Moving Mountains

Ideas and events may come and go
But memories and rocks tend to accumulate

There are objects piled through the years
That tempted others to procrastinate

Gradually the chaos has begun to wane
But only gardenite seems to evaporate

after reading "The Little Prince"

From the seeds I sow,
no flowers grow;
and even baobabs have fowers.

My ears are too long
and for me the stars sing no song
though I could be tamed in just a few hours

Shadows and Dust

It's not a very good picture, but fore some reason I like it.

Dancing Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs are a common topic of illustration for artists. Unfortunately though, while accurate in many respects, the representations of dinosaur (particularly Theropod and Ornithopod) stance has stood uncorrected for some time. The problem is that these dinosaurs are depicted as being perpetually on the tips of their toes. Although this way of doing things works out well enough for we mammals, particularly our relatives among the carnivore and ungulate clades, dinosaurs just didn’t hold to it. Figure 1 shows some of the typical examples of dinosaurs going around like ballerinas on point.

All of these were taken from the dinosuricon (sans permission, so don’t tell them) and depict mostly theropods moving at a walking pace, or even standing still as in figure 1-5. While running it would be acceptable for one of these creatures to be at some point during the stride supported by a single toe. This is because the animal’s momentum allow it to maintain a forward motion that outweighs the downward pull of gravity. It is even possible that for some of the smaller theropods, that they could be caught mid stride with neither foot touching the ground. Artists don’t typically do this because it takes more skill to make it look like the subject is a part of its environment when no even a foot is touching it. Since these dinosaurs are not moving at a hurried pace, it is reasonable to suspect that they should stand more naturally.
The natural stance of any animal can be determined by comparing its footprints to its skeleton, using modern analogues as guides. Birds, usually rheatites, are the best analogues we have for bipedal, non-avian dinosaurs. Humans are just all wrong for this purpose. As one can see from figure two, birds lack a heel pad and walk with the full toe on the ground until the other foot it planted, and the first is lifted up. Looking at dinosaur tracks, figure 3, we see the same pattern. The whole of each toe leaves its mark and what looks like a heel pad is only seen in deep prints that would have brought the metatarsus in contact with the mud. Don’t misunderstand. Dinosaurs and birds were still digitigrade, since they didn’t use the heel for walking as we humans do, but they certainly didn’t go around on the tips of their toes like an antelope. If this somehow diminishes dinosaurs, making them seem less agile or graceful, then so be it; “accuracy before tact” as they say.

Answer: Frequently

Desperate Much?

I got an e-mail today from Disneyland wantinto to know if I'd like to come back and work for them. It's been 4 years since I worked there, and I haven't had anything nice to say since then. Disneyland has a really high employee turn over rate and most leave the job a little more jaded and a little less magical than they went in. To be fair though, I still use puns adapted from the Jungle Cruise ride. By the way, if a disney employee refers to you as a customer instead of a guest, it means that they think you're shoplifting. I accidentally did that and almost got security called in.
"A customer on the floor is looking for a quintuple extra large Donald Duck shirt"
"really? a customer?"
"Yes a customer, quintuple extra large, that's what I said. Do we even make shirts that big?"
"Not yet, and I think you mean guest."
"Oh yeah! guest; not a customer. Seriously though, quintuple extra large."

Ganges Grasses Grazed by Giant Gorgons

I think a few paleobotonists need to get off their asses and get to India to find some body fossils of grasses. According to a recent article distinctive silica crystals, characteristic of grasses, have been identified in dinosaur coprolites (fossil poop). Normally I'm fairly sceptical of evidence that has passed through the gut of a multi-ton herbivore but phytoliths (the silica crystals) are pretty straight forward and you can find them if you are intrepid enough to dig through modern herbivore dung. What bothers me here is a few things; that nobody has found cretaceous age grass pollen or body fossils. They've found close relatives of hops and hemp from that age, but no kentucky blue grass. Another thing that bothers me is that the article claimed that the dung belonged to a sauropod, a conclusion reached by the proximity of the pile to a skeleton of that type. It could very well be a sauropod dropping, but one has to remember that a dinosaur will leave behind many poops, but only one skeleton with the odds of them being preserved together rather low. Furthermore, one should not conclude that grazing on nutrient rich, rapidly growing grass was what enabled the sauropods to reach their terrible size. Quite the contrary really. Sauropods reached tremendous size in the early Jurassic, more than 70 million years before the first grasses. The fact that sauropods ate everything was more likely the selective pressure that allowed grasses to come into existence.

Ebay Update

Thankfully, nobody bid on the tyrannosaur mentioned below. For now at least it has been spared.

Greater Ebay Sadness

After re-examining the picture of the Juvenile "T. rex" skull for sale on ebay, I have serious doubts that it is T. rex at all and not some other species; perhaps one new to science. My reasons are many. First of all, the area of the maxilla below the antorbital fenestra is much thicker in its inferior-superior aspect than well known adult specimens. Also, since the nasals and premaxilla is present, you can see that the nares are placed much to far superiorly with its posterior margin almost directly superior to the anterior margin of the maxilary finestra. In adults, the nares and the maxilary fenestra form an almost horizontal line. Because of the superior placement of the nares, the anterior portion of the premaxilla is not a thin splint as in adults and other tyrannosaurids (including juveniles) but rather a thick crest. The number of maxilary alveolae seems to be right, as are the shapes of both the antorbital and maxillary fenestrae. It seems to be lacking a distinctive pit in the corner of the lacrymal, but this could be age related. The inferior margin of the orbit is more constricted than in T. rex (though this could be due to the angle of the photo) but the postorbital seems to be equally robust. In all, the skull of this animal is boxier than adult T. rex which is contrary to current ideas about how tyrannosaurs aged in general. Typically they start out with very lean faces, which get boxier as they age. I propose that this is a new species of Tyrannosaurus which will never make it into the scientific literature. If T. rex was the wolf of the late cretaceous, then this was the bull dog.

And price climbs higher

The partial skull of a tyrannosaurid is for sale on ebay. This isn't the first time that somebody has taken a T-rex to the auction block, but it's the first time I've seen this quality of a specimen for sale on ebay. At the time of my posting this, the bid was at nearly $300,000. The T-rex named Sue went for 8.3 million at Sothebys a few years ago, and that was for the entire skeleton. This isn't even 5 percent of a skeleton, it's just part of the skull and a rib. And I know that no museum would pay that much for it. After all, the current bid is already close to the value Phil Currie's research chair here at the U of A for the next 5 years.

GOGIRA!!!

First hobbits and now this. My collegues in paleo are playing way too much to the comercial nick names. Before "Sue" the T. rex, fossils didn't get nick names, they got accession numbers. A paleontologist could look at a Tyrannosaur skeleton and say "hey, I think that's MOR555." Now a fossil has been dubbed Godzilla and I cringe. What ever happened to media taking the dinosaur name and making it popular. Fifty or so dinosaur wouldn't be called raptors if it weren't for the original Velociraptor. Where's the dignity gone?

Tasmanian Family Robinson

Swiss Family Robinson was not quite the book that I expected it to be. My expectations were based on the disney movie, which I should have anticipated being much more tame than the actual book. Still, even key things were different. For example, the family spent only one summer in the tree house and the rest of their habitation on the island in a salt cave. What amused me though was that Weiss made no attempt to accurately portray any particular island. Instead, he set the family down on an island that was home to creatures from all seven continents. Once there, the family ate everything. Their diet was as varied as that of the tasmanian devil in the Warner Brother's cartoons. Among the things I can recall off the top of my head, they ate: agoutis, antelope, apes, bears, beavers, beef, a boa constrictor, boars, buffalo, bull frogs, cabibara, canadian roughed grouse, clams, ducks, doves, eels, flamingos, geese, goats, grubs, herring, jackals, kangaroos, lions, lobsters, monkeys, mussels, ostrich, oysters, parakeets, parrots, peccaries, penguins, pigeons, pigs, porcupine, rats, salmon, sea turtle, sheep, sturgeon, swans, tigers, tortoise, seals, sea lions, walrus, whales, zebras and even rabbits. Not only this, but the island was somehow naturally stocked with every imaginable edible plant. Or, if it did not grow naturally, the ship that the family had been wrecked on had either saplings or seeds to be planted. The afterward to the book describes how the book was based on campfire stories told by the author's father for the purpose of igniting his son's interest in natural history. If anything, it seems that the authors interest in nature was a gastronomical one.

The good thing about Kansas hating evolution

There's always a cynical way of turning even bad news into good news. The Kansas state school board decided that science = philosophy thereby allowing for the complete (and I hate to use the turm, but...) brainwashing of the children in its public schools. My solution for all of this is to let them go on hating evolution. I'll just go to people who live atop the fossil rich Niobrara chalk and offer to remove those pesky, hurtful fossils from their land so that they don't "damage" the fragile minds of their children. This will inevitably backfire, but at least I'll have a good laugh about it.

Democracy Inaction

I completely forgot about the California special elections until I was reminded on Saturday. I don't even know what most of the propositions are for. It's not even apathy this time; I actually care what happens in my home state. I just forgot.
Californians seem to screw themselves over more and more every year, or at least make lateral moves on the pain scale. The problem is that of the some 30 million Californians, less than half vote and even fewer are well informed. I should have voted. I'm not being a very good American.

How to Tell your Friends from the Apes

If your friends are like mine, then there is no difficulty in this matter. If your friends are like other people I’ve met though, it is a bit trickier. The book by Will Cuppy that shares its title with this post is in every respect just like his other books. The humor is dry and witty and pertains entirely to natural history, sex and academics 1. “How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes”2 was actually the first book in Cuppy’s animal series. His only previous book was “How to be a Hermit.”3 Cuppy’s books, which also include “How to Attract the Wombat” and “How to Become Extinct”4 actually have nothing to do with the how to’s of their titles but are rather collections of humorous sketches about animals. As often as not, the qualities attributed to the animal under investigation are identical to somebody that the author was familiar with. When looked at solely in terms of personality, it is perhaps too difficult to distinguish vast hordes of human beings from simian5 counterparts.

1. Though seldom to any two of the three naturally coincide
2. Originally published in 1931. Cuppy worked as a book reviewer and managed to convince a few of his book reviewer friends that the public aught to purchase and possibly even read his books.
3. A book that finally convince me that I was indeed a natural hermit.
4. “The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody” was published posthumously and was given a title by somebody who was apparently ignorant of Cuppy’s other works.
5. or avian or reptilian or piscian or even molluscan