The Manis Mastodon

While growing up in Seattle, I often lamented the lack of dinosaurs from the Pacific Northwest, but I always took some solace in the fact that we had some pretty cool mammal fossils.  I was a regular visitor to the Burke Museum to see the Blue Lake Rhino and the Sea-Tac Sloth, and my family indulged me enough to take me on trips to Ginkgo State Park, Republic, and the John Day Fossil Beds.  One of my particular favorite Northwest fossils was the Manis Mastodon, found near the town of Sequim, on the Olympic Peninsula, because, as a proboscidean, it was big, and therefore akin to the dinosaurs I so desperately wanted to study.  Now, of course, things have come full circle, and I'm living in the Northwest again and studying mammal paleontology.  I have a new appreciation for all the fossils I visited as a child (the John Day fauna has, in fact, become a huge part of my research), and it turns out that one of my old favorites was even more important than I realized.  The Manis Mastodon wasn't just big: it turns out that it's one of the only specimens in North America that preserves evidence of humans butchering a mastodon.  It had long been suspected (at least by some) that a bone point embedded in one of the mastodon's ribs was a broken-off projectile point, which would imply that humans not only scavenged mastodon carcasses, but might have actively hunted them as well.  This hypothesis was recently put to the test by a group of researchers that includes WSU's Carl Gustafson, the scientist that conducted the initial study of the site.  Scans of the rib confirm this hypothesis, but perhaps the most exciting finding of the study was that the Manis site was far older than had been expected: about 13,800 years old.  This revelation has two major implications.  First, it supports the evidence of the so-called "Kelp Highway" hypothesis (the main research focus of Oregon's own Jon Erlandson) that humans populated the Americas by travelling south along the West Coast.  Second, it suggests that humans were hunting large animals prior to the development of stone Clovis points, which may itself have implications for the extinction of the North American megafauna.  The moral of this story?  Never let anyone (even a younger version of me) tell you that there aren't any interesting fossils in the Northwest; as long as our region continues to yield finds like the Manis Mastodon, there will be plenty to keep paleontologists here busy for a long time.

Addendum: Adding to the Manis Mastodon's Northwest cred, Knute Berger, my favorite Seattle journalist has supplied a brief article on the subject.

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month - Terror Bird

This is the largest group of organisms I've ever featured as a FVOTM, but given that we're coming up on Halloween, it seemed appropriate to spotlight a family whose common name is based on how terrifying they were.  Terror birds (or, more correctly, phorusrhacids), represented by the LA County Museum's mount of Paraphysornis in the picture at left, were a group of giant, flightless birds related to living seriemas, most of which have been uncovered in South America.  Flightless birds are not unusual, as anyone who's seen an ostrich, emu, or rhea (or fossils of elephant birds, moas, or mihirungs) can attest.  However, phorusrhacids were different in one key respect: they were carnivorous.  Carnivory has been suggested for some other land birds - chief among them the Eocene Gastornis, itself a possible terror bird ancestor - but the huge size, robust build, and raptor-like beaks of phorusrhacids leave no doubt.  In fact, the near absence of large mammalian carnivores in South America for most of the Cenozoic indicates that the top predator niche on that continent was occupied by terror birds (they would have preyed upon one of the strangest herbivore faunas in the world, composed of, among other things, meridiungulates, xenarthrans, and - somewhat inexplicably - platyrrhine primates and hystricomorph rodents).  Phorusrhacids were key players in the American Biotic Interchange; once thought to have gone extinct when mammalian carnivores (including the iconic Smilodon) moved in from the north, it is now known that terror birds actually expanded onto the Gulf Coastal Plain in North America, where they were represented by Titanis, one of the largest birds ever to have lived (though it was not the largest phorusrhacid - that honor is currently bestowed on the recently-described Kelenken from Argentina).

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Megalonyx jeffersoni

This month's (somewhat belated) fossil vertebrate is a long-time favorite of mine: Megalonyx jeffersoni, a Pleistocene ground sloth.  The reasons for it being one of my favorites are prosaic enough: there was a skeleton of one in Seattle's Burke Museum while I was growing up (a specimen that was discovered during the construction of Sea-Tac Airport, which I always felt would make it a good candidate for Washington State Fossil, an honor that's since been bestowed on the Columbian mammoth).  Ground sloths are one of the great evolutionary success stories to come out of South America, having been among the first animals from the formerly island continent to expand into North America after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama about 3 million years ago (ground sloths actually seem to have made the jump to North America well before the isthmus was fully formed, suggesting that they, like modern sloths, were very capable swimmers).  Ground sloths thrived in North America until the Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, around 13,000 years ago, that also sounded the death knell for mammoths, horses, camels, and many other types of mammal on the continent.  Megalonyx has the distinction of being the only fossil vertebrate to have been described by a President of the United States: Thomas Jefferson, who described a specimen from a cave in West Virginia as a kind of lion.  The great anatomist Caspar Wistar subsequently reidentified it as a sloth, named the species after the then ex-president, and is thought to have suggested to Meriwether Lewis that he keep a weather eye open for living megafauna, such as Megalonyx, during his expedition west with William Clark.

Orcutt & Hopkins, 2011

It's been a long time coming, but as of today, my first paper is officially published.  It's in this month's Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology and has the thrilling title 'The canid fauna of the Juntura Formation (Late Clarendonian), Oregon.'  It's far from groundbreaking work, as most of it is a redescription of misidentified specimens, but it does have its noteworthy elements.  It includes the description of a jaw of the giant dog Epicyon saevus found during our lab's field work in 2008.  It provides information on the postcrania of the even more giant E. haydeni and the much smaller (but previously unknown from the Northwest) Carpocyon.  Perhaps most importantly, it's the first publication to come out of the Hopkins Lab's Juntura Project.  The Juntura Basin east of Burns in southeast Oregon was the research focus of the pioneering paleoecologist J. Arnold Shotwell (also of the U of O) until the 1970s, but has been largely neglected since Shotwell left the field.  Our lab's field work in the area has been the first concerted research project there in nearly forty years, and if nothing else my paper stands as the first fruits of what will hopefully (and presumably) be a very fruitful paleontological endeavor.

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Archaeotherium

It's springtime, which means its time for class field trips, which to a paleontologist in Oregon can only mean it's time to head to the John Day Basin.  The fossil beds of the John Day country are some of the best continuous exposures of Oligo-Miocene sediments in the world, and have yielded everything from tiny "worm-lizards" to gomphotheres.  One of my favorite animals from the area, though, is the entelodont Archaeotherium from the Late Oligocene Turtle Cove Member of the John Day Formation (in the picture at left, Archaeotherium can be seen in the foreground, while the background is Sheep Rock, the most spectacular of the Turtle Cove outcrops).  Entelodonts have been popularly termed 'terminator pigs' or 'hell pigs,' and with good reason.  Opinions are split on whether or not entelodonts were particularly closely related to pigs (they may have been closer relatives of hippos), but they certainly would have been hellish things to encounter.  Their large, flat teeth are similar to those of bears, pigs, and humans (though on a much larger scale than the latter two), and like all these animals they were almost certainly omnivorous, making them some of the only artiodactyls to include meat as a major part of their diet.  The skulls of entelodonts, including Archaeotherium, are generally long and characterized by strange protuberances at the back of the jaw that may have served as anchors for muscles or, perhaps more likely, may have played a role in display or competition for mates.  Archaeotherium was a mid-sized entelodont, but members of the family could grow to huge sizes: the giant Daeodon (once known by the fantastic name Dinohyus, or 'Terrible Pig') grew to the size of a rhinoceros.

Fun With Body Mass Estimates

The latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology has been a minor media sensation because it includes a description of the largest known rabbit, Nuralagus rex from the Pliocene of Menorca (as neat an illustration of the Island Rule as ever there was).  For those of us interested in carnivores, though, the issue also included the description of, as the authors put it, 'a gigantic otter.'  The otter is from the Pliocene Awash region of Ethiopia - site of many a famous hominid discovery - and is a new species in the genus Enhydriodon: E. dikikae.  Giant animals are always fun to read about, and they're even more so to someone writing a dissertation on mammal body size evolution.  The paper includes dental measurements for the new species, including the dimensions of the first lower molar (the carnassial, for those that know your carnivore teeth), which is tightly correlated with body size.  I couldn't resist plugging the E. dikikae measurements into the body mass regression for mustelids developed by Blaire Van Valkenburgh to get some kind of idea of the size of the animal.  There are two specimens included in the paper: the smaller, more complete tooth suggests a 77 kg animal, while the larger, incomplete tooth may represent an animal of 126 kg.  The former mass would put the individual in the same size range as modern giant otter (Pteroneura brasiliensis), but the larger individual would be in a class by itself; a 126 kg otter would be roughly the same size as a large jaguar or a small lion.  Of course, as with any body mass estimate for exceptionally large (or small) animals, these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt: the very fact that E. dikikae is so big means that it falls well outside the range of masses in living mustelids (with the not insignificant exception of the giant otter) and that any estimate of its weight is therefore extrapolating beyond the available data (the same issue has been raised for mass estimates of giant South American rodents).  Still, it's fossils like this that remind me why I consider myself lucky to be a paleobiologist; after all, what other field would publish journals describing giant rabbits and otters in the same issue?  Life, and in particular prehistoric life, is just so cool.

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Baryonyx walkeri

Last month's fossil vertebrate was an Irish icon, so in honor of April's St. George's Day, it only seems fair to put the spotlight on an English animal.  The earliest dinosaurs to ever be described were English, but for the most part the end of the Victorian Era was also the end of new dinosaur discoveries in Great Britain.  A few new taxa have come to light in the previous few decades, though, perhaps the most impressive of which is the bizarre Baryonyx walkeri.  Uncovered in Surrey in 1983 and named in 1986, the genus name translates as 'heavy claw,' a reference to the large, recurved claws on the animal's hands.  The other noteworthy feature of Baryonyx is its elongated skull with a kinked jaw, remarkably similar to that of a crocodile.  This skull, in conjunction with fish scales found within the specimen's body cavity, led to the conclusion (since challenged by some, but still largely accepted) that Baryonyx was piscivorous.  It's unusual morphology meant that the relationship of Baryonyx to other dinosaurs remained a mystery for some years, though the discovery of similar dinosaurs have shown that it was a member of the Spinosauridae, a group of large (in at least one case very large), sometimes sail-backed, likely fish-eating group of theropods that lived mainly on the southern continents during the Cretaceous.  Baryonyx was very closely related to the much-publicized African spinosaur Suchomimus tenerensis; in fact, the two were likely members of the same genus.

José María Velasco

Serendipity can be a wonderful thing.  While doing research in Mexico City last September, I spent a day in the historic center of the city, and one of the places I visited was the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso; tourists like me flock there because it was the birthplace of the Mexican muralist movement, but while I was there it was also hosting an exhibit celebrating the centennial of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.  You can imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to round a corner in the geology section of the exhibit to see these:

The paintings above, as well as a third of cave bears that I couldn't find an imagine for online, are by the artist José María Velasco, who I have to admit I'd never heard of before my trip.  He lived and worked in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries and is best remembered for his landscapes of the Valley of Mexico, which have served as a touchstone of Mexican national identity.  He was also a scientist, with a particular interest in natural history (a running theme in his profession, it so transpires, as Mexico's greatest landscape artist, Dr. Atl, was also an amateur volcanologist and advocate for science); he even described a species of salamander, that has since been renamed in his honor.  This may explain why he was commissioned to decorate UNAM's Instituto de Geologia.  Velasco's paintings have adorned the palatial building (itself as glorious an example of early 20th Century museum architecture and design as you'll find anywhere in the world) near central Mexico City since the 1910s, and had been brought over to the UNAM exhibit during some renovations (you can get a sense of how they look in situ in this picture).  Information on the paintings is scarce, but it appears that Velasco painted two series: one tracing the history of marine life and one depicting terrestrial animals and landscapes through time.  These would have been painted at roughly the same time as some of the greatest works of Charles R. Knight and his European counterpart, Heinrich Harder, and I would argue that not only are Velasco's reconstructions in the same league as those of his more famous contemporaries (though it must be said that no one before or since can compete with the vibrancy of Knight's animals), but he in fact surpasses them in many ways; his paleo-landscapes are especially impressive (though sadly underrepresented online).  This should come as no surprise, as Velasco was, after all, a classically trained painter and one of his country's greatest artists of the pre-modern era.  It seems a shame that his contributions to scientific illustration and paleoart should have lapsed into obscurity, and I thought I'd do my humble best to try to share some of those contributions with the world.

Brontomerus, Hell Creek, and Mesozoic Ecology

Two dinosaur-related stories have been getting a lot of press this month.  The first is the naming of the new sauropod Brontomerus mcintoshi (Taylor et al. 2011), which is remarkable for its name (literally 'McIntosh's Thunder Thighs'), its oddly large legs, and its implications for Early Cretaceous sauropod diversity.  The story that is more intriguing to me, though, is the publication of the results of the Hell Creek Project dinosaur census (Horner et al. 2011).  For those who aren't familiar with it, the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana and adjacent states has produced one of the richest assemblages of Late Cretaceous vertebrates in the world.  The fauna has been extensively sampled and studied, thanks in large part to the efforts of Jack Horner at MSU's Museum of the Rockies.  The completeness of the Hell Creek fossil record makes it an appealing subject for paleoecological analysis, which is the focus of Horner's new paper.  The authors draw two major conclusions: that the bulk of the large-bodied dinosaurs from Hell Creek represent individuals of intermediate age, while juveniles and old adults are rare, and that Tyrannosaurus was so common that it must have been more ecologically analogous to scavenging, opportunistic hyenas rather than predatory big cats (which require huge amounts of food and are therefore almost always much less common than their prey).  The first point should perhaps not be surprising; as is observed in the paper, there are compelling ecological and taphonomic reasons why very young individuals should not be found at Hell Creek, and it is likewise to be expected that most dinosaurs probably did not survive to extreme old age.  The argument that Tyrannosaurus could not have been an active hunter - the part of the research, incidentally, that has attracted the most media attention - is somewhat more problematic.  Certainly, a modern mammalian predator would not be as abundant as Tyrannosaurus was in the Hell Creek fauna, but using mammals as analogs for dinosaurs has its drawbacks.  Dinosaurs were biologically distinct from mammals (no mammal, for example, could grow to the sizes of sauropods without outstripping their food supply) and the Mesozoic world was fundamentally different from that of today, and as such dinosaurs played by a different set of rules than does anything currently living (including the dinosaurs' descendants, the birds).  Because of this, patterns such as predator/prey ratios that can be very informative when discussing community structure in Cenozoic ecosystems may mean something very different in the Mesozoic, and the preponderance of Tyrannosaurus may be due to biological factors such as metabolism or social structure or to taphonomic biases.  This post may sound like a criticism of Horner et al., but that is not its intent.  In fact, I think the finding that Tyrannosaurus was aberrantly common in the Hell Creek fauna is extremely interesting and certainly the authors' interpretation may be correct.  Further, Hell Creek is one of the only Mesozoic ecosystems that lends itself to fairly robust ecological analysis, and it's excellent that work along those lines is being conducted.  However, at the end of the day, there's a reason dinosaurs are so popular: they are utterly foreign to modern eyes.  This is something of a double-edged sword, because it does make dinosaurs fascinating animals, but it also means they have no good modern analog and that any reconstruction of their ecology will always be cursed with a lower degree of confidence than studies of animals such as reptiles, birds, and, of course, mammals.

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Megaloceros giganteus

As my readers are no doubt aware, St. Patrick's Day is this month, and in honor of that March's fossil vertebrate is the extinct animal most strongly associated with Ireland: Megaloceros, the Irish elk.  It's common name, as famously observed by Stephen J. Gould, is a double misnomer, as Megaloceros was not exclusively Irish (it's remains have been found across Eurasia) and while it is a cervid (the largest ever known, in fact), it is not particularly closely related to elk.  However, the earliest specimens to be described were uncovered from Irish bogs, which still yield some of the most impressive Megaloceros fossils.  Because of this, the Irish elk remains something of a national symbol of Ireland, with its remains adorning museums, universities (such as the pair at left from Dublin's Trinity College), and castles alike.  The outsized antlers of Megaloceros males have, unsurprisingly, been the focus of a great deal of research.  Whether they were the product of sexual selection, allometric growth, or some combination of the two has been an area of debate, as has been their role in the animals' extinction.  A long-standing (but somewhat fanciful) hypothesis held that Irish elk went extinct when forests overtook the more open habitats to which they were adapted and that their large bodies and antlers made life in a closed environment impossible.  A more likely culprit is changing climate that ushered in flora that were nutritionally insufficient to support healthy populations of large, antlered animals such as Megaloceros.

Oregon Trail Word Cloud

What's this blog all about?  This word cloud from Wordle pretty succinctly sums up my major themes from the last several months.  Apparently I like ecology a lot, but not as much as the number one.

Humboldt, Bergmann, and Haeckel: The German Roots of Ecology

One of the axioms of science is that any report on your research should include a thorough overview of the topic it addresses. This often means that introductions to scientific papers include some very old citations (for some authors, trying to find the oldest publication you can legitimately cite has become a game, and a pretty fun one at that). I'm in the process of writing the first chapter of my dissertation on the influence - or lack thereof - of climate on body size evolution in mammals, which turns out to be a very long-standing area of study. In working back to the roots of the debate, I've found myself returning to three papers from the early to middle 19th Century, one of which has a direct bearing on my research, another that is a little more tenuously connected, and a third that is only indirectly related but has a profound impact on everything I study. These papers were written by three very different scientists who were studying very different groups of organisms, but all three papers share one major commonality and, as I hope to convince you, several smaller ones as well.

The most recent of these publications is Haeckel (1866): Generelle Morphologie der Organismen by Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel. Haeckel is remembered today for many things; some of these are positive (he was continental Europe's most eloquent and effective supporter of Darwin and one of the most accomplished scientific illustrators of all time) and some of them very, very negative (he used evolution and his studies on development to justify scientific racism), but he makes an appearance here because it was in his 1866 book that he introduced the word 'ecology' to the world. Haeckel defined his newly-minted word (which roughly translates as 'house study' in Greek) as the study of the environments of organisms. In modern popular culture, environment is often taken to mean the group of abiotic factors - variables such as climate, geography, and geology - that influence an organism, but to ecologists, this is only half the story; organisms also interact with a biotic environment shaped by factors such as predation, competition, and productivity. Ecology, then, is the study of how biotic and abiotic variables influence organisms or, more simply put, the study of why organisms evolve (as opposed to how life has evolved and is evolving, the province of evolutionary biology, though of course there is a huge overlap between the two fields). Because he coined the term, Haeckel is often thought of as the father of ecology, but in fact he would have had no field to provide a name for had it not been for the work of earlier scientists studying the influence of environment on evolution.

One of the most influential of these proto-ecologists was Karl Georg Lucas Christian Bergmann, whose work forms the backbone of my dissertation and of countless other research projects over the course of the last century and a half. Very little biographical information is available for Bergmann: the salient points are that he was born in 1814, attended the University of Göttingen, taught at both his alma mater and at Rostock, and died in 1865, one year before Haeckel wrote his landmark book. While at Göttingen in 1847, Bergmann published the paper for which he is best remembered today: Über die Verhältnisse der Wärmeökomie der Thiere zu ihrer Grösse. The title is a bit of a tongue twister for non-German speakers, but the concept is straightforward enough. Bergmann observed that species of mammals (not individuals within species, as is commonly thought) that lived near the poles tended to be larger than those living towards the equator. Bergmann's explanation for this was that large mammals have small surface area to volume ratios and can therefore retain heat more easily while, conversely, small mammals can shed heat more effectively. Naturally, the poles are colder than temperate regions which are in turn colder than the tropics, and therefore as you head from the former to the latter, you should expect to see a decrease in body size. Bergmann's rule, as this hypothesis has come to be known, has been put to the test several times; his relatively simple explanation has been both supported and attacked by ecologists through the years, but regardless of what you think of his rule, it can't be denied that Bergmann was a pioneering ecologist. By assigning a physical cause to a biotic pattern - and eleven years before Darwin and Wallace introduced the world to natural selection, no less - Bergmann set the tone for generation of ecologists to follow, and as such he deserves to be remembered as a father of the field.

If Bergmann is one of the fathers of ecology, then surely its grandfather was Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt (1769-1859). As opposed to the relatively obscure Bergmann and the politically distasteful Haeckel, Humboldt is one of the best-known and most beloved figures in the history of science; his Latin American travels and research garnered praise from such luminaries as Edgar Allen Poe, Simon Bolivar, and Thomas Jefferson (himself a scientist of no little reputation) and would inspire Darwin's voyage on the Beagle. While it was his travel narrative that would establish his fame, Humboldt also laid the cornerstone of ecology when, along with his traveling companion Aimee Bonpland, he published Essai sur la géographie des plantes in 1805.  During his sojourn in South America, Humboldt had climbed the volcanic peak of Chimborazo in the Ecuadorian Andes (though he failed to reach the summit) and was struck by the distinct zones of vegetation he encountered during his ascent.  His notes, coupled with observations of similar patterns on European mountains, gave Humboldt the data necessary for his 1805 paper as well as the large-scale figure that accompanied it (itself a milestone of scientific illustration).  By tying vegetation to factors such as temperature, air pressure, and soil type Humboldt became the first scientist to seriously study the influence of the environment on organisms, earning his reputation as a pioneering ecologist as well as countless citations in manuscripts (including mine) over the course of the subsequent two centuries.
The authors of these three papers no doubt had many things in common, but perhaps the most striking is that they shared a country of origin.  At first glance, it seems illogical that ecology should have been born in Germany (which, after all, was only a collection of smaller kingdoms and principalities until 1871).  Germany has always produced great scientists, from Leibniz to Einstein, but in Humboldt's time Paris was the center of the scientific world, and many of the most celebrated accomplishments of 19th Century science took place not on the Continent but across the English Channel.  Even within biology, France and Britain played a dominant role, producing some of the greatest anatomists and, later, evolutionary biologists that have ever lived.  Nonetheless, ecology was, at its root, a uniquely German phenomenon.  This begs a rather obvious question: why?  While I'm a far better paleontologist than historian, I think think I have the glimmer of an answer, but in the interest of keeping unassailable historical facts apart from more baseless arm-waving, I'll save my thoughts for a later post.  Stay tuned...

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Megatherium americanum

FVOTM is back from its extended holiday vacation, and because February 12th is Darwin Day, this month's vertebrate is an animal that played a crucial role in the development of evolutionary theory: the giant ground sloth Megatherium americanum.  The species would have been familiar to Darwin before he ever departed on the Beagle: it had been named in 1796 by no less a figure than Baron Georges Cuvier and its size (comparable to that of a modern elephant) and bizarre combination of traits (such as teeth without enamel and claws that the animal evidently walked on) had made it immensely popular.  Darwin himself uncovered fossils of Megatherium - as well as the hippo-like ungulate Toxodon - at Bahia Blanca, south of Buenos Aires.  While it is impossible to pinpoint exactly where or when Darwin first began to understand the patterns that he would later use to support natural selection, his recognition that Megatherium shared many features - including its apparently aberrant teeth and claws - with modern tree sloths certainly represents a milestone, as the great scientist would himself acknowledge in the opening lines of his epochal On the Origin of Species: "When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent.  These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species - that mystery of mysteries as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers."

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Diplodocus carnegii

Last month's Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting was held in Pittsburgh and while animal chosen for the conference logo was the awkwardly-named tetrapod Fedexia, there is another animal that will forever be associated with vertebrate paleontology in that city's Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The museum has existed since 1895, but it was in 1898 that its namesake would spur the discovery of its most famous specimen. It's unclear whether Andrew Carnegie was alerted to the publicity value of sauropod skeletons by a visit to the American Museum of Natural History or by a sensational newspaper headline trumpeting the discovery of "The Most Colossal Animal Ever On Earth." Regardless of the cause, he hired away some of the AMNH's paleontologists and sent them to the badlands of Wyoming to find a giant dinosaur for his museum. His team succeeded spectacularly, and in 1901 the fruits of their labor were described as Diplodocus carnegii. The skeleton, which for decades was the longest - though far from largest - dinosaur known, was a huge hit in Pittsburgh and around the world, as Carnegie presented casts of the skeleton (known affectionately as Dippy) as gifts to museums in capitals across the globe. Dippy even has a couple of connections to paleontology in Oregon: D. carnegii was one of the taxa modeled by UO computer scientist/paleontologist Kent Stevens, and the cast presented by Carnegie to London's Natural History Museum was the first fossil I ever saw and was largely responsible for setting me down the path I'm still traveling today.

Research Report: Mexico City

Whenever I tell anyone that I'm a paleontology student, one of the questions I inevitably get is 'Where do you do your field work?' When I tell them that I don't really do field work and that I do my research in the basements of museums, they usually say something to the effect of 'Oh, that's too bad.' Actually, it isn't. For one thing, the best science in our field is done indoors in collections, libraries, and labs. For another, I actually enjoy collections work (you can see a lot more fossils in a day in a museum than you ever will in the field). For yet another, it can take you to some of the best parts of the world. So far my collections visits have brought me home to Seattle, across the Cascades to John Day, to the great cities of California, to the university towns of the Rockies and Great Plains, to New York's unsurpassed temple to natural history, and now they've brought me to one of the greatest, most historic, and culturally rich cities on the planet. I'm writing this post from Coyoacan, a colonial town turned urban neighborhood in Mexico City. I've come to visit the collections of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in order to expand the scope of my dissertation to all of North America rather than just the US. While I've made an avowed effort to cut down on travelogue-type entries on this blog, this is the first international research trip I've taken, and as such a few posts from south of the border might be of more general interest than the usual "this is what I did today and this is what I think of it" travel update. I'll do my best to supply a few of these posts on the state of my research and of paleontology and science in Mexico during the duration of my visit this week, so stay tuned.

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Epicyon haydeni

Last month, while measuring teeth in the collections of the University of Montana and Idaho State University, I came across jaws of one of the more impressive carnivores ever to have lived. The picture at left (from UM) may not do the size of the animal justice, but Epicyon haydeni is the most massive known canid; the largest known individuals may have exceeded 200 pounds, putting them well within the size range of modern black bears. Epicyon was a member of a group of canids known as borophagines that were among the most common carnivores of the North American Oligo-Miocene. Borophagines are often described as hyena-like, and many of the larger taxa - including Epicyon - were likely bone-crushing predators. However, the group was very diverse and many of its members, especially in the Oligocene and Early-Mid Miocene, were actually fairly small; at least one species had an almost raccoon-like morphology. In many Late Miocene faunas, two species of Epicyon co-occur: the larger E. haydeni and the smaller (but still very big) E. saevus. Canid experts extraordinaire Xiaoming Wang and Richard Tedford have suggested that this is the result of character displacement, making Epicyon an excellent example of how the fossil record can record ecological and evolutionary patterns.

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Oncorchynchus rastrosus

Salmon are a symbol of the Northwest, and with good reason: not only have they been a staple food for humans for millennia and a hugely important link in regional food chains for much longer, but they have very deep roots here. Go back to the Late Miocene and you would still see salmon in the rivers of Oregon; you would, in fact, see one of the most impressive prehistoric fish ever discovered: Oncorhynchus rastrosus, the sabertooth salmon. The features that gave the fish its common name (and its original genus name, Smilodonichthys) are its enlarged canines which, arresting as they are, are not as unusual as they might seem, as many modern salmon grow large breeding teeth while migrating upstream to spawn. The size of O. rastrosus, though, is unique: at lengths of up to 2 meters, it was a good deal larger than the largest known Chinook salmon and head and shoulders beyond sockeyes, its nearest living relatives. The sabertooth salmon was in the news this last month (both in the paper and on TV) after a team led by the University of Oregon's own Edward Davis performed a CAT-scan on its skull. The result of this research is a series of impressive 3-D reconstructions, which can be viewed in an online exhibit by the U of O Museum of Natural & Cultural History; if you'd rather see the original in person, it will be part of the museum's revamped PaleoLab exhibit opening this month.

Field Report: Field Camp 2010

As many of you may know, I was the TA for the paleontology portion of the U of O's field camp this year. Since I got back earlier this week, several people have asked me what we did and what we found. I may not be a great blogger, but even I know the first rule of journalism, so in the interest of giving the people what they want, here's a brief summary of what went on (You'll notice that I'm not giving names or locations of any of the work we did; we were at two sites, both of which are publicly owned, and since illegal collection on federal land is a recurring problem in eastern Oregon, I don't want to provide any information that an unscrupulous fossil poacher might be able to use; for those of you who are wondering, yes, we did have the appropriate permits).

The first site we visited (let's call it Site 1, since imagination is precious and should be conserved) was an exposure of the famous John Day Formation, which has yielded one of the largest and best-preserved Oligocene faunas in the world. Since the primary purpose of our trip was to teach basic paleontological field methods, the bulk of our time was devoted to creating stratigraphic sections for the outcrop. There was, however, time for fossil prospecting as well, and it was very - almost ludicrously - productive. Among the things we uncovered were rodents (particularly squirrels and aplodontids), hypertragulids (mouse deer), canids, nimravids (sabertoothed, cat-like carnivores), horses, entelodonts (bearlike relatives of pigs), and rhinos. Perhaps the most impressive specimens we unearthed were four skulls of oreodonts, pig- and/or sheep-like ungulates that were abundant in the late Oligocene of Oregon (we found ample oreodont postcrania as well, some of which are pictured above).

Our second site (being creative once again, let's call it Site 2) was less fossiliferous but scientifically much more interesting. Instead of just getting a handle on the local stratigraphy as we'd done at Site 1, we were also interested in pinning down the age and paleoenvironment of Site 2, both of which were big question marks going in to field camp. Fortunately, the fossils we found were exactly the ones we'd hoped for to be able to assign an age to the fauna: jaws of the canids Tephrocyon and Cynarctoides, teeth of the horses Archaeohippus and Merychippus, the beaver Monosaulax, and a smattering of camels and paleomerycids (antelope-like ungulates). For those of you who know your North American biostratigraphy, that places you unequivocally in the mid-Miocene (~16 Ma), which in this part of Oregon means you're in the Mascall Formation. Pinning down the paleoenvironment was made easy by the discovery of a bird (probably some kind of waterfowl) and by several shell fragments of pond turtles (I won't insult your intelligence by telling you exactly what the students concluded about the site's paleoecology, but if you can't figure out what environment is likely to be represented by waterfowl and pond turtles, I question whether this is the blog for you).

So there you have it: for a trip whose primary motivation was teaching, we had a remarkably successful couple of weeks in the field (and not just in terms of finding fossils; we were very lucky weather-wise as well, though the last couple of days did manage to break the 100° mark). We and our specimens are now all safely back in Eugene, with the latter awaiting curation and, eventually, a trip back east, where they will be reposited in the collections of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Bradysaurus

In honor of this year's World Cup host, July's fossil vertebrate is South African. Bradysaurus (literally "Slow Lizard," represented here by a skeleton from Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde) was a pareiasaur, a group of large, armored herbivores that may be distantly related to turtles. Though pareiasaurs have been found in late Permian sites throughout the Old World, Bradysaurus is unique to the Karoo Basin north and east of Cape Town. While pareiasaurs were among the largest members of the South African ecosystem, the fauna was dominated by therapsids, or "mammal-like reptiles," including the now-iconic, predatory gorgonopsians and burrowing dicynodonts. The Karoo has been the focus of many research projects in recent years because it is one of the few regions with a terrestrial fossil record of the Permian Extinction, the largest mass extinction in the history of life. Pareiasaurs were among the groups that would not survive the end of the Permian; if you want to see one today, I recommend Oregon's very own Prehistoric Gardens.

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Platanistoid Dolphin

Modern dolphins are by many measures the most successful group of cetaceans: they are diverse, intelligent, and in many cases have proven more resistant to anthropogenic change than their larger relatives. Some dolphins have even colonized freshwater environments. These 'river dolphins' are often referred to as platanistoids, a name based on the modern genus Platanista that inhabits the Ganges and Indus Rivers (other genera inhabit the Amazon, La Plata, and - until recently - Yangtze Rivers), but there has been much debate about whether or not all river dolphins are actually related, as was originally thought. If the world's living and extinct river dolphins really are the product of separate colonizations of freshwater habitats, then they represent a striking example of convergent evolution: platanistoids share many morphological characteristics, perhaps the most striking being a long, pointed rostrum (or snout; this feature makes them similar in form to many other fish-eating vertebrates, such as ichthyosaurs and swordfish). The specimen at left, an as-yet unnamed platanistoid from the mid-Miocene of Oregon, exhibits this characteristic rostrum. However, it was uncovered from the Astoria Formation, a marine unit from the Oregon Coast, making it a saltwater freshwater dolphin. This implies that at least one lineage of river dolphins evolved its unusual morphology before migrating inland. To see this specimen, drop by the U of O's Museum of Natural & Cultural History's Paleolab exhibit, where it will be on display until this summer; if you're in Seattle, some very nice skulls of the similar (but unrelated) Eurhinodelphis are on display at the Burke Museum's Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway exhibit until the end of May.

Exhibit Review: San Diego Natural History Museum

I've been thinking for a while that it might be fun to try my hand at reviewing new (or at least relatively new) books, exhibits, papers, and the like from the world of paleontology, and this is my first attempt at doing so. Any thoughts on the format or the utility of this sort of post would be much appreciated.

Museum: San Diego Natural History Museum, San Diego, California

Exhibit: Fossil Mysteries

Theme: Paleontology

Grade: A+

This exhibit isn't new per se, but it is new to me and it's recent enough that I feel justified in reviewing it. Part of my impression of the San Diego museum may be colored by my time doing research in the collections, and it's worth noting that the facilities there are excellent, from the well-appointed prep lab to the well-organized cabinets of fossils to the offices with views over Balboa Park. That said, the exhibits there are among the best I've seen anywhere. The focus of Fossil Mysteries is deceptively constrained, displaying only fossils from the San Diego area. This is the sort of seemingly narrow focus that could lead to an exhibit consisting primarily of fossils on shelves: interesting, perhaps, to scientists, but with little value for anyone else. However, when put in the correct context, local fossils from sites familiar to museumgoers can be used as springboards to present broader concepts, and Fossil Mysteries does this to great effect. As the name of the exhibit suggests, this is done by presenting visitors with a series of questions. Some of these are rhetorical and answered fairly quickly (e.g. 'How can you tell different groups of carnivorous mammals apart?). Others (e.g. 'Why are there no more mammoths in Southern California?') are intentionally left unanswered, though visitors are provided with evidence they can use to draw their own conclusions. Of course, relying on museumgoers to actually read all an exhibit's signage is a bad bet, and several interactive displays are in place to appeal to younger visitors (my favorite was a series of self-powered displays on animal locomotion, all of which fed into the larger theme of adaptation). Models of some of the more impressive fossils are much in evidence (some of which are half skeletal, half fleshed-out); the full-sized Carcharodon megalodon and a prowling Panthera atrox are particularly impressive. A walk-through diorama of an Eocene jungle serves as an introduction to paleoecology. Many of the displays are augmented by vibrant murals by William Stout, which, taken as a whole, constitute one of the more impressive paleoartistic undertakings since Rudolph Zallinger's Age of Reptiles mural at Yale. One of the only drawbacks to Fossil Mysteries is the placement of these murals directly behind specimens, making them difficult to see and detracting from their full effect.

Many of my paleontological friends are likely reading this and despairing over another fossil exhibit based primarily on interactive displays. I would respond by saying that, first of all, we, as a discipline, should get past the delusion that fossils and fossils alone are enough to draw - and more importantly, to educate - a general audience, and second of all that, at least in this case, there's no cause for concern. One of the great strengths of Fossil Mysteries is its balance of interactive and specimen-based displays, and some of the specimens chosen for exhibit are impressive indeed. There's the San Diego ankylosaur (complete with encrusted oysters), bird tracks from the Oligocene Otay Formation, the Chula Vista walrus, a complete fossil gray whale, and several large mammals from Rancho La Brea, as well as several other smaller fossils too numerous to detail. It's hard to imagine Fossil Mysteries not having some appeal to anyone with even the remotest interest in paleontology or science in general, and because of that it stands head and shoulders above most recent paleo exhibits.

Notes From a Golden Age

Apologies for the text color issues with this post; Blogger is either acting up today or I'm being an idiot. Either way, as an unredeemable perfectionist, I find it even more annoying than you do.

I spent last week visiting Oregon's southern neighbor, primarily the Los Angeles and San Diego areas, and while native Northwesterners are inherently distrustful of Southern California (LA is the Mordor to the Northwest's Rohan, with the Bay Area playing the role of Gondor in this cumbersome and hopelessly nerdy analogy), speaking purely as a paleontologist, I have to admit it's an exciting place to be right now. In fact, as the collections manager of one of the museums I visited opined, this really could be considered the golden age of Southern California paleontology.

Many people don't appreciate the wealth of the fossil record around LA and San Diego, but it really is remarkable. Everyone is familiar with the carnivores, birds, ground sloths, and ungulates of Rancho La Brea, of course, but it's far from the only Pleistocene site in the region (perhaps even more remarkable are the pygmy mammoths of the Channel Islands, the most unusual members of a unique fauna). Go back to the Pliocene and beyond and you find several remarkable marine mammals, including early baleen whales, walruses, desmostylians, and giant sea cows. Of particular interest to me are the land mammals of the Miocene, which are found in almost unbelievable abundance in the Barstow Basin and in the canyons of the Coast and Peninsular Ranges. San Diego County has its own (though, it must be said, somewhat less spectacular) answer to the Oligocene faunas of Oregon and South Dakota as well as one of the continent's better-preserved Eocene ecosystems. There are even some dinosaurs and Cretaceous marine reptiles, the tip of Baja California's iceberg.

And these fossils have plenty of people around to collect them. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has one of the best vertebrate fossil collections in the country, and the San Diego Natural History Museum, San Bernardino County Museum, and Raymond Alf Museum (associated, unusually, with a high school) are none too shabby either (the San Diego museum has one of the nicest collections facilities I've seen, and I've visited a great many museums over the course of my dissertation research). Remarkably, all four of these museums either have opened or will soon be opening new paleontology exhibits (again, San Diego really excels here; more on this in a later post, if I get around to it). Several universities in the area are among the leaders of North American paleontology; UCLA and USC are probably the most prominent, but several smaller universities in the area have active research programs as well. The only loser in the world of Southern Californian paleontology at the moment is Santa Barbara, who's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis recently lost John Alroy to Australia and who's natural history museum, while housing some excellent Channel Islands specimens, has no active paleontology program of which I'm aware (though it's worth noting that UCSB is one of the regional departments with a paleo program).

I'm not in the habit of heaping praise on Southern California (so much so that I feel compelled to point out that the collections of Berkeley's UC Museum of Paleontology are still the best on the West Coast). That said, this is an economic climate in which science, along with everybody else, has had to make many cutbacks, some of them very regrettable, and to see paleontology not only surviving, but thriving somewhere in the country is encouraging. May we all soon be following their example.

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Cophocetus

This month's fossil vertebrate - and those for all the months between February and May - is a whale. This cetacean theme is in honor of the UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History's current exhibit, Whales of Deep Time. It's the first part of the three-part exhibit Paleolab-Oregon's Past Revealed (tune in this summer to find out about Part 2). This is, to a certain extent, shameless self-promotion, as I played a small part in putting the show together (I wrote some of the labels; drop by to see if you can guess which ones!). It's also the first time in decades that we've been able to put so many of the UO's more spectacular fossils on display, so if you have any interest in Northwest paleontology, it's well worth a visit.

February's whale is Cophocetus oregonensis, a species that, as the name suggests, is unique to the Oregon coast: the type specimen was unearthed near the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse in Newport. Bones that may be attributable to another species of Cophocetus have been uncovered near San Mateo, California. The Newport specimen - currently on display in Paleolab - consists of an incomplete skeleton including a vestigial pelvis, a relic from its distant, land-dwelling ancestors. Cophocetus was a member of the Pelocetidae, an extinct family of whales found worldwide during the Miocene. Pelocetids were early balaenopteroids, making them not-too-distant relatives of modern rorquals, including humpback and blue whales.

2009: The Year In...

...The Northwest

It was a bad year to be a mayor, both in Seattle and in Portland. However, not too much sympathy was lost on Mayors Nickels and Adams, as the economic recession reached (hopefully) rock bottom, particularly in Oregon, and the region's largest city lost a long-time news source. On the plus side, Seattle opened its long-awaited (and desperately-needed) light rail system and it became fun to be a fan of the Mariners and Blazers again. Sticking with sports, it was also the best time in years to be a Duck (who played probably their biggest game ever this December after a disastrous start to the season).

...Science

The biggest science story in 2009 was something that happened 150 years ago. This was Darwin Year, a chance to celebrate the 200th birthday of a great scientist and the sesquicentennial of his epochal work. It was also a chance to take stock of the standing of evolution today. As a theory, it remains sound, well-supported, and a scientific fact. As far as teaching and public acceptance of it, though, the US continues to lag well behind the rest of the developed world. However, for the first time in a long while, pro-science education groups were able to make themselves heard above the ravings of the "intelligent design" community; let's hope this trend continues into 2010 and beyond. Anyone questioning the value of evolutionary theory should take a look at the major role it played in understanding and mitigating the effects of the swine flu pandemic that swept across the world this year.

There were, of course, other science stories in 2009, particularly related to ongoing global climate change and the major conference addressing the topic at year's end in Copenhagen. My favorite discovery of the year, though, was tool-use in octopi, the first time such complex behavior has been observed in any invertebrate.

...Paleontology

Paleontology is (or at least should be) measured by the theories generated by paleontologists, not by the number of new species described. That said, fossils form the backbone of our science, and it can't be denied that there were several spectacular new fossils described this year. Some of these (Darwinius and Raptorex, for example) were cool but probably overhyped (though having paleontology in the news is never a bad thing). Ardipithecus, on the other hand, is probably worth all the attention it got. Some extremely important marine mammal fossils (the otter-like pinniped Puijila and the pregnant whale Maiacetus) came to light this year, and probably didn't generate as much excitement as they should have. Far and away my favorite new fossil organism is the giant snake Titanoboa (the description of which came complete with an interesting but, sadly, flawed method of using snake size as a climatic proxy).

...Me

My year can be summed up in two words: travel and research. I spent a week in May in New York, a month on the road to Cincinnati and back, a couple of days in Copenhagen, a couple of weeks in Ireland, and a week at my old home in Bristol. Along the way I measured hundreds of mammal teeth and presented some preliminary results from my various research projects at four different conferences. I also submitted my first paper and my second NSF grant proposal, both of which I have high (and hopefully not naive) hopes of seeing come to fruition in the coming year. The NSF grant was just rejected today, so there's one bit of optimism that won't carry on into the new year. Oh well.

...Reflecting on the Aughts

It only came to my attention about a week ago that this was the end of a decade (depending on how you measure these things, of course). Despite my avowed effort to try to steer away from self-reflection on this blog, it really does boggle the mind a bit to look back on a what really has been a momentous ten years, both historically and personally. For my part, on this date in 1999 I had just finished my first quarter of college and was en route to visit my grandmother on Lopez Island (and, it so transpired, to see a fireworks show that put Seattle's to shame). I was just coming to realize how difficult it is to leave the place you grew up and to which you will always feel a profound connection. I was also just beginning to dip my toes into the world of academic paleontology (which, at the time, I thought would end with me working on early dinosaurs). Today, I have recently returned from Lopez (some things never change). I've found at least a temporary home back in the Northwest, and I'm a PhD candidate fully immersed in the world of paleontology. In the interim, I've shifted my focus from dinosaurs to the paleoecology of mammals (much less charismatic but much more interesting). I've travelled the US and the world; I even moved to England for a year for a masters degree. Like many people, I wallowed in depression and fear after 9/11, but not long after I experienced what have been, to date, the happiest times of my life while working at the Pacific Science Center. I've lost family members and seen my best friends get married and begin families of their own. I've experienced love, both requited and unrequited, joy and grief, hope and despair. I'm not sure if everything I've seen and done this decade has made me a better person (I'm sure it's made me more cynical, but I'm not convinced that's an entirely bad thing) but I am sure that's it's been an incredible ride (and I mean literally incredible: if you'd told me what was in store back in 1999, I likely would not have believed you). Regardless of their effect on me, and at the risk of sounding trite, I wouldn't exchange my experience in the Aughts for anything, and I hope that the 2010s will be equally interesting (in the good sense of the word, of course) for me and for all you readers out there.

Fossil Vertebrate of the Month: Tiktaalik

I used to have a feature on my academic site where I would pick a Fossil Vertebrate of the Month, about which I would write a little blurb and provide relevant links. I had let FVOTM lapse, but was recently encouraged to restart it, and I thought I would share it on this blog as well. Enjoy!

This November 24th marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, one of the most important books in history. Darwin famously devoted a chapter of his magnum opus to the imperfection of the fossil record and why transitional fossils supporting his theory might prove to be difficult to find. "Missing links" do remain rare, but they are uncovered from time to time, and the most spectacular example from recent history is this month's featured animal. Famously touted for its combination of fish and tetrapod features, Tiktaalik is actually a link in a well-documented transition between lobe-finned fish such as Eusthenopteron through "fishapods" such as Panderichthys and Acanthostega to true tetrapods such as Ichthyostega. Not only is Tiktaalik an impressive fossil (or, more accurately, group of fossils, as severals pecimens have been uncovered), but it provides an excellent example of the predictive power of evolutionary theory. Chicago paleontologist Neil Shubin actually went out looking for something very like Tiktaalik; he knew the approximate age of a gap in the tetrapod fossil record, he knew that most early tetrapod fossils had been found in rocks from around the edges of the North Atlantic, and that rocks of the appropriate age (Late Devonian) outcropped on Ellesmere Island in the Candian Arctic (one of the closest major land masses to the North Pole, appropriately enough for this time of year). Shubin's hypothesis proved to be correct, and a 2004 expedition uncovered the first remains of Tiktaalik, which has since taken its place alongside Archaeopteryx and Australopithecus as one of the most impressive transitional fossils ever discovered.

Burian & Knight Videos

Back when I first got my new computer, I thought it would be fun to test out the capabilities of Apple's movie program, so just for kicks I put together a couple of video tributes to my two favorite paleoartists, Zdenek Burian and Charles. R. Knight. I stumbled across them today while looking through some of my older files and figured it was time they saw the light of day, as it were.

New Look

Given the neglect this blog has experienced lately, I thought it was high time for some changes to be made. Any of my handful of long-time readers will notice that there's a new look, but I'm also going to make a concerted effort to change the content slightly. Looking back over my last several entries, I notice that a great man of them are somewhat long-winded descriptions of trips I've been on or things I've done. Way back when I started blogging, sharing my experiences was the whole point, given that I was a few thousand miles from all my friends and family. Now that I'm firmly ensconced back in the States, though, I imagine rambling travelogues and the like are getting a little boring. From now on, I'm going to try and focus more on what I think are the strengths of this blog: "insider" thoughts on paleontology and the Pacific Northwest, probably the only two areas to which I can realistically cast myself as an "insider" (whatever that means). There will, as always, be digressions - probably lots of them - but I will do my best to keep things at least relatively interesting to a larger audience. Stay tuned!

In the Wake of the Vikings

For the first time in more than two years, I have the distinct pleasure of updating this blog from Europe. My purpose for being here is twofold: at the moment I'm on a family vacation to Copenhagen and Ireland, at the end of which I'll be hopping across the Irish Sea to my old home in Bristol for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting. My perhaps too-colorful title may make it sound like more of an adventure than it really is (though it is, strictly speaking, accurate, as Ireland and England were colonized by the Norse - and in particular by Danes - during the Middle Ages), but it is one of the bigger trips I've taken in my life, and I will do my best to file periodic travelogues (though now that I think about, a large percentage of my reading audience are either on this trip with me or will be rendezvousing with me in Bristol). I will also post photos to my Picasa account for any of you who might be interested in what, say, Roskilde looks like this time of year.