The Fisherman & the Sinosauropteryx

When dealing with research from a particular few scientists – namely, the BANDits – none of them intrigue me more than the work of Theagarten Lingham-Soliar (hereafter, TLS). It isn’t just that the subject matter is intriguing (structure of skin, body shape and contour, reconstruction of body in mosasaurs and ichthyosaurs from sharks and cetaceans) but that amongst BANDits, TLS is the most practical, the more methods-driven. TLS’s primary work has been to uncover the structure and arrangement of fibres that comprise skin, and associated structures, tissues like collagen, elastin, and the surface of this skin. When I first began reading his work on dinosaur skin, focusing on Sinosauropterys prima, I was extremely interested: I wanted not merely to know how he got his conclusions, but how the work he sought to refute got theirs. I was fully willing to entertain that TLS, a seeming maverick, was a nuts and bolts scientist, applying a methodology towards discriminating epidermal, dermal, and extra-dermal structures. TLS had cut his teeth on shark and whale skin, applied it to other animals, and was confirmed in his conclusions (or at least not doubted). It seemed TLS had caught a fish, and it was a big one.

The Fisherman & the Sinosauropteryx – preview

Sinosauropteryx sp., IVPP V12415.

Head Full of Air

Frog Face

Here’s the skull of the anurognathid Anurognathus ammoni. This guy appears on the banner above — occasionally — to which I’ve granted nice, long filamentous integument, especially in front of the eyes. And there’s not a whole lot in front of the eyes….

Are Scansoriopterygids Oviraptorosaurs?

Scansoriopterygidae represent one of those bizarre groups of animals that seem to defy simplistic evaluation; there’s always something about them that says “You should compare with that that other group” whenever you look at a part. It doesn’t help that two specimens are from relatively juvenile-seeming animals, there are only three specimens and each is the holotype of its own species, and that they share a mix of derived and seeming basal characters when it comes to maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs. Of particular interest, though, has been the relatively short skull, extremely long arms with even longer hands and a gigantic third finger, short legs and toes but a long hallux, and strange integument. The latest attempt at figuring out what these yokels are comes from Drs. Federico Agnolín and Fernando Novas, who published their study in an eBook through SpringerVerlag that came out last week. This attempt seems to peg their affinities with oviraptorosaurs, a proposition that intrigues me as it has others. What follows below is an analysis of their justifications for the relationship.

Bannerz

By now some of you may have noticed that the banner at the top of the page has changed. Some of you may have noticed that it keeps changing. Indeed, that the banner has changed any time you reload, go to a new page, etc. The first banner always depicted the mosasaur Globidens dakotensis, in a variety of ways; but it was always intended that this banner be unstable, altering as my needs suited me. I felt the model (a stippled skull in a very pleasant, earthy reddish-brown silhouette) worked extremely well, and thus that the design would be useful to me, and so it has been for the last few years. Now, things are changing, and I’m getting off my butt and making NEW banners in the same style, depicting new animals; these are in a random queue so that the banner you see will differ one click to the next, or stay the same, or whatever. It is eventually my intention to have enough there that you may never encounter the same one twice in, say, a month of reading the blog.

Criminal Lineup

Via Facebook comes this cute comic from Felippe Nanni posted on his DeviantArt page:

“That’s him, officer!”

Little does the officer know, she kidnapped the oviraptor’s own eggs and took a bite before the oviraptor came home and called the cops. The cops know the oviraptor’s reputation, and believed him not one whit. (What’s cute about this is that both other animals in the lineup are also possible egg-eaters, a large mammal and a large varanid-like lizard; the cop-oraptor is appropriately feathered, as is our unfortunate victim.)