Smithsonian.com

Down in the Valley: In the 1930s, residents near the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts named a strip of land “Pioneer Valley” in a bid to attract tourists with imagery of colonial frontier life. But, I guess with everyone struggling in a tough economy, settler life doesn’t quite hold the escapist appeal it once did. So, according to Bob’s Dinosaur Blog, one local advocate named Sarah Doyle has launched a rebranding effort: “Doyle would like to change Pioneer Valley’s name to Valley of the Dinosaurs, based on the thousands of fossilized footprints that can be found in the general area…There’s only one problem with this scheme—the dinosaurs that left their footprints in the Connecticut River Valley are mostly unidentified, and not nearly as sexy as T. Rex or Triceratops.” (Which could explain the sudden mass deliveries of these dinosaur shoes to the Berkshire area….)

The Eye of the Beholder: Why I Hate Theropods explains why he loves duckweed.

Kids Write the Darndest Things: Peter Bond has been posting examples of work he did as a child, including the opus, The Adventures of Flat-Foot, the Deinonychis!—his earliest attempt at writing and illustrating a kid’s story book. An excerpt: “One day Flat-Foot went to see if anything was in the mailbox. He levitated the mail to his hand. He ripped open all the mail at once. He opened one with a mark on it. The envelope was a letter from: Torro the Tyrannosaurus rex!!! It read that a bomb was planted in Sanfrancisus, his home city.” (So far, it’s better than the latest season of 24.)

Body Art: The Free Tattoo Designs blog (seriously, is there any topic that doesn’t have a blog?) gives rave reviews to this collection of temporary “Mini Dinosaurs Tattoos”. Apparently, they’re fun for kids of, um, all ages: “I had these as party favors recently; they’re a big hit. You get a stegosaurus on your clavicle, then go to a bar and someone thinks it’s the best tattoo they’ve ever seen.” (Hah! Wait till they see my tattoo of a brontosaurus shooting flames from its mouth…)

Boneyard: Archosaur Musings continues his reviews of museums around the world. This time, the setting is the State Museum for Natural History is Stuttgart: “One thing that was well done in several places was to have out an original slab of disarticulated bones with each carefully labeled to show which part of the skeleton it came from, then suspended above it was a complete skeletal reconstruction of the whole animal. It really helps show off both the anatomy, and how we get from a pile of bones to a whole mounted skeleton. In a similar vein a nice aetosaur was on display but instead of the usual resin or plaster bones to replace those missing, it was completed with burnished metal, giving a real ‘living tank’ look like no other. We definitely need robot aetosaurs!” (Amen!)

Dinonauts: The May 2009 issue of Scientific American has a feature article, “Our Planet’s Leaky Atmosphere.” As a number of bloggers have pointed out, there is a slight error in one of the captions: “When a comet or asteroid strikes a planet, it creates an enormous explosion that throws rock, water, dinosaurs, and air into space.” (As if we didn’t already have enough junk cluttering Earth’s orbit…)

Dino Expo: Goseong province on the south coast of Korea hosts a giant dinosaur expo every three years. “During this time an immense park is turned into a dinosaur event that covers several square kilometers and features multiple themed pavilions (Cretaceous, Jurassic, etc.), tons of dino sculptures and a dino museum that would put most museums in NA to shame,” writes Michael Ryan over at Palaeoblog.  Be sure to check out his photos, including (shudder) the “triceratops toilet.”

I Want to Believe! Glendon Mellow has recently unveiled his latest artwork: “Mythical Flying Trilobite Fossil III.”. Also, Glendon sets the record straight about his chosen subject matter: “For the Arizona resident searching under ‘flying trilobite hoax,’ I’m kind of glad you didn’t find one. I don’t paint inaccurately-winged flying trilobites on pieces of shale for the same reason people make crop circles or launch flares….I paint flying trilobites largely for the same reason people paint dragons or faeries. It’s fun and interesting, and hopefully sparks the imagination….Can you imagine if I did try to perpetuate a hoax about finding a genuine flying trilobite fossil?”

I agree. I mean, who would be gullible enough to believe in a flying trilobite? That’s almost as absurd as the idea of a stegosaurus living among humans in Cambodia…oh, wait.

An artist's impression of the asteroid impact at Chicxulub. From Wikipedia.

Mass extinction is an extremely difficult subject to study. It is one thing to identify a mass extinction in the fossil record, but it is quite another to be able to fully explain its cause. It is not surprising, then, that the triggers for the great mass extinctions in earth’s history are hotly debated. The end-Cretaceous extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs (among other creatures) is no exception.

A new paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society has once again stirred debate over whether the impact of an asteroid about 65 million years ago caused the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Written by Gerta Keller and Thierry Adatte, the paper suggests that the asteroid that impacted at the site of Chicxulub came 300,000 years before the mass extinction, thus making the asteroid a poor candidate for the extinction’s trigger. The key to the hypothesis presented in the paper is a 30-foot layer of rock near the impact site that sits right above the impact layer. Keller and Adatte argue that this layer accumulated relatively slowly, over 300,000 years, and no species go extinct within it. It is not until the upper limit of the layer that species go extinct.

Keller has long been a critic of the hypothesis that the end-Cretaceous extinction was sparked by the asteroid strike at Chicxulub. In the past she has favored multiple asteroid impacts as an explanation, although more recently she has preferred the activity of volcanoes that formed the Deccan Traps rock formation in India. The volcanoes erupted at the end of the Cretaceous, between about 68 and 60 million years ago, and they were so violent that some scientists think that they were the primary agents of mass extinction. Either way, though, over the past several years Keller has sampled rock in regions close to the Chicxulub impact crater and since at least 2003 has been saying that the asteroid struck 300,000 years prior to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

The problem with many of Keller’s papers, however, is that she has often sampled the area closest to the impact crater. This is the area that was the most affected by the immediate after-effects of the strike. Huge waves swept towards the coast, shock waves ran through the rock, and earthquakes were triggered by the impact. All of this makes the area in and around the crater very geologically complex. As paleontologist J. Smit has pointed out, for instance, fossils that Keller had previously identified as being Cretaceous in age really came from the Paleocene, the epoch right after the Cretaceous. Smit’s observations are more consistent with what is seen at end-Cretaceous boundary sites elsewhere.

While it is important to study the Chicxulub impact crater and the surrounding area, the best evidence for the timing of the impact and the end-Cretaceous mass extinction is found farther afield. The correlation of sites around the world shows that many of the groups that went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous went extinct at or shortly before the impact layer. There still many places in the world, primarily in the southern hemisphere, where the end-Cretaceous mass extinction has yet to be studied in detail, but the asteroid remains a major contender for the cause of extinction. But debate will continue and Keller’s hypothesis will stand or fall according to the evidence.

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A preparator at work in the fossil lab at the National Museum of Natural History. From Flickr user szlea.

Of all the people who have said they wanted to be paleontologists someday, how many have actually realized their dream? Probably very few. Some people develop other interests or find a career that they feel better suits them, but of the pool of “would-be” paleontologists there are quite a few who simply did not know how to start making progress towards that goal.

When I was getting ready to go to college, I had a dream of becoming a paleontologist. Given that I lived in New Jersey, however, my parents and guidance counselor assured me that there were no paleontology programs at the nearby universities. If I wanted to learn about dinosaurs I would have to go out west, and that was something I could not afford to do.

Much to my frustration I later learned that there were paleontology programs within my reach. If only I had known about them sooner! I imagine that I am not the only one who has been frustrated in this way, but what can aspiring paleontologists do to get on the right track?

Fortunately, some professional paleontologists have shared their advice on their personal blogs. Late last year, paleontologist Jeffrey Martz ran a whole series of posts on “Advice for Aspiring Researchers in Vertebrate Paleontology.” The posts covered the topics “Do you really want to be a researcher?” “Find Your Specialty,” “Look Carefully, Don’t Be Afriad to Reinvent the Wheel, Find Your Future Projects,” “Find Your Community” and “You Are Not Writing To Yourself.” These posts really put professional paleontology in perspective and are must-read entries for anyone considering a career as a vertebrate paleontologist.

If you are already in college (or will start classes soon), keep in mind that not all the relevant courses will be explicitly marked “Paleontology”. Many courses in physical anthropology departments, like ones about the structure of the human skeleton, can be invaluable to budding paleontologists. Make sure you look through a college’s course catalog to see what is offered and, if you don’t see a major you like, talk to an advisor to see if you can create your own course of study. I didn’t know this was possible when I first entered college, but I really wish that I did!

Perhaps some of you are like me, however, in that you presently don’t have the ability to go back to school or pursue an academic career right now. That does not mean you have to be disengaged from the paleontological community. One of the best ways to educate yourself on your own time is by keeping up with new research, and paleontologists Andy Farke and Dave Hone have shared tips for good ways to get a hold of papers. Technical papers might be tough to get through at first, but reading them is one of the best ways to teach yourself about paleontology.

As with many other academic careers, though, there are more paleontologists than there are jobs. Even if you can complete your training and get a Ph.D. in paleontology, it might be (and probably will be) very difficult to find steady work. This is why you can’t just want to be a paleontologist; you really have to feel the need to be a paleontologist. It is the sort of career that has many challenges that can only be overcome by those truly passionate about it.

Even if you can’t make paleontology a career, there are other ways to stay involved. Go to conferences, keep up with journals, and ask if there are any volunteer positions at your local museums. If you spend enough time educating yourself, you may even be able to publish papers. Not everyone can be a professional paleontologist, but there are many ways to participate in the field.

The top and left-side views of the partial skull of Xiongguanlong. From the Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper.

Even though Tyrannosaurus has been a dinosaur celebrity for a century, we have only recently begun to understand how it evolved. For many years it seemed to be a larger and deadlier version of earlier carnivorous dinosaurs like Allosaurus, but recent discoveries have placed Tyrannosaurus and its relatives among the coelurosaurs. New finds made in Asia, in particular, have revealed that some of the earliest dinosaurs that would give rise to Tyrannosaurus were small, long-armed predators that were covered in feathers. Frustratingly, there has been a 50-million-year gap in our knowledge between these early types and the more familiar tyrannosaurids, which flourished between 80 and 65 million years ago, but a new discovery announced in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B helps to fill in the void.

Called Xiongguanlong baimoensis, the new tyrannosaurid comes from sediments in western China that are 125 million to 99 million years old. Even though the skull was somewhat crushed during fossilization, it is well enough preserved to show that this dinosaur had a long, low skull that was broad across the back. Interestingly, though, it was not the largest theropod dinosaur of its time. Other non-predatory theropods, like a recently-announced ornithomimosaur named Beishanlong, were considerably larger. Indeed, it was not the bone-crushing terror that its later relatives would be.

Xiongguanlong occupies an important place in tyrannosaurid evolution. Not only did it temporally exist between the earliest tyrannosauroid dinosaurs and the later, larger genera, but it is intermediate between the two in terms of form, as well. This does not mean it is necessarily the direct ancestor or descendant of any known dinosaurs, but it is useful in determining the general pattern of tyrannosauroid evolution. It also hints that there is still a lot left to be found: who knows how many other strange tyrannosauroids there once were?

The cover of Fantastic Four #345. From Cover Browser.

I was cleaning out some old boxes yesterday when I happened upon dinosaurs in an unexpected place. A few years ago a cousin of mine gave me all of his old comic books, most of which wound up in a box for safe keeping. When I dug up the dusty old container yesterday, I noticed that some of Marvel’s most famous superheros once fought dinosaurs.

The 345th issue of Fantastic Four might have held a shock for fans of the super-powered team. On the cover of this issue was a Triceratops draped in the torn suits of Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing with the words “Fantastic Four No More!” Could a herbivorous dinosaur really have been the end of the heroes?

As you might expect, the answer is “no.” Due to a time travel glitch, the Fantastic Four wound up on a mysterious island where American soldiers were already battling it out with dinosaurs. (Gee, that’s an original idea.) The superheros and the soldiers manage to evade the dinosaurs with few casualties, but in order to distract a rampaging Triceratops Mr. Fantastic has to strip to his skivvies. Thankfully he is provided with an extra uniform soon afterwards.

The next issue, #346, picks up the storyline. After fending off a Tyrannosaurus the survivors head out to sea on a wooden raft, and as is comic book convention there is something hungry waiting in the water. Somehow the humans manage to fend off the Kronosaurus and make it back to their own time. I am a little weary of the “dinosaurs on a mysterious island” storyline, though. Why can’t someone think of something a little more original, like “Dinosaurs on a Plane“?

A child poses next to the skeleton of a hadrosauroid dinosaur. From Flickr user Clover 1.

Time is running out for paleontologists studying a Cretaceous fossil site in North Arlington, Texas. As reported by CBS 11, paleontologists from the University of Texas only have about five months to finish their work before they will have to make way for a huge development project. This is unfortunate, especially because the site may hold the remains of a mystery dinosaur.

The 1,700-acre site was discovered in 2003 by Art Sahlstein and his daughter Olivia. It seemed like a promising place to dig, conveniently placed for University of Texas students, but it took about four years before paleontologists received permission to excavate. When they were finally able to search the locality, the paleontologists found that most of the bones belonged to a hadrosauroid dinosaur, perhaps Protohadros. They have yet to find a skull, however, and researchers working the site have stated that finding one is essential to knowing whether these dinosaurs were Protohadros or something new. They only have the summer to find out.

A lithograph showing some of the first Hadrosaurus fossils. From Wikipedia.

Digging up fossils can be hard work, and it is important for any fossil hunter to pack a hearty lunch to keep their strength up. Apparently that is what the 19th century amateur paleontologist William Parker Foulke did. As reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Foulke’s lunchbox has recently been found, and it was big enough to hold a whole modern dinosaur.

It all started about 10 years ago when someone gave the lunchbox to Englishman Crosby Brown. Brown was an aficionado of railroad history and his friend thought that the lunchbox, marked “W. Parker Foulke, Haddonfield, NJ,” had belonged to a 19th-century railway worker. Brown couldn’t find anything about anyone named Foulke connected to the railway, but after he did a web search a few weeks ago he realized that it had belonged to the New Jersey paleontologist.

By coincidence, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia has been running an exhibition honoring Foulke. Called “Hadrosaurus foulkii: The Dinosaur That Changed the World,” the display focuses on Foulke’s discovery of Hadrosaurus, one of the most significant finds in all of dinosaur paleontology. The lunchbox will be on display there until the exhibit closes in May, after which it will be presented to the living relatives of W.P. Foulke.

The Dinostory sandstorm display in Australia. Courtesy of Flickr user sandyfeet

If you live in the vicinity of Frankston, Victoria in Australia, you still have a few days to see gigantic dinosaurs made from sand. This year the theme for the Sand Sculpting Austrlia exhibition was “DinoStory,” and an international team of sand sculptors has etched dinosaurs into the sand. They are very impressive, and look even better at night. If you want to see them, you will have to move fast. The exhibition closes on Saturday, April 25.