Paleo Road Trip '09: Lincoln

I've stopped in Lincoln several times on my road trips across the country, and on my very first trip I realized that it makes an excellent home-away-from-home for two reasons. First, it is the only place in the Northern Plains where you can reliably get dinner after 8:00. In fact, you can get some really good food there, particularly around the Haymarket district. This is a product, of course, of Lincoln being the college town to end all college towns, giving it a cosmopolitan air of a city several times its size. Case in point: Omaha is a much larger city less than an hour down the road, and it is certainly more of an economic powerhouse, but while it's not a bad place, it is something of a cultural wasteland. It is, to be fair, home of the College World Series and one of the nation's best zoos, but force me to choose between the two and I'll choose Lincoln 10 times out of 10. It was, in fact, Lincoln that taught me the valuable lesson that road trips are best broken up as legs between college towns, which has made my many cross-country excursions over the years much more enjoyable.

The other reason I have always had a fondness for Lincoln is what brought me to town this summer: it's home to one of the best - if most overlooked - paleontology museums in the US. As I noted in my last post, Nebraska is probably the best part of the world in which to find Miocene mammals, and the University of Nebraska State Museum reflects this rich fossil record spectacularly. It has case upon case of horse, rhino, and camel skeletons, but somewhat counterintuitively, the real reason paleontologists should take the time to visit Lincoln is their collection of fossil elephants and elephant relatives, which is the largest in the world and includes the largest mammoth I've ever seen (which is, not coincidentally, the state fossil of Nebraska).

Of course, nowhere is perfect, and I happened to arrive in Lincoln at the same time as a fairly formidable storm front with some equally formidable tornadoes in tow. As noted before, I'm not a big fan of thunderstorms, and that goes double when those storms blot out the sun between the Missouri and the Wabash. Still, there are only so many ways of getting to Cincinnati from Lincoln, and the end of the first stage of my trip was destined to be made in the company of lightning, thunder, and blindingly heavy rain.

Paleo Road Trip '09: The Oregon Trail

This blog didn't get its title because 'The Oregon Trail' was the first name to spring to mind. Or rather, it was the first name to spring to mind for a good reason. When you grow up in the South, I'm told, your history classes revolve around the Civil War. In the Northeast, you get a heavy helping of the American Revolution. Presumably, Californian children are all conversant about the Camino Real and the Gold Rush. In the Northwest, we learn about trails. Two trails, to be precise: the one blazed by Lewis and Clark and the route followed by overland immigrants to the promised land of the Willamette Valley. It's quite a testament to the Northwest that people wanted to get there so badly they were willing to risk life and limb (from bears and Indians in the case of Lewis and Clark, from snakes and dysentery on the part of the settlers) to get there. Of course, both trails were blazed across landscapes far different from the lush river valleys and dense forests of Oregon and Washington. One of the most storied parts of the Oregon Trail lay nearly 2000 miles to the east, in the western half of Nebraska. This is where the emigrants first saw significant topography along the trail. They were still out of sight of the Rocky Mountains, but over millions of years the Platte River has carved the sandstones along its banks into convoluted hills and bluffs that would become among the trail's most recognizable landmarks. The two most famous of these (intimately familiar to anyone who played the Oregon Trail computer game as kids) were Chimney Rock and Scott's Bluff. Given that I had a full day to get between Laramie and Lincoln, I couldn't pass up the chance to swing a little bit out of my way and acquaint myself with these monoliths in person. Chimney Rock is a state symbol of Nebraska and certainly the more bizarrely shaped of the two, but if you find yourself in the area and only have time to see one, by all means go to Scott's Bluff. You can drive or hike to the top, and it's well worth the trip, because the views are expansive and absolutely gorgeous. On top of that, the area has some really interesting plant life, with flora that would look more at home somewhere in the Southwest than in the Great Plains.

Of course, there's another reason to make the trip to the Nebraska panhandle, provided at least you have an interest in fossils. I waxed ecstatic in earlier posts about the Eocene fossils of Wyoming, but if you, like me, are more interested in the fauna of the Oligocene and Miocene, there's no place like Nebraska. Every town you pass through seems to have some formation, fauna, age, or at least species named after it: Gering, Scottsbluff, Bridgeport, and so on ad nauseum. People don't tend to think of Nebraska as a paleontological mecca, but it really is. I only regret that time didn't allow for me to visit Agate Fossil Beds up the road, source of copious numbers of fossils of the bizarre perissodactyl Moropus and the gigantic, piglike entelodont Dinohyus. As it was, I had to get back on the road to get to Lincoln, one of my favorite homes-away-from-home.

Paleo Road Trip '09: Laramie

The state quarter for Wyoming is one of the simpler coins in the series: a bronco-riding cowboy and the motto 'The Equality State.' The slogan is a tip of the hat to Wyoming's status as the first state to allow women the vote, and while that's certainly something to be proud of, the cowboy is really the more accurate symbol of the state. Other states may lay a louder claim to the cowboy mythos, but nowhere in the country is the Wild West still as palpably alive as in Wyoming. It's one of my favorite things about the state; while I may disagree politically with your average Wyomingite (don't forget that this is the state that gave us Dick Cheney), but I appreciate genuineness, and there can be no doubt that the genuine frontier spirit is alive and well here. As one of Wyoming's more prominent cities, you might expect Laramie to be a microcosm of the still-Wild West. However, it's also the site of the state university and as such has a more cosmopolitan atmosphere than even Cheyenne, its much larger neighbor to the east. If I had any doubts that I would enjoy my brief visit to Laramie, they dissipated when I drove into town to find that the university hosts public radio stations playing both jazz and classical music (this puts it one solid step ahead of Eugene which, despite its somewhat pompous claims to cultural prominence, is a wasteland when it comes to jazz on the radio). Besides just having impeccable taste in music, Laramites enjoy one of the nicest and most architecturally unified campuses around, views of some of the more spectacular peaks of the Rockies, and a downtown full of old buildings and good restaurants. One of those restaurants is even vegetarian, but one really has to pity anyone who would voluntarily deprive themselves of some of the world's best beef straight from the source. Say what you will about cowboys, but they certainly know how to do steak right.

Save the UW Geology Museum

It is, of course, stating the obvious to point out that these are economically difficult times. Everyone is feeling the pinch, and universities are no exception. Sadly, I have found myself in Laramie not long after the University of Wyoming has announced several budget cuts and that prominent among them is the closure of the Museum of Geology. This has, not surprisingly, created an uproar in the paleontological community, as the primary focus of the museum is the state's fossil record. Many people have pointed out that the museum's operating costs are small relative to the university's overall budget. They have pointed out that Brent Breithaupt (one of paleontology's true characters, as anyone who has attended an SVP auction can attest) will be out of a job. They have pointed out that the museum is one of the largest and most important in the Mountain West, that it is home of one of only five Apatosaurus skeletons anywhere in the world and of "Big Al," the only Allosaurus ever to get its own program on BBC and one of the most well-known and remarkable dinosaur fossils anywhere. All of these are excellent points, but I'd like to approach the issue from a slightly different angle.

The American West in general is justifiably famous for its paleontological resources, but even by the standards of this mother lode of fossils Wyoming stands alone. It is most famous for its dinosaurs. Ask anyone what their favorite dinosaur was as a child, and it will almost certainly be from Wyoming: Apatosaurus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Tyrannosaurus are all local products. The Wyoming record of Cenozoic vertebrates is equally rich. The database I've been compiling as part of my dissertation research is full of specimens from the eastern part of the state, where some of the world's finest Miocene mammal faunas have been uncovered. Spectacular as these faunas are, they pale in comparison to those from a few million years earlier and a few hundred miles to the east in the Bridger Basin, home of what is probably the best sequence of Paleoecene and Eocene beds on the planet. Fossils here are not just plentiful, they are gorgeous. Herring-like fish from the Green River Formation are preserved in the millions and in exquisite detail, along with crocodiles, stingrays, birds, gars, bats, and other Eocene lake dwellers. Go to any of the great museums out east, and you will see fossils from Wyoming. You will see lots of them, because there are few - if any - places on Earth with as rich a paleontological heritage.

By deciding to close down the UW Geology Museum, the university has turned its back on this heritage. Knowing that their state has produced a fossil bestiary more spectacular and more diverse than those of most countries should be a point of pride for Wyomingites. The museum has, until now, done an admirable job inspiring interest in and teaching about the state's fossil record. It has shown generations of visitors that the land on which they live is not only gorgeous and unique now, but has been for millions of years, and that Wyoming's celebrated wildlife is heir to a long and spectacular tradition. If the museum closes, it won't just be the university that feels its loss; a truly important public institution and point of state pride will have disappeared.

The museum has put together a petition, if you're interested in doing something to try to counteract the university's mistake. I particularly urge paleontologists to make their voices heard; even if you have no connection to the UW museum, I know we all care too much about the future of our field to see a precedent like this set.

Paleo Road Trip '09: The Road to Laramie

As many of you know, I left Eugene on Saturday on a 3-week trip to Cincinnati and points between. The main purpose of my trip is to attend (and present at) the North American Paleontological Convention, but I'll be doing dissertation research at points along the way. This old blog has run fallow of late, so I thought that posting about my various stops along the way would be a good way of clearing out the cobwebs (you see, I'm so out of shape writing-wise that I'm using mixed metaphors; dear me...). I'll also be posting photos here. So, stay tuned: it should be an interesting ride.

I'm writing this from my first waypoint, Laramie, Wyoming (more about it in a later post), home of the University of Wyoming's vertebrate fossil collection (more about that later on, too). The drive here was one of the longest I'll be doing this entire trip, and it's a real shame I only had two days to do it. It's also a shame that the Mountain West has been experiencing one of its more protracted periods of thunderstorms in some time. Of course, I'm sure many of you are probably pretty jealous of this, but I was never much of a storm-chaser. To be sure, there is something breathtaking about seeing an impossibly dark cloud looming above the Rocky Mountains and to see the flashes of thunderbolts crashing all around you. Usually, I'm all for experiencing nature at its most sublime (a word that, as always, I use in its original sense, not the watered down version that's bandied about so much these days), and I think it's healthy to be reminded of just how small and insignificant you are from time to time. Thunderstorms, though, tend to impress me more with terror than with awe (other members of the Hopkins Lab will vouch for just how nervous I got when storm clouds hove into view during field work last summer). To me there is just something fundamentally wrong about a weather system that can simultaneously start flash floods and fire. Give me good, old-fashioned grey skies and a persistent drizzle any day.

That whining aside, there is one more thing worth mentioning briefly about my drive to Laramie. On several previous road trips, I've passed near Promontory, Utah, but had never stopped (part of the reason for this is that no one in my family has ever been too keen on spending money in the Beehive State for fear that a good chunk of any taxes you pay here will find their way to the Mormons). Still, as one of those kids who grew up loving all things train-related, Promontory has always had a strong attraction. As I'm sure everyone remembers from their history books, that was where Leland Stanford drove in the "Golden Spike" in 1869, joining his Southern Pacific Railroad to the Union Pacific and creating the first transcontinental railroad line. It's hard to overstate the importance of this event in the history of Westward Expansion: it pretty effectively marks the end of the age of mountain men and emigrant trails and the beginning what people tend to think of as the Wild West. As both a train and Western history buff, the allure proved just too much to ignore this time. I was a little disappointed to learn that the spike itself is back in California, and I also happened to arrive at a time of day during which there were no programs going on, so I'll confess the overall effect was a little underwhelming. Still, if you like your old steam locomotives, the park has two spectacularly restored examples (which I'm told they run a few times each day, sadly none of which was anywhere near the time I was around) and it's always worth seeing the spot where such an epochal event took place. It also gives you a chance to see some of the bird life that shows up this time of year at the north end of the Great Salt Lake (which, incidentally, manages to break several laws of physics by somehow being flatter than other bodies of water).

The thunderstorm-ridden drive across southern was unremarkable, but by way of a segue to my next post, I'd just like to briefly mention that it crosses the Bridger Basin. That name most likely doesn't ring a bell, but it would if you were a paleontologist. One of the great joys of traveling through this part of the country as a paleontologist is that you are continually encountering place names that are very familiar to you and your colleagues, to locals, and to absolutely no one else anywhere in the world. I imagine that if you study the Eocene, going to southeast Wyoming - and in particular, passing through Fort Bridger and Green River - must feel like coming home. Given that I've rambled on longer than I intended too already, I won't go into much detail on the historical and scientific significance of the Eocene beds of the Bridger Basin, but suffice it to say that they account for much of what we know about life on Earth between about 75 and 40 million years ago, and that many of the biggest names in paleontology have worked there. The same could be said for the Jurassic beds to the east or the Miocene beds near the Nebraska border. In short, there are few places on Earth as fossiliferous as Wyoming, a fact that you would think would make anyone proud. Turns out, though, that now is not a great time to be a paleontologist in the Equality State.

Destino

Today is the birthday of Salvador Dalí, one of the most famous artists to have ever lived.  It has been argued that this fame has as more to do with Dalí's self-aggrandizement than it does with his actual art, and it can't be denied that he was one of the most narcissistic people ever to have lived (case in point: the object in the right foreground of The Persistence of Memory is, in fact, a sideways profile of the artist).  There are plenty of other reasons to dislike Dalí, chief among them his tacit support of the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.  All that aside, though, it also can't be denied that he had considerable talent and that more people are drawn to his paintings than to those of any other surrealist.  I include myself in this group; there's something about the empty landscapes, nightmarish figures, and optical illusions of Dali's paintings that I find fascinating.  You can imagine, then, how excited I was when I learned that he had teamed up with Walt Disney in the '40s to make a short animated film entitled Destino.  It would seem that this pairing really was too good to be true, and for whatever reason the project never took off.  Destino was forgotten until very recently, when it was completed based on Dalí's original storyboard.  As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the great achievements in animation, right up there with The Rite of Spring in Fantasia.  I've attached a couple of clips below; if you like your cartoons creepy, then you'll absolutely love these.

The Prodigal Kid

It's the first week of April, which means that once again the baseball season is upon us.  Last year at this time I was rhapsodizing over Dave Niehaus' induction into the Hall of Fame and was voicing cautious optimism about the upcoming Mariners season.  Well, as any of you who are Northwest sports fans know, that optimism was dashed quickly and mercilessly, ushering in the worst year in history not just for the Mariners but for Seattle sports in general (capped off, of course, by the Sonics' treacherous defection to Oklahoma City).  In light of all that, you might expect me to be pretty downbeat about the advent of a new season, but once again I am cautiously optimistic.  I'm not predicting that the Mariners will be making the playoffs, mind you, but things are looking up: it's a beautiful spring day, the team is under new and wiser management, and Ken Griffey, Jr. has come home.

This offseason was supposed to be all about stockpiling young talent, and for the most part it was.  However, no move the Mariners made this winter created a bigger splash than the signing of Junior.  There were several legitimate concerns about the team signing a veteran who will likely retire after the season, but I'll admit I was as thrilled as anyone when the news came down the wire that the greatest player in team history was returning to Seattle.  Every team out there has had great players, of course, but in his first tour with the Mariners, Griffey transcended greatness.  It's not that he was always the best player in the league - though there were years when that was the case - but no player has ever meant as much to a team as Junior did to Seattle.  He shared the clubhouse with other greats who deserve all the praise they get and then some - Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner, Randy Johnson - but in the '90s, Ken Griffey, Jr. was the Seattle Mariners.  He was unique, bursting with almost unbelievable potential (which he sadly never lived up to after leaving for Cincinnati), and always a pleasure to watch.  Some of the best memories from my childhood involve sitting in the Kingdome watching his majestic home runs soar along the right field line and into the upper deck.  It's not a stretch to say that the Seattle Mariners wouldn't exist without Junior: without his drawing power, it's all but certain that the team would have moved to Tampa Bay or some other city with cash and a stadium to spare.  It was a dismal day when he left for a nearly decade-long sojourn in the Midwest, but now he's come home.  He may not - in point of fact will not - treat us to a repeat performance of his glory days, but just seeing him playing in Safeco Field (a stadium designed around him) is going to be a wonderful experience, and one that Seattle has never needed more desperately.

Ik houd dan honkbal!

That, as near as my computer's translation software can figure, is how to say 'I love baseball' in Dutch.  Why did I bother to learn that phrase?  Because I do love baseball, and I also love underdog stories, and the Netherlands have provided me with both during the early stages of this year's World Baseball Classic.  Those of you out there who are baseball fans but have been ignoring the WBC should be ashamed of yourselves: not only is it a good thing for the game on the international level, but it's been immensely entertaining so far.  Coming into the tournament, the Dominican Republic was thought by many to be one of the top contenders to win it all.  I certainly shared that opinion, and with good reason: their lineup is made up not just of Major League players but of Major League stars.  And yet, here we are reaching the end of the first round and the Dominicans have been eliminated already.  Had you told me prior to the WBC that this would be the case, I would have presumed that they had lost two games at the hands of second-tier Caribbean powers Puerto Rico and Panama, but no: both losses came at the hands of the Dutch, a team with two or maybe three recognizable players, none of which could ever be considered a star by any stretch of the imagination.  Just how big is this upset?  This chart of the odds of winning the tournament should give you some idea:

For those of you that prefer to think in more strictly mathematical terms, the a priori probability of the Dominican Republic winning the WBC was 100 times greater than that for the Netherlands.  Of course, the Dutch are a long way from being able to claim the championship, but those numbers do nicely underscore the magnitude of this upset, which is easily one of the greatest ever in any sport (especially considering that they beat the Dominicans twice.  TWICE!!!).  The Dutch and what they've accomplished so far are exactly the reason I will always proudly say that 'Ik houd dan honkbal.'

Oh, and we shouldn't forget about another lovable underdog that, as I write this, is still alive.  Advance, Australia fair...

Happy Swan Day

A month ago, I proposed that today, James G. Swan's birthday, would make an admirable regional holiday for the Northwest.  I don't know about you all, but it's a lovely (for January) day here in Eugene, and I intend to celebrate accordingly.  The best way to do so, at least as far as I see it?  Go do something today that you couldn't do if you lived elsewhere.  I plan to walk up Spencer's Butte or around Hendricks Park; if you're in Seattle, a trip to the Pike Place Market or Ballard Locks might be in order, and Portlanders have easy access to the Gorge and the northern Oregon Coast (to say nothing of Powell's).  If you're up for something more low-key, or are a Northwesterner exiled to some other part of the world, might I recommend sitting down with a book by Jonathan Raban, Ken Kesey, or any number of other local authors (which would go well with some local music, anything from George Frederick McKay to Pearl Jam).  Whatever you do, if you - like me - love the Northwest, try to take a moment at some point to reflect on just how lucky you are to be a resident of one of the most beautiful corners of the world.  Happy Swan Day!

What I Learned in 2008

• Heinrich Harder is wicked awesome.
• Even Mariners baseball can get boring if the team is inept enough.
• Never volatilize cat urine.  Not even your worst enemy deserves to smell that.
• Day trips from Eugene to the John Day Fossil Beds are feasible, provided you're willing to get up at 4:00.
• There's never a dull moment on the Mariners blogosphere.
• The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is everything the Experience Music Project wishes it were but will never be.
• Going to a game at Autzen is much more fun when the Ducks win.
• Getting funding is hard, at least under the Bush Administration.
• Preparing for - and worrying about - comps is far, far worse than actually taking them.
• There is no free lunch as far as camping in the Juntura area is concerned.  Unless you're a mosquito.
• Lucy is well worth the trip to see in person.
• American democracy is still alive and kicking.
• Barack Obama is an exceptionally good speaker, especially in person.
• Caucuses are more fun than primaries.
• Horses > dogs >> squirrels, at least as far as their fossil records go.
• Genghis Khan invented pants.
• I still refer to Seattleites and Washingtonians as 'we' (and I probably always will).
• Dave Niehaus really is a hall of fame-caliber broadcaster.
• Pasadena is cool.  San Bernardino is not.
• The Big Time Brewery has a long-lost twin in Berkeley.
• Giving a talk at SVP is much better than presenting a poster.
• I'm not the only one who thinks making a year-in-review bulleted list is a good idea.

Happy 2009, everyone!

Swan Day: A Modest Proposal

One of the best things about living in the US is that you can travel between radically different cultures without ever leaving the country.  You could visit, for example, the Deep South and the Southwest and be forgiven for thinking you had just been to opposite sides of the globe.  While having such differences can sometimes lead to friction (see the last eight years for an illustration of this point), each region is unique, fascinating, and well worth celebrating.  In some areas, this admittedly well-worn axiom is taken at face value, leading to the development of regional holidays.  Sometimes these holidays were created to honor a person or event unique to a region (as with Kamehameha Day in Hawai'i or Patriots' Day in New England), and sometimes they evolve from ostensibly nationwide holidays that for one reason or another have strong local appeal (as with Leif Erikson Day in the Upper Midwest and New Orleans' Mardi Gras).  Any long-term readers of this blog can probably see where I'm going with this, so I'll cut right to the chase: the Northwest is conspicuous in its lack of a regional holiday, and I think I know just the day we should have one.

A month from today is the birthday of James G. Swan, one of the greatest - albeit least known - figures in Northwest history.  I could drone on for paragraphs about why Swan was an interesting person, but I'll leave that in the much more eloquent hands of novelist Ivan Doig, who's Winter Brothers is a book I would recommend to anyone with an interest in Swan or, indeed, in the Northwest as a whole.  I'll just briefly outline why I think Swan embodies the best of this region.  First, he wasn't born here, but in Massachusetts.  This may sound counterintuitive, but when you consider that the region's history has been driven by exploration (e.g. Lewis and Clark) and immigration (e.g. The Oregon Trail) it's really very appropriate.  Second, unlike many of his contemporaries, his relationship with the many Native Americans he encountered was, it appears, mutually positive.  He saw the region's tribes not just as savages or anthropological curiosities, but as the complex, living cultures they were (and still are).  Third, and most importantly, he loved the Northwest and made this abundantly clear in his writing.  He lived On Willapa Bay, among the Makah on the Olympic Peninsula, and in Port Townsend on Puget Sound.  He travelled to Astoria in Oregon and the Haida Gwaii in British Columbia, and he wrote glowingly of his experiences in all these places.  Few people have ever taken to an adopted home more enthusiastically and more wholeheartedly, and at least to my mind there is no date more appropriate for a Northwestern regional holiday.

Many of you may think this is some elaborate and long-winded - though not particularly funny - joke.  It's not.  I'd estimate that at least half of the posts on this blog are paeans to the cultural and physical landscape of the Northwest (which is why, incidentally, I'm not bothering to defend my assertion that the region deserves to be celebrated; there's plenty of that elsewhere on this site).  Many of you out there, of course,  are from elsewhere and don't feel any particular connection to Oregon, Washington, or BC, in which case there's no reason this should affect you.  However, for those of you who consider yourself Northwesterners, be you native or adopted, I suggest you mark January 11th on your calendars, and if you have friends who you think are likely to be enthusiastic about this hare-brained idea, mention it to them as well.  I'm not advocating anything extravagant here, mind you.  The last thing the world need is another made-up holiday when people are expected to throw money at cards, gifts, or fancy meals.  For many of us who call the Northwest home, though, I think there's a great deal to be said for recognizing what it is that we appreciate about it.

Going Bowling

I usually try to stay away from opining about sports on this blog, since I know much of my audience (if I still have one) are more interested in other things.  However, due to current events, you all will have to put up with me writing about college football (fortunately, I can't force any of you to read my blog...yet).  The matchups for the 2008-2009 bowl season were announced today, which means that sportwriters across the country are indulging in their annual bout of whining about how a playoff system is necessary for the future of NCAA football.  As you may have guessed by my use of the word 'whining,' I am a staunch supporter of the bowl system (though not necessarily the BCS).  There are several reasons for this; these reasons are idealistic (Why should college sports, which are ostensibly played by amateurs, be so concerned about crowning a champion?), financial (bowls can be extremely lucrative for almost everyone involved), or traditionalist (a sport as steeped in pageantry as college football should maintain the system is has had for a century now) in nature, and admittedly some are much more convincing than others.  However, the best argument against a playoff system is, I would argue, purely practical in nature.

The main complaint leveled against the bowl system is that rankings are somehow intrinsically less fair than playoffs.  A few simple stats show that, in football at least, this is simply untrue.  For the sake of argument, let's assume that a really top-notch NCAA football team wins 60% of its football games against teams of the caliber it would meet in a playoff (this is awfully generous, I should point out, as the real underdog winning percentage in bowl games is roughly 50%).  Let's assume as well that in order to win the championship, a team would have to win three playoff games, just as a conference champion with a first round bye in the NFL would.  As we all learned as far back as high school, the chances of a team winning all three games to claim the championship are 60% x 60% x 60%, or 21.6%.  If we up the odds of winning a game to 70%, the odds of winning out rise to just 34.3%.  The reason odds like these are so problematic in football is that the sample size of one game is laughably small.  In baseball, basketball, or hockey, where playoffs consist of multi-game series, the odds of the better team prevailing are much greater (though even in these sports it can be hard to predict; does anyone really think the Colorado Rockies and Philadelphia Phillies were the best teams in baseball the last two years?).

Opponents of the bowl system would interject at this point to argument that playoffs allow teams to control their own destiny.  This also is patently untrue.  The most compelling argument against this notion is that one team alone cannot control the outcome of a game; if that were the case, there would be no point in playing the games in the first place.  Besides, in any close football game (as the latter games of a playoff generally would be), it is generally factors well outside a team's influence that give one side an edge.  Weather, field conditions, fan presence (even in a "neutral" stadium, one team will have more fans than another, which really can make a difference in football), and, most importantly of all, human error on the part of the referees routinely affect game scores, as anyone who watched the Oregon/Oklahoma game in 2006 could tell you.

So, to return to my original point, college football has two choices for how it could run its postseason.  The supposedly "fair" playoff system is in fact governed by chance and the team that is crowned as champion at the end will almost certainly not be the best from the regular season.  The BCS, to be sure, has some flaws as well.  Most glaringly, there are too many bowls, and the computer rankings determining which teams get to go to the best games are, in a word, terrible.  However, the coaches' and sportswriters' polls that are compiled at the end of the bowl season tend to do a good job of reflecting which teams are the best, not based on a handful of single-elimination games at the end of the year, but over the course of the entire season.  Which system, then, is really more "unfair" and less likely to crown a "legitimate" champion?  It's worth thinking about.  If you care about this sort of thing.

N.B. For those of you who don't follow football, I apologize for pretty much everything about this post, and especially for not explaining what exactly I mean by the BCS and the bowl system.  The simple truth of the matter is that, love it or hate it, the selection process for college football's postseason is extraordinarily complex, and explaining it would have just about doubled the size of an already-overlong post.  Hopefully Wikipedia will suffice on this one.

Lucy's Legacy

I'd like to put in a plug for my old stomping grounds, the Pacific Science Center.  This is old news to most of you, I imagine, but PSC is currently hosting 'Lucy's Legacy.'  Lucy is, of course, the best-preserved skeleton known of the early hominid Australopithecus and is the most famous fossil in the world.  This fame is well-deserved; while Lucy is physically not particularly large, she is a titanic figure in the story of human evolution; without her, much of what we know about our early ancestors could never have been learned.  What the Rosetta Stone, the Declaration of Independence, or the Dead Sea Scrolls are to our history, Lucy is to our prehistory.  In fact, in being quite literally unique, she may eclipse any man-made artifact in significance.  I'm posting this little soliloquy not just because I'm still a bit giddy from having had the privilege to see a fossil of such stature, but to encourage any of you who have the means to get to Seattle before March 8th to do so.  Unless you plan to make a habit of visiting Ethiopia (a plan that is sadly impractical for most of us), this is most likely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  No doubt many of you will think I am blowing this out of proportion because I am myself a paleontologist that is easily excited by this sort of thing.  This may be somewhat true, but regardless of your opinions on fossils, it is not everyday a key figure in humankind's heritage is deposited for a few months right in our own backyard, and it would be a shame for anyone to pass up the chance to see Lucy in person.

USA! USA! USA!

As established in an earlier post, the readers of my blog may be small in number but rich in brains, so I'm sure you were all aware that today is Election Day, and I imagine that most - if not all - of you have voted already.  Just in the off-chance that any of you had forgotten, though, consider this a public service announcement reminding you that you if you don't vote in an election of this magnitude (there may never be bigger in most of our lifetimes) you're ruining democracy for the rest of us.  Also, don't forget that there is more than just the presidency at stake; I know that all the west coast states have hugely important issues and races lower on the ballot, and I have no doubt the same could be said of states across the country.  Remember, regardless of what you think of our country's behavior in recent years and over the course of its history, it was founded on unimpeachably noble ideals, and today is your chance to celebrate the very best of what the US stands for.

Lobbying for Paleontology

Last week was the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting in Cleveland.  It was a great conference all around: Cleveland is a much better city than it's made out to be (the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is especially excellent, despite the exorbitant entry fees), there were lots of good presentations, and as always it was great to meet up with old friends and make new ones.  I should mention that every member of our lab group presented a talk or poster, and I think (and certainly hope) that we succeeded in our goal of announcing Oregon's return to the world of vertebrate paleontology.  My favorite thing about the trip, though?  The hotel lobby.  Honestly.  The conference was held in the Renaissance Hotel, which was built, and the lobby in particular is a throwback to the Gilded Age (an era that was, it must be noted, gilded for paleontologists as well as industrialists; when the Renaissance was built, Henry Fairfield Osborn was presiding over Barnum Brown and Charles R. Knight, and the "Bone Wars" of Marsh and Cope were a recent and palpable memory).  One of the points of scientific conferences is to give researchers a chance to discuss their current work with their colleagues, and there is no better atmosphere in which to do so than in marvelously soft couches with the sound of a fountain in the background and vaulted arches overhead (arches with spandrels, appropriately enough for a meeting of evolutionary biologists).  It helped that there was an excellent - if expensive - bar built in, complete with Great Lakes microbrews, which provide an exception to the rule that there is no good beer between the coasts (the Oktoberfest and Eliot Ness amber ales are especially nice).  Sitting around talking with your friends and colleagues in the Renaissance lobby makes you feel like one of the railroad tycoons or captains of industry the hotel once hosted.  Could there be a better place to hold a meeting for people who make a living of living in the past?

My Name is Chin Trout

Say what you will about the journalistic quality of the Eugene Weekly; it introduced me to this fantastic application of modern technology, so it can't be all bad.

2008-2009 Pac-10 Vertebrate Paleontology Rankings

It being football season, I got to wondering how the different Pac-10 schools would stack up if they competed for paleontological rather than athletic prowess (this was clearly a list that needed to be made, and also a testament to my seemingly limitless powers of procrastination).  I decided to see how things stood by tallying up the number of talks being presented by researchers from each university at next month's Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference (this means, of course, that I was measuring the influence of vertebrate paleontologists only, but this isn't rocket science, after all).  Without further ado, here are the rankings (numbers of talks are shown in parentheses after each school):

1. California (21)

2. Washington (11)

3(t). Oregon (7)

3(t). USC (7)

5. UCLA (6)

6. Stanford (5)

7. Arizona (2)

8(t). Arizona State (0)

8(t). Oregon State (0)

8(t). Washington State (0)

Analysis

It's no surprise to see Berkeley comfortably atop the list, given that it has long been one of the world's best universities for paleontology (appropriate for a school who's mascot is an extinct animal).  The Huskies' distant second finish is a testament to Washington's paleontological renaissance in recent years.  From my point of view, it's gratifying to see Oregon tie with USC (though in fairness, the Trojans probably deserve the tiebreaker due to their connection with LA's natural history museum, which is also sending some speakers); for those of you who might be reading this in Eugene and think that seven sounds like an awfully large number, two of those talks are accounted for by paleoprimatologist Stephen Frost in the anthropology department.  Rounding out the field, UCLA and Stanford make solid showings, as expected, and Arizona stays out of the cellar by sending a geochemist to talk about isotopes from fossil hominids.  Sadly, the Sun Devils, Beavers, and Cougars have some serious recruiting to do if they want to have any hopes of moving up the rankings in the foreseeable future.  For those of you who prefer charts to lists, try this on for size; if nothing else, it drives home just how good Berkeley is:

Disclaimer

I've taken my share of stats classes in my life, and I'm well aware that this is probably not the most robust technique for ranking universities.  If you are taking this post seriously enough to complain about my methods, you are missing the point.

Just Deserts

People often refer to most of the American West as 'desert,' but strictly speaking much of it is not true desert, but scrubland.  It's a minor difference both ecologically and semantically, but much of Oregon falls into the latter category.  However, the southeast corner of the state is true desert by anyone's standards (it's the northern reaches of the Great Basin Desert, for those of you who are sticklers for this sort of thing), and that's where I spent the last week.  I was there with the rest of the U of O vertebrate paleontology program (all 5 of us); our main goal was to re-locate several sites collected in the 1950s and '60s that have since fallen into neglect.  I'll confess that at first I was not too thrilled with the idea, partly because I'm never too happy about leaving my cat behind, partly because I much prefer lab work to field work (the lab is where real science is done, after all), but also because I find deserts oddly unsettling.  This is probably because the desert is so radically different then the wet, temperate climates in which I've spent most of my life.  To give just one example, rain west of the Cascades is at worst an annoyance, at best something to be welcomed because it keeps everything so green.  Head east of the Cascades, though, and rain can kill you if it comes down hard enough to trigger flash floods (to say nothing of the lightning that often accompanies it).

There are plenty of other differences as well, of course, and it is by that same token that deserts also hold a strange fascination for me (the list of things that simultaneously creep me out and appeal to me is a long one).  As a kid, my favorite nature programs were those set in Arizona or the Sahara, largely because the wildlife was so radically different than anything we saw in western Washington.  The animals (and to a lesser extent the plants) of the North American desert are still the main attraction for me; there's something to be said for living in a state in which you can drive only a couple of hundred miles and find yourself in a completely different ecosystem filled with exotic organisms.  I especially like the bestiary of biting, stinging, and prickly animals (though I also realize that these are the main complaint about the desert for most people).  It's always a bit of a thrill to come across a rattlesnake, scorpion, or black widow (none of which are a particularly great threat to a healthy adult, especially if viewed from a prudent distance; the only desert animals I would just as soon avoid completely are the giant Pepsis wasps which lay their eggs in living tarantulas and can inflict the second most painful injury - and most painful sting - of any insect).

I'm happy to say, that on balance, this trip fell more towards the interesting rather than the nerve-wracking end of the spectrum.  The weather was perfect (though there was one afternoon of looming rain clouds that had me a bit nervous), the wildlife was present but unthreatening (with the exception of the clouds of mosquitoes that descended upon us nightly; that's what we got for camping in the wettest spot in the area, I guess), and the paleontology was, on the whole, successful.  While our main goal was to locate old sites and get a sense of the regional geology, we also spent a fair amount of time prospecting for fossils.  We came back with a respectable haul of camels, horses, mastodonts, and lots of catfish; one of our crew even found a dog jaw that I'll be able to use in my dissertation research.  In the end, then, it was well worth it, but it may be some time before I'm ever truly comfortable in the desert.

Corvid Appreciation

In pretty much any part of the world, crows, jays, or magpies - the group of birds known as corvids - are a daily fact of life, animals so common that most people don't even notice them.  This is especially true in Seattle, which is rumored to harbor the world's largest population of crows (either the American crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos, or the Northwestern crow, Corvus caurinus, depending on who you believe).  Whether or not this has ever been reliably demonstrated, it is a fact that Seattle is home to a remarkably large number of the animals, most of which roost directly above the house of one of my best friends from middle school.  At my family's house, our backyard was frequented by a more colorful relative, the electric-blue, crested Steller's jay.  When we went camping in the mountains, we were invariably plagued by gray jays ("camp-robbers," as they're aptly known to many people) and Clark's nutcrackers, and if we headed east of the Cascades we saw more than our share of black-billed magpies and Northern ravens.  I've always had a certain fondness for corvids, not only because I saw so much of them while growing up, but because they are among the smartest animals on the face of the planet (there are, of course, lots of angsty people out there who identify with crows because they are seen as dark and misunderstood; the irony of this Gothic fascination is that corvids in general - and crows in particular - are intensely social animals). Corvids maintain extremely complex social structures, have been observed using tools, are inveterate problem-solvers, have remarkable memories, and are apparently capable of quite sophisticated communication.  Further proof of the intellectual capabilities of crows and their relatives was provided this week by John Marzluff at the University of Washington, who suggests that not only are Seattle's crows capable of remembering people's appearance, they are able to communicate the appearance of individuals perceived as dangerous to other crows.  I'm more convinced of the first point than the second, but read the article and decide for yourself; regardless of the extent of their skills of recognition, the study is another testament to the complexity of the corvid mind.  Most of us will never have the opportunity of seeing chimps or gorillas in the wild, and while dolphins are nothing new to many of us, few people ever get to see them up close an in their element.  Fortunately, we all (unless we live in Antarctica) have the opportunity of observing animals on nearly a daily basis that belong in the same brainy category as primates and cetaceans.  Bear that in mind next time you see a jay foraging in your yard, a murder of crows in a tree, or even a magpie raiding a trash can; each and every corvid out there is a remarkable animal, as will become quickly apparent if you spend even a little time observing their behavior.

What I Learned in California

With the words of Muhhamad in mind ("Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have travelled"), here's what I learned during the last three weeks in the Bay Area and LA.

• The University of California Museum of Paleontology is much, much more than just a pretty website.
• Squirrel fossils are less common than you might think if you looked only at the Oregon and Washington collections.
• You should never try to go to the De Young Museum on a summer weekend.  The Palace of the Legion of Honor, however, is well worth the trip: it has free organ concerts some afternoons, an odd but interesting penchant for juxtaposing Rodin and Dale Chihuly, and perhaps the best view of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
• Monkey Head Ale is shockingly drinkable given its alcohol content, and the Triple Rock brewpub is a dead ringer for Seattle's Big Time Brewery, minus the shuffleboard tables in the back room.
• Berkeley does monumental architecture very well.  Santa Cruz does landscaping very well (hard not to when your campus is literally in the middle of a redwood forest).  USC...not so much.
• A distant relative of mine was honored by having a fossil dog from the La Brea tar pits named after him: Canis orcutti.  The relative in question was William Warren Orcutt, an oil man who, among other things, discovered the first fossils at La Brea and was also the namesake for Orcutt, California.  Sadly, C. orcutti has since been lumped into the species C. latrans, the coyote.
• If you can only visit one of the California missions, it should be La Purísima, near Lompoc.  If you can visit a second, it should be Santa Barbara, because that's probably what heaven looks like.
• The San Bernardino County Museum has a surprisingly good fossil collection, but you have to really want to get there.
• LA remains a sprawling, polluted tumor of a city that guzzles up water and power at an alarming rate.  That said, it does have a larger number of things going for it than I'd previously appreciated.

-It has a trio of art museums (The Getty Center, The Norton Simon Museum, and the LA County Museum of Art) that, while they may not rival Madrid's 'Golden Triangle' are as good as anything on this continent and the equal of many European cities.

-The Getty Center is as ethereally gorgeous in the evening as it is at midday.

-LA rapid transit has gotten significantly better with the construction of many light rail lines, though people still tended to look at me funny when I said I was taking the train in to the natural history museum every day.

-Speaking of the natural history museum, it's fantastic, if a bit dated in places (though really, that's what I liked about it; more about that in a later post).

-Pasadena is gorgeous and is a shining example of what the region could - and probably should - be, though one wonders how much longer they'll be able to keep it so green.

-Union Station is really cool and, incidentally, an exemplary transit hub.

-The Griffith Observatory is great regardless of whether you like sweeping views, Art Deco architecture, astronomy, or free museums.

• Merychippus gets old very quickly, especially when it's not identified down to the species level.
• Driving all the way up the Central Valley is more of an ordeal than you might expect, not just because it's really flat and boring, but because there's a decent chance traffic will be stopped by a wildfire on the median.

Big Day

I have been waiting all day for something big - good or bad - to happen. It's my dad's birthday, which is fairly big in and of itself, but this date has been a red-letter day for other reasons the last couple of years. Without going into any personal detail, July 22nd, 2006 was one of the more miserable in recent memory. On the other hand, on July 22nd, 2007 I and some of my classmates from the Analytical Paleobiology course took a whale-watching cruise out of Santa Barbara and saw several blue whales. Marine mammal viewing might not register as an epochal event for most people, but seeing the largest animal on Earth had long been on my list of things to do during my life; it was, however, one of those things (like receiving a knighthood) that I assumed would never actually happen. So, with the last two years still fresh in my memory, I have been waiting with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation for something to happen today. However, it's now 11:00 and the odds of anything taking place in the next hour are pretty small, so I guess that two year run was a flash in the pan. As relieved as I am that nothing bad happened, I'll admit that in a strange way I'm a bit disappointed; guess I'll just have to wait 'til next year.

Selection's Sesquisentennial

"Evolution is only a theory" is a popular phrase with the "intelligent design" and creationism crowd. Far brighter and more articulate minds than mine have taken up pen and ink (or keyboard) to expose the glaring ignorance, both semantic and scientific, that underlie this motto. Evolution is, of course, a theory, but a theory is more than just an educated guess, as the Discovery Institute and their cronies would like us to believe, but a scientific fact, and it has been so since this date 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace jointly presented their theory of natural selection to the Linnaean Society of London. People often credit Darwin and Wallace with coming up with the concept of evolution out of the blue, but this is not the case; what they did accomplish was to take a somewhat amorphous idea and bring it solidly into the realm of science. In fact, prior to 1858, the creationists might have had a point: evolution was not a theory, but an as-yet unproven hypothesis. It has been suggested by some that the earliest glimmerings of the idea occurred to Linnaeus himself who, after a life of categorizing organisms, may have realized that some natural force was responsible for the nested patterns he observed. This is all conjecture, but, whatever its beginnings, the concept had, well, evolved into nearly its present form by the early 19th Century. The most famous proto-evolutionist was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who looked a the same patterns and correctly identified them as evidence of biological change over time. Lamarck's only major failing, and the reason he is often scoffed at by scholars today, is that he was unable to establish the mechanism underlying evolution. Darwin and Wallace, then, were not starting from scratch, but this in no way diminishes their accomplishment. It is one thing to come up with a hypothesis, quite another to move that hypothesis into the realm of theory (which is to say, again, fact). To do so requires a mechanism (in this case natural selection) and mountains of supporting evidence. Darwin, of course, collected much of his evidence on his voyage around the world in the Beagle, and then spent the next several years studying organisms closer to home, most notably pigeons and barnacles. Wallace spent many years in the jungles of Malaysia and the Amazon, often low on both money and luck (his entire Amazonian collection was lost at sea on the return to England). Both men independently came to realize that variation and differential survival were the driving force behind the diversity of life on Earth. Darwin was the first to recognize this fact, but held off on publishing it because he realized the ramifications it would have. When he realized that his younger colleague had come to the same conclusions, he was finally spurred into publishing, and on July 1, 1858, the two men presented natural selection to the world by way of the Linnaean Society (some have suggested that this apparent act of camaraderie masks the fact that Darwin's behavior upon learning he was about to be scooped was less than honorable; the historical record is murky upon this point).
The social shock waves were soon to hit, just as Darwin predicted. It is a testament to the soundness of natural selection, though, that its main detractors were social entities (the most vociferous of these being the Church of England) rather than scientists. The evidence compiled over the years by Darwin and Wallace was so substantial and well-presented that the scientific community flocked to it remarkably rapidly (a few well-known and outspoken opponents such as Richard Owen notwithstanding). Any scientific critique of the theory was ultimately shown to be flawed, and several well-timed fossil discoveries (Archaeopteryx and Java Man chief among them) helped cement natural selection as fact beyond any reasonable doubt. Social criticism continued, and is still very much in force today, but even the most vehement creationists must admit that the theory of Darwin and Wallace is a milestone in world history. July 1st has the misfortune of falling within a week of the anniversary of another epochal date and for that reason (among others) it is often overlooked. However, as this year marks the sesquicentennial of what may be thought of as science's watershed moment, I encourage everyone out there to take just a moment to give a tip of the hat (literally or figuratively) to Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, and their theory of natural selection - still standing tall and proud after 150 years!

The Wide World of Paleontology: Spring 2008

At the end of last quarter, I summed up the high points of our department's paleo discussion group. While the group didn't meet this spring, I thought that it might be fun to sum up the major developments in paleontology during the last few months for the sake of whoever out there still reads this blog. Enjoy!

• The term "missing link" is generally frowned upon, and with good reason, but it can't be denied that discoveries of transitional fossils are always exciting. It may not have the glamor of Lucy or Archaeopteryx, but paleontologists from the University of Calgary described an animal very near the common ancestor of salamanders and frogs this May. Dubbed Gerobatrachus, it lived in the Permian and looked very much like what a salamander/frog would be expected to.
• South America and Australia are both island continents (or at least South America was until Panama appeared on the scene in the Pliocene), and as such have been of interest to paleontologists as long as there has been a science of paleontology. This spring, two papers showed that the continents have more in common than many people may realize. A Cretaceous dinosaur from Victoria and an Eocene mammal from Queensland both show affinities with South American animals; this is no shock, as the two continents were connected until relatively recently, but the results are nonetheless biogeographically interesting. Other extinct Australian organisms to make the news this spring were the giant marsupial Diprotodon, which may be represented by only one species rather than several as had previously been thought, the placoderm fish Gogonasus, a specimen of which was found with an unhatched embryo preserved within it, and the so-called Tasmanian tiger, from which genes were isolated and inserted into a mouse embryo.
• Northwest fossils also found their ways into the headlines in the last few months. Dinosaur bones found in British Columbia several years ago have been revisited by a University of Alberta student, and they may represent a new species. The paleoecology of BC's most famous fossil site has also been revisited, and the result is a food web for the Cambrian Burgess Shale fauna. While not entirely paleontological, coprolites from eastern Oregon have yielded the oldest human DNA from the New World and show - not surprisingly - that the earliest Americans were genetically similar to Siberians.
• The seemingly inexhaustible quarries of Liaoning, China just keep on producing exquisitely-preserved fossil birds and feathered dinosaurs. The early bird Eoconfuciusornis was described by researchers at the University of Bristol, including my former master's supervisor. A former Bristolian made further paleornithological waves by describing a fossil parrot from the Eocene of Denmark, which he nicknamed "Danish Blue" after Monty Python's famous 'Dead Parrot Sketch.'
• My favorite paper this spring was the one that suggested the giant pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus and its relatives did not, in fact, spend much time in the air, but were likely terrestrial predators. This is an interesting hypothesis, as the diet of giant pterosaurs has long been a matter of some debate. It is not unheard of for flying animals to become predominately land-living hunters; the most spectacular example are the flightless, extinct phorusrhacids, but modern storks, secretary birds, and seriemas live similar lifestyles, making the image of Quetzalcoatlus as a predator is at least plausible.

I'm back and you're all brilliant!

I have no idea what precisely this means; if you click on the banner above, it will take you to a website that tells you the reading level of your blog. This 'genius' rating means either that the language I use here is far too stilted or that my audience, small though it may be, is the intellectual cream of the crop. I choose to believe the latter.
Incidentally, if any of you are reading this post, it means you are not only very bright (apparently), but very patient as well. I have been terrible about posting lately, and in the off-chance that any of you look to The Oregon Trail for part of your day's entertainment or edification, I will try to be much better about updating things. Welcome back to my weird little world!

Rhododendrons

The Northwest certainly isn't the only part of the world in which rhododendrons grow (the middle stretch of the Appalachians, I understand, has some particularly nice groves), but they do seem to disproportionately common in gardens here. Presumably this is because our climate mirrors that of the Himalayan foothills where the greatest diversity of wild species occurs; whatever the reason, rhododendron blooms are perhaps the most spectacular symbol of spring in this part of the world (a fact that Washington has recognized by declaring a native species, Rhododendron macrophyllum, the state flower). On the premise that there are few better subjects out there on which to test my "new" camera's macro function, I spent an hour or so today in the gardens at Eugene's Hendricks Park photographing rhododendrons. The result is the slideshow below (which also includes shots from my trip to Seattle a couple of weeks ago); I'm no Ansel Adams, but if you've had a hard time believing that spring has actually arrived, I hope these photos do their part to get you in the spirit.

Happy Music Day!

Today marks the 184th anniversary of music's acme. On May 7th, 1824, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was premiered in Vienna. The Ninth and it's signature Ode to Joy (based on a work by poet Friedrich Schiller) has routinely been recognized as the greatest piece of music ever written, and I'm not about to second guess received wisdom in this case (especially when you consider that Beethoven was stone deaf when he wrote it). The same concert also saw the premier of Die Weihe des Hauses and Missa Solemnis, both brilliant works in their own right. If that weren't enough, today is also the birthday of two musical giants, Johannes Brahms (whose eponymous lullaby you've heard many times even if you don't listen to classical music) and Peter Illych Tchakovsky (long a personal favorite of mine). So if you, like me, regard music as something near a religion, I hope you had a chance to enjoy what would undoubtedly be one of the faith's high holidays.