Three Days In New Mexico, Part 2: Spencer Was Like An Angel

Although Paul Olsen is running the CPCP project, someone decided that Spencer Lucas should host the CPCP meeting at the NMMNHS, an interesting choice to be sure. To his credit, Spencer was extremely personable. During the talks, he made frequent comments and interjections (I think he even asked a couple questions), which were always calmly and politely stated. Although there was much disagreement at various stages of the conference regarding his opinions, his responses were extremely civil. He did not ask any questions regarding my presentation cutting up his lithostratigraphic correlations within the park, although he did energetically scribble down notes.

I had not really planned to directly interact with Lucas on any level during the course of the meeting. However, he came up to me as people were just arriving on the first day, said hello, and stuck out his hand. I had heard much of Lucas’ legendary charm but had never experienced its full blast first-hand. I was duly impressed. Raw niceness radiated off of him as though from a living ray of sunshine. It is impossible to refuse to shake hands under such conditions without creating a rift in the fabric of space-time. He asked me kindly how things were going, and I answered; still at the park, job-hunting, etc…

What an affable guy! I was immediately self-conscious about seeming rude. Had I written anything particularly nasty about Spencer recently? Think! Think! No, I realized; my last blog was on the federal deficit, which I likened to a rabid dog which acts friendly to people’s faces while planning to bite them in the back. I felt relieved. Lucas forgot to say hello to Bill, which was probably just an oversight.

He was super nice, honestly.

Next: Why We Need Core

Three Days In New Mexico, Part 1: I Wonder Who Reviewed The Typothorax Paper?

Bill and I were in Albuquerque this weekend for the second meeting of the Colorado Plateau Coring Project. The CPCP is a project spearheaded by Paul Olsen to drill for cores from the Colorado Plateau (the current focus is early Mesozoic strata). Amongst other opportunities, this trip also afforded to opportunity to get a peek at a couple Typothorax specimens on display in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

The aetosaur Typothorax coccinarum is of obvious personal interest to me, having been the subject of my master’s thesis (Martz, 2002). I described the material collected by Charles Camp from Canjilon Quarry in the Petrified Forest Member of northern New Mexico, which consisted of disarticulated but associated skeletal material (mostly osteoderms). I figured out, as best I could, which regions of the body particular osteoderms came from by using patterns of variation in articulated carapaces of other aetosaur taxa. Bill and I refer to this as “positional analysis," which Rob Long and Karen Ballew began in their landmark 1985 paper, but which I fleshed out a bit for Typothorax.

The New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science has excavated TWO articulated Typothorax skeletons from the Bull Canyon Formation of New Mexico. The first (which was briefly described by Hunt et al. in the 1993 Global Triassic volume) was accidently destroyed while being molded, but they were able to get one good pull off the mold which was used to make the bronze on display in the Triassic hall at the NMMNHS.

The second specimen was recovered more recently. Although not as complete as the first specimen, it was highlighted in a recent newspaper article in which peculiar spikey osteoderms on the underside of the tail were speculated to represent “claspers.” This specimen is currently on display in the NMMNHS, and a description is allegedly in press. Neither Bill nor I remember being asked to review the manuscript, which is a little odd since we are sometimes considered “experts” on the subject of aetosaurs.

From Paleo Errata

Anyway, it is a fairly impressive specimen. I’m not going to discuss the specimen as it is still unpublished, but I retract my suggestion on Bill’s blog that the spiky osteoderms are misplaced caudal lateral osteoderms; these are clearly right where they ought to be, and the “claspers” are clearly osteoderms on the ventral side of the tail, as alleged by the authors quoted in the article. I look forward to seeing the description, since it will be a while yet before I get around to publishing a detailed description of the Canjilon material. Both NMMNHS specimens will prove invaluable for testing my positioning of osteoderms, and for clarifying the position of weird osteoderms whose positions I could only speculate upon.

Since Bill has been delinquent on posting my life reconstructions of the Chinle fauna, here is Typothorax. It took me about three tries to do a life reconstruction that worked, for reasons I’ll discuss when the paper on the NMMNHS paper comes out.

From Paleo Errata

Naturally, I fully expect that any observations I made in my thesis which were not previously published will be credited to ME, and I can get extremely unpleasant when this expectation is not met.

Next: Spencer Was Like An Angel

We Like Janet

Rabid stray dogs. They are a problem but not the REAL problem. I was just thinking about this today.

Let's say a stray dog is in the habit of getting out of its owner's yard and running around the neighborhood, biting people and shitting on their lawns. It has been doing this for years. Perhaps as long as you have been living in this neighborhood, fifteen years or so, you have been hearing about this goddamned dog and what a nuisance it is. The worst-kept secret in the neighborhood, and yet somehow, when hearing about what the dog has done lately, people are always...SO SHOCKED!

The dog is friendly enough to people's faces. It runs around, cheerful and playful. It has a certain superficial charm, enough that people who would know better can turn a blind eye when in bites people in the back, really hard. So irascible, ha ha!

Besides, the neighbors are scared of the dog. They want to stay friends with it and its owners so that they can play in its yard. Its really big, not quite perfectly rectangular yard. Lots of good bones buried in there. Who gives a shit if it bites the occasional kid?

If you love this neighborhood, and believe in a strong, safe, and supportive community, you would be upset, I expect. Nonetheless, why waste energy getting angry at the dog? It is just a dog after all, sick and fucked in the head. It does what it in its nature.

However, if the owner of the dog repeatedly allows this to happen, if your fellow neighbors fail to complain to the owner or the police because they are, I don't know, dickless wonders who are afraid of the dog or its owners, or if the police refuse to do anything about the problem, or even admit that the problem exists...THEN you have reason to be consumed by incendiary rage, right? The system is broken.

The dog isn't the fucking problem, but the moral cowardice by the folks who could have made a difference is sickening, and not the sort of thing you forget, ever. You expected better.

And now the neighbors have all gone inside and pulled down the blinds. Stop asking about the dog. Please stop asking about the dog. You raised the subject of the dog at the last community meeting and got a lively discussion out of it. Isn't that enough?

Aetogate? Right, sorry. Unrelated subject.

Yeah, anyway, Janet Stemwedel wrote a really nice blog. We really like her.

LNJ

The Food Was Good In the Faraway Land of "Connecticut"

Oh God, was it ever. The Food, the Food.

Holbrook's strip of fast food restaurants is fantastic, do not mistake me. They are all there: McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen. We lack only Wendy's and Sonic. I thought my life was complete.

Last week, I went to visit my buddy Jonathan Weinbaum in Connecticut, and found that New England has a different concept of what constitutes "eating." A more enlightened concept. I learned that pizza, for example, is not supposed to stick out straight. It is supposed to droop when you pick it up, causing the cheese and pepperoni to slide into your lap, and that the dough and tomato sauce should be awesome enough to need no lame ass "toppings." Pizza Hut uses toppings to obscure the fact that their "pizza" is actually complete shit. Stop crying Pizza Hut, you know it is true. The vendor stands down the street from the Peabody represent about half the world's nations and are at least as good as anywhere I've eaten in Flagstaff, and truly excellent Thai restaurants outnumber meth labs in New Haven (pretty sure). This is not the case in Holbrook.

I have no money, but the incipient tire around my waist knows where it all went. Oh yes.

Anyway, nice visit. I want to go back. Connecticut has largely replaced its Triassic outcrops with trees and water, but it is not a bad trade. They have an ocean there, and Manhattan is only an hour or two away. They have food there too, and many nice-looking women and also taxis. There is also a pretty impressive natural history museum with lots of dinosaurs.

From Paleo Errata

The Yale Center for British Art currently has a phenomenal exhibit on Darwin. It includes some of the books he took on the Beagle (unfortunately not including his personal copies of Lyell's Principles of Geology or Malthus' Population; those would have made me shit myself), and a couple first editions of Origin. However, the bulk of the exhibit is actually devoted to 19th century artwork relating to, or inspired by, Darwin's theory. The exhibit is at least as interested in the social impact and influences of Darwin's work than with the mechanics of his theory, and it is pretty eye-opening. Commendably, the exhibit does not shy away from the less comfortable aspects of how 19th century thinkers regarded race, and describes and illustrates these viewpoints without either vilifying or whitewashing the more prejudiced and silly aspects of a lot of early evolutionary thought. A really thought provoking-exhibit, and I recommend it to anyone who can make it.

From Paleo Errata

I'm going to go burn down our goddamn Pizza Hut now, and piss on the ashes. I want Pocky.

LNJ

Let The Healing Begin

Last night, my computer began ramming a crucifix into its' USB port screaming...well, you know what it was screaming. Just substitute "Vista" for "Jesus." So, I finally took the plunge. I backed up all my files and used the installation CD for XP. Vista is now burning in hell like the evil, filthy thing that it is, and has taken Norton with it. Cook, fuckers.

My computer wept, and we held each other.

Unfortunately, the preinstalled wireless driver is also gone, and I am currently hunting for it online so that I can transfer it to my laptop. A minor setback, I am hoping. The important thing is that I can now hold my breath in the time it takes to completely restart my computer, programs open as fast as I can blink, and there is no longer the constant buzz of SOMETHING ALWAYS RUNNING. My laptop actually performs as though it has a dual core.

Rayfield et al.? Oh right. Yeah, I'll have another one of those to post too, hopefully.

LNJ

I Am Become Death

It took forever just to upload this stupid cartoon

LNJ

Ah, Yep

A while ago I gave my personal definition of what science is, why we use it, and touched briefly on what I think this means for "non-conflict" between science and religion. I also recently lamented the distorted view of the boundaries of science implicit in using the term "supernatural."

Although I still want to go into this subject in a little more detail myself, this posting by P.Z. Myers and this even better one by Jerry Coyne lay out the case against reconciliation between science and religion beautifully. Coyne goes into some interesting detail about the intellectual roots of creationism as well, and the uncomfortable similarities it has with the thinking of conciliatory evolutionists like Kenneth Miller.

LNJ