The Paleo-Tourist

The Noble Pentaceratops

I was visiting the University of Oklahoma a few days ago and as I wrapped up a solid day of physics discussions, my host offered to show me the university’s Sam Noble Museum of Natural History.  I readily agreed and we arrived just 45 minutes before the museum closed.  There’s normally a $5 admission fee but the cashiers were already counting up the day’s receipts and just waved us in.  There’s plenty to see in the Sam Noble Museum, from dioramas of the Cretaceous seas that once covered Oklahoma to the remains of camels that lived there millions of years later.  As we made an abbreviated tour back in time, I had two things in the back of my mind:  How will I pick out something especially striking from all of the really fine exhibits here; and I really need to get a decent lightweight digital camera.  I took a lot of crappy pictures with my iPhone, but at least I did come upon something really unique:  The World’s Largest Land Animal Skull.

It belongs to Pentaceratops, a ceratopsian dinosaur 74 million years old.  The animal’s frill towers 3.2 meters (10.5 feet) above its chin.  On display below it is a certificate from Guinness World Records proclaiming it to be the single largest dinosaur skull ever found.  The skull goes along with one of the most complete skeletons of Pentaceratops found to date. 

There were many species of Ceratopsian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous Period.  The best known is Triceratops, with its distinctive three horns and bony frill around the skull.  The number of horns and the shape of the frill varied among the Ceratopsians and there has been a good deal of speculation about their purpose.  In the more dramatic artist’s conceptions, they are a means of defense against giant predators like Tyrannosaurus rex.  More recently, some paleontologists have come to think that they might have been primarily used as a sexual attractor or as a means of dominance within a herd.  I find this last idea easy to believe;  even now it’s intimidating to stand in front of this creature.  He would have been impressive indeed in life.  Animals today are often impressed by size and there’s no reason to think the dinosaurs were any different.  I suspect that even a Tyrannosaur might have thought twice about attacking something as big the Pentaceratops appeared to be.

There appears to be an interesting side story to go with the skull.  A placard indicates that it was hidden away in the museum's collections, unexamined for fifty years before somebody opened it up and realized what a unique and important specimen it was.  It would be interesting to know more about that, but it that's all the placard says and it isn't mentioned on the museum's web site.  I've heard similar tales at other museums.  They're chronically short of money and manpower so it's not unheard-of for a remarkable fossil to languish for half a century.  Of course, from the dinosaur's point of view, that's nothing.

There was plenty more to see, but the museum closed at 5:00 so I had to cut the visit short.  I’ll try to get back there sometime and if you happen to be in Norman, Oklahoma, the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History is well worth a visit. 

Fossil Mysteries in San Diego

I've been back from San Diego for two weeks now and still hadn't finished writing up my paleo-tourist adventures there.  That's the problem with having a day job - it's so distracting.  But now that I'm back at the blog, there's quite a bit more to be said for San Diego.  Balboa Park is a unique central feature of the city.  Not only does it contain the San Diego Zoo, but an array of attractions including  botanical gardens, a miniature railroad, a carousel, and 17 museums.  The San Diego Natural History Museum is among them.  The museum's central paleontology exhibit is Fossil Mysteries, which features mainly regional fossils from San Diego County and Baja California.  The region's fossil record goes back as far as the late Cretaceous Period, 75 million years ago.  As the exhibit's title suggests, the visitor is encouraged to ask questions about the fossils:  How old are they?  What sort of place did these creatures live in?  How did they die?  Why did they become extinct?  And how do the fossils provide answers?

Fossil Mysteries also features some very good dioramas.  There's one depicting the end of the Cretaceous, a time of transition from the Age of Reptiles to the Age of Mammals.  The scene of early opposums (opposa?) scavenging the corpse of a dinosaur is evocative.

Like every museum I've seen in California, the San Diego  museum has a splendid display of Ice Age fossils courtesy of Rancho La Brea.  But what really stands out in this exhibit is the re-creation of the Eocene Epoch.  This relatively early epoch in the Age of Mammals is beautifully depicted in a diorama showing what southern Califorinia was like from 48 to 40 million years ago. The locale was a mangrove swamp back then, inhabited by the ancestors of modern tapirs, crocodilians who hadn't changed much since the Jurassic, and animals who have no living descendants today.  A word of caution:  The simulated calls of the Hyeanodon playing in the background could drive you up a mangrove.

If you're in San Diego, Balboa Park is not to be missed and the San Diego Natural History Museum is worth a visit.  But brace yourself for sticker shock; each museum and garden has a separate admission. Park Passes are available but don't include the zoo. I got my Natural History Museum tickets at a $1 discount by purchasing them along with a whale watching tour (Hornblower's), whose cruises include volunteer whale experts from the museum.

Elephant Odyssey in San Diego

Balboa Park in central San Diego is a scenic locale with a number of attractions, including the world-famous San Diego Zoo.  Since I'm in town with the Missus for the weekend, we decided to see the lions and tigers and bears, with maybe a side trip to the reptile house.  It's definitely worth a visit, but since zoos typically focus on living animals, I wasn't expecting it to be a stop for the Paleo-tourist. That was before I entered the Elephant Odyssey.  This section of the zoo introduces the visitor to the animals past and present.  In fact, it is the only zoo exhibit I've seen that is based largely on regional fossils. 

Entering the exhibit, you first encounter a re-creation of the La Brea Tar Pits, with the simulated remains of the hapless megafuana who met their end there.  It's intended as an introduction to the animals that lived here 12,000 years ago, in the Pleistocene Epoch.  Proceeding onward, you find a display of Pleistocene fossils and life-size reproductions of a family of Columbian Mammoths, Harlan's Ground Sloth and the American Lion.   The exhibit notes that California has the world's largest concentration of Pleistocene fossils and many of these extinct animals have living counterparts.

Nearby, you will also see live examples of the modern versions: lions and elephants from Africa.   Walking on farther, you will see living tapirs, llamas and capybara (the world's largest rodent), along with descriptions of their Pleistocene counterparts.  In fact, the continuing theme is the comparison  of the the living animals with the extinct ones.  The similarities are very strong, since 12,000 years is not such a long time on the evolutionary time scale.  But in terms of human lifetimes, it is unimaginably long ago and the themes of extinction and conservation are inescapably part of the picture.   I would recommend a visit to the San Diego Zoo to anybody, but the paleo-tourist should not miss the Elephant Odyssey exhibit.

Middle Schoolers Have the Smarts in Washington, DC

I went into DC today to serve as a Scientific Judge in the Washington area Regional Science Bowl for middle schools.  This was a qualifier for the National Science Bowl, to be held in April.  Both the regional and national science bowls are sponsored by the U. S. Department of Energy.  The format is straightforward:  Two panels of kids from competing schools sit at tables facing a set of judges.  One of the judges (me) reads a short-answer or multiple choice question from one of six scientific categories.    Each contestant has a lighted buzzer that he/she presses when they think they know the answer.  If the answer is correct, they get points and a shot at a bonus question.  If it's incorrect, we move on.  The competition continues for two 8-minute sessions and then new teams come in.  I'm glad I only had to read the questions and not answer them.  Congratulations to Washington Latin PCS, who will move on to the National round.

The paleontology enthusiasts who follow this blog will no doubt wonder if there were questions on this topic.  There were a couple, in the category of Earth and Space Science.  Alas, nobody scored any points on them in my sessions.  One young lady misremembered the period in which amphibians first appeared (Devonian) and nobody could remember the term "index fossil".   Just as well I never got to the bonus question "What gas is responsible for the color of Uranus?"  With middle schoolers, that one could have been asking for trouble.

Methane.

I just saw an online article in National Geographic: The largest rabbit ever found.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/110323-giant-rabbit-minorca-biggest-bunny-science-nuralagus-rex-largest/

Could this be a job for the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch?

The Pleistocene in Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara is a picturesque coastal town that seems a stranger to the winter weather that we Chicagoans are used to seeing in late November.  It also has a good natural history museum.  I drove past an old Spanish mission shaded with live oaks to reach the museum, which is also constructed in the old mission style.  It comprises several buildings and outdoor courtyards.  On entering I walked past Chad, the blue whale, and wandered between a diverse array of halls from birds, mammals, and insects to gems and minerals.  The museum also has a planetarium and a large hall for special exhibits.  There was an orchid show here the day I visited.

It’s all interesting, but what brings a paleo-tourist to a natural history museum are the fossils, so it wasn’t long before I was in the Geology & Paleontology Hall.  The exhibits here are focused largely on local paleontology, but, as I saw on my earlier visits to the La Brea Tar Pits and the Channel Islands, the paleontology in these parts can be rather dramatic.  The exhibit includes some fossils from La Brea (there are lots of them to spare) and a cast of a Pygmy Mammoth excavation that appears to be identical to the one at the Channel Islands National Park Visitors’ Center.  But there is also a real skeleton of a Pygmy Mammoth (Mammuthus exilus), the most complete specimen found so far and the first to be dated.  Radiocarbon dating puts its age at approximately 12,840 years.  Another rare mammoth fossil is the molar and jaw of Mammuthus meridionalis.  They refer to it as the “Southern Mammoth”, maybe because it’s found in these southern parts, but I had always heard it referred to as the “Ancestral Mammoth” (see e. g.,  Mammoths:  Giants of the Ice Age by Adrian Lister & Paul Bahn).  At roughly 800,000 years, it’s much older than the Pygmy Mammoth.  It’s called the Ancestral Mammoth because it’s the ancestor of the ancestor of the ancestor of the Pygmy Mammoth.  The Steppe Mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii) evolved from the Ancestral Mammoth; the Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and Columbian Mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) evolved from the Steppe Mammoth; and the Pygmy Mammoth evolved from the Columbian Mammoth.  Had enough Mammuthi?  How about a bird with teeth?

Modern birds of course, do not have teeth.  But it was not always thus.  The earliest known birds, which evolved from dinosaurs, had teeth.  Toothed birds continued to fill the skies from the Jurassic up to the Pleistocene.  The Santa Barbara museum has a well-preserved specimen that’s about 19,000 years old.  I’m not sure when they died out, probably about 10,000 years ago in extinction that took place at the end of the last Ice Age.  Whenever it was, such birds are now as rare as hens’ teeth.

Mammoths in Exile

After visiting Rancho La Brea, the next stop on our southern California Paleo-tour was Ventura, on the coast west of Los Angeles.  We had leisurely breakfast and headed for the visitors’ center for the Channel Islands National Park.  The Channel Islands – so named because of their location in the Santa Barbara Channel – are a unique and beautiful locale.  The chain of four northern islands was once a single island during the last Ice Age, or Wisconsinan Epoch.  When the glaciers melted at the end of this epoch, the sea levels rose and flooded the valleys of this large island, leaving the high points isolated from one another and, of course, from the mainland.  The result was the preservation of the ancient California landscape, along with the evolution of unique plants and animals.  One of the most interesting of these was a creature whose name sounds like an oxymoron:  the Pygmy Mammoth, also known as the Dwarf Mammoth.  Actually, I rather like the scientific name Mammuthus exilus, or “exiled mammoth.”  It’s more descriptive, since even the Pygmy Mammoth is not so very small a creature, some five feet high at the shoulder.  It’s only a dwarf compared to its ancestor, Mammuthus columbii, the Columbian Mammoth (14 feet high).

The Columbian Mammoth was one of the largest land mammals ever.  So how did the Pygmy Mammoth descend from it?  It appears that mammoths swam to the island when the sea levels were low and it was not too far away (Note:  Modern elephants are very good swimmers, so the mammoths probably were too).  When the glaciers melted and the sea levels rose, they were isolated.  As Darwin realized from his studies in the Galapagos, isolation is a powerful factor in evolution.  The big Columbian Mammoths would have fared well on the mainland, or even a large island, where there would be lots of open grazing space.  Their size would have been some protection against the chief predators of the day, such as the dire wolf and the sabertooth cat.  But on a small island, where the food supply is limited and there are no large predators, size is no longer an advantage.  Natural selection is all about “the survival of the fittest”, but what makes a creature fit for one environment can make it quite unfit for another.  So it was with the mammoths.  Over thousands of years, it was the smaller pachyderms, not the larger ones, who had the advantage on the Channel Islands.  In the end, Mammuthus exilus turned out to be the last surviving mammoth, dying out only 4000-5000 years ago.

Interestingly, the Channel Islands were not the only place where this happened.  Dwarf mammoths descended from the Woolly Mammoth have been found on St. Paul Island off Alaska and also on Wrangel Island off Siberia.  An essential element of science is that tests must be repeatable and the test of placing mammoths on isolated islands certainly gives consistent results.

The Pygmy Mammoths of California were discovered on Santa Rosa Island and I would have liked to visit there.  I then discovered that I shouldn’t have lingered over breakfast, because there are a limited number of boats going out to the islands and the one for Santa Rosa had already left.  Amber and I were able to get a boat to Santa Cruz Island instead.  You get to the island in a high-speed catamaran and the ride takes about an hour.  Even though I saw no mammoths on Santa Cruz, I wasn’t disappointed.  The hiking is good and the scenery is magnificent.  I did see at least one Island Fox – a diminutive version of foxes on the mainland.  It was unafraid of people and seemed quite at home in the picnic area.  Feeding the animals is forbidden in any National Park, but I have a feeling that this fellow had a way of cadging table scraps.  When human beings are part of an animal’s environment, it adapts.

The Paleo-Tourist Goes to Hollywood

  I visited southern California a few weeks ago and found several places to interest a paleo-tourist, but the place that sticks in the mind is the La Brea Tar Pits.  It’s one of the most famous fossil sites in the world and I’ve wanted to visit there since I was six years old.  From Charles Knight’s famous depictions of the Pleistocene Epoch, I had visions of open pits of reeking asphalt out in the middle of a grassy savannah.  In fact, La Brea is smack in the middle of Hollywood.  You know:  movie stars, glamour, and all that.  Things have changed in the last 40,000 years and this famous animal trap of the Ice Age is now Hancock Park, located between W. 6^th street and Wilshire.  It contains two museums:  The Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The story of the La Brea Tar Pits is well-known (to those who know it well), but I’ll tell it briefly once again:  Asphalt from crude petroleum formed under ancient seas seeped up through subterranean fissures to form sticky pools, easily hidden by water or wind-blown debris.  Animals became stuck in it, becoming easy prey for predators such as saber-toothed cats and dire wolves.  But the predators also became trapped in the goo and the whole bunch of them would come to a sticky end all at once.  They sank into the tar, which was quite effective at preserving their bones.  The result is a treasure trove of fossilized remains, illustrating life in the late Pleistocene with such unparalleled detail that this time has been designated the “Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age”.

I could have spent more time in the Page Museum, but I arrived late in the day.  It’s a six-hour drive down from the San Francisco Bay area (if traffic is good).  I learned the hard way that if you’re short on time, it’s best to see the outdoor tar pits first – they close at 4:00; the Page Museum closes at 5:00.  There’s more info on their web page at www.tarpits.org.  I went through the museum in an hour and a half, but that was basically breezing through without lingering over any of the really spectacular fossils on display.  The bones are sufficiently plentiful and well-preserved that there are many displays of complete mounted skeletons, including huge ground sloths, extinct bison and my own favorite, the saber-toothed cat.  I grew up calling this beast the saber-toothed tiger.  Actually, it is not related to tigers at all, but the alliterative name is catchy and I won’t fault anybody for using it.

A particularly impressive display is the Dire Wolf Wall, an array of 400 dire wolf skulls.  The sheer number of them is stunning, not to mention scientifically significant:  There are enough of them to do statistical analyses of the animals.

I left the museum while I still had sufficient light to walk around the park and view the fenced-in tar pits.  In one large pond, natural gas still bubbles to the surface while sculpted mammoths struggle in alarm.  Night was falling as I left and the art museum will just have to wait for some other day.  If you have any interest in paleontology at all, a visit to Rancho La Brea should be on your bucket list.

Dinos in Dallas

Fair Park, site of the Texas State Fair, is just a few minutes east of the center of Dallas.  There is a complex of museums on the fairgrounds overlooked by the Cotton Bowl.  When the fair isn’t in progess, an early weekday visitor can stroll quietly and view the sculpture in an artificial lagoon, on which rows of turtles sit placidly sunning themselves.  The Dallas Museum of Nature & Science comprise two buildings on this campus:  The Museum of Nature and the Museum of Science.  I found myself in Dallas with a couple of hours to kill so I drove over for a visit.  A single $10 ticket is good for both museums.  There is also an IMAX theater and a planetarium, which are extra.

The Natural History Museum has a definite Texas flavor, from the statue of Jumbo, a mammoth found in the Dallas area, to the model of Dallasaurus, an early ancestor of the marine reptiles known as mosasaurs.  The astute reader will quickly guess where Dallasaurus was found.  He/she will also note that, despite the title of this entry, neither of these creatures is a dinosaur.  Some of the most interesting fossils there were non-dinosaurs, but I decided that “Assorted Fossils from the Permian to the Pleistocene in Dallas” really stinks as a title so I went for the quick alliteration.  The most impressive non-dinosaur in the hall is Deinosuchus, a 12-meter (40 foot) Cretaceous crocodilian found, among other places, in Texas.  A cast of this monster’s skull is on display; it could and probably did eat dinosaurs for dinner.  

There are dinosaurs on display as well.  The central exhibit is a cast of the Titanosaur Malawisaurus, named for the African country of Malawi where it was found.  Why, I wondered, with this evident Texan theme, is an African dinosaur so prominent?  Answer:  Because it is a close relative of a Texas dinosaur known as Alamosaurus.  There are some actual bones from an Alamosaurus in a nearby display.

On the lower floor, visitors can watch fossil preparators at work in the prep lab.  There are also a few displays of Permian fossils there.  Elsewhere in the museum, there are many dioramas with taxidermed specimens of Texas wildlife.  Since birds are descended from theropod dinosaurs, I can include the Ivory-billed woodpeckers in the dino count, although the jury is still out on whether they are extinct or not.

Over in the Science Museum, there is a somewhat larger theropod on display, one who is very definitely extinct:  Tyrannosaurus rex.  A full-size T. rex stands in the lobby and there is a movie star in the dinosaur exhibit.  This is a 7-foot model, known in the trade as a maquette, that was used in the production of the film Jurassic Park.  It is a faithful representation of the dinosaur, based on the best scientific knowledge available in 1993, when the film was made. 

I might forget the details of the meetings that brought me to Dallas.   But I will remember the Alamosaurus.

The Unexpected Microraptor

Can random acts of kindness really change the world?  It may not sound likely, but something happened recently that makes me wonder.  I’m living a bachelor’s life in Maryland whilst the Missus has started her new job a continent away in California (note to Missus:  not the Hugh Hefner type of bachelor).  I don’t see my friends in Chicago with any regularity, so it was easy to think I’d been forgotten.  But a few weeks ago, I was back in Chicago and a friend presented me with a print she’d seen at an art show and just had to get for me.  It was a drawing of a fossil of Microraptor gui, a feathered dinosaur found at a site near Liaoning, China.  I was touched.  I’ve had it framed.

I have a history with Microraptor gui.  Back in 2007, the Field Museum hosted an exhibit called Dinosaurs:  Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries.  I worked as a docent in this exhibit and my favorite part of it was a diorama re-creating a slice of life in the early Cretaceous, based on a collection of marvelous fossils from Liaoning.  What happened at Liaoning 130 million years ago was extremely fortunate from our point of view, although it was anything but for the creatures who lived there at the time.  A volcano erupted, showering the region with very fine-grained ash.  Plants, ponds, frogs, fish and dinosaurs all were buried in sediment fine enough to preserve soft tissue and even the imprints of feathers.  Today the fossils in the “paper shale” of northeastern China provide a window into that long-vanished ecosystem.  Scientists used them to create a beautiful forest diorama of that lost time with a fully-developed picture of its flora and fauna.  One of the denizens of this ancient forest was Microraptor gui.

Microraptor was a bit of a surprise to paleontologists.  It had feathers, but it was neither a bird nor an ancestor of birds.  It evolved along an entirely parallel track and shows conclusively that birds are not the only creatures ever to have feathers.  To date, about 10 specimens have been recovered from the Liaoning shale, with clear imprints of feathers on both the forelimbs and the hind limbs.  It’s not clear why both sets of limbs had feathers, although they probably served some aerodynamic purpose.  It’s also not clear whether Microraptor could actually fly, but the re-creation in the diorama showed a model of the dinosaur gliding from tree to tree, rather like a modern flying squirrel.  It’s speculative, but probably as good a guess as any.

The path from ancient dinosaurs to modern birds is a complicated one, with unexpected twists along the way.  Evolution is slow and subtle, making one minor adaptation at a time, but eventually getting us from a world with Microraptor gui to one with red-tailed hawks.  So back to my original question:  can small random acts of kindness make a difference in the world?  Well, if small biological changes can fuel the process of evolution, why not?  Do something nice for somebody today.