Archaeopteryx: The Icon of Evolution

As with the museum posts(page) it really don't make sense search wise to name my book review posts book review # so I am going to go to naming them the title of the book for simplicities sake. Now on to the review.

It was a typical day in the Late Jurassic (Tithonian to be specific) on a small island located in the Tethys Ocean on what is currently the Bavarian region of Germany. The climate was warm and dry and the sun was beaming down on the small bush sized plants that covered the island. Out over the sea a group of pterosaurs (for me I will say Rhamphorhynchus muensteri) caught fish that swam to close to the surface near the reef while the breath of some of the marine reptiles (e.g. ichthyosaurs) broke the surface on occasion. On shore small theropod dinosaurs poked around in the bushes hoping to find a lizard or insect that they may be able to eat. The young Archaeopteryx had watched this scene play out plenty of times but only recently away from the safety of her mother's nest but at least now she could fly, well at least short distances and her flight wasn't very powerful due to her sternal keel still being cartilage. Her black feathers glistened in the sunlight and as a curious Compsognathus got too close she snapped her toothed jaw at it and flew slightly higher out of grasp for the dinosaur. She of course was a dinosaur too but there was something special about her she also had a lot of features that made her look more bird like than dinosaur like except for her long tail and her toothed "beak", and she certainly wasn't the first dinosaur to look bird-like but she would become when discovered one of the most important. As she looked out over the sea toward the dark black clouds that had been approaching for a while now she realized she was hungry it had been a while since she ate after all. Something hit her on the head and then more and more she wasn't quite sure what this was after all it hadn't rained, at least not much, her entire life. The rain drops also disturbed a dragonfly nearby from the branch it was sitting on and she took off after it. As she closed in a strong gust of wind blew her out over the reef, this was further out to sea than she had ever been. She looked toward shore and then the wind picked up even more. 150 million years later, in 1861, a slab of limestone is split from a quarry in the Solnhofen formation and she would again see the light of a new day but the world would be completely different than the one she lived in but she too would change it greatly.

While that story is clearly fictional the idea behind it is the vast amount of information that we have learned about Archaeopteryx lithographica since the first one was discovered in 1861. While most of this knowledge has been out there for years the first time that I truly saw it all compiled in one place was in a book I just finished called Archaeopteryx: The Icon of Evolution by Dr. Peter Wellnhofer (someone really needs to update and expand on his Wikipedia page). In this book we are taken to Solnhofen where we learn about the limestone that Archaeopteryx was deposited in and how this helps understand the environment that this animal lived in. We then learn about the animal itself and Dr. Wellnhofer tries to fit it into a phylogenetic location which includes a discussion on the different views of how birds evolved as well as the evolution of flight. While there have only been a total of ten (well eleven but the most recent one hasn't been published on yet and was just found late in 2011) body specimens and one isolated feather found we know so much about this animal. Part of the reason is how complete the specimens are with most being nearly complete but what I think the main reason for the amount we know about the animal is the just sheer amount of research that has been done on the specimens since it was the first animal found that truly showed the evolution of organisms in action, in this case the evolution of dinosaurs to birds.

This book is exceptionally well written and that is due to the sheer amount of knowledge that Dr. Wellnhofer has on paleontology and in particular the Solnhofen region. If you want to learn about Archaeopteryx or if you want to learn about Solnhofen geology or if you just want a book with really really nice pictures of really amazing fossils this is the book for you. Detailed images of all 10 of the specimens are included including pictures taken using infrared which really helps show off a lot of the soft tissue preserved in the specimen. There is a detailed description of the genus in general as well as where it fits evolutionarily which includes a very through description of the origin of birds including the many hypothesis of what the evolved from, and he, logically, leans toward them evolving from theropod dinosaurs. There is also a brief overview of the different ideas of how flight and feathers evolved and a basic overview of known, as of 2009, Mesozoic bird species.

If there is one fault in the book it is that it is too detailed. At times I felt like I was dredging through scientific papers, this is part of the reason it took me so long to finish, so if you aren't an expert in the field or haven't spent a lot of time reading scientific papers on dinosaur and bird evolution you might struggle a bit through parts. Most of the book is easily readable and the parts that are technical can be skipped or skimmed over without missing the overall point or theme of the section so don't let the technical nature scare you off. The price might scare you off but it is worth it for all the knowledge contained within.

The only other problem is that the book is dated which should say something about how fast the science has come since 2009. This is really that much of a problem after all how was Dr. Wellnhofer supposed to know that since I started reading the book early last year that phylogenetic studies would say that Archaeopteryx is not a bird (Naish et al., 2011; Xu et al. 2011), although at least one study disagrees (Lee & Worthy, 2011), that the color of the feathers would be determined (Carney et al., 2012), and that an even earlier feathered dinosaur would be discovered (Liu et al., 2012) (I got the e-mail about that last one as I was working on this review). So I will forgive the book seemingly being slightly dated since there are so many new specimens found in the paleontology world every year, there have been several new Mesozoic birds found in the past year (e.g. Xu et al., 2011).

This book is very interesting and worth picking up. It is a handy reference for the currently known specimens as well as about the evolution of birds in general. Oh and did I mention it has very awesome pictures, yeah they are very pretty. I will leave you, again, with a picture of the one specimen of Archaeopteryx that I have seen, the Thermopolis specimen, it was a great experience.

Book citation
Wellnhofer, P. 2009. Archaeopteryx: The Icon of Evolution. Verlag Dr. Friedrich Pfeil, Munchen, 208p.

References
Lee, M. S. Y., & T. H. Worthy. 2011. Likelihood reinstates Archaeopteryx as a primitive bird. Biology Letters doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0884.

Liu, Y.-Q., Kuang, H.-W., Jiang, X.-J., Peng, N., Xu, H., & Sun, H.-Y. 2012. Timing of the earliest known feathered dinosaurs and transitional pterosaurs older than the Jehol Biota. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology doi: 10.1016/j.palaeo.2012.01.017.

Naish, D., Dyke, G., Cau, A., Escuillié, F. & Godefroit, P. 2011. A gigantic bird from the Upper Cretaceous of Central Asia. Biology Letters doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0683 (I should note that there is some doubt if this is actually a bird anymore but that shouldn't change the phylogentic tree published within)

Xu, X., You, H., Du, K. & Han, F. 2011. An Archaeopteryx-like theropod from China and the origin of Avialae. Nature 475, 465-470.

Book review page

Carnegie Museum of Natural History

See I told you I would put a real post together before I posted another video. I am also changing the way I do these, since I now have a separate page linking to all of the museum posts I figured I would start just titling the museum posts the name of the museum. So I guess if you were confused this would be under the old title scheme Museum Visit #5. Enough with the housekeeping stuff lets move on to the actual review.

Let me start by saying that while I may have included several images in this post [image to right is of Dippy outside the museum, obviously it had snowed, and as always all images are by the author ask for permission if you wish to use them] if you head over to Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings blog he has several posts dedicated to the museum, I will link to all of them at the bottom of the post, so make sure you head over there and be warned there may be more added over the next few days/weeks. Needing to look at some other specimens for my research I had contacted Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CM) (Wikipedia page) to get a chance to look at some of their specimens. Once I had finished my research I took some time too look through the museum itself but as my time was short, and I wanted to beat rush hour home, I did a quicker trip through the museum than I normally would have. With that said this is the museum I grew up going to, being from the Pittsburgh region, so I know a lot of the permanent exhibits really well, and I spent plenty of time in the dinosaur hall anyway.

This history of this museum is the history of Pittsburgh in a nutshell. The museum is located in the Oakland region of the city sandwiched between two of the local colleges, the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and has several other colleges close by. The museum building actually houses two museums, the museum of natural history and the museum of art (Wikipedia page), and a branch of the Carnegie Library (Wikipedia page) system for the city. The building and the 3 main things in it were gifted to the city by, shockingly, Andrew Carnegie who had basically built the city through his steel industry and wanted, or as he felt needed, to give back to the people of the city so he gifted the museum and a huge library system to the city to pay it back. The fossils within the great dinosaur hall Carnegie had bought specifically to fill the hall with what, at the time, were the great new finds of prehistoric beasts coming out of the western U.S.. While he did not acquire as many as the American Museum of Natural History (Wikipedia page) in New York or the Smithsonian (Wikipedia page) in Washington, D.C. he managed to have a great many finds come to Pittsburgh. Many of these finds were completely new genus and species and one Apatosaurus louisae was named after Carnegie's wife while one dinosaur was named after him as well, Diplodocus carnegii. The museum was amazing when it was first finished and it represented the wealth that was the city and the power that it held when steel was made there. Very little changed in the museum for many years and as jobs and influence moved from the cities the dinosaurs in the hall continued to look more and more out of date as they were set up in a way that we thought dinosaurs were during the early to middle 20th century. During the late 1990's and early 2000's thanks in part to growing influence of the medical field, a lot coming out of Pitt, and a growth in technology, a lot of which came out of CMU, the region started to see renewed growth in jobs and people. Around the same time CM decided their dinosaurs were out of date and set off on a multi-year project to update them. This meant closing the dinosaur hall down and remaking the whole thing. I remember seeing the dinosaurs in the old style and was upset when they said they were going to close the hall down but seeing the finished project it was well worth it [Image to the left and above of the new hall]. You can see why I said the history of the museum follow that of the city pretty well though now hopefully, also that was far longer than I wanted it to be whoops.

Walking into the museum you get the feel that you are walking back in time, not quite to the time of the dinosaurs but at least to the time of Andrew Carnegie, the marble that surrounds the interior of the natural history entrance is impressive and shortly after paying admission there are many open rooms that have artifacts from Ancient Greece and Rome. This was early 20th century decadence at its best in a museum for the people. The cost to get in is not cheap, $17.95 for an adult, but trust me it is worth it, I should note that if you are a member or a member of several other museums you can get in for cheaper or even free. Now you are going to have to walk past the gift shop and unless you want to carry around your gift with you all day I would try to hold off till the end of the day, although they do have plenty of fun/cool stuff in there.

I am going to treat the museum as unidirectional and in reality there are plenty of ways to explore the museum and you can explore it however you want but the museum is kind of set up to be viewed in the way I am going about it [Image at right is of the fighting T. rex's]. Continuing forward you will enter into a smaller hall, this one gives you a very basic primer of geology. There are displays talking about such varied things as oil and natural gas, this was built before the big natural gas push in the northeast as well, to coal as well as just talking about general rock types and fossils. There are also several displays talking about the local geology and why the local geography is the way it is. The coolest thing in this room is the "elevator", I forget what their name for it is, that "takes you under the museum" to see the rocks. While it takes you down the guide talks about the geology of the area and about more general geologic situations such as it getting warmer the further down you go. The final thing you might notice as you walk out is a display of the what the area looked like during the Pennsylvanian, it was swampy, and includes some of the plants and animals known from that time period, this was also put together before the discovery of Fedexia striegeli so that is not included.

As you move on you may be tempted to speed ahead into the dinosaur hall but those doors are there for a reason, turn right to go see the impressive mineral collection. This also used to be not as well put together but when they redid the dinosaur hall they redid this as well. I don't know if it is as large as the one at the Houston Museum but it is put together in a more modern way and just seems a little more interesting. The problem with it is that it is just too big and I doubt many kids are going to have the patience to walk though/look at all of the mineral after all they just saw a glimpse of the dinosaurs. One more thing to see before you enter the dinosaur hall is right across from the minerals is a large glass faced room. If you are lucky you may be able to catch paleontologists in there working on dinosaur bones so it is pretty cool especially for the budding paleontologists in your group.

Walking into the dinosaur hall is an experience in and of itself [Image to left is of the doors to the entrance to the dinosaur hall with a Herrerasaurus in front of it]. We have all seen museums that are dark and dingy and all they have on display are the dinosaur fossils themselves. Walking into CM's dinosaur hall you are immediately hit with how bright it is, most of which is done with skylights in the roof. On the walls are vast paintings making the skeletons on display part of the ecosystem from which they came. The room is divided up into the three periods that made up the Mesozoic. In the Triassic portion a phytosaur, Redondasaurus bermani, skeleton on display hunts or is at least annoyed by a small group of early theropod dinosaurs, Coelophysis bauri, representing animals found in the Chinle Group of New Mexico and Arizona, although this is about the same age as the Dockum in West Texas. There is also a display on the more "local" Triassic finds from the rift basins of the east coast from North Carolina up through Connecticut which you can read more about in a book I reviewed in the past. Many of the dinosaurs in the Jurassic section were unearthed in what is now Dinosaur National Monument (Wikipedia page) so there is a display on that. The museum then shows its classic sauropods against a beautiful background that includes some rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs and in a display that includes footprints. There is also in this section a small collection of fossils from Solnhofen Formation of Germany which were donated to the museum by Bayet in 1903. Finally you enter the Cretaceous which consists of 2 Tyrannosaurus rexs fighting over a kill while a Quetzalcoatlus flies overhead. Finally there is a smaller room that shows off some of the Cretaceous interior seaway animals that have been found from places like the Niobrara of Kansas. From here there is a stairwell to go up and view the exhibits from above which is well worth taking the time to do as this is a view you typically don't get a most museums. There are lots of smaller displays which I did not talk about, sorry I could keep going for a while, but I did want to mention two other things. Most of the big displays have computer monitors that you can touch and find out more information. One of the things you can learn is just how much of the skeleton you are looking at is real and you will find that most of the skeletons on display are mostly real which is pretty cool to see. The other thing I wanted to point out is that if a specimen was the first of its species to be named it is known as a type specimen and these are displayed prominently throughout the hall whenever there is a type specimen on display, and trust me there are a lot of them.

Moving from the dinosaur hall we next move onto the Cenozoic area [Image at right is of the ground sloth Paramylodon harlani]. This area is one of the few areas of the museum itself that I have complaints about. Maybe it is because my wife studies prehistoric mammals or maybe it is just my love of all things paleontology but I find this area to be a little disappointing. There are only a few specimens on display although the main ones separate from the kids area are very well done. There is a little area where kids can "dig" for fossils and while I love this idea the way they set up a lot of the mammal fossils around the outer edge can make them hard to get to or see. This is especially true if the pit is closed or if there are kids digging in the pit and you don't want to risk stepping on them. I think this is the area that needs to currently be redone the most move the specimens out where they can better be displayed and seen also bring up some more fossils from collections so we can get a more diverse showing. This is a time that most people forget about and there were plenty of interesting animals that lived then too so lets show them off as well.

The next exhibit area is upstairs and consists of stuffed/taxidermied animals from all around the world. These are really well done and while they show there age in that a museum built today probably wouldn't have as many they are in really good shape. The animals are also not just lifeless animals but have realistic backgrounds to where they come from, again complete with footprints, and seem to be really alive now. There are plenty of animals from Africa and North America primarily but a few Asian and South American animals also make an appearance. Prior to the Pittsburgh Zoo (Wikipedia page), which is great as well, becoming as good as it is this would likely have been the only place people would have seen animals in their more natural environment. When originally built the zoo was nothing more than steel cages and concrete floors, and trust me it has come a long way from that, so the animals in no way looked natural or at home but you could see that at the museum.

There are two other main exhibits that are worth checking out but I won't go into too much detail here. There is an exhibit on Ancient Egypt which has some cool displays and specimens from there. There is also an exhibit on some of the native people from closer to the Arctic Circle. This is probably the only place I have been to that has an exhibit on them so it is interesting to compare with the more southern Native Americans. The final thing to check out is a little explore area. This area has lots of things for kids to do and gives them a chance to learn about science and to touch things like animals pelts and the like.

I love this museum but I am sure I am a little biased. It is definitely worth the price of admission and you will spend the better part of the day there. If you have some time you admission will also get you a chance to go see the art museum, and you might want to because you are also likely paying for parking which can be expensive but kind of has to be to discourage people from parking there for work/school. My only complaint about the museum itself is the size/set up of the Cenozoic mammal portion but I do have one other complaint so hear me out. The museum does have a little restaurant area, which is nice considering some museums like Panhandle Plains don't even have one at all and the one in Houston is just a McDonald's, but the food overall is sub-par and expensive for what you get. Although I will recommend that you get the dinosaur smiley cookies they are from Eat 'n Park which is a local chain that has great cookies so these are just as good plus they are dinosaur shaped what's not to love!

Museum visits page

Links to Dave Hone's posts are below the fold

Museum Visit #4

It had been a while since I had been to a museum so when one of my fellow graduate students suggested making a trip to Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum (Wikipedia article) I jumped on the opportunity. He had the option to make the trip a couple of months ago but had decided not to go but back then I had done some research on the museum which made the decision to go even easier when he asked. So early on the morning of May 14th a group of us set off from Lubbock, TX to take the hour and forty-five to two hour trip up to Canyon, TX to the museum.

This museum claims to be the largest history museum in the state of Texas and I would not doubt that it is for a second. This is a pretty impressive for a state that is as obsessed with its history as Texas is. The museum is deceivingly large looking small on the outside and located on the campus of West Texas A&M University in a fairly small town outside of Amarillo, TX. The main focus of the museum is on the Panhandle of Texas.

Walking into the museum you get a taste of what you are going to see in the lobby. There is a small display on Native Americans from the region a small paleontology section and a small display on history of European Settlers in the region. It cost about $10 to get in but it was well worth the price.

The first hall we walked through talked about the Native Americans that lived in the area. There were plenty of artifacts used by Native Americans to farm as well as gather and hold water and other important aspects to life. The exhibit was set up based on three aspects for living in the area, which for some reason I can't remember right now, but included things like food water and shelter, for this reason the Native American artifacts were scattered throughout the area. There is a very brief discussion on why farming is possible in the area, pumping water from the Ogallala Aquifer, and some of the harm we are doing to the aquifer by farming using it. While this historical portion is interesting it was actually the reason we went nor is it what I am going to focus on now.

Entering into the paleontology section you are greeted by a large mural with 3 casts in front of it. These represent the panhandle during the age of mammals, I am not sure specifically sorry you get the generic title there, and include a three-toed horse as well as a Gomphothere. There is then a quick summary of life through time starting in the Cambrian and moving through the Permian, in other words the Paleozoic. Each time section has fossils that represent organisms found during those time periods, most of these are small invertebrates and since these times are poorly represented or not represented at all in Texas they are just kind of glanced over. Entering into the Permian there are many fossils that have been found in not just Texas but in the panhandle.

Now is a good time to point out that many of the actual fossils in the museum from the panhandle were found during the 30's and 40's by Works Progress Administration (WPA) digs. These digs were "shovel-ready" jobs that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had promised just to give people jobs so they had money so they could spend said money to improve the economy. Many of these fossils came from nearby Palo Duro Canyon State Park (Wikipedia article, and tourist page) which is why they are stored in Canyon, TX. With as many Permian rocks as are in the State Park the Permian fossils are under represented. Part of this is because while Permian fossils are well known from the state they are actually very poorly represented in the Quartermaster Formation, the Permian aged rocks in the state park.

The Triassic fossils do not suffer the same fate. This is because the Triassic is represented by the Dockum Group which in the Panhandle has produced plenty of fossils and still does today, this is the work that the Museum of Texas Tech University Paleontology Division (MoTTU-P) focuses on. So there are plenty of phytosaurs and metoposaurs on display in the Panhandle-Plains Museum. The remainder of the Mesozoic is underrepresented in the Panhandle (there is some Cretaceous aged rock on the South to Southeastern edge of the caprock) so there are very few fossils on display from the Jurassic and Cretaceous. They did have some sauropod fossils, likely casts, as well as a few other Mesozoic casts including the centerpiece of the paleontology wing a cast of Allosaurus. The one area that did anger me was they had the sauropod fossils labeled as "Brontosaurus", for those who don't know "Brontosaurs" has long since been synonomized with Apatosaurus (go type Brontosaurus into Wikipedia), this set out a minor moment of rage, the fact that the skull was of a Diplodocid didn't help much.

But a major portion of the Paleontology exhibit focused on the fossil mammals that had been found in the area. The panhandle is home to three North American Land Mammal Ages (NALMA); Clarendonian, Hemphillian, and Blancan. These were where many of the fossils were from and there was case after case of fossils from these ages. I can tell that the exhibit hadn't been updated in a while because many of the genus and species names are outdated and have been synonomized with others, I discuss this on the appropriate images in my Flickr set on the museum. I was impressed by this massive display of mammal fossils because this is not typically what you see at most museums but if this is what they have the most of why not. They also had a display talking about horse evolution something which is impressive for West Texas.

Moving on from the fossils there is a brief overview of the geology of Palo Duro Canyon, something which I am planning a post on since we went there right after the museum. There is then a display on windmills, if you really want to see something on that come down to Lubbock and go to the American Wind Power Center (Wikipedia article), and old cars. The second floor had lots of guns, up through the better part of the Cold War, then a discussion on oil drilling, saddles, and lots of art. The basement had a few hidden gems including taxidermy displays of animals that live or used to live in the area. We did not get to see Pioneer Town because it was being renovated.

Despite its few faults the museum is worth stopping by for anyone in the South Plains and if you are in the area for any reason it is worth stopping by. We got there around 10am and left the museum at 2pm so make sure to leave plenty of time. I also took over 600 pictures, mostly because I am a huge nerd, but make sure you are ready to take lots of pictures. I think the museum gets forgotten about by people who go to Palo Duro State Park but they should really take the time to go see the museum. Sorry this post ended up being so long but when I see a hidden gem I want to make sure other people notice it as well. All images included in the post were taken by the author and if you wish to see more you can go to my Flickr set on the museum or for pictures that include those from Palo Duro my Flickr set that includes both.



Museum visits page

Help Preserve the Sharktooth Hill Bonebed

While reading this morning's eSkeptic (sign up to receive eSkeptic for free here) I saw this request for help from some very good paleontologists in the L.A. area. While I do not have the ability to help them financially what I do have is a blog to help spread the word so if you can please help them out so we don't lose this important scientific site forever!

We have learned that the world-famous Sharktooth Hill Bonebed fossil locality northwest of Bakersfield, one of the richest and most important sites in the world, is in danger of being sold off to commercial collectors. If this happens, the dealers will excavate it for only the commercially valuable fossils and destroy all the scientific information from the hundreds of sharks, as well as whales and seals and other marine mammals that come from these deposits.

The owner of this land, Bob Ernst (who was a good friend of ours), passed away several years ago suddenly without leaving a will, and his widow is now selling off the fossil-rich property to the highest bidder. Already a lot of important specimens have been sold in auction (including some that were already in a museum collection), and now the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is trying to buy one of the most important parcels of Ernst’s property to hold as a scientific preserve (imagine the Page Museum at La Brea Tar Pits, but for marine life). If the museum can raise another $25,000–30,000, they will buy the land. If we collect more than what they need for the land purchase, it will be applied to Phase II of the project, building a visitor’s center. The goal is to preserve the site, while allowing access to schools and non-profit educational groups to help collect the less scientifically significant shark teeth and whale bones. Just imagine that you had been one of the donors who assisted with the acquisition of the La Brea Tar Pits. This is just that type of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

If you would like to make a tax-deductible contribution toward the cause of preserving this legendary locality, please let us know. We must move quickly before the land is sold off and locked away from the public. Dr. John Long of the Natural History Museum has pledged to give a personal tour of the locality, after its purchase, to anyone who donates $2000 or more. You can contact Donald Prothero (Prothero@oxy.edu) or John Long (jlong@nhm.org) for more information. Don’t let this opportunity to preserve such an important place for science pass you by. Please help!

Thank you,
Donald Prothero and Teresa LeVelle

Lubbock Paleontology

When I first moved out to Lubbock, Texas I wasn't sure what I was getting myself in for. I knew that the terrain would be flat but I had also heard stories that there is nothing to do here. While I have been living out here I have found plenty of things to do, including visits to the Museum of Texas Tech and the American Windpower Center (among others) within the city and trips further west to visit several national parks. One of the places in Lubbock that came as a surprise to me was the Lubbock Lake Landmark (LLL) (Wikipedia article) [Photo at left of Short Faced Bear, Arctodus simus, statue at the LLL]. The LLL is a primarily archaeological site that shows evidence of at least 12000 years of human civilization from Clovis time to present. Well an article in today's Daily Toreador, the Texas Tech University student paper, talks about a new exhibit at the LLL that shows the animals that have been found at, or near, the site through time.

The exhibit includes surprising animals once living in Lubbock. The Hub City once was home to many exotic animals no longer found anywhere near Lubbock.

“Short-faced bears, sloths and camels all lived in Lubbock at one time or another,” [Susan] Rowe [education program manager of the LLL] said. “Many visitors are very surprised about camels once living in our area.”

I saw the exhibit a few weeks ago and while it is small it is really well done. Most of the animals they show are from the site itself but some of them have not been found on site but at a nearby site, about an hours drive, and a formation that underlies most of the landmark, the Blancan Formation (yes the type locality for the Blancan Land Mammal Age). Overall worth a couple of hours of your time if you are in Lubbock.

Very well said Dr. Holtz

While going through all of my e-mails today from this weekend, so tired must sleep, I was reading though an e-mail thread on the Dinosaur Mailing List that had a great quote from Dr. Tom Holtz. The question had been raised about what does the lay person need to know about paleontology and dinosaurs.

Summarizing the key points of the history of life over nearly 4 billion years of evolutionary history is a big task. After all, there is a tendency to focus on the spectacular and sensationalized rather than the ordinary and humdrum. As Stephen Jay Gould and others often remarked, from a purely objective external standpoint we have always lived in the Age of Bacteria, and the changing panoply of animals and plants during the last half-billion years have only been superficial changes.

But the question wasn’t “what should a dispassionate outsider regard as the modal aspect of the History of Life?”; it was “What should everyone know about paleontology?” Since we are terrestrial mammals of the latest Cenozoic, we have a natural interest in events on the land and during the most recent parts of Earth History. That is a fair bias: it does focus on who WE are and where WE come from.

The full post can be read in one of three places:
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week (SVPOW)
Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings
Superoceras

Pterosaurs Could Fly!

In response to a number of recent papers suggesting that heavy pterosaurs, such as Quetzalcoatlus, might not be able to fly (Chatterjee and Templin, 2004; Wilkinson, 2008; Sato et al., 2009; Henderson, 2010), a new paper was published last week by Dr. Mark Witton and Dr. Michael Habib stating that they could in fact launch themselves and were capable of flight(Witton and Habib, 2010). Most of the media attention focused on the launch part, even though the idea had been published in the past (Habib, 2008), and even some publications that refered to pterosaurs as dinosaurs (argh) I was glad to see the NPR report on the paper that included a few words with Dr. Habib.

Sources
Chatterjee S., and Templin R.J. (2004) Posture, Locomotion and Palaeoecology of Pterosaurs. Geological Society of America Special Publication 376: 1–64.

Habib M.B. (2008) Comparative evidence for quadrupedal launch in pterosaurs.
Zitteliana B28: 161–168.

Henderson D.M. (2010) Pterosaur body mass estimates from three-dimensional
mathematical slicing. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 30: 768–785.

Sato K., Sakamoto K., Watanuki Y., Takahashi A., Katsumata N., et al. (2009)
Scaling of soaring seabirds and implications for flight abilities of giant
pterosaurs. PLoS ONE 4: e5400.

Wilkinson M.T. (2008) Three dimensional geometry of a pterosaur wing
skeleton, and its implications for aerial and terrestrial locomotion. Zoological
Journal of Linnaean Society 154: 27–69.

Witton MP, Habib MB (2010) On the Size and Flight Diversity of Giant Pterosaurs, the Use of Birds as Pterosaur Analogues and Comments on Pterosaur Flightlessness. PLoS ONE 5(11): e13982. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013982

Museum Visit #3

Last Friday, September 3, I finally made a trip to go actually walk around the Museum of Texas Tech University (MoTTU) (Official website, Wikipedia article). The museum was open late due to being a part of the First Friday Art Trail here in Lubbock. It was nice to walk around the museum again. The museum itself is small kind of what you would expect from a museum on a university campus, in case you didn't catch on it is at Texas Tech University. The museum has full time exhibits dedicated to Lubbock history, Mesozoic life, and African art. There are also several exhibits that get replaced off and on through out the year. One of these that is running for a little while deals with pterosaurs and one of my fellow graduate students telling me about this is actually why I went. I am primarily going to focus on the Paleontology hall with maybe a slight mention on the Pterosaur exhibit.

The Paleontology Hall talks about changes in life through time. Starting with a brief exhibit on some of the first dinosaurs and talking about what paleontology is. The exhibit continues into the Triassic. Lubbock and Texas Tech are a hotbed of research in the Triassic Period due to the proximity to the Triassic aged Dockum Group. There are casts of phytosaur skulls and a bigger exhibit with a cast of an aetosaur and Postosuchus kirkpatricki, which was originally found near the town of Post, TX (about 40 miles from Lubbock). There is also a small exhibit on the evolution of birds which includes the possible bird possible chimaera Protoavis texensis. There is also discussion of some of the dinosaurs out of Big Bend National Park (Park webpage, Wikipedia article) and then some talk of some of the early mammals found both in the Dockum as well as some from the K/T boundary of Big Bend National Park.

The pterosaur exhibit, which you will be able to view through November 7, was interesting. Dr. Sankar Chatterjee has recently been doing a heavy amount of research into pterosaurs so many of the exhibits are casts that are being worked on and studied down in the basement. The exhibit is well put together and sums up a lot of the current researching going on in the study of pterosaurs including questions of how they would have moved while on the ground as well as what is the use of the massive crests that many of the, especially later, pterosaurs posses.

Overall the Museum of Texas Tech University is worth the quick visit to go see if you are in Lubbock. Some of the areas such as the Lubbock history as well as the art exhibits will be worth seeing if you are interested in that. The museum is small so the museum really appreciates visitors from out of town but I wouldn't make a special trip to Lubbock to see it. It also needs a little updating in some areas but with as small a budget as the museum has it is very well done. If you are interested in Triassic aged organisms the MoTTU is one of the few museums that contains a large amount of Triassic fossils.

Museum visits page

Museum Visit #2

Yes I know I said that this one would be on the Museum of Texas Tech University but I haven't actually had the time to go through the museum yet so I will get back to that later.

So I was driving between San Antonio, TX and Baton Rouge, LA earlier this month. This drive is just a trip down I-10 which involves driving through Houston. So since I was driving through, and there was an exhibit that I wanted to see (more on that later), I decided I would stop at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

This is a large museum with many different portions to their exhibit but since I only had a few hours to spare I decided to focus mostly on the paleontology oriented exhibits since that is more what interests me. The main paleontology hall you walk into the standard dinosaur hall. This is what you expect to see dinosaur wise from most, a T-Rex a type of sauropod a Quetzalcoatlus (this is an interesting cast that I will discuss later) and a handful of other dinosaurs, but is still put together very well. Around the outside of this exhibit hall the exhibit shows many different fossils from different time periods and the exhibits tend to make sure to show fossils from the state of Texas.

Continuing around the exhibit you do find some mammals including a cast of an early lemur like primate jaw from Wyoming. There is also a good discussion on the evolution of the horse. Overall this is what you would expect from a mammal exhibit from a major museum, it is interesting but doesn't bring in the crowds.

I walked quickly through the Wiess Energy Hall and then I made it to the second level of the museum and walked through the gem and mineral hall and the malacology exhibit but didn't focus on either of these three due to lack of time but they are worth checking out if you go there. While on the second floor I noticed that the cast of the Quetzalcoatlus had different colored bones. There were some that were a grey to black color and were smooth in texture while there were others that were brown and looked more realistic in their texture. My best guess of what these changes in color mean is that the brown bones are casts that represent what has actually been found of Quetzalcoatlus and the rest is what we might expect to find in the future.

I then went to the exhibit that I really went there to see, the Archaeopteryx: Icon of Evolution exhibit. This is what I really wanted to go see since my current research is on a pterosaur sample that was found in the Solnhofen Limestone of Germany which is where all of these samples are from. The specimens on display here are amazing and you can see soft tissue in everything from the pterosaurs to the insects. The exhibit winds you though tons of fish and other organisms from the limestone and eventually you get to the highlight the Archaeopteryx. The exhibit does a great job of using Archaeopteryx to support the Theory of Evolution. It did such a good job I heard someone leaving clearly frustrated say, "I still don't believe we evolved 'cause of the big bang or anything." I think it put a clear ding in their armor of creationism. If you are in the Houston area go see this exhibit before it leaves town on September 6.

Having a little extra time, and not wanting to continue driving in the rain (it was a waste I got caught driving in the rain anyway), I decided to head into the Butterfly Center. I remember going here when I was a younger kid but they had updated the entrance now. You now get to see other insects before you walk in get the see the butterflies emerge from their chrysalis. They also try to teach kids that bugs aren't bad and they all do stuff that needs to be done so don't be afraid. The exhibit is well put together and the plants have grown since I was last there creating a much more foresty (is this even a word whatever I'm going with it) feel. The butterflies were all over the place which apparently they hadn't been earlier in the day but you can tell they are used to avoiding people they stayed away from anything that moves so you have to be very still to get them to land on you.

I normally wouldn't say anything about the gift shop but I don't think that I have ever been in a museum gift shop that big or one that sold that much fancy stuff, not what you would normally expect.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science is a great trip and as I said if you are in Houston before the Archaeopteryx exhibit ends go for sure. Make sure you have some time to spend because there are many different things to see and do here that make the experience worth the trip.

Museum visits page

Book Review #5

So this review is going to be a little bit different. The prior 4 reviews had been books that I had read purely for enjoyment this meant that the review was based primarily on how much I enjoyed the book. This book was read so I could more easily catch up on the data as far as the current state of affairs in the study of pterosaurs. The book was The Pterosaurs: From Deep Time by Dr. David M. Unwin.

For those of you who haven't figured out what this book is about it is clearly, look at the title, about pterosaurs. These group of flying reptiles is often misunderstood and is understudied for sure. The number of books about the group is very limited and this book, published in 2006, is the first major work on the subject since 1991, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs by Dr. Peter Wellnhofer which is fairly outdated seriously 15 years is a long time in sciences.

So as always lets see what the cover flap has to say, its long so you can just skip it if you want:

Here is the first complete portrait of the legendary flying dragons of deep time-the pterosaurs-designed for non-specialists, yet founded on real science of these bizarre creatures. Presented lucidly and accessibly by one of the world's leading experts, David Unwin's book is built on a mountain of new fossil discoveries and the latest research.

About 220 millions of years ago, a group of reptiles took to Earth's vast and open skies. No longer tethered to the ground, the earliest pterosaurs evolved into a multitude of diverse forms, spread around the globe, and ruled the skies until they went extinct along with the dinosaurs about sixty-five million years ago, rarely leaving fossils as a record of their existence. What they did leave was a mystery for paleontologists to solve; an enigma so difficult to crack that it took centuries of false starts and missteps before the path to a true understanding of pterosaurs was uncovered.

Now, an understanding of the fundamental nature of these strange creatures is finally possible. In the last fifteen years, stunning new fossil finds and significant advances in technology have led to a breakthrough in our knowledge of pterosaurs. New fossils of the earliest species were discovered in Italy, a remarkably well-preserved and complete wing was found in Central Asia, and, most extraordinarily, a pterosaur embryo inside an egg was unearthed in China. CAT scanning has let researchers glimpse inside pterosaur skulls and construct three-dimensional images of their bodies from crushed bones, and modern techniques for analyzing relationships between species have revealed surprising insights into the evolution of the group.

Drawing on these and other advances, David Unwin, caretaker of Archaeopteryx and curator at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, paints pterosaurs and their world more vividly than has previously been possible. He eloquently reconstructs their biology and behavior. Pterosaurs weren't scaly like dinosaurs, but hairy; most were brightly colored and adorned with remarkable head crests; they were excellent fliers with physiologically sophisticated wings; they walked on all fours; and they varied in size from eight inches to forty feet in wingspan. He shows how they lived their lives, raised their young, and interacted with the different environments of Mesozoic Earth. Then, building on his thorough examination of their anatomy and lifestyle, and using the powerful technique of cladistic analysis, Unwin unravels the evolutionary history of pterosaurs and establishes their place in the one great tree of life.

Packed with seventy color and eighty-five black and white illustrations-including eight full-page original color paintings that are scientific recreations of different pterosaur species-The Pterosaurs From Deep Time takes readers on an wondrous expedition back through the lost world of the Earth's deep past.

So if you read all that you probably appreciate how long it took me to type all that for those of you who didn't realize it took forever so I understand why you skipped it. Anyway onto the review.

The book is wonderfully illustrated with beautiful images and other graphics, although the images in Wellnhofer's are slightly better and well there are more of them. It also presents some of the latest research in pterosaurology, well recent in 2006. The book is written quite simply at times but if you don't have some basic anatomy some of the chapters might get a little complicated. It also provides so huge updates that have occurred in the study of pterosaurs since 1991. The author also includes many inside jokes that a non-expert might not get but I found hilarious like this one from page 226:

Curious, eventful and littered with strange characters-one might expect the pterosaur story to have been told on half a hundred occasions. And so it has been, but often only as part of the backdrop to those hoggers of the limelight: the dinosaurs. When pterosaurs have occasionally made it to the center stage the performance barely lasts on scene. Dimorphodon briefly lurches into view; those trust troupers, Rhamphorhynchus and Pterodactylus, go through their fish-juggling routine; Pteranodon sweeps past, all beak and crest; and Quetzalcoatlus is winched on for the grand finale. Cue volcanoes and meteorites, and there is still time enough to retire to the bar for a quick drink while the King of the Tyrant Lizards eats the final curtain.

This book should be a required for all those who want to know anything about pterosaurs. If I have any complaints it is that the book is outdated, imagine how outdated Wellnhofer's is if this one is outdated in 4 years, but that problem should be alleviated later next year, of course after I should be done with my Thesis, with the publication of The Pterosauria (I want this bad!!!). Don't expect this to be an afternoon read it takes a lot of time and with all of his sources referenced you can build quite a large library of pterosaur papers which you might want to reference for a little bit more information when he refers to them. But overall a very informative read that very well summarizes the information on pterosaurs that we have accumulated over the last 200+ years.

Book Citations
UNWIN, D. M. 2006. Pterosaurs from Deep Time. Pi Press, New York, 347 p.

WELLNHOFER, P. 1991. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Prehistoric Flying Reptiles. Salamander Books Ltd, London, 192 p.

Book review page

Museum Visit

So about a week ago I was in Gainsville, FL home of the University of Florida. While there I took a couple of hours to visit the museum there, the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Let me start by saying that if you ever are in Gainsville it is worth a visit to the museum. It is fairly large, at least for a university museum, and contains a lot of different sections. The section that interests me, being a paleontologist, is the paleontology part. You start walking through a couple of small dioramas of early life but since there aren't much in the way of early fossils from Florida this is all kind of glanced over. You won't find much in the way of dinosaurs here, that is what happens when the state is underwater/doesn't exist for the entirety of the Mesozoic.

Then you walk into the main fossil hall which is quite impressive. Normally when you see fossil specimens in an exhibit hall they are entirely casts of the original bones so they can keep the actual specimens in the back where researchers have access to them. These exhibits here use actual fossils, if you look close at the specimens you will see that the individual elements have ID numbers on them that are given to the fossils when they are first prepared and put in collections. We were told that they sometimes have to go pull out fossils from the exhibits so people can do studying/analysis of them. The exhibit hall is full of specimens that you normally don't see in museums because most people are interested in dinosaurs.

While I was there they had what is called Can you Dig It going on. This is an event that geology department puts on every year apparently where they talk to the little kids about some fun stuff with geology. They had a volcano that they made explode every 30ish minutes and had a table on rocks and minerals. The vert paleo group had a table where they talked about Florida fossils as well as a few other topics. They also gave each kid that game an actual fossil, most likely ones that were either very common or had little significance. There was a little kid there holding her's and she looked ecstatic to just have one it was cute.


The final thing that I went to was the butterfly exhibit. This one of the few things that you have to pay to get into but it is well worth the price to get in. If you haven't ever been to an exhibit like this you are walking through a room that is filled with butterflies that fly all around you and you do have to watch your step. They also have some weaver birds and some other birds in their as well so it is always full of activity. There are plenty of flowers and the butterflies land on you if you stand still so it is enjoyable, and kids will love it.

I didn't have time to see the rest of the exhibits but you can find out more about them here, which shows just how large the museum is. It also appears that there are a lot of activities that the museum puts on, similar to the Can You Dig It activity I mentioned earlier. So if you live in or near the city of Gainsville, FL I recommend going if you get the chance and those of you that might be traveling through the area take a couple of hours to stop by and check out/support the science that goes on in Florida.

This finally brings me to something I blogged about earlier about supporting the push for a new museum for LSU (here). After seeing what used to be the museum that they have a University of Florida getting support allowed them to build a much larger and better museum that attracts all sorts of events. So continue to show your support for LSU to put in a new museum (here).

I plan on blogging about any museum visits that I do from now on, but I guess I should do the one here in Lubbock, the Museum of Texas Tech University, next.

Museum visits page

Why argue against people who believe the earth is 6000 years old?

So people might be wondering why do I care about informing people what the science actually says. Well today I was clicking through xkcd and came across this:



Yeah the fact that anyone can become a member of our representative democracy and/or they vote is pretty much the main reason.

Book Review #3

I finally have had some time to read. And while this is a good thing it turns out that I did not bring near enough books home to read. It is kind of sad that a book that I started months ago I read in 3 days, although I only actually read 2 of those days, and the main reason I got done so fast was that I had to wait for 3 and 1/2 hours for my car to get inspected.

But enough about me lets get to talking about the book. This book is a book I promised would be in my second book review when I wrote my first one (1st one here, 2nd one here) and that I failed miserably at. Yes I finally finished Your Inner Fish by Dr. Neil Shubin. In this book Dr. Shubin uses his discovery of Tiktaalik to describe in very simple terms the evolution of humans from simple single celled organisms to what we are now. In the process he talks about the major skull systems like sight, hearing, and smell and describes how they evolved from our more simple relatives to now. The description on the book reads:

WHY DO WE LOOK THE WAY WE DO? Neil Shubin, the paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the "fish with hands," tells the story of our bodies as you've never heard it before. By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and the major parts of our genome look, and function, like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest--enlightening, accessible, and told with irresistible enthusiasm.

I really did love this book. It is a very simple read, at least for someone who just took a class in vertebrate paleontology in which a lot of the same topics where discussed, so it doesn't like some one is lecturing too you but at the same time it is not so simple that you feel that someone should be cleaning drool off of your chin. It is clearly written for someone with at least some education that somewhere along the line included some basic biology. He also includes within a couple of quick one-liners that actually had me laughing as I read them. I like the way he treats the subject as well he takes you through his life at the start of each chapter and you can feel him "evolving" as a human and each of his stories in someway tie into the topic of that chapter.

If there was one thing he could have done better is to disguise the book. What do I mean by that? Well the full title of the book is Your Inner Fish, A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-year History of the Human Body. Right away any creationist is not going to pick this book up to read it. And the sad thing is that those are the people who need to read this book the most. He is very clear in how evolution works and would clear up a lot of misconceptions that creationists have about the science involved. So what should he have done? I don't really know the answer to that maybe come up with a name like "How Tiktaalik disproves evolution" and then have "not" written somewhere really small on the cover.

So what do I suggest? I recommend that you read this book it is a very good intro to evolution and if you are a high school or college student interested in evolution at all you should definitely read it. But after you read it you should make sure that your creationist friends read it, I would say go make them buy another copy but then I doubt they would do that since well I have a hard time buying creationist books, they are the ones after all who really do need it.

The author has a website (here) which has a lot of supplementary material for the book, and in fact as I found out from Dr. PZ Myers' blog (Pharyngula found here) today Dr. Shubin and company put out all of the images from the book on PowerPoint slides for teachers to use during their lectures (here). Dr. Shubin they have been downloaded and will be greatly appreciated during my lab teaching in the spring semester but will obviously be referenced to you I thank you.

Book citation
Neil Shubin . Your Inner Fish, a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. 2008. Pantheon Books. New York.

Book review page