Hey there every peoples!

Fossil discovery is the stuff of legends. News reports, books, and documentaries portray paleontologists searching the forsaken terrain of far off lands, roughing it like cowboys. Cut off from the hustle and bustle of modern society, they have retreated to perhaps one of the last wild spaces on earth, free to scour the badlands for the bones of long forgotten creatures. Eyes to the ground, the keep a sharp vigil for any sign that a bone is peeking out of the ground. Any thing is welcome, but the remains of a beast new to science is the greatest prize to be had. It is the romantic vision most often conjured by the secondhand story teller as well as common people who hear the word paleontologist. This version was true back in the early days of paleontology, and it still occurs in some of the more remote parts of the world.

But that is the glamorous version of paleontology. A more “mundane” series of events is arguably more common in paleontology. That is especially true here in California, the most populous state in the country. Here, fossils are found (for the most part) not in far flung deserts, but right under our feet. I am of course talking about fossils discovered during construction projects.

Like i said, we are the most populous state in the nation and that means lots of development. Housing, businesses, infrastructure, you name it! Whether the ground needs to be leveled for a foundation or we need lots of dirt for fill-in, the men in hard hats are constantly tearing into the earth. And it’s not like there is any shortage of examples. The world famous fossils of the La Brea Tar Pits were discovered when the asphalt was being harvested to help pave the streets of LA. The Diamond Valley Lake local fauna were found during the construction of a reservoir. Emma, the southern mammoth from Moorpark, was uncovered by a bulldozer during construction of a housing development. And it’s because of such rapid and constant development that the Cooper Center exists, since the county needed someplace to keep all of the fossils turning up. The list simply goes on and on. In fact, finding fossils in construction zones became such a common occurence that California has a law requiring construction outfits to have a paleontologist onsite to collect and preserve any fossils uncovered during operations. Despite all that we have found in the pursuit of progress, we never know what we may accidentally uncover next (on a local level, if they actually do develop Price Canyon, it’s anyone’s guess what may surface). Just such a find was made in the spring of 1993 at perhaps the last place anyone would expect to find fossils: a municipal dump.

Landfills (dumps to the layman) are a little more complex than is commonly thought. Instead of just dumping everything into one giant trash heap, the refuse is spread out over a flat plane and then covered with earth. A new trash layer is then laid on top and covered with earth; rinse and repeat. This method of trash disposal requires copious amounts of new dirt, so the onsite quarries can get pretty deep. It was during this routine exercise that the first clues were found. A mammoth tusk was found 35 feet below the surface on that fateful day in 1993. I cool find, but hardly news worthy. But then another bone was found. And another. This garbage dump in the boondocks of California was rapidly turning into an ice age goldmine.To date, several thousand specimens from 39 different species have been found.

And these aren’t your standard ice age fossils. Although much work needs to be done, the presence of certain species indicates that the site date to the Irvingtonian, which means the fossils could be anywhere from 300,000 to 1.8 million years old (though most references i’ve seen estimate the site to be between 500 and 700 thousand years old). Irvingtonian sites are rarer than the younger Rancho La Brean sites. To find fossils from his time is always exciting, but the Fairmead Landfill goes beyond the pail, giving us an unimaginable quantity of fossils. This gives us a snapshot of life in a time that is not as well understood as we like.

And just like Ranch La Brea and Diamond Valley, a museum was created to showcase the incredible fossils being found at the Fairmead Landfill. Built across the road from the landfill itself, it took on the title of Fossil Discovery Center of Medera County. Completed in 2010, they now teach people about this amazing discovery (though apparently they moonlight in other areas of the San Joaquin Valley) through exhibits, interactives, and programs. And in the end, isn’t that what we are really here to see?

The first thing you encounter within is a mammoth. Or rather, the floating disembodied head of a mammoth:

Aw man, that’s soooo fake! You can totally see the wires!

Idea was to display the skull at the height it would have been in life. That actually isn’t a bad idea when a skull is all you have. I took that shot in the summer of last year. Needless to say they upgraded their display, as can be seen this photo i shamelessly stole from their facebook page:

The mammoth skull got a body, it’s a Christmas miracle!

They have a small case about geologic time and some posters about the animals found at Fairmead. The majority of the display in this room is some glass and wood cabinets filled with fossils from the site. Most of them are horse bones, since they are the most common animals found at the site. In Rancho La Brean sites, horse are second to bison in abundance. But since this site hails from the earlier Irvingtonian, bison hadn’t reached North America yet. In the time before bison, horses were the most common large mammal in North American ecosystems. Here are but a few:

A nearly complete horse skull. woot!

Horse foot bones. Anyone up for a game of footsies?

Just some run of the mill horse leg bones.

Horses may crowd the stage but they are by no means the only ones. The second most common animals are camels:

Screw dinosaurs, those are some gnarly deadly looking teeth!

It’s the fossil toe bone of an extinct camel. No, i’m not doing the obvious joke.

Other animals include:

Scutes from a western pond turtle

Antler of a deer

Horn core of Tetrameryx irvingtonensis, a small pronghorn

A jaw bone from some kind of mystery critter…

After leaving this room we walk past the prep lab where new discoveries are prepped for storage and display:

A volunteer hard at work bringing the Pleistocene to life

And into the other main exhibit space:

Horses and camels and sloths, oh my!

Here they have some cast skeletons of ice age animals behind small cases of fossils. I rather like this approach, as it seems to solve the issue of having those impressive, eye catching pieces as well as the real stuff. This section also enlightens us on the carnivores found at Fairmead. As i always tell people, carnivores are much rarer in the fossils record because there are always many more herbivores than carnivores in an ecosystem. While more detailed study is needed, initial analysis of the sediment, plants, state of the fossils indicates the animals died and were buried around a watering hole. While this type of environment is always an animal magnate, it isn’t particularly biased toward carnivores. So the fact that this isn’t a carnivore trap but has produced several carnivore fossils is astonishing. Dire wolf and American cheetah are known from some fragmentary jaws. Homotherium also made an appearance in the assemblage. If i remember the spiel the volunteer gave me, the short-faced bear is known from a single fossil. But most spectacular of all is the saber-toothed cat skull:

Unfortunately, it’s just a picture on an info plaque…

This skull is labeled “Smilodon sp.” but they hint that it may be a new species. At this point in time the reigning Smilodon species was Smilodon gracilis which is known from other Irvingtonian age sites in California, Florida, and i think a few other places. Even though the formidable canines broke off long ago, it i nonetheless incredible to have a skull, especially since whole saber cat skulls are unknown from this time. When i was last there in August, i had heard that Dr. Robert Dundas, Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at CSU Fresno, was working on describing this and other specimens. Needless to say, i can’t wait to get my hands on that paper! None of the carnivore fossils were actually on display, which is a bummer. But not a total loss when you see what i talk about near the end.

Beside the prep lab was a small prep area where a guy from CSU Fresno (can’t remember his name cause I’m a dolt. Nice guy though, actually remembered me on my second visit) was working on some mosasaur bones from the Moreno formation in Fresno County. I think he was outside the prep lab because the blocks were too big. Remember, this museum was built with Fairmead fossils in mind, so they are used to working on isolated bones, not huge blocks containing marine reptiles. In fact the blocks are so heavy, the university guy told me that they broke an engine lift (those rigs used to hoist the engines out of cars) trying to move them.

Prepping some mosasaur bones

The last of the exhibits consists of a water hole outback (so far, it can only be seen through a window) meant to resemble what they thought the landfill looked like over half a million years ago. And if you look past it, across the road, you can see how it looks today, a mn made mountain designed to house our waste. But if it wasn’t for that, we wouldn’t have all the glorious fossils that made this museum possible.

The Fairmead Landfill, from then to now

Finally, the gift shop! Why include the gift shop in a review of a museum? I got three words for you: casts for sale!

A partial right mandible of a dire wolf and a tooth of a camel. Both of these casts were made from specimens found at the Fairmead Landfill

Seriously, how cool is that? If you saw my review of the Alf Museum, you’ll remember how stoked i was over those fossil casts Andrew Farke gave me. I love these casts here for the same reason as Andy’s. They are unlike all the other casts you find for sale. Most companies seem to have the same cast, taken from the same specimen. This can make things in the cast market rather bland because it’s just the exact same thing everywhere. I mean, they all have the same pristine cast of a dire wolf skull from Rancho La Brea. But it has no character, especially if everyone else has it. But the jaw previously mentioned is far above that skull. Why? Because it’s cast from an actual fossil found at the Fairmead Landfill. It comes a lesser known site, showing that animals we accommodate with a world famous site actually did live elsewhere. Not only that, but it’s incomplete. Yes, i just used incompleteness as a selling point. It’s rough, it’s textured, it has it’s own unique form. Same for the camel tooth. When everyone has the exact same cast, when you see that cast all over the web and even in museums, you forget that the fossil it came from was once a living animal whose remains has survived untold millenia to get here today. Getting a cast is not only the ultimate paleo souvenir, but it preserves the sense of awe and wonder inherent in it’s original fossil, especially when it comes from your homeland or a site that hasn’t been beaten to death (like Rancho La Brea). As such, i honestly don’t understand why more museums aren’t doing this. I mean, the Fossil Discovery Center made $45 off of me (actually, more like $75. I bought a second dire wolf jaw for the Ray Alf Museum) because they casted some of their fossils. They don’t have to be the big uber specimens seen in the exhibit hall, but smaller stuff in the $10 to $50 to even $60 range. Just look at the specimens displayed in the mammal hall at the San Bernardino County Museum. Those cases are full of teeth, jaws, and other bones from Cajon Pass, Barstow, and various Pleistocene localities that would be perfect candidates for gift shop casts ( I predict an 83% chance that Eric Scott with show up in the comments to shout “DON’T TEMPT ME!!!”). Every fossil is unique and yet we only cast what we deem to be pleasing to the eyes. It’s not about how perfect or complete a fossil is. It’s about the story it has to tell. Because the Fossil Discovery Center sold a cast of one of their specimens, i now have my own copy of the story of a fierce predator who stalked verdant wilds of California long before his famous counterparts were even around to stumble into a tar pit. If i ever get my museum going, you bet that i will sell casts of fossils that we find, in the hopes that they can continue to tell their story after people have left.

Over all, this museum seems pretty bland bare, but give it a chance. You have to remember, it’s only 2 years old. All museums start out small. Even the mighty institutions like NHMLAC and the Field Museum started out no bigger than 3 times the size of the Fossil Discovery Center. My only gripe is they don’t have any carnivore material on display, but hopefully that will change once they get published. They do have lots of original fossils on display and they are unique among other fossil collections. I fucking love the idea of selling casts and the staff (including the guy on the mosasaur) are friendly and helpful. Sure it’s off the beaten path, but I say it’s still worth checking out. They may not have the huge collections or elaborate exhibits of other museums, but for something just starting out, it ain’t bad at all. I can only hope my own museum will be half as big or good looking as the Fossil Discovery Center if i ever get it built.

Next week, join us for the somewhat thrilling conclusion to “Better Know a Museum” Month, where i tackle the juggernaut that is the Age of Mammals Hall at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Is it good? Are the exhibits sound? How does it measure up to the Dinosaur Halls? Stay Tuned!

Til next time!

Hey there every peoples!

Welcome to the finale of “Better Know a Museum” Month. What a ride, huh? Yeah it’s two weeks late. But i had finals last week and typing this out has just been so tedious. I really need to invest in some voice recognition software. Anyway, everything good must eventually come to an (or continue to live on in a despoiled state. I’m looking at you Star Wars!). And for the final installment of this special series i have decided to revisit a previous review.

In the summer of 2010, The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County unveiled the first phase of its “Next” Project in the form of an expanded and updated Cenozoic hall. Called the Age of Mammals, the new hall sought to tell the story of how mammals adapted to climate change over the eons as well as reveal how science works. The bottom floor is dedicated to the evolution of mammals. The narrative is told in a brightly lit, open space chock full of skeletons of ancient mammals from the Eocene to the Pleistocene. One stretch of the hall chronicles human evolution and the last section features mounts of modern mammals. The mezzanine above features a spectacular skeleton of a Miocene desmostylian. One side details the science of fossil mammals, showing how we know what we know. Lastly the other side explains the fossil history of Los Angeles. It’s certainly the biggest Cenozoic hall in the western US and has many exemplary specimens on display. In my initial review, I was pretty positive with what the LA Museum had created. But after a couple years of visiting it, and comparing to the dinosaur halls, I think the initial wow factor has worn off. These days I find myself describing the hall as somewhat… disappointing.

But how can such a diverse and expansive hall, built by one of the biggest museums in America, be anything less than epic? Well I have a few qualms with the new hall, likely to forever be brushed off as the nitpickings of an obsessive nerd. But nothing is ever perfect and I feel my gripes do have merit. One is the narrative, or rather, how it’s told. The layout of the bottom floor is obviously designed to be open for free exploration, instead of forcing guests through a narrow timeline like old museums did. This was to be a hall for the 21^st century, casting off traditional notions of exhibit design. But the way the hall is organized, that narrative of evolution in response to climate change gets lost in transition. Sure, it’s easy enough to follow along if you know what to look for, but like I said, this open space is meant to be non-restrictive. So in the wanderings of the average museum goer, that narrative may get thrown out of order. With the current layout, modern mammals are right after the Oligocene mounts. Across the hall are a couple more Oligocene mammals and a mélange of early and late Miocene mammals. The ice age mammals were all together, on their own. But because they are under the folds of the mezzanine, they feel cramped and it’s difficult to truly appreciate to appreciate them when they look like they are competing for space. You don’t have to sacrifice order for freedom of movement. Take “Fossil Mysteries” as the San Diego Natural History Museum for example. The exhibit follows the traditional chronological layout. It’s a timeline alright, but one that is easy to follow and non restrictive. You can easily go from the Cretaceous to the Oligocene if you don’t feel like winding around the Eocene. You can start in the Cretaceous and go forward or you can start in the Pleistocene and go backwards. The exhibits are spacious for their size and are lit with plenty of natural light (not exactly the cramp, dark exhibits of old the museum was trying leave behind). The Raymond Alf Museum also uses the timeline approach and isn’t very restrictive either. That probably has more to do with its size and shape but still. The LA Museum’s layout has the spirit of a story through time but it doesn’t feel like one. The ordering of specimens in the hall may be a little nitpicky but I’m just getting started.

I’m sure some of you are thinking that the layout of San Diego exhibit is a lot LA’s. Yes, they are somewhat similar, but the San Diego exhibit has something else helping its narrative. They succeed in making it look like an exhibit of the 21^st century and for me, that’s a minus. Museums have always strived to bring the past to life, trying to recreate the environments we think have come and gone. They put skeletons and even models in dioramas or some other kind of setting, trying to bring their specimens to life. Large museums have abandoned this approach, claiming they want to move away from the “cabinet of curiosities” and create a very modern aesthetic. If that’s what they want to do, who am I to question it? But I feel like they are simply upgrading their cabinet of curiosity. These modern looking halls simply put their skeletons on display in barren tombs behind panes of glass. Most of the time they are just mounted in standing positions, like prehistoric animals were always posing for pictures. When the new hall was planned, the LA Museum said they were going to mount their skeletons in new, life-like poses. Ah, if only. Some of them were, notably the dire wolf and pronghorn skeletons (who were in running positions, locked in an endless, silent chase). The same goes for a cast skeleton of Epicyon chasing a three-toed horse. Finally the La Brea horse was in its old rearing position. Aside from that, most of the other mounts are in the same old static poses. That may be because most of them are from the old hall and that makes them look tired and familiar, but more on that later. Point is, little in the new hall make me think of them as living animals. Dioramas are the obvious solution but not the only one. Simple color schemes or even just lighting can create an ambient environment. Sound can also be used to turn a simple display into a more immersive experience. I again direct you to the Raymond Alf Museum. Each section features a sweeping mural and the bases of the displays are modeled after rock strata. The Precambrian alcove has the sound of a storm, invoking the sense of a violent and unstable world where the first life emerged. Even when there wasn’t a mural, photos of dig sites and geologic formations helped to turn the hall into more than just plain space.

This particularly bugged me when the dinosaur halls opened. At least 4 large murals depicted dinosaurs and other animals in full detail. And they weren’t the stereotypical murals where they tried to cram in as many species as possible. They showed one, maybe two species going about their daily lives. They have similar style murals in the lower level of the mammal hall. Except they are not quite to the scale of the dinosaur halls:

Yep, they are just in small spaces under signs and behind the specimens. Practically the bare minimum and hardly sufficient to convey the changing world mammals lived in. And the murals up in the section on LA through the ages were hardly any better. They were indeed the stereotypical murals trying to cram as many animals into the landscape. Not only that, but they were in a monochrome penciled style. They almost look like they were lifted from some stuffy old textbook. Look at the mural from the Hall of Geological Wonders:

Now that’s how you do a mural!

They wanted it to look like life back then. Contrary to what we see in typical murals, animals didn’t all gather in one spot and act their best. Usually you would expect to see one species in a large swath of landscape. The Hall of Geological Wonders captures then. If you were to go back to the Santa Ana in the Pleistocene, you would maybe see 2 or 3 species of herbivores gathering at the local water source (like we see in animals today). Now this could still work with the tar pit mural given the suspected taphonomic scenario. But the other murals are just the same tired by-the-numbers murals that add no real life to the displays (and according to a certain marine mammal guru, the dolphins in the middle Miocene mural leave something to be desired. Plus I have my own words about the Sespe mural). The displays do use colors relevant to the climate and environment, but they end up clashing with and drowning out the murals. Sad part is, this is my favorite part of the whole hall. Not even the story of their own city (even here they cheated, as only two of the localities are in or were near Los Angeles) got anything to bring lost worlds alive. I mean, they couldn’t have a branch with a primate model on it or a patch of grass with the Miocene fossils, nothing to aid the narrative. And many times it doesn’t even need to be the environment itself. The visitor center at John Day Fossils Beds National Monument has their fossils set in reconstructions of the rocks they were found in. The visitor center at Red Rock Canyon takes a similar approach, displaying their specimens against a backdrop of faux Dove Spring formation mudstone. Andrew Farke (curator at the Raymond Alf Museum and yet another nice guy willing to put with me) said in a review of the dinosaur halls:. Environment can be used to put things in context and this is especially true of mammals. Whether it’s a diorama or a full mural or even subtle set pieces, visual cues are powerful tools to express the shifting climates and morphing ecosystems. Considering that the story of mammals is adaptation to an ever changing world, recreating past environments is the greatest way to tell that story. Even small additions can help. But the static poses and lack of environment are small potatoes next to what I felt was the greatest disappointment of all.

Remember what I said about the postures looking tired and familiar, because I had seen them so many times in the old hall? Well that’s because most of the mounts were from the old hall. I can understand using them because you have them, but these were the exact same way they were in the old hall, with only a few changed into new positions. Often times old specimens can feel new when placed into a totally new setting. Like this mastodon jaw:

Practically looks like a different fossil, all thanks to lighting and an updated display case. So let’s compare this with the LA Museum’s hall:

A skeleton of Menoceras, from the early Miocene of Nebraska.

So why does this new home, bathed in natural light and decked out in modern splendor, feel like a disappointment? We’ve established that so many of the unchanged mounts play a part. Well it’s the main part. Allow me to explain. This is the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the largest museum in the west, with over 35 million specimens in their collections. They should be able to display things no one else can. And yet most of mounts are left over from the old hall. Sure, most of the stuff on the mezzanine is new, but it’s hard to appreciate when half the hall consists of rehashed material. Through random google searches and the like, I have learned of some really unique and awesome specimens. Like Capricamelus, a camel who thought he was a goat (an excellent example of convergent evolution); Or Gomphotaria, a ginormous walrus from Orange County (not only with a complete skeleton, but a pathology as well); And the San Pedro gray whale, the only fossil gray whale known (at  least according to them). Not to mention fossils from southern California and beyond. And what did they opt for? The same old Oligocene and Miocene stuff that every other major museum (and some minor ones) has.

Unfortunately big museums like LA need to draw in the crowds and that means throwing out as many impressive eye-catching specimens as possible. And I guess only those clichéd (I can’t believe I just applied that word to fossils. Excuse me while I go atone for my folly with a claw hammer) skeletons from the Midwest are the only way to achieve that. These not-even-rehashed mounts from the old Cenozoic hall contrasted sharply with the dinosaur hall. Hardly any of the old mounts came back (probably because there weren’t many) and even then they looked new. For example, the cast of Mamenchisaurus had a new skull and the marine reptiles were in updated swimming positions. After that, so many of the skeletons had never been seen before in the exhibits of old. Plus all the singular specimens looked and felt new. This is probably because the majority of material in the dinosaur halls was found in the last decade or so. According to a video made shortly after the old Cenozoic hall was closed, a lot of the material was bought in the 60s and 70s from museums in the midwest. Plus another good chunk of their collection was absorbed from Cal Tech when they no longer wanted to continue with a paleontology program. So it’s not like they worked particularly hard for their older collections; given that so much of the specimens in the new hall are derived from such, it kills the wonder for someone like me. The upper mezzanine is better, as most of the material is original and comes from lesser known parts of the fossil realm, such as Mexico, Sharktooth Hill, and California’s southern coast. But just like downstairs, there is an abundance of mundane material. That Material comes from Rancho La Brea. The tar pits have their own material and even then, most museums have casts or traded specimens from Rancho La Brea. I can see I being applicable in the “Fossil History of LA” section, but elsewhere it’s just cliché (looks like I need another minute with the hammer).

Overall, this hall feels phoned in compared to the Dinosaur Halls. With the Dinosaur Halls, everything felt new and innovative. They obviously put a lot of thought and effort into it. The labels include detailed specimen information: species name, location, acquisition (ie. Holland Dinosaur Expedition, 2004), specimen number, and a skeletal diagram showing what parts of the skeleton are real. The Cenozoic Hall just has the basics: specimen number, general location, age, and a blank skeletal diagram. And as I detailed earlier, at least half the specimens are rehashed from the old hall in a bland uninspired setting.

This pretty much lays out why I like the smaller museums more. They feature specimens from the lesser know places, the ones you don’t hear about all the time. They showcase the stuff that doesn’t get showcased elsewhere because it’s not considered impressive enough. Thus it’s relegated to the collections where their story cannot be heard. And for the umpteenth time, that’s why I want to start a museum here on the Central Coast. The fossils from here are sutured away in the collections of these big museums, glossed over in favor of the run-of-the-mill material (hello hammer, my old friend). Sure the Cenozoic Hall had some stuff on display from the Sespe formation as well as the Mastodon from Simi Valley (who presence feels very forced, considering there was nowhere near enough to mount a full skeleton), but that get them a couple brownie points at most (since the Sespe stuff is just there because it kinda relates to LA). I would say that California fossils might get a second chance with the museum’s third new hall, but that hope is dashed. The new hall was going to be about California, but they changed it to LA. If they do have a display about fossils, it will probably include material from Rancho La Brea, making the stuff in the Cenozoic Hall all the more redundant (*sigh* hammer time…). Plus they are just thrown out on display. Not lighting, no models, no prehistoric landscaping to create an immersive environment; it’s just a cabinet of curiosities with a section on science. This is a problem with all the big museums: LA, American, Field, Smithsonian, Royal Ontario, etc. Because they are so big and well known and draw in so many people through sheer word of mouth, they can get away with just having stuff on display. Because smaller museums like San Bernardino or San Diego are smaller, they have to be creative and innovative with their displays. The payoff is a richer and more constructive representation of the ancient world that people can feel more immersed in. And of course, they show us the local stuff, and if it isn’t local, many times it’s from places not so well known. That’s why I love the Alf Museum and the San Bernardino County Museum. For example, they show off stuff (or in the case of SBCM, will show off. Eventually…) from Barstow. Barstow is hailed as this Miocene gold mine, the type locality of the Barstovian North American Land Mammal Age. The American Museum has the largest collection, and surely Smithsonian, Berkeley, and LA have collections from there as well. Well so what? I only know the American Museum has the biggest collection because Eric Scott told me. And to me, the collections of Alf and SBCM are more impressive. They didn’t swoop in and plunder an untapped Barstow formation while paleontology was still in its golden age. They’ve had to collect from an intensely searched, heavily picked over (I’m still trying to get over this “picked over” mentality, but it’s really hard) locality. And yet they have managed to build a collection with some truly impressive specimens. And those two museums are doing what they can to tell the tale of Barstow 15 million years ago.

Plain and simple, while the new Cenozoic Hall is the biggest in the west, given who created it the place just felt like a disappointment. Save for most of the original material, the hall is a modern rehashing if the same thing people saw years ago. I’ll probably be getting hate mail from museum staff, volunteers, and fans for this (or at least a hundred stink eyes at the next Red Rock Canyon trip). But I stand by it. I’m tired of the big joints with the big collections getting by with the bare minimum. It takes more than just big complete skeletons to make a great exhibit. You need the original fossils and an immersive environment to do the beasts of old justice. Well that wraps it up for “Better Know a Museum Month”. Thanks for sticking with me. Now I’m gonna take a break and try to save up enough money for some voice recognition software.

Till next time!

Hey there every peoples!

Long time no see. So what’s my excuse this time? Just the usual this time a year: Live Oak music Festival (our 13th year going and volunteering), the Fourth of July, and then just lots of other little stuff. But the good news is I finally managed to get my hands on a voice-recognition program! I was able to find one on Amazon for only $40. This is my first time trying it out so hopefully this will really help improve my typing so I can get these posts to you guys on a more regular basis (like I used to when I first started). But enough about me, today’s post is about someone special. Well he may not be so special when you consider the nature of the Internet but for me he kind of is special. It seems my blog is really coming along. In the roughly 2 1/2 years I’ve been running it I’ve somehow garnered over 30,000 views. I have had many people, some who I never met before, tell me that they liked it. And it seems my blog has taken just one more step to towards… bloghood (yeah, let’s just go with that for now). You see ladies and gentlemen, I have gotten my very first troll!

But who is this troll you may ask? Well do you remember a little blog post I wrote called the “Tragedy of Lone Star”? In case you haven’t here is the gist of it: I chronicled the unfortunate journey of a large mastodon skull found in Texas from a gravel pit to a garage and into the hands of a creationist who then put it up for auction to pay off some debts. Well it seems this creationist has found my post and he was not very happy. He left several comments that amounted to little more than inane vitriol and mudslinging tirades without anything really sustentative. I will admit some of his words did sting me. Half a year ago I probably would’ve curled up in a ball hoping I would die, thinking myself some kind of epic failure. But not this time. I have the tools and the people to help me in my battle against the Noonday Demon. And because of them I am not as weak as I used to be. Which means instead of getting depressed about this single man’s harsh words, I will treat him as all trolls should be treated: by tackling the problem head-on and tearing his idiotic screeds to shreds. In essence there are quite a few doozies so we best dive right in.

Hey there whoever you are,

I am Ripper, Tearer, Slasher, Gouger!  I am the teeth to the darkness, the talons in the night! Mine is strength, and lust, and power! I AM BEOWULF! Sorry sorry I just couldn’t resist.

I went between laughing and being mad at your drivvle about the Lone Star mastodon.

Well I do to make people laugh when I can. Calling my stuff drivel, eh? Gee, I must’ve struck a nerve!

You should have invested a little effort in fact-checking. Too chicken to call the person you’re trying to villanize? Most of you armchair fossil lovers are.

What can I say, I did the best I could. Not only did I read several news articles containing direct quotes from him and other folks involved in the whole debacle but I also did go through the little PDF pamphlet that he printed to go along with the skull. I mean yeah perhaps I could’ve called him but let’s face it I was writing a blog post, not an article from major news outlet. Besides, the stuff from the pamphlet as well as… well,  pretty much anything on his website makes it perfectly clear that Joe Taylor is a creationist. Maybe I didn’t call him out of fear that he probably would have dragged the conversation into another debate over evolution. As we all know creationists never have anything new to offer the debate; so calling him and getting bogged down in a pointless argument would’ve been a waste time. And the comment about being “chicken” and an “armchair fossil lover” is just him puffing up his chest trying to sound all big and tough.

Are you too lazy to go work like Mike and I did?

Just a basic ad hominem attack. This shows that this Joe Taylor guy doesn’t know me. But if he bothered to read over my blog he would have known that I’m not in the field not because I’m lazy but because I really don’t have that much opportunity at the moment. A lot of people who are interested in paleontology don’t do all the work that professional paleontologists do because a lot of them don’t really live near a major museum. So you see Joe it’s not laziness, it’s just a lack of resources not specific to me.

And your whining about other people finding fossils you should have…?? LOL!

That’s mischaracterization and I guess “whining” qualifies as ad hominem. Nowhere in my post did I say that I, the Central Coast Paleontologist, had to have the skull or other fossils that I “whine” about. I simply argue that the skull should’ve been in a museum. In fact, since I’m such an advocate of local fossils staying local, I’d say the skull should’ve stayed in a Texas Museum. We are only halfway through the comment and Joe is already showing how intellectually bankrupt his argument is by relying on such fallacies as name-calling, strawmen, and as we will soon find out, flat out lying.

You live in California idiot. Fossils are everywhere! Get out of your baby chair and go find some. Grow up.

Add “Idiot” and “baby chair” to the ad hominem tally. I know that there are fossils everywhere (that word… so right and yet so wrong). Believe me. I’ve been trying my damnedest to go out and find fossils. But it’s not as easy as Joe apparently thinks it is. For starters I’m just a college student. I don’t have near enough money to fund some of the major excavations that museums undertake. Furthermore I don’t always have the time to go out and look for stuff usually because I’m busy with school. But I would say that the biggest hurdle is probably the most obvious (well maybe not to Joe). Go over to the Hit List and look at all the places hope to search someday. What do they all have in common? All of them (or at least the greater majority) are on government lands. You need a permit just to go out and look for stuff. In order to actually dig up fossils and move them out, you need a detailed curation plan. That requires a museum (as does the provision that the specimens must go to an approved repository). I doubt that I could just get a space over at the storage facility and have the government except that as a suitable repository for fossils. So until I can get my own building somewhere, invertebrates and plants are about all I can collect. Considering that I want to be a scientist and even open my own museum means I have to do everything right. And that means setting up a proper repository before I can actually go find vertebrate fossils.

Quit wasting your time in school and go to work for a real museum like I did and learn bones from the atheist evolutionists like I did.

Uh, did he just tell me to stop “wasting time” with school? Sure I’ve had trouble with school and had been there longer then I probably should’ve been. But I don’t want to just dig up fossils. I want to teach people about them I want to even study them and try to learn their secrets. Sure there one, maybe two, self-taught paleontologists out there. But I’m not them. If I want to fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming a paleontologist and opening my own museum I need an education. And as I noted above I don’t exactly have the resources to just dive in and work with fossils. Tthe biggest museum on the Central Coast (actually the biggest museum between Los Angeles and San Francisco) barely has a paleontology collection to speak of. It doesn’t have a paleontology curator and thus their paleontology program is nonexistent. I did volunteer for one summer in 2008 helping them work on their newfound mammoth. The last couple of years I went on those field trips to Red Rock Canyon with the LA Museum (last year I found a camel ulna). I have also gone on those paleontology and geology field trips to the San Bernardino County Museum. Plain and simple, I’m doing the best I can with what’s available to me. Since he takes the time to brand paleontologists as “atheist evolutionists”, Joe reveals yet again that he’s a creationist who is interested in fossils for religious interests, not scientific ones. But more on that later.

You guys are so “brave on the web” and gutless in person

Just more of Joe trying to sound like such a big  bad man. And again he doesn’t even know me.

Come to my museum and see what we do with fossils

One: your website makes clear what you guys do with fossils. You try to use them as props in your failing effort to prove an ancient myth. Two: I live in California and your museum is in Texas. How do you propose I get there, use the Tardus? Even if I did have the means to visit your museum I wouldn’t. Creationists use the same tired old arguments over and over and over so visiting his place wouldn’t offer me anything new or challenging. Besides there are so many real museums east of the Rockies  I could visit instead. Like the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, Illinois. Or the fabulous new Paleontology Hall that just opened up at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences. I loved the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina. And of course there’s the Smithsonian’s legendary National Museum of Natural History. So can someone please explain why I should forego all of these just to visit his podunk little shrine to pseudoscience?

Or maybe you don’t really have any passion for fossils, you just like to throw rocks from a safe distance.

Yet more mindless ad hominem attacks. There are plenty of people out there (some of them professional paleontologists) who can attest to my passion for fossils.

Your article was disgusting. You have the book I did on Lone Star, my contact info is in there, give me a call. I don’t bite.

Why? At the moment I have absolutely no reason to call him. Especially considering this guy is willing to distort science for Jesus.

All right on the second comment:

Hey Paleoblogger, why don’t you invest some time in Mexico. There are so many mammoth remains there that one top secular, evolutionist paleontologist whom you would accept said to me that, in Mexico, “You have to dig through the mammoths to get to the dinosaurs.” And since no one can sell the bones, those “evil” commercial guys won’t be digging there and upsetting you.

Why don’t I invest time in Mexico? The same reasons I listed above: I don’t have the resources and unless he’s referring to Baja, it’s simply not a place I want to prospect. I’m interested in fossils of the American West; Joe would’ve known that if he bothered doing his research. And again he has to note that a paleontologist is secular and “evolutionist” (as if that pathetic label had any actual bearing on the situation). But moving to Mexico to do paleontology wouldn’t really solve the problem. I mean there’d still be people selling fossils up in the states. Running from a problem never solves anything.

This one was in response to a comment someone left on the original Lone Star entry:

Asbet: What “mistreatment are you talking about? The mastodon skull is in a museum. I didn’t get one penny from its sale. Would you have cried if you saw the skull laying on a cement floor broken up? Or scooped up and stored in some garage where no one would see it? What is so horrible about a beautiful and important skull being thoroughly studied, documented and restored and made available to the public? Was it horrible that good casts were sent to other museums for kids to see? You need to get your info from the source and not some wannabe paleo blogger. You have a personal invitation to my museum and a personal tour of what we do.

And what museum might that be Joe? In addition to being a creationist Joe apparently has terrible reading comprehension. In my original entry I stated that I had contacted  both the auction house and Joe Taylor and they both told me that the skull ended up at a private museum in New Mexico off view to the public. So the fact that the skull ended up in a private museum (as stated by both the auction house and the guy who hocked it) automatically refutes his claim that the skull is available to the public. And studied and documented? How? I scoured Google scholar and found absolutely no papers even mentioning this specimen. And yes it was thoroughly restored but that’s the problem. Restoration is only done for exhibits and even then it’s nowhere near the extent that Joe did. That is because museums want people to appreciate the original fossil, to be able to see the original material. For fucks sake, judging from the photos Lone Star is covered in so much makeup that you can’t tell what the real fossil is and what isn’t. But probably the biggest problem Joe has with this little tirade is he’s not being specific. He’s not saying what museum the skull ended up then. He’s not saying this study and documentation is. He’s not saying which museums the casts went to. I can’t help but feel like he’s leaving out the specific details because he doesn’t want anyone following up on them to see if they’re true or not.

And now for the grand finale: comment number four:

Kenneth: can you name any paleontologists whom you accept who work for free? I know numerous real paleontologists, many are atheists and evolutionists, and ALL of them work for money, and if they didn’t sell their time working on fossils they would have to get a job that did pay. From your self-descripytion, you are not a Christian but an evolutionist. The two are not compatible. You and your paleo blogger, here, are ignorant. You too have a personal invitation from me — the guy who saved Lone Star from remaining obscure — to come tour my museum and see what we actually do here.

His screed about paleontologists working for money is a red herring. Paleontologists work out of a passion for discovery, learning, and helping us understand the world around us. Besides, paleontologists don’t make that much. In fact, all those paleontologists working at museums usually teach at the local college as well to help pay the bills. Paleontologists have told me that this is a science that you have to really love to participate in because the pay aint so great. So what if they get paid. Have you seen the society we live in? People need money just to be able to live. Just because paleontologists get paid for doing their job doesn’t mean that they are in it solely for the money. And last I checked, they weren’t auctioning off priceless fossils to dig themselves out of a hole. Also note how Joe says that Kenneth is not a Christian. This is what’s known as the No True Scotsman fallacy. It’s a favorite of creationists. When a Christian doesn’t follow a creationist’s ultra literal interpretation of the Bible, they are labeled as not being a Christian. Even if they still believe in God, read the Bible, and go to church. You know everything that makes a Christian a Christian. It just demonstrates yet again how intellectually bankrupt creationists are. It shows just how narrow minded and dogmatic they are. There is no middle ground. There is no other side of the issue. It’s just their fanatical interpretation of the Bible and nothing else. If you don’t think exactly like they do you are the enemy.

And lastly yes, you did save Lone Star from obscurity. In the worst way possible way! Lone Star only got a brief spat of fame because you decided to sell him to save your own ass. He was remembered because he was being labeled as 40,000 years old by someone who thinks the age of the earth is only 6000. Once the terrible deed was done, he vanished back into obscurity. I have scoured the internet and have found no trace of Lone Star. No scientific papers, no museum pages, and only news articles from the time he was auctioned. Nothing else exists. If Lone Star was in a public museum they would have a page about him. Considering he’s possibly the biggest mastodon ever found, I’m pretty sure a museum would be really proud of that. Even if it was a cast their website would say something. When I type “Lone Star” mastodon into Google, I find nothing. This only confirms what Joe and the auction house had originally told me: that lone Star ended up in some private museum away from the world. So when Joe says that Lone Star is in the museum being studied and enjoyed by the public, and that there are casts that other museums, either he is straight up lying or there is something he is leaving out. Science demands repeatability, the ability to go back and check someone else’s work to see if it was right or not. Since Joe’s comments cannot be verified (because he won’t give the names of the museums or the papers that included research on the skull) it is incredibly difficult to take him at his word. Who knows: the world may never see Lone Star again.

Plain and simple, this is just some guy who got upset because someone called him out on his bullshit. He lashes out with name-calling and logical fallacies in hopes that his pathetic attempt at bullying will shut me up or cause people to take him seriously. There is nothing about this guy to take seriously. Not only did he sell a valuable fossil, but he is also a creationist. Believing all science to be flawed, he attempts to use fossils to prop up his fragile faith in a Bronze Age myth. As a creationist, he distorts the facts and promotes forgeries in a demented caricature of what science actually does. There are no free spots in the market place of ideas. If you want a spot, you have to be able to stand up to rigorous testing and scientific scrutiny. Creationism fails to fulful either and yet it’s proponants (like Joe) demand it be put on the same level as evolution or or geology, or any other facet of scientific fact.  Creationists don’t want to teach people about the world and how it came to be. The only wants to sell a very narrow minded, ill-informed version of history and justify it by calling it God’s work. Joe is not a paleontologist but a religious zealot. And it is for this reason that his childish words and macho posturing does not faze me in the slightest. It is merely water over a ducks back for I know in my heart that I’m on the right side of the debate. That is the side that sees fossils like Lone Star as valuable clues to the riddle of our past and not as cash cows or trinkets claimed to support a failed ideology.

Till next time!

Hey there every peoples!

Summer has come and gone. And now i have been plunged head first into what is probably going to be my most hellish nightmare inducing semester yet. Spanish might be manageable, but on top of that i have chemistry (which i was never good at, being one of the physical sciences) and geometry/trigonometry (it’s a combined class, but since math has always been my greatest weakness it’s going to be much much worse). I have a five and a half hour break on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so hopefully i can still deliver a blog post now and then.

Before this brutal slogthrough school began, me and my folks managed to take a short camping trip up to Big Sur (I say short, but it was still about five days). It was well worth the limited time we had. The scenery was spectacular and very easy to see why people come from all over the world to see it. But since we were up north i managed to get in some fossil hunting. Bobby was nice enough to point me to one of his old stomping grounds near Santa Cruz. Finding the site was easy enough however i didn’t get to search the full length of the cliffs. High tide was around noon and by the time it had gotten low enough to continue, the sun was hanging low in the sky. But i did manage to find quite a bit.

The mystical cliffs at New Brighton State Beach

The multitude of boulders at the foot of the cliffs were brimming with invertebrates, just like Bobby said:

See all those white streaks? Those are the outlines of fossil sea shells!

Holy hell, that’s a lot of clams! Saw quite a few of these along the cliffs.

The invertebrate layer. You could follow this all long the cliffs. Pretty unbelievable!

I collected a few smaller rocks with some specimens in them. But i wasn’t just here for the clams. As you all already know, i have a burning hunger to search for vertebrate fossils. However, most of the places i want to search are on goverment land and they want the permit applicant to have a curation plan (somehow i doubt they would accept “rubbermade tub in my bedroom” as a curation plan). To do that i need to create a repository and i doubt that will ever happen soon, if at all. But Bobby told of a place where collecting of vertebrate material was allowed. Naturally i was ecstatic! Was i finally moving up in the world of paleontology? Only a visit to the cliffs would tell.

Now Bobby was certainly right about the invertebrates being plentiful. But he had told me that “the vertebrates take quite a bit more looking (especially in the summertime)”. After spending some time at the locality, i wasn’t sure what he meant. With what felt like little effort, i managed to find lots of vertebrate bones poking out of the boulders:

What looks like a whale vertebra

A curious assortment of fossil bones

Probably a rib

Bonanza! Sure not all of it is complete (or even recognizable), but i couldn’t believe how much i was finding. Unfortunately, none of this was within my reach. They were all locked in boulders weighing hundreds of pounds each. Absolutely no way me and my dad could carry any of those out. This fact was especially painful when i encountered these:

A rib or possibly even a jaw bone

A nice looking whale vertebra

The worst offender of the bunch. It appears to be a series of vertebra. It was killing me so much that i couldn’t remove it (it still does).

Note to self: First thing to do if i ever land a job is to invest in a rock saw.
Not all was lost, however. We managed to find a smaller boulder on the main beach:

As you can see, “smaller” is relative.

Relative indeed. Because while this wasn’t as big as the other boulders, the damn thing still weighed 150 pounds! So we had to take a sledge hammer and knock off some of the dead weight (as the fossils were to one side). It was a success! We got it small enough to carry:

Believe it or not, smashing a big rock into smaller ones was a lot of work. Now i understand why prison inmates had to do it in the old days!

Now there is the simple matter of getting the bones out. Since I’m broke and still struggling to find work, the higher tech options like zip scribes and microblasters are out of the question. I remember Bobby mentioning on his blog that he used acid prep on concretions like these. But i have never attempted it on anything this big before. We have an old washtub, and while the rock barely fits, the bottom of the tub has some noticeable crackage going on. So should i just go to Walmart and get one of those plastic tubs that people at parties use to keep beer and ice in? And lastly, there’s this interesting little piece:
So as you can imagine, any advice on how to get the bones out of the rocks is greatly appreciated.

Only time will tell if i got anything good or not. I did save the gps coordinates of that vertebral series should i ever develop the means to extract it. But i must say that it was very gratifying to finally get out and start collecting vertebrate fossils for the museum i hope to start. Having things bigger and more impressive than molluscs should hopefully draw more support when i eventually start the public outreach step. Of course, i i could go anywhere else, i could find even greater stuff (especially the San Juan Basin and such, since people go nuts for dinosaurs). But for now, I’m glad to have found this little tidbit from Santa Cruz, which brings me just one step closer to fulfilling The Grand Vision. Thanks Bobby for directing me to this locality.
Till next time!

Hey there every peoples!

My God it’s been forever since I’ve done a post. Needless to say school’s been complete and total hell. After just a week and a half after it started, the strain was just too much to bear. I actually ended up dropping one of my classes. That seemed to take the pressure off a little bit but in the end really didn’t improve things all that much. I’m still doing horribly in my two current classes. One is a combination geometry and trigonometry class and the other one is intro to chemistry. Throughout my life I’ve always hated math and loved science. But I am having such a hard time with chemistry that I’m feeling the opposite. I find myself actually kind of liking the math (ok, tolerating, not liking) and hating the science. As you can imagine this has all done “wonders” for my fight against the Noonday Demon. So not only has school kept me mired down but October was a very busy month for me. First I went to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios; and then there was Prehistoric OC for National Fossil Day in Buena Park; then there was helping grandma clear the sand off her rental home’s driveway; a trip to the Ernst Quarries to look for fossils; and finally last weekend which were about to discuss. Now since school has started there’s been a post I’ve been working on and off but I just haven’t had much time to work on it. But I really want to get it up and a few other posts but first I want to talk about this weekend while still fresh in my mind.

The three or four people who actually follow my blog will know that since 2010 I have attended the natural history Museum of Los Angeles County’s field trip to Red Rock Canyon State Park. It’s really a fantastic trip not just because all the great planning that goes into it by the education department, but also because you get to go look for fossils with the actual scientists. Last year I actually managed to find an ulna from a camel. So with last year turning out so well, how this year turn out? Well I’ll tell you: meh.

Well just like last year I was one of the first non-staff member people there. That is because it takes me over four hours to get there and so I leave early in the morning. And so that afternoon Dave Whistler was nice enough to let me tag along on a scouting sortie to look for potential localities. The spot we found was not far from where we went last year. And as usual there were plenty of root casts and bone fragments all around, but nothing out of the ordinary. Though while I was out there I did manage take a bit of a spill down a rocky slope! Not long after that we piled back into Dave’s truck and headed back to camp. And for about half the trip Dave was constantly lamenting the fact that Red Rock Canyon hasn’t had a decent rain in a decade. Paleontologists love rain because it exposes new fossils. But the longer the locality goes without rain the harder it is to find anything. But he was also lamenting the fact that there so few places that we can actually access with this number of people, so unfortunately our options are limited.

Getting ready to scout the locality.

Once we got back to camp I quickly adjusted what little gear I had on me and hiked up onto the ridge overlooking our camp. I have gone up there the last couple years because Dave says that I can usually find something up there. The last two years yielded just random bone fragments. But this year I actually had the good fortune of finding about three piles of associated fragments. I mean, they’re still fragments but at least they’re associated (meaning I found them together). And I also found two pieces of a large bone that I’ll talk about a little later. It was really cool to find these pieces because Xiaoming didn’t really believe that there is anything up there (because it’s on such a high slope nothing would survive). Well I finally did manage to find something and again you’ll see that later.

The view from atop the ridge, facing away from camp.

And so the next day after breakfast and orientation we headed out to the spot and I was actually a little bit optimistic. I mean, I actually found quite a handful of fragments the previous day so who knows what I would find out there. boy was I in for a disappointment!  I was finding the typical fragments, but they were few and far between. now I scoured a large area and even wandered over to the spot that we searched last year. It was almost like the earth was mocking me. I found a few little splinters that looked like they could lead to something more. So I dug out my dig knife and paintbrush and started clearing away the dirt. But then it just all started breaking up into more fragments. So I ditched the paint brush and gently blew on it. That also obliterated it more. Ugh! And if that wasn’t enough, check this out:

At first i thought this may have been the skull or jaw of a horse. But upon closer inspection, it was nothing more than a weird collection of rocks. *Sigh*…

Just like that. Every time I found a bone the Dove Springs formation was spitting it in my face, like some sort of contemptuous pity. And the next day was even worse! The bigwigs decided to have us hike to a valley behind the campground. Oh holy hell the substrate sucked! It was so covered and full of rocks and the outcrops were covered by this kind of hard sandy crust. At least at the other locality I managed to find a big pile of fragments. And what did I find here?

The Lone Sliver

That’s right: one measly fragment! And not only that, it was a wash bone (meaning I found it in the wash. These fragments are pretty much disregarded by the scientists because they’ve been washed away from their original burial site). Dr. Dave did manage to locate one of his old micro-sites. I guess that was something. So it sounds like the pickings were slim. I mean even if I can’t find something then neither can anyone else right? Have you forgotten who were talking about here? Other people found:

A partial foot bone

Another partial limb element

A horse tooth

Another horse tooth

A camel tooth

Some bone from a carnivore

As if that wasn’t bad enough, on the first Saturday foray, someone found a fragment of bone up on a hill top. When they picked it up, they could see there was more bone inside the hill. So they call over Dr. Dave as is standard operating procedure. He starts brushing and scraping away the dirt and the more he does the more bone he finds. That’s when young upstart Gary arrives on the scene and commandeers the operation (at least, that’s what went down according to Dave). Soon enough they had uncovered the complete foot of an ancient horse. But that wasn’t all. Next to the horse’s heel bone was a partial jaw and teeth of an antelope. But the pit was saving the best for last. As they finished uncovering the horse’s hoof, there is another bit of bone at its tip. But even these seasoned veterans of the field were unprepared for what came next. Inch by meticulous inch that little bit of bone slowly grew into the complete lower jaw of an enormous cat. The jaw bone was not only long but it was incredibly deep, twice as deep as the jaws of other feline predators known from the formation. As Xiaoming, the resident carnivore expert, leaned in and looked at the cat’s characteristic teeth, he was blown away. Calling upon his expert knowledge of carnivores, he suspected that the cat was not only new to the area, but that it also may have been a progenitor of the Machairodont lineage of saber tooth cats.

Full view of the site. The horse bones take up the center of the shot and the cat jaw is to the top left.

The cat jaw that everyone was fixated on.

So not only did someone find a miniature multi-species bonebed, but they also probably found one of the most exciting fossils ever found in the park. I what was old Doug left with? Bupkis:

A partial scapula or shoulder blade. This is the big bone i fond up on the ridge. It’s either a gomphothere, rhino, or uber camel. There’s too little to tell for sure.

The distal end of a limb bone crushed flat.

A fragment of bone bearing the gnaw marks of an ancient dog.

A fragment of a cannon bone from one of the Miocene’s many diminutive pronghorn antelopes.

As for the crushed limb bone? Well in the field I thought it might’ve been part of a calcanium (heel bone). Then a girl who’s been on this trip many times more than I have, didn’t think so. Geez, am I so bad that I’m being corrected by a high school girl? And well what a surprise she was right. Even though Dave and Gary thought it could be a calcanium, Xiaoming thought it was the end of a long bone (which I came to agree with). People kept telling me that I did find something, but that provided little (if any) consolation. Everyone knows that my little pile of crap was getting hucked aside like yesterday’s garbage because it wasn’t as complete or informative as what other people found. I pleaded with Xiaoming to at least keep the chew bone (that could be used for educational purposes) but in the end it probably fell by the wayside as well.

“But Doug”, I hear you saying, “you found that camel bone last year, can’t you be proud of that?” Well yeah, I mean, I am proud of it, but I’m afraid that I will become that guy who has one moment of glory and just coasts on it. You know the kind of guy who looks for every opportunity to bring it up and everyone else is like “oh God, again with that stupid camel bone?” Besides, I remember Xiaoming telling me that it wasn’t as well preserved and many of the diagnostic features were gone. That cat jaw will probably get prepped ASAP back at the museum, cataloged, and published while my camel bone will get stuffed in a cabinet and forgotten about. I say that I believe every fossil is important, but I’m sure if Orwell were a paleontologist, the barn in Animal Farm may have read “all fossils are important but some are more important than others.” And indeed that is true but hopefully you get the idea. But in the end what’s it matter. It’s not like there’s anything real at stake besides the bruised pride of some depressed wannabe.

I could say that the social situation was a bit better. The education staff were friendlier (especially Karen and Brayden) and somewhat more concerned (after my episode up on the ridge that is). Field trip veteran Bridget was nice as usual when we are actually interacting. And I managed to chat with Dave and Xiaoming, for however briefly. I don’t know, I was still feeling the same as the other trips. Watching some of these people interacting so strongly with each other (staff or otherwise), there was a general atmosphere of comradery that only comes from them doing this year after year. These folks have only known me for a grand total of 71/2 days spread out over 3 years. Though I guess it’s really my fault. This lousy asperger’s syndrome of mine makes it more difficult for me to engage in basic social exercises and the usual result is people thinking I’m a little off. So really, it’s my own damn fault, not everyone else’s, that I don’t feel like I belong. A few folks showed some concern, but since they don’t know me that well it’s not their fault for not knowing that when I utter the words “nothing” or “fine”, I’m anything but. Expecting that of strangers is again my failing.

All my nagging and bemoaning aside, I’d do this trip again in a heartbeat. The scenery and landscape alone is worth it. Not only that, but it’s such a great opportunity to go look for fossils with the actual scientists. Great lot they are, from the sagely aura of Dave to the soft spoken wisdom of Xiaoming to the regular guy feel of Gary to even the charmingly thick accent of that one woman (oh man, I’m probably gonna die for that last one).  And since I want to collect fossils here someday for my museum, it’s probably great that I’m getting familiar with the place. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to do it next year. The museum will be having its centennial next year and as part of that they are hosting the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s the same time as when the Red Rock Canyon trip takes place. Naturally, SVP has priority. So I’ll have to go two years before I can again answer the siren call of the Mojave Desert and it’s ancient secrets. At least they were nice enough to give us all a good run this weekend before the looming dry spell.

From left to right: Aisling Farrell, Dave Whistler, Gary Takeuchi, Matt the Guy, and Guillermo(?)

Till next time!

Hey there every peoples!

This post has been a long time coming. I did my research for it over 3 months ago! But school really kept me busy. I am now failing hard my trig and chem classes. Normally the Noonday Demon would use this to torment me, but since i have chosen a different path it hasn’t bugged me that much (though the Demon does have other aspects of my psyche to stay occupied with). Enough time has passed. It’s high time i got around to talking about a very unique fossil sight here on the Central Coast.

Tar pits. Now what did you immediately start thinking of when i said that? No doubt you were thinking about one of the most famous fossils sites in the world, Rancho La Brea. Discovered in the early 20th century, the tar pits have churned out over one million fossils of plants and animals from the late Pleistocene, 10-40 thousand years ago. The tar oozing out of the ground is the remains of crude oil that found it’s way to the surface. This tar was collected in the early 20th century to pave streets and roads (that’s how the fossils were found). Rancho La Brea dominates the discussion about tar; hell now a days it’s hard to talk about the Pleistocene in general without Rancho La Brea finding it’s way into the conversation. It’s status in the world of paleontology is so ingrained that it’s easy to forget that Rancho La Brea is rather limited in it’s information. Obviously it doesn’t speak for the whole Pleistocene epoch, only the final stretch. Nor does it represent animals in north America, only California. In fact, not even California. Rancho La Brea is a snapshot of the Los Angeles Basin 10-40 thousand years ago. Nothing more. In fact, it’s not even the only asphaltum site in California (let alone the world) to produce fossils. So why does it get all the attention and fanfare? True, it is the largest and best preserved tar pits deposit, and one of the largest and best preserved fossil sites in the world. But why dos that somehow make it the champion over everything else? Why is it when a new Pleistocene treasure trove is discovered (like Fairmead Landfill and Snowmass Village), it is always slapped with the description “it could rival the world famous La Brea Tar Pits”? This is like how whenever a new theropod is discovered it’s always being compared to T. rex. It’s just monotonous and adds nothing to the discussion, except maybe commentary in an over-hyped yet completely nonexistent competition. As you all know, I’m about what is outside the mainstream, the unsung tales of the places and animals that get little time (if any at all) in the spotlight. And that’s what I’m here to share with you.

As i mentioned above, Rancho La Brea isn’t the only tar pit site in California with literal skeletons in their closets. California is home to some of the richest oil fields in North America (at least it was at some point), and with that much black stuff in the ground it was bound to pop up in other places. Rancho La Brea is in fact only one of four fossil-bearing tar seeps in California. Two are found in Kern County, relatively close to each other. One lies along California Highweay 58 inthe McKittrick oil field. Today, the rolling hills host dozens of oil rigs, slowly bobbing up and down like a novelty drinking bird. A bronze plaque marks the site where hundreds of ice age fossils were dredged from the sticky black ooze. The other site was found a shorts ways down the valley near the town of Maricopa. Like McKittrick, it produced many fossils of dire wolves, bears, lions, horses, bison, and other creatures. Finally, the last of the fossil tar pits sites actually resides here on the central coast, on the southern end of Santa Barbara County.

In the early 20th century, the demand for asphalt in a rapidly developing California was astronomical. Wherever tar was to be found, it was to be pulled from the earth by any means. Carpinteria was the perfect spot. The city is named after the Spanish word for carpenter. This name alludes to the Chumash and their great wood working skills, specifically in building plank canoes (Tomole in the native tongue). One of the most ubiquitous features of the plank canoe was the material used to to caulk the planks. The Chumash used tar that they found along the beach as a sealant to make the canoes water tight. Not only that, but they used it as an everyday adhesive, for everything from making water bottles to securing arrowheads to making game pieces. They even chewed lumps of asphalt like gum! So it was fairly obvious that Carpinteria was an ideal spot to harvest asphalt. Several large pits were opened, almost resembling quarries. Workers used giant, heated spatula-like shovels to extract the tar from the earthen mass. At one point Carpinteria was home to one of the biggest asphalt mines in the world.

Carpinteria asphalt mine, 1900

As with the other sites, eventually animal bones and plant remains were discovered in the tar. But something was off. Hardly any bones of the legendary and charismatic megafauna were found. Mostly the remains of smaller mammals and birds were turning up. Plant remains were found as well, but not in the quantities found at Rancho La Brea or elsewhere. Compared to even Maricopa, Carpinteria seemed bereft of an intriguing and important fossil assemblage. Why? How were the other tar pits able to yield impressive fossils of ice age beasts while the Carpinteria assemblage looks like the collection of an amateur naturalist?  I intend to show you why, and to also show you that Carpinteria’s fossils are every bit as interesting and important as all the other sites.

Paul Collins, curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, was nice enough to help me my efforts to bring this unique site to light. Not only did he provide me with many wonderful paper, but he even took me behind the scenes to photograph the specimens! And his awesomeness doesn’t end there. When i visited, he was working o identifying 9,000 bird remains dug up in a cave on the Channel Islands. This work ill help us understand the changes the faunas of the islands may have undergone through time. It’s almost like paleontology! But alas we are here to talk about the fossils from the tar pits. I’ll start with the big guys first, since there aren’t that many of them.

There are between 3 and 6 species of large mammals identified from the Carpinteria deposits. Unfortunately they are all known from very limited and fragmentary remains. The horse appears to be most well represented, known by a number of limb elements. While no solid id can be made, it does most resemble the western horse, Equus occidentalis. Bones referable to Odocoileus were found, but so far cannot be distinguished between white-tail and mule deer. Camelops, the big camelid of the American Pleistocene, is known from a single vertebra. Bison may have been around as well, as hinted at by a navicular-cuboid (bone from the ankle joint). A fragment of skull with a milk tooth may have belonged to the formidable American lion. Finally, the dire wolf rounds out the large mammals, being represented by a couple upper jaw fragments and a possible limb bone (and maybe something else, see photo below). All in all, the material representing the popular megafauna could hardly be called enviable, consisting of bits and pieces. But by no means was Carpenteria a bust. It’s treasures just exist on a smaller scale.

Foot bone of an extinct horse.

A vertebra in proper need of identification. In a paper, it was referred to Camelops sp. But in the storage tray it was labeled as bison. Anyone out there got any ideas?

A calcaneus from a large hoofed mammal, either horse, bison, or camel.

A baculum (or penis bone) from a large wolf, possibly a dire wolf.

Small animal remains are far more numerous. Coyotes and gray foxes are well represented. Another common species is the striped skunk, with the spotted skunk being much rarer. A single calcaneus (heel bone) of the badger is known. Rodents were as abundant as ever, with gophers, mice, voles, and squirrels. Reptiles such as lizards, turtles, and snakes make an appearance, though not that common. The ornate shrew was present. But where the tar seeps really shine is the birds.

Two of several striped skunk skulls found at the site

Lowers jaws of the ornate(?) shrew

Gray squirrel teeth

To date, 79 species of birds have been identified from the Carpinteria tar pit. Most of them are alive today and any birder would be able to spot them (assuming this birder discovered time travel that is). There are so  many birds i don’t know where to start. Well for starters, one bone has been identified as a pelican. Raptors are especially prevalent, with the bald eagle, golden eagle, cooper hawk, sharp-shinned hawk, and barn owl inhabiting the paleoenviornment. California condor and Merrium’s Teratorn (Teratornis ) also joined the ranks of the avifauna.

A metatarsal of the most famous of ice age birds, Merriam’s Teratorn (Teratornis merriami)

Bones from an ancient roadrunner.

Proximal humerus (end of upper arm bone that connects to the shoulder) of an extinct stork.

Woodpecker skull

Thigh and foot bones from the band-tailed pigeon. Bask in the glory of Paleo Pigeon!

The local streams, ponds, and beach front were home to pelicans, rails, and ducks. The woodlands must have been alive with the calls of king birds, western meadow larks, crows, scrub jays, and finches. Turkeys and road runners foraged on the forest floor. Wood peckers would have been busy carving out nests while band-tailed pigeons gave them all that funny look of theirs.

Plant fossils may be on par with birds in terms of abundance. Pine cones are plentiful in the deposit, most belonging to the Monterey pine. Cypress cones have also been found, as well as the remains of oak, manzanita, juniper, and fir. These plants reveal that Carpinteria was cooler and wetter during this time period. Indeed, it may have resembled the present day Monterey Peninsula.

One of the numerous Monterey Pine cones.

An oak leave. Sorry for the picture, but the leaf was too delicate to remove from it’s vial.

A bunch of seeds from the Manzanita plant.

But that’s not all. There is a rather curious addition to the fossil assemblage. In the tar pit scientists found lots of shells of invertebrates. Probably not too surprising except for the fact that these were marine organisms. To top that off, the asphalt even yielded a few pieces of whale bone. How could this have happened? The Pleistocene is often referred to as the ice age. But it was actually a series of ice ages separated by warmer stretches of time known as inter-glacial periods. Some of the inter-glacial periods were warm enough to melt the polar ice caps a little and raise sea level. This caused some coastal areas to be underwater. Carpinteria is close enough (hell it’s practically on the beach) to have been submerged during one of these periods. But there is sill some mystery as to how the fossils got there. Was the asphalt trap active during the submerged stage, trapping live marine animals? Or were these the remains of animals resting on the sea floor that were later subsumed by the asphalt when the seep became active? Perhaps future research provide the answer.

Marine gastropods (snails).

An unusual looking bivalve. I have a couple modern shells like this, but i don’t know the scientific name.

A couple pieces of bone (probably rib) from a whale

Carpinteria’s tar pit biota is a gem no matter how you look at it. Many may think it’s not as impressive as the other tar pit deposits, especially Rancho la Brea. But the scientific and educational value (not to mention interest) of something should not be judged based on how it measures up to the well known articles. Ice age deposits, from Diamond Valley to Snowmass Village and beyond, are always reported to “rival the famous La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles”. So the site can’t be judged based on there own merit, they have somehow compare and compete with Rancho la Brea? This is just like how news outlets are always trying to link, if not out right compare, every new theropod to Tyrannosaurus rex. Brian Switek as lamented this many times; can’t say i blame him given how pervasive the trend is. Comparing sites can be insightful and should be done, but not in this stupid competitive sense that people seem to think is the only way that matters. Every fossil, and every fossil locality, is unique and that is what makes them interesting. You can keep trying to compare to the bigger, the more complete, the “cooler”, the truth is that doesn’t achieve anything. One fossil site is not a representative for the ancient anymore than one theropod represents all meat eating dinosaurs. All are equally important and all have their own stories to tell. The famous and well known have had their stories told and retold countless times. Maybe it’s time we give them a break so that the many other wonderful places and creatures can have their chance to be heard.

I have learned a lot in researching this post. Sure, i finally gained a clear picture of what was found in the Carpinteria tar pits. But i like to think i got something more. I got to experience another piece of my heritage, as well as the heritage of everyone on the Central Coast. We had our own version of Rancho la Brea, not as big and flashy but every bit important. I learned that fossils are always fascinating because they are fossils. It doesn’t matter if it’s big or small, or if it has a backbone or not, or if it’s a fragment or a whole skeleton. It is a piece of prehistory, a record of a living, breathing organism who lived so long ago as to make human history look like the blink of an eye. A tiny brachiopod is just as amazing as the biggest dinosaur because both made the impossible journey through millions of years of geologic upheaval to arrive at the present day. And that is what i want to teach people, whether it be with my little blog here or the museum i someday hope (a fools hope at that) to create. I hope to give a stage for the fossil mammals of California and Oregon, the Dinosaurs of the American West and even Baja California, and the strange creatures who preceded the monsters of the Mesozoic. But above all, i want to give a voice to the forgotten denizens of the Central Coast. A very big thanks goes to Paul Collins and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. I am both humbled and grateful that they shared this important piece of our heritage with me, so that i could share it with you.

Till next time!

Hey there every peoples!

Well that’s another year down! Sorry i haven’t posted as much as i should have. But i have been quite busy, especially with school. Thanks god it’s over (for now at least). I’m actually work on a huge post, probably against my better judgement. No doubt in over my head, i have been chipping away at it for the last week or so. But i didn’t think i’d get it in before year’s end. So i instead opted for a much shorter, quicker post that i have actually been meaning to do for some time now. That’s all i have for now so enjoy!

Now we know that museums are always complaining that they can only put a small portion their collections on display. That’s certainly true, but I still don’t think that’s any excuse for not trying to diversify their collections and instead opting for the same material everyone else displays. But there are many out there (sadly I’m amongst them for reasons you should already know by now) who can’t help but feel some resentment towards museums that keep all these fabulous relics of the earth had no way, seen only by the few scientists allowed access. How can people know what their heritage really entails? How can interested folk like me see the specimens, out of either sheer curiosity or to compare them with something they found? Well one possible solution is online databases.

For those of you who don’t know, there are several institutions out there who have moved their collection databases online. These can be easily searched by anyone, academic or otherwise. Now this certainly has the potential to ease the animosity that some like me possess by allowing us to see just what is behind locked doors. They can help us to better understand the breadth of the museum’s collection. Hell, it could allow us to discover specimens we never knew existed. Now of course this isn’t a complete fix. It still doesn’t compare to seeing the real deal, which remains sealed away. But something is better than nothing. Unfortunately, museums have been very slow to adopt this new method of outreach. And the few who have certainly leave room for improvement.

Listen to the bottom and work your way up shall we? Sitting down at the bottom is the Museum of the Rockies. This lame entry into the world of online databases consists of a static list of genera and species ordered alphabetically. So right off the bat there’s a problem: you cannot narrow or broaden your search. You’re stuck with whatever they put in place. But that ain’t the worst of it. Their list only goes up to K, with only one entry (Knightia, famous herring of the Green River formation). The Museum of the Rockies is mostly Honda one the largest collections of dinosaurs in the world, including vast holdings of Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex. And yet they’re not even represented on this list. The individual specimen logs consist of unspaced rows of information. Each specimen appears to have an accompanying photo but it is broken. Why even bother in the first place? Probably their only saving grace is that they do give some detailed information about the specimen but that’s it. Banged up job doing their guys!

Not like any of the next entries are much better. In fact there’s quite a few that that fall into this level. First up we have the San Bernardino County Museum. It causes me great pain to write this because I really do like that place. Then a friendly knowledgeable staff and I think it has really cool fossils in the collection (which Eric was nice enough to show me a few of, that one time). But all their search consists of is a menu bar to select your department and then a single bar to enter a search keyword. And you really have to make sure you spell the word correct or try and anticipated the word even exists in the database. Individual profiles provide only the barest of information and no picture to speak of. Pretty much on par is the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. There is consists of three bars. The first one simply allows you to sort the listing by one of several categories. The next is a search bar to enter the specimen ID number (a useless feature if you’re not a scientist or familiar with the collection). The third is the same as the second but with the locality ID. This means that you can only use the first toolbar which then takes you to a set of rather confusing and rigid search parameters. Because you can’t simply leave the field blank, your results will get skewed most foul. And of course, no pictures. This is a tragedy because like the San Bernardino County Museum the place sounds like they have some really cool fossils in the collection. The San Diego Museum is barely a step above, with a few search bars of different categories. Like the others it displays the scantest, bare minimum type of information. Once again, this makes me sad because I know based on their excellent exhibit that they have some really unique and interesting fossils.

The final entry in the subpar department may surprise you. No better than these meager databases I have laid before you is the one and only American Museum of Natural History. You must be wondering “can such an important and reputable institution have a crappy online database?”  Turns out they can. Their basic search consists of little more than a keyword bar with a secondary bar that allows you to differentiate between “all specimens” and “image specimens”. Might as well just go with that over the advanced search. Three of the bars consist of catalog number, accension number, and “other numbers” (no seriously, that’s an option). I already established in the last paragraph why such choices are irrelevant and useless to the common man. The other three bars are for taxonomy, stratigraphy, and locality. As of the like that you better have all your spelling and names in order. Everything was possible but they actually provide less information than any of the places previously listed. You just get the component, the locality , collector , and catalog number. For some reason you only get the actual name of the species in the search, rather than its individual profile. Lastly some specimens do have photos but you can’t blow them up or anything. And they are too few and far between. You should think the place is esteemed as the American Museum of Natural History would do better.

So after all that griping did I really find anyone with a satisfactory online collections database? The answer is yes, actually. The first is the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology. The maid had an edge because they are a small museum but whatever . They have a good variety of fields to help you narrow your search in the individual profiles have all the relevant information. Not as detailed as the next two, but definitely a step in the right direction (and certainly more than most of the other guys we’ve talked about ). They have not a photo to speak of, but maybe this is because it’s relatively new. And besides that might get fixed in the near future (see below).

And now for the pinnacle, the best of what online collection databases has to offer.  They are tied with one another and it is safe to say that they are way ahead of the competition. They’re by no means perfect, but definitely the best we’ve got. I’m talking about the online collection databases for the California Museum of Paleontology (at UC Berkeley) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Both have quite similar layouts which may or may not be a coincidence considering they actually work. Each search offers a wide variety of choices to help you narrow your search. You could divide between vertebrates, invertebrates, or plants. You can search as much as an entire country or as little as an individual county. You’re not just restricted to general time frames; you can actually go down to the epoch if you need to. You can search the formation or if you know what you’re looking for just go with the genus or species. Now would be nice if you could narrow it down a little bit more to the member of the formation but hey you can’t have everything. Each individual profile offers an extensive range of information, the one they specimens slots are empty. If these can be filled they should because it makes a record looking complete; if it can’t be filled then it should just be labeled as unknown. Many specimens have photos that can even be blown up. But like the American Museum, they are a scarce commodity. With Berkeley in particular, they get a few demerits because there seemed to be a few specimens missing from the database. These are mainly specimens I’ve heard of from other people, such as specimens from the Pismo formation and placing fossils from the Guadalupe dunes. , Makes you wonder what else is been left out. So as you can see there is certainly room for improvement but I will tip my hat off to these two institutions for at least creating intuitive and even useful online databases.

Now before you start making excuses, like how they don’t have the time or resources or people to do such a thing, let me say that paleontology seems to be having a bit of an image problem as of late. Like I said, people who seem to have this kind of resentment towards museums because the majority of stuff cannot be seen. Online databases are a chance to at least stem that tide. One not the same as viewing the real thing, people would nonetheless be able to view all the specimens that a museum holds without all the trouble of trying to manage visitors to the collections. People are slow to adopt the “shared heritage” argument because they have no idea what the true extent of their heritage is. They need to be able to see that in one form or another, to truly understand it. And it might not be as hard to achieve as you might think. I have a camera, a flickr account (a pro account I might add), passion, and am willing to work for free. I mean I’m completely willing to devote my time and energy to helping museums bring their collections into the digital age. Hell I’ve been trying to do it with Andy Farke Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology. But I haven’t heard back from him in a while, that’s probably just because he’s been busy (at least as far as I can tell). It’s not like I would just photograph the Alf’s collection to be done with it. Anyone else out there, from San Diego, LA, to Berkeley, and maybe even beyond: I’d be more than willing to help you photograph your collections and plug them into an online database. I like taking pictures, I love fossils, and can’t wait to get into the world of paleontology, even if it’s as a volunteer (and let’s face it, you guys practically run on those!). I want to build my own museum because I want to share fossils with the people of the world. I want to give a platform to the fossils that are so often overlooked and not known because they’re in the collections were no one can even know they exist. But you have a chance to rectify that by creating online databases. We are still in the infancy of the digital revolution. Technology has already taken our field in ways we never thought possible. And now here is an opportunity easily within reach, to advance the cause of science even further. You can open the doors to the museum unseen without even turning a key. Bring your collections out of the dark and into the light of the public eye. Because how can people appreciate the fossil record when so much of it remains hidden?

Till next time!

Hey there every peoples!

I have really let this blog go. And I’m not happy about it. I seem to have a small cadre of followers and I feel I let you down. School and family issues have kept me tied up. Plus I have been working on this post on and off since January. It’s the longest one I have written yet. I hope it’s worth it!

What is it about dinosaurs? I often think that the reason I stick with fossil mammals over dinosaurs (at least in an official capacity. I still want to dig them up!) is because mammals simply make more sense. With dinosaurs there’s just all this fierce debate fueled by speculation and taxonomy is a complete mass. I pretty feel that if I get my Museum enterprise underway that I’ll just find dinosaurs and let other, more qualified people study them. So then I’ve find myself in a paradox, being a casual observer of dinosaurs and yet writing a lengthy in-depth essay covering one of the most hotly contended facets of dinosaur paleontology in recent times: the Toroceratops debate.

What is the Toroceratops debate? The debate surrounds the claim that instead of being a valid species, the late Cretaceous horned dinosaur Torosaurus was really just the final growth stage of Triceratops. Now there was a lot of outcry when this was first announced, mainly because of the people’s misconceptions that Triceratops was being sunk, not Torosaurus. But beyond the public scope in the academic arena (as well as the blogosphere) the discussion has raged over the validity of the idea. I remember when I first heard about the idea I didn’t really think much of it. At the timed I figured it was the most plausible of Horner’s wild and crazy synonymys. Back then it seemed to at least make more sense than his proposed pachycephalosaur ontogeny. But now after two years and really looking at both sides I now think that now “Triceratops is Torosaurus” is just as hard to swallow. nNow make sure you don’t have anything else on your plate because this is going to be a long one.

We must first start in the beginning, even before the original “Toroceratops” paper. For the better part of the last decade the intensely studied fauna of the latest cretaceous Hell Creek formation has been undergoing a second mass extinction. What I mean by that is many of the formation’s iconic dinosaurs have been sunk, synonomized (mostly by Horner and his colleagues) with other species. The first to go was Nanoyrannus. now believed to be a juvenile T-rex (and I will admit, it’s looking pretty solid). Next up on the list were Stygimoloch and Dracorex. These two dinosaurs, known as pachycephalosaurs or boneheads, were believed to represent two distinct taxa, closely related o the contemporary Pachycephalosaurus. In 2007 Jack Horner and Mark Goodwin proposed that these three dinosaurs are actually just growth stages of the same animal. I still find it a little hard to believe because in all pretty much the whole animal kingdom juveniles are not more richly ornamented than adults. The hadrosaur Anatotitan got  reclassified as a fully mature Edmontosaurus. At that rate it was only a matter of time before the horned dinosaurs would get thrown on the chopping block. For at least a decade Jack Horner and the Museum of the Rockies have been scouring the Hell Creek formation collecting every fossil they came across. This has given them an enormous hoard of fossils that allow them to really test ideas about dinosaur biology, ecology and behavior. One of the revelations to come out of all this material with the idea that Triceratops went through a rather weird ontogeny as it grew up. Babies were born with small brow horns and little spikes around the edge of their frill called epiossifications and small, straight horns. As the dinosaur grew its horns curved upward and it developed a short triangular nose stud. As they continue to grow the horns start to slowly droop back forward into the standard Triceratops position, the nasal stud grew into a long forward pointing horn,  and the epiossifications were absorbed into the bony frill. It’s certainly an extreme pattern, especially when compared with other horn dinosaurs. But the abundance of the fossils in the study made it clear that Triceratops had one hell of a growth curve. Just how weird is the point of contention in the current debate.

The growth series for Triceratops, as proposed by Horner and Goodwin. From Horner and Goodwin, 2006.

The absorption of epiossifications as Triceratops grew. From Horner and Goodwin, 2006.

The reason Horner and Scannella’s paper has caused such fevered discussion is because it proposes that late in life Triceratops went through yet another radical change: expanding a short saddle-shaped frill into a broad flat plate, its horns straighten and took on a steeper angle from the orbit, and split its epiossifications. Triceratops is one of the few horn dinosaurs that has a solid neck frill. Everyone else has huge holes in their parietals (Just so that we are clear, the frill is made of 3 main bones: the parietal forms the center and top of the frill, while the two squamosals make up the sides. All animals have these bones. It’s just that in horned dinosaurs these bones were greatly expanded to form the frill), believed by many scientists to have helped reduce the weight of the frill. Now it’s being argued that Triceratops did have a fenestrated frill but that it only developed way late in its life. So is all this possible? Let’s have a look at the evidence.

The biggest component is the frill. Triceratops’ frill was short and rounded with a somewhat deep saddle shape. It also has no or barely present epiossifications. Compare this to Torosaurus, whose frill looks more like the typical chasmosaurine frill. It is much larger, giving Torosaurus one of the largest skulls of any land animal. It is flat with squared off edges. In the skulls that exhibit epiossifications, Torosaurus has twice as many as Triceratops. And most obvious of all are the two large fenestrae in the middle of the parietal. The backbone of Horner and Scannella’s argument is skull histology. Histology is the practice of dissecting a fossil, cutting into it to analyze bone microstructure. Using this technique they found what they claim to be evidence that the frill of Triceratops was thinning to open into the huge holes, or parietal fenestrae, that are characteristic of Torosaurus. Well does it?

The top left specimen is from a juvenile Triceratops. The top right comes from a sub-adult Triceratops. The bottom left is also a sub-adult Triceratops. The bottom right is a Torosaurus. From Scannella and Horner, 2010.

The one on the upper left possesses an odd depression that H&S claim is the beginning of a fenestrae. I’m not so sure, the bone looks pretty distorted, and how did they rule out pathology or more likely, an artifact of preservation?The lower left specimen has a more blatant depression; H&S claim the bone broke away during fossilization because it was so thin. The lower right seems like the best of the group. It’s a full on fenestrae with a little bit of bone on the edge. Good good, that’s a fine bit of evidence. Is it concrete? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. How do we know these aren’t immature Torosaurus? Maybe it had small fennestrae as a juvenile and here we see it filling out in young adult hood. H&S claim that histology shows the Triceratops frill thinning in just the right places corresponding with the fenestrae in Torosaurus (but more on that in a little bit). Plus, there was something about their proposed growth series that bugged me. It may be significant or it may just be me reading too much into it. Here is their proposed growth series:

The proposed ontogeny for Triceratops, from baby to full adult (in this case, Torosaurus). From Scannella and Horner, 2010.

Notice anything, particularly with specimens G through J? Here, let me highlight it for you:

Highlighted version of the proposed ontogeny. From Scannella and Horner, 2010.

G’s frill has a very steep angle. H’s angle is more horizontal, like what we see in Torosaurus. Then suddenly I shoots right back up, before J goes back to the more relaxed angle. What was supposed to be going on there? I mean, the proposed growth changes aren’t extreme enough, now we’re adding in alternating frill angles? Going over that figure I kept hearing Homer Simpson in my head saying “Frill goes up. Frill goes down. Frill goes up. Frill goes down.” Or is this more of that infamous Triceratops variation? More on that later.

H&S also say that the histology revealed Triceratops horns to still be quite plastic (or rather metaplastic) so that it could in fact change into the Torosaurus horns. Here is a section of triceratops horn and frill under the microscope:

Horn core histology, beginning with a juvenile. From Scanella and Horner, 2010.

The loosely knit cells indicate that the bone is still growing. As we follow the progression, the bone becomes more and more tightly knit. The final two images are densely packed, which, according to H&S, means it is mature.

This all sounds pretty interesting. But the big question raised by all this was: is there an intermediate? H&S say they have found over 100 new Triceratops specimens since 1999, with a couple Torosaurus thrown in. Combine that with all the specimens in other museums and you have what sounds like a very good sample size (especially for a fossils species). Surely there must be at least one or even a few examples out there of a Triceratops morphing into a Torosaurus. Indeed H&S in their paper cite such a transitional fossil: Nedoceratops. Wait, what?

I’m heeeeeeeere! (took this at the Smithsonian waaaay back in 2007. Sadly was my only trip to the East Coast ever…)

Nedoceratops is, hands down, the most controversial horned dinosaur out there. It’s had 3 names slapped on it throughout its history. Scientists still can’t decide what the hell is up with all the holes in its frill. And like most fossils, it’s incomplete. So when H&S claim it’s really an intermediate between Triceratops and Torosaurus, it’s gonna raise a few eyebrows. But H&S play it straight, claiming that Nedoceratops has all the features of a maturing Triceratops caught in the act of changing into Torosaurus. And thus begins the next chapter in this epic debate.

In 2011, a year after the Toroceratops paper was published, Andrew Farke of the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology published a paper on the problematic skull. Except that Farke’s paper went in a different direction. He argues that Nedoceratops is indeed a valid genus, based on subtle features of the skull. He also included a rebuttal of the “Toroceratops” hypothesis. Things were about to get interesting.

Perhaps the most notorious feature of Nedoceratops is all the holes in its frill. There are 3 in total. So what? Most ceratopsians have holes in there frills. But Nedoceratops has holes in its squamosals, a very unusual feature. Plus it has only one small slit in its parietal. The holes in the squamosals were long thought to be wounds from jousting with rivals. However, Farke couldn’t find any evidence of trauma. The holes edges were smooth and the shape of them was irregular overall. The irregular shapes led Farke to conclude that they were not morphological traits and relegated them to some as yet unknown pathology. This left the hole in the parietal. It’s a small slit, but Farke was able to discern that this one was likely a morphological trait. But all ceratopsians with parietal fenestrae have two. Why doesn’t Nedoceratops? The best answer:

The skull of Nedoceratops. The gray portions indicate parts that are restored. From Farke, 2011.

So whether Nedoceratops had a second slit or none at all, we may never know. The rest of the skull, on the other hand, still holds clues as to the animal’s status. The nasal horn is very short and round, resembling a mound more than the classic Triceratops horn. The brow horns (the left horn is mostly reconstructed, but the right horn is mostly complete) are very erect, whereas the horns of Triceratops are angled forward. And the surface of the frill is quite vascularized and rugose in texture. Juvenile bone usually has a “pebbly” texture because it is still growing. The deep vascularization and little to no sign of cranial sutures led Farke to conclude that Nedoceratops was a mature adult and thus had no more growing to do. It seems Nedoceratops had finally gotten back on its feet.

Near the end of his paper Farke discusses the taxonomy of latest cretaceous ceratopsians in North America. He goes on to list some criticisms of the “Toroceratops” hypothesis. First, since he was able to determine that Nedoceratops is a distinct genus, “Toroceratops” loses its transitional stage. Moreover Farke notes that Triceratops has 5-6 epiossifications (the bumps around the edge of the frill) while Torosaurus has spaces for 10 to 12. He points out that in well sampled ceratopsids there is no adding of epiossifications during ontogeny (though Scanella would later claim it might be happening in Anchiceratops and Agujacertops. This was quite recent, so it obsiously hasn’t had time to be properly tested). The number of epiossifications stayed the same all through the growth trajectory, with maybe a variation of one. So if the “Toroceratops” debate is correct, it would mean Triceratops went through the very unusual process of doubling its epiossifications. Remember that Triceratops almost fully absorbed it’s epiossifications as it grew; so first it would resorb these bones and then double them. Weird. Another odd trend, if correct, is the addition of the parietal fenestrae. Again Farke points out that in ceratopsians for which we have a good growth series, the parietal fenestrae appear early in the growth trajectory. As noted earlier Triceratops is unique in having a solid frill. That it retained a solid frill for most of its life before putting a couple holes in it is highly unusual. Finally, whether the “pebbly” texture heralds the development of the fenestrae. Centrosaurus apertus has this texture on its squamosals and yet not one specimen has squamosal fenestrae. This suggests that the “pebbly” texture may not be a sure fire indicator of fenestration.

Farke had made his case. Not only did he provide evidence that Nedoceratops was a valid genus after all, but also made the first in-press challenge to “Toroceratops”. And like any good science article, it was questioned. But in this case, it was by H&S. They wasted no time tearing into the article. They published their rebuttal the very same year.

In it, they reinforce their claim that Nedoceratops is the long sought after transitional form. Before the year was out they published a paper reaffirming their original assessment that Nedoceratops is the transitional form and that Torosaurus remains sunk. They claim a minute depression in the back of the frill is in the right place to open into fenestrae:

The slit on the parietal of Nedoceratops. The dotted line marks where H&S think a fenestra is forming. From Scannella and Horner, 2011.

The lack of a nasal horn? Nope, that’s apparently too variably to use as a taxonomic marker:

A selection of nasals from various horned dinosaurs. The first comes from a Triceratops in the Smithsonian. The second is Nedoceratops. The third is Triceratops, though it was once thought to be a separate species (Ugrosaurus). The last one is Torosaurus. From Scannella and Horner, 2011.

And now for the epiossifications. The fact that Torosaurus has twice as many as Triceratops has been  a major kink in the “Toroceratops” idea. H&S attempted to solve this by hypothesizing that Triceratops doubled the number of epiossifications as it grew (as if all the other late-in-life changes weren’t enough). Their reasoning? One is that the frill is heavily vascularised, with lots of blood flow being directed to the epiossification or the slots for them. They say this is to fuel the splitting of one epiossification into two.

Quite a tall claim. They back up this idea with MOR 2975. This is an epiossification that appears to have two peaks instead of one, perhaps indicating that it was splitting. That’s great and all, but it’s far from conclusive. Remember, these guys claim to have collected 100 new triceratops specimens. With such a huge sample size it is a little troubling that can’t find more than one example. Indeed, the fact they can’t find a transitional form other than the always dubious Nedoceratops doesn’t look good for them.

Is this eppoccipitol in the process of splitting into two? From Scannella and Horner, 2011.

We now arrive to the most recent (see: a year ago) play in the great “Torosaurus” debate. In early 2012 Nick Longrich and Daniel Field published their paper on the issue. They did a survey of 30 Triceratops and 6 Torosaurus skulls. They were examined for a suite of morphological characteristics and came up with a simple regimen to assess synonomy. It consists of three parts: range (do they live in the same place), intermediates (where does it fit on the current understand of the growth trajectory? Does it neatly slide in or does it look out of place?), and age (how old is the animal? Do all specimens turn up younger or older than specimens of the other?). First off, they plotted the known ranges of Triceratops and Torosaurus. While most of their range overlaps, only triceratops is found in the very north, while only Torosaurus is found in the south. While there may be something going on, Longrich and Field concede that the overlap mostly likely passes the test.

The known ranges of Triceratops and Torosaurus. From Longrich and Field, 2012.

Next is the intermediate test. As stated for something to be an intermediate it needs to fit in its proposed slot in the growth series. Nedoceratops, they argue, doesn’t pass muster because many of the proposed transitional features don’t properly match the Torosaurus morph. This is especially true of the frill fenestration. The fenestrae of Torosaurus are on the parietal. But the fenestra (at least the outlines claimed by H&S) is small and shaped nothing like those in Torosaurus. They concluded based this and other aberrant features, contra Farke, that Nedoceratops is merely a sick Triceratops. But what about the depressions in Triceratops frills? Longrich and Field tried to find them and found that the depressions didn’t line up with Torosaurus. They straddle the parietal and squamosal, something not seen in any other ceratopsid. Lastly they  argue that in the over 100 years that fossils of these animals have been collected, including the 100 at the Museum of the Rockies, no clearly, indisputable transitional fossil has been found. Paleontology can always surprise us, but given the time and number of specimens found, it’s looking pretty bleak. Longrich and Field conclude that the synonomy argument fails this test.

Comparison of Triceratops (YPM 1823) with Torosaurus (ANSP 15192). Those depressions don’t look like they are in the right place. From Longrich and Field, 2012.

Finally is age, which for those very few who haven’t been following closely, is the cornerstone of the debate. But how do you age a specimen? H&S think histology is the only real way. Remember, they claim that Torosaurus has more mature looking bone than Triceratops, ergo it’s the adult stage. But Longrich and Field took a different approach. They tried to look at the anatomy of the skulls themselves. They examined specimens, quite a few of which were collected in the old days, for telltale signs of aging (Longrich said that because they weren’t cutting into the bone for histology they were able to examine a broader range of specimens). They examined bone texture along the surface of the skulls. According to their hypothesis, younger animals have a rough bone texture because they are still growing. Conversely, older animals have smoother texture because they are done adding bone. Secondly, they looked at skull suture fusion. Dinosaurs, like many other animal groups, were born with their skulls and limb bones (the ends of them rather) unfused. As the animal grows and matures, the bones fuse together and upon adulthood are fully melded together. While unable to give a precise age, the presence of unfused bones is usually an indicator that the animal wasn’t mature yet.  So Longrich and Field set about the task of examining these traits in Triceratops and Torosaurus. If all the specimens of Triceratops turned out to be younger than all the specimens of Torosaurus, then that would be pretty good evidence for synonomy. But if there was one Torosaurus that proved to be younger than a Triceratops, then that would be a good case for them being separate. A juvenile Torosaurus is often cited as being the deal breaker for the “Toroceratops” hypothesis. Did they find it?

Their study found that there are many fully mature Triceratops specimens out there (according to their criteria, at least). This rather complicates the picture. All Triceratops must still be somewhat young if they were to grow into Torosaurus. But mature Triceratops isn’t enough. There needs to be an immature Torosaurus. Well as part of their study Longrich and Field examined two historic specimens: YPM 1830 and YPM 1831. These two skulls have been on display at Yale’s Peabody Museum since the days of O.C. Marsh. Unfortunately, the skulls are partials and were heavily reconstructed with plaster, even covering up the original bone.* Andrew Farke had a chance to look at them up close and tried to discern what was real and what was not. And because he’s such an awesome guy, he posted his notes online for everyone to access:

YPM 1830, the holotype specimen for the now defunct Torosaurus “gladius”. White areas indicate what he discerned to be real fossil. From the personal notes of Andrew Farke.

YPM 1831, a pivotal part of the “Toroceratops” debate. White areas indicate what he discerned to be real fossil. From the personal notes of Andrew Farke.

*(This illustrates wonderfully why original fossils shouldn’t be restored. If you’re going to do a full reconstruction, make casts and use those. This leaves the original fossils intact and available for study, without having to try and decipher which is real and what isn’t. If only more people understood this *coughLoneStarcough*)

YPM 1831 is the real star here. First it’s enormous, something like 8 feet long! But that alone isn’t what makes it interesting. Longrich and Field found what looked like unfused margins in the skull. They also found the rough texture that suggests the animals was still growing. Because of its size, they classified it as a sub-adult, an animal that is nearing maturity. This is huge. It’s a legitimate challenge to the “Toroceratops” hypothesis since there must be no immature specimens of Torosaurus to make it work. Longrich and Field do caution, however, that this may need more work due to another specimen, this one at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. This Torosaurus specimen is almost half the size of YPM 1831 and yet its degree of skull fusion and bone texture suggest an adult. Does this mean that Torosaurus started out big and shrank as it matured, like that one species of frog? Of course not. It could simply be a runt. Or maybe it’s a female, like Peter Dodson once suggested, meaning Torosaurus experienced a good degree of sexual dimorphism. Nonetheless, Longrich and Field had made their challenge. Were things finally coming to a head?

Front part of the skull of YPM 1831. According to Longrich and Field, the unfused bones in the nasal (as well as elsewhere) indicate an immature animal. From Longrich and Field, 2012.

YPM 1831 compared to ANSP 15192. Note the striking difference in size. From Longrich and Field, 2012.

This is a debate held at Yale shortly after Longrich and Field’s paper had been published. It pits Nick Longrich against Jack Horner in a primeval battle for supremacy. The next leg of the debate is summed up well in the words of Horner in this video:

Ok, imma ‘bout to go on a little rant here. I talk about the debate and the responses to the Longrich and Field paper below. If you want to skip my rambling, go right ahead.

What really sticks in my craw is Horner’s callous attitude towards certain fossils. Where he says Yale should stuff all their specimens in storage and go get new ones. How can you say that? Though sad to say this isn’t the first instance of him expressing his opinion that certain fossils (ones without data) are worthless. The first I heard was in a debate at the London Natural History Museum. It was over whether T. rex was a predator or scavenger, but they talked about other parts of paleontology as well. At one point Horner said that “All that stuff at the American Museum? You can throw all that away.” Seriously? No wait, it gets better! The ever  prolific dinosaur writer Brian Switek interviewed Horner on his blog back in 2008 . The first commenter gave us this anecdote:

Horner: “First off, that quote is in reference to specimens taken from the field before the proper scientific studies have been completed.”

Last semester, Horner spoke to my museum studies class at Montana State University about his paleontology field work and museum work at the Museum of the Rockies. First thing, he held up a piece of bone and asked, “Anyone know what this is?” “Vertebrae,” “dinosaur bone,” “T. rex toe bone,” – various answers. Horner replied, “It’s nothing,” and proceeded to slam the bone onto a table extremely hard, breaking into pieces. “When this bone was found, nobody recorded its location or other relevant data. It’s a worthless piece of bone, because it is out of context.” Then he proceeded to stress the importance of documentation in museum work.

And then Traumador the Tyrannosaur chimed in:

Mike V-

Having fossil hunted in both the same region of Montana as Dr. Horner typical does his work, and further north in Alberta there are soooooooo many random disarticulated bones in areas that you can afford to smash some (especially those taken out of stratographic context), and still give three times as many to the local skool (though in Alberta due to the laws involved with fossil conservation it’d be easier and more LEGAL for a curator to smash a fossil than give it away to a non museum entity).

Also his point about documentation is totally founded. The Royal Tyrrell has BOXES and BOXES of useless chum bones that the public brings in. Without a location or associated material frankly hadrosaur vertabrae, rib, or digit bones are really worthless. Heck even Albertosaur teeth fall into the category of useless. They make great additions to the education departments collection of them (some 20+ of them when I left the museum), but beyond that if we don’t know where their coming from they teach us NOTHING. We can’t even safely say their Albertosaur in fact!

So fossils are not only eligible for mothballing and ditching, but apparently wanton destruction is now acceptable?  All fossils are important. Everyone is an irreplaceable record of a world that vanished long before our own. They all have something to tell us about the ancient earth. Now let’s be clear: I fully understand the importance of field data. I try to record as much as I can whenever I collect fossils. But I find it simply inexcusable to imply that just because a fossil doesn’t have that data it can be tossed aside or even destroyed. Especially if that fossil was collected a century ago when they had no way of knowing how important field data was. They can be used for education, display, or any number of things (use your imagination!). And they could still have scientific value. My buddy Eric Scott said that “some data is better than no data at all”. He then went on to explain that excluding certain things because they do not meet your standards means you’re artificially reducing your sample size. He then described and instance where a scientist only used dates obtained by only one method and then acted surprised when her results were skewed. Again, I fully acknowledge how important field data i. If your worried about people messing with that record, try to explain how they can rectify the issue. For example, on my first Manix trip, Eric Scott explained how he’d love to get a “public curation” plan going. The idea is that regular people can go look for fossils, and if they find something, they leave it in place and notify the museum. Or explain to people that there are free gps apps for smart phones. If they bring the fossils in they can at least record its position. But what you shouldn’t do is iply that certain fossils are worthless and expendable. You never know how people will interpret something. For fucks sake, look at the snafu with your original “Toroceratops” paper! I may not have been Horner’s biggest fan, but this attitude if his makes me respect him much less. I honestly cannot imagine how someone can think that fossils can be sorted into “good” and “bad” and the bad ones suffer for it. Again, what kind of message does that send to the public? And how would you feel if that huge collection you have built for over a decade were, in the future, considered worthless because you did some they didn’t approve of? Fossils are totally unique. They are pieces of our ancient heritage. Not curiosities that we can arbitrarily abandon because it may not meet their standard of worth.

The responses Horner used at that debate are the same ones he and Scanella brought up when the paper was published: “Those variables are too variable!” That’s right. They claim that the timing of skull suture fusion is highly variable. They claim to have specimens that are really small yet have fully fused skulls and very large specimens with unfused skulls (though in the video, Horner claims this is probably due to taphonomy, but whether that has to do with suture  fusion is yet to be demonstrated). They also dismiss bone texture, insisting that histology is the only sure fire way to age a specimen. But how reliable is it? In their paper, Longrich and Field point out that in both histology studies done by Horner and Scanella they only tested one specimen of Torosaurus. This is such a puny sample size and frankly to think one specimen represents the norm is shoddy work. But in the debate Longrich shows a sheep bone that has what is thought to be immature and mature textures in the same bone! In the paper, they refer to a study about how types of strain can create different looking bone microstructure. He rightly points out that histology could be useful, but it needs to be ironed out and demonstrated in modern animals before we can apply it to extinct animals with any kind of certainty.

And how does Horner respond? He just smiles and says “We have those.” “We’ve done that.” “We don’t just do that.” It’s maddening! But this has been a supreme complaint of everyone (at least on the Torosaurus side) in the debate. It feels like Horner and Scanella are using cheap tactics to deflect criticism. When Farke and Longrich & Field came up potential diagnostic features, they simply say those features are too variable. Then how do we divide taxa? How do we tell one animal from another when one of the animals apparently exhibits unparalleled individual variation? They maintain that to do so you need stratigraphy, taphonomy, ontongeny (through histology, of course), and geography to assess dinosaur taxonomy. (see, this is why field data is important, to test stuff like this) But are these late cretaceous dinosaurs so homogenous that we need all that just to be able to identify the damn thing? I know you’re not supposed to argue from personally incredulity (don’t worry, I’ll atone for it later), but I guess I’m just having trouble wrapping my head around the concept that identification rests on everything except the actually gross morphology of the animal.

And at the end of the debate Longrich blasts Horner for what has been another complaint from the Torosaurus camp. In this debate, and elsewhere, H&S claim they have the specimens that neatly prove their hypothesis and disproves everyone else. Except that no one else has seen these. In the debate Horner whines that it takes a long time. Yeah it does and it sucks, but this is scientific discourse. Other people need to be able to see it so they can assess for themselves. Also so they know you aren’t just pulling stuff out your ass. Maybe you really do have all those specimens that could lay the debate to rest. Great! Publish them! What’s holding you back? Hell as Ach noted in his rant, it deosn’t have to be super professional, it could just be a photo essay on the internet show the full range of variability you keep your 100 triceratops specimens possess. We’re not talking about building a sky scraper here, just photographing fossils. Hell, all you really need an enthusiast with a camera and a flickr account. Like me (right know I’m photographing specimens in the Raymond Alf Museum’s collection for their online database). But plain and simple citing unpublished specimens leaves the rest of us with nothing to go on but your word. This is like all those math tests I took growing up telling me to show my work. You guys need to show your work. I know I know, it takes a long time. Well until shit actually gets published don’t act surprised when people have trouble believing you about these phantom specimens.

One argument for the synonymy is that Triceratops is very common while Torosaurus is very rare. People argue that most animals don’t survive to adulthood, therefore we shouldn’t be surprised that we have very few adult Triceratops (Torosaurus). True, most animals don’t make it to maturity. But then why is Triceratops such an outlier? The majority of the fossil record presents the opposite scenario: we mostly find adults while juveniles are rare. Hell they’re often a big deal whenever they are found. Maybe there is some taphonomic bias at work in the fossil record and it would be extremely weird that Triceratops figured out how to beat it. Another lkitte quirk is just what Torosaurtus is supposed to be a mature form of. In the Yale debate Horner touches on a revelation that was produced by the Hell Creek Project. Apparently the two known species of Triceratops were not contemporary as was long thought. Instead, Triceratops horridus is the oldest, found in the lower part of the Hell Creek. Next comes an unnamed intermediate that’s in the middle. And finally we have Triceratops pororsus at the top of the formation, living in the very last moments of the Cretaceous. Which one of these is Torosaurus supposed to be the adult of? This part may take a while to answer. And Zach suggested that we may have more specimens of Torosaurus then we realize. He notes that several skulls (including the one crowning the famous skeletal mount at the American Museum of Natural History) bear many anatomical similarities to Torosaurus. Unfortunately, at least a couple of these specimens don’t have the crucial parietal. I wonder what might turn up if these fossils were subjected to histology (unlikely, since they are also historic specimens). Are these animals in fact Torosaurus? It will be very difficult to say without that critical middle bone (They were restored with solid frills because they were assumed to be Triceratops) but I think it is an interesting idea that out to be followed up on. Or not. After all they have no data, so they are just useless hunks of rock who have no business being in the scientific discussion…

So where does the debate go from here? Basically each side has laid down what it would take to convince them: either an unmistakable juvenile Torosaurus or an unambiguous transitional skull between Triceratops and Torosaurus. Both sides no doubt will continue to butt heads over the identity of these two stupendous animals. Meanwhile the debate will continue to be discussed by everyone else. In a recent paper Darren Naish and his colleagues recently wrote a paper arguing that the “species recognition” hypothesis (which Horner is also one of the biggest proponents of)  doesn’t really have the same explaining power as sexual selection. Part of the paper argues that the late life ontogenetic hypothesis is in contradiction to species recognition. For starters, if there was only one species of ceratopsian (as opposed to two or even three) living in late Cretaceous North America, who was Triceratops trying to tell itself apart from? More importantly is the question of mate selection. Fossils show that many dinosaur lineages were able to breed before reaching skeletal maturity. If the “Toroceratops” idea were correct, animals looking to breed would be able to choose from short-frilled, long-frilled, and everything in-between. Naish suggests “…the ontogenetic morphing hypothesis is in direct contradiction with the species recognition hypothesis since the latter requires that members of a species are enough alike that we can obviously identify the anatomical features that allowed them to distinguish conspecifics from heterospecifics.” An interesting idea; we’ll have to see how this might play out in the “Toroceratops” debate, if at all. It was just a passing mention in a paper dealing with sexual selection as the best explanation for weird structures in dinosaurs. I can’t wait to see what the heavy hitters in the discussion come up with!

The reconstructed skeleton of Yoshi’s Trike, a triceratops found in 2010. While the size of an elephant (no matter, an elephant would still kick his ass!), histology says he still had some growing to do. From Flickr user WernerG2011

And that pretty much sums up the great thing about this debate. It has for the most part taken place out in the open. The initial paper that started the whole mess is paywalled, sure. But every subsequent paper has been published in an open access journal, where anyone can see it. Plus exchanges have been published on the Walking with Dinosaurs site as well as the debate above, which the folks at Yale had the good sense and decency to put on the ever popular Youtube. And I think it wonderfully illustrates how science is supposed to work (ok, mostly, obviously not in the case of citing unpublished specimens). Too often I see people jump on a paper and act like it’s concrete in its assertions. They treat it as absolute instead of a stepping stone. Science is based on evidence and when new evidence comes to light we have to discard old ideas. It’s not a rigid process either. A discovery is made and then it’s basically up in the air until further testing either proves or disproves it. What would science be like if every paper was just accepted right off the bat and treated as absolute truth? It would be this stiff, boring rigmarole that shambled from one stepping stone to the next. Science is supposed to be a fluid and vibrant river of ideas, a place where hypotheses and theories race along the surface. Sometimes they hit a rock (opposing ideas or evidence) and sink but it still had a hell of a ride before then. Horner and Scanella put forward a very compelling idea, but it’s one that will require a lot of work to make it float. Their case is not as airtight as they make it out to be (then again, neither is Farkes, or Longrich & Fields, or anyone else’s). The river of science flows through parts unknown and it’s impossible to say where it will go. Supposedly Scanella is finally gonna publish that long awaited paper on Triceratops biostratigraphy this year. Personally I can’t wait to see what it says, not just about the “Toroceratops” debate but about Triceratops. And maybe in the future they’ll have more concrete evidence of their assertions. Or maybe their detractors will. Or maybe H&S won’t find any. Regardless where this ends up, I think this will go down as one of the greatest debates in the annals of paleontology. Until then, the river of science will keep on flowing.

Tis next time!

Addendum (or in this case, addendumb): It has been brought to my attention that i have it all wrong. In my effort to cover one of the most furious and dynamic debates in paleontology i seem to have completely misunderstood how science is supposed to work. First off, it takes time. A lot of time. Not everything gets published at once. So it was asinine of me to think that citing unpublished specimens in discussions outside of print was unprofessional. Scientists don’t have that much time and resources to be able to write peer-reviewed articles, so not everything is made known right away. Secondly is specimens. Thinking that all fossils are important is apparently misguided. Only ones that meet current academic standards are worth saving. Everything else can be ignored. I’d like to continue thinking that every fossil can serve a purpose and thus deserves to be saved, but i don’t have a degree or  a museum full of specimens, so obviously I’m in no position to decide what is important and what isn’t. Finally, i learned that the demon makes me an ill-informed asshole. I tried my damnedest to approach this academically. I didn’t just read books, websites, or blog posts. No, i spent a crap load of time pouring over the actual scientific articles, making sure i got everything right and and trying to emulate academic discussion. But it was all in vein. The demon got the better of me and in turn made me demonize a hard working and apparently good-natured scientist who is likely far more important to the science than I could ever hope to be. So when writing a post, it’s best to actually contact them and get their personal statement on such things so that you don’t end up talking trash about them or their work and make your yourself look like some mean-spirited amateur. If i can’t impartially describe and discuss peer-reviewed research then what hope for me is there? I was obviously way in over my head on this one. It was terribly foolish of me to think i could actually approach dinosaurs academically. Hell, i can barely hold my own with fossil mammals, so it’s my fault for not realizing it sooner.

I’ll leave this up for a little while for the few who read my ramblings. Then I’ll tear it down. Because if my writings are as good as some say then it obviously has no place here.

Hey there every people!

Nestled within the heart of the Mojave Desert is the small town of Barstow. This place of 15,000 people is not favorably thought of by some and most just pass through on their way to Las Vegas. But outside of Barstow lies one of the great natural treasures in southern California: Rainbow Basin.

This area, under the stewardship of the BLM, is home to spectacular geology with dozens of faults creating an awe-inspiring landscape of tilted rocks with alternating layers of green, brown, and red. But this place is also known for fossils. Since the early 20^th century it has been a hotbed of paleontological activity. It is the type locality for the Barstovian North American Land Mammal Age. To date hundreds of fossil have been found, with more being found every year. Thanks to the workings of the San Bernardino County Museum and the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology (as well as it’s correlation with parts of the Caliente Formation here on the Central Coast), I have fallen in love with this Paleontologist/Geologist’s dream come true. But a mysterious creature has haunted me for about as long as I have been fascinated by it. And today I can finally put the specter to rest.

It began long ago when I attended my first Fossil Fest at the Raymond Alf Museum. I was drooling over (as I usually do when I go there) the cast skeleton of the bear dog Amphicyon mounted over a fossil track way. A woman walked up and began marveling at it as well. Someone started talking with her (I assumed he was a docent) and explained how it was a top predator. I chimed in and said how the dogs and cats of period were simply put to shame by such an awesome beast. The guy then said that even the saber toothed cats of the period were no match for it. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. What sabertooths? The only cat I knew of from Barstow was Pseuaelurus. And he was no saber tooth! I didn’t think much of it then and went back to enjoying the festival.

But as the years dragged on the phantom sabertooth kept hounding me. Fliers put out by the San Bernardino County Museum for trips to and lectures on Barstow always mentioned saber toothed cats in their usual list of extinct animals. I was often hearing references to the phantom sabertooth but never did they mention who. I was finding nothing on the internet. It was driving me nuts! So finally on the 2013 Lake Manix trip I asked Eric Scott. His response:

“Blah blah blah blah fossil horses blah blah blah Tommy’s Burgers blah blah blah blah then Kathleen said ‘ewww, that’s not a pineapple!’ blah blah blah Pseudaelurus may have had elongated and slightly flattened canines like a clouded leopard blah blah blah blah Tommy’s Burgers blah blah blah…”

Interesting. So like a clouded leopard Pseudaelrus may have had elongated but still fairly conical teeth. Sounds pretty sweet, but I ran into a snag: all specimens i have found pictures of have short conical teeth like the cougar it’s so often compared to:

The beautifally preserved skull of Pseudaelurus from Barstow. From the collections of the San Bernardino County Museum

A lower jaw of Pseudalurus from Barstow. From the collections of the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology

Skull of Pseudaelurus from New Mexico, with a conical tooth design. From Rothwell, 2001

A tooth tentatively assigned to Pseudaelurus from Barstow. From the collections of the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology

Even if it did have longer clouded leopard-like teeth, I doubt anyone would confuse it with a sabertooth. And on the 2013 Barstow trip Eric had nothing to tell me. It seemed I was going to be tormented by this faceless spectral sabertooth for all time. But not long after the trip, I had a revelation during one of my notorious random google searches. The answer to the riddle of the Phantom Sabertooth of Barstow had been under my nose all these years.

A long time ago I came across an anthology of publications from the 2006 Desert Symposium. I rifled through it but it was soon buried in my ever expanding library of pdf files. And so it was eventually forgotten. While out in Rainbow Basin Eric and Kathleen passed around a biostratigraphic chart of the Barstow fauna. I only took a cursory glance at it as I was trying to set up a shot for my photography class. And in yet another google search I came across the symposium collection again. Curiously, it came up in a search for “Barstow sabertooth”. It probably didn’t mean much (in these searches, two widely separated, unrelated words could cause the paper to appear in the search results) but I checked it out anyway. And lo and behold there was the exact same biostratigraphy chart from the trip! I started scouring right away, looking for any unfamiliar names. At first I didn’t find anything, just the usual suspects. But then I stumbled across a name, tucked away between Pseudaelurus intrepidus and Hyphippus affinis, with a temporal span so small it’s no wonder it’s so easy to miss. It simply said “Nimravides sp.” I couldn’t believe it. I had finally found the identity of the Phantom Sabertooth of Barstow! But this didn’t mean it was truly over.

Megafaunal biostratigraphy from the Barstow formation of California. From Pagnac and Reynolds, 2006

Nimravides? He once lived in Barstow? I had no idea and this may be part of the reason why it remained in the shadows for so long. True cats didn’t arrive in America until about 15 mya. Before that cat-like nimravids filled the role. I have found little about that group from this time period. And since Barbaurofelis came here from Asia, I had thought the group had died out here until its arrival. And the big sabertooths that we know so well like Megenterion, Machairodus, and Nimravides, didn’t show up (again, from Asia, I’m told) until the late Miocene, a few million years after the Barstovian ended. Now when Nimaravides is mentioned, it’s always referring to the lion-size badass of the late Miocene, known from some very good specimens found in the Midwest. But never before had I heard of it from the middle Miocene.

A skull of Nimravides at the American Museum of Natural History. Image from Wikipedia

Jaw of Nimravides from Kansas

Possible jaws of Nimravides from Red Rock Canyon State Park, California. It may be something else; Xiaoming Wang said they’re still working it out. From an article by Dave Whistler

Another clue may be in the brief description offered in the paper. They say the species of Nimravides (They can’t be too specific, probably because there haven’t been enough fossils found so far to allow precise identification) was small in size, between a lynx and a small cougar. I’d say we’re dealing with an animal roughly 35 to 100 pounds. That’s barely on par with Pseudalurus, who is described as the size of a cougar or leopard. While a sabertooth, it’s hard to imagine how it can compete with the somewhat larger (and much more common) Pseudaelurus, the numerous dogs ranging from fox to wolf, and the giant bear dog. And the other clue may be in its presence on the chart:

Check out “Nimravides sp.” highlighted in red. From Pagnac and Reynolds, 2006

Look how short its temporal span is. Does this mean that all fossils of this animal were found in one very narrow strip of the formation? I don’t think so. Look at all the species’ time ranges. They are much longer,  spanning hundred of thousands of years. This is allowed thanks to decades of geological and paleontological research, with hundreds of specimens found. And Nimravides’ span is really no longer than a couple of other species on there. It is much more likely that this animal is known from very few specimens, maybe even just one. I have not been able to find it, with  the Raymond Alf, San Bernardino County, UCMP, and American Museum’s online databases turning up nothing (not surprising, given how bad the database is for the later). Or maybe there were more than one specimen and perhaps they were all found in the same quarry, which could account for the limited time range. It’s possible, but until these few specimens get published (in the scientific literature or otherwise) it may be a while before the answer comes to light.

And with the close of this mystery my understanding of Barstow fossils grows a little more. And my fascination with them even more so. My phantom critter has a name now and yet it remains elusive. The single or few specimens known are currently MIA, hiding in some forgotten corner down in the depths of a sprawling museum. Not only that, but I have found no mention of any specimens found, so I guess no others have been found since the ones barely mentioned in the biostratigraphy graph. Maybe one day i might be able to go to Barstow and try to pick up his trail. But it seems that for the foreseeable future, “Nimravides sp.” will remain the Phantom Sabertooth of Barstow.

Till next time!

Hey there every peoples!

I have really let this blog go. And I’m not happy about it. I seem to have a small cadre of followers and I feel I let you down. School and family issues have kept me tied up. Plus I have been working on this post on and off since January. It’s the longest one I have written yet. I hope it’s worth it!

What is it about dinosaurs? I often think that the reason I stick with fossil mammals over dinosaurs (at least in an official capacity. I still want to dig them up!) is because mammals simply make more sense. With dinosaurs there’s just all this fierce debate fueled by speculation and taxonomy is a complete mass. I pretty feel that if I get my Museum enterprise underway that I’ll just find dinosaurs and let other, more qualified people study them. So then I’ve find myself in a paradox, being a casual observer of dinosaurs and yet writing a lengthy in-depth essay covering one of the most hotly contended facets of dinosaur paleontology in recent times: the Toroceratops debate.

What is the Toroceratops debate? The debate surrounds the claim that instead of being a valid species, the late Cretaceous horned dinosaur Torosaurus was really just the final growth stage of Triceratops. Now there was a lot of outcry when this was first announced, mainly because of the people’s misconceptions that Triceratops was being sunk, not Torosaurus. But beyond the public scope in the academic arena (as well as the blogosphere) the discussion has raged over the validity of the idea. I remember when I first heard about the idea I didn’t really think much of it. At the timed I figured it was the most plausible of Horner’s wild and crazy synonymys. Back then it seemed to at least make more sense than his proposed pachycephalosaur ontogeny. But now after two years and really looking at both sides I now think that now “Triceratops is Torosaurus” is just as hard to swallow. nNow make sure you don’t have anything else on your plate because this is going to be a long one.

We must first start in the beginning, even before the original “Toroceratops” paper. For the better part of the last decade the intensely studied fauna of the latest cretaceous Hell Creek formation has been undergoing a second mass extinction. What I mean by that is many of the formation’s iconic dinosaurs have been sunk, synonomized (mostly by Horner and his colleagues) with other species. The first to go was Nanoyrannus. now believed to be a juvenile T-rex (and I will admit, it’s looking pretty solid). Next up on the list were Stygimoloch and Dracorex. These two dinosaurs, known as pachycephalosaurs or boneheads, were believed to represent two distinct taxa, closely related o the contemporary Pachycephalosaurus. In 2007 Jack Horner and Mark Goodwin proposed that these three dinosaurs are actually just growth stages of the same animal. I still find it a little hard to believe because in all pretty much the whole animal kingdom juveniles are not more richly ornamented than adults. The hadrosaur Anatotitan got  reclassified as a fully mature Edmontosaurus. At that rate it was only a matter of time before the horned dinosaurs would get thrown on the chopping block. For at least a decade Jack Horner and the Museum of the Rockies have been scouring the Hell Creek formation collecting every fossil they came across. This has given them an enormous hoard of fossils that allow them to really test ideas about dinosaur biology, ecology and behavior. One of the revelations to come out of all this material with the idea that Triceratops went through a rather weird ontogeny as it grew up. Babies were born with small brow horns and little spikes around the edge of their frill called epiossifications and small, straight horns. As the dinosaur grew its horns curved upward and it developed a short triangular nose stud. As they continue to grow the horns start to slowly droop back forward into the standard Triceratops position, the nasal stud grew into a long forward pointing horn,  and the epiossifications were absorbed into the bony frill. It’s certainly an extreme pattern, especially when compared with other horn dinosaurs. But the abundance of the fossils in the study made it clear that Triceratops had one hell of a growth curve. Just how weird is the point of contention in the current debate.

The growth series for Triceratops, as proposed by Horner and Goodwin. From Horner and Goodwin, 2006.

The absorption of epiossifications as Triceratops grew. From Horner and Goodwin, 2006.

The reason Horner and Scannella’s paper has caused such fevered discussion is because it proposes that late in life Triceratops went through yet another radical change: expanding a short saddle-shaped frill into a broad flat plate, its horns straighten and took on a steeper angle from the orbit, and split its epiossifications. Triceratops is one of the few horn dinosaurs that has a solid neck frill. Everyone else has huge holes in their parietals (Just so that we are clear, the frill is made of 3 main bones: the parietal forms the center and top of the frill, while the two squamosals make up the sides. All animals have these bones. It’s just that in horned dinosaurs these bones were greatly expanded to form the frill), believed by many scientists to have helped reduce the weight of the frill. Now it’s being argued that Triceratops did have a fenestrated frill but that it only developed way late in its life. So is all this possible? Let’s have a look at the evidence.

The biggest component is the frill. Triceratops’ frill was short and rounded with a somewhat deep saddle shape. It also has no or barely present epiossifications. Compare this to Torosaurus, whose frill looks more like the typical chasmosaurine frill. It is much larger, giving Torosaurus one of the largest skulls of any land animal. It is flat with squared off edges. In the skulls that exhibit epiossifications, Torosaurus has twice as many as Triceratops. And most obvious of all are the two large fenestrae in the middle of the parietal. The backbone of Horner and Scannella’s argument is skull histology. Histology is the practice of dissecting a fossil, cutting into it to analyze bone microstructure. Using this technique they found what they claim to be evidence that the frill of Triceratops was thinning to open into the huge holes, or parietal fenestrae, that are characteristic of Torosaurus. Well does it?

The top left specimen is from a juvenile Triceratops. The top right comes from a sub-adult Triceratops. The bottom left is also a sub-adult Triceratops. The bottom right is a Torosaurus. From Scannella and Horner, 2010.

The one on the upper left possesses an odd depression that H&S claim is the beginning of a fenestrae. I’m not so sure, the bone looks pretty distorted, and how did they rule out pathology or more likely, an artifact of preservation?The lower left specimen has a more blatant depression; H&S claim the bone broke away during fossilization because it was so thin. The lower right seems like the best of the group. It’s a full on fenestrae with a little bit of bone on the edge. Good good, that’s a fine bit of evidence. Is it concrete? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. How do we know these aren’t immature Torosaurus? Maybe it had small fennestrae as a juvenile and here we see it filling out in young adult hood. H&S claim that histology shows the Triceratops frill thinning in just the right places corresponding with the fenestrae in Torosaurus (but more on that in a little bit). Plus, there was something about their proposed growth series that bugged me. It may be significant or it may just be me reading too much into it. Here is their proposed growth series:

The proposed ontogeny for Triceratops, from baby to full adult (in this case, Torosaurus). From Scannella and Horner, 2010.

Notice anything, particularly with specimens G through J? Here, let me highlight it for you:

Highlighted version of the proposed ontogeny. From Scannella and Horner, 2010.

G’s frill has a very steep angle. H’s angle is more horizontal, like what we see in Torosaurus. Then suddenly I shoots right back up, before J goes back to the more relaxed angle. What was supposed to be going on there? I mean, the proposed growth changes aren’t extreme enough, now we’re adding in alternating frill angles? Going over that figure I kept hearing Homer Simpson in my head saying “Frill goes up. Frill goes down. Frill goes up. Frill goes down.” Or is this more of that infamous Triceratops variation? More on that later.

H&S also say that the histology revealed Triceratops horns to still be quite plastic (or rather metaplastic) so that it could in fact change into the Torosaurus horns. Here is a section of triceratops horn and frill under the microscope:

Horn core histology, beginning with a juvenile. From Scanella and Horner, 2010.

The loosely knit cells indicate that the bone is still growing. As we follow the progression, the bone becomes more and more tightly knit. The final two images are densely packed, which, according to H&S, means it is mature.

This all sounds pretty interesting. But the big question raised by all this was: is there an intermediate? H&S say they have found over 100 new Triceratops specimens since 1999, with a couple Torosaurus thrown in. Combine that with all the specimens in other museums and you have what sounds like a very good sample size (especially for a fossils species). Surely there must be at least one or even a few examples out there of a Triceratops morphing into a Torosaurus. Indeed H&S in their paper cite such a transitional fossil: Nedoceratops. Wait, what?

I’m heeeeeeeere! (took this at the Smithsonian waaaay back in 2007. Sadly was my only trip to the East Coast ever…)

Nedoceratops is, hands down, the most controversial horned dinosaur out there. It’s had 3 names slapped on it throughout its history. Scientists still can’t decide what the hell is up with all the holes in its frill. And like most fossils, it’s incomplete. So when H&S claim it’s really an intermediate between Triceratops and Torosaurus, it’s gonna raise a few eyebrows. But H&S play it straight, claiming that Nedoceratops has all the features of a maturing Triceratops caught in the act of changing into Torosaurus. And thus begins the next chapter in this epic debate.

In 2011, a year after the Toroceratops paper was published, Andrew Farke of the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology published a paper on the problematic skull. Except that Farke’s paper went in a different direction. He argues that Nedoceratops is indeed a valid genus, based on subtle features of the skull. He also included a rebuttal of the “Toroceratops” hypothesis. Things were about to get interesting.

Perhaps the most notorious feature of Nedoceratops is all the holes in its frill. There are 3 in total. So what? Most ceratopsians have holes in there frills. But Nedoceratops has holes in its squamosals, a very unusual feature. Plus it has only one small slit in its parietal. The holes in the squamosals were long thought to be wounds from jousting with rivals. However, Farke couldn’t find any evidence of trauma. The holes edges were smooth and the shape of them was irregular overall. The irregular shapes led Farke to conclude that they were not morphological traits and relegated them to some as yet unknown pathology. This left the hole in the parietal. It’s a small slit, but Farke was able to discern that this one was likely a morphological trait. But all ceratopsians with parietal fenestrae have two. Why doesn’t Nedoceratops? The best answer:

The skull of Nedoceratops. The gray portions indicate parts that are restored. From Farke, 2011.

So whether Nedoceratops had a second slit or none at all, we may never know. The rest of the skull, on the other hand, still holds clues as to the animal’s status. The nasal horn is very short and round, resembling a mound more than the classic Triceratops horn. The brow horns (the left horn is mostly reconstructed, but the right horn is mostly complete) are very erect, whereas the horns of Triceratops are angled forward. And the surface of the frill is quite vascularized and rugose in texture. Juvenile bone usually has a “pebbly” texture because it is still growing. The deep vascularization and little to no sign of cranial sutures led Farke to conclude that Nedoceratops was a mature adult and thus had no more growing to do. It seems Nedoceratops had finally gotten back on its feet.

Near the end of his paper Farke discusses the taxonomy of latest cretaceous ceratopsians in North America. He goes on to list some criticisms of the “Toroceratops” hypothesis. First, since he was able to determine that Nedoceratops is a distinct genus, “Toroceratops” loses its transitional stage. Moreover Farke notes that Triceratops has 5-6 epiossifications (the bumps around the edge of the frill) while Torosaurus has spaces for 10 to 12. He points out that in well sampled ceratopsids there is no adding of epiossifications during ontogeny (though Scanella would later claim it might be happening in Anchiceratops and Agujacertops. This was quite recent, so it obsiously hasn’t had time to be properly tested). The number of epiossifications stayed the same all through the growth trajectory, with maybe a variation of one. So if the “Toroceratops” debate is correct, it would mean Triceratops went through the very unusual process of doubling its epiossifications. Remember that Triceratops almost fully absorbed it’s epiossifications as it grew; so first it would resorb these bones and then double them. Weird. Another odd trend, if correct, is the addition of the parietal fenestrae. Again Farke points out that in ceratopsians for which we have a good growth series, the parietal fenestrae appear early in the growth trajectory. As noted earlier Triceratops is unique in having a solid frill. That it retained a solid frill for most of its life before putting a couple holes in it is highly unusual. Finally, whether the “pebbly” texture heralds the development of the fenestrae. Centrosaurus apertus has this texture on its squamosals and yet not one specimen has squamosal fenestrae. This suggests that the “pebbly” texture may not be a sure fire indicator of fenestration.

Farke had made his case. Not only did he provide evidence that Nedoceratops was a valid genus after all, but also made the first in-press challenge to “Toroceratops”. And like any good science article, it was questioned. But in this case, it was by H&S. They wasted no time tearing into the article. They published their rebuttal the very same year.

In it, they reinforce their claim that Nedoceratops is the long sought after transitional form. Before the year was out they published a paper reaffirming their original assessment that Nedoceratops is the transitional form and that Torosaurus remains sunk. They claim a minute depression in the back of the frill is in the right place to open into fenestrae:

The slit on the parietal of Nedoceratops. The dotted line marks where H&S think a fenestra is forming. From Scannella and Horner, 2011.

The lack of a nasal horn? Nope, that’s apparently too variably to use as a taxonomic marker:

A selection of nasals from various horned dinosaurs. The first comes from a Triceratops in the Smithsonian. The second is Nedoceratops. The third is Triceratops, though it was once thought to be a separate species (Ugrosaurus). The last one is Torosaurus. From Scannella and Horner, 2011.

And now for the epiossifications. The fact that Torosaurus has twice as many as Triceratops has been  a major kink in the “Toroceratops” idea. H&S attempted to solve this by hypothesizing that Triceratops doubled the number of epiossifications as it grew (as if all the other late-in-life changes weren’t enough). Their reasoning? One is that the frill is heavily vascularised, with lots of blood flow being directed to the epiossification or the slots for them. They say this is to fuel the splitting of one epiossification into two.

Quite a tall claim. They back up this idea with MOR 2975. This is an epiossification that appears to have two peaks instead of one, perhaps indicating that it was splitting. That’s great and all, but it’s far from conclusive. Remember, these guys claim to have collected 100 new triceratops specimens. With such a huge sample size it is a little troubling that can’t find more than one example. Indeed, the fact they can’t find a transitional form other than the always dubious Nedoceratops doesn’t look good for them.

Is this eppoccipitol in the process of splitting into two? From Scannella and Horner, 2011.

We now arrive to the most recent (see: a year ago) play in the great “Torosaurus” debate. In early 2012 Nick Longrich and Daniel Field published their paper on the issue. They did a survey of 30 Triceratops and 6 Torosaurus skulls. They were examined for a suite of morphological characteristics and came up with a simple regimen to assess synonomy. It consists of three parts: range (do they live in the same place), intermediates (where does it fit on the current understand of the growth trajectory? Does it neatly slide in or does it look out of place?), and age (how old is the animal? Do all specimens turn up younger or older than specimens of the other?). First off, they plotted the known ranges of Triceratops and Torosaurus. While most of their range overlaps, only triceratops is found in the very north, while only Torosaurus is found in the south. While there may be something going on, Longrich and Field concede that the overlap mostly likely passes the test.

The known ranges of Triceratops and Torosaurus. From Longrich and Field, 2012.

Next is the intermediate test. As stated for something to be an intermediate it needs to fit in its proposed slot in the growth series. Nedoceratops, they argue, doesn’t pass muster because many of the proposed transitional features don’t properly match the Torosaurus morph. This is especially true of the frill fenestration. The fenestrae of Torosaurus are on the parietal. But the fenestra (at least the outlines claimed by H&S) is small and shaped nothing like those in Torosaurus. They concluded based this and other aberrant features, contra Farke, that Nedoceratops is merely a sick Triceratops. But what about the depressions in Triceratops frills? Longrich and Field tried to find them and found that the depressions didn’t line up with Torosaurus. They straddle the parietal and squamosal, something not seen in any other ceratopsid. Lastly they  argue that in the over 100 years that fossils of these animals have been collected, including the 100 at the Museum of the Rockies, no clearly, indisputable transitional fossil has been found. Paleontology can always surprise us, but given the time and number of specimens found, it’s looking pretty bleak. Longrich and Field conclude that the synonomy argument fails this test.

Comparison of Triceratops (YPM 1823) with Torosaurus (ANSP 15192). Those depressions don’t look like they are in the right place. From Longrich and Field, 2012.

Finally is age, which for those very few who haven’t been following closely, is the cornerstone of the debate. But how do you age a specimen? H&S think histology is the only real way. Remember, they claim that Torosaurus has more mature looking bone than Triceratops, ergo it’s the adult stage. But Longrich and Field took a different approach. They tried to look at the anatomy of the skulls themselves. They examined specimens, quite a few of which were collected in the old days, for telltale signs of aging (Longrich said that because they weren’t cutting into the bone for histology they were able to examine a broader range of specimens). They examined bone texture along the surface of the skulls. According to their hypothesis, younger animals have a rough bone texture because they are still growing. Conversely, older animals have smoother texture because they are done adding bone. Secondly, they looked at skull suture fusion. Dinosaurs, like many other animal groups, were born with their skulls and limb bones (the ends of them rather) unfused. As the animal grows and matures, the bones fuse together and upon adulthood are fully melded together. While unable to give a precise age, the presence of unfused bones is usually an indicator that the animal wasn’t mature yet.  So Longrich and Field set about the task of examining these traits in Triceratops and Torosaurus. If all the specimens of Triceratops turned out to be younger than all the specimens of Torosaurus, then that would be pretty good evidence for synonomy. But if there was one Torosaurus that proved to be younger than a Triceratops, then that would be a good case for them being separate. A juvenile Torosaurus is often cited as being the deal breaker for the “Toroceratops” hypothesis. Did they find it?

Their study found that there are many fully mature Triceratops specimens out there (according to their criteria, at least). This rather complicates the picture. All Triceratops must still be somewhat young if they were to grow into Torosaurus. But mature Triceratops isn’t enough. There needs to be an immature Torosaurus. Well as part of their study Longrich and Field examined two historic specimens: YPM 1830 and YPM 1831. These two skulls have been on display at Yale’s Peabody Museum since the days of O.C. Marsh. Unfortunately, the skulls are partials and were heavily reconstructed with plaster, even covering up the original bone.* Andrew Farke had a chance to look at them up close and tried to discern what was real and what was not. And because he’s such an awesome guy, he posted his notes online for everyone to access:

YPM 1830, the holotype specimen for the now defunct Torosaurus “gladius”. White areas indicate what he discerned to be real fossil. From the personal notes of Andrew Farke.

YPM 1831, a pivotal part of the “Toroceratops” debate. White areas indicate what he discerned to be real fossil. From the personal notes of Andrew Farke.

*(This illustrates wonderfully why original fossils shouldn’t be restored. If you’re going to do a full reconstruction, make casts and use those. This leaves the original fossils intact and available for study, without having to try and decipher which is real and what isn’t. If only more people understood this *coughLoneStarcough*)

YPM 1831 is the real star here. First it’s enormous, something like 8 feet long! But that alone isn’t what makes it interesting. Longrich and Field found what looked like unfused margins in the skull. They also found the rough texture that suggests the animals was still growing. Because of its size, they classified it as a sub-adult, an animal that is nearing maturity. This is huge. It’s a legitimate challenge to the “Toroceratops” hypothesis since there must be no immature specimens of Torosaurus to make it work. Longrich and Field do caution, however, that this may need more work due to another specimen, this one at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. This Torosaurus specimen is almost half the size of YPM 1831 and yet its degree of skull fusion and bone texture suggest an adult. Does this mean that Torosaurus started out big and shrank as it matured, like that one species of frog? Of course not. It could simply be a runt. Or maybe it’s a female, like Peter Dodson once suggested, meaning Torosaurus experienced a good degree of sexual dimorphism. Nonetheless, Longrich and Field had made their challenge. Were things finally coming to a head?

Front part of the skull of YPM 1831. According to Longrich and Field, the unfused bones in the nasal (as well as elsewhere) indicate an immature animal. From Longrich and Field, 2012.

YPM 1831 compared to ANSP 15192. Note the striking difference in size. From Longrich and Field, 2012.

This is a debate held at Yale shortly after Longrich and Field’s paper had been published. It pits Nick Longrich against Jack Horner in a primeval battle for supremacy. The next leg of the debate is summed up well in the words of Horner in this video:

Ok, imma ‘bout to go on a little rant here. I talk about the debate and the responses to the Longrich and Field paper below. If you want to skip my rambling, go right ahead.

What really sticks in my craw is Horner’s callous attitude towards certain fossils. Where he says Yale should stuff all their specimens in storage and go get new ones. How can you say that? Though sad to say this isn’t the first instance of him expressing his opinion that certain fossils (ones without data) are worthless. The first I heard was in a debate at the London Natural History Museum. It was over whether T. rex was a predator or scavenger, but they talked about other parts of paleontology as well. At one point Horner said that “All that stuff at the American Museum? You can throw all that away.” Seriously? No wait, it gets better! The ever  prolific dinosaur writer Brian Switek interviewed Horner on his blog back in 2008 . The first commenter gave us this anecdote:

Horner: “First off, that quote is in reference to specimens taken from the field before the proper scientific studies have been completed.”

Last semester, Horner spoke to my museum studies class at Montana State University about his paleontology field work and museum work at the Museum of the Rockies. First thing, he held up a piece of bone and asked, “Anyone know what this is?” “Vertebrae,” “dinosaur bone,” “T. rex toe bone,” – various answers. Horner replied, “It’s nothing,” and proceeded to slam the bone onto a table extremely hard, breaking into pieces. “When this bone was found, nobody recorded its location or other relevant data. It’s a worthless piece of bone, because it is out of context.” Then he proceeded to stress the importance of documentation in museum work.

And then Traumador the Tyrannosaur chimed in:

Mike V-

Having fossil hunted in both the same region of Montana as Dr. Horner typical does his work, and further north in Alberta there are soooooooo many random disarticulated bones in areas that you can afford to smash some (especially those taken out of stratographic context), and still give three times as many to the local skool (though in Alberta due to the laws involved with fossil conservation it’d be easier and more LEGAL for a curator to smash a fossil than give it away to a non museum entity).

Also his point about documentation is totally founded. The Royal Tyrrell has BOXES and BOXES of useless chum bones that the public brings in. Without a location or associated material frankly hadrosaur vertabrae, rib, or digit bones are really worthless. Heck even Albertosaur teeth fall into the category of useless. They make great additions to the education departments collection of them (some 20+ of them when I left the museum), but beyond that if we don’t know where their coming from they teach us NOTHING. We can’t even safely say their Albertosaur in fact!

So fossils are not only eligible for mothballing and ditching, but apparently wanton destruction is now acceptable?  All fossils are important. Everyone is an irreplaceable record of a world that vanished long before our own. They all have something to tell us about the ancient earth. Now let’s be clear: I fully understand the importance of field data. I try to record as much as I can whenever I collect fossils. But I find it simply inexcusable to imply that just because a fossil doesn’t have that data it can be tossed aside or even destroyed. Especially if that fossil was collected a century ago when they had no way of knowing how important field data was. They can be used for education, display, or any number of things (use your imagination!). And they could still have scientific value. My buddy Eric Scott said that “some data is better than no data at all”. He then went on to explain that excluding certain things because they do not meet your standards means you’re artificially reducing your sample size. He then described and instance where a scientist only used dates obtained by only one method and then acted surprised when her results were skewed. Again, I fully acknowledge how important field data i. If your worried about people messing with that record, try to explain how they can rectify the issue. For example, on my first Manix trip, Eric Scott explained how he’d love to get a “public curation” plan going. The idea is that regular people can go look for fossils, and if they find something, they leave it in place and notify the museum. Or explain to people that there are free gps apps for smart phones. If they bring the fossils in they can at least record its position. But what you shouldn’t do is iply that certain fossils are worthless and expendable. You never know how people will interpret something. For fucks sake, look at the snafu with your original “Toroceratops” paper! I may not have been Horner’s biggest fan, but this attitude if his makes me respect him much less. I honestly cannot imagine how someone can think that fossils can be sorted into “good” and “bad” and the bad ones suffer for it. Again, what kind of message does that send to the public? And how would you feel if that huge collection you have built for over a decade were, in the future, considered worthless because you did some they didn’t approve of? Fossils are totally unique. They are pieces of our ancient heritage. Not curiosities that we can arbitrarily abandon because it may not meet their standard of worth.

The responses Horner used at that debate are the same ones he and Scanella brought up when the paper was published: “Those variables are too variable!” That’s right. They claim that the timing of skull suture fusion is highly variable. They claim to have specimens that are really small yet have fully fused skulls and very large specimens with unfused skulls (though in the video, Horner claims this is probably due to taphonomy, but whether that has to do with suture  fusion is yet to be demonstrated). They also dismiss bone texture, insisting that histology is the only sure fire way to age a specimen. But how reliable is it? In their paper, Longrich and Field point out that in both histology studies done by Horner and Scanella they only tested one specimen of Torosaurus. This is such a puny sample size and frankly to think one specimen represents the norm is shoddy work. But in the debate Longrich shows a sheep bone that has what is thought to be immature and mature textures in the same bone! In the paper, they refer to a study about how types of strain can create different looking bone microstructure. He rightly points out that histology could be useful, but it needs to be ironed out and demonstrated in modern animals before we can apply it to extinct animals with any kind of certainty.

And how does Horner respond? He just smiles and says “We have those.” “We’ve done that.” “We don’t just do that.” It’s maddening! But this has been a supreme complaint of everyone (at least on the Torosaurus side) in the debate. It feels like Horner and Scanella are using cheap tactics to deflect criticism. When Farke and Longrich & Field came up potential diagnostic features, they simply say those features are too variable. Then how do we divide taxa? How do we tell one animal from another when one of the animals apparently exhibits unparalleled individual variation? They maintain that to do so you need stratigraphy, taphonomy, ontongeny (through histology, of course), and geography to assess dinosaur taxonomy. (see, this is why field data is important, to test stuff like this) But are these late cretaceous dinosaurs so homogenous that we need all that just to be able to identify the damn thing? I know you’re not supposed to argue from personally incredulity (don’t worry, I’ll atone for it later), but I guess I’m just having trouble wrapping my head around the concept that identification rests on everything except the actually gross morphology of the animal.

And at the end of the debate Longrich blasts Horner for what has been another complaint from the Torosaurus camp. In this debate, and elsewhere, H&S claim they have the specimens that neatly prove their hypothesis and disproves everyone else. Except that no one else has seen these. In the debate Horner whines that it takes a long time. Yeah it does and it sucks, but this is scientific discourse. Other people need to be able to see it so they can assess for themselves. Also so they know you aren’t just pulling stuff out your ass. Maybe you really do have all those specimens that could lay the debate to rest. Great! Publish them! What’s holding you back? Hell as Ach noted in his rant, it deosn’t have to be super professional, it could just be a photo essay on the internet show the full range of variability you keep your 100 triceratops specimens possess. We’re not talking about building a sky scraper here, just photographing fossils. Hell, all you really need an enthusiast with a camera and a flickr account. Like me (right know I’m photographing specimens in the Raymond Alf Museum’s collection for their online database). But plain and simple citing unpublished specimens leaves the rest of us with nothing to go on but your word. This is like all those math tests I took growing up telling me to show my work. You guys need to show your work. I know I know, it takes a long time. Well until shit actually gets published don’t act surprised when people have trouble believing you about these phantom specimens.

One argument for the synonymy is that Triceratops is very common while Torosaurus is very rare. People argue that most animals don’t survive to adulthood, therefore we shouldn’t be surprised that we have very few adult Triceratops (Torosaurus). True, most animals don’t make it to maturity. But then why is Triceratops such an outlier? The majority of the fossil record presents the opposite scenario: we mostly find adults while juveniles are rare. Hell they’re often a big deal whenever they are found. Maybe there is some taphonomic bias at work in the fossil record and it would be extremely weird that Triceratops figured out how to beat it. Another lkitte quirk is just what Torosaurtus is supposed to be a mature form of. In the Yale debate Horner touches on a revelation that was produced by the Hell Creek Project. Apparently the two known species of Triceratops were not contemporary as was long thought. Instead, Triceratops horridus is the oldest, found in the lower part of the Hell Creek. Next comes an unnamed intermediate that’s in the middle. And finally we have Triceratops pororsus at the top of the formation, living in the very last moments of the Cretaceous. Which one of these is Torosaurus supposed to be the adult of? This part may take a while to answer. And Zach suggested that we may have more specimens of Torosaurus then we realize. He notes that several skulls (including the one crowning the famous skeletal mount at the American Museum of Natural History) bear many anatomical similarities to Torosaurus. Unfortunately, at least a couple of these specimens don’t have the crucial parietal. I wonder what might turn up if these fossils were subjected to histology (unlikely, since they are also historic specimens). Are these animals in fact Torosaurus? It will be very difficult to say without that critical middle bone (They were restored with solid frills because they were assumed to be Triceratops) but I think it is an interesting idea that out to be followed up on. Or not. After all they have no data, so they are just useless hunks of rock who have no business being in the scientific discussion…

So where does the debate go from here? Basically each side has laid down what it would take to convince them: either an unmistakable juvenile Torosaurus or an unambiguous transitional skull between Triceratops and Torosaurus. Both sides no doubt will continue to butt heads over the identity of these two stupendous animals. Meanwhile the debate will continue to be discussed by everyone else. In a recent paper Darren Naish and his colleagues recently wrote a paper arguing that the “species recognition” hypothesis (which Horner is also one of the biggest proponents of)  doesn’t really have the same explaining power as sexual selection. Part of the paper argues that the late life ontogenetic hypothesis is in contradiction to species recognition. For starters, if there was only one species of ceratopsian (as opposed to two or even three) living in late Cretaceous North America, who was Triceratops trying to tell itself apart from? More importantly is the question of mate selection. Fossils show that many dinosaur lineages were able to breed before reaching skeletal maturity. If the “Toroceratops” idea were correct, animals looking to breed would be able to choose from short-frilled, long-frilled, and everything in-between. Naish suggests “…the ontogenetic morphing hypothesis is in direct contradiction with the species recognition hypothesis since the latter requires that members of a species are enough alike that we can obviously identify the anatomical features that allowed them to distinguish conspecifics from heterospecifics.” An interesting idea; we’ll have to see how this might play out in the “Toroceratops” debate, if at all. It was just a passing mention in a paper dealing with sexual selection as the best explanation for weird structures in dinosaurs. I can’t wait to see what the heavy hitters in the discussion come up with!

The reconstructed skeleton of Yoshi’s Trike, a triceratops found in 2010. While the size of an elephant (no matter, an elephant would still kick his ass!), histology says he still had some growing to do. From Flickr user WernerG2011

And that pretty much sums up the great thing about this debate. It has for the most part taken place out in the open. The initial paper that started the whole mess is paywalled, sure. But every subsequent paper has been published in an open access journal, where anyone can see it. Plus exchanges have been published on the Walking with Dinosaurs site as well as the debate above, which the folks at Yale had the good sense and decency to put on the ever popular Youtube. And I think it wonderfully illustrates how science is supposed to work (ok, mostly, obviously not in the case of citing unpublished specimens). Too often I see people jump on a paper and act like it’s concrete in its assertions. They treat it as absolute instead of a stepping stone. Science is based on evidence and when new evidence comes to light we have to discard old ideas. It’s not a rigid process either. A discovery is made and then it’s basically up in the air until further testing either proves or disproves it. What would science be like if every paper was just accepted right off the bat and treated as absolute truth? It would be this stiff, boring rigmarole that shambled from one stepping stone to the next. Science is supposed to be a fluid and vibrant river of ideas, a place where hypotheses and theories race along the surface. Sometimes they hit a rock (opposing ideas or evidence) and sink but it still had a hell of a ride before then. Horner and Scanella put forward a very compelling idea, but it’s one that will require a lot of work to make it float. Their case is not as airtight as they make it out to be (then again, neither is Farkes, or Longrich & Fields, or anyone else’s). The river of science flows through parts unknown and it’s impossible to say where it will go. Supposedly Scanella is finally gonna publish that long awaited paper on Triceratops biostratigraphy this year. Personally I can’t wait to see what it says, not just about the “Toroceratops” debate but about Triceratops. And maybe in the future they’ll have more concrete evidence of their assertions. Or maybe their detractors will. Or maybe H&S won’t find any. Regardless where this ends up, I think this will go down as one of the greatest debates in the annals of paleontology. Until then, the river of science will keep on flowing.

Tis next time!

Addendum (or in this case, addendumb): It has been brought to my attention that i have it all wrong. In my effort to cover one of the most furious and dynamic debates in paleontology i seem to have completely misunderstood how science is supposed to work. First off, it takes time. A lot of time. Not everything gets published at once. So it was asinine of me to think that citing unpublished specimens in discussions outside of print was unprofessional. Scientists don’t have that much time and resources to be able to write peer-reviewed articles, so not everything is made known right away. Secondly is specimens. Thinking that all fossils are important is apparently misguided. Only ones that meet current academic standards are worth saving. Everything else can be ignored. I’d like to continue thinking that every fossil can serve a purpose and thus deserves to be saved, but i don’t have a degree or  a museum full of specimens, so obviously I’m in no position to decide what is important and what isn’t. Finally, i learned that the demon makes me an ill-informed asshole. I tried my damnedest to approach this academically. I didn’t just read books, websites, or blog posts. No, i spent a crap load of time pouring over the actual scientific articles, making sure i got everything right and and trying to emulate academic discussion. But it was all in vein. The demon got the better of me and in turn made me demonize a hard working and apparently good-natured scientist who is likely far more important to the science than I could ever hope to be. So when writing a post, it’s best to actually contact them and get their personal statement on such things so that you don’t end up talking trash about them or their work and make your yourself look like some mean-spirited amateur. If i can’t impartially describe and discuss peer-reviewed research then what hope for me is there? I was obviously way in over my head on this one. It was terribly foolish of me to think i could actually approach dinosaurs academically. Hell, i can barely hold my own with fossil mammals, so it’s my fault for not realizing it sooner.

Further addendum: Remember those squamosal fenestrae in Nedoceratops? Well i noticed them (most likely not the first) in the Torosaurus specimen at the Milwaukee Public Museum:

Torosaurus at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Unlike most other Torosaurus specimens, this one was found with some post cranial bones. From Flickr user AStrangerintheAlps.

Torosaurus at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Unlike most other Torosaurus specimens, this one was found with some post cranial bones. From Flickr user Idontlikeribena.

It’s hard to see the one on the left squamosal,  but it’s there. Both are irregular in shape. And they can’t be artifacts of preservation because if they were the museum would have filled them in (as can be seen in other parts of the restoration). I found no mention of these in the papers listed above. So we have two specimens that have squamosal fenestrae. So what do they mean? Is this just some pathology that has no bearing on the debate? Are they actual traits (or a species specific malady?) that suggest that Nedoceratops was a juvenile Torosaurus? Or could the Milwaukee specimen be the long lost second specimen of Nedoceratops? I don’t know. It’s just an interesting little fact, don’t know how that popped in there. But given how bad i did with the main post you should probably just ignore it.

Hey there every peoples!

I keep going on and on about this museum project of mine, but what exactly is the purpose of it all? Well the reason i use the most is to create a home for Central Coast fossils. But the Central Coast is really a spearhead for an even greater mission: to give a platform to the fossils who don’t seem to get much exposure

A daunting task to be sure. I am always fighting hard to hold the depression at bay and think positively. I am doing what i can to get the ball rolling. But one aspect that keeps  rearing it’s ugly head is that of my academic prowess. “Oh, you need to go to a higher college!”, “You need a degree!”, “You HAVE to have the education that only a snooty, overpriced school can provide!” Well i thought i had escaped such a predicament by  getting an AA in science from Cuesta and then try to find other avenues into the discipline. But i was told in  a recent email that i need to have some heavy duty background in geology to not only understand stratigraphy, but even to have any hopes of getting onto BLM lands. As you may or may not know, pretty much all the good spots are on land owned by this agency, even a couple major deposits here on the Central Coast (ok, those may be Forestry Service, but I’ve heard they are just as strict). Now, presume i do get my museum built and the Central Coast’s fossil come to reside there? What then? Keep on looking! A museum with no active field programs is stale and not very exciting. Plus, i need to search other places like Barstow, John Day, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and all the others on the Hit List if I’m to ever have any chance of completing my goal to create a platform for the lesser known fossils of the west.

But that’s probably a pipe dream like the museum! In that same email, they went on at length about how important stratigraphic data is. Without it, no one in the scientific community would never study my specimens because they have no data. Pretty sure i stressed a couple times how i understand how important the collateral data is, and even mentioned that i do my best to collect it and would like to know how better to do so. But no, feel free to lecture me on how important strat data is and how worthless my stuff would be without it, because only a professional can decide whether or not i understand something. And his advice to remedy the situation? He hammered the fucking school crap again! Excuse me while i go “cope” with this for a moment.

Ok look, i understand school and education are very important (but then again, i might not understand it. I’ll let you decide whether or not i do, and if i don’t, be sure to belabor it even more!), but it has problems. I have a learning disability that used to cause me to despair because I’d never be able to meet the requirements to transfer to a university. The way i see it, the education system is fatally flawed in how it imposes a one size-fits all style of education on us. You will learn this way and that’s that. Oh, you have an issue that causes you to struggle in this system? Too bad, you fail, F!!! Something has got to give. This semester i had the fortune of meeting a nice young woman in my sculpting and my lap swimming classes. She’s had to struggle with school as well. She has missed a lot of school in her life because her Crohn’s disease and persistent bone tumors meant she was constantly in the hospital. We keep being told to persevere, that we should keep working towards that higher education. But what’s supposed to happen to people like us who have trouble with the system because of medical or mental issues? Are we just supposed to except that we’ll never attain that fancy, way-too-fucking-expensive piece of paper? As she said, people like us would probably flourish in our fields (me paleontology, her physical therapy) because we are very passionate and knowledgeable about them. But no, we are forced to undergo a process that obviously isn’t working for us; so since we don’t have a university diploma, we don’t get to partake in the one thing we want to do more than anything else.

So what does any of this have to do with the title? Well unlike education or entrance into your chosen field, there just might be alternative ways to tell the stories of lesser known fossils. Hell, I’ve been doing it with this blog. But there is only so much (or so little, depending on the post) that a paleo fanboy (let’s face it, that’s all i am) can do. I wrote a post on face book lamenting how i wish i could write a book on California’s fossil vertebrates. For starters, i have no idea how to write a book. Do you write it and then try to find a publisher? Or is it the other way around? How do you fund something that would require a lot of traveling for research and photography? How do you find an illustrator? Would i have to be working in some kind of time frame, under a deadline, or not?

Assuming i was able to start authoring a book it going to require an assload of research. Especially for a topic as diverse and deep as the fossil vertebrates of California. In most people’s eyes I’d be grossly unqualified. I don’t possess the aforementioned infernal degree. That and the fact I’m not associated with some fancy elite institution means i can’t get access to scientific articles on paper aggregating sites (or the journals themselves). And do you need academic clout to gain access to museum research libraries? And having no academic clout means i probably can’t get into museum collections to photograph specimens. Ok, maybe a few like Santa Barbara, Raymond Alf, and San Bernardino County; but asgreat as those places are, they are only a small membership in a greater collective of repositories housing California fossils.

I got a couple reassurances that this may not be as bad as i might think. One commenter told me that “the journey will qualify you”. And another commenter (actually someone i knew in high school) offered to do illustrations. I dunno. People are always telling me I’m a good writer. And this book would give me another way to tell the untold stories of the Central Coast’s fossils as well as many other localities in California (contrary to popular portrayal, California has more to it’s fossil record than Rancho La Brea). What do you think? Should i tackle such an endeavor? If so, you got any advice on how to get started? Or on any part of the process from idea to publication? I’d appreciate anything you got. Because if i pulled this off, even if my museum quest crashes and burns, I’ll still feel like i completed my mission.

Till next time!

Hey there every peoples!

How long has it been since I talked about just Central Coast fossils? Yeah, way too long. So now that i have finally gotten around to it, which one should I do? While I’m not one to let others influence my thought process, the idea for this one came from the geology field course i took this semester.

It was mainly geology, with the only fossils being Cambrian trilobites and Precambrian stromatolites and trace fossils, so there wasn’t too much to really sink my teeth into. But because Grover (my geology teacher) is such a nice guy, he did allow me to briefly bloviate about fossils at some of the stops. These were Rainbow Basin in Barstow, Titus Canyon in Death Valley, and Red Rock Canyon State Park in…. Red Rock Canyon. First up was Rainbow Basin. When Grover handed the speaking over to me, he asked “So Doug, what kinds of animals used to live out here?” I decided to start with arguably the most unusual and charismatic beast of the Barstow fauna. I simply said “bear dogs”. Suddenly everyone was amazed and enthralled. For the rest of the trip, everyone was asking about bear dogs at the other fossil stops I discussed. Everyone kept saying bear dog in the vein of “awesome!” Apparently the other van was googling Bbear dog on their phones as we left Rainbow Basin. One girl said we should change our school mascot from the cougar to the bear dog (Cuesta College, the fighting Bear Dogs!). Grover even took it upon himself to give me a nickname: Bear Dog Doug. And then another girl who shall remain nameless *coughStacycough* made an adjustment to it which Grover must never know about. And at the end of the semester meeting i brought many of my fossil replicas (and a few real ones), with the specimens being relevant to the faunas i talked about on the trip. And everyone was bummed when they found out I didn’t have any bear dog material. Of course if there was a place for Central Coast fossils this wouldn’t have happened. But anyway, this interest and banter about bear dogs influenced my decision to make the newest installment of “Central Coast Critters” about these awesomely named beasties.

So just what are bear dogs? The name can certainly fire the imagination to conjure up all kinds of bear/dog hybrids. The name stems from early researchers who thought them to be ancestral to dogs and bears, due to them having features seen in both. Later they were assigned closer to bears. The latest taxonomic review suggests they may be basal caniforms (related to dogs and bears, as well as the four other groups placed in caniformia). Bear dogs first appeared in North America in the early Oligocene. From there they diversified and formed a significant part of the Oligocene carnivore guild. They tapered out a bit at the end of the Oligocene and into the Miocene. One or two genera then roamed the continent until the group died out in North America at the end of the Miocene. Their fossils are well known from the Midwest, but they have been found at a number of localities on the West Coast as well. This includes a couple from the Central Coast.

Maxilla or upper jaw of Pliocyon from the middle Miocene of Oregon. At The Thomas Condon Paleontology Center, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, OR

Our earliest member of the bear dog clan is a little guy called Temnocyon. Temnocyon comes from the Oligocene deposits of the Sespe formation in Ventura County. This means he was prowling the open forests of the Central Coast 29 million years ago. It was the size of a large coyote and may have made a living hunting the numerous species of oreodonts that shared it’s world. But there may have been another bear dog trying to hog the spotlight. In the same faunal list* i learned about Temnocyon in also mentioned a critter called Pseudocynodictis. I haven’t been able to find anything on this guy, so whether or not it’s a valid genus is unknown. It may not even be a solid id at the Central Coast locality, as the list has a question mark at the end of it’s name. Whether it was here or not, we had at least one yesitwasreallythereyeahit’strue bear dog. But as we move into another time and place, we will come face to face with the poster child for the bear dog lineage, an animal who pretty much comes to mind first when the name bear dog is uttered.

*From one of Chester Stocks many papers on the Sespe faunas. They have proven an invaluable resource since he published and everything he found and MOST of them are freely available online. Of course the one drawback is that they were written in the 1930s. That’s a mighty long time for changes to be made in paleontology. Whether any additions have been made to the Sespe fauna (aside from some microfossil mitigation at Simi Valley landfill) i don’t know. It’s yet another case of no information being available and why i write this blog and want to start a museum.

Skull of Temnocyon from the John Day Beds in Oregon. From Cope, 1883

To find our next bear dog we must travel north to the Cuyama Valley and fast forward about 15 million years. The strata known as the Caliente formation spans an incredible length of time, almost 20 million years! In the middle of it, during the Barstovian NALMA, we encounter the big bad daddy of the bear dogs: Amphicyon! Amphicyon is perhaps one of the best known of the bear dogs, known from numerous specimens across North America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. There are many species known, ranging in size from a Rottweiler to a grizzly bear! Which one of these prowled the ancient wilds of the Cuyama Valley? We don’t know for certain. All i can find is a molar in Berkeley’s online database (there’s Caliente material at the LA Museum but they don’t have an online database). I wish i could rectify this but more on that later. Amphicyon is considered a top predator, ruling any and all ecosystems it inhabited. So what did this carnivore hunt? “Anything it wanted” would be the instinctual answer. The real answer is probably more akin to “depends on the environment”. For example Magericyon, a similar-sized species from Spain, is thought to have preyed on antelope and musk deer (apparently bones of the animals showings signs of digestion, are suspected of having been left behind by the bear dog). The Caliente formation has produced many similar-sized species of horses, camels, pronghorns, deer, and peccaries that may have met their end in the jaws of Amphicyon. Amphicyon represents the second officially discovered bear dog from the Central Coast. But i have a sneaking suspicion that a later species may have carried out the last of the clan in North America on the Central Coast as well.

Cast skeleton of Amphicyon mounted a fossil trackway thought to have been made by it. At the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology, Claremont, CA

About 100 miles east of Cuyama Valley is the much better known Red Rock Canyon. This fantastic locality records a stretch of time called the Clarendonian roughly 12 to 8 million years ago. While not as well known, the Clarendonian sections of the Caliente fm. have produced similar fossils. Now there is a bear dog known from Red Rock Canyon called Ischyrocyon. This genus is the last bear dog in North America. Maybe bear dogs just couldn’t handle the competition with cats, dogs, and bears anymore, hard to say. The Red Rock Canyon species is known as Ischyrocyon mojaviensis. Unfortunately, it isn’t very well known. So far all we have is a fragmentary skull and some forelimb bones. Now, no fossils of Ischyrocyon have been found in the Cuyama Valley. But given the relatively short distance between it and Red Rock Canyon as well as a similarity in their faunas, I’d be surprised if he wasn’t hanging around the valley as well.

Reconstructed skull of Ischyrocyon mojaviensis. No, that is not the canine, but a mere incisor. That’s how wicked this guys dentition was! At the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, CA

You all know I would love nothing more than to rove the badlands of the Cuyama Valley to find more fossils of these bear dogs and their contemporaries. Oh to go out into the field and uncover new pieces to add to a known but poorly understood assemblage. So far the stuff locked up in Berkeley and LA are the only remains known. No one seems interested in looking to see if there is more to be found. I feel I could be doing science a favor as well as fleshing out the story of the Central Coast. Except everything and everyone says I can’t. Even if I had a curation facility, apparently I can’t look for fossils unless I have an expensive piece of paper. Once again, i get that education is important, but this insistence that a university is the only option is not conducive to my mental well being. You all remember how I lamented not being able to go through school and not being able to pursue my lifelong passion because of it. Why can’t I learn the necessary skills another way? Why do I need a diploma to tell people I know my stuff? Looking to trying to get experience, I tried applying for a field assistant position (summer internship) at the Museum of Western Colorado. Jim Kirkland linked to it on Facebook and said it was a tremendous opportunity. So I sent in a resume in. A month or so later I got the token rejection letter in the mail. It said something about “…and your education, skills, and qualifications were impressive;” Yeah, sure. After all, such an important position should go to someone who is actually competent, someone who has the diploma or is in the process of getting it, not some lame amateur.

You know, people keep telling me I’m smart. And, on occasion, I start to believe it. And then reality comes back, throws me to the floor, and scolds me for forgetting my place. I can’t search for fossils to further science and the Grand Vision. I apparently have no hope of securing a position that could help me learn to be a better paleontologist (Oh hell, I’m nowhere near anything of the sort). Private and commercial collectors are able to search for and collect fossils with only their own interests in mind. I want to serve the greater good, with sciences interests in mind, and yet I don’t get to look for fossils because I haven’t gone to a tedious and overpriced school. Often makes me wonder what the point is in pursuing paleontology. Judging from the  museum’s response (“We had an unprecedented number of qualified applicants this year…”), the world of paleontology has no need of me. There seems to be enough knowledgeable folks to fill in the limited job market that is paleontology that it can afford to bypass an obviously inferior acolyte such as myself.

So sorry for the tangent. Remember, passion can be a gift and a curse. But back to subject at hand. Bear dogs are pretty well known in the fossil record. But certain species could stand to be fleshed out.  Chief among them the members of the Central Coast chapter. We need to ply the Sespe and Caliente formations further. Not only would that strengthen their record in a regional sense, but also contribute to the greater scientific knowledge pool. I just hope I get to be a part of that.

Till next time!

Hey there every peoples!

I have been hella busy this summer! A neighbor’s wedding, trip to Sacramento, camping up at Mono Lake, enjoying some summer blockbusters. Yeah, a lot on my plate. Me and my associate have also been busy trying to get things rolling on the Project. We are even putting some public displays together. But the latest piece of my very busy summer had to do with identifying a fossil we found. And along the way, i also had an opportunity to finally meet someone: The Phantom Sabertooth of Barstow.

It is very  frustrating trying to get information on something. This is no doubt due in large part to the closed nature of the academic sphere. Some like Andy Farke and the folks over at SV-POW are fighting the good fight to make research open access. While papers are starting to be published open to the public, much of what has been published in the past remains shut off (if it was even digitized). And sometimes information is just not there because they either don’t respond or decide to lecture you instead of just giving you the information you can use to educate yourself. As a result i am often forced to work with an incomplete dataset. So it should be no surprise that i get things wrong. A good example would be the Phantom Sabertooth of Barstow. I stupidly assumed that just because i couldn’t find anything on it that it was an obscure taxa (it was Nimravides, but i knew it only from a blip on a biostratigraphy chart). Eric Scott at the San Bernardino County Museum pointed out that this was not the case. In fact, he kindly offered to bring me face to face with the Phantom.

It turns out that the SBCM has (as far as anyone can tell) the only remains of Nimravides from Barstow. I guess i wasn’t wrong about everything. I had first postulated that perhaps the reason the Barstow Nimravides was so obscure was either it was known from either a single specimen or just one locality. Turns out i was half right. Eric was nice enough to provide me with a paper written way back in 2002. It was the thesis of one Ian Duncan Browne and it deals with the mammals of the Robin’s Quarry, a site that occurs later in the Barstow beds. It yielded many spectacular fossils of herbivores and carnivores, including their prized skull of Pseudaelurus. And among them were the fossils of Nimravides.

They are not much, falling in with the usual trend of Barstow’s scrappy fossil remains. Most prominent, perhaps, is a mostly complete lower jaw:

A mostly complete lower jaw. Sorry Eric, i couldn’t remember all the technical jargon. Maybe if i was somehow immersed in it I could…

Also there is a right maxila (upper jaw) with the telltale sabertooth):

The right upper jaw, complete with cute little sabertooth!

Also included were a left maxilla and premaxilla, a zygomatic process (cheek bone), a rib fragment, and a few other odd bits. Whether these all came from the same animal is hard to say, but based on what i say, there would probably be at least two individuals. This meager collection of fossils represents the only record of Nimravides in Barstow. That’s why it was only a blip on on that biostratigraphy chart. That’s why there almost no mention of it anywhere. A few specimens from a single locality. But what little has been found can tell us a few things. The first is the age. According to Browne, the Robin’s Quarry lies in the upper member of the Bartow formation, estimated to be 13.8 million years old. It’s presence here suggests Nimravides may have been late to the party. Indeed, Browne says that this is the earliest temporal occurrence of the genus. Basically all other Nimravides are known from the late Miocene and early Pliocene. So this would be the first Nimravides period. Ad undoubtedly a new species.

Something else is the size. The later, better known species of Nimravides are the size of lions. But you may have noticed from the photos that this guy is tiny. In life he may have been no bigger than a bobcat (dare i call it a… toy sabertooth?). But saberooths and their copycats (no pun intended) are well known for being heavily muscled brutes who wrestled big prey to the ground before dispatching them with their lengthy fangs. But while they are flat and serrated, the Barstow Nimravides had rather short canines, looking like the milk fangs of another sabertooth’s cubs. Perhaps Nimravides took down comparatively small  prey; that is, animals smaller than the preferred prey of the other carnivores but still larger than itself. It may have gone after pronghorns or maybe the young of the smaller species of horses and camels. Unfortunately, until more is more is found we don’t have anyway of knowing just what this little terror was capable of.

A phantom is often something that has a fleeting presence. Or it may be something seen sporadically. I greatly appreciate Eric’s effort to make the phantom real for me, but i feel as is he will continue be a spectral cat for years to come. So far all we have is some bones and jaws from one locality in a geo/paleo sequence lasting roughly 3 million years. It’s not much to go on. Just how big was this animal? What did it hunt? What was it capable of hunting? How did it move about the open woodlands and floodplains of Miocene Barstow? Just how different was it from it’s descendants? Some of these may be answered by the careful analysis of the Robbin’s Quarry specimens, but the whole picture will only be made clear when/if we ever find more fossils. I got to see it with my own eyes. But i think it will be some time before before Nimravides can shed its title as the Phantom Sabertooth of Barstow.

Till next Time!

Hey there everypeoples!

For most people, museums are just places to take the family on a lazy weekend or places you go to gawk at stuffed animals and ancient skeletons that have no practical applications to their lives or society. For me though, they were one of the only places i ever felt at home, where i belong. I have been going to museums to feed my passion for the natural world all my life. Whenever we went on a trip i was always looking for a museum to go to. And these days, i my enthusiasm has not waned. Since i hope to open my own museum someday, i am always looking at museum exhibits closely, looking for inspiration, what works, and even things not to do.

But museums are far more than just casual desitnations. They are libraries of the natural world, archives where the wonders of our planet are kept safe for posterity. Their exhibits aren’t just to display things, but to engage visitor, to teach them about nature, how it relates to them, and why it’s worth saving. If done well, they can balance the telling of a narrative, the science behind the displays, and keep your mind engaged.

Not all exhibits are created equal though. Depending on the goals and the execution, an exhibit may turn out alright or even mediocre. Several factors affect the final product: budget, number of specimens, space, available materials, what would visitors like to see, what message are you trying to convey, etc. A lot of planning must go into the creation of an exhibit, with schematics and concept art being the first step.One of the reasons i love concept art so much (and think should be display far more often, no matter the project) is comparing the original idea to the finished product. Sometimes it remains intact; far more often the finished exhibit hardly resembles it’s ancestral form on paper. It shows the evolution of the thoughts and ideas that went into the project. And sometimes, the original idea may be better than the one comprising the final incarnation. But the success of an exhibit depends on the execution of the ideas. Did you successfully convey your message? Did you make effective use of the space? Do you have any interactive elements and if so, are they fun, informative/easy to understand, and easy to maintain? Does it create a dynamic and stimulating environment for guests to explore? These are the questions that define the success of an exhibit. No matter how much money, space, or collections you have, if these questions aren’t satisfied then your exhibit may not be as great as you wanted it to be.

All this has been leading up to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s newest exhibit: “Becoming Los Angeles”. At 14,000 square feet, it is the largest exhibit in the museum. It tells the story of how the Los Angeles Basin went from a sparsley inhabited wilderness to a powerhouse of the modern metropolitan world. It is divided into six sections: The region at the time of Spanish contact; the Spanish Mission Era; the Mexican Rancho Era; the early American Period; the emergence of a new American city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the Great Depression and World War II, to the present. It sounds like quite the history lesson! And since the NHMLAC has over 36 million specimens in their collections, they must surely have tons of objects that each help tell the story of one of America’s mightiest cities! After all, they have 14,000 square feet to work with. And this was meant to be the final piece in their Next project, the penultimate exhibit leading up to the museum centennial. If they would pull out all the the stops on an exhibit, it would certainly be this one. So, how did this exhibit turn out?

Yeah they got a really big space and poured millions of dollars into it, and drew upon their vast collections. But frankly, i was underwhelmed. This was not what i expected from a institution as prestigious as NHMLAC (ok, maybe a little after the “Age of Mammals” display). It just didn’t wow me. Now you may think that unfair, that since i have been to so many museums that it would be hard to wow me. Let me tell you something: my tastes in movies and the rare instances where I’m not happy with my food would suggest to most that i have low standards (and let’s face facts, i do…). But I kinda do as well when it comes to museum exhibits. I can usually be happy with a display if they put at least some effort into it, or if they have some unique specimens. But when it’s as big and publicized as an exhibit at such a large and esteemed institution, the expectations are going to be high. Basically, there weren’t enough items on display, there were space issues, and i just flat out didn’t like the overall design. So just why did this exhibit fail to live up to the hype?

The first big screw up was the amount of specimens in the exhibit. There just weren’t enough (at least it didn’t feel like enough). You’re supposed to have the largest collection of artifacts from early Los Angeles. Where are they? Alright, alright, they did have some cool specimens. Like a fragment of Native American plank canoe, the table on which the Treatie of Cahuenga was signed, and the animation desk used by Walt Disney to create “Steamboat Willy”. But these are supposed to be highlights, not the major components of the exhibit. Perhaps the worst offender was the Native American display. It was a small 3×7 case at the very beginning. It housed some artifacts related to plank canoes on one side and the other had a couple blank mortars and a completed one w/ pestal. That’s it. The next section on the mission period was hardly better. A food storage structure, a stone axe head, and a couple lengths of shell beads. You can almost count on two hands how many Native American artifacts were in this exhibit. We’re they not part of L.A.’s story? They’ve lived there since the last ice age. And yet they are practically ignored; you almost get the impression they weren’t important to the narrative until they were being subjugated by the Spanish, and even then the tiny section makes them look like a footnote. Now, i may be over analyzing here. But when you create an exhibit, you need to make sure your guests aren’t going to interpret it the wrong way.

This is all the Native Americans got in the mission era. Seriously? No comparison between Native Americans before and after contact? No discussion of the impacts Europeans had on them, like clothing, subsistence, tools, shelter, war, disease, and religion? Nope? Just a few token artifacts? Ok…

In fact it seemed the further in time we went the more numerous the specimens got (more or less). What happened to “the largest collection of artifacts from early L.A.”? Early means, well, early; not halfway through it’s history. I guess when looked at as a whole, there’s a satisfactory number of specimens on display. But when things are sectioned off like this, i tend to look at the individual sections, which can suddenly make it look like there is less than there really is (fall into that all the time with San Diego Museum’s “Fossil Mysteries”). But this was only the least of my gripes.

I’ll be frank: this exhibit had space issues. Now, usually when an exhibit has space issues, it is over loaded. It packs everything into a space not adequate for its needs and is usually a sign that it’s time to renovate. But “Becoming Los Angeles” actually has the opposite problem: it hasn’t filled up it’s space. Seriously, there are a couple of pockets of open area that feel completely wasted:

“In 1542, there was hardly anything on view.” The entrance to “Becoming Los Angeles”. That tiny case there? That’s all the pre-contact Native Americans got.

Just look at all that wasted space…

Seriously. You could have fleshed out the narrative, especially the Native American part! Each topic seemed to have a few artifacts related to it and nothing else. The section on the US-Mexican War in California? The table and two rifles. The huge interest in exotic animals in the early 20th century? A stuffed ostrich (ripped right out of the diorama in the hall of african mammals. Now there is just a void that used to, very obviously, have something in it). When the dinosaur hall was created, they seemed to try to cram in as many specimens as possible, even having a wall of 100 fossils. Why are you suddenly skimping here? I thought you had “the largest collection of artifacts from early L.A.”. The cases and displays just feel hollow and half filled.

But by far my biggest problem with the exhibit was the overall design. I really HATE this ultra-modern aesthetic that many museums are going with these days. Instead of trying to create a dynamic, immersive environment they are taking the easy way out and housing their specimens in sterile tombs fit for a sci-fi film. The L.A. Museum specifically said that it was trying to move away from the “cabinet of curiosities” and create a museum for the 21st century. Well they succeeded on the second part. It does look like the museum of tomorrow. But is that a good thing? You see, by just putting specimens on display without trying to create some sense of environment, all you are really doing is updating the cabinet of curiosities. Instead of cramped  and dark, it is now open and bright. But it’s still the cabinet of curiosities. They did this with the “Age of Mammals”. Because they have many modern relatives and analogues, it is easier to envision prehistoric mammals as living animals, and thus especially need some kind of environment to bring them alive. They also used this aestheic for the dinosaur hall, but i feel it actually kind of works there since we are constantly have to revise our understanding of them and their world (would be nigh impossible to keep changing the exhibit to match current scientific knowledge).

I feel like I’ve been transported back in time to an early 19th century ranchero!

Silly Doug. Sure, an immersive setting could bring this turn of the century oil pump to life. But this is a museum for the 21st century! We need a sterile and modern environment to remind visitors just how old and obsolete this machine is!

A wooden sewer pipe and a telegraph puncher. Are they heralds of the modern age proudly displayed or are they corpses from a past time laid out on the slab?

But it is perhaps worst here. To be honest, i felt like i was walking through an art gallery, not a history museum. These old, rustic artifacts just felt so out of place. I have yet to visit an exhibit that so heavily contrasts old with new. It just takes away from the fact these are decades, even centuries old. And there was this weird streak running through the top of the gallery. Supposedly it’s supposed to guide you through history, occasionally touching down at major points in time. But all it did for me was further take me out of the exhibit. It felt like an eyesore whose purpose is never readily discernible. I’d need someone to tell me just what the hell that was. And basically it’s the only thing tying the narrative together. I know it’s important to keep an exhibit somewhat open so that you aren’t forcing people through a narrow, one way only chronology. But like with the “Age of Mammals” hall, there is no real sense of order or progression here. It’s difficult to get a handle on the series of time periods when one is right across the hall from another. So i guess you would need the ceiling sculpture to guide you through history. Of course, that’s assuming you know that’s its function when you first walk in.

Time is a river of metal bands.

There was one cool display though. It talked about how one year there was drought which killed off a lot of L.A.’s cattle. Then the next year there was a grasshopper plague. They had the skeleton of a cow being picked at by vultures. On the wall behind, projected grasshoppers ran a muck. But it was still house inside one of those sterile tombs of a display case.

Sadly, the most imaginative display in the exhibit.

And two of the mini dioramas came back from the old California History hall. But they are set down in the bases of pedestals at floor level. Makes it hard to appreciate from up here at standing height.

Roping a grizzly bear, likely for a bear and bull fight. I had to crouch to get a shot of this.

There is just nothing here to make it feel like I’m on a journey through history. This looked like it was designed by an interior decorator who has never been to a museum before or some post-modernist artist who is more concerned with expression than teaching. Unfortunately big museums can get away with the infernal modern look because they get loads of visitors anyway. They don’t have to be creative because people are just cowed by the big displays and pretty specimens and then spread the word. Because they pack their halls with complete skeletons and tons of original fossils in lifeless displays, it feels more like the goal is to show off their mighty collections than educate the populace. But i think it’s doing both the visitors and the specimens a great disservice by just stuffing them in bland and uninspired environments. In fact, compare my pictures of the hall above with the Transcontinental Railroad gallery at the California State Railroad Museum:

The Transcontinental Railroad gallery at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. Now what look’s more interesting: this or “Becoming Los Angeles”?

The Transcontinental Railroad gallery at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. Now what look’s more interesting: this or “Becoming Los Angeles”?

I was literally floored when i rounded the corner and got my first glimpse of this hall. Seriously, i was in total amazement. First off, it has scale. It’s a huge space, enough to house a camp, a tunnel, a locomotive, and more. Second is that it creates that sense of environment. They really went all out to make it feel like the Sierra Nevada. Mannequins were hard at work, tools lay strewn about, display cases built right into the rock faces. This was so much more memorable than “Becoming Los Angeles” because this felt like a place to explore, not merely walk around, look at something for a sec, and then move on. It shows a desire to connect you with what you see by immersing you in it’s world. It’s not a showpiece; it’s a part of our world, both past and present. Simply throwing it on display with a small information plaque in a blank space dampens it’s uniqueness and fails to tell it’s story properly.

But what if i told you this wasn’t the original idea? What if i told you this was just the latest iteration of an idea? Would you still stick with it? Or do you think the old idea would have been better? I fall into the latter set. As i mentioned way above, i love concept art because i’m fascinated by how much an idea changes. And sometimes i find myself liking one of the original concepts over the finished product. Unfortunately, there’s no concept art for this exhibit (none that i can find anyway), but some of the earlier press releases for the NHMLAC renovations suggests a very different hall then the one we see now. In fact, it had a completely different subject.

The exhibit was going to be called “Under The Sun”. It would talk about the natural and cultural history of California, with the end talking about the risk both face at the hands of climate change. I thought this was a wonderful idea. I gripe ad nauseum  about the “Age of Mammals” hall not having enough fossils from places other than the usual localities most museums display. I know from my research and whatnot that the L.A. Museum has an extensive collection of fossils from California that never see the light of day: Their collection of fossils from Red Rock Canyon, the “goat camel” Capricamelus, and loads of stuff from my beloved Central Coast. “Under the Sun” could have rectified this by having a section talking about the prehistory of California, with these specimens (and/or others from the Golden State) finally getting their story told. But California is not blessed with just rich geology and paleontology. California’s unique topography creates a staggering range of habitats and microclimates supporting abundant plant and animal life. For thousands of years California was home to a great diversity of native cultures, with something like 26 distinct tribes living here. There are plenty of regional museums and visitor centers who talk about their respective areas in detail. But not everyone gets to visit them. Since Los Angeles, and it’s museums, are a hub of international travel, this would have been  a golden opportunity to really give people a sense of how diverse and magnificent California really is. But alas, it was not to be.

When i went on the San Bernardino Museum’s field trip to the L.A. Museum last year, we were given  a tour by one of the guys who works in the Dinosaur Institute. Eric asked him about the exhibit and he responded “They changed it to L.A.”. It was disappointing news to be sure, but I thought it could still work. LA is still a large area with fossils (the San Pedro gray whale, the skeleton of Gomphotaria (who i call the “crusher walrus”) from Orange County, and of course Rancho La Brea, which could have freed up room in the “Age of Mammals” for other fossils) and wildlife of it’s own. Maybe they could even discuss how these aspects of the natural world have fared in light of L.A.’s relentless urban expansion. But then I started to read descriptions of the hall to come. It wasn’t even going to maintain the spirit of the original exhibit. It was going to talk about the history of Los Angeles. This is a NATURAL history museum, although I  didn’t mind the California History hall because it was more inclusive and there were some really neat things on display, including all those beautiful mini dioramas. By why the sudden shift to LA? What makes it so special over California? I don’t know what the official excuse was, but all the promotional material kept saying “No one can tell the story of Los Angeles better than we can”. Gee, i wonder why! You’re the frickin’ Los Angeles Museum; of course you’re better equipped than most! But honestly, is that really something to brag about? Seems like a real niche area of focus to me. I bet the Nevada State Museum could the tell the story of Carson City better than anyone else. I’m sure the San Bernardino County Museum can tell the story of the Inland Empire better than anyone else. I know for sure the Florida Museum of Natural History can tell the story of the Sunshine State better than anyone else. How many other museums out there are trying to tell the story of Los Angeles? Who are you trying to outdo? I get you’re trying to make it local, but saying that you’re the best equipped when you are obviously the specialist is, to me, a rather weak selling point. And an especially weak reason to change from a potentially great exhibit to a less enthralling one

“Becoming Los Angeles” isn’t bad per-say, but for me, it was terribly underwhelming. The wasted space, the lack of any real Native American  discussion, and the shift from the awesome sounding “Under the Sun” all dampen my opinion. But what really kills it for me is the modernist aesthetic. At no point did i feel i was in a history exhibit. The sterile and droll settings utterly failed to draw me into the narrative. And the fact they devoted the largest exhibit space in the museum to this just adds insult to injury. It’s just not what i would expect from a place as vast and renowned as the L.A. Museum.

Now lets take a look at something smaller. We’ve seen how a big museum build exhibits (sometimes not so well), how about a small museum? The same trip I visited the L.A. Museum, i wandered on down to the John D. Cooper Center in Santa Ana. In case you have forgotten, they were founded a few years ago to become the official custodial outfit for all of Orange County’s paleontological and archaeological wealth. I was there to say hi to the wonderful people who work there as well as trying to identify a fossil my buddy found. But the Cooper Center is, unfortunately, a strictly curatorial facility. They try to keep their location off the books so people don’t break in and steal the precious specimens. So they don’t have any public displays. Well at the center at least. There are fossils on display at Ralph Clark Regional Park. And Meredith Rivin, their associate curator, told me there was an official Cooper Center display at the historic courthouse. So after my visit i headed on over there. So how was it?

I think it was decent. The specimens are just in display cases, like many museums (Including L.A.), with small info plaques and no sense of environment. So why do I call the Cooper Center display decent while tearing into the L.A. Museum for god-knows-how long  for doing the same thing? The answer is simple: the Cooper Center doesn’t have the resources of the L.A. Museum.

Doesn’t seem like much. But there’s actually quite a bit here. It’s just been concentrated into a few small cases.

Doesn’t seem like much. But there’s actually quite a bit here. It’s just been concentrated into a few small cases.

This is what you see when you enter. On the left you have ancient projectile points and on the right you have fossil shark teeth (there is a row of real ones right under the title). Pretty cool huh? Wonderfully joining archaeology and paleontology, the focuses of the Cooper Center. I love it!

It is a small outfit. They don’t have the money or the man power of the big museums. This means that there is only so much they can do. The Cooper Center exhibit is the best they can do right now with what they have. They did their best and really that’s all we can ask of them. Don’t like it? Then donate to them so they can get the materials and personnel to do better. Plus, they do have some really cool specimens on display:

A rare and fascinating fossil find: the fossilized vertebrae and gill rakers of a basking shark. Most shark fossils are teeth since their cartilaginous skeletons aren’t strong enough to fossilize. And yet the Cooper Center, being the total bosses that they are, have another set of fossil basking shark vertebrae (on display in Ralph Clark Park).

The skull of a new species of bear-dog. OC has some of the few (that i know of) early Miocene terrestrial fossils in California.

Ok, this is the only thing that bugged me. They don’t clearly date the specimen. It’s in the same case as the early Miocene stuff and the plaque even suggests it’s that age. But it almost has the same look as the fossils i have seen from the Telaga Quarry, which is Eocene in age.

A beautiful seashell fishing hook.

The always enigmatic cogstone.

That’s why i like these smaller museums. They focus on stuff that is different, stuff that in big museums most often gets shoved aside for the usual stock. If the specimens are unique and numerous, i can forgive the small museum for having the “cabinet of curiosity” feel. I know they are doing their best they can. Since they don’t have the vast collections, funding, and people of the big museums, the exhibit setting is just a victim of circumstance. So all in all, if you’re in Santa Ana, drop by the courthouse and see some of Orange County’s ancient treasures. It’s worth it.

It’s not easy creating an exhibit. Whether you have nothing or everything, it is a daunting endeavor. Being a big and well respected museum doesn’t mean your exhibit can’t be lackluster. Being a small and obscure museum limits you in what you can create, but if the heart is there, it can be just as good as anything else out there. An exhibit isn’t just a place to look at cool stuff. It’s an environment that we are actively exploring and enjoying. The space is just as important as the specimens being displayed in them. Without the right setting, the specimens are just pretty things to stare at. Too long have museums been portrayed in pop culture as boring snoozefests. They need to engage the visitor, immerse them in a world they won’t find anywhere else. And if museums keep going the sleek, modern route, i fear that world may eventually die out.

Till next time!

Hey there Everypeoples!

Last time we reviewed a decent museum exhibit and a sub-par one. I mentioned that I am always going to museums and how I’m always taking note of their exhibit designs. A big part of trying to start my museum is to teach about and display fossils (as well as rock, minerals, and human artifacts). But what would it all look like? I thought it might be a little fun to see what my museum could look like.

Basically, this is just one big “what if”. We  won’t adhere to the cold hard ruination of reality and instead substitute an alternate reality (following my favorite Mythbusters quote) where we find ideal conditions. Here we have the money and the space to build our exhibits no problem. The other important aspect (and no doubt the far more fantastical one) is that the great fossil wealth of the Central Coast has been returned to it’s homeland. And for good measure, a good working relationship with the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Now i only focused on fossils because that is what i know the most about (my knowledge of Central Coast archaeology and geology is pretty pathetic, nothing i could create an exhibit around) and even that is limited. Plus i am one terrible artist so please bear with me.

The Jurassic display

The first is the Jurassic display. Nothing special since there really isn’t that much to begin with. It mainly includes fossils from a deep sea vent community found in the San Rafael Mountains of Santa Barbara County. Berkeley holds two plesiosaur vertebra from a mine in SLO County. These would be displayed next to a cast skelton of one of the many Jurassic plesiosaurs from Europe.

The Eocene Display

Next up is the Eocene. This exhibit is based on the 42 million year old fauna of the Sespe formation in Ventura County. Now no plant fossils have yet been found in the Sespe. But we know that the climate was wet and hot, basically a subtropical rainforest. For some reason the mural in the L.A. Museum’s “Age of Mammals” hall depicts this as a carbon copy of a Louisiana cypress swamp. San Diego has produced numerous plant fossils of the same age and it’s only a hundred or so miles from the Las Posas Hills in Ventura County so we can probably get away with some extrapolation. So basically we’d have a large diorama, kind of in the style of museum mammal halls where it serves as a window into the subject’s world. Though this one would spill out a bit so it’s more immersive and not shut up and frammed in. The centerpiece would of course be the large brontothere or rhino who are kind of the icons of the Eocene. Teleodus is a brontothere from the Sespe, but how much of it exists to allow a full scale model is uncertain. It could very well be Amynodontopsis, an extinct rhino. The carnivore Tapocyon and the primates Chumashius (tarsier-like) and Dyseolemur (lemur-like) hang out in the trees. Meanwhile, the mouse deer Sespemeryx cautiously peeks out from behind a tree. The diorama would be flanked by cases displaying fossils from the Sespe Eocene.

The Oligocene Display

Onward to the Oligocene! The Sespe has a member 29 million years old that has preserved a middle Oligocene fauna to match that of the Eocene. A large mural serves as the backdrop portraying the stark changes to the landscape from the last display. In the center is the largely complete skeleton of the oreodont Eporeodon from South Mountain. To it’s right is a slab containing the bones of 2 rhinos (Subhyracodon) and the shell of a tortoise. We see a model of the rhino to the right of the slab. In the other side we have a large outcrop of Sespe sandstone jutting out from the display, where the skeleton of the nimravid Hoplophoneus looks down on visitors.

The Terrestrial Miocene Display

The Miocene space would perhaps be the grandest as there is a lot of material. Here we see the Terrestrial half of the Miocene. The back of the hall features the reconstructed skeleton of Miolabis fricki and a skeleton of Gomphotherium (it didn’t show up in the scan, but in front of the gomphothere is a case housing a jawbone from Cuyama Valley). In the left wall is a large case showing numerous fossils from the Caliente formation. Because the Caliente is a continuous sequence of almost 20 million years, the fossils would be arranged chronologically, to teach visitors about biotratigrpahy and faunal turnover. In the middle we have a diorama of the giant dog Epicyon chasing the cat Pseudaelurus away from it’s kill of a horse. Ok, Epicyon doesn’t turn up in the fossil invenotries of the Central Coast. But it has been found in neighboring Kern County, so it probably did live here. We just haven’t found it yet (no one is searching the Caliente. I would, but i’m not allowed to because i don’t have a fancy and expensive degree). I guess if all else fails, i could change it to the bear-dog Amphicyon; he is known from the Central Coast

The Marine Miocene Display

The other half of the Miocene is devoted to the many, many marine fossils of the Central Coast (see Bobby, I’m doing my part!). I read in the L.A. Museum’s collection news letter that they had excavated a whale skeleton outside Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County. That’s the row of pointy circles in the center (they’re supposed to be vertebrae. Wa wa waaaaa…). On it’s right is a case housing the skull of a miocene Sperm whale (also from Santa Maria), the skull of a Desmostylian from Arroyo Burro Beach, and the vertebra and ribs of the sea cow Dusisiren from SLO County. The aspect i would be most excited to come to fruition is the bird Pelegornis orri (formerly Osteodontornis). In a model of a rocky sea ledge lie embedded the part and counterpart of this animal’s stupendous fossil. And on top of this ledge would be the big bird itself, stretching out it’s 14 foot wingspan as if it’s preparing for take of. Finally a case would be devoted to the Central Coast’s bounty of marine invertebrates.

I don’t have one for the Pliocene, sadly. I just don’t know enough about the Pismo formation or any other Pliocene fossils from the region. At the moment all i can think of is a life sized sea cow (Hydrodamalis cuesta, basically a manatee the size of a killer whale) lazily grazing in a kelp forest.

The Pleistocene Display

We conclude with the Pleistocene exhibit. To one side is a diorama of Carpenteria during the last ice age. A horse and a skunk occupy the ground with the trees hosting golden eagle, stork, and meadowlark. In front would be a case housing fossils from the Carpenteria tar pits. Next to it would be a display about ice age megafauna in general, with bones of bison, horse, camel, and other animals. At the end of the row is a case with cast skulls of ice age carnivores, not just of the Big Four (Smilodon, dire wolf, American lion/naegele’s giant jaguar, and short-faced bear) but also American cheetah, scimitar cat, and Florida cave bear. Because the big four always invariably make up the carnivores in an ice age exhibit! Remember i’m all about breaking the mold and doing what’s different. Anyway, in the middle of the exhibit would be a long narrow display housing the fossils of the Central Coast’s many Pleistocene pachyderms. It would feature skulls, teeth, and bones of southern mammoth (in this case Emma, the Moorpark Mammoth), Colombian mammoth, American mastodon, and the channel island dwarf mammoth. To the right would be the skeleton of Rosie, the most complete dwarf mammoth known. Next to that would be a display about channel island fossils, with not just dwarf mammoth but also small mammals and birds. Finally, at the end of the aisle, a skeleton of Harlan’s ground sloth browsing on a tree with a case housing a couple fossils accompanying it. A teratorn model would be suspended from the ceiling.

So what do you think? Well I’m not that sure it matters since this is nothing more than a pipe dream. Seriously, I’d be lucky to see the museum advance to this stage within my lifetime. But I thought since i’m talking about exhibit and even reviewing them it might be fun to see how I’d do it. But without the fossil specimens of the Central Coast and without the assload of funding this would require, it seems this version of the Grand Vision is doomed to remain a pointless fantasy. We are working on a small display in Cambria very slowly right now. It’s not much but it is an actual display. Who knows, maybe one day when the planets align, hell freezes over, and world peace is achieved, these crappy drawings will be brought to life.

Till next time!

Hey there every peoples!

Last week was the first (and probably only, until i either land a job or get funding) time i was able to attend SVP, the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. It was fun, it was informative, it was exhausting! I saw some great talks, some great posters, and some not so great examples of either. Saw all the familiar faces, met some new ones, and got loads of advice and swag. It was a fantastic experience. It has left me a bit drained but not just physically. The conference has brought up a couple issues that no doubt stick in the Society’s craw.

The first and by all means the most prominent is a poster by longtime paleontologist Pete Larson. Larson’s poster involved one of the most contentious of dinosaur taxa: Nanotyrannus. His poster claimed to support it’s validity based on the theropod half of the Montana “Dueling Dinosaurs”. He even brought along casts of the specimen to show people (something i think more people there need to do). But in the wake of the conference, his poster has unleashed a shit storm, and not because of it’s scientific merits. The “Dueling Dinosaurs” were collected commercially on private land. The owners tried to sell it to a museum but no one bit. Now they are set to go to auction in New York. After that, who knows what their fate will be. The controversy lies in their provenance. Most paleontologists abhor publishing on privately owned specimens. Furthermore, the Society has strict guidelines about commercial specimens. However the controversy has opened up old wounds in the debate over just who gets to collect fossils.

Now i don’t like the commercial sale of fossils. I may have given in to blind emotion (just one of the many benefits of having depression. Sign up now and we’ll thrown in the inferiority complex absolutely free!) and was too quick to demonize the commercial guys. I still don’t like the commercialization of paleontology but i now recognize that there are many nuanced levels. The whole debate is hardly black and white and possesses many aspects that must all be addressed. For starters, there’s the whole selling of vertebrate fossils. Every fossil is important to science. The more specimens we have, the more ideas we can test. Now, i am willing to compromise on really common undiagnostic stuff, like shark teeth and cetacean vertebrae/ribs. But stuff like the “Dueling Dinosaurs”… i agree with everyone else that those should be in a museum. Hell, i asked my buddy if we had any space to store them, as they would be great for the Project. But alas, we have no hopes of meeting what the owners want for it.

The fossils were found on private land and ultimately it’s theirs to do what they want with it. Pete Larson did his best to try and get them into a museum. But the owners sank considerable resources into their preparation and needed to make up for it. They sought to sell the specimen for $15 million to a museum. Yeah right! Seriously, $15 million? That’s what most museums spend on major renovations. If they had $15 million dollars, that could fund their museum (infrastructure, education, research) for years on end. With that kind of money, they could just go find their own dinosaurs. So with no one coughing up the dough, the “Dueling Dinosaurs” are getting thrown on the auction block. No one is happy about that. Pete Larson has been doing everything he can to make sure there is some kind of record of these specimens (he even had 3d scans he was showing people on his tablet). Whether or not the specimens will end up in a museum we cannot know. And this, i believe, forms the crux of the commercial/private debate.

We have folks on the commercial/private side claiming that they could make great contributions to the science if only the professionals would get off their high horse. As far as i can tell, there are two principle reasons why professional paleontologist looks down upon commercial/private collectors. The first is the scientific record. When a fossil is collected, scientists take careful note of a number of details: gps coordinates, stratigraphy, sediment comp, taphonomy, position of the specimen, and lots of other stuff. Most commercial/private collectors don’t keep such detailed records, and the specimen loses most of it’s scientific value. Now Pete maintains that the “Dueling Dinosaurs” were excavated with such data (which may not matter anyway, as we will soon see). But the majority do not, and considering science needs repeatable data, not keeping field records of specimens is a real deal breaker. Now, i am an amateur, not a commercial/private collector, and yet i get the same spiel about the importance of field data, so i guess we have that common ground.

The other major problem mainstream paleontology has with commercial/private specimens is their providence. When a specimen is in a museum, it is secure there. It is kept in a stable environment where it receives the proper care. And we know that it will continue to be there until the end of time except for extenuating circumstances. The problem with commercial/private specimens is that their fate is uncertain. The owner may not take care of it. Or he may treasure for the rest of his life. But when he dies there’s no telling where that specimen may end up next. If a scientists had published on it, and then a family member had decided to sell it or throw it out, then future scientists can’t access that specimen for their own research. It doesn’t matter if the current owner is willing to grant access to scientists. The next owner may not. And that is the big hang up. Specimens always need to be accessible in a place where we know they aren’t going anywhere.

Most museums do some grandstanding about how museum collections are community resources (“public trust” is a common descriptor) that represent a shared heritage. Many commercial/private collectors claim that they don’t, that most specimens are locked away in the collections were they are never shared with the public. And you know what: they aren’t wrong. I think I make it pretty obvious the resentment i feel towards certain museums, despite my full support of the shared heritage arguments. I feel museums are suffering an image problem right now, being places were some fossils are shared but the rest are hoarded. I think museums need to work more towards open access. In my museum i hope to do just that. Constantly rotate specimens out from the collections so that they all get face time. Hold regular open houses to show people the collections. Or maybe even have a couple volunteers whose sole job is to escort people (who have come by appointment) through the collections. Not only would they show them around and answer questions, but also ensure they follow the rules and that any specimens are handled with care. We need to do more to make people feel connected with the collections. Digital databases and photos are a good start, but they lack the punch of the real thing. It’d hard for people to feel connected to their heritage when they are actively denied access to it.

(though there exceptions, obviously. Right now there is talk that the San Diego Natural History Museum is going to auction off some of their specimens, mostly ones found by Charles Sternberg. What the hell?)

Now members of the society taking part in this debate often claim it’s a slippery slope because they don’t want to alienate their amateur members. Well I’m not a member but i am an amateur, so what do i think of all this? I am an opponent of commercial/private collection of (vertebrate) fossils but at the same time i can partially understand where they are coming from. I understand the need for a repository and field data, and yet i get barred from most sites because i don’t have the fancy college degree. Us amateurs have science’s interest at heart, and yet most public lands prohibit us from collecting because of some arbitrary rule. We often get the same spiel the commercial/private guys get. Our intentions are noble, and there are likely commercial/private guys who are too. All the mud slinging they do (like in the SVP poster controversy) isn’t doing any good. Something has to change.

For example, the great and mighty Thomas Holtz told me at SVP that he would like to see some middle ground reached. Something to the tune of a finder’s fee or maybe even museums paying trained commercial crews (i guess something akin to the mitigation companies we have here in southern California) to find fossils. I’m sure there are kinks to be worked out even with that but you know what: at least it’s a suggestion. There very well could be middle ground between pros and commercial/private guys. Why aren’t they working towards a solution, one that would benefit all? I think it’s because the commercial/private don’t fully understand the mission of scientists while the pros are too entrenched in academic dogma to realize that not all commercial/private collectors are the stereotypes they envision and that some of them could even be an asset, not a hindrance.

And what about us amateurs, who get left out in the cold because we couldn’t afford/hack college? We want to help you, we want to do the science, but we are not allowed to because we are not an official member of the establishment. Academia and the government have this potentially vast resource to help collect all the fossils the professionals don’t have time for and yet you are effectively snubbing your noses at us because we don’t have fancy degrees. Why doesn’t the BLM, Dept. of the Interior, or some other federal agency (since they apply more broadly) run a field course in paleontology? Why not teach us amateurs the ins and outs of properly searching for, excavating, and removing fossils? Teach us how to find them, how measure stratigraphy so we can record their position, how to stabilize and jacket them so we can remove them. Give us the tools and skills to do it right and in the process serve science, the government, and the public. And with that field course under our belts, how about you make us go through certification. Make us demonstrate we know what we are doing. Maybe you can even require us to go through re-certification every so often to make sure we are up to date on current field practices. That way, those of us with a passion for paleontology but without a degree can still contribute to the science.

But what if people don’t want to do all that tedious record keeping? Well, my first time to Lake Manix, Eric Scott (you know, that guy from the San Barnardino County Museum I’m always referring to?) talk about an idea he had. He called it a public curation program. Basically, members of the public could go on to public lands and look for fossils. If they found something, they would leave it alone, record it’s position, and report it to the museum. The museum would then go collect it with all the important data. Now obviously this could be exploited, where people say they will follow the rules but end up keeping the fossil themselves. So maybe even this would require some kind of certification, thus binding them to a code of ethics that could bring about consequences if broken. Perhaps require a sign in/sign out deal to carefully monitor who is out there and what they find. It would take some work, but i think this would be a great way to get people involved.

I feel my ideas would solve the dilemma for amateurs and the public. But unfortunately they may fall on deaf ears. The politics and rabble rousing stirred up by the debate between mainstream paleontologists and commercial/private collectors dominates the discourse. A whole faction of us (amateurs) are getting screwed over while the commercial/private collectors are painted with a broad brush and cast universally as villains. A greater understanding of all sides is needed. We need to work together to do what is best for the public and ultimately, for the fossils. There are solutions to be found here. Maybe we’ll be able to find them when we stop yelling at each other and learn that we can in fact work together. Because ultimately it’s the fossils that suffer when we let emotion and stiff, binary laws govern the discourse rather than reason. I am sick of wanting to help but being brushed aside because i don’t meet the standards of the academic orthodoxy. And from some of the stuff i have heard from the commercial/private end, i might not be the only one. I think it’s high time we stop grinding our axes and start swapping olive branches. I think science will be much better for it.

Until next time!

Hey there every peoples!

Politics suck. They do nothing but mar progress and prevent anything meaningful from getting done. Those engaged in politics only seem interested in playing the game. And politics have the unfailing ability to overcomplicated anything and everything. Not to mention divide folks into embittered camps facing off like a couple of street gangs ready to rumble. Unfortunately the hemorrhoid that is politics isn’t relegated to the government alone. They seem to have a way of permeating everything, fro schools, to businesses to even science. The world of paleontology has it’s own political atmosphere and just like everywhere else, they seem to stand in the way of progress.

For starters, let us revisit the Montana Dueling Dinosaurs. They were set to go to auction last month, much to the horror of paleontologists. However, they did not sell. Perhaps the price was too high. Maybe the controversy surrounding the specimens was too much for any prospective buyer. So their fate remains uncertain for now. One article i read said that museums had contacted the auction house telling them to put the specimens on hold so they might negotiate (i can’t find that article at the moment so don’t quote me on that). This latest chapter in the saga of the MDD has brought with it fresh brawling between professionals and commercial collectors alike.

The attempt to sell the MDD is nothing short of tragic, even infuriating. These are very important specimens that not only would wow museum goers but also be great assets in the pursuit of dinosaur science. But there is one unfortunate detail that often gets overlooked: they were found on private land. They are the property of the landowner. We can condemn him and and plead with him until the cows come home. But at the end of the day, he is well within his legal rights to try and sell them. But some don’t think so. Thomas Carr thinks he has a solution to the problem: eminent domain. Basically eminent domain says the government can seize any privately owned property (usually land) if it is for the greater good of the people. Carr argues that . So therefore, the government should use eminent domain to wrest ownership of the MDD away from the landowner so that they can be placed in a museum.

BAD IDEA!!!!!!

Look, there is already a festering pool of resentment towards academic paleontology. I should know, I’m sympathetic to their cause and even i have a grudge against them. There is already this view that paleontologist are greedy misers who want to be the only ones with fossils. Only they get to search for fossils on (supposedly) public lands. The fossils they discover disappear into cavernous vaults never to be seen again. Carr thinks eminent domain may finally be the shock to commercial collectors that they can’t keep selling important fossils. But this would only be dumping gas on the fire. Imagine the attitude i just talked about and multiply it by 20. Using eminent domain to seize fossils won’t make them stop dead in their tracks, they’ll just keep doing it but under the radar, all the while harboring a more antagonistic attitude towards scientists.

I’m against the sale of important vertebrate fossils, but there has to be some kind of middle ground. Instead of trying to punish commercial collectors why not try to work with them? If they find something important they report it to you. And then they can sell all the fragmentary stuff that paleontologists usually don’t bother with anyway. Paleontologists complain that so many fossils are lost to erosion every year because there aren’t enough people to look for them. But they would apparently rather see those specimens lost to erosion than for someone other than a professional to find them (more on that later). This attitude that only professionals get to hunt for fossils is only fueling the view that scientists are a bunch of elitists who hoard fossils for themselves. Until we retire the inflammatory rhetoric and try to find a solution might we finally be able to prevent more cases like the MDD.

Throughout these debates the professionals argue that only museums can provide the proper care for fossils. Furthermore, being in a museum means it’s in the public trust, where it belongs to everyone. The museum is the only proper place for fossils. But then shit like this happens. And this. And this. Oh and don’t forget this. So we have museums attempting to sell their specimens (they were later taken off the market but the fact remains they even tried in the first place), selling out to religious donors, firing their staff, and having to scuttle plans for expansion. To the casual observer, it looks like museums are no better off than private citizens. And then there is this comment from Carr’s post:

As Witton reported on the Pterosaur-Net blog-

“Without mentioning any names, the Texas Memorial Museum has placed a strict embargo on the release of information about Quetzalcoatlus until the full monographic description has been properly published. This has been promised since at least the 1980s (Langston 1981; Kellner and Langston 1996) and, in the meantime, getting access to the material seems to be extremely difficult. I asked to see the material back in 2006 and was told no. Colleagues of mine have asked the same, and got the same answer. The few friends of mine that have seen the specimens are sworn to secrecy and, if they want to publish even itty-bitty snippets of information about them, they have to ask permission first.”

So even specimens in museums are being hoarded, in this case from other scientists (take that comment with a grain of salt though). These specimens are supposed to be in the public trust, the professionals always claim. But are they really? Civilians are prohibited from collecting fossils from (supposedly) public lands. Paleontologists scoop them up and then ship them off (often hundreds of miles away), where they may be seen being prepped, and then are interred into the collections never to been seen again save for the occasional professional scientist. It’s hard to buy the public trust argument when most fossils are hidden away from the public. Most people don’t even know those specimens exist. They just have to take the museum’s word that the fossils are held in their trust, even though only scientists ever get to so much as see them. “But Doug, museums don’t have enough space to display everything.” Yes, that is true. However, there are many ways to remedy this problem that museums don’t even try to do. Have a space where specimens are rotated out. Have an online database. Have a public online gallery of pictures and 3d scans. Maybe even lax access to the collections a little bit, either with open houses or volunteers who can escort appointments through. Why not any of those?

Perhaps it is because specimens aren’t treated as relics of everyone’s heritage. Andy Farke writes over at PlosOne about how even images of specimens are being hoarded. Paleontology is all too eager to right the digital imaging wave but has forgotten what it’s mission is in the first place. Andy lays out how museums put ridiculous amounts of restrictions on photos and 3d scans of specimens. Not only has this been hurting the science, but it also bars most of the solutions i offered above for no good reason. Andy rightly points out that the copyrighting of specimen photos and 3d scans are basically treating these specimens as property. They are being treated as the property of the museum that must be protected from any unauthorized exposure. Remind me again how it’s in the public trust when the museum thinks it should maintain such a choke hold on the best ways to bring them to light? I still think interaction with the real thing is the best way to go, but photos and 3d scans are an excellent start to bringing specimens out of the dark and into the public eye. As i noted before, there are too many excellent specimens hidden away in collections that the public has no idea even exists. All this strict control of images does is reinforce the already bad public image paleontology has gained as of late.

Why am i now partly sticking up for the commercial guys? I have in the past condemned them with much vitriol like the rest of the academics. So why am i calling for a truce with them and even arguing some of their points? Well the truth is that i actually relate to them a little. They are prohibited from collecting on (supposedly) public lands but that’s seen as a good thing because they want to sell fossils. I have science’s interest at heart. I was to collect fossils because i want to study them and teach people about them. They are not for my collection. I’m trying to build a museum so that my stuff will be available to scientists and the public alike. And i know full well the importance of collateral data, so i collect all that i can when i find a fossil. And yet i am also prohibited from collecting on (supposedly) public lands. I am very knowledgeable in how to collect, excavate, and prepare fossils. I know the importance of field data and do my best to gather it. I want to serve science. But i don’t have a fancy and expensive degree, so i just get thrown in with the commercial and private collectors and am invariable banned from trying to uncover and share the evidence of what is apparently (or maybe i should say… supposedly!) my heritage. It’s like having a family heirloom hidden in an attic I’m not allowed to go in.

People constantly shout that amateurs make very important contributions to paleontology. Usually they never give an example. Most vertebrate fossil deposits are on government land of some type, and all require the fancy and expensive degree to be able to collect on. So i can’t help but wonder how many other amateurs like me are out there unable to serve science because we simply lack a specific piece of paper. There was this article a little while back, but it doesn’t say where he found the fossils or who owned the land. Plain and simple, most federal lands only allow professionals to collect fossils. Paleontology almost has that “I’ve got mine” attitude that so many right wingers have. They got their degrees, they are allowed to collect fossils, so why care about amateurs like me who only want to help them?  This has to change.

Remember when i said paleontologists complain that so many fossils are lost to erosion every year because there aren’t enough people to look for them? Well there might be enough people if amateurs like me were allowed to at least look for fossils on (supposedly) public lands. We have sciences interests at heart. We want to collect responsibly. And yet this vast reserve of potential eyes in the field is cast aside because we aren’t professionals. You afraid we might not keep the exact field notes you think is required? Then teach us! Or at the very least, give us the information (papers, maps, stratigraphy charts) so that we can keep proper data. Maybe have the government run field courses with certification? Or perhaps that public curation program Eric once mentioned? Paleontology has a vast and untapped source of people who are considerate and knowledgeable of science that is going to waste because the law is rigid and binary. Until us amateurs are allowed to collect on public lands, i think paleontologists have no room to complain about fossils being lost to erosion because of lack of people searching.

The politics of paleontology are about ugly as anywhere else. Arguments over how to collect, care for, and just where they belong rage as much as wildfire. And it seems people are too caught up in their own interests to try and find a solution to it all. There is a big push for open access in paleontology, not just of papers but also images and 3d scans. But i think it needs to go even further. I think if you truly want paleontology to be open access, then that means not just letting people read about science, but also being able to do it. We amateurs have knowledge and skills and yet the science that we are deeply passionate about still feels high up on an ivory tower. Not all of us can volunteer at a museum (in my case, i don’t live near one and even if i did, it would be no guarantee. I’ve been turned down from volunteer positions before) but we all do, in one capacity or another, have the ability to hunt for fossils that would add to the record of OUR heritage. Even the commercial guys have the potential to contribute. But if science is relegated to the domain of the elite few degree holders, then i fear the rift between the professionals and the civilians is only going to get bigger. I just don’t understand why both sides are more interesting in rubbing salt into wounds than heeling them. I guess politics is here to stay. And we will all suffer for it.

Till next time.

Hey there every peoples!

You know, I keep getting followers. Once in a while I get a message saying that someone is now following my little blog here. And I don’t get why. My posts are sporadic and often overlong. And lately they have consisted of little more than whiney screeds. No wonder I hardly get any comments. But what can I do? I am what I am. And what I am is an aspiring fossil hunter with depression.

It is very difficult to handle. And little things can set it off, often in a domino pattern. It can be especially bad when it concerns the one thing that I am deeply passionate about and want to pursue for the rest of my life. My whole life has been in anticipation of finally going out into the field. But a couple snags and the system I never can. This crap has manifested itself in the continuing debate between academics and commercial collectors and my pathetic attempts to engage in said debate.

The first was on Brian Switek’s Laelaps. He was discussing a new documentary called “Dinosaur 13”. He film details the Sue fiasco and the effect it had on the commercial aspect of fossils. I decided to voice my opinion on a couple of lines that he wrote:

I’ve ranted about this topic plenty over on my blog so I’ll just stick to a couple points.

“– from depleting entire sites to valuable specimens going off to private collections where no one can see them.”- Simple fact of the matter is, the vast majority of fossils, from unseemly fragments to whole skeletons, are never seen by anyone save for the occasional scientist. The only time people may see them is when they are in the viewable preparation lab (and not all museums have those). We are constantly reminded that what we see on display is only a fraction of the collection, and then are left completely in the dark about what the collection could possibly consist of. The tired excuse is “museums don’t have space to display everything”. Yes that is true, but there are ways around this. Rotate specimens out, have open houses, and publish in open access. Best of all, you can have an online database! Some museums have those, but even the best leave much to be desired (namely, few to no pictures of the actual specimens!). Museums say fossils represent our heritage. But most people don’t know the true extent of their heritage because most is locked away, unseen, in some warehouse. That needs to change.

“And that’s not to mention that these dinosaurs sometimes go to collections or institutions far from home, such as a Diplodocus from Wyoming recently sold to an unfinished museum in Denmark…”- Just how far is “far from home”? Do you mean land of origin or just the country? Pretty much all my region’s fossils are, in fact, outside the region! And guess what: very very few of them are display. The rest are hidden away in the collections. Our own museums have so many dinosaur fossils as it is. So what’s wrong with some going to museums outside the country, to nations who don’t have the rich fossil deposits we do? As long as there is good local representation (unlike my home region), then maybe it’s not so bad when we occasionally let a fossil leave.

Not the best argument, but good enough right? I was swiftly reminded why I don’t engage in debate of any kind when this guy decided to chime in:

You’d not guess from Doug’s comment that that one of the functions of a proper natural history museum’s collecting items is to have them conserved and studied and not just displaying them to the public. The main problem scientists have with important specimens going into private collections is not that the number of people who are not studying them but get to see them is so much smaller than if they are on display in a museum but is that there is no reasonable guarantee of access for scientists to the specimen when it is in a private collection.

I’m particularly amused by the ‘something must be done’ about museums not displaying more of their specimens, which is not going to happen if museums are paying big bucks to fossil dealers for specimens.

It would be nice if museums could display more of their specimens (and if the public had an interest beyond that in the more charismatic ones), but it would be even nicer if they had the funds to ensure proper conservation and study of their specimens. Having to compete with fossil dealers is not going to help them do it.

He’s probably right. I say that not because I agree with him, but because I’m never right about anything. However, I feel compelled to take it apart:

You’d not guess from Doug’s comment that that one of the functions of a proper natural history museum’s collecting items is to have them conserved and studied and not just displaying them to the public.

Personally, I think you can’t have one without the other. If you have a lot of public displays but no collections and research then you’re just a common visitor center. But if you have research and collections with no public displays or programs, then you’re some stuffy institute hoarding the treasures of the natural world. Luckily most do have both, but I feel the public exposure could be improved. (And he seemed to conveniently ignore my suggestions for remedying the situation)

But if the public aspect is never given any real thought, why bother with public displays and programs at all? Museums are always using language like “public trust”, “our heritage”, and the like. I have long bought into and supported the public trust argument, but it has been wearing thin as of late. Just what does “holding it in the public trust” mean? I seriously don’t think I’ve ever found a straight answer. But the problem, as I see it, is that entire chapters of fossil history go unnoticed because museums don’t have the space to display them and access to the collections is strictly limited. And I’m not just talking the scraps and fragments that make up a solid portion of most museum’s collections; I mean there are complete, beautifully preserved specimens representing lesser known species and regions, but the public has no idea they exist because museums choose to only display a few prime pieces. Which leads us to:

(and if the public had an interest beyond that in the more charismatic ones)

And whose fault is that? Surely the public bears some responsibility for being so fickle, but I think the other side of the problem is the museums themselves. So many of them (especially the major ones) always display complete, pristine skeletons from the same places (Eocene Wyoming, Oligocene South Dakota, Miocene Nebraska). You know, a quote from Nostalgia Critic describes the situation perfectly:

Have you ever considered the possibility that maybe people don’t know what’s best for them? And that by continually giving them the same crap they’ll never know what’s different, so they’ll just keep asking for the same crap?

The public may be obsessed with big and flashy, but museums are not helping the problem by only displaying whole skeletons of the most marketable species. Doing so not only severely limits what you can display, but it also presents a bad image. People imagine paleontology has going out and always finding a complete skeleton. Hell, complete skeletons fetch the highest prices on the commercial market because people seem to think they are only things worth finding. What is more, by only displaying big charismatic stuff you leave out significant chunks of the earth’s past. You are failing to tell the story of life big time by only focusing on the big, complete stuff. And as I pointed out above there is loads of complete and charismatic specimens that remain locked away and out of sight. For example:

Smilodon fatalis skull discovered in Bee County, Texas. From the Smithsonian’s online collections database

This is the skull of Smilodon from the collections of the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. It comes from Texas. Skulls this whole and pristine are extremely rare and valuable. And what does the museum have on display? A cast of a skeleton from Rancho La Brea. Like every other museum. I talked in my Carpenteria Tar Pits post about how we shouldn’t focus so much on one site or area because it is regional and thus doesn’t speak for places elsewhere. Having that Texas skull on display would be unique; no one else can display it. And I’m sure Texans would get a swell of pride seeing a piece of their state’s heritage displayed in one of the greatest museums in the world. But why be different when same sells?

Having to compete with fossil dealers is not going to help them do it.

You’re the one saying you have to compete. I have already talked about potential middle ground in previous posts. So have others, who are probably much better than I am at explaining it.

I understand the need for fossils to be conserved. It is what I hope to do with the Grand Vision. But museums need to do more to make fossils public if the “public trust” approach is to ever have any real merit. I’m sure he’s right, since I’m never right about anything. It’s what I get for opening my big mouth.

However, that guy’s comment is the lesser prod of my mental anguish. The other came when I tried to voice my opinion in a debate way above my pay grade. It was in the comments section of a video debate about the fossil trade. I was greeted with this:

The laws ban non-permit-holders from collecting on public lands. Any land that is open for citizens to walk over, and enjoy for other purposes, is still open for visual prospecting. You are welcome to look for fossils, you just cannot collect them. If you do discover something important, you can take photos and email them to someone who does have a permit. Museums would much rather see photos of a potential specimen than have someone bring in fragments, which removes them from their taphonomic context in the original locality. Also, if you develop a good relationship with a museum, then sometimes the museum can add you to their permit as an approved research associate, even without a “fancy degree”.

“Fancy degrees” are a way of demonstrating that a person has devoted significant study to a field. Just as people want to go to a doctor that has earned an MD, and people want their engineers and mechanics to be certified, the government requires that someone collecting on government land must have certification in the form of an advanced degree or a job at an accredited museum, and that the fossils collected must end up in an accredited repository so that they will always be available for scientific research, and, for the large interesting specimens, public display and enjoyment.

Once again there is really no point in following up because let’s face it, this is me we’re talking about. But that won’t stop me from trying.

You are welcome to look for fossils, you just cannot collect them.

Look, I’m trying to start a museum. How am I supposed to accomplish that if I can never collect anything? Too many of my homeland’s fossils have already been taken away. Repatriation of said fossils is a fevered delusion only a simpleton like me could ever think was even remotely possible. If I’m to ever have any chance of a Central Coast museum, I need to start finding my own material.

If you do discover something important, you can take photos and email them to someone who does have a permit. Museums would much rather see photos of a potential specimen than have someone bring in fragments, which removes them from their taphonomic context in the original locality.

You really think that will work? I have thought of that as a possible solution to this whole mess, but just how feasible is it? A museum’s curators have duties that extend beyond just collecting stuff. If I’m constantly emailing them about stuff I find, then they won’t have time to collect them all in between their other duties. And considering the remoteness of most fossil localities, it would take them awhile to get out there, and the specimen could very well be gone by then because I’m not even allowed to stabilize and jacket it (to ensure it would survive until they could get to it). There was a fossil here in SLO County that I tried to get several scientists interested in. No takers. So even if I did what you suggested, is there really any guarantee they would come to collect it?

And again, how will that help me in my efforts to start my own museum? Not only am I not collecting anything for my museum’s collection, but it would be leaving the region. That is wholly antithetical to what I’m trying to accomplish.

Also, if you develop a good relationship with a museum, then sometimes the museum can add you to their permit as an approved research associate, even without a “fancy degree”.

Tried that before. I have built good relationships with museums, but something tells me I couldn’t get on their permit because I lack the fancy degree. And don’t trot out the tired old “volunteer at a museum”. I have discussed plenty about why that isn’t really feasible for me at the moment (finances, having to relocate, and the fact that it’s not even a sure thing). I don’t have an easy opportunity to volunteer. I have tried desperately to offer my services to museums and their paleontologists, and it’s always brushed off and ignored. “Volunteer at a museum” has become a hollow, meaningless response meant to immediately dismiss the problem without any kind of thought. It’s basically a talking point more than anything.

I’m starting to get weary of academics and the like complaining about not having enough bodies in the field to find fossils. Dr. Dave Whistler once said we need to get more people into Cuyama Valley. Denver Fowler once said the purpose of their “Alamosaurus is one of the biggest dinosaurs known” paper was to try and get people interested in the Ojo Alamo formation. Well you know what? I am interested. I am willing to go out and look. And at my own expense even, since I’m not part of any outfit. Paleontologists are often complaining that more fossils are lost to erosion than what we can currently find because there isn’t enough man power. There would be if amateurs like me were allowed to prospect and collect. But if you would rather leave fossils out to rot because we don’t meet yours and the government’s extremely high standards, then you don’t get to complain.

“Fancy degrees” are a way of demonstrating that a person has devoted significant study to a field. Just as people want to go to a doctor that has earned an MD, and people want their engineers and mechanics to be certified, the government requires that someone collecting on government land must have certification in the form of an advanced degree or a job at an accredited museum, and that the fossils collected must end up in an accredited repository so that they will always be available for scientific research, and, for the large interesting specimens, public display and enjoyment.

And we’re back to this again. I fully understand the need for collateral data. I try to keep the best records I can when I collect. I understand the need for a repository. That doesn’t bother me. That’s something I could eventually work towards. But this insistence on the fancy degree… Apparently you can be a seasoned veteran of the field with years of experience and the tools and knowledge to follow the procedures of paleontology to the letter; but if you don’t have that fancy degree, than you’re shit out of luck.

Look, the fancy degree just isn’t an option for me. You any idea what I have to do before I can even transfer to a university? Biology, physics, chemistry, geometry, trigonometry, precalculus, and calculus. All just to transfer. Biology wouldn’t be so bad since I know a fare bit about it. But all the other stuff… My learning disability really gimps my math skills. And all those courses are extremely math heavy. I tried talking trigonometry. On average half my test would be blank when I turned it in. Math lab and other DSPS tools weren’t much help. Never mind just trying to learn how to do it. There were core concepts I was not grasping, because anything above algebra requires a kind of abstract thought that my learning disability does not permit. So I cannot pursue that fancy degree. And according to the world, that’s just tough shit. The requirement for proper curation is something I could eventually acquire. The rigid and callous insistence on the fancy degree kills everything I hope to achieve before I even had a chance to pursue it.

Folks, I honestly don’t know what to think anymore. For so long, I thought the academics were on the right side. I even sought to join in my own way, maybe even bring about some of the changes I have talked about over the years. But now, I don’t know. I find myself sympathizing with the commercial dealers not because I agree with their practices, but because I seem to be villanized as much as them. I thought my cause was just. I thought I could join in the honored crusade to protect, study, and share the mysteries and marvels of our ancient past. But I guess I was wrong. Without the fancy degree, I am a nobody. Because I didn’t go to the solemn halls of academia, I couldn’t possibly be a paleontologist. Because a fancy degree is the only way to be a paleontologist, I am but an irresponsible hack, a pathetic wannabe who cannot do any good because he isn’t part of the elite.

So what do I do? Do I just accept I’ll never be able to follow my dream of creating my own museum? Do I simply resign myself to wandering the badlands snapping shots of fossils only for others to scoop up and lock away? Do I continue to blindly follow the law even though it’s bullshit? Or do I throw caution to the wind and collect anyway, breaking the law and becoming (quite possibly even more of) an outcast? Do I continue to follow the scientists I respect and aspire to be like? Or do I throw myself in with the commercial folks who I have been lumped in with? Or do I just remove myself from the world all together? Press the cold steel and with one little jerk loose the crimson tide? Perhaps my disappearance would solve the problem to everyone’s satisfaction. One less whiny and deranged hack in the world mucking things up for the proper folk. Of course, that’s assuming the world would even notice I was gone. Not thoroughly convinced it would.

I just spent a great of time venting. All of it wrong headed for sure, because I never seem to understand anything to actually be able to form a respectable opinion. It usually just ends with me being in the wrong and often getting me in hot water with folks I care about. I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. Growing up I was constantly bombarded with “positive thinking”, saying you can do whatever you want if you work hard enough. Turns out that was a lie. No matter what you do, there will always be arbitrary and malevolent forces keeping you from going anywhere. My entire life has been in the pursuit of paleontology. The Grand Vision is what defines me. If I can’t follow that, if the world is so hell bent on taking that from me, then I have no idea where to go, what to do. But it certainly doesn’t sound like a world worth being a part of.

Till next time

Hey there every peoples!

This last week and a half  has been tumultuous to say the least. It’s pretty much been my biggest fight with the demon in ages. I’m still getting over that thanks to the support of my friends and family (and certain services helped as well). So this time around, I’m doing something totally for fun. It’s just some silly discussion meant to goof around with to help take my mind off things. With that out of the way, let’s dive in!

Not long ago on February 25, the world was treated to the theatrical trailer for the upcoming Godzilla movie. If you haven’t already seen it, here you go (and if you have seen it, watch it again so you may further bask in it’s awesomeness):

What makes this film different from the prolific and long running Godzilla franchise? Well the first is that this is supposed to be an “Americanized” Godzilla film. The films by Toho and Showa command a large, loyal fan base; however, outside that fan base the Godzilla movies are viewed as cheesy and camp b-movies starring guys in rubber suits, nothing to be taken seriously (despite the grim tone and apocalyptic themes of the original 1954 film). The first attempt to bring Godzilla to America was Roland Emrich’s 1998 “Godzilla”. It was a box office hit, but it scored poorly with fans and critics alike. Today it’s so reviled that some fans pretend it doesn’t even exist.

Now I’m here mainly to talk about the monsters and not really delve into the themes, characters, and plot (well mostly). I love movie monsters, and my childhood was populated by the likes of King Kong, Ray Harryhouson’s menagerie, and of course, Godzilla. I’m not into the whole obsession our country has with Japanese culture, but I can’t deny the impact Godzilla has had. After all, he is the King of the Monsters. Legendary has made it clear that no Toho monsters will appear in the film. All the monsters save for the G-Man himself were created from scratch. Now I’ve prattled long enough. Let’s get it on!

Muto

The monsters in this movie are called Mutos. What is a Muto? We’re not entirely sure given the secrecy surrounding them. We do know that they are named after M.U.T.O., a research organization that will play a central role in the plot. They seem to be waging a secret war against Godzilla (and possibly the Mutos as well) and operate under a heavy veil of secrecy. Later we’ll talk about the possible relation this outfit has with their titular monsters.

8-Legged Muto

At Comic Con 2013, a tightly packed auditorium was treated to a special trailer for Godzilla. The footage never surfaced, so all we had to go on were eyewitness reports. While everyone cheered the Return of the King, a lot of attention was payed to Godzilla’s foe. Accounts vary, but the general outline of the creature was described as this:

Eyewitness sketch of the “8-Legged Muto”.

Strange for sure, like some kind of alien spider. Could it be from outer space? This was the face of the Mutos for a few months before some pictures of a toy related to the film were leaked on the internet. Most were taken down but we do have a few drawings based on it’s likeness, which is quite a bit different than what we see above:

Not only does this make the creature look much more believable than the toy, but since it’s fan art the studio can’t tear it down! Now that’s a win-win! From Deviantart user DJ1NNsGR1MO1R3

Whereas the first image looks like a mutant spider (an animal we are all familiar with), this looks like something from out of this world. Many comparisons have been drawn to Cloverfield, for obvious reasons. I do like the claws. They look like something that walks arond on the knuckle but then uncurl to act as hooks in climbing. Both versions look like rather delicate; the second one even more than the first. How could a creature like this even pose a threat to Godzilla, let alone go toe-to-toe with him? Time will tell.

This guy has made a couple brief appearances in the trailers. Of course, hardly anything is revealed. The first one shows the Muto chomping a street train in half:

I don’t think this is what they meant by “dining car”!

At the rear of the still you can make out the jaw and membrane making up the Muto’s mouth. Early speculation on this shot posited that the Muto had three jaws: one upper, two lower. The toy didn’t give that impression, although it was just a simple figure. The other time is when he tries to curb stomp a group of people (army? M.U.T.O. agents?):

“Feel-”

“The-”

“Thunder!”

Now there has been a lot of speculation on just what is going on here. Many think the Muto is emitting some kind of explosion or pulse. However, the people seem to be reacting more to the foot crashing down (and they don’t waver all that much). Based on the toy, i think this is some kind of bio-luminescence that just created a flash when the Muto stomped. All was clear, except for a teaser from Ban Dai. It’s just a silhouette, but it complicates the picture:

Unfortunately, this is a toy image. So it’s only a matter of time before the company tears it down.

This looks just like the reports from Comic Con. Could the Comic Con Muto have been an early concept that was later refined into the current 8-Legged Muto? Is it a predecessor to the current form in the film’s universe? Or is it a separate Muto adding to the headaches of mankind and Godzilla alike? Who can tell at this point.

Winged Muto

Early toy descriptions mentioned not just a “Multi-Legged” Muto, but also a “Winged” Muto. Even less is known about this guy than the Multi-Legged one. He appears much like is compatriot in a couple brief shots of parts of its body:

“It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… one of the most overused jokes in existence!”

I don’t care what anyone says- that was cooler than any dive i saw at the 2012 Olympics!

It appears full bodied and has pointed wings like a falcon or a pterasaur. The resemblance to that later has led to many fans insisting it’s Rodan, despite Legendary staunchly declaring that no previous monsters would appear. Some thought it may have been a mutant bat. For support, they cite a shot of fighter jets falling out of the sky. If it was a mutant bat, they argued, it might have disabled the planes with some kind of sonic sound wave. But the identity of this Muto has recently been either clarified or confused further by another toy leak:

Again, thanks to a fans artwork, we get a more realistic looking creature and the company can’t tear it down. By Deviantart user kaijugroupie84

Now many have complained about the appearance of this Muto. They chiefly call it uninspired and lame. And i agree somewhat. It’s just the 8-Legged Muto with one pair of limbs converted to wings. It just looks like they used the copy and paste function in photoshop. Many argue that these are male and female or different life stages of the same species. Ok, I can buy that. But still, they didn’t alter any of the body for flight (fantastic premise of the movies or not, it looks ill-equipped to take to the skies) or anything else besides wings to denote sexual dimorphism. They could have looked significantly different and still be the same species. For example, angler fish are sexually dimorphic to the extreme. Females are greatly larger than the males. The male latches onto the female and suck nutrients out of her. When they were first discovered, scientists thought they were different species! So yeah, i think they got a little lazy with the design here. But again, toys aren’t always the most accurate representations of their onscreen incarnations. Maybe it will look different in the movie. Or maybe it isn’t the only Muto overhead….

Centipede Muto

The titanic corpse of this creature was partly shown in the Comic Con footage. Since then, debate has raged over whether or not it will appear in the film. It has become known as “Vishnu”, because of the dialogue in the Comic Con footage (Oppenheimer’s quoting of Hindu scriptures. Despite the overlap in the footage, I think that quote was meant to be describing Godzilla) and many legs (Hindu deities are depicted with multiple arms; the most I’ve seen is 18!). Fans also debated over how many legs it has: 8 pairs or 10 pairs. Regardless, it looks like a cross between a lizard and a centipede:

“Just a flesh wound!”

One fan speculated that the number of legs, shape of the feet, and build of the body strongly resembles a water bear. I like this idea. Despite the cute sounding name, water bears are some of the toughest organisms known. Given all the crap they can survive, it would make sense for one to grow gigantic and become resistant to radiation. Now, most think this guy won’t be in the film, arguing that Comic Con was just concept footage. However, i think he may very well make an appearance. Take a look at this shot:

Never forget: What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!

It’s your typical path of destruction, but look again. It looks narrow and appears to have left a furrow. This doesn’t seem like Godzilla’s handy work. It’s too neat. This is the kind of thing that would be left by something long and slender. Kinda like Vishnu! But how do we know Vishnu is long and slender when we see only a small part of him in the Comic Con footage? Once again, we have toy spoilers to thank:

Unfortunately, this is a toy image. So it’s only a matter of time before the company tears it down.

Once again, we have no idea for sure. He may be a chopped creation. Many movies have toys of characters, enemies, and monsters that don’t appear in the film. The extreme amount of secrecy surrounding the film makes anything difficult to determine. But i hope he makes it in. For some reason, Vishnu has kinda grown on me.

Another Winged Muto?

The possibility of another Winged Muto comes from a shot in the second trailer:

That soldier in the background done got pwned!

The current school of thought is that this takes place during a train shipment of missiles (and quite possibly other things). However, the train is halted and apparently attacked by the Mutos. In this shot we see one destroying a rail bridge during the ensuing battle. At fist some thought it was Godzilla, who was cleaving the bridge with one of his dorsal spines. However further analysis revealed that it is not the right shape to be one of Godzilla’s spines. In light of the Winged Muto reveal, it doesn’t match that one either. Could this be a different, separate Muto? Could it be it’s “true form”? We’ll have to wait and see.

Dead or Ancient Kaiju?

This ominous shot shows a M.U.T.O. team investigating a giant skeleton in an underground cavern:

I don’t suppose they’ll play the ribcage like a giant xylophone…

Again, at first people thought it was Godzilla (either the original or another one). But it’s too long and serpentine. Is it a fossil? Is it more recent? For that, we’ll have to talk about the nature of the Mutos itself.

Origins

Now we get to the nitty gritty: just where did the Mutos come from? One idea tossed around is they were created by their name sake company. In the second trailer, Ken Watanabe’s character says “They were trying to kill it”. This is a reference to the use of nuclear weapons in an attempt to kill Godzilla when he first surfaced in the 1950s. The word “trying” and the fact the movie takes place now mean it didn’t work. Shortly after, he says ominously “The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around”. Could it be that the Mutos were created by M.U.T.O. to combat Godzilla? Only they get loose and run amok? This would certainly fit into the theme of the movie about mans self-imposed struggle with the natural world. But yet another toy leak casts doubt on that theory. The description on the back of a Godzilla figure has this to say:

Since then, the giant creature has been living in the deep ocean – until a threat to his survival from an ancient foe forces him to reappear.

 

This implies that Godzilla is, like the original, a prehistoric monster revived/awakened by nuclear radiation. The same for the Mutos, who were apparently Godzilla’s enemies way back in the day. While in line with the canon of the original films, it doesn’t seem to have the same intellectual weight as the genetic engineering theory. But there is a possibility that both could be right. Perhaps after Godzilla arose in the 1950s, M.U.T.O., in their quest for a solution, found the remains of another giant monster from earth’s past. They somehow manage to salvage dna from it which they then use to create the Mutos. I’d say anything is possible at this point!

So that’s what i think so far on the new monster looking to make their entry into the Godzilla mythos. It’s a tall order, but Legendary seems confident. Either way, i can’t wait to see some good ol’ fashioned monster mayhem come May.

Till next time!

Hey there every peoples!

At the suggestion of someone, i have decided to start posting pictures of specimens to show the progress of the Central Coast Prehistory Project’s collections.

For the first, i decided to show a specimen i found recently while cleaning out some rejects that were taking up space.

Hatchet fish. From Lompoc, Santa Barbara County.

This is a specimen of a deep sea hatchet fish, found near Lompoc, Santa Barbara County. It comes from the diotomaceous shales of the Monterey formation. The detail of preservation is remarkable, as we are able to see the tiny teeth on it’s jaw:

Close up of jaw, revealing it’s teeth.

This is just the first of many, although i’m not sure on the regularity. I don’t want to give it all away at once! So stay tuned to see what other treasures the CCPP turns up!

Til next time!