paleontology
laelaps | April 21, 2010
In a clip from the recent BBC program Museum of Life, visitors to London's Natural History Museum try to identify what kind of animal Megatherium was. Paleo fans will know it as one of the largest ground sloths to have ever lived (as well as one of the first to be described), but if I didn't know that and had no background in paleo, I might think it was a dinosaur, too!
grrlscientist | April 21, 2010tags: Koprolithen, Senckenberg Naturmuseum, museums, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, fossils, paleontology, image of the day, photography
Koprolithen.
Senckenberg Naturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: GrrlScientist, 13 April 2010 [larger view]
laelaps | April 20, 2010
For much of the past 130 million years South America was an island continent, and on it organisms evolved in "splendid isolation." Mammals, especially, evolved into forms not seen anywhere else, and while some mammalian immigrants made their way to South America during the past 30 million years it was not until about three million years ago, with the closing of the isthmus of Panama, that large animals from North and South America began to wander across the new landbridge and mix with the endemic faunas. This is why there were elephants in South America and giant ground sloths in North…
grrlscientist | April 20, 2010tags: Fledermaus Hologramm, Senckenberg Naturmuseum, museums, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, fossils, paleontology, image of the day, photography
Fledermaus Hologramm.
Senckenberg Naturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: GrrlScientist, 13 April 2010 [larger view]
grrlscientist | April 18, 2010tags: Trilobiten Abdruck, Senckenberg Naturmuseum, museums, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, fossils, paleontology, image of the day, photography
Trilobiten Abdruck.
Senckenberg Naturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: GrrlScientist, 13 April 2010 [larger view]
Impressionsby Ryan Jennings
A lifetime can be likened to a lonely beach of sand.
a stranger makes a mark one day, an imprint of a hand.
As time goes by the beach once clear is now a cluttered field
of memories and keep-sakes of the ones that we hold dear.
Time does its best to wash away remembrances of those -
the ones we…
grrlscientist | April 17, 2010tags: Lituites lituus, Senckenberg Naturmuseum, museums, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, fossils, paleontology, image of the day, photography
Lituites lituus.
Senckenberg Naturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: GrrlScientist, 13 April 2010 [larger view]
If you were here today, I would show you this lovely Ordovician fossil shell. The Ordovician Period began with a series of major extinction events that ended the Cambrian Period roughly 488.3 ± 1.7 million years ago, and lasted for about 44.6 million years. Despite a world filled with destruction, death and mass extinctions,…
laelaps | April 15, 2010Top of the encrusted surface of a brachiopod shell, showing the "war" between an edrioasteroid (star-shaped organism at center) and a fast-growing bryozoan colony. From Sprinkle and Rodgers 2010.
Back in the early days of paleontology, when the meaning and origin of fossils was still in doubt, some naturalists believed that the shells, shark teeth, and other petrified curiosities were attempts by the rock to imitate life. Fossils were not true vestiges of history, it was believed, but instead the product of some "plastic virtue" suffused throughout the non-living Creation. As naturalists…
laelaps | April 14, 2010Off the top of your head, how many female paleontologists can you name?
Hopefully, thanks to the recent publication of The Fossil Hunter and Remarkable Creatures, the brilliant 19th century fossil collector Mary Anning should spring to mind, but it seems to me that women are underrepresented in discussions of paleontology. In books, documentaries, news reports, and other popularizations, male authorities (from Georges Cuvier and William Buckland to Bob Bakker and Jack Horner today) take center stage much more often than women, and this is despite the fact that there are (and have been) many…
laelaps | April 13, 2010A red panda (Ailurus fulgens, left, photographed at the Bronx Zoo) and a giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca, right, photographed at the National Zoo).
As the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould observed in one of his most famous essays, the thumbs of giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) are nothing at all like the large digits on our own hands. Their accessory "thumbs", visible on the surface as a differentiated part of the pad on the "palm" of the hand, are modified sesamoid bones derived from the wrist. They are jury-rigged bits of anatomy which cast nature as an "excellent tinkerer, not a…
laelaps | April 12, 2010An African wild dog (Lycaon pictus, left) compared to a spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta, right). Both photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
It never fails. Whenever I visit a zoo's African wild dog exhibit someone inevitably asks "Are those hyenas?", and when I visit spotted hyena enclosures I often hear the question "Are those dogs?" These carnivores, known to scientists as Lycaon pictus and Crocuta crocuta (respectively), are only distant cousins, but the vague similarities shared between them often cause people to confuse one with the other.
There are a few quick and dirty ways to tell them apart…
laelaps | April 9, 2010
Now that the details about Australopithecus sediba have been published, I am faced with an important question - how am I going to fit the new hominin into Written in Stone?
When I started composing Written in Stone I was determined to make it as up-to-date as possible. This was not only out of a concern for accuracy, but also stemmed from a desire to present the public with some discoveries that they may not have heard about before. Given that new paleontological papers are being published every week, however, I have often been faced with the question of how to incorporate interesting new…
laelaps | April 8, 2010A diagram of how the skeletons of Australopithecus sediba came to be preserved in the Malapa cave deposit. From Dirks et al, 2010.
A little less than two million years ago, in what is now South Africa, a torrential downpour washed the bodies of two humans into the deep recesses of a cave. Just how their remains came to be in the cave in the first place is a mystery. Perhaps they fell in through the gaping hole in the cave roof just as hyenas, saber-toothed cats, horses, and other animals had, but, however the humans entered the cave, their bones ultimately came to rest in a natural bowl…
laelaps | April 7, 2010A leopard (Panthera pardus). Image from Wikipedia.
When a leopard eats a baboon, what is left behind? This question is not only relevant to primatologists and zoologists. Even though instances of predation on humans is relatively rare, big cats still kill and consume people, and when they do they can virtually obliterate a body. Yet, just like a human criminal, the dining habits of big cats leave tell-tale clues, and in 2004 researchers Travis Pickering and Kristian Carlson fed two captive leopards eight complete baboon carcasses each in order catalog the most useful ways to identify the…
laelaps | April 7, 2010Want the dirt on the new species of fossil human which will be described in Science this week? Tune in to the BBC World Service "Science in Action" program this Friday to hear me discuss the discovery with host Jon Stewart. The program should be available on the web sometime after it airs, as well.
laelaps | April 6, 2010A leopard (Panthera pardus). Image from Wikipedia.
SK-54 is a curious fossil. The 1.5 million year old skullcap represents a juvenile Paranthropus robustus, one of the heavy-jawed hominins which lived in prehistoric South Africa, but there is something that makes this skull fragment particularly special. Near one of the sutures along the back of the skull are two neat puncture marks, the hallmark of a leopard.
Even though it was initially proposed that SK-54 had been murdered by another australopithecine wielding a weapon of bone or horn, in the late 1960's the paleontologist C.K. Brain was…
laelaps | April 5, 2010According to multiple reports released yesterday, scientists will announce the discovery of a new species of two-million-year-old hominin this week. Do you know what that means? That's right; writers are breaking out the pop-sci boilerplate to tell us all about the new "missing link." To paraphrase what I have seen in the headlines alone, the find is the "missing link which will shed new light on human evolution and rewrite what we thought we knew about our history."
I don't believe the hype, but I can only speculate on the actual significance of the specimens in question. According to the…
laelaps | April 1, 2010The partial faces of Anoiapithecus (left), Pierolapithecus (center), and Dryopithecus (right). (Images not to scale)
Our species is just one branch of a withering part of the evolutionary tree, the great apes. Along with the handful of species of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, we are all that is left of the hominids, and considering the threats our close relatives face we could very soon be the only great apes left. It has not always been this way. During the swath of prehistory ~23-5 million years ago known as the Miocene a variety of ape species inhabited forests through much of…
laelaps | March 31, 2010The latest edition of the open-access paleontology journal Palaeontologia Electronica was recently published, and I am happy to say that it contains my review of The Paleobiological Revolution. If you are interested in the history of science and how paleontology has changed during the past four decades, definitely check it out.
With any luck, I will be able to publish a few more contributions to the technical literature this year. I have one paper in press, another which is presently inching through the review process, a piece I just started writing up about an enormous example of…
grrlscientist | March 30, 2010tags: evolution, evolutionary biology, UV light, flight, dinosaur, dromaeosaur, theropods, Microraptor gui, paleontology, fossils, birds, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club
Figure 1. The holotype of Microraptor gui, IVPP V 13352 under normal light. This shows the preserved feathers (white arrow) and the 'halo' around the specimen where they appear to be absent (black arrows). Scale bar at 5 cm. [larger view]
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009223
It has long been known that when exposed to ultraviolent light, fossilized bones and shells -- and even…
laelaps | March 29, 2010The fail whale comes to rest; the decomposing body of a gray whale is host to a diverse array of scavengers and other deep sea organisms. From Goffredi et al., 2004.
In the deep sea, no carcass goes to waste. Platoons of crabs, fish, and other scavengers make short work of most of the bodies which come to rest on the sea bottom, but every now and then the carrion-eaters are presented with a rotting bonanza; a whale fall. Muscle, viscera, blubber, and bone; it all gets broken down, but it takes so long that the whale carcass actually provides a temporary home for a variety of organisms which…