Palaeognathae = rheas, emus, cassowaries et al.


• Neognathae = more modern birds

As the exhibit progressed, various characteristics such as backward-pointing toes, ankle bone bracing the shin, hollow bones, fewer teeth, beaks, and, of course, feathers appeared and became more prominent.
On the Tree of Life Web site you can see a cladistic diagram for the group Aves.

See also Notes from the feathered dinosaur exhibit.

Notes from the Flying Dinosaurs exhibit

OK, I know it was "Feather'd Dinosaurs." But "Flying Dinosaurs" sounds more like a circus.
Early finds:

• 1844, lizardlike dinosaurs


• around 1870, A flying, toothed bird, 9" high, with a deep breastbone, from 95 - 65 mya.


• 1870, Hesperornis regalis. Aquatic, toothed bird with no wings, about 3 feet high, found by O. C. Marsh, one of the great early fossil-hunters.


• Archaeopteryx, 145 mya, about 18" high, found in lithographic (very fine) limestone


• Compsognathus longipes, a bipedal dinosaur from 145 mya.


• 1861, another dinosaur found in lithographic limestone with its head drawn back like a dead bird's.

By the mid-1800s, Thomas Huxley was suggesting that birds had developed from dinosaurs.

Scene-setting for the bird exhibit:

• at entrance, reconstructions of dinosaurs (Velociraptors and Therizinosaurus) without and then with feathers


• finely preserved fossils from the area where they are found: aquatic lizards, dragonfly, spider

New evidence up to January 2005, including specimens from China:

• flying reptiles, pterosaurs - preserved with wing tissue and protofeathers


• another flying reptile, Eosipterus, with 12' wingspan, skin (dots) showing follicles, visible fibres around head, and coloured bands showing shades of plumage


• Jeholosaurus shangyuarensis, 125 mya, most primitive bird-hipped dinosaur in China (in its own time, a living fossil known from 60 million years previously)


• Cryptovolans pauli, 125 mya, had flight feathers behind hind feet and may have flown with all four limbs


• Sinosauropteryx heilmanni, feathered therapod (shown in model)


• Scansoriopteryx, "climbing wing," shown in fossil and model. Has long arms for swinging from branches and claws arranged for climbing. Greatly strengthens "top-down" theory of flight. 186 - 165 mya = 20 to 40 million years older than Archaeopteryx. Has a long ilium but otherwise is less birdlike than Archaeopteryx: Scansoriopteryx has no wishbone but two separate clavicles; and its pubic bone points forward and is smaller than the ischium.


• Deionychus. Small, flying dromaeosaur: we can tell because its scapula and coracoroid bones are at right angles. Tail was stiffened with bony rods as in all dromaeosaurs.


• Sinohydrosaur. Swims


• "Yanbird" (found with Sinohydrosaur). Not yet described. Has pygostyle (reduced tail, "parson's nose") like a modern bird [could this be Hongshaniornis?]


• Eoantiornus. 125 mya. Short-faced bird with teeth.


• Liaoxiornis . Virtually a missing link between birds and dinosaurs. Deep chest, wings with very small hands: could fly. Had teeth and a medium-length tail.

See also: Dinosaur-to-bird cladistics and The proof is in the plumage.

A new bird from China: Hongshanornis

Researchers in China have recovered a new genus and species (gen. et sp. nov.) of fossil bird beautifully perserved in fine lake sediments that show the outlines of its feathers. There's a picture and a general-interest article at National Geographic. The main link (below) is to the article on the Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences Web site, "Discovery of an ornithurine bird and its implication for Early Cretaceous avian radiation," by Zhonghe Zhou and Fucheng Zhang. From the abstract:

Hongshanornis longicresta... had completely reduced teeth and possessed a beak in both the upper and lower jaws, representing the earliest known beaked ornithurine. The preservation of a predentary bone confirms that this structure is not unique to ornithischian dinosaurs but was common in early ornithurine birds.... It was probably a wader, feeding in shallow water or marshes.

The next link shows the phylogenetic relationship of Hongshanornis:

The strict consensus phylogenetic tree shows that Hongshanornis longicresta is the most basal ornithurine bird. The result was derived from a PAUP... analysis with 202 morphological characters... of 23 avian taxa and Dromeosauridae. Seven new avian taxa were added to the data matrix of Clarke and Norell, including Yanornis chaoyangensis, Yixianornis grabaui, Hongshanornis longicresta, Liaoningornis longidigitus, Confuciusornis sanctus, Sapeornis chaoyangensis, and Jeholornis prima. [The elisions show where I've removed details of the techniques.]

See the cladistic diagram of Hongshanornis.