Why I’m (Mostly) A Cenozoic Guy

10 02 2010

Good tidings and well-wishes!

It’s fairly safe to assume that anyone who’s given so much as a passing glance to this humble corner of the ‘net is well-aware of my overall preference of prehistoric mammals to their reptilian counterparts, as evidenced by my heading, my ‘comments section’ avatar, and the appreciable majority of my posts.

However, you may be suprised to learn that I haven’t always been like this. In the fairly recent past, I, like the most paleontology enthusiasts, was completely smitten by dinosaurs, mosasaurs, pterosaurs, crocodylians, and their scaly brethren (in point of fact, for a time, I rather resented mammals due to the general public’s unfair tendency to invariably treat them with more respect and admiration than it would ever consider granting to any organism which doesn’t utilize milk). While I still adore these fascinating creatures, I’ve since shifted my focus primarily towards the hairy side of vertebrate paleontology.

To assist me in partially explaining this academic epiphany, I’ll utilize an excerpt from a recent interview with pterosaur expert Mark Witton who, in addition to being a spellbindingly-talented illustrator and writer, also seems to express quite a bit of enthusiasm about my beloved fossil mammals for, when asked to state his favorite era in Earth’s history outside the Mesozoic, he replied:

“The Cainozoic (known to Americans as the Cenozoic – ed.) is undeniably interesting because you can really trace the development of modern ecologies and environments across the fossil record. You can watch mammal lineages bed-hop between different ecological niches – different feliformes vying for the hypercarnivory niche, hyena-like dogs, hippo- and horse-like like rhinos, tapir-like elephants, giraffe-like camels, that sort of thing. Cainozoic fossils haven’t had so long to be chewed up by destructive geological processes and this means we have a much greater insight into what was going on and this allows surprising glimpses into even epochs of 20 million years ago. Plus, mammal teeth are very identifiable, hardy and abundant anyway, so we can get a really good idea which groups were around in different places and times. As such, while the familiarity of some fossil mammals means that they may be somewhat less spectacular or intriguing than the more outlandish Mesozoic and Palaeozoic forms that preceded them, the depth of information available about them makes them equally compelling critters to learn about. The Cainozoic is, therefore, a particularly detailed chapter in Earth’s history and it’s hard not to be really sucked into learning about it once you start digging around.”

I certainly couldn’t have said it better myself (although I’ll concede that while the abundance of fossilized mammal teeth certainly makes things more scientifically convenient, it also forces the lion’s share of virtually any paleo-mammology volume to degenerate into a ‘dentistry 101′ textbook).

Furthermore, while one would likely come to the conclusion that the ‘greater insight’ into Cenozoic life to which Witton refers would indicate that the amazing organisms the era contains are recieved with an enormous amount of esteem by the paleontological community, this isn’t the case, at least not to the degree anyone unfamiliar with our science is bound to assume. Indeed, a quick perusal of my blogroll alone will provide sufficient data to uphold the assertion that the majority of amature and professional paleontologists alike adhere to the study of extinct reptiles. Dinosaurs, I hardly need mention, boast an especially large following, but this fact is destined to recieve its own rant post.

I fully realize that this love of all things reptilian is perfectly understandable: after-all, the fact that we cannot consider ourselves to be members of the reptilia class by any definition alone is sufficient enough to secure the appeal of these creatures to the well-known region of our imagination which lends itself to be captured by anything it deems ‘alien’. However, in this regard, our psyche tends to pursue ‘foreign discovery’ to the expense of that which lies within our own metaphorical back yard. Although we may have more in common with cetaceans than sauropods, the former behemoths are just as fascinating, yet we overlook them for their comparative familiarity.

The paleontological community has thus reached the bizarre state of expressing our collective interest in a group of unfamiliar animals for being strange and intriguing, yet many of its members withold their enthusiasm for a relatively closely acquainted group in spite of their own strangeness and intrigue. This relative neglect is one of the most powerful forces which ultimately draws me towards the study of paleo-mammology, as I’m sure it does for a great many of us interested in the field.

May the fossil record continue to enchant us all!





Weekly Spotlight (Mini Version): Scelidotherium

6 02 2010

Good tidings and well-wishes! 

Due to the advent of recent academic pressures, this is going to be one of my shorter entries. 

I’ve often utilized the opening segment of this space to lament the neglect of whichever prehistoric critter I’ve opted to feature during the course of that particular week by the public and/or the scientific community. However, I’m glad to say that I cannot do so whilst discussing a giant ground sloth, for last year’s article on Eremotherium is by far one of my most popular to date.  Nevertheless, as in any group, the ground sloth clan maintains its fair share of lesser-known members, my favorite of which being the long-faced Scelidotherium sp. (“a Scelidotherium walks into a bar…”). 

Scelidotherium skeletal reconstruction.

Scelidotherium is, amazingly, the namesake genus of the South American Scelidotheriinae subfamily (which in turn belongs to the Mylodontidae family); a group that also contains such stellar sloths as Catonyx & Valgipes and which is defined by, among others, the following characteristics: 

-Like all Mylodonts, they possess lobate teeth (which, by definition, are riddled with projections or ‘lobes’) however, the Scelidotheres are unique in being transversely compressed (flattened from side to side). 

-As I mentioned earlier, the skulls of these animals are notably elongate. More specifically, the nasals and maxillae were particularly long: the former stretched for at least half the length of the skill in these beasts! 

-Their femurs were famously short and wide, leading Sir Richard Owen to create the name ‘Scelidotherium‘, which roughly translates to ‘femur beast’. 

-The astragalus sported a depression on the surface with which it touched the tibia. 

Scelidotherium skeletal mount.

 Scelidotherium itself was discovered by a Mr. Charles Darwin near Punta Alta, Argentina in 1832 during his famous voyage, though he initially assumed the remains belonged to the larger Megatherium. According to “The Cambridge Natural History, Volume 10″, Scelidotherium has “four properly-developed toes in the fore-foot, the thumb being rudimentary; of these, the first two bear claws. The hind feet are also four-toed.” It’s also been theorized that Scelidotherium may have had a strong, muscular tongue (ideally, like many ground sloths) and that the beast probably maintained a more diverse diet than did most Megalonychids, Megatheriids, and Mylodontids. 

Scelidotherium reconstruction.

May the fossil record continue to enchant us all!





TTT’s 100th Post Improv Special!

29 01 2010

Wow. I just can’t look at the first three words of that title without the hint of a smile crossing my face.

As I’ve come to understand, one traditionally celebrates such a landmark in the life of his or her blog as the advent of its one-hundredth post by attempting to erect a show-stopping article designed to thoroughly sweep the audience off their feet. However, as most of my friends and associates would readily agree, respect for tradition and conformity has never been my strong point. In place of the aforementioned ritual, I’ve opted to use this milestone as an excuse to (briefly) go ‘off the record’ and allot myself the age-old indulgence of highlighting a few completely random things that most of my readers likely don’t know about me. For humility’s sake, I’ll attempt to buck my well-documented personal verbosity in the hope that this post will be relatively brief.

Yours truly sitting before the famed 'Meteor Crater' site in Arizona.

1.) I despise bacon!!!

This assertion will likely convince the average member of my sex that I’m some sort of pansy (which, in all seriousness, is somewhat true), but I simply cannot deny my loathing of bacon strips. While I generally prefer fruits and veggies to meat, I’m not a vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination (I actually quite enjoy seafood and poultry). Nevertheless, I draw the line at bacon because it’s essentially composed of hard, crispy sticks of grease.

2.) My favorite movie is ‘King Kong’ (1933).

While I’ve made my love of giant monsters well-known elsewhere, I can’t quite bring myself to cite any ‘Godzilla’, ‘Gamera’ or Ray Harryhausen flick as my favorite film (although each group contains a close runner-up in this regard), for that honor belongs to the movie which literally started it all. Not only are Willis O’Brien’s legendary stop-motion special effects absolutely spellbinding even to those first enjoying them seven decades after their conception, but the movie is also surprisingly well-written and boasts an intriguing message about the human condition. Even the enormous fanbase of the masterful ‘Jurassic Park’ can’t claim that Speilberg’s film is nearly as balanced, original, and evocative as ‘King Kong’: the great American epic of monster cinema.

I played Orin Scrivello, D.D.S. a few years back in a community theatre production of my favorite musical, "Little Shop Of Horrors". Here, I'm seated in the plant's mouth beside a pair of my fellow cast-members while screwing around backstage.

3.) I’m a bit of a Russophile.

No, I’m NOT a fan of Russian politics, Vladimir Putin’s malevolent antics, or the former U.S.S.R. I simply find the country’s history, culture, and language to be a most interesting blend of East and West. I’ve tried to teach myself to speak and read Russian on several occasions (especially in the aftermath of my discovery that this blog is fairly popular amongst the country’s paleontology enthusiasts) and have invariably failed, a predicament for which I largely blame the devilishly tricky alphabet. I can, however, speak with a fluent Russian accent.

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Alright then, now that I’ve discussed my thoughts on such scattered topics as bacon, monster movies, and Russia, the time has come to reveal just how much my humble corner of the internet has meant to me during its hundred-post reign.

Blogging has been a wonderful experience for me, and I can think of no decision in recent memory which has positively affected my life to the extent that my resolution to create ‘The Theatrical Tanystropheus’ has. To me, few things are as intensely rewarding as being able to connect with the paleontological community as I’m now able to on an almost daily basis. Being able to thus discuss the science to which I’m devoted and which has utterly captivated me throughout my life with some of its foremost experts and enthusiasts alike has, at the risk of invoking a cliché, truly been a dream come true. Through this digital venue, I’ve become introduced to some of the most interesting, knowledgeable, and passionate people with whom I’ve ever had the pleasure of coming in contact.

Therefore, I’d enjoy nothing less than to take this celebratory opportunity to extend my most heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to read my articles and entertain my thoughts.Your audience is very much appreciated and despite my obvious love of theatricality, I feel that it is I who must now give a round of applause. With great anticipation, I look forward to our frequent correspondence during my next one-hundred posts and beyond!

May the fossil record continue to enchant us all!





Weekly Spotlight: Wonambi

28 01 2010

Good tidings and well-wishes!

(NOTE: I’ve decided to replace the word ‘Wonders’ with ‘Spotlight’ for this series because it’s more…well…’theatrical’.)

To the comparative anatomist, few creatures possess the intrigue of snakes. The underlying rationale of this contention is simple: whether we’re observing a 300-pound python or a robust adder, snakes invariably put our perception of how animals move to the most rigorous of tests. Those who equate speed with ‘leg size’ are utterly perplexed by the nimble mamba while those who believe that raw power is bound to the strength of limbs and jaws are stunned by the sheer might of a common boa. For these reasons among a hoard of others, snakes have developed into an incomparably divisive cultural icon: one would be truly hard-pressed to locate any sort of mythological reference to these beasts which could even come close to being cited as ‘neutral’. Despite (or perhaps ‘due to’) this phenomenon, snakes have always reaped an enormous amount of attention from any race of people fortunate enough to live alongside them.

What most people don’t realize, however, is that these fascinating animals are of intense interest to evolutionary biologists and paleontologists as well, for their fossil record reverses another unscientific assumption which has become ingrained into our collective psyche: the idea that the presence of limbs are a sign that one has ‘climbed the evolutionary tree’ (so to speak) to a higher vantage point than one’s legless cousins. The fact that serpents have lost their limbs utterly astounds most laymen along with the contention that, as a whole, lizards are the more primitive group. The question of why they opted to reverse the several-hundred-million-year-old trend of developing legs is one which contains such an enormous degree of controversy as to prohibit its discussion in this humble venue. I shall therefore leave my audience with one final note on the matter: the scientific community is, as a whole, unsure whether snakes lost their limbs to better facilitate burrowing or marine life (which would have, ideally, resulted in their eventual return to the terrestrial haunts of their ancestors…for the record, I belong to the former school of thought).

This mystery isn’t assisted by the fossil record to a degree even remotely approached by that with which it has aided our efforts to solve the riddles of avain and cetacean evolution because snakes generally possess comparatively delicate skeletons. Nonetheless, the efforts of fossil hunters have yielded a number of intriguing prehistoric serpents such as the appreciably large Australian genus Wonambi.

Wonambi skull reconstructions, the larger of which belong to W. naracoortensis while their smaller companions belong to W. barriei.

Wonambi is by a wide margin the best-known member of the extinct Madtsoiidae family whose chronological reign extended from the late Cretaceous to the late Pleistocene and whose members have been unearthed in South America, Africa, India, Southern Europe, and (most famously) Australia. For a full list of the group’s distinguishing characteristics, I’d recommend consulting the link provided earlier in this paragraph, though I’ll highlight a few below:

-Generally long and cylindrical bodies.

-Long and narrow skulls with tightly-fixed upper jaws.

-Rounded snouts.

-A braincase which is fairly narrow when viewed from between the orbits (‘eye sockets’) but which widens posteriorly.

-Elongate vertebrae which become lower more posteriorly.

-No sign of limb elements (unlike several other species).

An illustrated selection of Wonambi vertebrae.

In “Stalking The Plumed Serpent And Other Adventures In Herpetology”, D. Bruce Mans writes:

“No Madtsoiid snakes survive anywhere today, but fossils of Wonambi naracoortensis indicate that this species was present in Australia until the late Pleistocene, only about 40,000 years ago, and maybe even more recently. Aboriginal man is known to have arrived in Australia at least 60,000 years ago, so it’s highly probable that man was in Australia at the same time as Wonambi naracoortensis. Was Wonambi the source of the rainbow serpent myth?

Wonambi is a local Aboriginal word meaning giant snake or rainbow serpent, which is why paleontologist Meredith Smith used that name when she described the snake in 1976. A chill goes up my spine as I stare down in my hand at a vertebra of Wonambi. This giant snake, estimated to be about 18 feet long [(5.5 meters)] and as thick as a telegraph pole [(more on that later)] was the last of a long line of snakes in a primitive snake family whose evolutionary history was longer than the rise and domination of Earth by modern mammals and flowering plants.”

A display in which a heavily reconstructed Wonambi battles for its life against the marsupial lion, Thylacoelo carnifex.

The last sentence of Mans’ statement likely raised a few eyebrows from my herpetologically-inclined readers, for to them it’s no secret that reptile sizes are often exaggerated (some early dispatches from South American explorers claim that Anacondas reach lengths of 18 meters, while the longest recorded specimen only stretched to half that size). However, the size estimates described above are in fact real, though this certainly isn’t to say that Wonambi was a true ‘giant among serpents’ as Ralph E. Molnar points out in “Dragons In The Dust: The Paleobiology Of The Giant Monitor Lizard Megalania” (which I’ve previously cited at length here):

“The squamates (snakes and lizards)… evolved large predators in Australia, including Megalania among lizards, as well as large snakes such as WonambiWonambi was not that large for a snake, not in the same class as Megalania among lizards. John Scanlon (…Australia’s only specialist in fossil snakes) responded to the remark that Wonambi had a head the size of a shovel with a letter to the magazine Nature Australia showing that the shovel must have been of the kind used by small children to build sand castles on the beach. Even so, Wonambi was big enough, at about 6 meters long, to give a healthy fright to anyone encountering it- if there was actually anyone around to encounter it before it became extinct.”

A large Wonambi stalks its marsupial prey.

Though there’s not much else to say about Wonambi scientifically, the idea that the massive snake may have given rise to the mythical rainbow serpent demands further discussion. According to Aboriginal Art Online:

“The belief in the Rainbow Snake, a personification of fertility, increase (richness in propoagation of plants and animals) and rain, is common throughout Australia. It is a creator of human beings, having life-giving powers that send conception spirits to all the waterholes. It is responsible for regenerating rains, and also for storms and floods when it acts as an agent of punishment against those who transgress the law or upset it in any way. It swallows people in great floods and regurgitates their bones, which turn into stone, thus documenting such events. Rainbow snakes can also enter a man and endow him with magical powers, or leave ‘little rainbows’, their progeny, within his body which will make him ail and die. As the regenerative and reproductive power in nature and human beings, it is the main character in the region’s major rituals.”

While this hypothesis, if true, certainly wouldn’t mark the only occasion in which extinct beasts have directly influenced mythology, the notion that Wonambi may have led to what is arguably the most God-like character of Aboriginal culture is truly captivating.

A massive Wonambi devours a moderately-large marsupial. (Hat tip to my regular reader Doug)

May the fossil record continue to enchant us all!





Richard Dawkins On Science & Moral Philosophy

26 01 2010

Good tidings and well-wishes!

In the tradition of a recent post in which I highlighted Stephen Jay Gould’s views on (among other things) the relationship between ethics and science, I’ve decided to share the following video in which the famed Richard Dawkins offers his thoughts on the subject. While I’ve made my disdain for Dawkins’ incessant injection of Atheism into ‘popular science’ quite clear elsewhere, I must concede that he’s (mostly) spot on in this case.





A Proboscidean Family Portrait

25 01 2010

Good tidings and well-wishes!

At the onset of last Saturday’s ‘Weekly Wonders’ post which featured Prodeinotherium, I lamented my inability to locate any reconstructions of the intriguing animal. Fortunately, however, I’ve recently stumbled upon a wonderful digitalized version of the following image which originally appeared in Jeheskel Shoshani and Pascal Tassy’s incomparable compendium “The Proboscidea: Evolution And Paleoecology Of Elephants And Their Relatives”, which features Prodeinotherium bavaricum (number 4) along with a number of its relatives. Rather than merely inject it into the aforementioned post, I’ve decided that it deserves its own article and have therefore attempted to grant it with such a distinction.


The animals depicted in the above image are as follows:

1=Moeritherium trigodon

2=Numidotherium koholense

3=Barytherium grave

4=Prodeinotherium bavaricum

5=Palaeomastodon beadnelli

6= Mammut americanum

7= Gomphotherium angustidens

8= Platybelodon grangeri

9= Rhynchotherium tlascalae (which I’ve covered previously here)

10= Cuvieronius hyodon

11= Tetralophodon longirostris

12= Anancus arvernensis

13= Stegolophodon cautleyi

14= Stegodon ganesa (for an interesting article related to which, do go here)

15= Primelephas gomphotheroides

16= Loxodonta africana

17= Elephas maxiums

18= Mammuthus primigenius

May the fossil record continue to enchant us all!





Weekly Wonders: Prodeinotherium

24 01 2010

Good tidings and well-wishes!

(NOTE #1: Despite WordPress’ argument to the contrary, this post was in fact written on Saturday, January 23rd, so it counts!)

(NOTE #2: Due to the unfortunate fact that I’ve been unable to locate any reconstructions of Prodeinotherium, all of the images displayed in this post depict it’s more famous relative Deinotherium unless otherwise indicated)

As amusement park caricaturists are well-aware, celebrities often become synonymous with a given trait. For instance, if you’re anything like me, when you consider “big chins”, Jay Leno comes to mind, and when someone gives mention to “greasepaint moustaches”, your mind turns to Groucho Marx. In fact, the latter example became so fundamental to the man’s identity that, according to legend, he’d routinely go without his trademark nasal attire to avoid public detection.

This trend isn’t at all unlike that which accompanies how our brain learns to recognize various animals. Attempting to imagine a horse without its hooves or a bird without its feathers often proves to be an extraordinarily difficult feat. Yet, the fossil record clearly indicates that such creatures once existed. In addition, it would appear that, even during their presence, both characteristics have displayed a significant amount of diversity within their respective group’s evolutionary tree. Which brings us to elephants…

Proboscidean trunks, so characteristic of the order’s modern representatives, have likely undergone a similar amount of variety during their 35-million-year-old history, yet it’s notoriously difficult to be more specific to this end due to the fact that they simply don’t fossilize. Thus, with the obvious exception of frozen Mammuthus primigenius specimens, any attempt to reconstruct their appearance on extinct genera must be made on the basis of the skull in question. Yet this is hardly a foolproof method. For instance, most illustrations of Platybelodon, Amebelodon, and their kin display a short, flap-like proboscis which came to be unchallenged within the paleontological community’s collective psyche until Dave Lambert made the assertion that, on the basis of morphological evidence, the trunks of these animals were much more like those of modern elephants. However, when it comes to controversial trunks, no group can challenge the family of this week’s featured beast, the Deinotheriidae.

Prodeinotherium teeth being measured.

According to Jeheskel Shoshani and Pascal Tassy’s definitive text “The Proboscidea: Evolution And Paleoecology Of Elephants And Their Relatives”, no one was quite sure what to make of the Deinotheriidae in the years following its discovery in the form of isolated teeth which were assigned to extinct rhinos, tapirs, and ground sloths before “a partial skeleton was unearthed during the collapse of an embarkment on the Prague-Brunn railroad in 1853″. Even now, their taxonomic allegiances remain a point of dispute: though most authorities place them within the proboscidea, others maintain that they represent a sister group.

Traditional Deinotherium reconstruction.

While their direct ancestry is fairly ambiguous, the earliest Deinothere known to science is the hippo-sized Chilgatherium harrisi from the late Oligocene of Ethiopia, which is consistent with the theory that the proboscidea initially emerged in Africa. The group appears to have persisted for 20 million years until the latest-known genus, Deinotherium bozasi of Kenya, finally went extinct in the late Pleistocene (their extinction may have been directly related to the spread of grasslands and competition from the Elephantids during the Pliocene). During the course of the family’s evolution, relatively few significant anatomical alterations were obtained (especially when one considers the uncanny diversity of the Gomphotheriidae) other than a progressive increase in size. Geographically, the Deinotheriidae was more ‘adventurous’, having spread to Eurasia during the early Miocene with Prodeinotherium sp. leading the charge.

A lone Deinotherium patrols a Spanish plain during the late Miocene.

The earliest Prodeinotherium species, P. hobleyi, is known from early Miocene deposits in Eastern Africa. As the genus spread, new species began to appear in Pakistan (P. pentapotamiae) and France (P. bavaricum). During the mid-Miocene, these animals started to become replaced by Deinotherium species: D. bozasi, D. giganteum, and D. indicus, respectively. This raises an intriguing question: did Deinotherium emerge from one ancestral species, or did each aforementioned Deinotherium species evolve from its local Prodeinotherium counterpart? Hopefully, further research will clear up the genus’ mysterious origins.

An enormous Deinotherium giganteum pursues a pair of Australopithecus in a promotional image for BBC's 'Walking With Beasts" mini-series.

In “Evolving Eden: An Illustrated Guide To The Evolution Of The African Large-Mammal Fauna”, Alan Turner lists the following characteristics of the Deinotheriidae family:

“Members… have high crested teeth… They are well known in the African fossil record, especially in the Pliocene of eastern areas with the species Deinotherium bozasi… Deinotheres are distinguished from other proboscideans by the absence of upper tusks and the presence of distinctive, downwardly curved tusks in the lower jaw and by the elongated shape of the skull.”

Prodeinotherium is distinguished from its more famous namesake by it’s proportionally smaller size, forelimbs, and molars.

Right, then. Now that we’ve discussed the evolution and distinguishing characteristics of this week’s animal and the family to which it belonged, it’s time for the fun part: analyzing it’s dietary behavior and soft-tissue anatomy (that sentence alone seems sufficient enough to qualify yours truly as a grade-A nerd, but who’s complaining?).

Yet another traditional Deinotherium reconstruction.

One of the first things any budding paleo-mammology enthusiast grows to learn and appreciate is the importance of mammalian teeth: a fact which is just as prominent in the Deinotheriidae as in any family of mammals. Shoshani writes:

“The… shearing teeth of deinotheres were ideally suited for processing soft foliage. Loss of the upper tusks and the downturned nature of the lower tusks would have permitted more direct access of food to the mouth, and could justify an interpretation of a short, tapir-like proboscis in these animals [(more on that later)]. Many deinothere tusks show evidence of wear, although no consistent wear pattern or location has been identified. The fact that deinotheres had long legs but short necks enables one to argue against frequent use of their tusks for, and [it's been suggested] that these tusks could have been used as sources of purchase for manipulation of a short proboscis or even for recognition of individuals by members of the same species.”

In “Mammoths, Sabertooths, And Hominids: 65 Million Years Of Mammalian Evolution In Europe” Jordi Agusti makes the following observation:

“The shape of muscle insertion areas in the neck vertebrae and posterior skull of deinotheres reflects a marked specialization for enhanced movement in the vertical plane. Compared with those of a modern elephant, the muscles that pull the head up and those that bring it down [could] act through a wider arc. This was very likely related to the action of the downward-pointing tusks, although the precise function of the tusks remains a matter of debate. Since the deinotheres were clearly obligate browsers- as indicated by the morphology of their cheek teeth- it seems likely that the tusks were used in concert with the trunk to gather foliage from the branches of trees.”

As I hinted at the onset of this post, the trunks of the Deinotheriidae are by a wide margin the family’s most controversial feature. To explain why, allow me to reference an excellent 2008 post on the subject fromThe World We Don’t Live In“:

“When [the legendary paleontologist Henry Fairfeld] Osborn first reconstructed Deinotherium back in 1910, he drew it with a short, flap-like trunk much like a tapir’s, but later dropped that reconstruction for no known reason…This reconstruction was revived by [Georgi] Markov [along with his colleagues N. Spassov & V. Simeonovski in 2001] . From a study of the skull’s shape, they deduced that Deinotherium must have had a short, tapir-like snout hanging over its descending lower jaw. A long trunk was not necessary, as a browser standing 5 m high at the shoulder had little need to reach the ground. The tusks remained free for whatever purpose they served, and the nostrils, at the end of the proboscis, could smell and inspect food.”

Deinotherium reconstruction with a short, tapir-like trunk.

However, not everyone buys into this interpretation, as many paleo-artists still reconstruct Prodeinotherium and its kin with lengthy, sinuous trunks which resemble those of their modern relatives. Nevertheless, it goes to reveal that, as with a great many congregations of organisms, the scientific community still has much to learn about the evolution and diversity of the proboscidea.

May the fossil record continue to enchant us all!

UPDATE: God, I love my readers! Doug has courteously scanned a few of Mauricio Anton’s amazing Prodeinotherium illustrations which I’ve displayed below (note that the latter sketch compares a P. hobleyi to a modern African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana). Many thanks!!





“Charles Darwin: Live & In Concert” To Appear On CSPAN-2.

22 01 2010

Good tidings and well-wishes!

Last February, I wrote a brief article about Richard Milner’s critically acclaimed one-man musical, “Charles Darwin: Live And In Concert“.  I, being a die-hard evolution nerd AND an avid theatrical performer/aficionado, absolutely adore the idea, though I’ve only been able to listen to the show’s soundtrack rather than actually watch a live performance.

Recently, I’ve received the following e-mail from Milner’s official website:

“The Book Channel (CSPAN-2) airs Singing Darwinian Scholar Richard Milner’s one-man show on the history of evolution! 8am Sat., Jan. 23 (re-airing Sun. at 7pm). Milner is the author of Darwin’s Universe: Evolution from A to Z (Univ. of Calif. Press) The show was filmed at CUNY.”

Though I regrettably won’t be able to watch it due to my television’s restrictive selection of channels, I’d heartily recommend that everyone with a comprehensive cable company and a remote interest in evolution and/or theatre tune in!