Fieldwork in North Otago

 A couple weeks ago Ewan invited fellow student Cheng-Hsiu Tsai and myself along on some fieldwork in North Otago. We drove up the coast on highway 1 (sounds eerily familiar to my usual routine in California!), while Ewan gave us a geological narration of the drive. For the uninitiated - New Zealand has historically been a source of scattered Oligocene and Neogene fossil cetaceans (and other marine vertebrates), and many early discoveries include the baleen whales Mauicetus parki, "Mauicetus" lophocephalus, "Mauicetus" waitakiensis, and "Mauicetus" brevicollis, the early odontocete Notocetus marplesi, the possible archaeocete Kekenodon onomata, and fossil penguins, sharks, etc. However, it was not until the 1980's when Ewan and his dedicated preparator Andrew Grebneff received a National Geographic grant to excavate more fossils - and since, there has been an explosion in the volume of Oligocene marine vertebrates (particularly cetaceans) from the South Island of New Zealand. Many of these localities are in North Otago and South Canterbury, but I won't give out any more detailed information due to the sensitivity of the localities.

 

We arrived at this first locality - a lime quarry - to meet up with 3rd year student (and part time fossil preparator) Nichole Moerhouse, who was collecting data for a research project on the depositional environment of the Kokoamu Greensand and the Otekaike Limestone. The Kokoamu Greensand is early Late Oligocene in age (~30-26 Ma), and is a relatively thin richly glauconitic sandstone overlying a temporally significant unconformity, which is angular in places. It gradually transitions to the latest Oligocene-earliest Miocene Otekaike Limestone (~25 Ma), which can be 'sandy' in places, and basally contains glauconite. The Kokoamu-Otekaike section represents an overall shallowing - glauconite can only form in relatively deep environments (at least deeper than 'middle' shelf) during very slow sedimentation), and a gradual transition from slow offshore glauconite-rich deposition to inner shelf/shoreface calcareous deposition with abundantly preserved invertebrates. For those less familiar with stratigraphy and sedimentology - this is a fairly straightforward and commonly encountered type of depositional 'sequence' in marine strata, and generally represents an initial deepening of the shelf (possibly due to the continental shelf being down-dropped due to tectonic subsidence, or an increase in sea level) and subsequent filling of the basin and sediment marching out onto the shelf from the shoreline. Understanding concepts like this is crucial to paleontology, as these processes are going to affect the preservation, abundance, and three dimensional distribution of fossils within a body of rock.

 

Here, Tsai climbs up an exposure of the Otekaike Limestone to look for cetaceans. This is the only photo my camera took that day - it's particularly finicky and doesn't like cheap batteries, unfortunately for my wallet.

 

Nicole and I looking at a fossil dolphin in the Otekaike Limestone - it's below Tsai's feet, who took the picture. Ewan had spotted this years before, and sent Tsai and I up to locate it. It was exposed when the original road bed to the quarry was dug out (what we're standing in), and in the time since, a lower road was dug (the trench can be seen to the upper right).

 

 A fossil baleen whale mandible! Unfortunately it was not in great shape, but there was a thin flat bone above it - which could be a maxilla, the large flat bone in the snout of a baleen whale. It may be worth excavating in the future. We found nothing else of note at this locality. We visited two other spots - at one of which I spotted what most likely is a partial jawbone from a small dolphin. At the third locality for the day, we walked around and found a few cetacean bone fragments, part of a penguin vertebra, a penguin coracoid, a swordfish vertebra, and part of a large shark vertebra. Ewan also found a partial cetacean earbone, part of which had been scraped away by heavy machinery. He went and fetched his special chainsaw - and after 45 seconds of work, had a block of sandstone with the earbone inside. I am extremely interested in bringing this excavation method back to the states, as it reduces the time spent excavating by 75% or so.

Next up: pictures from a hike into native New Zealand forest.

An Eocene pinniped? A critique of Diedrich (2011)

Several months ago I was kindly asked by Dr. Cajus Diedrich to remove this post. I have edited certain parts for content. Following the mantra that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", I've decided to leave the post up to inform those interested in fossil pinnipeds with a series of critical comments and observations regarding the "Eocene" seal. -R.W. Boessenecker, 11/28/2012

While I was in Montana enjoying my first christmas vacation with my in-laws, I got an email with an attached pdf of a new paper that had just been published. I had expected quite a bit of time to get some work done -after all, my wife and I were up there for a week and a half and her parents would be at work much of that time - and the weather was too poor to go and do anything outside. I had already expected to get some reading and writing done, so I was pleased to hear of the new publication. Once I saw the title page, though, I was immediately skeptical, and indeed - my skepticism did not go away once I was finished with the article. The title of the article was "The world’s oldest fossil seal record", and the abstract indicated that an Eocene seal - not just any pinniped, but a phocid seal - had been discovered in Germany. I was not familiar with the author, Cajus Diedrich, whose previous work has focused on other groups (Pleistocene carnivores, Triassic marine reptiles) - but I did remember reading an article by him revising placodont (you remember, those funky sauropterygian marine reptiles with big crushing teeth) paleoecology, suggesting that most placodonts were Triassic analogs of sea cows.

The skeleton of the dawn seal, Enaliarctos - the oldest known
bona fide pinniped. From Berta et al. (1989).

Before I go any further, I should summarize why exactly one should be skeptical of an Eocene pinniped. For starters, the majority (either by taxa or number of specimens, ~99%) of fossil pinnipeds are from the Miocene or younger strata. There are a handful of bona fide pinnipeds from the late Oligocene, though, which are represented by skulls. These include Enaliarctos tedfordi from the Yaquina Formation of Oregon (~28-25 Ma), and Enaliarctos barnesi from the uppermost Yaquina Formation or lowermost Nye Mudstone (~26-23 Ma, also Oregon). There are a bunch of other species of Enaliarctos known from the early Miocene and roughly 20-25 Ma in age, including Enaliarctos emlongi from near the Nye Mudstone-Astoria Formation contact in Oregon, Enaliarctos mitchelli (early Miocene Jewett Sand of California and Nye Mudstone of Oregon), and Enaliarctos mealsi from the Jewett Sand. Slightly younger fossil assemblages from the Astoria Formation, further upsection in the Newport Basin of Lincoln County, Oregon, show a mix of "enaliarctine" pinnipeds (Pteronarctos, Pacificotaria), two species of Desmatophoca, an early 'allodesmine', and the dawn walrus Proneotherium (Barnes, 1989; 1990; 1992; Barnes and Hirota, 1995; Kohno et al., 1995). Note that during the early Miocene in the North Pacific, yes - pinnipeds first start to diversify and different groups (e.g. non-"enaliarctines"), but most of these are either "enaliarctines", members of a wholly extinct clade (Desmatophocidae), or extremely archaic and "enaliarctine"-like members of extant clades (Proneotherium).

The femur of the dawn seal, Enaliarctos. This is Enaliarctos emlongi
from Oregon. From Berta (1991).

In other words, there aren't any crown-clade pinnipeds anywhere close to the Oligo-Miocene boundary. In the North Atlantic, the oldest known pinniped with diagnostic remains is Leptophoca from the middle Miocene Calvert Formation of Maryland, crania of which were described by Koretsky (2001). In fact, this is the oldest bona-fide and widely accepted record of fossil phocids. Irina Koretsky and Al Sanders published a paper in 2002 about partial fossil femora reputedly from the late Oligocene of South Carolina (I have discussed these specimens elsewhere). To summarize - these fossils are roughly 10 Ma older than Leptophoca and were presented as being 1) the oldest fossil phocids, and 2) evidence for pinniped diphyly. For the uninitiated, there have been several morphological hypotheses for pinniped evolution, and the diphyletic view states that true seals (Phocidae) are related to mustelids/musteloids, and sea lions (Otariidae) and walruses (Odobenidae) form a monophyletic clade (Otarioidea) and share a common ursid-like ancestor, having adapted to water separately from phocids. I won't go into it now, as the Eocene seal is totally separate from diphyly/monophyly. There are several problems with Koretsky and Sanders (2002) - 1) they did not examine femora of other Oligocene terrestrial mammals, and 2) the stratigraphic provenance of those specimens are questionable (see here for more on this). To summarize: late Oligocene pinnipeds consist of only a few diagnostic fossils from the North Pacific, and modern "family" level clades do not appear until a ways into the Miocene.

The femora of the alleged Oligocene seal. From Koretsky and Sanders (2002).

Phew, now that the introduction is done, I can talk about the paper. Diedrich (2011) published a partial, proximal femur fragment (just like Koretsky and Sanders 2002), from the Fürstenau Formation of Northern Germany, which is a Lutetian age shallow marine unit deposited on the southern margin of the pre-North Sea basin, roughly 45-49 Ma in age. So, we're not even talking latest Eocene and bordering on Oligocene - this is early middle Eocene, about 5 Ma before basilosaurids show up, just before protocetids evolve. The fossil itself is phosphatized and exhibits several borings, is missing the distal end, and has clearly been reworked (for the uninitiated: phosphatization can only occur on bones or sediment below the sediment-water interface, so a bone that is both phosphatized and abraded or polished by default has been reworked). It does look remarkably phocid-like: it lacks a fovea capitis for the teres ligament - a little pit on the femoral head. It also appears to genuinely lack a lesser trochanter (as opposted to being abraded or broken off) and is very anteroposteriorly flattened. All of these features are phocid or pinniped characteristics; the lack of a fovea capitis is a probable pinniped synapomorphy (Berta and Wyss, 1994). A lesser trochanter is absent in all modern and fossil phocids and the modern walrus, but present in all fossil walruses and modern and fossil otariids. Interestingly, these are all the same features listed by Koretsky and Sanders (2002) to identify their femora from the Oligocene of South Carolina. I'm not sure that erecting the name Praephoca bellunensis for this fragment of an element with dubious diagnostic utility was prudent.

The holotype femoral fragment of Praephoca bellunensis, the alleged
Eocene seal. From Diedrich (2011).

So far so good. When oddball fossils like this crop up - ones that just smell fishy - the best thing to do is to see if something could have gotten seriously screwed up between it leaving the ground and entering the annals of a journal. Reading the Materials and Methods, it goes through a long description of the large excavation conducted at Dalum, Germany, where the Fürstenau Formation is exposed. Buried toward the end of the Materials and Methods section, I found this:

"The femur illustrated in Figure 2 was actually found was actually found in these gravels during the 1980s, and has prompted a major program seeking to understand the biodiversity of marine vertebrates in Europe during the Eocene, in relation to that of the terrestrial vertebrates. This femur, together with all material from the 2011 excavations, is housed in the Shark Center at Bippen (SCB) in northwest Ger-many, a public visitor center and museum in the UNESCO- supported “Geo and Naturpark TERRA. Vita”."

So, it sounds like this started with the discovery of the fossil femur 25-30 years ago, and then the excavation was undertaken in May 2011. Who collected the fossil originally? I just don't know. Whoever it was - especially if was an amateur collector unfamiliar with local stratigraphy - do we know that they were able to positively remember the exact locality and horizon at which the fossil was collected? 25-30 years is a long time - and people often have unreliable memories, which is why most scientists can't afford to not write important things down. I have also met collectors who have admitted to intentionally making misleading statements to researchers about the locality and provenance of certain specimens, and I've met collectors who can't remember what they collected last week. To be clear, I know many collectors who know local stratigraphy very well and remember the exact location, time, date, etc. of a fossil collection. The same variable quality of memory exists within paleontologists - which is why we really must write everything down. To summarize, the stratigraphic provenance is poor, and it is not clear if the fossil really came from that locality or not. Secondly: the fossil is reposited at the "Shark Center at Bippen". Look it up - the only results are the pdfs of Diedrich's articles. I'm not sure where this place is, or who runs it.

Modern pinniped femora (from right to left - walrus, California sea lion, and harbor seal), arrow showing the position of the lesser trochanter. While it is reduced and absent in the modern walrus, it is present in nearly all fossil walruses for which femora are known (e.g. Imagotaria, Gomphotaria, Valenictus, Proneotherium).

An additional bit of interesting contextual data is a paper published on the results of the May 2011 excavation (Diedrich 2012), which yielded 13,690 shark teeth (!!!!), 206 ray teeth, a handful of other marine vertebrates, and two indeterminate mammal bones. Not even a single isolated seal tooth; my own field collecting suggests that you should find a tooth for every 5 pinniped bones or so, and perhaps a pinniped bone for every 10 shark teeth (Purisima Fm. data from my still unpublished Master's Thesis). So, where are they? There should have been hundreds of phocid fossils, and there aren't even any cetacean bones (probably because it's too old for archaeocetes; only a couple of protocetid and remingtonocetid specimens are known from Europe, and it's too early for basilosaurids). Cetaceans are almost always more common than pinnipeds in any given marine assemblage. It just doesn't add up.

Cladogram with fossil-calibrated molecular divergence dates, modified from Fulton and Strobeck (2010). This study isn't perfect by any means (and warrants further discussion on this blog), but is a hell of a lot closer to the mark than what Praephoca would do to this cladogram.

Another line of evidence are molecular divergence dates for pinnipeds, and the "fissiped" carnivoran fossil record. The most recent molecular divergence dates published by Fulton and Strobeck (2010) suggest an Oligo-Miocene divergence of basal pinnipeds (this is, however, based on Enaliarctos as a fossil calibration). The pinniped + mustelid divergence is in the latest Eocene, and the caniform divergence occurs just earlier in the early-middle Eocene. The earliest true carnivorans don't even appear until the Eocene, and the earliest possible Caniformia appear about 42 Ma - about 3 Ma after this alleged seal fossil. Purported pinniped sister taxa like Amphicticeps, Amphicynodon, Pachycynodon, and Allocyon don't show up until the Oligocene; apparently more pinniped-like taxa like Kolponomos and Puijila aren't even in the picture until the earliest Miocene. Just on grounds of parsimony, given the ranges of these other taxa - this record should be considered suspect. Accepting Praephoca at face value, and putting it into a phylogeny would 1) telescope nearly all cladogenesis within the Caniformia ~30 million years earlier than previously thought, and 2) add dozens of ghost lineages for nearly every caniform clade across the entirety of the Oligocene and halfway across the Eocene, at that. Where are all the fragmentary scraps of the dozens of other crown-clade carnivorans in the early Eocene? They just don't exist, although they would be a natural consequence of having phocids in the Eocene.

On the other hand, I am glad that the study got published, because it gives us something interesting and controversial to talk about it - just as long as molecular systematists don't take it too seriously. This is a nagging worry, as I've seen in happen before (e.g. the Milinkovitch 1993 hypothesis, which I will talk about another time). In all seriousness - there are a number of problems with the work of Diedrich (2011), and should not be taken at face value. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - a busted up femur that may or may not be from a phocid seal and may or may not have been collected at the same site which later produced nearly 14,000 vertebrate fossils and not a single other pinniped element is not extraordinary evidence. 

References/further reading:

L. G. Barnes. 1989. A new enaliarctine pinniped from the Astoria Formation, Oregon, and a classification of the Otariidae (Mammalia: Carnivora). Contributions in Science 403:1-26

L. G. Barnes. 1990. A new Miocene enaliarctine pinniped of the genus Pteronarctos (Mammalia: Otariidae) from the Astoria Formation, Oregon. Contributions in Science 422:1-20

L. G. Barnes. 1992. A new genus and species of middle Miocene enaliarctine pinniped (Mammalia, Carnivora, Otariidae) from the Astoria Formation in Coastal Oregon. Contributions in Science 431:1-27

L. G. Barnes and K. Hirota. 1995. Miocene pinnipeds of the otariid subfamily Allodesminae in the North Pacific Ocean: Systematics and relationships. The Island Arc 3:329-360

Berta, A. 1991. New Enaliarctos* (Pinnipedimorpha) from the Miocene of Oregon and the role of "Enaliarctids" in Pinniped Phylogeny. Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology 69.

A. Berta. 1994. New specimens of the pinnipediform Pteronarctos from the Miocene of Oregon. Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology 78:1-30

C. Diedrich. 2011. The world's oldest fossil seal record. Natural Science 3(11):914-920.

C. Diedrich. 2012. Eocene (Lutetian) Shark-Rich Coastal Paleoenvironments of the Southern North Sea Basin in Europe: Biodiversity of the Marine Furstenau Formation Including
Early White andMegatooth Sharks. International Journal of Oceanography doi:10.1155/2012/565326

T. L. Fulton and C. Strobeck. 2010. Multiple fossil calibrations, nuclear loci and mitochondrial genomes provide new insight into biogeography and divergence timing for true seals (Phocidae, Pinnipedia). Journal of Biogeography 37:814-829

N. Kohno, L. G. Barnes, and K. Hirota. 1995. Miocene fossil pinnipeds of the genera Prototaria and Neotherium (Carnivora; Otariidae; Imagotariinae) in the North Pacific Ocean: Evolution, relationships and distribution. The Island Arc 3:285-308

I. Koretsky. 2001. Morphology and systematics of Miocene Phocinae (Mammalia: Carnivora) from Paratethys and the North Atlantic region. Geologica Hungarica Series Palaeontologica 54:1-109

Koretsky, I.A. and A.E. Sanders, 2002. Paleontology of the Late Oligocene Ashley and Chandler Bridge Formations of South Carolina, 1: Paleogene pinniped remains; the oldest known Seal. Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology 93: 179-183.

Rybczynski, N., Dawson, M.R., Tedford, R.H. (2009). "A semi-aquatic Arctic mammalian carnivore from the Miocene epoch and origin of Pinnipedia". Nature 458 (7241): 1021–24

R. H. Tedford, L. G. Barnes, and C. E. Ray (1994). "The early Miocene littoral ursoid carnivoran Kolponomos: Systematics and mode of life". Proceedings of the San Diego Society of Natural History 29:11-32.

X. Wang, M. C. McKenna, and D. Dashzeveg. 2005. Amphicticeps and Amphicynodon (Arctoidea, Carnivora) from Hsanda Gol Formation, Central Mongolia and phylogeny of basal arctoids with comments on zoogeography. American Museum Novitates 3483:1-57

New Zealand Eomysticetidae - first look

Starting in the late 1970's and early 1980's, Dr. R. Ewan Fordyce received a grant from National Geographic to start conducting extensive fieldwork on the South Island of New Zealand in search of Oligocene cetaceans and other marine vertebrates. Incidentally, non-cetaceans such as abundant penguins, sharks, and bony fish were collected as well. This fieldwork was not limited to the Oligocene, but also included forays into Paleocene, Eocene, and Miocene localities. Over the past 30 years, Ewan has established a massive collection with an astonishing number of beautiful cetaceans. Not only are these fossils beautiful in terms of their preservation, but many of them are extremely bizarre, and the assemblage as a whole includes squalodontid, squalodelphinid, ?dalpiazinid, kentriodontid, and waipatiid odontocetes, as well as several types of baleen whales (toothed mysticetes, Mauicetus and similar "cetotheres", eomysticetids, and others), and even late surviving archaeocetes. Some of these cetaceans have been described, including Waipatia and an eocene archaeocete (Zygorhiza sp.), and several other taxa are on their way to being described.

I first met Ewan in 2005 at the SVP meeting in Arizona, and I vividly remember watching him discuss how to excavate fossil whales with a chainsaw, of all things; I immediately thought it was too extreme of an excavation method for me, but after I saw it in action last monday in the field (ironically, at the same quarry the photographs from the 2005 presentation), I immediately decided I would bring this method back to the United States. In fact, it was quite funny after watching him rev up the chainsaw - an adrenaline-inducing activity in and of itself - and afterwards stating in a polite Kiwi accent "that should clean up quite nicely".

But I digress - prior to graduation from Montana State University last spring, I contacted Ewan about a Ph.D. project, and he suggested studying the large collection of eomysticetid baleen whales from the Kokoamu Greensand and Otekaike Limestone that he had established. I remembered his talk from the 2006 SVP meeting in Ottawa, part of which included a slideshow of beautiful new fossil eomysticetids. I was pretty shocked to have been offered such a beautiful (and large!) collection of fossils to study. The family Eomysticetidae was named by Al Sanders and Larry Barnes in 2002 to accommodate the new taxon Eomysticetus, which is the most primitive described toothless baleen whale (i.e. baleen-bearing baleen whale, if that makes any sense, as opposed to a toothed baleen whale). Previously, the most primitive toothless mysticetes were some of the "cetothere" whales described by Remington Kellogg from the Chesapeake Group on the east coast, AKA "Kelloggitheres"; these however were much younger than any toothed mysticete (such as aetiocetids), and there was an apparently substantial morphological gap between toothed mysticetes and Kelloggitheres. My job is to fill a bit more of this gap in with more eomysticetids from the southern hemisphere- and so far, none of them seem to be identifiable as Eomysticetus, and there are probably several new genera and species represented.

Ewan Fordyce also took on another student recently, which was a total surprise for me. Even when I first got here, it sound like it would be several months away; instead, the new student arrived only two weeks after I did, and even stayed in the same temporary apartment my wife and I stayed in the first week we were here. Cheng-Hsiu Tsai, who goes by just 'Tsai', will be studying the other big group of fossil mysticetes from the Oligocene of New Zealand: Mauicetus and Mauicetus-like mysticetes, which may be the earliest Kelloggitheres. Tsai can be seen inspecting the ventral side of one of the eomysticetid skulls in the above photo.

This specimen, for example, is one of my dissertation specimens: a new taxon, with an extremely narrow rostrum, elongate dentaries, enormous temporal fossae with a long intertemporal region, and really weird squamosals.

Yours truly, examining the extraordinarily freaky squamosals of the specimen.

Tsai, demonstrating the proper way to photograph a mysticete skull.

Yours truly, demonstrating how to use yourself as a scale bar. I am 5'8" tall.

The beautiful skull in oblique view.

Tsai examining the skull. The brass seam on the floor is actually a joint where the floor opens for a small elevator used to bring large fossils up from the basement. On thursday, I spent most of the afternoon lifting a really really heavy plaster jacket a total of about eight feet - this ordeal took about an hour and a half, three other students, Ewan, and our preparator, Sophie. Fortunately, when the jacket is prepared, it will hopefully be a lot lighter when it goes back downstairs.

Visit to the Otago Museum

I know there are some readers of this blog who have patiently waited and waited for pictures of beautiful Oligocene marine mammal fossils - to you I say, sorry for the delay. I'm going to try and get several blog posts written this weekend so I can post them incrementally. This one will mostly be in 'slideshow' format.

I've been fairly busy since I got here, and I've bordered on stress trying to figure out 1) where all the eomysticetid specimens are in collections, 2) which earbones belong to which skull or skeleton (just taking a while to become familiarized with the specimen numbers), 3) trying to make some sense out of the earbones and trying to group them based on consistently seen characteristics (and I have made a bit of headway), and 4) just generally trying to figure out how many taxa I am dealing with and thus 5) how many manuscripts/dissertation chapters this will end up making. Since I've finally made some headway and started describing the first material (a partial skull with earbones and a very partial postcranial skeleton), I've relaxed a bit and can allocate time to other activities. That being said, I'm also locked out of the building for four days due to construction/maintenance activities in the building. Fortunately, this will give me an opportunity to divert some time to my Pelagiarctos study with Morgan Churchill. Also, in other news - I finally finished up my massive manuscript describing an entire marine mammal assemblage from a locality in the Purisima Formation, which resulted in being just over 200 double spaced pages long with 45 figures; Felix Marx graciously offered to take a look, as did Ewan Fordyce. I have a bit of work left cleaning up some figures, but it should be submittable soon.

A spectacularly beautiful dalpiazinid dolphin! Look at those damn teeth! There's another specimen with even crazier incisors, and a full dentition, and jaw.

An archaic edentulous mysticete which may fall somewhere on the cetacean family tree near eomysticetids. This specimen will be part of my dissertation.

The holotype skeleton of the giant moonfish Megalampris keyesi. This set of slabs is seriously about 15 feet long and about 8 feet wide. Described by Gottfried et al. 2006.

A disarticulated skeleton of a squalodelphinid dolphin. My labmate and office mate Yoshi Tanaka is studying squalodelphinids for his dissertation (although their skulls are in better shape than in this specimen).

A partial skeleton of the giant shark Carcharocles angustidens, described by Gottfried and Fordyce (2001). Believe it or not, this specimen was found above the dolphin and moonfish skeletons in the same quarry; the shark was found first, and underneath they ran into dolphin bones; below that, they started seeing fish bones (from what turned out to be a truly monstrous fish). They called the shark Carcharodon angustidens instead, as Mike Gottfried is in the Carcharodon camp; that's fine, we all get along pretty well. Mike will be visiting University of Otago for paleo research in May, which will be a great opportunity to catch up.

Detail of the big, beautiful teeth of Carcharocles angustidens.

Beautiful jaw fragment of the undescribed squalodelphinid from the block photographed above.

The skull of the "Shag Point Plesiosaur", now known as Kaiwhekea. That's pronounced "Ky-feh-key-uh"; one Maori pronunciation is "wh" as an 'f'.

The holotype skeleton of Kaiwhekea; yes folks, that's all one gigantic concretion that is ~20 feet long. It took a crew of 3-6 to collect those blocks over the course of a month (each day).

More photos will be coming soon!

The Passing of Frank C. Whitmore, Jr.

The preeminent mammalian paleontologist Frank C. Whitmore, Jr. passed away at the ripe old age of 96 within the past few days. Whitmore is well known to the marine mammal paleontology community for his long standing research interests in fossil cetaceans, and I find myself regularly reading, re-reading, and citing his work over and over again (and it will probably stay as such for the duration of my career). Unfortunately, I never got to meet him in person, but many other older "students" of fossil marine mammals have - check out the link below for Butch Dooley's remembrance of Frank, which includes some biographical details.

Two fossil cetaceans were named after him in his honor: the large squalodontid Squalodon whitmorei, and the early toothless mysticete Eomysticetus whitmorei.

http://vmnhpaleontology.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/in-memoriam-frank-whitmore-2/#more-3989

Making the Move, Part 2: sights and sounds of Dunedin

Welcome from New Zealand! Kia Ora. We don't quite yet have internet at our house, so I'm typing this up on my nearly embarassingly small HP mini laptop on the wireless connection at the library on the U. Otago campus (the most spectacular library I've ever been in, might I add). Our lack of an internet connection is the reason that this post had to wait nearly two weeks; we initially had an internet connection at the flat we were staying at in City Centre, but after only 5 days we found a house we liked. We arrived on monday, and within 24 hours we had already checked out our first apartment (a bit of a dump and way too far from campus). We checked out another flat on wednesday - also a bit far, but it had an incredible view - but there was no grocery store within a mile, and it was up a flight of 300 stairs or so, and no access road you could ride a bike on (and up a huge hill). Thursday we checked out two places - one was a flat without a garden but a nice view, also on a huge hill, with no groceries - and the fourth place was a whole house with a cute yard, large windows, and only a little over a mile from campus (~25 min walk, 10 min bike ride). The house had a nice view (of a hillside, but not the harbor... or perhaps harbour), and after thinking about it for a bit, we decided to take it. And thus, we had found a great house and had completely moved in during our first week (in fact, on day 5 we signed the lease).

This post will be brief, but shows a bunch of pictures from our first day or two of sightseeing. Parts of it feel a bit like Europe, which is great, and many other aspects are totally unique or perhaps more like the US (Kiwis in particular are decidedly un-European, and have a familiar carefree, relaxed attitude that I am used to along parts of the California coastline). Anyway, enjoy the photos - the next post will have pictures of the Otago campus, which is just about the most beautiful college campus I have ever set foot upon, and I hope the next post will elicit much
jealousy from my friends and colleagues in the states...

I can't remember the official name of this building, but it is basically the city hall of Dunedin.

A cathedral next to city hall, at the Octagon.
A view down Maitland Street where we were staying our first week. South Dunedin and the southern ocean is off in the distance.

A view down another street I can't remember, instead looking a bit east, showing Vauxhall in the distance and the Otago Harbour.

How weird - I flew nearly as far away from California and my field area as you can get, and I find a bike from the Marin Bicycle Co. called the "Drakes beach" model...

The Cadbury Factory, the chocalatey center of Dunedin, and the center of all Cadbury related operations in New Zealand.

I think this was the local courthouse. It's near the famous train station.

The famous Dunedin Rail Station. What a beautiful building! This is the starting point for the Taieri Gorge rail trip.

The other side of the Dunedin Rail Station. It reminds me a bit of the tracks at Bristol Temple Meads station, just scaled down and smaller.

Sarah on board one of the trains. A Taieri Gorge train, perhaps?

This pretty building had a no-nonsense sign labelling it as the "Dunedin Prison". I expected it to be historical, and maybe some sort of museum, until we peeked around the side and saw all sorts of concertina wire.

A really cool church in Dunedin - I believe this is the First Church of Dunedin. Don't ask me what denomination, I don't write that sort of stuff down.

Lastly, the Speights Brewery! I've already enjoyed my fair share of the local brew favorite, Speights "Distinction", which is pretty damn tasty. I was also surprised to find myself in cider country, which was a wonderful discovery much as it was during my 2009 SVP trip to Bristol, England - which is also located in cider country. And damn, that stuff is stronger and tastier than I remember...

Making the move: 30 hours to the bottom of the world

Well folks, we made it! Six months of preparations finally culminated in our flight and successful move to the South Island of New Zealand. We left Saturday evening from SFO, and arrived on Monday afternoon (skipping sunday because of the International Date Line). So far, we've been here for three days, and already we have managed to pick up cell phones, open a bank account, get my registration started, check out four houses/apartments (and choose one!), explore campus, and have been able to explore a bit of the town. We've been walking anywhere from 3 miles a day to 7 miles (today, for example) and it has been quite the adventure. Here are some photos from the plane flight to start off, and later I'll show another post with pictures of the town, and another with pictures of campus to make everyone reading this from US university jealous (yes, everyone). The Otago U. campus has to be the most spectacular college I have ever seen.

My brother and our large pile of checked and carry on bags. Some were way too heavy, and we needed to move some stuff from my heavy bags into Sarah's lighter bags.

Well, crap. There's a long way to go still... taken on the flight to Auckland from SFO. This flight lasted 13 hours, and we had a 9.5 hour layover, and a second 2 hour flight to Dunedin.

Now you can see how little time I had to prepare for this, due to trying to wrap up various research in California: I did not get a chance to read this book (kindly lent to us by fellow student Gabriel Aguirre-Fernandez) until I got onto the plane to New Zealand.

Yes, that is Richard Simmons about to tell us to "Blow and Blow". While the Richard Simmons bit was a bit intense and totally off the wall, this had to be the most entertaining airline safety video I've ever seen.

My wife, excited at the possibility of seeing penguins, watching Happy Feet 2 on the plane.

Dawn at the Auckland Airport, 5:00 am.

Pushing the cart of carry on luggage to the domestic terminal, which is located about a half mile from the international terminal - you're supposed to follow the green line. After sitting and sweating and feeling nasty for 13 hours, it was nice to get outside in the night air and move our legs.

Finally on our second flight! This is looking southwest over the entrance to a large bay near Auckland, on the North Island.

On the ground in Dunedin! Seriously, 1/3 of the stuff - including both suitcases coming down that ramp - are ours.

The driver's on the wrong side! This will still take a bit of time to get used to. Gabriel was kind enough to pick us up from the airport and drive us in to town, although I'll admit he had a pretty terrified look on his face when he saw how many checked bags we had to pick up.