The evolutionary line from theropod dinosaurs is absolute. There is no question that this is one of the greatest stories that life on Earth has ever told us, But evolution is not linear; it’s chaotic. It’s bizarre. Along this theropod line, dinosaurs were experimenting – they were the evolutionary scientists of their time.
One of the weirdest things that theropods did was become herbivores again – this is exceptionally odd when we consider that they’re the cousins of epic carnivores like Tyrannosaurus and Deinonychus.
Therizinosaurs were one of these groups of hipster dinosaurs. Not content with a life dining on raw steak, they actually estranged themselves and became ecological innovators, eventually turning herbivorous.
For some years now, Mary Schweitzer and her team have been researching the idea that organic molecules can be preserved for millions of years, specifically within dinosaurs. They have used a plethora of chemical and biotechnological techniques to demonstrate that, within animals like Tyrannosaurus rex, it is possible to find the residue of structures such as blood vessels and even proteins. Naturally, her research has been met with a whole wad of stiff resistance from the scientific community, seemingly for no other reason than “We don’t like the sound of that..”. Scientific rigour ftw!
Let’s go meta. Recently, ecologist extraordinaire Dr. Jacquelyn Gill (or is it Professor cos of that weird American system?) wrote a wonderful review article on the extinctions that affected many large mammal species during the last 50-10,000 years. This period is known as the Quaternary, and was a time when ice ages were running rife between warmer periods, and herds of enigmatic mammals roamed the steppes. It’s also a time when many wonderful animals, such as mammoths, disappeared from our planet forever, apart from rare fuzzy sightings from drunk Russians that later turn out to be a bear, or nothing. The result is that although we have a spectacular range of mammals decorating our landscapes today, this is but a shadow of mammals’ true splendour back just a few thousand years.
A new initiative has just been announced that could help to revolutionise palaeontology. PaleoDeepDive is essentially an automated version of the Paleobiology Database, which is an online, professionally crowd-sourced and curated database of fossil occurrences pulled from the literature.
They have a launch video here:
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I have a couple of reservations about this. Firstly, how do they expect to mine data from articles that are mostly still locked behind paywalls, at least legally.
I’m also a little concerned about the precision of their algorithms. Towards the end, they mention that in a sample of 500 articles, they get 15000 species names, whereas the PaleobioDB only picks up 1100. Well, in the latter, these names are occurrences – explicit records of fossils in time and space. What these 15000 represent is not clear – are they just those that are mentioned in the text, and therefore don’t really have any use, or are all the palaeontologists really just missing out on 90% of the data when extracting manually?
Additionally, I am concerned about the linking of metadata, such as the location and age of fossils, as well as data about the geology, environment of deposition, taphonomy etc. All of this information has to be sifted out of articles from within a host of information in articles when extraction is manual. I’m not sure if a machine will be able to distinguish between, for example, geological dates from something related, but not directly the age of the fossil, in text.
Anyway, these are just preliminary thoughts, and am sure that they have crossed the developers’ minds at some point, I look forward to seeing how this progresses, and undermines a lot of my work! 😉
Oops.
Also, I’d love to hear any thoughts or comments you have about it!
