Hairy Museum of Natural History

For any New Mexico readers, there are a couple of lectures coming up this week that would be of interest to the paleontology-minded:

The NM Friends of Paleontology are meeting Monday, Nov. 17 at 7:00pm at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. This month’s meeting includes a talk by Larry Rinehart on some of the recent work he’s done on the allometry, growth, dimorphism and population structure of Coelophysis bauri from Ghost Ranch. The NMFOP meetings are free and open to the public.

On Thursday the 20th, geologist David Love and paleontologist Gary Morgan will be giving a talk on a 10 million year old oreodont recently unearthed at the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge. The talk will begin at 3:30pm in the Macey Center auditorium at New Mexico Tech in Socorro (admission $5). More info about this find is online here.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Dinosaurs, Mammals, Neogene, Recent Discoveries, Triassic.

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The Beyond Bones blog at the Houston Museum of Natural Science is full of paleo-stories these days:

• Several prime pelycosaur posts from recent field work in the Permian beds of Seymour, including Dimetrodon-as-chondrichthivore and new material that may be from the narrow-snouted finback Secodontosaurus .
• And a step-by-step look at how Julius T. Csotonyi recreated the world of Leonardo, the fantastically well-preserved Brachylophosaurus, for the museum’s Dinosaur Mummy CSI: Cretaceous Science Investigation exhibit. Csotonyi’s digital paintings are about the best I’ve seen, and this post gives valuable insight into his process.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cretaceous, Dinosaurs, Museumabilia, Permian, Synapsids.

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There are a couple of chuckles to be gleaned from this charity parody:

From the One Velociraptor per Child mission statement:

“Most of the nearly two billion children in the developing world have inadequate access to dinosaurs. Some receive no paleontology training at all. One in three has never even seen a dinosaur in person…

…dinosaur ownership emphasizes what Chua calls “survival learning” as the fundamental experience. A dinosaur uniquely fosters learning survival skills by allowing children to “think about living” in ways that are otherwise impossible.”

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Dinosaurs, Paleo-Pop.

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• 
• Epidexipteryx hui
  Credit: Zhao Chuang & Xing Lida.

• New Dinosaur: Epidexipteryx hui
• Name Means: Yaoming Hu’s Display Feather
• Relations: Scansoripterygid Avialaean
• Holotype: IVPP V15471, skeleton preserved with feather impressions.
• Location: Inner Mongolia, northern China
• Age: ?Middle to Late Jurassic, somewhere between 152,000,000 to 168,000,000 years ago
• Info: The well-preserved skeleton of little Epidexipteryx shows that this pigeon-sized dinosaur was covered in a fluffy feather coat, although it did not possess any contour feathers that would have enabled it to fly. It did, however sport two pairs of long ribbon-like plumes that fanned out from the tip of its rather short tail, presumably used for some sort of display. Other interesting features include its enlarged, forward-curving front teeth and its unusually proportioned hip bones. Its describers suggest that Epidexipteryx was related to the long-fingered Epidendrosaurus, and that these unusual little dinosaurs are examples of a previously unknown diversity of theropods near the origin of birds.
• Reference: F. Zhang, Z. Zhou, X. Xu, X. Wang and C. Sullivan, 2008. A bizarre Jurassic maniraptoran from China with elongate ribbon-like feathers Nature 455: 1105-1108.
• Elsewhere on the Web:
  • Nature: Figures and Tables
  • Palaeoblog: Epidexipteryx, Jurassic Feathered Dinosaur
  • Catalog of Organisms: A New Stem-Bird and Publication in the Digital Age
  • BBC News: New Feathered Dinosaur Discovered
  • Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings has a guest post by one of the describers of Epidexipteryx, Corwin Sullivan: The Vampire Peacock of Daohugou

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Dinosaurs, Jurassic.

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As previously mentioned, today our poster on the growth, allometry, and age/size distribution of Coelophysis bauri goes up at SVP.

I’ll write up more about my contribution to this in the next couple of days, but for now, I’ll repost the abstract below:

We statistically extracted size (= age) classes from Coelophysis bauri metrics. Using these size classes, we generated a hypothetical growth curve for C. bauri based on femur lengths (N=56). This curve is similar in shape to that of some birds (e.g. Gallus gallus) with the differences largely in time scale, and also to previously reported histologically derived growth data for C. kayentakatae rhodesiensis. Age and mass distributions were then calculated based on the number of individuals in each age class and on femur dimensions. Hypothetically, Coelophysis’ growth rate was very high for the first year. Sexual dimorphism apparently onset between years one and two. After one year growth slowed in the gracile morph while the robust morph is first apparent and grew aggressively for another year; slow growth then continued in both morphs. Robust and gracile morphs probably represent males and females respectively based on their sexual dimorphism index (SDI = robust size / gracile size = 1.34). Both age and mass distributions are of hyperbolic form. Very small ~one-year-olds weighing ~2 kg and ~1.4 m long comprise 40 % of the population, ~11 % are adults weighing ~14 kg and ~2.7 m long, ~2 % reach 25 kg and 3.1 m length.

Our allometry study, based on the 15 suitably complete specimens, agrees with previous studies showing that orbits and hind limbs show negative allometry while skull and neck lengths are positive. Allometric growth constants (this study) relative to total length are: skull length, 1.62; cervical series, 1.31; sacrum, 1.26; caudal series, 0.78; forelimb inc. hand, 1.3; hand, 1.52; hindlimb inc. foot, 0.92; foot, 0.91. Relative to skull length: orbit diameter, 0.28; height at quadrate, 0.22; height at prefrontal, 0.32. The cervical series shows complex allometry (log-transformed data are better fit by a polynomial than linear regression); growth rate being high in juveniles and progressively lower in adults. Thus, relative to adult proportions, juveniles had very short, high faces with large orbits, very short necks, short torsos, long tails, short arms, very small hands, long legs and large feet.

Larry and my other coauthors have agreed to make available for download a PDF of the 2-page, 11 x 17″ handout for any interested parties:

Rinehart_etal_svp2008handout.pdf [1.4Mb PDF]

• Reference: Rinehart, L. F., Heckert, A. B., Lucas, S. G., and Celeskey, M. D., 2008. Growth, allometry, and age/size distribution of the Late Triassic theropod Coelophysis bauri: preliminary results. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology Vol. 28, suppl. to No. 3.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Dinosaurs, The Day Job, Triassic.

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