Paleo digest: slow-breaking news
I'm at the point in tonight's insomnia where I'm unlikely to accomplish any more real work, so I'm going to try something I've been meaning to do: post interesting paleontology tidbits I've picked up in grad school, for you benighted types who don't have access to The Literature.
*Despite the raw awesomeness of the Coelophysis Madonna t-shirt, which features a mother gnawing on her young...
...they probably weren't cannibals after all:
http://www.hmnh.org/archives/2006/09/23/coelophysis-acquitted-of-cannibalism
*The holotype specimen of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus (a huge sail-backed theropod seen in Jurassic Park III) was destroyed in a British bombing raid of Munich in 1944.
Pre-obliteration pictures of the museum-mounted specimens were recently discovered in the archives and published in Journal of Paleontology.
Previously, workers only had drawings to go on, so these photos give further insight into the structure of the teeth and the accuracy of the classic sail-back reconstruction, among other things.
One of the authors, incidentally, was just fired (well, he "resigned") for sexually harassing his grad students.
*A personal favorite: it turns out that the carcasses of duck-billed dinosaurs provided a uniquely perfect environment for fish preservation. They've pulled incredibly well-preserved, virtually fresh-looking sturgeon and paddlefish out of hadrosaur guts. (Wish I had a picture for this one, because they're remarkable.) I don't have the paper in front of me, but the idea, I think, is that the large fish went after smaller fish feeding on bloated hardosaur carcasses, and that the intestinal cavities of said bloated carcasses made for good, netlike death traps.
If this kind of thing interests people, I can keep an eye out for stuff to post in later entries.
*Despite the raw awesomeness of the Coelophysis Madonna t-shirt, which features a mother gnawing on her young...
...they probably weren't cannibals after all:
http://www.hmnh.org/archives/2006/09/23/coelophysis-acquitted-of-cannibalism
*The holotype specimen of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus (a huge sail-backed theropod seen in Jurassic Park III) was destroyed in a British bombing raid of Munich in 1944.
Pre-obliteration pictures of the museum-mounted specimens were recently discovered in the archives and published in Journal of Paleontology.
Previously, workers only had drawings to go on, so these photos give further insight into the structure of the teeth and the accuracy of the classic sail-back reconstruction, among other things.
One of the authors, incidentally, was just fired (well, he "resigned") for sexually harassing his grad students.
*A personal favorite: it turns out that the carcasses of duck-billed dinosaurs provided a uniquely perfect environment for fish preservation. They've pulled incredibly well-preserved, virtually fresh-looking sturgeon and paddlefish out of hadrosaur guts. (Wish I had a picture for this one, because they're remarkable.) I don't have the paper in front of me, but the idea, I think, is that the large fish went after smaller fish feeding on bloated hardosaur carcasses, and that the intestinal cavities of said bloated carcasses made for good, netlike death traps.
If this kind of thing interests people, I can keep an eye out for stuff to post in later entries.