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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One hell of an intermediate – presenting Darwinopterus

The skull of Darwinopterus - courtesy Dave Unwin

I do so dislike the term ‘transitional fossil’, like ‘missing link’ and ‘ancestor’ these words and phrases have been warped by the media (I think) to the point where they seem to be accepted as technical scientific terms for what were largely informal general concepts and the whole things has become a bit of a minefield. When you add to that the willful misuse and manipulation of the terms by some to try to challenge evolution then it gets even worse. However there are times when something is so obvious and clear and simple that it is hard to use any other term. No, I don’t like ‘transitional fossil’, and this is not a ‘transition’ in the sense of an ancestor because, well that’s not how palaeontology works, BUT, if you want an example of ingtwo separate body plans and shunt them together into some kind of 50-50 version, this is it. Yes, today saw the publication of the new pterosaur Darwinopterus and as the title of this post and introductory paragraph gives away, it is a real intermediate between two groups of pterosaurs.

The head of Quetzalcoatlus

Well after a typically exhausting trans-continental flight (well, two continents really) I’m back in the UK though tired and perhaps understandably not best suited to blogging, but with SVP and a well earned break for me coming up, this may be it for a while (bar the odd post like this I suspect). So for now, have the head of the giant azdarchid pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus taken in the Museo del Desierto in Mexico. Although there is some skull material for this genus, it has never been well described and is incomplete hence the variation you can see among the various reconstructions of the head though this one is pretty typical and probably fairly accurate.

Pterosaur wing folding

Yes, it’s another picture from Stuttgart (hey, they have some fantastic models) but with a specific purpose this time out, to talk about the way the wings of pterosaurs fold. We have already covered on here the shape and structure of the pterosaurian wing, and the bony structure, and also the mechanism by which the wing finger might extend and retract but here I want to talk about what this might mean in practical terms for a living animal, or at least how things might look.

Dsungaripterus takes wing

Time for a short and sweet picture post of a pterosaur mount in the air. This is one of several IVPP casts of the unusual pterodactyloid pterosaur Dsungaripterus. The dsungaripterid pterosaurs are oft times rather different to others and indeed are a unique group in that they seem to have proportionally rather heavier bones than other pterodactyloids. Dsungaripterus itself is interesting in having the odd combination of an upturned and toothless beak tip and then especially robust and rounded teeth at the back of the jaw. These are ultra weird in that the surrounding bone grows over the teeth such that in older individuals you can’t always see the tooth at all for some sockets, just a rounded lump of bone. I’ll leave it there simply because I have more planned on dsungaripterids and don’t want to write a big post right now, more to come later (at some indeterminate future point).

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Is this the worst media coverage of pterosaurs ever?

No, that’s not hyperbole. We really have a stinker here. Allow me to elaborate: as some of you may be aware, a paper came out this week covering a pterosaur trace fossil of an animal landing – in other words, it came into land after a flight and then walked off. I don’t often cover new papers on here, and don’t always cover even my own so no marks are lost for having missed it. Anyway, this got some coverage in the media and I was quoted in several stories about the paper. Here is one of the originals and it’s worth reading so that you can get some context for later.

Then I found this online. Oh dear. For all my recent complaints about the media, hopefully at least some of you will have noted that I did have some nice things to say about the stories in general and emphasised that while many are woefully bad, some stories are very good. This is genuinely one of the worst excesses I have seen of media screw-ups. I can only conclude that they read one of the original stories and then tried to change it so that it looked a bit different (since I wasn’t quoted on the press release they must have taken my quotes from a piece by Charles Choi, the only person I spoke to about this).

In doing so they fell for every classic error I complain about. They copy stuff indiscriminately, they get things wrong, they misattribute things and add errors and here, even contradictions. It really is horrendous, and, to cap it all, it was written by the sites science editor! Their only possible defence is that they are a software website, but for me this would be pitiful – if you report enough on science to require a titled editor you should get it right. Hell, if you are doing *anything* like this you should get it right (or very nearly right, everyone makes mistakes and you can’t always go into the detail you want). This is another level though, and allow me to elaborate more.

Let’s start with the title which includes ‘preferred’. Occasional anthropomorphism aside, this implies a choice was made – pterosaurs went for their runways as a matter of choice. Not true and not stated anywhere by anyone. Underneath it says “The conclusion belongs to a new scientific study” which to me is just poor English as well as being generally incorrect since the study doesn’t say this. In any case, how would you know? – this is the first example and you cannot extrapolate for a data point of one. Incidentally the English is dodgy throughout and I suspect the author is a non-native speaker and while this may not be his fault as such, if you are writing for an English-language website then I have little sympathy.

Next there is the top left with the image, one of Mark Witton’s that they have used without permission (so I understand) and certainly without credit (though I’ll admit I’m not sure why it was on Wikicommons). If you click on it there is a bit of text that says that pterosaurs only flew when they had to, though who knows where they got that from and that it is eating a lizard which is of course a sauropod.

The first word of the article is “Archaeologists”. This one AGAIN. Palaeontologists are not archaeologists. Not are they “Anthropologists” which also turns up later on. The word palaeontologist never turns up at all! Still in the same sentence we are told that pterosaurs are the ancestors of birds. No, no, no, no and no. And no. They then say that the track is very rare which should be obvious given that it is the first one ever discovered, good investigative journalism there. Still in the opening paragraph we get ‘proto-birds’ and then a horribly mangled sentence of “did not leave a massive imprint on the ground, such as the largest dinosaurs that ever roamed the Earth, the 50-tonne sauropods, did, LiveScience reports” horribly mangling my own quote while entertainingly revealing where they cribbed all this stuff from.

Moving on we are told that they have “two-foot-long feet” which will be a big surprise as the wingspan was probably only around 3 feet. Were they wearing skis? I think they mean the *track* is two feet long, but this is not what they say.

Now we get a stunning line where they seem to manage to think that the term pterosaur refers to a species (or think they are all the same size) while calling them flying lizards. So birds are pterosaurs which are lizards. Awesome! In the following ‘anthropologist’ sentence we are told that this track shows a take off and landing trace which is wrong, they only land. The original report they quote from even says that scientists now want to find a take-off trace as well which they clearly missed.

The next bit is fine, presumably because they copied it nearly wholesale and thus failed to screw anything up including lifting quotes directly. However, not to worry as in the last paragraph they manage to say that pterosaurs had great flight control and flight capabilities which rather contradicts their opening gambit that they only flew when necessary.

So there you have it, an absolute litany of crass basic errors that have been introduced for no apparent reason despite the whole thing being an obvious cut-and-paste hatchet job of an article which they even cite as the source. Quotes mangled, image appropriated, contradictions introduced and basic misunderstandings abound. This really is absolutely horrible. The only obvious thing I expect was the ‘pterosaurs are dinosaurs’ schtick which they avoided only by calling them birds and lizards. Genius. Good work lads, now, please never, ever write anything about science ever again. Because if you can’t even get this kind of stuff right, then I can only pray that you never have to cover string theory.

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Pterosaur trabeculae

Time for another obscure word in the annals of vertebrate palaeontology and here is one that ties together birds and pterosaurs, if only in a nomenclatural sense. For those that do not know, both pterosaurs and birds have hollowed out, pneumatic bones which in life were filled with air sacs that were extensions of the lungs. However, this obviously could potentially weaken the bones and make them vulnerable to being broken and given the kinds of high forces that many of them would have to deal with (like the bones of the wing or legs for flight and landing respectively) you want to keep them strong.

Evolution has evolved an elegant way around the conflict here – keeping things hollow (and thus light) but strong with some biological scaffolding. The trabeculae are therefore the various small and often intricate little webs and buttresses and spars of bones that populate the insides of various bird and pterosaur bones, providing strength and support to the bone with the minimum of extra mass. These naturally tend to be denser in number and more complex in the ends of bones such as the one pictured here or those with higher stresses and strains, but they can be quite sparse in others.

Inevitably they are little discussed in the literature since in a well preserved bone you can’t see them and even in those that are broken open they are not always visible. Even if they are visible are themselves broken, or as shown here, so complex as to be beyond description. As a result they receive little attention though they are potentially very important as they may help show which bones are taking which stresses where and even in what orientation. As such there may be much functional anatomy hidden in the trabeculae and we have yet to investigate them properly, though with modern scanning methods and further interest beginning this may not be the case for too many more years.

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Flugsaurier 2010 – Beijing

Those of you who missed the 2007 Wellnhofer pterosaur meeting in Munich (for shame!) will have the opportunity to correct their mistake from the 5^th of August 2010 now that the dates for the next meeting have been announced.

Lü Jungchang (seen here in our ‘ascent of man’ line up with Alex Kellner, Taissa Rodrigues and myself) and Dave Unwin have done the groundwork for this project and now the first circular has been sent out, so I am copying it here to give it a bit more publicity. Obviously this is not something that will interest too many people outside of the professional filed who therefore already know about this, but it might catch a couple of eyes. Of particular interest should be the field trip to Liaoning which will be a fitting follow up to our previous excursion to sites of exceptional pterosaur preservation – namely the Bavarian Solnhofen beds.

As before there will be talks, open discussions, specimens to see and the whole thing will be followed by a special volume of pterosaur papers. So sharpen up those papers, get your abstracts written and keep your diaries free for Flugsaurier 2010. Full details below the fold:

What on Earth are pycnofibers?

You wait month to publish a paper and then two come along in as many days. So with the baby killing theropods now dealt with, we can turn to pycnofibers.

Yes, finally that term all pterosaur workers have been waiting for has been established. Pterosaur ‘hair’, ‘body fibers’, ‘fur’ and the rest can be consigned to the bin to be replaced by the term pycnofiber. A new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B led by Alex Kellner (pictured), however redescribes some of the soft tissues from the wonderfully preserved anurognathid pterosaur Jeholopterus from the Yixian and sets this problem to rights by coining the term pycnofiber. It really is more of a housekeeping issue than anything else, but a useful one. Of course that’s hardly the main thrust of the paper in which we discuss the structure of the main wing as well as the pycnofibers themselves with both new observations and some more UV work from Helmut Tischlinger.

Just a massive Pteranodon

Yes it’s another picture-with-some-text post, but hey, it’s a nice Pteranodon. And massive indeed as although this was mounted high up on the wall of the Sino-German Fossil & Geology Park (meaning I was unable to measure it) I’d guess the wingspan was well over 4 m and probably over 5. In short it’s big (indeed quite possibly too big for reasons I’ll not delve into here since I don’t know the origin of the mount). I assume it’s a combined cast / model but regardless,but it is a nice representation of this giant pterosaur.

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Early pterosaur reconstructions

As noted on here before the first pterosaur specimen to be discovered was rather special and wonderfully detailed and complete. While obviously comparative anatomy was still a developing field in the 1700’s and there were still thousands of exotic and bizarre animals to be discovered or at least studied properly that we now somewhat take for granted (like giraffe or platypus) one would have hoped that the scientists of the day (Cuvier aside) would have recognised it as a reptile.

I’ll happily admit that it doesn’t look much like a ‘typical’ reptile but then, it doesn’t look much like a bird or a mammal either, but with only these two groups known to have produced flying species at the time, the comparison was perhaps inevitable. Certainly there were some bizarre theories flying around at the time for the true nature of pterosaurs, even after other specimens and other species were known. While most of them died a quiet death (with the exception of Harry Seeley’s ‘bird ancestors’ hypothesis which persisted, if only by himself, into the 1900’s) there were still occasionally new interpretations put forward or old ones revived.

One of the most famous (and indeed most reproduced) is that of Edward Newman from 1843 where he suggested that pterosaurs were actually flying marsupials. And here it is in its rather limited glory. One thing to note which is quite common with these kinds of pictures (and indeed of much palaeoart both in the past and, irritatingly / worryingly in the present) is just how many things are fundamentally different to the actual bones. OK, if he thinks they are furry and had little ears then fine, add fur and give them ears – you can’t see otherwise in the skeleton (even if you can infer it if you realise it’s a reptile). BUT you can’t just make the head half the length of that of the body, or make all the toes the same length, or add extra fingers when this is clearly not seen in the fossil (though the ones in the background look far more pterodactylus-y). These kinds of things happen and it’s a horrible conflagration of ignorance or wilful manipulation in most cases. Anyway, enjoy it for what it is, an interesting, if largely now irrelevant part of palaeontological history.

A pelvis at the front – the notarium

Time to continue the general lesson in odd bits of pterosaurian anatomy and here we have a real specialisation: the notarium. This is unique to larger pterodactyloids and is essentially a fusion of the vertebrae that make up the spine where the shoulder articulates with the back to produce something that looks rather like a pelvis at the front. It has some interesting connotations for pterosaur evolution and ecology, and that of the development of bone in general.