Paleontology Week in Review: 5/24/14

This week, starting every Saturday, I’ll do a paleontology week in review. I’ll go over new discoveries, recommend articles on them, and give my perspective on it.

First up is Leinkupal laticauda, discovered by a team led by Palbo Gallina of the Universidad Maimoides, who has a right to be cocky about his find.  Leinkupal, like most dinosaur finds, is sadly incomplete, mostly vertebrae. However, the vertebrae indicate a small (30 foot) sauropod, and a unique one at that.  This is because the vertebrae are unmistakably, distinctly diplodocid. Diplodocids were long-snouted,  whip-tailed sauropods that reached their heyday in the Late Jurassic with their banner species: the legendary Apatosaurus, the famous Diplodocus, Barosaurus, African Tornieria, Portuguese Dinheirosaurus, and the gigantic Supersaurus among them. Like their stegosaur compatriots, they went into a sudden extinction at the end of the Jurassic. As the stegosaurs were replaced by ankylosaurs, diplodocids were replaced by the titanosaurs, broad-toothed, box-headed sauropods that conquered every continent and lasted until the end of the Cretaceous.

What makes Leinkupal unique is its being in the Bajada Colorado Formation, about 133 million years ago. It’s been 12 million years after the Jurassic extinction, and no diplodocids have been found in the Cretaceous until now.  It’s a survivor, and survivor species are fascinating. What allowed them to survive? What kind of environment did it have? What were the other species? Unfortunately, little is known on this formation and so we don’t know, but it’s a great discovery and I hope Gallina et all will find more about this unique animal.

Here’s the paper:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0097128

The other news is even bigger, but also a South American sauropod. I was talking about Titanosaurs earlier, and they include the giant sauropods Paralititan, Antarctosaurus, Puertasaurus, and Argentinasaurus.  This team includes Drs. Diego Po, Pablo Puerta and Jose Luis Carballido from the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio.  They announced that seven specimens were found, with the huge bones being excavated for the past three years and will continue for a long time in the future.  The animals are estimated to be up to 130 feet long, larger than any other sauropods found.  Matt Wedel used a femur to calculate one specimen to be the size of the current record holder for largest dinosaur, Argentinasaurus, while other experts argue for a larger size. Regardless, this is a close relative of the giant Puertasaurus and Argentinasaurus, and in the same titanic size range.

Here are two good articles on the find

http://svpow.com/2014/05/19/the-new-argentine-titanosaur-was-about-the-same-size-as-the-biggest-argentinosaurus/

http://paleoking.blogspot.com/2014/05/record-smashing-titanosaur-just.html

The formation is not reported in most of the press releases, but the location-Chubut, and the report of Tyrannotitan teeth, suggest the animal is from the Cerro Barcino formation. The environment, according to earlier finds, was a dry plain, so dry that the resident crocodile predator Barcinosuchus seemed to be specialize in terrestrial prey. Other dinosaurs include the giant predatory carnosaur Tyrannotitan, the smaller ceratosaur (perhaps the last non-abeliosaurid) Genyodectes, and the smaller titanosaurus Chubutisaurus.    I hope to soon make an article on the succession of South American formations, but it preceded the other giants Argentinasaurus, Antarctosaurus, and Puertasaurus the same way Tyrannotitan preceded Giganotosaurus, Mapusaurus, Aerosteon and Orkoraptor.

Sadly, there's been no paper and no name given to this new giant, but I'll give you updates as they come up in the news! Right now we can just cheer on Carbadillo and company and wish them the best of luck on this amazing discovery.

That’s all the news for this week , and I’ll see you the next Saturday if anything comes up!

Documentary Review: Walking With Dinosaurs-the Ballad of Big Al

In December I reviewed the sequel to the BBC’s smash hit Walking With Dinosaurs, Walking With Beasts. However, this wasn’t the only 2001 followup. It’s a sign of the original series’ success that they not only made a sequel, but also made a spinoff around the same time. This was not a complete series, however, but a single episode explicitly based on a specific fossil. It has the same opening sequence as the rest of the series, and follows the same format. The name of this special, however, is much less dramatic, despite the story being as grim and violent as the other stories in the series: The Ballad of Big Al. 

Top 10 Prehistoric Creatures pictured accidentally

You know, it’s easy to see how we’ve misinterpreted fossils.  It’s difficult for any part of an animal to fossilize, so complete specimens are rare and really special.  So inaccurate palaeoart is inevitable, and really not surprising at all.  Then there are the times when reconstructions accidentally depict a different animal entirely unintentionally. We all know about how Tyrannosaurus was originally reconstructed on Allosaurus and Apatosaurus on Camarosaurus, but they’re not alone. Sometimes it’s because of misidentification, and sometimes it’s simply due to laziness in paleontological reconstructions.  Here are the top 10 Prehistoric Animals people picture when they try to picture a different animal (there has to be a specific word for this phenomenon. I’m sure there’s one in German or something).

Species That Don't Get Enough Publicity #6: Moropus

The thing about the featured animal today is you’ve probably seen it before. There’s a lot of museums with it-the Harvard museum, Yale Peabody museum, Field Museum, Denver museum, Smithsonian National Museum, Carnegie museum, and American museum each have a mount of it. There are multiple mounts at the place of its discovery, the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument in Nebraska. I’m sure most of you have seen this one and wandered past it, thinking it a horse or a big bizarre mammal. It is a big, bizarre mammal, but it’s one that’s one of my favorites. This is Moropus, 5 species of a large, successful mammal that roamed the American west.

April 1

Well, I know all the real blogs are doing elaborate April Fool's gags, but I'm going to save that for next year. Still, I want to entertain, so today we're doing do an MST3k-style commentary track for the Korean dinosaur movie Tarbosaurus aka Speckles The Tarbosaurus.

Food for thought: Omnivore’s dilemma

In case you pay attention to the latest paleontology news, there’s been a lot of publicity towards the ever-growing case for giant flightless birds being herbivores. Isotope analysis done on the Eocene Gastornis and Pleistocene Genyornis suggest diets high in fruits (for Gastornis) and grass (Genyornis), overturning the long-held assumption of them as predators.  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00114-014-1158-2 So that’s that, it seems; we made a mistake, and now these brilliant scientists have demoted these terrifying runners into placid, docile browsers according to the headlines.  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00114-014-1158-2

Documentary Review: Walking With Monsters 2005

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally time we finish the “Walking With” trilogy. True, there’s the three Chased by Dinosaurs specials and Allosaurus and Walking With Cavemen, but this one is the closest to the original in terms of structure.  It’s very different, however, in many ways, from running time to presentation. It’s certainly ambitious and explores much-neglected times and places in prehistory. People often forget that these periods existed, and only the trilobite, Dimetrodon, and possibly Meganuera as familiar to most of the public. They’ve always played second fiddle to dinosaurs, so much that Dimetrodon is more often placed with dinosaurs than with fellow Pelycosaurs. It’s telling that in the former exhibit Life Over Time, there was a corridor visitors could take to bypass the entire Palaeozoic and go straight to the dinosaurs (thankfully, Evolving Planet does not). It’s certainly the longest in terms of time periods covered, while it’s much shorter in running time: at 90 minutes, it’s half the length of the first two.  So without further ado, let’s look at the prehistoric clip show to see how they can deal with 280 million years of evolution in one and a half hours.