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.

Gripe

Eventually, when I finish my current projects, I will get around to discussing conodonts, and their jaw-like … things. But for the moment, I’d like to call out to the various sources on the latest paper (not yet published in print in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, B: Biological Sciences, but available online, here) that has been receiving attention [Taylor Reint's consideration, a Nature blog, and a Scientific American blog treatment] due to the results of finite element analysis (FEA) on one of the posterior P elements of conodonts.

The Thing I Like About “Toroceratops”

Let me first apologize for using “Toroceratops.” There is no such taxon, but the name is being used to describe the debate that is now raging through the dinosaur paleontological circuit, and it’s too catchy not to use. Now, on with the show.

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.

Dromaeosaurs are Terrestrial Hawks

Denver Fowler and colleagues have just published a series of papers dealing with the reconstruction of predatory behavior as indicated by the proportions, curvature, and anatomy of the pes in theropod dinosaurs. They began this study investigating birds, and the range of ecology and behavior exhibited by a variety of birds. Then they expanded this to that ever-curious group, dromaeosaurs. That is the topic of the current paper, by Denver Fowler, Elizabeth Freedman, John Scannella and Robert Kambic, who describe the pedal anatomy of Deinonychus antirrhopus in relation to its possible predatory capabilities, including the premises of previous authors who’ve inferred the foot was used in climbing (including up the sides of very, very large prey).

What Carbon Has To Do With It

This may go under the radar, so I consider it opportune to mention it. While it doesn’t directly consider fossil archosaurs in any fashion, or a ridiculously over-hyped but very popular group of bird-stem archosaurs, the study at hand does consider the methodology of 1) writing a good paper, 2) being exceptionally thorough in both summary of previous results and current methodology, and 3) analyzing a bulk of trends in consideration for how to assess diet when all you have are teeth.

Dinosaurs of the Morrison Had No Lips … or Did They?

Just a minor post. I wanted to present a portion of a larger project on attempting to illustrate typical dinosaurs (especially ornithischians), and I thought “What better method than that well-sampled and intriguing Morrison Formation and its remarkable diversity?” So I started using a minimalistic stippling technique to draw the “busts” of the Morrison paleofauna, focusing on ornithischians. This has the advantage of allowing me to approach well-studied, well-photographed, and decently accessible taxa from the Morrison Formation. This runs into a small problem, that of the composition of the Morrison “fauna,” which is in fact comprised of several temporal (and apparently regional) faunae. To simplify things, I am ignoring all of that.

A Tiny Little Terror From Which There Is No Escape

Meet Cronopio:

Making Things Look Funny — Again

Discussing body posture and its artistic expression has had me going back and revising my reconstructions. It has led to something of an exploration in the artistic presentation in what we see based on our expectations.

Walking Sledgehammers

Scott Persons and Phil Currie made waves late last year with a study that showed everyone’s reconstructions of dinosaur tail anatomy was wrong. We, they said, had incorrectly measured the mass of the m. caudofemoralis longus, the muscle that runs from the mid-femur and along the transverse processes of the caudal vertebra, and as such had undersized the muscle and thus aspect of the tail. We’d drawn the tail way too thin, as shown here in W. Scott Person’s explanation at Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings and Brian Switek’s Laelaps, but also Scott Hartman’s great review at Skeletal Drawing and Virginia Arbour’s interview with co-author Scott Persons at Psuedoplocephalus.