It’s Not Easy Being a Urodele…

Sure, it may be the Year of the Frog, but what is this dude, chopped limb? No. He’s a Southern Two-Lined Salamander, Eurceya cirrigera, that I found beneath the leaf litter in the woods behind Jessica’s old (okay, not that old) Kentucky Home. He showed up on New Years Eve as if to remind us that if 2008 is a year to celebrate hopping croakers, 2007 was a great year for writhing squirmers:

All 3 Taricha torosa pics = J. Lo.

That last nerdy pic seems an appropriate segue to a Schrutian diatribe:

THESIS: The various magical powers attributed to salamanders by classical and medieval authorities [Paracelsus, I'm looking at you] can barely hold a candle to the actual feats of urodeles and their skin-snacking cousins the caecilians.

FACT: Urodeles can regrow entire limbs (snap!)

FACT: Dudeski once ate a Taricha newt (in my hand above) on a dare and DIED.

FACT: All salamanders respire across their skin and some (like the Eurycea in the first picture) have lost their lungs entirely.

FACT: Woah.

NOT-FACT: Salamanders spring-forth fully formed from stones cast into a fire.

Solstice is Over Man!

So, I won’t waste my time wishing y’all a happy holiday. I converted to animism on I-5 just south of Lodi, beneath a wheeling gyre of White Pelicans. Mahayana blows
dude. Sorry.

Those pelicans then shall be our collective mascot this holy season, their holding pattern a gleaming metaphor for our soul. Which is to say, don’t be surprised if things are pretty quiet around here for the rest of the week.

In the mean time:

- Jennifer Rae Atkins pulled of the astonishing feat of drawing twenty-four mammals in twenty-four hours and in the process raised $800 for Defenders of Wildlife. With the help of several gallons of vanilla DP, she even managed to slam my “diabolical” curve-ball request out of the park. Go check out her awesome work!

- Entomologist, photographer and one-time Davisite, Alex Wild has launched an awesome ant-blog Myrmecos. Wild’s photography is truly amazing and has often made me want to chuck my camera off a cliff. Fortunately, since the camera doesn’t belong to me, there aren’t many cliffs in Davis. His blog may well drive me to lob my laptop into the Interstate though.

- Mechanical insect art by Mike Libby! Crazy…

- Tai’s tales of auspicious animal encounters reveals the patent grayness of my animistic sphere. But I saw an octopus! and cranes! and like, multiple scorpions some of which I held so cut me some slack.

- I was desperately hoping to take up the Schmitz et al. paper in the inaugural issue of Nature Geoscience and the broader issue of the Ordovician radiation and the growing impulse to invoke bolides as a causal agent for all dramatic biotic events… But, well we’re gonna have to wait for that.

So, here’s your homework - “What are the benefits and dangers of applying neoecology notions like disturbance ecology or island biogeography to evolutionary or extinction events in the fossil record?” Write a three to five page review of the issue including at least six primary references and one figure, due January 15th 2008.

okay, we’ll leave it at that, if I haven’t had cause or opportunity to apologize to you in person this year, I’m sorry.  There’s always next year!

Er…How about Mink-tailed Muntjac with Marfan’s?

Okay, I’m going on record in defense of our favorite AP word-smith, science writer Seth Borenstein.

In a nice blogpost on Indohyus, [the sexiest new raoellid on the block] Brian takes Borenstein to task for some awkward animalian analogizing:

writer Seth Borenstein can’t seem to figure out just what Indohyus is. His confusion is apparent from the first line of the article;

It sounds like a stretch, but a new study suggests that the missing evolutionary link between whales and land animals is an odd raccoon-sized animal that looks like a long-tailed deer without antlers. Or an overgrown long-legged rat.

Borenstein scrabbles¹ to lump Indohyus in with some modern animals in a feeble attempt to get people to understand the fossil find, but I can’t help but wonder if such a comparison does more harm than good.

As I noted in a comment on Brian’s blog however, Borenstein cribbed his ungainly comparison from the lead author on the Indohyus paper Hans Thewissen, at least in part:

“The earliest whales didn’t look like whales at all,” Thewissen said. “It looked like a cross between a pig and a dog.” They lost their legs and ability to walk on land about 40 million years ago, he said.

And the Indohyus? “A tiny little deer maybe the size of a raccoon and no antlers,” Thewissen said. He said it most resembles the current African mousedeer, which has a rat-like nose and “when danger approaches, it jumps in the water and hides.”

Sure, maybe it’s a misleading oversimplification to cast the cetacean ancestry debate as a war between the “racoon-deer campus” and the “hippo campus².” Sure, trying to shoehorn every strange animal into this or that familiar category or combo of categories is a dubious (though longstanding and universal) habit. But, as long as we’re not ‘calling whale evolution into question’ hey, I’m pretty happy.

Sometimes, words just fail. Good thing we have Carl Buell. Check out Buell’s awesome reconstruction on Laelaps.

¹ - Note the awesome verbing of the word “scrabble”.
² - sorry.

Wave Bye-Bye to the Polymath…

Well, calling Charles Willson Peale a polymath may be rather generous. Then again, if I had run a failed saddle shop, painted some bossy white dudes, and created the first American Natural History Museum, I think I’d probably feel pretty worthy of the title. Anyway, when was the last time you went to a glass harmonica concert or whatever? [well, knowing microecos readers, it was probably last weekend]

At any rate, before we tossed his geriatric remains from the bell jar, I figured it was worth giving the bloke a proper post. Exhumation of the Mastadon [sic] (1806) (pictured above) remains probably the best American painting to date, though some of Richard Estes’ stuff comes close. That is, of course, ol’ Pealey himself in the jacket and slacks. Much, much more Peale info here.

microecos is a rotting peaty wreck.

Surf…and…Tuuuuurf!

She’s a love mummy.

Okay, okay. So we all know that it’s a “seclusion” of embiopterans, a bazaar of guillemonts, a blessing of unicorns etc. But what do you call a group of mummies? Why, a malodor of course! Or, wait maybe that’s skunks (six cents to the first person who can come up with the collective noun for skunks without using Google).
Well, whatever it is we need it what with the announcement of yet another dinosaur mummy. Of course, the use of the term “mummy” to describe these exquisitely well-preserved dinosaurs is something of a misnomer since the mode of preservation here has nothing to do with Egyptian mortuary practices. I only wonder why they didn’t rush the press release out in late October (hint hint to anyone sitting on an unpublished volant cervid).

Given the choice, I’d be rather more excited about a “mummified” crurotarsan, or pterosaur, or amphisbaenid, or oligochaete or, well just about anything besides another hadrosaur but hey, nobody asked me. And, it’s a great excuse to re-run my “Wide-open blood-spattered Trachodon” shown above. I did that with a computer.

If you mistakenly arrived here looking for an intelligent discussion of a breaking paleontological discovery, please accept my apologies. And may I direct you to When Pigs Fly Returns or Pondering Pikaia?

That is all.

Tempo and Mode

Mic check.

I’ll let this crazy picture I snapped at the Elfin Forest last summer stand as a visual metaphor viz-a the sweeping cryogenic field that has enveloped these parts of late. Wait, I guess that’s a mixed-media metaphor?

I’m sorry my writing is so belaboured. And also mawkish. What’re you gonna do?
This lizard escaped by the way.

Next up: MORE VAMPING!

[then a wholesale deconstruction/reanimation of microecos right before your very eyes, sure to be ghoulish experience for all]

Pod People

Mmm…ice cream cake…

Dinosaurs are totally absurd. Sauropods in particular. And it just gets worse.

Yesterday was a 1-2 punch of overwrought sauropodian redonkulusness:

First, the unveiling of Xenoposeidon, which co-describer Darren Naish modestly dubs, “the world’s most amazing sauropod.” The little white blip in the figure below is the type material: one lone, scrappy chunk-o-vertebrae that had been collecting dust on a shelf for over a century. Despite the fact that the skeleton is rather, ahem, incomplete this fossil has the potential to be extraordinarily important based on its location, age and apparent taxonomic independence. The new dino has become something of an internet event so if your curious to know more check out the Naish link above, Matt’s hilarious writeup (I’ll bet you didn’t know “poseidon” means “based on very few vertebrae”), lead author Mike Taylor’s entire website devoted to the critter (which has a .pdf copy of the original paper), and of course Sauropod Vertebrae Picture of the Week which will soon be changing it’s name to Xenoposeidon clearing house.

As if all that wasn’t enough to get your head spinning faster than Linda Blair at an Aleister Crowley book-signing, yesterdy ALSO saw the formal description of the more prosaically named, but not less nonsensicalNigersaurus. The paper, authored by my good buddy Paul Sereno and co, appeared on the supremely kickass open access journal PLOSOne.

Figure 1 from Sereno et al. 2007

Aside from the general wackiness in the jaws, the are some other strange things about this critter. The skull is exceptionally lightly built, the paper describes it as “semi-translucent”, it must have been a bitch to prepare. The skull holds more than 500 teeth, when you include the replacement teeth buried in the skull, and the authors estimate a tooth replacement interval of approximately one month (i.e. teeth lasted about a month before they were shed and replaced)! The skull structure suggests a downward orientation of the skull (as shown in the bottom of figure 1), which is consistent with apparent ‘grazing’ form of the jaw. The wear patterns on the teeth also make some interesting indications about how the jaw processed food.

Someone likened the mouth to a vacuum cleaner, and now the popular press is accusing Nigersaurus of being a suction feeder which is certainly not the case. I think a better functional analogy would be a pooper-scooper:

But then I suppose we’d be learning that Nigersaurus was a coprophage…

Like Xenoposeidon, Nigersaurus is stomping all over the interwebs: Brian penned a nice piece yesterday about how the new beastie fits into our changing views of sauropods in general, Anne-Marie has her take over at Pondering Pikaia, and Project Exploration has a whole pageful of amazing photos of Nigersaurus.

And if all this doesn’t make you want to go bang your head against a wall, thenI don’t know what will.