Hairy Museum of Natural History

The Beyond Bones blog at the Houston Museum of Natural Science is full of paleo-stories these days:

• Several prime pelycosaur posts from recent field work in the Permian beds of Seymour, including Dimetrodon-as-chondrichthivore and new material that may be from the narrow-snouted finback Secodontosaurus .
• And a step-by-step look at how Julius T. Csotonyi recreated the world of Leonardo, the fantastically well-preserved Brachylophosaurus, for the museum’s Dinosaur Mummy CSI: Cretaceous Science Investigation exhibit. Csotonyi’s digital paintings are about the best I’ve seen, and this post gives valuable insight into his process.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cretaceous, Dinosaurs, Museumabilia, Permian, Synapsids.

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Striving for fair and balanced reporting for all arthropod aficionados:

A few weeks old, but worth noting: World’s oldest flying insect fossil. A beautiful resting trace from a Carboniferous insect that landed with its limbs sprawled out like a mayfly; found in Massachusetts by a geology student at Tufts University.

Moving back in time, Chris Nedin kicks off his new Ediacaran blog with a compelling Cambrian tale of how flexible trilobites avoided unlucky breaks in The Spandrels of San Marco and the Anomalocaris Paradigm.

Speaking of the Cambrian, scientists are furthering their insight into the exceptional preservation of the famous Burgess Shale fossils, according to this article.

And  The Life of Madygen provides a brief introduction to the Triassic titanopterans, an extinct group of insects, related to grasshoppers and crickets, but with wingspans reaching half-a-meter across!

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cambrian, Carboniferous, Invertebrates, Triassic.

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Some impressive fossils from the Chengjiang Lagerstätte in China hit the news this week—a heretofore undescribed type of Cambrian arthropod that was preserved shell-to-tail in long chains, kind of like half-billion year-old invertebrate snap-lock beads.

A photo and a closeup of the astounding Chengjiang “Chained Arthropods”
Photos by Derek Siveter from the University of Oxford Media Release.

The researchers who reported on these fossils in this week’s issue of Science suspect that these ancient “conga lines” might reflect some sort of migratory behavior.

• Reference: Hou, X.-G., Siveter, D. J., Aldridge, R. J., and Siveter, D. J. 2008. Collective Behavior in an Early Cambrian Arthropod. Science: 322: 5899, p. 224. doi: 10.1126/science.1162794
• Web Coverage:
  • University of Oxford press release
  • Science News: New Arthropod Species Really Stuck Together
  • National Geographic: “Daisy Chains” of Fossil Creatures Found in China
  • Catalogue of Organisms: Chain Chain Chain

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cambrian, Invertebrates.

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• 
• Gerobatrachus hottoni
  Painting by Michael Skrepnick,
  from the press release at EurekAlert.

• New Amphibian: Gerobatrachus hottoni
• Name means:Hotton’s Elder Frog
• Relations: Amphibamid temnospondyl and stem-batrachian (an early offshoot on the lineage leading to frogs and salamanders)
• Location: Texas, U.S.A.
• Age: Early Permian, ~290,000,000 years ago
• Size: Less than 12cm (5 inches) long
• Info: The three groups of living amphibians (frogs, salamanders, and caecilians) most certainly had their roots in the great amphibian radiations of the Late Paleozoic Era, but the fossil record has provided few clues that help pinpoint their precise ancestry. Gerobatrachus was a small temnospondyl, part of a very successful and numerous group of amphibians in the latter part of the Paleozoic. The remains of Gerobatrachus exhibit a unique mosaic of features in its teeth, ears, limbs, and vertebrae that suggest it may have been close to the origins of both modern frogs and salamanders. Although many researchers have proposed a close relationship between all three groups of living amphibians, a phylogenetic analysis that included Gerobatrachus found that caecilians had their origins in a completely different group of Paleozoic amphibians, the lepospondyls.
• Reference: Anderson, J. S., Reisz, R. R., Scott, D., Fröbisch, N. B., and Sumida, S. S. 2008. A stem batrachian from the Early Permian of Texas and the origin of frogs and salamanders. Nature 453, 515–518 (22 May 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature06865. The article is available for download from the Center for North American Herpetology PDF Library.
• Web coverage:
  • Press Release
  • LiveScience on MSNBC
  • The Dragon’s Tales 1 & 2
  • Palaeoblog
  • El PaleoFreak

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Permian, Recent Discoveries, Tetrapods.

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In which I play “catch-up” for a few sites overlooked in my absence (note the partially-updated blogroll to the left). Today I’ll point out some excellent posts from the past few months dealing with different aspects of the Permian:

First up, Will at The Dragon’s Tales has had a couple of great articles on two of the more charismatic groups from the latter days of the Paleozoic: the carnivorous, sabre-toothed gorgonopsians and the herbivorous, tusk-beaked dicynodonts. Plus, he notes that there are some fantastic restorations of Permian vertebrates showing up on Wikipedia.

Speaking of dicynodonts, The Lord Geekington, mentions the ubiquitous Permo-Triassic straddler Lystrosaurus in his review of aquatic habits in stem-group synapsids. At the other end (that is, the beginning) of the Permian, he also discusses the potentially piscivorous pelycosaur Ophiacodon.

Finally, I recently came across the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s Prehistoric CSI blog, whose archives are chock full of fossil finds from Seymour, Texas—a treasure trove of Early Permian vertebrates—with videos and photos, and field sketches by Dr. Robert Bakker.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Permian, Reptiles, Synapsids, Tetrapods.

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