minor musings on the macrocosm
Oh, hey blog. Not much. Touch-and-go lately. Got the DFA reissues of the first two Pylon albums: Gyrate (plus) and Chomp (more) in the mail this weekend, thanks.
Not that I should really be adding anything to my plate at this point, but I’ve started a gig writing science stories for the online only San Francisco Examiner newspaper, check out the first installment here.
Also, go check out the recently redesigned 3D Museum website.
pax.
Very cool paper out in Science today demonstrating that the Toco Toucan (Ramphastos toco) uses its bill for thermoregulation.
The story seems to be getting some good traction with the popular press, unsprisingly given the winning combination of outside the box thinking, novel application of hi-tech toy tool (an infrared camera) and charismatic megafauna.
Check out LiveScience for an awesome video (or if you are lucky enough to have access to Science you can watch the video–commercial free–in the supplementary info for the new paper).
Adapted from Figure 1 - Tattersall et al. 2009
Note that the new study does not explicitly rule out sexual selection or foraging strategies as important factors in the evolution of the Toucan bill. Multifunction is ubiquitous in nature (something paleontologists who argue that X structure evolved for Y reason would be well-served to remember). Nevertheless the Tatterall et al. paper poses an interesting question as to whether thermoregulation has been an overlooked factor in the evolution of other bird groups. The Hornbills of tropical Asia and Africa–often claimed as ecological analogues of Neotropical Toucans–would be a logical candidate for similar study.
Oh yeah, here’s some hive mind Wikipedia brilliance on Toucan Sam:
Biologically speaking, Toucan Sam appears to be a Keel-billed Toucan parrot. Keel-billed Toucan Parrots are well-known for their colorful beaks and propensity for fruit in their diets, two features which are very consistent with the character.
Really Wikipedia? Toucans are parrots? RU SURE? And anyway I thought he was a Mountain Toucan you know, biologically speaking. He is blue after all.
And before anyone calls me out for complaining about a Wikipedia entry without fixing it, I mean, come on, it’s really too awesome to amend isn’t it?
Last time, we looked at various portraits of a weak-ass minor planet getting effed up by our atmosphere before getting royally bitch slapped by our lithosphere. Anyone with a passing interest in dinosaurs will know that strike of the space-junk, while widely accepted (though see recent meso-profile critiques), is but one of countless etiologies proposed for terminal Cretaceous bummer days.
You might think that protracted catastrophes like pestilence, climate change and famine offer less in the way of dramatic potential than a body of a certain mass rapidly attempting to occupy the same space as a much more massive body. If so, you should probably read more.
At all points the dinosaurs that had trampled the earth till the grasses grew, the most superb of all vertebrates, the creatures that fix the imagination above all others, are seen to fail. The growth forces and the responses to environment were no longer in adjustment. Eggs were few, their loss from attack devastating, life slow. The young were the prey of their own kind, and the race had lived long enough for reptiles lower in life’s scale to threaten. If new enemies were needed they were at the jungle-edge. Geologic change that once would have meant mere fluctuation in habitat affected the declining numbers disastrously, and what such change and the reptiles soon to rule in the forests of the Eocence may have failed to accomplish, senility did. That long dinosaurian day was done. Its sun was sinking beneath the horizon forever. (Wieland 1925).
15 years later Disney took a stab, note that it anticipated Bataan by at least a year. Talk about zeitgeist. While drought and desertification deal the fatal blow (with some help from miring), major geologic upheaval kicks in as an epilogue. We can talk about this and Lyell, and Agassiz some time.
Now, assuming you are are as sick of asteroid porn and dinosaurs as I am you will want to hear about the mass dysphoria induced by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring courtesy of radio lab.
Chris Norris recently deployed the term “asteroid porn” for a certain gratuitous style employed by those writing about meteoric catastrophe:
Here is a brief summary of a typical piece of asteroid porn. Dinosaurs are peacefully grazing (or browsing, or doing whatever) on a warm sunny day (or at sunset, or some other time of peacefullness) when they see a big fireball fall out of the sky. It hits the Earth so hard that larva comes out, like a big bursting geological zit. The larva shoots up hundreds of miles into the air and comes down, setting fire to, like, the whole planet. All the forests are on fire, and all the dinosaurs are on fire as well. Then there’s this big blast wave, and it’s so big it goes round the world, like, 5 times at the speed of Concorde, and when it hits the burning dinosaurs they all get blown into burning pieces…
You’ll want to read the entire post.
Not all porn is so literate though. Books, television, film and, most especially the internet abound with visual artworks that operate in the same vein. One well-worn style adopts a “dinosaur-eye view,” typically peppering the foreground with a tyrannosaur, hadrosaur or ceratopsian or some combination thereof. A few enterprising artists even manage a nod to Charles Knight.
The players in these epic finales span a comical range of emotive reaction to the impact, from “wha?” to “HOLY EFF!” to “screw extinction–I’M GOING TO EAT YOU!!!” A few contemplative dinosaurs, cast in silhouette, even appear rather philosophical about their impending demise.
And of course, it’s a nearly irresistible vehicle for a one-liner:
Large pterosaurs offer a convenient excuse to adopt an aerial perspective that permits a more graphic celebration of “the junk” (the bolide that is). Plus there must be a sense of clever satisfaction tat comes when you work Quetzalcoatlus into a painting of Mesoamerican Armageddon.
Another popular technique takes yet another step back to show what the hypothetical Troodon cosmonauts would have seen.
This view shifts the victim role from the dinosaurs to the planet itself. It also lends a certain historical anonymity to the event–this could be a catastrophe in the distant past, or the not-so-remote future. In fact, some even depict an anachronistic geography that necessarily implies the latter to the careful observer.
It’s tempting to speculate that this orbital perspective might not have occurred to an artist working prior to the advent of satellite photography. A similar argument has been made regarding the link between the Victorian “aquarium craze” and the subsequent proliferation of artworks adopting an underwater perspective (Clary and Wandersee 2005).
With their melodramatic flair, stereotyped compositions and limited pool of motifs, these images might easily be regarded as derivative at best and sure, pornographic at worst. Much like metal album art. However, these depictions will also afford ample fodder for a future, likely poor, overeducated and underemployed, generation of science/art historians interested in the cultural impact of late 20th Century neo-catastrophism. Unless we are all wiped out by an asteroid first.
Coming up: Stravinsky, climate change and the Bataan march
postscripto: Huh, look at that. 300 microecos posts in just over 3 years. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
A note on the images: All are thumbnails gleaned from Google Image searches of “asteroid impact”, “dinosaur extinction” etc. They are reproduced here for the purposes of discussion only. This is a cultural studies blog. Deal.
If 2008 is remembered for anything, surely it will come to be known as the year Triassic broke.
When you were a kid, the Triassic was an impossibly dreary place peppered with some generic economy-model dinosaurs. Oh sure there were also some stupid looking synapids, a bunch of “thecodonts” and “eosuchians” or whatever, a mess of footprints, maybe a mass extinction event or two…but honestly, who gave a Morganucodon’s ass?
I mean, check out the short shrift the Triassic gets in Zallinger’s famous Age of Reptiles mural. “Dude, is that a Plateosaurus? No way…sick!”
click to buy the t-shirt!
While Triassic dinosaur faunae may not be as a charismatic as those of the later Mesozoic, there are still plenty of reasons to be interested in what was going on on our planet between ~250 and ~200 million years ago. Emerging from wake of the largest mass extinction event of all time, perhaps uncoincidentally, the Triassic was a time of dramatic evolutionary change. A great wealth of new clades appeared in the Triassic–including the first “true” mammals, crocodilians, frogs, turtles, squamates, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, sauropterygians, scleractinian corals, modern sharks, coccolithophores, several important insect groups, I could go on and on–this evolutionary overdrive is so pronounced that some even speak of a “Triassic explosion.” The end of the Triassic was marked by another pronounced extinction event, which although pale in comparision to the Permo-Triassic event may have paved the way for the rise of the dinosaurs although others maintain it was the rise of dinosaurs themselves that drove the extinction.
All of which makes this classic Onion article even more hilariously poingnant. In fact, we “secular Triassicists” are witnessing something of a golden era. Nick Fraser’s spectacular Dawn of the Dinosaurs, published in 2006 is a great resource for those interested in delving into the Triassic world, as visualized by the exceptionally talented Douglas Henderson. However the pace of discovery and the renewed scientific interest in the Triassic is so pronounced that a revised edition is already needed.
In the mean time, here is my list of the top 5 Triassic news stories of 2008:
click to buy the t-shirt!
5) The Aeto-Contra scandal – The confusion and controversy surrounding the naming of a new species of the unusual armored hellasaurs known as aetosaurs exploded across the internets in early 2008 and blossomed into a full fledged “-gate” with its own website and everything. While in the end, the “resolution” of the conflict left plenty to be desired, if it’s true that there is no such thing as bad publicity then perhaps the silver-lining to the scandal is a somewhat higher profile for those wacky Aetosaurs.
4) Kryostega the Crocomander and Gerrothorax the, uh, Toiletmander? – While large, freakazoid “amphibians” (i.e. non-amniote tetrapods) were diverse and widespread in the Paleozoic they gradually trickled out during the Mesozoic leaving only the extant lissamphibians. However during the Triassic a number of impressive “amphibians” were still around kicking ass and taking names. The antarctic Kryostega a 4.5 meter aquatic predator was in the news this year, as was the rather smaller Gerrothroax whose unusual head-lifting bite inspired some choice wordsmithing by headline writers across the globe. Don’t miss Matt Celeskey’s awesome interactive Gerrothorax animation at the Hairy Museum of Natural History. (Speaking of Antarctica, the oldest known tetrapod burrows, sweet.)
3) Longisquama Lets its Freak Flags Fly – Even among the surreal host of Triassic creatures, Longisquama stands out as a weirdo. Recent work on the bizarre skin appendages of Longisquama add to our understanding of this strange animal but still leave much room for future discovery…more on this later, maybe.
2) The Triassic (Blog) Explosion – No fewer than three, that’s right three Triassic themed blogs launched this year all of which are required reading for Triassophiles:
Life of the Madygen – triassiccritters.blogspot.com – Written by a paleontologist based in Germany, this blog highlights the important Triassic fossils of Central Asia, including the aforementioned Longisquama. The outcrop photos are geo-porn at its finest.
Chinleana – chinleana.blogspot.com – The Chinle Formation is the most famous and arguably most important source of terrestrial Triassic fossils in North America. Recent discoveries in the Chinle have shed light on the origin of dinosaurs, transformed our understanding of late Triassic stratigraphy and revealed a host of interesting hellasaurs all of which (and more) are fodder for Chinle expert Bill Parker.
Paleoerrata – paleoerrata.blogspot.com – Yet another expert on North American Triassic terrestrial vertebrates, Jeff Martz’s blog thus far has covered not just the evolutionary history of the Triassic but is also a font of wisdom for aspiring young bucks and does, er, un- or underemployed paleontologists.
1) Triassic Turtle Mania – Odontochelys and Chinlechelys: a one-two punch in the ongoing turtle evolution cage-match. Confusingly each fossil is seen as a TKO by the respective rival camps, on the plus side both paint a picture of Triassic turtles as being more morphologically and ecologically diverse than ever imagined. Both fossils sent ripples across the blogosphere as usual, the Hairy Museum of Natural History is an excellent place to start.
Coming in 2009 – The Return of the Enigmatic Hellasaur (including Thalattosaurs…I swear!). See you next year!
Visit the 3D museum. Pan. Rotate. Zoom. Enjoy. If you are interested in donating your own 3D fossil scans to the collection drop me a line.
POSTSCRIPTO- Unintentionally appropos: Daruka, I (2008) A phenomenological model for the collective landing of bird flocks. Proceedings of the Royal Society, B DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.1444.
Abstract: A three-dimensional phenomenological model was developed to describe the collective landing of bird flocks. The employed individual based model included the landscape (as an external field) and a continuous internal variable G, to characterize the landing intent of the birds. The birds’ interaction with the landscape was coupled adaptively to their landing intent. During the flight, a sharp crossover is observed in the dynamics of the landing intent, i.e. from the initial, non-landing state (small G) to the landing state (large G) that was terminated by the landing of the flock. In the model, the landing process appears to be a highly concerted, collective motion of the birds, in agreement with the field observations.
sweet.
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