No I Did Not Mean Triceratops, I Meant Ceratops

Recently, the folks over at the Best Western Denver Southwest purchased yet another fossil cast for their amazing hotel!*  This time, the cast is of a skull nicknamed "Judith," a specimen that is referred by some paleontologists to the dinosaur genus Ceratops.  And, no, I didn't mean to say Triceratops.  Don't feel bad if you haven't heard of Ceratops montanus: as a matter of fact, I hadn't really heard of it either until several weeks ago, when Greg Tally informed me that the Morrison Natural History Museum would soon be receiving a very large box in the mail!  Judith is still in the Cretaceous Room here at the MNHM, where she will stay for at least a few more weeks.  I really didn't know much at all about this dinosaur, and was eager to learn more.  Unfortunately, there's not much out there, as Ceratops is based on just a few bones that were discovered in the late 1800s.  Despite the lack of material, Ceratops does have a pretty fascinating history, and is an incredibly important dinosaur; not because of what has been discovered about the fossils themselves, so much as what these fossils resulted in.

Greg Tally peers through one of the fenestrae (literally means "window" in Latin) in the skull of Judith, the Ceratops montanus skull for the hotel that is temporarily on display at the Morrison Museum.  Photo Credit: Greg and Meredith Tally

When it comes to giving an animal or a group of animals a scientific classification, there are a lot of hoops you have to jump through, and a bunch of rules you have to follow.  Sometimes, groups of animals are named after the best known and understood animal in that group.  For example, Stegosaurus is the genus of dinosaur that defined the group of animals called the stegosaurs, and Tyrannosaurus is the genus of dinosaur that defined the group of animals called the tyrannosaurs.  Sometimes, it isn't quite as simple.  Think about it this way: Las Vegas is easily the most famous city in Nevada, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who spent a significant portion of their childhood thinking that Las Vegas was the capital of Nevada.  However, it is Carson City that holds the official title of capital.  Even though Las Vegas receives much more attention than Carson City, the state of Nevada isn't simply going to change where its capital is, and to the best of my knowledge, a change like that never really happens.

Although that comparison was a bit of a stretch and had about as many holes as the skull of Chasmosaurus, I think you get my point.  The same thing goes for scientific names.  Although Triceratops is the best known individual of the dinosaurian group called the ceratopsians, this group is still called the ceratopsians, as opposed to being called the triceratopsians.  That's because it was Ceratops, and not Triceratops, that was described by scientists first.

Ceratops montanus, temporarily on display at the Morrison Natural History Museum.  Photo Credit: Greg and Meredith Tally

The year was 1888, and paleontology in western North America was still going strong.  We've talked about the Bone Wars between paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope before, and we are going to revisit Marsh in this post.  To maximize the number of fossils he could describe, Marsh called upon the talents of a large number of fossil collectors, including the always brilliant Arthur Lakes in Morrison, Colorado.  Another of these collectors was a man named John Bell Hatcher.  Although Hatcher should also be remembered for a large number of his contributions to paleontology, for our purposes here we remember Hatcher as the man who discovered Ceratops.  On a trip to a known dinosaur fossil site near the Judith River in Montana, Hatcher discovered a number of fossils.  One of these fossil discoveries was composed only of a pair of horn cores.

Doesn't sound like much, does it?  Well, truth be told, it wasn't, though it was enough for Marsh to realize that he had something new.  If you click HERE, you can view the two page paper that Marsh published in 1888 that briefly described this new discovery as an animal called "Ceratops montanus."  There are several things of interest that we should take away from this paper, some of which are:

1. Marsh originally suspected that this new creature was "nearly allied to Stegosaurus of the Jurassic, but differs especially in having had a pair of large horns on the upper part of the head."  Marsh got the location of the horns right, but the close relation to Stegosaurus.....not so much.  Given the enormously tiny sampling of bones he had to work with though, it's not a surprise that Marsh compared this new animal to something that he already knew a good deal about.  Keep in mind that this is the very first scientific description of a ceratopsian dinosaur, so Marsh just had to go off of what had already been discovered.  Which was nothing.
2. Marsh notes that the "position and direction" of the horns could be likened to the enormous Meiolania, an extinct turtle from Australia, as well as the lizards in the genus Phrynosomax, the horned lizards.  He also notes that amongst the dinosaurs, the "only known example of a similar structure....is the single median horn-core on the nasals of Ceratosaurus," a mid-sized theropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation.   
3. In 1887, the year before this paper was published, geologist Whitman Cross sent Marsh a pair of horn cores about two feet in length and six inches across at their widest point.  Discovered right smack dab in the middle of where Denver, Colorado is today, Cross relayed to Marsh that they had been discovered in beds of Cretaceous rock.  Marsh, however, decided that these horns must have belonged to some sort of enormous bison, and gave the horns the name "Bison alticornis."  Perhaps Marsh was still suffering from the misconception that the 1887 discovery was, indeed, an enormous extinct bison, as these 1887 Denver horn cores are not mentioned in the brief Ceratops paper.  It is mentioned, however, that if the horns were discovered "detached," their "resemblance in form and position of the posterior horn-cores to those of some of the ungulate mammals is very striking," and the horns would "naturally be referred to that group."  I have no evidence to support my hypothesis, but I wonder whether this comparison to the mammalian ungulates is insurance on the part of Marsh, as perhaps at this point he had recognized the true nature of the 1887 horn cores.  This is pure conjecture on my part, and is mostly irrelevant anyways, as in 1889 Marsh recognized the dinosaurian nature of the Denver cores, and referred them to the genus Ceratops.  Today, these horn cores are regarded as belonging to Triceratops.
4. Marsh mentions that several limb bones, vertebrae, and teeth were also found in the Ceratops horizon, as well as several bits of dermal armor, and states that he believes they also belonged to Ceratops.  Whether this is true or not I do not know, but what I do know to be false is Marsh's next sentence, in which he states that the bones "indicate a close affinity with Stegosaurus, which was probably the Jurassic ancestor of Ceratops."  The specimen is housed in the Smithsonian today, under the catalogue number USNM 2411.  A search through the online records of the Smithosonian shows that 2411 consists only of a partial skull, which seems to be consistent with what I've read in other sources.  I'm not sure whether these other skeletal elements mentioned above have found a definitive dinosaurian home, or whether their true owner is uncertain.  
5. The final paragraph is, in my opinion, inarguably the most important.  The paragraph reads as follows: "The remains at present referred to this genus, while resembling Stegosaurus in various important characters, appear to represent a distinct and highly specialized family, that may be called the Ceratopsidae."  In this paragraph, Marsh has created the group of dinosaurs that, more colloquially, we refer to as the ceratopsians.  Or, more colloquially than that, "those dinosaurs that look like Triceratops with those horns."

Ceratops was discovered in what scientists now call the Judith River Formation.  Several other ceratopsians have been discovered in this formation, and due to the small amount and fragmentary nature of the material that was originally described as Ceratops, most paleontologists consider the dinosaur to be a nomen dubium.  Nomen dubium pretty much means that the material is too fragmentary for it to be diagnostic, and can't really be used in the future to determine whether new specimens are the same as the original or not.  Whether or not the newly discovered Judith specimen currently on display at the Morrison Museum is, indeed, Ceratops is still up in the air, as the paper has not been published yet.  Almost all of my Ceratops knowledge is out on the table for all to see, so I am not going to speculate or attempt to draw conclusions about something that I don't really know enough about to have an informed opinion on.  Guess we will just have to wait and see!  In the meantime, come on by the Morrison Natural History Museum and the Best Western Denver Southwest to see Judith, and much more!

*If you've been living underground amongst worms and fossils for the last few months, you might not have heard of the hotel, so you can check out some incredible pictures of the best Best Western by clicking HERE and HERE.

Works Cited:

Invasion of the Great Horned Owls

Throughout my entire life, I had not seen more than a handful of owls in the wild, but in the last month (actually exactly a month ago today, on November 16th) I have seen owls on three different occasions, all three of which were great horned owls (Bubo virginianus), not to mention the two times that I saw the great horned owl parent and chicks at my grandparents house in the few months preceding that!  The largest owl of Central and South America and the second largest in North America (following the snowy owl), the great horned owl is actually closely related to the snowy owl, despite their very different outer appearances.  Despite its name, the "horns" on the head of the great horned owl are really just tufts of feathers.  The great horned owl is labeled as "Least Concern" by the IUCN. Also, this post is a birthday post for Joseph M. Roessler, happy birthday big guy!

One of the most notable features of the owls in general are their incredibly flexible necks.  Most birds of prey likes hawks, falcons, eagles, and vultures, have their eyes on opposite sides of their head.  Owls, however, like we humans, have binocular, or stereoscopic, vision.  This means that owls have to turn their heads a lot more than other birds of prey might in order to look all around.  In response to this, the owls have evolved the ability to turn their heads around 270 degrees, in either direction!

One of the great horned owls that my grandparents had in their backyard for a few months

Another interesting ability of the great horned owl, and owls in general, is their interesting method of digestion.  Birds nowadays don't have teeth, so they are unable to chew their food.  So most of the time, they (owls amongst them) swallow their food whole if they are unable to tear small chunks off of it.  This also means that the owl swallows the indigestible bits of its prey, such as the bones and the fur.  So after their meals, owls will regurgitate balls of the indigestible materials, colloquially referred to as "owl pellets!"

The great horned owl, more so than other owls, has an amazing crushing grip in its talons, around 300 pounds per square inch, which is more than the human hand is capable of!  There are also reports of cases in which the power exerted by the talons of the great horned owl matching those of much larger species of bird of prey, like the golden eagle.  The great horned owl is also capable of lifting prey that is several times heavier than they are.

What's on the menu for the great horned owl?  Where to begin!  Let's break it down by group, and give a few examples of each.  I am by no means including all of its prey items as that would take an immense amount of time. 

• Mammals
• Porcupines
• Skunk
• Domestic Cats
• Small or young domestic dogs
• Rabbits and hares
• Muskrat
• Squirrels
• Weasels and martens
• Shrews
• Lemmings
• Voles
• Bats
• Armadillos
• Mice
• Flying Squirrels
• Rats
• Marmots
• Birds: 
• Turkey
• Great blue heron and other herons
• Woodpecker
• Crows
• Pigeons
• Quail
• Gulls
• Ducks
• Other birds of prey, such as red-tailed hawks, snowy owls, and other great horned owls
• Misc.
• Young alligators
•  Amphibians
• Scorpions
• Worms
• Insects
• Crustaceans
• Centipedes
• Roadkill

Where did I see the owls?  The first one was exactly a month ago when my friend Masaki Kleinkopf and I were heading back from seeing the new James Bond movie, Skyfall, which was really really good (but not as good, in my opinion, as The Hobbit, which we saw last night and which was fantastic).  We decided to take the back way, the bird of prey route between Boulder and Superior where one can frequently see red-tailed hawks, kestrels, turkey vultures, and golden eagles.  Instead, we saw a great horned owl!

A picture of one of the red-tailed hawks that I took yesterday on the Bird of Prey Route.  Not only is it an amazing bird in its own right, but it is also potential prey for the great horned owl.

The next two sightings were actually yesterday and the day before.  The first one was when my other friend Mona Kamath and I were driving along West 120th Ave., and we saw a great horned owl perched in a tree!  Yesterday, on my way home from the Morrison Museum, I took a brief detour to see if the owl was still there, and he was!  Not in the same tree, but in another tree that was quite close by!  How exciting!  Enjoy the pictures! 

And remember, if you have a birthday coming up, just email me the date at cuyvaldar123946@gmail.com with the date and your favorite animal, and I will do my best to get a post in!  And remember, if you like what you're reading, make sure you LIKE US ON FACEBOOK, follow us (if you have a google or gmail account), or hit the subscribe button off to the right if you don't!

Animal of the Day: Addax

The Addax (Addax nasomaculatus) sometime called the screwhorn antelope, is a "Critically Endangered" member of the group of animals known collectively as the antelope.  The addax is found in the Sahara desert.  The Addax has been extirpated, or made regionally extinct, in the countries of Egypt, Algeria, Western Sahara, and Sudan.  Nowadays, the Addax can only be naturally found in the countries of Chad,  Niger, Mauritania, and has been reintroduced into Morocco and Tunisia.  The Addax has earned its "Critically Endangered" status due to the immense and very frequent hunting of its horns, and is still often hunted on game reserves in the United States.  The meat and leather obtained from the Addax are also highly prized.  Their diet consists of primarily grass, as well as the leaves of various shrubs.  Rarely drinking, they instead gain most of their moisture through the plants that they eat.  The Addax is a slow moving animal, leaving it vulnerable to attacks from cheetahs, leopards, lions, African wild dogs, and humans.  The calves can also be killed by servals, caracals and hyenas.

There is also a Spanish motorsport team named the Barwa Addax Team, but I was unable to ascertain whether this team was named after the animal or not!
 

Antlers Vs. Horns, Part 2: Horns

A horn, unlike an antler, is attached to an animal.  It consists of a bony core, a projection of the bone of an animal, and is covered by a layer of keratin (your fingernails are composed of keratin).  Also unlike an antler, that falls off easily and annually, a horn, if it is broken off, will never grow back the same way.  That is why poachers have to kill rhinos (who have horns) to actually take their horns, as opposed to just letting them fall off.

Many different types of animals have horns.  Let's take a look at a few of these creatures.

The members of the family "Giraffidae," which includes the giraffe and the okapi, both have horn-like things on their heads, called "ossicones."

The members of the family "Rhinocerotidae," or the rhinos, have horns that are composed solely of keratin, and do not have the bone core typical of many horns.  The horns of the rhinos also grow continuously.

Some of the members of the family "Chamaeleonidae," or the chameleons, often have horns projecting out of their skulls, which are covered in a layer of keratin.

And, of course, the members of the family "Ceratopsidae," a group of marginocephalian dinosaurs, have horns projecting out of their skulls. 
Below is a short list of some of the more famous Ceratopsian dinosaurs.

Famous examples of Ceratopsian Dinosaurs (or "Ceratopsians That I Have Heard Of):

1. Triceratops - (Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming, U.S.; Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada)
2. Arrhincoceratops - (Alberta, Canada)
3. Torosaurus - (Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming, U.S.; Saskatchewan, Canada)
   
4. Monoclonius - (Montana, U.S.; Alberta, Canada)
5. Chasmosaurus - (Alberta, Canada)
   
6. Centrosaurus - (Alberta, Canada)
7. Styracosaurus - (Montana, U.S.; Alberta, Canada)
   
8. Achelousaurus - (Montana, U.S.)
9. Pentaceratops - (New Mexico, U.S.)
10. Vagaceratops - (Alberta, Canada)
    
11. Diabloceratops - (Utah, U.S.)
12. Albertaceratops - (Montana, U.S.; Alberta, Canada)
13. Einiosaurus - (Montana, U.S.)
14. Anchiceratops - (Alberta, Canada)
15. Mojoceratops - (Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada)
16. Pachyrhinosaurus - (Alaska, U.S.; Alberta, Canada)
17. Kosmoceratops - (Utah, U.S.)
18. Medusaceratops (Montana, U.S.)
19. Utahceratops - (Utah, U.S.)

Keep in mind that the tusks seen in elephants, mammoths, walruses, and hippos, despite being superficially similar to horns, are actually greatly enlarged teeth!