Back in the Late Cretaceous, the USA was divided. Not politically, but by a vast continental sea called the Western Interior Seaway, splitting the continent into two separate landmasses. The western one of these, known as Laramidia, played host to some of the popular dinosaurs like Parasaurolophus, or ‘Elvis’ in Pete Postlethwaite dialect, and the ceratopsian Chasmosaurus. One of the cool things about Laramidia though, is that you had a whopping great amount of these megaherbivorous dinosaurs, or omnomnomosaurs, living together in the same time and place. How could one area contain such a vast number and range of dinosaurs?
In which we explain how camel ankle bones relate to the fate of global ecosystems.
This was originally posted at 4th Dimensional Biology by Brianna McHorse and Edward Davis. Reblogging because awesome (with permission).
I’m taking time away from comic book blogging to do some actual SCIENCE BLOGGING. Just last month I published a paper in Palaeontologia Electronica with my esteemed colleague Brianna McHorse (who blogs over at Fossilosophy). It’s called “A method for improved identification of postcrania from mammalian fossil assemblages: multivariate discriminant function analysis of camelid astragali.” In this paper, we work with fossilized camel ankle bones from theThousand Creek of Nevada that are about 8 million years old. Here’s the plain-language abstract for those who don’t speak paleontology. Brianna and I have coauthored this blog post to share the wonders of these ankle bones with a broader audience.
To bird or not to bird..
In 2012, the controversial case over whether or not Archaeopteryx lithographica, perhaps the most iconic dinosaur species of all time, was a bird was settled. Apparently. (free pdf) This was an important analysis for two reasons. Firstly, it countered a previous study showing that Archaeopteryx was more closely related to dinosaurs like Velociraptor and Deinonychus, and secondly used advanced, sort of non-traditional methods in palaeontology, called maximum likelihood and Bayesian analysis, to work out its relationships.
It’s been a while..!
In a post two months ago, I promised that I’d keep you updated with how my research is progressing. Needless to say, I’ve done a pretty poor job of that, unless you follow me on Twitter! I must apologise – the workload while travelling was severely under-estimated, and I’ve barely had time to catch a nap. I’m writing to you now from Lyon, where I finally had a day off in about a month to explore the Basilica and Roman amphitheater ruins here, and am now nestled in a snug pub hammering away at a manuscript!