Species Status for the Extinct Moa Euryapteryx

Complex Species Status for Extinct Moa (Aves: Dinornithiformes) from the Genus Euryapteryx. Huynen, L. and D.M. Lambert. PLoS ONE 9(3): e90212.

DNA barcoding shows that two species were likely to have existed in the genus Euryapteryx, with the possibility of some subspecies.

"Our results do provide a clearer picture of the species status of Euryapteryx, however, and support the suggestion that two species of Euryapteryx may have existed during the Holocene as well as a subspecies (possibly attributable to E. curtus curtus) that is found solely on New Zealand's North Island." (Dr. David Lambert)

Released This Day (1959): The Giant Behemoth

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Behemoth, the Sea Monster (1959) is an American-British science-fiction film co-production, which is an unacknowledged remake of Ray Harryhausen's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), also co-scripted and directed by Eugène Lourié. Released in the United States as The Giant Behemoth, the film starred Gene Evans and André Morell. From wiki

Born This Day: Willis O'Brien

A tip of the fedora to the late, great Willis O'Brien who breathed life into the fur and armature that become King Kong, the 8th Wonder of the World!

His biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:

Willis O'Brien (March 2, 1886 - November 8, 1962)

Special effects wizard best known to the world as the man who
created King Kong. O'Brien was a sculptor and cartoonist for the San Francisco "Daily News" before he first dabbled in the medium of film during the 'teens. His work caught the attention of the Edison company, for whom he produced several short subjects with a prehistoric them. Titles include The Dinosaur and the Missing Link, RFD 10,000 B.C and Prehistoric Poultry. His method of animating small rubber figures, carefully molded over metal skeletons with movable joints, by moving them a fraction of an inch for each frame of film exposed, became the standard process of live-action animation.

In 1918 he made his most ambitious film yet, The Ghost of Slumber Mountain paving the way for The Lost World (1925), a major Hollywood feature which told of a search for prehistoric creatures. O'Brien's dinosaurs were his most realistic yet, and still impress today, even in the wake of Jurassic Park Still, Obie (as he was known) kept experimenting.

When producer Merian C. Cooper saw his work, he hired O'Brien to animate King Kong (which, up to that point, was to have been shot with an actor in a gorilla suit). The extraordinary success of King Kong (1933) spawned an immediate sequel, The Son of Kong (also 1933), and made O'Brien a hero to several generations of fantasy filmmakers to come. O'Brien won his only Oscar for his effects in Mighty Joe Young (1949), another giant-monkey movie, on which his protégé (and successor) Ray Harryhausen worked.

O'Brien worked on other giant-monster movies (including 1957's The Black Scorpion his last) before dying in 1962. Today, O'Brien would be kingpin of his own studio, but even in the wake of King Kong he had trouble launching other film projects, and many promising ideas languished on studio drawing boards for decades to follow. One of the RKO staff with whom he'd worked in the 1930s, Linwood Dunn, gave O'Brien his final employment, doing stop-motion figures for It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963).

In 1950 O'Brien received (finally!) a special Oscar for his work on Mighty Joe Young which was the first such award ever given for special effects. This film also launched the career of the next great stop-motion animator, Ray Harryhausen.

Died This Day: Sir Charles Lyell

Nov. 14, 1797 - Feb. 22, 1875

From Minnesota State University at Mankato comes this excellent bio on Lyell:

Sir Charles Lyell attended Oxford University at age 19. Lyell's father was an active naturalist. Lyell had access to an elaborate library including subjects such as Geology.

When Lyell was at Oxford, his interests were mathematics, classics, law and geology. He attended a lecture by William Buckland that triggered his enthusiasm for geology. Lyell originally started his career as a lawyer, but later turned to geology. He became an author of The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man in 1863 and Principles of Geology. Lyell argued in this book that, at the time, presently observable geological processes were adequate to explain geological history. He thought the action of the rain, sea, volcanoes and earthquakes explained the geological history of more ancient times.

Lyell rebelled against the prevailing theories of geology of the time. He thought the theories were biased, based on the interpretation of Genesis. He thought it would be more practical to exclude sudden geological catastrophes to vouch for fossil remains of extinct species and believed it was necessary to create a vast time scale for Earth's history. This concept was called Uniformitarianism. The second edition of Principles of Geology introduced new ideas regarding metamorphic rocks. It described rock changes due to high temperature in sedimentary rocks adjacent to igneous rocks. His third volume dealt with paleontology and stratigraphy. Lyell stressed that the antiquity of human species was far beyond the accepted theories of that time.

Charles Darwin became his dear friend and correspondent. Darwin is quoted saying, "The greatest merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one's mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it through his eyes."

Image from King’s College London.

Henry Boltinoff Cartoon

By Henry Boltinoff

This Day in History: Darwin Observes Rapid Geological Change

In 1835, Charles Darwin, on his H.M.S. Beagle voyage reached Chile, and experienced a very strong earthquake and shortly afterward saw evidence of several feet of uplift in the region. He repeated measurement a few days later, and found the land had risen several feet. He had proved that geological changes occur even in our own time.

Concepción, Chile, after the 1835 quake

Lyell's principles were based on the concept of a steady-state, nondirectional earth whereby uplift, subsidence, erosion, and deposition were all balanced. Thereby, Darwin coupled in his mind this dramatic evidence of elevation with accompanying subsidence and deposition. Thus he hypothesized that coral reefs of the Pacific developed on the margins of subsiding land masses, in the three stages of fringing reef, barrier reef, and atoll. From Today In Science History

Read John van Wyhe on Darwin and the Earthquake

Born This Day: Raymond Cecil Moore

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Moore (Feb. 20, 1892 - April 16, 1974) was an American paleontologist known for his work on Paleozoic crinoids, bryozoans, and corals. Moore was the founder and editor of the landmark multi-volume Treatise of Invertebrate Paleontology.

Born This Day: William Diller Matthew

Matthew (Feb. 19, 1871 – Sept. 24, 1930) was a superb mammalian paleontologist and important biogeographic theorist, and also G. G. Simpson's primary mentor. He published voluminiously on the fossil record of mammals and advocated a fully modern approach to taxonomy that emphasized tying scientific names to natural biological populations. His 1930 paper gives a clear statement of this position.

Matthew's key biogeographic theory was that waves of faunal migration repeatedly went from the northern continents southwards. This theory, which had obvious racial and political overtones, was justified by a "stabilist" view of paleogeography (i.e., that the continents had never moved from their modern positions), and by evidence from the relatively young fossil record of mammals, at the expense of other data that would have shown the more ancient interconnections among South America, Africa, India, and Australia. Remarkably, Matthew remained a Darwinian despite working for the autocratic orthogeneticist H. F. Osborn for three decades.

Info from HERE. Image from HERE.

Born This Day: Sven Anders Hedin

Hedin (Feb. 19,1865 - Nov. 26, 1952) was a Swedish explorer and geographer, born in Stockholm, who led four multi-year expeditions into Central Asia between 1897 and 1935. Although not as well known as Roy Chapman Andrews his work in the regions revealed a wealth of cultural, archaeological and palaeontological wonders.

During his first major Asian expedition, he crossed the Pamirs, charted Lop Nor (Lake) in China, and finally arrived at Beijing. He then journeyed to Tibet by way of Mongolia, Siberia, and the Gobi Desert. Hedin explored Tibet and Xinjiang (Sinkiang), identified the sources of the Brahmaputra, Indus, and Sutlej rivers, and, in 1906, explored and named the Trans-Himalayas. In 1927 Hedin led an expedition of Chinese and Swedish scientists into Central Asia.

He wrote extensively about his adventures (e.g., Across the Gobi Desert, The Conquest of Tibet (1935), My Life as an Explorer (1926)) and they make for engaging and fascinating reading for anyone interested in the early days of exploring Central Asia. link

An excellent summary of Hedin’s life and expeditions into Central Asia can be found at the IDP News Archives image

Born This Day: Sir Roderick Impey Murchison

Murchison (Feb. 19, 1792 - Oct. 22, 1871) was a Scottish geologist who first differentiated the Silurian strata in the geologic sequence of Early Paleozoic strata (408-540 million years old). He believed in fossils as primary criteria. In 1831, he began researching the previously geologically unknown graywacke rocks of the Lower Paleozoic, found underlying the Old Red Sandstone in parts of Wales, which culminated in his major work the Silurian System (1839).

An eurypterid, a prehistoric sea scorpion from PBS.org.

Murchison named the Silurian after an ancient British tribe that inhabited South Wales. He established the Devonian working with Adam Sedgwick (1839). He named the Permian (1841) after the Perm province in Russia where he made a geological survey in 1840-45. link

Form, Function, & Evolution of Living Organisms

Form, function, and evolution of living organisms. 2014. J. R. Banavar, et al. PNAS

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New research suggests that the shapes of both plants and animals evolved in response to the same mathematical and physical principles.

Kleiber’s Law (metabolism = mass^3/4), one of the few widely held tenets in biology, shows that as living things get larger, their metabolisms and their life spans increase at predictable rates. Named after the Swiss biologist Max Kleiber who formulated it in the 1930s, the law fits observations on everything from animals' energy intake to the number of young they bear. It's used to calculate the correct human dosage of a medicine tested on mice, among many other things.

The researchers propose that the shapes of both plants and animals evolved in response to the same mathematical and physical principles. By working through the logic underlying Kleiber's mathematical formula, and applying it separately to the geometry of plants and animals, the team was able to explain decades worth of real-world observations.

Born This Day: Aleksandr Oparin, Originator of Primordial Soup

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Oparin (Feb 18, 1894 - April 21, 1980) was a Russian biochemist who suggested (1938) that life on Earth developed through gradual chemical evolution of carbon-based molecules in a “primordial soup”, at just about the same time as the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane was independently proposing a similar theory.

As early as 1922, at a meeting of the Russian Botanical Society, he had first introduced his concept of a primordial organism arising in a brew of already-formed organic compounds.

More info at Physics of the Universe
Download his book "The Origin of Life on The Earth" from Archive.org

Alley Oop Dino-Battle!

A 1937 Sunday page from the classic Alley Oop comic strip by V. T. Hamlin.

The Oxygen Requirements of the Earliest Animals

The oxygen requirements of the earliest animals. D. B. Mills, et al. 2014.PNAS, Feb. 17, 2014.

New studies of a small sea sponge fished out of a Danish fjord shows that complex life does not need high levels of oxygen in order to live and grow.

Complex life evolved is believed to have evolved after the atmospheric levels of oxygen began to rise app. 630 – 635 million years ago. Halichondria panicea closely resembles the first animals on Earth & shows that animals can live and grow even when the atmosphere contains only 0.5 per cent of the oxygen levels in today's atmosphere.

The big question now is: If low oxygen levels did not prevent animals from evolving – then what did? Why did life consist of only primitive single-celled bacteria and amoebae for billions of years before everything suddenly exploded and complex life arose?

Born This Day: Horace de Suassure

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de Saussure (Feb. 17, 1740 - Jan. 22, 1799) was a Swiss physicist and geologist who introduced the term geology into the scientific literature in the first volume of Voyages dans les Alpes (1779-96). Link

Died This Day (1967): Antonio Moreno, The Man Who Discovered The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

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Antonio Moreno played Carl Maia, the scientist who discovered the fossil evidence for The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Moreno had a long career in Hollywood with a notable run playing Latin lover in the silent film era.

Happy 100th Birthday to Gertie the Dinosaur!

One hundred years ago today, Winsor McCay's animated film, Gertie the Dinosaur, premiered. Gertie is considered by many as the first true animated character to be featured in a film.

For this cartoon, McCay (Sept. 26, 1987 – July 26, 1934) hand drew each frame of film. He took it on the vaudeville circuit and delighted audiences by being able to ‘interact’ with Gertie. In addition to Gertie, he is best known for his ground-breaking newspaper comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland that ran from 1905 to 1914.

Born This Day: Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, Early Evolutionary Theorist

Treviranus (Feb. 4, 1776 - Feb. 16, 1837) was a German naturalist who

made histological and anatomical studies on invertebrates. Preceding Darwin, he believed in the “descent by modification,” of species.

He produced six volumes of his Biologie; oder die Philosophie der lebenden Natur between 1802 and 1822. Therein, he held that simple forms (Protists), which he termed zoophytes, were “the primitive types from which all the organisms of the higher classes had arisen by gradual development.” He was among the first to regard the cell as the structural unit of life forms. link image

Born This Day: Raymond Dart

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Dart (Feb. 4 1893 - Nov. 22, 1988) was an Australian-born, South African physical anthropologist. In 1924, working with students in the Taung limestone South Africa, they discovered the first Australopithecus africanus. Dubbed "missing link" at the time, skull is also known as the 'Taung child', and was only three years old at the time of death. More on Dart here

Born This Day: Gideon Mantell

Mantell (Feb. 3, 1790 – Nov. 10, 1852), a physician of Lewes in Sussex in southern England, had for years been collecting fossils in the sandstone of Tilgate forest, and he had discovered bones belonging to three extinct species: a giant crocodile, a plesiosaur, and Buckland's Megalosaurus. But in 1822 he found several teeth that "possessed characters so remarkable" that they had to have come from a fourth and distinct species of Saurian. After consulting numerous experts, Mantell finally recognized that the teeth bore an uncanny resemblance to the teeth of the living iguana, except that they were twenty times larger.
In this paper, the second published description of a dinosaur, he concluded that he had found the teeth of a giant lizard, which he named Iguanodon, or "Iguana-tooth."

Mantell illustrated his announcement with a single lithographed plate. Mantell included at the bottom of the plate a drawing of a recent iguana jaw, which is shown four times natural size, and for further comparison, he added views of the inner and outer surface of a single iguana tooth, "greatly magnified."

The traditional story that Mantell's wife found the first teeth in 1822, while the doctor was visiting a patient, appears, alas, to be unfounded.

Info and plate from HERE.

Died This Day: Ernst Mayr

Any student of biology, or anyone with an interest in the natural world, will be familiar with Ernst Mayr who passed away on February 3rd, 2005 in Bedford, Mass. Born in Kempton, Germany he joined the American Museum of Natural History as a curator in 1931. In 1953 he left the museum to work at Harvard University where he stayed until his retirement in 1975.

While working on the problem of speciation in the birds of New Guinea, Mayr realized that the multitude of species and and subspecies that he saw could best be explained as being a snapshot of evolution in action. He suggested that new species could arise when the range of one species was fractured long enough for members in different parts of the range to evolve characters that would not allow individuals to reproduce when they were brought back together again. This lead to him developing the “biological species concept” in which species are defined as populations of interbreeding organisms rather than just a collection of characters. This idea, along with his theory of “allopatric speciation” was published in his book “Systematics and the Origin of the Species” (1942) and later contributed to the “Punctuated Equilibrium” theory of Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould.

Ernst Mayr was himself inspired by the work of geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and his book “Genetics and the Origin of the Species” (1937). These two men, together with the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, combined the sciences of genetics, zoology and paleontology into what is now known as “the new synthesis” that provides the modern experimental underpinning to the concepts that Charles Darwin presented in his book, “On the Origin of the Species” .

For anyone interested in learning more about modern evolutionary theory I’d recommend Mayr’s recent book “What Evolution Is” (2002). It’s written in an engaging and readable format from the perspective of someone who’s thought about evolution all his life.

Tarzan vs. T. rex

The above image was painted by Morris "Mo" Gollub who also did the best of the Turok, Son of Stone covers.

Read more about Morris at Pete Von Sholly's website, VonShollyWood

Australornis lovei, new Paleocene bird from New Zealand

First diagnosable non-sphenisciform bird from the early Paleocene of New Zealand. Mayr, RP Scofield, J. Royal Society of New Zealand

Abstract: A new avian taxon from the early Paleocene Waipara Greensand in Canterbury, New Zealand, is described. The holotype of Australornis lovei, gen. et sp. nov. includes wing and pectoral girdle bones, which exhibit distinctive morphologies. Notable features are a very long crista deltopectoralis, a craniocaudally flattened shaft, and a large tuberculum dorsale of the humerus, as well as a ridge-like caudal surface of the proximal ulna.

Although a well-founded assignment of the new species to any of the extant higher-level taxa is not possible, key morphological features of stem group Sphenisciformes (penguins) are absent in A. lovei. Other than penguins, the holotype of A. lovei represents one of the most significant records of a marine Paleocene bird from the Southern Hemisphere, and contributes to the emerging view that Neoaves were already diversified in the earliest Paleogene. link

Roy Chapman Andrews - Searching For Lost Worlds

From The Discovery Channels, 1998

Yongjinglong, A New Titanosaurian Sauropod from China

A New Titanosaurian Sauropod from the Hekou Group (Lower Cretaceous) of the Lanzhou-Minhe Basin, Gansu Province, China

 Image: University of Pennsylvania

A team led by University of Pennsylvania paleontologists has characterized a new dinosaur based on fossil remains found in northwestern China. The species, a plant-eating sauropod named Yongjinglong datangi, roamed during the Early Cretaceous period, more than 100 million years ago. 

This sauropod belonged to a group known as Titanosauria, members of which were among the largest living creatures to ever walk the earth. At roughly 50-60 feet long, the Yongjinglong individual discovered was a medium-sized Titanosaur. Anatomical evidence, however, points to it being a juvenile; adults may have been larger. press release

Published This Day (1868): Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication by Darwin

From Today In Science History:

In 1868, Charles Darwin's book - Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - was published. He was 58. It is probably the second in importance of all his works. This was a follow-up work, written in response to criticisms that his theory of evolution was unsubstantiated. Darwin here supports his views via analysis of various aspects of plant and animal life, including an inventory of varieties and their physical and behavioral characteristics, and an investigation of the impact of a species' surrounding environment and the effect of both natural and forced changes in this environment.

We Found The Evolution Man!

From My Greatest Adventure #31, May, 1959 DC Comics.
Cover by Bob Brown. Art by George Roussos

Died This Day: Horace de Suassure

Horace Bénédict de Saussure
Born 17 Feb 1740; died 22 Jan 1799.

A Swiss physicist and geologist, he introduced the term geology into the scientific literature in the first volume of Voyages dans les Alpes (1779-96). Link

Died This Day: George Ledyard Stebbins

From the U Calif., Berkeley:

Along with Dobzhansky (1900 - 1975), animal systematist Ernst Mayr, and paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson (1902 - 1984), Stebbins (Jan. 6, 1906 - Jan. 19 2000) is considered one of the architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s, an intellectual watershed and historic turning point that brought together research in cytology, genetics, systematics, paleontology into a common evolutionary framework. This synthesis, which had the effect of reconciling the often opposing views of laboratory-oriented geneticists and natural history oriented systematists, made Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection the centerpiece of the new discipline of evolutionary biology.

In this role, Stebbins is credited with bringing a modern framework to the study of plant evolution, and he is perhaps best known for his book Variation and Evolution in Plants, published by Columbia University Press (NY) in 1950. In the 1940s, Stebbins also played an important role in organizing the nascent Society for the Study of Evolution, of which he became the third president in 1948, and used his position to speak out for the botanical side of evolutionary studies, a field that had been dominated by zoologists. Photo .

Born This Day: August Weismann

From Today In Science History:

August (Friedrich Leopold) Weismann (Jan. 17, 1834 – Nov. 5, 1914) was a German biologist and one of the founders of the science of genetics. He is best known for his opposition to the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired traits and for his "germ plasm" theory, the forerunner of DNA theory.

Weismann conceived the idea, arising out of his early observations on the Hydrozoa, that the germ cells of animals contain "something essential for the species, something which must be carefully preserved and passed on from one generation to another."

Weismann envisioned the hereditary substances from the two parents become mixed together in the fertilized egg and a form of nuclear division in which each daughter nucleus receives only half the original ancestral germ plasms.

More info from Science World. image

Born This Day: Ruth Rose

Ruth Rose (Jan. 16, 1896 - June 8, 1978) was the daughter of Edward E. Rose. In 1926 she meet (and later married) cinematographer Ernest Schoedsack when they were both working on a New York Geological Society expedition to the Galapagos Islands. Together with partner and fellow producer director, Meriam C. Cooper, and animator Willis O’Brien, they made “King Kong”, released in 1933. Rose shared in many of Schoedsack’s and Cooper’s wildness film productions, and worked as a writer or script doctor on King Kong, Son of Kong, She, The Last Days of Pompeii and Mighty Joe Young.

The photo from King Kong (above) is of Bruce Cabot, Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong, but Rose clearly modeled the characters they played after Schoedsack, herself, and Cooper.

Large landmasses existed 2.7 billion years ago

Decoupled Hf-Nd isotopes in Neoarchean seawater reveal weathering of emerged continents Viehmann, et al., Geology, on-line early publication.

Kamandi by jack Kirby © DC Comics

Researchers have determined the isotope composition of the rare trace elements Hafnium and Neodymium in 2,700 million year-old seawater by using high purity chemical sediments from Temagami Banded Iron Formation in Canada.

The new findings show that 2,700 million years ago relatively large landmasses emerged from the oceans that were exposed to weathering and erosion by the sun, wind and rain.

Dr. Hoffmann: "The isotope Hafnium 176 in contrast to its counterpart Neodymium 143 was transported by means of weathering into the oceans and became part of iron-rich sediments on the sea floor 2,700 million years ago. link

Born This Day: Caroline Munro

Art © Mark Schultz

Munro is probably best known for her role in in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). She had a long career in a variety of genre films including a stint with Hammer Films, and notably with Ray Harryhausen as the slave girl, Margiana, in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974).

The Palaeoblog salutes her both for being the Godmother of Ray Harryhausen’s daughter and for her role as Princess Dia in At the Earth’s Core (1976)

Died This Day: Jean-Baptiste-Julien d' Omalius d' Halloy

d'Halloy (Feb. 16, 1783 - Jan. 15, 1875) was a Belgian geologist who was an early proponent of evolution and was acknowledged by Charles Darwin in his preface to ‘On The Origin of the Species’ for his opinions on the origin of new species through descent with modification.

He determined the stratigraphy of the Carboniferous and other rocks in Belgium and the Rhine provinces, and also made detailed studies of the Tertiary deposits of the Paris Basin. link

Died This Day: Alpheus Hyatt

From Today in Science History:

U.S. zoologist and paleontologist who studied invertebrate fossil records, the evolution of the cephalopods (a class of mollusks including squids and octopuses) and the development of primitive organisms.

Along with E. Cope, Hyatt (April 5, 1838 - Jan. 15, 1902) was the most prominent American neo-Lamarckian. Based on the analogy of ontogeny with phylogeny, Hyatt claimed that lineages, like individuals, had cycles of youth, old age, and death (extinction). This idea became the bulwark of orthogenetic theories in the U.S. Hyatt was the founder and first editor of the American Naturalist, and first president of Woods Hole laboratory.

Iguanodon - Living Engine of Destruction!

Devil Dinosaur by Jack Kirby
© Marvel Comics

Palaeoblog To Return in 2014

Good news for everyone who followed the Palaeoblog. It will be coming back in a modified form in the near future. Much like the Rhedosaurus, all it has to do is shake off the frozen ice and awaken from its cold slumber.

You can also get the usual Palaeoblog news by following my Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/DrMichaelJRyan

Paleoblog Over & Out

After an extended break, the Palaeoblog is officially closing up shop.

When it started up almost 10 years ago it was a great way to get palaeo-related news out to people who would otherwise have a hard time finding it. Blogs like this have now been largely superseded by other forms of social media, so I have no doubt that you've all got better ways to stay informed. Thanks for all the support over the years!

Albertadromeus syntarus, New Ornithopod from Alberta

New data on the diversity and abundance of smallbodied ornithopods (Dinosauria, Ornithischia) from the Belly River Group (Campanian) of Alberta. 2013. Brown, C.M., et al. Journal of Vert. Paleo. 33: 495-520.

Image © Julius Csytonyi

More info here

Acrotholus audeti, a New Pachycephalosaur from Alberta

The oldest North American pachycephalosaurid and the hidden diversity of small-bodied ornithischian dinosaurs. 2013. D.C. Evans, et al. Nature Communications

Read more here

Ray Harryhausen 1920-2013

Ray Harryhausen passed away today. No doubt his spirit is roaming a jungle somewhere "way west of Sumatra" with Willis, Merian, Ernest, Ruth, and Carl Denham looking for giant gorillas!

The Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation