SVP, you're so silly.

Those chairs nearly killed me.

 

The annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting wrapped up yesterday. This year we got to visit the very nice city of Raleigh, North Carolina. There were many, many interesting talks and posters which I can't possibly cover in detail here, but I will look forward to the papers that will hopefully eventually come out of this meeting. SVP is the big-time serious palaeo conference for most of us here in North America...and yet, although at times the talks are SO SERIOUS, what I really like about SVP is how much fun everyone is having. And this brings me to the chairs. The chairs at the Raleigh Convention Centre seem to have built-in whoopie cushions. If you sat down too quickly, the result was unavoidable. (Raleigh Convention Centre: please don't change this!) And so, during the transition between each talk as people moved in and out of the session, a low murmur of toots resonated throughout the room. This was pretty funny during the talks, but was almost unbearable during the final banquet and awards ceremony on Saturday night. As we recognized the contributions of various members of the SVP, we would rise to give standing ovations. And as about 1000 people sat down simultaneously, the squeaky chairs were that much more noticeable.

 

Now, I don't mean to go on and on about the chairs...but the thing was, as the awards ceremony went on, I'm pretty sure the majority of people in the room were making a conscious effort to make the chairs squeak more loudly. SVP, I love you even more for this.

 

I love that our society gets the conference started with a big party in a museum, this year the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. We got to hang out with Jane and Acrocanthosaurus!

Meatballs! In! Space!

I love that the SVP hosts a giant silent auction to raise funds for various society projects. And I love that so many people donate so generously, and that so many talented people make awesome stuff for the auction.

I love that my colleagues wear ALL THE PINS.

 

I love that the auction committee dresses up for the live auction. Avengersaurs, assemble!

 

I love that the conference ends with a giant dance party featuring "Walk the Dinosaur", "I am a Palaeontologist", and "Time Warp". I love that so many of my colleagues are awesome dancers!

 

There's a lot to love about SVP and palaeontology, but most importantly I love that we don't take ourselves too seriously. We're passionate about our science, we're doing awesome and interesting research, and we're having fun. See you next year in Los Angeles!

(Also required reading: What do vertebrate paleontologists talk about?)



BREAKING UPDATE 22/10/2012: The squeaks have been recorded for posterity!

Thoughts on Tarbosaurus, Part 1.

Last time I promised photos of our fieldwork here in Edmonton, but then over the weekend the palaeoverse kind of erupted (in a good way) over the auction of a Tarbosaurus skeleton. Go read Brian Switek’s articlefirst if you’re not acquainted with the story.

Because I am insane, I often read the comments sections on news articles about palaeontology. There are a lot of weird and misguided statements in the comments sections of some of the Tarbosaurus auction news articles (e.g. at CNN, USAToday, Wired). Some of these comments make me frustrated, so I figured I’d try to write down my thoughts on some of the most common recurring themes: 1) Paleontologists are just as bad as fossil poachers and/or private collectors because we hoard the dinosaurs all to ourselves and lock them away in cabinets where the public can’t see them; 2) How do we know the tyrannosaur came from Mongolia?; 3) Why does the auction company call it Tyrannosaurus bataar while palaeontologists call it Tarbosaurus?; and 4) Why is fossil poaching such a big deal, anyway? I’m going to address these over a couple of blog posts because for some reason on these topics I am unusually longwinded and the answer to the first question was getting kind of gigantic.

So, to start with: “Paleontologists are just as bad as fossil poachers and/or private collectors because we hoard the dinosaurs all to ourselves and lock them away in cabinets where the public can’t see them.”

I sort of understand where this sentiment is coming from, but unfortunately it is wholly incorrect, and it saddens me that there folks who have become disenfranchised with science in this way. The role of museums is to conserve artifacts for the long haul – not just a few years, not just this generation, but theoretically for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Museums also facilitate scientific research (thus contributing new knowledge to society), and education (passing new and old knowledge to members of society). Although there are privately-run museums, many museums in Canada are at least partially supported by the government – ie. the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Because these are publicly-supported institutions, their role is to conserve cultural and natural history artifacts for the people, and so the whole concept of fossils being locked away from the public in museums is largely incorrect.

But let’s dig a little deeper (har har). Yes, a lot of specimens are stored in cabinets and rarely seen by the public. This is not because palaeontologists are trying to ‘hide’ specimens, but because at any museum there is limited space and funding for exhibiting specimens. Choosing which specimens go on display involves a lot of factors: is the specimen sturdy enough to be mounted or displayed, does the specimen need to be easily accessible for research, is there enough space to display the specimen, will it require special new cabinetry and lighting, will it require an entire overhaul of the existing displays or can it be slotted into an existing gallery, how much new interpretive material needs to be created, and more. Not all fossils make great display specimens, but that does not mean they are ‘worthless’ or have little scientific value. For example, many studies require the identification and measurement of THOUSANDS of teeth and bone fragments. How else can you know if a particular fossil is rare unless you have a large, unbiased sample? Yes, we could display these tiny fossils, and I actually think that would be a great way to teach the value of large collections of otherwise mundane fossils. BUT given the option of displaying 1000 Paronychodon teeth in a glass cabinet, or one really excellent Albertosaurus skull, it makes sense that the museum would display the showier, more easily relatable object (sorry, Derek). In a perfect world we would not need to make that choice, but in reality there are constraints on what can be displayed based on time, money, and space.

A lot of commenters on the news articles have mentioned that a lot of museums offer ‘backstage tours’ to the collections areas. While this is true, it is also true that many museums require visiting researchers to be professional palaeontologists associated with either a museum or university (or to be a student studying towards that profession). I can’t speak for all museums here, but I suspect that the main reason for limiting visitors to the backstage areas comes back to conservation of the material. A lot of fossils don’t do well with repeated handling, and even gentle handling by careful scientists (or contact with things like metal calipers!) can gradually erode and damage specimens. As such, limiting access to the collections is not really because we want to hoard the fossils and keep them to ourselves, but out of concern for the long-term safety of irreplaceable objects. The flip side of this is that some museums have dedicated teaching and outreach collections of sturdier specimens that can be handled often.

But a lot of these comments seem to come back to a sense of distrust of professional palaeontologists, and perhaps a distrust of the ‘scientific establishment’ as a whole. I don’t really know what to say to this – yeah, there are probably some really awful people who are also palaeontologists, who don’t look kindly on amateur palaeontologists or private collectors, and who may be generally unpleasant people to be around. But there are awful people in every profession. It doesn’t excuse their behaviour, but there’s not necessarily a lot any one of us can do about it. From my experience, the vast majority of professional palaeontologists are just that – professional. They are excited to learn more about life on earth, to contribute to the scientific record, and to educate the public about those findings. They like dinosaurs (or brachiopods, or trilobites, or sabre-toothed cats) SO MUCH that they literally want to spend their entire career thinking about them ALL THE TIME. (There is no escape.) Many of them would love to display more of their fossils, but are unable to because of lack of funding or space. So, if you are really and truly concerned about the lack of public access to fossils, the best thing you can do is go out and support your local museum. Petition your local or provincial or federal government to make museum funding a priority. Participate in fundraisers or organize your own. Donate your time by volunteering as a fossil preparator, or go out into your community and teach others about palaeontology. The worst thing you can do is support the illicit trade of poached, illegally-acquired specimens. And we’ll talk about why in the next post.

(And if you want to help out re: the Tarbosaurus auction, there's a Change.org petition you can sign.)

5 Questions for Caleb Brown

I'm very pleased to present another UALVP-related study today, this time by Caleb Brown (formerly at the University of Calgary and now at the University of Toronto). Caleb recently published a paper in PLoS ONE featuring one of my favourite UALVP specimens, our Stegoceras partial skeleton, UALVP 2.


1. What inspired you to conduct this study?

I was initially interested in pachycephalosaur postcranial anatomy for the purpose of differentiating between isolated pachycephalosaur postcranial material and those of basal ornithopods (like Thescelosaurus and Parksosaurus), on which I was doing my Masters research at the University of Calgary with Anthony Russell. In order to get a better understanding of the postcranial anatomy of these animals I went to the source, Stegoceras - UALVP 002, one of the best (if not the best) pachycephalosaur skeletons known, and the first postcranial skeleton discovered. In addition to other things, I was initially struck by the presence of large numbers of bony elements that I could not identify and that did not match the morphology of other ornithischians.

 

 

These elements looked superficially like gastralia, and indeed that is what they were identified in Gilmore’s 1924 description. But ornithischians were not supposed to have gastralia, so my interest was peeked. Investigation into the literature revealed that others had worked on these enigmatic elements; Marya´nska and Osmólska (1974) found similar elements in the tail of Homalocephale in Mongolia, illustrating they were not gastralia, and Sues and Galton (1987) correlated the structures between Homalocephale and Stegoceras. Particularly interesting was the articulated series found in the tail of Homalocephale. These showed a distinctive pattern that matched myomeres and myosepta, the sideways “w” shaped muscles and tendons, seen in fish.

Fortunately, with funding from Lubrizol Corp. and Montessori High School (University Circle, Cleveland, OH) I was able to accompany Michael Ryan (Cleveland Museum of Natural History) and David Evans (Royal Ontario Museum) to Mongolia to do fieldwork in the summer of 2009. I was also fortunate enough to be able to examine the Homalocephale specimen while I was there. This allowed me to test my ideas about the deep homology of these interesting structures.

2. What’s so special about pachycephalosaur tails, anyway?

First off, pachycephalosaur tails, like the rest of their postcranial skeletons, are rare. Often with dinosaurs you find the rest of the skeleton but are missing the most important part, the head. This is not true for pachycephalosaurs, which we know almost everything about based on the skull. You can count on one hand the number of partial skeletons known (and these are partial skeletons). What we know about pachycephalosaur skeletons is limited to these few specimens. They are special in that when preserved they show a unique morphology of having a halo of superficial “W” shaped elements forming a cylinder around the entire circumference of the tail. This is not seen in other dinosaur groups, or any other tetrapod. That is not the only odd thing though; they lack the deep longitudinal or paraxial tendons seen in most other ornithischian groups and they have elongated and highly bowed caudal ribs.  These three things may be related, but that is not yet clear.

3. What is the difference between gastralia, ossified tendons, and ossified myorhabdoi?

This is an interesting question with a bit of a complex answer. All of these structures are similar in that they are not endochondral bones, that is they do not develop from a cartilaginous precursor, which is the case with the majority of the postcranial bones in most taxa.

Gastralia are dermal or intramembranous bones that are associated with the abdominal musculature, and can be associated with respiration. They were likely the primitive condition for tetrapods but today are restricted to Crocodylia, Sphenodon, and possible the plastron of turtles (Classens, 2004).

The term ‘ossified tendons’ describes a variety of structures including ossified myorhabdoi. Although this term would include any ossification of the connective tissues articulating muscles to bones, its usage in dinosaurs, particularly ornithischians, usually refers to longitudinal paraxial structures along the dorsal or caudal vertebral series. These tendons often have the pattern of either a trellis or longitudinal bundles, can be epaxial or hypaxial, and are usually closely associated with the vertebrae (Organ 2006). Ossified myorhabdoi are restricted to the caudal musculature, and are essentially ossified myosepta. Unlike the majority of the paraxial tendons, these are superficial, forming a halo around the circumference of the tail where the transverse skeletogenous septum intersects with the integument, and preserve a morphology reminiscent of the undifferentiated myoseptal musculature of fish. They are also different in their histological structure (Organ and Adams, 2005). We still know very little about ossified myorhabdoi and hopefully discovery of additional specimens and more research on extant taxa will reveal more regarding their significance.

4. Why don’t other dinosaurs have a caudal basket?

It is often hard to answer why some groups have a structure while other don’t, and this becomes particularly difficult when the function of the structure is not fully understood. If the function of the ‘caudal basket’ is to rigidify the tail of pachycephalosaurs, then the reason that other groups don’t have it is because many have found a different solution to the same problem.  Many other ornithischians have longitudinal or paraxial tendons (usually called “ossified tendons”) in the form of a trellis or bundles. Some theropods stiffen their tail by extending the zygapophyses across numerous vertebrae. Until the function of these structures can be better established, we may not know the full significance of their occurrence.

 

5. Does the presence of a caudal basket tell us anything about head-butting behaviour in pachycephalosaurs?

The caudal basket likely had significant implications for the posture and locomotion of pachycephalosaurs. It has been suggested by previous authors that it helped the tail to act as a tripodal prop, potentially during intraspecific behaviour. It would also have greatly stiffened the tail. Our analysis is consistent with these interpretations, and in that manner is consistent with the idea of head-butting behaviour in pachycephalosaurs. 

The presence of the caudal basket has also been used to support the idea of agonistic flank butting behaviour in pachycephalosaurs (Goodwin et al., 1998), with the caudal basket acting as armor. We suggest that the morphology of the myorhabdoi is not consistent with armor seen in other groups, and this function in pachycephalosaurs seems unlikely.

Thanks very much Caleb! You can read more about pachycephalosaur tails in:

Brown CM, Russell AP. 2012. Homology and architecture of the caudal basket of Pachycephalosauria (Dinosauria: Ornithischia): the first occurrence of myorhabdoi in tetrapoda. PLoS ONE 7(1): e30212.

Hearing more about them.

After the talks had ended on the first day of the Hadrosaur Symposium, I had a bit of free time to visit the galleries, which I hadn't seen in about a year and a half. I was expecting the Alberta Unearthed: 25 Years of Discovery exhibit, but was delighted by this unexpected surprise: a short, but excellent, exhibit on women in palaeontology!

 

Located on the ramp up to the Darwin exhibit after you exit Lords of the Land, the exhibit consists of 19 or 20 profiles of female palaeontologists. Each framed image included a photo, a brief biography, and an image of a representative specimen or field locality (example above featuring Dr. Betsy Nicholls). I was particularly pleased to see that the Tyrrell had attempted to include women of many different races, nationalities, ages, and career stages, studying a variety of taxa and using many different techniques.

I was particularly intrigued the quote from Naomi Oreskes below the exhibit title, "The question is not why there haven't been more women in science, the question is rather why we have not heard more about them." Dr. Oreskes is a historian of science at University of California at San Diego, and her paper "Objectivity or Heroism? The Invisibility of Women in Science" is well worth a read (and really, go read it - palaeontology is all about heroism). It's a sentiment that I share and that I've discussed before: although there may not be an equal ratio of women:men in palaeontology yet, we're definitely getting closer, so why don't we seem to be as visible as the men? It is certainly up to us to speak up for ourselves, but it's really, really nice to see a major institution like the Tyrrell stepping up and hosting an exhibit like this.

I hope that at least some people will take the time to stop and read some of the biographies on their way to the fossils - if I had one complaint, it is that because the exhibit consists only of pictures in a hallway leading to the main exhibits, that it may be easily passed over. If specimens had been incorporated somehow, as they were with the Great Minds, Fresh Finds exhibit (showcasing the work of the museum's scientists), that might have been able to grab more attention. Sadly, most people walking through this hallway while I was present would pause for a moment at the entrance, but then skip on through the rest of the exhibit. I realize that space constraints probably would not permit anything more than what they have done, however, and the exhibit is pleasant to look at and rewarding for those who take some time to read the biographies. In particular, I hope school groups take advantage of it and that teachers incorporate questions about female scientists into their activities.

I'll finish here with a very nice video produced by the Tyrrell, featuring Dr. Don Brinkman discussing the work of Dr. Betsy Nicholls, who was a curator at the museum until her death in 2004 and whose work is featured in the Triassic Giant gallery.

Baron von Nopcsa, Scolosaurus, and the spiky-clubbed ankylosaur.

Baron von Nopcsa is a pretty cool dude, maybe even as cool as Freddie Mercury. Born in 1877 in Transylvania, he is probably best known for his work on the Haţeg fauna of Romania.

Nopcsa also published a lot of papers on ankylosaurs!

Like SCOLOSAURUS!

(This image is from an awesome book I found at WalMart – the Colossal Book of Dinosaurs)

If you’ve ever visited the Natural History Museum in London, then you’ve seen Scolosaurus cutleri (now considered Euoplocephalus tutus) – it’s at the entrance to the Dinosaur Hall. It is perhaps the best preserved ankylosaur, and certainly the best from North America, with all of the armour in situ but sadly lacking the skull and tail club. IMPORTANT NOTE! If you see a reconstruction of a spike-tailed ankylosaur like the one above, it is WRONG! And unfortunately this spiky-clubbed reconstruction traces back to von Nopsca’s original description of Scolosaurus in 1928, which includes a drawing of a stub-tailed, spiky-clubbed Scolosaurus. Why is this so? Well, BMNH R5161 is missing the tail club completely, from the front of the handle right back to the knob. The midpoint of the tail got kind of smushed, and there are two large spikes at that point, so this area was misinterpreted as the end of the tail. And voila, a spiky tail club is born. The spiky-clubbed ankylosaur causes me endless dismay.

Most reconstructions of Euoplocephalus use BMNH R5161 as the basis for the armour – whenever you see a generic plastic ankylosaur toy with two big spikes on the shoulders and two big spikes at the midpoint of the tail, you’re looking at BMNH R5161.

Nopcsa was not just keen to describe new species and specimens, but to figure out how these animals worked. Although nowadays we don’t really think ankylosaurs were primarily insectivorous animals, I love the following passage in the Scolosaurus description.

"Both in Euoplocephalus and in Struthiosaurus the quadrate is remarkably feeble and this was probably also the case in Panoplosaurus...therefore one must conclude that their food must have been rather soft. The teeth of these animals are frequently more or less reduced, the food they took was therefore not even cut to pieces. The claws of Scolosaurus show no special fossorial adaptation, the food of Scolosaurus was therefore not dug up out of the ground, thus Scolosaurus evidently did not live on subterranean bulbs. It did not live in a marshy country, therefore soft aquatic plants are also excluded as food, hard desert plants are naturally still more excluded and even succulent desert plants could not be dissected. Surely its immobility prevented Scolosaurus from procuring its food by running to and fro and all this limits the nature of its food to a great extent. The result is that insects are the single sort of food that has seriously to be considered.


As many recent deserticolous reptiles are insectivorous, one may suppose that the same was also the case in Scolosaurus. The insects that abound nowadays in deserts are Coleoptera, Orthoptera and Neuroptera. All these groups are known from precretaceous times. Especially Orthoptera occur in arid regions occasionally in tremendous swarms and they supply sometimes great quantities of food."

Nopcsa then goes on to calculate how much food Scolosaurus would need based on figures from zookeepers feeding captive reptiles, and ends the discussion with the following:

"One large grasshopper weighs about 2 gramms, so Scolosaurus could have lived on even less than 7000 grasshoppers and beetles a week."

To which I say: !

Even though this may not seem to be the best interpretation today, I think it’s really important to recognize Nopcsa’s treatment of Scolosaurus as a living animal – he wanted to know what it ate, how it survived, and then he sat down and wrote out his reasoning in a pretty clear manner.


Another notable ankylosaur described by Nopcsa is Struthiosaurus transylvanicus from the Haţeg Basin. Like many of the other dinosaurs from this area, S. transylvanicus may have been a somewhat dwarfed form (or may just be represented by juvenile material). S. transylvanicus was discovered by Nopcsa’s lover Elmas Doda Bajazid.

Oh, how the times have changed? A very Scelidosaurus-y Struthiosaurus from Nopcsa 1929.

The end of Nopcsa’s story is a tragic one: in 1933, following financial difficulties that led to him selling his fossil collection to the Natural History Museum in London, he shot Bajazid and then himself.



Grigorescu (2010) provides an excellent biography of Baron von Nopcsa, especially his activities in the Haţeg Basin:


Grigorescu D. 2010. The Latest Cretaceous fauna with dinosaurs and mammals from the Haţeg Basin – A historical overview. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 293:271-282.

 
More literature:

Benton MJ, Csiki Z, Grigorescu D, Redelstorff R, Sander PM, Stein K, Weishampel DB. 2010. Dinosaurs and the island rule: the dwarfed dinosaurs from Haţeg Island. Palaeogeography, palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 293:438-454.

Nopcsa F. 1928. Palaeontological notes on reptiles. Geologica Hungarica, Ser Palaeontologica 1:1-84. (Scolosaurus description)

Nopcsa F. 1929. Dinosaurierreste aus Siebenbürgen V. Geologica Hungarica, Ser. Palaeontologica 4:1–76. (Struthiosaurus description)