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.

It's #SciArt week on Twitter!

I think we often downplay or take for granted the role that art plays in science. High quality art is obviously a hugely important aspect of public science communication. A paper describing a new species of dinosaur will have much more impact on the public if it's accompanied by an excellent life restoration of that dinosaur. Astronomers and their spacey kin use illustrations to show us satellites, the solar system, and far-off planets we can't photograph. Biologists dealing with the very small need illustrators to show us the cells in our bodies, what's inside those cells, what DNA looks like and how it works – the list is endless.

But the #SciArt tweet storm happening this week got me thinking again about the role that art plays in my own daily scientific activities. While I don't consider myself an artist, I was always drawing while I was growing up (for a while I entertained the idea of becoming an animator!). And I'm still drawing! Every time I go to a museum, I draw pretty much everything I look at. Why draw when I've got easy access to digital photography? Well, I take tons of photos, too, but drawing makes me LOOK at the specimen. 

LOOKING AROUND YOU IS VERY IMPORTANT.

Sketching slows me down, in a good way. What's that weird texture in this part of the bone, how far does this groove extend, what's with this unusual hole in this spot? Is there symmetry? Asymmetry? What's missing, and what's been filled in with plaster? What exactly was I measuring when I say 'length' or 'width'? I've filled many notebooks with drawings, stream-of-consciousness-style notes, measurements, and other bits of data. Mostly I use regular ol' pencils, but I also really like coloured pens and usually travel with a set for annotating my pencil drawings. I would love to be the kind of person that could do watercolour sketching, or proper graphite drawings.

These are some of my earliest notes from my MSc research, from a 2007 visit to the Royal Ontario Museum.

I think, as scientists, we do ourselves a disservice by not teaching students more about art skills and visual design. Being able to quickly and confidently sketch something in front of you is a useful skill to have! And understanding some of the principles of visual design – lines, shapes, negative space, colour combinations, and the like – can only make you a better communicator of science, especially in scientific papers. In addition to just being personally rewarding, drawing makes me a better scientist!

If you're a Twitterer, you should really check out the #SciArt hashtag this week (and into the future), to see the variety of techniques and approaches people take to science art. 

The Great Canadian Dinosaur Hunt

Dino Hunt Canada is almost here! Starting this Friday, History Channel Canada will be airing a series of hour-long documentaries devoted to dinosaur expeditions all across Canada - and not just in the famous badlands of Alberta! The production crew visited field localities in Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, multiple places around Alberta, and British Columbia. It's going to be a real who's who and where's where of Canadian palaeontology.

I'll be in the second episode featuring work in Dinosaur Provincial Park, which we filmed in 2013. It was a fun if somewhat unusual experience to have such a large film crew with us, and I'm looking forward to seeing the whole shebang!

What was the crew filming in DPP? Tune in to find out!

There's also a really excellent website to accompany the show. You can learn more about some of the dinosaurs featured in the series (including wonderful new artwork by Danielle Dufault!), see interviews with some of the palaeontologists, and submit ideas for a nickname for a new dinosaur excavated during the show by the Southern Alberta Dinosaur Project. You can even submit questions and maybe have my weirdo face answer them via Skype! All in all, it's looking really good so far and I'm so happy to see the huge variety of dinosaur research being conducted across Canada by so many talented and hardworking people.

Did the sauropod Leinkupal survive the End Cretaceous mass extinction?

No.

Discovery News has a short video up discussing a new paper in PLOS ONE, Gallina et al.'s "A diplodocid sauropod survivor from the Early Cretaceous of South America". I think it is really great that they want to showcase this interesting new find! But the DNews report leaves an awful lot to be desired.

The news report is titled "There's a dinosaur that survived mass extinction!", which would lead most people to think that some kind of post-Cretaceous dinosaur has been discovered. At about 25 seconds in, the reporter says this is the first time scientists have found a dinosaur that survived the great extinction, presumably referring to the End Cretaceous mass extinction that happened 66 million years ago. Right away, it seems that there's a huge misunderstanding here – there have been multiple mass extinctions in the history of life, not just the one that killed the non-avian dinosaurs. Additionally, the 'great extinction' should really refer to the End Permian extinction, by all accounts the most devastating mass extinction ever.

Anyway, Gallina et al. have described a new diplodocid sauropod, called Leinkupal, from the Early Cretaceous (probably about 140-130 million years ago) in Patagonia. This is significant because diplodocid sauropods were pretty abundant in Jurassic rocks from North America, Europe and Africa, but seem to have disappeared from the fossil record after the Jurassic. Since diplodocids were present in the Jurassic of Africa, it was also thought that they were probably present in the Jurassic of South America, but no fossils had ever been found. So, Leinkupal confirms one hypothesis (that diplodocids were present in South America), and also rejects another (diplodocid sauropods went extinct at the end of the Jurassic). Good stuff all around! But Leinkupal does not tell us that dinosaurs survived the 'great extinction' (whatever that is), and it certainly did not survive the End Cretaceous extinction, on account of it having been dead for about 70 million years before that happened.

Vertebrae from Leinkupal, from Gallina et al.

This little video is an amazing microcosm of misconceptions about evolution and palaeontology, and it's really frustrating to see this coming from Discovery News. Here's some other little snippets:

* "The diplodocid sauropod is a family" – I hate to nitpick over grammar (wait, who am I kidding – I love nitpicking over grammar!), but the grammatical failure here I think represents a pretty basic misunderstanding of how taxonomy works. Later on, the reporter says of diplodocids that "the species was thought to be an exclusively North American dinosaur". Diplodocids are a subset of sauropods, in the same way that sauropods are a subset of dinosaurs. Diplodocidae is the formal 'family' name for this group, and Diplodocidae contains many genera and species. Some of these are familiar, like Diplodocus and Apatosaurus, some are less familiar, like Tornieria and some are new, like Leinkupal. We use classification systems to understand how animals are related to each other, and to understand the scale of certain biogeographic patterns. Getting this stuff right is both relatively easy and also important!

The imposing figure of "Seismosaurus" hallorum, a diplodocid from New Mexico on display at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science. "Seismosaurus" is thought by some authors to be the same genus as Diplodocus.

*At one point, the reporter says that diplodocids were "assumed to have gone extinct", which is kind of true but also takes a lot of the science out of the story! Palaeontologists didn't just assume diplodocids were extinct, they observed the pattern in the fossil record in which diplodocids were present in some layers and then not in others, and concluded that either 1) diplodocid sauropods went extinct at the end of the Jurassic or 2) we have incomplete data, and sauropods may just not be preserved in the post-Jurassic rocks we've looked at. It turns out that the latter idea was correct!

* The reporter comments that the Patagonian discovery is the earliest record of diplodocids. It's easy to get mixed up with this sometimes, but Leinkupal represents the youngest, and therefore latest record of the group. The earliest record of a group would be the first record, and therefore the oldest record. Since this is the main point of this story, they should really get this right!

* The reporter also states that Leinkupal was found in a place that palaeontologists never expected (South America), when in fact the biogeographic pattern of known diplodocids hinted strongly at the possibility of South American diplodocids. This is so great! We were able to use our knowledge of the fossil record to predict where we might find a kind of dinosaur that we had not found there before.

* Finally, the segment opens with the reporter making a show of how hard it is to pronounce the new dinosaur's name. It's true that Leinkupal doesn't have the familiar Something-saurus structure that lots of dinosaurs have, but it's not overly difficult to pronounce. There are two things that bother me here: 1) Why, Discovery News, are you making your female presenter pretend to be dumber than she surely is? and 2) An unfamiliar foreign word is made out to be this super weird and difficult thing, when they could have taken a moment to point out that this unusual name means "Vanishing family" in Mapudungun. It's a beautiful and evocative word that reflects the significance of the specimen, and highlights a local language that most of us are not familiar with. A moment that could have been used to learn something new was instead used to indicate that new things are weird and learning is hard.

This is really shallow and lazy writing. All of the important points to cover in a video segment of this length can be found in the three-paragraph introduction of the open-access paper. There's no excuse to not get it right. Instead of highlighting how this discovery shows the power of scientific predictions, we got a video that can't get basic facts correct, and pretends that this stuff is really hard rather than working to make it accessible to everyone.

The Systematic Position of the King of the Monsters

A few weeks ago I was really excited to be contacted by Danielle Venton, a freelance writer working on a piece for Popular Mechanics about the biology of Godzilla! With a new big-screen appearance by Godzilla right around the corner, I thought this was a fun exercise in speculative biology. The piece is out now at Popular Mechanics and I highly recommend checking out "The Impossible Anatomy of Godzilla".

I've always been a fan of B-movies (especially ones that have been MST3K'd) and monster movies, so, in preparation for the new Godzilla film, I've been trying to brush up on my kaiju history. Perhaps unfortunately, my introduction to Godzilla was with 1998's TriStar film, which seems to be uniformly considered not that great an entry into the monster's filmography. In the process of helping out with Venton's piece about Godzilla, I also came across some really fun previous discussions of Godzilla's anatomy. I heartily recommend checking out Darren Naish's "The science of Godzilla, 2010" and "The anatomy of Zilla, the TriStar 'Godzilla'" over at Tetrapod Zoology, and Brian Switek's "What kind of dinosaur is Godzilla?" over at Smithsonian.com.

[Some of what I find is very silly. Godzilla flies using his rocket breath in Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster!]

Most discussions of Godzilla's anatomy use dinosaurs (for classic Godzilla) or lizards (for Zilla) as starting points, and it's generally understood that the original Godzilla design was a melding of an Allosaurus, Iguanodon, and Stegosaurus. However, it occurred to me that another group of diapsids might serve as plausible candidates for Godzilla's heritage: the pseudosuchians (or crurotarsans, if you prefer)!

Today's only living pseudosuchians, the crocodilians, have osteoderms in their skin, if somewhat less flamboyant than Godzilla's. The 'scale' pattern on their heads is actually formed through cracking of the skin during development, resulting in a texture similar to what's seen on Godzilla's body, which in turn is apparently supposed to resemble the keloid scars of nuclear explosion survivors.

West African dwarf crocodile (Osteolaemus tetraspis) at the Toronto Zoo.

All living crocodilians are aquatic quadrupeds with powerful tails, and Godzilla seems to be a pretty good swimmer using his tail as a propulsive mechanism. Although many pseudosuchians were quadrupeds, some, like the poposauroids, were bipedal! Pseudosuchians seemed to have typically retained most fingers on the hand, like Godzilla, but unlike most theropod dinosaur lineages.

As far as I know, and I certainly haven't done a thorough literature search on this, there are no known pseudosuchians with nuclear breath....but alligators can produce a mighty bellow during breeding season.

Could Godzilla represent a long-lost and enigmatic lineage of pseudosuchian? Should there be a Godzillasuchus? Tell me what you think in the comments!

Cock-a-doodle-doo

I've finally got the time and gumption to sit down and write again, so let's do some research blogging! And let's show some skin while we're at it!

The first paper I'll talk about is not one that I'm lead author on, but which was a really fun project to be involved in. This was the description of a super cool specimen of a hadrosaur from the area around Grande Prairie with some impressive skin impressions. UALVP 53722 was collected as a large block that had fallen along the creekside. Unfortunately, the rest of the skeleton could not be located, which might mean it's still in situ somewhere with nothing visible, or it had already broken apart into unrecognizable pieces. The block preserves the back of the skull with the neck arched over the shoulders, the classic 'death pose' seen in many dinosaur skeletons. Most of the skull is missing, but what is present shows that it is an Edmontosaurus regalis, the slightly older species of Edmontosaurus. 

Flat-headed Edmontosaurus at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

And sitting on top of the skull is a round, relatively smooth lump of soft tissue, like the comb on a rooster's head. 

My primary contribution to the paper was to examine the CT scans of the specimen to confirm that there wasn't a bony structure within the crest, so that we could be confidant that it truly was a soft tissue structure only. The UofA put together a short video about CT scanning the fossil that is worth a watch:

The fleshy comb in UALVP 53722 the first time we've seen anything like this in a dinosaur, and was totally unexpected – Edmontosaurus is one of the 'flat-headed' hadrosaurs that lacks the bony crest characteristic of lambeosaurines like Corythosaurus or Lambeosaurus. I love this discovery because it is such a great example of how much soft tissues contribute to the appearance of an animal. It also goes to show how a new fossil, even for a relatively well known dinosaur like Edmontosaurus (which is known from many skeletons and bonebeds) can still give us new information. 

Crested Edmontosaurus based on UALVP 53722.

I was also a big fan of the book "All Yesterdays", and I feel like this specimen kind of fits in with some of the more adventurous reconstructions of dinosaurs with elaborate soft tissues that have become more fashionable of late. And like all good discoveries, we end up with more questions that need to be answered: did all Edmontosaurus regalis have this fleshy comb, or was it restricted to adults, or even just adult males? If males and females both had the comb, was it larger in one sex than the other? Was it brightly coloured? Did Edmontosaurus annectens have a fleshy crest? We'll only be able to answer these questions with more specimens.

Anyway, go check the paper out! UALVP 53722 was on display in Edmonton for a short time earlier this year – stay tuned for more information on where it will be on display next! Many thanks to Phil Bell (a former Currie Lab student and now at the University of New England in Australia) for inviting me to help out with this paper.

Bell PR, Fanti F, Currie PJ, Arbour VM. 2014. A mummified duck-billed dinosaur with a soft-tissue cock's comb. Current Biology 24:70-75.

Horner JR. 2014. Paleontology: a cock's comb on a duck-billed dinosaur. Current Biology 24.

And for those who are extra keen, here's my Quirks & Quarks radio interview from January 2014.

Thoughts on Tarbosaurus, Part 2

In my last post I talked about the role of museums in conserving fossil resources, with regards to the recent news about the Tarbosaurus auction. I wanted to address some of the other frequent comments I have seen on blogs and news articles. So, we’re now on to:

Comment 2: How do we know the tyrannosaur came from Mongolia? (and the related question, which I’ve decided to lump with this one: Why does the auction company, and subsequent news stories, refer to the specimen as Tyrannosaurus bataar while palaeontologists call it Tarbosaurus?

The first thing we need to address with these questions is the concept of ‘species’. In high school, most of us will have learned that a species is defined as a group of interbreeding individuals that can produce fertile offspring. This is called the Biological Species Concept. What many people may not know is that this is just one of many species concepts. Palaeontologists can’t go back in time to check on which dinosaurs were interbreeding, so the biological species concept can’t really be used in palaeontology. Instead, we generally use the Morphological Species Concept, which essentially boils down to ‘a species is a group of individuals that look like each other and not like others’.

Much of the arguing and debate in palaeontology results from the problems associated with the morphological species concept, and that is because individuals from the same species can look different from each other, and individuals from different species can look similar to each other. Biologists working on still living (‘extant’) animals need to worry about three main sources of morphological variation:

1.      Changes that occur during growth: An older individual of the same species can look different from a younger one.

2.      Sexual dimorphism: Males and females of the same species may look different.

3.      Normal individual variation: Individuals within a species can look different from each other because of normal variation resulting from small genetic differences and environmental differences. As an example, think about all the different dog breeds there are today. All dogs can interbreed (theoretically, although surely a Great Dane crossed with a Chihuahua must be pushing the limits of what is practical...) and produce fertile offspring, and belong to the same species, Canis familiaris. On top of that, all dogs are descended from domesticated grey wolves, and so many scientists regard them as a subset of the species Canis lupus. In taxonomic terms, this is called a subspecies, and we would write it as Canis lupus familiaris.

 Via Wikimedia Commons.

Palaeontologists need to add one more source of variation because we work with fossils, and that is:

4.     Changes that occur during fossilization (‘taphonomy’): Most fossils preserve only the skeleton, and so information from soft tissues like colour, integument, and muscles is lost. Skeletons become disarticulated, and individual bones get broken. All of this reduces the amount of information we have to work with. Finally, the remaining bones can become squished and distorted because of the extreme forces that occur as rocks form.

 Disarticulated Argali sheep skeleton in Mongolia, 2010.

Finally, it is important to remember that the natural world doesn’t always fit into discrete categories, and that the concept of species, genus, etc. is something that humans have created to help sort living things into workable categories. How many differences do two populations need to have in order to call them different species? How many differences until we split things into different genera? There isn’t really an answer to those questions, and so deciding on what are ‘species-level’ differences vs. ‘genus-level’ differences is the source of much debate.

But that’s ok, because that is a big part of what is fun about taxonomy and palaeontology!

So, moving on to Tyrannosaurus rex vs. Tyrannosaurus bataar vs. Tarbosaurus bataar. Tarbosaurus bataar and Tyrannosaurus rex have several morphological differences in the skull, but these are not necessarily obvious if you’re not accustomed to anatomical terminology or used to looking at skulls. Nevertheless, they are present, and there is an excellent, free to access paper in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica that you can go download right now to see for yourself. In a nutshell, the skull of Tarbosaurus is narrower than Tyrannosaurus when you look at it front on, and the nasal bones (the bones along the top of the snout) are domed near the front of the eyes. Additionally, the arms of Tarbosaurus are proportionately even shorter relative to the rest of the body than those of Tyrannosaurus, which are already pretty short.

Tarbosaurus bataar partial skull at the Palaeontological Institute in Moscow.

Tyrannosaurus rex skull at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta.

It’s pretty clear that Tarbosaurus bataar and Tyrannosaurus rex represent different species, because these differences are geographically separated. Small-armed, narrow-skull tyrannosaurs are only found in Mongolia, and longer-armed, wider-skull tyrannosaurs are found only in North America. You could make an argument that perhaps the differences are insufficient to warrant having two genera, in which case the genus Tyrannosaurus has priority over Tarbosaurus because it was named first. However, most palaeontologists accept both the genus Tarbosaurus and the genus Tyrannosaurus as being valid. So why did the auction house consistently call their skeleton Tyrannosaurus bataar? I can’t say for sure, but I suspect it is because Tyrannosaurus is much more a household name than Tarbosaurus, and this makes the skeleton more recognizable and interesting. It’s easier to tell someone your skeleton is a Tyrannosaurus than to do what I’ve just done here and explain how there is a similar, but different, tyrannosaur in Mongolia called Tarbosaurus.

So, we can look for anatomical features in the skull and skeleton that indicate whether or not the tyrannosaur was a Tarbosaurus or a Tyrannosaurus. But how do we know that the skeleton came from Mongolia? Well, much like certain animals today are found only in certain places, some dinosaurs were found only in some places and not others. Tarbosaurus has so far only been recovered from the Nemegt Formation, a set of rocks that are only known in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. If the skeleton is shown to be a Tarbosaurus, and not some other species of tyrannosaur, then the conclusion we must come to without any additional information is that the specimen comes from Mongolia. We can also use the colour and preservation of the bones to identify where the skeleton came from, because different rock units will produce differently coloured fossils (in Alberta, dinosaur bones are often brown or black, and in Mongolia, they are often white or reddish).

If for some reason there was good evidence that the skeleton did not, in fact, come from Mongolia, that would only make the specimen more scientifically important, as it would extend the geographic or stratigraphic range of the genus Tarbosaurus and would give us important new information about that genus.

I had originally hoped to post this second part much sooner, and so much has transpired since my original Tarbosaurus post. I’m particularly pleased to see that a delegation of Mongolians and palaeontologists examined the auctioned Tarbosaurus this week as part of the investigation into the specimen. You can read their report at the Painter Law Firm's website. I also highly recommend this article at the Guardian by palaeontologist Dave Hone, and many thanks to Brian Switek at Dinosaur Tracking for his kind words about my first post in this series.

Literature!

Hurum JH, Sabath K. 2003. Giant theropod dinosaurs from Asia and North America: skulls of Tarbosaurus bataar and Tyrannosaurus rex compared. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 48:161-190.

Let it snow...

Well it's a balmy -37C windchill here today (but just -27C without, so it's not so bad! right?), and wonderfully snowy, and what do you know but there's an article about our day in Dinosaur Provincial Park last December.

You can read Ed Struzik's complementary (and complimentary) pieces in the Edmonton Journal:

"Science rewrites assumptions about prehistoric animals."

and

"Dinosaur hunter Phil Currie shows no sign of slowing down." This one features a nice video of us preparing the Daspletosaurus jacket for the helicopter lift, and the helicopter lift itself.

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.

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.

On the Presence of Female Palaeontologists in the Popular Media

Last week I did a bunch of interviews with many different media outlets about Gwawinapterus. One of the most interesting was a conversation I had with CBC Radio Edmonton’s show Radio Active, which aired on Friday evening. You can listen to it here.


I was asked not just about the pterosaur, but about what it is like to be a female palaeontologist and how the media exposure may affect the career of a scientist just starting out. What I thought was interesting was that the interviewers both before and during the Radio Active show noted that most people don’t really associate palaeontology with women, and that dinosaurs seem to be more for boys. I found this a bit surprising because whenever I go out and do activities with younger kids, ALL kids love dinosaurs, regardless of gender. But it got me thinking again about women in palaeontology, and in particular, where are the female palaeontologists in the popular media?

There is a lot of text coming. I am sorry. Here is a screenshot of the first page of Google Images when you search 'female paleontologist'. I find most of the results baffling.

I can think of precious few female palaeontologists that have featured in dino documentaries as talking heads, or that I sort of regularly see in the media reporting on their papers. Karen Chin (in When Dinosaurs Roamed America) and Mary Schweitzer (who works on dinosaur soft tissues and DNA) come to mind immediately. I am sure there are others, but I think we may be swamped by the men in the field if I were to crunch numbers. I don’t think that this is just representative of an age difference either, ie. that its the well-established palaeontologists, who happen to be male right now, that get featured. Dinos Alive! 3D (an Imax film) featured Sterling Nesbitt while he was still a graduate student. And although I know lots of female grad students, I’m not sure I see their work in the media very often. So this raises some questions for me:

1. Are female palaeontologists less likely to be approached by the media? If so, why?
2. Are female palaeontologists less likely to approach the media? If so, why?
3. Are female palaeontologists trying to get their work out there, but are being blocked by the media? If so, why?

I am pretty sure #3 is not the answer. But I bet you #1 and #2 both play a role. Although I am certainly no expert on science communication, here are some things I have learned while working with the media that will maybe help you get started.

1. For the most part, the media will not approach you for a story. They have no idea your paper exists. It is totally, 100% ok for you to contact your university or museum’s media office and say “I wrote a paper and I want to do a press release. Will you help me do this?” The only instance I have ever been approached without a press release was for my PLoS One paper on the math of tail-clubbing in ankylosaurs, and I am pretty sure that is because PLoS One is an open access journal that science reporters regularly check.

2. GIVE TALKS AT SVP. Did you know that only about 10% of the presenters talking about dinosaurs at the Pittsburgh SVP were female? It’s true, I counted! Also, I was one of them. Isn’t that weird? I am pretty sure there are more than 10% female dinosaur people. Giving talks at SVP has let people know that I am out there and working on interesting stuff. As such, when someone was contacted by the team working on what would become Clash of the Dinosaurs, that person knew I was working on tail club biomechanics and recommended they contact me. (Mystery person, who are you? I owe you a thank-you.) I don’t think that would have happened if I had not given a talk at the Cleveland SVP. I have absolutely nothing against poster presentations and I like doing them very much, but I think that talks make you visible to a larger audience and we shouldn’t be afraid to get up there.

3. Go to ‘talking to the media’ workshops. I went to one at SVP a few years back and learned a lot. They are worthwhile.

4. And don’t be afraid to just in general go out and talk about your research. Museum or university or local nonprofit (I’m thinking of the Dinosaur Research Institute from my experience) doing a fundraiser and need a speaker? Local school or library or amateur palaeontology group looking for a workshop or presentation? Yes, of course you would love to!


I won’t get into the merits or drawbacks of talking to the media, but I think overall it is a good thing, and it is also fun! Will it benefit my career in the long run? I don’t know. I think ultimately I just need to keep doing the best science I can, and scientists will hear about my work through journals and meetings regardless of whether or not I publicize my research. But I hope that by putting myself out there as a (reasonably?) normal person who is also female and ALSO a scientist I will show folks that it is normal to have female palaeontologists and scientists. The more women there are visibly doing science, the less the stereotype that science isn’t for girls makes any sense.