US Research trip part 7: USNM ocean hall and hall of marine life exhibits

 I first visited the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in 2005 when I was an undergraduate, and didn't exactly have a great camera at the time. In the time being, the new Sant Ocean Hall has been installed, which includes a number of great exhibits on modern and fossil marine organisms. Here are a collection of photos I took in the Hall of Marine Life and the Sant Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian during my trip.

A beautiful mount of a sailfish (Istiophorus) in the new Sant Ocean Hall.

A sculpture of a northern right whale (Eubalaena japonica) in the Sant Ocean Hall.

A familiar face! This is a cast of the skull of the early toothed mysticete Llanocetus denticrenatus from the latest Eocene of Seymour Island, Antarctica. The skull was collected by Ewan Fordyce in Summer 1986 on an antarctic expedition. We have the original (and a cast) here in our department, currently under study by Ewan.

 The holotype mandibular fragment of Llanocetus denticrenatus, collected on an earlier expedition and named by Ed Mitchell in 1989.

A mounted cast of the skeleton of the Egyptian basilosaurid archaeocete Dorudon atrox.

A mounted skeleton of the Eocene protocetid archaeocete Maiacetus inuus from Pakistan. This is a cast of the male individual; the female - the "Good Mother Whale" - was found with the skeleton of a near term fetus inside.

A giant or Japanese spider crab, Macrocheira kaempferi, in the Sant Ocean Hall - nightmare fuel for my wife.

Dolly! Or, Dolichorhynchops as she's known to the marine reptile community. A 3-4 meter long short necked pliosaur.

Skeleton of the basilosaurid Zygorhiza from the Eocene of the southeastern US. It's about a 5 meter long animal with pretty gnarly teeth (as with all basilosaurids).

And here's the skull of Zygorhiza. It retains some primitive features, such as teeth below the orbit and heterodonty (teeth of different morphologies such as incisors, molars, etc), and several adcanced features like a posteriorly shifted bony naris and reduced hindlimbs.

The paratype skull of Diorocetus hiatus, described by Remington Kellogg in the 1960's, from the Calvert Formation of Maryland. I saw the holotype, and as mentioned in a previous post, parts of it are mostly sculpted.

Mounted skeleton of the strange Miocene pinniped Acrophoca longirostris from Peru. This long-snouted seal is well known from the Pisco Formation, and has something to do with the evolution of modern antarctic lobodontine seals.

An undescribed species of Spheniscus penguin, also from the Pisco Formation of Peru.

An early type of different flightless bird - a cast of Hesperornis, a very well known toothed swimming bird from the "middle" Cretaceous of North America, first described by O.C. Marsh from the Niobrara Formation.

Some pretty pencil urchin.

A preserved adult and juvenile coelacanth (Latimeria), a living fossil. For the uninitiated - coelacanths were known from the fossil record (Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous), but thought to have gone extinct at the K/Pg boundary along with nonavian dinosaurs and other groups (e.g. ammonites, mosasaurs); a live specimen was caught off South Africa in the 1930's.

US Research trip part 6: out and about in DC

As a US citizen it's pretty inspiring to walk around Washington DC and see all of these famous buildings and monuments in our nation's capitol. Unfortunately, while I did eat at this great diner across the street from Ford's Theater (where Lincoln was assassinated) I forgot to take some pictures. I also didn't get a chance to visit the house where The Exorcist was filmed, right in Georgetown. Either way, I saw plenty of other great stuff.

The white house! Being two weeks before the election, I was sincerely hoping that Obama would not have to move out soon.

Outside the White House. Maybe he was a Romney voter?

Looking down Pennsylvania Ave. towards the U.S. Capitol building.

The south lawn of the White House. Just to the left of this photo is Michelle's vegetable garden.

A look down Constitution Avenue from near the Washington Monument; the Department of Justice and IRS are based in these red-roofed buildings.

America! Flags next to the Washington Monument.

View west from the Washington Monument past the World War II monument and reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial.

Monument to Ulysses S. Grant, just west of the capitol building.

East side of the U.S. capitol building.

 

The national archives - they had an exhibit on the cuban missile crisis which I did not have time to visit. This is pretty close to the USNM, and I walked past this neat building every day to the metro station.

There was only one example of graffiti on the World War II memorial. This was a common graffiti cartoon that was done in Europe by GI's in random places. This example was intentionally engraved onto the WWII memorial.

The Lincoln Memorial - 8 hours before Hurricane Sandy made landfall.

The statue of Lincoln in the memorial.

The elegantly simple Vietnam memorial wall.

Congratulations: Hutton Award, several Ph.D. student publications in OU paleontology

Several other members of the paleontology group here at the University of Otago have made some recent advances in their research and careers that I felt should be noted here.

First and foremost, last month my adviser Ewan Fordyce was awarded the Hutton Medal in Geology by the Royal Society of New Zealand. The award is given annually to researchers for outstanding work on animal, plant, and earth sciences. Ewan's long standing (~30 years) focus on the paleontology of sharks, penguins, and cetaceans of New Zealand was recognized by this award, and it was quite a surprise for him.

R. Ewan Fordyce (left) after awarding of the Hutton Medal; Alan Musgrove (right) appeared in this university photo for the 2012 Humanities Aronui Medal. From www.otago.ac.nz

I would also like to congratulate my labmates Gabriel Aguirre, Carol Loch, Felix Marx, and Cheng Hisu Tsai for getting manuscripts accepted for publication. Gabriel just got a paper from his dissertation on a new fossil dolphin accepted in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology; Carol has gotten several papers regarding cetacean teeth accepted over the past few months in various journals (e.g. Marine Mammal Science, Zoomorphology); Felix has gotten a paper on mysticete phylogeny accepted; and Tsai has gotten a paper on Pleistocene gray whales from Taiwan accepted in the Paleontological Journal. As for myself - I just got something accepted too, so there's some nice icing on the cake. 

Congratulations to Ewan on the award all my labmates on their accepted papers - I'll discuss some of these papers in detail once they're out.

US Research trip part 5: fossil pinniped bonanza at the USNM

One of my alternative goals for research at the USNM was to photograph as many fossil pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walruses) as I could. The USNM has an unparalleled collection of fossil pinnipeds - primarily due to the efforts of my hero Douglas Emlong. In fact, most of the fossil pinnipeds in this post were collected in the 1960's and 1970's by Emlong. Emlong's collection has been very important for understanding the early evolution of pinnipeds, and has been utilized in many publications of new species and genera, functional analyses, and phylogenetic analyses.

A partial skull referred to Pinnarctidion rayi by Annalisa Berta (1994). Pinnarctidion was a tiny pinniped - although this specimen is a bit larger than the type, which I've shown below. 

A cast of the holotype humerus of the walrus Valenictus imperialensis from the Pliocene Imperial Group of southern California. This species of Valenictus is known only from the humerus, but another species from the coeval San Diego Formation (Valenictus chulavistensis) is known from multiple partial skeletons and skulls, which show that it lacked all teeth aside from the canines.

A cast of the holotype skull of Homiphoca capensis from the Pliocene of Langebaanweg in South Africa. At the time of my visit I had not anticipated seeing casts of foreign specimens like this, as I did not know about them beforehand - but finding them was certainly a welcome surprise. I had not yet seen a cast of Homiphoca; Homiphoca is a fossil monachine seal that has something to do with the evolution of leopard, ross, crabeater, weddell, and elephant seals.

A skull from the Emlong collection from the latest Oligocene/earliest Miocene of Oregon, referred to Enaliarctos mitchelli by Annalisa Berta (1991). The species was previously reported by Larry Barnes (1979) from the earliest Miocene Jewett Sand at Pyramid Hill in Kern County, California, based on a rostrum (holotype) and a palate (paratype).

A skull of the early pinniped Pteronarctos goedertae, referred by Annalisa Berta (1994). Berta synonymized two species with P. goedertae - Pteronarctos piersoni, and Pacificotaria hadromma, all from the Astoria Formation near Newport, Oregon. Pteronarctos was a late surviving enaliarctine and would have probably looked like a small sea lion.

While not explicitly a pinniped and may seem a bit out of place in the theme of this post, the "beach bear" or "oyster bear" Kolponomos newportensis is another marine carnivore, also collected by Doug Emlong. This specimen was found near what is now the Wal-Mart in Newport, Oregon. I believe that Kolponomos has something to do with early pinniped evolution; as I've pointed out in an earlier post, if the otter-like early Miocene Puijila darwini has anything to do with pinnipeds, then so does Kolponomos, because all of the cranial features linking Puijila to pinnipeds are also present in Kolponomos.

The tiny holotype skull of Pinnarctidion rayi, described by Annalisa Berta (1994) from the early Miocene Nye Mudstone of Newport, Oregon. This specimen was collected near the Kolponomos specimen above. Pinnarctidion is another enaliarctine pinniped, which in some phylogenetic analyses has cropped up near or as the most basal member of the Phocoidea (desmatophocid seals and modern earless seals). Pinnarctidion was originally described from the early Miocene Jewett Sand of Pyramid Hill, along with Enaliarctos mitchelli and Enaliarctos mealsi.

The large and beautiful holotype skull of Proterozetes ulysses, from the early Pleistocene Port Orford Formation of Oregon - also collected by Doug Emlong. The genus Proterozetes may or may not be a junior synonym of Eumetopias, the steller's sea lion - and it was originally mentioned as a new species of Eumetopias in the 1970's.

My labmate Yoshi Tanaka with the beautiful skeleton of Enaliarctos mealsi - also from Pyramid Hill, and also collected by Emlong - described by Berta et al. (1989). This fossil appeared in two counterpart slabs of a concretion, which were glued together with a ton of epoxy, and prepared out from both right and left sides and mounted on this slab. Although Yoshi is currently studying archaic fossil dolphins from New Zealand for his Ph.D., he studied primitive walruses from Japan for his master's thesis with Naoki Kohno and also has a research interest in fossil pinnipeds.

Finally, another pinniped that was not collected by Emlong: a cast of a skeleton of Acrophoca longirostris from the latest Miocene/earliest Pliocene Pisco Formation of Peru. A mount of the whole skeleton is shown right above the in-situ display; I'll include photographs of the mounted skeleton in a subsequent post.

An adorably sized partial left maxilla of the Pliocene walrus Ontocetus emmonsi (formerly Alachtherium) from the Yorktown Formation in North Carolina (Lee Creek Mine), described by Kohno and Ray (2008). This specimen shows that even derived walruses possessed enamel caps on their teeth, just at a very young age - in contrast to previous studies that have indicated the loss of enamel in odobenine walruses such as Odobenus, Valenictus, Ontocetus, and Protodobenus.

Another view of the referred skeleton of Enaliarctos mealsi.

Further Reading:

L. G. Barnes. 1979. Fossil enaliarctine pinnpeds (Mammalia: Otariidae) from Pyramid Hill, Kern County, California). Contributions in Science of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County 318:1-41

L. G. Barnes, C. E. Ray, and I. Koretsky. 2006. A new Pliocene sea lion, Proterozetes ulysses (Mammalia: Otariidae) from Oregon, U.S.A. Mesozoic and Cenozoic Vertebrates and Paleoenvironments 57-77

Berta, A. 1991. New Enaliarctos* (Pinnipedimorpha) from the Oligocene and Miocene of Oregon and the role of ‘enaliarctids’ in pinniped phylogeny. Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology 69:1–33.

A. Berta. 1994. A new species of phocoid pinniped Pinnarctidion from the early Miocene of Oregon. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 14:405-413

Berta, A., and Ray, C. E. 1990. Skeletal morphology and locomotor capabilities of the archaic pinniped Enaliarctos mealsi. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 10:141–157.

Berta, A., C.E. Ray and A.R. Wyss. 1989. Skeleton of the oldest known pinniped, Enaliarctos mealsi. Science 244:60-62.

Kohno, N. 2006. A new Miocene odobenid (Mammalia: Carnivora) from Hokkaido, Japan, and its implications for odobenid phylogeny.  Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 26:411–421.

N. Kohno and C. E. Ray. 2008. Pliocene walruses from the Yorktown Formation of Virginia and North Carolina, and a systematic revision of the North Atlantic Pliocene walruses. Virginia Museum of Natural History Special Publication 14:39-80

E. D. Mitchell. 1961. A new walrus from the imperial Pliocene of Southern California: with notes on odobenid and otariid humeri. Los Angeles County Museum Contributions in Science 44:1-28

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

Rapid seafloor decomposition of pig carcass (video)

As a vertebrate paleontologist, it's necessary to have a strong understanding of the manner in which modern animals decompose, as it can inform us of formative processes in the preservation of fossils. Fossils, after all, are all parts of dead organisms - and understanding the taphonomy - or "laws of burial" of modern and fossil organisms can guide us in interpreting the paleoecology of fossil species.

Here's a video that's been making its rounds on the science blogs from the deep sea experimental station VENUS, based at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Several forensic experiments have been conducted with the station, which is effectively a seafloor, remotely operated laboratory connected to the internet. The pigs were dropped off in the area, and an ROV docked at the seafloor station went out and brought the carcasses to the station.

Here's a fantastic video of a pig carcass being consumed by isopod and decapod crustaceans at roughly 90 meters water depth:



What exactly does this sort of data tell paleontologists? For starters, if you count the days, you'll see that a medium-sized vertebrate carcass (although small with regards to cetaceans) can be consumed and skeletonized in about a week. This could suggest that once a carcass reaches the seafloor, there may be little opportunity for the carcass to refloat, for example. In other experiments at the same site conducted during a period of lower dissolved oxygen, skeletonization took place only after 40+ days at the seafloor. So, there is quite a bit of variability, depending upon a number of factors.

For the taphonomically inclined, much of the observations from the VENUS forensic experiments have already been published by Gail Anderson:

Anderson, G.S. 2009. Decomposition and Invertebrate Colonization of Cadavers in Coastal Marine Environments. In J. Armendt et al. (eds), Current Concepts in Forensic Entomology, p. 223-272.

US Research trip part 4: National Air and Space Museum

And now for something completely different: planes and rockets! No trip to DC is complete without a visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, especially for those interested or fascinated by aviation history. Ever since watching "The Right Stuff" and Apollo 13 as a young boy, I've been fascinated by experimental aviation and space exploration.

The single most stunning piece in the museum: the Bell X-1, aka "Glamorous Glennis", flown by Chuck Yeager in 1947, and the first flight to really break the sound barrier. There are some other possible cases of the sound barrier being broken during World War 2 by German and British pilots during dives, but none of these included sustained flight over Mach 1.

The Spirit of St. Louis, flown by Charles Lindbergh for his 1927 non-stop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. In order to have improved center of gravity, the fuel tanks were placed in front of the cockpit - which also meant that no forward facing winshield could be used; Lindbergh navigated primarily from instruments, and a forward facing periscope was also installed.

The Apollo 11 command module capsule! They have it totally sealed off in plexiglass to keep heathens from touching it.

One of my favorite aircraft: the X-15, the grandson of the X-1. Both aircraft were carried while slung under the wing of a modified bomber like a giant bomb (B-29 mothership for the X-1, B-52 for the X-15), to be dropped off at high altitude; this was to conserve fuel which would normally be spent during takeoff. The X-15 not only set speed records at flying nearly 7 times the speed of sound, but also set altitude records, flying up to 100 km and past the Karman Line (i.e., officially into space). The shuttle program used a lot of the information generated by the X-15 later on during the 1970's.

A mockup of the Apollo-Soyuz test project in 1975, which ceremoniously 

marked the end of the space race.

A German V-1 'flying bomb' or 'buzz bomb', powered by a pulse jet engine; nearly 10,000 V-1s were fired from occuppied Europe at southeast England in 1944 and 1945.

The big brother of the V-1, the V-2 rocket, a short range liquid-propellant ballistic missile developed in Germany during the second world war. I've seen two of these: this rocket, and one at the British Military Museum in London.

Easily the sexiest aircraft in the museum: the Hughes H-1 racer, which Hughes flew himself and set world speed records in. The film "The Aviator" shows Hughes flying the H-1 during a flight in which he ran out of fuel and crash-landed; it was intended as a prototype and proof-of concept for next generation fighter planes, and Hughes later indicated he felt such military aircraft as the Japanese 'Zero' were ripped off from his plane. One of the innovations for this aircraft were flush rivets.