Hairy Museum of Natural History

SteveSteve, the globetrotting panda over at The Panda’s Thumb, has some pictures from the South Australian Museum’s Ediacaran Hall, including a wee beastie that appears to be the oldest known chordate.

Chordates are animals with nifty features like notochords that stiffen their back, serial sets of body muscles, gill slits, and a head. In other words critters like you, me, your dog, that fish, and just about every sea squirt anyone’s ever met. This fossil gives us a glimpse at what our ancestors were like 600,000,000 years ago, back when animals looked significantly more like gelatinous sleeping bags than they do these days.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Chordates, Precambrian.

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Wildlife artist Carel Brest van Kempen swung by the Hairy Museum last week and enjoyed it enough to leave a complimentary note in the ol’ suggestion box.

…and I’m glad he did, because otherwise I might never had known that he’s started up a blog full of pithy thoughts on natural history, working as an artist, and the intersection of the two. Take a peek at his work, both visual and verbal, at Rigor Vitae: Life Unyielding.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Friends of the HMNH, Recent Discoveries.

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I missed out on this item at the Day Job, but luckily a combination of mainstream and slipstream media have picked up the story of the remains of uber-croc Deinosuchus uncovered in the fossil collections of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

The armor plates, teeth, and a partial jaw of this Cretaceous crocodylian were discovered in northwest New Mexico six years ago by NMMNH&S volunteer Paul Sealey. Museum curator Dr. Spencer Lucas noticed the remains while looking through the museum’s extensive paleo-collections. Deinosuchus, a 30-foot long crocodile that lived alongside (and likely preyed upon) the last of the dinosaurs, is known from elsewhere in the United States, but this is the first record of the giant reptile from New Mexico.

Apparently the fossils will be out on display at the NMMNH&S later this year. Until then, photos and the rest of the story are available in this Albuquerque Tribune article.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cretaceous, Recent Discoveries, Reptiles, The Day Job.

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