Nobody likes Aetiocetus =(

I randomly came across this while trying to look up information for a summary about Aetiocetus weltoni I'm writing for a webpage (more info on the new webpage soon!).


Anyway, I became the first person to officially 'like' Aetiocetus. Please think of the toothed mysticetes; the Aetiocetus weltoni holotype specimen is alone this Valentine's Day. Please show Aetiocetus some love.

Marcus Ross and young earth creationism at the GSA 2010 meeting

Just within the last couple hours an email went out on the VertPaleo listserv, which was copied directly from Joe Meerts' blog, "Science, AntiScience, and Geology", and can be seen here.

Joe Meert reports on an incident at GSA, where Marcus Ross (well known to be a young earth creationist) was presenting non-creationist paleontological research. At the end of Ross' talk, Meert challenged him to explain how it fit into the context of young-earth creationist flood geological nonsense (my paraphrasing).

I'm rather surprised that there were so many people criticizing Meert for giving Ross a hard time or having any sympathy toward Ross at all. I feel a bit sympathetic towards Ross, simply because he does appear to have a genuine case of "scientific schizophrenia", and it must be quite difficult to remember every morning which pair of shoes to put on (functioning academic versus crazy-time fairy tale).

Meert understandably gave Ross a hard time, and for primarily one reason: Ross et al. go back to their creationist audience and say "look, we're real scientists! Our research is valid." And then say the same thing to the Texas board of education (which already has enough medieval loonies on it).

I completely agree with Meert on this: Marcus Ross et al. represent everything we as scientists and educators stand against. I know there's this whole thing called freedom of religion. But, if outside of the sphere of academia you tell people "I'm a real scientist, so you can believe everything I say, including that the flood killed all the dinosaurs" - that's a really, really malicious ethics violation, let alone a conflict of interest. I'm not advocating blacklisting and witch-hunting - but it is safe to say that the way things work currently just isn't good enough.

Granted, I understand GSA must not have any sort of abstract reviewing process - all you need to know is if "Geology of Star Wars" made it into a GSA poster session, young-earth lunacy can as well.

Unfortunately for my field, there seems to be a lot of interest by young-earth creationists in whale taphonomy; that will be covered in upcoming posts. And what happens with regarding citations of this work? Can their work be considered reliable? It certainly cannot be considered objective by any stretch of the imagination. Do we ignore it and not cite it? Do we call B.S.? This is a real problem.

The Coastal Paleontologist will return!

Hey Folks - sorry for the hiatus; I've been rather busy dividing my time between excavating a whale from the Santa Margarita Sandstone, collecting thesis data on the coast, and spending the rest of my time on a beach at 6,000 feet - Lake Tahoe, of course. Sufficiently sunburned (not that bad) and with some neat fossils under my belt, I'll resume quasi-regular posting for the rest of the summer. Sorry for the break; next up - excavating a mysticete braincase from a construction site in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Away For Thanksgiving

Sorry about the lack of posts over the last week or so; in a few hours I will be flying to California for Thanksgiving break, and this time will have 8 days (and thus, another 10 days before I write on here again) - my longest Thanksgiving ever, I think. What's this mean for me? Well, obviously I'm going to eat a lot of turkey with some of my relatives (my favorite set of cousins will be there; awesome). However, Thanksgiving is the first iteration of my 'real' field season.


Every spring, all my friends get antsy and extremely excited for the summer field season with Museum of the Rockies; they spend about two or more months digging up dinosaurs in the badlands of Montana - usually the Judith River Formation and the Hell Creek Formation, and formerly the Two Medicine Formation (although a few camps have been there within the last few years).

Summer has a completely different meaning for me; there is very little erosion on the coast, and summer is typically a season of crowded beaches, traffic over highway 92 and 17, high school kids are out of class and go smoke pot on the beach (and usually sit right on the outcrop, and are too dumb to move). Beach sands typically accumulate during the summer, piling up ever higher, foiling any attempt at collecting material below the high tide line. The lack of rain and storm waves means that most exposures by now are coated with a healthy coat of dust and grime, rendering any possibility of spotting smaller shark teeth and bird bones improbable.

Winter, on the other hand, is my field season, albeit short. Winter storms clean the cliffs off, erode the cliffs, and strip sand off beaches, allowing collecting from the wave-cut platform and the base of the cliffs (sand movement during storm and fairweather usually abrades the portions of cliffs that are buried during the summer as well). Additionally, the cold temperatures drive away the throngs of people who flock to the boardwalk and Santa Cruz beach during the summer, which means all I have to deal with is rush hour traffic.

Winter obviously has its drawbacks; 1), it's cold; 2), it's rainy; 3) the hours are short; and 4), the reduced sand level (sand gets stored in offshore sand bars during the winter months) often means access to certain areas is much trickier, often requiring some creativity and flexibility (i.e. lots of climbing, boulder hopping, etc.). This winter is an El Nino event, which excites the hell out of me - some vicious winter storms this year would be awesome. Last winter was fairly lame (although the little rain we did receive made it easy to get out), although I did pick up a nice delphinoid odontocete skull and a partial Herpetocetus dentary. Winter 2007-8 was just amazing, however; a nearly complete Carcharocles megalodon tooth (the day before christmas, no less!), only the second known for the Purisima (and only one available to scientists for research - will be donated to UCMP in the next few months), as well as a 40-50% complete female fur seal skeleton, a juvenile Herpetocetus dentary, and a smattering of pinniped bones.

I wish I really could properly convey my excitement to you - Thanksgiving field trips are the prelude to the really good 'stuff', so to speak, although storms typically haven't cleaned the cliffs and lowered sand levels enough to be terribly different from summertime. However, the three months between summer and thanksgiving makes it seem that much more prolific. I'm also uber excited, because I will be visiting some old localities I haven't been to in a while.

On a final note, for the last three and a half years I've been working on a manuscript version of my undergraduate research project, which was the description and analysis of a new, probable late Pliocene assemblage in the Purisima Formation. In 2007 I sent a copy of this to a couple colleagues of mine (Frank Perry, Santa Cruz Museum of NH, and Chuck Powell, Menlo Park USGS); unfortunately, my writing skills were relatively poor at the time, the manuscript was incomplete, figureless, and had older 'chunks' from previous drafts embedded, much like an accreted terrane that is then subjected to regional metamorphism; a really ugly, foul smelling, nasty thing that no one should bother looking at (can't you tell I enjoyed metamorphic petrology?!).

Needless to say, after reading the revisions, I felt pretty guilty that I had bothered having them proofread it in the first place. In any event, I've spent the last month seriously reconsidering every word in the manuscript, and rewriting it piece-by-piece into a coherent piece of literature, complete with submission-ready figures; last night, I emailed it out (again), and hopefully this time there will be less 'red'. I showed up at our local sports bar (Spectators, my third home; second home being my apartment, first home being my office) and let the 60-page paper drop to the bar table with a resounding 'thud', which, oddly enough, drew applause from my (drunk) friends and a high five from my friend (Hi Christina!) who's going to proofread that copy. Within seconds, a red pen was already out, which had crossed out my last name and replaced it with "boogernecker". Thanks, guys.

Anyway - Happy Thanksgiving!

Summer Adventures Part 4: Paleo-themed tourist traps

Towards the tail-end of the summer my girlfriend flew out to California, and we took a road trip through the Pacific Northwest. Of course, we saw the typical roadside attractions in Northern California such as the "Legend of Bigfoot", "Confusion Hill" (home of the "Chipalope" - Oh yes, half chipmunk, half antelope[fixed really stupid typo!]), "One log house", "Tree House", and the big grand daddy of them all, the "Trees of mystery" - home of a 70' tall Paul Bunyan statue.

In Oregon, we stopped at a weird place called "Prehistoric Gardens" - basically, a bunch of outdated extinct reptile sculptures in the forest. Well, let's just say that it was only worth our money because of how funky some of the models looked and how bad/off the wall/totally insane some of the information was.

The tyrant king himself welcomes weary drivers in from the road.

The second weirdest depiction of Triceratops I've ever seen.

Pretty standard Ankylosaurus model.

Oh, no! A killer Elasmosaurus (w/ lens flare!) in the middle of the... forest?

This one really screwed with me. OK, I've heard this (obviously) for Oviraptor, but ornithomimids?

My brave companion facing the evil Pteranodon.

Cold blooded? Cretaceaus?

I don't want to know how an Ichthyosaurus made its way into the forest.

In Newport, Oregon, we found the trashiest tourist souvenir shops I've ever seen, which says a lot because I've been to Disneyland, Pier 39, and Fisherman's Wharf. What's worse, these were built right next to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, and named "Aquarium Square Shops" - completely misleading. Anyway, this was literally the first thing we saw when we made it to Newport - a big blue pliosaur.

They didn't even try with this one. They call it "Nessie", the "Yaquina Bay Sea Monster", and "Kronosaurus" all within 4 feet. What?! First off, Nessie is the Loch Ness Monster. Second, I've never heard of a Yaquina Bay Sea Monster (wouldn't be a bay monster?), and it is obviously a sick marketing ploy just like Tahoe Tessie (rhymes with nessie, but at least they bothered to put a 'T' on the beginning). They didn't even bother coming up with an original name (seriously, it doesn't take more than half a second to think of a name other than one used by an already established fake sea monster), AND they go ahead and call it Kronosaurus at the same time.

The coastal paleontologist is taking a 'break'...

My plan for the start of summer was originally to leave MT a week from today, and take a five day drive through the Pacific Northwest, and check out several fossil localities I'm currently investigating, and eventually meet my folks up in Tahoe before finally making it back to the SF area for summer (and master's thesis fieldwork).

To make a long story short, I got a phone call from my dept. head, and now I'm TA'ing our Geology Field Camp summer course. It's way awesome on several levels - 1), I finally have a job; 2) its an honor, knowing how much more qualified many of the other candidates are; 3) the same professors who taught the course when I took it are doing it again, which is great; and 4) It was a freaking blast when I took field camp, and had to turn in assignments. Instead, this time around I don't have any assignments to turn in, and have to help students toward the answer (which... I end up doing for free during the school year anyway). And I get to camp and drink beer around a fire and hike all day in the foothills of the Northern Rockies for a month (and in Yellowstone N.P.). Sounds like the perfect job for me!

In any event, now that I have a job 'till the end of June that entails being away from civilization for a week at a time (Awesome!), I won't have internet access. In any event... all of you should be out doing fieldwork by now (that is, if you truly deserve to be reading this!). Bottom line is, there probably won't be many posts in the next month, although if there are, they will probably be from field camp. I still have to post the rest of the pictures of the acid prep 'experiment'.

So get out there and measure some sections, and dig up something up!

Busy, busy, busy

Once again, there's been a lull in my free time available for this blog, so I apologize. I've had a great many things keeping me busy - being turned down by grants, getting grants, writing my SVP abstract coauthors, writing SVP travel grant applications so that I can go to England this year, putting together a powerpoint on toothed whales of the Purisima Fm. (I'll use much of the imagery for future posts) for our 4th annual Earth Sciences Colloquium, reading about the Proterozoic LaHood Formation and Carbonate depositional systems for class, attempting to organize the Colloquium, AND finishing my proposal by tommorrow. Luckily, 3/4 of all this is already done.

And with respect to the mystery fossil: the jury is still out, but Dave Bohaska made an interesting observation that it is similar to an odontocete vomer; it may be a highly abraded specimen. I'll have to see the originals again (I saw them over spring break; the collector wondered if I had made any progress - I shrugged).

There'll be a new post as soon as I get my proposal and colloquium presentations completed.

I have successfully navigated, conquered, and left the seventh level of hell

As in my first semester of graduate school, which was pretty damn tough, but a challenge nonetheless. In any event, finals are over, and my first real break from it has started... I... don't know what to do with all my free time! Its amazing... Anyway, expect more activity on here than what has been recently.

Happy finals!

Turkey Day!!!

Well, I'm about to leave for Thanksgiving week, and in a few minutes I'll be driving to the sprawling, gigantic Gallatin Field airport here in Bozeman (or should I say Belgrade). Anyway, it only has four gates, and can't service anything larger than a 737 (which it only does during the holidays).

I am super excited, mainly to see my family (who I haven't seen in several months), but also because of fieldwork - I have checked aerial photos, and there has been a LOT of coastal erosion, and it will only get worse (or in my case, better) between now and winter break.

You see, most paleontologists (here at MSU anyway) only get to their field areas in the summer, because its usually too damn cold to do so in the winter (although with a few Miocene land mammal spots around Bozeman, we've gone out in 20 degree weather before, and done jackets in 35 degree weather, with snow on the ground - we were really, really bored.... yeah...).

However, in California, it rarely dips below 45 degrees on the coast (and sometimes rarely above 55 in the winter), so it is possible to go out during this time of the year. However, in the winter, it is not only possible, it is usually far more productive as well. This is due to increased storm activity during the winter, and the increased chance of having cliff collapses (which really suck for the landowners above, who usually have pieces of their backyard now fifty feet lower, but is really good for me!). Also, during the summer the lack of extremely high tides and storms usually allows the cliffs to collect all sorts of dust, grime, and algae - storms during the winter usually clean off all this unsightly garbage, so that you can see clean, unweathered rock surfaces. I cannot begin to explain how much easier and more productive it makes collecting.

It also allows for the researcher to actually see sedimentary structures, and the detail of trace fossils (e.g. spreiten). Anyway, I have a good feeling about thanksgiving break, and a good feeling about winter break this year. Although I have no idea how I can top last winter break - a 40% complete fur seal skeleton (with partial skull), two partial odontocete skulls (one with partial skeleton, and a partial dentary), a 6" long Carcharocles megalodon tooth (aka bigass shark tooth), and a bunch of pinniped bones, bird bones, and shark teeth as icing on the cake.

I'll try to top that. I know I have at least one dolphin skull to excavate. Wish me luck, and Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Highlights from the Summer 2008 Field Season

While this blog is still in its infancy, I know I can say that most of my field seasons (whether they be summer or winter, or even spring break) cannot be summed up in one blog post.

Summer 2008 is the exception. The majority of summer 2008 was spent in a Calculus II course at College of San Mateo, hoping in vain (well... as I'm now a grad student... not completely in vain anyway) to pass. You see, I took Calc I at CSM the previous summer, and it proved to be a cakewalk, compared to the same class at MSU. At MSU, they use it as a weeder class to get rid of people who are mathematically retarded. In the case of MSU, there are a lot (and I mean A LOT) of engineering students, and our program is fairly strong here (whatever that means; I'll make negative comments about engineers in some other post in the future). So, that translates into a class that attempts to weed out engineering students. That would be fine, except that (GASP!) I am not an engineering student (thank god). You see, myself included, and many, many other paleontology students are plagued with being bad at math (I am actually rather proud that it is not intuitive; I guess I feel it shows that I'd rather think about things than play with a calculator or a slide rule all day [again, I'll save rant for later post]). In any event, Calc I here at MSU was practically impossible for me to pass. So I took it at CSM, and it really, really, REALLY paid off. I got taught the basics, and I passed.

Fast forward to Calc II. Calc II at MSU isn't so bad, but SVP 2007 kinda screwed that up last fall, so I dropped it, and then spring 2008 really kicked ass in Stats 332, without the prerequisite (thats right Dr. Boik, you asshat, I passed). So I expect a not-so-terribly-difficult time in Calc II. WRONG. I show up on the first day, and its this short dude with crazy white hair named Adolf Schender or some shit. Shortest Nazi I've ever met, anyway (and I knew a couple in high school).

He passes out the syllabus, and I shit you not, on the front it has a subtitle called "Student Learning Outcomes." Then, below it, instead of just numbering them, or having bullets, or dashes or something normal, it says SLO1. As in "student learning outcome 1." Then, SLO2, SLO3, SLO4, SLO5, SLO6, and SLO7. What the fuck? Are you kidding me? I don't even remember some of the nazi-ass instructors at MSU pulling that shit, and this was at a goddamn community college. Anyway, the douche (er dude I meant) was a total asshole the entire class, and to summarize it I passed, and ya, so fuck that guy.

Oh, right, fieldwork. So this stupid math bullshit ate up 90% of my time all summer; at least the prior summer (2007) the class got out at 10:30 am, so I could drive out to the coast and actually have a cool life. This summer, however, the class got out at 1; granted, sunset's at 8pm, so I could have gotten 7 hours of work in, but I kinda wanted to be with my family a little bit too, ya know? So I could pretty much only go out on the weekends.

Which is why I only made it out to the coast five times the entire summer; thats usually the number of trips I do in a week and a half. Next summer will be different, where I'll be staying down in Santa Cruz for 3-5 days at a time (master's thesis fieldwork).

So... in the attached photos, you should see a picture of a bone in situ, and a big shark tooth. The shark tooth is none other than Carcharodon carcharias, or the great white shark. The bone is a phalanx from some kind of walrus (possibly a Dusignathine, or double-tusked walrus). Besides these, my friend Kim Wendell found a very nice juvenile Herpetocetus petrosal (i'll be doing several posts in the future about Herpetocetus, fear not). There should also be a couple photos from my field area.

But... that was basically my entire summer. I usually found that amount of stuff in one or two day trips during the winter. It doesn't really matter, because I'll be going back and starting master's thesis fieldwork in a couple months, and will really be able to find some good fossils.

Hello world!

We'll see if I have enough time this semester to make this worthwhile. I hope to at least have one or two posts a week. We'll see, I guess!