Turtle Beaks And Dinosaurs

It’s interesting to note that that beaks of animals come in all sorts of strange shapes, including hooks and serrations. Sometimes, none of this matches the underlying bone structure.

Canadian Amber, Fin-Tailed Dinosaurs, and a Despairing Blogger

Science, as a process, promotes an adversarial system. A scientist poses an hypothesis from an observation, then attempts to refute this hypothesis through further observations arrived at from experimentation and testing, and poses a further hypothesis from the results; if it stands, he can make a claim that a thing is, or isn’t. Another scientist comes along and attempts to refute that finding, and so on and so forth. We can presume that scientist A and scientist B are both using the same data or are merely increasing the data used to make observations, and that the same data is included by further authors, thus merely expanding the perspective. But it seems there are adversaries, and there are enemies. Some scientists, against seeming logic, will not even regard the same datasets offered, and use this as refutation of previous datasets or observations. Science, we presume, is not served when workers talk past one another, or make claims that a thing simply is, without any substantiation for why.

I Cannot Compel to Reason: Triceratops, We Done It Again

Earlier this year, Andy Farke took the opportunity of  a remodel to assess the skull of that classic of classic dinosaurs, Nedoceratops hatcheri. Formally named by Richard Swan Lull (completing a monograph that first OC Marsh had begun but uncompleted by hid death, and then resumed by John Bell Hatcher until his death), he presumed it may have been a pathological specimen, probably Triceratops (one of its species, many of which abounded at the time), owning to large irregular rather than concise fenestrae in the parietals and one of the squamosals; but he relented on the idea of its apparently unique features and coined the name Diceratops hatcheri. The name would be later found to be ironic.

The Next Step

While discussing lips in theropod dinosaurs is easy, and a bit dinosaur-centric (what about lips in nondinosaurian archosaurs?!), there are two major elements of the dinosaury that bear understanding: First, that ornithischians present an additional hurdle to overcome when discussing facial skin and its extent (i.e., the issue of “cheeks”) and sauropods present the interesting issue of what to do with large open spaces in the jaw. The latter issue is easier to deal with and represents the next step.

Extensive, Short & Round

What follows is slightly familiar, but brief. I posted earlier on the rhamphothecal covering in a turtle, Caretta caretta, the loggerhead. While investigating the plausible beak structure base don superficial osteological markers in connection to oviraptorosaur work, I could not just focus on turtles, but also birds. These form the bracketing taxa by which oviraptorosaurs would be assessed to determine comparable tissues, as no other living animals have rhamphotheca in this form. That they are made from different types of keratin may or may not be relevant, as the fundamental link or lack thereof has yet to be explored. So we start with the hypothesis that the two groups do, in fact, form a viable bracket into which we can place oviraptorosaurs.

Making Lip of It

I’m more than a little interested in the “how you know” of paleontological reconstruction. As it may be apparent by now, I’m an artist, and as such tend to see things on an aesthetic level more than a technical one. Although I still see things technically, I look at them through aesthetic eyes. Because I’m a relativist, I try to put perspective on this by occasionally taking those glasses off, and look at something ONLY in a technical light, but this is hard: There are times when, regardless of the technical expertise of the work, I like its aesthetic, and this causes me to have issues on writing, where my tone and thoughts jumble together. It feels right, now you’re making me read it through like an editor?!

But art sometimes must take precedence, because in technical illustration, we have to be able to easily understand what we are seeing.

A Joker Smile

On occasion, paleontology becomes a lot like art. When trying to depict reconstruction and hypothesis, instead of just writing it, we end up creating art — both intentional and inadvertent.

What you see here, of course, is not a typical piece of “art,” but nor is it a typical piece of paleontological specimen illustration. What it is, even if you’re astute and guess correctly, will be clarified soon.

Aerostatopes

Over at Saurian, Mark Wildman discusses one of the under-cared-for groups of large terrestrial reptiles, those lovable and odd hadrosauroids. In it, he made the following comment:

Although hadrosaurines generally lacked raised cranial ornamentation, they, never the less, may have possessed a resonating sac that was located in the deep depression that surrounded the external nares. This could also have been brightly coloured and the combination of sound and inflated air sac would have made for an impressive display – something similar to the frigatebird of today.

This is interesting because, a while back, I started illustrating things like this:

Incredulous Teeth, IV: Triassic Palate Mashers

Placodonts are by far one of the most interesting if less diverse clades of Triassic sauropterygian (a group including the far more diverse plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs). These taxa include the relative basal Placodus and Paraplacodus, but the more interesting taxa are by far the Cyamodontoidea. Today, I take a look at one, Placochelys placodonta (Jaekel, 1902).

Making Things Look “Funny”

When playing around with the idea that how we orient our material when we measure it, it struck me how alien the images look when you reposition them.