Amnesia

It's happened yet again. A woman said hi to me, called me by name and actually took the time to have a brief conversation with me, but I have no idea what her name is or where I knew her from. It always bothers me when people who I would view as perfect strangers appear to know me quite well. I did the usual, banal conversation, making due without using any names and not getting into any details. Odds are that I knew her from dance lessons. It's been so long since going that it seems highly plausible that she was there. Oh well, it wasn't the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last time that this happens. At least I'm sure this time that I hadn't hit on her at a party or something, that's always extra embarrassing.

My Christmas Wish

I have two wishes:
1. That the peoples of the world would (including their governments) would realize that we are all in search of a little help and therefore live by a modicum of tolerance and periodic altruism. If you see that someone really needs your help, help them, even if you have to break the rules.
2. That people would stop telling me that these are the best years of my life. The idea that it won't get any better is wholly depressing.

The Hit Parade

Wow, my life is going great right now! In fact, I think I'll take a moment to reflect on a few of the things that have made it so wonderful.
. I wasn't allowed to write the GRE because I forgot my passport at home despite the facts that I paid over $140 to take it and had all sorts of other government issued ID.
. I have an air mattress which is completely deflated because the nozzle came unglued from the rest of it. I now get to sleep on the floor, cushioned only by a few sheets. It's just like camping.
. The stair-well incident: refer back to "drinking with the profs"
. My diet is entirely composed of potatoes, carrots, coffee, corn, eggs, peas, rye flower, coffee, whole wheat bread, onions, butter, coffee, peanut butter, jam, mr noodle (50% msg), oh and coffee.
. The other day the zipper on my back pack failed, spilling my belongings and a pair of borrowed binoculars onto the icy pavement. I'm still trying to find oneof the lenses from those binoculars.
. I have exams, that I really would rather not take.
. Somehow, I'm always short of money on my one card when I really need to print something.
. Universities have consistently told me that they don't have money to fund me
. In order to lighten the load of what I'll be bringing back at the end of next semester, I'm taking so many fossils across to border, that if I'm caught, I'll certainly face a $50,000 fine and possibly up to one year in prison.
. My frying pan produces more smoke than edible food.
. Today I apparently made it clear to a highly respected member of my field that I support the black market fossil trade (which i don't - all the fossils that I purchase are legally exported from their nation or origin).
. I'm procrastinating studying for an exam that's tomorrow by writing this.
. I keep getting the distinct impression in the back of my mind that there is a god, and that he's mildly perturbed about this whole atheism thing.

Google Does it Again

I have to say that I am very pleased with Google as a company. First of all, they own this website. But other than that, the company is making available, free of charge, alot of services that people used to pay for or might not otherwise be able to exist if not for Google's financial assistance (i.e. Blogger). If you want to buy something, go to froogle. If you want the news, go to google news. for web mail, I enjoy a free gig of space thanks to g-mail. If you want to find something on the web, well, that really depends on what you're looking for. It used to be that for everything, google.com was the best choice. As a result, those of us writing papers end up with a whole lot of useless results and very little academic. But now, there is Google Scholar which searches for academic papers only. I was rather concerned that once I eventually left a University (if every) I would no longer be able to make use of the databases which the university subscribes to, to find the papers I need. But now it's free and available anywhere with an internet connection. I can see these other databases eventually going out of business or lowering their prices to remain competitive, but that's not all that bad.

More of Gelnaw's Law

Check it out. Here's an article about Webster dictionary's web site but notice the incorrect spelling in the title.
http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/top/story/0,4136,78923,00.html

The Relationship Between Science And Religion

Religion is spiritual and pedagogical
Science is secular and methodological.
The latter enhances hermeneutical thought,
The former gives meaning that some scientists sought.
Though Science’s tacit dimension does surely exist,
There need not be religion for it to subsist.
Philosophical men have wondered long,
Where the dialogue would best belong.

To ethical insight both now may lay claim.
Their paths did differ, but results are the same.
There is a problem in inferring from is to ought.
But it doesn’t have to conflict with the god that you’ve got.
Advances in theory and knowledge lead to mental satisfaction,
Whether or not you believe in divine interaction.
There is virtue in humanism you cannot ignore,
It produces Ten Commandments, minus four.

I am an Atheist that Advocates Agnosticism

The paradox:
Assume:
-There is a God that is omnipotent and omniscient
-God created all things via ordained natural laws
-Sin exists, and is not in accordance with the values of God
-God wants us to be happy, and happiness is the aim of human existence
-God punishes sinners
Conclusions from those assumptions:
-No observation of nature can be inconsistent with the existence of God
-The original conditions of the universe were set such that there would eventually be organisms aware of that being (the Anthropic Principal) and God knew this.
-Natural laws cannot be violated from within the system; one may only be placed in situations in which separate natural laws, as they have been artificially divided,
-Randomness is an illusion: knowing all of the laws and the precise position and velocity of all particles and energy negates Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal.
-Free will is an illusion: one cannot act except in accordance with natural laws whether we are aware of them or not, except in the instance of divine intervention/ miracles.
-Paradox 1: The act of sinning is therefore in accordance with and is the product of God’s natural laws, but not in accordance with God’s values.
-God knows and has always known who will and will not sin
-While Jesus could have made a difference, God still knows in advance who will and will not sin, and sin still exists.
-The rejection of Jesus as lord and savior is the invisible and unconscious consequence of natural law.
-Paradox 2: God wants us to be happy but knowingly predetermined via his non-negotiable natural laws that some would sin and therefore suffer.
-If it is therefore part of God’s values that a certain acceptable percentage not be happy, and increased happiness (though perhaps not as great as the sinless) can be attained by that percentage by continued or greater discontinuity with God’s values (e.g. via hedonism), then there is no incentive for that percentage to reduce their sin
-Paradox 3: God does not like sin but knowingly created a system by which a positive feedback loop increases it.

Calvin and Hobbes

Seems Familiar

Irony of Ironies

Sometimes the validity of Gelnaw's Law washes over me, hitting me like a wave during fair weather. Other times, it's like a tsunami. Two excellent examples: I have my ornithology Lab final next week. To study for this I need my bird book (which I haven't been using too much until now). The other night, I discovered it was missing, completely gone, as though it evaporated into the ether. In response, I went to the library and picked up a book that is actually superior. After that, I went to the zoology museum and low and behold, there was my lab book. Wow, that's like three distinctly ironic moments in one story.
Ok, now for the second example. Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. I am an American and so typically I try to do a little something for the holiday. This year I think I'll go hungry. Why? Because I'm completely out of money from my "this is not rent money" account. I recalled seeing my ballance in Denver and still having a fair amount of money. Yesterday I tried to buy fries ($2.05 CAD) and my card was declined, so I guess registering for the GRE kind of ate into that. I actually have a fair bit o' savings (thanks to Mom and Dad) but that's locked in a savings account in California and I discontinued the checking account there because I didn't want to pay a monthly fee. Foresight would have been great there. Ok, so what do I have for rations? A single potatoe, half a bottle each of mustard and ketchup, 1/5 of a bottle of ranch dressing, 1/10th of one onion, a life saver candy, 1/4 sac of flour, and 1/2 bag of brown sugar. What a Thanks Giving feast that'll make, yum! Ok, so maybe I should use some of the cash I've got for groceries. Though I think I'll have some trouble stretching $3.21. Well, Happy Thanks Giving!

GRE

Well, I spent $40 USD but It think its worth it. I postponed when I'm taking the GRE. The other day I realized that I wasn't writing it on the thrid but on the second. The second is also the day of my Ornithology Lab final. I just figured that I didn't have enough room in my brain for over 250 birds, how to recognize them, where they live, what they sound like AND the antonym of Sedulous. I've been studying for the GRE but I just don't think that it would be worth the money to write it when I've got bird info filling up all the precious little grey matter I have left. So now I'm writing it on Monday the 13th. 11 more days to study (and I don't mean 11 days to procrastinate) won't hurt either.

Drinkin' With the Profs

Ok, so last night there was a little seminar for students in Dr. lamoureux's science and religion class to learn about evolution. For this special event, Dr. Michael Caldwell was called in to help explain some of the concepts to people who have clearly never had any biology in their lives. Brilliant people I'm sure, but just no biology. Some of their questions such as "so did it go fish then monkeys then us?" only go to support my suggestion that if I have to take calculus and chemistry and English as a Paleo student, then Math, Chemistry and English majors should be forced to take at least one course of biology and one course of geology. Biology for Beginners and Rocks for Jocks. I think that this teaching method alone will go a long way to clear up the widespread misonception that "there is no evidence for evolution." Furthermore, I think that if the anti-evolution comunity is going to be so outspoken and actively recruit followers, then the evolution community ought to do the same. By the way, this has absolutely nothing to do with my religious views, I don't have problems with people who are religious and accept evolution, I just think that ignorance is perhaps the largest stumbling block in the path of the biological sciences.
After the Seminar, the profs, a bunch of paleo students and one non-paleo student went out for beers. I'd didn't pay for a single beer the whole night, and that's all right by me. I look forward to the day when I have the financial freedom to do the same for some of my students. Lamoureux, Caldwell and I had some interesting religious discussion. Basically it boiled down to accepting that we three are men of very strong belief. Caldwell and I just believe in one less god that Lamoureux does.
I also greatly appreciated the opportunity to pick Caldwell's brain about the issues with improving the Paleo program here at the U of A. From what i gather, the biggest stumbling block there is insurance. Want to take students into the field for a field school? Well, if you have more than 15 students, you would need a bus with a certified driver. Under 15 people and you need a 15 passanger van, for which you need someone with a class 4 liscence. How about if you want to teach students how to manage collections or museums, or prepare fossils for study? Well there's a limited amount of time in the curriculum, and letting students with potentially no experience handle fossils is an insurance nightmare.
On another note, I also figured out that being a man of such strong convictions, and therefore a very high level of confidence, is sexy to women. Without going into too much detail, a young lady with whom I have history, and who is currently dating someone else, had no trouble expressing the fact that she still has feelings for me. Woot! Then I figured it out; on the previous occasion that she had expressed such feelings, I had engaged in intense discussion with someone on the subject of politics. I had suspected previously that the power of word and mind were the attracting force, but last night provided supporting evidence. Of course, she was pretty drunk on both occasions, so I think it's important not to read too much into things. Also, just for clarification's sake, although she expressed feelings, we didn't do anything as the result. I know that she's seeing someone else, and I have much too strong of a superego to allow myself to overpowered by the id. That is to say, I could not ethically do anything with her. Were she my girlfriend, I would not tollerate her expressing such feelings to other men. It's the whole catagorical imperative thing. Wow, who knew I'd actually use anything from my ethics class.

SVP

SVP was great this year. As usual I missed a few of the morning talks because I was sleeping off some of the drinks from the night before. Paleo conferences are most certainly not places to get some sleep. Or rather, they aren't if you're a paleontologist. I could imagine a lot of people falling fast asleep in the dimmed halls while someone spouted jargon way above their heads. Thankfully though I was quite enthralled by the lectures and now have a much clearer idea of what I'm doing with all of this dino and bird data that I've collected. It boils down to: I have so much more to do. There was a couple of fellows who modeled the craniofacial ontogeny of the allosaurs using simple linear regression of measurements that they took using calipers. They took alot more measurements than I have, but I think that I'll take their 50 some odd different variables and apply it across taxa in order to get a better picture of the evolution of these animals. Either that or I could just use image analysis software to plot the change in shape of these skulls. In either case, I'll then use Finite element analysis to plot the amount and area of strain on the bones in the skull in a 3-D computer model based on ct scans, and see how the forces are transmitted and how it changes with a change in each of the measured variables. Then, using the concept of functional domains in the skull, I'll determine how those changes in force distribution effect each of the domains. Then if I figure out how growth rates are involved (within a phylogenetically independent context), I'll have a pretty good Idea how these animals are evolving and about the multitudinous tradeoffs involved during evolution. It'll boil down to a hell of a lot of multiple linear regressions, resulting in a model that will probably have about 50 dimensions. This way, if I ever get a partial skull, I'll be able to predict all kinds of crap about the rest of it, without ever seeing it. People with think I'm crazy and say that no-one can possibly predict all of that because of a cumulative effect of all of the deviations in the data away from an exact line. Then I'll avoid making sense out of my statements by referring them to information that they would have already known or predicted on their own and stroll out amidst a hail of questions, angry shouts and calls from starry eyed undergrads.
The last part I embellished on a bit, but I don't think that it's an unreasonable prediction.

Off to SVP

Well, once again SVP time is here. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I hop on a plane, then a nother plane and eventually get to Denver, Colorado. This year is a bit different. I have a real purpose for being there. No, I'm not presenting. I'm schmoozing. This year I have to convince a prof through charm and wit that they can't live without me as a grad student. I even got a haircut for the occasion.

What a Load Off

Well, I'm done with my midturms. Wow, that's a relief. Since I don't have to study, I can relax and spend some time celebrating the accomplishment of finishing exams. Now all I have to do before I leave for SVP on tuesday is: wash my laundry, get a hair cut, pack, analyze about 3 dozen bird skulls in scion image, write the introduction, procedure/methods and results of an ornithology paper, do 3 or 4 hours of solid bird watching (for which I must borrow some binoculars), but a GRE book, confirm my flight with the airline, finish my botony labs for next week, read up for what I'll be talking with people about at svp, analyze and plot my dinosaur data (and probably formalize a methods section for that too), arrange for a ride to the airport, print out pertinant application information for my prospective grad schools, arrange for someone in my lab to take pictures of the dead raptors that they're getting in on wednesday and arrange for my ornithology lab partners to not get totally lost on our project that is due that day after I get back. Well, is that all! I could probably get most of that done by tonight!

How to Annoy a Prospective Grad Advisor

Try this out: while sending out a mass e-mail to get a feel for who is accepting grad students and who isn't accidentally forget to change the name at the top of two going to the professor with rather famous research. If he has his own agent, is a national geographic explorer and his is a houshold name in your field, or if he has recently published a paper in Nature that you'd like to base much of your research on and you get it completely wrong, it tells him that you're clearly not paying attention when it comes to such important matters as Grad School Applications.
Dr. s Sereno and Erickson, if you read this; I'm sorry.

The Idiots Guide Reptilian Braincase Anatomy

Dispite the title, I have no intention of explaining the anatomy of the reptilian braincase here. Rather, I would like to call for an idiots guide to it. I've been reading and re-reading Rieppel & Zaher's (2000) paper as well as papers on amphisbaenids, and gekkonids and their respecive brain cases. So far I have this to say: It's a small wonder that when a person achieves the supreme enlightenment of being able to understand this stuff in detail, his or her grey matter doesn't liquify and shoot out their eyes like science fair volcanoes.
The one solace that I have found is that someone else understands that this stuff is really complicated and has attempted to dumb it down to the level of your average, soon to be graduating, university biology student. The site Palaeos has a section specially dedicated to the braincase.
I don't know who wrote it, but whoever he or she was, that person is a genius; not so much for their clear understanding of the braincase, but because of such great lines as:

Braincase terminology is somewhat fractal. Each level of obscure anatomical referents turns out to be made up of parts and variants with even more eldritch anatomical names. Just as the essentially Greek braincase regions are made up of little Latin structures, there is probably an entire vocabulary of component substructures which is represented in Babylonian pictograms, the true meaning of which is revealed only to a secret hereditary caste of anatomical hierophants.

It seems to be one of those unwritten rules of paleontology that no one illustrates a mammaliform in occipital view.

While Bob is not a creature of towering intellectual prowess, we nonetheless value his companionship because of his congenial disposition and straightforward anatomy.

More Dinosaur News

It seems that there has been alot coming out of Liaonang, China lately. Earlier this month was the anouncement of a tyrranosaur with feathers, and now a new troodontid with a birdlike resting pose and a fossil "bird embryo" (shell not actually found). The new troodontid is what especially interests me. I don't consider the birdlike pose to be anything particularly special. People have acceped for a while now that dinosaurs such as this one were warm blooded and feathered, so it is no surprise to me that it would have tucked its head under its "wing" to stay warm. It's long tail is also curled around its body. What interests me about it is, as usual its braincase. You should see this thing. From the dorsal surface, the dermatocranium (all you can see of the brain case) looks exactly like a blown up version of Archaeopteryx's. Also, the little guy has a very Archaeopteryx look in genral to the whole head. Very exciting. I bet that if someone were to do a CT scan of this sucker they'd find even more similarities.
The other group that this individual strongly reminded me of was the ornithomimosaurs. In fact, until I saw the teeth, my first reaction was to call it an ornithomimid. I've heard talk lately of placing the troodontids as a sister group to ornithomimids as opposed to the dromaeosaurs and the birds as a sister group to both of those. I have no problem with that. There seem to be alot more troodontids in the literature lately than dromaeosaurs, so I feel that this sort of response is expected. Everyone want's their specimen to be the closest to birds.
One thing I found currious about the article was that it described the dinosaur as having a proportionately small head. Ok, maybe short, but not small. Head is about half the length of the torso and most of that is brain case. They made a comment that the reduction in size was crucial for flight and is responsible for alot of the other features associated with early birds. Well Duh!!! I've been saying that for over three years now! From allometry we know that the brain has to become proportionately larger compared to the body size as the size of the animal decreases. Having a larger, heavier brain just means that you have to shorten and lighten the rest of your face so it doesn't make you front heavy!

THE project

A 6 inch stack of photocopied or printed primary literature,
80 scanned and captured images,
34 usable taxa,
comprising 8 major groups
and 4 recognizable morphological groups,
measured for over 50 variables
to produce over 2000 pieces of raw data,
filtered to produce 38 informative variables,
then analyzed to produce 190 pieces of basic statistical information
and 703 pairwise plots as a preliminary test of correlation
from which at least 6 groups of complexly interrelated variables have been found
by 1 student
who is only 1/2 done
and receiving 0 university credit for it.

A belief System in Crisis

Atheists as a whole are in trouble. We're already the minority, but I've noticed something quite dramatic that I'd never quite noticed before: There is a major shortage of good looking female atheists. If you are an atheist and consider yourself decent in the looks department; then you are a rare exception my friend. Do not misconstrue my statement to mean that I think there are a bunch of good looking male atheists. I have no idea; I'm not looking for those. I appear to be one of two atheists in the evening section of my science and religion course. The other one is female, but as shallow as it sounds, I wouldn't want to date her. However, there are a few really good looking catholic girls in the class. What's kept me from asking them out? You can't start a relationship on the basis of a difference in fundamental beliefs; it just wouldn't work. Ok, maybe there is some girl out there who would think it cool to go out with an epistemological bad boy, but I've never met her. Unfortunately though, no matter who I'm talking to, religion always seems to come up early; perhaps I lead the conversation that way, but I can't help it; being an atheist is part of my identity. I've been defending it so long that I really can't imagine not getting into regular discussions on the topic.
Anyway; if you're a female atheist (or don't mind an atheist fellow), happen to read obscure blogs and are easy on the eyes: drop me a line.

Wanderlust

Far away places with strange-soundin' names
Far away over the sea
Those far away places with the strange-soundin' names
Are callin', callin' me
Goin' to China or maybe Siam
I want to see for myself
Those far away places
I've been readin' about
In a book that I took from the shelf
I start gettin' restless whenever I hear
The whistle of a train
I pray for the day I can get underway
And look for those castles in Spain

They call me a dreamer, well maybe I am
But I know that I'm burnin' to see
Those far away places with the strange-soundin' names
Callin', callin' me
(I pray for the day when I'll find a way
Those far away places to see)
Those far away places with the strange-soundin' names
Callin', callin' me

Early mid-life crisis

Twenty years from now

you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do

than by the ones you did do.

So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor.

Catch the trade winds in your sails.

Explore. Dream. Discover.

(Mark Twain)

The very knowledge of this is enough to give anyone an early mid-life crisis. Discovering it on your own is even worse.

Don't Fence Me In (Cole Porter)

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in.

Just turn me loose,
let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the western skies.
On my Cayuse, let me wander over yonder
Till I see the mountains rise.
I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hovels and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in.

Experiment failed

My experiment in not having a tv has failed. I haven't had a tv for a month and I'm no better student now than when I had one. Instead of plopping myself down infront of the little glowing box I find other distractions; like reading books on how to be a hermit by people who've been dead for 50 years. I go dancing, check my e-mail about 50 times per day, go to bed early and generally procrastinate. Now Midterms are upon me and I'm completely skrewed once again. The moral of this story is, that while it may seem to the casual observer that I'm getting more done, what I'm really doing is finding different ways to procrastinate.

Field Trips

This weekend went fairly well. On Friday I hung out with Dan Gregorash and Kirsten (don't know her last name) and watched some of the best of SNL. On Saturday, the U of A paleontological society went to Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park and we looked for dinosaur bones. We found a fair bit. It was mostly hadrosaur bits though a couple of people found Albertosaur tooth fragments. One fellow even found a nice little microsite that yielded a number of Albertosaur tooth fragments, a champsasaur vert, several hadrosaur teeth, ossified tendons and a partial raptor claw. Since its a provincial park we left everything where we found it. Perhaps some year the society should arrange with a rancher to look in the badlands on his property so that we can keep the fossils.
On Sunday, I woke up at 4 am to go bird watching with my Ornithology class. We went to the beaver hill banding station where we defrosted and put up mist nets to catch passerine birds. A net left up over night even caught a great horned owl. We also went to several marshes in the area to check out the waterfowl. All in all, the weekend went pretty well.

Not Again

In today's opinion section of the Gateway there is a rather long article on why human beings are no longer evolving. I see this turning into another creation/evolution debate in the opinion section. There was one last year and it was stupid and banal then and I imagine that this one will be just as annoying. I have decided to nip this in the bud, try and stop it before it gets going. My technique will be to divert the argument. The title of the article is "Sadly, you're going to have to settle for one penis." Therefore I could talk about how placental mammals and birds are actually relatively unusual in the vertebrata for having a single penis. Never mind the fact that the majority of fish and amphibians lack such an organ all together, actually, the majority of species actually have a double wang. Snakes and lizards have a double johnson known as the hemipenis. Marsupials such as your friend and mine the common opossum (Didelphis virginiensis) have a bifurcate penis. I don't know of anybody who has examined the monotreme member but I imagine that since most of its characters are intermediate between the reptile and mammal condition, that they too would have paired parts too. Even sharks are doubly endowed. Although they lack a true penis, they have structures called claspers which they use for the transfer of gametes to the female (most fish don't have internal fertilization like sharks).

Another topic that I think I prefer is to refute several of the key points in his article. For example, the author claims that there is no longer differential reproduction in humans. Well this is simply not true. Stupid and ignorant and poor people have way more kids than the well educated. Affluent people tend to know already that bringing another child into the world is just cruel (to the child and to everyone else). I'm not saying here that being poor, stupid or ignorant means that you are necessarily the other two (I've met some well educated people in my life that are real idiots), but there is a definite correlation. Granted, stupid people do tend to eliminate themselves from the gene pool from time to time (see the Darwin Awards) but it doesn't make up for the sheer volume of kids they keep pumping out. If ignorance is bliss, then sheer stupidity must be orgasmic. As for the poverty factor, its a simple matter of compensation. In the past it was: when times are hard, the more kids you pump out the more likely a couple of them will survive. Now practically all of them are surviving and competing amongst themselves for the same resources, therefore perpetuating the cycle. But what about the genetic factor? For evolution to take place you need to have a genetic reason for increased fitness. Well, I hate to sound bigoted here, but due to their socioeconomic position, ethnic minorities tend to have a ton of kids. For example in California, there is a huge Mexican population. Because they are forced into low paying jobs, they can't afford proper schooling (educational funds distributed based on the income of the neighborhood) and so they have two strikes against them. Also because most Mexicans are also Catholics, they're already predisposed to produce prolific progeny.

Now I don't want some Catholics commenting on the site about how every sperm is sacred or some 6 day, young earth, I-don't-give-a-rat's-ass-what-the-evidence-is Creationist trying to shoot down evolution. If you want to talk about those things, you can bite my child hating, tailless mammalian butt!

WTF

What the hell have I been doing with my life. One of my favorite lines from "South Park" is "There is a time and a place for everything: College." Ok, I'm here, I've been here for three years and what the hell have I done? University years (especially the undergraduate years) are supposed to be the ones when you (dare I use this sappy line) grow as a person. The way I interpret this is that I should have at least scored a few points against me on the purity test. But no! I'm still alone, I still don't know jack, I don't have a job (or for that matter any cash), a car, a social life, I don't even keep up with the news. All I do all day is sit on my ever expanding ass and think about dinosaurs, about increasing my pathetic fossil collection, check my e-mail and occasionally watch a movie or a little porn. One of the highlights of my drab and dismal week is when I get a call from my Mom and I spend an hour convincing her that the money she's spending for my education is well spent. I appear to have the interpersonal skills of a salamander. I can't even call myself the biggest fucking nerd I know. I've lost my identity. I lost it about three years when I moved to this frigid country. It normally takes me until finals to get this bitter and spiteful at life but I guess it's just building up faster now. And you know what, I think I'll rant like this a little more often. Maybe people will actually start reading my website instead of just seeing that it's about paleontology and fucking off to go see which celebrity was arrested again or which movie crashed in the box offices.

Copyrights to fossils

I've been trying to find out if there are any laws pertaining to the right to copy fossils or copy other people's copies of fossils. Ethically, it seems to me that if you make a copy of a fossil from the original, then you should be able to disseminate or sell those copies as you wish. However, if you are the purchaser of that cast, then it seems to me that you should need permission to make a mold and further casts from it, particularly if you are doing this for profit or in such a way that would hurt the income of the owner of the original fossil.
However, as somebody who would very much like to make my own copies of a large number of fossils without paying royalties for them, I would hate to get sued for such practices. The problem that I see is that casts from legitimate institutions with original fossils are extremely expensive, much the same way that movie and music distributors gouge customers for their copy-written products. Thus, people are tempted to buy or sell essentially pirated fossils. The solution as I see it is a reduction in price from the owner of the original and clear copyright laws pertaining to fossils and other antiquities. I understand that it is very expensive to produce a cast of a fossil (the mold actually being the most expensive part usually), but if many are sold, then it reduces the unit cost in terms of the production of the mold. Another complicating factor is that many paleontologists would prefer to have exclusive intellectual rights to their fossils, but choose to sell display copies at high prices to prevent people from writing papers from purchased casts. Thus, clear policies regarding fossils as intellectual property is also important.
All these logistics will only bog down the scientific process, and is an unfortunate side effect of the popularization and comercialization of paleontology.

Assumptions

Several times in my life I have been confronted with the falseness of one of my assumptions that I had long held to be true. For example, when I was a kid, my parents and several others (fossils dealers) told me that Oreodons were a variety of three toed horse, about the size of a medium size dog. Last year I found out that they were not horses, and have never been considered horses by any serious paleontologist and have since heard that they are just a group of ungulates more closely allied to deer (although people used to think pigs). Well, this weekend another one of my long held assumptions came crumbling down. I had known for a while that a wide variety of fossils come from Morocco and have been able to even identify Moroccan fossils by sight from some distance. Some of the more common items that have grabbed my interest are the very large shark teeth, mosasaur teeth and dinosaurs. All of these are found during phosphate mining. Another fauna found there is of devonian age and consists of a wide variety of trilobites, conodonts, ammonites and nautiloids (orthoceras).
I had heard from some of the other paleo people here at the U of Alberta that palaeophis (a large sea snake) vertebrae were also being found. Naturally, I wanted some (a "snake vert" had once bought as a kid turned out to be from a kangaroo - bought from the same people who told me the lies about oreodons) so I turned to the internet. I found some at Indiana9 fossils for $1.00 each. The label said that they were from the Ouled Abdoun basin, which is in Khouribga, Morocco. It also said that they were of Eocene age. Ok, so I did some checking and it turned out that every one of the shark teeth I have from that region are also of the same age. The mosasaur teeth are however obviously of the late Cretaceous. This means that a lot of labels on my collection in So. Cal. Are quite wrong. Well, I did some further checking and I found several references to that region bearing paleocene rocks. And talking with Caldwell, found out that nobody is really sure whether or not there is a conformable succession or not. I think Caldwell is really hoping that the palaeophis turn out to be Cretaceous (There was apparently a very large palaeophis of Cretaceous age found in Morocco ).
Another assumption that I had was that since I hadn't seen these for sale much that they would be rare and that $1.00 a piece was a good price. Much to my dismay, after I had ordered all 33 at Indiana9 fossils, I found them for only $0.25 each at paleoguy. So I canceled my order from the former, and I think I'll get about 100 from the latter. In the end, I'll actually be paying less for more fossils. Which is always a plus.

Digital Photography

This summer I took alot of pictures with my digital camera. I thought that I had saved those pictures. Apparently i was wrong. Because I take so many pictures there were two times this summer at which I unloaded my memory cards. Once was onto G-mail. Hey, they give you a gig of space, why not use it. The second time was when my boss allowed me to use her computer for a rather long time to try to get the pictures onto a cd. At the time i verified the pics by opening the drive in My computer and they were there. however when i got back here to Alberta, I looked at the same cd, and not a single one of my pictures was there. There were pictures there, they just weren't the ones I took. My boss had given me a cd with some pics of a dig that I was on already on it. Also, not only had I apparently failed to write those pictures (including alot of scenery, alot of fossils/ museum exhibits and some people that I'd acually like to remember, but I though that it would have been a good idea to transfer some of the photos of field school from g-mail to the cd. As such, I ended up deleting about half of the pictures that I had taken at field school, thinking that I had just written it to cd! God is clearly punishing me for being a paleontologist.

How the Money Goes

My goodness I'm spending alot lately. And as a man characteristically frugal, I have spent quite alot. Normally, getting money from me is like draiwng blood from a stone. However, despite the fact that I took out $200 from a cash machine a week ago and sold three text books for a total of $140, I only have $65 left in my wallet! Where did all that money go you might ask? The same day that I sold my books (all for 1/3 less than what I paid for them) I bought a statistics text for $80. Today alone I gave up roughly $50 at the bookstore for handouts, readings and notes for my Science and Religion course as well as $7 for a couple of 3-ring binders and forked out $40 for the lab work and photocopied text book for Paleobotany. And I've only put $5 on my one card. Ok, that explains away$182 of the $275 spent, but what about the rest of it? Perishables- those things that are quite ephemeral and therefore definately do not hold their value. And believe it or not, my boredom has driven me to actually spend money ( a fair amount too) on socializing. I went to a dance on saturday ($7) and was convinced to take swing lessons from that campus swing dance club. The first lesson is $20 and each following one is $5, and there is a $10 annual membership fee. So last night alone I spent $30 for a one hour dance lesson. Ok that brings us up to $219. I know that I spent $4 on laundry, but where on earth did the rest of it go? Have I really spent that much on Food? Could I have actually spent $56 on food in only a week!? Not possible. Ok, maybe I spent up to $30 on food, as I'm stocking up on longlasting stuff like laundry detergent, a tooth brush and toothpaste, but what the hell did I do with the rest of the damn money? Why the hell can't I account for roughly $25!?
Ok, this may seem like a piddling little sum to those of you reading this, but I don't have a job and the one I was hoping to get has just been given to someone else. Not having income sucks! I can't imagine how bad off Allan must be with roughly the same expenses and having not had income all summer.

snake phylogeny

This year's major project is on the phylogeny of snakes. Never mind the fact that I never finished (or even got near finishing) last year's project. Thankfully, being at the U of A means that I have the guidance of Dr. Michael Caldwell, one of the guys deeply embroyled in the snake phylogeny debate. It also means that it is becoming abundantly apparent that guys with way more experience and skill in comparative anatomy have tackled this topic to a degree of depth far greater than I could possibly do within the scope of this project. However, it aught to be very educational. In other words I'm going to get schooled bigtime on this one.

Juvenile Mosasaurs

The other night it occurred to me that I had never seen a specimen identified as a juvenile mosasaur. That's because none exist (actually there's a jaw bone that was misidentified for a while, but that appears to be it). For something as relatively common as mosasaurs with as wide of a geologic range and diversity of species and genera, it seemed odd to me that none would be known. After all, even the elusive T. rex had subadult specimens known and even some that would really count as juveniles. I then though to myself that there would be several reasons for why this would happen. First of all, a smaller animals is less likely to preserve. However, smaller animals, with much more delicate bones than those of a mosasaur (eg fish and a few birds) have been readily preserved in the Niabrara, Kansas chalk. Perhaps there were just very few jouveniles swimming around in environments where they could be preserved. Interspecific cannibalism is certainly known for mosasaurs so it stands to reason that a little guy would just get eaten up such that the vast majority of the population is composed of animals much too large to be preyed upon. This sort of thing is seen in crododiles where juveniles are quite inconspicuous and the adults live for a very long time once too large to be eaten by most predators. The fear of being preyed upon also results in a behavioral reason for a lack of preservation. Were a young mosasaur to spend the majority of his young life in estuaries (an environment quite poor for preservation and seen much less commonly than deltas or open seas) and only venture into open water once too large to subsist on the small estuarine fauna, then that too would explain the lack of early ontonogenic stages. The last idea would be that these reptiles gave live birth as some variety of snake do as did ichthyosaurs ( I don't know about plesiosaurs). Snakes typically give birth to a large number of very small young, but ichthyosaurs and modern marine mammals only birth one comparatively large young at a time. It could be then that the young mosasaur reached adulthood rather quickly, decreasing the probability of leaving juvenile fossils. Of course the truth probably lies in a combination of several of these factors.

Gelnaw's Law

Although Gelnaw's Law has been deleted from Wikipedia, it still survives right now in a couple of online dictionary type websites that derived their definitions from the open source encyclopedia. In order to commemorate eminent demise in anonymity, I have found a couple of historical examples of Gelnaw's Law in action.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, had his wife Martha put the toothpaste on his toothbrush for him every night.
While studying theater at the Pasadena Playhouse, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman (Classmates) were voted least likely to succeed in show business. Along the same lines, John Murray Anderson's Dramatic school in New York sent a young Lucille Ball home because she was "too shy" to be an actress.
Movie star W.C. Fields was so suspicious of his girlfriends that he hired detectives to follow them around and see if they were cheating. One girl ended up marrying the detective hired to follow her.
The Earl of Cardigan, who became famous for sending British Calvary to their pointless deaths in the famous "Charge of the Light Brigade" died some years later from falling off a horse.
Joseph Murray, who founded the Irish League of Decency to promote censorship, died from a heart attack after watching his first nude scene on Irish TV.
My source for this information is a calendar of stupid things through history which does not site its own sources.

University level unintelligence

Buying books from the university bookstore is never fun. Crowds of people lining up to buy overpriced books. Yesterday there had been a whole pile of text books for my Stat class in Subtitles, the used books store, but today there were none, leaving me rather annoyed and in need of a quick alternative. Seeing that the price of a new text with SPSS software was about $160 I decided to try to buy from an individual rather than the store. But since I was there and had cash, I bought the course book for my science and religion class. The woman at the cash register was an excellent example of garbage in; garbage out computing. With tax the book was $15.12. I gave a twenty and got $5.88 back. Anybody with any brains at all should have noticed that you shouldn't get a 5 back from 20 if the price was over 15. Whatever, I wasn't going to point this out. Later I saw that she had some how hit $2.00 before the $20.00 which meant that she still gave me the wrong change from what she entered. Whatever, I bought a chicken turnover with my small windfall.

goings on

I think I may soon become a stinky, unenthusiastic, paleontologically obsessed trogladite (as many of those things go together). I guess somebody was having fun, but today the only shower in my apartment is broken and there is a sign on the door saying that the whole bathroom is out of order. Without a shower I am left with two options: become rather smelly or use showers in the locker-rooms on campus. As I have never used the campus showers before (always preferring showering at home) I can only imagine how bad it is. Hopefully not too bad 'cause I need to pick up this weekend.
As for unenthusiastic, everybody's been asking me what I did this summer and for the sake of saving time, each time I tell the story, it gets shorter and shorter. Unlike most fish stories, what I did on my summer vacation is rapidly becoming very uninteresting. I suppose that eventually people will be able to tell how uninteresting it is even before they ask, thereby saving much time and apathy all around.
I tried to identify my new dinosaur claw when I got home but to my dismay The Dinosauria wasn't much help. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if it even is from a dinosaur. It is very weakly recurved and has no perceptable flexor tubercle, but it is much too long and narrow to be a pedal ungual (I think). My computer is a piece of crap right now so I can't unload my pictures from my digital camera. I suppose I could delete one of the superfluous pics on the camera but I am reluctant. I guess I'll have to wait a while on that identification.

Fossils

I have finally received my fossils from the middle east. Stacey brought me 4 medium sized theropod teeth, probably from Deltadromeus, a Carcharodontosaurus tooth, a Spinosaurus tooth and a mosasaur tooth and a theropod claw (probably from an ornithomimid). All of the teeth are in excellent condition with all of the points intact with at most minor but invisible repairs. The deltadromaeus teeth are each about 2 cm long, the Carcharodontosaurus tooth is about 4 or 5 cm and the Spinosaurus tooth is about 10 cm. For these I paid $100.00 canadian dollars. As I am obsessed with the value of things, I checked out ebay to see what my new collection might be worth here in north America. A similarly sized but inferior quality collection was for sale for $250.00 US dollars while another seller with a large Carcharodontosaur tooth but smaller Spinosaur tooth was selling the two for $299.00 US dollars. I certainly got my money's worth. I know from experience that the mosasaur tooth would sell retail for between $15 (trade show) and $40 (mall rock shop) USD. But what if I were to try and buy these individually? At FossilMall.comhttp://www.fossilmall.com/index.htm I saw deltadromeus teeth for about $45 each and spinosaur teeth for $250+ each. And I have yet to see an ornithomimid claw for sale anywhere.
As a matter of fact, i have no recollection of mention of any ornithomimids from north Africa ever! While writing this, I've done a quick check of the literature with Georef and have come up with Elaphrosaurus which apparently occurs in North America and Africa but is late jurrasic in age and is found in the Tendaguru beds of East Africa, specifically Tanzania as well as elements from Tegana Formation, Province de Kasr-es-Souk, Morocco. It is known from fragmentary postcranial remains and has recently been allied with the ceratosauria not the ornithomimosauria. So either I've miss-identified the fossil, it is a claw from Elaphrosaurus or there could possibly be an ornithomimid from north Africa which nobody has previously noted. However, having only one claw would make it impossible to correcly identify it, especially if there is conflict righ now over the affinity of Elaphrosaurus. I'll have to check what elements have been ascribed to that genus. I'll be contacting Paul Sereno of the Chicago Field Museum to see what he thinks.
If you were wondering why I haven't gone off about the fish I received from Lebanon it is because i simply don't know enough about them. From Matt's e-mail I had anticipated a single large plate with a rather spectacular fish. Instead, I received several smaller fish plates, a shrimp, a cray fish and an ophiroid. While not particularly spectacular compared to much of the material available on the market here in Canada and the US, it is nice to have some fish from the late cretaceous. The ones here in North America are mostly from the Eocene of the Green River fm in Wyoming.

the world on its head

For the first time in my life, planning isn't going as well as I had planned. Craig Dylke is fond of saying that planning is for communists and school girls. I on the other hand have often said that with good information, events and their outcomes will be possible. The "good information" part though is critical. For the longest time, since my second year of high school (7 years ago) I've had kind of a crush on a particular girl. However, my crippling shyness and the fact that I moved 3000 miles away prevented me from ever doing anything about it. We however remained friends and I had always figured that if I moved back to Southern California, I could use the friendship as a springboard for a relationship. Poor foolish me. Last week I called her just to see how things were going when she told me some shocking news. She was gay, a lesbian. She had tried dating guys but found girls better. Well, so much for that plan! After hanging up, I noticed dull pain throughout my left arm, the sure sign of a broken heart.
Look on the bright side, I thought to myself, I can better concentrate on someone else. I had hooked up with a girl at a party only two days before leaving Edmonton for field school and then for South Dakota and figured that things there were promising. After all, in her e-mails to me she had given me a stupidly lovable nick name, a good sign if ever I saw one. She had however neglected to mention that she was seeing someone else. So much for that plan too.
This is also the first time in my life that I'm not certain of where exactly I want to be one year from now. Since Jr. High I had known that I wanted to study paleontology at the U of Alberta. Of course at the time I thought that there were closer ties with the Royal Tyrrell and that there would be dinosaur specialist here (but that's another issue). Now that I need to start picking a grad school. I'm much less certain. I need to take the GRE's and schmooze with potential advisors and see what I'm even going to specifically study next year. I also feel like I need to produce some sort of master work that I can present while I'm applying as sort of the kicker.
I had always planned to be happy and successful at 25. The domino's need to start falling into place. I need a new plan of action. It seems like I'm turning my life on its head, but I need to step it into high gear.
And for somebody who's had 4 complete meals in as many days, i'm surprised how lucid I am.

Paleontology delirium

As is sometimes the case when I travel, I caught some sort of stomach bug. This combined with sleeping on a very hard floor (not mattress yet) resulted in quite vivid dreams that frequently crossed partly into the waking world. As such, last night the collective finds of Charles H. And George F. Sternberg reeled through my drab apartment. Opened plaster jackets with columns of vertebrae exposed, mosasaurs, titanotheres, xiphactinus, dinosaurs, oreodons, etc. These particular visions were undoubtedly the result of the fact that I've been reading the biography of the Sternberg family of fossil hunters titled "Dinosaur Dynasty." I suppose that it's a good thing that I wasn't reading Fight Club or other such work. As much as I enjoy paleontology, I hope never to ruin it again by including it in any fever induced delirium.

The Proliferation of Stuff

There is an old saying which dictates that "friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate." I believe that the same is true of personal belongings; it just piles up. As someone who is constantly moving from one region to another, this becomes a major annoyance. I have tried to be minimalist in my life, not buying much, not even owning more than the bare essentials of furniture (not even a kitchen table or a couch) this has alleviated much of the problem. When I move to a new area I have to store my belongings somewhere and decide what I will need for the rest of the season. The boy scout motto of "Be Prepared" usually flashes through my mind at this time. Anything that I don't bring, I will automatically need. Anything that I bring, I will largely not need; it is better to have it an not need it than need it an not have it. As a result, when I came out to south Dakota I packed up my enormous green bag, a smaller green suit case, my green back pack, another back pack and a poster tube full of stuff and hauled it 1260 miles from Edmonton, AB to Hot Springs, SD.
In short, I ended up not even using: half of my long sleeve shirts, my corduroy pants, swim trunks, good black shoes, hand lens, cellulose acetate strips, mancalla board (and marbles), half the books I brought, several cd's of software and data, leather jacket, touque, gloves, Tyrrell Staff hat, most photocopies from scientific journals and coloured pencils. There's more to that list but I can't remember off hand what. I also could have lived quite comfortably without my bath robe, dinosaur skull models, posters, hat rack, journal, drawing pencils, art paper, several t-shirts, jazz and swing cd's (I don't have a cd player and the others that do decided that they didn't like my music), rock hammer and dissection kit.
All of this stuff could have gone into storage but didn't. Now that I have to go back to Edmonton, I've accumulated even more stuff. Most of what I accumulate anywhere I go is books. Academia is heavy to lug around. The problem is that if I didn't buy a lot of the books that I wanted here at Mammoth site, then I would not have received my employee discount of 20% and thus would have paid considerably more online. Fight Club, Choke and Lulably I bought and read here because I finally made the time for it and am shipping those back to California (I can't imagine any problem from my siblings trying to read it; my family doesn't exactly read for fun). "Marsh's Dinosaurs" I bought because I found it for $30: much better than I've seen before. There's also the books that my parents and grand parents sent me, and the National Geographics from the 1920's and the copy of Darwin's "The Descent of Man" that I bought at the library book sale.
And then there's the fossils. I'm addicted to those. If I see a deal on an ammonite, or an oreodon skull, I can't pass it up. I bought something like 3 half complete skulls, one nearly complete one, 6 cranial endocasts, a 20 lb ammonite and found a neonate oreodon skull and a paleolagus skull. From a local rancher I bought close to a dozen mosasaur vertebrae, a plesiosaur vertebra, 3 partial didimoceras, a piece of petrified cycad and a dinosaur bone that I can't identify. Most of that I'm shipping to California at great expense. Because of Alberta's strict fossil protection laws, I'm a bit hesitant to take fossils into Canada for fear that I won't be able to take them back out.
I have way too much stuff!

Improved readership

I seem to have acumulated a few new readers lately. Last week I had the fortune of meeting a couple of people my own age here in Hot Springs. The reason that this is significant is that just about everybody my age here has left in order to "see the world." Growing up in a small town must be a bit trying on one's patients. In any case, when they hit 30, most have realized that they don't like the rest of the world and move back to their small home town to raise their new (often accidental) family. The two people that I met, by the names of Steph and Glen, were both interesting people from North Dakota and they were traveling around in a Suburban doing sidewalk sundayschool programs for kids. I told them about my blog and even inspired Steph to start her own. I think the thing that kind of knocked me off my feet was that they had both thought I was cute when they met me ( I was their tour guide at Mammoth Site). Being a self professed homophobe, I'm not sure to be flattered or just react auckwardly. As such, when I found out I did both.
Another new reader is my advisor Dr. Michael Caldwell. Apparently he found out about my blog and actually read a great deal of it. I had written him asking what he thought I should do for my 499 project and he recommended working on some aspect of braincases and the Rieppel-Caldwell debate. Realizing that he had read my confession to only understanding about half of Rieppel's paper and my extremely high goals that I had set in my entry about the archaeopteryx brain case I feel a bit sheepish. Oh well, them's the breaks. Either way, I've got more readers for my site and hopefully I'll actually be able to expand that further thr0ugh word of mouth.

tyrannosaur family values

The more that I've read about the tyrannosaur growth rates, the more problems I've seen. First of all, the paper places the age of senescence and death at about 30 years old. That is really young for a big animal. In mammals and reptiles, the larger and animal is, generally the longer that it lives. Also, the paper said that T. rex and other members of the group would have only spent about 30% of their lives at their adult size, which seems to me to be extraordonarily short. It does mean that more of their lives would have been spent being able to run very fast, thereby benefiting their hunting ability, but only having 10 years to reproduce and raise a family presents a problem. The biggest problem lies in when tyrannosaurs would have reached sexual maturity relative to somatic maturity. If they are both at the same time, then the females would be starting their own family group well after loosing the ability to run quickly. Does this mean that females did not leave the family group they started life in before starting their own family? For a youngster to be helpful in the hunt, it would have needed to be at least 2 years old (youngest tyrannosaur individual found in association with larger individuals) and would have only weighed about 50 kg. Would aunts and even uncles have helped to care for the young for 2 years or more? possibly sacrificing their own reproductive success?
This also means that the mother of the family group would have died well before any of her offspring would have started reproducing. Thus a family group would be siblings from possibly several broods (therefore half siblings- usually reducing it's willingness to help with sibling's young compared to starting its own family group). In the case of Sue, the most famous T. rex, Duffy, a jouvenille found in association might have actually been her sibling rather than her offspring.
Sue presents another problem. She is really, really battle worn. Evidence of broken bones, infections, torn ligaments etc. This degree of wear and tear initially lead Peter Larson to believe that she was about three times older than the newest age estamate of death. If even a few of those injuries were sustained during the period when she was experiencing exponential growth (up to about 2.8 kg per day) then she would have needed not only to be cared for by her siblings, but massive quantities of food would have had to been draged to her in order to sustain her increadable growth spirt. Also, that much injury in 30 years seems a bit excessive. Have young tyrannosaurs been found with proportionate amounts of battle damage? Would childhood injuries be as visible as those seen on Sue? And what about the Gorgosaurus at the Indianapolis childrens museum with what apears to be a tumor in its brain case? Could a cancer have sprouted up and grown that large in the last 10 years of its life between reaching maturity and death?
I'll include some other problems and implications that I've noticed in another blog, but i've notice that this one has dragged on a bit long.

Tyrannosaur growth rates

Oh joyous day, somebody has actually published on Tyrannosaur growth rates! They included T. rex, Daspletosaurus, Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus. I kind of wish that they had published on Nanotyrannus and Tarbosaurus as well, but them's the breaks. Much of the research was based on Tyrrell material and this gives me the ideal opportunety to springboard my research on brain body size relationships within that group. I think that the first thing I need to do is actually measure the size of the endocasts of the various specimens (I think that I'll use liquid latex). From there, I'll find out how much each weighed and calculate the strength of the skulls of each. I think that with their methods I could also do this for Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, dromaeosaurs, oviraptorosaurs, ornithomimids and any other group of theropods. Using the fibula (one of the only non hollow bones in a theropod) is brilliant! However, I din't see them use any comparison to modern bird fibulas to test whether or not they were acurate. Oh, that'd make another really good project! I have way, way too many projects that I need to do. Hopefully without a TV this year, I'll be able to accomplish a few of them. That in itself would be a good experiment to see if its the bad influence of TV or my own lack of a strong work ethic (and funding and specimens) that has kept me from completing any projects.

Archaeopteryx

I read in science news today that in the Aug 5 edition of science, the CT scan team at U of Texas scanned the brain case of the london specimen of Archaeopteryx. There were a couple of things that struck me right away. I saw this presented on at SVP last year and I'm pretty sure that it wasn't the same people presenting as are now getting the paper in Nature. Also, then it was the Berlin Specimen, which actually has a brain case that is only half crushed. The London specimen is actually missing its head entirely. I don't know if this is an error on the part of Science news or what but I am definately glad to see that this particular team did the ct scan. They do good work and it means that they will eventually post it on http://www.digimorph.org . It also occured to me that in order to present at last years svp, they would have had to have had an abstract ready by April 2003. Is that how long it takes a paper to get into nature these days? I'm not sure if that's a long time or not, but I don't think that the science is moving fast enough (Nature needs to be weekly now instead of biweekly) The report went on to say that the digital endocast had enlarged regions for sight (optic lobes and optic tectum), muscle controle and had a very birdlike middle ear with an elongate hearing aparatus similar to modern birds.
Speaking of brain cases, I've decided that I'm going to compare the brain cases of helodermata, amphisbainids, snakes, dolichosaurs and mosasaurs to hopefully refute some of the groups as a sister group to snakes. Personally, I'd also like to find out where dolichosaurs are phylogenetically (descendants of basal mosasaurs or some other lizard group entirely?). Onfortunately though, when I tried to read Rieppel's paper comparing mosasaurs, snakes and varanids, I think I understood the abstract, the intro and the discussion but only about every third word in the actual body of the paper. It's going to be an interesting year. Hopefully since I won't have a tv I'll actually get alot done.

Stressed is desserts spelled backwards

Well, my stress level is quickly climbing back up to school year norms. So far I don't have a place to live, the classes that I want conflict, leaving me with nothing to do mondays and fridays after 10:00 am (and while it may seem very relaxing, I know it will kill any motivation I'll have to get out of bet at a reasonable time on those days), my insomnia is back (7 hrs sleep in the last 65) , I haven't accomplished anything that I wanted to this summer, I don't have a 499 research topic, the girls here still hate my guts, even if I do apply for canadian perminant residency, it will take at least a year to process which counts out my chances of affording any Canadian grad school and I've only saved about $2,000 USD this summer (well below even the cost of the fall semester). It's good to have things back to normal.

At the Movies

Spider-Man 2 finally came to Hot Springs, South Dakota. It was a decent movie but it could have been better. It seemed to me that Toby McGuire must have been stoned throughout the entire shooting of the movie. In just about every scene where we could see his eyes, they were blood shot and watery. Further proof is that there is a scene in the movie where Peter Parker is just eating chocolate cake with his land lords daughter. There was absolutely no reason for that scene to be in the movie. The whole point was that she eventually gives him a message from his aunt.
What was worse was that Doc. Oc. who could have been a really cool villain, was really shallow and one dimentional as a character. He doesn't even get that much screen time compared to how much time is spent on Peter Parker trying to ballance duty and booty. What really bothered me was that he quit being evil just as soon as Spider-Man tried reasoning with him. Shouldn't that be a hero's first response, especially if its one academic to another? And who gives machinary artificial inteligence complex enough and dangerous enough that it needs an inhibitor chip? If you know it's that dangerous, redesign the software with the inhibition built in!

Even Mexico's sold out

Today I saw a visitor to the museum that was wearing a t-shirt that said "Hard Rock Cafe - Tijuana. What happened to the good old TJ of yore. When you could go there to buy weapons, drugs, alcohol all before your 21st birthday. The appeal of TJ was that you could go to some sleazy hole in the wall bar, pic up a cute chicana, promise to take her back to the USA then dump her and go back to your homeland after you were done with her. Or even better yet, pick up an american girl and giver her some disease or get her pregnant so that it'd be really funny when her family asks here what souvenirs she got south of the border. I tell you, the whole world's gradually selling out.

Natural Law

Gelnaw's Law: Nature tends towards maximum irony.

 

Digging with the BHI

   This weekend I went to Wyoming to participate in a Dino dig with the Black Hills Institute.  There were three dinosaur horizons within only a couple of meters of each other.  The first had some sauropod and some stegosaur bits, but the material was really badly weathered from being at the surface.  The next horizon, the one that I worked at contained a nearly complete "Camarasaur."  I put that in quotes because they really aren't sure yet.  Alot of the features look like a mix of camarasaur and diplodocoid characters.  An hour before I left they started to find the skull so that ought to provide some insite.  The next horizon below that contained some more stegosaur bits but that site hadn't been opened yet.  What I found while there included a number of rib fragments, what might be part of the maxilla of the sauropod we're looking and a coelurus tooth.  While walking around a found a couple of large (25+  lbs) bone fragments that everybody else had passed over as rocks.  I guess they weren't expecting to find eroded material that big.  Too bad I didn't get to keep one of them, but it probably would have cost about $30 to send it home to the collection anyway.
   Over the weekend I also read Fight Club.  It's a good book and the movie parted from it a bit, but having seen both I'd have to say that the movie was a really good adaptation.  What was changed was probably done so to cut down on the number of characters and to keep it from getting an NC17 rating.  I liked it so much that I just ordered that author's other books Lulaby and Choke.  But since I found a good deal on Marsh's Dinosaurs, I ordered that at the same time too. 

Bush

I don't know much about politics, but I know what I dislike, and I dislike president Bush.  This November I'll be voting for Kerry.  There are many reasons why (http://drivingvotes.org/bushfacts.shtml) but my biggest reason is that when I started University in Canada, the Canadian dollar traded for roughly 66 cents American.  Now it trades for 76.5 cents.  I've lost money without spending it, and I hate losing money.  I think of the value of things in terms of their permanence or lack of mutability.  I hope that Bush doesn't have much permanence.

Much new stuff

    Well, none of the plans that I had for this last week panned out.  I thought that they might not, hense the "of mice and men" title on the post.  I really wanted to go to the rex dig site, but the van left without me that morning.  I was a little late but they must have left early because if they had left right on time, I would have at least seen them pulling away.  I'm making up for that loss though.  Tomarrow, whether I like it or not, I'm going to a Jurassic Dig site with the Black Hills institute.  My boss felt sorry for me missing the van last time so she arranged me to work with them Friday, Saturday and Sunday. 
    The plan to go cave exploring kind of fell out too.  I wanted to get the most out of my day off so I decided to see Mt Rushmore and go cave exploring in the same day.  And since I don't own a car (and the people who I could borrow one from are still a bit angry with me) I decided to hitch hike.  In the proud tradition of my father Gypsy Gelnaw, I hit the road and stuck out my thumb.  I left at 8:00 in the morning an had made it the 50 miles by 2:00 in the afternoon.  I was supposed to be at the cave by 5:00 pm.  It takes about two hours to see the monument and do everything that there is to do there (I might have been a bit slower because I was tired and my feet hurt).  As luck would have it, one of the people who gave me a ride (specifically the one who gave me the lift to the monument) was actually the daughter of Bob Farrar, one of the co-owners of the black hills institute.  So at 4:30, rather than try to make it 40 miles back to the cave in two hours, I decided to accept her invitation to visit the institute.  I don't know if my positive impression helped me get the weekend spot on the dig, but it couldn't have hurt. 
    On the way to Mt. Rushmore, I stopped in Custer and checked out the rock shops there.  For under $30 I picked up 4 cranial endocasts, two half skulls, one 3/4 complete skull and 3 very incomplete skulls of oreodons (oligocene sheep sized horse).  And to think, my parents got me a 5/6 complete skull for me for x-mas when I was  about 12 for $200.  Boy they charge alot for importing a fossil to California.

Of Mice and Men

Well, this week promises to be a bit more interesting than usual. Tomarrow I'm going to Wyoming with Earthwatch to check out one of Peter Larson's Tyrannosaur sites. It's either where they found Sue or where they found Stan. Either way, their's more Tyrannosaur material there which supports the hypothesis that gregarious behavior is a conservative trait across the tyrannosauria.
Saturday Evening I might be going spelunking in Wind Cave. The park manager is going to try to map some unexplored parts of the cave and said I could join him. It aught to be a very memorable experience if my mild claustrophobia doesn't turn into crippling claustrophobia. Then again, even if it does, it will still be quite memorable, but for the entirely wrong reasons.
On top of this, I'm finally getting some bigger projects in the lab. We're getting in Pygmy Mammoth material from the channel islands of California (The Santa Barbara Museum which sould be handling it doesn't have a preparator right now so we're handling it) but so far I haven't been able to work on any of it. Right now I've got a first thorasic vertebra, two phalangies and a mid thoracic vertebra to work on. I aught to be done with three of them by the end of Saturday.

Bone Bed

I got to work in the bonebed today. This is only the second time that they've let me work in there but this time I was at least closer to bone, though I didn't personally find any. Bonebed work is quite possibly the most satisfying work that I've done here: considerably more enjoyable than giving tours and working in the gift shop and more physically exerting than time in the lab.

Welcome New Readers

I have recently acquired what I believe will be several regular readers and so I say welcome. Perhaps this means I'll soon be able to get more than 1000 hits on this site. And so to them I say welcome.
Today's blog is about villains. Nearly every movie, book and comic book has a villain in it (except for crappy dramas that rely on interpersonal and internal conflict). There is a very fine line between super hero and super villain. It often depends on the point of view. To the British of the 1770's the revolutionary Americans were treasonous terrorists. Villains often could have been hero's if not for some bitterness, spite or resentment introduced to their lives. But what makes a villain and what makes him good at what he does? Quintessential, a villain must inspire hatred in either the protagonists or in the audience. Merely causing fear or pain or injustice is not enough to be really evil. Instead, the victims must vow to exact vengeance on their nemesis. Ideally this must be difficult for the good guy(s), that way there's actually some plot.
In nearly every comic book, the super hero has some weakness which his arch rival attempts to exploit. Knowledge is power and so if the villain knows for example the hero's secret identity (often quite contrary to their usual appearance to the world) then that villain has the upper hand. I rather like Superman as an example. Kill Bill vol. 2 explained it quite eloquently. Clark Kent is Superman's critique of the human race- cowardly, weak and physically flawed (the glasses). But even when he's Clark Kent, he's still Superman on the inside and drops everything to go do some good deed. No matter how hard he tries, he would never stop being Superman. Clark is merely a camouflage cover so that he can blend in with normal society. If Luthor were ever to discover that duality, then Superman would be rendered powerless against him. Bringing Luthor to justice would automatically mean having to accept that everyone would know his secret and that he would never be able to partake in casual society again. It would be lost to him forever and not even Superman has courage enough to give that up.
Until the final resolution, the villain is the one that has the most fun. Toying with the hero's, dangling false leads in front of their noses. Inevitably however, villain always slips up. Otherwise the audience would be outraged at the conclusion and the series would quickly end. The villain's tragic flaw is usually pride. Pride in one's work leads to bragging and the villain makes the mistake of revealing his sinister plot before the job is done. In the really good comics, the hero's even learn something from the villain. The reasons for his megalomania or other such condition as revealed through a very open rant encourage the heros to prevent other from going down the darker path.
Be on the look out for villains everywhere... Mwahahahahaha!!!

National Geographic

Yesterday the public library held a book sale, at which there was quite alot of crap, but also a couple of gems. I picked up a copy of Darwin's "On the Oriin of Species" and "The Descent of Man" for a dollar as well as the major works of Levoisier and Faraday and some other chemist who's name I can't remember for another dollar. I also picked up a whole bunch of old national geographic magazines. Unfortunately they didn't have anything from 1919 (the year I really want because it contains an article by on Barnum Brown) but they did have 1920, 1921, 1922 and 1923. Despite this wide range of years, none of them were complete. There was another collector there competing with me for posession. As a result I got a little over half of each of the above mentioned years. I normally wouldn't have wasted my time on National Geographics that don't have a Paleo article but for $1 each, it seemed like too good of an offer to pass up. The Wee book in in Edmonton near where I used to live offered National Geographics from the 1920's for $32 CAD each, so I feel that I got a really good deal. Even if I can only sell them for $10 USD each, I'm still making $270 USD profit on a $30 investment. If anyone would like to buy some old Nat Geo's off me for $10 a piece, I'd be more than happy to sell. Otherwise, I'll just be mailing them back to California to join the rest of the Gelnaw Library and Museum.
Just as a side note, I'm at the public library and the guy sitting next to me at the computers is watching copious amounts of gay porn. I reallize that it's gay pride week or month or whatever, but that is just rediculous.

William Gelnaw's Guide to Frugal Living

The people at google have recently reintroduced the ignorant masses to one of my favorite words; frugale. Unfortunatly, They spell it Froogle so it matches the parent company and now nobody anwhere will be able to spell it properly (heaven help us if it ever makes its way onto spell check lists). I have often found myself trying to explain to people why this word is such an appropriate discription of me. If you know me and know the meaning of the word, then its clear. But when the girl is asking if you want a private dance and all you have is ones, I find myself coming up with synonyms like cheap, pennywise, thrifty, a miser etc.
Frugal is not only a word but an idea that is sorely out of use. People today really don't know how to save their money. Granted, there are alot of circumstances in life that prevent one from being able to save (like getting knocked up), but for much of the population there is no excuse. The American economy practically runs on the fact that Americans buy more than they can afford thereby keeping inflation and interest rates pretty constant. As such I have decided two write the great unamerican novel (or manual). "William Gelnaw's Guide to Frugal living" or just "The Guide to Frugal Living" will instruct the ignorant and spend happy populace of this great nation in the ways of making their money last. If it works en mass then its true that my followers will see an initial reduction in the quality of their lives, but in the long run they'll be glad. I've come up with a few chapter headings as follows:

Never Pay full Price for Retail

Making it Last

Shared Living Arangements or Try Living at the Office

Never Buy Name Brand

The Gender Difference

Peasant Vision

Ebay, the Dollar Store, the Salvatio Army and You

Comparison Shopping

Don't have kids, Please

The Credit Conspiracy

It's Cheaper to Keep'er

Sugar Mamma's/ Daddies and You

Don't Let Grades Get in the Way of Your Education, Attending University for Free

Gambling Losses

Charity

The Tax Man Cometh

Police Auctions, the Repo Depot

Don't Have Much, Will Travel

Free Lunch and other Myths (getting/stealing free food, and pot lucks)

Grow Your Own, Make Your Own

Penny Wise but Pound Foolish

Black Hills Institute

Yesterday, I went to The Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City South Dakota, and it's awesome!!! It's only a three room museum (the mineral room, the fossil room and the gift shop) but its great. When I picture what I would really want my own museum to be like, I picture something like that. It is the former home of Sue the T. Rex and is the perminant home of Stan of the same species as well as several other Tyrannosaurs of various nick names. Generally, I think t sucks that they had Sue taken away by the FBI and then sold to another museum for $8.3 million (all procedes going to the guy who was leasing the land from the Soix). The institute saw no money from that sale despite the fact that they gave the guy $5000 to dig on his land, and pumped thousands more into its excavation and partial preparation. In spite of this, and the fact that the owners both did some jail time for alleged fossil poaching, the institute seems to be doing ok. The skull of Stan is quite possibly the best preserved dinosaur skull I have ever seen. Ironically, they also have a cast on display of MOR 555. I can't imagine it should have been too hard for the Chicago field museum to sell them or even give them a cast of Sue. The Institute should have at least have been offered a discount (you know, for finding the damn thing!!!). They've also got awesome displays of lagerstaten fossils from the Green River Formation, Lebanon (Yay lebanese fossil exports) and the Solenhofren, Germany. They've also got the biggest, best preserved Euriptyerid I've ever seen.
I highly recomend a visit to any avid fossil nerd. Admission is free but please give them a donation. They've earned it.

writing friends

I've been getting the impression lately that I may be trying to contact people by the wrong e-mail addresses. I've sent out a couple of e-mails to friends but I get the impression that nobody is getting them. Either that or they just haven't written back yet. Michelle wrote me back and did it rather promptly. I've written Sudeep twice in the last two months and haven't gotten any reply. Perhaps he feels bad about the fact that I spent more time with Michelle the last time I was in California than with him. If that is the Case, I'm sorry dude. Ok, that could explain one lack of response. What's wrong with the rest of you. I lead a really boring life here in South Dakota and it means alot when I get correspondence.

perminance and imperminance

I was surprised today to find out that the wiki that I created about the value of public participants in field work still exists despite the fact that it was at one point slated for deletion due to its enormous size. It's no longer under the heading field work, but you can get to it from a link in that heading or using the above link. I am kind of depressed that whoever relocated it specified it as archaeological despite the fact that there isn't one archaeological organization that I surveyed. He must not have even read the abstract.
Besides checking out my old Wiki, I've been filling up my G-mail account. I think I must be the only person to have already filled close to 30% of my free Gigabite of space already. I've been sending myself my digital photos so I can get them off of my memory card. I didn't want to burn them onto a cd yet because it seemed like only 240 megabytes of an available 700 would be a waste of space. In retrospect I should have just burt the cd as a session and added more later. Oh well.
In other news, somebody took my idea and is making a whole lot of money off of it. Well, actually they just had a similar idea and are making money off of a limited academic circle. There's a book called "the dinosaur paper 1676-1908" (dates may be wrong here) in which it repuplishes all of the original papers starting with the very first description of a dinosaur and going to the start of the 20th century. My idea was a bit more limited in scope. I just wanted to do this for each major journal that published dino papers separately. Whoever compiled this is briliant, and clearly very hard working. I have no idea how they got some of these papers. Anyway, I must have this book. Unfortunately, It's just as costly as a text book ($75 USD) so I think I'll wait until I can get it used. Or, since I'm only buying used texts now, I think I'll use what I save on those to buy it. I've spent alot lately on my paleo adiction (Lebanese and Moroccan fossils) so I think I should wait.
Another book that I'm really sorry that I have to wait to buy is Alfred S. Romer's "The Osteology of the Reptiles." It looks like a great book but its about $110 USD. That's alot for book that hasn't had a new edition in over 30 years and doesn't have a single color plate. Perhaps some money making scheme of mine will cover it. Who knows?

Good to be me

It's good to be me, especially since I've got some seriously cool hookups. Matt Vavreck is currently in Lebanon doing some research for Dr. Chatterton. While there, he's doing a little shoping for me. I'm not quite sure what I'm getting, but its between several varieties of Cretaceous age fossil fish. Apparently, I could get some small ones for $5 each or bigger ones for more. I might even get a cretaceous ray (now if only I could remember the name of the Alberta variety so I could do some comparison, beggins with an M,I think).
Meanwhile elsewhere in the Middle East (Morocco) Stacey Gibb (also doing research for Dr. Chatterton) has money from me specifically for some dinosaur material and an enormous Trilobite.
I'd personally rather be doing this shopping my self but it's nice to be able to get the local price discount on otherwise expensive fossils. A great example of just such a discount is something I happened upon just the other day. I was walking around town (window shopping without the intention to buy) when I spied a couple of fossil turtles from the White River formation. A smaller one (about 10 inches long and 6 inches wide) was missing the majority of the carapase (showing just the endocast) and the plastron was obscured by matrix. The larger one (12 inches by 7 inches) still has about half of its carapase (also showing an endocast where shell is missing) and the plastron is once again obscured by matrix. Normally, If I were to buy this from a retailer in California who knows anything about fossils, I would be charge about $100-$150 for the better one. I bought it from a shop that had a couple of fossils (but mostly used books) for a grand total of $35, plus tax. Now I have a project in cleaning it up. I particularly like it because if reminds me of when I was a kid and I preped the same Oreodon skull (from the same formation) for 5 years (I'm alot faster now).

DinoData

Once again I would like to sing the praises of Dinodata. It's been a while since I've visited the site but I'm glad that I did. Apparently an oviraptor called Ingenia (one who's photo has long eluded me)has been shown to gave numerous impressions of blood vessels on the inside of its brain case, indicating that at least in that group, the brain was snuggly fitting within the skull, much like modern birds and mammals. As for what this evidence indicates in terms of phylogeny its pretty inconclusive if you ask me. The camp that says that oviraptors are within the crown group birds would argue that they inherited their larger brains from their birdy ancestors, where as the group that puts oviraptors in an outgroup relation to birds would argue that birds and oviraptors inherited the larger brain from a common ancestor. I personally like the idea that an ancestor with either a much lower body mass or a dramatic change in bite mechanics (reduces shock transmission to the brain) facilitated the transition to a more closely fitting brain. Still this hypothesis could go either way in terms of phylogeny.

What a Good Day!!!

Today's been going pretty good. It turns out somebody actually reads my blog! Who knew, huh? I've also taken care of the financial stuff for the U of A paleo society (that I to say I'v passed the buck to somebody else), I've packed up most of my stuff and I got Gmail. As for the comment on my last blog about becoming a superhero called Mammoth Man, I've decided to pass on that. After all, I've always wanted to be a super villain rather than the hero and people might be kind of confused when they expect somebody mammoth in proportion but only get me. On top of that, the idea of an evil paleontologist has been done. Remember the 80's movie BABY, about a baby dinosaur that's being hunted by an evil paleontologist in the Congo and a beautiful but ditsy female paleontologist and her husband are trying to save it? The movie did ok, but the evil paleontologist dies at the end, and i really don't want that kind of precedent set for me.

The end is near

Well, despite the fact that everything I touch seams to be doomed to ruin (even especially this blog), I can just about see the end at hand. Eleve more days until I leave for field school and about ten more after that until I leave for south Dakota. My housing situation is taken care of for once and I just have to worry about getting through my exams and field school alive. Given that my shoes are absolute crapola (I was going to buy new ones but cheaped out) I think I'm going to buy some insoles and glue tire tred onto the bottom of my current shoes. That ought to extend the life of them for another year or so. The next time I blog, odds are I'll have something to say about the pleistocene of South Dakota.

Putting an end to it

In the opinion section of the Gateway (the University of Alberta student's union run news paper) there has been something of a debate each week regarding evolution and creation. Since for some reason, the debate is now even being advertised on my site, I figured I'd just try to put an end to it. The fact of the matter is that anyone who has ever become embroiled in such a debate has inadvertently come to the inevitable conclusion that you will never convince someone of a different opinion than yourself that they are wrong and that they will never convince you. You walk away from the conversation wondering how the other person could be so closed minded and blind to the obvious truth. People are stubborn. Pretty much once they've reached the age of 15 their ideologies are set and only life altering experiences will ever change it. A person may become more complacent over time about their ideology and this may lead that person having less of an impact on the ideology of the next generation, but the persons themselves are rather unchanging. It's like evolution is suppose, any individual is stuck in their genetic place. Small changes can occur but its just a matter of how much impact that individual has on the next generation that determines the eventual outcome of the population. The population will fluctuate with changes in the environment, but without the introduction of novel features or a stark need for change, there will be a fair amount of stasis in the relative proportions of ideologies in the population.

piling up

Right now I'm supposed to be working on either of two systematics papers, one on gerrids one on conodons, or an applied ethics paper, or even a paper on the value of amature field assistants to paleontology (particularly in day digs programs) or an interpretation of a wheeler diagram that my strat team constructed this last week. I haven't started any of them. And frankly I really don't feel like doing any of them today. What I'd really like to do is scan through my annotated bibliography of dinosaur paleopathology and find articles relevant to predator-prey relations (for somebody elses research project) or look up the mineralology of dinosaur bone from different locals or continue my ongoing quest to measure all of the relevant qualities of all the fenestrae in theropod skulls. After all, I haven't even been given the topics for my ethics paper, I don't have the references for my conodonts paper and I didn't print out my trees for my gerrids systematics paper. That prety much leaves the Day Digs paper and the wheeler diagram write up. Being that the wheeler diagram is due sooner, in the spirit of procrastination, I think I'll work on the Day Digs paper instead. University would be great if you got to do your own research, on topics that hold your interest. I've been told that grad school is like that (but not by grad students or profs) so I guess I'll have to wait until i've got a degree before people will just let me research what I like in peace.

A call for Wikipedia submissions

I was surfing wikipedia and was shocked to find that there was practically no discussion of marine reptiles. A search for Euryapsida doesn't even turn up any results. I'm imploring anyone with expertise on marine reptiles (even extant ones) to submit to the site. Honestly, how are people supposed to learn if we don't teach them. I set up a stub site that has a basic break down of the marine reptiles into diapsids (mosasaurs, marine crocs and marine iguanas) and Euryapsids (plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and placodonts) there is of course a plethora of others but I don't have the time to fill them in.

I hate the people who advertize on this site

When I've looked at the top of the screen on my blog yesterday and today, I was shocked to see ads for creation science, 7 day creation, bible help etc. HAVE I MENIONED THESE AT ALL? I'm a devout atheist and usually talk about biology, paleontology or ethics, not creationism. I usually don't even give creationism the time of day. If you are interested in these bible help places, please don't link to them from my site. It's just embarassing.

Free Vert Paleo Papers

I found a great web site that is giving away free copies of recent paleotnological papers in pdf format. I highly recomend visiting the site soon. I don't think that it is quite in agreement with international copyright laws and may be shut down soon. So all of you Paleo Pirates should head over now! the addresss is :
www.geocities.com/mesozoicdinosaurs/dinopapers.html#dinosaurs