More sauropods on the horizon?

Somewhere in Spain, scientists have uncovered what Times Online is calling "Europe's largest boneyard." Not only is it the largest, but it's also diverse, with about 8 species of dinosaurs found so far amid the 8,000 fossils.

Picture from Times Online (reference below)

The boneyard was found in June and has been picked at vigorously since then. It's evidently going to play a big part in the dinosaur extinction investigation.

My favorite part: they've found three or four Titanosaurs! And they've found Titanosaurs with scutes, which has, according to the article, never happened in Europe before. AND they've found "more than 100 individual Titanosaurs"! That's great!

I would like to know what it all implies for sauropods. Do the scutes imply migratory behavior?

As far as I know, there was a land bridge connecting "North America" to "Asia," but I'm not 100% on that. I honestly don't know enough about all of this to have any answers, but I would love to hear from someone who does.

Reference

Thomas Catᮠin. "Dinosaur graveyard may unearth new reasons for their extinction." Times Online. November 29, 2007. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2963586.ece

Nigersaurus...and a question...

*Credit: Photo © Gabrielle Lyon, courtesy Project Exploration

Science has always been my passion. As a young kid I would capture and observe small animals from the stream in our back yard. Lightning, tornadoes and other natural phenomena fascinated me; I put pictures of extreme weather on my walls and tried, with no luck, to go on a tornado chase for my fifteenth birthday. I told my parents, all throughout my childhood, that I wanted to be a paleontologist.

So I often wonder why I majored in writing and not in a science. And the answer is actually very simple: I was scared. Science is intimidating. It's an arena where everyone is trying to prove you wrong. It's not static. It's dominated by some of the most brilliant minds. It's a field that requires a certain kind of thinking.

I was afraid of science. I was afraid of being proven wrong, of asking the wrong questions. And sometimes I still am. So I have a question. One that may have a painfully obvious answer to some of you. I've been afraid to ask it, but I also want to be a good scientist, and I figure asking questions is the best way to become a good scientist. So here goes...

Nigersaurus had a very pneumatic vertebrae, which made the skeleton quite light (relatively). But Nigersaurus was also very small (also relatively!). So the question (not mine) is, "Why did a small sauropod need a light skeleton?"

My question is, could it be a form of protection? If Nigersaurus was small compared to most sauropods, and most sauropods got their protection from their size alone, would a lighter skeleton allow for a faster sauropod? One that would not have a size advantage?

And that leads me to more questions, as follows:

• In general, are lighter-boned animals faster than animals with dense bones?
• Is bone density related to muscle size? I'm assuming that small bones have small muscle attachment sites and than light bones can only handle a certain amount of stress caused by muscle contraction.
• Would a small sauropod be fast enough to outrun a carnivorous therapod?
• If not faster, what sort of adaptations would a small sauropod have for defense?

I also wonder, could the light skeleton mean that Nigersaurus was a slender animal? Perhaps it was not as robust as other sauropods, especially given its feeding habits and did not need an especially strong frame to carry its weight.

Anyway, I hope that doing this will help me get over my fear of asking questions and maybe stimulate some good conversation. I'm always afraid to ask questions like this, but really, what do I have to lose?

Reference

Sereno, P. C., Wilson, J. A., Witmer, L. M., Whitlock, J. A., Maga, A., Ide, O. & Rowe, T. A. (2007). Structural extremes in a Cretaceous dinosaur. PLoS One (11): published online.

I hate to be one of those students, but...

Chemistry lab is turning out to be a real disappointment. From annoying lab partners to obnoxious classmates...and now the TA.

I don't want to be one of those "my teacher sucks because I'm not doing well" students, but I have that attitude at this point.

For the lab section of my Chemistry course I have to hand in a pre-lab and lab report for every experiment. The pre-lab is a statement of purpose and a brief version of the procedures. We hand the pre-labs in before each lab. The purpose of them, as stated in the syllabus, is to show evidence of preparation for the lab. I have been writing the pre-labs with the utmost care; making the purpose statement as concise and accurate a possible and writing the procedures out with less detail than the lab manual, but enough detail so that I could do the lab correctly. Yesterday, I got back the first two labs that we did and while I got the full 8 points for each lab report, I got only 1 out of 3 points for each pre-lab. The only explanation of the grade slash was this: "Too detailed information."


Okay. So there's too much in the procedure section. I get it. I need to do less. That's fine. My problem is that I've now handed in three labs without knowing that I'm putting in too much detail. Perhaps if my first lab had been returned, oh, earlier than a month after I handed it in, I might have been able to address the problem. But now I have three crappy pre-lab grades. The lab doesn't count for more than 1/5 of my grade, but it's still going to bring down my overall grade (which up until now was 100%). I understand that my TA is busy. He's a PhD student and he's got his own stuff goin' on. But crap...a month later???

It also sorta irks me that the kids who do their pre-labs in the five minutes before lab starts get better grades. It's pretty obvious that the grades don't actually reflect preparedness...
Also, the girl who asks me ninety questions during the lab needs to crack the spine on her lab manual. I'm not her freakin' tutor.

In the spirit of recent sauropod posts, I thought I would include some pictures I took at the Miami Science Museum's "Dinosaurs of China" exhibit. The first is Lufengosaurus and the second is Shunosaurus. More pictures can be found here.






And the moment you've all been waiting for...my favorite new bookend:





Thanks for listening....now, off to the doctor...

I Freakin' Love Sauropods!

I got to work this morning, checked my email and, as always, eagerly opened up StatCounter to see just how many millions have read my blog. Yesterday was a record-breaker with a total of .000022 million visits! Pitiful as that is, I'm pretty excited. That's almost twice as much as the day before.

After opening my email and checking StatCounter, I went through my list of favorite blogs and visited each one in order. At this point, I have to say that there's a really amazing community of paleobloggers out there. I look forward to reading their blogs every morning...I always learn something new and their enthusiasm keeps me excited.

Anyway, I arrived at Darren's Tetrapod Zoology blog and a sauropod image caught my eye. I freakin' love sauropods. I love their long necks...their complicated phylogeny. I love their names, the arguments over their posture, their size. Why did anything on Earth ever get so big? They're beautiful and they're relatively understudied. And there are so many unanswered questions.

When I first decided to go back to school, I knew it would be years before I got to do any new dino research, but I wanted to get involved in one way or another, even if it meant nothing to anyone else. I started compiling a list of all known Sauropodomorphs on an Excel spreadsheet. I did my best to categorize them by their phylogeny, estimated length, locality (formation in one column, country in another), and age (period in one column, epoch in another). Nomen Nudum were highlighted in blue. Nomen Dubium were highlighted in pink. I used the DML as a reference at first, and then turned to Wilson and Sereno (1998), Wilson (2002) and Upchurch et al. (2004). Using Excel, I could organize the spreadsheet by category. I could view all of the sauropods found in Argentina, all of the sauropods from the Kimmeridgian, all of the Titanosaurs. Unfortunately, my list was so big that breaking the sauropods into categories didn't help me to understand them more...there was just too much information. And I kept having to add sauropods every day, given the serious increase in sauropod discoveries!

What I did learn is that sauropod phylogeny is all over the place. I kept finding new clade names and dinos that didn't seem to fit anywhere. I am just as confused about the whole thing today than I was when I started. I'm going to have to study phylogenetics and anatomy before I really get the whole sauropod classification thing down...

Since I've strayed so far from my original point, with no hope of finding a clever way to make the transition, I'll just say it: SV-POW! Matt at Ask Dr. Vector, Darren at Tetrapod Zoology and Mike Taylor have teamed up to bring us all the Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog! It's new, it's completely nerdy and it's all about sauropods vertebrae! I suggest you go behold the wonder and beauty of it all.