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.