You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose...and you can definitely pick your ankylosaur's nose.

Say hello to Euoplocephalus, the best known ankylosaur you've never heard of. Besides Pinacosaurus from Mongolia and China, there are more specimens referred to Euoplocephalus than to any other ankylosaurid, and it is certainly the most well represented ankylosaurid from North America. Yet Euoplocephalus often gets overlooked because its younger cousin is THAT ankylosaur, the one that starred at the World's Fair and was in Jurassic Park III and Clash of the Dinosaurs and Dinosaur Revolution and gets all the cool toys and, you know, is the namesake of the group. You know, Ankylosaurus. Well, hopefully you'll be hearing more from me about Euoplocephalus over the coming months. Today we'll be picking its nose.

Ankylosaurs are kind of weird as dinosaurs goes, because they get rid of things like the antorbital and supraorbital fenestrae, and tuck the laterotemporal fenestrae back behind the squamosals and quadratojugals. In a sense, the windows to the skull are all closed, and so it's hard to see some of the internal features that are more visible on other dinosaur skulls. Our new paper describes UALVP 47977, a busted up Euoplocephalus skull from Dinosaur Provincial Park. Normally, busted skulls don't appear very exciting, as important pieces might be missing, and they don't make very good display specimens. In this case however, UALVP 47977 gives us more information because it is broken! This specimen shows off details of the braincase and nasal passages that we don't typically get to see, including impressions of blood vessels.

I am trying (slowly but surely) to sort out the mess that is the genus Euoplocephalus, and so I was interested in comparing UALVP 47977 with other skulls to see if any of its features were present in other skulls. The only other skull that is naturally broken in a similar way is AMNH 5238, and it looks pretty similar - it even has blood vessel impressions in the same place (this specimen is also super cool because it has ciliary osteoderms, or, bony eyelids!). I was delighted when Dr. Larry Witmer made the CT scans of AMNH 5405 available on his website following the Witmer and Ridgely (2008) publication on paranasal sinuses. I also made arrangments to CT scan UALVP 31, one of our 'classic' University of Alberta specimens.

With CT scans in hand, I went through the process of eliminating matrix from the inside of the nasal passages (in essence, picking their noses), so I could examine the skull roof of these two specimens. This process is called segmentation, which means that you place a 'mask' over the parts of the CT scan that you want to appear in the 3D model, and remove the mask where you don't want something in the model. Although the software we use, Mimics, has lots of tools to help speed up the segmentation process, with fossils sometimes the contrast between bone and stone is not very great. As a result, sometimes you just have to go through the CT scans slice by slice and trace out by hand what you want to keep. This is super tedious work at times and I have the utmost respect for the amazing 3D visualizations that come out of Dr. Witmer's lab. Eventually we invited Dr. Witmer to collaborate on the paper with us, but I think it was good that we were able to independently test their 3D model using different software and fresh eyes, a sentiment echoed over on the WitmerLab blog.

The segmentation process begins! All of that uniformly-dense stuff in the palatal area has to go. The green 'mask' will be eliminated wherever there is matrix instead of bone, leaving only the bone in the 3D model.

I won't go into too much detail on the paper here, but I will say that this was a tough but very interesting project to work on. I've learned a lot about braincases and brains and noses over the course of writing this manuscript, but I'm sure I've still got more to learn. I've definitely had a lot of moments where I felt pretty stupid for not knowing certain things, but I think perhaps part of science is getting outside of your comfort zone. Ankylosaur tails are good, but skulls are pretty fun too, and I hope I can share some more skull papers with you soon! 

Here's a video we put together for the press release accompanying the paper, featuring the ever lovely UALVP 31.

Literature!

Miyashita T, Arbour VM, Witmer LM, Currie PJ. 2011. The internal cranial morphology of an armoured dinosaur Euoplocephalus corroborated by X-ray computed tomographic reconstruction. Journal of Anatomy, first published 29 Sept 2011, doi:10.111/j.1469.-7580.2011.01427.x.

Witmer LM, Ridgely RC. 2008. The paranasal air sinuses of predatory and armored dinosaurs (Archosauria: Theropoda and Ankylosauria) and their contribution to cephalic architecture. Anatomical Record 291:1362-1388.

And check out the post over at Pick & Scalpel, which has more information and some great images!

An armored dinosaur gets a second opinion—and the crazy-straw nasal passage survives!

...and finally, because this has certainly helped me sometimes:

Schwartz MA. 2008. The importance of stupidity in scientific research. Journal of Cell science 121:1771.

Hadrosaurs get their moment in the sun.

Living in Edmonton means I'm in close proximity to the dinosaur capital of Canada, Drumheller, and the wonderful Royal Tyrrell Museum. Last week the U of A crew headed down to the Hadrosaur Symposium, a wonderful event by all accounts with lots of interesting talks and good conversation. I won't report on the science presented as much of the research is as yet unpublished (although look out for the eventual symposium volume), but thought I would share a few photos and links to symposium goodies.

First off, the Tyrrell is making some of the keynote lectures available on their Youtube channel. David Weishampel's is already online; other keynote speakers were Kishigjav Tsogtbaatar, Pascale Godefroit, Rodolfo Coria, and Jack Horner.

You can also check out the official Hadrosaur Symposium Flickr page for some very nice photos of the goings on.

And here's a few photos of my own!

Symposium attendees get a backstage tour of the collections.

Hadrosaur heads in the main gallery.

And some hadrosaur bodies!

There were some original skulls on display in the poster room as well.

I'm a Palaeontologist, and I liked Dinosaur Revolution.

There. I said it. I liked Dinosaur Revolution.

I was pretty sure I'd be hooked from the moment I saw the trailer and saw this recreated with Cryolophosaurus. Hot dang, the raging dino fanboy in me loves me some Charles Knight.

I have been following with great interest the various perspectives on Dinosaur Revolution at palaeoblogs around the net - see Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs, Dinosaur Tracking, and a whole slew of posts over on Art Evolved. As with any dino documentary (and probably ALL documentaries, regardless of subject matter), there are inaccuracies to point out. However, I was surprised by strong backlash Dinosaur Revolution has seemed to receive around the palaeo blogosphere. I've only caught the first two episodes so far, but I'm looking forward to seeing the next two.

I view Dinosaur Revolution as kind of like an animated children's storybook about dinosaurs - something like the A Day in the Life of... series, which has a story followed by a discussion of the scientific research behind the story. Would we criticize a children's storybook for using narrative and some anthropomorphism to get the story across? Or how about, would we criticize it based on its art style - cartoons get a pass (the I Am A... series), but more photorealistic portrayals don't?

I think the show does a pretty good job of getting some science across within the context of what the show is supposed to be. The short interstitials with the palaeontologists provide a bit of context for some of the ideas being presented, there's footage of fossils and fieldwork, and there's even AN EXPERIMENT! at the end of The Watering Hole. I agree with many reviews that the second episode was the stronger of the first two, and that the first episode was somewhat uneven. I didn't love every part of Dinosaur Revolution, but I liked more than I disliked. I disliked Gigantoraptor's crazy inflatable wattle, but not because it was crazy - I disliked it because it took away from the potentially more interesting story about display feathers in oviraptorosaurs. I disliked Saurosuchus not eating the Eoraptor that it bit and threw away, because that was crazy. But I liked a lot of the (I guess) controversial bits - the Looney Tunes homages, the therapsid getting thrown into the Saurosuchus' mouth, the Glacialisaurus hacking up a wad of sap. Those things were funny, and I think in the context of this particular program that the humour worked well and was ok.

And seriously, how cool is it to have the Ischigualasto, the Hanson, and the Iren Dabasu formations all in one episode? Have we ever seen Eoraptor, Glacialisaurus, or Gigantoraptor on TV before? I hope that the portrayal of all these marvelous dinosaurs inspires people to head to Wikipedia and learn more.

So I'm wondering - a lot of the controversial things in Dinosaur Revolution seem, well, cool to me. And I think it's ok to be cool. And I think that Dinosaur Revolution was marketed to be cool, and to be more storybook, less documentary sensu stricto. They advertised it at Comic Con! How often do dino documentaries get advertised at geek conventions?

That Tyrannosaurus has a skull for a face, and that is cool. He's like Ghost Rider!

So I liked Dinosaur Revolution, and I think it's a shame more people didn't. Perhaps context is everything. Perhaps the biggest problem is that even though the marketing indicated this was not a typical documentary, airing this on the Discovery and Science Channels was just the wrong context.

Velociraptor-free, mostly...

For the last several years, our lab has run a volunteer fossil prep program on weekday evenings. As the school year starts again, I thought I'd share our recruitment poster for this year!

We are very fortunate to have two prep labs in the BioSci building at the University of Alberta. Our basement lab handles the larger, more complex specimens like skulls or partial skeletons. The fourth floor lab, shown here, is where volunteers help us get through the enormous quantity of smaller fossils we've collected. There's lots of table space and light, and with volunteers it becomes quite sociable in the evenings!

There's always at least one grad student or upper-year undergrad present who supervises the volunteers and teaches them prep techniques. Volunteers have come from many different departments at the U of A, not just the sciences! We also get the occasional volunteers from outside the university, who hear about us online or via posters we put up around town.

Volunteers help us prepare a wide variety of material from all over Alberta, including theropods, hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, crocs, turtles, and champsosaurs. A lot of the small material comes from Dinosaur Provincial Park and is fairly easy to prep (sometimes just require a good toothbrushing and some glue!), but we also have more challenging projects like specimens from our Wapiti River Pachyrhinosaurus bonebed in Grande Prairie. We also have material collected way back in 1921 that has never been prepared!

The beginning of the school year is always exciting and I hope we'll see a bunch of new and returning volunteers in the next few weeks. If you're interested in keeping up with the goings on in our lab, you can follow us on our Facebook page, Dino Lab at the University of Alberta.

In Which there are Whales

One more post from my trip to Vancouver last weekend, which upon reflection definitely had a whaley theme to it. What can I say, I have a soft spot for cetaceans.

On Sunday I went whale watching with the aptly named Prince of Whales company. We almost didn't see any, but the boat went further than usual on its route after reports that a pod had been spotted. And sure enough, there was a pod of 20 - 30 orcas from the endangered Southern Resident Killer Whale community! My only regret is that we didn't have longer to watch them.

At the time our on-board naturalists thought this was L-pod, but after checking some of the photos they took (which were much better than mine), I think that K-pod may have been hanging out here, too. How can you tell one orca from another? Orcas have distinctive grey splotches on their backs just behind their dorsal fins, called saddle patches. Because the fin and back are exposed when they surface, scientists have been able to catalogue who's who in each pod, and each orca has a letter and number designation. Based on the naturalist's photos, we saw K21 (a male born in 1986) and L47 (a female born in 1974). I might have caught K16 and K12 in some of my photos. The Southern Residents were featured in the movie Free Willy (although Keiko himself was from the area around Iceland), and Luna, a famous orphaned orca who made friends with people, was from L pod.

Tuesday I had the chance to visit the wonderful Vancouver Aquarium again. I like a lot of things about this aquarium, such as its focus on the organisms found around Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, and Haida Gwaii. There's a big emphasis on active research: during the dolphin 'show' (and I use the term show very loosely here, as it is not the dramatized muscial adventure you will see at Sea World but more of a casual talk about the animals) there was a demonstration of how scientists at the aquarium are investigating why cetaceans become entangled in fishing gear. There's no shying away from evolution, either.

Highlights this time included baby wolf eels, comb jellies, and of course the dolphins.

And here is a sea pen! They look kind of like Ediacaran fossils!

All in all, it's a great place and I highly recommend it to anyone visiting Vancouver. And that wraps up my trip to the Canadian Paleontology Conference, and now I begin my planning for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Las Vegas...

...oh, what the heck:

Beaty Biodiversity Museum

The Canadian Paleontology Conference I attended over the weekend was held at the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver, and the public lecture, talks, posters, and banquet were all held in the Beaty Biodiversity Museum.

The museum is actually mostly underground, but the ground-level glass atrium is definitely eye-catching! Inside is a suspended skeleton of a 150-foot blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus. It's particularly striking at night.

Once inside, you can view the skeleton from pretty much every angle except dorsally; a ramp runs on the right lateral side down to the galleries. At the end of the talks, we dined on salmon at tables under the whale!

UBC is doing some really innovative things with regards to museums and collections. The Museum of Anthropology, which I visited last year, was the first to renovate its gallery space to include the entire collection. The Biodiversity Museum has followed suit, and the exhibits sit within the collections! It's a pretty good way to kill two birds with one stone, and is a space-efficient (and I'm assuming cost-efficient) way to display specimens. Every few feet one of the storage cabinets has been converted into a display case, and there are a few strategically-placed gaps in the rows to allow for some different display cases. The cases in the middle of this photo had displays about how specimens are collected, and you could pull out the drawers to see more specimens. There were also a couple of interactive kiosks, my favourite being the display about algae. The table had two shopping baskets and a variety of packaged food products; the goal was to separate out the food that had algae in it and the food that didn't (spoiler alert: all but one product had some sort of algae in it!). It was a cool way to teach people about these unappreciated organisms!

What's also great about the museum is that it features all kinds of interesting organisms. The displays include mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, lots of different invertebrates, plants, fungi, and fossils. I really liked the way fossils were incorporated into the exhibits - in the appropriate region of the collection, glass floor panels showed the fossils 'in the ground', like this school of fish from the Green River Formation.

I'm cheating here because this photo is not from the biodiversity museum, but from the Pacific Museum of the Earth (in the Department of Earth & Ocean Sciences) across the street. I had to put it in, because it reminds me how Alberta dinosaurs wind up everywhere. This Lambeosaurus was collected from Dinosaur Provincial Park by the Sternbergs in the 1920s, and is on permanent loan from the Canadian Museum of Nature (and yes, it's real, not a cast).

Nanaimo Group Field Trip

I've just returned from the Canadian Paleontology Conference, which was held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. I participated in the field trip to Vancouver Island, where we explored Nanaimo Group outcrops. Gwawinapterus was collected from Nanaimo Group rocks on Hornby Island, and although we didn't get out to Hornby, we did check out several other formations and localities. Here's a few highlights from the trip!

After taking one of the ferries from Vancouver to Nanaimo, we stopped at Departure Bay. During the day we'd be working our way up through the Nanaimo Group and therefore into deeper water environments. The Haslam Formation outcrops here and represents a shallow marine environment.

We saw some really great inoceramid clams at Departure Bay.

Next stop was Englishman River Falls Provincial Park, a beautiful spot. Didn't find many fossils, but I enjoyed the waterfall very much!

We also enjoyed the lushness of the temperate rainforest.

We next headed out to Trent River, a popular place for amateur collectors. Here the Pender Formation crops out, as well as the Comox and Haslam Formations. Abundant nodules contain ammonites, bivalves, and other invertebrates. Elasmosaurs, mosasaurs, and turtles have also been found near this locality! (See more about the Puntledge River elasmosaur at the Courtenay Museum.) These outcrops represent deeper water facies including turbidites.

Pete tries his hand at cracking open a nodule.

We finished the day off with a stop at the Qualicum Beach Museum, which features a nice display of fossils collected in the area as well as casts of specimens from all over the world. A cast of the Gwawinapterus holotype is also on display here!