Look at that...whatever it is.

I had an unsettling moment today when it occurred to me that, perhaps, people don’t learn anything from museums.

I sincerely hope this is not true. I say this after having visited the marvellous Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, spending about 5 hours today perusing the galleries and shamelessly eavesdropping on people’s reactions to the exhibits. Kids were certainly excited about the exhibits and eagerly pointed things out to their parents. But what sorts of things did I overhear parents saying to their children?

In reference to a very nice mosasaur skeleton, with accompanying illustration: “That’s neat sweetie, look. It looks kind of like a crocodile I guess. It must be a crocodile fish.”

By that logic, I guess the early whale Zygorhiza is probably a crocodile fish, too.

Looking at Pteranodon: “Look at that...whatever it is.”

That is a Pteranodon, good sir, as the label clearly states. This comment particularly stung because of all the things I remember from my visit to the Smithsonian when I was 10, it was this Pteranodon keeping watch over the dinosaur hall that was most burned into my memory. Also, holy mackerel! Look at the wing below it!

In front of Ceratosaurus: “Look kiddo, T. rex!”

Ceratosaurus does not equal Tyrannosaurus.

I was heartened to see some parents slowing down, reading things to their children and asking them questions about the exhibits. But for the most part, most folks simply went ‘Wow! A dinosaur!’, snapped a photo, and kept going. The same was largely true for a lot of the other exhibits as well, particularly in the ocean gallery (although in that case, the comment was ‘Wow! A giant squid!’).


In other galleries, I was a bit surprised by reactions to the unknown or new.

At the binturong: “What kind of cat is that?” followed by immediately walking away.

At the Chinese pangolin: “What the hell is that? GROSS!” followed by immediately walking away.

I will not fault people for not knowing that Ceratosaurus is different than Tyrannosaurus, or not having any idea what a pangolin is. What I find distressing is the lack of desire to KNOW reflected by some of these comments. The reactions were not “What kind of cat is that? A binturong? Oh, it’s not a cat? Why? That’s neat!” or “Look at that...whatever that is...oh, it’s a Pteranodon!” The reactions were “I don’t know what that is and I’m not going to do anything to change that.”

These comments got me thinking about the role of natural history museums (and museums of any sort, I suppose), once again. I love museums. I think I learn when I visit museums, especially for topics I know little about. I may not get a lot out of most dinosaur exhibits, but I almost always find something new (e.g., the Smithsonian’s small but very good exhibit on the dinosaurs from Maryland, and I will talk about this more in a later post). But how do other people approach museums? Perhaps not everyone shares the same enthusiasm for all topics, and will breeze through the exhibits – and that’s ok. Perhaps museums are most effective at teaching when they are visited by school groups; school visits are probably more focused on a single gallery, may have the students filling out worksheets or booklets and therefore LOOKING at things for more than 5 seconds, and teachers may have access to curriculum guides and other resources not available to tourists or parents. Follow-up activities may help the students reflect on what they saw. For most regular tourists though, what are they getting out of the museum? I don’t mean this flippantly – I would be genuinely interested to know if there has been any research done on what people retain from museum visits, and how to deliver information in a museum setting most effectively. The museum was busy and bopping and full of energy, and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. But if you aren’t pausing, reflecting, asking questions and seeking answers, what are you getting out of the museum experience?

Gwawinapterus update

For those who are keeping track of such things, I'd like to point out that a corrigendum to the Gwawinapterus paper is available online, noting a change in specimen number for the holotype. The specimen is now housed at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, under the accession number RBCM.EH2011.003.0001. You may have encountered some news reports discussing controversy over the naming and credit for discovery of the specimen. Gwawinapterus stands as a valid name, but our corrigendum clarifies that the specimen was originally discovered by Sharon Hubbard, a resident of Parksville, BC; Graham Beard brought the specimen to our attention.

Reference:
Arbour VM, Currie PJ. 2011. Corrigendum: An istiodactylid pterosaur from the Upper Cretaceous Nanaimo Group, Hornby Island, British Columbia, Canada. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 48:778.

The winter term draws to a close, the fossils come out of hiding one last time.

We are very fortunate at the University of Alberta to offer several courses in Palaeontology (and not just through zoology or biology - they get their own PALEO course code). PALEO 418 and 419 cover vertebrate palaeontology in lecture and lab format, PALEO 414 focuses more on invertebrate paleontology and functional morphology, and PALEO 400 is a field school held right in Edmonton at the Danek hadrosaur bonebed.

Lucky for me, I got to TA the PALEO 419 labs this semester. PALEO 418 covers the origins of vertebrates, fish, early tetrapods, turtles, lepidosauromorphs, and marine reptiles. PALEO 419 covers the synapsids and archosauromorphs. And that means I get to teach people about dinosaurs!

The archosauromorph lab exam was held this week, and most of the specimens were out for review. It made for a pretty impressive sight when you walked in the lab.

Because a variety of instructors have taught this course over the years, we have a pretty good collection of teaching casts and specimens that covers a fair amount of archosauromorph diversity. Most of the specimens are casts, but we do use some original material that's relatively sturdy and/or abundant (things like ankylosaur osteoderms, hadrosaur limb elements, teeth, etc). The U of A also has a small but excellent palaeontology museum in the Earth Sciences building, and students are expected to check out certain specimens there throughout the semester. Because we have a variety of ceratopsian specimens from Dinosaur Park and Grande Prairie being prepared in our prep lab, we also did a 'field trip' there during the ceratopsian lab. Prospective students: the U of A is a good place to be for palaeontology!

But today the students wrote their exam, which means the semester is over for me (except for marking, of course)...and perhaps spring is on the way?*



*spring doesn't happen until June in Edmonton. Oh well.

Reconstructing Gwawinapterus

Yesterday I talked about both how I came to work on what would become Gwawinapterus, and what’s actually interesting about that scrappy little jaw. Today I wanted to talk a little bit about something a little less technical – the ‘reconstruction’ of Gwawinapterus that I created for the media release.

I put reconstruction in quotation marks because I’m working with just the front of the snout – the tip of the iceberg, really – and recreating a whole animal, so there’s going to be an awful lot of guessing involved. However, there may be a bit less guesswork than you might expect.

So far, istiodactylids seem to me to be a fairly morphologically conservative group, and by that I mean that most of the species look fairly similar to each other. None are particularly large or small, and their cranial and postcranial anatomy is pretty consistent. So, the overall shape of Gwawinapterus is probably not too far off – it probably had a long, low skull and may not have had any sort of crest or ornamentation like a lot of other pterosaurs. Like other pterodactyloid pterosaurs, it would have had a short tail, long neck, and long metacarpals, and may have walked with an erect, parasaggital gait. One somewhat notable difference between Gwawinapterus and other istiodactylids is that Gwawinapterus would have had a comparatively deeper snout, and it may turn out it had a less elongate skull compared to other istiodactylids as well. Pterosaurs had a fuzzy covering somewhat like mammalian hair (they’re called pycnofibres!) and I’ve given Gwawinapterus a slightly shaggy neck reminiscent of ravens.

(Thanks yet again, Wikipedia.)

Based on comments on some of the news articles that came out yesterday, people seem to either love or hate the colour pattern I chose. That’s ok. The pattern I chose was inspired by the art of the Kwakwaka’wakw, who live on the northern end of Vancouver Island. The name Gwawinapterus is partly derived from the Kwakwala word for Raven, Gwa’wina, because the skull of many istiodactylids remind me of Raven masks.

(This one's from me this time, from a visit to the MOA at UBC.)

If you’ve visited Vancouver’s Stanley Park and seen the totem poles or visited the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (which you must if you are in the area!), you’ll have seen a lot of the Kwakwaka’wakw style of art. (There are many first nations tribes in British Columbia and each have their own distinct language and artistic style, so I think it’s important not to lump them all into ‘northwest coast art’.) This art is highly stylized and so by default the reconstruction of Gwawinapterus is quite stylized. Although I’m not so bad at drawing in a sort of sparse, graphic-designy style, I don’t have the skill or time to do full shaded renderings – I’ve got nothing on artists John Conway or Mark Witton or my friend and colleague Lida Xing. But stylized I can do, so stylized pterosaur you get!

Despite the stylized nature of my Gwawinapterus drawing, there are certainly some elements of the reconstruction that are somewhat grounded in real life. Lots of animals have black and white counter-shading and we’ve seen earlier this year that a reddish-brown pigment was found in at least some feathered dinosaurs. Black markings around the eyes are found in lots of mammals (badgers, raccoons, and cheetahs come to mind) and birds (Atlantic puffin). The ‘salmon egg’ ovals down the back and legs might be a bit off, but lots of animals certainly have spots and splotches.

(...wikipedia)

And now, before this post gets too long, I shall direct you to further reading if you’re interested in some of the less pterosaury points touched on in this post:

The UBC Museum of Anthropology: You could literally spend hours browsing their entire collection – you can narrow your search by choosing People --> North America, and then Coast Salish, Gitxsan, Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingit, or Tsimshian, to name just a few.

The Raven Steals the Light: Raven is perhaps the most popular recurring character in many northwest coast stories. This book, by Robert Bringhurst and noted artist Bill Reid, introduces several Haida stories featuring Raven and other colourful characters.

Raven Wing

Thanks to Dave Hone for hosting a guest post about my recent paper over on his blog Archosaur Musings. I talked a bit about how I came to work on this specimen there, but here I’d like to talk about the specimen itself and what it means for pterosaur palaeontology.

Gwawinapterus is neat for a bunch of reasons. In Canada, we’ve got pterosaur material from Dinosaur Provincial Park that probably belongs to Quetzalcoatlus (including an amazing wing bone with embedded velociraptorine tooth!), but Gwawinapterus is the first pterosaur that is only known from Canada. It’s also, as far as I know, the first cranial material of a pterosaur from Canada (which may not be saying a lot, but there you go).

Victoria, you always pick the prettiest specimens to work on.

Gwawinapterus is also an istiodactylid pterosaur, which is interesting by its own right simply because there aren’t a lot of istiodactylids known in the fossil record, period. Howse, Milner, and Martill showed in 2001 that “Ornithodesmus” latidens from the Isle of Wight actually represented a distinct genus of pterosaur, Istiodactylus, and thus the Istiodactylidae was born. Since then, there have been some more istiodactylid teeth identified in Europe, but most other species of istiodactylids come from China. These include Istiodactylus sinensis, Nurhachius, and a host of others. All istiodactylids have been named in just the last ten years.

Prior to finding Gwawinapterus, there was no indication that istiodactylids were found in North America...with a pretty big and potentially interesting exception. Bakker (1998) noted the presence of some pterosaur teeth in the Morrison Formation that bear a striking resemblance to istiodactylid teeth. Is it possible that istiodactylid pterosaurs were present in North America since the Jurassic? Only more discoveries will help us to sort out the biogeography of the group.

And finally, all other istiodactylids are found in much older rocks from the Early Cretaceous, whereas Gwawinapterus is of Late Cretaceous age. No other pterosaurs of this age have teeth! Why do we find a toothed pterosaur so late in the game? What were the functional advantages to retaining or losing teeth in pterosaurs? Many folks in the media have asked me what kind of things Gwawinapterus was eating. It’s a fair question, although I can’t really give a very satisfactory answer – I suspect it would have been just fine at taking down small prey, and may also have been a good scavenger. The small, tightly packed teeth are somewhat reminiscent of piranha teeth, although I am leery that by saying this people will picture swarms of Gwawinapterus surrounding some big dinosaur and nibbling it to bits within minutes. Even though that would be awesome. (Incidentally, this behaviour is probably not natural for piranhas, either.)

Grr! (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

With its long snout and sharp little teeth, maybe Gwawinapterus was good at sticking its nose into carcasses and nipping bits of meat off the bones. This is not an original idea – Howse et al. proposed it back in 2001 for Istiodactylus latidens. Whatever it was doing, Gwawinapterus was probably doing it differently from other pterosaurs at the time, and I think that’s interesting.


Literature!

Andres B, Ji Q. 2006. A new species of Istiodactylus (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea) from the Lower Cretaceous of Liaoning, China. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 26:70–78.

Arbour VM, Currie PJ. 2011. An istiodactylid pterosaur from the Upper Cretaceous Nanaimo Group, Hornby Island, British Columbia, Canada. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 48:63-69.

Bakker RT. 1998. Dinosaur mid-life crisis: the Jurassic–Cretaceous transition in Wyoming and Colorado. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 14: 67–77.

Currie PJ, Jacobsen AR. 1995. An azhdarchid pterosaur eaten by a velociraptorine theropod. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 32:922-925.

Howse SCB, Milner AR, Martill DM. 2001. Pterosaurs. In: Martill DM, Naish D (eds.) Dinosaurs of the Isle of Wight. The Palaeontological Association, London, UK., pp. 324–335.

Sazima I, Machado FA. 1990. Underwater observations of piranhas in western Brazil. Environmental Biology of Fishes 28:17-31.

Wang X, Kellner AWA, Zhou Z, Campos DA. 2005. Pterosaur diversity and faunal turnover in Cretaceous terrestrial ecosystems in China. Nature 437: 875–879. 

Flying away again...

I arrived in Ulaanbaatar last Saturday and am heading out to the Gobi Desert tomorrow morning. I’ve got a few blog posts that will appear while I’m away, but emails and facebook will be on hiatus until I return in late September.

However, I will leave you with a few palaeo notes and photos before I disappear for four weeks. During the Flugsaurier Symposium Scott and I had the opportunity to go on a field trip to Liaoning province to visit Jehol group outcrops and museums. Yesterday I posted a few photos of the Chaoyang Geopark. Today I’ve got some pictures of the Sihetun Fossil Museum and Darwinopterus field locality.

Outside the Sihetun Museum was this great expanse of Jehol Group outcrop. We all got to try cracking open some rocks, and many conchostracans and insects were found.



The Sihetun Museum had several very nice Psittacosaurus specimens, like this rather squashed fellow.



A particular treat of the trip was to visit the locality where Darwinopterus was collected, in the middle of a bunch of corn fields. It was interesting to see how Jehol rocks are typically quarried – the farmers find a productive level and then tunnel into the hillside. Unfortunately, this isn’t a very safe method for collecting.


I leave you with a final photo of my fine fangly friend Zhenyuanopterus, a huge boreopterid pterosaur from the Jehol.

Take care everyone and I’ll see you in September.

Chaoyang Geopark

During the Flugsaurier Symposium I went on a field trip to Liaoning Province, which was a great opportunity to see different parts of China and visit Jehol group outcrops and museums. We first visited the Chaoyang Fossil Bird Geopark, which included a museum, in situ exhibits, parks, and lots of interesting statues. This is Nurhachius, an istiodactylid pterosaur from the Jiufotang Formation. The model has too many teeth, but he’s still pretty fun.



One of the best parts of the visit was this great in situ display exposing Jehol Group rocks. It had fairly good descriptions of the geology, and even marked on faults and other interesting features. Fossils discovered during the excavation were left in place, and included Cathayornis, Shenzhouraptor, and lots of fish.


Inside the museum proper were literally hundreds of Liaoning fossils of every sort – insects, plants, fish, turtles, champsosaurs, theropods, birds, pterosaurs – the list goes on and on. Here’s just a single display case showing off various fossil birds - I think they are all Confuciusornis, but may be mistaken.


It was easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of fossil material in the geopark. After we finished in the museum we entered the fossil forest full of enormous petrified stumps. Incredible!

The museum and geopark had a few glitches - some specimens were mislabelled or in the wrong hallway, and there may have been a few 'plussed' specimens on display - but it was a really cool place that certainly has a lot of potential if a few of these errors are fixed up.

Name that specimen, IVPP edition.

The IVPP’s public galleries are quite a lot of fun, and Scott and I spent a lunchtime wandering around. We saw many famous fossils! Can you guess the identity of the following close-ups? Answers at the bottom!




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1. This scaly appendage is the lobe-fin of a preserved Latimeria.
2. A delicious meal of Psittacosaurus can be found inside Repenomanus.
3. This friendly fangly smile is that of the pterosaur Haopterus.
4. The delicate toes and feathers of Microraptor.
5. The perfectly placed plastron of Odontochelys.
6. A Pachyrhinosaurus wannabe, the nose of the rhino Coelodonta.