Nice Baculum! (and other thoughts on Puijila)

Too much?  Sorry it’s really hot and my brain is addled–and uh, I mean, I was just following orders.  Also, I’ve already beaten the “sexy little otter” joke to death right?

Anyway, far be it from me to try and tell you something about Puijila darwini the putative transitional seal taking his star turn in this weeks Nature (Rybczynski, Dawson and Tedford 2009).  Brohan’s already got his own pimped out, interactive, 3D, trilingual website.  I imagine the Twitter feed is in the works.

Um so rather than plagiarize the press-release here are some random, certainly minor, musings as I sit in 100 F Davis, CA and ponder freshwater proto-seals frolicking in a balmy Arctic lake one million score years ago today…

Melting Poles and the coming Paleontological Bonanza?

H.P. Lovecraft’s 1931 novella At The Mountains of Madness begins as a paleontological expedition to Antarctica and gradually (predictably) in an orgy of hallucinatory amoral undead tentacular horror and carnage.  Two decades before, R. F. Scott’s infamously ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition succumbed to exposure and starvation rather than murderous ambulatory crinoids.  However, as in the Lovecraft story, Scott’s mission was, in part to collect fossils from Antarctica in order to better understand the geological and biological history of the now-frozen continent.  Some of these were recovered along with the remains of the crew:  Scott had refused to abandon the collections, and the crew was dragging 35 lbs of Permo-Triassic plant fossils around with them until the bitter end. Around the same time, Carl Wiman and Eric Stensiö, among others were making important fossil discoveries at the opposite end of the globe on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen.

The pace of important fossil discoveries at high latitudes (including Antarctica and Spitsbergen as well as Greenland, Nunavut, and Siberia) has seemed to quicken–Tiktaalik and Kryostega providing just two recent, high-profile examples.

So far this has probably been driven by technological advances that make it easier to get to these remote locations and work under polar conditions.  However, given recent climatic projections it’s interesting to wonder how a reduction in ice at the poles might affect polar paleontology.  Not only might the recession of glaciers expose fossil bearing strata, but reduction of ice on land and sea might permit easier access to known localities.

I certainly don’t mean this as some kind of apologia for anthropogenic warming of the planet–obviously any paleontological rewards will likely come at deep expense to the living ecosystems in these regions.  And rising global sea-levels might destroy important existing coastal fossil localities.  Even under the most optimistic scenarios however, we will almost certainly sea a waning of ice at least in the Arctic.  Indeed, despite of truth-bending denials by folks like George Will it’s already happening. It will be interesting, in a sick, doom-filled, quasi-Lovecraftian way to watch how a changing climate might reveal new secrets of our past…even if we don’t turn up evidence of a lost race of sentient malicious Paleozoic invertebrates.

Damn! I knew I should have taken Inuktikut instead of Latin

For a while now, I have been interested in the introgression of nonIndo-European languages into taxonomic nomenclature, especially those that derive from “indigenous” cultures (whatever that means…)  Like Tiktaalik, “Puijila” is of Inuktikut origin, in this case referring to a small seal.  Tiktaalik means “burbot”, a type of fish.  I am, for the record, wholly in favor of this practice but if I was writing a paper about this in college I would probably raise the question of whether this amounted to some form of “cultural appropriation.” Incidentally, I like the fact that Puijila has some vague phonic resonance with  the names of extant northern hemisphere seals (or phocine phocid phocoids for those of you keeping score at home) Phoca, Pusa, Pagophilus, Histriophoca.  Whatever.

Research Publication Figure of the Week (1 week late)

Figure 3. from Hagadorn and Seilacher 2009

What an interrogative week, huh?  National Geographic mused, koanically, “First Tool Users Were Sea Scorpions?” Discover’s online news mashup engine 80 Beats pondered, prosaically, “Did ‘Hermit’ Sea Creature Hide Under Borrowed Shells in First Forays Onto Land?“  Neither of which really even approach the telegraphic glory of Hagadorn and Seilacher’s rhetorical paper title “Hermit Arthropods 500 million years ago?” which appears in this month’s issue of Geology.

All of which would seem to beg the same answer, because the only thing more badass than a sea scorpion is a sea scorpion with a van!

Ref.
Hagadorn, JW and A Seilacher 2009. “Hermit arthropods 500 millon years ago?” Geology 37(4):295-298

Fun with Fake Tilt-Shift

Tilt-shift is a relatively sophisticated photography technique that allows photographers to play with perspective creating dizzying, fantastic images that confound our expectations about scale.

Tilt-shift maker is a fun, and easy to use website that allows you to simulate the effect (albeit imperfectly) on your own photos or things you find on the web.  I knew there was a reason I was taking so many photos of rooftops while I was in China… (click for larger versions)

Third Eye Vision

Many have pondered the reception of the steady stream of e-m message bottles we’ve been casting into the cosmic lagoon for a century or so.  What are the aliens making of The Honeymooners, The Brady Bunch, the numbers stations, That 70s Show?  Are they amused? perplexed? outraged?

The best, I suppose that we can hope for is that they might find some sense of aesthetic beauty in the radiation pouring off our planet–as we get from the flash of a lampyrid; a solar glint off the gorget of hummingbird or the belly of lizard.  Beautiful and stripped of meaning.

The worst is that they might eventually swing by and try to clean up the stain.

All of which is a silly way to try to direct you to one of the best blog posts that I have read in ages.

Time’s Spiral in Arrow Canyon

On an autumn afternoon, Earl Wadsworth climbed up to the top of a ledge in a remote slot canyon in Nevada.  With a knife or a nail or some other tool Earl scratched a large cursive “E” into the limestone wall.  After some consideration the graffiti-artist gave up on the formal script and printed his full name across the rock.

Just below he added the date: “November, 14th 1920.”

Eighty-six years later, to the day, I found myself on the same ledge admiring Wadsworth’s handiwork. 

Enigmatic Triassic Hellasaur Thursday — The mostest unkindestest cut

Venom–toxic fluid injected to subdue prey or deter potential predators–is widespread in the animal kingdom, from jellyfish to scorpions to platypodes. A case could even be made that stinging nettle is an example of a venomous plant, since it injects its toxin into victims. However, most toxic plants, as well as toxic animals and fungi that rely on passive delivery of toxins (e.g. newts) are considered poisonous but not venomous.

Snakes are one of the most familiar groups of venomous animal although a majority of snakes lack venom. Most people are also aware of the venomous beaded lizards (or, “gila monsters”) in the genus Heloderma. Far less well known is that varanid monitor lizards and bearded dragon, Pogona, popular in the pet trade, also possess a mild venom. We’re talking real venom here, not the bacterial brew that produces the much discussed septic bite of some varanid lizards. In fact, the discovery that venom occurs in reptiles aside from snakes and Heloderma was made only a few years ago and has forced us to rethink the evolutionary origins of venom among squamates (Fry et al. 2006).

So, what does any of this have to do with enigmatic Triassic hellasaurs?

Enigmatic Triassic Hellasaur Thursday…who’s counting anway? — The Duck-billed Ichthyopus

When George Shaw received the first platypus skin to make it to England in 1789, he took a pair of scissors to it to look for stitches, or so the story goes. “It is impossible not to entertain some doubts as to the genuine nature of the animal,” wrote Shaw. Surgeon, and racist, Henry Knox argued that the Asian itinerary by which the specimen had traveled was, “sufficient to rouse the suspicions of the scientific naturalist, aware of the monstrous impostures which the artful Chinese had so frequently practiced on European adventurers.” Of course, the reality of this chimerical creature has long since been recognized, and, as of this week, we have the unique genome to prove it.

More recently the “Archaeoraptor” scandal raised echoes of Knox’s Sinophobia, and this weeks’ hellasaur is certainly enough to raise eyebrows. Hupehsuchus nanchangensis, has that “designed by committee” look, with the limbs of a basal ichthyosaur, the dorsal armor of a placodont and the bill of a…well, duck. But the fossils indeed check-out: this is no “monstrous imposture”, just one freaky-ass (or if you rather, enigmatic-ass) hellasaur.

Hupehsuchus nanchangensis by Zach Miller

And the more you look, the weirder it gets…more tomorrow!