The extremely talented natural history artist Carl Buell, whose work has been featured in the books of Carl Zimmer and rotating through the upper left corner of the biological uber-blog Pharyngula, has recently begun writing and posting on his new blog, Olduvai George.
One look at his Shasta Ground Sloth, and you know this is going to be one to watch.
This Sunday’s New York Times has an article (registration required) on the search for buried dinosaurs in Central Park. In 1868, British sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (who created the first life-sized dinosaur sculptures for London’s Crystal Palace) was invited to work on a series of restorations of extinct American animals for a planned “Paleozoic Museum” in Central Park. Hawkins, however, had the misfortune of working on the project through a change of New York City government, and found himself on the wrong side of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. Tweed had vandals break into Hawkins’ studio and smash his sculptures, and rumor has it that at least some of the pieces were buried in Central Park. A group of present day “urban explorers” are hoping to find a few pieces and possibly recreate the sculptures.
Little-seen photographs of Hawkin’s studio with some of his Paleozoic Museum models are online here and here. A “virtual tour” of the unbuilt Paleozoic Museum is online at the UnMuseum’s “The Museum that Never Was.”
By now you’ve probably heard that the Kansas State Board of Education has voted to redefine their science standards to help worthless drivel like “intelligent design” gain a foothold in the state’s public school classrooms. Disturbing as this development is, there are forces massing to combat this rising tide of faith-based ignorance, including a welcome development from the private sector.
Through the end of the year, Zygote Games is offering a 20% discount on all purchases of their paleo-themed card game, Bone Wars, that are purchased from or shipped to a Kansas address. (The HMNH review of Bone Wars is here.) I think this is a great way to help compensate for the disgraceful actions of those Board-members who compromised the quality of public education in Kansas, and I hope that other science promoters will follow suit.
It has long been held that grasses didn’t evolve (or at least, didn’t evolve much) until after the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, which has been a particular problem for paleoartists trying to figure out what sort of ground cover to render under the feet of their tyrannosaurs and ceratopsians (a common, if unrealistic, solution: bare earth). But a new paper in Science reports a finding that may overturn the conventional wisdom. A team of scientists have analyzed the coprolites (fossilized dung) from titanosaurid sauropods in India and found the traces of five different types of grasses that made up part of these dinosaurs’ well-balanced diet.
The tell-tale clues were microscopic pieces of silica known as phytoliths, which are formed in plant tissues and can be used as a signature to identify specific types of plant. The diversity of the phytoliths found reveal that grass evolution had been well underway by the Late Cretaceous, and the fact that they were found in India suggests that grasses had spread before 80 million years ago, when India split off from Africa and Antarctica and began its island journey northward towards Asia.
An interesting side note is that the early existence of grasses might explain the dentition of an unusual group of Cretaceous-Paleocene mammals known as Gondwanatheres. Gondwanathere teeth seem to be well-adapted for processing grass, but it was thought that they lived before grasses had evolved. Now, it seems, the teeth and the plants seem to have a much better fit.
Grasses weren’t the only plants found in the titanosaur droppings—remains of palms, conifers, and dicotyledons are reported as well. So it may still be premature to picture a Triceratops family mowing through a vast grassy plain, but it certainly would be appropriate to place a few clumps of grass beneath the feet of titanosaurs.
The head of Centrosaurus brinkmani, © Mark Schultz 2005
from the CMNH press release
From the Cleveland Museum of Natural History comes news of a new species of ceratopsian, Centrosaurus brinkmani. Described by Palaeoblogger Dr. Michael Ryan in the latest issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, this beautiful new rhino-dino is characterized by an unique cluster of “spikelets” that make it look “like someone stuck a bunch of long-spined sea anemones all around the margin of the frill,” according to Dr. Ryan.
The museum’s press release gives some background on the fossil find and has some beautiful life restorations of the animal by artists Mark Schultz and Michael Skrepnick.
