What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Fine Feathered Friends

 

The Royal Alberta Museum is also currently hosting a temporary exhibit on the use of feathers in hat-making (millinery!) and fashion, called Fashioning Feathers. I'm not usually all that into the history of costume and fashion in museums, and so I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting I found this particular exhibit. I think it was the intersection of biology and fashion that was so neat.

 

 

 

There was a wide variety of taxidermied bird specimens showing what species were used for different styles, like in the photo above.

 

 

Besides the usual pheasants and roosters, there were some really unusual birds on display, like this Western Crowned Pigeon (Goura cristata).

 

 

 

 

 

I was pretty shocked to learn that many brilliantly coloured tropical birds, like birds of paradise, were dyed black for use in hats.  These three parrots are actually dyed Carolina parakeets (Conuropsis carolinensis), which, through a combination of hunting, habitat loss, and the plume trade, went extinct in 1918.

 

Audubon's Carolina parakeets, via Wikipedia.

 

Why not use naturally black or dark-coloured birds? Whatever would possess someone to harvest such colourful birds only to dye them black, when there are SO MANY shiny black birds present in North America? The mind boggles.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation: From Wolf to Woof

 

I had a chance to visit "Wolf to Woof", a travelling exhibit hosted by the Royal Alberta Museum this summer. This exhibit does a nice job covering the biology and evolution of dogs, and the relationships between canids and humans, and overall I was pretty happy that I got to see it.

 

 

The exhibit opens with the wolf ancestry of domesticated dogs and showed the variety of shapes and sizes of modern dog breeds. I liked these creepy cutaway dog skeletons, which show some of the differences in the skeletons of a St. Bernard, saluki, and French bulldog. There were quite a few models of dogs throughout the exhibit which were just slightly uncanny - I think it might have been the way that fur was sculpted and textured, that just made them feel slightly...slimy. It's hard to describe.

 

 

The domestication of dogs from wolves was explained in detail, but there was actually very little on the evolution of canids as a whole. A single station had a few replica skulls of Hesperocyon (an early canid), Canis dirus (the dire wolf), and Borophagus (the bone-crushing dog), and a cladogram showing the relationships of fossil and extant canids. I would have liked to have seen a bit more about the fossil history of dogs, but I guess I'm probably biased.

 

 

 

A real treat was the chance to see some taxidermied specimens of canid species you just don't really see in zoos or even in most museums, like this bush dog (Speothos venaticus)...

 

 

And a maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyuris). There were also several foxes, a coyote, and a wolf.

 

 

There was a great station where you could listen to a variety of canid vocalizations and their 'translations'. But much of the remainder of the exhibit, on dog senses and roles in society, fell a little bit flat for me (e.g., a recreation of what it would be like to be rescued by a St. Bernard via crawling into a plastic snow pile; acute sense of smell in dogs demonstrated by wafting weird simulated bacon smell at your face, etc., and some out of place art pieces about dogs in media and life as a wolf). A final criticism was that the exhibit is clearly showing its age, with a lot of scuffed and scratched surfaces and some truly ancient interactive computer stations with roller balls. But the exhibit was reasonably popular on the summer day that I visited, and kids seemed to be getting a lot out of it, so perhaps I'm not exactly the target audience for something like this. I could see this exhibit working very well as a school field trip.

Back to the RBCM

I had the nicest commute to work yesterday morning.

A brisk jaunt over the Rocky Mountains, then a smooth descent into this fluffy loveliness.

And here's what I found on the other side of those clouds!

Yes, I was back at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, BC, to return the holotype of Gwawinapterus to British Columbia. I do not know if there are plans to display the specimen, but there is currently an excellent 'Behind the Scenes' exhibit with a great display from the Palaeontology Department featuring other specimens from Hornby Island (the Gwawinapterus locality), north-central BC, and more.

During my last visit I was able to snap this nice cast of a segment of trackway from the Lower Cretaceous Gething Formation of Peace River Canyon. These are on display outside the museum, sort of near the main entrance. This was one of Phil Currie's first major projects after being hired at the Provincial Museum of Alberta (now the Royal Alberta Museum). The trackways in this area were originally collected by CM Sternberg in the 1930s, and subsequently by the Royal Ontario Museum in 1965. With the construction of the WAC Bennett Dam (which would eventually fill to form Williston Lake), an extended expedition was organized by the Provincial Museum of Alberta, and the tracksite was visited from 1976-1979. More than 1700 footprints were documented during these expeditions, and at least 100 trackways were identified. The photo above shows the foot and handprints of a hadrosaur, but theropod, ankylosaur, and even bird footprints are known from the Gething Formation.

 
 
You can read more about the Peace River Canyon tracks here (free PDF!):
 
Currie PJ. 1983. Hadrosaur trackways from the Lower Cretaceous of Canada. Acta Palaeontological Polonica 28:63-73.



Ankylosaurus through the Ages

I saw a post up at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs today – did you know Ankylosaurus could fly? The original Sinclair World’s Fair Ankylosaurus was being lifted by crane from the Houston Museum of Natural History as the museum undergoes expansion and renovations.

This got me thinking about a talk I gave for the Alberta Palaeontological Society annual meeting last March: “My ankylosaur is a big dumb tank! Ankylosaur reconstructions in the scientific literature and popular media.” I talked about why ankylosaurs are reconstructed in certain ways, both accurate and inaccurate. Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology has been talking about memes in palaeontological illustration, and how certain wacky reconstructions and poses pop up again and again. I think this is perhaps especially well illustrated by several ankylosaur taxa and today I’d like to talk about Ankylosaurus.

Brown 1908. The Ankylosauridae, a new family of armored dinosaurs from the upper Cretaceous. AMNH Bulletin 24:187-201.

Oh, Ankylosaurus. The namesake of the Ankylosauria and Ankylosauridae. One of the most popular ankylosaurs. And yet Ankylosaurus is not particularly well known in terms of skeletal material – some skulls, a tail club, and miscellaneous postcranial bits. Barnum Brown’s 1908 description included the pictured reconstruction of the armour. At the time Brown did not know that Ankylosaurus had a tail club, so he reconstructed it with a more Stegosaurus-like tail. The armour is shown as pretty uniform across the body, mostly because Brown didn’t have a lot to work with and little to compare Ankylosaurus to.

Enter the World’s Fair dinosaurs by Sinclair, including Ankylosaurus. We have a replica (cast? Model? Does anyone know?) at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton (along with a Sinclair Corythosaurus), which I think is pretty rad. Note the strange, pustulated tail club back there, dragging on the ground. Boo. There’s really no reason for the tail club to be portrayed as a lumpy, gross thing – the only known tail club of Ankylosaurus actually has a very smooth texture! The World’s Fair Ankylosaurus (along with the Zallinger mural at the Peabody Museum) would define how Ankylosaurus is drawn and modeled for a very long time – I have a pink Ankylosaurus eraser from an elementary school book fair that is clearly modeled on this fellow, for example.

Walking with Dinosaurs included an Ankylosaurus in the final episode, Death of a Dyanasty, back in 1999. There’s that lumpy tail club again! Again, we see the influences of Brown and the Sinclair World’s Fair Ankylosaurus. A couple of Ankylosaurus make an appearance in Jurassic Park 3 (briefly, as they float down the river after escaping the Pteranodon aviary), and holy smokes are they ever strange.

(From the delightfully thorough Dinosaur Toy Blog.)

In 2004, Ken Carpenter published a wonderful, long, detailed revision of Ankylosaurus in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, and offered a new armour reconstruction. If you’ve got the Carnegie series Ankylosaurus toy, you’ll be familiar with this new interpretation – they clearly drew much of their inspiration and information from Carpenter’s new reconstruction. There are a few minor points I could quibble about, but overall it’s a good reconstruction of the armour, and a big change from the uniform spiky Ankylosaurus. And the tail club isn’t horrible!

The most recent TV Ankylosaurus I know of was in Clash of the Dinosaurs. Say what you will about the show, but I thought the ankylosaur segment was pretty good. I had the opportunity to do a bit of advising for that segment, and it was a lot of fun to work with the producers to try to get Ankylosaurus just right. They did a great job on the head, and the body is almost like a little bit of a mix between the Brown/World’s Fair Ankylosaurus and the Carpenter Ankylosaurus. And the tail club was not gross! Hooray and success!

It is a less well-known fact that Ankylosaurus looked quite dapper in a hat.