Hairy Museum of Natural History

• 
• Gerobatrachus hottoni
  Painting by Michael Skrepnick,
  from the press release at EurekAlert.

• New Amphibian: Gerobatrachus hottoni
• Name means:Hotton’s Elder Frog
• Relations: Amphibamid temnospondyl and stem-batrachian (an early offshoot on the lineage leading to frogs and salamanders)
• Location: Texas, U.S.A.
• Age: Early Permian, ~290,000,000 years ago
• Size: Less than 12cm (5 inches) long
• Info: The three groups of living amphibians (frogs, salamanders, and caecilians) most certainly had their roots in the great amphibian radiations of the Late Paleozoic Era, but the fossil record has provided few clues that help pinpoint their precise ancestry. Gerobatrachus was a small temnospondyl, part of a very successful and numerous group of amphibians in the latter part of the Paleozoic. The remains of Gerobatrachus exhibit a unique mosaic of features in its teeth, ears, limbs, and vertebrae that suggest it may have been close to the origins of both modern frogs and salamanders. Although many researchers have proposed a close relationship between all three groups of living amphibians, a phylogenetic analysis that included Gerobatrachus found that caecilians had their origins in a completely different group of Paleozoic amphibians, the lepospondyls.
• Reference: Anderson, J. S., Reisz, R. R., Scott, D., Fröbisch, N. B., and Sumida, S. S. 2008. A stem batrachian from the Early Permian of Texas and the origin of frogs and salamanders. Nature 453, 515–518 (22 May 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature06865. The article is available for download from the Center for North American Herpetology PDF Library.
• Web coverage:
  • Press Release
  • LiveScience on MSNBC
  • The Dragon’s Tales 1 & 2
  • Palaeoblog
  • El PaleoFreak

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Permian, Recent Discoveries, Tetrapods.

Comments on record: (4)

Laelaps is hosting the twentieth edition of The Boneyard, the bi-weekly paleo-blogging carnival. This time it comes with a contest and a theme - “Meeting a Prehistoric Creature”. Head on over, peruse the offerings, and vote for your favorite three!

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Webbery.

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In this case, mine appears to be a Triassic coelacanth:

This was the scene at The Day Job a couple of weeks back, as we unpacked a sculpture for the newly-opened Triassic exhibit. I happened to be wearing the right shirt for the occasion, and my boss David snapped this picture. The piece I’m holding is a fantastic restoration of the freshwater coelacanth, Chinlea sorenseni, about to snap up a school of Synorichthyes. The fish were sculpted by the talented Gary Staab of Staab Studios for the exhibit.

And here’s how the sculpture looks on display, beneath a cast of an fossil Chinlea skull and some Triassic coelacanth bits from New Mexico. The panel is sandwiched between a petrified lungfish burrow and the reconstructed leaves of the enigmatic plant Sanmiguelia. A reflection from the fishtank of Kirby, a living African lungfish, can be seen in the window:

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Bony Fish, The Day Job, Triassic.

Comments on record: (2)

Today’s the day! Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Triassic New Mexico opens at 9:00 sharp at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. I (and many other talented staff, volunteers, and contractors) have been working on this exhibit for a couple of years now, and I’m proud (and more than a little exhausted) to say that everyone’s hard work came together beautifully this past week.

I’ll be at the museum for an exhibit poster signing from 9:00 to noon, so if you’re in the vicinity, stop by and say hi.

If you aren’t anywhere near Albuquerque, there’s still a portion of the exhibit tailor-made for you. There hasn’t been any press on this yet, but if you swing by nmstatefossil.org and poke around, you’ll find a wealth of information on New Mexico’s most famous fossil resident, the little dinosaur Coelophysis. The NMMNHS has gotten permission from several authors, publishers, and other museums to distribute much of the primary literature on this Triassic theropod, so digging deep into the site will allow you to access a couple dozen PDFs of technical and popular articles.

The site was put together by Ideum, a fantastic group of interactive developers in Corrales, NM. They also worked with us on an in-hall interactive to interpret our two-ton Coelophysis block from Ghost Ranch:

The touchscreen display features a drag-and-zoom viewer that allows visitors to get a detailed look at the block, a series of highlighted features that can be toggled on and off, video segments of the block’s preparator explaining the features in detail, and an overlay showing the death positions of 7 of the more complete Coelophysis preserved in the block. More info about the interactives can be seen at Ideum’s blog and portfolio site.

And some quick pictures from before I dash out the door:

The skulls of Triassic amphibians. Clockwise from the top: Eocyclotosaurus (cast), Hadrokkosaurus (cast), juvenile and adult Buettneria (fossil), and Mastodonsaurus (cast).

A touchable bonded-bronze cast of the aetosaur Typothorax coccinarum.

Phytosaur skulls (Pseudopalatus buceros) from the Snyder Quarry near Ghost Ranch.

The tiny braincase of the earliest-known mammal, Adelobasileus cromptoni.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: The Day Job, Triassic.

Comments on record: (8)

The Boneyard #19 is online at Familiarity Breeds Content, and Laelaps has something special planned for the 20th edition of this paleo-carnival.

And check out the seventh installment of Linneaus’ Legacy, over at The Ethical Palaeontologist.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Webbery.

Comments on record: (0)