minor musings on the macrocosm
Whilst yez all labor over IDs for the last post here’s some more fore yez:
all rotten and laced with clues. and bacteria.
POSTSCRIPTO: Apologies for the subliterate turn, sadly it’s not the first time. It’s metaphorical. It’s a coping mechanism. My lease on blogging is neither new nor transferable.
In the incursive preamble we spiroambulated about the corpses of mummified dinosaurs, pickled pelicans, time and a piss-covered pseudo-esker of rock, rock salt and dust. So, what does all of this have to do with experimental taphonomy?
I am, of course, a Nor-Cal-ian, and so, a HUGE hyphae fan. Needless to say, this new brevium by Schmidt, Dörfelt and Perrichot, Carnivorous Fungi from Cretaceous Amber, in last week’s Science leaves me deeply stoked.
I mean, come on. Just, try asking most people to name their favorite fossil fungus (no, Ediacarans don’t count). Well, actually we’re still out of luck since the authors don’t hazard a Christening beyond noting that the fossil fungus is unlike modern nematode-trappers. May I humbly suggest:
“Keakdasneakmyces bowensis“?
So, in summary: Nematophagous fungi are A) totally terrifying (if you’re a nematode), E) totally indispensible (if you like eating vegetables), X) totally rad (in general) 4) have a fossil record going back to the Cretaceous. There are awesome diagram-laden websites, movies &c.
Yadadadig?
Postscript: Just slightly off topic, but anyone unfamiliar (or familar for that matter) with the awesome and terrifying beauty that is Cordyceps should check out this post by Neurophilospher.
postscript to the postscript – formatting issues are now solved. sorta. also var. typos.
She’s a love mummy.
Okay, okay. So we all know that it’s a “seclusion” of embiopterans, a bazaar of guillemonts, a blessing of unicorns etc. But what do you call a group of mummies? Why, a malodor of course! Or, wait maybe that’s skunks (six cents to the first person who can come up with the collective noun for skunks without using Google).
Well, whatever it is we need it what with the announcement of yet another dinosaur mummy. Of course, the use of the term “mummy” to describe these exquisitely well-preserved dinosaurs is something of a misnomer since the mode of preservation here has nothing to do with Egyptian mortuary practices. I only wonder why they didn’t rush the press release out in late October (hint hint to anyone sitting on an unpublished volant cervid).
Given the choice, I’d be rather more excited about a “mummified” crurotarsan, or pterosaur, or amphisbaenid, or oligochaete or, well just about anything besides another hadrosaur but hey, nobody asked me. And, it’s a great excuse to re-run my “Wide-open blood-spattered Trachodon” shown above. I did that with a computer.
If you mistakenly arrived here looking for an intelligent discussion of a breaking paleontological discovery, please accept my apologies. And may I direct you to When Pigs Fly Returns or Pondering Pikaia?
That is all.
A revisit to the beach which inspired the original, barely readable, post (Where Has All the Carrion Gone?) proved again that the Lost Coast, south of Pt. Mendocino CA is a great place to die. Or at least a great place to have your carcass wash up.
Deceased White Pelican, Pelecanus erythrorhynchos, on the north shore of Great Salt Lake.
About 100 meters from Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty”, I once stumbled across this pickled pelican. Interestingly, others have noted (1, 2) a scattering of dead pelicans around the large earth and rock spiral artpiece which juts out from the north shore of the Great Salt Lake. In fact, there are even Flickr photos of what appears to be a different individual. Large colonies of nesting White Pelicans on nearby islands are the presumed source of the dessicated cadavers, which might float some distance across the lake until being left high and dry by receding waters.
These salt mummies are oddly appropriate accents to an art piece concerned with time and permanence. In fact, Smithson’s 1970 film about Spiral Jetty even includes a sequence with the ‘Trachodon mummy‘, an exceptionally preserved 65 million -year-dead hadrosaur fossil discovered by Charles Sternberg in 1908, which you can see for yourself. In the just barely under-the-top scene1, Smithson uses a spooky blood-red filter to turn the natural history museum into something out of Hostel part II.
Smithson’s intent would seem to be to forge a direct link between the silent testimony of the fossil and his own attempt to reify time (that’s right, I said ‘reify’). I wouldn’t give either the pelican or the jetty good odds at sticking around for 65 million years, although in retrospect, who could have said the Edmontosaurus would?
Smithon’s construction has undergone several briny baptisms which have left an aura (or perhaps crust is a better term) of agedness that belies the fact that it was constructed, geologically yesterday. The pelican, conversely, has been preserved in a state of arrested decay, spared the instant deconstruction fated most no-longer metabolizing clots of nitrogen and carbon.
Both strike the addled visitor as rather insignificant blemishes on the gleaming crystalline flats. But in a sea of uniformity, blemishes catch the eye.
Wait a minute, didn’t I promise a ‘sciencey’ post? Don’t worry we’re getting there…maybe.
1 – Actually, I haven’t seen this film since college. It might not even be Sternberg’s ‘trachodon’ in the movie, but it’s something like it. There is a clip on youtube. It’s not the hadromummy scene, but one with a vaguely chilling foreshadowing of Smithon’s death in a plane crash while surveying another piece in Texas.
Let’s set aside strange phallic flowers and take up small gray birds with snicker-inducing names.
So, here’s most beautiful bird #6, the celebrated Lava Beds Titmouse, Baeolophus something-or-other. To many, it may be be a dicky bird. To William Gambel it would have been a plain-old Plain Titmouse, which was good enough until 1996. For the contemporary birder, it’s something of a headache.
It’s rather easy to overlook the dead, they don’t move much and they hardly have anything to say. Nevertheless, it’s an apparent truism that there are not enough bird carcasses lying around, compared to the shitstorms of flocking pigeons, starlings, spugs and whatever other avian excretory plagues defile our coveted personal transport systems. AÖrstan recently parsed this question over at Snail’s Tales.
One explanation for the dearth of dead bird carcasses rests upon the ability of necrophages to quickly process latent biomass into food. There is undoubtedly much truth to this, and I loath to think of wading through a world without scavangers and decomposers.
The Snail’s Tales post led me to A Snail’s Eye View of dipteran remediation complete with some beautiful fly graphics of calliphorids that “appear from nowhere” (spontaneous generation!) and the aptly named sarcophagids like those fornicating on the shovel handle above.
I argue that this is only part of the story.
Anyone who hikes with dogs is aware that there is no shortage of carrion in various states of rereification out there:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiq07L-CQaM]
Though we were able to keep Clyde from downing the above wriggling protein-fest, he soon arrived with another partially decomposed rodent proudly clenched in his jaws. He also rustled up some quasi-disarticulated Mule Deer limbs on the same hike. I probably ought to chalk up my queasy GI sentiments about eating carrion not to any moral superiority on my part, but to Clyde’s superior constitution1.
Early on, it would seem that Homo was an opportunist par excellence, surely not shying away from a free meal. Yet somewhere along the way tools or culture or behavior weakened our stomach and we lost the taste for a nicely ripened marmot carcass with good maggot marbelling.
How exactly our digestive weakness, or disgust, got cross-mapped across onto our regard for various “non-normative” sexual behaviors will be the territory for future enlightened generations of neuro-historians2, and perhaps also the subject of a few well earned chuckles, though I’m betting it had something to do with death and maybe Catholics.
Anyway, anyone with open eyes is likely to observe a number of dead birds across their daily transects whether in city or country3. On a recent trip down I-5 I counted no fewer than six dead owls, mostly Tyto alba probably. Carel accounts 27 dead Longears along a Nevada highway and I wonder how many I missed. There are many dead raptors to be seen along our “rights-of-way” drawn in no doubt by the car-killed carrion buffet and perhaps by the unintentional baiting of rodents et al. by cast off tasty morsels.
Birds fly, make noise, aggregate in large numbers…they’re remarkably conspicuous animals. It’s notable that there are a lot more birders out there than mousers or lizarders or spiderers. But when they die they’re a bit more crytpic.
I imagine that the main source for the discrepancy is our general disregard for the dead animals we step over and around everyday without a second thought. A flattened Rock Dove is much easier to overlook than one flapping about. We generally don’t go hunting for the thousands of half-rotten starlings littering our alleys and gutters and chimneys so we should be wary of assuming their absence.
1- Of course, Clyde is no stranger to pleasures of the hunt. Moments after I took the top photo, and seconds after frolicking joyfully in the surf,
Clyde stalked and killed the first of two vertebrates he’s dispatched in the eight months since we’ve had him. The victim was a shorebird probably much akin to the mummmy found in the sand. I don’t think it was a Snowy Plover. Still, I feel terrible about it.
From Miki Malör’s Vampyroteuthis infernalis (left) shipboard photo by Carl Chun (right)
Via, Pharyngula, please watch this National Geographic clip on the Vampire Squid.
Careful viewers will note the “LF” bomb dropped liberally within the narration. Darren Naish recently skewered the “living fossil” moniker as a tag for the hirsute Sumatran Rhino regarded by others as a throwback to the days when large wool(l)y quadrapeds tramped across Eurasia.
“Living fossil” has been used to describe taxa with lengthy fossil records (sharks and crocodilians), phylogentically isolated taxa (Ginkgo) and taxa with previously widespread but now highly restricted distributions (Sphenodon), taxa with presumed primitive or highly conserved morphologies (Monotremes, horseshoe crabs), and taxa previously known only from the fossil record (Coelocanths, Metasequoia). Note that many of the groups listed may also fit some or all of the other various connotations.
Chuck D himself deployed the term In The Origin,
…All fresh-water basins, taken together, make a small area compared with that of the sea or of the land; and, consequently, the competition between fresh-water productions will have been less severe than elsewhere; new forms will have been more slowly formed, and old forms more slowly exterminated. And it is in fresh water that we find seven genera of Ganoid fishes, remnants of a once preponderant order: and in fresh water we find some of the most anomalous forms now known in the world, as the Ornithorhynchus and Lepidosiren, which, like fossils, connect to a certain extent orders now widely separated in the natural scale. These anomalous forms may almost be called living fossils; they have endured to the present day, from having inhabited a confined area, and from having thus been exposed to less severe competition. (Darwin 1859)
Darwin may be missing the mark here, life in fresh water lakes was apparently no impediment to the rapid radiation of Cichlids. The deep ocean has seemingly been a better archivist of living evolutionary history.
Neopilina was dredged from 3000 m, in one unsung evolutionary victory, validating and challenging platonic notions of mollusc evolution. Crinoids and brachiopods trade worn jokes filtered from the detrital rain of the upper-world. Vampire squid have held on to their old-time neocoleoid relijun. Archea, so named, bear their chronic burden at the interface of earth and sea. Or maybe not.
Evolution is a complex process played out within the spaces between innumerable overlapping breeding populations varying across space and time. There is no lockstep march forward, even if nucleotides do throb at an even pace. There is no more reason to believe that monotremes or tuataras ought to catch up to Quaternary morphologic standards, than to think our fellow Catarrhines should be learning how to use a salad fork correctly.
(Rodolfo Coria – AP)
Another addition to the growing list of gee-whiz vertebrate fossils described in 2006:
Mapusaurus roseae, a new member of the absurdly beefy theropod family formally known as the Charcharodontosauridae ("shark-toothed lizards"). A close cousin of Mapusaurus, Giganotosaurus, dethroned media darling Marc bolan as the largest known terrestrial carnivore in the 90s1. It appears that Mapusaurus probably matched or exceeded T. rex in length and mass. With predictable torpididty, the popular media is picking up the story, though why not head straight to the source?
Beyond the absurd physical proportions of this new theropod, the fact that multiple individuals were found in one locality (at least seven based on the number of foot bones) has interesting implications. One, possibly remote, interpretation is that this accumulation of juvenile and adult skeletons represents some type of family group or pack (the popular media seems especially entranced by this scenario). Pack hunting has been proposed in other theropods, especially in (relatively) smaller genera like Deinonychus.
Of course, the accumulation of multiple individuals could also be indicative of a predator trap, where multiple predators were attracted to a mire where prey was rendered immobile and easy pickins' (think La Brea tarpits). The bonebed is reportedly monospecific, only containg the remains of Mapusaurus, though nothing would preclude Mapusaurus from playing both predator and prey. Perhaps an unfortunate juvenile became stuck and lured in successively larger cousins a la Bruegel's Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1556):
The name of this new monster shares two things with another recent fossil blockbuster: Tiktaalik roseae. First, both share "roseae" as the specific designator (apparently a reference to a "rosy" rock formation in the case of Mapusaurus and an homage to an "anonymous" benefactor in the case of Tiktaalik).
Second, the generic names for each incoporates a word borrowed from a local indigenous group (Mapusaurus from the Mapuche word for "Earth", and Tiktaalik from the Inuktitut word for "burbot"). This trend has been growing in vertebrate paleontology for some time (see also this year's Erketu). While it reveals an admirable flowering of cultural sensitivity within the walls of academia it's rendering my rudimentary Greco-Latin skills obsolete!
Alright time to walk my ground dragon, but go check out Mike Keesey's post:
1 – As with most biggest/oldest/smallest fossils, the title for "biggest meat-eater" remains contentious. A recent article in JVP puts the WWII casualty Spinosaurus out front.
