minor musings on the macrocosm
LOL! j/k but, seriously what the eff was Raeticodactylus chomping with those whackjob quinticuspid teeth? Um, doy! Baby placodonts!
Sorry.
POSTSCRIPTO!
Turns out the feet may have been involved too, we await further details….
In the incursive preamble we spiroambulated about the corpses of mummified dinosaurs, pickled pelicans, time and a piss-covered pseudo-esker of rock, rock salt and dust. So, what does all of this have to do with experimental taphonomy?
Those ready for their biweekly dose of permineralization action: Boneyard ver. 3 is up at Laelaps. Conspicuously absent from the record are Brian’s own slough of recent paleopostage, so here’s a stratigraphic sample:
Things you don’t want to meet down in the sewer.
Psittacosaurus goes to the hairdresser and comes back with extensions.
and,
You can’t write yourself out of prehistory Brian. The boneyard heads over to When Pigs Fly Returns in two weeks. See you there.
waiting for a tornado?
The Boneyard numero dos is up at Laelaps. Highlights: Chuck D. muses on some ‘diluvial’ mastodons in South America; Dr. Vector’s new game of one-up-manship; baby titanosaurs, crunchy on the outside chewy in the middle; Basilosaurus, quite dignified even without the extra bones or a top-hat; and Zach ponders Deinonychus timber wolf or komodo dragon?
And even though I forgot to submit, Brian managed to squeeze in my brief post on skimming pterosaurs. Good chap! I’m gonna write something great for #3, just gotta figure out what….
Enough babbling, go read it!
So goes the theory of pterosaurian mega-skimmers according to a new PLOS paper by Humphries et al. The researchers, including Flickr pterosaur maven Mark Witton, employed the bane of all arm-waving theories, math, to model the energy costs of a large flying pterosaur dipping it’s jaws into the surf to scoop up fish. At least one group of extant birds, the aptly named Skimmers, engages in this behavior. Perceived skeletal similarities (mostly a long, tapered ‘bill’) had led some to infer this style of feeding in pterosaurs.
The authors conclude that the drag incurred by such a behavior would have rendered it a near-impossibility, at least among the large pterosaurs that have been most commonly depicted skimming. The researchers also compared the skulls of pterosaurs with living Skimmers and found the former lacking many of the morphological specializations that would be expected in organisms adapted to skimming.
Once again, PLoS = totally awesome (see, I can use math too!) Much more at Laelaps, if we’re lucky, Darren might weigh in too. Above image questionably sourced from this questionable source.
POSTSCRIPT:
Mark Witton’s awesome illustration and a personal account is here. A summary by Liza Gross, PLoS is here.
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