Hairy Museum of Natural History

• 
• Chinlechelys tenertesta
  Life restoration by Mary Sundstrom
  

• New Turtle: Chinlechelys tenertesta
• Name Means: Delicately-shelled Chinle Turtle
• Relations: Basal Turtle
• Holotype: NMMNH P-16697, partial skeleton including pieces of carapace, plastron, neck spine, etc.
• Location: New Mexico, U.S.A.
• Age: Late Triassic, ~205,000,000 years ago
• Info: The fragments that make up the holotype of Chinlechelys include one and one-half dorsal vertebrae that are fused to a thin bit of shell in a distinctively turtle-like manner. Other pieces include a chunk of the plastron, or lower shell, and a piece from the rear of the carapace (upper shell) with bits of rib on the underside. Two spikes of armor were found that may have protected the animal’s neck—similar spikes adorned the necks of more completely known Triassic turtles like the European Proganochelys.
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  The more impressive bits of Chinlechelys on display at the NMMNHS.
• Joyce et al. consider Chinlechelys to be something of a “turtle-in-progress.” Its shell is extremely thin (1 to 3mm thick) and, unlike all other turtles, its ribs do not appear to be tightly fused to its carapace. This fossil could help resolve a long-standing controversy in turtle evolution—did the turtle shell evolve as the ribs widened and fused together into a dome-like shell, or did rows of armor plating in the skin expand until they fused together and integrated with the ribs and vertebrae for support? According to its describers, the thin shell and loosely integrated ribs of Chinlechelys provide compelling evidence for the latter scenario.
• Reference: Joyce, W. G., Lucas, S. G., Scheyer, T. M., Heckert, A. B., and Hunt, A. P., 2008. A thin-shelled reptile from the Late Triassic of North America and the origin of the turtle shell Proceedings of the Royal Society B Published online (FirstCite). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.1196
• Elsewhere on the Web:
  • New Scientist: Fossil Reveals How the Turtle Got Its Shell
  • Chinleana: New “Proto-Turtle” from the Late Triassic of New Mexico
  • Dracovenator: Good News Everyone!

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Reptiles, Triassic.

Comments on record: (1)

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)

• 
• A quick vector sketch of the head of
  Raeticodactylus filisurensis

• New pterosaur: Raeticodactylus filisurensis
• Name means: (Wing) Finger from the village of Filisur, in Raetia (the old name for the Swiss Canton Grisons, where it was found)
• Relations: Basal pterosaur
• Location: Eastern Switzerland
• Age: Late Triassic, ~203,000,000 years ago
• Material: Nearly complete skull, partial postcrania
• Wingspan: 135cm (~4.5 feet)
• Info: The oldest known pterosaur fossils come from late in the Triassic period, when this finger-winged group of reptiles first took to the skies. Newly-described Raeticodactylus adds to the handful of currently known Triassic pterosaurs. Raeticodactylus sported a unique crest above its nose, a deeply-keeled lower jaw, and a unique combination of teeth—fangs at the front of its mouth with wrinkled enamel on the inside, and crunching teeth further back in its jaws tipped with three to five cusps. Its limbs were long and thin compared to its contemporaries, giving it about twice the wingspan of the most famous Triassic pterosaur, Eudimorphodon ranzii. And, oddly enough, the head of its femur is offset 90° from the shaft, suggesting an upright stance more similar to that of dinosaurs than other pterosaurs.
• Reference: Stecher, R. 2008. A new Triassic pterosaur from Switzerland (Central Austroalpine, Grisons), Raeticodactylus filisurensis gen. et sp. nov. Swiss Journal of Geosciences doi: 10.1007/s00015-008-1252-6.
• Web coverage:
  • Laelaps
  • When Pigs Fly Returns 1 & 2
  • David Hone’s Blog
  • microecos

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Recent Discoveries, Reptiles, Triassic.

Comments on record: (4)

A little more news on the upcoming Triassic exhibit at the day job—Discovery News writer Larry O’Hanlon met with the NMMNHS Triassic Team last week, and has posted a teaser article up on his blog, Earth Impacts, with the promise of more to come.

The post includes a couple of illustrations done for the hall: a rendering of the early mammal Adelobasileus by illustrator Mary Sundstrom, and my own painting of a large archosauriform known from a few dozen well-weathered fossils from the Middle Triassic of New Mexico. The restoration (shown above) is based largely on big erythrosuchian predators like Erythrosuchus and Shansisuchus (from South Africa and China, respectively).

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Museumabilia, The Day Job, Triassic.

Comments on record: (4)