Kulindadromeus images

While I’m sure huge parts of the internet are currently going mad over the new ornithischian Kulindadromeus and the implications for fuzzy dinosaurs (or otherwise) there current crop of pictures available isn’t that great. Inevitably those in the paper are small and crammed into the limited space (in the main paper at least, I’ve not yet got hold of the supplementary files and am writing this before the paper is released) and the press images are focused on the beautiful life reconstructions. However, Pascal Godefroit was kind enough to pass onto me a pile of images that he said I could use. Many have made their way onto my Guardian piece on the subject, but even there they have to stay small to fit the website’s style and some of the detail is lacking, so I’ll put them up here instead.

Obviously these images come directly from Pascal and are copyright to him and his team and should not be reproduced without his direct permission. Anyway, they do show some nice details of various parts of these specimens and the different integumentary structures (both scales and filaments) rather well and I imagine will be of some interest. I won’t add any more description here since I’ve already written a couple of thousand words on this animal today and I suspect most readers will be angling for the paper to do their detailed reading anyway. Enjoy.

Multiple filaments associated with the femur

 

Multiple filaments associated with the humerus.

 

Small scales associated with the pes.

 

Small filaments associated with the skull.

 

Filaments at the proximal tibia.

 

Scales on the distal tibia.

 

Close up of tooth series.

 

Huge thanks to Pascal for lending me these images and letting me put them online and obviously my congratulations on the discovery.

Flugsaurier 2015: Portsmouth, UK

Way back in 2001 the first real symposium dedicated solely to pterosaurs (rather than a subset of another conference) was convened in Toulouse thanks largely to the organisation of Eric Buffetaut. By all accounts it was a success and spawned the well known and much cited 2003 Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs special volume. The event however was something of a one-off, and I don’t think there was any great plans to have another later conference.

At the end of my time in Germany however, I wanted to arrange a conference and with the museum home to some legendary pterosaur specimens and the retiring Peter Wellnhofer, this ultimately led to Flugsaurier 2007 in Munich. Both a celebration of all things pterosaurian and a tribute to Peter’s career, this was attended by nearly 50 people with delegates from North and South America, Asia, Australia and Europe, and later spawned the 2008 Festschrift for Peter. At the meeting it was agreed that this would be an excellent series to continue and so Flugsaurier 2010 in Beijing was immediately announced, and then this was followed by a shift to South America and Rio 2013 collectively covering three of the great centres for pterosaur finds and research. Each meeting has seen a swathe of researchers descend on the host institute and the unveiling of some up to the minute research and important new finds.

Now though, Flugsaurier returns to Europe and will be in Portsmouth in 2015 from August 25th-30th. Dave Martill is the main organiser of this one at his parent university, ably assisted (well, we think so) by a small army of associates. As has become usual for Flugsaurier, the conference will consist of talks and posters about pterosaurs, workshops and round-table discussions, specimen viewings and fieldtrips. It is NOT limited to academics, and we have a good record of artists, non-pterosaur specialists, curators, and the general public attending as delegates as well as early-career researchers like MSc and PhD students presenting their work. As a generally small meeting, it is rather informal and there’s lots of break-outs and discussions between presentations and through the breaks and evenings and much to talk over.

All the major details are on the website for the event here, and the first circular is already out and online here. Do please share these links with the wider academic and social community (we have tried and failed to get e-mails to the DML and VertPal list so if someone could send out the links, that would be wonderful, thanks), there is a group on Facebook, an @Flugsaurier2015 twitter feed and also we’re using the hashtag #flugsaurier2015 to keep people up to date. More information will follow soon, but the basics are up and online and registration will open shortly.

Some of the best interactions and exchanges we have had at previous meetings have come from those who normally only dabble in pterosaurs and are bringing external ideas and methods into the community so while obviously there is a *lot* of winged reptile stuff going round, it’s not just a meeting of the usual pterosaur suspects. Indeed in this case we really hope for a bit more of that at this one as thanks to some cunning timing, the meeting will run just before SVPCA in the neighbouring city of Southampton.

Yes, you can attend two palaeontological conferences in succession! SVPCA, for those that have never been, is a meeting for vertebrate palaeontology and comparative anatomy. Although very UK centric, SVPCA always attracts a number of European delegates and even those from further afield (Matt Wedel and Don Henderson regularly attend for example) but is also a small meeting (generally around 130 people) and as such is an informal and fun community. There’s no parallel sessions and a relaxed and fun atmosphere (last year we had a presentation done in song with guitar backing!) and it also includes a day for preparators and conservators on top of covering everything from fish to hominids over the run time. SVPCA is also a special haven for palaeoart people (Bob Nicholls, Luis Rey, Mark Witton and John Conway are always there, and those with big outreach profiles like Darren Naish and Dougal Dixon also always attend). In short, those who might be considering a major journey from across the ocean for just a few days of pterosaurs and think it a bit much money and commitment, well the opportunity to combine it with SVPCA hopefully makes it a still greater proposition.

The fieldtrips will also be run in such a way as to maximise this too. A pre-conference excursion to the Isle of Wight on August 25th will effectively start Flugsaurier, and then a post-conference weekend field trip to the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site on August 29th and 30th will be run jointly with SVPCA as a prelude to that meeting.

Hopefully then there’s some excellent scope for friends, colleagues, researchers and interested people from all over the world to take the opportunity to come to the UK and both meetings. Pterosaurs may not be your first or only love, but the integration with SVPCA makes a superb opportunity to combine the two and see two whole vertebrate meetings. Both are relatively cheap, and with an international community heading over for Flugsaurier as well as a European crowd for SVPCA, it will hopefully be both intimate and wide-ranging.

As a quick aside, note that the plan was always for Flugsaurier to be on a cycle of every three years, but we quickly realised that this cycle specifically ran with the huge ICVM and was sucking up some of our potential delegates who naturally did not want to make two big international trips per year on top of the usual SVPCA / SVP trips. So this one comes just two years after Rio, but we should return to the previous cycle after this and hopefully someone will be volunteering to host Flugsaurier 2018.

I do hope to see an excellent turn out for both (apparently we’re running at nearly two dozen registered for Flugsaurier already in just the first few days of putting out the first circular) and that will grow quickly I’m sure. Roll on 2015!

London Zoo

This review is a very long time coming given how many times I have visited this place over the years. In addition to many childhood trips, I worked as a volunteer keeper here at weekends for several years and as a result know the place fairly intimately. The lack of a review was largely down to not having any accessible photos during most of my blogging past, but a visit in April this year took care of that. In many ways it makes this summary all the more appropriate since a huge amount has changed in the last few years. Although London has always undergone upgrades and renovations, some of the most recent alterations have rather starkly changed the face of the zoo and the difference say between now and ten years ago is a world away to say the different between 1984 and 2004.

London historically has some major issues when it comes to these kinds of changes which makes the transformation all the more remarkable. Situated in Regent’s Park, it doesn’t actually own the land it is on and instead effectively enjoys rent-free tenancy from the crown, but it also means they can’t expand with public rights of way across the zoo, and the presence of both a road and canal through it, limit the footprint further and the locations of possible new builds or rebuilds. Many of the buildings are also old and creaking, making the costs of maintenance and upgrades very expensive, while prices in London for building work are obviously much greater than in many places. On top of that many of the buildings are historically important and have listed status, which means even minor changes, let alone major alterations or replacing the building, are often impossible. Put that all together with the funding crisis the zoo suffered for many years (staff were made redundant, buildings closed, animals moved on) and it’s incredible that not only are they still afloat, but have in fact been rejuvenated.

Some of the repurposing has been very intelligently done. Much of the Charles Clore Pavilion (effectively the small mammal house and nocturnal section) has been knocked together to form a single, large walk-through South American enclosure with birds, armadillos, sloths, tamandua, marmosets and others wandering freely, while the basement still houses the nocturnal animals, and the perimeter contains a series of other small critters like squirrels and tree shrews. It has totally changed the scope and style of the building, but without huge changes to the structure that would be costly, and allowing the fundamental purpose (small mammals) to remain the same (keeping staff and facilities in situ too).

This is still very much a city zoo, meaning it is generally small but packs a lot in. One major improvement (if originally most a money-saving effort) was the removal of most of the larger animals and the zoo no longer has the rhinos and elephants of before, while things like big cats and apes are fewer in number and have much larger enclosures. Even so, ‘traditional’ species like giraffe, (Asiatic) lions, gorilla and vultures are still in residence, but the focus has turned to smaller animals in many cases when it comes to things like large mammals and birds, though the presence of Komodo dragons, tigers, hunting dogs, okapi and llama hardly means that it is all ‘tiny’ species though these are in abundance.

For a long time it boasted the most diverse (in terms of species) collection in the UK, if not Europe, and while I don’t know if this is still the case, it must certainly come close. This is assisted by the presence of the Clore, insect house (the Millennium building), aquarium, reptile house and an aviary for small birds, and so there is a huge amount of species covered between these. While here too there are plenty of ‘traditional’ species that the public will hoover up, even to the jaded zoo go-er like me, seeing things like Congo pygmy goose, Philippines crocodile and frogmouths were all new and great to see.

One can also get much closer to many animals than in many places. In addition to the Clore, the children’s zoo, two small aviaries, the giant Snowden aviary and butterfly house all had walk-through sections while new viewing platforms for the giraffe and well designed new set-ups for the tiger and gorillas give much better access (while still giving the animals privacy) than before. So although much of the zoo is still original in many ways (there are no shortage of bricks, concrete and historic buildings), and preserves its feel and tradition, it is no longer the stark and unfriendly place as it was so often portrayed in the bad old days.

While certainly I do have a bias in all of this with my connections to the zoo, it is hard not to consider it still one of the premier collections in the world. It is a modern flourishing zoo, and given that it has maintained its position as one of the top zoos for research and conservation work (it was originally founded as part of the Zoological Society which sits in the grounds) while reworking the grounds and facilities, and housing a vast collection of important species, it is hard to find any real flaw in the place these days. No matter your interest in zoos – interesting species, common species, research, education, conservation, history and design there is something important and compelling here. Sure there are things to improve and change, but one can say that of any zoo, however good it is, but if you are a zoo aficionado, London really is one of the places to visit.