|
Musings and enthusings of an armchair paleontologist |
Here’s a video I took at the DMNS. It’s one of the preparators cutting open a plaster jacket. The docent at the prep lab exhibit said that they were cutting open specimens from the SnowMastodon expedition, but he wasn’t sure what the guy was actually working on. If you have any clues yourself, please let me know and I’ll post an update here.
Thanks!
As has been previously illustrated, I have a thing for Dunklosteus. The armor, the machismo, the low-slung gnathal plates ready to dispatch chompy, slicey death in 1/50th of a second. It turns out the DMNS has a cast that has been scaled down a bit, but is not behind glass or lucite, making it eminently suitable for photographing. They also have a T-Rex(DMNH #2151) at the front of the museum, poised to stomp-and-chomp his way through the masses of visitors cowering below…
It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Long enough that they were still the Denver Museum of Natural History and I was still taking pictures on film when I was there last. Feorlen and I flew into DEN this weekend to visit her sister, but one of the things on my agenda this weekend was a trip to the Museum.
Denver paleo-geeks should run, not walk to the DMNS and check out the Snowmastodon Project. There are actual bones on public display for a limited time while they finish drying. Yes, I said drying. You see, these bones were found at the bottom of a reservoir at the Snowmass Resort while construction crews were enlarging said reservoir. After it had been drained and they started the actual backhoe-and-skiploader work they struck bone…and then again, and then even more. At that point, somebody called the museum and a team of real(unlike your author) paleontologists descended upon the site to perform an extraction.
One main issue is that the bones were at the bottom of a lake for some time so they are completely soaked, I heard the word “gelid” used by at least one docent. So, off they went into a series of bags where the humidity and drying could be carefully controlled lest they crack and possibly crumble. Some have a reached a state where they’re dry enough to be put on display and viewed by the public.
Mastodon First Rib. Note sample cut where bone was removed for DNA sequencing/analysis.
Adult(Foreground) and Juvenile(Background) Mastodon femurs
What’s interesting here is that the femur of the juvenile Mastodon is actually longer than that of the adult.
The bone in the foreground is an adult bone because the “growth cap” is present at both ends of the bone. When the bone of an animal has reached adult size, the ends fuse together creating the cap you see.
Close-up:
detail of Mastodon femur(juvenile)
Mastodon tusk fragment
Like Mosasaur munching and crunching its way through an Ammonite shell, so has the Dino Toy Blog munched and crunched its way through my brains attention for just about anything else over the next few days. An entire blog dedicated to reviews of dinosaur toys, action figures, sculptures and statuary. This is so totally cool. There’s not much else to say right now, I’m too busy at the moment typing in the names of random paleo-critters to see what’s out there and what they’ve reviewed.
Taking pictures of things in glass cases is a nightmare, esp. in museums where you’ve got low ambient lighting, which means other exhibits will probably be spotlit, reflecting off the case, people walking around, also causing reflections, etc. So it can be a huge pain. I think I managed to bag a couple really good shots here from the “Evolving Planet” exhibit at the FMNH.
Take a Lumix FZ-40, manual focus, no flash, 1-second exposure and 3/4 from the back, add in a lot of patience waiting for the gaggles of people to float by and we get:
The Devonian Placoderm "Dunklosteus" at the Field Museum
One of the best pics I’ve taken of “The Big D”, period. I’ve found this specimen hard to take good pictures of because the specimens and/or casts I’ve seen have been in glass cases in either very dark or very bright rooms.
IMO, It’s hard to be a paleo-geek and NOT appreciate/respect something with 8K psi bite force, capable of opening its jaws in 1/50th of a second. Put another way, Dunklosteus was the freakin’ honey-badger of the Devonian seas. He just didn’t freakin’ care!
Check out these gnathal plates. Dude! gnathal plates! Focus on that for a second. Here’s something that managed to be the apex predator of its day w/ out teeth. Freakin’ Dunklosteus didn’t NEED teeth. Who needs teeth when you’ve got a set of these:
Knife-edge cutting blades as part of the jaw. Who needs teeth ? Well, okay, pretty much everybody that comes afterwards. Teeth are a morphable, replaceable answer to the how-to-chomp question. Teeth can be specialized, even for different stages of an organism’s life. That’s a win over gnathal plates, which are part of the jaw and can’t be replaced, change size/shape, etc.(It should also be noted here that there is no evidence in the fossil record of young, teenage Dunklosteus filing their plates, piercing them, getting “grillz” or “vampire” plates or anything like that.) Still, it’s hard to beat them, particularly back in the Devonian when a lot of things that would have been food for Dunklosteus were armored as well.
*CHOMP*SLICE*CRUSH*
You’re done!
380 million years after Dunklosteus lived and there still isn’t anything that comes close to that bite. Placoderms, Respect!
We’re making a brief trip to the Field Museum (FMNH) this weekend.
Stay tuned for lots of pix of Sue The T-Rex and other paleo-geekiness. I was first there in January 2010 and had an awesome time. I view second/nth visits as a chance to poke around different corners of exhibits I didn’t get to look at too much the first time or spend more time with favorite ones, take some better pictures of things. Since I was there last, I’ve also upgraded my camera some, so I’m hoping to be able to take pix with some generally better quality than the last time.
A new paper in PLoS ONE from researchers at the University of Calgary shows that Stegoceras validum had the cranial structures & support for head-butting contests, even if there’s no evidence that it actually happened.
CT scans of the skull of a Stegoceras v. skull show that it has internal and external bone structures similar to those found in big-horn sheep and musk-oxen.
UoC article here with the paper abstract at PLoS ONE
This is actually pretty interesting because everything I’ve heard about the head-butting vs. display debate seemed to be siding with the “display” argument. Of course, ability or feature does not directly correlate to use.
What would be interesting to look at from here would be evidence of stress and impact. I would think that features like micro-fractures and other stress/usage patterns would become readily apparent if the skull were to be examined further. If they compared the structure of the S. v. skull to that of other “colliders” and found enough similarity to draw the conclusion that head-butting was structurally possible, maybe they could look for similarities in stress features as well.
I came up with the name for this blog a couple years ago based on observation that dinosaurs(and paleo-critters in general) seem to be represented in popular media as one of three very generic types:
-The big stompy lumbering sauropodomorph,(think Brachiosaurus or Diplodocus).
-The big chompy, vicious,carnivorous theropod(think T. rex or Allosaurus or so)
-The weird-ass spikey thing that the chompy one tries to eat, like Ankylosaurus or Triceratops(Which are from entirely different sub-orders, but pop-culture rarely distinguishes that far down.)
Which also says something about the tone or manner in which this blog is presented. I strive for a level of detail and rigor that you won’t get from a movie or Discovery Channel special but am not above admitting that I own most of those videos. A quick survey of the paleo-bookshelf here reveals titles by Peter Wellnhofer, Jennifer Clack, Patricia Vickers-Rich, Dodson, Lessum, Olshevsky and “Captain Raptor” by Kevin O’Malley and Patrick O’Brien. Paleontology (and science in general, by extent) is cool in and of itself but a T. rex stomping through the forest, roaring and chomping lawyers does have its own appeal.
