Tagged by ~Sphenacodon

I've decided to make these (vaguely) palaeo-related in keeping with this account.

1) I get very drunk at conferences and talk dense incoherent philosophy (sometimes of science) to whoever I happen to bail up toward the end of the evening. Then I sleep though the talks the next day.

2) I can rarely keep interested in a palaeontogical subject long enough to really get to grips with it.

3) Sometimes I do paintings to prove to myself I'm still better than the other guys if I put my mind to it (in this I have a mixed success rate).

4) I would rather my palaeontography be interesting than right.

5) Same goes for all my ideas really.

6) At SVP 2004 I only went to three talks (see #1).

7) When I was thirteen I wrote a letter to Bob Bakker suggesting that the way hadrosaurs defended themselves was by digging burrows (in Raptor Red he has therizinosaurs living in burrows, I've always wondered if I inspired him!).

8) Shortly thereafter I phoned Greg Paul (Australia to the US) to ask him all sorts of stupid questions. Like "what the deal with the sprawling ceratopsians thing, why aren't they listening to the LIGHT OF THE DINOSAUR RENAISSANCE??" (Okay I didn't actually say that last bit, but I meant it!), and "where can I get a copy of Predatory Dinosaurs of the World?" (even though I'd photocopied the entire thing at my local library).

Okay, I'll tag ~Archosaurian and ~MattMart.

Greg Paul's running pose seems to have become the standard posture for skeletals of dinosaurs, and although I don't particularly like it, I've got no real gripes with it, and that's not what I'm going to complain about.

It's his posing of pterosaurs that worries me - the wings up, one foot pushing-off pose. A lot of people have followed his lead on this, so I think it's important to point out that it's probably wrong. Pterosaurs did not launch like that, they almost certainly launched quadrupedally, with the hand being the last thing to leave the ground. This was Jim Cunningham's idea originally, but others have picked up on it. There's one paper out (I think it's in Chatterjee et al. 2004, Posture, Locomotion, and Paleoecology of Pterosaurs. geosociety.org), and several more in the works on this.

So even though it looks cool, it's doubtful they ever struck such a pose, and hence it's not really good for skeletals. That's why I don't pose them that way, and instead always do a dorsal and lateral view, and removed the legs in the lateral view. It's not the only way it could be done, of course, but the Greg Paul-styley ones have to stop.

People, this is a disgrace! [link]

There is only one accurate depiction of Velociraptor on the first page of a Google image search for "Velociraptor". The rest are absolutely terrible!

As palaeontogaphers, we should all be concerned about this - if we take what we do seriously at all, we want people to have a reasonable idea of what prehistoric animals look like.

But don't despair, we can make a difference! Google works by links - so let's have a link-to-an-accurate-Velociraptor day on the internets. Simply link to your favourite V. image or page using the word "Velociraptor" in your journal , website or blog, and help bring the popular image of V. (and by extension prehistoric animals) more into line with the science.

Here's a nice page at Scott Hartman's SkeletalDrawing.com that I plan to link to a few times: [link]

Today, Velociraptor, tomorrow, the (palaeo)world!

Well, I'm back from the Munich Pterosaur conference - I bet you didn't even know I'd gone. Nevertheless, a report. I'll stick to the things that interested me most, which are to do with anatomy and flight mechanics that affect appearance. For a broader view, check out Darren Naish's blog [link]

Muchos thankos to Dave Hone who organised the thing, which not only went off without a hitch, but which was wall to wall awesome.

Just as an example, he had managed to collect the two finest specimens of Pterodactylus plus the holotype, the Zittel wing, the Darkwing Rhamphorynchus, a gob-smacking new specimen that I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about, the Tapejara with soft tissue crest, Ludodactylus, a freakin' Archaeopteryx and the really famous Compsognathus, plus a whole bunch of other specimens that blew everyone's socks off all in the same room. If you now anything about pterosaurs, you'll know how amazing that was.

I presented a poster on the forelimb musculature of Anhanguera, in which I reached a very similar conclusion to Chris Bennett who did a talk on the very same thing. Chris's paper will be out mid next year, my poster is available to anyone that asks under a creative commons license.

Chris and I both independently reached the conclusion that the wing finger flexes into flight position, and hyperextends to fold. The hand is essentially palm forward during flight (rather than palm-down, as is common in pictures). Chris also pretty convincingly argued that the pteroid articulates on the back underside of the preaxial carpal not on the top, as has been shown in countless drawings -- if true (and I'll bet my bottom dollar it is), it pretty much sinks the notion that the pteroid could point forward during flight.

Laurence Browning and the Bristol crew presented work on the flexibility of the wing spar using beam theory, and finite element analysis. The results were pretty similar to what I remember of similar work done during the Stanford Pterosaur Project - the outer wing was quite flexible. It would have flexed upward during flight quite a bit, though I don't remember the exact numbers. I have known about this for some time, and largely failed to incorporate it into my drawings. This has given me the nudge I needed, and I have updated my paintings where appropriate.

O'Conner, Classens and Unwin presented some pretty cool air sac stuff - most interesting to me was their diagram showing air sacs all throughout the wing - in front and behind the wings spar, just as I've been drawing it for ages now.

Mark Witton gave an interesting talk on pterosaur mass estimates. He found a really tight correlation between skeletal mass in modern birds and mammals to their overall mass (birds do not have lighter skeletons than mammals, they just have more voluminous bones). Applying that to pterosaurs, he got pretty high estimates for pterosaurs, considering how low some have been in the past. They are generally in line with Greg Paul's estimates, although the manner in which they were derived differs substantially. Quetzalcoatlus northropi came out at 250kg - which is the highest estimate yet (some have ranged as low as 70kg!), but not so heavy for an animal that could look a giraffe in the eye. Check out Mark's drawing, and more detailed explanation here => [link]

Lastly, Helmut Tischlinger's photographs of the fossils under UV light is amazing, and brought a few new things to, erm... light. But you'll have to wait for the paper on that one.

There was lots more, but I'm sure there are better people to hear it from than me.