Deinonychus at the AMNH

Since the theropods are doing well this week, it’s time to wheel out another image kindly sent in by Steve Cohen. I suspect there’s a nice mount of Deinonychus in a great many museums in North America, but for all my traveling, I’ve only ever seen two of them (part shown here) and didn’t have time to study either in any detail. Here though is an excellent and indeed famous mount in the AMNH of this dinosaur and it would probably be even more impressive if Steve hadn’t sent this to Heinrich Mallison as well and he’d not put it up a couple of weeks back….

Suchomimus

Yesterday I spotted a nice picture of a mount of Suchomimus on Twitter posted up by artist Brett Booth. On asking he was kind enough to provide me with the full set of things he’d taken and gave me permission to post them up. Years ago I got a chance to see a cast of the manus of this animal, but at the time I didn’t know much about dinosaurs and ironically the one other theropod I’d seen much of was Baryonyx, so the interesting robustness of these things rather passed me by.

Spinosaurs are popular and have done well in the last couple of years. In addition to Oxalaia last year we also have recent had Icthyovenator and Ostafrikasaurus and that’s before we mention the most important spinosaurid find of recent years (according to me) – half a tooth. However, while the ranks of the spinosaurs has been growing, Suchomimus remains the the most complete spinosaur known to date with most of the skeleton having been recovered compared to the masses of vertebrae, snouts and teeth that characterise rather too many of them. Only Baryonyx really comes close in terms of completeness, that that does at least have the advantage of having a good full description of the material.

Still, Brett’s photos help there as there are some nice ones. This looks to me like a good cast of the holotype material and there’s a bonus at the end of what looks like an original arm next to a human and T. rex for comparison. I actually forgot to ask Brett if he knew what the status of the mount was, or for that matter where this is being exhibited, but I’m delighted to be able to put it up here.

Late edit: Brett tried to add a comment but if having troubles. He sent me this in an e-mail that answers a few of my comments and queries:

This was at Lynx Exhibits in El Paso Texas, part of that traveling Supercroc exhibit. I believe it leaves after this weekend. It was on some sort of rig that would move if you pulled a few levers. Totally worth the trip!

The arm is original except for the metacarpals and first claw (the parts in blue.)

What didn’t come out was all the pitting and lines on the spine, very much like a stegosaurus plate. And there was some damage or warping to the pubis.

I have to say this was a HUGE animal. I was far more impressed with the size of this than I was when I saw Sue. I hit the knee and I’m 6’3″. Really impressive.

Academics on archosaurs: Heinrich Mallison

Heinrich Mallison, Researcher, Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity at the Humboldt University Berlin.
I’m a geologist/palaeontologist trying hard to use digital techniques to unlock the remaining secrets of dinosaur locomotion.

1. What first got you interested or involved in your research field?

I guess – but given my age of roughly 6 years back then it’s kinda hard to tell – I guess it was a dinosaur book my Dad bought me in the Stuttgart Zoo’s shop (no idea why a dinosaur book).

2. What is your favourite piece of research?

The speedwalking dinosaur hypothesis I still need to publish.

3. What do you think is the most interesting or important discovery in your field in recent years?

That basal dinosaurs, and even basal dinosauromorphs, were so much more bird-like [and, by convergence, mammal-like]  with regards to lungs, metabolism, bone growth, etc. then previously imagined. Suddenly, many questions resolve themselves into a fitting picture, and many supposed/questionable convergences default into shared inheritance!

4. What do you think is the biggest unanswered question in your field right now?

Funding – when will politicians understand that basic research is more important than a short-time blip in the GNP?

5. What advice would you give to students about research?

Palaeontology is a true multidisciplinary science. Therefore, it does not matter what you study officially (geology, palaeontology, zoology, botany, climate research, physics, veterinary of human medicine, engineering, etc.) – you have to do them all anyway! Find a subject what can feed you if there is no research funding for dinosaurs.

Guest Post: A phylogeny of ankylosaurian dinosaurs

At least a few parts of the dinosaurian family tree are still relatively little studied and are controversial. One of these is the ankylosaurian dinosaurs, though a new paper seeks to delve into this problem and produced a new and comprehensive analysis. Lead author Rick Thompson takes us through it:

In 1842 Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur”, helping to imbue the world with a fascination for the gigantic ‘terrible lizards’ of the prehistoric world. Owen’s work was based on the fossil remains of three distinct archosaurs; Megalosaurus and Iguanadon have become fixed in our consciousness as archetypal dinosaurs, while the third, Hylaeosaurus, is very much the ‘ugly-duckling’ of the trio. Hylaeosaurus is a member of the Ankylosauria, a group of Middle Jurassic to the Late Cretaceous heavily armoured herbivorous dinosaurs, closely related to the stegosaurs in the clade Thyreophora. The story of Hylaeosaurus somewhat mirrors that of its ankylosaur relatives; fragmentary, difficult to study and lacking the popularity of its theropod, ornithopod and sauropod cousins. The ankylosaurs barely even worked their way into Jurassic Park (apparently Ankylosaurus does appear in Jurassic Park III – if you can stand it…)! The lasting image of the Ankylosauria in the public consciousness is the classic battle between Ankylosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, with the ankylosaur determinedly swinging its tail club towards the leg of its powerful foe. Indeed, it is the presence of the tail club, widely regarded as a defensive weapon that could shatter bone (Arbour et al. 2009), which has helped to raise the profile of this fascinating dinosaur group.

Of course ankylosaurs are more than just a dinosaur with a weaponized tail. The Ankylosauria includes over 50 valid taxa, only a fraction of which possess this idiosyncratic armament. Fragmentary ankylosaur specimens have been recovered from every continent on Earth, though their record in North America and Asia is by far the best. It is their extensive covering of dermal armour, particularly that of the skull, that has proved to be both the blessing and bane of ankylosaur palaeontology. The high level of morphological diversity in the armour is probably responsible for the large number of ankylosaur taxa. The cranial ossifications completely cover the bony sutures of the skull, simultaneously providing a unique pattern to identify new species, while destroying a wealth of cranial characters that could help to resolve the interrelationships of the wider clade. Thus the evolution of the Ankylosauria is very poorly understood, and presents a tough challenge for systematic palaeontologists.

Traditionally the Ankylosauria is split into two families, the Ankylosauridae and Nodosauridae. The Ankylosauridae includes many of the more recognisable taxa including Ankylosaurus and Euoplocephalus. Ankylosaurids are generally identified by their short-broad skulls, which are ornamented with horn-like ossifications above (supraorbital), behind (squamosal) and below (quadratojugal) the eye, along with the presence of a tail club. The Nodosauridae generally have a more elongate skull, with a domed skull roof (parietal region) and boss-like rather than horn-like cranial ossifications. Their trunk armour often incorporates spike-like ossifications along their flanks, though no tail club is present. In recent years, a number of ankylosaurs, such Gastonia and the aptly named Gargoyleosaurus, have been found to possess combinations of these classic traits, thus blurring the distinction between ankylosaurids and nodosaurids. This has led some authors to erect a new group of ankylosaurs, the Polacanthidae, which includes many of these recent discoveries, along with a few older, fragmentary genera like Owen’s Hylaeosaurus.

 

A mounted skeleton of Gastonia burgei. Note the large shield over the pelvis, a character suggested to unite polacanthid taxa. Photo by Susie Maidment.

The validity of the polacanthid hypothesis has proved hard to test cladistically, as the majority of ankylosaur character sets are either heavily biased towards the skull, or include a limited number of taxa. As many of the potential polacanthid taxa are fragmentary, or predominantly postcranial, the incorporation of these taxa into ankylosaur phylogeny has been problematic. Studies including some polacanthid genera place them either towards the root of the Ankylosauridae, or as a new family (Polacanthidae), sister to the Ankylosauridae. During my Master’s Degree in Biosystematics at Imperial College, London, I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to try to resolve some of these issues in ankylosaur evolution. Paul Barrett and Susie Maidment offered me the chance to revise and update the unpublished PhD thesis of Jolyon Parish on ankylosaur phylogeny. My aim was to expand the taxon sample of Parish’s thesis, as well as modify his extensive character set. In this way I hoped to produce a ‘palaeontological total evidence’ phylogeny of the Ankylosauria, which included all valid taxa regardless of completeness, and a roughly even mix of cranial and postcranial characters.

The results of this project were recently published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, and give some new insights into ankylosaur evolution. Encouragingly our data did support the traditional split between the nodosaurids and ankylosaurids; however, no polacanthid clade was recovered. Instead, all taxa that have been affiliated with the Polacanthidae by various authors (and Ankylosauridae by others) were resolved within the Nodosauridae. In the strict consensus tree (the tree which summarizes all of the information that each of the shortest possible evolutionary trees agree upon) the nodosaurid clade formed a polytomy – that is, we could say nothing about the internal relationships of the group. This poor resolution of the clade was in fact caused by a number of unstable taxa, whose position on the tree is highly variable. Unsurprisingly three of these unstable taxa have previously been attributed to the Polacanthidae. To counteract their influence we produced a derivative strict reduced consensus tree (shown in the figure). This tree prunes unstable taxa from the strict consensus tree, greatly increasing resolution. In this phylogeny it is clear that the ‘polacanthid’ taxa form a basal grade of nodosaurid dinosaurs, while the traditional nodosaurids (clade D) form a polytomy.

This result simultaneously highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘palaeontological total evidence’ approach. By including all taxa (regardless of completeness) and a character set sampled from the whole skeleton, a large amount of missing data was guaranteed. This lowers the resolution of the tree, as seen in the traditional nodosaurid clade. However, it is the inclusion of such a broad sample of characters and taxa that has allowed completely new relationships to be revealed, placing ‘polacanthid’ taxa in the Nodosauridae. The problems have been further confounded by the extensive cranial ossification of the taxa. The variation in such complex ornamentation is exceptionally hard to capture using traditional discrete characters. This makes it very hard to test for presence of the evolutionary signal in the ornamentation. In the future, a study which incorporates extensive measurements of the cranial armour could better capture this variation, and more clearly reveal the relationships of the group. This is particularly important for the Nodosauridae, many of which are primarily distinguished by their cranial ornamentation.

The phylogeny of the Ankylosauridae was much better resolved, and broadly in agreement with existing studies, if the ‘polacanthid’ taxa are discounted. Again in this clade we see that the basal lineages do not conform to the traditional view of the Ankylosauridae, often having elongate skulls. The tip of the tail has not been recovered in many of these taxa, so the presence of a tail club is uncertain. However, our tree is the first cladistic analysis to place an ankylosaur that clearly lacks a tail club within the Ankylosauridae. Zhongyaunsaurus was originally described as a nodosaurid, though this assignment was subsequently corrected by Ken Carpenter (Carpenter et al. 2008). Our phylogeny confirms that Zhongyaunsaurus was indeed an ankylosaurid, and suggests that the most characteristic trait of the Ankylosauria is only present in the most derived ankylosaurids.

Unfortunately our study has done little to help the plight of the earliest known ankylosaur, Hylaeosaurus. Our analysis suggests that it is a member of the Nodosauridae, but its removal from the reduced consensus tree feels like a sad continuation of its rather anonymous history. Never the less, our study has helped to reveal a new perspective on the Ankylosauria. Although the ankylosaurid-nodosaurid dichotomy has been maintained, it appears that the classical characters of these groups only apply to the most derived of their forms. The earliest lineages of each family show greater levels of diversity in their armour and body form. This has made their classification difficult, and without more fossils, or newer forms of character, it is likely to remain so. There is still much work to do in order to understand the evolution of this extraordinary group of animals, but hopefully our study can serve to trigger a new wave of research in the coming years.

 

 

Academics on Archosaurs: David Fastovsky

David E. Fastovsky, University of Rhode Island
Mesozoic, terrestrial vertebrate-bearing paleoenvironments, vertebrate paleontology

1. What first got you interested or involved in your research field?

Roy Chapman Andrews:  All About Dinosaurs (1953).

2. What is your favourite piece of research?

Overall, I loved working on fluxes of vertebrate extinctions at the K/T boundary; I also loved working on some very interesting vertebrate-bearing paleoenvironments in NE Mexico; the rocks were crazy; the fossils were weird; it just doesn’t get better than that!

3. What do you think is the most interesting or important discovery in your field in recent years?

Feathered non-avian dinosaurs; the extinctions at the K/T boundary.

4. What do you think is the biggest unanswered question in your field right now?

We’ve begun to move from individual specimens to ecosystems.  That kind of work should continue; that’s how to really capture the great rhythms of life through time.

5. What advice would you give to students about research?

Be creative.

Guest Post: Yurgovuchia doellingi

Those keeping up with the scientific literature will know that a new dromaeosaur was described just the other day. One of the authors, Jim Kirkland, has been kind enough to pen a few lines about the discovery and has included some nice photos of the excavation too. Enjoy:

Academics on archosaurs: Jerry Harris

Dr. Jerry D. Harris, Director of Paleontology, Dixie State College of Utah
Specialist in being as much of a generalist as possible.

1. What first got you interested or involved in your research field?

Dunno, exactly…I have very hazy memories of playing with a set of old Marx dinosaur toys in a room with gigantic paper cutouts of various dinosaurs in the early 1970s; my mom tells me I had those starting at age 2, so I have no idea what was my initial exposure. I also have (less hazy) memories as an older child poring over books such as McGowen’s Album of Dinosaurs and Craig’s Dinosaurs and More Dinosaurs in fascination. Of course, all of these books and toys are hopelessly outdated–even laughably so–by today’s standards, but they obviously piqued my interest. Somewhere amid all the baby/early childhood stuff my mom saved is something I wrote in second grade–this was on those gray, sideways, blue-lined pieces of paper on which children learn to print. The assignment clearly had been to respond to a question such as “If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?” My answer: Compsognathus. I don’t remember why. Spelled it correctly, too.

2. What is your favourite piece of research?

But…but…I love _all_ of my children equally!  In all seriousness, I have a particular fondness for some of the first papers I wrote, particularly the ones that describe the theropod track Saurexallopus, the pterosaur Kepodactylus, and a bunch of isolated dinosaur tracks from the Morrison Formation near Canon City, Colorado. Compared to what I think I could produce today, they’re not the greatest papers…in some ways, they are blatantly amateurish! But producing them having only a bachelor’s degree behind me was an extremely interesting, eye-opening process that really exposed me to what the meat of research paleontology really is, which is nothing like anything I’d ever seen in a book or TV show. Anyone seriously contemplating getting into paleontology should have this kind of experience at the undergraduate level. I have lots of fond memories of being surrounded by stacks of papers, in my apartment or a nearby coffee shop, trying to learn about so many different things, amalgamate and filter them, and apply them to resolve a problem. They’re not the greatest papers in the world, but they were the foundation of my education in how to be a research scientist and therefore are near and dear to my heart.

3. What do you think is the most interesting or important discovery in your field in recent years?

At the risk of psittaciforming Tom Holtz, feathered dinosaurs and the cementing of the birds-are-dinosaur-descendants theory (yes, theory…no longer a hypothesis). Of course, it opens up all kinds of new questions about how far we can push inferences about dinosaurs based on extant bird physiology/anatomy/behavior/etc., but that’s also a great thing–gives us paleontologists something to do! Also, the increasing application of all kinds of technologies to resolve paleontological problems. In particular, increasingly high-resolution CT scanning has provided some really interesting insights into aspects of dinosaur paleobiology that I bet no one thought we would ever be able to tackle even a generation or two ago. (On a tangential note, the increasing prevalence of 3D digitization and rapid prototyping will, in the not-too-distant future, make possible comparing specimens in far-flung reaches of the globe easier and cheaper than traveling a lot). Lastly, I’d say that the (again increasing) realization that non-avian dinosaurs don’t really have any modern analogs in terms of anatomy, physiology, and ecology–and that dinosaurs aren’t the big, sluggish, swamp-dwelling reptiles I grew up with–makes working on them so much more fun and exciting because it allows us to see where principles we think we understand from extant organisms aren’t broad enough to encompass much of the past, and try to figure out more inclusive principles as well as all the variables that made the past unlike the present and tease out their effects.

It’s funny that I say all that because, at heart, I’m still a “let’s go dig up something new and describe it” kind of guy, which has increasing risk of obsolescence…

4. What do you think is the biggest unanswered question in your field right now?

The biggest question is: who the heck is going to employ the vast numbers of paleontologists coming out of schools these days?!? …OK, so that’s not really it. The biggest question is: when are physicists going to get off their collective gluteals and invent time machines that will allow us to go back and observe dinosaurs firsthand?!? …OK, so that’s not really it, either. Actually, I don’t know that I can answer this one–there are so many huge questions, none more important than the other! For example, why did ornithuran dinosaurs survive the K-Pg extinction event but no others did? Why don’t ornithischians show any osteological hallmarks of having pneumatic diverticula, and how did they effectively compete against saurischians without them? Why are the footprint records of many dinosauromorph groups so strangely different than the body-fossil records? When will someone reconcile opposing molecular and fossil-based phylogenies? What’s it gonna take before everyone on the planet realizes that everything tastes like basal saurischian dinosaur, not chicken, and that eggs demonstrably came first? …OK, so I’m getting off track here…

5. What advice would you give to students about research?

As a teacher of scientific writing, and as someone who learned via trial-by-fire under the tutelage of someone unafraid to rip my writing to shreds, I have a personal interest in good writing. It’s also something I consistently fail to see from students, and something I see with alarmingly decreasing frequency in the literature. Frankly, if you want anyone to take your research seriously, write it correctly: use words properly and to maximum effect, structure sentences properly, use parallel structure throughout and across paragraphs and paper sections, and perhaps above all else, learn how to explain your reasoning in a clear, logical fashion.

Beyond that pet peeve, obviously doing careful research is key. Often, that means doing detailed work, not glossing over various details that you think are unimportant, or that aren’t usually talked about in other papers. You never know what will be important in the future! Doing careful research also means examining all issues from multiple angles–these days, phylogenetics seems to be the favorite perspective, but functional morphology, paleoecology, sedimentology, stratigraphy, paleobiogeography, etc. all contribute valuable information. Be holistic, not narrowly focused…maybe not all in a single paper, but in approaching any specific problem. (Plus, this gives you ample opportunity to beef up your CVs!).

Academics on archosaurs: Tom Holtz

Dr. Thomas R. Holtz, Jr., Univeristy of Maryland
Specialist in theropod paleobiology, with special concentration on/obsession with/affection for the Tyrannosauroidea

1. What first got you interested or involved in your research field?

As a young kid (about 3 years or so) I got two different toy dinosaurs: a Tyrannosaurus and a “Brontosaurus“. I asked my mom what they were, and she said “dinosaurs”. I apparently was very skeptical, because how could these two animals which looked SO different from each other both be called the same thing, when horses and cows (which looked a lot more similar) had their own names. So she bought a copy of the How and Why Wonderbook of Dinosaurs and read to me from it. At that point I decided I would grow up to be a dinosaur. Somewhat later (when my parents convinced me that this was not going to happen), I decided I would be a paleontologist.

2. What is your favourite piece of research?

I think my favorite pieces of research include: establishment under a phylogenetic context that tyrannosaurs were coelurosaurs (already suggested since the early 20th Century, and independently developed by Currie, Novas, and Sereno while I was doing my work); functional anatomy of the arctometatarsus (again there had been previous work on the subject, but by giving the structure a name it seems to have attracted more rigorous studies (e.g., various papers by Eric Snively); and the critical analysis of the obligate scavenging hypothesis for Tyrannosaurus and kin.

3. What do you think is the most interesting or important discovery in your field in recent years?

Feathers. Feathers galore. Feathers on fairly basal coelurosaurs, and maybe deeper. (However, I would also say that work on growth rates in dinosaurs and the revolution in studies of respiration and air sacs in archosaurs are also revolutionary for the field).

4. What do you think is the biggest unanswered question in your field right now?

How basal were feathers? Or, to put this a different way, are the elements in Tianyulong, coelurosaurs, and/or pterosaur pycnofibres homologous? Towards this end, dinosaur fossils in lacustrine or lagoonal deposits of the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic are greatly to be desired!

5. What advice would you give to students about research?

So many important things to suggest here…

One: Read the older literature! Just because a work wasn’t published since 2000 doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have great observations.

Two: Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Science is all about reducing the error bars over time, so don’t expect the first paper in a field to be the last word!

Three: Always keep in mind: if you were wrong, how would you know it? In other words, be clear as to what your hypotheses really are.

and a big one:

Four: Read outside your field! Be aware of research done in other disciplines, from functional anatomy to sedimentology and stratigraphy to ecology and so forth. Don’t get pigeon-holed into a single particular topic.

Academics on archosaurs

I have been delighted with the response to the (theoretically at least) ongoing series of palaeoart interviews. People seem to really enjoy them, and having a whole series with the same questions has enabled readers to cross compare ideas and see a little of the mechanics of the minds of the artists. Now while I do love good palaeoart, but I do want the focus of the Musings to be more about the science and recently I have started to wind down a bit. However, a solution to both issues popped into my head just the other day – to interview my colleagues about their research.

Now the obvious problem is that a good interview digs deep into the workings of a researcher’s field, how they work, how things intertwine, and can go back and fourth to develop ideas. That means a long and involved process and I’m no skilled interviewer and moreover, few people will want to take that kind of time and effort. My solution therefore is to pose just a few short and simple questions that will be quick and easy to answer and hopefully encourage people to take part and yet by focusing them on their own research themes, provide contrasting and expansive answers.

In short I hope to build up a body of these that will get a wide range of researchers to talk about their work and interests and provide a much broader picture of the state of archosaurian science than just reviews of papers and new discoveries, and to get a chance to hear from a lot more people than just those of us who blog or comment regularly. We’ll see how it goes of course, but I do already have a few lined up and a bunch of feelers out there. This will hopefully therefore become a frequent, if irregular, new theme on the Musings and so I’ve put up a new category to cover it.

The first proper interview will follow very shortly, stay tuned!

Pterosaur ontogeny

 Not too long ago, Matt Wedel had an SV-POW! post that talked about ways of diagnosing an adult vs non-adult sauropod. Inspired by this and the fact that I have recently been playing around with issues of ontogeny in pterosaurs, I decided to write something similar for the non-avian Mesozoic fliers. If you have a pterosaur specimen in front of you, just how do you know if it’s an adult or not?

Obviously there are some general indicators that are pretty good for vertebrates as a whole that will get you quite a long way (even if this is a new species). Size is obviously rarely a great indicator, but if you have a pterodactyloid with a 20 cm wingspan then it’s going to be a juvenile, and likewise if you have a rhamphorhynchoid coming in close to the 2 m mark it’s very unlikely to be anything but a big adult. Young animals (and especially very young animals) tend to have big heads compared to their body and especially very big eyes compared to the size of the head. A bunch of fusions are absent in young pterosaurs that are present in adults too, just as you’d expect for most animals. The sutures between the centrum and neural arch of the vertebrae will be open in juveniles and closed in adults, and similarly the elements of the pelvis and sacrum, and the scapula and coracoid will be separate in young animals and fused together in adults.

Pterosaurs also have some characters of ontogenetic change that are rather more peculiar to them than vertebrates in general. Very young pterosaurs also tend to have a very grainy texture to the surfaces of their longbones, despite the fact that even embryonic pterosaurs have a pretty ossified set of bones (unlike many young animals). Smaller pterosaurs also tend to have various parts of the skeleton being less ossified and rather amorphous compared to those of adults. The tarsals are often not well ossified and can be missing (well don’t preserve) and if present may be very simple shapes. The carpals tend to look more ‘blobby’ and lack the detailed morphology seen in adults and will be separated into multiple elements whereas in adults the wrist will primarily be formed of just two massive elements (plus the pteroid). Finally, while obviously you would expect skulls to fuse up during ontogeny, pterosaurs do tend to take it one step further than most. Rather like birds, in adult pterosaurs the sutures all but disappear, or even go entirely, such that the skull looks like a single smooth piece of bone. Also as in some birds, bigger pterodactyloids have a notarium and this only fuses up and fully develops in adults. Similar to the point above about absolute size, the presence and development of some form of head crest is indicative, but not a great indicator of age. Yes a massive and elaborate crest in an animal is indicative that it’s an adult, but there could be a fairly well developed crest in an animal that is close to becoming and adult and of course there are taxa without crests and in at least once case it appears that females don’t have crests.

As in mammals, but unlike dinosaurs and birds, pterosaur also have epiphyses. The growing plates at the ends of the long bones physically separate the main shaft of the bone from the proximal and distal ends, so things like the femur can appear to be in three pieces. Obviously as growth slows towards maturity these epiphyses slowly disappear as they fuse into the single element that you would expect to see.

So in short, something that is small, with grainy textured bones, a big head, with big eyes, unossified tarsals, amorphous carpals, no crest, clear sutures in the skull, no notarium, and separated scapulocoracids, pelvis, epiphyses and neurocentral sutures is going to be a young juvenile. And the close these various features get to the opposite condition the closer the animal is likely to be to adulthood.

As ever with such things these are not absolutes, but merely guides. Good guides, certainly – you simply won’t see a notarium in a very young pterosaur, or open neurocentral arches in a big, old adult. However, in terms of determining more subtle difference in age it will be tricky – one animal may have fused up the notarium, but may have incompletely ossified tarsals and another could have the reverse. Although at least some characters do seem to have a bit of a pattern (the scapulocoracoid seems to fuse pretty early in most things) a general lack of numerous specimens of different ages makes it hard to do any more detailed analysis. Still, in terms of gross age (hatchling – young – adolescent – adult) even for a specimen of a previously unknown species with no obvious close relatives, it should be relatively easy to determine the approximate age of the animal.

Catch 22

While the aquatic dinosaurs nonsense certainly united palaeontologists in their dismissal of the ‘hypothesis’ it also caused something of a split. Discussions both public and private went around about how to deal with such an issue. It’s a fundamental problem with bad science and anti-science and while it’s a fairly obvious one, it is worth laying it out. In short, once the proverbial cat is out of the bag and has spread to a significant number of the public via the media, there is no obviously good way of tacking the problem.

Option 1 is quite simple – ignore it. It’s bad science, it’s wrong. Sooner or later most people will simply forget and move on and many will recognise it as being wrong.

Option 2 is to counter it. Show why it’s wrong and why the good science is right.

This all sounds rather reasonable and not too tricky and either way, the good science should shine through. The reality though is all too different and in fact dealing with it is a catch 22. Follow option 1 and you will find a good number of people will, years later, still think this thing was true. They heard it, absorbed it, heard nothing to contradict it and so assumed it was right. Even if it sounded dodgy, they do now have two (or more) competing ideas in their heads and might not be able to say which is right or better supported. If you do nothing then bad ideas can fester and it can be triumphed by some as a victory with the scientists too cowed to reply.

Acting may not help much however. Assuming you can even reach many or the same people as the original story (the media rarely publish retractions, don’t tend to give replies the same airtime or print space, and will come later) you may convince few. Simply continuing the discussion gives a sense of validity to an idea that it shouldn’t have simply by arguing with it and keeps things going longer than they should.

So it is a damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Some favour the ‘let it lie’ approach and others the ‘get good info out there’ (like this for the aquatic dinos at least). Not surprisingly I tend to favour the latter with my overall approach and attitude to science communication, but it’s not a blanket one. There’s no need to devote time and effort to disprove every bit of silliness that appears online and in the media, if no one has seen it, it’s not even an issue. But for me, major stories do have an impact and I’ve too often seen people cling onto things and think of them as genuine simply because they were reported and while it might give a nonsense piece a little of the oxygen of publicity, providing a well-directed and decent sized dose of science will probably reach a few more people and more than offset the damage.

The real solution of course is for idiots to spot pushing BS as science, the media to stop reporting BS as science and to make everyone scientifically literate so they know BS when they see it. In the absence of solutions to those trivial problems however, we have to do the best we can, even if we can’t always agree on the best way to do it.

Book review: When Dinos Dawned….

I would have put the full title of the book in the title of of the post, but frankly I thought it might end up filling the whole page. “When Dinos Dawned, Mammals got Munched & Pterosaurs took Flight: a Cartoon Prehistory of Life in the Triassic” is probably one of the longest titles going, but this is perhaps the only real criticism I can have of this book.

This entry is the latest in a series for National Geographic by author / artist Hannah Bonner. It’s aimed at children quite clearly, but I think there’s enough depth to be of interest to adults and bring a little enlightenment to even knowledgeable readers. The science is basically perfect, and the material is presented in a fun and accessible manner. The drawings are simple in style, but extremely accurate in terms of anatomy and settings and nicely executed – there are ‘cartoon’ style animals for various panels, but the majority of the content is more like the cover shown here.

The Triassic is of course a time when lots of interesting things were happening. While perhaps understandably most books like this would focus on dinosaurs and by extension the Jurassic and Cretaceous, there is a lot more to the Mesozoic than just dinosaurs and the Triassic has most of that covered. Odd crocs, aetosaurs, phytosaurs, the first pterosaurs, the first icthyosaurs, prolacertiforms and the weirdness that is things like Longisquama. A lot of these are unlikely to be on the radar of a young dinosaur enthusiast, so this really helps fill in the picture of what was going on in terms of evolution and the changing faunas.

Obviously the reptiles get to dominate this, but mammals, insects and even plants get a decent look-in and are put in context of what was going on. It was also good to see lots of more obscure things get a look in – even books that do cover aetosaurs or the like will often include a token animal – I certainly can’t think of any previous effort that covered three (count them!) drepanosaurs. When the rhynchosaurs, Panphagia, Lotosaurus, Odontochelys and Proterosuchus also get a mention and are illustrated, well it’s just lovely.

At this point I should probably note that I’m reviewing this because I was lucky enough to be sent a preview copy. My colleague Corwin Sullivan played a major role as a consultant on this book given his work on various Triassic critters and Hannah also contacted me during her research (but I don’t recall even giving her any specific help in the end). Still, she was kind enough to arrange for me to get a free copy and I’ll gladly cover it here (especially after I spotted a reference to the Musings in a list of useful websites in the back). Certainly the accuracy is to Corwin’s credit for his advice and to Hannah’s for taking it, and the book certainly benefits as a result.

Overall though this is an excellent effort with much to recommend about it – good science, nice art, a great theme and well written. While I’d imagine the market is a little limited, this is going to go down very will with all kinds of kids who like their dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasties but want to know more and have more than enough books discussing Diplodocus and Tyrannosaurus. Great stuff.