Paleo Poetry

What follows after the break is the remainder of the paleontologically inspired poetry that I came up with last night. I had been meaning to take notes on Aristotle's Historia Animalia but found my diversion much more rewarding.
Three attempts at verse:

Ode to an Elasmosaur
Among the many creatures
Who've lived in the briney deep
the plesiosaur is very special
for his neck is quite unique.

It's as long as it is slender
and supports a tiny head;
The head supports his many teeth
that fill fishes full of dread

The length of the neck is what's peculior,
as its not shared by seals, turtles or the whales.
What is this adaptation for?
It's so they can look at their own tails.

Plea From an Inverted Turtle

I am not dead.
I simply cannot right myself
as I am flipped upon my back.
I was put in this position by my rival
in a sudden sneak attack.
He did it because he got it in his head
that to be this way would be deleterious to my health
and thus my chances of survival.

The problem as I see it
arises from my shell
which keeps my feet a pointing skywards
and thus me from moving all that well.

And if you help me get right side up today
it's a courtesy I'd someday be willing to repay.

Reflections from a Mosasaur
"I am not a dinosaur,"
states a lizard gliding through the surf
"I have been much happier
For abandoning the turf.

A land lubber I am not
I much prefer the waves
going about upon the shore
is no way for a Clidastes to behave.

My yellow scales stay bright and clean
And my body long and lean
And if you wonder why I abhor the shore,
The reason's plainly seen.

I enjoy eating till I'm busting
Things a dinosaur finds disgusting
Since I could wish
For no greater dish
Than of calamary or some fish."

A Permian Parable

A Dimetrodon and an Edaphosaur
One day happened to have a chat
Wherein the Dimetrodon remarked
That they were both getting rather fat.

"The issue with my waistline
Has its roots within my head.
And if you come a little closer
I'll explain just what I mean."

For a moment the Edaphosaur hesitated,
his feeble brain gave him an inckling of dread,
but since they both had sails upon their backs
he figured that they must have temperments equally serene.

"Obesity is caused by caring for our dentition"
continued the Dimetrodon, who smiled as he said
"A little closer perhaps and you'll see
That I keep every single tooth of mine exceptionally clean."

Now, an Edaphosaur is quite stupid
And he is easy to mislead
So that while examining his companion's teeth
he became trapped in between.

Thus by eating other poor pelycosaurs
The Dimetrodon keeps himself well fed.
He gives the appearance of being docile,
but is not what he seems.

Science News

- Snake!
I evidently made a mistake by not applying to do research in Australia. They've aparently found another large, non-macrostomatan (what you typically think of when you think snake) snake. From the picture below a couple of really cool things pop out at me right away. First, the quadrate looks rather similar to the c-shaped condition of mosasaurs. The other thing is that the trigeminal foramen in the prootic of the braincase is open anteriorly and would have been bound on that side by the descending flange of the parietal. I'll grant that this second feature could just be an artifact of breakage, but if not, then it represents the primitive condition also seen in Wonambi. Another cool thing is the jugal. In varanids, the lower half of the orbital margin is made up of a robust jugal. It appears to be the same case here. In a python, there is no jugal. In the defense of people who say that mosasaurs are not the sister taxon to snakes however, this snake has big nasals and small premaxillae (the other way around in varanoids), the frontal-parietal suture is pointed backwards rather than being straight and I see no supratemporal listed in the diagram.

Yurlunggur:


Python



-Immunologists realize that lab mice have two thymuses (thymice?), not one.
I honestly can't blame them too much for missing this little organ for the last two hundred or so years. It's about the size of the head of a pin and looks like a lymph gland. My only concern is that this might be an abaration of using lab mice rather than wild mice. Lab mice are all genetically identical. It's like there are 80 million clones. If however a mutation were to rise in one of the breeding stocks of lab mice (say, for an extra thymus), it wouldn't really get noticed and it might be coinsidence that this particular research team got mice from this mutated stock. In humans, the number of thymuses is incosistant, with most people having one in the chest and some having an additional one in the neck as with these mice. I'd like to see if a wild mouse has an extra thymus.

-Leave it to scientists to find a way to grow tits in the lab.
Naturally, the report only talked about the prospects of this research for treatment of breast cancer and not augmentation.

-Plants produce greenhouse gas
I was forced in high school to memorize the Kreb cycle, the Calvin cycle and several other cycles and pathways that I've since forgotten the name of. But aparently there is a new one that produces methane under normal atmospheric conditions. I can't wait for the conservatives to jump all over this and say that cutting down the rainforest will help eliminate this greenhouse gas.

-Further evidence that my Y-chomosome is mostly junk DNA
Any guy who has taken genetics or who has a girlfriend that has, has been told that only a very small part of the gender determining Y-chomosome actually does anything; specifically regulate the production of androgens and of hair on the earlobes. The rest of the chromosome is there so that it can line up with the X during myocis. To do this, there has to be some similarity to the X, otherwise the two wouldn't come together. Aparently though, this hasn't stopped repeated, massive mutations in the Y-chromosome that further show that you can do a whole lot to it (except have more than one) without deleterious effects.

-Hummingbirds capable of watching scientists
A study conducted on rufus troated hummingbirds provides evidence that the birds are able to remember now only what something looks like and where it is, but when they last saw it. This was done by refilling artificial flowers with nectar at specific intervals. The hummingbirds made a pattern of visiting the flowers right after they were filled. So either they can remember things well, or can deduce that everytime a person goes to a fake flower, it gets refilled.

I (and a few other Albertan Paleontologists) owe Nick Longrich an apology.
Nick didn't make the cover of Scince magazine, nor did he contribute to the article that it relates to. He did however give a talk on the exact same kind of convergence on the semi-aquatic lifestyle in a mesozoic non-eutherian mammal last September at a conference at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Nick is known among his friends (and we really do consider ourselves friends of his) for being able to talk your ear off for extended periods of time and for drawing dramatic conclusions from only a little evidence. In September he tried to convinse us that didelphadon was semi-aquatic and had a beaver-style, flattened tail. I and a few others were skepticle because he only had two, relatively unrelated pieces of evidence. First was his recognition of some flattened mammalian tail vertebrae, the second was a well known set of robust jaws. The two have never been found together. But this new chinese discovery makes it look like Nick might have been right after all.

Photographic update

It's amazing how quickly one can go through more than 256 megs of memory when taking pictures.
Here are a few for the people who don't check the "my photos" link in the sidebar.

These Moroccan mosasaur jaws which for sale by the hundreds in Tucson are all fakes. The teeth are genuine Prognathodon teeth, but they aren't really set in jaws. They are composites composed of teeth and ribs set in a matrix of sand and adhesive.


Some people at the Tucson show got a little creative with their fossils; mixing paleontology and art.


There was some very cool stuff for sale there. This is a mongolian theropod. I don't know what kind, but its probably a troodontid. With the exception of missing a little bit of it's tail, it's a perfect specimen.


of course, there were fish too.


for those of you who are fans of the lizards, this one is from the green river and cost only one quarter as much as the above dinosaur.


an unintentional goatse near the one of the host hotels in Tucson


this one is from the Quartzite show. They're supposed to be dolfins, but givin that they are green and have a virtical rather than horizonal tail fluke, they must be ichthyosaurs.


more recently, I've been able to take some excellent macro photos of the abundant lizards in the painted desert east of Cameron, AZ.


unfortunately, the climate in the painted desert is extremely dry. Consiquentially, there is no wood for me to make a fire with, which has lead me to purchase a propane camp stove now that I'm in civilization again.

For the future, there will typically be a one month lag between when I take a picture and when it ends up on-line since I max out my free flickr account very quickly and am anxious to get as many photos online so as to clear up memory on my USB key.

Survey

1. If you had to choose between being blind, deaf or never being able to walk again, which would you choose?
I'd choose to be deaf. I've never seen a scientific journal in brail, it's difficult to study microscopic anatomical features by touch and I've only ever heard of one guy doing field work who couldn't walk.

2. If you could have any suite of super powers (those existing in combination in an established character: eg. Wolverine has claws and healing, Superman has strength, speed, x-ray vision, etc.) which would you choose?
Jedi powers: telepathy + telekinesis + light saber. I'd so abuse them.

3. One physical feature that you don't like about yourself and can't easily change.
I have stubby fingers. It is perhaps why I'm not a professional jazz saxophonist.

4. One physical feature that you like about yourself and isn't likely to change.
my blue-grey eyes

5. Three physical features that you look for in the opposite sex (amend this question for your own preferences)
a. elegant neck
b. slim (preferably weighs the same as or less than me)
c. brunette or red head

6. Three personality traits saught in the opposite sex.
a. intellectual/ nerdy : must be well read
b. cynical/ sarcastic : not necessarily the same but usually go together
c. extrovert in some way. When two hermits get together, they soon seperate.

7. If you could not have your ideal profession (paleontologist in my case) then what is your plan B?
Get my graduate gemologist degree (one semester) and appraise gemstones, especially diamonds, for a living.

8. Which do you relate to more, Calvin or Hobbes?
Hobbes, because he views humanity as inately flawed and is much more sensible and reasonable than Calvin. Furthermore, others go to him for academic help (though his answers are as much smart sounding BS as truth). Also, he is fulling willing if not eager to go exploring. I do however get along with Calvin types, which I suppose is reasonable to expect.

9. How many states, provinces and countries have you been to?
States: 18; AK, AZ, CA, CO, NV, FL, HI, ID, MD, MN, MT, ND, NY, SD, UT, VA, WA, WY
Provinces: 3; BC, AB, MB
Countries: 3; USA, Mexico, Canada

10. Three things that you'd like to do before dieing.
a. write a best seller
b. be the owner and opperator of my own museum
c. anything that makes it so that school children will be forced to learn about me; famous or infamous.

11. Favorite personal possessions.
a. my entire fossil collection - I don't divide that kind of thing up
b. my fedora

In the Field: week 1

I spent the last week in the painted desert, particularly the Chilne and Kayenta formations, of Arizona, about 50 miles north of Flagstaff. It's awesome! The whole of the Chilne formation in this area seems to be a petrified forest. There are large trees in situ and fragments of petrified wood everwhere. It did however take me a few days to find any bone material and it's rather difficult for me to tell where the boundary between the Chilne and the Kayenta formations actually occurs, so I'm not always sure if I'm in the upper Triassic or lower Jurassic. Two of the days without finding bone don't entirely count. On one day I was asaulted by a sand storm that kept me pent up in my van most of the day¹ and on another I spent without success while trying to find a known bonebed in the Kayenta formation². The last couple of days however have been a great success, wherein I've found one in situ partial skeleton that I've begun excavating and one microvertebrate site from which I've recovered over 20 vertebrae, several partial ribs and four teeth as well as several whole and countless fragmentary osteoderms³. I can't be sure, but I think that most of the material that I've found belonged to a group of large plant eating reptiles called Aetosaurs. However, it is just as possible that the osteoderms that I'm finding belong to one of the other archosaurs that were alive at the time.
My most significant discovery so far however is of a piece of petrified wood from a tree sized lycopod, which I think might be stigmaria or a very worn down lepidodentron. I didn't bring my paleobotony notes with me, so it's difficult to say. The reason that this is significant is that this group of plants is thought to have died out completely by the middle permian. The fact that I found this in either late Triassic or early Jurassic rocks means that the group lasted more than 60 million years longer than previously thought and in fact survived a mass extinction that killed off more than 90% of all life on earth at the end of the Permian!

1. Two things learned that day were: A. never try to brush your teeth during a sand storm. B. Aviator sunglasses are not an adequate substitute for safety goggles when going for a walk in a sand storm.

2. The site was 10 km east of my camp site and consiquentially meant that by the time I got there I only had an hour of prospecting before I had to turn around and go back. I still didn't get back until after dark. While descending a hill in the dark I fell and hurt my right knee; something that's slowed me down every day since. Bad show all around.

3. If you don't know what an osteoderm is, think of the armor plates on the back of an alligator or crocodile. They're modified scales with a bony center. Unfortunately, just about everybody in the triassic had them, making them unhelpful for identification purposes.

Tucson, Day 7

I saw the last of the show today and was kind of disappointed that the remainder was almost entirely minerals. It's nice and shiny, but it doesn't pique my interest. As with the fossil dealers, alot of the minerals were the same kind of specimens, the same quality and from the same mines, just in the booths of different dealers.
I'm skipping town tomorrow, right after a trip to the post office to send all the stuff I've picked up to my parents for storage. Sorry Mom, sorry Dad, but the museum has to be put somewhere. There is still a chance for me to pick thinks up for people who are interested so long as you call me before 2:00pm mountain time.

Paleo-News

A new primitive Tyrranosauroid has been described. This time it has a crest on it's head reminiscent of a pterosaur. They're calling it Guanlong wucaii. As with other crested theropods, the standing hypothesis is that the crest was used for sexual display. Furthermore, following recent trends in popular analysies to do on specimens, a histological thin section was made of the (presumably) fibula and was used to determine that this animal was in its 12th year of life, while another specimen found associated with it was only 1/2 as old. Unfortunately, this discover, as well as others, came too late to make it into the most recent edition of the Dinosauria and will likely not be added as an adendum to The Relationships of Basal Theropod Dinosaurs.

Advertisement

Guy's, Valentine's day is coming up and if you want to get your special lady some fine jewlery, I'm the one to talk to. If you send me a request, I'll find it here in Tucson for considerably less than you'd see at a boutique. I recommend pearls. To get ahold of me for requests, call my cell at (714) 767-2886. I'll send you a picture of the item, a price, and if you like it I'll ship asap.

Tucson, Day 6

Didn't do a whole lot today; contradicted what I said yesterday about not buying anymore moroccan fossils. I just couldn't resist. I bought one jaw segment that looked like it might be from Globidens (it wasn't) and two small blocks that I realized fit together, giving me two nearly complete dentaries; $10 per block, so $30 total. Yesterday I saw two cleaned dentaries of about the same size for sale for $175 and $225 each. It's definately worth my time to prep out the specimens myself. I'm still trying to figure out if the bone fragment associated witht the pterygoid that I cleaned up the other day is an epipterygoid or something else.
Other purchases: 1 dried Draco (the kind that glides using an expanded rib cage) lizard $40, 1 skink skeleton $25, 1 book on the ammonites and other cephalopods of the Pierre Shale formation $20. The guy who was selling the modern lizard material said that he could also hook me up with indonesian monitor lizard skulls, possibly a whole skeleton, and various snake skeletons on the cheap.
In other news, I dropped by the various gem expos around town. I was like one of pavlov's puppies hearing the bell. I saw gems so gorgeous that I wouldn't dare desbribe some of them, lest I do them injustice. One that I will describe though is an emerald that measured roughly an inch and half by 3/4 of an inch. It was a brilliant stone, moderately clear, but of a pale green. It had to be over 150 carats. It almost makes me want to take a semester of gemology to become a master appraiser.

Tucson, Day 5

For me and for now, the buying of fossils has ceased. I decided against buying a badly crushed Moroccan Prognathodon rostrom even though I talked the dealer down to nearly half of his original asking price. Most people decide not to buy something that they want because of a bad experience with people selling it or because they can't afford it, I decided not to buy it just because of the good experience I had with another set of dealers of Moroccan fossils. Until now, it'd been my experience that these dealers are shifty and fake as much of the vertebrate material as they find and that they were ignorant to nearly every aspect beyond the name and price of the specimens that they sell. I'll admit, I even got a little racist; generalizing all dealers from Morocco as generally hurtful to the scientific process. The people with Sahara Overland however are quite different. One frenchman with the company was quite knowledgeable and even knew Dr. Caldwell, read his papers, as well as just about all other literature on vertebrate paleontology in north Africa. In fact, I listened to a rather passionate tirade about how North American scientists are throwing away research opportunities buy not working with them.
The other people were also helpful; one Texan even flat out told me that I shouldn't buy any of his "complete" skulls, calling them "Ribosaurs." As a consiquence, Sahara Overland and it's sister company Doc Fossils, are the only Moroccans that I have or will do business with. When I bought the trilobites in Quartzite, it was from Sahara Overland. Yesterday I bought a section of Halisaurus (a mosasaur; I'm guessing on the genus based on its small size and strongly recurved teeth) pterygoid and a parietal and partial frontal from a (I think) Prognathodon. Tomorrow I'll buy an isopod from them which I'll send up to a friend in Canada who is studying them currently.
As a consiquence of my good experience, I have decided that my next great adventure will be to Morocco. Naturally, this trip may have to wait until after grad school, but I will not buy any large specimen until I've been to Morocco and had the chance to satiate my facination with fossil reptiles. Until then, the US is my hunting ground.
On another note, I've had some success in interviewing people about the rock and mineral trade. The consensus so far, among rock, mineral and fossil dealers alike, is that paleontologists have their heads up their collective ass with regards to policy for collecting on public lands.

Tucson, Day 3

Today was a good day. Althought I spent alot of money, I feel that I got some awesome specimens as well as some good information on where to find more. In particular, I bought 3 lizard jaws, two turtle jaws, a small turtle skull, three or four large salamander vertebrae, and about 40 snake vertebrae - all from the late pleistocene of Florida. I also bought 4 Branchiosaur larvae for $100. I also picked up a tiny Keichousaur and a section of pleistocene alligator maxilla that shows replacement teeth growing in under the older teeth. Most of all though, I'm happy to finally have found some affordable lizard material. I'll grant that it isnt' that old and doesn't say anything about the origin of snakes, but it is a start to figuring out changes in squamate biogeography in North America during the latest cenozoic.
Tomarrow I anticipate spending more. One of the most unusual things I found today was a collection of Miocene partial penguin skulls. Given how odd these are, I'm compelled to spend a little money on one. I also found a Moroccan mosasaur brain case and another fragmentary skull for a good price. On the other hand, I've been hearing some very compelling arguments for me to ignore the dealers here and just go to Morocco myself. That however is a trip that will have to wait.

Tucson, Day 2

Today, I found more of what I was looking for; specifically interesting fossil lizards. Not only that, but they are cheaper today ranging from only $1,800 to $10,000 for whole lizards and $300 for a mosasaur braincase. The most interesting things of today were a partial Agialosaur (close relative of mosasaurs) and a small, possibly jouvenile Archialosaur (also closely related to mosasaurs) from Brazil. If I hadn't used up all of my Flickr uploads for the month of February, there would be some pictures here to illustrate what I'm talking about. In the mean time though, I'm going to e-mail some pictures to Dr. Caldwell to see what he thinks of them.

Tucson, Az

The word of the day is disappointment. I had envissioned the Rock, Mineral and Fossil show at Tucson to be some sort of magical land where dealers coffer their earthen wares at prices close to what you would pay in the region that these fossils are from; a place where I could find fantastic deals and specimens worthy of study. This was not the case.
I'll grant that there are some spectacular items here. Among these are ichthyosaurs, Psytacosaurs, Eocene bats and birds and more ammonites and trilobites than you can shake a stick at. The fact of the matter is however that everybody knows what their fossils are worth and are selling them as such. We're not talking cost of replacement, but ebay, open market price. Before I came out here I looked at people's photos from previous years. Since everything has a price tag on it, it was easy for me to guage how much I would expect to spend. It seems that the price of two of the things that I was interested in buying has close to dectupled (10 fold increase) in the last couple of years. Where photos from previous years showed Sinohydrosaurs and Keichiosaurs for below $50, with some as low as $25, the price now starts at $150 and goes up to $400 for small ones. Incidently, very small and very large specimens are worth more; as though most of these creatures consistantly died at the same age.
The thing that I've been looking all day for is lizard material. Alas, I only found one non mosasaurian lizard. It was from the Liaonang formation of China (same as sinohydrosaurus). I got a picture but didn't have time to reference anything to find out what it was. The cool thing was that it had skin impressions showing scute like scales on the tail. The only drawback was that they guy was asking $28,000.00 for it. He was only asking $25k for his complete theropods (excluding birds which were less) and about 25 hundred for psitacosaurs.
On the positive side, I did manage to get two of the largest Paleophis vertebra I've seen for free. The guy was selling mixed fossils from morocco by the pound, and the vertebrae were too light for his scale. Consiquently, he just gave them to me. Another gem of a find was a miocene snake vertebra from Florida.
I just hope that tomorrow is more rewarding.

New Phone Number

If people want to get ahold of me by phone, my new number is (714) 767-2886.
I changed so I wouldn't get charged roaming or for night or weekend calls. Night is from 7 pm to 7 am. Not only that, but my parents are paying for it since it only costs them $10 per month to add me to their plan.

Neo Con Mom

My parents keep getting more and more conservative. They've bought in completely to the "freedom in exchange for security" mentality. It's a major difference in paradigms; so much so that nothing I ever say would be able to convince them otherwise. We just have different views of what is important. I opened with comments about the Boing boing article about it costing 15 million dollars per person caught with the US - visitor program, and they rebutted with "it's worth it, because it's a deterrant. Besides, the cost per person caught will decrease as more people are caught."
Last night, the president announced a "22-percent increase in clean-energy research. . . to invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants, revolutionary solar and wind technologies, and clean, safe nuclear energy. (Applause.)¹ " I checked the department of energy website but couldn't find how much is currently being spent on these kinds of programs. I think that somebody should do a study on the cost effectiveness on reducing the probability of terror attacks, comparing spending on programs that increase security and those that reduce dependancy on middle eastern oil. I'll grant that such a study would probably cost $15 million, but that just means that we wont catch Cat Stevens the next time he tries to enter the USA.

1. That quotation is from the white house website. The "applause" was actually written into the transcript. I'm not sure if that means that people were scheduled to applause there, or actually cheered spontaneously there.

Wakey wakey, now assume the position.

This morning I was awoken at 5 am by six LA county Sheriff's deputies. The reason for this is that I was sleeping in my parents' rental house, which is (with the exception of some of my stuff) currently vacent so that some remodeling can be done before my parents move in. My next door neighbor saw my van, assumed that I was a squatter and called the cops. The real irony is that even when I was a squatter in an otherwise abandoned house, nobody called the cops.
I calmly explained to the officers that I was visiting from out of town an actually belonged there. When they examined my drivers lisence, one officer asked "visiting all the way from fullerton?" It was fortunate that still had my U of A student ID in my wallet and that my parents gave me keys rather than make me use the unlocked back door like everybody else (including all six deputies). They officers checked my record and left after concluding that I didn't have any outstanding warrents that they could arrest me for.
A few of things pissed me off while they were there though. First of all, one female officer unholstered her gun and used her free time to check out the laser sight on it. They didn't seem very amused by my reference to Pen and Teller's comedy rutine about hand guns with laser sights. The important thing however is that the gun should not have been unholstered while I was on the floor with my hands behind my back. She wasn't even pointing it at me, she was just sort of aiming down the hall. Another thing that pissed me off was that it took six officers to do this. That means that they called in backup before they even got to the house. Sure, they're covering their asses, but a few could have left once I was subdued (and by subdued, I mean woken up and placed on the floor). The last thing that piqued my annoyance was that one of first things that one officer said was "we're just checking out a complaint, we're not stepping on any of your rights." My little internal monologue responded "like hell you are" but I didn't think that it'd really help my situation to say it outloud. What has our society come to when officers say "we're not stepping on your rights" rather than actually telling me what my rights are.
It didn't occur to me until right after they left to ask what legal code allowed them to enter a home without permission from the owner or a warrent. Right before writing this entry, I called up the LA County sheriff's office, got the run around for 5 minutes and then was told that forced entry is at the discression of the dispatcher depending on the situation. I wonder what they would have done if I wasn't sleeping there, if I had just parked the van overnight. Would they have towed my vehicle from a private driveway without permission of the property owner? Ah yes, it's good to be back in the land of the free secure.

When did I become uncle Rico?

Similarities noticed between myself and the antagonist to Napoleon Dynomite:
1. When I'm not crashing with my relatives, I live in a van that's more than a decade old.
2. I currently have a rediculous looking, thin mustache.
3. I fixate on the past; not my past, but the past none the less. I also wish I had a time machine.
4. I sell things door to door; I sell fossils to people I know are dealers rather than crockery to neighbors, but it's still sales.
5. I have already heard one sibling say "Gaaa, quit eating all our food!"
In short, I'm one football and one camcorder away from being uncle Rico.

Also, for future reference, I'm going to be milking the fact that I now live out of my van for every pun, joke and reference I can get. You've been warned.

Fullerton, CA

It'll be interesting to see what a map of my path looks like when I'm done with my travels. I'm now at my parents' place in Fullerton, California. I really wasn't anticipating coming back here for a long time, but then I really wasn't anticipating buying a whale skeleton when I set out either. I made the purchase and there wasn't any more room in the van for me to sleep, so I went back north to Vegas, loaded up the van with as much of my stuff as I could and drove down to Orange county last night. Now my stuff is stored in my parents' atic and they've offered to feed and shelter me for a few days.
I e-mailed a photo to Dr. Barnes at the LA coutny Museum of Natural History to see if the skeleton might be significant, he told me that it was likely herpetocetine cetotheriid, which would make it special and rare and therefor worth aquaring for a museum. Unfortunatley the LA county museum has a policy agains purchasing fossils and so he recommended that I talk the dealer into donating it or buying it myself then donating it. There was no way the dealer was going to donate it for the tax write off since it and many other of his fossils were likely illegally collected. In the end I got the guy to knock $100 off his asking price and drove away with the whale for $400. I however do not make enough money to donate this fossil for tax purposes. Therefore, this whale, from the San Diego area is now the first large specimen in the Genlaw Museum of Natural History, a not yet accredited institution.
I'll be here in southern California for a few days; at least until I can sell some of the trilobites and ammonites I bought and take care of a snafu with my grad school applications. After that, it's on to Tucson, the Petrified forest and points east from there.

Waiting for answers about bad fossils

So I'm still in Quartzite. I'm waiting to hear back from Dr. Hans Larsson at McGill University about wether I'm correct in thinking that a couple of fossils being pushed by some Moroccan dealers are fakes. Actually, I think that they're composits; chimeras if you will. I think that the front end is of a mosasaur and that the back is of a crocodile. The dealers are selling them as crocodiles. Moroccans are sneaky when it comes to fossils. Alot of ammonites are really just carved bits of sandstone. A rediculous number of trilobites are either composits or total fakes. I'm waiting to hear back because I'd hate to be wrong about these fossils and miss out on a deal. The dealers are asking about $600 each, which for a mosasaur skull or a crocodile skull is cheap like borsht. Composits however have no place in museums and I'm only going after museum quality if I'm paying $600 a head.

Quartzite, AZ

George Lucas must have seen Quartzite, Arizona right before he envisioned Mos Isly space port. There are maybe fifteen or twenty permanent buildings and the rest are trailors, RV's and tents. I've spent a fair amount of money here ($345 USD so far) and I'm likely to spend alot more before the end of the day. As far as rocks, minerals and fossils go, there are about 6 countries represented here: the USA, Morocco, Madagascar, Argentina, Brazil and China. two things that I'm likely to buy are an incomplete whale skeleton and a crocodile skull. Both are Moroccan.
I've been sleeping in the van and the nights aren't too cold. Over the weekend I had the fortune of meeting a group called"sisters on the fly" which is a group of women who meet and travel the country. Mostly they just asked me about paleontology, but one fellow made sure to ask if I was a christian. Since I was sharing these people's food and camp fire, I decided not to alienate them, so I played appologetics. I said I was a christian and believed in God and evolution simultaneously. I gave Dr. Lamoureaux's class synopsis as my justification: A book of god's words (the bible) and a book of his works (nature) which are both true and that the bible is not a book of science. For my three minute schpeel I received acolades for having the best argument for believing in the two that they'd ever heard. Of course, I put on a slight southern twang and said things like "y'all" and "aint." I stayed warm and got fed, so I don't feel so bad about compromising my ardent atheistic beliefs.
I'll be leaving Quartzite soon. I haven't quite decided where I'll be going, but I've seen everything here and haven't been nearly as impressed as I was when I was a kid. If I buy the skulls, I'll go back to California to drop them off, if not, I'll just go up to northern Arizona, perhaps I'll see the grand canyon again.

Trip Update

I still haven't left Canada. I've been hanging out with some friends, first in Calgary and now in Drumheller. I did manage to get some prospecting in, but I didn't find anything particularly noteworthy; A few hadrosaur ribs, and a large number of unidentifieable fragments, so I haven't kept anything. The fact that we found some of the material in a park and the prevailing ethics of my two companions also detered me from collecting anything. I'll be leaving some time tomarrow to head back to Calgary briefly and then head south.

Making it Last

When one leaves a place, one often can't help feel that the time is full of lasts; last time you'll see a person, last time you'll have coffee at your favorite coffee shop, last time you'll get shot down by the barista at said coffee shop. . . etc. I went through this when I first left California. I say first left there because I've left there several times since. I go back to places I've been, I see people I knew, see people who knew me but who I've completely forgotten. The only thing that really does seem final is my residency. These places are no longer my home. I'll probably never be able to aford to live in California again, I don't have any cuase to live in Hot Springs, South Dakota, Drumheller is a place that I visit. You can never go home again. The place is still there, but it's not the same.

King Kong

Warning: This blog contains spoilers. Continue reading at the risk of being less surprised at the theater.

There is a good reason why pedantic biologists never make monster movies, we'd suck all the fun right out it. The special effects team for King Kong definately had their work cut out for them. But they rose to the task and I'd be surprised if they don't win the academy award for it. The textures of the creatures were great. Skin moved like skin, hair moved like hair, and things exploded pretty much how you'd expect them to. The problem however, is that although the special effects guys had some awesome physics engines to produce realistic textures and movements, they obviously had to through out any consideration of size.
Size is a serious constraint on movement and how an animal must be designed. For example, after the band of heros has been chased by every dinosaur on Skull Island, they are dropped down a ravine where they are attacked by giant bugs. Not just made up bugs, but enormous crickets, worms, tailless whip scorpions, cave spiders and other arthropods that I didn't imediately recognize. Except for enlarged jaws and claws, the proportions of each of these bugs was true to the original creature. However, if you scale up a bug, it would be too heavy to support its own weight. The largest land arthropod ever was a millipede that was about a foot wide and five or six feet long. It got around by having dozens of legs to hold itself up. The reason that one to one (or isometric) scaling up doesn't work is that a body's weight increases proportionately to the volume (a cubic function) and the muscle streangth increases proportionally to the cross sectional area of the muslce. Therefore, for a doubling of all dimensions, the weight increases 8 times, while the streangth only 4. The giant bugs would have likely even crushed themselves under their own weight, much less be able to climb down walls and leap onto the face of Adrien Brody.
With this in mind, Kong would have been much different too. He would have much less resembled a gorilla than the primate equivalent of a large ungulate. He most certainly would not have been able to jump around or slip around on a frozen pond. Remember, the weight of an animal is distributed over the area of its feet (and in this case knuckles). Therefore, Kong would have either had to have much much larger feet, or something more columnar and elephantine.
The other problem that size imposes on the creatures of Skull island is that large animals typically don't persist on small islands. Normally one sees pygmies rather than giants. It would have been a much different movie if Ann Darrow was abducted by a troupe of pygmie gorillas. Islands can't support large creatures. They quickly run out of food. I suppose that this might explain why everything was so eager to eat the humans. I really don't see spiders living peacefully with crickets, waiting for something to fall into their den.
Now for the dinosaur review: Peter Jackson obviously went for artsy rather than accurate. Ever dinosaur was an homage to some monster movie of the 1930's. There is even a point where Ann Darrow is menased by nothing less than a giant rock iguana. That's right, the special effects guys made a computer version of one of the worst dinosaurs in movie history; an iguana with extra spikes glued to its back. There is a rather important scene where the men are all chased by a herd of sauropods through a steep walled canyon. Those that aren't crushed right away or when every dinosaur trips over one another at the end escape by running between the legs of the giants. Two problems here. First, a large sauropod could probably do a top speed of 10 miles an hour running. Second, if they did go as fast as they did on film, then every other thing in the gorge would have been crushed; the people, the stupid looking bug eyed raptor wanna-be's, everything. Nobody survives a buffalo stampede or an elephant stampede, sauropods should be no different. Here's the artsy thing though. These weren't just any sauropods, these were undouptably Brontosaurus'. If my dad reads this, he'll no doubt point out that he's been advocating the validity of Brontosaurus as a name since I first took an interest in dinosaurs and found out that it was't valid. Since Peter Jackson wanted this to be set at the same time as the original King Kong, he used the dinosaurs that they did. I can't even feel justified in calling them Camerasaurs, the body would be wrong. Simply, it's an Apatosaur body with a Camerasaur head. Therefore, it's a Brontosaurus.
As for T. rex, it was well done, though I seriously wasn't expecting three of them. I was concerned that they'd messed too much witht the teeth of the dinosaur since the one on the posters is quite snaggle toothed, but the two others had normal teeth. The crocodilian style skin does bother me (since they didn't have dermal armor like a croc) but this was homage to the claymation dinosaurs of the first film. What bothered me more though was that Kong was bitten several times without showing major damage. T. rex had the strongest bite of any animal ever known. Stronger than a great white, stronger than any of the other contendors for largest predator ever. It would essentially be equivalent to getting hit by a Buick with teeth the size of bananas. But Kong can't lose until the end, so he bests the tyrant lizards by tearing open those powerful jaws. If you were to ask me to bet on a gorilla vs. a hyena, I'd bet on the hyena. The gorilla's got reach and strength of arm, but the hyena, like T. rex has bone crushing jaws. One gorilla vs. 3 hyenas, and I'd still bet on the bone crushers.
Oh yeah, and Kong dies at the end but doesn't spat so much as land intact. He doesn't even crack pavement. I realize that a penny would reach critical velocity before hitting the street, but not a 25 foot gorilla.

Let Them Play!

According to a recent article, the United States, my home country that I love and will soon be returning to, has banned Cuba from playing in the inaugural World Baseball Classic. Not only this, but it was done through the Treasury department because of the stupid embargo that's over 30 years old. If you are a fan of baseball, or of freedom, then write either President Bush or a Senator or Congressman or even Allen Greenspan, and demand that Cuba be allowed to play.

The President:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461

The Department of the Treasury
office of the treasurer: same address as president
fax: (202) 622-6415

office of economic policy: Office of Assistant Secretary (202) 622-2200

Sick or Brilliant or Both

The proliferation of Creation Museums is getting out of hand. I came across the website of Creation Expeditions, a Florida based organization that runs tourist expeditions to fossil sites and does the whole thing in the context of Young Earth Creationism! This is just sick! Sick! People are being taught that shark teeth that they find in florida were burried at the same time as edmontosaurus skeletons in South Dakota. These people actually see the strata, know enough that different fossil assemblages occur in different rock units, but still preach that it's all one bed, layed down during Noah's flood. Here's the sickest part of all, they have a wickedly sweet little museum with fossils and a lab that I'd kill* a creationist to have. Not only do they have a perfectly preserved Edmontosaurus, skin and all, but they have one of the most complete Allosaur skulls in the world. In the world people! These things aren't exactly laying around for just any jackass to pickup! My only hope is that this is a ruse, a ploy by legitimate paleontologists to rake in the bucks by exploiting religious fundamentalism. If that's the case, then they are most certainly a group of twisted and deranged, but brilliant people. If not, then leave out the brilliant part.


*I would never actually use violence to aquire goods; litigation is much more effective.

A poem for wanderers of Buttes & Coulees

Dazzle, travel,
Rumble gravel,
Slip and slide,
Bumble, fumble,
Stumble, tumble
Enjoy the ride.

Haggis Hunt

Evidently, there exists more than one species of non-australian monotreme, a fact that i was hitherto unaware. As a matter of fact, the Balblair Stotch Wiskey company has an entire website devoted to the little beast. The first extant (extinct ones don't count) non-australian monotreme is the Easter Platypus of North America. The second, the one that I've only just found out about is the Haggis of Scottland. Haggis also happens to be a dish of meat and oatmeal stuffed into the innards of a sheep, but the resemblance to the primitive mammal ends with the size and general roundness. The Haggis differs from the Easter platypus in retaining the ancestrally flattened rostrom. This is quite contrary to what one would expect from the etymology of the name of our North American monotreme, since platypus literally means "flat faced." Contrary to some early speculation, neither non-australian monotreme bears any close relation to Rhinogrades, which are completely different. I suspect that all extant monotremes form a monophyletic group, which should also include the fossil Obdurodon.

Ebay Law Suit?

in my e-mail this morning:
"Congratulations! You have received this Notice because the records of eBay, Inc. indicate you are a current or former eBay account holder who has been deemed eligible to receive a payment from the class action settlement in accordance with eBay Litigation, Case No. 02 1227 JF PVT, pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose.In your specific case you have been found to be eligible for a payment of $149.99 USD."

I haven't even spent that much at ebay, let alone deserve that much back in a class action suit. Of course, they say that they will transfer the money directly into your account, the information for which you provide by clicking a link. The page that comes up looks identical to an old ebay sign in page, except that the web address doesn't have the word ebay even in it. I really hope that phishing like this doesn't actually catch anyone.

Harry Potter and the omissions for the sake of time

I am not myself an ardent fan of J.K. Rowling’s works, yet even I noticed some glaring omissions, some of which will no doubt precipitate further omissions down the line. However, I didn’t mind the fact that Hermione never tries to stick up for elf rights ( computer generated elves are expensive), that the obnoxious reporter never gets her comeuppance, that Hedwig the owl doesn’t return throughout the whole movie, Victor Krum’s brutal mispronunciation of Hermione, or that they digitally erased prominent nose of the actor who played Voldemort. None of those would have done anything significant to advance the story.
As an aside, the scene in which Myrtle, the ghost that haunts the bathrooms, converses with Harry while he’s in the bath, figuring out the clue to the second challenge is just a bit too creepy. The ghost is of a girl, no older than 14 but she lays on the innuendo pretty thick. I understand that the movies and books are getting darker and more mature, but that was a bit much. It also bothered me that there were pretty much only two or three appearances of Hermione in which she didn’t break down crying. Is the character really that emotional, or is that the actress’ whole range?
All and all, it was an enjoyable movie. No film with a well done dragon can be all that bad. The only thing missing there were the ears (all dragons have external ears), but I suppose that would be the fault of the art director and not the writers.

On Blogging

A web log, like a personal diary or journal, is a form of mental catharsis; a purging of emotions. Catharsis itself derives from the Greek Kathairein, which means to purge, especially the digestive system. People don’t typically regurgitate warm fuzzies. As the analogy drawn above would suggest, what people write on blogs is acrid, bitter, foul nastiness typed out as cleverly as possible and then spewed onto the world wide web. Another way of looking at it is that most of it is complete shit.
This blog is no exception and I’ve fiercely upheld the view that anonymity + audience = complete jerk. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to stop. That’s just the way things are. As with all other human endeavors, if you feel like being optimistic about it, then you obviously don’t know what’s going on.

Google talk

Google has unleashed yet another service: Google talk. They're purporting it as the free alternative to other IM services. If I recall correctly, AIM and MSN messenger were free to begin with. The difference here appears to be the ability to place a free long distance phone call through the internet. I've used internet based calling systems in the past, and though they were cheap, the quality was poor. There was a noticable lag time between phrases. The advantage of those systems was that you could call someone's phone from your computer, rathr than just computer to computer calls. I'm not sure if Google talk will allow this, but if it does, then I invite people to call me for free at (780) 932-2518 to test the system out. Please do not all between 8:30 AM and 4:30pm Mountain time since I'll be at work. Also, since I don't have the internet at home I won't be testing this new service myself.

Fat kids keep getting fatter

Where's Sheldon Mopes now that the world needs him most?

Of Mice and Mensa

Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes, is fully a character driven novel. It has a plot, but a fairly unexciting one. The novel explores the academic’s greatest wish and greatest fear; fore one’s intelligence to increase or to diminish respectively. The book is heavily laced with references to Plato’s states of being and becoming; how much is reality and how much is just shadows o a wall. In spite of a lot of heavy handed moralizing aimed at erudites and pedants and other people who know what erudites and pedants are, Keyes’ work is quite enjoyable and requires minimal suspension of disbelief. I’ll grant that there are way too many women lasciviously throwing themselves at the narrator, but there seems to be too much sex in all character driven novels. How else is the author to keep his reader entertained without any real action?
Anyone, sufficiently self-conscience, will recognize his or her own intelligence as an are that could stand improvement1. Nobody is supremely intelligent, though we’d like to be. It’s embarrassing to say “I don’t know” or “that’s not my field of expertise” or “I’ve forgotten more than you’ve ever learned.” This last one was a favorite of my Mom’s, though she gave it up on me when I started using words that she’d never heard before. I’ve even written several posts about my dissatisfaction with my own ability to retain what I learn in the classroom. Professors that I’ve asked about this tell me that it’s normal; that the sort of retention I seek comes only after several years of teaching the material. Even so, it’s still embarrassing to say “I forget."

1. I've found the application of caffeine to do wonders for mental acuity.

Site your f^*#ing sources!

There is a reason that National Geographic is not considered a scintific journal; that reason is accountability. They don't have any. If they say something that isn't true, it's okay because they're just a magazine and no longer the Journal of the National Geographic Society. Following a link about the new archaeopteryx mentioned below, I was eventually brought to an article about communication in Cassowaries. For a 7th grader, this would have been a decent article. But I'm not a 7'th grader, I didn't go to Nat Geo for kids, I expect better. Three things particularly bothered me about the article. First of all, it was unnecessarily tied to dinosaurs, as though research about the world's largest forest bird wasn't interesting enough on its own. A dinosaur reference might have been tolerable if it were brief, but instead the whole article was geared to drawing a link between the two subjects, even throwing in the ubiquitious Jurassic Park references. If I were an ornithologist, I'd be kind of ticked off at Nat Geo for making my very difficult research sound invalid as its own topic.
Second, the author botched an explanation of how primitive rhatites (the group that cassowaries belong to) realy are, stating that "they are thought to have more in common with dinosaurs than most other birds." That isn't true. All modern thoughts about relatedness are based on shared commonalities. If a group of birds had more in common with dinosaurs than other birds, then they'd be lumped in with dinosaurs. There are alot of features which separate all birds (including rheatites) from the dinosaurs. Rheatites are secondarily flighless, one of many groups of birds to go that route through the ages. In fact, the tinamous (the closest relative of rheatites) flies and even migrates hundredss of miles anually despite being worse on the wing than a chicken. Resemblance to dinosaurs is superficial. The things that make them primitive are characters of the palate and braincase, not long legs and short arms.
The third thing that bothers me is that the author claims that cassowaries have claws on their wings. I'd never heard that before so I did an extensive google search on the subject. The closest I came was a reference about claws on the digits of some South American Rheas. I might have been more willing to believe the Nat Geo writer if perhaps he had sited his source for the information. Throughout high school and university we're browbeaten with the idea that not siting a source is plagerism; unless of course it's common knowledge. But then, National Geographic is not an academic press. They don't have acountability to either the people that they take information from, or spoon feed that information to.

New Archaeopteryx!

Why didn't somebody tell me that there was a new Archaeopteryx specimen out there? Surely somebody would have mentioned this at SVP, and from there it would have gotten back to me! At least I know now. I am glad to hear that this one has a really nice skull and feet since these were somewhat obscured or crushed on past skeletons.

The specimen is described in the December 2nd issue of Science Magazine. The hot issue that I see arising from this specimen is the cladogram produced from its study. First of all, for those of you who don't know, a cladogram is the graphical depiction of a hypothetical evolutionary tree. The evolution of birds has been in hot debate for quite a while, and everybody who studies the topic produces a cladogram different from everybody elses. Because an analysis can produce more than one cladogram that is equally likely to be correct given the data, researchers make consensus trees in which uncertain areas are collapsed to a polytomy. The tree that the analysis of the new archaeopteryx produced is a consensus of 288 equally likely trees. As a consiquence, it shows that birds are not monophyletic; meaning that they arose twice. One lineage produced Archaeopteryx and another produced Confuciusornis. Even here there are multiple ways of interpreting the data. It could be that dinosaurs developed wings then re-evolved large body size and a secondarily flightless habit, only to re-evolve flight in some small bodied forms; or that "flight" (quotation marks because many argue that it was a terrible flier) is not the ancestral condition for the whole lineage; or that the authors are wrong in placing birds into two separate groups.


It worries me that the authors didn't include any members of crown group aves. In this sort of analyis, had they included modern birds, all the birds might have clumped together rather than being seperate. It all depends on who you include in your analysis; more so than how complete your fossils are. Don't get me wrong, an incomplete fossil creates alot of uncertainty, but exclusion of taxa creates more.

You can stop looking now

That's right, the hubble space telescope found god so you can all stop looking. Below is god in profile.

oh, and they found Sauron too.

all of the pictures on the website that these two came from are also in a very fine cofee table book that I have copies to both my dad and a good friend for their birthdays.

California Will, Collections Dude

Mine is now the name on the office door. This is a big thing for me. I'm the one who put it up there, and it actually says collections dude, but its still a big thing. I'll see how long it is before somebody notices.

The Jungle Book

I have not seen the abomination that is Disney’s “The Jungle Book 2” but I can tell from the preview that none of the writers for it ever actually read Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Books.” Although the original film covers very little of the material from the book, comprising about 2.5 of the 8 stories in the first volume alone, the writers don’t seem to have thought to use any more of Kipling’s material for the sequel. I understand that certain things were not possible due to the way the first movie treated the material. For example, it would be difficult for Mowgli to have further adventures with Kaa the rock python since they were friends in the book and enemies in the movie. Even so, a writer should have been able to work something out.
The fact that Mowgli followed a little girl back to man-kind wouldn’t have even interfered with following Kipling’s stories. In the book, he goes back as a boy but is later turned away from the village because he falls at odds with the tall-tale telling local hunter who tries to take credit and the reward when Mowgli kills Shere Khan. Mowgli saves the lives of the people who had been good to him, for they had been branded as sorcerers for taking care of a devil child, and then turns the full force of the jungle on the remaining people and drives them away, destroying the village completely. That would have made a pretty good first half of a movie. A good second half would have been Mowgli re-earning the trust of the wolves by helping them defeat a pack of 200 red dogs that attack the pack of 40 wolves. Throw in a few songs about trust, acceptance of diversity and about the vice of telling lies and you’ve got a good Disney movie. Since that movie wouldn’t have sucked, one could even have made a third movie and still followed Kipling’s actual work.Not to be nit-picky here, but what was up with the T.V. show “Tail Spin.” I understand that the characters were only loosely based on those in the Jungle Book; after all, Baloo the bear was the pilot of an airplane and Louie (not actually mentioned by Kipling) was the owner of a bar. They even managed to work in Shere Khan as a businessman. But what the heck happened to Bagheera? Not even a cameo?

Another reason I love caffein

Apparently it boosts short term memory. So much so in fact that the writer of the news article actually remembered to include a p-value when he stated that the results of the study were statistically significant. For those of you who don't know, the p-value is the probability that the results were purely by chance. The lower the p-value the more statistically significant the findings. Three cheers for statistics everybody!

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

Calvin and Hobbes

I don't know if anyone realized this, but yesterday, October 30 marked the 11 year aniversary of what I'm pretty sure was the very last Calvin and Hobbes. It's kind of convenient that the Complete anthology of the comic strip came out recently.

Curse You First Person Narative!

Richard Russo's Straight Man is an excellent example of what has happened to the modern novel (not as in modern and post-modern, just recent). The story is about perfectly normal people, having perfectly normal problems. In this case, it's a middle aged English professor dealing with office politics during a period of budget cuts, an enlarged prostate (which happens to be a metaphor for both his stress level and his issues with his estranged, albiet academically famous, father) and his daughter's marital problems. There, in only a few lines, I've summed up what took Russo 400 pages to say. It wasn't even until more than half way through the book that all of the characters were fully introduced.
Ironically, from the blurb on the dust jacket, I thought that I'd really enjoy the book. Even from a more detailed synopsis than the one I gave above, one would come to the same conclusion. The main character's sense of humour is dead pan, sarcastic and relies greatly on irony (a subject very close to my heart). The issues dealt with in the the novel are one's that I'm familiar with. University politics are practically the bread and butter of University conversation. The protagonist even threatens to kill a duck every day until he received his budget and later admonishes an obsequious, ambishous and untallented student for writing fiction directly based on his own life, the very thing Russo has done. The thing was that all of these things are not extrordonary. This kind of stuff goes on all the time, and nobody else thought to write a horrifically long book about it.
Furthermore, the first person narative bothers me. The reason is that it effects my own internal monologue. By silently reading the author's syntax and diction, it gradually becomes engrained into my own patterns of thought. I find myself using his repeated phrases even. I noticed this when I read the works of Chuck Palianuck, but those stories were at least odd enough to be interesting. Straight Man is just boring and has driven me further into insanity.

Comments: now with word verification

The spam has gotten out of hand. Consiquentially I have enabled word verification for the comments section. It's an extra step just to leave a comment, but it's either this or no comments at all (not that you guys comment anyway).

Science Marches On

It's a good week for Mankind; I just hope that company-kind doesn't ruin it for us. The completion of a major phase of the HapMap project marks the identification of variations in the 0.1% of the genome that differs between individuals in our species. While 0.1% sounds like a small number, it actually acounts for about 10 million pieces of genetic information. This information will greatly accelorate the study of causes of -, suseptability to- and effectiveness of treatment for diseases. I anticipate some people to be concerned over the implications this will have in nightmare scenarios (any science fiction plot about a dystopia where science has run amock; e.g. designor babies as in Gataca). Already a clinical trial is underway at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas to determine the social effect of gender selection by couples undergoing assisted reproduction. However, the real concern for me is that the human genome hasn't been treated as entirely open scource. You can have a look at any sequence you like via Genbank, but genes are actually patented by companies allowing only them to conduct research into the prevention or treatment of diseases linked to that gene. I fear that ultimately, companies will price gouge people on the basis of their heredity and that because all people have potential to be gouged equally, the government will turn a blind eye to it.
Furthermore, the scientific comunity has issued some very straight forward suggestions for how to bring the United States back to the forefront of scientific research (which is a major source of economic growth) that I fear will be likely ignored for at least another 3 years, until an new (hopefully more academically friendly) administration takes power.

Literary Musings

What does a hermit do when he has a lot of time on his hands and no TV? The answer is read, a lot. So far, in the last two weeks, I've polished off H.G. Well's The First Men in the Moon, Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, William Golding's The Lord of the Flies, Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days and already a third of Aldus Huxley's Brave New World. My favorite by hare is already Brave New World. It was originally written to satirize the Californian way of life as Huxley saw it but ended up representing almost the entire world. There are some pretty corny cultural references in the book too. For example, the first name of Lenina (an obvious derivation of Lenin) and the surname of Trotsky are both considered fine and respectable names. Obstacle golf (aka mini golf) is a common passtime and one may go to the feelies (tactile descendant of the talkies) or listen to a sexophone.
I have enjoyed the book so thuroughly though because the "brave new world" is so like the old one (the one that Huxley lived in and we're still living in) with the primary diference being that people naturally fall into their castes rather than being forced there. The conditioning is the same, only done by parents rather than a totalitarian government and soma isn't quite so popular.
My parents made frequent references to this book when I was growing up, so now it's a treat to finally read it. "Betas are better because we have more fun," or "the world needs epislons too," my dad would occasionally say. I'll grant that this shows just how nerdy of a home I grew up in. Personally, I think of myself as an Alfa, if not an Alfa plus, but then, that's how Huxley likely saw himself too. Aldus Huxley was from an amazing family. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, famed associated of Charles Darwin; his father was a noted writer; one of his brothers was the first director of UNESCO and another brother was a nobel laureate for Biology. Is it better to be a Beta? I don't think so. Nobody remembers the Betas of the world, and not even most of the Alphas. But then, only an Alpha would be more conserned over perminance than having fun. I was conditioned to be an Alpha, it's all I want or know.

Science + Music = Sexy

Which spinosaur is that?

While searching for info to either confirm or deny that this "oldest South American Dromaeosaur" might actually be a spinosaurid, I came across the below images of a spinosaur skull in a japanese fossil catalogue. What puzzles me about it is that it is listed as a replica. I can't figure out what it is supposed to be a replica of. It isn't of Suchomimus as the website claims, since that is very different looking. Furthermore, the teeth in the sockets are either real spinosaur teeth, or some of the best replicas I've ever seen. Furthermore, if it is a replica, then somebody put alot more effort into painting it to look real than other specimens in the catalogue. I'm not suggesting that the whole thing is real. To the contrary, most of the lower jaw, the quadrates, the post orbital and possibly the squamosal look fabricated or at least of a very different preservational state than the rest of the skull. Irritator chalangeri has an orbit similar to this piece but ot the fancy rest (which does look real). Baryonyx and Suchomimus have much more rectangluar (rather than trianglular) profiles to their skulls and neither has the crest.


Oh, and since I'm on the topic, after reading the paper more carefully, I agree with the authors of the South American dromaeosaur paper. It was the maxilary fenestra that sold me on it.

Dinosaur News link dump

the Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology is this weekend. It's in Arizona so I won't be going this year. However, this is the time that everybody reveals their discoveries for the year. A few people have released theirs early to beat the rush. Paleo-mammal and fish discoveries are coming out now, but few of them ever make the major news chanels.

another Swimming theropod

Russian dinosaur footprints

The flight of a 4-winged dinosaur

earliest “dromaeosaurid” (quotation marks because I seriously doubt that it is a dromaeosaur. I thinks it’s likely a small spinosaurid, a group common to south America and Africa, but not included in the study)

Mode of killing in dromaeosaurs

News Flash: Some Scientists Nerdier Than Previously Thought!

In the Journal Nature, one finds many articles that would be deemed sensational such as Pleistocene re-wilding, the biggest, oldest or smallest dinosuars, and the latest news about global warming. Reading through a back issue recently, I came across and actual argument over the genetics of Wizarding in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. The text is as follows:

Jeffrey Craig and colleagues, in Correspondence ("Harry Potter and the recessive allele" Nature 436, 776; 2005), recommend the use of analogies as tools for introducing young people to scientific concepts. Taking their example from J. K. Rowling's stories about the young wizard Harry Potter, they suggest that wizarding is a monogenic trait, with the wizard allele (W) recessive to the muggle allele (M). We believe the assumption that wizarding has a genetic basis to be deterministic and unsupported by available evidence.
Following Craig and colleagues' analogy, Hermione, as a muggle-born witch, must have WM parents. However, as Rowling fans could point out, Hermione's parents were muggle dentists who lack any family history of wizarding. It's true, of course, that chance may not have thrown up a witch or wizard for many generations, or that any who did have magical powers may have kept them secret to avoid a witch hunt.
What about Neville's apparently poor wizarding skills? These cannot be explained by incomplete penetrance, as Craig and colleagues suggest. In incomplete penetrance, individuals either display the trait or not: they do not display an intermediate degree of the trait. Poor wizarding skills might be indicative of variable expressivity of an allele. However, both variable expressivity and incomplete penetrance are associated with dominant alleles. If the wizarding allele were dominant, rather than recessive as suggested, wizarding children such as Hermione could not be born to non-wizarding parents.
Neville's clumsiness may, perhaps, be an individual characteristic unrelated to his potential powers. However, it is not possible, from the evidence presented so far, to conclude that wizarding is a heritable trait.

Link dump

Cold plasma

Regenerative mice

science blog

fellow disbeliever

Not Learning My Lesson

Laying on the floor, staring at the carpet fibres, thinking to my self "well, here we are again. You know this isn't good for you, that this isn't going to help you in your ultimate goals, so why do you keep doing this? You seem like you've got a decent sized brain pan, so what gives? Are you trying to make up for four years of lost time? And just think of your organs! Oh well, I give up. I'm checking out, good night." I've lost my soul, I'm hitting the sauce and the sauce is hitting back right in the gut. It all seems like such a good idea at the time; "have some friends over. . . it'll be fun." But when friends don't show up and the philosophy is "more for me then," I ultimately end up on the floor of my apartment, clutching my stomach and going over the opening lines of this post in my head over and over. Oh damnable cranberries! Terriaki, orange and ginger have been the wreck of me. Eat to live, don't live to eat as they say. This frenzy of cooking with actual recipes, sauces and side dishes has resulted in a couple of nights of over eating and resultant stomach aches. The fact that the soul has completely fallen off one of my sneakers hasn't even distracted me from my gastronomic experimentation. Oh, and it all seemed so good at the time.

It’s like a party in my mouth and someone lit the carpet on fire.

Hermits aren’t usually known for our cooking. If a meal requires more than one pot or pan, then it is usually regarded as too complex a dish for our humble pallets. However, since I’ve sent out an open invitation for thanksgiving, I thought that I should try out some more gastronomically pleasing dishes. I made spicy chicken, coconut rice and vegetables. I modified a recipe I’d found online to fit my budget and I’ll admit that it turned out better than I’d expected.
Coconut rice: just like normal rice except you replace some of the water with coconut milk.
Spicy Chicken: Ingredients:
1. As much chicken as you plan on eating. If this is greater than one whole chicken, multiply the recipe and then consult a physician about your eating disorder.
2. One dollop of margarine (any other oil based food product will likely work, with the exception of cheeze wiz)
3. ¼ cup water
4. 5 tbsp teriyaki sauce
5. 2 tbsp vinegar
6. ½ tsp Cayenne pepper (the more you add, the spicier it gets)
7. 1 chopped clove of fresh garlic (here I interpret a clove to be one of the internal subdivisions rather than the whole thing of fresh garlic)
8. ½ inch section of fresh ginger, thinly sliced
9. Handful of chopped red onion (people with big hands should perhaps consider making more chicken)
10. Pinch of curry powder

Directions: Mix together ingredients 3 through 10. Cut up the chiken into bite-sized pieces and fry it in the margarine till it starts to discolor (about 5 minutes) then pour in the mixture. Let this boil down (I don’t like words like simmer) to a desirable volume, or until you get bored and then serve it over the rice. There, it’s so simple that a one armed chimp with palsy could do it.

and I even had permission

I'm not in Calgary right now. I should be. I should be quietly laughing at creationists tring to out argue two of my favorite professors. I should be, but I'm not. The guys left without me. Oh well, I pretty much know how these things turn out in the end anyway.

Editing Opinions?

In the Opinion section of the school newspaper a "debate" over the idea of intelligent design has been taking place. This happens every year, but usually it happens much later. Every year, I write in to put this argument to rest. Frankly it's like beating a dead horse; it's fun and energetic for a while, but in the end nothing is accomplished. Normally, my letter hasn't been edited, but this year was different. They actually cut out one of the most poignant sentences in my letter, as well as changed the title. The original title read "Art Students don't get a say in science." The new one reads "Intelligent design supporters don't understand science." I'll grant that it's true, but arts students don't understand either. The important portion that was omitted was this: "I DON'T HAVE TO RESPECT YOUR OPINION. Respect is earned, not given." It might as well have been the thesis for the whole letter since it sums up the importance having informed opinions vs. just anybody. The real issue is whether or not they should be editing opinion pieces for content that is neither profane, unclear, or exceeds the word limit.

Weekend far from Serene

On Friday night, a few friends and I saw Serenity. I was originally going to write a much longer post, but I think that saying that "it was so unbelievably, stupendously, incredibly awesome that I nearly filled my pants" pretty much sums it up. I wasn't even the most excited on in the theater either. By comparison, I was quite subdued. Alot of fans of the show Firefly (on which the movie is based) had a lot of questions, that they hoped would be answered. I'm not giving too much away here, but no, the questions are not answered, nor will they ever be, now stop asking!
Saturday, I was supposed to go prospecting in the North Sascatchewan River valley, but it rained, so I went to the mall and baught a cell phone instead. It is amazing the difference that a sales person can make. There are at least three stores for each major local cell phone company at West Edmonton Mall. First I tried individual stores, and then found one that had all the companies in one shop. At individual stores, the sales rep assumed I was going to buy the phone right then and there when they explained their "deal." One guy actually said "so, are you going to get it?" At each one of the individual stores, I got the impression that they were jointly trying to deceive me; not telling me all I wanted to know, waiting to be asked about every little detail. How much is long distance? How much is roaming? How long of a contract to I have to sign up for to get that promotion? How many minutes do I get after the promotional period? Can I switch companies with this phone? I'm leaving the country, of course I don't want to sign up for a three year plan. In the end, the girl at the all-in-one store was the most helpful; explaining which phones could be unlocked and switched to other companies and recommending that I get a monthly plan rather than a pay as you go plan, and a long distance phone card rather than a long distance calling plan. Guess who got my business.
The phone wasn't cheap. It was $200 and the phone company required a $200 deposit since I didn't have any credit in Canada. My last phone company never asked for this, but I'm still pissed off at them anyway. The interac machine in the store had difficulty reading my bank card, so I went to a nearby cash machine, which stopped working before it finished dispensing my money, or a receipt. In any case, I bought the phone and went on my somewhat less than merry way. I don't like shelling out a week's pay for something that I'd rather not need, so I went to see Batman Begins at the cheap theater. It doesn't quite balance out, but I wasn't really thinking about how much I'd spent during or until much after the movie. By the way, Batman Begins was really well done. It was nice to see a batman without bat-nipples or neon painted street gangs or cheesey one-liners.
Sunday was fairly uneventful, except that the guy at the Shopper's Drug Mart sold me a Pay as You Go phone card rather than a long distance calling card. It was a waste of $10 for me, but I don't blame him too much. The packaging was very misleading.