Paleo Errata

How Science Works, Part 1: What We "Know"

2012-01-10T10:27:00.000-08:00

Hello. Where have I been? Hiding, that's where!

Not really. I've just been busy, doing research, pulling together manuscripts, doing illustrations, and being homeless and poor. Now I am more or less stationary in Salt Lake City for a while, I feel for the first time in a year like I have something resembling a routine, so I want to start writing again.

One of the big motivators for me going back to blogging was a message I received from a fellow (we'll call him "Martin") involved in a long-term debate over evolution with his parents, who believe that the Bible is a historically accurate account of the history of the world. At one point, he and his mother engaged in a three-hour discussion with a creationist with a PhD who is a faculty member at a university (I don't want to say who), and I've been asked to provide an alternate perspective based on actual evidence and reason. I received quite a lengthy transcript of the original discussion, and have been crawling through it. The creationist in question has backgrounds in both biology and geology, and draws a lot of Biblical scripture into it, so it makes for pretty interesting reading. As I started writing up my responses to Martin, I realized that it was good stuff to blog on. Some of of this material is probably better being discussed over at "Flying Blind," the blog I created specifically for discussing the specific claims and reasoning of creationists. However, there is a lot of material on the more general nature of science and faith that are suitable to talk about here.

One subject I've been addressing in my responses deals with what science is actually trying to do, and what scientists mean when they talk about "proof." From the creationist transcript:

"anytime you hear a scientist say that something is true or proven, you know he is talking philosophy, which is the same as religion in that context. Only in logic and mathematics can you really say something is 'proof'. And even there that can be challenged.”

The argument that science in general or evolutionary science in particular is a type of religion is a common one, but since it wasn't elaborated on, I won't get into it here; AronRa has a perfectly good dissection of it anyway. I want instead to focus on the statement that science doesn't "prove" things. I've talked before about how science is fundamentally based on the recognition of human fallibility, and want to elaborate a bit about what this means for knowledge, and what we can actually "know."

Science certainly does not “prove” things beyond any doubt, and there is always the provision in science that ideas, even well-accepted ideas, can change. The most extreme version of this philosophy, advocated by Karl Popper, is that a single piece of falsifying evidence can destroy and entire theory, no matter how many tests that theory has previously survived. This is an oft-repeated bit of bullshit which deserves an entire post, so I won't get into what I call "the Myth of Single Bullet Falsification" here. Sufficient to say, the more general claim that any idea can be shown to be wrong is correct.

However, the same thing is true of real life. That doesn’t stop us from forming opinions, and being reasonably certain about them. I’m pretty sure my mother isn’t a robot. She looks and acts human, and everything I know about modern technology and artificial intelligence indicates that building a robot as human-like as my mother is impossible. That’s the evidence I have at my disposal, so that is what I base my opinion on. And I am pretty confident about it, so confident that I would stake my life on it if I really had too.

Of course, I STILL could be wrong. There might be some secret lab somewhere that can make super realistic robots that no one knows about. And if I saw a reputable news story about such a lab, or caught my mother changing her batteries, I would revise my opinion. However, I have not been presented with that evidence. Right now, it exists only in my imagination. The real world evidence I can point to is what I listed in the paragraph above. So for the time being, I’m sticking with that. This is what scientists usually mean when they use the word “proof”; not absolute certainty, just certain enough that they don’t have any real doubts about it (for now).

There are different levels of certainty of course. I’m pretty sure (though not as sure as I am about my mother not being a robot) that my car will run tomorrow, that I will not be diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, or that a comet will not hit the Earth tomorrow. My current plans revolve around these things being true…but I could be wrong. Indeed, I'm much more likely to be wrong about these things than I am about the existence of lifelike androids. That doesn’t stop me from making plans. It doesn’t stop MOST people from making plans, most of the time, and when it does we tend to throw around terms like "mental illness." Part of being a sane, reasonable, and functional human being is whether or not you can distinguish between probabilities, possibilities, and pure imagination. The same thing is very much true of science, where there are also many levels of certainty. The basic difference between speculation, hypotheses, and theories has to do with how much evidence they have supporting them (speculation has the least, theories the most), and how certain we can therefore be about them.

Anyway, the point is that being really sure about something doesn’t mean that you can’t change your mind, and accepting that you can change your mind doesn’t mean that you can’t be really certain. We all juggle this conundrum in our day-to-day lives, and seem to do just fine. I’m really sure Mom isn’t a robot. I’m also really sure I could change my mind if the right evidence was presented. This may seem like a contradiction, but it doesn’t keep me from having an opinion or making specific plans about whether to take to a doctor or a mechanic if she is feeling poorly. The same thing is true of science. We can’t really “prove”, but we can be certain enough. I’m about as certain that evolution is a real thing, and that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old, as I am that my Mom isn’t a robot.

Paleo Errata Retires.

2011-04-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

I began Paleo Errata during a time when I was in bad need of constructive distractions, and had a variety of science and religion-related things to talk and think about that I didn't really have another available forum for. I really enjoyed the creative process of blogging, and I have produced a few posts over the past two and a half years that may actually be worth reading. However, over time, my focus wavered quite a bit. There was no real core theme to Paleo Errata, and a result, I tended to ramble quite a bit. I had a lot of fun posting random shit which amused me, but that is really the domain of Facebook.

When I was invited to participate over at Labspaces.net, I initially had no idea what I was going to blog about. I named the blog House of Bones because it sounded cool. I eventually decided I wanted to do a post about transitional fossils in the archosaur family tree, but I quickly realized that I was going to have to give a lot of geology and biology background to get non-paleontological readers to the point where they could understand it. At that point, the blogs pretty much started writing themselves. The structure provided by House of Bones as a blog with a theme was invaluable for me finding a point in blogging again. As a result, I have made two decisions regarding my blogging.

The first is that I'm starting up a new one called "Flying Blind", which will deal with specifically with my self-education on antievolutionism, something I've wanted to get serious about for a while now. The other is that it is time for Paleo Errata to retire. I have two main focuses for my blogging now, and any other biographical posts on my traveling or whatnot can get thrown into Flying Blind. The only subjects that I might post on Paleo Errata from time to time are commentaries on particular paleontology papers and subjects which are a little too technical for House of Bones; in this case, the name "Paleo Errata" will actually reflect something on the content.

I have provided an organized list of my favorite posts and links over the past two and a half years below. Scattered amongst the bullshit are a handful of posts which have actual content and that I am actually a bit proud of, and a few things I wrote which made me laugh; I honestly couldn't give too much of a shit if anyone else finds the same things funny that I do, but if you did, I'm glad. It's been a lot of fun, but time to move on.
(p.s.: This is not an April Fool's Day joke)
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Advice for Aspiring Researchers in Vertebrate Paleontology
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8

Science and Religion
What Science Is.
What Does "Supernatural" Mean?
Open Letter To Supporters of Teaching Intelligent Design
Why is God Better Than Evolution?
The Reality Fish
Darwin Worship
The Limits of Science
Agnostic Secular Humanist Morality
Thoughts on 9/11
The "WTC Mosque"
The Difference Between Persistent Rationality And Dogma
Talking To Creationists
Being An Atheist Is Easy
Answering Michael Ruse
Why It Matters.

Jeff Reads Genesis!
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Genesis Synopsis
Part 3: The Creation Story
Part 4: The Old Testament God
Part 5: Sex! (originally a two-parter, but I accidentally deleted part 2; that still pisses me off).

Actual Stuff About Paleontology
The Future of Upper Triassic Biostratigraphy and Biochronology
William Smith's Bitchin' Map
Red Canyon
Phytosaurs and Evolution
Late Triassic Dispersal And Endemism
The JVP Typothorax Paper
Don't Impose Personal Style When Reviewing A Paper
My Interview on Dave Hone's Blog
My Dinosaur Origins Lecture at 21st Floor
Stereopairs Are Cool
The Curse Of Big Picture Study Bias

Hee Hee
We Like Janet
Spencer Was Like An Angel
Our Official Disclaimer
Heh.

Miscellaneous
Today is the Day That Music Dies
The Food Was Good In the Faraway Land of Connecticut
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Bristol Has Been Fun (The England Trip Part 1)
We Are Now In London (The England Trip Part 2)
More On London And Bristol (The England Trip Part 3)
Why I Am Basically An Optimist
Don McLeroy Is (A Little Bit) Right
The Science And Art Of Banagma
Too Many Stars
The True Story Of How Jurassic Park Made Everything O.K.
And oh yeah, remember this?

Other People's Shit That Amused, Astonished, or Touched Me
Tim Minchin's "Storm" and "White Wine In The Sun"
Holy shit, did you know that bats can screw and fellate at the same time? And Walruses can fellate themselves. Biology fascinates me.
Ian Murphy Visits the Creation Museum
Peer Review Circa 1945
The Evolution of Homer Simpson
Sumerians Look On In Confusion As Christian God Creates World (Onion)
Dinosaurs Sadly Extinct Before Invention of the Bazooka (Onion)
Dog Hates Me On The Power of Prayer
Dog Hates Me On Drugs and Alchohol
The Known Universe
The OK-Go Video With The Treadmills
The OK-Go Video With The Rube Goldberg Machine
The OK-Go Video With The Dogs
BRING ME THE LAST DODO BIRD!
Jon Stewart On The WTC Mosque
George Carlin On America
Dr. Tran!
The Furious Little Cinnamin Bun
DA NA NA NA DA NA NA NA NA NA!
Conan O'Brien Drives an Explosive-Packed Car Off A Cliff

Two Things So Awesome That They Need Their Own Section
A Universe Not Made For Us (Carl Sagan)
Science Save My Soul (Philhellenes)

Letters!

2011-02-27T10:56:00.001-08:00

Dear Ray Comfort,

God, if He/She/It exists, is probably pretty smart and might have opinions. However, God didn't tell me that he created life using magic instead of chemistry and evolution. You did, and you aren't God. You are a fallible, flesh and blood human being, and therefore potentially delusional. If I say that life evolved and probably originated through abiogenesis, I'm not questioning God. I'm just questioning you.

Dear James Ussher

God, if He/She/It exists, is probably pretty smart and might have opinions. However, God didn't tell me that the world was created on October 23rd, 4004 B.C. In fact, the Bible didn't either. You calculated that date using a lot of guesswork, and no one has checked your math. If I say that the world was probably not created in 4004 B.C., I'm not questioning God or the Bible. I'm just questioning you.

Dear Bible,

God, if He/She/It exists, is probably pretty smart and might have opinions. However, God didn't tell me that slavery (Exodus 21:2-21; Leviticus 25:44-46), having drunken sex with one's daughters (Genesis 19:31-35), and genocide (e.g. 1 Samuel 1:1-3), were morally right (or at least permissible under certain circumstances), that homosexuality and getting tattoos (Leviticus 18:22, 19:28)was wrong, or that the world was created in six days (Gensis 1). You did, and you are just a book, written and assembled by fallible flesh and blood human beings. And yes, I know that at several points you say this clearly yourself and never even claim to be written by God, but a lot of people say that you were. Perhaps the next edition could include a disclaimer.

Dear Jesus,

God, if He/She/It exists, is probably pretty smart and might have opinions. However, God didn't tell me that you are the son of God and could do magic. The Bible did, and the Bible is a book written and assembled by fallible, flesh and blood human beings. If I say that you were probably not the son of God, I'm not questioning God, I'm just questioning a book. I already wrote the Bible a letter explaining this.

The Gospels don't really present you as being some kind of ingenious moral philosopher anyway. You seem to have spent half your time getting pissed off at your followers for not understanding your parables, and your moral theory seems to have mostly consisted of "give your money to the poor and follow me around, or else". However, you do seem to enjoy eating; you let your followers eat of the Sabbath, and in fact would make so much fish and bread for them to eat that they had leftovers. I like eating too! The Bible also never says anything about you being abstinent, and you seem to have really liked that Mary Magdalene chick more than your other followers, so hey ;). I picture you as an impoverished, overweight, egotistical, and slightly ill-tempered Jewish teacher who at least appreciates food and women, so we have some things in common (hey, I'm even circumcised!) But you were no deep moral philosopher, buddy.

Dear God,

(If You really exist), You can really be a fucking asshole, do you know that? Do you really have any kind of plan at all, or are you just fucking around? It gets a little stressful sometimes not knowing what your game is. I mean, a lot of people talk about how everything that happens is part of God's plan for us, but what if the plan involves getting raped, dying of a painful childhood disease, or having one's burning body fall from the top floor of the World Trade Center? I'm sorry, but that plan sucks, God. I would not feel comforted by being a domino just because I was part of a plan.

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for my life and all; even in the worst times, it's better to be alive than dead because I know you will throw me some more good times sooner or later (at least, until you kill me). But SHIT dude, you couldn't give me one measly pair of functional wings?

Dear Science,

I am pretty smart, and I have opinions. However, I am a fallible flesh and blood human being, and therefore potentially delusional. If you say that everything that I think is complete bullshit, you aren't questioning God. You're just questioning me.

LNJ

p.s. Dear Reverend Storms: Stay classy. I'm sure you and Ted Haggard have a lot to talk about.

Why It Matters.

2011-02-23T09:52:00.000-08:00

I’ve stated in this blog that evolution is not a particular problem for religion. Although I think that a careful analysis of how science operates completely falsifies the argument that science cannot comment on the supernatural, religious scientists are certainly capable of practicing their particular disciplines as competently as non-believers.

I am also not bothered by religious people in general, even if I do not accept what they believe, unless their behavior compels them to treat other human beings badly...and the vast majority of them don’t. I am not offended by religious practice and ritual (unless, again, it involves treating people like shit). Far from it. I’ve gone into churches, mosques, and synagogues, and attended Christian and Jewish services and rituals, and thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere and vibe, even if it changed nothing about my thoughts on what is real. Why then do I insist on publicly being a pain in the ass about God and the supernatural? Why can’t I be a nice, quiet atheist who keeps his opinions to himself?

Because I don’t like being lied about. And more importantly, I don’t like it being taken for granted by most of the American public that lying about me is normal.

Conservative politics rely heavily on accusing secularists of “persecuting” them. This is a grotesque misuse of the word. “Persecution” means that you are legally prevented from practicing your religion and/or risking violent reprisals by doing so. Any Jew living in medieval Europe, or Christian living in first century Rome, would laugh uproariously at the notion that secularists and atheists in this country are a practicing a form of “persecution” against religious people.

All religious denominations in this country have the right to practice their religion. The have the right to attend whatever church they choose. They have the right to publicly advertise their religious beliefs (even by coming up to my front door). They even have the right to raise their children in an intellectually stifling atmosphere, if they are so inclined (while they are limited in their abilities to enforce their children’s obedience to their religion with physical violence, psychological abuse is still perfectly legal). They are not being pursued down the street by mobs of atheists with torches and pitchforks, although they may imagine that they are. It is legally prohibited to pay them less, deny them employment, or give them fewer legal freedoms than non-believers.

What then do conservatives actually mean when they talk about “persecution”?

Quite simply, they use the word “persecution” when they are not allowed to force non-believers to pay lip service to their religion. The classic example is gay marriage. Conservatives, who have the legal right to marry consenting adults of the same sex (if they are so inclined), are going out of their way to keep other consenting adults from making the same decision for themselves. What possible excuse could they have? Because it undermines their heterosexual marriage. That’s right. Heterosexual marriages and nuclear families aren’t fucked up because spouses are insensitive, philandering, and/or physically abusive bastards, or insensitive, philandering, and/or emotionally abusive bitches. No, it’s the fault of some gay couple living thousands of miles away. They don’t actually want to get married because they love each other, they are just doing it to fuck up the life of straight people. They are persecuting conservatives by not letting them tell them who they can marry.

To a certain extent, this is also the same impulse behind opposition to teaching evolution in schools. We can’t teach evolution in biology classes just because it is the cornerstone of modern biology, oh no. It isn’t even enough for conservatives to be able to take their kids out of schools that teach real biology and hom skool them. No, they have to fuck up the education of everyone else’s kids by teaching something in biology classrooms which is not actually biology but that they personally wish was biology…and if the courts don’t let them, they are being persecuted.

It gets even more infuriating when conservatives lie directly (or at least, repeat bullshit that they might actually believe) about atheistic secularism and evolution. Nazi Germany was an atheistic and Darwinian regime? Evolution is accepted only by a scientific minority? Atheists have no basis for morality? These statements are not matters of opinion or belief; they are flat out bullshit. Hitler was explicitly anti-Darwin, and Nazi Germany was steeped in Christian propaganda. Evolution is apparently accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists, and certainly by nearly every biologist and paleontologists I've ever spoken to on the subject. Every atheist I’ve ever discussed morality with most certainly has a clear opinion of what is right and wrong, and why. These are facts, not opinions or beliefs.

Insecurity is the only plausible explanation for this behavior on the part of conservative apologists and politicians. Why else would anyone feel persecuted for simply not being allowed to fuck with someone else’s life? Why would someone feel the need to lie about what other people think and do to justify their own beliefs? Is it simply that their own belief system is so fragile that denying the reality of what other people say and think is the only way to preserve it?

That can't possibly be the reason, of course. I'm just being silly, ha ha!

This attitude, this impulse to stifle facts and opinions and lie about what secular atheists think and do, is not restricted to the far right. Left-leaning apologists and non-believers pull the same shit, accusing Dawkins and Meyers of being as “dogmatic” and “militant” as religious extremists, simply because they won’t say something along the lines of “well, your position is devoid of reason and unsupported by evidence, but still on equal par with what I think.” P.Z. Meyers (one of the most “militant” atheists in America) supports of the right of Muslims to build a community center in downtown Manhattan, something that no extremist Christian would ever do. Richard Dawkins was criticized by a Catholic liberal for claiming that child rape is wrong, and should be punished. Having an opinion based on reason, evidence, and a concern for human welfare, and (horror of horrors) explaining that opinion publicly...this is what even left-leaning apologists and politically sensitive non-believers mean by “militancy.”

Fucking serious?

Philhellenes (who also posted one of the most exceptional defenses of science and atheism I've ever seen) also had an eye-opening post on reactions to an atheist billboard proclaiming: “Don’t believe in God? You aren’t alone.”

The billboard is simply saying that atheists exist. We exist. And people freaked the fuck out.

In that same upload, Philhellenes stated a very clear and reasonable goal of openly advertising and discussing secular atheism. It is not to eradicate religion and turn everyone in the world into an atheist. It is simply to get atheism to the point where people can acknowledge its existence, and where making patronizing and blatantly false statements about atheism and its supposed lack of morals, reason, or intelligence is not taken for granted. That is enough. Why should that be problem for religious apologists?...unless of course, allowing larger numbers of people to hear our views honestly explained would cause them to flock from stifling and close-minded religious denominations in large numbers. And that couldn't possibly happen, ha ha.

If you are an atheist or an agnostic who has any manner of self-respect, please pay attention. The next time you hear someone talking about how atheism and agnosticism is a “religion” or a “belief”, or that atheists simply explaining their opinions publicly is “persecution” or “dogmatism”, please don’t stand there bobbing your head like a fucking retard. If you actually agreed with that, you probably wouldn’t be an atheist or agnostic to begin with.

You are being dissed. You are being misrepresented. You are being lied about. And you are letting them get away with it. Stand up for yourself. Don’t let some insecure douchebag feel comfortable about their position by lying about you, and above all, don’t let them tell you that it is an offense for you to exist.

Is There Anything Republicans Do That Isn't Pretty Much Pure Evil?

2011-02-02T10:59:00.001-08:00

Jesus. Christ.

If you can think of a reason why this might be bad, sign here.

Sarah Werning Said It.

2011-02-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

What she said was "Holy. Shit."

The Curse Of "Big Picture Study" Bias

2011-01-23T17:34:00.000-08:00

Vertebrate paleontology is one of the most broad-based, interdisciplinary branches of the natural sciences. Even though it is usually considered a branch of geology (and most university-based vertebrate paleontologists belong to Geology departments), it straddles the line between geology and biology. While it may be concerned with the lives of once living organisms, nearly all information about these organisms comes ultimately from the rock record. This occurs most notably in the form of the fossils themselves, but also as information about the environments these organisms inhabited (depositional systems, paleoclimate), the ways in which taxa and faunas changed over time (biostratigraphy/biochronology), and possible causes for faunal change (many of which, such as the identification of bolide impacts, rely heavily on geochemistry). The biological aspects of paleontology also loom large of course; systematics (including both alpha taxonomy and phylogenetics), functional morphology, and ontogenetic development studied through histology (especially what it may tell us about metabolism) perhaps being the most prominent. It’s a lot to process, but combined these various lines of evidence have the ability to tell us a great deal about the history of life on Earth.

A modest example of this is my own work with Bill here at Petrified Forest, where we have spent the last couple years collecting a great deal of geologic and morphological data to tell us about faunal change over time, and its relationship to environmental change, within this particular little corner of Arizona during a particular little segment of time. However, in mostly confining its gaze to one particular geographic unit, our work is not what might be considered a “big picture” study. “Big picture” studies tend to look at global issues, especially over long periods of time. They synthesize large quantities of data compiled by (mostly other) scientists, and they get a lot of attention. And money. What is sometimes under appreciated is that these big picture studies are only as solid as the multiple lines of evidence on which they are drawn.

The fact is that detailed small picture studies and big picture studies need each other. Small scale studies need big picture studies to give them ultimate relevance…but big picture studies need detailed small scale studies to give them validity. A small-scale study that isn’t incorporated into an overall picture of the grand scheme of things is an irrelevancy, and isolated novelty with no context. A big picture study can’t exist without small picture studies, and if the small picture studies are poorly done, the big picture study is bullshit. Garbage in, garbage out as they say.

In light of this co-dependence between small picture and big picture studies, I never fail to get pissed off when universities, grants, and journals consider big picture studies to be more important and worthy than small picture studies. Back in 2005, when the first preliminary paper on the Revueltosaurus material from PEFO which demonstrated that Revueltosaurus was not an ornithischian dinosaur was being prepared, we (well, Bill Randy, and Sterling; I had almost nothing to do with it) initially submitted it to JVP. However, the initial JVP paper was rejected for being of “too provincial” in its scope, or something along those lines.

One problem with this criticism is its inherent ridiculousness…ALL papers published in ANY journal are of provincial interest to some degree. I have never received an issue of JVP where I was particularly interested in all of the papers, or even most of them. While I recognize that bovid phylogeny or trace element geochemical analysis of vertebrate bones are as important and valid (to someone) as my own studies are to me, I couldn’t personally give a flying fuck about them. Even bigger picture studies, such as the impact of statistical tests or coding methods on phylogeny, are not so pressing to more geology-oriented workers like me.

But there is a deeper and more fundamental problem to this bias: it discourages detailed small-picture studies. This bias is ultimately destructive to science. If careful and detailed work to really nail down a limited problem is discouraged so that such studies are neglected, then what becomes of the larger, big picture syntheses based on these studies? For vertebrate paleontology to flourish as a rigorous science, detailed small-picture studies need to be supported and encouraged. They must be put an equal footing with broader-based big picture studies in terms of respect and funding. If we can reward scientists for playing with other people’s data, why can’t we reward the people who did the work to produce that data in the first place?

Pehaps My All Time Favorite Family Guy Moment

2011-01-23T13:49:00.000-08:00

The first time I saw this, I thought I was going to die.

Yes, I Love Dinosaurs Too.

2011-01-21T21:27:00.000-08:00

Best Quote Ever

2011-01-20T18:35:00.000-08:00

Sure, I know the meaning of love. It's muscular. It's alive. It throbs. And it's full of blood.
-PZ Myers, biologist

Am I The Only Non-Conservative Who Thinks That This Is Bullshit?

2011-01-16T11:27:00.000-08:00

What the fuck?

I've been waiting patiently for the last week for something to emerge suggesting that Loughner was in any way shape or form inspired by Palin, the Tea Party, or anything even remotely associated with conservative rhetoric. It hasn't emerged. All indications are that he is a crazy nonpartisan fuck who is broadly, vaguely, and incoherently anti...something or other. His specific beef against Giffords seems to be that she didn't answer a question for him once. He registered as an independent, and he is an atheist, which doesn't exactly put him in the conservative camp. His actions seem to have been inspired by nothing more specific than the voices in his head.

Could the political rhetoric we've been seeing inspire this kind of violence? I guess that it could, hypothetically. But it hasn't, at least not in this case.

Is conservative hate-mongering really more repulsive than the fact that Democrats are making political mileage out of senseless murders? I am an libertarian/liberal leaning atheist, but I am also capable of rational thought. This is bullshit.

House of Bones And The Future of Paleoerrata

2011-01-13T20:03:00.001-08:00

I have a new hosted blog now where I have to post relevant shit and not swear so much.

Paleoerrata serves three basic functions for me:

1. A place to discuss matters which will mean something to people with a little bit of paleontology background (e.g. the Advice For Aspiring Researchers series, and my commentaries on Triassic-related literature).

2. An outlet for working out my ideas on science and religion.

3. A place to post whatever random shit amuses me.

I want to use House of Bones as more of an outreach blog; a place to introduce non-paleontologists, both the lay public and scientists in other disciplines, to vertebrate paleontology. It will be more of my "respectable" face. As such, it might end up being a watered-down version of Darren Naish's Tetrapod Zoology blog; a place for giving overviews of particular subjects.

I still plan to maintain Paleoerrata, although as I am busting my ass trying to get drafts and illustrations finished for two extremely in-depth descriptions of pseudosuchian archosaurs, it may be a little neglected for a while. I have done blogs now discussing most of my big ideas on the science-religion debate, and am currently planning another essentially summarizing why I think it is important to keep hashing out a subject which causes a lot of people a lot of consternation.

However, House of Bones will be getting most of my attention for at least a while. I have a big series of posts that I am exited about which will combine an overview of archosaur evolution and dinosaur origins, and a discussion of the moronic ignorance of Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort. It will be called "Searching for the Crocoduck."

Mark Twain On The Subject Of Homeopathic Medicine.

2011-01-09T13:14:00.000-08:00

Here.

Just Watch. You'll Get The Idea.

2011-01-08T17:52:00.000-08:00

This is obviously not paleo-related, but quite interesting nonetheless.

The True Story Of How Jurassic Park Made Everything OK

2011-01-05T10:37:00.000-08:00

Darren Naish's excellent blog on stegosaur taxonomy includes a photograph of the Stegosaurus mount at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (fifth image down). Ah yes, I know that mount. Let me tell you the story.

I started working at DMNS in 1992, when I was 17. It was still the Denver Museum of Natural History (DMNH) in those days; incidentally, the name change took place sometime in the late 1990s, and was a largely unadvertised administrative decision to accommodate the then brand-new, hideously expensive, and totally uninspiring space science exhibit. The move royally pissed off most of the people I knew who worked there, many if whom decided the new acronym DMNS stood for "dumbass."

In consider myself extremely fortunate to have worked at DMNH as a volunteer from 1992 to 1994, as I witnessed and participated (in a minor way) in virtually the entire construction of the Prehistoric Journey exhibit, which means that I got to help dismantle the old dinosaur mounts on the first floor and remount them upstairs. This was also when I met Ken Carpenter, Bryan Small, and the four temporary staff members hired to help assemble the exhibit: Jerry Harris, Jennifer Moerman (who currently works at the Natural History Museum in Philadelphia), John Christians (who left paleo to go teach high school), and Karen Alf (who did some important work with dinosaur eggs; sadly, Karen died about ten years ago).

I was a skinny kid in those days who wore a large black hat which obstructed my peripheral vision. I bumped my head into things several times. This is known as "foreshadowing."

This story takes place after I had been working at DMNH about a year or so. It was, in fact, the week the Jurassic Park opened (and the summer after I graduated from high school), before anyone really had any idea what a completely game-changing movie it was going to be. Ken Carpenter had been invited to an early screening for a bunch of dinosaur paleontologists that week, and was looking forward to it.

This particular day, I'm helping touch up the Allosaurus and Stegosaurus skeletons. Now, the DMNH Stegosaurus skull is mostly a plaster reconstruction, and while it was on exhibit in the old dinosaur hall, no one was sure if there might be real bone inside. When the skeleton was dismantled and the bones re-prepped, it was discovered that there was a real skull roof buried inside, which is visible in the new mount. Fortunately though, the rest of the skull was plaster. That is more foreshadowing.

The skeleton was mostly mounted by then, including the skull. I'm painting some of the reconstructed areas on the Allosaurus pelvis and verts, while Ken is getting the forelimbs of the Stegosaurus mounted. Incidentally, Ken's method in mounting the skeletons was to first use duct tape to tape the limb bones to the armature to hold it in place while he welded on the braces; the Rocky Mountain News ran a story on duct tape about that time, and the cover image was a great photo of Ken taping the Diplodocus tibia in place.

Ken has finished getting the armature welded for the left forelimb, and says "Martz, come over here and hold the shoulder blade for me."

So, I hop down off the ladder and duck under the skull, but stand up too soon. I feel my head smash into something, which doesn't really hurt that bad since whatever it is crumbles immediately, and then I am sitting on the floor under a decapitated Stegosaurus surrounded by little bits of plaster. It takes me a moment to absorb the calamity.

Oh, shit, I think.

Ken stands surveying the scene for a moment, and then walks out of the room. I'm not sure if he is getting away to avoid killing me, or if he is going to look for a tool that will hurt more than the welding torch, so I take the opportunity to flee.

The week passes without me working up the balls to go back to the museum, and two days before Jurassic Park comes out, I get a call from John Christians. John tells me that everything is cool. I can come back and Ken won't kill me. Ken saw Jurassic Park and it was fucking awesome. The words "shit pants" were used. The Denver Museum has bought two rows of seats in a theater for opening day, would I like to go? Sure, I said. And it wasn't a trap either; Ken really was in a good mood. I sat with two rows of natural history employees and watched the dawn of the cg age and we did a lot of cheering and screaming, and everything was cool.

LNJ

p.s. I tried to find the image of Ken taping up the Diplodocus image online, and somehow found this news story. What the fuck, google?

New Science Blog

2011-01-04T09:56:00.001-08:00

It's great to see biology discussed with this kind of enthusiasm.

I've been tempted and encouraged to up my game, but I'm not sure that my causal obscenity can compete with this kind of focus. We are all beautiful and unique snowflakes.

Too Many Stars

2011-01-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

I need people to check my math on this.

A few weeks ago, Bill and I were on the way to Flagstaff, and we got to talking about the size of the Universe. Bill mentioned a recent survey of the cosmos which estimates that there are about 300 septillion (3.0 x 1023) stars (the 23 is supposed to be a superscript; blogger apparantly can't do superscripts), which is roughly three times the previous estimate of 100 septillion (3 x 1023) stars.

We tried to figure out how to represent that as something that we could more easily grasp, like if each star was a grain of sand laid out in a perfectly uniform carpet with the grains touching, how big an area would that cover? We decided it would probably be something ridiculously huge, like the area of the entire North American continent. Just driving the 100 odd miles between Holbrook and Flagstaff, imagining the number of grains of sand flying by on either side of us, it seemed like an awful lot.

Nope. I finally sat down to do the math.

Lets make all the sand grains about 0.5 mm in diameter. This makes for 400 grains/cm2, or 4 x 1012 grains/km2.

1 x 1023 grains of sand (representing stars) divided by 4 x 1012 grains/km2 = a total area of about 2.5 x 101o km2.
3 x 1023 grains of sand (representing stars) divided by 4 x 1012 grains of sand/km2 = a total area of about 7.5 x 101o km2.

However, the total land surface of the entire Earth is only about 1.5 x 108 km2....

Which means you would need between about 167-500 Earths (depending on which estimate for the number of stars that you use), with the entire land surface covered with a uniform carpet of sand one grain deep and with all the grains touching, to equal the number of stars in the visible universe.

If you drain all the water off the Earth so that you can cover the entire surface are of the Earth (which is about 5.1 x 108 km2), you would only need 49-147 Earths.

That is a shitload of stars. And they were ALL MADE JUST FOR US. Don't you feel fortunate?

2010. Meh.

2010-12-31T20:08:00.000-08:00

2010 was an all right but not spectacular year. All in all I hung about, got work done, had some fun and really good moments, some nasty pain and frustrations, and got some useful things done without making any major changes in my life. Meh, but overall good meh, I think. I don't mind the occasional meh year.

2011 has the potential to be a good deal more interesting. I will be facing at least one, and potentially two changes in employment, and possibly a major and thoroughly awesome relocation. I may be visiting two countries, including my first trip south of the equator. I also may have as many as SEVEN papers on which I am first or second author in review and/or in press by the end of the year, and at least one other where I am at least part of the list. I missed the 2010 Paleo Project Challenge but compensated for it by getting a SEVERAL papers not done. And these aren't bullshit crappy mass-produced papers that don't really figure stuff out and couldn't survive peer review that you might publish in your self-edited bulletin neither. These papers that I have not gotten done are all Awesome papers that Solve the Mysteries of the Universe.

Sorry, didn't mean to jerk off in your face there, ha ha! Here's a hanky.

Yes, anyway, I am working on a few of them tonight. Yes, I am at home on New Years all alone, working on papers. This makes me both lame and awesome. I am in one of my high productivity episodes where all I want to do is work and work, so I am working and working. It's too fucking cold out to go anywhere anyway.

Actually, it's just lame. I'm writing papers on New Year's Eve. This is bullshit.

One thing that really made me laugh. A friend forwarded me a text message from her sister, which reads:

I tried to read Gus' new book of Bible stories to him today, but had to shelf it as God was a dick in every single story.

Happy New Year!

p.s.: I considered doing a list of my favorite posts of 2010 like John Wilkins the albino gorilla but realized that most of my posts suck. This guy needs a fucking editor I think to myself when I read them. Why can't he stay on topic? These paragraphs do not follow a natural progression.

Also, I somehow missed this great posting by Matt Wedel at SV-POW on soft tissue reconstructions in sauropods; his thoughts on breaking up the familiar skeletal outline with funky soft tissue madness definitely mirror my own.

Answering Michael Ruse

2010-12-29T17:36:00.000-08:00

Michael Ruse asks a question, and John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts thinks he has a point. I don't.

Here is Ruse's question:

The first amendment of the U.S. Constitution separates science and religion. (Don’t get into arguments about wording. That is how it has been interpreted.) You cannot legally teach religion in state schools, at least not in biology and other science classes. That was the issue in Arkansas and Dover. (I am not talking about current affairs or like courses.) But now ask yourself. If “God exists” is a religious claim (and it surely is), why then is “God does not exist” not a religious claim? And if Creationism implies God exists and cannot therefore be taught, why then should science which implies God does not exist be taught?

Let me field that one, Michael.

"God exists" is NOT a fundamentally religious claim. "God does not exist" is not a fundamentally scientific one. The specific reason WHY the claims are made is what separates religion from science.

This question is a point of confusion only for those who argue that belief in God or the supernatural is BY DEFINITION, a non-scientific issue, something that I have argued in the past is bullshit. Science makes claims about things that are real vs. imaginary, not things that are "natural" vs. "supernatural", and the latter terms don't really mean anything anyway. If the REALITY of the "supernatural" (i.e. forces acting outside of the known laws of physics and chemistry) could be demonstrated by repeatable scientific testing, they would be scientific...but it can't, so it is unscientific, and also therefore probably imaginary (i.e. bullshit).

Disbelief in God is not necessarily scientific; people can certainly reject God for irrational and emotional reasons (although this is not the case for most atheists I know), just as they can accept His existence for irrational and emotional reasons. However, atheism as I "practice" it is scientific. Rejecting claims for which there is no evidence is about as scientific as you can get.

Ruse's confusion is yet another reason why I consider the NOMA approach to be not just misleading, but downright destructive of to our understanding of what it is that science actually does. If Michael Ruse, someone who has been writing on the Creationism-Evolution debate for some time, can actually be confused about why rejection of the supernatural is a scientific AND non-religious position, how can the general public be expected to understand what science is at all?

LNJ

Potentially Interesting.

2010-12-21T23:02:00.000-08:00

Is It OK To Think That This Is Great? I'm Not Sure.

2010-12-14T19:53:00.000-08:00

If you have even heard of the Internet you have probably seen this by now, but I thought I'd post it just in case, because it is very important for you to see it.

The following news story of a foiled rape attempt would be a disturbing but fairly unremarkable evening news story, were it not for the absolutely astonishing statement by the victim's brother.

There are fairly interesting things that you can do with such material, if you are a couple of smartass kids with a computer and some spare time.

It is terrifyingly catchy. I haven't even memorized the lyrics to "Silent Night" yet, but I've got this one down.

There is an iTunes version available for purchase, with some of the proceeds going to the Dodsons. So actually, it is all in good taste. That is the only reason I posted it.

Stereopairs Are Cool.

2010-12-13T19:12:00.000-08:00

Bill Mueller of Texas Tech University has an extremely simple set of instructions up at Matt Brown's fossil prep site for making stereopairs. I had never actually tried this before, but wanted to try putting together stereopairs for the Longosuchus cranial material Bill Parker and I are redescribing, and decided to try it with the lectotype braincase.

The entire process was ridiculously easy. All you have to do is get the two images the right angle apart as would be seen by your eyes from the distance the camera is from the specimen; for a camera two feet above the specimen on a tripod, this is about six degrees. I literally just taped two pencils to the underside of a clipboard with scotch tape at the right distance to make a angle of six degrees if I pushed down on one end of the clipboard, put the braincase on the clipboard under the camera, and started taking pictures; for each stereopair, I took the first photo with the clipboard level, then pushed down on the end with my finger to tilt the specimen for the second picture. I assembled the entire figure below in about a day, and can get the images to pop out right on the screen just by crossing my eyes.

If you have ever been able to get those "Magic Eye" pictures to work (or not), the principle is the same; just let your eyes relax so that each image for each stereopair splits in two, and get the splits from each photo to cross over each other. It helps to identify particular landmarks on each photo and concentrate on getting them to cross over. Just WILL them to do so, and eventually your eyes will figure out what they are supposed to do.

The main disadvantage with stereopairs is a size restriction. Equivalent landmarks can't be more than about 60-65 mm (the distance between your eyes) ON THE PAGE (or screen), so the stereopairs can't be more than about twice the size they are on the screen now. This is an obvious disadvantage if you want to show details on something big like a braincase, so I will probably end up just using stereopairs for particular details like the middle and inner ear. Still, it was pretty cool to be able to assemble something like this so quickly and easily.

Followup: Mike Taylor at SV-POW has a post showing a couple other methods of presenting stereopairs which are pretty cool.

Being An Atheist Is Easy

2010-11-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

"Atheist" is a stupid word. So is "agnostic." The fact that we need both words is even stupider.

If you are a nonbeliever, you have probably heard the argument: "You can't disprove the existence of God." You might have heard it from a believer, or from a politically sensitive agnostic, but the basic assumption is that atheism means thinking that the existence of God can be disproved.

This argument is a ruse. Don't be deceived.

Atheists don't have to DISprove anything. There is nothing to disprove. You don't have to disprove something when there was never any evidence for it in the first place. Someone told us something, but they didn't present any evidence for it, so we didn't believe it. That is all there is to being an atheist. The burden of proof is on the believer, and if they can't provide it, the default assumption should be that there is nothing there.

This is the same reason why claiming that atheism is a religious belief is absolutely ridiculous. Why would not specifically believing something be itself a religious belief? Just because we aren't buying something doesn't mean that we are selling something else.

Imagine that I am sitting at a table with two other people. One of them says: "There is an invisible gnome in the middle of the table. He wants you to cut off your pinky finger, or he will use his gnome magic to destroy your soul after you die." Then he cuts off his finger. If you don't specifically believe him, and don't cut your finger off because the whole thing seems completely retarded, is that a religious belief? Do you really need a specific word (presumably "agnomist") to describe you?

Or what if the next day, and for every day after, a different person came in and told you that something else invisible was sitting in the middle of the table: a fairy, a dragon, a ghost... all without a single shred of evidence, and you see no reason to believe any of it, as every time there is clearly nothing there. Are you a polytheist now? Do you need a separate word to describe you for every unsubstantiated thing you don't believe?

Or, imagine this. After the Gnomist mutilates himself, you start stabbing the empty air over the table with your finger and shouting, "Look, you goddamn psychopath, there is nothing there!" (while conspicuously not cutting off your pinky). The third person sits with his hands folded complacently and says: "The existence of the gnome has not been proven" (also conspicuously not cutting off his pinky). Is the difference between you and him really so strong that we would need two different words to describe you? Neither of you believe in the fucking gnome! The difference is just one of temperament.

Why does not specifically believing in God need a word to describe it? Why do two slightly different shades of disbelief (agnostic and atheist) need to be distinguished? There is only one reason: Because so many people do believe in this one specific unsubstantiated thing (God), that they treat belief as the default. Atheism and agnosticism therefore become verbs, as though they require some kind of action, and not believing something with slightly different degrees of equivocation therefore become two different actions.

Don't let them get away with that. You don't have to do shit. It's Sunday, so sit back and take it easy, and let them do the work of getting dressed up and driving themselves to church.

This is the first Christmas song to actually bring a tear to my eye.

LNJ

Talking To Creationists

2010-11-23T19:41:00.001-08:00

(Author's note: This is just the end of my last posting; I cut it off and made it a separate post to trim down the last one. So, if you didn't finish the last one, here is what you missed).

The evolution-creationism debate ultimately boils down to large masses of sheep who are concerned that accepting evolution will endanger their souls. Although I think that there are arguments that can be used to quell these concerns (see below), I do NOT subscribe to downplaying the fact that, compared to the general public, atheism and agnosticism are disproportionately common among biologists and paleontologists. It is disingenuous to pretend that non-belief is not a common side effect of the scientific mindset, or that there is not a perfectly good reason for this. Scientific non-believers, even the politically correct ones, usually have particular and explainable reasons for why they are not religious.

In order for evolutionists to have any claim of intellectual and ethical superiority over creationists (which is like shooting fish in a barrel), we have to be completely honest. It is highly disingenuous for supporters of evolution to try to create the impression that the views of obstinately persistent and articulate atheists like Dawkins and Meyers represent some kind of fanatical fringe within the scientific community.

As far as mollifying the fears of creationists, I would like to suggest trying the following tactics:

1. Distinguish between infallible God (or Bible) and fallible creationist speaker or writer. Creationists are perfectly happy pointing out that scientists are fallible human beings, and that the scientific method is based on the recognition that any belief held by scientists can be totally wrong...but they do not want to apply the same criteria to themselves. Rather, they try to make it sound as though they are personally speaking for an infallible God, and that questioning their beliefs is the same thing as questioning God. Point out the difference. If a creationist (or any believer) claims that God exists, or that He believes or did anything in particular, than I am not really questioning God if I doubt it. God didn't tell me those things. A human being did. I'm questioning them.

Likewise, although creationists like to argue that accepting evolution or questioning the Genesis creation story makes God angry and will endanger your soul, the Bible says no such thing. The Bible (for obvious reasons) expresses no opinion on the subject of evolutionary theory, but more importantly, it attaches absolutely NO importance to the Genesis creation story. The story is told, and then forgotten; the Bible does not say that you have to believe it at all, even though the Old Testament has fucking rules for EVERYTHING. Pretty much all Christians (whether they want to admit it or not) selectively interpret the Bible, which explicitly supports child abuse (and murder), spousal abuse (and murder), and slavery. If you are going to pick and choose which of God's explicit instructions you want to acknowledge, then why make a big deal about a story that He never attaches any importance to at all? Although creationists may argue that questioning one part of the Bible means questioning all of it, the Bible doesn't say that either. This is the creationist's insecurity, not God's, Jesus', or the Bible's.

2. If you believe that God is responsible for the apparently random and meaningless events that guide our daily lives, then evolution should be no particular problem. If I won the lottery, broke my leg, got killed in a car accident, or met my future wife on a spur of the moment trip to Flagstaff, most modern Christians would be perfectly happy to ascribe this to being part of God's Plan. If so, than God is perfectly happy operating through materialistic, mundane, and non-miraculous events and accidents. However, if you suggest that things were any different in the distant past, people freak the fuck out. Why? All evolution really suggests is that the same processes happening right now (like mutation, microevolution, pain and death in the natural world, etc..) have been happening for a long time, and that there have been long term effects. If you can honestly believe that a jet crashing onto a highway past the end of the runway and killing a child in he backseat of the car is part of God's Plan, what is the fucking problem with evolution?

3. Point out that, even if you yourself are a non-believer, there are many evolutionist scientists who are also Christians. Intellectual partitioning is one of the great talents of the human species. "That's different" may be the most destructive words in any human language. Some dictator slaughtering entire villages somewhere in the third world is an atrocity, but the Israelites doing it when they got to the Promised Land...that's different. God wanted it. That motherfucker who cut me off on the freeway needs to die in fire, but when I did it to that other asshole...that's different. He deserved it. Injecting religious claims into biology is irrational and absurd, but believing that God exists and that Jesus was his son...that's different. You get the idea. Although I am pretty convinced that the entire scientific method (and the fact that it works at all) is at odds with the religious claim that faith is a valid path to any kind of truth...evolution is not a particular problem for religion.

Suggesting these tactics may seem contradictory to what I talked about at the beginning of this post, but I don't think it so, as long as you are honest about your own viewpoints...it's just that your audience doesn't have to agree with them. Introduce them to the idea of intellectual freedom. Hearing and understanding something does not slave them to having to believe it, or to not believing it. You may be a non-believer, and may have very particular reasons for it, but it is at least possible to be a scientist and evolutionist who also believes in God.

Anyway...

The Difference Between Persistent Rationality And "Dogma"

2010-11-22T19:08:00.001-08:00

The VRTPALEO List discussion regarding the creationist video fiasco has been lively. Kevin Padian is clearly upset by this entire mess, which is understandable given the fact that he is one of the leading voices in vertebrate paleontology for the teaching of evolution, including being the president of the board of directors for the National Center For Science Education (NCSE). Getting duped by those douchebags in such a shamefully dishonest and underhanded scheme must be painful and absolutely infuriating. Kevin, rarely one to publicly say anything overtly critical or negative about anyone, has been dispensing some hurt on the VP list...and it's been beautiful.

In any case, the VRTPALEO List discussion is following the usual route that science and religion discussions tend to take there. People dispense anecdotes, offer advice and talk idealistically about "fighting the good fight" without actually planning to do anything (like me for example), go off on tangents about what bullshit Christianity is, and accuse the "militant" atheists going off on these tangents of being "dogmatic," and of "making things worse" by offering honest opinions. I want to address a couple things: the claim that Richard Dawkins and Greg Paul are "dogmatic", and the difference between being honest and "dogmatic" in religious discussions.

If the term "dogma" refers to an irrational and unsubstantiated position, then there is nothing dogmatic about the religious opposition of Richard Dawkins or Greg Paul. Emphatic, irritable, frustrated, and a bit pompous perhaps, yes. Dogmatic, no. I don't recall ever reading anything written by either of them that did not support their arguments with reasoning, logic, and evidence. That is the very antithesis of being "dogmatic". The claim that outspoken scientific representatives of the atheistic/agnostic community are "dogmatic" is one of the most oft-repeated and cheap-shot bullshit statements made by creationists and politically correct non-believers. There is a strong strain of (usually leftist) moral and intellectual cowardice in our society, which holds that if a non-believer even STATES their lack of support for a religious claim, or worse yet (horror or horrors) EXPLAINS that position, then they are being unreasonable, and that them incarcerating, blowing up, and beheading believers is the next logical step. This is complete horseshit; educated, rationalist, agnostic/atheistic secular humanists are generally among the most supportive of freedom of speech and worship for everybody. Even P.Z. Meyers, perhaps the most outspoken and caustic scientific atheist on this side of the Atlantic, recognizes the importance of allowing the religious to practice and advertise their beliefs in a free society...as long as freedom of speech applies in both directions.

The very fact that simply explaining a lack of belief in religion, and not wussing out just because a lot of people find your opinions discomforting, is seen as being "dogmatic" or "fanatical" is powerful testimony to how weak and irrational those beliefs really are. Don't gently poke that wet toilet paper with your finger! You're being too rough! Douglas Adams has one of the best quotes regarding this (taken from this speech):

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes.
Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'.

Religious apologetics, and the defense of it by politically correct non-believers, is like the Special Olympics of Reason. The reaction to using scientific reasoning and logic to question religion is similar to if an Olympic heavyweight boxer entered the Special Olympics and beat up a retarded kid. You can't do that! It's not FAAAAAAAIR!!! The rules are different! My response to the argument that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria" is addressed here, here, and here; one of Richard Dawkin's better commentaries on it is here.

Stuff.

2010-11-21T18:04:00.000-08:00

What is wrong with this hamster?

And these squirrels?

And these?

And this one?

And this one?

What is going on in the world today? What the fuck is happening to our squirrels?

On a lighter note, there is this. Block out some time. It never stops.

Creationists Lie For Jesus, Again.

2010-11-19T18:53:00.000-08:00

The following was posted by Kevin Padian on the VRTPALEO list. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that Kevin wants the message dispersed as widely as possible, and post it here:

Got your attention? Good. Here's a recent video called "Evolution, theGrand Experiment," that dozens of VPers helped to make, innocent of the fact that the smooth-talking and obviously intelligent filmmakers were young-earth creationists. As the publicity says, it was "filmed over 12 years on three continents and seven countries," and you can get it for twenty bucks on Amazon. It's being widely shown on cable TV. And it's being used in testimony for a current trial about whether and how to teach evolution in schools.
http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Grand-Experiment-Episode-1/dp/0892216972

The scientists punked by these twerps include Jim Kirkland, Phil Gingerich, Angela Milner, John Long, Gary Morgan, Irena Koretsky, TasserHussain, Gunther Viohl, Peter Wellnhofer, Tim Rowe, Annalise Berta, Phil Currie, Bill Clemens, Paul Sereno, Dave Weishampel, Nick Czaplewski, AndyKnoll, and Monroe Strickberger ... and yours truly. It's not that what all of you say in the video is wrong. It's that the filmmakers have taken it completely out of context. They have represented the honest uncertainty of science as fraud and hoax.
Oh, except for the supreme a**holery of Storrs Olson, king of the knuckleheads. He plays right into their hands, as you would expect.
The lesson would seem to be: unless you know personally and trust who filmmakers and media folk are, don't talk to them. Except, of course, if they are from National Geographic. The best thing about this film is that it blows a new protostome into the scientific pretensions of some of that magazine's staff, who ignored Tim Rowe's evidence that Archaeoraptor was a fake, and instead went with the counsel of an (unnamed but widely known) advisor to NG who stated that "all these fossils have been altered anyway."
You may want to consider buying this video and showing it to your students with your own narration. You could even build a non-majors course inscientific inquiry and evolution by showing and stopping this film, interspersing your own evidence and perspective, and showing how some people are happy to lie for Jesus and any other religious icon.
Thanks to the NCSE staff for putting us on to this scam.

AronRa again. How can these douchbags seriously claim that thier opposition to evolution has anything to do with morality?

Hitler Does Not Fall Into The Atheistic/Agnostic Rational Secular Humanist Evolutionist Paradigm

2010-11-11T06:45:00.001-08:00

AronRa also addresses the issue.

One Of The Best Things I've Seen In A While

2010-11-06T16:08:00.000-07:00

I don't think even Sagan said it better than this. I'm just not sure what was up with the clip of Rutger Hauer from Blade Runner.

Familiarity can breed contempt with the cosmic scale of deep time and space. We throw around numbers like millions and billions as though it was nothing, and I find sometimes that I have become so used to it that I think I actually understand what these numbers mean.

I don't. Neither do you.

The human brain cannot comprehend a number like a million. It isn't made to. We can hold a number like a hundred in our head, and with a little effort, a thousand. Beyond that, it gets sticky. Draw a timeline stretching across your wall spanning 6,000 years, all of human recorded history and then some. If you stare at it long enough, you might be able to, just barely, fit the whole thing in your head, and understand it as multiples to the length of your life. But you have no fucking concept of a million.

Try all the conceptual games you want. The age of the universe is a calender year. The age of the Earth is the distance between your outstretched arms. These tricks may give you a sense of relative length; the age of the Earth is this much longer than the time that complex life has existed; dinosaurs lasted this much longer than the human species; but you don't understand those numbers in absolute terms. You have NO IDEA.

It always boggles my mind a little when scientists are accused of making the human species insignificant, as though the size of the universe, or the length of time that the Earth has existed, makes our span short and unimportant. I refer to this as looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Our (relatively) minuscule corner of the universe is amazing. The sliver of geologic time we exist in is amazing. The human species is amazing. Your individual life is amazing. It isn't that we are billions of times less important than the scale of time and space; rather that the universe is a billion times more extraordinary because it can hold the human species, and billions and trillions of things that are just as incredible...and unlike the tiny, petty myths of religion, the amazing things that science shows us are, as far as we can tell, actually real.

Like the creator of this clip, I have a hard time sometimes comprehending what people see in religion, or ever have.

Excuse me now, I have to go take a leak.

Don't Impose Personal Style When Reviewing a Paper

2010-11-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

A vertebrate paleontologist of my acquaintance just got back a final review of a paper that he had previously resubmitted, and asked my opinion on the numerous edits to the paper, many of which he felt were unnecessary. This raises an issue on reviewing papers that Bill and I have bitched to each other about in the past: the imposition of personal style preferences on the reviewee.

The main purpose of a review is to determine how successful you have been at getting another human being into your brain. If you have done a good job, the reviewer will find your arguments and reasoning compelling, and agree with your conclusions. However, a more fundamental purpose of reviews is to find out if you have been successful at getting a reader to understand what you are trying to say at all. Anyone who has written a paper (and who actually cares about how good it is) knows that there comes a point after you have re-written and re-edited it over and over again when you are incapable of evaluating your own writing. Your brain knows the patterns of words on the page so thoroughly that they seem natural and right even if they are actually unclear. One useful trick is simply to put the manuscript down for a while and refuse to look at it until you have forgotten what you wrote, but a better route is just getting someone else to read it who has NOT been staring at the same goddamned words for weeks on end. YOU know what you are trying to say, but that doesn't matter if your reader doesn't. You aren't writing to yourself.

A helpful reviewer knows how to reword confusing sentences in a way that improves clarity, such as by breaking it up into chunks, moving a verb to the front on the sentence, clarifying the subject of a sentence, or just completely re-writing it.

For example: "The shape of the lacrimal, the length of the maxilla, and the number of aveoli in the dentary, are all means by which Smilosuchus and Pseudopalatus may be differentiated."

The reader's brain wants to know up front why these things are being listed. Don't keep it in suspense. Try:

"Smilosuchus and Pseudopalatus may be differentiated by the shape of the lacrimal, the length of the maxilla, and the number of aveoli in the dentary."

Also, shorter is better; a major part of becoming a good scientific writer (or good writer in general) is learning to convey the same amount of information with fewer words. You want your reader to have to spend as little time and do as little work is possible to understand your meanings so that they do not lose consciousness before finishing the paper. If there is a paragraph, or a couple of consecutive sentences, that are twice as long as they really need to be, a good editor can condense the whole thing without loosing information.

For example: "The maxilla of Pseudopalatus has an elongate anterior process. The anterior process of the maxilla has a raised anteroposteriorly oriented ridge on the lateral surface. The maxilla also has a rugose lateral surface. Also, the posterior end of the maxilla contacts the jugal. Moreover the shape of the suture between the maxilla and the jugal is serrate in lateral view."

Condense to: "The maxilla of Pseudopalatus has a rugose lateral surface, an elongate anterior process with a raised anteroposteriorly oriented ridge on the lateral surface, and a posterior suture with the jugal that is serrate in lateral view."

All the same information, two lines shorter.

However, it is important to make a distinction between writing clarity and writing style. Just because a writer didn't say something the way that you personally would have written it does not mean that your way is better. Getting back "corrections" on a paper which are strictly stylistic can be extremely annoying. For example, someone might write something like:

"Contrary to the findings of Goober (1965), the maxillae of Smilosuchus and Postosuchus both have a first aveolus twice the size of the more posterior aveoli."

I might personally have written this as: "The maxillae of Smilosuchus and Postosuchus both have a first aveolus twice the size of the posterior aveoli, contra Goober (1965)."

My way cuts down a few words, but not in a really major way, and the meaning of the first sentence is perfectly clear. Therefore, I personally wouldn't edit it. The difference is mostly one of personal style.

Or, someone might write: "The anterior PORTION of the maxilla is mediolaterally expanded", whereas I would write "The anterior PART of the maxilla is mediolaterally expanded", but I know what the fucking word "portion" means in the context without having to think about it.

Another problem some reviewers have is with colloquial terms, such as "the lacrimal is sandwiched between the prefrontal and the maxilla." "Sandwiched" is a fairly unambiguous term, and I know instantly reading this what the sentence means. I probably wouldn't have used the word personally, but I wouldn't suggest changing it. This is a style difference, but not one which hurts the ability of the reader to absorb information.

Incidentally, the particular examples I used were not from a real manuscript. I made them all up, so I hope you weren't taking notes. Douchebag.

WOW.

2010-11-01T18:18:00.000-07:00

Wow.

YES.

2010-10-28T19:17:00.000-07:00

This is not a "wreck." This is awesome.

Triassic dinosauromorphs

2010-10-23T21:09:00.001-07:00

I am slowly but surely getting the individual black and white line drawings in the faunal comparison that got posted on Dave Hone's blog colored in. I have plans for them, oh yes. Wonderful and mightly plans.

In the meantime, I was asked to put together a composition for the cover of the dinosaur origins volume resulting from last year's SVP Symposium in Bristol. It is going to be published by the Earth and Environmental Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, I'd never heard of it either, but it must be an important journal because it will have my artwork on the cover. It will also have my paper with Bill revising the tetrapod biostratigraphy of PEFO.

Anyway, I busted ass and got the dinosauromorphs colored in, and also added Tawa, Plateosaurus and Lesothosaurus to round out the dinosauromorph family tree (well, technically just dinosauriform since I don't have any lagerpetids). The cover will have these arranged in a phylogenetic tree with the basal archosaurs, still in black and white. I haven't had time to color all the pseudosuchians yet, and also the format of the cover required that I stack things on top of each other vertically; so the dinosauromorphs are colored and stacked on top of the pseudosuchians. This is bullshit, and I feel dirty.

Anyway, here are just the colored dinosaurmorphs. I have Marasuchus, Silesaurus, and Herrerasaurus identified as such, as they were the actual models; in the black and white version, they are standing in for Dromomeron, the PEFO silesaurid, and Chindesaurus respectively.

From Paleo Errata

Also, you need to watch this right away.

LNJ

Dinosaur Podcasts

2010-10-16T19:56:00.001-07:00

A few months ago, Dave Hone asked my to participate in a podcast he wanted to pull together with a rationalist (is that a word? I think that's a word) site called the 21st floor. I downloaded the recording software he recommended, and put together a monologue on dinosaur origins (Dave, Mike Taylor, Tom Holtz, Paul Barrett, Suzie Maidment, and Jerry Harris did the other segments on the different dinosaur groups). I though it was going to be a pain in the ass to figure out the software, but it was actually kind of fun. The direct link to the podcast is here.

However, I do need to work on my delivery when I speak. All I could think listening to myself was "who is this smarmy asshole?" Part of the problem might be that I did the recordings laying on my back with the laptop sitting on my chest, and my head propped up with a pillow, so my windpipe might have been a little compressed; between trying to speak slowly and methodically, and working a little hard to force the air out, I have this insufferable drawl. Or maybe I just sound like that. Shit.

Yes, That's The Stuff.

2010-10-15T20:12:00.001-07:00

Also, big congratulations to Rebecca Hunt-Foster (of Dinochick fame, also my former fellow grad student at Texas Tech) and John Foster (I reviewed his book), who now have a baby girl. She was born on October 12th, on National Fossil Day, during the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting. In a perfect world she would have actually been born AT the meeting, and been delivered by Phil Currie during the after hours party on Wednesday. This is not a perfect world. Still, pretty auspicious. You two timed that well.

LNJ

Advice For Aspiring Vertebrate Paleontologists, Part 8: Be Thou Selfish, But Not A Douchebag

2010-10-14T04:23:00.001-07:00

Downtown Pittsburgh is an odd in a slightly idiosyncratic in a way I can't quite put my finger on, but that I like somehow. Nice and crappy looking buildings co-exist peacefully on the street. I saw tour buses driving around that look like boats, and a couple kids riding bikes down a busy sidewalk. There are cool looking projections on the sides of buildings, sometimes accompanied by sound effects; I guess Pittsburgh is the poor man's Tokyo. The panhandlers are quiet and unobtrusive. I understood most of Barsbald's speech. Goddamn was the food expensive at the Westin though. Not the best SVP meeting ever, but a decent enough one, and it went by really fast. I mostly enjoyed it for reasons having nothing to do with the actual meeting.

Don't miss SVP 2011, the first one where most people attending 8:00 a.m. talks will already be drunk.

Listen, dudes. Out there are many paleontologists trying to establish themselves, who want to not be posers and do good work, but who feel that they are not in the cool kids group. They see paleontologists who are well known, and whom they would like to be able to work with and hang out with, who do not seem too terribly interested in them, even if they share research interests. As a result, they make the mistake of thinking that the apparent disinterest is personal, like the big boys and girls just don't think they are cool enough to hang out with. This is the wrong way to think about it.

People are inherently selfish. Everybody in the world is trying to find whatever it is that makes them feel happy and productive, while (if they are good people) doing as little damage to their fellow human beings as they can. The same is true of paleontologists.

Most paleontologists with well-established research programs and professional respect got there by learning how to find and exploit the resources available too them, both in terms of research projects, and people who could provide them with information, help them advance, and find jobs and things to work on. Well-established paleontologists have a network of people they know who they are working with and being provided information by, and a list of things they are working on which eat up their time. Although most are happy to offer a little time to help out students and researchers trying to get a foot in the door, the bulk of their attention is devoted to doing the things they want to do, and the people that can help them get these things.

When they see you, the question that these researchers are asking themselves, consciously or subconsciously, is: what can that person do for ME? Are you someone with information that they would like to have, or who can offer them a new project to work on? Will you be a driven and productive graduate student who will win them kudos, perform useful tasks, and not require too much supervision?

You need to learn to think the same way. Don't waste you time worrying about whether or not the big boys and girls have accepted you or not and just USE the fuckers. Suck up whatever information they offer. Listen in on their conversations, consider their advice on grad schools and projects. When people with money offer it to you, take it. Suck them dry like a fucking vampire and move on to the next one. Eventually, they will recognize you as one of their own.

Now please note: this is not the same as being a douchebag, i.e. someone who takes things rather than just accepting them when they are offered. You are a douchebag if you do one of the following:

1. Move into someone else's field area without discussing the matter with them.
2. Publish on material (or at least an aspect of the material) that someone else is already invested time and effort in, unless they told you that they are probably never going to publish themselves, and that they don't mind.
3. Otherwise fuck over colleagues behind their backs.

Important clue: if you are doing something that may impact another researcher's work, and have not discussed it with them, you may be a douchebag. If you do it to a grad student, you are douchebag squared. If you delude yourself into thinking that taking something that someone else has already done makes you "tough", or even competent, you are the Duke of Douche. You can add it to your other title, King of the Shinglers. You know who I am talking about asshole.

Sorry, I got a little distracted there.

I have a flight to catch, so goodbye everybody. Take care. Except for you, douchebag. Get run over by a bus or something. Stop getting your poodles to write letters trying to get me and Bill fired. It isn't working, and just emphasizes that no one is listening to you anymore. The Emperor has no clothes, and a tiny cock.

Everyone else ignore that. I was talking to douchebag.

Interview

2010-10-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

There is some kind of interview with an artist or something.

Woah, Really?

2010-09-17T16:49:00.000-07:00

Is this mount depicting what I think it does?

Bill just posted Michelle Stocker's new paper, taken from her thesis, on Leptosuchus and related phytosaurs. Previously, I blogged on phytosaur evolution; spcifically how different evolutionary grades of phytosaur show up in the fossil record in exactly the stratigraphic sequence expected from evolution. The new taxon new taxon that Michelle names, Pravusuchus, fits very nicely into that picture. It is an intermediate between Leptosuchus-like phytosaurs and Pseudopalatus. It also occur stratigraphically at just below the lowest occurences of Pseudopalatus, and as high as the highest-known Leptosuchus-like specimens. Bill and I document this in our forthcoming paper on park biostratigraphy, although we got the final revisions back a little too soon to use the name Pravusuchus, which hadn't been published yet.

Thoughts On 9/11

2010-09-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

Fucking 9/11.

Soon to be known as National Acrimonious Religious Debate Day. Are we going to have to keep going through this shit every year? I've just engaged in an extended debate with someone I don't know in the comments section of a mutual acquaintance's facebook page on whether the Bible is a violent book or not. Despite my documentation of Old Testament passages demonstrating God's support of slavery, mass murder, and incest, I was assured that the REST of the Bible shows that He later changed his mind about having to do those awful things to people, and gave us His only son so that he...wouldn't have to do those awful things anymore. Or something to that effect. The logic didn't quite connect.

Things have changed, oh yes. Remember how it actually felt on the day, and the following days as it sunk in? It didn't feel quite real, at least not to me; if Jerry Bruckheimer had pitched the 9/11 attacks as a movie plot the day before, he probably would have been told that it was too over the top and far-fetched.

I went to Manhattan a few years ago. It was my first visit. I remember standing outside the WTC site and looking up the surrounding skyscrapers which are, by my usual standards, quite large buildings...and then looking at a diagram of the site before the attacks and realizing the towers had been two or three times as tall. Playing the tower collapses in my head, the sheer scale of destruction was terrifying.

America tried to turn the whole thing on its head in the following weeks, turn it into something emotional and inspiring, and it left a bad taste in my mouth even then. We heard tear-jerking stories about people on the flights calling family members, and inspiring stories of courage and how America stood up as one. You know, let's roll.

However, this is all basically bullshit. 9/11 was not, first and foremost, a day of tragedy or national unity. It was a day of horror. Horror is not a redeemable emotion. You can't turn horror into something appealing or inspiring. Listening to people scream in terror as a gigantic unreal fireball erupts from the side of a skyscraper, watching living, burning human bodies fall hundreds of feet to splatter on the concrete, watching the whole fucking gargantuan building full of more living, burning human bodies go down and knowing the other one was going to go with it...check out this page on the numbers for 9/11 statistics, and compare the death count with the total number of human body parts recovered during the cleanup. Try to write an inspiring tear-jerker about that shit, Alan Jackson.

So we moved away from horror, and turned to more media-friendly emotions which had become a bad joke by the time the Iraq war rolled around and we realized the tone the Bush Administration was going to take against criticism. Now we have moved on to arguing about whether all of Islam should be blamed for 9/11, and the tactics and arguments used by both sides have gotten positively hilarious. We have moved away from Bush-era self-righteousness...and I am afraid that we have moved too far.

Fucking Christ, did I actually just write that?

I'm certainly as pleased as anyone that the doofus Reverend Terry Jones has abandoned his plan to hold a massive Qur'an burning on 9/11. I have watched with amusement over the last few days as he has backpedaled from a self-righteousness firebrand calling for global denouncement of Islam as the Devil's seed, to trying to sound like he is involved in rational and mutually respectful debate with members of the Islamic community. The funniest part were the entreaties by the president, General Petraeus, and even Sarah Palin suggesting that the whole thing was...un-American and that it endangered our boys overseas. Gee, that must have really fucking stung.

Yesterday I watched an interview with Jones' increasingly irritated son assuring the crowd of reporters that "No, there will be no book burning tomorrow...Why do I have to keep saying it?" Hmmm...probably because your original intention was to make a huge, incendiary, well-publicized international event out it in the first place. It takes a while for these things to die down, you know.

However, as funny as it is to watch a conservative preacher being pilloried on patriotic rhetoric, and to see it actually having an effect on him, there are repercussions to consider. Essentially, Jones was browbeaten with the argument that aggravating Muslims will encourage them towards violence against Christians and Americans, and that it is better for him to not exercise his freedom of speech in order to prevent retaliation.

So...are we going to hear this same shit from the Obama and General Petraeus the next time Matt Stone and Trey Parker want to show Mohammad on South Park?

We're moving out onto a slippery slope here. I think it might have been better just to downplay the whole thing by emphasizing how ridiculous and pathetic it was; an expression of furious indignation that there were people in the world who would dare to believe in a different fable than Jones, and to point out that the burning wouldn't have actually accomplished anything. Islam will not magically evaporate if enough Qur'ans are burned. It would even have been all right to point out that the burning would create bad feelings, and hampered American diplomatic efforts overseas...but instead, Obama and Petraeus emphasized the threat of violence. The President of the United States has essentially told radical Islam that he will fear monger and discourage freedom of speech on its behalf. Our fault, please don't hurt us. I think Obama has fucked up, and big.

I don't think that we should fear Islam, at least in the long run...not if freedom, secularization, and standards of living generally improve globally. Once upon a time, western Christianity used to be just as violent and intolerant; impoverished people with shitty standards of living tend to hedge their bets on the afterlife. But western civilization is chilly chill these days, and Christians are not so willing to leave their comfortable materialistic lives to bring hellfire down on the infidel.

Like Christianity, Islam will (hopefully) temper down if its followers find themselves with more and more materialistic distractions. God didn't really mean all that shit about the House of War, its all about looooove. Call off the jihad, let's order pizza, smoke a joint, and watch some porn. The Qur'an is just...allegorical, man.

If it worked for the Old Testament, it can work for anything.

LNJ

I Get The Best Shit On Facebook

2010-09-06T10:58:00.000-07:00

Also, an interesting opinion piece on the history of religious hysteria in America...

My birthday is in a few months. I want everyone on the Internet to pitch in and buy me one of these. I will love you all forever.

I am busy and productive! I am working on a shitload of artwork for a book on the history of life, the paper revising the lithostratigraphy of the northern part of PEFO, a larger scope Upper Triassic stratigraphy paper (both with Bill Parker), and my dissertation chapter on the lithostratigraphy of the Dockum Group. The PEFO vertebrate biostratigraphy chapter for the SVP dinosaur origins volume is revised and sent back; it will rock quite nicely and help get Late Triassic vertebrate biochronology on more firmly scientifically testable ground. I also finished my field mapping revisions for the PEFO geologic map, a project I've been working on with Lisa Skinner and Paul Umhoefer at NAU; they have been incorporated into the electronic geo-rectified version, and it will eventually get published (somewhere) once the north end revisions are published. Bill and I also wrapped up a couple condensed synthesis papers on park lithostratigraphy and vertebrate paleontology for the upcoming SEPM paleosol conference being held at PEFO in a couple weeks; these are basically gray literature, but we will probably merge and expand them into a nice readable synthesis on Chinle lithostratigraphy, paleontology, and geochronology once...certain other papers which we are marginally involved with get published.

I bought myself this mug. If I get submittable drafts of my current slate of papers done by the end of the year, I'll get this one (see here for explanation). I like coffee. And I rule.

I have a string of projects slated for the spring once I get the current batch done, as well as an awesome escape plan for possibly leaving PEFO, which may (or may not) occur sometime next year.

LNJ

P.Z. Myers On The WTC Mosque, Which Is Not Technically A Mosque, Nor At The Actual WTC Site

2010-09-01T17:15:00.000-07:00

P.Z. nails it too.

P.Z. Myers is one of the best known "extremist" evolutionists on this side of the Atlantic who is antagonistic about religion, but his posting makes one thing very clear: he understands the value of religious freedom, and can distinguish between the criticism of religion and the oppression of religion. Opponents of atheistic secular humanism may want to paint us as being oppressive and close-minded as fundamentalists, that accusation is almost always absolute bullshit.

The defense of both open inquiry and religious freedom ideologically go hand in hand in a free secular society. The right of individuals to practice any sort of ridiculous and irrational superstition they want (as long as it does not interfere with the right of other people to live their own lives) is as important as my right to openly make whatever insensitive and politically incorrect observations on those beliefs that I might want to.

I don't think that a mosque should be built at the World Trade Center, or anywhere else...the same goes for churches. I think we should be building hospitals and rehab centers and orphanages and libraries and museums, and other things that enhance human knowledge and the quality of human life, and encourage people to care more about each other than what an angry and judgmental imaginary friend who lives in the sky might think. But that is beside the point. The universe does not revolve around me and what I want. I don't think that a mosque should be built at the World Trade Center site...but I think that Muslims should be able to build one there if they want to.

Or to put it another way...

LNJ

P.S. "Softer World" also has the world's best t-shirts.

And this helps. It really really helps.

Heh.

2010-08-26T19:27:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart on the WTC Mosque

2010-08-22T13:39:00.000-07:00

Stewart nails it.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Extremist Makeover - Homeland Edition

http://www.thedailyshow.com/

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

George Carlin on America

2010-08-01T05:13:00.001-07:00

Oh dear, George. So disheartening. It can't possibly be true.

...And Back To Cool Again

2010-07-26T21:28:00.000-07:00

I am quite fond of internet comics, which require less time to keep up on than TV, and many of which are quite brilliant. I encountered Axe Cop via The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, and it is now part of my permanent links. Click here to learn how this comic was created. It is completely awesome. I occasionally talk to Bill's six-year-old twins, who are also MAD GENIUSES. I may have to try this.

Yes, also...Going to SVP? Hotel arrangements going to be tight? Hey, solution.

I am picking away on a three-parter, partly inspired by interesting and laughable recent events which I am not at liberty to divulge, on science blogging and what it is good for. It may take a while to get it properly crafted and make sure that it contains my required quota of obscenity, and I am also getting two really important park-related projects wrapped up. So...it may be a while. Sorry to leave you hanging with two consecutive posts linking to discussions of sodomy, but that is just how it goes sometimes. It is part of our national legacy now, so maybe you should actually be proud.

LNJ

Not So Cool Stuff

2010-07-10T18:33:00.000-07:00

Are we feeling a little amnesia, America?

LNJ

Cool Stuff

2010-07-08T23:49:00.000-07:00

While Richard Dawkins may be the name most associated with the scientific denial of religious belief, he can't hold a candle to Carl Sagan, the greatest voice for reason in living memory.

You don't often see animation this ambitious.

BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

LNJ

Open Letter To Carl

2010-06-29T21:51:00.001-07:00

The following post started off as an e-mail response on the VERTPALEO list to a non-degreed enthusiast who has managed to remain astonishingly ignorant and naive over the past twenty years about how and why vertebrate paleontologists do things, in spite of the fact that this individual was well-known and knowledgeable on the dinosaur literature when I was just starting my undergrad degree. He has, as far as I can tell, gained no deeper understanding into how science or vertebrate paleontology works in all that time, and periodically bad-mouths researchers in spite of the fact that they provide him with a constant supply of dinosaur scientific literature that he needs to survive. Imagine, if you will, a baby that sucks on the teat of a woman who is not his mother, and then punches her because he thinks she is a selfish woman for eating and drinking so that she can produce milk. Yet he won't stop sucking (so to speak).

We will call him Carl.

Carl’s most oft-repeated bit of inanity in the last year or so is to accuse vertebrate paleontologists of what he calls “Daffy Duck syndrome” (or some such bullshit) because we allegedly go “MINE-MINE-MINE!” (i.e., we WANT vertebrate fossils found on private property so that we can do research and write papers and learn shit). I tried to explain the distinction between WANTING fossils and EXPECTING private land owners to hand them over, and why we would presume to act disappointed if a land owner reneged on a promise to let us have something. I wrote a response to Carl, which I am still pretty proud of. Let’s read!

Carl, despite periodic accusations on this list, I have never personally heard ANY American paleontologist say that they do not think landowners have the right to decide what happens with fossils found on their personal property, or that they want to enact legislation which will allow state or federal governments to confiscate fossils found on private property. This is an oft-repeated bit of horseshit. Such paleontologists may exist, but if they do they are few and far between.

Do we WANT fossils found on private land? Sure we do. Such fossils provide valuable scientific information, and are therefore of interest to us. If we had these fossils in our possession, we could write papers about them that you could then read. It is my understanding like you like collecting and reading papers on dinosaurs. Paleontologists need fossils to write papers for you, Carl. This does not mean we think land owners HAVE to give them to us.

However, once a land owner has specifically TOLD paleontologists that they may collect, there is a commitment of time and money that the paleontologist makes in collecting the fossils and preparing them. This time and money is wasted if the landowner reneges and takes the specimen back. If a specimen is published on, and especially if it is a type specimen, then there is also the loss of time and effort that went into writing the paper, as claims about the specimen are not longer testable by future researchers who cannot examine the specimen.

If the land owner had simply said "NO" when asked for permission to collect on their property, than these issues would not have even arisen. The paleontologist would simply have been sad and disappointed and found something else to do.

Or, imagine if Mickey Mouse agreed to give or sell Daffy Duck a house, and so Daffy got rid of his our old home and packed all of his duck stuff into a moving van, and then showed up at Mickey's house and Mickey and Minnie were like, psych, we are keeping the house, sorry about all the effort and trouble you went through for nothing, Daffy, ha ha! Daffy would be upset, wouldn't he? Wouldn't you feel sorry for Daffy, especially if he was going to let you sleep on his couch and criticize his house-acquiring habits without paying rent or helping keep the place picked up? There is a difference between saying that the homeowner does not have the right to decide what to do with their own home, and being upset that they reneged after they SAID they would give it to you and you spent time and money moving all of your stuff. Do you understand the difference, Carl?

Carl’s response can be paraphrased as “nuh-uh, you don’t know what researchers think.” I did not respond.

Feeling spurned by the academic community, Carl has found solace in the arms of commercial collectors, who make him feel welcome. He has made appeals on the VERTPALEO list for SVP to be more welcoming to commercial collectors, and was answered brilliantly and patiently by Eric Scott. To paraphrase, less patiently:

Commercial collection is not vertebrate paleontology. It is commercial collection. The goal of commercial collection is to make money through the commercial sale of vertebrate fossils. That is why it is called commercial collection. The goal of vertebrate paleontology is to learn about vertebrate fossils and what they tell us about extinct vertebrates. That is why it is called vertebrate paleontology instead of commercial collection. If the goal of vertebrate paleontology was to make money off the sale of vertebrate fossils, than vertebrate paleontology would be called commercial collection, which wouldn’t make any goddamn sense at all.

Commercial collectors and vertebrate paleontology can have mutually beneficial and informative relationships, but that does not change the fact that their fundamental goals are not the same. Otherwise commercial collection would be called vertebra…well, see the above paragraph. Scrupulous and helpful commercial collectors may be welcome guests in the vertebrate paleontological community, and provide useful information and resources, but this is still the Society of VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY, not the Society of COMMERICAL COLLECTION. See the above paragraph again if you are getting confused.

For vertebrate paleontologists to do vertebrate paleontology, we need fossils in public repositories. For this reason, we do not SUPPORT the sale of vertebrate fossils to private collectors (although this is not the same as saying that we actively FIGHT the right of private individuals to sell their personal property). To sum up, we do not actively support commercial collection because we are trying to do vertebrate paleontology. Because this is the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. It was founded by vertebrate paleontologists.

I Almost Forgot...

2010-06-25T22:51:00.000-07:00

This was sent to us by Katie Loughney, a student at the University of Rhode Island doing work in the park. This is a real street in St. Louis.

Amen to that.

LNJ

Advice For Aspiring Researchers In Vertebrate Paleontology, Part 7: Are You A Scientist, Or Are You A Poser?

2010-06-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I read a lot of dinosaur books. I thought I knew a thing or two about paleontology.

When I was seventeen, more than half my life ago, I was introduced to vertebrate paleontology first-hand via the volunteer program at the Denver Museum Natural History. I learned that I didn’t know jack shit. I learned how to prep and identify fossils, and how to read scientific papers. I learned how to do field work. I learned that vertebrate paleontologists were human beings who had fun and made mistakes and gossiped and liked to get drunk and laid. I smashed the Stegosaurus skull with my head the week that Jurassic Park came out and learned that I shouldn’t wear large hats that obstructed my peripheral vision. I learned what it was like to be around a group of people who were interested in what I was interested in and liked having me around.

Most importantly, I learned that contributing to vertebrate paleontology, whether through fossil preparation or writing papers, required working industriously and caring about what you produced, but did not require having an advanced degree.

Over the nearly twenty subsequent years that I have been at been at least peripherally involved in the field of vertebrate paleontology, first as a student and observer, and later as a researcher with my own particular project goals and interests, I have read and participated in myriad discussions on the Dinosaur and VERTPALEO mailing lists about the difference between “amateurs” and “professionals,” or what separates scientists from non-scientists.

I’ll explain what the distinction means to me. It’s pretty simple:

Some people care about figuring shit out. They are interested in learning things. In the process of learning things they realize that some things are known to be not well-understood, and that some things thought to be well-understood actually aren’t. Their response is to want to learn about these things and to try to improve the understanding of these things, both for themselves and for everyone else. They, familiarize themselves with past work on the subject, look at the available data very carefully, seek out new data, and then try to give a carefully crafted and well-informed opinion on the way things are. In the process of doing this work, they discover more and more things that are not well understood, and they plan out various projects to learn about them. These people also recognize that they are fallible, that they have to provide evidence for their ideas that stands up to critical scrutiny, and that they have to be able to address and convincingly refute alternative opinions for their own opinions to have validity. In the process of doing this work and fostering an intellectually honest attitude about themselves and what the produce, they earn the respect of the scientific community. These people are SCIENTISTS…regardless of whether they have degrees or not.

Some people care more about appearances. They want people to think that they do science, that they know what they are talking about, and that they are right and can’t be wrong. At least some of them actually believe these things. They want people to regard them as professionals, but they do not want to do the work necessary for that image to have substance. They do sloppy work that gets them citations, but does not provide solid data or compelling support for their ideas. They often self-publish so that their papers do not have to risk the excruciating healing fire of peer review. They ignore or give only the briefest of comment on the work of others who disagree with them so that readers will not be aware of dissenting opinions. They might do a few days of volunteer prep work or field work before giving up, and then spend years telling people that they are paleontologists. These people are POSERS…regardless of whether they have degrees or not.

Are you a scientist, or are you a poser?

The aforementioned arguments on the DML and VERTPALEO Lists often involve non-degreed dinosaur enthusiasts complaining about not being able to publish peer-reviewed papers (because they don’t have time, or can’t get access to any specimens, or whatever), or how they shouldn’t have to because peer-reviewed papers are overrated. As someone who wrote, re-wrote, re-re-re-wrote, and published their first peer-reviewed publication while still a college sophomore, both complaints smack of utter bullshit.

I am sick and tired of hearing people complain about how peer review is not a perfect process, because garbage still gets through the cracks. This is not unlike the claim of creationists that science is no better than pseudoscience because it is often wrong. Yes, science is often wrong, and peer review often fails…but it is much, much, much, much, much better than they alternative, and the overall quality of what comes out of the peer-review process is infinitely better than what went in.

I am also sick of hearing people claim that peer review promotes censorship and group-think. This is (mostly) bullshit. A reviewer does not have to agree with the views presented in a paper for the paper to be accepted, providing that a compelling appeal can be made to the editor. A reviewer may feel that a scathing criticism is unfair and misses the point…but even then, the criticism may still be used to improve the quality of the paper. It may be that the misunderstanding was due to the writer doing a poor job of explaining their evidence and arguments, or that the unfair criticisms predict biases and unjustified attacks that may assault the paper after publication. Either way, they can be used to improve the effectiveness of the paper by clarifying the writing and answering the potential unjustified criticisms in advance. See Bill’s recent post addressing both these points using the example of a paper we submitted in the past year (and some additional comments he just made to this post).

If you get rejected, you have an alternative recourse…resubmit it to another journal. If the rejection really does indicate incompetence, bias, or carelessness on the part of the editorial board and reviewers, then try a different editorial board. Consider the objections to the first submission, use them to improve the clarity and quality of the manuscript, and give it another try.

Or it may just be that your paper got rejected because it fucking sucks and should never have been written, because it presented shitty data and sloppy arguments, or was just badly written, contributes nothing to the scientific quest for knowledge and greater understanding. Either way, quit complaining and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. I dare you. Can your ideas, data, and writing survive professional scrutiny or not? Are you a scientist, or are you a poser?

Even more frustrating than these complaints by non-degreed enthusiasts is when they are endorsed by degreed professionals who suggest that there is nothing wrong with self-publishing, and that holding them up to our standards is somehow elitist. To me, the implication that requiring non-professionals to submit to peer-reviewed journals is “elitist” is itself an elitist argument, because it implies that non-degreed professional can’t compete as legitimate scientists. It is insulting and false, and I can’t believe that non-degreed enthusiasts look on these individuals as "supportive" instead of patronizing.

There are individuals out there who are considered experts by degreed paleontologists, even though they themselves did not get PhDs, or any advanced degrees, or have advanced degrees in fields having nothing to do with paleontology. They nonetheless acquired expertise on paleontological specialties, write papers aimed at solving problems, and submit to journals and volumes which require them to improve and revise manuscripts. Some of them don’t publish much, but contribute to science through being first-rate preparators and field workers, and thereby contribute to science through the collection and protection of data. Jack McIntosh. Andrew Milner. Bill Parker. Greg Paul. Virginia Tidwell and other people I knew at the Denver Museum. Matt Brown. Jack Fucking Horner.

There is not some magic barrier that you cross that takes you from non-professional to professional. The first draft of the first paper you ever write will suck. The idea is to re-work it, get help and advice from scientists with more experience, and gradually gain an understanding of what science is trying to accomplish, what makes a paper work or not work, whether or not a paper is a useful contribution or not, and how to produce condensed, clear writing. This process may start in college at the undergraduate or graduate level, or may start without having any degree at all. You get to be a scientist through the acquisition of knowledge and experience. Paleontologists with degrees tend to be better scientists because they got experience in the process of getting their degrees, but it is the acquisition of experience that matters.

The goal of science is the construction of sound arguments built on solid data, all explained clearly enough that a reasonably intelligent and knowledgeable reader can absorb it. The goal of science is not to make people who don’t care about the construction and dissemination of knowledge FEEL like scientists by putting up with papers that are badly written and reasoned.

Science doesn’t care about how you feel. It just cares about what you produce. This isn’t the Special Olympics. We don’t hold separate competitions for retarded papers. You may have trained at a top-notch school, or trained on your own and acquired first-hand expertise just through hard work…but in the end, all that matters is whether or not you can compete. And if you can’t compete, please don’t shit in our sport, because we want the games to be good. We are building a body of knowledge that we want to be as reliable as possible. We care about the integrity and quality of science. We don’t care about your ego.

Are you a scientist, or are you a poser?

LNJ

p.s. In response to some of the comments, I just want to clarify: I would not describe anyone who doesn’t do scientific research as a “poser,” because most of them aren’t posing. I was not aiming at popular science writers, teachers, preparators, collection managers, or museum volunteers, or anyone involved in the field of vertebrate paleontology who does NOT want to do original research or contribute to the primary scientific literature. There are certainly innumerable ways that individuals can contribute to vertebrate paleontology that do not involve publishing. All I was trying to say is that if you DO want to publish scientific research, do it right. I reserve the term “poser” for someone who wants to be perceived as something in particular without actually doing it right.

Someone who communicates science to the general public, and does it effectively, is not a poser…they really are communicating science to the public. This does not make them a scientist, a term I would restrict to someone who figures out NEW things (i.e. does research), properly tortures their ideas and data with critical thinking and peer review to see what they are made of, and communicates them effectively to other scientists...and that is all right. There are lots of things to do in the field of vertebrate paleontology aside from research.

All of the jobs I listed above are important to vertebrate paleontology. Scientific researchers arguably need preparators and collection managers more than preparators and collection managers need researchers, and God knows that scientists need people who can explain to the general public exactly what it is that we do. Also, of course, one CAN be a preparator, collection manager, teacher etc. AND be a scientist at the same time, and there are plenty of individuals who juggle multiple tasks. I was introduced to verebrate paleontological research AND fossil preparation by Ken Carpenter, who at the time was a full-time fossil preparator without a PhD. It slowed down his research projects not a bit, and there were volunteers at Denver without ANY advanced degrees who had more scientific research papers in press by the time I started my graduate program than I still have now.

Huh. I'm a TOTAL poser. Nooooooooo!

The Science And Art Of Banagma: Preliminary Results

2010-06-04T21:40:00.000-07:00

Since the dawn of time, one question has plagued mankind above all others: “What happens when you burn fruit?”

Together with other researchers from northern Arizona and the Dinosaur Discovery center in St. George, I set out to answer this question a month ago in Lisbon Valley, southern Utah. We chose this remote location due to the dangerous nature of the experiments (building big campfires while totally shitfaced). The experiments were very demanding and took a whole week.

The primary researchers were Tyler Birthisel, Rob Gay and myself, although we had assistance from Andrew Milner, Sarah Spears, and several others. Most of us were drunk. One member of the group prepared for the experiments by drinking most of a bottle of Jameson the night before I arrived, but the results were not conclusive as no fruit was actually burned and fruit burning didn’t actually factor into it at all. Also, getting really sick isn't really a result. They were just drinking. Who was it? I’m not going to say. The important thing is that she tried.

Bananas were chosen as the primary focus, because we were sitting around the fire and there happened to be bananas there and we were like, “Hey, I wonder what would happened if we put those in the fire?” So we did. Initial experiments were sloppy as the bananas were simply carelessly placed in the fire. They blackened and exuded a molten hot fruit semi-liquid which we decided to call “banagma.” We also decided to refer to the act of placing bananas in the fire to burn them as “banagma.”

Please note that a banana placed in the fire is not referred to as a “banagma.” It is just a banana that is burning. What are you, a fucking weirdo?

Subsequent experiments were more rigorous. We made observations while Tyler made carefully recorded our observations, which I timed with a stopwatch. He also carefully recorded our terminology, which we developed during the course of the experiment.

Additional experiments were attempted with tomatoes and a coconut, but they were uninspiring. The coconut was especially disappointing. We were hoping for an explosion, and got nothing; it just burned for a while, and then cracked open and leaked. Mike Getty cut it up and we ate it, and it was totally shit.

During the day, we occupied ourselves looking for fossils and measuring sections. Lisbon Valley has some interesting exposures of the Chinle Formation, which were deposited near the edge of the depositional basin during Late Triassic time. It only preserves the upper part of the Chinle Formation section (the Church Rock Member and an associated package of channel sandstones and mudstones called the Kane Springs beds), which lapped up against the edge of the Ancestral Rockies towards the end of the Chinle depositional sequence. They got some great fossil fish and trackways, and some phytosaur material. So we learned some things about Late Triassic paleontology and geology too.

Incidentally, Google tells me that “Banagma” is the name of a prostate researcher. I don’t know if that is important or not.

p.s. Tyler is an excellent field cook and made me awesome breakfasts and dinners all week, which I rewarded by sending him a huge box of gummy bears. Tyler likes gummy bears.

Good One

2010-05-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

P.Z. Meyers has an excellent post drilling the two most irritatingly nonsensical arguments in the science vs. religion debate: That religion is particularly good at propogating compassion or morality, and that religion restricts itself to ethical questions while science cannot address religious claims.

My own takes on these arguments can be found here and here.

LNJ

Awesome.

2010-05-24T20:35:00.000-07:00

I normally wait until the end of the month to post this kind of shit, but this can't wait.

Bring me the last DO-DO BIRD!!!

P.S. I just decided I needed to add a cat picture for no discernable reason. It isn't even my cat. It is Michelle Stocker's cat. I think his name is Trogdor, and I looked after him one summer while she was working at PEFO. He is almost blind but also liked to explore, and every day he would leave a trail of destruction thoroughout my house as he would blunder about looking for whatever it is that cats look for.

The techniques most cats use for investigating shelves full of stuff is to cautiously sniff individual items, and delicately pick thier way onto the shelf. Since Trogdor couldn't see well, his technique was to just to swipe out with his paw and sweep the whole fucking mess off the shelf and onto the floor, then to lay on the shelf.

I took this picture because he looked so peaceful that at first I thought he had died.

Wow, that was pretty random.

LNJ

The JVP Typothorax Paper: Jeff Is Still Best

2010-05-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

Typothorax coccinarum was the most common aetosaur in western North America for much of the Late Triassic. Like pretty much all aetosaurs, it is known primarily from its paramedian and lateral osteoderms, which have a distinctive morphology that can be used to identify and characterize the taxon. Prior to a few years ago, the best available specimens of the animal were from Canjilon Quarry, near Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, and a smaller specimen from the Post Quarry in West Texas. These specimens consist of associated but almost completely disarticulated material, including not just osteoderms but vertebrae and appendicular elements, which I described in detail for my master’s thesis (Martz, 2002).

I can safely say, with no conceit, that my thesis is a miracle from God. I thoroughly described and illustrated pretty much every available element. Using positional analysis (elaborated in pp. 127 & 130 in my thesis, and also by Parker, 2007), I was able to correctly infer the anterior to posterior placement and orientation of a jumble of disarticulated osteoderms. My drawings are totally fucking sweet. With the exception of Bill’s own thesis and subsequent publications on Desmatosuchus and Heliocanthus (Parker, 2002, 2007, 2008), it is the best descriptive paper ever published on a North American aetosaur. That statement is not self-aggrandizement. It is simply a fact.

However, God has a sick sense of humor, and provided the NMMNHS group with two nearly complete and better articulated specimens, which they published in the most recent issue of JVP (Heckert et al., 2010).

“Jeff,” I can hear you asking, “how is it?” Well, let me tell you.

In a nutshell, it presents a superficial anatomical description, some interesting and relevant new information and interpretations, and pulls the usual NMMNHS bullshit of trying to marginalize the (usually better) work of other researchers in favor of their own so that they get cited more. This tactic of theirs tends to be annoyingly successful, and I’ll talk about it a little more in my review of the new Triassic Life on Land book by Hans Sues and Nick Fraser. Since Bill will also be discussing the Heckert et al. (2010) paper and its useful points, I’ll delve directly into the bullshit concerning the treatment of my thesis. I’ll put off discussing some of their taxonomic conclusions for another post, and focus on their description.

First things first: No, they didn’t rip me off outright...at least, I don’t think they did based on my first couple readings. Holy shit, they even give me credit for some observations! However, the extent to which they tiptoe around my thesis in the descriptive section is almost hilarious. One of the points that we made during Aetogate is that Spielmann et al. (2006) cited my thesis chapter on Redondasuchus extensively, but only when they disagreed with me, and avoided giving me any credit for observations that they agreed with. They pull some of the same kind of crap here. They almost religiously avoid making any comparison between their material and the Canjilon stuff, and mostly use Long and Murry’s (1995) less detailed coverage in rare cases where they cite a previous observation. This is a rather striking omission since I completely described every element of Typothorax present in both the Canjilon Quarry and Post Quarry material, as well as providing anatomical interpretations and comparisons to other archosaurs. One would think these might be referenced more in a paper on the osteology and functional morphology of Typothorax. However, this isn’t really a problem as most of their description of the new skeletons is so superficial that it doesn’t establish a whole hell of a lot other than that 1) Typothorax was a vertebrate, and probably a tetrapod, and 2) that a lot of the elements aren’t well-exposed. So, no real harm done.

They make a few of the usual attempts to marginalize my description in favor of their own work with subtle word-play and some outright bullshit. For example, on p. 628, they state that “Martz (2002)…wrote extensively on additional elements, although these were largely isolated, or at best associated and in some cases may not pertain to T. coccinarum.” None of this is true. With the exception of a few isolated paramedian plates (which are indisputably Typothorax), ALL the Canjilon material I described was found in piles of associated plates and other postcrianial elements, something I was able to determine by matching the field numbers on individual elements to the original 1933 field maps.

They also do not actually defend the implication that anything I described isn’t actually Typothorax, with one exception: a possible clavicle which doesn’t match their material, and that I was ambiguous about identifying anyway. How do the other Canjilon elements I described compare to their specimens? Their descriptions provide almost no real morphological information beyond measurements, so who knows? However, pretty much everything I described is indisputably aetosaurian (and Typothorax is the only aetosaur at Canjilon), so their implication that I referred a lot of non-aetosaur elements to Typothorax is something they just made up.

Another example of this sort of disingenuous crap is when they point out (correctly) that I erred in showing a one-to-one relationship between vertebrae and osteoderm rows in the reconstruction of Typothorax I did in my thesis (Fig. 4.41). They note (also correctly) that in Desmatosuchus, it was already known that there are fewer plates in the cervical region than vertebrae (e.g. Case, 1922; Parker, 2002, 2008). They then proceed to quip (p. 634): “However, both Long and Murry (1995) and Martz (2002) persisted in reconstructing Typothorax as having a 1:1 match between cervical vertebrae and osteoderm rows” as though we should have known better.

They neglect to mention that a 1:1 ratio between presacral vertebrae and scutes IS known for other aetosaur taxa known from articulated carapaces (e.g. Walker, 1967; Heckert and Lucas, 1999; Schoch, 2007), and that this was pretty much taken for granted for other aetosaur taxa. They themselves had never previously bothered to suggest this might not be the particular case in Typothorax in their 1999 paper or anywhere else until they got the Badlands Ranch specimen.

(I have suspected for a couple years now that Typothorax might not have a 1:1 presacral vertebrae to plate ratio, which is reason I had trouble doing a good life reconstruction of an adult Typothorax that I alluded to in this post. Basically, I would try to line up of Typothorax osteoderms, and would end up with a freak with a gigantically elongate carapace that pulled the legs and head way apart. I knew something was wrong, but didn’t know exactly what until I had a chance to see the articulated skeleton of another as-of-yet undescribed aetosaur specimen in Germany that is closely related to Typothorax. That cleared up the confusion, and allowed by to do this corrected reconstruction last year; I don’t know if the exact pre-sacral scute count is right, but it is probably close).

The fact is, their description overall shows that I more-or-less correctly inferred the placement of most of the isolated paramedian and lateral osteoderms in the Canjilon and Post Quarry specimens using features of morphological variation established by other articulated taxa as my guidelines.

Heckert et al. (2010) are probably correct in that my description missed most of the anterior dorsal paramedians, and draw a lot of satisfaction pointing out possible/probable errors in my carapace reconstruction and in my identification of a few peculiar isolated scutes due to the fact that almost all my material was disarticulated. However, I am not terribly impressed with this, as their own descriptions of disarticulated aetosaur specimens tend to show that they can’t identify or orient isolated plates to save their asses (see Chapter 3 in Martz, 2002, and Parker, 2007). So if a couple ARTICULATED specimens allowed them to correctly identify the placement and orientation of the few anomalous plates that gave me some trouble in the disarticulated Canjilon and Post Quarry specimens, I am not going to exactly wet myself in amazement.

Their claim that I misidentified some of the weird cloacal scutes of Typothorax as lateral scutes in my thesis (Figs. 4.36-4.38) is probably also bullshit; my identification of most of these osteoderms as laterals is based on the two blocks from the Canjilon Quarry “U” specimen (Fig. 4.24), in which the paramedian, lateral, and ventral scutes are all in articulation (Fig. 4.24), so I am still confident that I assigned them correctly as laterals, although I might have wrongly placed them a little too far forward; they look more like the anterior caudal laterals on the Badlands Ranch specimen than the posterior dorsals that I identified them as. Having gotten a pretty good look at the Badlands Ranch specimen on display in NMMNHS, I am leaning towards some of the weirder scutes in the Canjilon Quarry specimen that I identified as ventral scutes (Fig. 4.40) are actually the weird spikey cloacal ventral scutes (Fig. 4.24b).

From Paleo Errata

Moreover, their own skeletal reconstruction shows at least one probable blunder. As has been the case in the last few NMMNHS contributions, Matt Celeskey’s excellent line drawings are the best thing about the paper. I do like his skeletal reconstruction, which shows Typothorax from front and back as well as top and side; my only real gripe with it is the anterior cervical paramedians. These are missing in one of the specimens they described, and distorted in the more complete specimen, but I identified them in the Canjilon material. The paramedian plates in the Canjilon material are slightly constricted laterally, and have lateral edges perpendicular to the anterior and posterior margins (see Martz 2002, Figs. 4.26-4.27); this is visible in the anteriormost paramedians in the NMMNHS Revuelto Creek specimen. However, these paramedians also have a subtle anterolateral curvature (again, see my thesis), their reconstruction shows them with straight anterior and posterior edges. The only type of osteoderm missing in their specimens, and they screwed it up because they couldn’t be bothered to credit my thesis.

Do I feel scooped because they published these specimens before I finally got around to publishing my thesis on the Canjilon and Post Quarry stuff? Not at all. As is usual with their descriptive papers, their treatment shows a lack of useful detail and much recognition of relevant features of taxonomic variation in aetosaurs, which means that I will still have adequate reason to re-describe Typothorax myself, once I get my current series of stratigraphy papers and a couple more aetosaur descriptions off my plate. If Heckert et al. eventually plan to elaborate on their superficial preliminary treatment by describing the NMMNHS specimens in proper detail, making comparative use of the most thorough, useful, informative, and best-illustrated description of Typothorax postcranial elements available (which is to say, mine), I will be absolutely delighted. I will also be so shocked that I’ll probably shit myself. I’m not holding my breath.

In the mean time, if you want a REAL description of the osteology of Typothorax, click here and download from the link at the bottom of the page.

P.S. It has been pointed out that referring to the "NMMNHS group" casts all reasearchers at NMMNHS in an unfair light. Fair enough, and apologies to anyone there actually doing legitimate work. I will try to cook up a new nickname which is more specific.

REFERENCES

Case, E.C. 1922. New reptiles and stegocephalians from the Upper Triassic of western Texas. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication, no. 321 (October, 1922). Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington D.C., 84 pp.

Heckert, A. B., and Lucas, S. G. 1999. A new aetosaur (Reptilia: Archosauria) from the Upper Triassic of Texas and the phylogeny of aetosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 50-68.

Heckert, A.B., S.G. Lucas, L.F. Rinehart, M.D. Celesky, J.A. Spielmann, and A.P. Hunt. 2010. Articulated skeletons of the aetosaur Typothorax coccinarum Cope (Archosauria: Stagonolepididae) from the Upper Triasssic Bull Canyon Formation (Revueltian: Early-Mid Norian), Eastern New Mexico, USA. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 30, no. 3 (May), pp. 619-642.

Long, R.A., and Murry P.A. 1995. Late Triassic (Carnian and Norian) tetrapods from the southwestern United States. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 4, 254 pp.

Martz, J.W. 2002. The morphology and ontogeny of Typothorax coccinarum (Archosauria, Stagonolepididae) from the Upper Triassic of the American southwest. M.S. thesis, Geosciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, 279 pp.

Parker, W.G. 2003. Description of a new specimen of Desmatosuchus haploceros from the Late Triassic of northern Arizona. M.S. thesis, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, 315 pp.

Parker, W.G. 2007. Reassessment of the aetosaur "Desmatosuchus chamaensis" with a reanalysis of the phylogeny of the Aetosauria (Archosauria: Pseudosuchia). Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 41-68.

Parker, W. G. 2008. Description of new material of the aetosaur Desmatosuchus spurensis (Archosauria: Suchia) from the Chinle Formation of Arizona and a revision of the genus Desmatosuchus. PaleoBios 28:1-40.

Schoch, R.R. 2007. Osteology of the small archosaur Aetosaurus from the Upper Triassic of Germany. Neues Jahrebuch für Geologie und Paleontologie Abhundhungen, vol. 246, no. 1 (October), pp. 1-35.

Spielmann, J.A., Hunt, A.P., Lucas, S.G., and Heckert, A.B. 2006. Revision of Redondasuchus (Archosauria: Aetosauria) from the Upper Triassic Redonda Formation, New Mexico, with description of a new species. In J.D. Harris, S.G. Lucas, J.A. Spielmann, M.G. Lockley, J.I. Kirkland, and A.R.C. Milner (eds.) The Triassic-Jurassic Terrestrial Transition. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 37, pp. 583-587. Albuquerque, NM.

Walker, A. D. 1961. Triassic reptiles from the Elgin area: Stagonolepis, Dasygnathus and their allies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, vol. 244, no. 709, pp. 103-204.

LNJ

Don McLeroy Is (A Little Bit) Right

2010-04-29T17:30:00.000-07:00

I’m disturbed by the Texas Board of Education’s recent revisions to their state educational standards for the Social Studies curriculum, but not just because of what (now former) Bible-thumping board member Don McLeroy wants.

According to McLeroy’s proposed changes, which will be voted on this month, everyone who ever did anything important was white, Christianity-hating secular genius Thomas Jefferson wasn’t really one of the Founding Fathers, separation of Church and State is a myth, and hip-hop has no cultural significance but country music does. I’m not making this up. McLeroy thinks someone needs to “stand up to the experts”. That is an actual quote.

This revisionist chicken-shit, and the fact that they actually might be getting away with it, is laughable, pathetic, and terrifying. However, others have already discussed it (see heah for example). I have other concerns, which seem to be largely lost in the scramble to slam McLeroy for his historical spin-doctoring.

In addition to these omissions, McLeroy and his supporters want some additions. These include discussing the Black Panthers alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Jefferson Davis alongside Abraham Lincoln, and the Venona project alongside McCarthy. They also advocate discussing the 2nd Amendment, and suggesting that conservative groups like the NRA and the Moral Majority has an important impact on the course of American history.

Watching left-leaning coverage (for example, AronRa’s YouTube video linked above), these additions are simply stated without commentary, as though it should be self-evident that they should not be discussed.

Well, why the fuck not?

The Black Panthers did exist, they were militant, and they did have an important and largely negative impact on how many Americans viewed the civil rights movement…in addition to unifying black communities and being the victims of a vicious counter-intelligence movement by the FBI. They do not provide a single easy and unambiguous moral lesson favoring either liberal or conservative agendas. Jerry Falwell was a loathsome, willfully ignorant douchebag, but it can’t be denied that he had an important influence on American politics and society, as have other conservative movements. The 2nd Amendment was the SECOND AMENDMENT, as in, it came right after the first, and before the third and fourth. The Founding Fathers clearly thought it was important, and the fact that it is unpopular today with a large chunk of the American population is reason to talk about it, not marginalize it.

This isn't quite like the attempts of the Texas School Board to work Intelligent Design into the biology curriculum, or to propose discussing "problems" with evolution which are based on a grotesque misrepresentation of how science in general, and evolutionary theory in particular, actually work. The things listed above are subjects of actual historical relevance.

Both sides betray themselves, not in what they want included and not removed, but in what they want removed and not put in. Just as the particular omissions of McLeroy’s board are dripping with racism (or at least white defensiveness) and religious insecurity, so does automatic opposition to many of his particular additions reveal liberal insecurity with the idea that non-whites or leftists might have ever done anything questionable, or that conservative movements might have actually have had an important place in American history.

Does McLeroy want these subjects taught honestly and objectively in American history classrooms? Will his preferred treatment of the Panthers get far beyond “they were scary black people with guns?” Of course not, are you fucking kidding? However, I don’t hear his many of his critics asking that these subjects be given fair and even-handed treatment, just talking as though it is a crime against reason that they are being discussed at all, and that is bullshit.

Why the automatic snide giggling at the suggestion that real individuals organizations of interest to a substantial chunk of the American population should actually be discussed in classrooms? Why the knee-jerk outrage at suggesting that there were equivocations, complications, and moral ambiguities to the civil rights movement, or any other subject in the history of this extraordinary, weird, and fucked-up country?

Like it or not, McLeroy’s claim of liberal bias has merit. Even though unequivocally slamming everything he has pushed for is easier (and more satisfying), effort should be made to extract the valid points against left-wing bias from the rest of his agenda.

People Writing Sedimentary Geology Papers, Please Read!

2010-04-26T17:26:00.000-07:00

"SILT" IS NOT SOMETHING DIFFERENT FROM "MUD." SILT IS A TYPE OF MUD.

"MUD" refers to all clastic grains smaller than 0.06 mm. "SILT" IS MUD with a grain size between 0.06 mm and 0.004 mm. If you are referring to MUD that is finer than SILT (i.e. is not gritty when you chew it), you are talking about "CLAY."

The two types of MUDSTONE are SILTSTONE and CLAYSTONE.

Got it?

JESUS.

Agnostic Secular Humanist Morality: HHDQ > SGD

2010-04-24T00:20:00.000-07:00

You are probably aware by now that Richard Dawkins and fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens want Pope Benedict XVI arrested if he sets foot in the UK for allegedly covering up sex abuse cases in the Catholic Church in his pre-Pope days. Relatively sane critiques of the two center on whether or not what they want is actually legally feasible (here is one of the more comprehensible discussions, and one I can’t follow a fucking word of), or whether or not Ratzinger, while still a cardinal, actually tried to prevent or interfere with the secular legal investigation. At least some sources (like this one) claim that secular authorities were alerted promptly in cases Ratzinger was involved with, and that the letter Ratzinger wrote (which allegedly encouraged silence under threat of excommunication) was intended to discourage discussion within the church to ensure a fair church trial, and was NOT intended to discourage the secular authorities from being notified and cooperated with. Having not read the letter, nor knowing anything about how cases are handled in the Catholic Church, I can’t address whether or not this is a reasonable interpretation.

However, the recent article in the Huffington Post written by Catholic Rory Fitzgerald does not take the sane and rational approach to critiquing Dawkins and Hitchens. Fitzgerald retaliates against Dawkins and Hitchens by arguing that they should be arrested for “atheist crimes”, specifically atrocities committed under Nazi Germany and communist regimes. Fitzgerald’s article has already been addressed by P.Z. Meyers and Jerry Coyne, but it worth taking another look at just for what it tells us about how religious apologists often view, and misrepresent, non-religious secular humanism.

One of the most important reasons why agnostics and atheists do not like religion is because of how it prioritizes in its view of what constitutes morality. The exact atheist/agnostic secular humanist standards for morality are rarely spelled out explicitly, even in anti-religious moral screeds like Richard Dawkins’ The God Hypothesis, or Sam Harris’ Letter To A Christian Nation, so it may be confusing to a religious reader why an atheist considers something moral or immoral. To agnositic secular humanists, morality means enhancing human happiness, dignity, and quality of life (which I will refer from here on out as HHDQ). Reason and critical thinking are also important, but only because it is the most clear-headed and reliable means of determining what it factually true, and what the most effective method is for achieving HHDQ.

It is important to note that atheism is NOT, by itself, a moral position, or even necessarily a rational one. It is simply a lack of belief in the existence of God. The view that Nazi Germany was an atheistic regime is bullshit, but communist regimes, and the human rights violations that occurred under them, undeniably had an anti-religious component. This is important to address. Communist regimes do not reflect the thinking of non-religious rational secular humanism, as many of their policies were neither rational, nor concerned, first and foremost, with HHDQ. Atheism should not be considered a moral position in and of itself, but only as a side-effect of rationality and a desire to focus on HHDQ. Even a casual perusal of God Hypothesis reveals that this is clearly Dawkins’ position.

Monotheistic religions also consider human happiness, dignity, and quality of life to be important, but they have another priority that trumps it: sucking the dick of a powerful imaginary friend in exchange for a reward (which might be abbreviated as “SGD”). The God of the Bible cares more about SGD than HHDQ, and religious atrocities throughout history are based on the same fucked-up priorities. Atheists and agnostics do not think this imaginary friend exists, and even if he did, we find the idea of appeasing him for no other reason than because he offers a reward to be morally cowardly and repugnant. Just as repugnant is the idea of covering up or making excuses for the wrongdoing of religious authorities in order to create the impression that religious people are less likely to do things that are evil and repugnant things (or even, heaven forbid, human things like wanting to get laid with a consenting adult).

Many of the things that religious authorities consider "immoral" are not clearly so under HHDQ, and can only be considered "immoral" if we assume 1) God is real, 2) that what God wants is, by definition, moral (no matter what that might be), and 3) that the things the Bible (or Koran) says God wants really are what God wants. Homosexual activity with other consenting adults does not (neccessarily) violate HHDQ, at least not if both partners are happy with it. Therefore, agnostic secular humanists do not consider it immoral. Christians and Muslims think that God doesn't like it (for reasons that He never clearly and rationally explains), which makes it immoral. SGD > HHDQ. However, sex with children psychologically scars human beings too young to know what they are getting into even if they say "yes." It violates HHDQ, and is therefore immoral to agnostic secular humanists, and we don't need God to tell us that.

Some of Fitzgerald’s comments are unintentionally ironic, particularly when he accuses Dawkins of trying to “undermine Judeo-Christian principles.” Dude…the issue at hand is CHILD RAPE. Dawkins and Hitchins have both stated explicitly that they consider CHILD RAPE TO BE BAD. Is holding individuals accountable for covering up CHILD RAPE “undermining Judeo-Christian principles”? If you say so, dude, but I doubt that is quite what you had in mind.

However, this is almost irrelevant to addressing Fitzgerald’s article, because he misrepresents the nature of the accusation against the Pope. Holding Dawkins accountable for “atheist crimes” committed by other atheists in the past would only be semi-reasonable if Dawkins wanted the Pope arrested for, say the Spanish Inquisition, or the Crusades. However, Dawkins and Hitchins are alleging that Pope Benedict personally did something wrong and illegal: interfering with a secular legal investigation into child sex abuse. Fitzgerald’s knee jerk reaction of trying Dawkins for every atheist atrocity ever committed smacks of defensive overcompensation.

Are the accusations of Dawkins and Hitchens fair? I don't know enough to say, but the answer hinges entirely on Ratzinger's personal intentions and actions.

Now for some random crap.

If you liked Dr. Tran, you'll probably like this.

Yeah, cute. Cats are not to be fucked with, not by babies, bears, or anyone.

Rank your facial hair. My beard fluctuates between the full beard and somewhat patchy (when I trim it), which I suppose means that I fluctuate between totally trustwothy and mildly dangerous. Sounds about right.

LNJ

Late Triassic Dispersal And Endemism

2010-04-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

I last left you with a Rube Goldberg machine and a walrus sucking its own cock. That was a high note for this blog, but I think it is time we got back to the Triassic. Focus, people.

A new paper by Martin Ezcurra attempts to quantify geographic variation in Middle and Late Triasic tetrapod faunas, and I want to elaborate on the problems that Bill pointed out due to absent data. Ezcurra took big composite phylogenetic trees meshing phylogenies of different groups of Triassic tetrapods, and ran them through something called “tree reconciliation analysis.” I don’t know exactly what that means other than it involves numbers, and my eyes tend to slide quickly and nervously past sections of papers containing lots of numbers they might slide quickly and nervously past an alley where two homeless people are butchering a third for the meat. Occasionally, as a matter of principle, I might force myself to read through the procedure to get a basic grasp on the calculations, the same way I might, as a matter of principle shout “hey, you guys shouldn’t be doing that!” into the alley before running. But not this time.

That seemed funnier when I thought it up at 3:00 this morning.

In a nutshell, Ezcurra compared phylogenetic trees with the geographic distribution of taxa to establish which areas of Pangea tended to have the most similar faunas, and what that tells us about patterns of dispersal. For the Middle Triassic, Ezcurra found evidence that vertebrate faunas tended to be more cosmopolitan with a “polyphyletic Gondwana”, meaning that different regions of Gondwana (South America, India, and Africa) had more similarities to various parts of Laurasia than they did to each other. Ezcurra interpreted this to mean that there were few barriers (climatic, geographic, or otherwise) to tetrapod dispersal across the supercontinent.

However, for the Late Triassic, Ezcurra found more evidence of faunal endemism, both between Gondwana and Laurasia, and between equatorial Laurasia (North America), and higher latitudes (Europe). It has been recognized for a long time that Late Triassic Laurasian and Gondwanan faunas showed some key differences, with Benton’s (1983) paper being the real landmark. However, Ezcurra’s analysis, largely as a result of leaving out some key taxa, missed some of the more important patterns noted by Benton (1983) which are still valid, and probably exaggerated the differences between Europe and North America. In particular, I have some issues with the decidedly selective treatment of phytosaurs and aetosaurs.

Part of the problem is the phylogenetic tree used for phytosaurs. Phytosaurs were a hugely important group in the northern hemisphere during the Late Triassic (e.g. Long and Murry, 1995; Hungerbeuhler, 2002), and virtually unknown from South America and Africa except for some scrappy specimens (Kischlatt and Lucas, 2003). However, Ezcurra’s phylogeny used Parker and Irmis’ (2006) phytosaur phylogeny, which (like Hungerbeuhler's 1998 phylogeny) was almost entirely concerned with pseudopalatines, the most derived phytosaur clade. As a result, other phytosaurs were pretty much ignored; Ballew’s (1989) analysis was the last published phylogeny to include the forms now assigned to Parasuchus, Angistorhinus, Leptosuchus, and/or Rutiodon, which show a lovely correspondence between stratigraphy and phylogeny in the western United States. Subsequent (but as of yet unpublished) phylogenies by Axel Hungerbeuhler and Michelle Stocker fit the broad patter Ballew recognized.

Phytosaurs show some really important geographic patterns. Basal phytosaurs (sometimes lumped into the genera Paleorhinus or Parasuchus; e.g. Hunt and Lucas, 1991a; Long and Murry, 1995) had a broad distribution and are known from Europe, North America, North Africa, and India (e.g. Chatterjee, 1978; Long and Murry, 1995). A Leptosuchus-like form from India links it to North America (Hungerbeuhler and Chatterjee, 2002). Moreover, Leptosuchus and the more derived Pseudopalatus are known from the from the Adamanian and Revueltian (which Ezcurra lumps into the South American “Ischigualastian and “Coloradian”) of North America respectively, but the European pseudopalatines Nicrosaurus and Mystriosuchus fall out in between them phylogenetically (Ballew, 1989; Hungerbeuhler, 2002; Parker and Irmis, 2006; Stocker, 2008). Phytosaurs were really getting around throughout Laurasia, and to at least some parts of Gondwana, and dispersal seems to have been occurring continuously as phytosaurs evolved during the Late Triassic.

The same is true of some aetosaurs. Ezcurra (2010) used Bill’s analysis from his Heliocanthus paper (Parker, 2007), which established the three broad groupings of aetosaurs (basal aetosaurines, typothoracisines, and desmatosuchines) that agree with my own observations of aetosaur morphology. As suggested by Ezcurra, the spiky desmatosuchine aetosaurs do seem to be restricted to North America (at least, so far), but the same isn’t true of aetosaurines. Although Ezcurra claims that the broad-bodied typothoracisine aetosaurs were also endemic to North America, Paratypothorax is also known from Europe. Moreover, I have seen photos of Indian aetosaur material that suggest to me that Typothorax and Paratypothorax might both have been present there, so like phytosaurs, typothoracisines were moving widely across Laurasia and probably at least down the east coast of Gondwana.

Most importantly, Ezcurra claims that “aetosaurines” (by which he probably means BASAL aetosaurines, as typothoracisines are also aetosaurines) were restricted to high latitudes and absent in North America. However, both Aetosaurus and Stagonolepis-like forms are known from western North America, so basal aetosaurines actually had a VERY cosmopolitan distribution, all the way from the deserts of Scotland to the more tropical conditions in western North America, back into higher latitudes of Brazil and Argentina.

From Paleo Errata

In summary, I don’t think all of Ezcurra’s latitudinal differences really hold up. The abundance of rhynchosaurs at high latitudes, while they are virtually absent in North America (Elder, 1978; Hunt and Lucas, 1991b), may be valid. The absence of prosauropods in North America (e.g. Nesbitt et al, 2005) until things really dried out there during the Early-Middle Jurassic may also be an important latitudinal pattern. Perhaps prosauropods and rhynchosaurs really did like dry conditions. It had also never occurred to me for some reason that an entire aetosaur clade (the desmatosuchines) was restricted to North America, while aetosaurines were more cosmopolitan. Perhaps the desmatosuchines liked more wetter conditions, which falls in pretty nicely with the timing of their extinction in North America (Parker and Martz, in prep). However, North America was not nearly as isolated as Ezcurra indicates, and many of the groups that he lists were a lot more cosmopolitan than he realized.

As noted by Benton (1983), India is a very interesting anomaly, forming an important faunal link between Gondwana and Laurasia, and between high and low latitudes. Rhynchosaurs and therapsids link it to the rest of Gondwana, while it also seems to contain aetosaurs and phytosaurs linking it to both North America and Europe. Its placement along the western margin of Tethys makes me wonder if oceans currents might have given the east coast of Gondwana a different climate from the rest of the southern supercontinent. Ezcurra’s analysis, though it contains a lot of problems, has certainly given me a lot to think about.

Oh yeah, here is something funny and unrelated. It just goes on and on and should stop being funny, but somehow it doesn’t. Well, it kind of does. It comes and goes.

“Female asses are mysterious creatures. They come and go as they please, and much of their behavior seems unfathomable to an outsider.”
-David Attenborough, “Planet Earth”

REFERENCES

Ballew, K.L. 1989. A phylogenetic analysis of Phytosauria from the late Triassic of the western United States. In Lucas, S.G., and Hunt, A.P. (eds.) Dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs in the American Southwest, pp. 309-339. New Mexico Museum of Natural History, Albuquerque, NM.

Benton, M.J. 1983a. Dinosaur success in the Triassic: a noncompetitive ecological model. Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 58, no. 1 (March), pp. 29-55.

Chatterjee, S. 1978. A primitive parasuchid (phytosaur) reptile from the Upper Triassic Maleri Formation of India. Paleontology, vol. 21, pt. 1, pp. 83-127.

Ezcurra, M. D. 2010. Biogeography of Triassic tetrapods: evidence for provincialism and driven sympatric cladogenesis in the early evolution of modern tetrapod lineages. Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Hungerbühler, A. 2002b. The late Triassic phytosaur Mystriosuchus westphali, with a revision of the genus. Palaeontology, vol. 45, pt. 2, pp. 377-418.

Hungerbühler, A., and Chatterjee, S. 2002. New phytosaurs from the Upper Triassic of India. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 22 (suppl. to no. 3, September 19th), p. 68A.

Hunt, A.P., and Lucas, S.G. 1991a. The Paleorhinus biochron and the correlation of the non-marine Upper Triassic of Pangaea. Palaeontology, vol. 34, pt. 2, pp. 487-501.

Hunt, A.P., and Lucas, S.G. 1991b. A new rhynchosaur from the Upper Triassic of West Texas, and the biochronology of Late Triassic rhynchosaurs. Paleontology, vol. 34, pt. 4, pp. 927-938.

Kischlat, E.-E., and S.G. Lucas. 2003. A phytosaur from the Upper Triassic of Brazil. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 464-467.

Parker, W.G. 2007. Reassessment of the aetosaur "Desmatosuchus chamaensis" with a reanalysis of the phylogeny of the Aetosauria (Archosauria: Pseudosuchia). Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 41-68.
Long and Murry, 1995

Nesbitt, S.J., Irmis, R.B., and Parker, W.G. 2007. A critical re-evaluation of the Late Triassic dinosaur taxa of North America. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, vol. 5, no. 2 (May 25th), pp. 209-243.

Parker, W.G., and Irmis, R.B. 2006a. A new species of the Late Triassic phytosaur Pseudopalatus (Archosauria: Pseudosuchia) from Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona. In Parker, W.G., Ash, S.R., and Irmis, R.B. (eds.) A Century of Research at Petrified Forest National Park 1906-2006. Museum of Northern Bulletin no. 62, pp. 126-143. Flagstaff, AZ.

Stocker, M.R. 2008. The relationships of the phytosaur Leptosuchus Cape 1922 with decriptions of new material from Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Iowa, IA, 220 pp.

WAVP, Mexico, etc.

2010-03-11T10:45:00.000-08:00

Oh, hey.

Busy busy busy. Bored bored bored. Learning to cook. Growing my hair out. Still cold, snowy, and shitty. Almost no field work getting done. No inclination to blog.

I went to the WAVP (Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists) meeting in Yuma last month, which was pretty fun. Just as SVP is rad because everyone is there and you get to bump into them all, WAVP's particular charm is that it is a small meeting, which means you are hanging out chummily with the same small group of people the whole time. You probably didn't go, which means you suck. You should have gone. There were a LOT of margaritas, and we went to Mexico.

There were only about a dozen or so people, nearly all of them working on Pleistocene mammals, which means I got exposure to an epoch with which I do not normally delve into. Part of the appeal of the Triassic is how alien it is. It was one of the major periods of evolutionary experimentation in vertebrate history, and featured a wide variety of weird animals with only distant connections to anything living today. Aetosaurs and rauisuchians may be close to modern crocodilians in evolutionary terms, but you wouldn't know it without a long, careful look, and even phytosaurs have only a superficial resemblance to their modern analogues. Metoposaurs were not just giant salamanders, and most of the lizard-looking and mouse-looking things scurrying around in the undergrowth were actually quite different forms of diapsids and synapsids.

Alternately, the appeal of the Pleistocene is how close it is to us in time. So close, and yet so far. Less than 50,000 years ago when anatomically modern humans were already out and about in the world, there were giant sloths, lions, cheetahs, sabretooth cats, and elephants walking around on roughly the same topography we now inhabit. The Pleistocene is the modern world with the addition of a mild hallucinogen, which is a way makes it both more accessible and arguably weirder than the Triassic.

Yeah, anyway, we went to prospect and camp in early Pleistocene delta deposits on the northeast side of the Sea of Cortez. It looks like a fairly uniform pile of sand at a distance, which is a little disconcerting to someone who specializes in identifying and tracing distinctive sandstone and mudstone packages.

Anyway, margaritas. It was fun. Go next year, you dick.

The first PEFO Chinle Formation paper got published, but you probably already knew that. Second one in review, third one taking shape as soon as the FUCKING SNOW STOPS.

I'll just leave you with a couple links that will enrich your lives to no end.

Madness. I'd like to say that the things I spend lots of time working on are more worthwhile, but I'd probably be fooling myself. Once the music starts, pay attention to the timing.

Walrus.

LNJ

“Consensus and Exception merged once more. Rather, Consensus and some Exceptions merged. Other Exceptions, feeling the first icy brush of the Merged Void against them, edged slightly apart from it. As they felt the weak gravitational tug, they moved even further from it, compressing their own awareness within themselves. Several hard, gem-like flames flared into new existence.”
-Dave Sim

PEFO Chinle Formation pictures: late 2009-early 2010

2010-02-05T17:00:00.000-08:00

Since Bill is in Austin now, I must post cool Chinle Formation pictures myself. These are nearly all from the Painted Desert/Devil's Playground area in the northern part of the park, where I am doing most of my field work now:

This first is in the extreme southwest corner of Devil's Playground. This area mostly exposes the Sonsela Member, which is an extremely sandy member with a lot of prominent sandstone beds that weather out to give Devil's Playground its striking topography. Here the highest capping sandstone weathers out as big blocks onto the surface of a slightly more friable gray sandstone that weathers into "hoodoos." This weathering pattern gives a hint of the compositional variation of these sandstones, which is an important clue that allows us to correlate beds in the northern and southern parts of the park.

The Painted Desert on a rainy day.

We got a ton of snow dumped on us in the past month, and now it is all melting and washing the reddish mudstones of the Painted Desert away.

I like this picture a lot; the black thing in the mid-ground is a petrified log weathering out of the Black Forest Bed.

My favorite little petroglyph. Little marmot dude or something. It is all by itself in the shadow of a mesa not far from Devil's Playground.

A deformed rabbit.

LNJ

Things On The Internet That Jeff Found Amusing (January 2010)

2010-02-01T20:00:00.000-08:00

I don't have time for obscenity or deep thinking today. My computer was the victim of a totally unprovoked viral/worm attack of some kind even though I had TWO up-to-date anti-virus programs installed. I wiped the operating system and am re-installing everything.

Here is the life reconstruction of Vancleavea I did a while ago. I'm tinkering with a cross-section reconstruction of the Sonsela Member fluvial system. Meh. At least the snow has melted enough for me to start getting out in the field again.

1,000,000 People Who Believe in Evolution: I'm not normally into facebook groups, but I'll make an exception for this one.

Vanity Fair's Review of the Creationist Museum: The writer took along Paul Bettany, who took the photographs. Yes, I mean Stephen Maturin/Charles Darwin-playing Paul Bettany. How fucking cool is that.

Hark, A Vagrant!: Historical comics! Sweet! There are even a few about science. This one isn't, but I like it. And this one. Too bad I've completely sworn off girls named Kate.

Beaker's Ode To Joy: I admire Beaker. He goes to work every day knowing that no matter what happens, he is going to get fucked, yet he remains upbeat.

Jack Bauer Interrogates Santa

What Goes With Jesus Wafers? Hmmm.... Two great tastes that taste great together.

LNJ

Why I Am Basically An Optimist

2010-01-27T22:00:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, I was sitting back in Macy’s in Flagstaff, the coffee house where I discovered what musicians experience in hell.

Sunday’s entertainment was a retarded young hippie espousing hippie wisdom to the hippie girl whom he was trying to hippie impress so that they might hippie screw. He bemoaned the terrible state of the world, and expressed many pieces of canned hippie philosophy on peace, love, freedom from chemicals and technology, and a virginal Earth, without presenting any actual plan for how to achieve these ends. For example:

“All those angry men with weapons, we just need to take their weapons away and give them plastic toys to play with.”

That is goddamned brilliant. The belligerent and armed are always thrilled to hand their weapons over to unarmed ultra-pacifists. Perhaps they will let you touch their guns after they finish clubbing you to death with them. But this was the show-stopper:

“I don’t understand Viagra. Are we really so sexually fucked up that we need all these pills to help us get it up? I mean, what did we do before Viagra when we got old?”

If I am not mistaken…WE DIDN’T FUCK.

Hear my words, retarded hippie dipshit.

This is not a perfect world. The exploding world population is an ever increasing problem, and our global resources are being depleted. Urban sprawl spreads onto arable farmland we will eventually need. We have not figured how to turn most garbage back into usable resources, and it is piling up at a disturbing rate. Nuclear weapons cannot be un-invented, and there is always the possibility that they will be used. We have real problems.

Nonetheless, things are pretty fucking awesome, here in the western world. 200 years ago, slavery and a second-class status for women and non-whites were considered perfectly normal. Today it is taken for granted that these institutions are vile and unacceptable, even if the process of eliminating them isn’t complete. We still have war, genocide, torture, rape, and religious fanaticism…but we have had these things continuously for at least as long as recorded history, so it isn't as though things are worse...and we at least have a general consensus across most of the civilized world that these things are bad.

The woman in front of me at Safeway the other night buying groceries with food stamps walked off with a cartload of food that would make real poor people shit themselves blind, and went back to some warm shelter with a television and fridge. Even with our fucked-up health care system, her diet, health, hygiene, and general standard of living would be the envy of most European nobility up until just a couple hundred years ago.

9/11? FUCK 9/11. During World War II, entire CITIES were leveled to the ground, two of them by nuclear weapons. Remember what it was like to have a competing superpower with a gigantic nuclear arsenal pointed at us and ready to go at any second, like we did just a few decades ago? The last major war between the European superpowers is almost outside of living memory.

Compared to the broad scope of history, we live in a time of remarkable peace and prosperity. We have a long way to go, but there is no prior time or place in history I would rather live than right where I am: western civilization in the early 21st century, where we have instantaneous access to the collective knowledge of mankind on our bitchin' new iPhones, and we live and fuck past 60. And I would rather live 10 years ago than 30, 30 rather than 60, and 60 rather than a 100. I think that bodes pretty well for the future.

The Limits Of Science

2010-01-22T04:19:00.000-08:00

So far, January has been kind of a bullshit month. Final revisions on the paper have been a never-ending nightmare due to PlosOne’s odd and sometimes vague formatting requirements (why would an online journal require abbreviated references?), and it has been snowing and raining too much for me to get out in the field. It has also been cold, and kind of lonely. I wish my cat was here, or a woman. Or both. A furry, sexy, cat woman.

Motivation is scarce, and I haven’t felt like working on the monophyly posts. I felt like writing this instead:

I want to deal some more with alleged limitations on science. I talked about Ken Miller's ad hoc application of the term “supernatural” to keep the existence of God safe from scientific inquiry, and want to deal here with the more general claim by Miller and others that science is restricted to asking questions about things working according to natural, materialistic laws.

In a prior blog, I described what I think science really is, and what it does. The scientific process is designed to establish if something is imaginary or not. We look for observable, repeatable phenomena, and rigorously test whether or not what seems to be happening is just in the imagination of certain individuals, or whether it exists outside of their heads. That is all.

What is it about the scientific methodology that requires that a phenomenon operate within the known laws of nature? Nothing. Science does not distinguish between the “natural” and the “supernatural”, just between the real and the imaginary. Science requires that a phenomenon must be repeatable observable to multiple parties…not that it operate according to the known laws of physics or chemistry.

Saying that “natural laws” put limitations on scientific inquiry is completely ass-backwards in the worst possible way. Our understanding of the laws of physics and chemistry do not dictate scientific inquiry…it’s the other way around. Scientific methodology was looking for what is real, and determined that the laws of physics and chemistry are (probably) reality. If this same methodology could establish that magic was not imaginary, acceptance the reality of magic would be scientific.

Saying that the supernatural is outside of the natural is like distinguishing medicine from “alternative medicine.” As Tim Minchin put it, “alternative medicine” that has actually been shown to work is just…medicine. If the “supernatural” can be shown to be not imaginary, then it becomes “natural”, whether it works according to the known laws of physics or not. What else would it be? If fairies, ghosts, and angels are real, why wouldn’t they be “natural?” We didn’t create them in a lab. What is it that makes them “unnatural” or “supernatural?” Why wouldn’t the “laws of nature” just be expanded to encompass…whatever it is that makes them work, regardless of whether we ever understand that process?

For example, you tell me that you have a magic crystal that you can turn into a flower, and then back again, by saying a magic word. So, myself and five other scientists take you into a small room full of cameras and recording equipment, search you to make sure you aren’t concealing anything, have you put the crystal on the table and put your hands clearly where we can see them, and (when WE are ready), have you say the word. We all watch the crystal turn into a flower. We ask you to say it again, and it turns back into a crystal.

We repeat the process several times. We record the transformation, and your voice, and scrutinize both. We bring in instruments to detect electrical activity, magnetism, gravitational changes, etc…, and they detect nothing unusual. We take samples from the crystal and flower, and analyze them chemically, again finding nothing unusual. We subject you to blood tests, CAT scans, all kind of medical tests, and ascertain that you are not a robot or alien with some kind of device inside you that can alter the physical properties of matter. We become convinced that the transformation is really happening, and find no evidence that known any known physical or chemical processes are at work.

Then we send you to another group of scientists, who do the whole thing over again.

What I just described is scientific confirmation of the existence of “magic.” The phenomenon is repeatable, it can be observed by multiple observers (repeatedly), and careful experimental controls demonstrate that it is not a hoax. Moreover, the phenomenon does not appear to not operate according to any known physical or chemical processes. Viola, the “supernatural” just became a thing which can be shown to probably be real, and is therefore scientific.

Why hasn’t this actually happened? Because psychics can’t actually do what they say they can do once you take away all their cheats. Because ghost hunters can’t actually get a supernatural phenomenon on camera in decent lighting allowing observers to establish that someone isn’t using mirrors or wires. Because little girls can only get clear, sharp photographs of fairies with no one else around. The “supernatural” isn’t “unscientific” because it is “outside of natural laws”. It is unscientific because it is bullshit. It can only appear to exist through imagination, hallucination, deception, and lying.

And the day you can show that I am wrong, it will become science.

Things On The Internet That Jeff Found Entertaining (December 2009)

2010-01-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

Hello there, and Happy New Year. I feel clean and new today. 2009 was a good year for me. I would even call it a very good year except for the fact that most of the goodness constituted therapy for the second half of 2008, which I will remember in perpetuity as the Year of Shit. Will 2010 bring me my very own spaceship, or testicular cancer? I can't wait to find out! Yay!

Although I have sworn to stop jacking around and mostly post things that actually have content, things come to me unbidden from across The Internet which are awesome. I have therefore decided to condense them into a monthly blog post. YouTube: Proof of the existence of God, or of the Devil? You decide.

AronRa: Yes, I already posted it. I don't care. Go watch the "Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism" series. Then watch all the other shit. Do it now.

The Oatmeal: Many fine cartoons. Be sure to check out "4 Reasons To Carry A Shovel At All Times" (my favorite), "How To Ride A Pony", "The Motherfucking Pterodactyl," "Twenty Things Worth Knowing About Beer." And of course, "What Marcellus Wallace Looks Like." I dare you. I double-dare you motherfucker.

Synapsid Tribute: Synapsids are all right, I guess. The scene with the gorgonopsid fighting the...whatever the fuck it was made me laugh. Can someone tell me what that was from?

Peer Review, Circa 1945: Truth.

http://www.partiallyclips.com/storage/20091201_CrestedBirds_lg.png: Nice commentary on sexual selection. It's funnier if you imagine that the male bird sounds like Patrick Wharburton.

Evolution of Homer Simpson: I'm not sure how the Simpsons has managed to stay funny for twenty years. Look what happened to fucking Garfield in less than a decade.

Harlan Ellison discusses God: Nothing too Earth-shattering, but I'm glad I wasn't eating or drinking anything when he made his final pronouncement on what to do with people who do evil.

The Onion: "Sumerians Look On In Confusion As Christian God creates World," and "Dinosaurs Sadly Extinct Before Invention of Bazooka," and "T.rex Ancestor Was Human-Sized."

Dogs Hate Me: I really like these. I don't know why:
Life. In a nutshell.
Love. In a nutshell.
Prayer. In another nutshell.
Drugs and alcohol are cool.

The Known Universe By AMNH: Space is too big, and something needs to be done about it.

Baboons join the Moving Car Hood Club: Something to add to my "to do before I die" list.

I am working on a follow up to my post on monophyly. Public and private reactions have been extremely interesting.

LNJ

Monophyletic Taxa Are Fake Too

2009-12-19T14:34:00.000-08:00

FIRSTLY: Matt Wedel has written a fairly eye-opening account of his recent experience with having his words distorted by the production company Dangerous Ltd. for their recent show Clash of the Dinosaurs, followed up heah and neah. These provide some valuable insight as to why so many shows on the Discovery Channel suck balls, as well as some suggestions on how to improve the situation. Moving on...

The following story is a work of fiction, though inspired by true events.

Once upon a time, there lived a population of drab and uninteresting terrestrial carnivorous reptiles that ate mice. “This is bullshit,” they thought, “to be so drab and uninteresting.” However, since adaptations are driven by random mutation and natural selection, they could do nothing about it. One day, one of them committed suicide by drowning herself in a river. She was buried and fossilized. Her name was Cecilia.

One day, three million years later, a subset of the population was isolated on a distant island, and random mutation and natural selection resulted in the development of a row of low spines running down their back, along with a larger and more robust body, allowing them to tackle larger prey animals which lived on the islands. “HELL yeah!” They said. “This is more like it!” They threw a massive kegger, and one named Ralph drank too much and died of alcohol poisoning. His friends overreacted and buried him in the floodplain, swearing to never speak of it again. He was also fossilized.

After another million years, some members of Ralph’s species decided to found a nudist colony on another island inhabited by the same prey species. Random mutation and natural selection resulted in the development of a distinctive coloration and mating display which caused their parent species to regard them as perverts. This display involved a prominent frill which grew over the pelvis, and a short horn on the nose. Other than that, their body plan and lifestyle didn’t change. One day, one of them got swept out to sea and drowned. He was buried and fossilized in marine mudstones. His name was Terence.
Four million years later, some members of Terence’s species just decided they wanted to live on a new island. They evolved into specialized marine predators with a long slender snout, flippers and a long, fin-like tail. They reduced the pelvic fin and nasal horn, but did not lose them entirely. They developed not only a different body plan and lifestyle, but genetic differences from Terence’s species far more extreme than those between Terence and Ralph’s species. One day one of them just died, in her sleep. It was very peaceful. Her name was Selma. She was buried and fossilized on the mainland, because she had always wanted to go there. It was really beautiful.
Seventy million years passed, and one day a species of primate took an interest in paleontology. Through perseverance and luck, they found the fossilized skeletons of Cecilia, Ralph, Terence and Selma. They correctly deduced, in broad terms, their evolutionary history, including the fact that Terence and Selma, despite their extremely different anatomical specializations, had a more recent common ancestor than Terence and Ralph due to the fact that they uniquely shared a pelvic fin and a nasal horn lacking in Ralph and Cecilia. They drew a picture with Cecelia, Ralph, Terence, and Selma on it. It may sound strange to turn a series of events into an abstract concept like a diagram, but this primate species found it helpful in order to grasp things conceptually.
Now comes the odd part. This primate species had a hard time drawing a distinction between real history and they abstract concepts that they used to describe and communicate about this real history. For example, they decided that Terence and Selma, simply due to the fact that they had a common ancestor, were the same…thing. Specifically, they were a thing shaped like a “V.” They lived on separate islands in separate times and had totally different lifestyles, but they were the same…thing. A thing shaped like a fucking “V.”

Then they realized, that Selma, Terence, and Ralph have a common ancestor too, and decided that also made them a single…thing. It was also shaped like a ‘V’. And Selma, Terence, and Ralph shared a common ancestor with Cecilia too, and that also made them the same…thing. Shaped like a “V.” These “V”s all fit nicely inside of each other, appealing to the primates sense of symmetry and order.

Then they decided that these “V”s were not just abstractions to help our visual primate brains grasp common descent. The “V”s were, well….real.

It gets weirder though.

Other primates noted that there were other interesting things to look at with Cecelia, Ralph, Terence, and Selma besides common descent. They noted for instance that Ralph and Terence shared a bunch of morphological adaptations related to their predatory lifestyle, which they inherited from a common ancestor, and set them apart from Cecelia and Selma. They decided to describe Ralph and Terence as being the same…thing. They didn’t mean for Selma’s fossilized bones to feel bad by being left out, but she didn’t strike them as being the same…thing.

“We mean no harm”, they said. “We just think there are other things to talk about besides common descent. Like common descent and morphology, or common descent and lifestyle. We just want a word to encompass these patterns of variation. CAN WE JUST HAVE A WORD?”

Then they went on to say: “Common descent between two organisms may be a reality. It may be a historical fact that two organisms have a more recent common ancestor than a third. However, if you start talking about organisms separated by millions of years of time and thousands of years of time as a single “thing”, than you are talking about an abstraction. A clade does not exist anywhere except in our imaginations. And this is OK! This is perfectly all right! We need abstractions to communicate. However, when you start saying that another type of abstraction should not be used because it is less ‘real’, things are getting silly."

Then they went on to say: “Why are we so obsessed with the idea that a classification system has to be ‘real?’ Why can’t we just admit that classification systems are inherently fake, because ‘natural groups’ with tidy, un-arbitrarily defined boundaries do not exist in nature? Why can’t we just acknowledge that we need abstractions to communicate about concepts and history, and that a concept can be both abstract and imaginary and still be useful?”

They were punished for heresy. God, it was fucking horrible. They used the CHIMP CANON.
LNJ

Phytosaurs And Evolution

2009-12-07T23:00:00.000-08:00

"There are no transitional fossils” is one of the most commonly repeated and blatant lies propagated by creationists, who are often either grotesquely ignorant (or pretend to be) of the spectacularly exploding fossil record, or have no idea what a transitional fossil is supposed to look like (e.g. Kirk Cameron’s retarded chimera “crocoduck”, which in fact existed, although it looked quite different. You get an "A" for effort Kirk).

However, one of the most compelling evidences of macroevolution is not just the existence of transitional fossils, but the order they appear in the rock record. The basic principles of biostratigraphy, the method paleontologists use to order fossils in time using thier stratigraphic sequence, was developed in the early 19th century by British canal surveyor named William Smith, and more or less independantly by the brilliant French naturalist Georges Cuvier and his collaborator Alexandre Brogniart.

Biostratigraphy as a means of ordering fossils is based on a very simple idea: If you have a pile of sediments, the ones at the bottom (and therefore the fossils in them) are oldest, and the ones at the top (and therefore the fossils in them) are youngest. This is based on the recognition that it is hard to bury something that isn't already there. Makes sense, ja? An added bonus of biostratigraphy is that if you can recognize the same species in piles of sediment from around the world, you can match them up (or "correlate" them) to produce a composite history of life on Earth, like so:

Smith and Cuvier were not evolutionists, and made thier observations that fossils appear in a certain order in a vertical sequence of strata decades before the publication of Origin of Species. Biostratigraphy therefore does not depend on any assumptions about evolution in order to work. As a result, it can be used as an independent check on macroevolution by determining whether or not transitional fossils actually appear in the expected order. The big picture of the origin of life was reconstructed almost entirely using biostratigraphy and biostratigraphic correlation, and gives us a picture of change through time consistent with macroevolution. However, this ordination also supports evolution on smaller macroevolutionary scales.

Archosaurs are better than any other kind of animal, as everyone agrees who is not a complete fool. However, basal archosauriforms and pseudosuchians (crocodile-line archosaurs) are rarely used to demonstrate the reality of evolution, in spite of the fact that both phytosaurs and early crocodylomorphs have beautiful fossil records. The theropod-bird transition is used a lot more commonly, presumably because theropods are dinosaurs and therefore deemed more “sexy” than pseudosuchian archosaurs. However, this is bullshit, because birds are pussies. Just look. Fuck birds.

Phytosaurs were the most common group of archosauriforms in western North America during the Late Triassic. Most phylogenetic analyses have found them to be the most basal members of the pseudosuchian lineage (e.g. Juul, 1994; Benton, 2004), although this opinion may be changing slightly in the near future. Or may not, I don't know. Forget I said anything.

Phytosaurs were the most common aquatic predators, and had a body form, and probably a lifestyle, similar to modern crocodilians (Hunt, 1989). They also got quite large, possibly reaching ten meters in length, although most were in the size range of big modern crocodilians. Phytosaurs are sometimes described as “crocodile-mimics”, although this is crap because they developed the crocodilian body form and lifestyle before crocodilians, and in fact so did earlier and more basal Triassic archosauriforms: the proterosuchids, proterochampsids, and that hideous little freak Vancleavea.

However, the skulls of phyosaurs differ from those of crocodilians, and most other reptiles, in several ways. These include having the external nares pushed back on the snout (whereas they are at the tip of the snout in most reptiles). Moreover most, but not all forms (this is a hint) have features of the back of the skull which are very modified. In most diapsids, the supratemporal fenestrae, the upper of the two diapsid openings at the top of the head, are more or less level with the skull roof. In most phytosaurs however, they are reduced and pushed anteroventrally to varying degrees (another hint). Moreover some phytosaurs (but not all, hint) have a bar forming the lateral border of this opening, which is composed of the postorbital and squamosal bones, which is greatly broadened and sculptured; it is relatively slender and smooth-surfaced bone in some phytosaurs and most reptiles.

In fact, you can roughly line up North American phytosaurs according to how much they differ from the “normal” archosaur condition. Phytosaur alpha taxonomy is notoriously convoluted, but several morphotypes may be identified which fall out in this order in the major phylogenetic analyses of this group (Ballew, 1989; Hungerbeuhler, 2002; Stocker, 2008, in press). Most or all of these may actually be grades, so the genera names are applied loosely. Paleorhinus has nostrils which, although set back on the snout, are anterior to the antorbital fenestra, a slender and smooth postorbitosquamosal bar, and supratemporal fenestrae which are level with the skull roof. Angistorhinus, retains all of these basal features, except that the nostrils are pushed up over the antorbital fenestrae, as they are in all other phytosaurs. Leptosuchus (sometimes called Rutiodon) still has a slender postorbitosquamosal bar, but the supratempotal fenestra are pushed anteroverntrally and more constricted than in Paleorhinus and Angistorhinus. This trend continues in Pseudopalatus and Redondasaurus, and in the latter, the fenestrae are actually completely closed up. Finally, both Pseudopalatus and Redondasaurus have broad and heavily sculptured postorbitosquamosal bars. Click the image to enlarge:

So…how does these different forms fall out stratigraphically? To answer this, we have to look at areas where different forms are known to occur in the same area, so that their stratigraphic relationships can be determined. The Dockum Group of West Texas and eastern New Mexico (see Lehman, 1994; Lucas, 1994; and Martz, 2008 for a lots of really exciting arguments about stratigraphic nomenclature) has all five morphotypes, and the Chinle Formation in the Colorado Plateau region (e.g. Stewart et al., 1972; Dubiel, 1994) has Leptosuchus, Pseudopalatus, and Redondasaurus.

In the Dockum Group, the first Paleorhinus specimens occur in conglomeratic sandstones at the base of the Upper Triassic section (variously called the Santa Rosa Sandstone, Camp Springs conglomerate, and Boren Ranch beds), and continue into the lowest mudstone-dominated units of the Dockum Group overlying these conglomerates (the Tecovas Formation and Garita Creek Formation). These lower mudstones are also where we get the first specimens of Angistorhinus and Leptosuchus. Pseudopalatus appears higher in the section, in sandy units in the middle of the Dockum Group and the upper mudstone-dominated units (in the Trujillo sandstone and Bull Canyon/upper Cooper Canyon Formation), and Redondasaurus appears in the uppermost beds of the Dockum Group (the uppermost Cooper Canyon Formation, and Redonda Formation) (e.g. Hunt and Lucas, 1991; Lucas, 1998; Lehman and Chatterjee, 2005; Martz, 2008).

In the Chinle Formation of northern Arizona, we do not have Angistorhinus, but the other four forms are present. And yes, Paleorhinus and Leptosuchus appear first (from the Placerias Quarry, which may be in either the Bluewater Creek Formation or Blue Mesa Member), Leptosuchus continues higher in the section (in the Blue Mesa and Sonsela Member), Pseudopalatus appears next (in the upper Sonsela Member, Petrified Forest Member, and Owl Rock Member), and Redondasaurus last (in the Rock Point Member at the very top of the Chinle Formation) (e.g. Lucas, 1998; Heckert and Lucas, 2002; Parker, 2006). How about that?

Postscript on lithostratigraphy: In the last strat column figure, "Cooper Canyon Formation" should really be "Bull Canyon Formation." These units have been considered equivalant by most workers, but one of the findings of my dissertation is that the lower part of the type section of the Cooper Canyon Formation is probably correlative with the Tecovas and Trujillo Formations. This works out fine, since the lower parts of the Cooper Canyon Formation in the type area have Paleorhinus and then Leptosuchus showing up before Pseudopalatus as expected, but I didn't want to delve into the nomenclatural mess.

pps. Thanks to Sterling for reminding me of the Placerias Quarry "Paleorhinus" skull.

REFERENCES
Ballew, K.L. 1989. A phylogenetic analysis of Phytosauria from the late Triassic of the western United States. In Lucas, S.G., and Hunt, A.P. (eds.) Dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs in the American Southwest, pp. 309-339. New Mexico Museum of Natural History, Albuquerque, NM.

Benton, M.J. 2004. Origin and relationships of Dinosauria. In D.B. Weishampel, P. Dodson, and H. Osmólska (eds.), The Dinosauria (2nd edition), pp. 7-19. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

Dubiel, R.F. 1994. Triassic deposystems, paleogeography, and paleoclimate of the Western Interior. In Caputo, M.V., J.A. Peterson, and K.J. Franczyk (eds.), Mesozoic Systems of the Rocky Mountain Region, USA, pp. 133-168.

Heckert, A.B., and Lucas, S.G. 2002b. Revised Upper Triassic stratigraphy of the Petrified Forest National Park. In A.B. Heckert and S.G. Lucas (eds.), Upper Triassic Stratigraphy and Paleontology. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 21, pp. 1-36. Albuquerque, NM.

Hungerbühler, A. 2002b. The late Triassic phytosaur Mystriosuchus westphali, with a revision of the genus. Palaeontology, vol. 45, pt. 2, pp. 377-418.

Hunt, A.P. 1989. Cranial morphology and ecolog y among phytosaurs. In S.G. Lucas, and A.P. Hunt (eds.), Dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs in the American Southwest, pp. 349-354. New Mexico Museum of Natural History, Albuquerque, NM.

Hunt, A.P., and Lucas, S.G. 1991. The Paleorhinus biochron and the correlation of the non-marine Upper Triassic of Pangaea. Palaeontology, vol. 34, pt. 2, pp. 487-501.

Juul, L. 1994. The phylogeny of basal archosaurs. Palaeontologie Afrique, vol. 31, pp. 1-38.

Lehman, T.M. 1994a. The saga of the Dockum Group and the case of the Texas/New Mexico boundary fault. New Mexico Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources Bulletin, no.150 (April), pp. 37-51.

Lehman, T. and S. Chatterjee. 2005. The depositional setting and vertebrate biostratigraphy of the Triassic Dockum Group of Texas. Indian Journal of Earth System Sciences, vol. 114, no. 3, pp. 325-351.

Lucas, S.G. 1998. Global Triassic tetrapod biostratigraphy and biochronology. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology vol. 143, pp. 347-384.

Lucas, S.G., Anderson, O.J., and Hunt, A.P. 1994. Triassic stratigraphy and correlations, southern High Plains of New Mexico-Texas. New Mexico Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources Bulletin, no. 150, pp. 105-126.

Stewart, J.H., Poole, F.G., and Wilson, R.F. 1972b. Stratigraphy and origin of the Chinle Formation and related Upper Triassic strata in the Colorado Plateau region. Geological Survey Professional Paper, no. 690, 336 pp.

Stocker, M.R. 2008. The relationships of the phytosaur Leptosuchus Cape 1922 with decriptions of new material from Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Iowa, IA, 220 pp.

Whatever! Whatever! I Do What I Want!

2009-11-28T18:34:00.000-08:00

I apparently made some kind of list of top 100 blogs that are useful for science educators. I don't need this kind of pressure and I shit on expectations. Therefore I am posting this instead. Then I am going to finish the life reconstruction of Vancleavea I was supposed to get to Sterling this week in time for the press release.

Jeff

Red Canyon

2009-11-14T12:25:00.000-08:00

The Colorado River in Arizona and Utah cuts through one of the most complete and best exposed sections of Phanerozoic sedimentary rocks in the western United States. When the Colorado Plateau was uplifted during the Cenozoic, the Colorado River ground down through thousands of feet of Paleozoic and Mesozoic sedimentary rocks, giving an only slightly edited account of the geological history of the region.

The deepest cuts are in Grand Canyon, where the Colorado River cuts clear down to Protorozoic metamorphic rocks. The rest of the section in Grand Canyon is mostly composed of Paleozoic beds deposited in marine settings on what was then the passive western margin of North America. Because there are virtually no tetrapod traces preserved (except in the terrestrial Permian rocks near the top of the sequence), and no archosaur fossils, no one really gives a shit about Grand Canyon geology.* However, if you leave that bullshit behind and keep going up the Colorado River into Marble Canyon in northernmost Arizona, and the Lake Powell/Glen Canyon area of southern Utah, you get to rocks that are more important. This is because they are Mesozoic sedimentary rocks, and they contain body and trace fossils of archosaurs and other Mesozoic tetrapods. Yes!

Red Canyon is one of the drainages connected to Lake Powell, and exposes a beautiful section of early Mesozoic (Middle Triassic-Early Jurassic) sedimentary rocks, including the Chinle Formation. Jim Kirkland and Andrew Milner were there this month to prospecting the lower part of the Chinle Formation, and I got invited to come up for a few days. It was cool. It is about a six hour drive through the reservation, and I got tied up for about a half hour trying to catch a stray puppy near Blanding (it was too wily got away with all my beef jerky), but I eventually got to the camp after dark on Friday night and stayed through Tuesday. Jim’s henchmen Don DeBlieux and Scott Madsen were also there, as were Dale Gray, Deb Nicholson and Andrew’s reliable flunky Tyler Birthisel.

The Red Canyon area is a fucking HUGE area to explore, in more ways than one. In addition to being geographically enormous, the vertical exposures are on a Biblical scale. When I say Biblical, I mean that they, like those in the Grand Canyon, may have been formed by the Flood. Let us not be close-minded, or we will be like ostriches burying their heads in the sand. Because then we will burn in hell like all ostriches do who do not accept Jesus.

The section is more sand-dominated than in the area around Petrified Forest. This is especially true of course of the massive vertical eolian sandstone cliffs of the Glen Canyon Group, but the Chinle and Moekopi Formations also seem to be more sandy than around PEFO. The results are some truly massive vertical exposures thousands of feet high. Here is a shot across the valley; the Early Triassic Moenkopi Formation, which was deposited in a gently flowing river system and near-shore environments, forms the dark brown low areas (the formation is actually pretty deeply incised by the river). The overlying Chinle Formation forms the sides of the mesas, and was deposited in more sub-tropical fluvial and lacustrine environments, which became increasingly arid toward the close of the Triassic as western North America moved north out of the tropics into the more arid mid-latitudes. The Glen Canyon Group is the massive sandstone capping the section, and represents an enormous eolian erg deposited in peak arid conditions which covered western North America during the beginning of the Jurassic. The orange carpet covering much of the Chinle is actually sandstone talus coming down off of the Glen Canyon Group.

When exploring these outcrops, it is vitally important to remember that they were NOT INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED to be actually be explored by human beings. The rocks do not particularly want you there, and exploring the upper part of the Chinle section (to say nothing of the Glen Canyon Group) involves some serious climbing up some frequently extremely hard and steep slopes. Fortunately, the sandstone talus coming off the Glen Canyon Group makes it a little easier to climb in places, if you pick your route carefully, and uranium miners also put in a few roads cutting up through the section.

The area is also fucking DESERTED. We up at the head of the canyon, pretty far from the shores of Lake Powell, and as a result, nobody wants to camp there. We saw no virtually one the entire time we were there except for some ranchers tending some suicidally depressed cows, and were able to stock up on huge piles of firewood pretty much every day with no problem.

I was mostly looking at rocks, and the area was overall pretty barren, so they didn't find much. However, some of the stuff they did find was pretty cool. Here is an awesome Cheirotherium trackway slab from the Moenkopi, formed by some kind of basal archosaur walking and swimming around in the Early Triassic river system. As with most of the localities, it is miles from the road, and was extremely difficult to get to.

Jim and Andrew were mostly interested in the Monitor Butte Member of the Chinle Formation, which makes up about the lower half the Chinle section in this area. This unit is pretty heavily pedogenically altered, and not surprisingly, the bone is mostly crap. However, they did find one very especially important locality preserving some very interesting and rarely preserved components of the Chinle ecosystem. Since I shouldn't talk too much about it, you have wasted your time reading this far. Sorry.

*Exaggeration

LNJ

The Most Terrifying Words In The English Language Are...

2009-11-07T10:12:00.000-08:00

..."I read your blog." Really scary words to hear in person. I do not write a blog. A little demon who lives inside me writes the blog. I just wake up the next morning and wonder "Jesus, what the hell did I just DO?" What was up with those last few? What did this blog used to be ABOUT? I need to write a few more of my "smart" blogs, about geology and evolution and shit.

For the first time in my life, I actually have multiple papers in prep with a the prospect of being submitted within a month or two, in review, and accepted. Crazyness. I've rarely felt so productive. I'm off to Utah to see the Chinle with Jim Kirkland, Russ Dubiel, and Andrew Milner. I've been waiting to get a look at the Monitor Butte Member for a while, and I actually get to see it with Dubiel, which will be awesome.

LNJ

The King Of Peace Is Coming, And He Rides A Slavering Dinosaur

2009-11-04T22:13:00.000-08:00

I'm sure you've seen this one:

But that was a more innocent time. These are days of doubt and turmoil, where gay people enter into civil unions just to ruin the marriages of straight people, and Muslims give oil to Chinese people that we obviously deserve more. We can't have Jesus riding no pussy sauropod, now can we. He needs a proper mount that can eat secular humanists and Jews.

Yes, he probably did.

We also can't having him taking shit from that motherfucker Charles Darwin. You may note that the knuckle on Jesus' right hand is already bleeding, whereas Darwin doesn't even know how to do a proper eye gouge. Jesus really seems to be enjoying this. When he finishes beating the living shit out of that evolutionist bitch, I think he is going to strip the flesh right off of his face with his TEETH.

Thanks to Sarah Werning for cartoon #2, and her always inspirational conversation. I hope Mike and Matt forgive my hasty and offensive comment on sauropods. I didn't mean it.

LNJ

AronRa

2009-11-04T20:26:00.000-08:00

Thanks to "Tatarize" at Ssnot for introducing me to AronRa through this excellent explanation of phylogenetic taxonomy. AronRa's YouTube page is now part of my permanant links. Make sure you check out the magnificent 2009 Golden Crocoduck Award that he has posted right now. You LIKE bananas, don't you?

LNJ

Ladies, Take Note.

2009-10-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

This is very very important! For science!

LNJ

Ian Murphy Visits The Creationist Museum

2009-10-24T20:57:00.001-07:00

Murphy writes for "The Beast", my favorite bipartisan scourge. He penned this account of his visit to Ken Ham's exciting experiment in alternative science, during which he appropriately masqueraded as the mentally retarded mascot of a phony Christian newspaper. He also wrote this equally entertaining road trip story.

This country is completely fucked.

LNJ

William Smith's Bitchin' Map

2009-10-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

Getting an area mapped is a pretty satisfying feeling, and gives me the absurd sense that I have really mastered the landscape in front of me. If I have explored an area thoroughly enough to map it in detail, I know that I have really nailed the stratigraphy...or at least that I probably nailed it as well (or better) than anyone else ever has, and conceivably as well as it is possible to. It is an awesome feeling to walk through an area that I have been mapping, wandering back and forth and all around to see it from all different angles until I really understood the physical relationship between different layers, and have the whole landscape before me make sense as a structure, as a story.

As I have argued elsewhere, my experiences both in my dissertation area and in PEFO have convinced me that a detailed map is not just a nice supplement to stratigraphic work, but is absolutely essential for a stratigraphic model to be considered reliable. A map ideally serves as evidence that you explored the distribution of rock units personally, and that you could trace these distributions in a way consistent with your understanding of their superpositonal relationships. If you trace two units you think are the same layer into the same area, and one turns out to dive underneath the other, your lithostratigraphic model is in need of modification...and as a direct consequence, so is the biostratigraphic model you built on it. In stratigraphy, geography is everything. Stratigraphy is a three-dimensional endeavor, not a two-dimensional one.

This often tragically under appreciated fact goes back to the founding of geology as a real science in the early 19th century. Lithostratigraphy, biostratigraphy, and geologic mapping were the inventions of the same man, a British canal surveyor named William Smith. Smith's critical insights and methods are beautifully explained in Simon Winchester's book, "The Map That Changed The World." However, although Winchester alludes early on to the importance of Smith's work in reshaping our understanding of Earth history away from Genesis and Ussher, he seems to have forgotten to talk about it later. The book ends with Smith's death, and does not really go into the fundamental importance of Smith's work to historical geology and paleontology.

Smith had two major insights. First, that rock strata can be traced geographically, and maintain their superpositional relationships wherever they are traced. Second, that the fossils vary between different strata, and likewise maintain consistent superpositional relationships in different geographic areas. Although in the almost 200 years since Smith we have found numerous complications and exceptions to these principles, their basic significance can hardly be understated. Only the introduction of radioisotopic dates had comparable importance in understanding the history of life as a narrative.

Consider the following list of statements, all made possible due to Smith's insights:

-Human beings lived after dinosaurs.

-The first fish showing a superficially tetrapod-like fin structure appear before the first fish-like tetrapods, which appear before less fish-like tetrapods, which appear before the first amniotes.

-Permian and Triassic synapsids showed an increasing number of mammal-like characters over time, with mammals appearing after the most mammal-like non-mammalian therapsids.

-Australopithecines appear before the earliest members of the genus Homo, which appear before more advanced members of the genus Homo, which appear before the first anatomically modern humans.

Smith didn't just allow us to make a the history of life into a story, in which events could be ordered, and cause and effect inferred based on the ordering of these events. His observations made it possible to determine that the fossil record supported evolution, by showing that forms appeared in a particular order consistent with evolutionary change. Consequently, I would argue that William Smith's contribution to understanding the history of life is on par with that of Charles Darwin. Darwin demonstrated that evolutionary change was a reality, and gave us a mechanism for that change, but it was Smith who gave us the tools for figuring out how the history of life actually unfolded.

Smith also made another brilliant innovation: he figured out how to document stratigraphy geographically, by plotting the exposures of rock strata on a map. Moreover, he illustrated the effectiveness and importance of geologic mapping as a way of testing stratigraphic models in the most dramatic way possible: by helping people make money off it. Smith's explorations were originally a way of finding the best routes for canals, but also applied to helping people figure out if economic commodities like coal and building stone could be found on their land. It is worth pointing out to creationists that the effectiveness of lithostratigraphy and biostratigraphy, the tools used for deriving evolutionary history, can be demonstrated by the fact that they have electricity and gas. Millions of dollars are staked on the effectiveness of these geologic tools, and it pays off. The money says historical geology is on a solid foundation.

Smith's first geologic map was of the area around Bath. Unfortunately it is (I am told) in Nottingham, so I didn't get a chance to see it. However, his completed geological map of England, published in 1815, is justifiably more famous. It is a monumental piece of work, and comparisons of the outcrop patterns with modern geologic maps of Great Britain shows that Smith really nailed it.

I had the privilege of seeing two copies. One is mounted in the lounge of the Geology Department in the University of Bristol, framed but not behind glass, and a little ragged at the seams. Unfortunately, my pictures came out a little blurry:

The other copy hangs at the home of the British Geological Society in Burlington House, a few blocks from Piccadilly Circus in London. This copy is framed behind glass, and is in absolutely magnificent condition. It looks like it was printed yesterday. The somewhat confused and long-suffering girl at the reception desk, who had only been working there about six days, could not understand why I wanted her to photograph me in front of a pair of green curtains (I couldn't photograph the actual map due to "copyright issues"), but did her best.

I still got more hair than him, hee hee.

LNJ

My Shiva Crater Art And Our Official Disclaimer

2009-10-17T20:03:00.001-07:00

As an undergraduate and grad student at Colorado State University and Texas Tech University, I occasionally did scientific illustration for various individuals. My skull drawings and life portraits of Puerto Rican bats were published a few years ago, and the "delightful drawing of bat faces" alluded to in this review of the book are mine, oh yes. I thought they could have been printed a little bigger, and at better resolution, because they are indeed delightful little bat faces. Unfortunately I cannot find them online, and my copies are in storage in Lubbock.

Artwork I did for Chatterjee pops up online from time to time. I did most (but not all) of the figures for this Microraptor paper, and also this life reconstruction. This one on Shiva Crater was just posted on Dragon's Tales.

Part of what makes me a good scientific illustrator is that I do as I am told.

On an unrelated note (no, I am not being facetious this time), Bill and I have some concerns to express. The text below is presented as our formal disclaimer, which may end up having to find its way into the cover letter of every paper we submit for the rest of our lives. Although we have not yet experienced any real problems yet from the attitude described below, which has mostly been pretty subtle, we want to nip this in the bud before it becomes a real nuisance. If you ever find yourself reviewing one of our papers, please read the following carefully before you even THINK of accusing us of personal bias in our scientific work. If we criticize someone's science, it is because we think the science has problems.

In the time since the ruling by the SVP Executive Committee and the New Mexico DCA on our allegations in Aetogate, we have begun to detect a certain curious attitude in some of our colleagues as to how we should interact professionally with Spencer Lucas and his colleagues in the future. Specifically, we have received the distinct impression from certain colleagues that we are expected to tone down our criticisms of their scientific work. We are not certain if this feeling is based on the assumption that we are too unprofessional to separate personal animosity from our evaluation of their science, or simply that we should go out of our way to not appear vindictive. We wish to address both of these possible rationales here.
We make no apologies for our insistence on publicly standing up for ourselves and for ethical scientific practice, or for inconveniencing certain members of the vertebrate
paleontological community with our refusal to mince words or peaceably accept rulings on our allegations that we still consider to have ignored or downplayed the issues we raised. However, our anger and disappointment is directed at behavior that we consider detrimental to the integrity of good scientific practice, and the objective evaluation of the work of colleagues is just as important to that integrity. Presenting misleading and vindictive attacks on colleagues is bad for science. So is cushioning valid criticisms merely so that they do not create the appearance of vindictiveness. We intend to do neither.
Our professional interests on Late Triassic stratigraphy and systematics mean that citation and commentary on the work of Lucas and his colleagues is unavoidable. Moreover, our own research (well as those of the many colleagues who share our interest in the Triassic) have raised discrepancies between our observations and the claims of Lucas and his colleagues. As a result, published conflicts in opinion are unavoidable, and probably will be for the rest of our careers. The only alternative is to leave the field of vertebrate paleontology, or at least not publish on the same subjects as Lucas and his colleagues. However, although this tactic has been adopted by some of our colleagues, and has been suggested to us from time to time, we have chosen not to pursue it. This is because letting dubious scientific claims go unchallenged just to avoid controversy seems counterproductive to us.
Being accused of ethical misconduct does not make Lucas and his colleagues immune to scientific criticism. Nor does being the accusers deprive us of our professional right and obligation to make such criticisms, in peer review or in our own manuscripts, if they are warranted. We certainly hope that reviewers of manuscripts will point out if our comments seem more vitriolic than strictly needed to make our case. However, we also ask that they not assume that criticisms are motivated solely by personal animosity, or expect us to tone down critiques if it means obscuring a valid argument against what we consider to be questionable scientific claims.
Thanks.

So Wrong

2009-10-10T18:45:00.000-07:00

Yes dammit, Pharyngula again.

Meyers posted on a painting a little while ago which proved conclusively that Jesus presented the Constitution to the American people personally, and that he had a hell of an expensive-looking wardrobe for a poor Jewish teacher living in first century Palestine. And that Abraham Lincoln is like, "what the fuck?" I wonder if the artist is aware that Thomas Jefferson's take on religion was a little different than that of modern Christian conservatives.

Someone with way too much time on thier hands has produced a modifed version of the painting.

LNJ

Darwin Worship

2009-10-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

I am back from England in awe at having visited the birthplace of modern biology and geology, and really fucking annoyed at the casual and routine suppression of biological reality that goes on in my own country. In England, one can find references to Darwin everywhere, and they even put his face on the 10 pound note. It is almost as if they are not afraid to acknowledge that evolutionary theory exists, and that it is important. It isn't fucking fair.

So, let us talk about Darwin worship! Yes! And in doing so, allow me to recycle an old VERTPALEO list message I once sent instead of having to write something completely new.

There are a couple of annoying myths about "Darwin worship": first that it exists, and second that Darwin never actually figured out anything important anyway. "Darwin worshipers", like the liberals who elected Obama just because of the exciting novelty of his skin color, are straw people. I don't know of anyone who "worships" Darwin (although there are plenty who are amazed at what he set in motion with a single book, and the amount of evidence that he documented in that book). Anyone who has any familiarity with evolutionary history knows perfectly well that a lot that of what Darwin thought was wrong. How many cases do you know of modern biologists or paleontologists who ignore or downplay post-Darwinian advances in evolutionary theory and genetics, and the rate and timing of evolutionary change, because they conflict with what Saint Darwin thought?

Nonetheless, it is pretty awe-inspiring how much he got right. The acceptance of evolution by natural scientists, not just as an interesting possibility, but as a reality, began with the publication of the Origin of Species, not with the works of Chambers or Lamark. Darwin's exhaustively researched and well-reasoned book built a remarkably solid foundation for evolutionary theory. I think that it is particularly worth pointing out that natural selection, the mechanism for adaptive evolution that Darwin is most closely associated with today, wasn't considered that important in the first few generations after Origin was published; Darwin was immortalized simply for documenting the reality that evolution had occurred. Moreover, he did it relying almost entirely on extant organisms, as the fossil record of the time wasn't of much use to him.

It is hard to see how anyone can miss that the Origin of Species was a major turning point in our understanding of biology and paleontology, and in the relationship between science and religion. Yes, the ideas that we may have a common origin with animals, and that nature may operate on non-supernatural processes, were around before Darwin..but Darwin jackhammered both ideas into the minds of scientists and lay people in a way that no one before him had even come close to accomplishing. Darwin's work represented a major turning point in the history of life science, and in the way that lay people look at life science and religion. THAT is what we celebrate on Darwin's B-Day; not the man as much as what his work set in motion.

If Darwin's proper place in the history of biology and paleontology is misunderstood by lay people and misrepresented by creationists...well,throw it on the pile. Getting the general public to have a basic understanding how natural selection is supposed to work, and the evidence that macroevolution has occurred, are probably more pressing problems than correcting the misconception that we "worship" Darwin.

Look, here is Saint Darwin in the British Museum of Natural History. Also, check out my kickass new profile picture.

LNJ

More On London And Bristol

2009-09-29T14:26:00.000-07:00

London is not Bristol. Both cities feel physically impossible, at least to me. However, whereas Bristol seems to violate physics with its steep and labyrinthine physical geography, London does so with its size.

The scale of London is intimidating. I don't mean that the city is geographically spread out, but that it feels big. The massive stone architecture of London, and streets which are far wider than those of Bristol, make the city feel about ten times larger than it ought to be. I have never had this impression of raw scale in Manhattan, or in any other other city. This stuck me most forcibly while visiting the Tower of London, the massive stone fortress infamous for being the place in England to go to get tortured or decapitated.

Standing with the Tower on one side, the enormous Thames River on the other side, and the massive Tower Bridge a half mile in the distance, I felt like an ant.

The international feel of London is striking, a reminder of how geographically close England is not only to continental Europe, but to the Asia, the Middle East, and even northern Africa. Foreign languages and ethnicities abound, seemingly even more than in the states. It is a weird felling for someone with a long time interest in Old World history born and raised in North America. Try this on for size, fellow Americans: I could hop in a car here and drive to Istanbul, and get there in less than a week.

For another thing thing, London is not as rough around the edges as Bristol, at least in the areas we were in. London feels like a center of civilization where the history is on display and tidily maintained. Bristol feels like a hard drinking port city it probably always has been, where the historical architecture is mixed in with bars, apartments, and messy day to day living. I found one little hole in the wall bar on a side street that seemed to be some kind of thespian hangout, with a bunch of signed photos from the likes of Alan Rickman and Ian McKellan. No bullshit.

The English can get highly entertaining and fucking demented when they drink. The very nice looking girls with short skirts are usually out and about by 10:00 pm. It wasn't too hard to find girlfriends screaming obscenities at their boyfriends (or vice versa), on any given evening, and fights were pretty common. I saw one mass of about ten people weaving back and forth across the street: a bunch of cops all trying to pull apart two guys with the help of some of their friends.

Here is one example to illustrate the difference: In London, public toilets charge 20-30 p. In Bristol, they have free public urinals to discourage people from pissing in stairwells and side streets. It doesn't work. I used one anyway, exercising the only legitimate excuse I may ever have to whip it out in public. It was the best day of my life.

What I am trying to say is that Bristol is a fun city.

Bill was trapped in the basement at the British Museum all day for the three days we spent in London, and our joint sightseeing was therefore restricted to the evenings, when most things were closed. This was fine, as most places we wanted to get inside charged a bit more than we could afford given how much we were spending on food, housing and transportation. Since this was mostly his visit for his dissertation project, I left him in the collections on Wednesday to wander around on my own.

In addition to visiting Burlington House, home of the Geological Society and an excellent copy of William Smith's first geologic map of England, I took a train to Crystal Palace Park to see Waterhouse Hawkins' dinosaurs. The sculptures are quite impressive, and in a really pretty corner of the park by a small lake, surrounded by dense vegetation that gives the spot a definite primeval forest vibe. If I lived in London, I would definitely spend the occasional quiet Sunday there just to chill out and read. Here is my first look at the dinosaur park. The icthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and crocodilians are closer, with the Megalosaurus and Iguanodon visible in the background:

Pretty sweet.

One final weird coincidence to relate. Bill and I stayed at a bed and breakfast in South Kensignton. The last couple days we were there, another guest came to visit, and sat down with us one morning at breakfast, a pleasant tall and thin fellow. He asked what we were doing in London, and I told him we were paleontologists looking at the collection at the British Museum of Natural History. He gave me what I interpreted as a blank look, so I explained that this means that were worked on fossils. However, he turned out be David Lindsay, a former preparator at the BMNH who published on procolophonids with Bob Carroll, and has since moved on to become an art conservator. It really is a small world.

LNJ

We Are Now In London

2009-09-27T14:29:00.000-07:00

Consequence was not invited to the SVP after-hours party.

There is a very good reason why SVP is held in another city every year. We must flee every city we visit with nervous glances over our shoulder, and hope that word will not get around to hotels in other cities as to exactly what the fuck they are getting themselves into by hosting us. Now that we are running out of American cities that are wise to our shenanigans, SVP is expanding its horizons internationally. Yeah! This delightful exercise in annual nation-hopping will continue until Mike Getty is inevitably incarcerated and executed by the Chinese government during our visit to Beijing...or at least, it wont be quite the same after that. Someone please fit him out with a radio collar before we get to Vegas, or he may never be seen again.

Bill and I took the bus to London this morning, and are both pretty wiped. Tomorrow, we visit the British Museum collections, and also hope to get to Westminster Abbey and Burlington House to see William Smith's geologic map of England.

Bristol Has Been Fun

2009-09-25T07:21:00.001-07:00

I didn’t sleep well the night before Bill and I left Holbrook at 5:00 am, and didn’t sleep more than a couple hours for the next 24. We plowed through the night far too rapidly at almost 600 miles an hour, and arrived in Bristol at 10:00 am (local time) the next day with our internal clocks well and truly fucked. Nonetheless, although I have noticed that my body has been exhausted, I haven’t really felt it. The journey and stay in England so far has been an absolute blast.

Bristol is an old city, and consequently it has a layout which has grown organically, rather than having been planned. Moreover, the city sits in an extremely hilly region of England, and as a result is a bewildering maze of streets that seem to defy the laws of physics. One may pass a street curving steeply uphill, then another curving parallel to it no more than 50 feet away, which impossibly goes downhill. The buildings lining these insane streets are tall and narrow, and are built in a bewildering variety of styles going back centuries.

It is an easy city to get lost in, which is how I like it, especially when wandering around drunk and alone at 1:00 am. There is a lot of beer and ale in Bristol, and I have already drunk most of it. Despite Britain’s reputation for shitty food, I have no complaints about anything I have eaten since arriving, which has included some excellent curry and an honest-to-Christ East Coast-style pizza. Bristol is also packed full of very attractive and classy women with beguiling accents who wear short skirts and black stockings.

The traffic is intense but curiously well ordered. The cars race through the streets a lot faster than seems safe, and the crosswalks and their signals are strictly advisory. People confidently but cautiously scurry across the streets like nervous raccoons. However, unlike in the states, the pedestrians and drivers are not out to kill or piss each other off, and cars will courteously slow down to let people across without incident.

I could spend a bit of time making interesting observations on the city and its inhabitants. However, I must instead relate the following scene which took place in a bar not far from the campus on the night of the 24th of September, 2009.

The bar was packed full of paleontologists. I was sitting in one corner of the bar talking to Sarah Werning and Matt Brown. Sitting unattended on one of the tables was a box containing a novelty do-it-yourself kit called “Stuff Your Own Beaver.” The outside of the box alleged to contain all that was necessary for stuffing a beaver (the kind with large teeth and a flat tail). The ownership of the box was not established at this time.

A paleontologist of our acquaintance, we will call him Carl, wandered over very drunk. He noticed the box and decided to open it, even though it did not belong to him, and found that it did indeed contain the components necessary for stuffing one (1) beaver: an empty beaver skin and a large bag of cotton. Carl tore open the bag and proceeded to stuff the beaver. Although he proceeded very slowly and methodically, he experienced difficulties getting small handfuls of cotton into the small opening on the beaver skin.

“I’ve never had this problem before” he remarked.

A second paleontologist, we will call her Anita, came over at this point. She was filled with indignation.

“That is my beaver!” she protested, and it was. I don't think he even apologized.

They Really Should Spit Instead...

2009-09-21T10:05:00.000-07:00

Parker and I are on our way to SVP in Bristol. I'm just sitting in Phoenix Sky Harbour waiting for our flight to Newark, but I had to share the following from Pharyngula.

"Yes, yes," the pastor told his congregation, "swallow for me..." Heh heh.

LNJ

The Open Dinosaur Project

2009-09-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

Andy Farke, Matt Wedel, and Mike Taylor have pioneered quite an intriguing experiment in online scientific collaboration, and Mike has requested the assistance of his fellow bloggers in advertising for the project. Since I owe Mike and Matt one of my testicles each for their unsolicited collaboration in Aetogate, and for keeping the archive of that sorry-ass losing struggle against bullshit and ethical cowardice alive, I have added the Open Dinosaur Project to my list of permanent links. As an alternative to literally giving them my balls. I'm sure you understand.

I would, however, like to make the same suggestion that Kevin Padian did on the VP-list: the project needs clear standardization in how the measurements are taken. Providing such standards is somewhat problematic given that they are mostly accepting published measurements. However, I would STRONGLY recommend providing some clear guidelines for new measurements at this early stage in the game.

As anyone who has measured a three-dimensional fossil knows, there are many ways to measure even a relatively simple shape (I would speculate that this is why the SV-POW crew did not start with vertebrae, which are about as three-dimensional as you can get). Length may be relatively straightforward for a long bone, but other dimensions might be more subjective. For example, something like "mid-shaft diameter" might be measured in a couple different ways. If it is not made exactly clear how, how is someone using the database to be certain that measurements for two different bones, especially from two different published sources, are really talking about the same thing? This isn't just me being nit-picky; I can envision the issue coming up during the review process for any manuscript incorporating this data.

I would recommend providing clearly labelled drawings of limb elements showing exactly how measurements should be taken. Here is a figure from my thesis to illustrate what I mean.

Providing clear measurement standards can help this database be improved and refined over time. For published limb measurements that are crappy or unclear, the standards could be used to eventually replace them with better ones. Through a slow process of replacement, we could have a standardized and continuously updated database of morphological data on dinosaurs. Wouldn't that be nice?

Another possible help might be photographs of the individual limb elements, or at least comments on the condition of the elements. Since vertebrate fossils tend to be a little fucked-up, it would be useful to any individual using the database to be able to evaluate the condition of an individual bone, and how distortion that occurred during fossilization, or preparation, might be impacting the measurement. One tibia I measured for my thesis was actually missing a big section of the midshaft, and the incomplete ends had been glued together. It was therefore a bit more compact than when it was in the animal's leg. Good to know, if you are interested in, say, limb bone allometry for a group of animals.

Just my two cents.

LNJ

Wow. I Mean, Wow.

2009-09-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

Her husband looks a bit uncomfortable.

LNJ

The Reality Fish

2009-08-31T17:28:00.000-07:00

We are all familiar with the Jesus fish, Darwin fish, and its many endless forms most beautiful. Two of my favorites can be found heah and neah.

However, none of these anti-Christian variants really capture what I think is the most essential point about the "war" between science and religion: wishful thinking doesn't change reality, no matter how hard you believe, and that isn't science's fault. These various emblems showing Jesus fish being eaten by dinosaurs, fucked by Darwin fish etc... make it seem as though science is out to get religion. It isn't, anymore than the objective of the construction company building an overpass through your neighborhood is to destroy your house. It may happen in the course of things, but that isn't the ultimate goal. You was just in the way when we was a comin' through. Nothing personal.

Consequently, I have made my own contribution to the Jesus fish pantheon, which I feel captures the real essence of the science-religion conflict:

From Paleo Errata

Is it not beautiful? Someone please make it for me and send me one.

Oh yeah, and check this out.

LNJ

Advice For Aspiring Researchers In Vertebrate Paleontology, Part 6: Being A Vertebrate Paleontology Student

2009-08-21T09:37:00.000-07:00

I previously did a series of posts where I presumed to offer advice to students looking to pursue a career in vertebrate paleontology (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5).

In a bygone year, a prominent vertebrate paleontologist wrote this letter to his students after returning to campus from sabbatical. It should be required reading for any undergraduate who hopes to pursue a career in VP. Surviving in this field as a research scientist requires enthusiasm and activity; VP isn't really built to sustain tourists. I have X-ed out names and dates since the professor in question is still alive.

"Dear Students,

"Please accept this memorandum as my formal greeting to you on my return from study leave and at the start of the academic year 19XX-XX. This memorandum is intended to serve as well as a reminder of certain realities that may have faded during the past year, while I was away. I hope that you will take the contents of this reminder seriously, because they outline the expectations that I have for each of you during your entire tenure here as graduate students, as well as during the coming year.

"It is a reality, of course, that sometime in the future I will have to evaluate your performance as a young scholar, for a prospective employer, perhaps, or when you apply for a further degree. That is a fact of life and one that I take seriously, especially if you intend continuing in vertebrate paleontology in some capacity. You should known that I value motivation as the most desirable quality in students at your stage of development. I have no patience with unmotivated students. I have lots of patience with highly motivated students.

"The official work week of the University is 35 hours, for full-time employees (technicians, typists, clerks, etc.). That, however, is not the duration I expect for your work week, irrespective of the present status of your program (that is, whether or not you are taking courses and/or teaching and/or working for me and/or working on your own research project). If you are not taking courses and not teaching, then I expect that the time taken for your research will expand into the increased time that you now have at your disposal. Similarly, if your are taking courses and/or teaching, you are not relieved at all of responsibility for maintaining an active research program, in addition to meeting those other academic demands on your time: I suppose it is an old-fashioned idea, but I expect students (especially graduate students) to study, as well; for example, which of you regularly reads Systematic Zoology, Evolution, Paleontology, Journal of Paleontology, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, at a minimum? And which of you regularly scans the remainder of the literature that is relevant to vertebrate paleontology and evolution? Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I strongly suspect that none of you do!

"Let me remind you that your research program does not merely consist of identifying your fossils and writing up your species accounts. You are also supposed to be educating yourselves, on your own initiative, as a simple reflection of the interest you have in your subject. You are past the stage of merely following the directions given you by your instructors in class; that's what being an undergraduate is all about. Now, as a research scientist-in-training, you are supposed to be devoting some significant fraction of your waking time to for doing science: for example, each of you has a vast amount of reading to do (unless you know more than I do, and I strongly suspect that you do not), each of you must be able to identify your fossils, you must understand their phylogenetic and geographic significance, you must be able to interpret them stratigraphically (and to have the relevant stratigraphy under control, which I suspect you do not), you may have preparation of fossils to do, you have to catalogue your collection before you complete your degree, etc., etc. In short, you have to be very busy, but since my return here, I have seen little evidence that you are very busy, at least on your academic work. Quite frankly, I hope that this situation does not continue.

"If you wish your "academic" day to end at 5:00 pm, I suggest that you become a bank clerk, salesperson, auto mechanic or whatever, and that you do so without delay. If you believe that your "academic" week should be confined to the interval between Monday and Friday, you'd best be a genius, because you will not be able to meet my expectations otherwise (and as far as I know, none of us here are geniuses).

"I urge you each to "get with it", to do so immediately, and to continue to do so until the scheduled completion of your program, on a sustained basis. If you do not know what to do, we can talk about it, in continuation of your education. But do not make the error of supposing that I do not mean what I say; if you think not, I suggest that you speak with XXXX XXXX, now of the Department of Entomology. He's a pleasant fellow, but that helped him not at all."

Ouch.

2009-08-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

Apparently, we could use a makeover.

On an unrelated note: You may be familiar with Captain Kirk's infamous spoken word renditions of “Rocketman” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” which are about as trippy weird and hilarious as it would be to watch the Pope hum and dance a little to “Promiscuous” with a completely straight face for his Sunday congregation.

During my Connecticut visit, Weinbaum played a song(?) called “I Can’t Get Behind That” from a more recent album of Shatner's called “Has Been.” To my surprise, it was actually pretty good, a funny and clever rant against things that Shatner finds annoying, so I downloaded the album the other day. I didn't care for all the numbers, but "Common People", "You'll Have Time", and "I Can't Get Behind That" are well worth checking out. Listening to "Common People" I felt a bit like the kids in the auditorium watching Jon Heder dance. It was so weird (mostly to hear Shatner bemoaning the plight of the working class), hilarious (unlike "Rocketman", the humor in "Has Been" is mostly intentional), and unexpectedly good that I was a little dumbstruck.

Anyway, nice job Kirk.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

2009-08-17T21:46:00.000-07:00

Hello my pretties.

One or two of you may have been reading the blog, and been really upset when I stopped posting. I apologize. Dry your little eyes. It was suggested that I get out of vertebrate paleontology, and I had to go think about it. All that thinking made me hungry, so then I had some pie. I am happy to announce that I have decided to stay in paleo, at least in an advisory capacity as a more or less competent stratigrapher who can also draw and annoy.

It has been a busy summer. Here is a picture of me and our paleo interns, Rachel and Chuck, at the corner of a street in Holbrook that has one of the best names of any street in the world. Rachel and Chuck were both awesome and really good at finding and digging up bones, although Bill had to beat Chuck unconscious with a piece of chicken one evening at Ghost Ranch. I’m not kidding.

They are gone now and I miss them very much. Fortunately our new preparators Matt Smith and Kenny Bader (who was with us last summer) are still here, after Matt Brown left us to go to Austin, which has more culture and less Jesus and meth (per capita). Here is the whole crew on the day we finally got out the aetosaur skeleton Bill blogged recently on. From left to right are me, Rachel, Chuck, Kenny, Matt, and Bill. Bill looks possessive.

My homeboy Jonathan Weinbaum came out for his first field season at a faculty member at Southern Connecticut State University, and prospected private property to the west of the park. He got a bunch of good stuff, including diagnostic phytosaur, aetosaur, and dinosaur material out of the Sonsela Member, and I am pretty sure I can tie his locality into the Devil’s Playground section. We camped out on one of my days off and I got good and wasted, but not Jonathan because he is a respected faculty member.

In addition to finally getting our first stratigraphy paper on the Chinle Formation in the park submitted, I have also written a book review of John Foster’s Jurassic West for JVP (due out in December). Congrats to Rebecca for bagging herself a guy who can write really well. In case you haven’t read it, it presents a glut of information in a clear an interesting manner, even though the Jurassic was a time when the dinosaurs were too big.

For July 4th, I went to the “RO-DEE-O” in the nearby town of Taylor. This is a traditional western event in which livestock are humiliated and retaliate by fucking up cowboys and clowns (in fact, one of the latter got his leg broken by a bull). One of the events was watching how fast a guy on a horse can jerk a baby cow off its feet with a rope around its neck, slam it on its back, and make it think it is crippled by tying its feet together. Awesome. I realized there can only be one thought running through their cute little heads as they trot past the stands to the gate after being freed:

I am going to fucking kill ALL of you.

We had fun. The sound track for the evening included hip hop and that country-western classic, “YMCA.” These songs represent subcultures with a long history of being respected and treasured in the American West, and I was proud as hell to see the people of Taylor dancing to them.

Take care of each other,

LNJ

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

2009-05-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-05-07T14:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-05T16:49:00.001-07:00

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"

2009-04-24T16:28:00.000-07:00

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