Hairy Museum of Natural History

Still digesting all the info presented over the past week at the Nonmarine Permian Symposium hosted by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. Luckily, I was able to take a few days away from my regular work in the museum’s Exhibits Department to attend talks by a cosmopolitan collection of researchers and join in the field trips to some of the gorgeous Permian red beds exposed around New Mexico.

All told, it painted a dynamic picture of the world between 300 and 250 million years ago, when the continents were coalescing into the supercontinent of Pangea, when the coal forests of the earlier Carboniferous period were losing ground to conifers and other plants more tolerant of drier climates, and when vertebrates began fine-tuning their adaptations to terrestrial life, diversifying into a riot of forms and leaving bones, footprints, and other traces in red rocks around the world.

Many of the illustrations shown in the HMNH’s Dispatch from the Permocarboniferous series were published in a symposium volume on “The Permian of Central New Mexico,” and all participants got a stylish, Permian Blue Bustin’ up Sphenacodonts T-shirt in honor of the occasion.

This weekend’s Albuquerque Tribune has a good article on the Symposium with additional background (and this illustration in the print version).

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Permian, The Day Job.

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Back in sunny New Mexico after a long weekend in overcast Pennsylvania, which was considerably brightened by the nuptials of my sister, Carrie, and her new husband, Chris. Best of luck to them both in their future together!

While I was out, several news items of a paleo persuasion have hit the presses. Here’s a quick wrap-up of the stories that grabbed my attention upon returning:

Couple of new pterosaurs from China: Feilongius youngi and Nurhachius ignaciobritoi.
Abstract and photos from the Nature article describing them and discussing the role of pterosaurs in Cretaceous ecosystems.
Article and restorations at National Geographic
Additional restorations from Dinosaur.net.cn (Chinese)

In additional pterosaur news, a team of researchers has proposed a new interpretation of the front of pterosaurs’ wings. If they are correct, a forewing controlled by a moveable pteroid bone would provide additional lift, allowing these flying reptiles to take off more easily and land at slower speeds than previously believed. A 4.5 Mb .avi movie showing the new, improved pterosaur wing is available here.

Two plesiosaur fossils from Australia have been found with pieces of clam and snail shells preserved in their stomachs. Plesiosaurs are widely thought to have used their long necks and sharp teeth to catch fast-swimming fish, but this find suggests that at least some were bottom-feeders.

A new study of the ‘killer claw’ of Velociraptor and its relatives finds that it may have been more useful for hanging onto prey than slicing them open. Looks like someone had fun building the robotic model.

And in other ‘raptor’ news, a new dromaeosaur has been described from South America. Buitreraptor gonzalezorum sheds light on a unique radiation of southern ‘raptors’ called unenlagiines, that has interesting implications for the evolution of both dromaeosaurs and birds.

Speaking of which, a collection of ornithological observations has been brought to my attention: a new edition of “I and the Bird” is up at Science and Sarcasm.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Miscellany, Recent Discoveries.

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On October 5th, 1905, paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn published a brief paper in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History on large carnivorous dinosaurs of the Cretaceous Period. The first part of the paper was a review of the state of knowledge at the time, running down a litany of 19th century names given to incomplete specimens or isolated teeth. These bits and pieces (with a few exceptions) had relatively little scientific value and even less popular appeal, which is why you can read through an entire library of dinosaur literature and only find a few sentences about Deinodon or Aublysodon.

But halfway through the paper, Osborn described a new dinosaur,^* then recently excavated in Montana, whose remains were complete enough to give a frightening picture of what it took to reach the top of the Cretaceous food chain. Osborn gave this beast the awe-inspiring name of Tyrannosaurus rex, and it would quickly capture the public imagination in a way that few animals ever have. The figure that accompanied this initial description no doubt sped this process along. A reconstruction of the skeleton of T. rex in all its sharp-toothed, puny-armed glory was compared with the skeleton of a human. Although this pairing was intended to show the size of the creature, the human figure looks particularly small and inoffensive, an hors d’oeuvre served up to placate the newly-christened Tyrant Lizard King.

In honor of the first century of Tyrannosaurus rex, the Hairy Museum of Natural History has transcribed Osborn’s initial description, “Tyrannosaurus and other Cretaceous Carnivorous Dinosaurs,” into HTML and made it available in our online library for your enlightenment and enjoyment.

Happy birthday, T. rex! May your reign continue for another hundred years!

Other resources surrounding the early history of Tyrannosaurus:

An in-depth summary of the excavation, description, and first displays of T. rex at the American Museum.

A gorgeous E. S. Christman drawing of the first known skull of T. rex

The online exhibit Paper Dinosaurs has quality reproductions of the first tyrannosaur reconstructions.

^*Osborn named two other dinosaurs in the paper: Dynamosaurus imperiosus, which turned out to be the remains of another T. rex that ended up buried alongside some armor from an Ankylosaurus, and Albertosaurus sarcophagus, a smaller, more lightly built tyrannosaurid known from Canada.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cretaceous, Dinosaurs.

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Reconstruction of the skull of Megalancosaurus preonensis,
after Renesto & Dalla Vecchia, 2005. Fig 5.

Silvio Renesto & Fabio Marco Dalla Vecchia have recently published the first detailed description of the skull of a Monkey-Lizard.^* The holotype of Megalancosaurus preonensis—a fairly well-known arboreal reptile from the Triassic of Italy—consists of two slabs that each preserve part of the front half of one individual, including a complete but split skull. This skull shows the head to be triangular and somewhat birdlike in profile, but a second, partial skull preserved in a different plane allowed Renesto & Dalla Vecchia to reconstruct the skull in two views—the image to your left is drawn from their reconstruction.

This new dorsal view makes Megalancosaurus look even more birdlike, or as the paper suggests, pterosaur-like. The authors point out that the skull of Megalancosaurus has several features in common with the skulls of early pterosaurs, but admit that it lacks a big one: the antorbital fenestra (a hole between the eye socket and the nose that likely housed some sort of sinus). Megalancosaurus and other monkey-lizards are generally considered to be quite distantly related to pterosaurs, so the similarities that they share might simply be due to convergence—both navigated complex, three-dimensional environments and likely pursued similar prey. Alternately, monkey-lizards might actually be closely related to pterosaurs, and Megalancosaurus simply lost its antorbital fenestra along the way.

After all, it probably needed it like a hole in the head.

^*Renesto, S. and Dalla Vecchia, F. M., 2005. “The Skull and Lower Jaw of the Holotype of Megalancosaurus preonensis (Diapsida, Drepanosauridae) from the Upper Triassic of Northern Italy.” Rivista Italiana di Paleontologia e Stratigrafia, 111: 2. pp. 247-257.

The term “Monkey-Lizards,” used with gleeful abandon at the Hairy Museum, is a loose translation of the name Simiosauria, coined by Phil Senter in 2004. Simiosauria technically refers to the group of animals that includes the family Drepanosauridae and all reptiles more closely related to it than to Coelurosauravus (a prehistoric gliding reptile) or modern reptiles. If Senter’s family tree is correct, this works out to include the animals described in the HMNH’s Monkey-Lizard Gallery, which have traditionally been referred to as drepanosaurs or drepanosaurids. This taxonomic footnote is provided for those wishing to learn more about the group—you’ll generally have more luck Googling “drepanosaur” than “monkey lizard”.

Thanks to Prof. Silvio Renesto for bringing this paper to my attention.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Recent Discoveries, Reptiles, Triassic.

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