Blog survey results!

It's hard for me to even believe this, but I've been writing Pseudoplocephalus for over 5 years now. I'd been an avid reader of many science blogs for a couple of years before I decided I wanted to try it out myself, and I decided to jump in finally because I was going to be spending three and a half months working and traveling around Korea, China and Mongolia back in 2010 on an NSERC-funded study abroad kind of thing. I figured that blog updates would be the best way to show what I was doing to friends and family, and if I liked it, I'd maybe keep writing about my research afterwards.

As I started writing here, I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to use Pseudoplocephalus as a science outreach tool (as opposed to keeping a grad school diary for my own benefits, etc.). At this point, my general goals with the blog are:

1.  Providing summaries of my research papers for nonspecialists, especially for papers that are paywalled.

2. Showing what it's like to be a research palaeontologist, for people who aren't scientists. (And, to be visibly female while doing so.)

3. Promoting the research environments of the various institutions I've worked at, to help increase the public's appreciation of research in museums and universities.

4. Talking about other issues of interest to me, like where palaeontology intersects with popular media and social justice issues. For this goal, I'm interested in reaching both scientists and nonscientists.

So, am I accomplishing any of those goals? I took part in Paige Jarreau's science blog survey and some of you were kind enough to fill out the survey, so here's a little bit of what I learned and how it relates to what I'm doing.

How are people finding my blog?

At least in terms of the people who answered the survey, most people seem to get to my blog via Facebook and Twitter, as well as the blogrolls of other palaeontology sites. But, about 20% of the respondents had only read one or two posts on my blog, suggesting that a fair number of people stumble across it without necessarily being deeply embedded within the palaeoblogosphere. Most of the survey respondents said they often seek out information about science online, and nobody said they rarely or never seek it out. Apparently, several of you were motivated to keep reading because you like my writing style, so thanks! That is nice of you to say!

How are people using my blog?

Many of the survey respondents read Pseudoplocephalus to keep up with the latest palaeo news and to find information that might not be reported in traditional media, so, cool. A bunch of you also wrote in that you come here to learn about ankylosaurs, so yay! Most of you do not come here for emotional support, which is also good, because ankylosaurs are terrible emotional support-givers. I recommend you check out Captain Awkward for the top-shelf adulting advice. Overall, I'd say the way people seem to be using my blog is in line with why I'm writing what I write.

Who are you people, anyway?

Several of the survey respondents noted that they know me personally. I AM BEING WATCHED, THANKS ANONYMOUS FRIENDS FOR CREEPIN' ME OUT. But seriously, that's not unexpected, and thanks creepy anonymous friends for filling out my survey. Out of the 102 people who filled out the survey, 67% identified as male and 31% identified as female. The biggest age cohort is YOUNGER THAN ME which is giving me SOME KIND OF FEELINGS. Most of you are also Caucasian, which means I need to do a better job of reaching out to non-white people or making my blog an inviting space for underrepresented minorities in science to come and have a look. I am not totally sure how to do this, so I guess I have some research ahead of me!

I am also apparently in good blog company because lots of you guys read blogs that I also like to read too, like Tetrapod Zoology, SV-POW, Laelaps, and Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs. In that same question (list up to three other science blogs that you read regularly), I noticed that blogs written by dudes far, far outnumbered blogs written by ladies in the blogs you submitted. Does this indicate that there are fewer blogs written by women in the palaeoblogosphere (or at least dinoblogosphere)? Are people more likely to think more highly of blogs written by men than women, or just more likely to remember blogs written by men?

Lastly, it was interesting to see the self-identified occupations you all listed – while it is not surprising that many of you are grad students, palaeontologists, or other scientists, it was heartening for me to see that non-scientists are also reading the blog, at least sometimes. Another goal kind of accomplished!

So, am I meeting any of the general goals I keep in mind when I'm writing here? Kind of. At least in terms of people who felt compelled to complete the survey, I'm largely speaking to an audience of scientific peers. BUT, I'm also reaching at least a few people who are not trained scientists, and I suspect a lot more of the casual hits my blog receives each day are not from dedicated scientists. Thanks again to everyone who participated in the survey – many of you left awfully nice comments for me, which really made me feel like this continues to be worth doing, so thanks for the ego boost. It's been interesting to see who this blog is reaching and why people are reading it! I don't know how long I'll keep this blog going, but I don't have any intention of stopping soon and I'm glad I have an audience of people who think it's worth following.

I like ankylosaur butts, and I cannot lie.

Yes, I seem to have this recurring fascination for the derrière of these dinosaurs. In 2009 I published a paper (with my fellow grad students Mike Burns and Robin Sissons) on Dyoplosaurus, in which we argued that the pelvis (specifically, the sacral ribs) is different than that of Euoplocephalus. I reconstructed the muscles of the tail and pelvis in my 2009 PLoS ONE paper on tail clubbing. Twice now I have spent significant portions of my summer preparing the pelvis of two different ankylosaur specimens. And now this month I have another paper (again with Mike Burns and my supervisor Phil Currie) on the ankylosaur pelvis, this time on the armour of the pelvic region.

The lovely behind of Aletopelta, from my visit to the San Diego Natural History Museum in 2009. It is an excellent museum, you should check it out!

It has been recognized for a long time now that some ankylosaurs were doing really weird things with the armour over their pelvis. In some taxa, the osteoderms fuse together to form a carapace-like shield over the hips. Previously, the presence or absence of this shield has been used in phylogenetic analyses to examine whether or not a third group of ankylosaurs, the Polacanthidae, is a valid taxon (in addition to the Nodosauridae and Ankylosauridae). However, it is not just the presence or absence of the pelvic shield, but the way that the pelvic shield is constructed, that may be important.

In this paper I and my coauthors propose a revised way of looking at the pelvic shield that breaks shields up into three categories: 1. fused, rosette pattern, 2. fused, uniform-sized polygons, and 3. not fused. “But Victoria, if the osteoderms aren’t fused, then why call it a pelvic shield?” you may ask. Well, after looking at the AMNH’s Sauropelta and the BMNH’s Euoplocephalus, I noticed that although the osteoderms of the pelvis weren’t coossified, there also weren’t any transverse bands segmenting the body in that region (see image below of BMNH R5161, the holotype of Scolosaurus discussed in this post). Although the osteoderms aren’t fused together, they still form a continuous shield over the pelvis.

The always exciting headless, clubless, BMNH R5161, modified from Nopsca's 1928 paper and as seen in Arbour et al. 2011.

More interesting, though, is what happens when we look at the other two categories – rosettes vs. uniform polygons – in a stratigraphic and geographic context. Rosettes are restricted to the Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous, whereas uniform polygons are primarily Upper Cretaceous. Uniform polygon shields are only found in North America (with the possible exception of Antarctopelta...which is from Antarctica). We did not run a phylogenetic analysis for this paper, but I plan to incorporate this data into subsequent analyses stemming from my PhD thesis on the phylogenetic relationships and biogeography of the Ankylosauridae. I will be very interested to see if any clades show up that reflect these stratigraphic and geographic patterns.


Here’s the paper! (behind a paywall, unfortunately...):

Arbour VM, Burns ME, Currie PJ. 2011. A review of pelvic shield morphology in ankylosaurs (Dinosauria: Ornithischia). Journal of Paleontology 85:298-302.
 
 
More papers about ankylosaur pelves!
 
Arbour VM, Burns ME, Sissons RL. 2009. A redescription of the ankylosaurid dinosaur Dyoplosaurus acutosquameus Parks, 1924 (Ornithischia: Ankylosauria) and a revision of the genus. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29:1117–1135.
 
Arbour VM. 2009. Estimating impact forces of tail club strikes by ankylosaurid dinosaurs. PLoS ONE 4: e6738.

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. 

Being a palaeontologist is awesome!

...because on your birthday, you get cool dinosaur toys.

(Thanks Mom & Dad and Pete.)

SVP Pseudo-Live Blogging, Part 2

SVP presentation featured on Dinosaur Tracking! Go take a look!

SVP Pseudo-Live Blogging

SVP talk accomplished! Now I can relax!

I will hopefully post some photos of the excellent welcome reception at the Carnegie Museum later this week once I have some time and sanity.

Also, I am now the proud owner of a patriotic Uncle Sam Stegosaurus. Thank you, Carnegie Museum.

Also also, why weren't there any ankylosaurs in the Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibit? *sad*

Success!

Candidacy exam accomplished!