Some cool extinct animals images:
Mis-shapes
Image by Mark Witton
I dance a lot in secret. I like dancing, see, but I’m too nervous to do it regularly in public. With an iPod beaming music into my head virtually all the time, I’d be dancing in very inappropriate places if I were totally unabashed about dancing in front of others – grooving along the fruit aisle in Tesco, sliding around Portsmouth’s Guildhall Square and that sort of thing. No, I keep my public dancing subtle - little flairs of my hands when typing, striding in time with the beat when walking, virtually indiscernible wiggles of my hips when at the gym (whoever designed exercise machines clearly thought nothing of their more flamboyantly minded customers, I tell you – try wiggling your ass to David Bowie’s Cracked Actor on a cross trainer and you’ll see what I mean).and so fourth. The story only changes in two places: if I think I’m on my own, suddenly, cooking dinner resembles the end of Saturday Night Fever or when I’m out with chums at some retro-music evening, and perhaps somewhat jollier for my intake of beverages. There, and typically to the sounds of The Rolling Stones more than others, my shyness disappears and my mojo, whatever I may have of one, does its stuff. My dancing, similarly to my good friend Richard Hing, requires lots of space: there’s all sorts of sliding, strutting, leg crossing, kneeling, enormous arm/hand movements and no shortage of considerable movement around the dance floor. Forget getting my PhD: my favourite memory of last Christmas was literally clearing a dance floor whilst jaggering around with my girlfriend to Brown Sugar. Not many people I know have done that, and I didn’t even have any shoes on.
Thing is, I need a particular type of music to dance. I need something with beats that you can move between, some change in tempo, a little melodrama and, more important than anything else, a dash of flamboyance. Yer glammy Bowie tracks, less pretentious Doors numbers and Beatles singles are perfect dancing fodder. You can imagine my dismay, then, that nowhere, virtually nowhere plays this stuff. Yes, all right, I’m several decades late to such a party but, really, would it kill people to throw these things onto their playlists once in a while? Instead, we have to make-do with clubs that play the tightest, most repetitive dancey-trancey tracks you could possibly imagine, the sort of thing that you could either subtly bounce to if you’re shy, go all trippy and arm wavy if you want as you loose yourself to the deafening beat or, if you’re of a looser disposition, grind your nether regions against those of a perfect stranger in the hope that they’ll take you home for cookies and beer later on. The flamboyant dancer is left out in such a place: there’s no musical or physical room to do anything, and defying your surroundings to be all flamboyant would almost certainly land you in a fight. In years gone by, I would’ve thought there was something wrong with me and shuffled around the edges of the venue until, at last, my less self-conscious friends left and I could escape with them under the guise of still being popular. Now, at the confidently cynical old age of 25, I happily left the last club I went to early. Let the fools dance their tight, constrained jigs as long as they want, thought I. Put on some Pulp or Iggy Pop and I’ll show them how it’s done. So, I wound my way home to the world of bad late night TV and nice beer, content with the fact that I’m different to the rest of the world.
Predictably, this long tale has some relevance to the world of palaeontology. Ages and ages ago, some chums of mine decided that they just weren’t happy with the cheap beer, crap music and overcrowding of the surprisingly controversial dance club of sauropod dinosaur neck posture and decided to do their own thing. The short version of the tale, covered in considerably more detail here, is that most folks for the last twenty years have assumed that long-necked dinosaurs habitually held their necks slung out horizontally from their bodies – you know, like they did in Walking with Dinosaurs. This was in stark contrast to how sauropods were originally reconstructed when, for giggles, they were always reconstructed with their necks arching into the air. The horizontal sauropod neck idea wheeled out in the 1980s sort of made sense in a strictly mechanical way: neck bones, like most vertebrae, have overlapping processes known as zygapophyses that, if you were to design such a system, would be in their most energetically effective position when they were held halfway between flexion and extension (the so-called neutral posture). This way, muscles running along the neck could be relaxed, letting the sauropod nuchal ligament (the strong, elastic tissues running along the upper surface of a tetrapod neck – you can feel your own on the back of your neck or, alternatively, go pinch the top of a horse’s neck) hold the vertebrae with minimal effort from the neck musculature. Both actual fossils and sexy computerised versions were thought to verify this posture and, before you new it, every sauropod from here to the Caucus Mountains was being reconstructed with a long, horizontally held neck.
However, at least three sauropodophiles weren’t keen to dance to this track. The chaps in question are the proud owners of the SV-POW! blog or, in full, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. For those of you unfamiliar with their neck of the interwoods, SV-POW! is an, uh… dedicated website dealing almost exclusively with the vertebrae of sauropod dinosaurs. You can tune in every week and see a new view of a Camarasaurus fourth cervical or something and learn a new fact or two about dinosaur anatomy. Clearly, it’s totally barmy and has no right to be anywhere near as good as it is, but the talents of Mike Taylor, Matt Wedel and Darren Naish somehow keep it not only informative and interesting, but fun and exciting. These guys have a passion for sauropod vertebrae that really makes you wonder if their wives know what they’re getting up to: eventually, one of them is bound to leave a note addressed to their family on their kitchen table explaining that they’ve run off with the Xenoposeidon type specimen or something. Anyway, the SV-POW!-er Rangers decided to test the notion of habitual horizontal neck postures in sauropods through some forehead-slappingly obvious science: how to modern tetrapods hold their necks?
Well, from salamanders to bunnies and crows to cattle, the answer is that virtually all extant tetrapods necks are almost always extended at their bases, with the skulls flexed on the foremost vertebra. In upright-standing critters such as mammals and birds, the neck is held vertically at rest even if the rest of the body is held horizontally (as is the case for most tetrapods – we have a pretty weird posture, after all). This has very, very few exceptions, so we can infer that fossil terrestrial tetrapods should’ve had inclined neck postures and flexed skulls too or, to put it another way, would have habitually have held their necks above their backs and rotated their heads downwards to see what was in front of them. Now, sauropods have crazylong necks, but there is no reason at all to assume that they were any different from modern animals: they too probably held their heads up high a lot of the time, bringing them down to earth when they had to drink or (in some cases) feed or whatever. What’s more, the idea of a horizontal neck being mechanically advantageous just ain’t right: as we all know from carrying virtually any heavy object, it is far easier to support the load when it is close to your centre of gravity than when held as far away as possible, which is the effect achieved with a horizontal neck. In my view, it all makes perfect sense and, because the SV-POW!-erpuff Girls have really gone to town on explaining their paper in excellent detail, I recommend that you point your browser this way to read all they have to say about it.
Now, I was privileged enough to be invited to the first official SV-POW!-wow dance before most other folks when the chaps asked me to draw their big press release image. Being asked to draw dinosaurs is quite a big deal for me: there aren’t that many chaps out there specialising in pterosaur art, but there is a whole truckload of really, really excellent dinosaur artists. Many of them manage to combine a real artistic flair with pinpoint anatomical accuracy: they won’t put claws on (most) titanosaur hands or leave the jaw of Tyrannosaurus without an enormous, bulging posterior pterygoideus muscle. This stuff is important: irritatingly, many palaeontologists pay little attention to such details when working with artists: they give them a skeletal reconstruction, leave them to their paintbrushes and then come back later with a pat on the back regardless of whether the depicted animal looks anything like it should or not. Sure, there may be talk of colour and composition, but scientific accuracy is pushed down the list of importance. A good palaeoartist, then, can almost work independently of a scientist (although, obviously, good communication between the two is best) and folks like Todd Marshall, Mike Skrepnick, Luis Rey and many more manage to produce work that is not looks exquisite, but also is scientifically savvy. In such company, then, it’s something of a surprise that all these folks were bypassed for the palaeoartist hack writing this. Maybe they made a mistake when sending the E-mail and didn’t want to feel embarrassed after I’d said yes to the commission. Maybe all the other palaeoartists were busy. Or maybe they liked my price tag.
Whatever the reason, once the neck-posture paper was in the publication mill, we began the process of putting the image together. A surprising amount of thought went into most aspects of it: Diplodocus was chosen as the animal because of its familiarity and to counter the BBC-produced low-slung versions appearing everywhere. Colour was unanimously decided as being drab: we all think sauropods are exciting, but big animals tend to be much duller than their smaller counterparts, so their shades of integument probably weren’t much to write home about. The position of the soft-tissue spines along the neck was debated, as was the position of the nostrils. With all of us being too geeky to resist at least one in-joke, we discussed the possibility of including a small, red Rhamphorhynchus alongside a sauropod neck a la Rudolph Zallinger’s Age of Reptiles mural. Alas, the Diplodocus bearing Morrison Formation hasn’t yet yielded any rhamphorhynchine pterosaurs, but, happily, we could substitute this for the Morisson rhamphorhynchid Harpactognathus - the fact that these pterosaurs are tiny specks on the page is obviously irrelevant. Different genders for the sauropods and a tripodal Diplodocus in the background were also discussed, but all were abandoned in favour of keeping the image as simple as possible. A drinking sauropod was realised as mandatory early on: we all figured that people would almost certainly misread the press releases and start harping on about sauropods needing to drink and all that. Hence, putting one slap-bang in the middle of the image graphically demonstrates that the SV-POW!-busters never said sauropods held their necks erect all the time, just that they would do by default. Even purely arty things like the framing of the animals in the background and the degree of contrast to loose when viewing sauropods from a distance was considered. Trees and other vegetation were included for scale and, for kicks, I went to town with some wibbly-wobbly reflections in the water. Having done work with several different palaeontologists now, I can reflect on this image as one of blissful efficiency: happily, the first concept sketch I drew was accepted as what we wanted (in fact, Mike was a little bummed that he couldn’t show the development of the idea in a series of blogposts) and, unlike some images I’ve drawn where people have proven very difficult to please or prone to changing their mind until you finally refuse to keep modifying the damn thing, the SV-POW!-trotters simply said what they wanted, what they liked and didn’t like and, well, we had the whole thing wrapped up within 10 days or so. The results, as you may have guessed, are above, and you can find a high-resolution version here.
And there, dear friends, ends the story of how to be different in the world of palaeontology and have someone with chronic verbal diarrhoea draw you a picture about it. Apologies to Mike who asked me to write up my thoughts on this way back in early July: blame all the dancing I’ve been doing in a certain workshop on my supersecret project involving my own long-necked creatures. What workshop and supersecret project is this? Point your interweb viewer at this and then join me in reciting my new mantra: No Pressure.
Stormy Clouds, New Horizons
Image by Mark Witton
It’s hard to escape the increasing realisation that my friends and I are twenty-somethings. When you’re, say, 22-23, you can dump yourself in the ‘early-twenties’ category and be content that youth and vigour are still happily with you, albeit without the angsty energy of adolescence. Then you hit the 24-26 category, where you’re around the cusp of your third decade on the planet and it slowly dawns on you that time is getting on. A quarter of a century has passed since you were born and doubts start creeping in. You spend a bit of every day wondering if you’re on the right career path; whether you should have your own place by now; thinking a bit more seriously about having some little versions of yourself running around and when, Jesus when will you loose that gawky physique you gained when you were 16 and turn your naked self into something resembling a man rather than a baby chimp.
However, if one thing comes with age, it’s a taste for good beer. As an underage teenager trying to be served in my local pub – complete with a soft teenage-moustache and enormous goggle-glasses - I was an avid lager drinker. You know: the likes of Kronenberg, Stella and, as a special treat, big bottles of Budweiser. Nowadays, though, I’m really not a lager fan at all. Nope, I’ve moved away to the considerably more interesting and mature world of ales and bitters. Ignoring the weak, crappy taste of Boddingtons and the like, ales are the way to go. Each has its own unique flavour and strength: some are very watery, some pack strong tastes that linger in your mouth for minutes, and others taste so flowery that I suspect brewers have been liquidising and bottling their local florists. Compared to lager, they’re incredibly flavoursome and rich and, once you’ve matured to Ale Age, there’s no going back. Still, as I watch my younger chums sucking up their lagers, I don’t judge or try to change them: nope, I quietly know that in a few years they’ll be watching other young men through the same, ale-distilled eyes. It’s all right, lager drinkers of the world: we were all there once, we understand, and we’re just waiting for you to join us.
Now, believe it or not, the professional interests of palaeontologists go through a similar maturation. 90 per cent of fresh-faced, first-year palaeontology students are only interested in one thing: dinosaurs. It’s dinosaurs this, dinosaurs that: they tolerate the molluscs and echinoderms put in front of them for description, they begrudgingly look at sediments and will consider basic geological principles like Walther’s Law of Superposition and continental drift but, given any freedom of choice over their topic of study, and they want dinosaurs. Some palaeontologists never grow out of this and, for them, they’re only interested in a fossil animal if their remains are big enough that you can wield them like guitars and pose on the front cover of scientific rock magazine equivalents, National Geographic and New Scientist. Thing is, though, this blinkered view obscures some of the true marvels of the fossil record. Some of the most fantastic, amazing things require more patience and contemplation to appreciate. The mysterious Ediacaran fauna. Small but intricately-spiralled graptolites or spiny trilobites. 30 million year-old molluscs and beetles with bona fidecolour patterns. It’s frustratingly incomplete, but, for the mature palaeontologist, the fossil record is freaking awesome even without its A-listers like dinosaurs and enormous marine reptiles. Sometimes it’s the richness of a particular fossil deposit that is fantastic, and not necessarily the likes of the Chinese Jehol Group or German Solnhofen Limestones which, with their fantastically preserved early-birds and whatnot, are predictable headline fodder. No, given enough time and patience, even the most unassuming fossil-deposits can be veritable goldmines, assuming you know what you’re looking for and where to find it.
Step in, then, my University of Portsmouth colleague, Dr. Steve Sweetman. Clearly not interested in discovering fossils that you can pose alongside while being circled by expensive photographers, Steve’s spent the last several years working on the microfossils of the Lower Cretaceous Wessex Formation of the Isle of Wight. To find them, he dried samples of silty clay taken from lignite-infested plant debris horizons found within the Wessex, washing the clay away and painstaking sifting through the remaining plant material to find the animal fossils. This required literally hundreds of hours of work to retrieve the fossils alone, let alone figure out what they were. As you might expect, such a project is worthy of a several-hundred page book, and, indeed, it’s results formed the subject of Steve’s Ph.D. thesis. However, the God-knows how many hours spent identifying his fossils have, thus far, only allowed him to review the Wessex tetrapods – vertebrates with/that once had four limbs – without even approaching the fish discoveries. Thing is, this alone has, by Jingo, totally changed what we know of the Wessex palaeofauna. Essentially doubling the number of known tetrapods from the Wessex Formation, Steve found a whopping 48 new types of critter from the Wessex, including dirty-big dinosaurs, tiny amphibians and mammals, and more middling-sized lizards, birds and mammals. His work allows for a much more complete picture of the 115 million year-old ecosystem record in these deposits, and, luckily and very honourably for me, Steve asked yours truly to paint a picture of the ecosystem that he is now more acquainted with than anyone else in the world. The result is above: it’s the biggest picture I’ve ever painted digitally and took 7 days to get from rough paper to your screens. There’re lots of things I would change if I had a few more days to work on it: some details of the water need work, there’s not nearly enough shading, everything looks too clean, some areas have been really, really, roughly coloured… Thing is, with a tight deadline to meet, I had to draw the line somewhere: eventually, you have to concede that you’re out of time and a project will have to be presented as it is. I guess it’s all right, but I reckon it could be better. Ho hum.
Anyway, enough moaning about my lack of artistic finesse: what’s going on in that crowded scene? Well, the picture can be divided into two parts. The top-half of the image is pure, Classic Wessex, full of big dinosaurs, big trees and big crocodiles. It also presents the Wessex palaeoenvironment, showing the kilometre-wide river that was responsible for depositing the clays of the Wessex Formation. This river meandered its way eastwards across a vast, seasonal floodplain through a landscape covered with ponds, conifer trees and ferns, with the biggest trees localised on the low hills found to the west of the floodplain. To the right of the image, the vegetation on these hills is being set alight by lightning storms that seasonally ravaged the floodplains, burning off the canopy and creating the floods that filled ponds, river channels and what-have-you with the sediment and plant muck that would eventually form the plant debris beds. En route, these floods would pick up animal carcasses and other remains – shed teeth, loose bones - and deposit them in the same plant debris horizons. As such, these storms played a vital role in recording the story of the Wessex fauna. Hooray for ancient storms, then.
The back- and midground of this scene holds some familiar characters - in fact, these well-known critters have already featured on this corner of the Interweb (check out this set here for some old sketches of vanilla Wessex forms). In the far distance, there’re a couple of titanosauriform sauropods: big ‘Angloposeidon’-type brachiosaurs and more derived titanosaurs next door. To the right of these strapping chappies is a lone Caulkicephalus, an ornithocheirid pterosaur surveying the water for fishy morsels (see this for a discussion of dip-feeding in ornithocheirids). To the right of him, moving into the middle ground, is a small group of Iguanodon-like ornithopods, though they aren’t necessarily Iguanodon proper. Why? Well, bucko, the taxonomy of iguanodonts was overhauled recently, suggesting that many of the large ornithopod remains lumped into Iguanodon actually represent several, highly-distinctive forms. Hence, the slender forms shown in the picture here aren’t Iguanodon, but the smaller, recently-christened Dollodon.
Just in front of the wading Dollodon is another group of ornithopods, the 2 m long Hypsilopohodon, some of which are being harassed by the large crocodilian Goniopholis (oh, and look closely and you can see some baby Hypsilopohodon amongst the adults, too). Just right of the central midground and around the Goniopholis are basking and swimming Bernissartia, crocodilians that specialised in grubbing-out and eating molluscs. Left of these, in the mouth of the tributary feeding the main river, is the back of Lepidotes, a metre-long armoured fish being eyed by the biggest predatory dinosaur yet known from the Wessex, Baryonyx. The fish-eating habits of Baryonyx are well-documented, being based on gut content (including digested remains of Lepidotes, dontchaknow), tooth morphology, skull biomechanics and other observations of spinosaur functional morphology, so it’s interest in the Lepidotes here is well-founded.
Now, these chaps are undeniably interesting, but they’re nothing new. No, the real interest of this picture is found in the foreground and in the skies. Looking skywards first: Steve’s found that Istiodactylus, a pterosaur found in the Isle of Wight’s lagoonal Vectis Formation, also occurred in the terrestrial deposits of the Wessex. Next to this critter is a mysterious ‘early bird’, here suggested to be an Archaeopteryx-type thing but, in actuality, only represented by teeth that, while undeniably avian, could belong to a number of basal birds. Moving to the bottom of the image, you can find a pond in the bottom-left corner that features a bonzanza of new Wessex forms: salamanders and frogs sit on the pond margins and swim beneath the water (and, hey, check this out: I found one of Steve’s best salamander specimens during my dissertation studies); ctenochasmatoid pterosaurs sieve the water for prey; lizards of all shapes and sizes bask on a dead tree and rare turtles watch the river slink by. Alongside our anapsid friends are a pair of hesperornithiformes, two sitting on the riverbank and another swallowing a fish in the river itself. Some derived hesperornithiformes famously lost all ability to fly, becoming specialised diving predators in the process. However, early Cretaceous hesperornithiformes weren’t anywhere near as specialised and, to my shame, I probably should’ve drawn such early forms instead of fully-fledged, aquatic forms – whoops. Another mistake is to be found in the foot morphology of these chaps: rather than goose-like webbed feet as I’ve drawn here, hesperornithiformes are known to have individually lobed toes like grebes and coots. Annoyingly, this thought crossed my mind when drawing them, but I thought I was confusing them with something else and didn’t think to verify it. Grr.
Anatomical and temporal blunders aside, the middle foreground features a small maniraptoran dinosaur - suggested here to be a small troodontid. Dangling from its mouth is a tiny, tiny albanerpetontid; an amphibian that, if it weren’t busy being lunch, would be happy burrowing through damp soil. Beneath these fellas is yet another lizard, while to their right are the flagfliers for Wessex Formation Mammalia: rat-sized multituberculates and a shrew-sized dryolestid. These chaps are climbing over lumpy termite mounds, things that, to my knowledge, are yet to appear on reconstructions of the Wessex palaoenvironment. Now, no termite mounds have been found in the Wessex, but the sheer abundance of termites is clear from the masses of termite droppings that Steve sifted through in the course of his studies. The morphology of these mounds is very speculative: while there are some Late Cretaceous termite nests known, we known next-to-nothing of Mesozoic termite mound structure because their fossilisation potential is pretty poor. It’s entirely possible that the Wessex termites were entirely subterranean, but the Wessex clays weren’t kind to terrestrial trace fossils and any evidence of such termites has probably disappeared entirely. Hence, while we know that termites were swarming all over the Wessex floodplain, the jury’s still very much out on their accommodation of choice: the depiction you see above is merely to demonstrate their presence, not infer their way of living.
And that’s just about it, I suppose. I should re-emphasise that the animals you see here are only representative of the kinds of animals in the Wessex Formation: they were considerably more speciose than depicted here, but, hey, you can only fit so many types of critter on a sheet of paper before it becomes overcrowded. Still, it’s a far richer scene than anyone would’ve been able to paint years even four years ago, so hats-off to Steve for taking all that time and effort to turn the Wessex from a bland(ish) lager to a deep-tasting palaeontological ale. On that note, it’s time to finish my nice, floral-tasting beer and get myself to bed. Hence, I’ll thank Steve for asking me to help present his findings to the world – I’m genuinely honoured that he holds my work highly enough to ask me to illustrate what I think is a real scientific achievement – and point out that full-size versions of this image can be found on various news websites around the ‘Net, including this one here. Oh, and Steve and I have produced a visual key to the different forms if you’re having trouble finding them: in fact, one look at this and you'll realise that you needn't have read the last 2000 words.
Anyway, ‘night all.
