Birdwatching at the Morrison Natural History Museum!

Last Monday, a snow storm hit Colorado....in the middle of May.  Although it snowed even as much as sixteen inches in some places, it melted pretty quickly afterwards, leaving an excellent opportunity for many birds that rely on insects for their meals.  After a rain, you can often see birds like the American robin or flicker foraging around (click HERE to read more), using the soft ground to their advantage to try and catch insects that were washed up out of the ground.  After the snow, it seems like a number of birds were attempting to do the same thing.  As I was closing up, I looked out behind the Morrison Natural History Museum, and noticed a bonanza of birds!  I ran downstairs and grabbed my camera, and tried to get some good shots.  Here, we have a male western bluebird (Sialia mexicana), perching on one of the blocks of sandstone from the historic Quarry 5 in Morrison.  This block contains dinosaur bone, making it ironic that the bluebird, a dinosaurian descendant itself, perched upon the block.

There were plenty of American robin (Turdus migratorius) running around, and got a few shots of them!

As we talked about in a PREVIOUS POST, winter causes many birds, including the American robin, to decrease their territoriality, and flock together.

There were several lark bunting (Calamospiza melanocorys) hopping around.  The lark bunting is actually the state bird of Colorado!

A European starling (Sturnus vulgaris) probes the ground.

There were several more male and female western bluebirds flitting around, and I got some pictures of them that I really like!  Below is a female perched on the fence next to the Jurassic Garden!

A male perched on a fence.  Notice the sexual dimorphism displayed here; the male displays much more vibrant plumage than does the female.

A female perched near my car!

Sometimes, I am really, really bad at identifying birds.  Below are two pictures of birds that I think I have identified correctly, but am not positive.  The first I think is a picture of a pair of chipping sparrows (Spizella passerina).

This one gave me a bit more trouble.  I think this bird is either a western wood-pewee (Contopus sordidulus) or a least flycatcher (Empidonax minimus).

Finally, a yellow-rumped warbler (Dendroica coronata)!

Works Cited:

Robbins, C. S., Bruun, B., & Zim, H. S. (1983). Birds of North America. New York: Golden Press.

Stokes, D. W., & Stokes, L. Q. (2010). The Stokes field guide to the birds of North America. New York: Little, Brown.

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:

Did Velociraptor Hunt In Packs?

Ever since the movie Jurassic Park came out in 1993, people from all over the world added the name Velociraptor to their often-short list of dinosaurs they had heard of, joining more famous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops. While the dinosaurs portrayed in the movie have often been hailed as “ahead of the times,” Steven Spielberg of course had to make some assumptions about dinosaur behavior.

Michael Crichton, the author of the original Jurassic Park book, did too, which can be clearly seen when reading both of his Jurassic Park books. In the first one, a theory was circulating that Tyrannosaurus had eyes like a frog, that would be unable to see something so long as it didn’t move. This is reflected in the way Dr. Alan Grant, one of the protagonists in the novel (as well as the subsequent movie) tells his comrades to react when they are spotted by a Tyrannosaurus: just don’t move. (Don’t blink. Don’t even blink. Blink and you’re dead.)  

However, this theory was debunked by the time that it came for Crichton to write his next dinosaur-themed book, The Lost World, a sequel to Jurassic Park.  In the sequel, Ian Malcolm, who was also a protagonist in the first novel, moves to the forefront. He explains that the Tyrannosaurus from the first novel was probably just not hungry enough to attack them, and that it was just toying with them. A clever way of seamlessly working that scientific transition into the books without disrupting the canon of the story!*

Spielberg also played a lot of things up throughout the movies to make it more cinematic and exciting: and, to be honest, I can’t really blame him, at least not as critically as some paleontologists do. (That, however, is a story for another time). Today, however, we are going to be talking about one cinematic Spielbergian leap, and the resounding effect it has had on paleo-enthusiasts the world over: the idea of raptors hunting in packs.

In the books and movie, the Jurassic Park raptors are portrayed as clever, cool, and calculating killing machines with the intelligence of a dolphin or an ape. Scientists know, however, that while animals such as Velociraptor and Troödon may have been smarter than their mammalian counterparts of the time, their intelligence nowhere near reaches that of some modern day cetaceans and primates. Most people don’t want to accept that, though: they want their dinos really smart!

Here’s my stab at psychology for the day. In my semester long psychology course that I took last year, we discussed something in a relationship and everyday life called a fiction. Essentially, when human beings have feelings for someone, they develop what we call “fictions” in their mind. Fictions  about physical appearance, fictions about intelligence, and fictions about other redeeming qualities as well. If two people are projecting these fictions onto each other, then a relationship can develop. On the other hand, sometimes these people are confronted with these fictions, and they realize that they are not all that they are cracked up to be. When these people fall short of their fictions, some emotional turmoil can result. In my opinion, the reality of the Velociraptor, as well as the reality of the rest of the dromaeosaurs, falls short of people’s expectations. I think a similar thing is occurring right now with dinosaurs and feathers: people want their T-rex scaly, not feathery! That might be why many people seem so opposed to the idea.

“All right,” people say. “So Velociraptor wasn’t a genius. It still hunted in packs, though, right?” It seems like a fairly obvious answer: “Of course they did! ….Right? I mean….if you think about it….” It’s when you start to really think about the evidence that this idea really falls apart. First, let’s look at a related animal called Deinonychus. Deinonychus is a mid-sized dromaeosaur, about thirteen feet long, and weighing about as much as a wolf. Living during the Early Cretaceous Period, between about 118 – 110 MYA, remains of Deinonychus have been found in the western United States. Deinonychus remains aren’t always found solo, however: in some cases, it looks like Deinonychus might have dined and died! At several different sites, Deinonychus remains have been found buried in close proximity to a large herbivorous ornithopod called Tenontosaurus.  Shed teeth from multiple animals seems to indicate that these animals might have been feeding together. Some paleontologists take this a step further, and propose that, not only did these animals feed together, but they lived and hunted together, too!

In this post, I am going to be using several modern-day analogues to point out flaws in some theories. (We’ve already done it with the deer!)  This time, we’re flying over to Indonesia to visit the Komodo dragon. The Komodo dragon is a very interesting animal that, like many other animals, will resort to cannibalism. The young Komodos take to the trees, hiding up in branches to light to support the weight of the adults.  The Komodos lead a generally solitary existence: that is, until it comes time to feed. At feeding time, the dragons will swarm all over the carcass, each fighting for a stake of the meal. To an outsider, unaware of how the animal had been killed, it might be interpreted that perhaps this was a family group that worked together to bring down a much larger prey.

Another comparison I like to make is a theoretical one. Imagine that a pride of lions has subdued a zebra on the plains of Africa. After they have eaten their fill, they move off into the shade to sleep off their recently acquired weight. Immediately afterwards, the vultures swoop in on the kill. Suddenly, somehow a flash flood overtakes the carcass and the vultures, leaving them buried in mud, sand, and silt. Over the next few thousand years, their remains fossilize. One million years later, paleontologists come across this find. To their eyes, it would appear, for all intents and purposes, like the vultures ganged up in a pack to subdue this one-toed creature. Maybe not the best comparison, but one that I always like to think about.

So does the evidence seem to allow us the conclusion that multiple Deinonychus fed together? I would say yes, the evidence does support that conclusion. Does the evidence support the conclusion that multiple Deinonychus lived together, and worked together to bring down the Tenontosaurus? In my opinion, I don’t think that that is enough evidence. Other paleontologists disagree, however, leaving the matter open for debate. Right now, what we need is a good fossil trackway.

Pyg learns about several baby Apatosaurus tracks at the Morrison Natural History Museum.  Together, these tracks create a trackway, which has revealed some very interesting behavior about these young sauropods!  To learn more, make sure to check out the museum's Facebook page HERE!

We’ve talked about trackways on the blog before. Fossil trackways are also often good evidence for group moving. We have many trackways that show groups of dinosaurs, such as sauropods, moving together in multi-age herds. We’ve talked before about the exciting conclusions that paleontologists are drawing by studying blocks of fossil footprints at the Morrison Natural History Museum. While fossil footprints aren’t always necessarily the final say, they are simply one more piece of the puzzle. And when it comes to dromaeosaur footprints, footprints that many different paleontologists agree belong to a dromaeosaur, we have none. Zilch. Zero. Nada. No dromaeosaur footprints. Not yet, anyways. So there’s one possible line of evidence down the drain.

Pyg compares her foot to the smallest baby Stegosaurus footprints in the world, also at the Morrison Natural History Museum!  These footprints us gain insights into social behavior, animal size, and locomotion.

Thus far, it doesn't seem like we have any evidence in FAVOR of Velociraptor hunting in packs. But evidence can work both ways: what about evidence AGAINST Velociraptor as a pack hunter? As a matter of fact, there is one main line of evidence that I find to be, if not conclusive, highly indicative of the truth being the pack hunting. This line of evidence comes from the environment that Velociraptor would have lived in. Velociraptor inhabited what is now the Gobi Desert of Mongolia between around 70 and 75 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous. Back then, the Gobi looked a lot like it does today: deserty. Now, this is very important. Think about desert animals today, specifically the carnivores, but the herbivores as well. Although the desert is certainly not a lifeless place, it is by no means a party like the African Serengeti, or the great plains of North America (before the railroads came through and people killed almost all of the bison). There simply isn't enough food for large animals to get by, especially not large groups of them.

Now think about a standard predator/prey ratio seen in environments today. Let's talk about my home-state of Colorado. There are lots of places to hike in Colorado, and in almost any part of the state you can see some sort of deer, be it mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, or moose: you name it, you can probably see at least one of these cervids at almost any place in Colorado. Now, consider this: how often do you see bears in Colorado? Or mountain lions? Not terribly often, and especially not very often when you consider how often one sees deer. That's because of the predator/prey ratio. Essentially, if the balance between predator and prey is not kept in check, then populations will crash. Therefore, it is imperative that the prey species outnumber the predator species by what is usually a significant margin, otherwise the predators will overhunt, and they will starve to death. (For a more complete discussion of the predator/prey ration, this time in the context of the lynx/hare cycle of Canada, click HERE).

Some predators can get away with hunting in groups or packs because the prey species are relatively abundant. For example, the African Serengeti. The prey density is just so incredibly high that many different types of predators, such as lions, hyenas, and African wild dogs, can all hunt in packs. It works for them, because there are just so many prey species there!

Now let us bring our attentions back to the deserts. You can walk for miles, you can drive for even more, and see hardly a sign of any vertebrate life. Most likely, all you will see is a vulture or a hawk soaring the thermals high above you, watching for its next meal. If you're lucky, you might see a deer, or possibly even a javelina (a pig-like creature native to the south western United States, as well as Central and South America). You aren't going to see a lot of them, though. And if the prey isn't plentiful, then the predators sure aren't going to be, either!

Although dinosaurian-dominated ecosystems were undoubtedly different in some aspects from the mammalian-dominated ones of today, the fundamentals of the predator/prey ration would still stand true. There just wouldn't have been enough food to go around for these animals to have been pack hunters!

So, the final question: did Velociraptor hunt in packs? Or didn't it? If I had to hazard an answer, I would say no, no they did not. Due to the extreme lack of evidence in favor of this social behavior, as well as some evidence that seems to indicate that they wouldn't have, I would say that they did not hunt in packs. Obviously, with future discoveries, my ideas may change, which is one of the great things about science: we are always learning new things! And who knows: maybe one day, it will be one of YOU who discovers that crucial bit of evidence that shows that Velociraptor did, indeed hunt in packs!

OK, that was WAY too cheesy to leave like that. I felt uncomfortable even writing it. Let's end on a joke, instead. Why couldn't T-rex clap its hands? Huh? Give up? Because he was dead. Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I will be here all week.

A special thanks to Matthew Mossbrucker and Robert Bakker for their helpful information in making this post!

*To be honest, the whole concept of the theory doesn’t make a lot of sense: think about modern-day deer as an analogue for extinct prey species. If they see a predator, they are going to freeze, as it is much more difficult to pick out a still animal from the surrounding landscape than it would be a moving animal.  So predators would have to be able to pick out the prey, otherwise it would never capture one.  This freezing behavior on the part of deer when they are startled also explains why deer often freeze in front of car headlights: deer in the headlights!

The Dino Hotel Nears Completion! Part 2

As I mentioned IN THE LAST POST, the Best Western Denver Southwest is nearing its completion!  Soon, it will be the most powerful natural history hotel/museum in the entire galaxy!  In this post, we are going to see more of what makes this dinosaur hotel so freaking awesome!  Let's check out some of the skulls and bones that are going to go in the hotel!  First off, an awesome skull of an Acrocanthosaurus!

A bunch of other awesome bones for the hotel were delivered a few months ago to the Morrison Natural History Museum since the lobby at the hotel wasn't finished yet!  Any guesses as to what is inside of the crate?

I hate to say it, but your guesses were probably wrong.  Here is what was inside, with Pyg modeling for scale!  First off, a pair of Brachiosaurus femora!

A Pachycephalosaurus skull!

One day when the Pachycephalosaurus skull was at the museum, Dr. Bob came in one day with a few other pachycephalosaur skulls belonging to Stygimoloch and Dracorex, and had us paint them!  

You can see that all three skulls are approximately the same size: there's NO way that they are all the same animal, as some paleontologists believe!

Another great picture of the Pachycephalosaurus skull!

Here's another dinosaur skull, this one is Edmontosaurus!

And the third and final awesome skull, a Camarasaurus!

The hotel has many other cool specimens, such as this Allosaurus skull, which was in the lobby!

Not only are there some FANTASTIC skulls, the hotel has some casts of fossil skeletons, as well!  Here is the plan for Wadsworth the Stegosaurus, hanging above the front desk!

First, here is Good Sir Wadsworth before being brought inside!

Wadsworth being hung up!

And finally, the lobby, complete in all of its glory!  Notice the Brachiosaurus femora off to the left, and the Edmontosaurus skull in the cabinet around the middle of the picture!

Here are some more great pictures from the lobby!  Here are the curiosity cabinets under construction:

And the final product, with the Allosaurus skull above the fireplace!

If you travel to the dining hall, right off the lobby, you can enjoy lots of fun food, just as an enormous Tylosaurus (now named Sophie) would have done 70 million years ago!  First, some pictures of Sophie!

The flipper of the specimen!

As we mentioned before, this Tylosaurus wasn't hungry when it died!  In the stomach of this beatsie are the remains of a small creature called Dolichorhynchops!  To learn more about both Tylosaurus and Dolichorhynchops, click the link HERE!

Some days, you can also check out a fun-filled and exciting fossil table, crammed full of awesome goodies!  Here are several shots of that!

They also have an awesome donation box for the Morrison Museum!  This mosasaur skull, belonging to another Western Interior Seaway critter called Clidastes, will sit inside of it!

Indeed, this hotel is full of prehistoric from top to bottom!  Actually, literally to the top, as the hotel will have a Pteranodon weathervane!  Here are the plans, and the actual weathervane itself!

Want to hear more about the hotel, but just won't be in the area anytime soon?  Not a problem!  Like their Facebook page by clicking HERE!  Not only do they share lots of awesome pictures and fun facts, they also create lots of fun Dino Memes!  Here is one of my favorites (partly because they included a link to our Xiphactinus: The Inception Fossil post when they uploaded the picture to Facebook!), but partly because it's an awesome meme!

And here is the first in a series of "Fun Fact" memes that I am working on with the Tally's!

Hope to see you all at the hotel!

The Dino Hotel Nears Completion! Part 1

You've probably heard me mention the Best Western Denver Southwest several times here on the blog: they are the folks who are changing their hotel into a dinosaur themed natural history museum/hotel extravaganza!  Well, the lobby is now complete, as is much of the rest of the dinosaur themed paraphernalia around the grounds!  Just a few more things are awaiting completion, but the hotel looks fantastic!  I thought I'd share some pictures of the hotel for you guys here!  For your information, the credit for all of the photos in this post goes to the Best Western Denver Southwest, unless it is otherwise noted or there is a stuffed Triceratops named Pyg in the picture!  But first, you should meet the stars of the hotel: the Tally family!

First, let's start on the outside of the hotel!  Here are the initial plans for the outside of the hotel:

And here is who greets you now when you walk inside: Stanley, the Stegosaurus!

Now, the lobby only just recently finished construction.  Until recently, the lobby entrance looked like this:

The lobby just finished construction and looks GREAT now, but first let's look at a few more construction pictures, just so you can get a feel for how far along everything has come!  First let's take a look at the pool!  In the far future, the room should be partially enclosed from the outdoors!

At the beginning of construction, this place looked like it does in the picture below with Meredith!

A few months later, we have their two children, Caroline and Joe Tally, talking about the future plans for the pool with a camera crew from the BBC!

Finally, here are some pictures of the pool from very recently, it is now finished!

At least, the pool itself is finished.  Sometime starting next year, the Tally's will be hiring someone to create a tile mosaic of some creatures that inhabited the Western Interior Seaway (which you can read more about HERE).  Oh....and did I forget to mention that the pool is in the shape of the seaway?  Pretty frickin' awesome if you ask me!

Now, a few pictures back, I mentioned that Joe and Caroline were talking to a BBC camera crew.  What was that all about?  Well, as you can imagine, this whole dinosaur hotel idea has been pretty popular to a whole lot of folks, and has made an appearance across a very wide range of media, one of which was a BBC story about it!  Check out the link HERE!  I also have several pictures of the filming!  First off, we have several pictures of the camera on Greg!

As you might have noticed in the video, the film crew also stopped at the Morrison Natural History Museum, my place of work!  There they interviewed the director and curator Matt Mossbrucker, and you can see a few of those pictures below!

Here the film crew watches as Matt excavates part of an Apatosaurus skull named Kevin upstairs in the lab!

Another big break for the hotel came from The Oatmeal!  We have a lot to cover here in this post so I won't take the time to delve into it myself, but you absolutely HAVE to check it out by clicking HERE: it is fantastic, I guarantee it!  These three screenshots below are credited to The Oatmeal!

It doesn't stop there, though!  The Tallys have also been featured in Entrepreneur magazine!  Here is a picture of the article, and you can read it yourself by clicking the link HERE!

And on the lighter side of things: have you ever heard of the popular YouTube series My Drunk Kitchen?  If not, make sure to check it out because it is hysterical: but especially make sure to check out the episode with the hotel and the museum in it!  Suffice it to say, the Tallys have definitely found their way down many different avenues of pop culture!

I don't really find it that surprising: what they're doing is freaking awesome!  Check out these murals that they are having painted on the back of the building!  The first one is a sort of walk through time, featuring all sorts of fun animals!  The close up below is of a prehistoric mammal called Uintatherium!

Here's another mural for you to check out:

As if that isn't enough awesome paleo art for you, hanging in the rooms will be copies of some of the watercolors made by an awesome paleontologist named Arthur Lakes who excavated a lot of cool things from the area, including some of the bones that we have in the museum!

There are also some awesome banners hanging on the poles outside the hotel!

These aren't the only reasons why the hotel is super cool, though: not by a long shot!  Usually every week, they have a Bird of Prey show and a Jungle Lady show!

First some pictures from the bird of prey shows!  First, a few pictures of Anne Price holding a barn owl!

Next, we have a picture of her holding a turkey vulture!

Next, we have Anne holding a Harris hawk, while Peter Reshetniak holds a great-horned owl!

 Here, Peter still holds the great-horned owl!

 Peter takes a turn with the Harris hawk!

Next, we have a picture of Peter holding a screech owl!

Finally, two kids are enthralled by the red-tailed hawk!

The Jungle Lady is really cool too, here are some pictures of the animals that she brings, too!  Here's Meredith with the albino Burmese python!

 And an albino hedgehog!

Here's a picture of a veiled chameleon named Prince Charming!

This post is really long: I am splitting it up into two parts!  Check back next time to learn about what REALLY makes the dinosaur hotel a DINOSAUR hotel!

Boulder Submerged: Not So Strange 70 Million Years Ago!

Where I live in Boulder, Colorado, we aren't used to having a whole lot of moisture.  For the last few days, however, we have been experiencing record breaking levels of rain: as a matter of fact, the sheer amount of rain that we are being inundated with has resulted in enormous levels of flooding, complete with evacuations, destroyed homes and roads, and unfortunately several deaths.  I am actually writing this Thursday evening after having my very first flood day, and we have a flood day tomorrow, too!  (And now I am finishing the post on Sunday and we are STILL getting rain!)  Despite the fact that all of this water in Boulder is quite unusual, if you were to travel back 70 to 100 million years ago right here in Boulder, water wouldn't be the exception: it would be the norm!

You see, 70 million years ago, there were no Rocky Mountains.  In fact, Colorado was nowhere near a mile high above sea level: it was about three hundred feet below!  Due to the fact that what would one day be Colorado was still located on continental crust, the Western Interior Seaway couldn't be super deep: nevertheless, three hundred feet deep was deep enough to contain an enormous assortment of fun creatures!  We've already met a large number of these creatures throughout different posts in the blog, but let's take another look at these guys, as well as other fun filled creatures of this ancient seaway!

Let's start on the shore: multiple dinosaur trackways throughout the nation (including two that I've been to, Dinosaur Ridge near Morrison and the Heritage Museum of the Texas Hill Country) show that many different dinosaurs roamed the shore of the Western Interior, including large ornithopods and large theropods.  Some of these dinosaurs actually died and were swept out to shore, such as the ankylosaur Niobrarasaurus!

Pyg chilling inside of a cast of one of the large ornithopod footprints from Dinosaur Ridge at the Morrison Natural History Museum

They weren't the only dinosaurs that lived on the shore, though: meet the flightless, cormorant-like bird Hesperornis!  Originally discovered by famous paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, Hesperornis grew to around six feet in length, and looks very similar to the Galápagos flightless cormorant via the process of convergent evolution!

Hesperornis probably ate a wide variety of fish, squid, and an interesting group of extinct marine vertebrates called ammonites.  Some ammonites could grow to simply ENORMOUS proportions, such as the one in the top left of the picture below, one from the Heritage Museum of the Texas Hill Country that I mentioned above.  Found all over the country (and, as a matter of fact, the world), one particular ammonite site looks like it might be a nesting site!  To learn more about this ammonite nesting site, click HERE to check out a guest post by paleontologist and physicist Wayne Itano!

Ammonites were by no means the largest creature in the Western Interior, however, and neither was Hesperornis.  As a matter of fact, neither of them were all that close at all!  Hesperornis was relatively close to the bottom of the food chain, a fact that we know conclusively due to the discovery of one particular specimen of an interesting animal called Tylosaurus in South Dakota.  Tylosaurus was a type of animal called a mosasaur, whose closest living relatives today are the monitor lizards (like the Komodo dragon and the Nile monitor).   Contained within the stomach cavity of this particular Tylosaurus specimen were the remains of a fish, a smaller related species of mosasaur, and a Hesperornis!  Platecarpus remains, one of those smaller mosasaurs, are sometimes found within the belly of the Tylosaurus, the belly of the beast!

Paleontologists are always very excited when they think they've found the fossilized remains of a predator with the remains of its prey still inside.  This can help establish a predator/prey relationship between the two creatures, a relationship that might otherwise have simply been theorized.  Fortunately for us paleontologists, multiple critters in the Western Interior Seaway have been discovered with other little critters within their stomach cavity!  One of these, which I have nicknamed "The Inception Fossil," we actually did a whole post about a few months back!  Entitled "Xiphactinus: The Inception Fossil," this post was all about a fish called Xiphactinus and why I called it "The Inception Fossil."  As you might have already guessed from the context, the nickname stems from the "fish within a fish" idea: Xiphactinus is often found with other fish inside of its stomach!  Below, you can see one of these Inception Fossils, where a Xiphactinus died shortly after swallowing a fish called Gillicus.

Xiphactinus and Gillicus were by no means the only fish in the sea!  The other day, my friend Sam Lippincott and I visited the Denver Gem and Mineral Show.  We both purchased several fossils there, and one of my purchases was a small tooth of another Western Interior Cretaceous Seaway (WIKS) fish called Enchodus.  The name of this fish roughly translates to "spear fish," and from the picture below, you can probably see why: this fish was definitely made to catch some other fish!  Fossils attributed to Enchodus have been found on either side of the K/T boundary, meaning that this fish seems to have survived the extinction that killed off the non avian dinosaurs, and many of the marine creatures as well!

It looks to me like this tooth may be one of the large protruding teeth on the upper part of the jaw.

Pyg checks out her new Enchodus tooth from the Denver Gem and Mineral Show!

I got another tooth from another fish that would have inhabited the Western Interior: this tooth belongs to the shark Squalicorax!  When fully grown, Squalicorax was around the size of the living great white shark, and would have prowled the oceans much like sharks do today.  As a matter of fact, sharks have survived relatively unchanged for hundreds of millions of years!

Pyg checks out the other tooth she purchased at the Denver Gem and Mineral Show, a Squalicorax tooth!

Next, we have a funky looking group of reptiles that look like nothing that we have on Earth today!  These are the plesiosaurs, and some of them could grow pretty large!  Remember before how we mentioned that Hesperornis was discovered by a guy named Marsh?  Well, Marsh had a paleontology rival named Cope.  This rivalry got kind of out of hand, and resulted in something that today we call "The Bone Wars."  (To learn more about the Bone Wars from the ridiculously funny "The Oatmeal," make sure to click the link HERE!)  One of the particularly famous instances in this paleontological skirmish was when Marsh's rival, Edward Drinker Cope, reconstructed one of these plesiosaurs.  Called Elasmosaurus, Cope accidentally placed the head of the animal on the tip of the tail instead of in its proper place at the end of the neck.  As you can imagine, Marsh took the opportunity to mock his rival.  This also sets up the perfect joke for The Oatmeal, but I won't spoil it for you: you have to check it out for yourself!

Although there were other plesiosaurs that swam through the ancient North American seas, my favorite is the funky looking Dolichorhynchops!  This type of short-necked plesiosaur has also been found in the stomach of the enormous Tylosaurus!

Dolichorhynchops is most definitely not a familiar face to your average Joe, but what about Archelon?  This massive sea turtle also inhabited the seaway, and is actually the largest sea turtle known to science!  This guy is about 13 feet long, which is about twice as long as the leatherback sea turtle, who are the largest living sea turtles!  And although Archelon looks similar to sea turtles today, it definitely doesn't look like the turtles we have in Boulder!

Just as the floodwaters are subsiding, so too did the Western Interior Seaway drain from the center of the North American continent.  As the Rocky Mountain started getting pushed up and the elevation got higher and higher, the shallow sea got shallower and shallower, until there was nothing left.  Nothing left, that is, except for the fossils that we find today!  And who knows, maybe the floodwaters from the recent storms have eroded away some overburden, revealing some prehistoric marine fossils beneath!

What is a Pterosaur?

Most of you have probably heard about the so-called "pterodactyls," the flying creatures that lived during the time of the dinosaurs. Like most of us, you might not know exactly what a pterodactyl, more properly known as a pterosaur, is. Is it a bird? A bat? A dinosaur? Possibly even an insect? Or a distinct group of archosaurs that are thought to be fairly closely related to both dinosaurs and crocodilians, but scientists still aren't 100% positive how they fit into the reptilian family tree? Well, if you were thinking the last option, then lo and behold: you're right! Although the pterodactyls would have soared through the skies much like birds, bats, and even some insects of today, they would have been a distinct group altogether. They are also not quite dinosaurs: as the last option says, no one knows quite yet how exactly they fit in!

Pyg perches next to the skeleton of one of the most famous pterosaurs, Pteranodon, at the Morrison Natural History Museum in Colorado!  

Another misconception you might be suffering under is what these extinct flying reptiles are actually called. Although most people call them pterodactyls, that isn't quite the correct term for them. Scientifically, these creatures are known as the pterosaurs. The name pterodactyls actually originates from a small pterosaur that is commonly found in the fine-grained Solnhofen fossil beds in Germany. Known as Pterodactylus, several hundred of these little reptiles have been discovered!

Pyg checks out a cast of one of the more famous Pterodactylus specimens from Solnhofen!

The Solnhofen quarries are world renknowed for their excellent fossils. Not only have a large number of Pterodactylus specimens been uncovered there, but it was from these quarries that the very first Archaeopteryx was uncovered in 1861.  This primitive bird is one of the missing links between birds and dinosaurs, as it shares many features in common with both groups (such as feathers with birds and hand claws and teeth with dinosaurs). Other famous and important animals to come out of the Solnhofen Quarries include numerous crustaceans, insects, and even a small crocodile called Alligatorellus!

Pyg learns more about both the Pterodactylus specimen from above (left), but also about Archaeopteryx (right)!  This cast is of the best specimen of this primitive bird, and was discovered in 1877!  (The original specimen was, not the cast).

Part of the reason why the Solnhofen Quarry is so darn special is the extremely fine-detail preserved in the fossils. As I just mentioned in the previous paragraph, feathers have been discovered with Archaeopteryx specimens. Feathers, much like skin, hair, and other soft-tissues, rarely fossilize. As the science of paleontology slowly evolves, just like the animals it studies, paleontologists become better and better equipped to deal with, not to mention find, these soft-tissue elements of these extinct animals. More and more dinosaurs are being discovered with not only skin, but oftentimes feathers, such as Microraptor, an animal fairly closely related to Velociraptor of Jurassic Park fame; Dilong, an ancient ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex; and the bizarre therizinosaurs; amongst many others.

And it's not just feathers that fossilize, either. Wing membranes, composed of a flap of skin, are being discovered more and more frequently when it comes to pterosaurs. When it comes to Pterodactylus, scientists have such a large sample size that they are able to reconstruct much of the soft-tissue anatomy of this particular pterosaur! Scientists also have a very thorough growth series for this particular pterosaur, with individuals ranging from hatchlings, just a few days to a few weeks old, all the way to very old individuals with wingspans of around five feet, which, for a Pterodactylus, is very hefty indeed!

Although we've talked a lot about Pterodactylus, there are many other fascinating pterosaurs! I've taken a recent interest in pterosaurs, but before we dive on in to a wide variety of posts, I wanted to provide a brief introduction! Remember, this is a VERY brief introduction. For a more thorough introduction to pterosaurs, consult a book or something, or check back in the future as we learn more about pterosaurs! Don't hold me to it, but I feel like sometime in the near future, I will be talking about Dimorphodon and the anurognathids! Check back soon!

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