Psittacosaurus and the Colorful Dinosaur Revolution

Within the last decade, paleontologists have discovered how to unlock the color of extinct organisms, and I think it is one of the most exciting and thought-provoking modern advancements in the field. I’ve written about it no less than four times on this blog (one, two, three, four!), and now I feel obligated to write about it again.

It has been about a month now since the unveiling of the “most accurate depiction of a dinosaur ever,” and the fanfare was suitably loud. Now, I’d like to take a look over what we know about this dinosaur, and where it fits into this grand paleontological revolution we're living through.

The dinosaur: Psittacosaurus

Was Lightning a Problem for Tall Dinosaurs?

The other day I came across this question and was shocked that I hadn’t thought about it before.

Everyone knows lightning loves striking tall objects. Many dinosaurs stood 15-20 feet tall, and big sauropods holding their necks upright may have peered down on the world from 40 or 50 feet up! Were they just giant walking lightning rods?

What a great question! Let’s break it down.

What's New In Paleontology? Highlights from SVPCA 2016. (Part 2)

Last week, paleontologists gathered in Liverpool for the 64^th Annual Symposium for Vertebrate Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy (SVPCA). I was unable to attend, mostly because of that big ocean sitting in the way (actually I’ve never been to SVPCA, I’d love to go) but I did get a hold of the abstract book. Lots of great talks and posters this year.

Here, I’ll go through some of my personal favorite highlights from this year’s meeting. I won’t have all the details, since I’m mostly going by the abstracts and not the full presentations, but I will be offering a glimpse into what’s currently happening in the field of paleontological research. 

Part II: Flying and Slithering Reptiles

What's New In Paleontology? Highlights from SVPCA 2016. (Part 1)

Last week, paleontologists gathered in Liverpool for the 64^th Annual Symposium for Vertebrate Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy (SVPCA). I was unable to attend, mostly because of that big ocean sitting in the way (actually I’ve never been to SVPCA, I’d love to go) but I did get a hold of the abstract book. Lots of great talks and posters this year.

Here, I’ll go through some of my personal favorite highlights from this year’s meeting. I won’t have all the details, since I’m mostly going by the abstracts and not the full presentations, but I will be offering a glimpse into what’s currently happening in the field of paleontological research. 

Part I: Dinosaurs

Floating Spinosaurus

Let's start with Donald Henderson throwing some big theropods in the water.

The Thunder Birds and the Bees

Every Spring in the nature preserve where I currently work, we are treated to the sight of a dozen or so tiny fluffy Canadian goslings. Everywhere they go, they are accompanied by both parents, who watch over them cautiously and confidently. Getting too close will earn you a display of head-bobbing and a stern hiss from mom or dad. The reproductive behavior of these birds is one of their most fascinating and endearing qualities.

Reproductive behavior is notoriously difficult to glean from fossils, which is a shame given how important sexual traits are in living creatures. How did ancient species select mates? Did they mate for life? Who watched the nest? All of these and more questions often go unanswered. But sometimes we get just the right data, as in the case of a new study on an ancient bird called a mihirung.

Human Environmental Engineering Goes Back a Long, Long Time

An alien species visiting Earth would find a planet clearly dominated by one species. It’s no secret that humanity has a major influence on all aspects of Earth processes – we’ve covered major portions of land surface in stone and asphalt; we’ve cleared natural landscapes and driven an ever-increasing number of species to extinction; we’ve filled the oceans with plastic and the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. This planet is very firmly in the grip of human activity.

But this legacy of environmental modification goes back further than we generally appreciate. Today’s issue of PNAS has a special section devoted to human evolution, and one paper outlines the modern understanding of the many ways our species has affected the physical world around us, and just how long we’ve been doing it. The fact is that our modern explorers – the intrepid adventurers of the past few centuries who discovered lands populated only by indigenous peoples or long-gone civilizations – were alien visitors to parts of the planet already dramatically transformed by human influence.

Here are some of the ways our species has been shaping natural environments since long before written history:

The Mystery of the Sunken City of Zakynthos

This scientific discovery reads like a science-fiction mystery novel.

It starts in 2014, when a group of tourists visiting the Greek island of Zakynthos decided to go snorkeling. While exploring the shallow ocean waters close to Alikanas Bay they stumbled upon what appeared to be the remnants of a sunken civilization: flat pavement stones and the circular bases of collapsed colonnades. Perhaps these were lost fragments of a city port submerged by the sea?

The divers took pictures and uploaded them online, where they reached the attention of Greece’s Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, who sent in an archaeological investigation team. The team discovered something very odd: there was no pottery, no coins, no signs at all of any human life. If this had once been a city, who lived there? Who built it? And why didn’t they leave behind any artifacts?

Ghost World - Part III: Resurrection

De-extinction. It's an amazing and controversial idea, and it may even be impossible. It's also not what you think. 

In Part I of this series, I reviewed the ways in which our world is a poor impersonation of what it was thousands of years ago, haunted by the absence of the ancient giants that once provided stability to ecosystems. In Part II, I reviewed the ways in which modern researchers are hoping to fix those ecosystems, by transporting "replacement" species to fill the gaps left by extinction, and even "un-domesticate" certain species to recreate their wild ancestors. 

Isn't there another option though? Instead of trying to replace the dead, why not bring them back? Why not simply clone extinct species?

Ghost World - Part II: Revival

In my last post, I described how the modern-day world is a global version of a ghost town: the extinction of dozens of species of large animals at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch left ecosystems incomplete and unbalanced. Without mammoths, ground sloths, and the rest, some plants and animals have thrived, others have suffered or disappeared altogether, and even natural processes like fire and climate have been affected. The natural world is incomplete without them, and continues to degrade like an abandoned village.

Of course, the key to “fixing” a ghost town is quite simple: bring people back. They don’t even have to be the same people. Just about anyone can tend the overgrown gardens, drive the disused cars, and shoo away the rats and roaches. The same may be true of our ecosystems, which brings me to an ambitious – and controversial – conservation idea:

Pleistocene Rewilding.

Ghost World - Part I. Dearly Departed

Imagine walking into a ghost town, recently deserted. It wouldn’t take you long to realize what’s missing. Cars are still parked along the streets, batteries slowly failing; sprinkler systems still spring to life on schedule, watering lawns that are steadily growing out of control; untended gardens are gradually overtaken by weeds, while insects and rodents dart in and out of homes with nothing to stop them but cats turned feral now that no one is leaving food out for them. All of these things are meant to be there, but they aren’t doing what they’re meant to do. Without people to maintain the town, it has descended into disrepair and instability.

Our world is in a state of disrepair and instability for the same reason – something important is missing. We live in a ghost world.

Why Were Prehistoric Animals So Big?

The other day I stopped by the American Museum of Natural History to visit their newest dinosaur display: the Titanosaur!

Discovered just last year in Argentina, this new species hasn’t officially received a name yet, but it is one of the largest dinosaurs yet discovered – the museum reconstruction is 122 feet long – and a lot of the skeleton has been uncovered between several specimens, unlike most poorly-known large sauropods.

The new titanosaur mount at the AMNH,
Photo by me, standing directly under the tip of the tail.

The media-hype over this skeleton, and the recent scientific reports about massive ancient giraffes and giant marine crocodiles, has a lot of people revisiting an old question: why were prehistoric animals so much bigger than their modern-day relatives?

Watch the World Change

A slightly belated Happy Earth Day to everyone!

One of my jobs at the museum this month was to set up a bunch of interactive tables for our Earth Day celebration.  My favorite of the tables was labeled “The Changing Environment” and it featured a series of maps, on paper and on slide shows, showing how our planet has changed in recent years, largely due to human activities.  Maps are a great visual representation of the state of the planet, and some of the maps I found were quite powerful.  I thought I'd share them.

The Serpents' Sequence

Scientists recently mapped the full genomes of snakes for the first time!

Actually, 2013 has been a big year for whole-genome sequencing in reptiles.

But let’s back up a step: What is whole-genome sequencing?

A genome is the entirety of an organism’s genetic material – all of its DNA.  Genes – small sections of DNA – code for proteins.  One gene might tell your body how to make a certain type of protein, and that protein might help build cells, or catalyze chemical reactions, or do pretty much anything else your body needs.  If you think of genes as the body’s instructions, then the genome is the entire blueprint.

Back in the early 1990’s, a group of scientists from various institutions in several countries embarked upon a legendary task: to describe and record the entire human genome – every gene in the body.  The Human Genome Project took over ten years to complete, but finally in 2003, these scientists published the full human whole-genome sequence for the first time - a full list of about 20,500 genes.  The Human Genome Project was one of the most monumental achievements of recent science, and it has led to incredible advancements in our understanding of human development, evolution, and especially genetic diseases.

In The Unlikeliest of Places

After hundreds of years of exploration, discovery and research, we’ve learned quite a lot about our planet.  You would think that after all of this time, there would be hardly any living thing left on Earth that we hadn’t yet found.  Well, you would be wrong.  Way wrong, actually.  Our planet is loaded with life.  New species are constantly being discovered – hundreds a year.  If I did a blog post every time a new species was discovered, I’d be posting multiple times a day.  Today’s blog post, however, is about one new species in particular which stands out among the rest.

The Amazon is
bursting with life

New species are often found in areas of the world that are harder for us to explore.  Oceans are a good example.  Rainforests are a great example.  The rainforests of the Amazon and Madagascar are constantly revealing new creatures to us.  Researchers in a rainforest in Borneo recently discovered a new species of mushroom that looks like a colorful sea sponge.  So much so, in fact, that they named the species Spongiforma squarepantsii, which is officially the most ridiculous species name I’ve heard since Dracorex hogwartsia.

Squids And Bricks In Space

This Monday, the space shuttle Endeavor will fly for the last time, carrying six crew members on a 16-day trip to the International Space Station.  This will be the second-to-last flight of NASA’s Space Shuttle Program.  After this, Atlantis will fly later this year, and then the Program will be done for good.  But scientists are putting this penultimate voyage to good use – not only will the shuttle be delivering the much-celebrated Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, designed to detect dark matter and other cool outer space-y stuff, but Endeavor will be home to a couple of rather unique and exciting experiments.

Space is a weird place.  It’s cold, it’s dark, it’s silent, and importantly, there’s no gravity, and that’s kind of a big deal.  Building machines to operate in space is a bit of a challenge, especially if you don’t know how your contraptions will act in little or no gravity.  Well, to get at solving this problem, the crew members of the Endeavor flight will help in conducting a special experiment.  Their mission, if they choose to accept it, will be to play with LEGOs in space.

Man, remember when you were little and being an astronaut seemed like the coolest job?  These guys get to go into space, and build stuff with LEGOs … in space!  I think I made the wrong career choice.