Dinosaur expressway: Although this one is near Denver, Colorado, a similar trackway has been discovered in China.
Courtesy Mark RyanScientists in China have discovered a trackway of some 3000 dinosaur footprints - all moving in the same direction - in the eastern region of Shandong province near the city of Zhucheng. The 100 million year-old tracks appear to be from several species. Click here for more info.
Tags : The Open Dinosaur Project
in Earth and Space Science, Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, Scientific Inquiry, and Biological Populations Change Over Time
Measuring the SMM camptosaurus: SMM paleo lab volunteers Becky Huset (left) and Neva Key consult over their ornithischian limb bone measurements for the Open Dinosaur Project.
Courtesy Mark RyanThe Open Dinosaur Project (ODP) allows anyone with an interest in paleontology, and access to skeletal information, scientific publications, or museum skeletons themselves the opportunity to be part of the compilation of an actual scientific paper. Paleontologists Andy Farke, Matt Wedel, and Mike Taylor make up the core ODP team, but only the core. The rest of the team is made up of individuals around the world. The hope is to put together a comprehensive database of information about the dimensions of limb bones (legs, arms, hands, and feet) of ornithischian (bird-hipped) dinosaurs in museums around the world with a goal of “investigating the evolution of locomotion and limb proportions in this group.”
“The Open Dinosaur Project fits very comfortably into that loose coalition of ideas: we’re trying to democratize science, open up data, blog the process, and make sure that the final publications are freely available to the world,” Mike Taylor said during a recent interview with the Brazilian science publication Ciência Hoje On-line.
Putting tape to toe: SMM volunteer Becky Huset measures the metatarsals and phalanx of the musuem's camptosaurus for the Open Dinosaur Project.
Courtesy Mark RyanTwo volunteers here at the Science Museum of Minnesota got themselves involved with this unique study. Becky Huset and Neva Key both work in the SMM paleo lab, usually hunched over fossils extracting them from rocks or preparing them for display. But recently, the two have spent time out on gallery floor measuring the limbs of some of the museum’s mounted ornithischian dinosaurs.
“We did the Camptosaurus and some cast bones from Stegosaurus from the collections,” Becky said. She added that measurements of the SMM Triceratops were already listed.
Why only ornithischian dinosaurs? Part of the reason was to keep the study somewhat manageable. But ornithischian dinosaurs also have an interesting evolution of locomotion that to date hasn’t been studied in depth. The dinosaur order radiated from a two-legged (biped) form into at least three different four-legged (quadruped) forms including armored dinosaurs (e.g. stegosaurs and ankylosaurs), ceratopsians (e.g. triceratops and chasmosaurus), and various ornithopod types, (e.g. camptosaurs, hadrosaurs, and iguanodontids).
.thumbnail.jpg "How to measure a scapcoracoid: One of several measuring aids available to project volunteers from the Open Dinosaur Project website.")
How to measure a scapcoracoid: One of several measuring aids available to project volunteers from the Open Dinosaur Project website.
Courtesy Open Dinosaur ProjectIn order to aid team members in gathering the proper information, instructions, templates, and other documents are available on the Open Dinosaur Project website. Diagrams explaining ornithischian limb osteology – including each bone’s proper name - are also on the site, as are illustrations showing exactly how to properly measure the dimensions of different bones. For those involved who don’t have access to museum specimens or material in other collections, the team leaders provide lists where prior publications with skeletal information can be accessed and mined for the study.
By last week, the Open Dinosaur Project had acquired nearly 1600 entries, but the results of all this work remain to be seen. The compiled data will be analyzed over the next couple months, and Farke, Wedel, and Taylor plan to begin writing the paper this spring. When completed the study will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. If all goes as planned, after publication, the lead researchers will make all the data available online for future studies.
Now that their data has been entered on the ODP site, SMM volunteers Huset and Key will have their names included as contributors, and eligible to be included in the resulting paper.
"We wanted to get the general public excited about and involved in doing “real” science, working in cooperation with paleontologists. There is a great interest out there in paleontology, particularly dinosaurs. It’s amazing how many non-paleontologists read the technical literature! I thought, “Why not harness this enthusiasm?” There have been many people waiting for this sort of opportunity (even if they didn’t know it), and I think the response speaks for itself." – Andy Farke in Ciência Hoje On-line
Becky Huset enjoyed being involved with the project. “[It] sounded like a good idea,” she said. “I like having knowledge that is freely available to everyone, and it was a good way to contribute to a paper. Do some "real" work."
LINKS
Open Dinosaur Project website
Wedel’s & Taylor’s dino-related blog
More about Ornithischian dinosaurs
Osteology (the scientific study of bones)
Sinosauropteryx
Courtesy Chuang Zhao and Lida XingScientists from China and the United Kingdom say they have found hints of color present in the fossils of both an ancient bird called Confuciusornis and a non-avian dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx. Using an electron microscope the researchers detected differently-shaped organelles called melanosomes in the feathers of each creature. Melanosomes contain melanin which determines color in human hair, animal fur, and feathers, but it's the shape of the melanosomes that determine the shade.
"A ginger-haired person would have more spherical melanosomes, and a black-haired or grey-haired person would have more of the sausage-shaped structures," said Mike Benton, professor of paleontology at the University of Bristol, and leader of the study.
Both shapes were found in the remains of Confuciusornis, which lived during the Early Cretaceous period. In the Sinosauropteryx fossil, which dates back to the same time, light and dark bands visible along its tail were determined to be white and ginger in color when its fossilized melanosomes were viewed under the microscope. The presence of melanosomes also confirms that the turkey-sized dinosaur had actual feathers rather than just shredded connective tissue as some scientists have suggested. The research appears in the latest issue of Nature.
Watch an interview with Professor Benton.
SOURCES
University of Bristol page
BBC story
Tiktaalik roseae: Early elpistostegid species from North America that transitioned from water to land
Courtesy National Science FoundationNew fossil footprints show that our earliest land dwelling ancestors walked on land 18 million years earlier than we previously thought. The earliest land “exploring” vertebrates, called elpistostegids (say that three times fast) were lobe-finned fish that could move on land and breath air but needed to live in an aquatic environment, much like the modern day mudskipper or lungfish. The earliest fully land “dwelling” vertebrates, called tetrapods, were the progenitors of all later amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, including humans.
Gambian Mudskipper
Courtesy Bjorn Christian Torrissen and Wikimedia Commons
Palaeontologists had previously identified tetrapods through fossilized skeletons. Now they have found fossilized footprints left behind by the animal in Poland (click the link for the photo). These footprints predate the earliest skeletal evidence for tetrapods and are causing scientists to reassess our knowledge of the vertebrate transition from water to land. The fossil footprints show that the animal was almost three feet in length and lived in the marine intertidal zone during the Middle Devonian period, 395 million years ago. It was previously believed that tetrapods lived in freshwater settings. Scientists now also think that the elpistostegids may not have been a short-lived transitional stage of vertebrate but may have lived alongside the tetrapods for nearly 10 million years.
Today's the birthday of Alfred Sherwood Romer, one of the most influential paleontologists of the 20th Century. Born in 1894 in White Plains, New York, Romer received his PhD in zoology at Columbia in 1921, then started work as an associate professor at the University of Chicago. He became a professor of zoology at Harvard in 1934, just a year after the first edition of his book Vertebrate Paleontology was published. Two further editions were published in 1945 and 1966, and the book is still considered a classic text in comparative anatomy. Romer was founder and the first president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. He died in 1973.
Arthur Lakes
Courtesy Arthur Lake Library, Colorado School of MinesArthur Lakes, pioneer dinosaur hunter, and chronicler of early American paleontology, was born this day in 1844 in Martock Summerset, England. Educated at Queens College in Oxford, Lakes eventually immigrated to the United States (via Canada) where he worked as a geologist, teacher, artist, and itinerant Episcopalian minister in the area around Golden, Colorado. 
Sketch by Arthur Lakes: From a Scientific American article detailing the discovery of dinosaur remains near Morrison, Colorado.
Courtesy Mark Ryan collectionOn March 27, 1877, while out measuring rock units in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains just west of Denver, Lakes and a companion, Captain Henry Beckwith, discovered large exposures of dinosaur remains. Hoping to stir up some interest, money, and perhaps some employment, Lakes sent some of the fossil bones eastward to both Othniel Marsh, and Edward Cope, unintentionally firing up the feud between the two pioneer paleontologists that would soon escalate into the famous Bone Wars of the latter 19th century. Marsh, at Yale’s Peabody Museum, eventually hired Lakes as a field worker, and used the fossils he found to describe a number of new dinosaurs species taken from several productive quarries around the Morrison, Colorado area. These new discoveries all came from the Late Jurassic-aged rocks (named the Morrison formation after the nearby town) and included the first discoveries of the now well known Stegosaurus, Diplodocus and Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus).
When the Colorado quarries were exhausted, Marsh sent Lakes north to Como Bluff in Wyoming Territory. Dinosaur bones had been found there not long after the Colorado discoveries. Arthur Lakes spent the 1879-80 season digging out tons of bones from of the Jurassic-aged sediments around Como Bluff, along with William Reed, a railroad worker who had brought the area’s rich fossil cache to Marsh’s attention. It must have been a strange pairing since the Oxford-trained Lakes was the polar opposite of the self-taught frontiersman Reed.
Como was one of the prime battlegrounds in the Fossil Feud between Marsh and Cope. The strata there was far richer than that at Morrison, and produced fossils that eventually filled the display halls at many of the world’s great natural history museums, including the Smithsonian in Washington, D. C., the Peabody Museum at Yale, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Original quarry site and dinosaur bone near Morrison: Arthur Lakes first discovered dinosaur bones here in 1877.
Courtesy Mark RyanLakes kept journals and wrote many letters of his activities at both Morrison and Como Bluff describing his explorations and the natural history of both areas (the journals were published in a book in 1997 by the Smithsonian Institute). These, along with his initial discoveries around Morrison, would probably have been enough to keep his name in the annals of paleontology, but his most important contributions to the science were the many sketches and watercolors he made at both locations. These depictions not only preserve a wonderful pictorial record of seminal events in the history of early American paleontology, but have also aided modern researchers in locating historical quarry sites at both locations. Many of Lakes’ original paintings are reposited at the Peabody Museum at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut.
Lakes’ original dinosaur quarry (#1) is preserved today as a historic landmark on the west side of Dinosaur Ridge along Alameda Parkway, overlooking the town of Morrison and the Red Rocks Amphitheater. Some bones, still intact in blocks of hard sandstone, can be seen there, as well as lateral views of some later discovered dinosaur footprints.
Quarry 10 at Morrison, Colorado: Lakes' historic dinosaur quarry was recently re-discovered on the slopes above town by researchers from the Morrison Natural History Museum.
Courtesy Mark RyanThe location of Quarry 10, where the remains of several sauropod species were discovered, was long lost until recently. The quarry was re-discovered and re-opened in 2002 by researchers from the nearby Morrison Natural History Museum. Artifacts of Arthur Lakes’ original diggings, such as nails and campfire charcoal have been recovered from the site. The nails would have come from support beams built to hold up the massive sandstone ledge that capped the softer clay layer from where many of the fossil bones were extracted. Lakes’ journal reported a couple collapses at this quarry in his journal. Luckily no one was working the quarry at the time, otherwise they would no doubt have been crushed to death by several tons of sandstone.
Arthur Lakes artifacts: Bits of charcoal, a support beam nail, and a belt buckle from Arthur Lakes' time recovered from Quarry 10 in Morrison, Colorado.
Courtesy Mark RyanRe-examination of Lakes' quarries has revealed some new secrets, such as the first footprints from a baby Stegosaurus. Yale has also loaned some of Lakes' original finds back to the museum in Morrison, including a toe bone from a baby Apatosaurus, and the articulated leg bones from the Apatosaurus ajax discovered at Quarry 10 in 1877.
Lakes eventually left the fossil trade, and turned his attention to the geology of Colorado, working for the US Geological Survey, and teaching courses in earth science and mining at what is today the Colorado School of Mines. The library at the school is named in his honor. Lakes continued to write, producing books and several articles about mining in Colorado. He and his sons also consulted for mining companies after he retired from teaching, and later moved to British Columbia to live out his days near his family. He died there in 1917.
If you'd like to learn more about Lakes and his life, there's a new book titled The Legacy of Arthur Lakes by Beth Simmons and Katherine Honda, recently published by The Friends of Dinosaur Ridge.
Tawa hallae: Illustration of the newly discovered theropod dinosaur
Courtesy Jorge GonzalezA new dinosaur found in New Mexico is changing how scientists view the early beginnings of the ruling reptiles. Tawa hallae was a small, carnivorous theropod measuring about 6-13 feet in length that hunted its prey during the late Triassic period not long after dinosaurs first appeared about 230 million years ago. Theropods are a group of mostly carnivorous dinosaurs that include the popular Tyrannosaurus rex. Until now, the record of Triassic theropods in North America has been somewhat lacking. But Tawa is helping change that.
Several high-quality specimens of T. hallae were uncovered, along with the remains of two other early meat-eaters in the spectacularly colorful strata around Ghost Ranch, an area near the town of Abiquiu in northern New Mexico. T, hallae's type specimen – that is the fossil that defines the species – was a nearly complete skeleton of a juvenile. The new study appeared in this month in the journal Science.
Digging out Tawa hallae at Ghost Ranch, NM: Sterling Nesbitt (left) and Michelle Stocker at work in the Hayden Quarry.
Courtesy Randall Irmis, University of UtahThe bones Tawa hallae display similar features found in later dinosaurs (including birds) such as hip structure, hollow bones, and space for air sacs in some vertebrae. But it also contains characteristics found in other early carnivores, such as Herrerasaurus, another Triassic period biped. Herrerasaurus remains have been found in Triassic rocks in South America, alongside the earliest known remains of the two other dinosaur forms: sauropodomorphs (long-necked herbivores such as Diplodocus), and ornithiscians (beaked herbivores such as Stegosaurus). Considered by some paleontologists as one of the earliest dinosaurs. Herrerasaurus displays some theropod features but is missing traits found in others, leading some scientists to speculate whether it was a theropod at all, or even a dinosaur. But according to Sterling Nesbitt, a paleontologist and the study's lead author from the University of Texas in Austin, Tawa hallae has answered some of those questions.
"Tawa pulls Herrerasaurus into the theropod lineage, so that means all three lineages are present in South America pretty much as soon as dinosaurs evolved," said Nesbitt. "Without Tawa, you can guess at that, but Tawa helps shore up that argument."
The remains of two other distinct theropods were also found in the same quarry at Ghost Ranch. One displayed characteristics that made it closely related to Coelophysis (found elsewhere at Ghost Ranch), and the other to Herrerasaurus - indicating the lines diverged before the unified landmass Pangaea split apart into separate continents.
“When we analyzed the evolutionary relationships of these dinosaurs, we discovered that they were only distantly related, and that each species had close relatives in South America,” said Randall Irmis of the University of Utah. “This implies that each carnivorous dinosaur species descended from a separate lineage before arriving in [the part of Pangea that is now] North America, instead of all evolving from a local ancestor.” Irmis co-authored the study, and also works at the Utah Museum of Natural History.
Oddly, no sauropodomorph or ornithischian remains from the Triassic Period have ever been found in North America. Scientists admit that's somewhat perplexing but think it's possible they migrated through the area when it was still part of Pangaea. But thanks to Tawa hallae the evolution of the theropod line is becoming clearer.
"Tawa gives us an unprecedented window into early dinosaur evolution, solidifying the relationships of early dinosaurs, revealing how they spread across the globe, and providing new insights into the evolution of their characteristics," Nesbitt said.
Ghost Ranch, New Mexico: The spectacular rock formations at Ghost Ranch display strata from all three geological periods of the Mesozoic era and have proven rich in Triassic-aged fossils.
Courtesy Mark RyanThe remains of Tawa hallae were found at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico about 65 miles north of Santa Fe, the same area where the spectacular Coelophysis remains were discovered in the late 1940s. Both species were found in the Chinle formation (pronounced chin lee), although Tawa’s fossils were found lower in the strata, in the older Petrified Forest member of the formation. The rich bone bed was first discovered in 2004 by amateurs on a week-long paleontology seminar sponsored by the Ruth Hall Museum at Ghost Ranch. Tawa hallae was named for the Hopi word for sun god, and in honor of Ruth Hall, the museum’s founder.
LINKS
National Science Foundation press release
Science Codex story
Science Frontline story
Today is the birthday of paleontologist Rainer Zangerl born 1912 in Winterthur Switzerland. Zangerl’s career spanned over 6 decades, much of it working for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago where he served many years as Curator of Fossil Reptiles and later as Curator of Fossil Fish, and as Chairman of the Geology Department. He specialized in fossil and extant turtles and prehistoric sharks. His volume for “Handbook of Paleoichthyology” (3A) dealing with Paleozoic sharks is considered a classic study of the ancient predatory fish. In the early 1950s, Zangerl discovered an exposure of Pennsylvania black shale rich in fossil fish in nearby Indiana, and spent many years studying and documenting the find. Dr. Zangerl was an expert in comparative anatomy, highly-skilled in x-ray photography, and a founding member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which awarded him its highest honor, the Romer-Simpson Medal in 2003.
Dr. Bruce Erickson, the Science Museum of Minnesota’s curator of paleontology worked several years with Zangerl at the Field Museum. “He was my boss, my mentor, and good friend,” he told me. “I even named a couple fossil turtles after him.”
(My own life intersected with Dr. Zangerl's in the early 1960s. When I was about 10 years old and in the early throes of my fascination with dinosaurs, I dragged a bag of bones all the way from Duluth to Chicago with hopes of having someone at the Field Museum confirm my suspicions they were from a stegosaurus. A road crew had unearthed the bones down the hill from our neighborhood and they let me take home as many as I wanted. The remains included ribs and teeth, vertebrae, femurs and tibias (I’m seen holding one in my avatar photo). When we got to the Field Museum my mom was surprised I had brought the bones along, but she was a good sport about it and asked someone if we could have the “fossils” identified. We were sent up to the second floor to meet with someone from the paleontology department. There, an older gentleman carefully studied my collection of bones until finally he picked out a tooth, held it up, and said in a thick German accent: “You’ve got yourself a horse.” It was Dr. Zangerl.
According to my mother my response was a very disappointed: “Oh, shucks.”)
Tyrannosaurus rex: "Jane" of the Burpee Museum in Rockford, Illinois.
Courtesy Mark RyanSeveral weeks ago the discovery of Raptorex, a scaled-down early relative of Tyrannosaurus rex from the Early Cretaceous, was making news. Now, another even older ancestor of the Tyrant King is doing the same thing. Proceratosaurus was unearthed in Gloucestershire, England in the early 1900s, and long misidentified as a species of Megalosaurus from the Middle Jurassic. But recent CT scans of the skull have revealed it is instead an ancient ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex. Read about it here.
Joseph Leidy: The last man who knew everything.
Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsToday is the birthday of scientist Joseph Leidy. Born in 1823, Leidy is considered the father of vertebrate paleontology. He described the first near complete dinosaur skeleton, Hadrosaurus foulkii, which was put on display at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences in 1868. But Leidy's studies weren't limited to just paleontology. His scientific interests and expertise were so vast a recent biography is titled Joseph Leidy: The last man who knew everything. If you read more about this remarkable man, you'll see that isn't too far from the truth.
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