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 Blogs like this have now been largely superseded by other forms of social media, so I have no doubt that you've all got better ways to stay informed.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

Premiered This Day (1981): Caveman

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Directed by Carl Gottlieb and starring Ringo Starr, this film is probably best known for introducing Starr to his future wife, Barbara Bach. Famed Animator Jim Danforth oversaw the creation of the dinosaurs.

A more interesting film with overtones of The Creature From The Black Lagoon (0:57) is Island of the Fish Men, also starring Bach.

Died This Day: Comte Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

Buffon (Sept. 7, 1707 – April 16, 1788) was a French naturalist, who formulated a crude theory of evolution and was the first to suggest that the earth might be older than suggested by the Bible.

In 1739 he was appointed keeper of the Jardin du Roi, a post he occupied until his death. There he worked on a comprehensive work on natural history, for which he is remembered, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière. He began this work in 1749, and it dominated the rest of his life. It would eventually run to 44 volumes, including quadrupeds, birds, reptiles and minerals.

He proposed (1778) that the Earth was hot at its creation and, from the rate of cooling, calculated its age to be 75,000 years, with life emerging some 40,000 years ago.

From Today In Science History. Stamp from HERE.

More info on Buffon from UC-Berkeley.

Died This Day: Rosalind Franklin

Image and a nice overview of her work on DNA

Rosalind Franklin (July 25, 1920 - Apr. 16, 1958) was an English scientist who contributed to the discovery of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a constituent of chromosomes that serves to encode genetic information. Beginning in 1951, she made careful X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA, leading her to suspect the helical form of the molecule, at least under the conditions she had used.

When Watson saw her photographs, he had confirmation of the double-helix form that he and Crick then published. She never received the recognition she deserved for her independent work, but had died of cancer four years before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Crick and Watson.

From Today In Science History

Premiered This Day: Women of The Prehistoric Planet

Written and directed by Arthur C. Pierce, and starring the perennial C-list actor John Agar (who had his own Prehistoric Theme Park!), this is just about as bad as it gets.

Published This Day: DNA Double Helix

From Today in Science History:

On this day in 1953, the journal Nature published a paper from Francis Crick and James Watson, titled Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid, in which they described a double helix structure for DNA.

Download the paper from Nature HERE.

Geological Time Scale First Proposed (1759)

Geological Time Scale

In 1759, Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino (1714-1795) dated a letter to Professor A.Vallisneri the younger, in which Arduino proposed a classification of Earth's surface rocks according to four brackets of successively younger orders: Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary. These are the four geological eras used today. The volcanic rocks without fossils which he saw in the Atesine Alps that formed the cores of large mountains he called Primary. Overlying them, the fossil rich rocks of limestone and clay that were found on the prealpine flanks of the mountains he called Secondary. The less consolidated fossil-bearing rocks of the subalpine foothills, he named Tertiary, and the alluvial rock deposits in the plains were the Quaternary. link

Premiered This Day: Gorgo

Gorgo premiered on this day in 1961. Directed by Eugène Lourié from a script by John Loring and Daniel Hyat, it featured a man in a rubber suit ala Toho’s Godzilla. More ignored than maligned, it holds up very well & is a well worth watching. Plus, it's newly available on Blu-Ray.

Over at Atomic Surgery the good doctors present a double bill to commemorate the day: a story by Steve Ditko from Gorgo #15 and a Gorgo filmbook from Famous Monsters of Filmland #50.

The End Triassic Extinction

Zircon U-Pb geochronology links the end-Triassic extinction with the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province. Blackburn, T.J., et al., Science, published on-line 21 March 2013

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More than 200 million years ago, a massive extinction decimated 76 percent of marine and terrestrial species, marking the end of the Triassic period and the onset of the Jurassic. This devastating event cleared the way for dinosaurs to dominate Earth for the next 135 million years, taking over ecological niches formerly occupied by other marine and terrestrial species.

It’s not entirely clear what caused the end-Triassic extinction, although most scientists agree on a likely scenario: Over a relatively short period of time, massive volcanic eruptions from a large region known as the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) spewed forth huge amounts of lava and gas, including carbon dioxide, sulfur and methane. This sudden release of gases into the atmosphere may have created intense global warming and acidification of the oceans that ultimately killed off thousands of plant and animal species.

Now researchers at MIT, Columbia University and elsewhere have determined that these eruptions occurred precisely when the extinction began, providing strong evidence that volcanic activity did indeed trigger the end-Triassic extinction. link.

Scrappy Little Jaw

The Ottawa, ON, based band <><>>>>> (aka The Band Whose Name is A Symbol, aka TBWNIS) will shortly be releasing their new vinyl-only LP, Scrappy Little Jaw. Yes, that scrappy little jaw on the cover is the holotype of Gryphoceratops.

If you want to pick up a copy of this limited edition beauty contact John at Birdman Sound.

The Brainless Origin of The Head

The bilaterian head patterning gene six3/6 controls aboral domain development in a cnidarian. 2013. Sinigaglia, C., et al. PLoS Biology 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001488.

In a simple, brainless sea anemone, the same genes that control head development in higher animals regulate the development of the front end of the swimming larvae. link

Author Summary [edit]: The evolutionary origin of head development is a fundamental question for understanding the evolution of animal body plans. Bilaterally symmetrical animals (Bilaterians) have an anterior-posterior (head-to-tail) axis, whose anterior end is usually characterized by a head and a brain.

Bilaterians evolved from an ancestor shared with cnidarians (corals, sea anemones, jellyfish), but brain-like structures are absent in cnidarians, although they have an obvious oral-aboral axis. Cnidarian larvae move with the aboral pole forward, but as adult polyps this pole is anchored to the ground, while the oral end is used for feeding. It is unclear whether one of the termini of cnidarians corresponds to the bilaterian head-forming region.

We show here that in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis genes regulating bilaterian head development are expressed at the larval aboral pole and that a key anterior developmental gene, six3/6, controls the development of the aboral pole. These findings support the hypothesis that the anterior, head-forming, region of bilaterians and the aboral region of cnidarians derived from the same domain of their last common ancestor and are therefore homologues.

Bads News on Jobs for Recent Ph.D.s

Read the article at The Atlantic: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists—in 7 Charts

Born This Day: Barnum Brown

Feb. 12, 1873 – Feb. 5, 1963
Photo © AMNH

From the AMNH bio:

The greatest dinosaur hunter of the twentieth century was Barnum Brown, who began his career at the American Museum of Natural History in 1897 as an assistant to Henry Fairfield Osborn. Brown traveled all over the world collecting dinosaurs and fossil mammals. Some consider him to be the last of the great dinosaur hunters.

Brown was always impeccably dressed, often wearing a tie and topcoat even in the field. He was a shrewd "horse trader" when it came to wheeling and dealing for fossil specimens. Many of Brown's greatest discoveries, including the first specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, are displayed in the Museum's Dinosaur Halls.

Born This Day: Charles Darwin

Feb. 12, 1809 – April 19, 1882


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More about Darwin HERE.

Published This Day: Steno Recognizes the Organic Origin of Fossils

From Today In Science History:

In 1667, a classic paleontological paper by Nicolaus Steno was published by the Royal Society, London. His topic, Head of a shark dissected, represented the first such scientific paper to recognise that fossils were the remains of creatures who had died and subsequently had become petrified. Controversy resulted as the same claim had been made in the time of the ancient Greeks, two millennia earlier.

Asteroid Did Kill The Dinosaurs

Time Scales of Critical Events Around the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. 2013. P.R. Renne, et al. Science 339: 684-687.

Abstract: Mass extinctions manifest in Earth's geologic record were turning points in biotic evolution. We present 40Ar/39Ar data that establish synchrony between the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary and associated mass extinctions with the Chicxulub bolide impact to within 32,000 years. Perturbation of the atmospheric carbon cycle at the boundary likely lasted less than 5000 years, exhibiting a recovery time scale two to three orders of magnitude shorter than that of the major ocean basins. Low-diversity mammalian fauna in the western Williston Basin persisted for as little as 20,000 years after the impact. The Chicxulub impact likely triggered a state shift of ecosystems already under near-critical stress.