An image request

A while back I launched a rather unsuccessful appeal for archosaur images to use on the Musings since I actually don’t have that many that I have not already used. These are of course still welcome, so if you have any photos that you own the copyright for, and don’t mind me using publicly, and if they are of archosaur fossils / casts / mounts then do please send them to me!

However this appeal is of a far more general kind. As I noted recently my main ‘online’ project Ask A Biologist is about to undergo a big makeover and we are also looking for any images related to biology to include in a big online gallery. So basically the same appeal applies but on a much bigger scale – please send me ANY images related to biology / palaeo that we can use. I should note that I do have a rather a lot of dinosaur, bird and mammal images already and we need some variety! Thus lings like people in labs, plants, cells, inverts, molecules, fungi, medicine related stuff, fish, non-dinosaur fossils etc. are especially welcome.

Send anything you have to me at dwe_hone AT yahoo.com
Thanks in advance for your help, it really is greatly appreciated.

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A bit more on convergence

Before my brief hiatus with a trip to Shandong (very worthwhile, despite the illness that stuck me down) I was talking about convergent characters and the importance of examining all the available evidence and not just a select feature or two. However, that post was written rather quickly and I didn’t have time to expand on it in the way I wished so now I’ll push on with a few more observations.

While last time I mentioned only specific characters like spines or claws that can arise convergently, it is course possible for entire suites of characters to evolve convergently. While a big and specialised ungual will help you break into a termite or ant nest, a well evolved termite eating animal will have modified arms to provide power to that claw, and have a long snout and / or tongue to reach those termites, perhaps specialised sticky saliva, digestion suited to large amounts of formic acid, lost teeth and more. Eating ant is more than just a claw, so animals that specialise for eating ant are likely to have whole sets of characters which all help to increase ant-eating abilities and thus evolve in the same way in multiple lineages – in other words convergence. After all, if you want to run fast, having a long lower leg is great, but having a long metatarsal too, and cutting down on the number of toes, and actually shortening the femur as well are even better.

This takes us nicely to the second point – that when those suites of characters combine in certain parts of the body this can cause taxonomic and systematic problems. Animals that are highly specialised for running often have the characteristics I note above, but what if you recover a fossil that is *just* a pair of legs? If you have an anteater arm then you will spot the big claw and modified ulna, but there are also some other features that should help reveal its true identity – pick up a maniraptoran theropod leg though and things get trickier. It is perhaps no surprise that there were early questions over the phylogenetic position of things like alvarezsaurs and oviraptorosaurs with their specialised cursorial legs – there is quite a lot of convergence there.

Finally, we come to a point about defining characteristics. Things can look very different from a general description or a very detailed one and apparent convergences can vanish in a puff of adjectives (like the flippers of penguins and turtles shown here). Both birds and pterosaurs have wings, but one has feathers and reduced fingers, the other a hugely elongate arm and membraneous wings. Bats can try and muscle birds out the way with their long wingers and ‘skin’-like wings, but again, closer examination shows that pterosaurs rely on a single finger to support their wing, not a whole hands worth. These are, of course, especially coarse examples, but I hope the point gets home.

That largely wraps up convergence, or at least as much as I wanted to say about it for now. Coming up soon, something else. For once I’m a bit bereft of pre-prepared posts so I’m not sure what I’ll get round to finishing up and posting. Stay tuned!

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Ten years for Bob!

This week Bob Nicholls celebrates 10 years as a professional free-lance palaeoartist. I’ve known Bob for a number of years now as he’s resident in the West Country and so used to see him semi-regularly in Bristol when he was working. For those at SVP who actually ventured deep into the Geology Department you may have seen his large mural-cum-collage thing that covers the walls around the museum part of the department. His work regularly crops up in books and museum guidebooks (and Luis Rey’s name badge) and he is increasingly becoming recognised as a very modern palaeoartist. So drop over to his website and take a look at some of his work when you have the time.

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Spiny-ness in mammals and rampant convergence

As the title has already given away, I’m going to talk about mammals a bit on here for once (well, OK, they have cropped up occasionally before) but as a set-up to a point about convergence and evaluating evidence so it will hopefully be instructive and not overly extant mammal-y for those who like their extinct archosaurs. So onto, as also already given away by the title, spines in mammals.

Proof by illustration

One might think that after developing as a science for the last two hundred years, palaeontology would demand some pretty rigorous proof of a concept before it enters the area of ideas that one could consider ‘general consensus’ or perhaps nowadays more accurately (though less inclusively) ‘passed peer review’. However there is still one holdover from the early days that crops up from time to time in the literature (though far more often in general ramblings of unpublished ideas and online discussions) that being the concept that an idea is convincing if you can produce some nice looking artwork to demonstrate it. Essentially, proof by illustration.

So just how many papers are there?

Last week I mentioned the problems of keeping up with the ever growing scientific literature and just how many papers and books there are now readily available. As an illustration of this, here is my bookcase at the IVPP. As you can see, it’s really very full with both books, scientific volumes and monographs and stacks of papers. Standing on top is set of boxfiles of various papers and there are several more sets like this sat on my desk right now for the projects I’m working on. Added to that is all the stuff I didn’t bring to China (another half dozen boxfiles) and my PDF collection (which currently stands just shy of 3000 files, some of which themselves are whole books). In short there is a lot of science out there!

Don’t forget that this collection is just what I have accumulated in around 10 since I first finished my batchelors degree and I only started my PhD in 2002. A great many researchers have entire rooms filled with books and papers and anyone who has stumbled into a science library will know just how much literature there is. Is it then surprising that even those of us with very narrow research interests have not actually read everything on the subject. I’ve not actually read a significant fraction of this collection (for obvious reasons, even averaging a page every 2 minutes, going 24 hours a day at a rough calculation means there is well over three months worth of reading there!) but the information is there and accessible which is the main thing. Even this of course does not take into account what I *don’t* have, I estimate I have only about 1 in 20 of every pterosaur paper ever published in my collections somewhere which is not great when you think about it. In short, the scientific literature is huge.

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Bristol Zoo

The zoo in Bristol has gone through a number of names in its distinguished history (first opening in 1836) and is currently the ‘Bristol Zoo Gardens’ though for a long time it was the last surviving ‘zoological and botanical gardens’ in the UK, and quite possibly the world. In fact thanks to its age it has a long-standing minor disagreement over its position as the ‘oldest’ modern zoo since while London Zoo first opened its doors in 1828 it was not until 1847 that it opened them to the general public and not just the member of the Royal Zoological Society and thus either predates Bristol by 8 years, or is 11 years younger.

In any case, both are important historical collections that have survived and even thrived in the modern era. Bristol Zoo is small and self contained close to the city centre but nevertheless manages to cram in a great deal and uses the limited space very well. Like London, they have moved away from large animals (elephants, rhino, giraffe etc.) so that despite the small size of the zoo, the enclosures themselves are roomy. Despite its age Bristol is one of the most modern zoos in Europe with almost every major building being either new or recently renovated and the collections as a result are very nice.

Say hello to Aardonyx

The skull of Aardonyx, courtesy Adam Yates.

Hopefully you have now said you ‘hellos’ so we can actually talk about the animal. Published today, Aardonyx was described by a team led by Adam Yates of Dracovenator fame. The beast in question is a new sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Early Jurassic of South Africa and has a few rather neat things to tell us about the evolution of sauropods. As ever I don’t want to simply rehash the paper as I’m sure a number of bloggers will cover most of the things going on and I’m not sure it serves a huge purpose for everyone to say the same things! There’ll be plenty of discussion I’m sure online, so I’ll try to be specific.

Tremble ye mighty referees and authors

Possibly. Anyway, I’ve now been formally taken on as one of the associate editors of the palaeontological journal ‘Historical Biology’ (my thanks to Gareth Dyke for his invitation to join the board). Having preached much about peer review, reviewing and writing papers and even the editorial process I hope that I can put this all into practice. This might put more people off than it encourages, but those of you writing palaeontological papers, (perhaps as part of the PPC?) an at least consider HB as your target journal.

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Dragons of the Air

My PhD student Ross Elgin has made an appearance on the Musings from time to time, most notably with his guest post on pterosaur head crests (from his paper that was part of the Wellnhofer volume – still available people!). Now however Ross has launched is own blog too in order to help put his work and that of the ‘Pterosaur Flight Dynamics Group’ based in Karlsruhe into the spotlight.

For those who love their pterosaurs therefore, I suggest you head on over to Dragons of the Air where the first posts are already up, with more to follow, plus of course a number of pages on the research group too. Shamefully this means that I can’t get him to write any more guest posts for me, but on the upside, there’ll be more pterosaur goodness for everyone.  In order to kick things off in as an appropriate manner as possible, have a nice picture of a Tapejara in all its magnificence as can be found hanging from the ceiling in the main hall of the Museum of Natural History in Karlsruhe.

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Behold the (possibly) mighty Deinocheirus

There is a tradition in archosaur palaeontology to refer to things we don’t know much about as ‘enigmatic’, and while an appropriate term much of the time, it is annoyingly overused. Basically if something is interesting and very incomplete it is left as ‘enigmatic’ which is often a euphemism for “I’m going to speculate wildly because there is no good evidence to contradict me” or “I’m not going to say anything about it at all”. Deinocheirus, in the public eye at least, sits firmly in the former camp and one can see why.

Recovered from Late Cretaceous rocks the specimen consists of just a partial pair of arms. Very, very large arms to be sure, and certainly a theropod but after that things get murky. Most researchers seem happy with the idea that these likely belonged to some form of giant ornithomimid it has previously suggested to belong to a theirizinosaur. As a result of that lack of information (a pair of partial arms, described quite sometime ago, and in Russian as I recall) Deinocheirus seems to have entered into popular palaeo folklore as the great unknown theropod, thought I would have thought something like Gigantoraptor and the presence of other giant therizinosaurs would have left it without much potential glamour even if a complete one ever turned up. Still, it IS rarely figured and I have Max Langer to thank for this image from Warsaw (though it’s not clear if this is the original or a cast).

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More online resources

So it turns out that I have been put on yet another list of ‘blogs for X’, in this case a list of “100 excellent blogs for science teachers“. A number of other famous / infamous palaeobloggers are on there too, but the whole thing has quite a few good looking sites that are probably worthy of perusal if you have not seen them before.

Also while I’m on the subject of science communication, the evergreen (well, mostly orange) Ask A Biologist is still going strong three and half years in and 2100 questions later. Thanks to a bit of funding grubbing we also now have significant funds to revamp the whole site and that process is now well underway – expect a relaunch next year. We are as ever keen to recruit new academics to our ranks and to advertise our presence as widely as possible so do please link to us and send our address to any people you know who are keen on biology and science.

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