Pterosaurs are pterosaurs

Recently a paper was published on a new pterosaur from the Dallas region of Texas (Myers, 2010). While an interesting find, I suggest you find the paper to read about it, I think the paper speaks for itself I wanted to blog about something else. I have read two different public articles about the paper and they both get it wrong.

The first one (found here) is a blog post from Scientific Blogging. Now I have stated in the past that I do enjoy the blogs on Scientific Blogging (see here, here, here, and here) but in this case they said something that made slap my own face.

The rare pterosaur — literally a winged lizard — is also one of the youngest members in the world of the family Ornithocheiridae, and only the second ornithocheirid ever documented in North America.

[emphasis mine]

Come on this is a scientific blog you are supposed to get this right. Lizards fall within the order Squamata and are more specifically within the Suborder of Lacertilia. While they are closely related to lizards, at least more so than they are to mammals, pterosaurs are not lizards. Pterosaurs are an order within the Archosaurs which actually puts them more closely related to crocodiles and dinosaurs than lizards.

So if a scientific blog can't get it right what chance do the nonscientific sources have? This next write up is from Fox News and was sent to me by my father. You don't have to get past the headline to see what is wrong with this article:

New Toothy, Flying Dino Discovered in Texas

Yes they call them dinosaurs and it gets better:

Evidence of these flying creatures has been rare in North America -- the newly identified Aetodactylus halli is only the second such dinosaur ever documented here, although toothed pterosaurs like it were common at the time elsewhere in the world.

Argh, come on people. While yes both dinosaurs and pterosaurs are members of Ornithodira they differ from there in many ways, not going to go in depth here because it would take to long, and some scientists say they shouldn't even be related this far down. This particular paragraph also makes it seem that pterosaurs, or worse yet dinosaurs, are rare in North America. If you read the actual paper neither one of those statements are what is argued in fact it they are just arguing that the ornithocheirid pterosaurs are rare in North America, in fact this is the second one of that clade found in North America. If they are arguing that dinosaurs are rare in Texas they are also wrong, also see Jacobs (1995).

So what conclusion can we draw from this? Scientists need to make sure that when interviewed we make sure to stress things like pterosaurs are not dinosaurs or lizards. We also need to make sure we do educated the general public when given the chance to point out things like this, because I am sure that most kids could tell you that pterosaurs are not dinosaurs nor are they lizards so we need to make sure we keep stressing this!

Sources

JACOBS, L. 1995. Lone Star Dinosaurs. Texas A& M University Press, College Station, 160 p.

MYERS, T. S. 2010. A new ornithocheirid pterosaur from the upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian-Turonian) Eagle Ford group of Texas. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30(1):280-287.

Why Dinosaurs are not just big lizards, Part 2

Part 1, Part 3

So last time we talked about the obvious differences between dinosaurs and lizards in this one we will talk a little more in depth about these differences.

Stance

So we have all probably seen alligators and lizards walking if you haven't check out the videos below:



You will probably notice that they way that they are walking has their feet in a position that is not directly under their body. Now look at the way you or your dog/cat/other mammal walks you will notice that the feet of the mammals are placed directly under the body. This allows these organisms to better support their own body weight with less muscle work while at the same time extending the stride length of the animal so you increase the speed without lengthening the legs. So what does this have to do with dinosaurs? Well lets look at dinosaur's closest living relatives, the birds:



Look at where those legs are located, they are right under the body of the bird. If you want to do more just do a google image search for bird legs. Some of you might be saying, "Wait birds are very derived," or, "You are assuming evolution to be correct." The answer to both statements is yes, you will notice that all that we see of the bird leg is actually from the knee down, and yes, so lets just look at dinosaur stance itself.



So what do we notice in those two images? The first thing, and the one most important to this post is the location of the legs they are directly under the body of the dinosaurs. This is a drastic change from that of the lizards and represent a huge improvement in the way that these organisms moved and may have been one of the reasons they were able to conquer the world during the Mesozoic. You be asking why their legs are under them or how do we know this? We will talk about that next time. I can also hear the complaints now, well those are drawing/recreations they aren't proof! True so here try this:







There better?

Part 1, Part 3

Why Dinosaurs are not just big lizards, Part 1

Part 2, Part 3

So with the semester winding down I figured I would take the time to explain the why the common young earth creationists (hence forth known as YEC) use to explain the lack of dinosaurs on the planet now but exist in the fossil record:



Kent is the main person who proliferates this fallacy, although I am sure that Ken Ham does as well, but now that he is behind bars it hasn't been getting quite as much press. He does get one thing right and that is reptiles continue to grow their entire life but he is wrong that dinosaurs are just big lizards and over the next few day/weeks we will discuss why. I will link all of these together so you can pick up from any part of the series and get to any other part. This first one should be pretty obvious to all parties concerned:

Physical Apperance

So while there may be some dinosaurs that happen to look like lizards the majority of them look nothing like lizards. Tell me if you have ever seen a lizard that looks like any of these:



Ok so maybe some people have seen the last one:



Lizards or snakes or crocdiles would have to do some major changes during growth in order for this to happen and since the lizards are able to reproduce without these changes it should be pretty obvious that these are not in fact just big lizards.

But even if you exclude dinosaurs and talk about other prehistoric reptiles you might have somethings that are similar to modern lizards and crocs, not counting ancient lizards and crocs,(see here among others) the more famous prehistoric reptiles look nothing like what we have today. So what looks like these YECs:



Although this one some people might say still exists:



Part 2, Part 3

Satire at its finest

So while trying to accomplish the general truck load of stuff you have to accomplish at the end of every semester add too that trying to get Thesis proposals finalized I have found very little time to do much else. So I daily take a coffee break and read the school newspaper, as I am sure you have figured out by now. Well today I came across this article and while I recommend you read the whole thing let me point out one section that really got my attention, let me preface this by saying that for the whole month of April we are supposed to get 1.29 inches of rain and as of writing this article we had received 4.56 inches and most of that was over a 4 day period (source):

Thirdly, they proclaim the rest of the civilized world has it. Clearly not, as Lubbock has not implemented them.

One Lubbock resident obviously disagrees as well. “Real American cities don’t need such tomfoolery like science on our roads. The internal combustion engine in my Hummer, powered by foreign liquids found under the Earth’s crust only needs a flat stretch of formulated asphalt to work. Science has its place: where I’m not.”

I’m also skeptical. Anything that uses the laws of physics to move water from a dangerous spot to a basin seems like it could be witchcraft, which is why I call upon whoever is in charge of the Tech roads to ban these contraptions from our university’s streets. They should continue to do important things, like arresting that bicycle for not parking on a university-approved bike rack, regardless if there are no open spots or ticketing that car that has been parked in the 30-minute zone for 32 minutes.

I was still unsure, although I was leaning toward it being, if it was satire or not till I reached this point. After reading this it took everything in me to not just start cracking up. This is how a lot of America feels and that is what makes this funny. This opinion has been taken on publicly by Gov. Sarah Palin when she was addressing global climate change and said that we [Americans] don't need, "this snake oil science stuff" (source).

Satire at its best should make us think about ourselves and our surroundings but do so in a slightly funny way that points out how funny some of what we believe actually is. Unfortunately many people become so ingrained with a belief system that even when you point out some of the more ridiculous parts of it, and every system has them, people accuse you of trying to offend them. I don't know that this piece was aimed at the right audience some will get it some won't for sure but the people who will see it probably won't get that it isn't just saying that we need drainage here in Lubbock, we do, but will miss the broader point he is trying to make. I agree this is far from a great piece of literature that will be studied for years to come but the point still comes across pretty darn well.

For a good satirical YouTuber who angers a lot of Christians go here!

Under God in the Pledge

So while reading the school paper yesterday I came across an opinion article written by one of the more liberal writers for the paper (typically the antithesis of Mr. Long). Well apparently in West Texas even the liberals are pretty freaking conservative. The article (found here) discusses why the "under God" portion of the pledge should not be removed. Originally I was going to break this down point by point but the commenters on the article did it pretty well already so I will just address one thing that drew my ire more than the rest. After discussing how the pledge was originally written to be used by any country that wanted it he says this:

Still, identifying with Christian beliefs myself, I’m sure some of you who do not are saying, “Well of course you see it that way.” My response to those people is quite simple: At any time you are free to leave the United States.

Despite my religious views or those of the next man, I think some have failed to realize this isn’t an issue of religion; it’s an issue of patriotism. The pledge was not designed to pay tribute to God or any other higher power. It was adopted with the intentions of its use being to express pride and support of our country. When the pledge is said, we face a flag, not an alter [sic].

This issue is far from an issue of patriotism. I love this country and am always grateful to those who have sacrificed so I can live here in peace and drink excess of coffee and do what I want, to a certain extent obviously. But your God and my God may very well difference this country was founded on freedom of religion (regardless of what the Texas School Board thinks). In fact the First Amendment to the Constitution in what we call the Bill of Rights says this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;[...]

There have been court cases to back this up since then including Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687 (1994) in which the Justice David Souter when writing the opinion of the majority said, "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion." Even as recently as 2007 court cases have supported this, see Inouye v Kemna. So Mr. Irby if you would prefer to live in a country that has an established religion then you are currently living in the wrong one. This is a democracy as you point out but we have rules in place to prevent:

Nor should a country founded on the basis of democracy be made to deny the wishes of the majority given that accommodating these wishes hurts no one, but denying them is in essence denying our country’s foundation and principles upon which it was built.

We have these rules to prevent this majority or mob rule from interfering on the rights of the minorities!

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

Private Fossil Collections

Vertebrate fossils are rare for most of the world, while there are of course some places where you can't seem to take a step without tripping over one. So what should be done when a fossil is found. Well if it is on your private land you are free to do what you want with it. This differs from the archaeological system in many states where you are obligated to report archaeological finds. If it is on public land it is by definition owned by the entire public. This is why in order to collect on public land you have to get a permit, which is hard to do if you don't have ties to someone who already has one, in order to collect. These are typically given the museums and individuals who are typically associated with research institutions, typically universities. This doesn't just apply to fossils but everything from animals to just the rocks themselves. For national forests and grasslands you also have to get a permit to log or graze cattle on them, their original purpose.

So what made me blog about this? I am sure that most people are familiar with the creationist museum just outside of Cincinnati, actually on the Kentucky side of the Ohio (see here). Well what many people don't realize is that there are in fact many creationist museums scattered around the country (see here). Once of these is called the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum located in Crosbyton, TX (see here, their official website is here). For those of you who aren't from/don't live in west Texas Crosbyton is only about 30-45 minutes from Lubbock, TX so I am clearly familiar with this museum. Well I didn't realize that they had a blog (here) so I figured I would read some of their posts when I came across it today. While many of his posts are political, very anti-Obama shocker there, some are about what they have found.

Part of one (here):

Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2009, we were collecting in southern Montana, when my digging buddie, Jordan Hall, found the largest hadrosaur footbone I have ever seen. For years we have offered a cast of a hind leg that was reported to be the largest known. It came from South Dakota. This new one looks to be 15% to 20% larger. Also, this Thursday, a long-time digging friend, Linda, sent a huge metatarsal from South Dakota that is the largest I had even seen. It was found this summer. We'll do some measurements and report on them.

Second one (here):

In July, I joined some digging buddies to help Otis Kline of the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum in Glendive, Montana finish the excavation of a large Triceratops. The vertebrae are 20 to 30 % larger than average. But the skull is odd. Based on the left squamosal, the nose horn and one brow horn and part of what appers to be a section of frill down the center of the skull, I am willing to say that it may be a new species. For such a large animal, one would expect the brow horn, the ones over the eyes, to be as much as 48 inches. This one is only 12 inches. But the nose horn is almost 12 inches which would be the right length for this size of skull. We will publish a sketch I did of it to get an idea of what it may turn out to look like.

These posts trouble me and show the problem with private collecting in general. If he is right in any way about these this data will not enter the scientific knowledge because it will not go through peer review, even if he did actually publish on it in some other source. This data and information will possibly be lost forever.

Now with that said do I think that people who find fossils on their private land should be forced to turn over their fossils? No, of course not what you find/do on your private land is up to you. Insisting otherwise is a very slippery slope one I do not feel we need to engage in. Which is why I find it interesting when Mr. Taylor says this (here):

The liberal democrat-socialists have tried many times to make it a criminal offense with jail time and huge fines for anyone other than a state approved person to collect even sea shells from public land. If they could stop you from collecting on private land they would. Then no one but state approved evolutionists would have fossils. The liberals will not stop till they tell everyone what to do in every area of our lives. WE VOTED THEM IN. NOW LET'S THROW THEM OUT!

No, sir, it is not just the "liberal democrat-socialists" that don't want people to collect on public lands. Remember Theodore Roosevelt, Republican president (here), he started the process of forming National Parks (here). The land was set aside to help preserve the nature and that is why we don't want everyone and their brother out digging for fossils, this would in fact destroy the land. So if someone is caught collecting fossils on public land then they need to be punished for it, unfortunately it is far to easy to get away with.

As Roosevelt said in an Address to the Deep Waterway Convention, Memphis, Tennessee, October 4, 1907:

...The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others.

(source)

Do you even know what you are talking about

I want to preface this post by saying I am slightly inebriated after that tough loss by VT in the quarterfinals of the NIT earlier tonight, I have a feeling I might regret this in the morning. Since I came across this earlier today I figured I would post on it.

Today's article comes from the Florida State University paper and is entitled Texas steers 'right'. Now the joke of the headline is the first line of the actual article but it also seems to be that the author is saying that Texas was right in the way in which they changed the history books recently.

Of course, denial of America as an exceptional country is a hallmark of modern liberalism. The left feels guilty that, despite its imperfections, the United States stands light-years above other nations in terms of freedom and opportunity for self-advancement. They degrade our Founding Fathers as little more than land-owning slave masters, while saying little, if anything, about the slavery that still exists in parts of Africa and the Middle East

I don't know of any liberals that do not view the US as an exceptional country they just view the US as a country that has flaws like every country that ever has or ever will. The US absolutely stands above other countries in terms of freedom but we do not stand up there as perfect, gays and lesbians do not have the same rights as most people among other flaws that we must all overcome.

Our Founding Fathers were clearly noble men but they were just men. They were flawed and lived in their time as we live in ours. People will look back on us now and will realize that we are not perfect. This is important to point out in history class, US history in particular, because it instills in all of us that we can be great people. By knowing they owned slaves and that they were not perfect we can see their flaws and learn from them so we don't make the same. You know why slavery in parts of Africa and the Middle East is not mentioned in the same class as the fact that our founding fathers owned slaves? Because that is world current events this class on the founding fathers would be U.S. History.

He goes on to say that the books not saying that Reagan was the only one who ended the cold war is wrong. I will admit that Reagan helped but it was much more complicated than that. He ends with this:

American students’ performance in math and science has plummeted relative to other countries over the years, probably in part due to other countries’ teachers not being fixated on leftist indoctrination strategies and actually doing their jobs.

This decision in Texas is cause for an optimistic appraisal of the state of affairs in American education. In a time in which the left is making one shamble after another in Washington, and people are becoming ever more discontented with them, it seems a les-than-prudent [sic] time for aging hippies to continue using the public schools as a venue to spew their long-discredited baloney.

Math and science performance has plummeted because we are afraid of offending someone. Evolution is a theory yes but in science that means it has been 99% proven but we don't talk about it to the extent that it deserves, and I could go on. The fact is that I came out of high school an ultra conservative so no our public education system is not "fixated on leftist indoctrination[...]".

The decision in Texas is a cause for sorrow. Thomas Jefferson and many other important Americans have been stricken from Texas history books, see my post for yesterday (here). Have you ever thought Mr. Berkowitz that maybe what you were being taught in high school about our history being flawed was true. Remember if we assume that we are always right and that everything that is going wrong is someone elses fault we end up in a position we don't want to be in.

Stop Politicising our class rooms

AronRa makes some great videos on YouTube and I highly recommend him for any of your evolution needs (if you will). He has also been a strong advocate against the current Texas Board of Education and their politicising of every topic (see here). Well he recently came out with a new video and since I was busy last week only just got to see it today. It is really well done and pretty much points out how much the current board is a failure:



Sign the petition (here)! and remind me not to ever let any kids I might eventually have go to school in Texas.

Really Mr. Long, Really?

So I have been sitting at 99 posts for a long time but I feel so proud I have somehow managed to put together 100 posts, counting this one. Yay! go me.

Ok now on to the real reason for this post. So one of the opinion writers, Roy Long, for the Texas Tech University paper, the Daily Toreador, has published some things before that I have disagreed with majorly (see here and trust me there are more that I didn't blog about), well he did it again. While the majority of the article (found here) I have no problem with it is about being able to change our views as new evidence comes forth, heck this is what science is all about. In fact early on he says this:

If I could travel in time and re-write those articles, I would change a few of them.

I would be more careful about wording because certain phrases I have used in columns have offended others and caused them to not pay attention to the message of the column.

Yes this is very true many times does the point of his article get lost in amongst some small piece of evidence he uses to "support" his view that is outright wrong. I will openly admit that I have had to relook over some of his articles because of this. But in the end doesn't this come down to the writer of the article?

Well this doesn't seem bad so far I was actually enjoying the article and he was making a valid point then he says this:

However, our society does not act this way. One glaring example is “Climategate.” The scientific community has been afraid to even accept data that might possibly argue the so-called climate change theory is wrong. They intentionally changed data so there would be no opposition to their theories. This is the ultimate appeal to dishonest consistency.

I literally put the paper on my desk at this point. I thought alright well climate change is still a developing science so maybe he was just confused or maybe he just hasn't read the full e-mails (see here, here, and here for starters). So I picked the paper back up and read this:

The response to the “intelligent design” theory has also been very similar. Instead of addressing the issues that have arose from Behe’s ideas, the scientific community at large has simply dismissed him because he dares question the god of evolution. Science, which was once progressive because it dared to contradict the wrong but established theories of men, has fallen to dogmatism.

I know rushed through the rest of his article and went out in the hall looking for someone to talk to, seeing no one I relaxed and read the rest of his article again. Why did this paragraph draw such a reaction out of me? Because Behe is wrong and intelligent design is not science and therefore should be dismissed by the scientific community (see Kitzmiller vs. Dover). I could cite the hundreds of people who have refuted ID as an invalid theory but in science it only takes one so may I recommend Only a Theory by Dr. Kenneth Miller (see my post here).

So why are these your two examples in the entire paper when both of them are the exact opposite of what you are trying to prove? Both ID and global climate change denialists (doesn't have the same ring as global warming denialists) are doing what you are claiming you are against. They are trying the keep the status quo the same they are not admitting they are wrong and moving on. With global climate change the e-mails were quote mined to get just a couple of quotes that sound like global climate change isn't happening or at least isn't man made. At least IDers see that there is some evidence for evolution but they still want God in there. Guess what that is still a very unprogressive statement.

So somewhere along the lines I really lost what Mr. Long was trying to argue so congrats Mr. Long you have successfully written another article that does the complete opposite of what you were trying to achieve.