Pterosaur.net Blog

Pterosaur.net research 2011

2012-01-08T19:59:00.002Z

About this time last year I put together a little post about all the work that had been done by various members of the P.net team over the previous 12 months. Obviously we continue to carry out and publish research and are involved in conferences and the like. I thought it fun to carry on with this pattern, so here is what we've put together from 2011. It's rather less than last year quite simply because we'd had the Flugsaurier meeting in Beijing which naturally resulted in an additional glut of abstracts. Even so there's a good mixture of conference material and real research papers here and it covers quite a range of pterosaur subject including flight, ecology, taxonomy, anatomy and even history of research.

Here's to the pterosaurs of 2012.

Andres, B., Howard, L., & Steel, L. 2011. Owen’s pterosaurs, old fossils shedding light on new clads. Symposium for Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy (SVPCA), Lyme Regis, UK.

Chapman, S. & Steel, L. 2011. Reptiles from the Lower Lias of the Dorset Coast and Mary Anning. Symposium for Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy (SVPCA), Lyme Regis, UK.

K. Eck, R.A. Elgin & E. Frey. On the osteology of Tapejara wellnhoferi KELLNER 1989 and the first occurrence of a multiple specimen assemblage from the Santana Formation, Araripe Basin, NE-Brazil. Swiss Journal of Palaeontology, DOI: 10.1007/s13358-011-0024-5

Elgin, R.A., & H.B.N. Campos. A new specimen of the azhdarchoid pterosaur Tapejara wellnhoferi. Historical Biology, DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2011.613467

Elgin, R.A., & E. Frey. A new ornithocheirid, Barbosania gracilirostris gen. et sp. nov. (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea) from the Santana Formation (Cretaceous) of NE Brazil. Swiss Journal of Palaeontology, DOI: 10.1007/s13358-011-0017-4

Elgin, R.A., & E. Frey. A nearly complete ornithocheirid pterosaur from the Crato Formation (Aptian, Early Cretaceous) of NE Brazil. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica DOI:10.4202/app.2010.0079

Elgin & E. Frey. A new azhdarchoid pterosaur from the Cenomanian (Late Cretaceous) of Lebanon. Swiss Journal of Geoscience, DOI: 10.1007/s00015-011-0081-1

*Elgin, R.A., Hone, D.W.E. & Frey, E. 2011. The extent of the pterosaur flight membrane. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 56: 99-111.

Habib, M. 2011. Functional Morphology of Anurognathid Pterosaurs. GSA Northeast Regional Conference •2011.

Habib, M. Solving the pterosaur size problem: Quadrupedal launch in the Pterosauria. Los Angeles County Museum

Hone, D.W.E., Naish, D. & Cuthill, I.C. Cranial ornamentation and sexual selection in pterosaurs and non-avian dinosaurs. Lethaia, in press.

Hone, D.W.E. A new specimen of the pterosaur Rhamphorhynchus. Historical Biology, in press.

Hone, D.W.E., Henderson, D.M. & Palmer, C. 2011. Investigating the buoyancy and floating posture of pterosaurs. Symposium for Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy (SVPCA), Lyme Regis, UK.

Lawlor, E., Beardmore, S., Hone, D.W.E., & Orr, P. 2011. Skeletal taphonomy of pterosaurs from the Late Jurassic of Germany. Symposium for Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy (SVPCA), Lyme Regis, UK.

Sweetman, S.C., Martill, D.M. & Witton, M.P. 2011. Pterosaurs. In
Batten, D.J. (ed.). English Wealden fossils. Palaeontological
Association, London, Field Guide to Fossils, 14, 769 pp.

Witton, M.P. 2011. The pectoral girdle of Dimorphodon macronyx
(Pterosauria, Dimorphodontidae) and the terrestrial abilities of
non-pterodactyloid pterosaurs. SVPCA 2011 Programme & Abstracts, Lyme
Regis, 2011, 22.

Witton, M.P. & Maclean-Henry, G. 2011. Additional details on the
skull of Istiodactylus latidens and the palaeoecology of istiodactylid
pterosaurs. SVPCA 2011 Programme & Abstracts, Lyme Regis, 2011, 28.

*Came out in 2010 and we talked about it then but, well, it does have a 2011 date on it.

OFF-TOPIC: Mark Witton’s handy-dandy guide to making it as a palaeoartist

2012-01-07T00:26:00.017Z

OR A most unexpected dose of possibly unsolicited, hopefully none-too-preachy advice

Not long ago I received an Email from ex-University of Portsmouth student Dominic Shaw asking for some pointers of how to get involved in palaeoartistry. As my reply got longer and longer, I wondered if anyone had ever published any general guidelines online as to how break into palaeoartistry and, to my surprise, I found nothing. Hence, I thought I could share my reply here – punctuated with a few pterosaur piccies to keep in with the décor of Pterosaur.Net – for all to see (reconstruction, above, shows Tupuxuara leonardii). Apologies to those understandably expecting something pterosaury from this post, and to my colleagues for abusing Pterosaur.Net’s status, but I figure this will reach a wider audience here than elsewhere, along with allowing free commentary below (something not afforded at other venues I regularly post in).

Before we begin though, a quick caveat. While I’ve had some success as a palaeoartist, my palaeoart has largely been done on the side of other employment. I’ve had an 18 month stint as a designer/sculptor with the UoP London pterosaur project and enjoyed brief periods in 2011 as a designer for the BBC’s upcoming Walking with Dinosaurs 3D movie, but I’ve never had to support myself for sustained periods with palaeoart commissions. Please bear this in mind as you read the words below: others may paint a very different picture of the palaeoart industry to my own. The points made here aren’t given in any particular order.

1. Develop a portfolio, and get it online

In this day and age, if you don’t own a website as a creative professional, you may as well not exist. Deviantart is probably the best first step: a limited service is free and it’s designed for viewing artwork, so it’s a good place to start building up a portfolio and start making a splash. Make sure your palaeoart work is kept distinct from anything else you do: there’s nothing wrong with having other work on the same site, but you want to make it easy for palaeoart aficionados to home in on their target.

Eventually, it’s probably worth transferring your portfolio to your own personal webspace. Make it stylish, but let people enjoy it in their own time: flashy movies of your portfolio seem like a good idea, but they tend to be more frustrating than dynamic. Visitors are there to see your work, after all, and having it whizz past while some ‘atmospheric’ music plays (which probably just makes most people turn the volume knob down) means your audience cannot appreciate what they logged on to see. Watermarks, restricted image resolutions or other means of blocking downloads are a much better way to showcase your work without it being ripped off.

2. Get in with the community

Perhaps one of the most important things you can do as an aspiring palaeoartist is to become integrated with the internet palaeocommunity. A truly international institution, it’s a terrific place where well-known professionals converse and rub shoulders with amateurs of all levels. As someone trying to get their work noticed, you need to get involved with it. Why not start a blog about your work, and keep visitors turning up with regular updates? To my mind, an ‘in progress’ shot of a painting or sculpture is the perfect excuse for a blog and invites discussion and advice from others about aspects of the reconstruction. Use forums like the Dinosaur Mailing List or ARTEvolved to keep people informed with what you’re up to. That way, when someone has an image in mind to be drawn, your work will be fresh in their mind. This, ultimately, is what you want: when a palaeontologist needs a reconstruction of species X or landscape Y for whatever reason, you want to be the guy they consider as the only person for that job.

Plus, these sites are great ways to directly talk to experts about any aspect of a reconstruction you’re having problems with (the Ask a Biologist website may also be of use in this regard) and keep up to date with the latest discoveries. Speaking of which…

3. Keep up to date with the latest discoveries, and do your homework

Others may disagree, but I think there’s definitely a ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ aspect to palaeoart. Your work should reflect the most up to date thoughts on the appearance and habits of whatever organism you’re depicting. If it doesn’t, it’s incorrect relative to our knowledge of that time. One of my favourite examples of glaringly inaccurate palaeoart is not a vertebrate at all, but stalked crinoids. These chaps, which should be ten-a-penny in some scenes of Mesozoic seas, are always shown with their brachials arranged in a cup-shape, waiting for detritus to fall from the seas above. The majority of modern stalked crinoids, by contrast, do quite the opposite when feeding, angling their calyx into currents with their arms fanning out behind them. Despite being known for decades (Macruder and Meyer 1973), this rather glaring error has yet to filter out of mainstream palaeoart. As such, we could most crinoid reconstructions as ‘incorrect’ with respect to our current knowledge of rheophilic crinoids*. Likewise, there is little excuse for getting the proportions of well-known species wrong, drawing soft-tissues volumes that could not fit their skeleton , depicting the wrong form of integument or, essentially, contradicting things that we have considerable evidence for. Learn and understand anatomy from modern animals (I particularly endorse this book in this regard) and apply it appropriately to fossil species: the trained eye can easily spot palaeoartists who appreciate relationships between skeletons and soft-tissues and those who’re making it up on the fly. It’s important that you do this to be taken seriously by the scientists you may one day be working with: they want to know that you’re keen on reconstructing extinct critters with as much accuracy as they are with their science. (Below: not a pterosaur)

*A get-out clause, I suppose, could be that a minority of modern stalked crinoids do feed in the ‘classic’ pose. Still, the fact that hardly any crinoids in palaeoart behave like the majority of extant crinoids is a bit of an oversight. Hmm… best stop talking about crinoids before I get lynched by my tetrapodophile colleagues.

4. Be your own PR agent

If the sniff of an opportunity wafts past your nose for high-profile or paid work, make sure you get an offer of your services in. Work is hard to come by in palaeoartistry (see below), so you want to grab opportunities with both hands if they’re available. The only reason I ended up working on Walking with Dinosaurs 3D is because, when approached as a consultant for their pterosaurs, I said I can also draw pretty pictures and was available for hire if they needed me. There’s obviously a need for tact in your approach to this (you don’t want to annoy any potential employers or commissioners) but be sure to seize any opportunities that come your way.

5. Go to conferences, and pimp yourself out

Palaeo conferences are terrific: day after day of interesting talks, the chance to catch up with rarely seen friends, a plethora of beer and, most importantly, the chance to meet lots of new contacts at the same time. Whatever aspect of palaeo you’re into, there’s a conference for you somewhere. Most palaeoartists, I suspect, are more interested in vertebrates than invertebrate fossils, so dates for SVPCA (held annually and almost exclusively in Britain) and SVP (annually and almost exclusively in the US) are dates to pop into your diaries. Take a portfolio of work along and show yourself off a little. Have some business cards made up (it doesn’t cost much if you design them yourself: I had mine printed for around £15) and distribute them accordingly. Talk to scientists about their work and, if they’re interested, offer your services for a PR image or whatever. Again, be tactful - be sure not to push yourself too hard on potentially interested parties (conferences are busy places: if someone looks distracted and busy, choose another time) – but make the most of these rare chances to meet people who you may one day be working with. Don’t forget: you can make much more of an impression in person than you can as a faceless Email.

UPDATE: 07/01/12: Having never done it myself, it slipped my mind that a number of palaeoartists use conferences to showcase and sell their work. Most palaeoartists I can think of that do this are, admittedly, fairly big names, but this may not necessarily mean relative newcomers are unwelcome or unable to have their own stalls. This may be a really worthwhile pursuit if you're looking to make it big: it provides an opporunity for people to introduce themselves to your cataglogue without it being pushed directly to them, and nothing says 'I've arrived' more than having your own little piece of real estate at a big international conference. In addition, these stalls are a great opportunity to track down and ask advice from other palaeoartists, who are nothing but friendly in my experience.

6. Be unique

A good way to get some attention is to reconstruct some critters that the rest of the world ignores. Lovely as they are, there are probably enough pictures of Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor now that, laid end to end, they’d stretch to the Moon and back. Other animals - even well-known beasties within charismatic clades like Dinosauria – are frustratingly neglected. Fill your portfolio with good restorations of ignored critters (many of which do cool things that would make for ace pictures: where are all the images of burrowing ornithischians, head-butting schizotherines or virtually anything outside of the Mesozoic?) and you may stand out from the crowd of artists presenting the umpteenth picture of theropod X attacking dinosaur Y.

Of course, this is something of a double edged sword: there are probably so many images of certain animals because some critters are very popular. Perhaps, then, it may be good to have a few well-known critters scattered through your portfolio as well: it’ll keep the masses happy and, more importantly, has the benefit of web surfers being more likely to pick up your artwork. Far more people will stumble across your site by Googling ‘Camarasaurus’ than ‘Baculites’. Ultimately, an increase in web traffic can’t damage your profile.

Additionally, let yourself develop your own distinctive style: don’t merely imitate others or, even worse, copy them outright. I think this can take some years to do (I notice that my own style has changed a lot over the years – for the better, I reckon - judge for yourself with the reconstructions of Tupandactylus, above) but it’s worth it: your work will stand out a lot more and be recognisable even without reading your name scrawled at the bottom.

7. Make sure you’re credited

It sounds obvious, but politely insist that whoever displays your work makes it clear who the artist is. A lot of palaeoart is commissioned for press work, and successful press releases can run and run: this is a great opportunity for your name to be seen and generate more buzz about your work. Most folks are very happy to whack your name next to an image, save for newspapers. It’s all ‘an artist’s reconstruction of so-and-so’ instead of the artists actual name. Still, there’s no point putting your work out there to attract attention if people don’t know who drew it, so make sure it’s clear that it belongs to you.

8. Do not quit your day job, and be aware that you may never be able to

Professional and amateur palaeonerds surround ourselves with palaeoart: it’s plastered on our office walls, throughout the books in our libraries, on computer desktop backgrounds and wherever our better halves will let us have it around the house. This gives the impression that the market for this stuff must be lucrative, but the truth is quite the opposite. The number of employers who can pay reasonably for good palaeoart (primarily some museums, a minority of magazines and books, some film makers) is tiny compared to the number of people who could supply it. The internet has revealed just how many excellent palaeoartists there are around the world, and the market is being increasingly diluted with easily contactable talent. For an idea of your competition, take a look at Wikipedia’s list of palaeoartists working nowadays: it’s huge. With such a large amount of competition, it’s going to be a while before you land enough commissions to stand out from the crowd and start demanding the big bucks that you can make an honest living off, and even longer if you’re a grown up with dependents and financial obligations.

Finally, and at the risk of sounding overly negative, it’s worth considering that the career of dedicated palaeoartist may be on its way out. A heated exchange on the Dinosaur Mailing List in 2011 hinted at this: established professionals stated that the number of modern palaeoartists working for lower wages was seriously undermining their livelihoods. The opinion of some folks in this discussion was that a lot of modern palaeoart is done by kids working in their parent’s basements, not functioning adults with mortgages and families, and that said children should either charge sensible money (which is difficult for young upstarts to do without a reputation to barter with) or quit professional palaeoart altogether.

Such an attitude, though, does not consider that palaeoart may not be the sole livelihood of many modern practitioners, meaning they can afford to take the financial hit of a low-cost commission. After all, it’s extremely flattering and exciting to be asked to reconstruct a new taxon or an exciting new behavioural hypothesis, and why should these artists not be allowed that opportunity? It’s not the 1990s any more: excellent palaeoart is no-longer synonymous with Sibbick, Paul, Henderson and a smattering of others in the way it was two decades ago. There’s a world of artists, each with their own style and expertise, that are slowly dispersing the contents of the palaeoart moneypot far and wide, which ultimately means a less reliable income for each individual. This is not to say that it’s not worth chasing the ambition of being a professional, dedicated palaeoartist, but you will be in a very lucky, and very tiny, minority if you achieve that goal. The take-home message here, then, is that aspiring palaeoartists, and perhaps palaeoartists in general, have to be realistic about the scant nature of our work in our field.

UPDATE: 07/01/12
9. Let’s talk money

The sticky topic of money is one that palaeoartists are a little cagey about: I suppose people are afraid of giving their costs away for fear of being undercut by others. It’s one that we should discuss a little more openly, however, to ensure that we’re being treated fairly by commissioners. So, when should you start charging, and how much? I don’t think there’s a straight answer to either of those. For reasons mentioned above, a new artist may not be able to charge anything of note: until you have something of a reputation, it may be better to think of establishing yourself than putting people off with high price tags for your unproven, unknown art. Some folks will, no doubt, scoff at this idea, but it’s no different from being in a band: you have to do a lot of free or poorly-paid gigs before there’s enough buzz about your show to start demanding higher fees.

Perhaps the time to start charging is when requests for your work start appearing frequently (and your time, therefore, is increasingly valuable to others), and definitely when you’re approached by Big Names with large amounts of funding. These, to my mind, includes film companies, larger magazines and publishing houses, and perhaps large research labs. While the latter may irk some – palaeontological science is hardly overfunded even in the best instances – I’m sure the scientists working in these labs appreciate that budding artists need to earn a living too, and, though they’re basically being paid for drawing a pretty picture (and probably having a ball doing it), they’re still executing a piece of work that can represent a substantial time investment, and should be reimbursed (for the record, I’ve a number of commissions from research labs and often been offered money before asking for any). In all instances, once you’re a known name, do not be afraid to ask for money: sometimes bringing this issue up yourself is the only way you’ll get paid. Money may not be the deal-clincher in your decision to take on a commission (it’s not for me, for one) but it’s good to ensure that you’re financially rewarded where possible.

Still, this doesn’t answer the big question: how much can you expect to make as a palaeoartist? There’s a lot to consider here, which means there may not be a straightforward answer for many scenarios. Are you merely being asked for the right to print an older image, or is the commission entirely new? How complex is the piece (considering backgrounds, number of taxa and individuals, use of colour, size etc.)? What is the timeframe you’ve got to work with? Importantly, are you retaining the copyright to the work? And where are you in your career? Is your name established yet? The bigger your name, the larger your price tag can be. As someone with perhaps some reputation as an artist (though still several country miles from the big leagues), my rough guide for imagery use and commissions is thus. The right to print an image in a profitable magazine should fetch you at least £100 – 200, the exact cost really depending on who’s asking you. If the magazine is a tiny one with small circulation, you may have to forgo any money at all. In an ideal world, the price of new commissions should fetch you many hundreds of pounds at least, and thousands if the work is particularly large, complicated or you’re surrendering your copyright with the work. The latter point is an important one: once the copyright has left your hands, that image will never make you any money again. Generally speaking, I suggest retaining the copyright to your work unless you have no choice: a successful press release image can turn into a little money spinner if popular, and you also get more control over what your work is associated with. Because I’ve never made a sculpture to order, I’ll refrain from commenting on their costings. In all instances, be friendly, sympathetic but assertive in your negotiations for money: you may be doing your hobby in exchange for cash, but that doesn’t give people a right to take you for granted.

Reference

Macurda, D. B. and Meyer, D. L. 1974. Feeding posture of modern stalked crinoids. Nature, 247, 394-396.

Pterosaurs in the Carnegie

2011-12-13T16:04:00.002Z

People keeping up with my main blog, the Archosaur Musings, will know that about a month ago I hopped over to Pittsburgh to do some pterosaur work with the esteemed Mike Habib at the legendary Carnegie Museum. Since then I've been furiously blogging about the huge number of dinosaurs that are on exhibition.

However, there's also a much-better-than-you-might-expect collection of pterosaurs on display and I took some time to blog my way through these. Since this has gone utterly unmentioned on P.net, it seemed I should rectify this. Sadly I'm just going to link back to all the other posts, but there's pretty pictures and stuff, so that should help with the disappointment right?

Campyloganthoides
'Pterodactylus'
Nyctosaurus
Pteranodon

Quetzalcoatlus

Enjoy!

Scarfe's snout

2011-11-25T11:54:00.003Z

This is a shameless re-post from the Musings, but really rather an appropriate one. Not only is it about a brand new pterosaur from the UK, but the post (and indeed new pterosaur) come courtesy of Dave Martill. Dave supervised the PhD research of Lorna steel, Darren Naish and Mark Witton, so in one way he has quite a claim to Pterosaur.net. Take it away Dave:

Cuspicephalus scarfi from the Late Jurassic Kimmeridge Clay Formation of Dorset is one of those irritating fossils. It was clearly a beautiful animal, with long, slender jaws and fine teeth that would have made it look impressive. It is without doubt a cracking fossil, displaying a near perfect right lateral outline, with only a little bit of the dorsal rest missing. OK, it is sad that the lower jaw and rest of skeleton is missing, but in the UK, this specimen is the best thing since the second specimen of Dimorphodon was discovered in the Lower Jurassic in the mid 1800s. But despite its near completeness for a British pterosaur skull, it is not entirely clear where it belongs in the grand scheme (or schemes), of pterosaur phylogeny. It appears to be a pterodactyloid similar to Germanodactylus on the basis of its single NAOF and straight dorsal border, but when compared with Darwinopterus, its affinities become less clear cut. Sure, it isn’t Darwinopterus, but it isn’t Germanodactylus in the strictest sense either. Dave Unwin thinks it might lie close to the base of Dsungaripteroidea, and I am inclined to agree, but caution that this is based mainly on the nature of its crest… not a good criterion given the distribution of elongate fibrous-looking crests in Pterosauria.

[caption id="attachment_6550" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Cuspicephalus skull. From Martill & Etches, in press"][/caption]

Cuspicephalus was discovered by Steve Etches. Known to most UK vertebrate palaeontologists, Steve collects fossils exclusively from the Kimmeridge Clay of Dorset and has built up a renowned collection housed in the Museum of Jurassic Marine Life (MJML) in Kimmeridge, Dorset. Steve discovered Cuspi on the wave cut platform in Kimmerdge Bay and reckons that one more tide would have destroyed it. Steve has found several other pterosaurs in the Kimmeridge Clay, some of which are represented by associated remains attributable to an animal close to Rhamphorhynhcus, and currently being examined by PhD student Michael O’Sullivan. A few specimens in Steve’s MJML have been identified as representing a germanodactylid by DMU, and it is possible that these elements are from the same animal as Cuspicephalus: clearly Steve needs to get out and find the complete skeleton.
The name Cuspicephalus is derived from the sharp pointed nature of the skull in lateral view, and I suspect in dorsal view too, but Kimmeridge Clay fossils are rather 2D to tell. The specific epithet honours Gerald Scarfe CBE. Scarfe is known to most UK citizens as the artist who provided the caricatures for the intro to the extremely popular satirical TV series Yes Minister and follow up Yes Prime Minister. Both were excellent lampoons of the UKs higher civil servants and mainly incompetent elected politicians. Globally Scarfe is known to several generations of Pink Floyd fans as the artist behind The Wall (album, film and more).

[caption id="attachment_6549" align="alignright" width="226" caption="Margret Thatcher as drawn by Gerald Scarfe. Courtesy Dave Martill"][/caption]

To readers of certain newspapers and periodicals Scarfe is loved or laothed for hard hitting political caricatures, and in particular those of British Prime Ministers and other notorious world leaders. Many were reproducible in daily newspapers, but others remained within the underground literature for reasons of decency (check out Rupert bear ****ing Mary Whitehosue with the Pope watching on). One cartoon of Scarfe’s that stands out is a caricature of Margaret Thatcher, an ex British Prime Minister who Scarfe Portrayed as a Tory blue, saggy-breasted pterodactyle, and therefore it seemed only fair that he should be honoured. Scarfe’s cartoon might have the number of fingers wrong, and he might have followed the Frey and Riess model for the orientation of the pteroid, but we all know he got the colour right.

Pip pip
Martill

Water Launching Pterosaurs

2011-11-21T06:14:00.000Z

This post is a cross-post from H2VP (again), but should be of interest to pterosaur.net readers.

I gave two presentations at SVP this year, and the second (in the form of a poster) was on pterosaur water launch. Specifically, I presented a model that Jim Cunningham and I have worked out for a plausible water launch strategy in Anhanguera. If you want to see what this might have looked like, turn your cursors here to Mark Witton's website. The relevant illustration is on the far right.

I will not give too much detail on this presentation at the moment, as it is shortly bound for PLoS ONE. However, here are some of the highlights:

- A bipedal water launch model appears to fail for Anhanguera (and other pterosaurs), just as the bipedal model fails for their terrestrial launch.

- A quadrupedal water launch model, in which the wings are the primary mechanism used to free the animal from the surface and to push along the surface to reach launch velocity, seems to check out for all of the parameters we can currently estimate with any confidence.

- Anhanguerids probably took multiple hops across the water surface to launch, but our calculations suggest that most of the actual energy expenditure was spent escaping the surface tension.

- Our model makes testable predictions about comparative anatomy of pterosaurs, which is important when building these kinds of models from fluid theory. Our model predicts that water launching pterosaurs should have features such as: warped deltopectoral crests or dp crests with flared distal ends, enlarged scapulae, extreme disparity between forelimb and hindlimb lengths, and reinforced scapulo-notarial joints. We have a more extensive list of features that can be shared a later date, but the primary note here is that these predicted features do indeed seem to show up mostly in marine pterosaurs, and less so in terrestrial taxa, so there is a least a loose, pattern-matching form of validation that can be applied to our hypothesis.

We hope to have animations and a full paper out on the topic of pterosaur water launch in the near future (next few months) so stay tuned!

Aurorazhdarcho - a Jurassic azhdarchoid

2011-11-02T07:52:00.000Z

Just a short post on this little fellow. I don't generally like blogging on new taxa as a lot of other people cover them and there's generally not much that can be said from an outside perspective that's not in the paper. I don't have much to add in that respect here either, but this is a nice thing for me to see out as I've seen the specimen knocking around in Dino Frey's office on a number of occasions over the last few years while being assured it would be described 'soon'. Well, now it is out and Aurorazhdarcho is born.

The specimen is obviously in superb condition (photos above and below lifted from Frey et al., 2011) though the head and neck are gone. Still, an impression remains on the sediment to show where they originally lay and given an idea of their original size and shape which is rather nice.

The most interesting thing though is the identification of this as member of the azhdarchoids. This most derived of pterosaur clades are otherwise known only from the Cretaceous, though a Jurassic origin is to be expected if (and for some, this is a big if) you accept that Germanodactylus is a dsungariptid and that this clade is the sister-taxon to the azhdarchoids. Certainly it has a few features that are unique to the group (that huge hindlimb for starters) and this identification looks good to me (though I have to confess I have yet to read the paper in full detail), though as ever with a specimen like this, the lack of a head is a real shame.

Frey, E., Meyer, C.A. & Tischlinger, H. 2011. The oldest azhdarchoid pterosaur from the Late Jurassic Solnhofen Limestone (Early Tithonian) of Southern Germany. Swiss Journal of Geosciences in press.

Dinosaur Revolution: Anhanguera

2011-10-05T21:39:00.002+01:00

This is actually a cross-post from H2VP, but it seems quite relevant here, as well. Those of you that watched episodes 3 and 4 of Dinosaur Revolution (which aired exactly one week ago) saw the sequence focusing on the large pterodactyloid pterosaur, Anhanguera. This was one of the sequences I had the most input on, so I thought it might be fun to chat briefly about some scientific background that inspired the sequence.

Parental care in pterosaurs?

The sequence opens with a mother Anhanguera visiting her nest of offspring, whom she then kicks out of the test for their first flights (these end poorly for the first two babies, but the "hero" character survives to fly another day). We have relatively little evidence regarding the specifics of parental care in pterosaurs. What we do have is good evidence that pterosaur babies were able to fly very early in life, and that the eggs were of a soft-shelled structure, which implies that the eggs were buried in foliage rather than brooded in the manner of birds. This manner of egg-laying alone does not tell us much about parental care - "leathery" eggs are laid by some taxa that do guard young (crocodilians) and many that do not (most squamates, though some of those guard nests and young, too). However, the fact that baby pterosaurs were so well developed, and likely able to fly early in life, is at least suggestive that there was not an extended period of parental care. Baby pterosaurs probably set off from the nest relatively early (possibly immediately). Check out Darren Naish's blog post from February on pterosaur babies and eggs for more.

Pterosaur Locomotion

There are three major types of motion shown in the sequence: ground locomotion, launching, and flight. As it turns out, the first two of these are really the same "mode" of movement. After speaking with David Krentz, he and I thought it would be interesting to show the baby Anhanguera hopping in a saltatorial fashion. There are no trackways that show this mode of locomotion in pterosaurs, but we also don't have any trackways that can reliably be mapped to ornithocheirids yet, and the limb proportions of ornithocheirds like Anhanguera are consistent with a saltatorial method of movement. This observation is noted in the paper that Mark Witton and I published in 2010. It is published in the highly acclaimed, open access journal PLoS ONE, and is freely available here.

The takeoff mechanism features the quadrupedal launch model that I proposed in 2008, and which was further used to make predictions about pterosaur ecology by Mark and I in the PLoS ONE paper. Julia Molnar generated a wonderful animation of quadrupedal launch for Anhanguera, and it has appeared across multiple venues, including National Geographic. She was subsequently kind enough to make it freely available on YouTube. I have inserted the video below. You can also pull it up by clicking here.

I have written about quadrupedal launch on other web resources previously, so I won't belabor the point here. In short, takeoff acceleration in animals tends to be generated mostly by the walking limbs, rather than the wings. As such, takeoff is really a form of running or leaping (usually the latter). The strengths of the limb bones in bending and torsion, particularly with regards to the moments sustained for leaping, are therefore highly indicative of launch mode. Pterosaurs turn out to be much more bat-like in this regard than bird-like: they had forelimbs which were much stronger than the hind limbs across a wide range of body sizes. By contrast, large birds have stronger hind limb elements (particularly the femur) when compared with the forelimb elements. Giant pterosaurs, such as Quetzalcoatlus, had very long, thin hind limb elements, which argues against a bird-like launch. However, because pterosaurs walked on their folded wings, as well, the incredibly robust forelimb musculature and structure could provide most of the launch power (and sustain the resulting forces) during a quadrupedal launch. Since pterosaurs were quadrupedal while moving on the ground to begin with, this is actually the most simple model, as well. Modern bats, particularly vampire bats and New Zealand short-tailed bats, use a quadrupedal launch.

There are a host of other problems with a bipedal launch in pterosaurs, including problems with angle of attack of the wing, trailing edge flutter, Wagner effects, insufficient height and time, and pitching instabilities. Depending on interest, I may do a summary of these observations at a later date.

There is not much to say specifically about the flight patterns. One nice thing was that the flapping amplitudes used were pretty reasonable. The wing cycles are probably a bit too large in some cases (particularly the Quetzalcoatlus models that do flybys), but it's usually much worse. The problem here is that large animals actually tend to fly with more shallow wing strokes, especially if they have high aspect ratio wings. This tends to make a distant albatross etc. seem a bit smaller to us than it really is, and the same happens when doing pterosaur models - they just don't look as huge if you model them correctly. In Clash of the Dinosaurs, I tried very hard to get the animators to reduce the flapping amplitude of the Quetzalcoatlus model to no avail - there was a general feeling from those working on the show that the giant size didn't come across with the lower-amplitude wingbeats that are predicted by anatomy and fluid mechanics. Oh well, such is life.

H2VP

2011-07-22T21:12:00.004+01:00

On the note of shameless plugs, readers of pterosaur.net may be interested to know that Justin Hall and I have launched a paleo blog called H2VP that will focus primarily on functional morphology and biomechanics of fossil vertebrates. We will be discussing pterosaurs from time-to-time (though I will be posting the dedicated pterosaur work here), as well as other Mesozoic animals that pterosaur enthusiasts may have interest in (right now theropods are featuring strongly, and an article on Mosasaurs will be forthcoming soon).

The blog can be found at: http://h2vp.blogspot.com/

Crazyass pterosaurs and massive, shameless self-promotion

2011-07-06T20:14:00.021+01:00

It's been a good while since I've posted anything here at Pterosaur.Net, and with good reason: a fair number of little projects, writing a book, moving house and the continued search for employment have kept me pretty busy for the last few months. One little project that I thought would be of interest to Pterosaur.Net readers, however, is my own website, the ego-trip/interactive CV/desperate bid for work that is Markwitton.com.

I've never designed a website before, resulting in a pretty simple design but, happily, I reckon it's fairly easy to read and navigate. I'll wager that Pterosaur.Net readers will find the full details of my upcoming Princeton University Press book, simply called (for the time being, anyway), Pterosaurs of most interest: you can find a full contents listing, sample imagery and an entire sample chapter, that dedicated to the recently-discovered weirdo pterosaurs from China, the boreopterids. Long term denizens of this blog may remember that Dave Hone mentioned Zhenyuanopterus, a recently discovered boreopterid, on these pages in March of 2010, and you can see a couple of the same critters lazily decorating the top of this post. They're crazy looking animals, bearing tiny, piggy-little eyes and buttloads of needle-like teeth that look useless for anything but straining pasta. But what sort of pterosaurs are they? How many boreopterids are there? Where and how did they live? Point your browser here to find out. (Snazzy Markwitton.com logo shown below)

Other pages of note include new illustrations, technical drawings and details of the 2010 London Royal Society/University of Portsmouth pterosaur exhibition and other sculptures. Oh, and a full list of my technical publications, including links and downloadable pdfs, can be found here. Please take a look and, by all means, drop me a line if you have any comments (especially if you have any functionality issues: I'm sure there's some kinks to work out. The same goes for typos I may have missed, for that matter).

No promises to post anything here anytime soon, I'm afraid: I'm moving house in the coming weeks and am quite desperate to get this book of mine finished, so I simply won't have the time. I genuinely don't know how regular bloggers manage to keep up their output: they must never sleep. Or eat. Or get distracted for long periods in the shower by their toes. In any case, I hope to get back to regular posting at some point in the future, but can't quite say when. Until then, thanks in advance for taking a peep at my site, and I hope you enjoy what you find.

Interview with John Sibbick

2011-06-16T13:28:00.002+01:00

Over on my main blog I have an interview with palaeoartist John Sibbick. This is rather relevant to P.net as John was the artist for the very important pterosaur encyclopedia of Peter Wellnhofer back in 1991. John was good enough to share a bunch of his artwork, including some of his originals for this book and a rather nice Dimorphodon skeleton. So click on the link and go and enjoy.

A Pterosaur Revolution?

2011-05-14T16:44:00.002+01:00

Back on my Archosaur Musings, I've been talking about dinosaur discovery rates for the last day or two and it seemed worth musing for a few lines on the same phenomenon with regards to pterosaurs. New pterosaurs are being discovered at only about a quarter of the rate of new dinosaurs, though given that there are far fewer pterosaur researchers than there are for dinosaurs, and the overall greater rarity of pterosaurs, this in fact probably represents an overall relatively higher rate of pterosaur discovery even if the absolute numbers are lower. That is already quite significant to my pterosaur-centric mind and belies the pterosaur revolution we seem to be undergoing.

On a slightly cloudier note, the ongoing controversy and problematic taxonomy of a number of groups or genera does mean that it's likely that a number of these new taxa will be sunk back into obscurity. While obviously this is the fate of some taxa in all groups, to my eye the pterosaurs to tend to do a bit worse in this area that do say the dinosaurs. Still, when just a few years ago Dave Unwin surmised there were only around 110 valid pterosaur genera after nearly 200 years of research, the fact that we have been able to add around 20 more in the last three years alone is stunning. Next year might well provide a bumper harvest too with the next Flugsaurier volume due.

While they're never going to get the same attention as dinosaurs, the last decade for pterosaur research really does point to a quiet revolution. We have more active researchers now than ever before (and by a fair margin) and we seem to be drawing in more attention from other workers (that is, there are quite a few dinosaur and archosaur guys who dabble with pterosaurs when in the past they wouldn't have done so) and we're getting together regularly too and producing whole volumes of papers. We're seeing not just a huge increase in the numbers of new genera, but even entire new clades like the boreopterids and chaoyangopterids, unexpected late surviving toothed taxa, and of course Darwinopterus makes quite a difference. There are also major increases in our knowledge of older taxa - there are lots more anuroganthids and azhdarchids than a few years back, and other discoveries are adding massively to our knowledge. You'd struggle to find even a handful of really good specimens with soft tissues a decade ago but now we are positively blessed, and we now have 4 pterosaur eggs (and three of them with embryos) when before 2004 we had none.

At the risk of a little hyperbole, I really think we are in the midst of something special happening with pterosaurs and I genuinely think that in a few decades we will look back at the time between around 2000 and 2020 as the time when we really got to grips with these taxa and much of our knowledge settled into a familiar pattern. There will of course be more surprises and changes to our ideas, but this is very probably the beginning of a new age of pterosaur science and their renaissance (which dinosaurs had in the 80s and 90s) is begun.

Functional Morphology of Anurognathid Pterosaurs

2011-04-11T20:45:00.007+01:00

I recently gave a talk with my preliminary results regarding anurognathid biomechanics at the GSA Northeastern Division Conference. There's nothing particularly shocking in it, but I have decided to post some of the highlights from my abstract and presentation here since this information is now technically "public". Obviously I am sitting on more data and results than appears here, which will be in a forthcoming manuscript.

On to the frog-mouths...

Anurognathid fossils include several exceptionally well-preserved specimens, some of which include extensive soft tissue preservation. This exceptional amount of morphological information makes anurognathids prime candidates for functional biomechanical analysis. Furthermore, anurognathids displayed a suite of unusual characteristics that make them of particular interest for functional study. These traits included extensive pycnofiber coverings, fringed wing margins, shortened distal wings, shortened faces, and enlarged orbits. Prior authors have suggested that anurognathids were adapted to catching small insects on the wing. My quantitative analysis that supports this general behavioral inference, and provides details regarding probable anurognathid locomotion.

First off, bone strength analysis in Anurognathus ammoni reveals that each proximal wing was capable of supporting nearly 22 body weights of force. The wing spar of A. ammoni was substantially stronger in bending than that of an average bird of the same size, and the calculated relative bone strength from Anurognathus ammoni overlaps significantly with that of living birds that capture prey on the wing (p>0.92) but differs significantly from all other avian morphogroups (p<0.04).

This might might seem like an obvious result, given all of the traits of the anurognathid skeleton already associated with insect capture, but it is important to remember that "insect capture" is an incredibly wide spectrum of feeding ecologies. There are, after all, quite a number of insects out there (as in, more than any other animal group) and so there are a diverse array of insect predators, as well. Only a subset of insectivorous vertebrates capture prey with a rapid pursuit on the wing - many bats, for example, are gleaners that pull insects from substrates. Some insectivorous bats and birds hawk insects only over short distances, or feed mostly on slow-flying prey. That Anurognathus ammoni seems mechanically similar to animals like fast-flying bats, kestrels, and swallows may not be all that shocking, but it's still useful information.

Anurognathid launch appears to have been particularly rapid and steep (more on this another time), and once airborne, anurognathid pterosaurs could likely generate high lift coefficients. Leading edge structure reconstructed from the soft tissue of Jeholopterus suggests that anurognathids were capable of generating a leading edge vortex (LEV) as observed in some living bats and birds (particularly swifts and flycatchers). I cannot calculate exactly how strong the LEV was - there simply is not enough detail in the soft tissue to tell - but in living vertebrate flyers a sustained LEV can pump up the lift generation by about 40%.

Analysis of flapping efficiency suggests that the expansion of the proximal wing, coupled with reduction of the distal wing elements, would have increased flapping power at the cost of slightly increased drag. The proportions of the wing and details of the shoulder may be indicative of the ability to hover for brief intervals (again, I shall be cruel and make everyone wait for details on this one). Overall, these results are consistent with reconstructions of anurognathids as highly maneuverable flyers, preferentially foraging on small aerial prey, likely at high speeds and accelerations. Conclusions regarding the effects of the extensive insulation on boundary layer control and such are pending analysis.

Pterosaurs...sort of

2011-03-30T13:59:00.001+01:00

A couple of weeks ago the scientific podcast that is Science...sort of ran a piece on this pterosaur paper of mine. Unfortunately, despite their normal sterling efforts, this wasn't really an accurate representation of pterosaurs or our research. Happily though, they were receptive to me pointing this out and were kind enough to immediately invite me and Ross Elgin onto the show to talk pterosaurs. That podcast is now up and you can drop in at this link here to hear us pontificate about those lovely flying reptiles and our work on them and of course giving Pterosaur.net a bit of promotion.

Catching up

2011-03-06T06:40:00.003Z

While we do try on Pterosaur.net to bring you the best of new pterosaur research, the fact that most of us blog independently of this site and have various other commitments means we aren't always quite as prompt as we should be, even for big stories. Thus while between us we did cover the amazing new specimen of a Darwinopterus preserved in association with an egg in several ways, we never actually wrote about it on here.

This specimen was described by longtime P.net friend Lu Jungchang (pictured above in front of his poster of a putative male and female Darwinopterus by our own Mark Witton) who also organised the 2010 pterosaur meeting in Beijing. 'JC' has been kind enough to let us use various photos of his specimens in the past and in this case let me have some extra photos for my post on this topic over at the Archosaur Musings. Meantime, Darren Naish has been blogging on the implications for pterosaur dimoprhism and behaviour over on Tetrapod Zoology so check them out for more details.

If you do want something a bit more recent though, I'm back at the IVPP in Beijing temporarily and lots of pterosaur specimens are currently on display. That lets me start up a special 'Pterosaur Week' so keep coming back on my site for the next few days and you can begin your tour with Haopterus.

Too Big to Fly? Giant pterosaurs take wing in PLoS ONE

2011-02-22T05:51:00.004Z

My post today is in the spirit of the old phrase "better late than never". As some of you may have already noted, Mark Witton and I produced a manuscript on giant pterosaurs back in November of 2010. David Hone was kind enough to link to the manuscript (which is freely available online in PLoS ONE) a while back, but I thought I'd shock everyone and actually discuss the manuscript a bit.

The basic idea of the manuscript was actually pretty straightforward - there have been a few papers published since 2004 that have suggested flightlessness for giant pterosaurs and/or suggested that they would be flightless at the body masses currently estimated for them. Mark and I were immediately skeptical of a number of the assumptions in these papers, and furthermore, we felt that it was about time that someone actually put forth a publication that made a quantitative argument for the ability of giant pterosaurs to fly. There has been a general consensus on that fact from the research community for a long time, but strangely enough, no one had previously sat down and actually laid out all the reasoning in a peer reviewed publication.

The arguments we make in the paper come in basically two types: 1) We demonstrated that pterosaurs cannot be simply modeled as birds and 2) the anatomy of pterosaurs independently suggests the ability to fly.

The first of these arguments was critical because prior assessments of pterosaur flight dynamics have often been derived from simple scaling of bird models. More to the point, all of the papers suggesting that giant pterosaurs were flightless did so through analogies with living birds. There were three such papers of interest. The first was Chatterjee and Templin (2004) that indicated a mass limited for a launching Quetzalcoatlus of 75 kg. Given the current mass estimates of 250 kg, that was quite a conundrum. However, as it turns out, Chatterjee and Templin assumed a bird-like launch strategy. More recent work by myself, Mark, and Jim Cunningham strongly indicates that this assumption is weak, and that pterosaurs were most likely quadrupedal launchers. Changing the launch model blows the lid off the 75 kg mass limit (and for those of you that are curious, 250 kg isn't the limit, either. More on that some other time, but in short, pterosaurs could have achieved larger sizes than Quetzalcoatlus).

The 'pterosaurs are not birds' problem also breaks down the argument of the second manuscript in question, Sato et al. (2009), which used accelerometer data from tube-nosed seabirds during takeoff and cruising flight as a benchmark for analyzing pterosaurs. The avian data in that manuscript are excellent, but alas they cannot be extrapolated to pterosaurs. The most recent manuscript to suggest flightlessness in pterosaurs is Henderson (2010), which applied an excellent new method of mass estimation to some sadly outdated models of pterosaur body shapes. The resulting estimate for body mass in Quetzalcoatlus was more than double that of even the highest previous estimates, but this estimate drops back close to that of Witton (2008) if an updated body volume is used. It is also worth noting here that we found no evidence for major size differences between the handful of giant azhdarchid pterosaurs - taking into account distortion, the Hatzegopteryx humerus is the same size as the Quetzalcoatlus humerus, more or less. As such, the largest known pterosaurs from multiple locations probably all come in around 10.5 meter wingspan mark.

So that's the bird analogy issue in a nutshell. But what about direct evidence of flight ability from the anatomy of the critters themselves? Mark and I examined the forelimb skeleton of giant pterosaurs, and showed (with both quantitative analysis and comparative anatomy) that the forelimb of big pterosaurs was considerably more robust than would be expected for simple quadrupedal walking. Furthermore, if one uses the most recent estimates of wing shape and body mass for the giants, the estimated climb out range and soaring distance available are both really quite impressive. So then, even if we assume that the largest pterosaurs could only flap for a short burst (which is likely), they would have had a couple of kilometers of range before they had to switch to soaring flight (thermals, etc) which shoots another hole in the "too big to fly" argument.

Add into all that our analysis of terrestrial competence in these animals (which was decent for some giants, like azhdarchids, but pretty limited for Pteranodon and kin), and some general issues about estimating body mass and you have our PLoS ONE paper in a nutshell. Good times. For those of you still searching in earnest for the original paper, you can turn your browsers here.

The one-word review of Flying Monsters 3D

2011-01-29T18:36:00.006Z

Falling over yourself to read Pterosaur.Net's review of the new David Attenborough documentary Flying Monster's 3D but just don't have the time to absorb all 3,184 words of it? No sweat: Pterosaur.Net regular Mike Traynor sent me this image that sums it up for us in a single word comprised of three simple letters (not sure how you have complex letters, actually, but never mind).

Thanks to Mike for allowing use of his image, and steer your Interweb craft here to read the slightly longer version.

What despair, pterosaurs and David Attenborough have in common

2011-01-25T22:18:00.026Z

We all have our own little guilty pleasures amongst our DVD collections, films that we watch when we’re glum or tired and very, very much on our own. You don’t want to watch these things with your buddies, see, because they’re massively embarrassing for one reason or other. They may have really crappy plots or autopilot scripting, or perhaps more emotional mush than the output of a flood at an instant mash potato factory. The acting may be so wooden that, with only a little sawing and polishing, you could easily fashion it into a neat bedside table and, in effects-laden films, we may find The Muppets or Button Moon more convincing depictions of reality than the cheese being touted onscreen. Sensible souls keep these discs in the same place as their prophylactics and haemorrhoid creams, the sort of nooks and crannies that friends and casual visitors won’t happen to chance across when visiting, and daren’t defend them when they’re rightly ridiculed in conversation. We keep our thoughts on them private, see, and daren’t tell anyone how we spend our guiltiest filmic moments. Well, mostly: my personal guilty pleasure is the 1992 Tim Burton movie Batman Returns, a flick I fondly remember watching over-and-over as an kid for its dark, twisted visuals, fantastical plot and (for an eight year old) complex characters: how could the good guy fall in love with a baddie, after all? The shots of Michelle Pfeiffer wielding a whip in a PVC catsuit, sparking all sorts of previously unknown and confusing thoughts in my eight year old brain, had nothing to do with my repeat watching at all. And they certainly don’t factor into any decision I may make into watching it now.

Thing is, I know when putting the disc into my DVD player that I need to switch my brain off to enjoy it. I’m not watching it to be intellectually stimulated: it’s pure bumph and mental comfort food. Thinking about the silliness of it all too much will just ruin it, so best to sit back and let it wash over you like the celluloid bubblebath that it is. For other films or programmes, though, you don’t expect to do this, and particularly so for documentaries. Their whole purpose, after all, is to present factually informed opinions and data: they exist to educate and stimulate us with new information. What then, should we make of a documentary that has less in common with an educational experience and more of a guilty pleasure, the sort of thing that hardcore documentary-aficionados will scorn and only the bravest admit to truly liking? The kind of documentary that asks you to kindly switch your brain off before you’ll be able to enjoy it?

You can see where this is going
Call a spotlight, please, on the new Atlantic Productions/David Attenborough pterosaur documentary, Flying Monsters 3D (cropped promotional poster and trailer shown above. All images used in this post are (c) Atlantic Productions). Hyped across the UK through a pretty extensive media campaign featuring articles in newspapers, TV guides, the Internet, television and even adverts on the London Underground, it’s a flagship show for Sky TV’s (the major subscription satellite TV company in the UK) new 3D channel, an attempt to show people that they should fork out for a 3D TV and Sky subscription even if they’re not interested in the major component of Sky 3D’s output, football. Much of the excitement about the programme has focused on its use of 3D technology, but there’s good reason to be excited about its content, too. The programme’s lead, Sir David Attenborough (shown below in a glider alongside the FM3D Quetzalcoatlus), needs no introduction to anyone reading this and the producers, Atlantic Productions, are veteran CG palaeodocumentary makers that have cut their palaeodoc teeth on the pliosaur-based Predator X, the Darwinius feature Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link and Attenborough’s recent tour through the origins on life, First Life. And it exclusively features pterosaurs for chrissakes, fantastic animals that have been begging for their own CG-laden documentary since Walking with Dinosaurs demonstrated that photo-realistic CG creatures were not just the claim of Hollywood blockbusters. A handful of pterosaur researchers were consulted in the making of the film, too – David Unwin, David Martill, Michael Habib and myself were all involved to ensure the science was on the money. With credentials like that, it’s understandable that expectations were higher for this than for many palaeodocs and, indeed, the programme has caused a stir around the world with palaeobloggers-a-plenty eager for it to land on their cinematic shores this Spring. The press reports have been positive too, with Attenborough and the technology of the film being highly praised in several articles.

Not having any of the necessary kit to see the show, I didn’t see the programme’s premiere at Christmas but, happily for me, my involvement as a technical consultant landed me and my other-half the chance to see a screening of the full length 70-minute version last Thursday (the upcoming cinema release is only 40 minutes). With such a stir around the film already, my hopes were high that everyone’s favourite leathery-winged beasties were about to get their moment in the media sun. Problem is, while some people are going to love this film - they're going to lap up the effects, the bizarreness of pterosaurs and the whispered Attenboroughness of it all, they won't be the people who're most excited about seeing it. No, I reckon that anyone with a real interest in palaeontology or pterosaurs, the sort of people who tune into this little corner of Hardcore Pterosaur Blogging, for instance, will be pretty underwhelmed with the whole thing. Indeed, it's not going to blow away anyone who, you know, actually pays attention to the film. And here’s why.

You look so fine
First up, credit given where it’s due: much has been made of the technology fuelling the 3D-enhanced presentation of Flying Monsters 3D, and for good reason: the presentation is stunning (FM3D Tupandactylus above). Most scrutiny will undoubtedly focus on the computer generated pterosaurs and – regardless of their scientific merit (we’ll get to that later) – they look dead impressive. Their fuzz and wing membranes ripple in the wind, their animation is smooth and their (entirely CG) environments look rich and convincing. As with most films of this kind, the lack of other animals in the CG scenes is notable, but given the time and expense it would take to render such effects, this is forgivable. The traditional photography is nicely done, too, with plenty of dramatic shots of fossil sites from helicopters, some fantastic close-ups of well-known pterosaur specimens and a suitably stirring, Thomas Newman-esque soundtrack overlying the whole thing to get the attention of your neck hair. The 3D, perhaps the most hyped component of the whole film, works well and, happily, isn’t gimmicky: there’s no cheesy 3D money shots to make audiences lurch about their seats and, instead, it only serves to add depth of vision to the pictures. Personally, I’m not sure the 3D really made the film a whole new visual experience: while impressive for the first five minutes, it quickly becomes par for the course, aside from the need to continuously push oversize 3D specs up your nose. Still, it all adds to the excellent presentation served up by Atlantic, and their cinematographers and computer wizards deserve several pats on the back for their work. Problem is, once you’ve taken in how nice everything looks, you start to focus on the story you’re being told and the content of the programme, and that's where the issues begin.

Psuedopterosaurology
As a documentary being presented by one of the most respected television natural historians of recent times, the content of FM3D has to match up to it’s presentation for it to be considered a real success. Alas, Flying Monsters 3D is a bit of a letdown here: I need to be careful with my own impressions here as, being a chap who’s been called a ‘pterosaur expert’ more than once, I may be more critical of the programme’s content than most. Thing is, this background means that I spent a lot of the film noting gross inaccuracies and misrepresentations of pterosaur knowledge, and this is surely a major failing of anything programme pretending to be a fact-based documentary. Take, for instance, the way that we’re explicitly told that pterosaurs were out-competed by birds and their ability to adapt to new ecologies, thus sealing the extinction of the more evolutionary-stagnant pterosaurs. Detailed analyses of bird and pterosaur diversity have either proved inconclusive on this issue (as in, we don't have enough data to say either way) or categorically stated that there's no evidence for bird-driven pterosaur extinction (Buffetaut et al. 1996; Slack et al. 2006; Butler et al. 2009; Dyke et al. 2009): claims like this really don’t reflect consensus opinions in the pterosaur scientific community. Elsewhere in the programme, we’re told that aktinofibrils – the stiffening fibres of pterosaur wings – enabled them to mould their wings in a very refined, precise way. These have been confused here with the muscle layer thought to be running through pterosaur wing membranes (Unwin 2005): aktinofibrils likely stiffened the wing or served as folding aids (Padian and Rayner 1983; Bennett 2000). Roborhamphus, the digital walking non-pterodactyloid pterosaur, is presented as strict fact despite still not being peer reviewed (and contradicting other evidence – see Bennett 1996) and the large tapejarid Tupandactylus is consistently called Tapejara despite being separated from this genus four (yes, four) sodding years ago (Kellner and Campos 2007). I mean, if you can't even be bothered to give them the right names...

Many sequences of the programme also shake the wrong end of the pterosaur stick, giving a rather inaccurate portrayal of pterosaur research and its history. A good chunk of the programme is given to the discovery of the Dimorphodon holotype, a partial skeleton found in 1828 in Dorset, as if it were pivotal in revealing pterosaurs to the world and understanding pterosaur morphology. This just isn’t the case: the first pterosaur fossil known to science, the complete skeleton of Pterodactylus antiquus, was found in 1784 and was a far more important specimen to our initial appreciation of pterosaurs. Not only did this fossil give pioneering scientists like Georges Cuvier the ability to interpret pterosaurs as extinct flying reptiles, but it was also a cornerstone for demonstrating concepts such as life before man, the use of comparative anatomy in identifying fossil animals and even extinction itself (Taquet and Padian 2004). While Dimorphodon was an important contribution to our knowledge of pterosaurs in 1828, it really did little more than demonstrate the temporal, geographic and morphological range of pterosaurs: it had nothing to do with discovering what pterosaurs actually were (and, besides, we didn’t see what Dimorphodon really looked like until the latter half of the 1800s, almost 100 years since pterosaur research began [Owen 1870]). Indeed, the programme’s emphasis on Dimorphodon as a completely known early pterosaur isn’t entirely clear: other forms (e.g. Preondactylus, Peteinosaurus and numerous campylognathoidid-like things) are as completely known and much older. (FM3D Quetzalcoatlus shown above)

It gets worse. For some reason, considerable screen time is given to the idea that Tupandactylus (sorry, ‘Tapejara’) had an ultra-sensitive headcrest capable of ‘autopiloting’ it’s flight. What’s more, we’re told that with backswept-wings, the same ornament would enable Tupandactylus to sail through water like a reptilian trimaran (as in, with it’s belly and legs acting as a hull and the wings and crest posing as sails). These ideas come courtesy of biomechanicist Sankar Chatterjee, who’s work builds upon minor statements about the sailing potential of other tapejarids made by Dino Frey and colleagues in 2003 (note that other discussions of sailing pterosaurs primarily focus on the antler-crested form Nyctosaurus: we don’t have time to go into them here). The science behind these claims has yet to reach the peer-reviewed press, however, and the idea of pterosaurs sailing in this manner has not gained any acceptance in mainstream pterosaur circles: with all due respect to Professor Chatterjee, I’m surprised the programme makers gave so much screentime to an idea that has such a long way to go before being accepted by the pterosaur community when there are other, equally interesting and far less controversial ideas they could have explored. They could’ve, for instance, demonstrated far more concrete ideas about crest dimorphism: virtually every animal in the film has a headcrest, giving the impression to pterosaur-savy individuals that the pterosaur social scene was something of a sausage fest. One sequence in particular stands out as the pterosaur equivalent of Brokeback Mountain.

Subjackanory
These problems – and I’ve only listed a few - are bad enough, but the most surprising letdown of all is that the show lacks good narrative, a shock considering the involvement of the Godfather of natural history films. We’re taken through a simplistic version of pterosaur evolution, looking at Dimorphodon, Darwinopterus, Pteranodon, Tupandactylus (sorry, ‘Tapejara’), and Quetzalcoatlus, a sequence that takes us from the early Jurassic to the late Cretaceous. Along the way we’re introduced to some different species and concepts of pterosaur locomotion and anatomy and, in theory, this should work fine. In actuality, though, it’s rather clumsily handled. We’re told at the film’s midpoint that Tupandactylus had fur (a claim based on fossils, apparently, but the only Tupandactylus I know of with an alleged ‘beard’ has not been studied nor even mentioned in the technical literature. Having seen photos, I’m not sure that the alleged beard isn’t actually an errant plant fossil) and that this suggests it’s able to control it’s body temperature. It’s pretty accepted that most – if not all – pterosaurs were covered in fuzzy pycnofibres, and it’s not at all unreasonable to assume this may have been important to their ability to fly: why is this specifically mentioned for Tupandactylus but no other pterosaurs, then? (Scavenging FM3D Quetzalcoatlus shown above. Note that scavenging habits for these animals has never really gained much acceptance amongst pterosaurologists - see Witton and Naish [2008])

Often, the narrative feels entirely ad-libbed. The discussion of the concept that pterodactyloids represented a significant upgrade in terrestrial capability from their ancestors brings in the discussion of the split uropatagia in pterodactyloids when, prior to this point, viewers had not been introduced to the idea that there was any sort of hindlimb-anchored membrane at all (well, unless they’d been paying close attention to the CG sequences). Later, Douglas Lawson talks us through estimates of how large Quetzalcoatlus northropi was thought to be in the 1970s (about 17 m across the wings – see Greenewalt 1975) but the producers keep any subsequent size estimates (more like 10 m - see Witton and Habib 2010) to themselves: the point is set up, but never finished. There’s a massive contradiction, too, the bristle-toothed ctenochasmatoid Pterodaustro is identified halfway through the film as a filter feeder, only for Attenborough to close the film in front of a flamingo flock and inform us that pterosaurs never achieved the diversity modern birds have, including never evolving filter feeding forms. All told, it seems like this was a story told on the fly with little continuity checking between scenes. Indeed, we left the theatre wondering if anyone with access to the script, let alone someone with a background in pterosaur research, had read the narrative from beginning to end or really had a good, solid grasp of what they were trying to say.

All down to the 1s and 0s
It’s left to the CG pterosaurs to justify your subscription to Sky 3D or IMAX theatre ticket, then, but they’re not quite strong enough to support the whole thing alone. They are lovingly rendered and, anatomically speaking, not too bad (though there were a whole load of suggestions made that were rejected for aesthetic or economic reasons - FM3D Dimorphodon, shown above, has suffered a lot in this regard), but their flight animations – the main way we see them - are too sinuous and, like most prehistoric beasties on film, they scream and wave their heads around far too much. Overall, the Tupandactylus and Darwinopterus probably come out best, though some scenes, such as the sailing tapejarids, hawking Darwinopterus and crashing Dimorphodon aren’t convincing at all. Two of these instances are actually laughably bad (apologies to the animators, but the Dimorphodon sequence is begging for a WWII plane crashing sound effect to be added over the top: seriously, animals just don’t spiral out of the sky like that!). As such, I’m not sure they’ll come across as convincing to anyone who’s familiar with actual animal movement and behaviour, and folks who know pterosaur anatomy will wince at the flexibility of their backs and tails, the floppy-curtain effects of the wing membranes on the grounded animals and the stiff, perpetually-forward facing heads. They have got a lot right: their feet are plantigrade, they launch quadrupedally and their limbs held are positioned parasagittally, but their movements are too exaggerated. CG animators will do well to learn that animals don't move like they’re acting in silent movies. Plus, Attenborough actually interacts with the CG models in some scenes and, call me boring, but these come across as pretty trite and nuke FM3D’s fridge: the models aren’t really convincing enough to stand up to their real-world surroundings, and they come worrying close to turning Attenborough from respected educator into a children’s performer (see image, below, of the FM3D Quetzalcoatlus soaring alongside Attenborough's glider).

So... you didn't like it then?
Not really. As a pterosaur documentary it's probably the best one yet - though that's hardly a mean feat - but it's a pretty sub-par programme in it's own right. Thing is, I wouldn’t normally care: most palaeodocs are, unfortunately, pretty terrible at the best of times, but this one could’ve been so much more. Why so many silly mistakes? Why such chaotic narrative? Pterosaurs are awesome animals: the fact that they formed the focus of such a prestigious documentary shows their public appeal and the numerous articles, webpages and books written about them denotes their hardcore interest. Alas, the media hype for the film betrays the real interest of the filmmakers: the technology behind the film. Indeed, search the websites associated with the flick and you’ll not find any mention of the science behind the piece: there’s some basic facts about pterosaurs, but the vast majority of the hype concerns the involvement of David Attenborough and the details of making a film in 3D. As mentioned above, this will be enough for some who're bowled over by the snazzy visuals and polish, but anyone who doesn’t knock their brains to ‘off’ when slipping the 3D glasses on will find it disappointingly empty. It really seems that, with a bit more care, this could’ve been as much of an achievement for effective scientific communication as it has been for 3D technology, but it’s really an enormous missed opportunity. The kind of thing, in fact, that makes a technical consultant want to grab a beer or two and reach for that guilty pleasure DVD. Despair, despair, despair.

References

Bennett, S. C. 2000. Pterosaur flight: the role of actinofibrils in wing function. Historical Biology, 14, 255-284.
Buffetaut, E., Clarke, J. B. and Le Lœuff, J. 1996. A terminal Cretaceous pterosaur from the Corbiéres (southern France) and the problem of pterosaur extinction. Bulletin de la Societe Geologique de France, 167, 753-759.
Butler, R. J., Barrett, P. M., Nowbath, S. & Upchurch, P. 2009. Estimating the effects of the rock record on pterosaur diversity patterns: implications for hypotheses of bird/pterosaur competitive replacement. Paleobiology 35, 432-446.
Dyke, G. J., McGowan, A. J., Nudds, R. L. and Smith, D. 2009. The shape of pterosaur evolution: evidence from the fossil record. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 22, 890-898.
Frey, E., Martill, D. M., and Buchy, C. C. 2003. A new species of tapejarid pterosaur with soft tissue head crest. In: Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J. M. (eds.) Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society Special Publication, 217, 65-72.
Kellner, A. W. A. and Campos, D. A. 2007. Short note on the ingroup relationships of the Tapejaridae (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea). Boletim do Museu Nacional, Nova Séroe, Rio de Janeiro - Brasil. Geologia, 75, 1-14.
Greenewalt, C. H. 1975. Could pterosaurs fly? Science, 188, 676.
Owen, R. 1870. A monograph of the fossil Reptilia of the Liassic Formations Part Third. Plesiosaurus, Dimorphodon, and Ichthyosaurus. Palaeontographical Society Monograph, 41–81.
Padian, K. and Rayner, J. M. V. 1993. The wings of pterosaurs. American Journal of Science, 293, 91-166.
Slack, K. E., Jones, C. M., Ando, T., Harrison, G. L. (A)., Fordyce, R. E., Arnason, U. and Penny, D. Early penguin fossils, plus mitochondrial genomes, calibrate avian evolution. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 23, 1144-1155.
Taquet, P. and Padian, K. 2004. The earliest known restoration of a pterosaur and the philosophical origins of Cuvier’s Ossemens Fossiles. Comptes Rendus.Palaevol, 3, 157-175.
Unwin, D. M. 2005. The Pterosaurs from Deep Time. Pi Press, New York, 347 pp.
Witton, M. P. and Habib, M. B. 2010. On the size and flight diversity of giant pterosaurs, the use of birds as pterosaur analogues and comments on pterosaur flightlessness. PLoS ONE, 5, e13982.
Witton, M. P. and Naish, D. 2008. A reappraisal of azhdarchid pterosaur functional morphology and paleoecology. PLoS ONE, 3, e2271.

Pterosaur.net 2010 research roundup

2011-01-14T15:54:00.003Z

One of the main motivations of the creation of Pterosaur.net was to get real information the public from real researchers. There is a ton of internet stuff on pterosaurs and (from what I have seen at least) the vast majority is out of date, badly put together, inaccurate or just amazingly wrong. Of course, the flipside of this is that we kinda need to show that we know what we are talking about. While that is actually rather hard to do, we can at least show that we are actively involved in research. Here then is a list of the papers and conference abstracts that the P.net team have been involved in over the last year. Given that for many of us, pterosaurs are not our main arm of research (Darren and I both do more dinosaurs than pterosaurs, Mike also works on birds), and that we do have other things to do as well (Ross has a PhD thesis to write, Lorna is a museum curator) it’s really pretty good.

In addition to most of us making it to Flugsaurier this year (which of course does bump up the abstract quotient) we have pushed out a decent sized fistful of pterosaur papers. While we don’t form any kind of formal research aggregate, the fact that we have and continue to collaborate within this community must make us one of, if not the, most productive and influential pterosaur group out there.

Conway, J.A. 2010 Reconstructing a pterosaur, a case study. Acta Geoscientica Sinica. 31(S1):14

Dyke, G., Benton, M., Posmosanu, E., & Naish, D. 2010. Early Cretaceous (Berriasian) birds and pterosaurs from the Cornet bauxite mine, Romania. Palaeontology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2010.00997.x

Elgin, R.A., Hone, D.W.E. & Frey, E. The extent of the pterosaur flight membrane. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, in press.

Habib M. 2010. The structural mechanics and evolution of aquaflying birds. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. 99(4): 687-698

Habib, M. 2010. 10,100 Miles: Maximum range and soaring efficiency of azhdarchid pterosaurs. J. Vert. Paleontol., SVP Program and Abstracts Book, 2010: 99A. 2010. Soaring efficiency and long distance travel in giant pterosaurs. Acta Geoscientica Sinica. 31(S1):27-28

Habib, M, Cunningham J. 2010. Capacity for Water Launch in Anhanguera and Quetzalcoatlus. Acta Geoscientica Sinica. 31(S1):24-25

Habib M, Godfrey S. 2010. On the hypertrophied opisthotic processes in Dsungaripterus weii Young (Pterodactyloidea, Pterosauria). Acta Geoscientica Sinica 31(S1):26-26

Hone, D.W.E., Lü, J. 2010. A new specimen of Dendrorhynchoides (Pterosauria: Anurognathidae) with a long tail and the evolution of the pterosaurian tail. Acta Geoscientica Sinica. 31(S1):29-30

Hyder, E. S., Martill, D. M. and Witton, M. P. 2010. A neoazhdarchian pelvis with a possible preserved air sac from the Santana Formation of Brazil: implications for functionality and phylogeny. Acta Geoscientica Sinica, 31 (1), 32-32.

Monninger, S., Frey, E., Elgin, R., Tischlinger, H., Sartori, J., & Schneider, P. 2010. Folds, wrinkles and the material properties of the pterosaurian flight membrane. Acta Geoscientica Sinica. 31(S1): 52

Moody, R. T. J. & Naish, D. 2010. Alan Jack Charig (1927-1997): an overview of his academic accomplishments and role in the world of fossil reptile research. In Moody, R. T. J., Buffetaut, E., Naish, D. & Martill, D. M. (eds) Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 343, 89-109.

Naish, D. 2010. Pneumaticity, the early years: Wealden Supergroup dinosaurs and the hypothesis of saurischian pneumaticity. In Moody, R. T. J., Buffetaut, E., Naish, D. &Martill, D. M. (eds) Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 343, 229-236.

Nesbitt, S.J. & Hone, D.W.E. An external mandibular fenestra in pterosaurs supports placement within Archosauriformes. Palaeodiversity, 3: 225-233.

Steel, L. 2010. The Pterosaur collection at the Natural History Museum, London, UK, overview, recent curatorial developments and exciting new finds. Acta Geoscientica Sinica. 31(S1):59-61

Tomkins, J. L., LeBas, N. R., Witton, M. P., Martill, D. M. and Humphries, S. 2010. Positive allometry and the prehistory of sexual selection. The American Naturalist, 176, 141-148.

Tütken, T., Hone, D.W.E. 2010. The ecology of pterosaurs based on carbon and oxygen isotope analysis. Acta Geoscientica Sinica. 31(S1) 65-67.

Witton M, Habib M. 2010. On the size and flight diversity of giant pterosaurs, the use of birds as pterosaur analogues and comments on pterosaur flightlessness. PLoS ONE. 5(11): e13982. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013982

Witton M, Habib M. 2010. The volancy, or not, of giant pterosaurs. Acta Geoscientica Sinica. 31(S1):76-78

Witton, M. P. 2010. Pteranodon and beyond: the history of giant pterosaurs from 1870 onward. In: Moody, R. T. J., Buffetaut, E., Naish, D. and Martill, D. M. (eds) Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 310, 313-323.

Witton, M. P., Martill, D. M. and Loveridge, R. F. 2010. Clipping the wings of giant pterosaurs: comments on wingspan estimations and diversity. Acta Geoscientica Sinica, 31 (1), 79-81.

Gwawinapterus takes wing

2011-01-11T11:13:00.003Z

Yep there's another new pterosaur on the block (and on the blog for that matter). Gwawinapterus is a new istiodactylid from Canada and the first from the Americas. I have a guest post from describer Victoria Arbour up on the Musings, so head here to take a peek.

Victoria M. Arbour; Philip J. Currie (2011). “An istiodactylid pterosaur from the Upper Cretaceous Nanaimo Group, Hornby Island, British Columbia, Canada.”. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

Late edit: Victoria has also blogged about this on her site as well.

Low flying Pteranodon

2010-12-27T12:12:00.000Z

There are far too few good pterosaur mounts in museums around the world, but admittedly with generally good reason. They are hard to model, there are few casts around, the interesting ones like Pteranodon are really quite big, and really you want them flying. That means mounting stuff on the ceiling which is difficult and even dangerous (well, public safety at least becomes an issue). And of course, much as I might loathe to admit it, they are just not as popular as dinosaurs. Still, there has been a slow but steady increase in the number of mounts like these turning up which is a good thing.

This particular one is in Eichstaett, and lovely it is too (thought the black Quetzalcoatlus above it is not half as nice). The mount is actually not far off the ground which make it easy to get a good look at it (I have seen an Anhanguera mounted about 5m off the ground in Frankfurt and you can barely see what is obviously a nice model) but the downside to this is that it's very hard to get far enough away to get the whole thing in frame, as the last photo shows.

Tis the season of Pterodactylus

2010-12-23T09:01:00.002Z

I've now managed to sort through most of my photos from my trip to the Solnhofen. That has resulted in me being able to put up some nice Pterodactylus photos over on my blog. So, since this site is just supposed to be about pterosaurs, I rather assume the readers would be interested. Here's a pair of special fossils, if for rather different reasons, and here's what happens to pterosaurs that really settle in Bavaria.

Pterosaur mandibular fenestrae

2010-12-16T08:14:00.002Z

So after that huge hiatus, suddenly P.net is back up and running and you get a raft of posts close together. Obviously as this is Dave again, I'm not going to totally recycle my posts form my own blog, but actively send you over there to read what I have already written. Still, this is an interesting paper because it tackles that terminally vexing problem of pterosaur origins.

The problem with specialising for flight is that it tends to require you remodel your skeleton rather drastically and for palaeontologists working just from bones, that can make it difficult to work out exactly which features are there, or are there but radically changed, or have gone. Thus while the pterosaur fossil record is pretty good in some respects, we have really struggled when it comes to working out their ancestors / nearest relatives from among the other reptiles. (Obviously we've narrowed it down a lot, but pinning it exactly is tricky).

One major character they have always seemed to lack is a mandibular fenestra, basically a hole in the jaw, which is otherwise present in many dinosaur and croc-like reptiles that pterosaurs are supposed to be related to. No fenestra, perhaps no close ties. But specimens both new-ish and old show that actually this might be present, and the discovery of various dinosaur relatives show some rather pterosaur like features. In short, the gap in our knowledge and the gap in the supposed differences in anatomy is starting to shrink.

If you want the full details, then head on over to the Musings where you can read part 1 and part 2 of my report on my new paper (with Sterling Nesbitt). Enjoy.

Research updates

2010-12-13T16:43:00.002Z

Well Mark and Mike have been promising for a while to blog about their paper of last month, but noting has quite materialised as yet. Still, if you have missed it, it is freely available online here at PLoS one. However, they are not the only ones to have been pterosaur-ing of late. Friends and colleagues of the P.net team in Tamara Fletcher and Colin Palmer have both had recent papers out and were good enough to blog about them for me over on the Musings. Tamara introduces some new Australian material and talks about the difficulty of writing that first paper and Colin takes us through his work on pterosaur flight.

So hop over there and take a look. I'm just back from a trip to Germany including a visit to Helmut Tischlinger and Ross Elgin and will have some photos to come from that too.

Dr. Witton dismisses more evidence for the existence of giant pterosaurs in the Lower Cretaceous

2010-10-17T17:15:00.006+01:00

I really liked my English Literature teachers at school. They were extremely laid back, personable folks who treated us like adults, which is a big deal when you’re 16 years old. They encouraged individuality in our interpretations of books and, indeed, my experience with them had me seriously considering teaching English if this palaeontology lark went nowhere. They even bought us books at the end of our A’ Levels that they thought matched our personalities: I got Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness - make of that what you will.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have the easiest ride when teaching me as I used to wind them up without end. Not, you understand, by drawing inflated phalluses on my exercise book, or by never handing assignments in, talking in class or constantly underachieving: no, I was routinely criticised for making them laugh with my essays. Apparently, nicknaming Hamlet ‘Hammy’ wasn’t standard practise and, so I hear, nine essays out of ten did not compare the cast of Volpone to characters from Only Fools and Horses. Likewise, passages in The Handmaid’s Tale weren’t often compared favourably to lyrics from Eurythmics numbers and, generally speaking, calling The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan a douche wasn’t the done thing. Thing is, none of my teachers had any problems with what I was saying, but the way that I expressed myself was just not on. ‘Don’t write like this’, my teachers told me time and again, ‘your examiners won’t appreciate it’. This confused me as a 16 year old and still does now. Do exam markers have no sense of humour? I’ve yet to meet someone who marks GCSE’s and A’ Levels, but, from this, I imagine they must resemble the enjoyment-hating Blue Meanies from The Yellow Submarine, stamping out positivity with rocket-propelled gloves, clown-controlled explosives and apple-lobbing men in top hats. At least, I hope they do: it’s a much more interesting picture than a bunch of sour-faced miseries sitting in grey office cubicles, angrily scribbling over exam copy books in red pen.

Nowadays, the only scribing I do with intentional dryness is for scientific papers (and even this has been described as too florid by some referees). It produces a strange, sub-schizophrenic feeling when writing and reading it, almost like the ‘Witton’ character cited in other papers isn’t really me: he’s some faceless, professional authority on pterosaurs, someone working in a studious, clean office and certainly not writing papers crashed out on his sofa with repeats of Top Gear on the TV and holes in his socks. But no, these people are one and the same and, to prove it, this post features some suitably dry text I had rejected from a chapter I’m coauthoring on Wealden Supergroup pterosaurs with Dave Martill and Steve Sweetman. For those who don’t know, the Wealden Supergroup is a historically significant series of Lower Cretaceous deposits found across southern England and is one of Europe’s top sites for terrestrial vertebrates of this time. The text evaluates claims that some Wealden pterosaur material represents pterosaurs of gigantic proportions and, because it’s hardly significant enough to warrant its own paper and we discussed other claims for gigantic pterosaurs in the Lower Cretaceous several weeks back, it seems like ideal fodder for the Pterosaur.Net blog. Before it starts, though, it’s worth pointing out that if these and my previous musings on these topics are correct, giant (say, 7 m spans and above) are an exclusively Upper Cretaceous phenomenon. OK? Great. Without further ado, then, I hand you over to my concise, authoritative sounding alter ego, Dr. Witton. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the lounge watching TV and playing with my feet.

Giant pterosaurs in the Wealden Supergroup?

Martill et al. (1996) and Howse et al. (2001) reported on several bone fragments from the Wessex Formation that allegedly revealed the presence of giant pterosaurs – possibly rivalling the 10 – 11 m wingspans of the largest known forms (Langston 1981) - amongst the Isle of Wight assemblage. The most pertinent of these fragments were a poorly preserved distal humerus (ICWMS 1995.631; 75 mm wide, A and B in the adjacent image [from Martill et al. 1996]) and a fragment of proximal first(?) wing phalanx (ICWMS 1995.629; 53 mm minimum width,C and D in the adjacent image) that, although fragmentary, are the largest articular ends of any pterosaur long bones yet reported from the Wealden.

The identity of these bones as giant pterosaurs is questionable, however. Both Martill et al. (1996) or Howse et al. (2001) report the allegedly giant remains as those of indeterminate pterosaurs, but the distal profile of ICWMS 1995.631 corresponds well with the distal humeri of ornithocheiroids (Hooley 1913; Wellnhofer 1985; Kellner and Tomida 2000) and is almost certainly a member of this clade. Accordingly, greater constraint can be placed on its size than previously realised. ICWMS 1995.631 is 17 per cent wider than the (63 mm) distal width of the Istiodactylus humerus reported by Hooley (1913; BMNH R706) but only 5 per cent wider than the same dimension (71 mm) reported for Anhanguera by Kellner and Tomida (2000; NSM-PV 19892). It is also substantially smaller than that of a large Pteranodon (102 mm; Bennett 2001; YPM 1175). The wingspans of these forms can be relatively well constrained at 5 m in the former cases and between 6 – 7 m for the latter. The transverse dimensions of these bones will not equate to proportional increases in humeral length either as pterosaur long bone articulations increase with positive allometry compared to length (for a good graphic example, compare the 5 and 10 -11 m span Quetzalcoatlus humeri figured by Wellnhofer [1991], p. 141). Thus, ICWMS 1995.631 would be negligably longer than the Istiodactylus and Anhanguera humeri mentioned above, suggesting it too was around 5 m in wingspan. It represents, therefore, a relatively large ornithocheirid but a ‘medium’ sized pterosaur overall.

The size of the individual represented by the possible first wing phalanx ICWMS 1995.629 is harder to determine as the specimen itself is hard to identify. Although the thinness of the bone wall indicates it is a pterodactyloid bone, the specimen lacks any features of note bar the expansion of one end and an oval cross section. Such attributes could apply to several pterosaur long bones: the distal half of the humerus, either end of the radius or ulna or the proximal wing metacarpal but, crucially, do not apply to the proximal phalanx of the wing finger. In at least some pterosaurs, these bones have cross sections that resemble rounded triangles, not ovals (Wellnhofer 1985). The identity of ICWMS 1995.629 as a giant pterosaur is dependent on its identification as a proximal wing phalanx as, if it represents another of the elements listed above, its proportions are unremarkable. With an identity as a proximal wing phalanx doubtful, its status as a pterosaurian giant is also unlikely.

Thus, there is no evidence that the Wealden Supergroup contained pterosaurs of particularly gigantic size. While the 5 m span Wealden forms are much larger than any modern flying animals, their wingspans are quite typical of Lower Cretaceous forms and much smaller than the true giants that would evolve later in the Cretaceous.

References

Bennett, S. C. 2001. The osteology and functional morphology of the Late Cretaceous pterosaur Pteranodon. Palaeontographica Abteilung A, 260, 1-153.
Hooley, R. W. 1913. On the skeleton of Ornithodesmus latidens; an Ornithosaur from the Wealden Shales of Atherfield (Isle of Wight). Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 96, 372-422.
Howse, S. C. B., Milner, A. R. and Martill, D. M. 2001. Pterosaurs. In: Martill, D. M. and Naish, D. (eds.), Dinosaurs of the Isle of Wight. Palaeontological Association, Field Guide to Fossils 10, pp. 324-335.
Kellner, A. W. A. and Tomida., Y. 2000. Description of a new species of Anhangueridae (Pterodactyloidea) with comments on the pterosaur fauna from the Santana Formation (Aptian -Albian), Northeastern Brazil. National Science Museum, Tokyo, Monographs, 17, 1-135.
Langston, W. Jr. 1981. Pterosaurs. Scientific American, 244, 92-102.
Martill, D. M., Frey, E., Green, M. and Green, M. E. 1996. Giant pterosaurs from the Lower Cretaceous of the Isle of Wight, UK. Neues Jahrbuch fur Geologie und Paläontologie, Monatshefte, 1996, 672-683.
Wellnhofer, P. 1985. Neue pterosaurier aus der Santana-Formation (Apt) der Chapada do Araripe, Brasilien. Palaeontographica. Abteilung A, 187, 105-182.
Wellnhofer, P. 1991. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs. Salamander Books Ltd., London. 192 pp.

Pterosaur books to know and love, part 2: The Pterosaurs from Deep Time

2010-10-11T22:25:00.005+01:00

Many, many moons ago, the Heroes of Pterosaur.Net were suggested to provide a reading list for people who just can’t get enough of our leathery-winged chums. Longer-term Pterosaur.Net groupies with good memories may recall that our suggested shortlist was, well, very short with only two notable tomes: Peter Wellnhofer’s 1991 Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Pterosaurs and David Unwin’s The Pterosaurs from Deep Time (2005). You were promised reviews of both: we looked at the Encyclopaedia back in January (seriously, where is 2010 going?) and, today, we’re casting our critical eyes over The Pterosaurs from Deep Time. If it sounds like the pterosaur book for you, however, you’re going to have to go Sherlock to find it: it’s been discontinued for a number of years and only loiters now in second-hand stores. However, Mike from Ottawa informed us last time that he found a cheap copy in an online store that only set him back $10, so you may not have to pay through the nose to obtain one. Question is, of course, do you want to own it in the first place?

The best pterosaur book since the last one
Believe it or not, there have only ever been three popular English books on pterosaurs published: Harry Seeley’s Dragons of the Air (1901 – yes, 1901), Wellnhofer’s Encyclopaedia, and the organ under our spotlight today, The Pterosaurs from Deep Time. The former books set a high benchmark for treatment of their subject matter: Seeley’s book is a classic, a slice of pterosaur history that summarises Seeley’s heretical ideas on pterosaur origins, biology and ecology. Seriously diehard pterosaur aficionados will want a copy but, alas, unless you find a lucky copy in a second hand shop, you’ll have to fork out a lot for it (cheapskates like me, though, can download the entire thing, for free, from here). Wellnhofer’s effort, as discussed previously, remains an essential reference tool for anyone with an interest in flying reptiles and has aged with dignity over the last 20 years. In fact, the only thing that Wellnhofer got wrong with his book was his timing: it was published just before the recent pterosaur research bonanza started (fuelled by spiffing new specimens from Brazil and China) and, therefore, doesn’t report the cohesion of ideas that he may have if he wrote it in 2000, say.

So, when Dave Unwin entered this arena with his book in 2005, he wasn’t exactly swamped with competition. With his main contenders being a dusty, ultra-rare historical tome and an excellent but rather old-fashioned encyclopaedia, he could’ve produced a sloppy, poorly-illustrated mess and still stood a chance of writing the best modern pterosaur book. Thankfully for us, The Pterosaurs from Deep Time continues the trend of its predecessors and is an excellent, informative presentation of modern ideas in pterosaur research. Given the prestige of its author, this isn’t a huge surprise: David Unwin is widely recognised as one of the foremost pterosaur experts in the world. Beginning his career with an assessment of the Victorian taxonomic mess that is the Cambridge Greensand pterosaur assemblage, Unwin has since worked on pterosaurs from all over the world and made significant contributions to research on virtually all aspects of their palaeobiology (including [deep breath]: pterosaur phylogeny, several geographical and taxonomic reviews, details of their flight apparatus, pterosaur respiration, reproduction, terrestrial locomotion and, most recently, bringing the world Darwinopterus). Given that his writing style is also extremely breezy and clear, he's surely one of the most suitable pterosaur palaeontologists around to summarise the current status of pterosaur knowledge. Hence, saying Unwin’s book is ‘the best since the last one’ is not only true by default, but also a considerable complement in saying that Deep Time is a worthy follow-on to Wellnhofer’s Encyclopaedia.

The pterosaur story
Although comparisons between Deep Time and the Encyclopaedia are inevitable, they're not entirely fair because the two books have very different formats. The Encyclopaedia is quite schematic in its layout with clearly defined sections and liberal use of detailed, technical diagrams: it feels far more like a textbook than something you would read from cover to cover. Deep Time, by contrast, is far more prosaic, flowing from chapter to chapter in a continuous way that makes it very easy to read in entirety. It begins with an introduction to pterosaurs and the concepts of fossilisation and geological time before moving onto an overview of pterosaur phylogeny (based on Unwin’s 2003 work), their anatomy, locomotion, reproduction and, finally, an attempt to tell the complete tale of pterosaur evolution. The encompassing approach of this latter chapter is very characteristic of Unwin’s work: many of his technical publication feature discussions of the broader implications for whichever topic is under scrutiny, be it eggshells (Unwin and Deeming 2008) or wing membrane distribution and terrestrial locomotion (Unwin 1999). The story presented in the penultimate chapter of Deep Time seeks to tie all the threads from the prior chapters together, explaining how and why pterosaurs took to the skies, the rise and success of pterodactyloids and their eventual extinction. Beyond this lies a wealth of footnotes and references to keep technical pterosaur buffs happy, along with a list of valid pterosaur species. As may be expected, the information was, at the time of writing, entirely up-to-date and we’re given the full benefit of the first 15 pterosaur bonanza years, including pterosaur brain CT scans to the wealth of soft-tissue data revealed by Brazilian and Chinese fossil Lagerstätten. There is, therefore, a wealth of information and interpretation held in Deep Time and, thanks to Unwin’s frequent quips and asides, it’s as enjoyable to read as it is informative.

We’re treated to glossy, full-colour illustrations for much of the book and, while the sources of many images will be known to those familiar with other pterosaur literature, most diagrams and drawings are well-executed and tie in nicely with the text. The excellent photographs, many of which are of previously unpublished details of well-known specimens or entirely new finds, are worthy of mention as are the superb pterosaur paintings by Todd Marshall that are dotted throughout the book (see image, above, of a Marshall Quetzalcoatlus, along with the Sordes on the book cover at the top of this post). I have a soft-spot for Marshall’s work: his animals and environments look refreshingly imperfect, a bit like they’ve been left outside in the wind and rain for some time. Plus, his style is one of the most striking and recognisable among the modern crop of palaeoartists. His punky, scruffy pterosaurs are no exception, and the depth he gives to his environments creates the impression of a broader world beyond the confines of the canvas. Happily, his pterosaur anatomy and postures aren’t too bad either, making his images a handy source of modern pterosaur restorations.

But…
So it’s praise, praise, praise, for Deep Time, then, but it’s not all good. For one thing, while most of the figures are absolutely spiffing, a few are a bit shaky with ugly, blocky lines, flat colours and poorly-defined details. This never becomes so much of a problem that you cannot see what the figure represents and there are only a handful of instances in the entire book, but the difference in quality between some illustrations is marked. The largest issue I have with Deep Time, however, is that sometimes the reader is given the impression that we know more about pterosaurs than we actually do. Take, for instance, Unwin’s arguments that a lack of pterosaur footprints prior to the mid-Jurassic is indicative of poor terrestrial abilities in non-pterodactyloid pterosaurs: is the record of pterosaur footprints really that complete that we can conclude this? I mean, how many trackways do we have of arboreal protosaurs or small, lithe dinosauriforms? Does that mean that they were clumsy, sluggish terrestrial animals, too? Though I can partially see Unwin's point on this one, I'm skeptical of using negative evidence in such a way, particularly with groups like pterosaurs with particularly patchy fossil records. Likewise, the suggestion that lonchodectids were Cretaceous pterosaur generalists seems a little bit of a stretch given that virtually no-one knows what they were really like and their record is very limited indeed.

On a similar note, the digital modelling of pterosaur terrestrial locomotion – the ‘Roborhamphus’ and ‘Robodactylus’ models crafted and worked on with Don Henderson (see Don's animation above, stolen from here) – is presented as accepted fact when, if I’m not mistaken, this work has only been published in a few abstracts (Unwin and Henderson 1999; Henderson and Unwin 1999) and not actually peer reviewed (please correct me if I’m wrong, though). Given that these models are somewhat at odds with other interpretations of pterosaur anatomy (e.g. laterally projecting hindlimbs in the Rhamphorhynchus model [contra. Padian 1983; Bennett 1997] and inflexible wrists in the pterodactyloid variant [contra. Bennett 2001; Wilkinson 2008; plus lots of pterosaur specimens with articulated, flexed wrists orientating depressing the wing metacarpal at least 40 degrees from the radius/ulna]), it may have been nice if a few more caveats about this work had been put in somewhere. Happily, this section of the book is unusual in not citing other, alternative interpretations and, in most instances, alternative hypotheses are mentioned and discussed.

Still, nothing’s perfect
These are relatively minor quibbles when the overall quality of the book is considered, though, and issues like those mentioned above are too rare top be major failings. In sum, then, even if you already own Wellnhofer’s Encyclopaedia, Deep Time is an essential purpose for the more up-to-date information it contains and, if you’re new to pterosaurs, it’s hard to imagine a better introduction. The fact that I've recommended this book to so many students and other pterosaurphiles is further testament to its quality and, frankly, it leaves a hard act to follow for the next guy in line writing a popular pterosaur book. Wait a second...

References

Bennet, S. C. 1997. The arboreal leaping theory of the origin of pterosaur flight. Historical Biology, 12, 265-290.
Bennett, S. C. 2001. The osteology and functional morphology of the Late Cretaceous pterosaur Pteranodon. Palaeontographica Abteilung A, 260, 1-153.
Henderson, D. and Unwin, D. M. 1999. Mathematical and computational model of a walking pterosaur. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 19, 50A.
Padian, K. 1983. A functional analysis of flying and walking in pterosaurs. Palaeobiology, 9, 218-239.
Seeley, H. G. 1901. Dragons of the air. Meuthuen and Co., London, United Kingdom, 239 pp.
Unwin, D. M. 1999. Pterosaurs: back to the traditional model? Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 14, 263-268.
Unwin, D. M. 2003. On the phylogeny and evolutionary history of pterosaurs. In: Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J. M. (eds.) Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society Special Publication, 217, 139-190.
Unwin, D. M. 2005. The Pterosaurs from Deep Time. Pi Press, New York, 347 pp.
Unwin, D. M. and Deeming, D.C. 2008. Pterosaur eggshell structure and its implications for pterosaur reproductive biology. Zitteliana, B28, 199-207.
Unwin, D. M. and Henderson, D. 1999. Testing the terrestrial ability of pterosaurs with computer-based methods. Journal of Vertebrate Paleonotology, 19, 81A.
Wellnhofer, P. 1991. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs. Salamander Books Ltd., London. 192 pp.
Wilkinson, M. T. 2008. Three dimensional geometry of a pterosaur wing skeleton, and its implications for aerial and terrestrial locomotion. Zoological Journal of Linnaean Society, 154, 27-69.

If you must procrastinate, procrastinate in pink

2010-10-07T09:53:00.005+01:00

This October sees the fine fellows of Art Evolved hosting a rather unique palaeoart charity event for the Canadian Cancer Society. Coinciding with Breast Cancer Awareness Month, they're donating $1 to the CCS for every illustration of a pink dinosaur (and hopefully other prehistoric beasties) sent to their site. Because the moral backbone of Pterosaur.Net is strong enough to build a bridge with, we couldn't resist doing our bit by adding some membraney-goodness to said event. Alas, time is short and the best I could manage was mere colour tweaking on this Ornithocheirus/Criorhynchus (there's confusion over just what these animals are, but we don't have time to go into that now): hopefully others can do better.

Head over to Art Evolved to find details on how to submit your own flamboyantly coloured extinct saurian and, if you need inspiration to get some pink paint out of the cupboard, crank your speakers up and stick this on. Coincidentally, my choice of red neckgear today is entirely identical to that seen in this video. Not sure what that says about me, but there you go. Anyway, stop reading this and get pinking!

In which the Pterosaur.net blog gets seriously self involved

2010-10-02T15:15:00.003+01:00

Ok so it's another re-post from my blog but one that is doubly relevant to pterosaurs. First of all, it contains pterosaur artwork of the highest quality and secondly, it's me interviewing John Conway about his art. So really it's kinda pterosaur.net squared. On an utterly unrelated note, but potentially of interest, if you are in anyway shape or form involved or interested in palaeontology then check out this years Palaeo Project Challenge over on Andy Farke's blog.

Right, onto the meat of the post.

These palaeoart interviews (see here for Luis Rey, Bob Nicholls, Brett Booth, Julia Molnar) have been very popular and I'm enjoying finding out how my friends and colleagues see their own work and that of others and with that, drumroll, it's the turn of John Conway. John has a big hand in Pterosaur.net and a generally huge web presence (most recently has seen the launch of his Ontograph Studios) when it comes to palaeo reconstructions but while he might have a lot of words and images online, until now he's not yet succumbed to the rigours of a Musings art interview. Take it away John (as ever, all art wrok is John's intellectual property):

- How long have you been an artist?

Since I was thirteen or so, so about sixteen years.

- How long have you been producing palaeoart?

I started with palaeontological art, so the same period. I've been through a few phases of eschewing paleontological stuff for "fine" art, but I've always come back.

- What first got you interested in dinosaurs and art?

I don't really remember the initial spark, but it was enough to get a twelve year old me to read The Dinosaur Heresies by Bob Bakker, which really got me interesting in dinosaurs seriously. It made me feel like such a revolutionary, everything we knew was wrong! Man, was all that orthodoxy gonna get it when I grew up!

About a year later Greg Paul's article "The science and art of restoring the life appearance of dinosaurs and their relatives: a rigorous how-to guide" in Czerkas' Dinosaurs Past and Present really got me interested in how dinosaurs (and their relatives) were depicted. His dinosaurs looked so strange and fascinating to a kid in 1992. Everything we knew was wrong (again)!

In the mid to late 90s I had battles with the museum I was working at to put feathers on my theropods. I felt like a real hero of the Dinosaur Renaissance. When they found the first feathered dinosaurs in China my head got so big I could scarcely walk for weeks.

- What is your favourite piece of dinosaur art that you have produced?

My favourite piece is always the one I'm working on. It's always going to be the greatest thing since... the last thing. Luckily, I think my most recent piece really is my best, it's an animated painting of the Jehol biota:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3oDaIME9eY]

It's a series of paintings done in Photoshop at successively smaller scales, then stitched together and animated in After Effects.

I was looking for a way to get across the sheer breadth of scale in the fossil record, from dinosaurs to pollen in this case. I was also looking for a way to make picture of a biota without having to do a 'menagerie' painting, which is otherwise a necessary evil if you want to get a lot of animals in the one scene.

I'm pretty happy with it, and plan to do a few more. I've also got other similar ideas in the pipeline.

- Who is your favourite palaeoartist or piece of palaeoart?

I have a few. Greg Paul is obviously huge. While a lot of people talk about is technical accuracy, I think his artistic style is fascinating. Look at painting like his Omeisaurus herd in a forest, it's surreal, intricate, beautiful stuff. I think a lot of people imitate bits of Greg's work, but most of them lack the visual distinctiveness that he has. I don't think most of them even understand how distinctive it is.

Doug Henderson is an extraordinary artist, I think I'd like his work even if it had nothing to do with prehistoric animals.

Hall Train is the greatest palaeontological sculptor and technician there is. He has very little web presence, so a lot of people don't know his work, but man, it's the closest you'll get to seeing a living dinosaur. He also thinks outside of the box, with new ways of doing old things, or perhaps that should be old ways of doing new things. An example of this is his clockwork walking Tyrannosaurus skeleton for the American Museum of Natural History. His stubborn refusal to have anything to do with computers hasn't put him in a dark ages, it's given his work a stunning 'real' sort of quality and lead him to break new ground. It's inspired me to look beyond mere painting, but also given me the courage not to just jump on the 3D CG modelling/animation bandwagon. There's new and exciting stuff to be done with an old medium.

Among the younger generation, more my age, Bob Nicholls' new work makes me jealous, and Julia Molnar's work is superb scientific illustration.

- What is your favourite dinosaur / archosaur?

Classics like Diplodocus, Corythosaurus, Pterodactylus, Anhanguera and Velociraptor all float my boat. But I don't have problems with the others!

- Is there any animal you would like to paint but have not?

Oh sure, heaps of things. Just about every new dinosaur and pterosaur. I'd also like to branch out to include just about everything, but it's difficult to familiarise yourself with _everything_ (it's hard enough keeping up with dinosaurs and pterosaurs!).

Mostly I want to be painting things which generally haven't been reconstructed accurately, and really going to town on producing the most rigorous reconstruction I can. A few years ago, pterosaurs were in this state, which attracted me to them--the situation is much better now.

- Oh yes, last question: What do you think is the most important part of good palaeoart?I expect people that know me will expect me to bang on about accuracy here, and I do think that a basic level of accuracy is a bare minimum. Many artists fail to reach this minimum, of course, and we can improve this situation quite a bit.

But actually, I think an interesting artistic style is tremendously important. Greg Paul and Doug Henderson have it, but I don't see a lot of young people now that interest me much artistically. 3D work has become very popular, but unfortunately it's uniformly awful at the moment.

I don't want to end on a negative note like that, and actually, I'm quite positive about the future. It would be great if people interested in the appearance of extinct animals could communicate better; we need to be sharing our ideas and research into animal appearance more than we are now. If we do that (and I'm hopeful we will), we'll be able to spend less time researching, and more time on the artistic side of things.

On a wing membrane and an ankle attachment.

2010-09-17T13:24:00.002+01:00

Regular pterophiles will realise that this is just a direct re-post from my own blog. However, the more dedicated pterosaur blog hound might not have seen this, so here's the post in all it's glory.

Proof, if it were needed, that the Pterosaur.net team do actually work on pterosaurs and not just blab endlessly about them comes from todays new paper featureing Ross Elgin, myself and Dino Frey. Once more, this is an odd time to talk about it since what has actually turned up are the uncorrected proofs, but it is out there and being read, so now is the time to talk about it. (You can download and read it here, and a very old post of mine here might be a good primer if you don't know your pterosaur wings too well).

This paper has it's roots in Ross' PhD work. In short, it's hard to test and discuss the flight profile of a given wingshape for a model pterosaur when there is little agreement (at least in the literature) over how the wings are shaped. If you look around you can find nearly a dozen different 'kinds' of wing that have been produced based on various specimens of various taxa at various times. It seemed high time that someone synthesised all of the available data from every specimen and tried to tie down exactly what the evidence was and what it told us about pterosaur wings.

[caption id="attachment_3928" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Various wingshapes and attachment positions for pterosaurs. From Elgin et al. in press."][/caption]

The two main variable here are how deep (broad chorded) the wing is, and where it attaches to the animal's body - at the hip, somewhere on the leg, or right down at the ankle. If you ask around, (and being firmly embedded in the pterosaur research community, I have) most people seem quite happy with the idea that it terminates at the ankle. But there is very little in the literature on the termination point and most of what there is actually favours a more proximal position. Why the ankle position?

Well, for the simple reason that most good (and that word is important as we shall see) specimens of pterosaurs, that preserve an intact (again, important) wing, show that it reached the ankle (or close to it). Some of this is directly observable. Some comes from UV photos. Some comes from admittedly less good specimens. But all of them seem to have the same pattern. Interestingly, this is also incredibly conservative in that we get this is anuroganthids, derived rhamphorhynchoids, basal pterodactyloids and azdarchoids. No matter which pterosaur phylogeny you prefer, it's hard to ignore the possibility (and indeed most parsimonious explanation) that all pterosaurs likely had this attachement. At the very least, it should be the default assumption.

So why the change from a non-ankle position? Mostly becuase we just have so many good specimens to wrok from that have appeared in the last few years, when in the 70s and 80s we were limited to often fragmentary wings of Solnhofen material. Natually China and Brazil has a lot to do with this, but we do include new German material too and refer to older specimens with a new eye. New and clearer information makes all the difference.

[caption id="attachment_3930" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Schematics of pterosaur wing preservation and attachements. From Elgin et al. in press."][/caption]

So what about the caveats of 'good' and 'intact'. This comes down to the taphonomy / preservation of the material. Pterosaur wings you see, despite their complex structures, are still essentially huge membranes (that were likely highly elastic) and thus unlike bones potentially subject to great distortion between death and discovery. You can see in a few at least that there are wrinkles and folds in the membrane showing that what is seen directly can't be the natural shape of the thing when unfurles and in flight (it must have been tight to serve as an aerofoil). Secondly, you can see large variation in the way (and most importantly the size) of the wing in some species. One specimen of Rhamphorhynchus for example has a tiny slice of a wing membrane that appears to be intact (it's not a loose piece) but has clearly shrunk or rolled up to a fraction of the size seen in other specimens (like the Dark Wing and Zittel Wing specimens).

[caption id="attachment_3929" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Small-winged Rhamphorhynchus. From Elgin et al. in press."][/caption]

Our conclusion is that such specimens with impossibly small wings have undergone post-mortem shrinkage. In essence, if you see a pterosaur wing on a specimen, it must be the minimum size of that wing in life. They can shrink after death, but not get bigger. If you have two specimens of a species with one small and one big wing, you should start with the bigger one as your minimum. This also affects the apparent attachement point of the wing, since if the wing was rather narrow close to the body, even a small big of shrinkage might make it appear thinner still and appear to pull it anteriorly (and this is likely as the proximal wing lacks the actinofibrils of the distal wing). Conveniently, when wings do move or dissassociate from the rest of the animal they tend to pull off the medial attachment first (as seen in the Zittel wing for example) and then disentigrate. In other words, an apparently thin wing attaching to the hip could be the result of post mortem changes from a bigger, deeper wing, but a broad wing reaching the ankle can't have shrunk from a bigger one (nothing to attach to) or been an expanded small one (it would detatch and fall apart).

One thing we are limited on though is the ability to determine the chord of the wing. While we can rule out a hip or knee based attachment, attacheing to the ankle does not mean the wing has to be broad. Those people who have argued for and illustrated narrow winged pterosaurs (especially ornithocheirids and pteranodontids) can still be right. A sharp inturn of the wing close to the body is plausible and gives a narrow chord wing with a 'broad' ankle attachement.

So there you have it. Pterosaurs had an ankle attachement and (in many cases at least) a bread-ish wing, though that could be sbuject to great and unseen variation. Those in the field will not find this much of a surprise, or even (I hope) find it rather too their taste. Even if you thoroughly disagree with everything else here, what we have at leact achieved is a framework for discussion. It's really hard to debate the merits of various interpretations when links like the ankle attachement are, in places, used synonymously with a broad chord when this is not the case.

By searating out the issues into several (linked) issues rather than one comprehensive one it becomes much easier to deal with each aspect in turn and use problematic fossils that can contribute to one problm even if not the other. Others might (and let's face it, probably will) argue in print, but I expect that the image at the top of the different wing planforms will serve as a useful guide for many a long year.

Ross A. Elgin, David W.E. Hone, and Eberhard Frey. The extent of the pterosaur flight membrane. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica in press. Available online 14 Sep 2010.

Note: this is an uncorrected proof. There are some typos and other errors in there and some of this might change a little before formal publication. I don't like the system, but not much I can do about it.

Euparkeria be damned: it's ROFLopterosauria

2010-09-10T19:54:00.010+01:00

I've tried to be good. No blogging for a bit while I catch up with work/job applications/dismantling the oven to clean it properly, but Ashley Fragomeni, aka Paleochick, has just gone and blown the whole thing. Her antics over at The Paleochick's Digs mean that, instead of finishing the Euparkeria skeletal reconstruction I need for my book, I'm now telling you about her ROFLopterosauria series, an collision of my pterosaur palaeoart and erudite observations into pterosaur palaeobiology. The latest one was just too funny to ignore, so here we are. On the internet. Blogging. Now my book won't be finished on time, I won't get paid, I won't make the rent and I'll be forced to sell my kidneys (both of them) and other parts of my body to make ends meet. Thanks a lot, Dusty.

We're promised a new bit of ROFLopterosauria every day or so for the next few days, so be sure to head back to the Paleochick's Digs over the next week to see more. The image above has nothing to do with anything you've just read, but shows Peter Wellnhofer's Rhamphorhynchus mobile on display in the Palaeontology Museum, Munich. We can't, after all, have a dull-looking blog post, can we?

Gorgonophilia, Star Trek and how they relate to giant pterosaurs in the Lower Cretaceous

2010-09-04T20:14:00.017+01:00

I was very happy to find that my airline had provided me with my own little TV screen and a selection of movies for my flight back from Flugsaurier 2010. With eight hours to kill, this was welcome news and, as soon as we were away and provided with those annoying little earbud headphones that never really fit your ears properly, I was off to Movieland. First up: the remake of Clash of the Titans, a flick that I’d not heard great things about but promised nice visuals, minimal cerebral action and plenty of nice CG creatures. The reviews I’d read were spot on: clichéd characters, dialogue so wooden it could serve as a useful boat oar and numerous clumsy attempts to cash in on the 3D bandwagon kicked off by Avatar. Still, it did feature a nicely rendered Pegasus, giant scorpion caravans and Medusa, a snake-woman hybrid that I found worryingly attractive. Most concerning is that it wasn’t just the top half that made for the most pleasant viewing (which would be understandable, given that her appearance was based on model Natalia Vodianova): there’s clearly a part of my psyche, unrecognised until a week or so ago, that really digs the thought of scantily-clad snakewomen sliding and coiling around their room and constricting visitors to their chambers. Imagine how touchy-feely that would be: you’d not mind having a late breakfast with that. Man, that' d be a night to remember. Just think of the... oh… wait a second. Oh yeah: pterosaurs. Blog post. Decency. No mythophilic filth. Got it.

Next up: last year's Star Trek reboot. Now, I’ve never seen eye-to-eye with Star Trek. I was once a massive fan of Star Wars, but Trek? No. Just couldn’t get into it. Lots of talking; uniforms that looked a bit like the pyjamas I used to wear; big, lumbering spaceships that fire weedy looking weapons; aliens that look just like people with pies glued to their foreheads and, most importantly, a distinct lack of Han Solo. Bottom line: I just found it a bit dull so, when I heard the whole thing was being rebooted I wasn’t terribly excited by the idea. Still, the reviews were pretty good so I thought I’d give it a whirl. I did, after all, have several hours of flight time to kill.

You know what? It was great. It was exciting. It had proper aliens and gripping, tense action scenes. It had Simon Pegg. It wasn’t clean cut: there was even a bit of proper, honest-to-goodness swearing. I was totally surprised and, while I’m unlikely to change my opinion on the other entries in the franchise, I’ll certainly give the 2012 Trek sequel a spin. I may even pay to see it at the cinema. You know: with my own money and everything.

And the new Star Trek is just like pterosaur specimen n. 12701a of the Ligabue collection

Seriously. For the uninitiated, n. 12701a is a tiny distal fragment of a pterosaur wing phalanx one from the Santana Formation of Brazil (described by Dalla Vecchia and Ligabue 1993; n. 12701a shown in adjacent line drawing). When I say fragment, I’m not kidding: it’s really is one of the most unremarkable, dull and uninteresting scraps of pterosaur fossil ever published on and, like the old Star Trek, it’s the sort of thing that we should only really be bothered about when there’s no reruns of The Simpsons on the telly. In fact, probably the only thing stopping n. 12701a from being totally forgotten about is its size: for a distal fragment of a wing phalanx, it’s huge. At 75 mm across, Dalla Vecchia and Ligabue reconstructed the length of the complete phalanx as 850 mm (based on ornithiocheiroids such as Pteranodon and Santanadactylus), a dimension almost twice the size of comparable elements from 4 -5 m span ornithocheirids. Using complete ornithocheirid wings as a guide, the authors then went on to suggest that tiny-little-fragment n. 12701a represents an animal with a whopping 8 – 9 m wingspan.

Now, in a world where the largest pterosaurs span something like 10 m, the predicted wingspan of n. 12701 isn’t really a big deal. What is, however, is its age: aside from this and some other problematic remains from Britain*, there are no accounts of giant pterosaurs in the Lower Cretaceous. Hence, n. 12701 suggests that sizes pretty-near comparable with the largest pterosaurs of all were achieved tens of millions of years before Pteranodon and the giant azhdarchids turn up. All of a sudden, then, that chunk of pterosaur is starting to look far less pre-2009 Star Trek-esque and far more akin to the 2009 reboot: it's exciting, interesting and, being the lone wolf for giant pterosaurs of this time, a touch edgy. Indeed, people have probably been getting excited about n. 12701a for some time: I wouldn’t be surprised if it influenced the decision to portray Ornithocheirus with a 10 m span in Walking with Dinosaurs, for instance (see image at the top of the post, from here).

*There is one additional claim for giant pterosaurs in the Lower Cretaceous based on very, very scrappy material from the Isle of Wight, UK (Martill et al. 1996). We don’t have time to go into the details here, but there’s good reason to think that these remains were not from giant animals. The rationale for this has been written up by myself, Dave Martill and Steve Sweetman and should be published next year.

Alas, n. 12701a may not be quite as New Trek as we all thought. To be honest, I’ve never been fully convinced that it demonstrated giant pterosaurs were present in the Lower Cretaceous: it’s just so scrappy that drawing any conclusions about its overall size seems extremely spurious. A little bit of further investigation reveals why this gut feeling may be right.

That was then: this is now
To begin with, there no way that n. 12701a can be allocated to any pterosaur group: it’s just too scrappy and undiagnostic (Dalla Vecchia and Ligabue stated this themselves, but it bears reiterating here because it will prove important later). It is probably sensible to suspect it represents a group known from the Santana Formation, meaning it could either represent an ornithocheirid or an azhdarchoid. Now, in 1993, the Santana Formation was mainly known for its ornithocheirids (e.g. Unwin 1988) and azhdarchoids were relatively new kids on the block (Kellner and Campos 1988; Kellner 1989). Since then, however, we’ve found much more azhdarchoid material including up to three new species (Kellner and Campos 1994, 2002; Witton 2009), complete skeletons (Kellner and Hasagawa 1993) and buckets of incomplete specimens that are sitting in museum stores. This suggests that azhdarchoids were a far more speciose and abundant component of the Santana Formation pterosaur assemblage than could be predicted in the early ‘90s, then, and this is means that we need to strongly consider that n. 12701a may have azhdarchoid affinities.

This is potentially quite a big deal because azhdarchoids and ornithocheirids have very different wing constructions (see diagram of pterodactyloid wing configurations, above. The top image shows the ornithocheirid wingplan; middle image, the azhdarchid wingplan; bottom, tapejarid wingplan. From Witton [2007]). The wing phalanges of ornithocheirids are far more proportionate along the length of the wing finger, decreasing in size distally but only by comparatively small measures (e.g. Wellnhofer 1985). Azhdarchoids, by contrast, have massive first phalanges in their wing fingers (occupying over 40 per cent of the total finger length) but then drastically reduced second, third and fourth elements (Unwin 2003; Kellner 2003). What’s more, the diameters of the distal wing phalanges decrease in size dramatically across the azhdarchoid wing: that of the first is proportionally enormous compared to the rest. What this is leading up to, then, is that an azhdarchoid could have a massive first wing phalanx like that represented by n. 12701a without being a pterosaur giant. In fact, scaling an azhdarchoid wing using the 850 mm-long first phalanx length predicted by Dalla Vecchia and Ligabue gives a single wing length of just 3 m, and, therefore, a total wingspan of 6 m. That’s big, sure, but hardly gigantic for a pterosaur. Plus, this estimate supposes that the 850 mm length reconstuction of n 12701a is appropriate: would the same estimate be generated if it were based on a non-ornithocheirid pterosaur?

The plot thickens further when we consider that large azhdarchoids are already known from the same locality as n. 12701a. The Santana Formation thalassodromid Thalassodromeus, in particular, is a huge animal with a jaw approaching a metre in length (see image, above, of the author posing in a most embarrassing fashion with a full-size Thalassodromeus bust). Estimating the wingspan for this animal is difficult as no postcranial material is known, but its skull proportions suggest a 5 m span (Kellner and Campos 2002). Given how little data we have regarding the proportions between neoazhdarchian skulls and wingspans, it may not be entirely crazy to suppose a 6 m wingspan, either. Along with everything else, then, there are pterosaurs in the Santana Formation that would be a good size match for n. 12701a if it were, indeed, an azhdarchoid.

So, Lower Cretaceous giant pterosaurs, then?
None of this delivers a death-blow to the idea of giant pterosaurs existing in the Lower Cretaceous of course, but it certainly suggests that there is an equally, if not more, parsimonious interpretation of n. 12701a than it being the sole remnant of a giant ornithocheirid species. If nothing else, ornithocheirids are among the best represented of all pterosaurs and, in our extensive sampling of them, there’s no other evidence for such enormous animals (at least, none that I’m aware of). Considering n. 12701a as an azhdarchoid is a far more believable interpretation: it scales to a wingspan that we know azhdarchoids achieved, we would expect its overly large proportions in an azhdarchoid wing and, indeed, there are even comparably sized azhdarchoids in the same deposit. As such, while I’m not going to rule out the evolution of giant pterosaurs in the Lower Cretaceous entirely, I think we need far more evidence that we currently have to consider their existence likely.

And that, folks, is it for now. It’s Saturday night, so I’ll take my tale of how n. 12701a went from being boring to being really exciting and then boring again to the pub. Hey, you never know: there may be some women down there that, from the waist down, resemble rattlesnakes. You never know. I need to get ready. Clean, ironed shirt? Check. Wallet, house keys and phone? Check. Reflective shield and anti-venom? Check. Right, toodles.

References

Dalla Vecchia, F. M. and Ligabue, G. 1993. On the presence of a giant pterosaur in the Lower Cretaceous (Aptian) of Chapada fo Arariple (northeastern Brazil). Bollettino della Scoietá Paleontologica Italiana, 32, 131-136.
Kellner, A. W. A. 1989. A new edentate pterosaur of the Lower Cretaceous of the Araripe Basin, Northeast Brazil. Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências, 61, 439-446.
Kellner, A. W. A. 2003. Pterosaur phylogeny and comments on the evolutionary history of the group. In: Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J. M. (eds.) Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society Special Publication, 217, 105-137.
Kellner, A. W. A. and Campos, D. A. 1988. Sobre um novo pterossauro com crista sagital da Bracia do Araripe, Cretáceo Inferior do Nordeste do Brasil. Anais da Academia Brasileira, Ciências, 60, 459-469.
Kellner, A. W. A. and Campos, D. A. 1994. A new species of Tupuxuara (Pterosauria, Tapejaridae) from the Early Cretaceous of Brazil. Anais da Academia Brasileira, Ciências, 66, 467–473.
Kellner, A. W. A. and Campos, D. A. 2002. The function of the cranial crest and jaws of a unique pterosaur from the Early Cretaceous of Brazil. Science, 297, 389-392.
Kellner, A. W. A. and Hasagawa, Y. 1993. Postcranial skeleton of Tupuxuara (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea, Tapejaridae) from the Lower Cretaceous of Brazil. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 13, 44A.
Martill, D. M., Frey, E., Green, M. and Green, M. E. 1996. Giant pterosaurs from the Lower Cretaceous of the Isle of Wight, UK. Neues Jahrbuch fur Geologie und Paläontologie, Monatshefte, 1996, 672-683.
Unwin, D. 1988. New pterosaurs from Brazil. Nature, 332, 398-399.
Unwin, D. M. 2003. On the phylogeny and evolutionary history of pterosaurs. In: Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J. M. (eds.) Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society Special Publication, 217, 139-190.
Wellnhofer, P. 1985. Neue pterosaurier aus der Santana-Formation (Apt) der Chapada do Araripe, Brasilien. Palaeontographica. Abteilung A, 187, 105-182.
Witton, M. P. 2007. Titans of the skies: azhdarchid pterosaurs. Geology Today, 23, 33-38.
Witton, M. P. 2009. A new species of Tupuxuara (Thalassodromidae, Azhdarchoidea) from the Lower Cretaceous Santana Formation of Brazil, with a note on the nomenclature of Thalassodromidae. Cretaceous Research, 30, 1293-1300.

Big news at Flickr

2010-08-29T20:02:00.003+01:00

Dead quick post this one. In fact, it's simply instruction to point your browser here. There's not only some interesting pterosaury information on offer, but also a big announcement. Well, big for me, anyway.

The adjacent Pteranodon image, by the way, has nothing to do with anything mentioned here or there: he's just jazzing up the post a bit.

The unexpected, dreaded link between Flugsaurier 2010 and linen blazers

2010-08-28T19:15:00.022+01:00

By jingo, I’ve just realised I’m worryingly close to being a yuppie. All the signs are there: I’m sitting in Costa coffee in Portsmouth’s Gunwharf Quays, a trendy waterfront complex of designer stores and chain restaurants. There’s an enormous cappuccino steaming away alongside my laptop, an iPod pouring music into my ears and I’ve inadvertently dressed entirely in designer clothes. Crap: I’ve even got a linen blazer draped over the chair opposite. I’m a haircut and an IKEA catalogue away from a leading role in a J. J. Abrams production. When did this happen? What happened to the slightly-alternative left-liberal arty type that I used to be? When did I suddenly become so… so… faux professional? Terms like ‘incentivise’ and ‘core competencies’ could now pass my lips and no-one would bat an eyelid. I feel so… middle management.

Best get to the bottom of this while I finish this mighty caffeinated beverage. If I can identify when this young professionalism started creeping up on me, I may be able to do something about it. It certainly wasn’t last night. No, that wasn’t very professional behaviour at all. It wasn’t my holiday in China: it’s hard to look professional when climate and hiking conspire to make you sweat more than an excited, overweight trekkie at his first Star Trek convention. But wait: just before that, there was the 2010 Flugsaurier International Symposium on Pterosaurs, held in Beijing at the start of August. Hmm… dozens of pterosaur experts from all over the world presenting their latest research, specimen viewings, museum visits and field excursions to fossiliferous outcrops of the Jehol Group? Attending that would give any wannabe pterosaur researcher delusions of professionalism: that must be it. Let’s investigate further.

Shiny new things

Flugsaurier 2010 (the particularly handsome, well-designed logo of which greeted you at the start of the post) featured talks and posters from dozens of pterosaur experts on virtually every research avenue of our leathery-winged chums. The talks were excellent and, it must be said, there was a surprising sense of intellectual cohesion. Pterosaur researchers are renowned for holding quite polar views on numerous topics but, at Flugsaurier 2010, there was a good sense that we’re starting to sing from similar song sheets. We don’t have time to mention every talk and poster of the conference (39 abstracts were submitted in total), but notable highlights included conference organiser Lü Junchang’s overview of Chinese pterosaurs, a talk that served to remind us how much China has contributed to pterosaur research since the discovery of the first Chinese pterosaur material in 1935. Fellow Pterosaur.Net host Dave Hone presented a new specimen of the anurognathid Dendorhynchoides that – get this – has a relatively long tail. The length of the tail in this animal has been controversial since its description (Ji and Ji 1998; drawing of the holotype, above, from this publication) thanks to some fabrication in the caudal region by its discoverers (Unwin et al. 2000). However, it turns out that the relatively long tail of the holotype was only partially restored and Dendorhynchoides did, indeed, have a longish tail. Dave continued to point out that there’s a wealth of phylogenetic potential in tail length: we just have to figure out a way to code it in a meaningful way. (You can see Dave’s comments on the meeting, incidentally, at this post at the Musings)

Further new discoveries were presented by Fabio Dalla Vecchia with a new, as yet unnamed, Triassic pterosaur from northern Italy. The affinities of this animal aren’t yet clear, though it appears to have some Raeticodactylus-like features. My fellow University of Portsmouth pterosaur worker, PhD student Steve Vidovic, presented his work on pterosaur tooth microstructure and revealed an unusual tooth tissue, neither dentine, cementum or enamel, comprising much of the external surface of pterosaur teeth. A movement is underway amongst certain pterosaur workers to christen this the ‘Vidovic Layer’ in a special avant-garde dancing and fireworks ceremony: please drop us a line if you’ve chorus line or pyrotechnics experience.

Helmut ‘UV wizard’ Tischlinger once again dazzled audiences with a display of new Solnhofen pterosaur specimens that, under UV light, were seen to have ridiculously-proportioned headcrests and hitherto unseen details of wing membrane histology. Worryingly for pterosaur palaeoartists, the size of pterosaur headcrests seems to be increasingly difficult to predict based on skull osteology alone and we may be painting virtually all our pterosaurs with vastly undersize headgear. Sticking with Solnhofen-esque pterosaurs, it was personally gratifying to see Chris Bennett’s poster on the taxonomy of Cycnorhamphus state that the Painten Pelican, a strange, isolated skull from Solnhofen deposits, should be referred to Cycnorhamphus as predicted on these very pages. Chris went on further to suggest that there is only one valid species of Cycnorhamphus, C. suevicus.

Dirty fakes and dissolving trees

Perhaps the most dramatic taxonomic revelation, though, came with the presentation of further preparation work on Cearadactylus atrox (line drawing of the holotype, above, from Unwin 2002), a mostly-complete skull from the Brazilian Santana Formation with unusual dentition and jaw structure (Leonardii and Borgomanero 1983, 1985). Previous views of the partially prepared specimen showed a very ornithocheirid-like cranial region but bizarre, stepped jaw tips with large, somewhat procumbent fangs. Cearadactylus has been classically difficult to place and has been housed amongst ornithiocheiroids (e.g. Dalla Vecchia 1993; Kellner and Tomida 2000) and ctenochasmatoids (Unwin 2002). With additional prep, however, Juliana Sayão was able to reveal that an ornithocheirid affinity was correct and, moreover, all the unusual features of the jaw tip are faked. The stepped nature of the jaw tips arose from the anterior skull and mandible having been broken off and reattached upside-down, while the large fangs were fabricated by imaginative fossil collectors or dealers. Actually, fossil fakery was something of a running theme in the conference: along with the doctored Dendorhynchoides discussed above, several faked pterosaur fossils were seen on display in the museum in Chaoyang Bird Fossil National Geopark and, in the privacy of Dave Hone’s office, we were shown a fantastic complete azhdarchoid-like pterosaur with an entirely fabricated head. The Cearadactylus fiasco is yet another demonstration that distinguishing genuinely unusual vertebrate fossils from those elaborated by dealers can be difficult. In my limited experience of dealing with such things, I reckon we have a good idea of what to expect in most fossil vertebrates so, if a feature looks totally, totally out-of-keeping with everything else we’ve ever seen, there’s the strong possibility that it’s been ‘improved’. Full preparation and investigation with things like UV light are probably the best way to detect potential fakeries but, even then, well-done fabrication can be difficult to detect.

In other talks, the phylogenetic influence of Darwinopterus was discussed by Dave Unwin. Dave plugged everyone’s favourite transitional pterosaur into two of the latest Big Pterosaur Phylogenies – that of Alex Kellner and his own - to see how it would affect tree topology. While Unwin’s own tree remained almost entirely consistent with previous incarnations, Alex’s didn’t fare quite so well and even well-supported groups like Pterodactyloidea collapsed into a polytomy with basal forms. Alex was, unfortunately, unavailable for comment due to being called back to Brazil early in the conference. Further cladistic acrobatics were performed by Chris Bennett with a test for homoplasy amongst predicted pterosaur relatives. Chirs found that characters of the hindlimb associated with cursoriality were likely to have developed convergently with other archosaurs, casting further mist over pterosaur origins.

Play that funky morphy, white boy
Pterosaur functional morphology was discussed at great length in several talks, and flight seemed to be on the topic of the moment. Colin Palmer told us of his physical and digital modelling of pterosaur wing sections and the aerodynamic effects felt across the wing. Mike Habib and I delivered back-to-back talks regarding the flight of giant pterosaurs: following several claims that large pterosaurs may have been flightless (Sato et al. 2009; Henderson 2010), we outlined several flaws in these predictions and that there’s actually very compelling evidence that even the largest pterosaurs could fly. Mike went on to say that, when they did, things like giant azhdarchids went like dynamite: in short, these were animals that could happily continent hop without working up a sweat. Mike and I have a paper accepted for publication on this that should see the light of day soon (at least, it will when I stop writing blog posts and get on with addressing our referee’s comments).

Mike returned to the stage to present his work with Jim Cunningham on water-launching pterosaurs. Pterosaur.Net readers will no-doubt be familiar with the concept of pterosaurian quadrupedal launches by now (see image, above, of Pteranodon mid-launch) and, by gum, it seems to work on water, too. I will say no more because a Mike and Jim have a paper on water launches in the works and, frankly, it’s so cool that I don’t want to steal any more of their thunder than I’ve already stolen. There will be some exceptional pictures being drawn of this stuff, though: hopefully Mike and Jim will get their work out soon.

Odds and ends
Two odds-and-sods presentations were also given: I presented new observations on giant azhdarchid remains that suggest they weren’t as big as we all thought and, changing key slightly half-way through my talk, then went on to discuss Quetzagate, or whatever you want to call the political and taxonomic debacle surrounding Quetzalcoatlus northropi (which, of course, you know all about because you’ve read this). Interestingly, this story was not as well known as I perceived it to be and, frankly, I’m wondering if it may warrant a more formal write up.

A less scandalous topic was covered by John Conway in the closing presentation where John discussed why pterosaur palaeoart – sorry – palaeontography – would benefit from a far more scientific approach. He’s dead right: pterosaurs are frequently portrayed with entirely incorrect proportions, muscle construction and unlikely colour schemes. Unfortunately, I’m amongst the guilty on this but I agree entirely with John: while we will remain shooting in the dark on most issues when reconstructing the life appearance of extinct animals, there are definitely some parts we can be ‘correct’ about (such as size and proportions) and others where we can at least aim for a likely ballpark (colour, behaviour). You can see the Anhanguera artwork that John used as his case study above, and further discussion of these points will feature, at some point, in these halls.

Once we all stopped yammering on

As with Munich before it, a portion of the conference was dedicated to specimen viewing. The new scaphognathine Fenhuangopterus, material referred to Darwinopterus, the chaoyangopterid Shenzhoupterus and a cast of the most complete and articulated large pterosaur I’ve ever seen - Zhenyuanopterus (above, with Dave Hone's cranium for scale) – were on offer. Poster displays took place in the same room but, in a silly move, I got too excited with Shenzhoupterus and didn’t get a proper look at them all. D’oh.

Field trips to outcrops of the Tiaojishan, Juifotang and Yixian Formations followed our time in Beijing, along with visits to several museums with extensive collections of Jehol material. As usual, dinosaurs were given pride of place in these institutions but, happily, other aspects of the Jehol biota were also given plenty of breathing space too.

Steve Vidovic and myself also made trips to the IVPP and Beijing Museum of Natural History: whilst the specimens were nice (and the fossil mammals were pretty incredible), both museums were let down by their woeful, woeful models of prehistoric beasties (image, above, of Beijing MNH Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. No, this isn't a joke). Whilst these were kept to a minimum in the IVPP, the Beijing MNHM has dedicated room after room to these travesties and, walking through them, they gave off no sense of wonder or scientific credibility: they were, frankly, a waste of space and money. To a certain extent, the same could be said of the wobbly animatronic dinosaurs littering the Chaoyang Bird Fossil National Geopark, models that are already showing drastic wear and tear after only a few years of operation. They all reminded me of comments made by Matt Wedel years ago concerning museums trying to be theme parks: gee-whizz displays and wobbly mechanised dinosaurs often only cheapen what could be a far more educational and interesting experience if museum developers only trusted public intellect a little more. After all, museum goers are intelligent enough to be interested in museum collections for what they are, not just because it’s associated with a squeaky Tyrannosaurus model that slowly moves it’s head from side-to-side and plays noises recorded from Jurassic Park. This is, of course, a whole issue in itself that I won’t elaborate on any further here, but museum directors take note: give your punters some credit!

And that was that
So, yes, that was Flugsaurier 2010. There are, of course, loads more things I could talk about and apologies to those who contributed and didn’t get a mention here. Thanks to the conference organisers, and particularly Lü Junchang, for putting the whole show together and keeping things running smoothly. Additional thanks go to all my friends and colleagues who made the experience such an enjoyable one, even if you did leave me with an inflated sense of professionalism. Now, with that coffee being long-finished (I’ve got the jittery hands of a high-end caffeine achiever to prove it) and designer threads suffocating my anti-commercialist, liberal attitudes, I must away to cleanse myself of yuppiedom before it's too late. If I'm not careful, I may become respectable. Holy Christmas: I may even grow up. Quick: where’s that linen jacket? I've got a date with that garment and some matches.

UPDATE: 29/08/10
Silly me: I forgot to mention that the conference abstracts are available for viewing here. Navigating your way around them, however, isn't terribly easy unless you can read Chinese. One final thing: Dave Hone had the adjacent image taken of Pterosaur.Net contributors in front of a very, very distant stretch of the Great Wall and, to put some faces to names, I thought I'd post it here. Plus, spreading our desperately handsome features as far as possible is basically a public service and bound to improve the moods of most people, so enjoy. (From left to right: John Conway, your host, Dave Hone, Mike Habib and Helmut Tischlinger)

References

Dalla Vecchia, F. M. 1993. Cearadactylus? ligabuei nov. sp., a new early Cretaceous (Aptian) pterosaur from Chapada do Araripe (Northeatern Brazil). Bollettino della Societá Paleontologica Italiana, 32, 401-409.
Henderson, D. M. 2010. Pterosaur body mass estimates from three-dimensional mathematical slicing. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30, 768-785.
Kellner, A. W. A. and Tomida., Y. 2000. Description of a new species of Anhangueridae (Pterodactyloidea) with comments on the pterosaur fauna from the Santana Formation (Aptian -Albian), Northeastern Brazil. National Science Museum, Tokyo, Monographs, 17, 1-135.
Ji, S. A. and Ji, Q. 1998. A new fossil pterosaur (Rhamphorhynchoidea) from Liaoning. Jiangsu Geology; 22, 199-206.
Leonardi, G. and Borgomanero, G. 1983. Cearadactylus atrox, nov. gen. nov. sp.; novo Pterosauria (Pterodactyloidea) da Chapada do Araripe, Ceará, Brasil. Congresso Brasileiro de Paleontologia, resumos, 17.
Leonardi, G. and Borgomanero, G. 1985. Cearadactylus atrox, nov. gen. nov. sp.; novo Pterosauria (Pterodactyloidea) da Chapada do Araripe, Ceará, Brasil. Coletânea de Trabalhos Paleontológicos, Série Geologica, Brasilia, 75-80.
Sato, K., Sakamoto, K., Watanuki, Y., Takahashi, A., Katsumata, N., Bost, C., and Weimerskirch, H. 2009. Scaling of soaring seabirds and implications for flight abilities of giant pterosaurs. PLoS ONE, 4, e5400.
Unwin, D. M. 2002. On the systematic relationships of Cearadactylus atrox, an enigmatic Early Cretaceous pterosaur from the Santana Formation of Brazil. Mitteilungen Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Geowissenschaftlichen, 5, 239-263.
Unwin, D. M., Lü, J. and Bakhurina, N. N. 2000. On the systematic and stratigraphic significance of pterosaurs from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation (Jehol Group) of Liaoning, China. Mitteilungen aus dem Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Geowissenschaftliche Reihe, 3, 181-206.

The London Pterosaur ExTrAvAgAnZa!!!1!! in full glory

2010-06-25T11:49:00.015+01:00

This is a hard post to write. It may be the big latte I’ve just drunk or possibly a sugar low, but there’s a genuine buzz about my fingers as I type this. In short, not too far away from the little café I’m perched in now sits an enormous pterosaur exhibition that the University of Portsmouth amigos David Martill, Bob Loveridge, an army of volunteers and I put together over the last year and a half. It’s been up for several days on London’s Southbank after being installed through the night of Sunday the 20th of June (and I mean through the night: we literally didn’t sleep for 2 days) and will remain there for another week or so. We'll be taking it all away with another all-nighter on the 5th of July. Having a huge display that you personally constructed - and based on your own PhD work - on the Southbank is a little bit exciting, and the fact that I got to meet Princess Anne, attend a Royal Society Convocation (attended by numerous Royals, including Queenie herself) and have numerous people wanting to shake my hand on a job well done while standing around our work is pretty durned good.

Anyway, enough gushing: below is a little taster of what we’ve got in store for Londoners over the next week and a half. You can see the final of our BBC videos, documenting the installation of our flying animals, here and, at the top of this post and beneath this text, there's a series of photographs taken from the exhibition itself. At some point in the near future, I'll post more images detailing the development of the exhibition and some of the concepts we went through in designing and manufacturing the display. Once again, thanks to everyone who helped us out with this project and, for those helping us on the stand over the next few days, thanks in advance. Again, it'd be great to see some Pterosaur.Netters there, too: entry is free and, behind us, you've got the entire Royal Society Summer Science Festival to run around (and there's some really cool stuff in there, too. Obviously not as cool as our display, though). Details can be found here. Anyway, enough blurb: on with the images. Click to enbiggen.

The whole schebang: two giant walking azhdarchids, three flying jobbies, a considerable number of display boards and some bemused onlookers.

Mike O'Sulivan and Luke Hauser, dedicated pterosaur groupies and student volunteers, pose next to our life-size male Pteranodon image. Note that while Pteranodon is big, both Mike and Luke were in the loo when height was being dished out*. Hence, it may appear a little smaller in life.

*Only joking, guys. You're both fine, upstanding examples of the male form. I mean, look at Luke there. Look at Mike lean. Pwhoar.

Our female azhdarchid, who became known as Quetza, grabs Dinner, the hapless baby titanosaur. Kids love this. And by 'love' I mean 'question why we're so heartless'. And by 'question why we're so heartless' I mean 'strongly object'.

The head of Bamofo, our big male azhdarchid. While there's plenty of goofs on him, Bamofo is my favourite model: part azhdarchid, part Terminator, part King Kong: all foam.

The guys next to our gallery of pterosaur busts. Pteranodon and Tupandactylus are taking great interest in Luke's hair, and Coloborhynchus is about to take a chunk of Irish from Mike's arm.

What giant pterosaurs look like when you view them from above. If I was feeling trite, I'd call this a 'pterosaur eye-view'. Thankfully, I'm feeling stern and not in the mood for such things, so I won't.

Two of our flying models, complete with RAF roundels to commerorate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. I genuinely had nothing to do with them and, being suspended 10 m in the air and well out of reach, I've decided to learn to like them.

The Brotherhood of Leathery Wings goes to London

2010-06-20T11:10:00.008+01:00

I’ve got a habit of withering on for ages when blogging, but that can’t be the case today: in a few short hours I’m off to London to install the University of Portsmouth/Royal Society ‘Pterosaurs: Dragons of the Air’ exhibition with my colleagues, Dave Martill and Bob Loveridge, along with a bunch of student labourers/slaves/groupies that we keep with us at all times. The last few weeks has seen us working like Japanese beavers trying to get everything finished (hence the lack of posts here) but, happily, we’ll be on display on London’s Southbank from the 25th of June to the 4th of July. More specifically, we can be found spread between the interior and exterior of Royal Festival Hall (see map, taken from a presentation I gave ages ago on the exhibition, below), not too far from Waterloo train station and the London Eye.

We’ve got 5 (count ‘em) giant azhdarchid models (two of which are standing on the ground as the world’s first Haenamichnus-inspired parasagittal terrestrial azhdarchid models), 13 pterosaur busts representing a broad sweep of their diversity, a life-size Pteranodon to have your photograph taken alongside and more information on pterosaurs than you could shake a stick at. It was a mammoth amount of work and special praise should be given to the students and other volenteers who put in so many hours in exchange for no more than a few pints of beer and, bizarrely, Southern Comfort and Coke (you know who you are). Simply put, these chaps were the cogs that helped our leathery-winged machine run smoothly, so they deserve considerable amounts of kudos, presents and praise.

You can meet our workforce at the exhibition and, in addition, we'll have several tamed pterosaur experts to chat to while you’re there. Along with myself, Dave and Bob, the likes of Darren Naish and Andre Veldmeijer will be dropping by to discuss all things pterosaurian. Two pterosaur-researching postgraduates from UoP, Richard Hing and Steven Vidovic, will also be on hand. The whole event, part of the biggest-ever Royal Society Summer Science Festival, is totally free to enjoy and should make for a great day out. It’d be fantastic to see some of the Pterosaur.Net readership there.

Right, I have to dash, but more on the exhibition will be posted when I get back. In the meantime, please enjoy two new images of giant azhdarchids penned back in January to advertise the exhibition. The image at the top shows our big male, Bamofo, terrorising some baby tyrannosaurus and, adjacent to this text, is the graceful Mistress swooping over a mudflat with bathing sauropods. See you all in London!

How a giant ape nearly brought flightless pterosaurs to cinema screens

2010-05-18T08:05:00.011+01:00

I've not kept it much of a secret that I’m a big fan of King Kong or, at least, the 1933 and 2005 versions (you can keep your ‘76 and Toho incarnations, thanks). There was something about the mythos of the film that excited me even before I had seen it so, when I was eight and my family saw the ’33 Kong being shown on late night TV, we grabbed it on video tape and I got up especially early before school to watch it. I only managed to see a brief glimpse of Kong himself before I had to leave for school, but that was enough to ensure that I resumed my viewing as soon as I got home. Almost 18 years later, I can still remember watching the charging Stegosaur for the first time, or that Brontosaurus chucking sailors around a swamp before chasing them up the tree. And, of course, the T. rex vs. Kong wrestling match, all framed by the wooden cabinet around our old TV and watched from our comfy blue sofa just left next to the patio door, with the heavy blue curtains closed to keep the glare off the TV.

Sometime later, my sister would record The New Adventures of Superman over virtually the entire thing and leave only Kong’s death atop the Empire State Building as my entire Kong experience. We’re still not talking.

Anyway, things turned out all right: I eventually got a proper copy of Kong and, hooray, Peter Jackson remade the original to generally great acclaim and success in 2005. Yesterday, my day was made when I received a copy of The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island, essentially being a collection of the creature and environment concept art for Jackson’s movie. Tell you what: Weta Workshop, the chaps behind the 2005 Kong special effects, really went to town with their ideas. They literally imagined an entire world, or at least an entire island, for their movie to be based in. In essence, they embarked on a big speculative zoology project, imagining what may have happened if Skull Island (the mysterious land that the explorers of the film er… explore) held a whole bunch of Mesozoic critters that survived the K/T extinction and continued to evolve. The film shows a handful of the more charismatic creations and environments, but there was buckets more that could’ve gone in. There’s nasty-looking fish, birds, worms and insects, several flying rats, all manner of theropods, ceratopsians and sauropods and even – get this – flying (not gliding) frogs. But they didn’t just go for wild and spectacular stuff: apparently fully immersed in their world, the chaps at Weta imagined the quieter, more sedate biota of Skull Island, including the inclusion of pretty-standard looking storks, egrets and herons in swamps and wetlands. But, and here’s the really cool bit, they also toyed with the idea of flightless, cormorant-like pterosaurs.

How cool would that have been? Secondarily flightless pterosaurs on film! And pterosaurs that are really, really far removed from those that we know and love! Sadly, it wasn’t to be but, still, it’s closer than almost any other film project I know of. Christened Axiciacephalus curia (see image at the top of this post; by Weta artist Johnny Brough), the Weta flightless pterosaur is around a metre long, has naked skin and bears long, low jaws filled with isodont, regularly spaced teeth. The nostrils are positioned far back along the jaw and on the dorsal surface of the skull. The neck and body are short but the tail is long, deep and muscular. Weirdly, the forelimbs are heavily modified into short, flipper-like appendages while the hindlimbs are elongate, three-toed and digitgrade. It’s meant to dwell around streams and live in a cormorant-like fashion, diving underwater and propelling itself along with its long legs. It really is very far removed from all things pterosaurian and, frankly, if it weren’t for the text, I would’ve thought it was some sort of weird theropod. Still, it deserves acclaim for being totally different (I thought my goat-tapejarids were good, but they’re blown out of the water here) and, moreover, a short-armed diving pterosaur may not be as crazy as you’d think.

And here’s why
For one thing, while pterosaur forelimbs are considerably more conspicuous than their hindlimbs, most pterosaur legs are not under-developed. As Padian (1983), Bennett (1997) and Habib (2008) have noted, they only appear small in contrast to the enormous heads and arms that characterise pterosaurs: they’re actually proportionate to the torso size and mechanically suited for powerful, leap-assisted takeoffs (Bennett 1997). Moreover, pterosaur swimming trackways indicate that they propelled themselves through water with their feet, not their hands (Lockley and Wright 2003; see adjacent image from the same paper. Illustration by Judy Peterson). Therefore, it’s not impossible to imagine a situation where a specialist wader pterodactyloid – a ctenochasmatoid, say – became secondarily flightless and, as wading turned to swimming, developed longer, more robust hindlimbs. Simultaneously, a diving animal would almost certainly reduce the size of its drag-inducing and now largely-useless arms, but still maintained some of their aerofoil properties for use as flippers. It’s a stretch, sure, and I’m not really sure the final product would look like Axiciacephalus, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

There's loads more we could say about this, but I don't really have the time. Still, it's pretty neat that flightless diving pterosaurs came close to being put on film and, actually, are a pretty groovy idea. In retrospect, you can see why Axiciacephalus didn’t make it into Kong 2005: although neat in its own way, it’s hardly as attention grabbing as the big tyrannosaurs, brontosaurs and gorillas that lived nearby. Certainly, it would’ve been a very different movie if Axiciacephalus and his more sedate chums had featured heavily. Anyway, must dash: I’ve got to go flip a giant pterosaur.

References

Bennett, S. C. The arboreal leaping theory of the origin of pterosaur flight. Historical Biology, 12, 265-290.
Habib, M.B. 2008. Comparative evidence for quadrupedal launch in pterosaurs. Zitteliana, B28, 161-168.
Lockley, M. G. and Wright, J. L. 2003. Pterosaur swim tracks and other ichnological evidence of behaviour and ecology. In: Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J. M. (eds.) Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society Special Publication, 217, 297-313.
Padian, K. 1983. Osteology and functional morphology of Dimorphodon macronyx (Buckland) (Pterosauria: Rhamphorhynchoidea) based on new material in the Yale Peabody Musuem. Postilla, 189, 44 pp.
Weta Workshop. 2005. The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island. Pocket Books, London, 223 pp.

Embarrassing questions on Quetzalcoatlus

2010-05-15T15:30:00.021+01:00

You can’t queue up at a supermarket checkout nowadays without being bombarded by celebrity lifestyle magazines. They glare at you from the impulse-buy shelves with paparazzi shots of stars looking flabby, pregnant, boozy or unhappy and garish, block capital headlines scorn celebs for revealing their mortal flaws. There is probably a deep-seated psychological reason to their popularity, perhaps reflecting the desire people have for gossip or reassuring somewhat insecure readers that it’s OK, people with stars on Hollywood Boulevard aren’t perfect either. The thing that strikes me, though, is that a lot of the people splashed all over the front pages of these rags have very little substance behind their fame, becoming famous because they took they posed semi-nude for a tabloid newspaper, are related to someone else in the public eye or appeared on telly for five minutes on a reality TV show. These are the empty celebrities, the ones that you assume have some reason for being known but, when investigated in more detail, are actually quite devoid of substance. It’s rare that these tabloid-fodder achieve international fame: to do that, you’ve at least got to be associated with an internationally-released product or hung-out in high-profile political circles. In some respects, then, becoming a real international household name requires a little more substance than your local, lower-grade celebrities. Talent, though, is handy but not strictly necessary.

There are definitely fossil animals that are the equivalent of A-list celebs, the sort of critters that every five year-old knows and that press releases strive to mention, no matter how tangential their work is to them, to gain more kudos. They’re the animals that the public know and love, the likes of Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed cats. Typically, these animals do have some substance to them: while their taxonomy may be confused or controversial, they definitely ‘exist’. Some pterosaurs are in this club too, with Pterodactylus (or probably ‘pterodactyls’) or Pteranodon being at the top of the list, and Quetzalcoatlus, everyone’s favourite superpterosaur, just behind (detail of a new image above). Thing is, though, Quetzalcoatlus may be a fraud. Yes, that’s right: there may be so little substance to its existence that its status as a household palaeontological name is undeserved: it’s a local celeb masquerading as a big shot. That’s controversial stuff and, no doubt, several of you have just sprayed your monitor with coffee shot through your nose at the very idea of such a thing. But mop up that liquid, dry the screen off, and we’ll see why I’m suddenly being so nasty to one of the cornerstones of Azhdarchidae.

Giant, yes; diagnostic, maybe not
As I’m sure you all know, Quetzalcoatlus stems from the Maastrichtian Javelina Formation of Texas. Remains of several animals that would be referred to this genus were found from 1972 – 1974 and were briefly described by their discover, Douglas Lawson, in 1975 (Lawson 1975a). Quetzalcoatlus was erected in the same year (Lawson 1975b) with fragments of a giant left wing (including a famous complete humerus, TMM 41450-3; see image, above) being used as the holotype for the type species, Q. northropi Lawson, 1975b. A bunch of smaller individuals that were represented by substantially more complete remains were discovered at the same time and initially referred to the same species (Lawson 1975a, b) but, later, were said to be sufficiently distinct from Q. northropi to deserve their own species (Kellner and Langston 1996). Pending their complete description, however, Kellner and Langston simply called them ‘Q. sp.’ for their work on the Quetzalcoatlus skull.

That all looks above board on the surface, but it doesn’t take much digging to find several massive holes. Firstly, despite the wealth of material that has been referred to it, neither Quetzalcoatlus or Q. northropi have ever been given a rigorous taxonomic definition*. To my knowledge, only Nesov (1991) has had a stab at a Quetzalcoatlus definition but his listed characters are either not unique to Quetzalcoatlus or of questionable validity, so his work is not really useful here. This leaves us without a diagnosis and, accordingly, we simply cannot know if Q. northropi is a valid species or not. What’s more, with Q. northropi being the type species of Quetzalcoatlus, the entire genus must go if the former is sunk.

*You could get away with this sort of stuff in the 1970s, but it’s much harder to be taxonomically slack nowadays. The ICZN (the body that regulates naming of zoological specimens) has recently tightened its rules considerably to make sure that new taxa come with proper holotype allocation, diagnoses and all other due practises (e.g. article 16, International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature 1999), so messes like the one under discussion here should – in theory – eventually become a thing of the past.

In my eyes, this is quite a real possibility. Pterosaur limb elements aren’t normally named because they are not considered diagnostic at generic or species levels: taxa that are based on limb elements alone have been considered nomina dubia by later authors. ’Santanadactylus’ spixi - a set of wrist bones - and Palaeornis cliftii - an isolated humerus – have both fallen into this trap (Unwin 2003; Witton et al. 2009). Unless Q. northropi is unusually distinctive, it’s possible it may be binned too. Adding more concern to this worryfire is that, so far as I can see, the Q. northropi humerus doesn’t look that different from other giant azhdarchid humeri (e.g. Padian and Smith 1992; Buffetaut et al. 2002) and the existence of these other giants nullifies the possibility of using size as a diagnostic feature (though this would be dodgy anyway). The other Q. northropi elements are so scrappy that they’re probably of very little taxonomic utility and preclude the use of limb element proportions in a diagnosis, too. Call me cynical if you like, but it looks like this could be an uphill struggle to me.

The plot thickens
There’s more. With no definition for Quetzalcoatlus, the referral of the Q. sp. material (including that depicted above, from Kellner and Langston 1996) to this taxon is also questionable. The Q. sp. material is what people refer to when talking about the detailed anatomy of Quetzalcoatlus, but we need to be careful: there has never been any justification printed for the allocation of Q. sp. to Quetzalcoatlus: we’ve just been told it’s similar to Q. northropi and can therefore be placed in the same genus. Thing is, Hatzegopteryx, Arambourgiania and Zhejiangopterus are pretty similar animals to Q. northropi too, so why can’t the Q. sp. material been popped in one of these genera instead? You can't argue taxonomic provinence in this instance, either: it's highly likely that there is more than one azhdarchid genus in the Javelina Formation (see my thoughts on this here), so you can’t suggest allocation of Q. sp. to Quetzalcoatlus through association alone.

To be clear, I'm not saying that Q. sp. itself is of questionable validity - whatever you want to call it, Q. sp. is definitely a valid, diagnosable species, I’m just iffy about its allocation to Quetzalcoatlus at present. Note, however, that the story continues outside of material referred to Quetzalcoatlus, too: the status of Hatzegopteryx may also hang in the balance. I don’t have time to go into that now, though.

So, what next?
The resolution of all this is, in my view, quite straightforward. Eagle-eyed readers may have read between the lines of this post and realised that, despite it’s fame, popularity and unearthing almost 40 years ago, there is almost nothing written or illustrated of Quetzalcoatlus. The issues highlighted here will not be resolved without this data and, frankly, a few good photographs and descriptions of Q. northopi would give all the information we need to get started. There is, in fact, a bit of an elephant in the room about Quetzalcoatlus and, foolish though it may be for a bloke looking for a job in the pterosaur corner of palaeoindustry to be so outspoken, it should be flagged up. Without mentioning any names, the Texas Memorial Museum has placed a strict embargo on the release of information about Quetzalcoatlus until the full monographic description has been properly published. This has been promised since at least the 1980s (Langston 1981; Kellner and Langston 1996) and, in the meantime, getting access to the material seems to be extremely difficult. I asked to see the material back in 2006 and was told no. Colleagues of mine have asked the same, and got the same answer. The few friends of mine that have seen the specimens are sworn to secrecy and, if they want to publish even itty-bitty snippets of information about them, they have to ask permission first.

If you ask me, this is all a bit rotten. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s ethical mission statement states that vertebrate palaeontologists of the world are here to:

To advance the science of vertebrate paleontology throughout the world;
To serve the common interests and facilitate the cooperation of all persons concerned with the history, evolution, ecology, comparative anatomy and taxonomy of vertebrate animals, as well as the field occurrence, collection and study of fossil vertebrates and the stratigraphy of the beds in which they are found;
To support and encourage the discovery, conservation and protection of vertebrate fossils and fossil sites;
To foster the scientific, educational and personal appreciation and understanding of vertebrate fossils and fossil sites by avocational, student and professional paleontologists and the general public.

From the SVP Constitution, Article 12, Code of Ethics.

Aside from the point 3 in this list, it seems that the decades-long embargo on the Quetzalcoatlus material isn't really in keeping with these guidelines. I mean, I get embargoes. I get 'gentlemen's agreements' about publishing rights. But 40 years to publish a specimen description while simultaneously being very cagey about giving access to the material? Seriously guys, what's going on? I'm not sure there's quite enough ground here to go stampeding to the SVP ethics committee or anything, but when is this material going to be properly published and freely available to see?

References

Buffetaut, E., Grigorescu, D. and Csiki, Z. 2002. A new giant pterosaur with a robust skull from the latest Cretaceous of Romania. Naturwissenschaften, 89, 180-184.
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. 1999. International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (4th Edition). The International Trust of Zoological Nomenclature, 1999.
Kellner, A. W. A. and Langston, W. Jr. 1996. Cranial remains of Quetzalcoatlus (Pterosauria, Azhdarchidae) from Late Cretaceous sediments of Big Bend National Park. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 16, 222-231.
Langston, W. Jr. 1981. Pterosaurs. Scientific American, 244, 92-102.
Lawson, D. A. 1975a. Pterosaur from the Latest Cretaceous of West Texas: discovery of the largest flying creature. Science, 185, 947-948.
Lawson, D. A. 1975b. Could pterosaurs fly? Science, 188, 676-677.
Nesov, L. A. 1991. Gigantskiye lyetayushchiye yashchyeryi semyeistva Azhdarchidae. I. Morfologiya, sistematika. Vestnik Leningradskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Seriya 7, 2, 14-23.
Padian, K. and Smith, M. 1992. New light on Late Cretaceous pterosaur material from Montana. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 12, 87-92.
Unwin, D. M. 2003. On the phylogeny and evolutionary history of pterosaurs. In: Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J. M. (eds.) Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society Special Publication, 217, 139-190.
Witton, M. P., Martill, D. M. and Green, M. 2009. On pterodactyloid diversity in the British Wealden (Lower Cretaceous) and a reappraisal of “Palaeornis” cliftii Mantell, 1844. Cretaceous Research, 30, 676-686.

On the nature of palaeontology and throwing away years of training for a career in artistry. Oh, and something on pterosaurs, too.

2010-05-08T15:26:00.014+01:00

Every now and then it occurs to me just how silly vertebrate palaeontology is. Consider the following: access to specimens is extremely competitive, but, despite this, a vast wealth of material remains undocumented; chances of scoring funding are less than 5 per cent; a high proportion of the work you perform is unpaid; there are all sorts of political considerations when reporting new finds or sharing information and, aside from ‘being nice to know’, there’s very little reason or rationale to investigate most extinct vertebrates – invertebrates and microfossils have utility in stratigraphy and hydrocarbon work, at least. All the same, people are falling over themselves to work in this profession, which means you have to be bristling with qualifications to even think of applying for an academic palaeo position. These qualifications don’t come cheaply: in Britain, you’re looking at three years of a relevant degree study, probably another year earning a Masters, then at least another three of PhD study. Tuition fees alone across this seven year period will set you back well over £20,000 and, while you’re studying, your earning power is significantly reduced: while all your school friends are off earning proper money in real jobs, even funded students will be just about be breaking even. As such, these seven years are not just spent acquiring the skills you need to be a palaeontologist: they're also seven years off the property ladder and seven years of not really putting any money into personal savings, and there’s little guarantee of a job at the end of it. What’s more, your fancy doctor’s title can become a burden as, while academic jobs become (theoretically) open to you, doors close on most menial jobs as, frankly, employers realise - probably rightly in many cases - that a PhD in a menial job will fly the nest as soon as they can.

Now, I’m not saying it’s all bad - vertebrate palaeontologists work hard at what they do because it brings enormous personal satisfaction and, ultimately, they’re being paid to do something they like – but the points made above are worth thinking about if you’re looking at a career in vert. palaeo. I stress that I'm genuinely not trying to put people off aspiring to palaeo jobs, but there are equally rewarding professions that are better paid, considerably more accessible and, at times when unemployment is looming on the horizon, considerably less stressful. I’m faced with the latter situation at the moment: thanks to greedy bankers around the world, British university budgets have been squeezed and, to slash costs, the University of Portsmouth is not renewing my contract post July. As such, I’m looking at joining the dole queue unless I can find a job before then and, without going into detail, pickings are slim at best. So slim, in fact, that I’ve been giving serious thought to leaving science and pursuing a career teaching art: I really enjoy teaching and, at times, I do wonder what I’m doing in science anyway. My dress sense, working methods and hobbies make me pretty unusual amongst the scientists I hang around with, but appear to be pretty typical of artier folks. But then, of course, I write something like the piece below and, by the end of it, I’m feeling pretty scientific. Maybe I should perform a cladistic analysis on interests and character traits and, plotting myself onto the tree, follow the career picked out for me in the consensus analysis. Until I do that, though, exactly where I should put myself professionally is a mystery, and one I’m quite keen to get to the bottom of.

The bit where I start talking about pterosaurs
Thankfully, I’m not alone in not being sure where I fit. An unusual pterosaur skull, nicknamed the Painten Pelican, has caused a lot of discussion amongst pterosaur palaeontologists because it is, superficially at least, so danged weird (see image, above). The specimen comprised a complete skull, mandible and cervical vertebra and, if you’re around in Southern Germany, you can see it for yourself: it’s on display in the Solnhofen Museum. A cast and UV photographs of the specimen were making quite a buzz at the 2007 Flugsaurier Meeting, and, apparently, the specimen is very slowly being written up. The Pelican has been mentioned in an abstract by Tischlinger and Frey (2007) but, this aside, it’s not been mentioned in the literature at all. This abstract describes the specimen as ‘a recently discovered skull of a very large azhdarchoid pterosaur from the locality Painten (Upper Kimmeridgian)’, but there are several reasons to think that this identification is wrong. In fact, amongst my colleagues at least, there seems to be some real confusion as to where this specimen should fit into pterosaur phylogeny. Thing is, I’m not sure we really need to be that confused about it, and here’s why.

The Painten Pelcian is, undeniably, something to get very excited about. The specimen is fantastically preserved, around 30 cm long and most notable for its strange jaws that are dorsally deflected and markedly divergent towards the jaw tip, forming a region where no direct occlusion of the bony jaw elements could occur. The jaw tips themselves, though, could occlude and bear a few (less than a dozen?) rounded, peg-like teeth in both the upper and lower jaws. The rest of the jaws are toothless, but a strange growth - presumably soft-tissue of some kind – appears to be present on the upper jaw and filled the gap made by the diverging jaws. It’s important to note how neat these features are: there’s no indication that they are pathological and, to date, there’s never been a pterosaur reported with such an odd looking jaw apparatus. The rest of the specimen shows a large fibrous crest along the mid-length of the skull, a nasoantorbital fenestra, an inverted-teardrop shaped orbit and a reclined occipital face with a prominent, rounded supraoccipital crest. The palate is prominently distended along for much of the jaw length and the jugal has an unusual posterior ventral deflection, extending ventrally so that the jaw articulation is in line with the base of the palatal surface. Sclerotic rings and hyoid apparatus are also preserved. The vertebra, so far as I can make out, is somewhat elongate, but other features are hard to discern from the photographs I have of the specimen.

So, it’s definitely a bit weird, definitely exciting, but what actually is it? Thanks to Darwinopterus, we can’t definitively say that the Painten Pelican is a pterodactyloid as we lack postcervical material that would show the only strong synapomorphies of this group (Lü et al. 2009). The skull is quite derived, though, and all basal monofenestratans found to date have pretty conservative skull morphology, so, until we see reason not to, it is probably safe to consider the Pelican as a pterodactyloid. The allocation of the Pelican to Azhdarchoidea by Tischlinger and Frey (2007) is, frankly, baffling, however: azhdarchoid skulls are readily identified by their edentuly and orbits positioned below the dorsal margin of their particularly large nasoantorbital fenestrae (see, for instance, Lü et al. 2008). As none of these features are seen in the Painten Pelican, it almost certainly is not an azhdarchoid. Elsewhere in Pterodactyloidea, the dental configuration is entirely opposite of what would be expected of a dsungaripteroid, ctenochasmatid or lonchodectid and the specimen lacks the elongate skull and derived dental characteristics of all ornithiocheiroids (e.g. Unwin 2003). It appears that we’re running out of places to put the Pelican then: is it something really, entirely new?

Probably not

While getting very excited about how kooky the Painten Pelican skull is, no-one seems to have noticed how favourably it compares with the Upper Jurassic French pterosaur Cycnorphamphus (= Gallodactylus; see Bennett 1996). This rarely discussed basal ctenochasmatoid, known from deposits in Canjuers and Solnhofen, contains two very similar species C. canjuerensis Fabre, 1974 (above, from Fabre 1974) and C. suevicus Quenstedt, 1855 (see photograph of skull and neck cast, below) and both bear dorsally sweeping upper jaws, kinked jugals, broad supraoccipital crests and elongate cervical vertebrae that are just like those of the Painten Pelican. What’s more, C. canjuerensis has a ventrally deflected mandible and robust cranial bones that are strikingly similar to the Painten specimen but, unfortunately, the holotype of this species also has broken jaw tips that prohibit comparisons of tooth morphology. Happily, C. suevicus shows that the dentition of at least one Cycnorhamphus species is confined to the jaw tip, though it does extend somewhat further back in the jawline than that of the Painten specimen. No Cycnorphamphus material has the strange structure on the upper jaw or large fibrous headcrest of the Pelcian, but this may reflect a imperfect preservation rather than their actual absence. The bottom line, though, is that the aspects of the Painten specimen that seem so odd are actually already known, almost identically so in fact, in another pterosaurs. Given that Cycnorhamphus and the Pelican stem from the very closely related depositional basins (see comment from Valentin, below), I think it’s very likely they’re one and the same. In fact, shoot: if the Painten Pelican isn’t just a complete skull of C. canjuerensis, I’ll eat my hat. The three corner job. With the feathers.

This could be another mystery solved, then, but I stress that this article is based on a brief period spent with a cast and numerous photographs of the Painten specimen, not the actual thing itself. I could, therefore, be very wrong and suggest waiting for the eventual technical documentation of this paper before getting too excited about what is said here. Still, it’s food for thought and, frankly, leaves me wishing that everything in life could be a bit more straightforward. Back to the work hunt, I guess.

References

Bennett, S. C. 1996. On the taxonomic status if Cycnorhamphus and Gallodactylus (Pterosauria: Pterodactyloidea). Journal of Paleonotology, 70, 335-338.
Fabre, J. 1976. Un noveau Pterodactylidae sur le gisement “Portlandian” de Canjurs (Var): Gallodactylus canjuersensis nov. gen., nov. sp. Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Science, Paris, 279, 2011-2014.
Lü, J., Unwin, D. M., Xu, L., and Zhang, X. 2008. A new azhdarchoid pterosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of China and its implications for pterosaur phylogeny and evolution. Naturwissenschaften, 95, 891-897.
Lü, J., Unwin, D. M., Jin, X., Liu, Y. and Ji, Q. 2009. Evidence for modular evolution in a long-tailed pterosaur with a pterodactyloid skull. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 277, 383-389.
Quenstedt, F. A. 1855. Über Pterodactylus suevicus im lithographischen Schiefer Wüttembergs. Tübingen. 52 pp.
Tischlinger, H. and Frey, E. 2007. “Solnhofen” pterosaurs with soft-part preservation: Soft-tissue crests and occipital cones, preservation of muscles and hairy structures. In: Hone, D. (ed.) Flugsaurier: The Wellnhofer pterosaur meeting, Munich, Abstract Volume, 32.

Scruffy pterosaurs by scruffy people

2010-04-08T20:35:00.011+01:00

As regular readers of the Pterosaur.Net blog will know (erm… assuming we have any), I work at the University of Portsmouth cobbling together models of giant pterosaurs out of bits of styrofoam, metal, fake fur and anything else that happens to be lying around. We’re supported by the Royal Society because, this coming June, we’re headlining their London Summer Science Festival. Being on a grander scale than anything the RS has pulled off before, our pterosaur models are booked to be displayed on the world-famous Southbank, right outside Royal Festival Hall and visible to thousands of people. The BBC have taken an interest in this and decided to record the progress on our project in a series of films: the first can be found here, the second here and, yesterday, the third was posted here.

Hosted by yours truly in the most forlorn looking vest seen this side of a Die Hard movie, it discusses the finer details of our pterosaur models: eyes, fur, colour and all that jazz. Also featured are Bob Loveridge, resident UoP Eyeman and chief techie-chap, and some of my slaves/groupies – sorry, student volunteers (Luke Hauser and Chris Callaghan) who’re working on their own contributions to the project. You can also spy a full-size Thalassodromeus bust in the background of one shot, but what you can’t see is it’s dual sided nature. Bored with making perfect pterosaurs over and over again and knowing full well that some pterosaur fossils show all sorts of interesting pathologies (Bennett 2003), I decided to render our Thalassodromeus rather visually-imparied in it's left eye, a consequence of a dirty-big scar across its eye and a cataract. Check him out: if anyone ever made a Bond film set in the Mesozoic, this thing would definitely be a baddie.

Dinner the baby titanosaur, momentarily freed from the azhdarchid jaws that normally hold him, acts as scale: he's about 1.2 m long. He's also been overhauled in recent weeks: he's no longer green, has fewer obvious joins and has undergone facial reconstruction surgery. He still has the same fantastic fashion sense, however and, apparently, a taste for chocolate (adjacent photo by Sarah Brown). Those wondering how sauropods grew so big so fast, take note.

Reference

Bennett, S. C. 2003. A survey of pathologies in large pterodactyloid pterosaurs. Palaeontology, 46, 195-196.

Actinopatagia percussion and sketchy speculation

2010-04-04T13:00:00.012+01:00

I’ve been enjoying the previously unreported sonic qualities pterosaur wings a lot this week. Thanks to the need to paint some fibreglass pterosaur wing membranes and a newfound obsession with the heavy beats of Florence and the Machine, I’ve been smacking out tunes with paintbrushes on the folded wings of our giant male azhdarchid model, tastefully named Bamofo, all week. Hit them hard enough with a paint-slopped brush and they make a noise unlike that of a walloped bass drum, albeit one that splashes paint everywhere and renders the artist and workshop looking like a Jackson Pollock canvas. With the amount of paint I find on the walls, floor and my hands, arms, shoulders, chest, neck and face after a particularly enthusiastic rendition of Dog Days Are Over, I’m surprised any colour has made it onto the model at all. Seriously: given my choice of using blue shading on Bamafo’s leading wing edges, a good day at work means I could easily pass as an extra in Braveheart.

To date, there’s not been any indication that any pterosaurs lost these impromptu percussion devices, nor scaled back their wing anatomy enough to assume that, winged or not, they had abandoned flight. Accordingly, I’m not aware of many – if any – pterosaurologists who consider that any known pterosaur was secondarily flightless. Unlike theropod dinosaurs, which seem to have developed and lost flight numerous times in their evolutionary history, it seems that all pterosaurs - even the biggest 250 kg jobbies - were able to takeoff and fly about with minimal fuss (Marden 1994; Habib 2008). Buffetaut et al. (2002) raised the possibility that the giant azhdarchid Hatzegopteryx may have been flightless, but ruled it out on grounds that the holotype humerus bears the same volant characteristics as it’s smaller brethren. Sato et al. (2009) suggested that pterosaurs spanning more than 5.1 m and massing more than 41 kg would be incapable of flight, thereby grounding a good number of forms including many long-winged, tiny legged ornithocheiroids. Without going into too much detail, this work is quite problematic and I’m pretty sure these conclusions have not been accepted by the pterosaur community: a rebuttal paper, penned by Mike Habib and myself, is under review, and Ross Elgin has posted similarly-minded comments on the Dragons of the Air blog. I suggested that mass and wingspan of Dimorphodon may have combined to produce a relatively ineffective flier that only took to the air to cover ground quickly or escape predation (Witton 2008): this could be taken as a suggestion that dimorphodontids were moving towards abandoning flight, but there’s no reason to assume that it had been totally lost.

Despite this, the subject of flightless pterosaurs has been brought up in informal circles a number of times: along with numerous discussions of the topic on blogs and the Dinosaur Mailing List, flightless pterosaurs have appeared on Tet Zoo here (along with being discussed in the comments of several other Tet Zoo posts) and were famously depicted as giraffe-like critters in The New Dinosaurs by Dixon (1988). In such discussions, it seems generally accepted that there’s no reason why pterosaurs shouldn’t have abandoned flight given the right selection pressures: as long as they could find enough to eat, reach suitable areas for reproducing and, by whatever means, achieve relief from predators, the terrestrial abilities of pterosaurs were probably sufficient to let them hang up their wings and let them become fully terrestrialised again. I’m in full agreement with this and, here, want to share some old speculations (drawn at the end of 2008) of flightless pterosaurs, complete with horrible, unimaginative Latin and Greek names. The drawings are a bit crude, but I’ve not had time to spruce them up – nor will I in the foreseeable future. Unlike most speculative flightless pterosaur creations, though, I haven’t just picked on azhdarchids: although they may have been more terrestrially proficient than other pterosaurs (Witton and Naish 2008), I’m sure other clades would be equally capable of abandoning flight. As such, some of imaginings here would not necessarily post-date the known pterosaur record: many would have existed side-by-side with flying (and Mesozoic) pterosaurs.

Apterigulo
Found in Early Jurassic forests (and decorating the top of this post), this metre-long bundle of fluff has ancestry lying with dimorphodontids: continual development of their large heads and hindlimbs (these attributes already make genuine dimorphodontids quite heavy for their size [Brower and Veinus 1981; Witton 2008] but retention of short wings rendered some members of this clade capable of only the most limited burst of flight, and, eventually, even this ability was lost. While the terrestrial ability of basal pterosaurs has generally been considered to be poor at best, this loss of flight didn’t leave Apterigulo and it’s kind up the proverbial locomotory creek: although the limbs are somewhat sprawled like it’s ancestors (see Unwin 1988), Apterigulo can move like dynamite with saltating, or rather bounding, around like a giant, reptilian squirrel. While this method of locomotion doesn’t permit Apterigulo to run marathons, it gives it a neat burst of speed over short distances and, what’s more, it could happily chase you up a tree: the exaggeration of its massive appendages and claws make it even more proficient at climbing than its ancestors (Unwin 1988). The skull, teeth and neck have become more robust and powerfully muscled, giving what was ancestrally a nasty bite even more force. Being derived from a flighted ancestor also gives Apterigulo an unusually strong but lightweight skeleton: this not only facilitates quicker movement, but means it’s capable of considerable rough and tumble. It uses these attributes to ambush and chase vertebrates across a range of size classes, mainly eating smaller forms but occasionally subduing prey of equal or even larger size. Burrowing dinosaurs are particular favourites: with its massive bulk blocking the burrow entrance, the experience is akin to being stuck in a train carriage with a hungry tiger. Once subdued, the carcasses of big animals are dragged into the treetops to keep them out of reach of other carnivores but, if their carrion is threatened before this can happen, little Apterigulo will stand firm against even the biggest scavengers. It would not, therefore, be an ideal house pet.

Caprajarids
At some point in the middle Cretaceous, some tapejarid populations began to favour the herbivorous side of their omnivorous diet so much that their guts required some development, including the expansion of their gizzard (it’s likely all pterosaurs had a gizzard of some kind – Reily et al. 2001) to house bulkier quantities of gastroliths. Their beaks became more robust with rounded tips and sharp tomia, making them suitable for cropping all manner of vegetation before their guts began the real processing procedure. Living in relatively bleak environments that excluded the existence of large dinosaur herbivores ensured that movement over harsh, craggy terrain was a constant issue, but the retention of the large foot pads of their ancestors (Frey et al. 2003) ensured good traction on even perilous slopes. Their pycnofibres – or fuzz – grew particularly long and shaggy to withstand the cool nights and winds of such environments and gregarious living ensured protection from the large azhdarchids that occasionally preyed upon the smaller individuals. Living in such groups encouraged the development of even more elaborate cranial crests than those of their flying ancestors as males sought breeding rights over the females. Free of aerodynamic considerations, male caprajarids went to town with bifurcating (males and females of this sort can be seen above), spiralling and even horn-like crests. If these visual displays could not sort out competition between males, violent shoving, punching and biting matches, often conducted whilst balanced on their hindlimbs, would take place.

Jacanazhdarchines
While the big azhdarchids were denizens of the open plains, smaller, more basal variants kept to the forests. One clade of these forest forms lost their ability to fly in the Late Cretaceous and, while some flightless developed into seriously lanky limbed, sloth- or monkey-like arboreal forms, others began to specialise in foraging around ponds and streams, these being obvious sources of all manner of foodstuffs. The smallest forms, the jacanazhdarchines (above), were only 20 cm in length and defied the reduction of foot size and non-flight fingers seen in their larger cousins (Hwang et al. 2002) and instead developed large, weight spreading appendages that made movement across soft substrata easy. The bulk of the flight apparatus was lost comparatively recently in these forms and, although the wing membranes were lost, the wing finger was retained and served as an additional weight spreading devices. The limbs were also lengthened, facilitating movement through deeper water and, when splayed, distributing their weight over an even larger area. With such weight spreading abilities and such small size, jacanazhdarchines could be entirely supported by even flimsy vegetation growing over water bodies and, with a turn of speed, could literally walk on water. The already hypertrophied azhdarchid rostrum was elongated further for swishing through the water in search of food, though the fused pterosaur skull and poor gaping ability of such a long rostrum means that their probing abilities were limited, however.

Aliazhdarcho
The pterosaur equivalent of putting a jet engine in a Land Rover, Aliazhdarcho (above) applied the powerful musculature, skeletal morphology and physiology of its azhdarchid ancestors to the sort of carnivory typically reserved for big, predatory theropods. The largest member of this clade was Aliazhdarcho, a 4 m tall monster with a deepened, robustly constructed metre-long head and stout limbs. This latter point is crucial to the hunting strategy of Aliazhdarcho: retaining the highly pneumatised skeleton of its ancestry means that it combined strength with lightness (despite its size, Aliazhdarcho weighed just under 500 kg), increasing the power/weight ratio and allowing the animal to move like the clappers during a sprint. The massive shoulder muscles that once propelled azhdarchids into the air were retained, but modified somewhat to prioritise grounded locomotion over aerial. The principle role of these muscles is a modified quadrupedal launch (Habib 2008) that, rather than being used for takeoff, provided a dynamite sprint start. With shoulder musculature used to high anaerobic loads, Aliazhdarcho was capable of moving at great speed for up to a minute before tiring, so ambushing it’s prey was the order of the day. Once within range, Aliazhdarcho would employ its long neck and head to strike its target prey, ramming or biting the haunches to prevent its escape and, ideally, tripping or crippling it. Once immobilised, the powerful jaws and deep, sharpened beak would remove chunks of meat from the dying animal, though the jaws weren’t quite strong enough to shatter bones. It would not, therefore, be a good idea to be a mid- to large-size animal in the same area as Aliazhdarcho: in short, wherever it was, you didn’t want to be.

And that’s it. Once again, that’s gone on far longer than I intended, but hey ho. Happy Easter to everyone and now, with the sun high in the sky, I’m heading off to my workshop. I just had a wicked idea involving our fake pterosaur fur and the bassline from David Bowie’s Stay.

References

Brower, J. C. and Venius, J. 1981. Allometry in pterosaurs. The University of Kansas Paleontological Contributions, 105, 1-32.
Buffetaut, E., Grigorescu, D. and Csiki, Z. 2002. A new giant pterosaur with a robust skull from the latest Cretaceous of Romania. Naturwissenschaften, 89, 180-184.
Dixon, D. 1988. The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution. Grafton Books, London, 120 pp.
Frey, E., Tischlinger, H., Buchy, M. C., and Martill, D. M. 2003. New specimens of pterosauria (Reptilia) with soft parts with implications for pterosaurian anatomy and locomotion. In: Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J. M. (eds.) Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society Special Publication, 217, 233-266.
Habib, M.B. 2008. Comparative evidence for quadrupedal launch in pterosaurs. Zitteliana, B28, 161-168.
Hwang, K. G., Huh, M, Lockley, M. G., Unwin, D. M. and Wright, J. L. 2002. New pterosaur tracks (Pteraichnidae) from the Late Cretaceous Uhangri Formation, S. W. Korea. Geological Magazine, 139, 421-435.
Marden, J. H. 1994. From damselflies to pterosaurs: how burst and sustainable flight performance scale with size. American Journal of Physiology, 266, 1077-1084.
Reily, S. M., McBrayer, L. D. and White, T. D. 2001. Prey processing in amniotes: biomechanical and behavioural patterns of food reduction. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A, 128, 397-415.
Sato, K., Sakamoto, K., Watanuki, Y., Takahashi, A., Katsumata, N., Bost, C., and Weimerskirch, H. 2009. Scaling of soaring seabirds and implications for flight abilities of giant pterosaurs. PLoS ONE, 4, e5400.
Unwin, D. M. 1988. New remains of the pterosaur Dimorphodon (Pterosauria: Rhamphorhynchoidea) and the terrestrial ability of early pterosaurs. Modern Geology, 13, 57-68.
Witton, M. P. 2008. A new approach to determining pterosaur body mass and its implications for pterosaur flight. Zitteliana, B28, 143-159.
Witton, M. P. and Naish, D. 2008. A reappraisal of azhdarchid pterosaur functional morphology and paleoecology. PLoS ONE, 3, e2271.

Update of Flugsaurier 2010 Beijing

2010-03-20T07:04:00.002Z

Two minor updates have come through on this meeting from Lu Jungchang so I thought I should put them here:

"Hello everyone, please pay attention to the following two changes about the pterosaur symposium:

1. Abstract deadline （May 15）：

We have just received news that abstracts for Flugsaurier 2010 will be published in the Journal . In order to ensure that everyone has enough time to prepare and submit abstracts we have decided to postpone the deadline for abstract submission to May 15. Please note that the page limit is now set at 4 pages. All other details remain as in the second circular.

2. Invitation letter.

If you need an invitation letter in order to secure a visa please make sure that you send us your passport details".

And finally since people don't seem to have quite picked up on this. DO NOT E-MAIL ME WITH YOUR QUESTIONS. I am helping out with the organisation but any questions should go to Dave Unwin or Lu Jungchang, not me.

Cross-post spectacualr - Zhenyuanopterus

2010-03-12T09:41:00.003Z

Since I mostly blog over at the Archosaur Musings, it's perhaps inevitable that my contributions to Pterosaur.net are a bit behind, and even more so as I've been swamped with dinosaur related stuff of late and have not had much time for pterosaurs. Still, for those who have not seen it already, meet Zhenyuanopterus.

This is a truly remarkable boreopterid pterosaur with a 4 m wingspan and one hell of a set of teeth. To cap it off, the specimen is truly great - both complete and articulated and in wonderful condition.

: Skull of Zhenyuanopterus holotype. Image courtesy of Lu Jungchang.

As you can see the skull is very long with quite a big midline crest, but it's the teeth that stand out. For a start, there are a huge number of them about 180 all told, and not only are the anterior teeth truly huge, but they are about ten times the length of the smallest teeth at the back of the jaw. It's quite a combination, and one certain to make life difficule for any Mesozoic surgeons but also anything that Zhenyuanopterus was trying to catch. As a boreopterid (and thus close to the ornithocheids) this was probably fish, though I have to wonder if such slender teeth were not vulnerable to being broken by large prey and suggests to me at least that perhaps smaller fish were normally targeted.

As the paper is really just a morphological description there's not much else to add here that won't be very technical and about as exciting at read as it would be for me to write. So I'll leave you with a nice picture of the whole, wonderfully preserved, specimen in all it's toothy glory.

I'll try and get things up faster in the future, but it can take time. Plus I really didn't want to bump Mark's excellent review of Ray Harryhausen's stuff off the top spot!

Lu, J. 2010. A new boreopterid pterodactyloid pterosaur from the Early Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Liaoning Province, northeastern China. Acta Geologica Sinica. 24, 241-246.

Sexed-up prehistory and stop motion pterosaurs: the Pteranodon of Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien

2010-03-06T15:19:00.020Z

It’s one of those days where someone forgot to switch the weather on. The sky is overcast in drab greys and whites, it’s not particularly hot or cold and there’s no sign that anyone’s going to be rained on anytime soon. Combine this with the general stillness of a Saturday morning and my place of residence being a pretty quiet street in the middle of Portsmouth and, really, there is nothing that interesting going on around me at all. It contrasts massively with the lush, spectacular world presented in James Cameron’s Avatar, the 3D SFXathon that I finally saw this week. If, like me, you’d not found time to see it yet, I do recommend that you make the push to catch it on a big screen before it disappears from cinemas: while the story is pretty clichéd and predictable (in a nutshell, the greedy corporation and marines from Cameron’s Aliens take on tribes of Ameridian-like, nature loving, strangely attractive 3 m tall blue catfolk), the technology generating the characters and environments is jaw-droppingly amazing. Moreso than any movie I’ve seen, you really feel like you’re in the film, a trick helped with the subtle use of 3D that, instead of a cheap gimmick, adds depth to the imagery to bring the normal 2D perception of a cinema screen more in line with our own ‘real world’ perception. I was a little disappointed with some of the creature designs: it was too easy to see that dogs, horses, rhinos and big cats had simply been redressed and the Na’vi were just a little too humanoid in form for my taste. While I appreciate that they were probably designed this way so that audiences can empathise with them, I’m still waiting for the day when someone designs their anthropomorphic aliens as globular mudusoids with no eyes and 6 tongues, complete with subtitled alien dialogue. You know, something really odd and, well, alien. After all, if Pixar can make us feel empathy for a virtually-mute Tonka truck with periscope eyes (WALL-E), couldn’t audiences fall for aliens that aren’t essentially people with pasties stuck to their foreheads, red skin or cat-like tails?

This trip to see the effects-laden Avatar coincides with me reading about another batch of famous stop-motion special effects in The Art of Ray Harryhausen (Harryhausen and Dalton 2005; cover image above). Almost everyone must know of Harryhausen’s work in some capacity or another: before computer graphics or gee-whizz motorised puppets, the monsters and beasties of cinema were created with stop-motion animation, the technique where armatured puppets are filmed a single frame at a time and, when ran as a film, appear to be moving. Harryhausen, though not the pioneer of this technique, is widely recognised as it’s master: classic stop-motion scenes of mythical beasts (such as the Sinbad movies, Clash of the Titans), aliens (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers), fairy tale characters and prehistoric animals (Valley of Gwangi, One Million Years B.C.) were all brought to life through his hands and feature some of the most famous scenes in special effects history. He learnt his craft through Willis O’Brien, the stop-motion pioneer who breathed life into the silent 1925 version of The Lost World and 1933 King Kong (among other things). The two worked together on various projects but Harryhausen went on to develop more cost-effective, efficient methods of stop-motion craft and covered a broader range of subjects: arguably, it’s these attributes that crown Harryhausen as the Godfather of Stop Motion.

The Art of Ray Harryhausen chronicles the creative process and artwork behind Harryhausen’s creations and demonstrates that he was an excellent artist along with a special effects guru. Like O’Brien (who’s working methods Harryhausen appears to have attempted to imitate, at least in his early career), he would produce sketches and key drawings of scenes from films in production to communicate and develop his ideas. Both O’Brien and Harryhausen were keen dinosaur buffs and both tried to get them into their films as much as possible. As such, they produced quite a bit of their own palaeoart, distinguished from most other art of this kind in featuring lost civilisations and people alongside their extinct animals. Much of this can be seen in The Art of Ray Harryhausen and, perhaps rather obviously, showcasing a few of the more pterosaur-based images is why we're here.

It’s interesting to note that O'Brien and Harryhausen took somewhat different approaches to filmmaking. O’Brien stayed much closer to his source material, so much so that his creations for The Lost World have been described as the most accurate dinosaurs committed to film considering scientific knowledge of the time. Harryhausen, by contrast, saw fit to ‘improve’ on several aspects of prehistoric animals. He often combined theropod bodyplans with those of Tyrannosaurus, most famously in Valley of Gwangi where he made his Allosaurus/Tyrannosaurus - ‘Allo-rex’ - the star of the show. In this respect, Harryhausen takes a more modern approach to putting prehistoric animals in film, taking heavy inspiration from the fossil record but embellishing it to make things cooler. Pterosaurs may show this ideological dichotomy more than any other beasties: Pteranodon, the largest and most spectacular pterosaur known during the professional careers of Harryhausen and O'Brien, featured in several works by both artists: The Lost World, King Kong, One Million Years BC and Valley of Gwangi. Happily for us, their key drawings of scenes featuring these critters have been retained and you can see O’Brien’s c.1930 view of a Pteranodon carrying off an ill-fated woman at the top of this post. The pterosaur and ideas of this scene, drawn for the never-realised project Creation, was recycled for another O'Brien project, King Kong (below). Kong buffs will note the famous chasm-spanning tree in the background of O'Brien's image, another device originally intended for Creation (featuring an angry Arsinotherium) but adapted for King Kong.

Aside from the oversize nature of the Kong pterosaur, O’Brien’s efforts aren't too bad. By and large, it looks like a fleshed, animated version of the Pteranodon we know and love from Eaton’s (1910) Pteranodon monograph: close inspection reveals it’s lacking one major toe, but we can excuse O’Brien that. Harryhausen’s pterosaurs, however, differ markedly from not only those of O’Brien but also the fossil record: check out his 1965 production drawing depicting a Pteranodon for One Million Years BC:

Harryhausen stayed close to this design when producing his puppet, although he did drop the merganser-like serrated bill (or possibly teeth - it's hard to see exactly) for the final model. The One Million Years BC puppet, then, ended up looking like this:

In both instances, Pteranodon bears bat-like wings and, counting the fingers in the key drawing, we discover that it actually has 6 fingers, 2 more than it should have. What’s more, look closely at the sketch and model and we find that the pterosaur’s feet have become almost convergent with the zygodactyl condition of owls: two powerfully muscled forward-pointing toes and a third, powerfully developed hallux. The pterosaur of Valley of Gwangi shows the same trait, apparently redlecting the need for the animals in these films to fly away with characters in their grasp. As Darren Naish noted on the main Pterosaur.net site, all pterosaurs have slender feet without large talons, meaning Harryhausen's versions are really at odds with what we know of pterosaur anatomy. Curiously, O'Brien's King Kong Pteranodon also had to airlift a person but was not given raptorial feet: instead, the foot simply wraps around Fay Wray to craddle her while in flight, but, that said, this creature was also meant to be much bigger than the Harryhausen pterosaurs.

Compositing his creations together with bits and pieces from other animals is very much in keeping with Harryhausen's design process: his critters do have a somewhat chimeric look about them where bits of differnt animals are combined together into new forms (compare the fishy gills of Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth with those of Clash of the Titan's Kraken, for instance). In this respect, a pterosaur with bat wings and owl-ish feet is not a particularly unusual creation to emerge from the Harryhausen mill. All the same, because Harryhausen was modifying the appearance of a real animal, he was been asked to justify himself. I’ll let him tell the story:

“Apropos One Million Years BC, I was once told by a five-year old that I knew nothing about pteranodons or pterodactyls because they don’t really have bat wings! Well, I know they don’t. They should have had huge pieces of skin stretched from the top of their legs out beyond their claws. But what I had to think about was how these creatures of the air would work cinematically when I was animating them. If I had made my creatures with just skin for wings they would have looked improbable, even if they had been more accurate, so I used a certain amount of cinematic license and gave them what I saw as more dramatic wings. In fact, I tried to make them look like umbrellas rather than bats. In effect, we tried to find a compromise between strict scientific accuracy and the need to achieve certain cinematic effects, and I believe we did the right thing. It gave them a fantasy element and after all we weren’t making pictures for palaeontologists, although today filmmakers make all their creatures so real – too real for my tastes.”

Harryhausen and Dalton 2005, p. 75.

I do find this attitude a little surprising: for some reason, I’d always assumed the likes of Harryhausen would only compromise on issues like this because of necessity. You know, like the models being unable to flap the wings properly without additional structural support or something. The eight-year old in me that grew up watching these films can forgive gaffs like one-to-many fingers or an incorrectly shaped head, but changing stuff around simply because it looks cooler seems a bit, well, sacrilege. Whatever: they're only movies and, really, expecting scientific accuracy from a film that was primarily sold by on the skimpiness of its heroine's bikini may be a bit much. Still, it'd be interesting to know if O'Brien, a man appeared to go to greater lengths to restore his animals more accurately, would've agreed with this. In some respects, you have to wonder if whether Harryhausen's attitude to his prehistoric critters reflects the type of films he was making: whereas O'Brien was making dinoflicks of (arguably) more respectability, Harryhausen's were, frankly, a little more pulpy. As such, O’Brien was able to emphasise the ‘animal’ side of his prehistoric creations, dedicating several scenes of The Lost World to animals idly chewing plant matter, nurturing young, being scared of gunfire and flames and that sort of stuff. Harryhausen’s beasts, though, needed to be far more immediate and Hollywoodised, being ushered on stage when needed to wreak havoc, chase people or fight each other, then disappear again to make room for the next one. Sexing up their appearances makes a little bit more sense in this regard, making sure they make more of an impression for their short, titillating moments on screen. This is not to belittle the achievements of either man, though: O'Brien could certainly make stop-motion exciting and dramatic and, although not given much chance with his dinosaurs or pterosaurs, Harryhausen animated many tragic and empathic characters in his career: I'm sure that, if given freedom to, he could've made very convincing dinosaurs and pterosaurs that looked and behaved in a much more realistic manner*.

*Unfortunately, I've not seen Animal Kingdom, an O'Brien/Harryhausen combined effort that features 'natural' scenes of prehistoric animals. This may be exactly what I'm looking for here, though Harryhausen himself remains unhappy with the piece.

Thankfully for pterosaur experts everywhere, the manner in which some movie prehistoric critters are reproduced by subsequent artists (how many Jurassic Park-inspired Tyrannosaurus have you seen, for instance?) hasn't quite caught on with Harryhausen's pterosaurs: there's no sign we're going to be overrun with pictures of talon-footed, six-fingered Pteranodon anytime soon. It is interesting to note, though, that Harryhausen's enhanced pterosaurs may have influenced at least some: this monstrosity bears a worrying resemlance to the beast that tried to feed Raquel Welch to it's leathery winged offspring.

And that will have to do, I think. This post was meant to be an excuse to show off some little seen artwork but has gone on far longer than intended. In a pleasant surprise, someone has finally fired up the weather cannon and, happily, it's all sunny and nice. That means it's time to stop staring at this screen and take a walk: toodleoo.

References

Eaton, G. F. 1910. Osteology of Pteranodon. Memoirs of the Connecticuit Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2, 1-38.
Harryhausen, R. and Dalton, T. 2005. The Art of Ray Harryhausen. Aurum Press Ltd., London, 230 pp.

TMM 42489-2: the hypersonic überbass slide-loading pterosaur you have to leave on the shelf at Currys

2010-02-26T00:51:00.021Z

We’ve got a little stereo in our kitchen that keeps us entertained when we’re cooking. It’s getting on a bit, though: it doesn’t always read CDs, songs begin skipping at the most inopportune moments and the speakers occasionally fail, requiring Fonzie-esque thumbs to reignite. While the latter undeniably draws respect from your male friends and makes the ladies swoon, having Mick Jagger develop the most irritating and incurable stutter when you’re busy straining pasta or removing hot dishes from the oven is starting to get a little irritating. Hence, last weekend, I went shopping for a replacement. While the internet is undeniably the place to buy things cheaply, there’s still something to be said for looking at your intended purchases in person and taking the demonstration models for a test drive. Problem is, the same time that you’re swayed by the bass levels, swish CD-loading motion and flashing lights of your desired rig is the same time that you notice that it’s two or three times what you can afford and, realistically, your shop floor experience with that stereo is the closest you’ll ever get to bringing hypersonic überbass slide-loading musiconica to your culinary experiences.

There are some pterosaur fossil specimens that seem similarly out of reach. They’re the ones that you see briefly when visiting museums, get sent a photograph of or see mentioned, briefly, in the literature. Should you make enquiries into their status, you’re very often told that someone else is researching them and, in true gentlemanly fashion, they’re to be left alone to pursue their studies to their conclusion. Other times, they’re just left alone because no-one is interested in them for the time being: this can be said of the ‘Painten Pelican’, a bizarre ctenochasmatoid on display in the Solnhofen Museum of Germany that appears to have something to do with Cycnorhamphus. It’s a seriously kick-ass, beautifully-preserved specimen of a gorgeous animal and I’d give my left arm to work on it, but until someone looks at it, it’s doing little else than sitting behind a glass panel. On occasion, interesting specimens are put up for sale online: recently, this shady process threw up a new Santana Formation pterosaur that, though Dave Martill pointed out to me that parts of this were fabricated, is almost certainly a new azhdarchoid taxon. One of the famous ‘KJ’ nyctosaurs (you know: the antler-crested ones described by Bennett [2003]) appeared on Ebay not too many weeks ago, too: both specimens, to my knowledge, have now disappeared off the radar completely. In all cases, these specimens are things that you can only pretend to play with at best: you can look at the pictures, infer what you can with very limited data and imagine what you could do with it should you be able to bring it home.

This brings us neatly to TMM 42489-2, or, as some of you may know it, the huge anterior skull and mandible fragment that Wellnhofer (1991) referred to Quetzalcoatlus on page 144 of his encyclopaedia (see image, above, drawn from the same photograph. Scale bar represents 100 mm). As we’ll see, it’s a dead exciting specimen but very little information about this specimen has been made public. It stems from the lower part of the Javelina Formation, the same Texan, latest Cretaceous sedimentological stomping ground as Quetzalcoatlus (Kellner 2004). It clearly belonged to a very large animal: although incomplete, the specimen is a good 800 mm long and around 350 mm tall: it’s entirely reasonable to think the entire skull was at least a metre in length when complete. Unlike many pterosaurs, it doesn’t bear a rostral headcrest but does bear a particularly expansive nasoantorbital fenestra. The rostrum itself is quite stubby and the upper jaw was quite deep, a condition that contrasts with the shallow lower jaw and the especially slender mandibular rami. Apparently, some cervical vertebrae (TMM 42489-1) were associated with this specimen, but little has been said of these other than that they were relatively shorter than those of Quetzalcoatlus (Kellner and Langston 1996). John Sibbick’s oft-copied reconstruction of Quetzalcoatlus in Wellnhofer (1991) took the morphology of TMM 42489-2 into account and gave his Quetz. a snub-nose. Thing is, the referral of TMM 4289-2 to Quetzalcoatlus is plain wrong: the skull material of Q. sp. was described by Kellner and Langston (1996) and while sharing the same generally crestless, pointy-tipped morphology, Q. sp. has a rostrum that is incredibly long – something like seven times longer than tall (see reconstruction of Q. sp, below, from Witton and Naish 2008. Scale bar represents 100 mm). Snub-nosed TMM 42489-2 is clearly not Quetzalcoatlus then, but we shouldn’t leave it there. Even the tiny experience we have with the specimen from Wellnhofer’s photograph shows that it must be something new for the Javelina Formation at least, but what is it?

Using the same photograph to form their opinions, several authors have had a stab at identifying TMM 42489-2. Everyone is happy that it represents an azhdarchoid: the combination of a large nasoantorbital fenestra and toothless jaws is not yet known from any other pterosaur group. Lű et al. (2006) noted similarities in the mandibular morphology and that of the azhdarchid Bakonydraco (Ősi et al. 2005), suggesting it would be represent a different type of Javelina azhdarchid. Slightly more exciting suggestsions were made by Kellner (2004), who suggested it was a late-surviving Tupuxuara-like tapejarid*. Martill and Naish (2006) agreed (in sorts), referring to it as the ‘Javelina Formation Tupuxuara’. These suggestions are potentially quite significant: latest Cretaceous pterosaur assemblages are almost entirely dominated by azhdarchids and, if TMM 42489-2 is a non-azhdarchid azhdarchoid, it means the end-Cretaceous pterosaur show was just a little richer than previously thought. It’s also noteworthy that, in recent years, another group of straight-jawed azhdarchoids, the chaoyangopterids, has been discovered (e.g. Lű et al. 2008) and may provide another potential taxonomic stable for the specimen: again, the existence of this group in the Late Cretaceous would be significant. Clearly, then, TMM 42489-2 could be of considerable importance for those trying to understand pterosaur evolutionary history, so what is it?

*The content of Tapejaridae is controversial with two broad schemes doing the rounds. Tapejaridae sensu Kellner (e.g. Kellner 2003, 2004; Kellner and Campos 2007) includes the short-faced, bent-jawed tapejarids (Tapejarinae) and bony sail crested forms Tupuxuara and Thalassodromeus (Thalassodrominae), whereas Tapejaridae sensu Unwin (e.g. Unwin 2003; Lű et al. 2008) is restricted to the short-faced, bent jawed forms. Tupuxuara and Thalassodromeus (forming Thalassodromidae – see Witton 2009) are grouped with other straight-jawed azhdarhchoids, chaoyangopterids and azhdarchids in Neoazhdarchia. This latter scheme is my preferred arrangement, but we don’t really have time to go into why here. That's not to say that we won't at a later date, though.

I looked into the affinities of TMM 42489-2 a little for my PhD when overhauling thalassodromid taxonomy (Witton 2008) but, unfortunately, found you can't really say much with absolute certainty: one image and brief descriptions of this specimen don’t really give much to work with. The mandible, in my view, is quite similar to most neoazhdarchian mandibles but not really identical to any. They’re all slender with shallow mandibular symphyses and, yes, while it does resemble that of Bakonydraco more than anything else, the Bakonydraco mandible doesn’t really look like the mandibles of other azhdarchids (e.g. Kellner and Langston 1996). Hence, this is only of limited use in figuring out exactly what TMM 42489-2 is. Likewise, the observation that the associated cervicals are shorter than those of Quetzalcoatlus doesn’t help much: Friday afternoon maths lessons were shorter than some azhdarchid vertebrae and, crucially, the longest and characteristically ‘azhdarchid’ vertebrae are only seen in the middle of the neck: proximal and distal vertebrae are comparatively stunted and complex (Pereda Suberbiola et al. 2003; Witton and Naish 2008). In this respect, they resemble the somewhat elongated cervical vertebrae of chaoyangopterids and, at the moment, I’m a little perplexed as to how to distinguish between the two: I wouldn’t be surprised if some azhdarchid occurrences represented solely by isolated cervicals are overturned once a way to distinguish the two groups are known. For the time being, though, it looks like the cervicals associated with TMM 42489-2 can provide little help on identifying the rostrum itself – and especially since there’s so little information available on them.

Comparison between posterodorsal and posteroventral extensions of azhdarchoid premaxillae. A, Tupuxuara; B, Thalassodromeus; C, Zhejiangopterus; D, Quetzalcoatlus; E, Shenzhoupterus; F, Jidapterus; G, Chaoyangopterus; H, TMM 43489-2. Vectors of measurments of premaxillary extensions are shown with black lines and values of posterodorsal extension height compared to ventral are given next to each rostrum. From Witton (2008).

We are reliant, therefore, on rostral morphology alone to identify TMM 42489-2. Thankfully, there may be just enough data here to do the job. It appears that neoazhdarchians can be roughly diagnosed by attributes of their rostra when viewed in lateral profile through looking at the morphology and size ratio of the upper and lower bars encompassing the nasoantorbital fenesta (see image, above), the shape of the dorsal rostral margin and the slenderness of the rostrum itself (Martill and Naish 2006; Witton 2008). Thalassodromids have straight or convex dorsal rostral margins, comparatively tall upper premaxillary bars that extend posterodorsally in sub-parallel fashion and short, deep rostra; chaoyangopterids have very slender but also sub-parallel upper premaxillary bars, concave dorsal margins and short rostra, while azhdarchids have upper premaxillary bars that are much deeper than the lower distally but rapidly taper proximally, straight dorsal margins and extremely long rostra. TMM 42489-2 doesn’t meet any of these exactly but does come close: aside from the long rostrum, it’s ticks all the boxes for an azhdarchid rostrum with its straight dorsal margin and tapering upper premaxillary bar. While the rostral biometrics do undoubtedly resemble those of thalassodromids more than azhdarchids, it’s notable that the azhdarchid Bakonydraco has an usually short, wide mandible: the skull of this form is unknown, but, assuming it has a similar width/length ratio to the lower jaw, it should also have a short rostrum unless its skull morphology differs dramatically from those of other azhdarchoids. Likewise, the poorly-known but wide-skulled azhdarchid Hatzegopteryx presumably had a short rostrum or, if proportioned like better known azhdarchid skulls, would’ve had a most unwieldy 5 m long jaw (Buffetaut et al. 2002, 2003).

Based on the little evidence we have, then, TMM 42489-2 can be tentatively interpreted as a new type of snub-nosed azhdarchid. If this is correct, TMM 42489-2 may not be quite as exciting as when it was considered a late-surviving thalassodromid as proposed by Kellner (2004) or Martill and Naish (2006), but it does provide some enrichment of the uppermost Cretaceous pterosaur scene by demonstrating significant morphological variation between azhdarchids. The differences in snout morphology will have some implications on feeding habits and dietary preferences, and these hints of ecological differentiation may explain how azhdarchids managed to be so abundant and successful. Plus, it’s made that little more exciting by being quite big - a 5 m wingspan seems quite reasonable for an azhdrchid with a 1 m long skull - and it almost certainly represents a new taxon, being readily distinguished from all other toothless pterosaurs through the shape of its rostrum. Can we do anything about all this, though? Can we heck: until the specimen is properly described and figured, it would be foolish to make it the focus of any study or attach a name to it. Until someone studies TMM 42489-2 properly then, it remains the pterosaur equivalent of an electronic store demonstration model: full of buzz, promise and excitement, but something that you can't really do anything with until you're ready to make the investment. Or someone else invests in it for you, which would be great.

References

Bennett, S. C. 2003. New crested specimens of the Late Cretaceous pterosaur Nyctosaurus. Palaeontologische Zeitschrift, 77, 61-75.
Buffetaut, E., Grigorescu, D. and Csiki, Z. 2002. A new giant pterosaur with a robust skull from the latest Cretaceous of Romania. Naturwissenschaften, 89, 180-184.
Buffetaut, E., Grigorescu, D. and Csiki, Z. 2003. Giant azhdarchid pterosaurs from the terminal Cretaceous of Transylvania (western Romania). In: Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J. M. (eds.) Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society Special Publication, 217, 91-104.
Kellner, A. W. A. 2003. Pterosaur phylogeny and comments on the evolutionary history of the group. In: Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J. M. (eds.) Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society Special Publication, 217, 105-137.
Kellner, A. W. A. 2004. New information on the Tapejaridae (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea) and discussion of the relationships of this clade. Ameghiniana, 41, 521-534.
Kellner, A. W. A. and Campos, D. A. 2007. Short note on the ingroup relationships of the Tapejaridae (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea). Boletim do Museu Nacional, Nova Séroe, Rio de Janeiro - Brasil. Geologia, 75, 1-14.
Kellner, A. W. A. and Langston, W. Jr. 1996. Cranial remains of Quetzalcoatlus (Pterosauria, Azhdarchidae) from Late Cretaceous sediments of Big Bend National Park. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 16, 222-231.
Lü, J., Unwin, D. M., Xu, L., and Zhang, X. 2008. A new azhdarchoid pterosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of China and its implications for pterosaur phylogeny and evolution. Naturwissenschaften, 95, 891-897.
Martill, D. M. and Naish, D. 2006. Cranial crest development in the azhdarchoid pterosaur Tupuxuara, with a review of the genus and tapejarid monophyly. Palaeontology, 49, 925-941.
Ősi, A., Weishampel, D. B. and Jianu, C. M. 2005. First evidence of azhdarchid pterosaurs from the Late Cretaceous of Hungary. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 50, 777-787.
Pereda Suberbiola, X., Bardet, N., Jouve, S., Iarochéne, M., Bouya, B. and Amaghzaz, M. 2003. A new azhdarchid pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous phosphates of Morocco. In: Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J. M. (eds.) Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society Special Publication, 217, 79-90.
Unwin, D. M. 2003. On the phylogeny and evolutionary history of pterosaurs. In: Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J. M. (eds.) Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society Special Publication, 217, 139-190.
Wellnhofer, P. 1991. The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Pterosaurs. Salamander Books Ltd., London. 192 pp.
Witton, M. P. 2008. The Palaeoecology and Diversity of Pterosaurs. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Portsmouth. 307 pp.
Witton, M. P. 2009. A new species of Tupuxuara (Thalassodromidae, Azhdarchoidea) from the Lower Cretaceous Santana Formation of Brazil, with a note on the nomenclature of Thalassodromidae. Cretaceous Research, 30, 1293-1300.
Witton, M. P. and Naish, D. 2008. A reappraisal of azhdarchid pterosaur functional morphology and paleoecology. PLoS ONE, 3, e2271.

Details for the 2010 Flugsaurier meeting

2010-02-08T09:30:00.005Z

UPDATE: 25/02/10. A while back, we posted an early version of the second circular for the 2010 Flugsaurier Meeting but, almost immediately, were told that a modified version would follow soon after. 'Soon after' means today, and what follows is the corrected version. The most important details - price, dates and deadlines - remain unchanged, but a few minor tweaks have been made here and there.

While the Pterosaur.net blog obviously is primarily set to cater for those with an interest in pterosaurs, rather than those dedicated to pterosaur research, it would be remiss to leave this out on the blog. There have been a number of pterosaur-dedicated meetings or seminars within meetings over the years, but only recently has this become more formal with a planned series or regular meetings devoted entirely to pterosaurs. The next scheduled one is however this summer in Beijing, and just out (literally, as of less than half an hour ago) is the second circular with all the details needed to sign up and attend.

This is of course a scientific meeting so don't think about coming unless you want to be immersed in the anatomical and systematic minutae of pterosaurs and lots of very techie details and arguments. If that is your bag however, all are of course welcome.

I’m sure I’ll see at least a few of you there. I have left out some details of the registration and payment methods etc. contact JC or Dave Unwin (or me I suppose, since I have a copy of the forms) for details. Everything else you need is below:

Flugsaurier 2010
Third International Symposium on Pterosaurs
5-10 August, 2010
Beijing, China
Second Circular

Pterosaurs are amongst the most fascinating and enigmatic of all extinct creatures. Thanks to some spectacular fossil finds in recent years our understanding of the palaeobiology and evolutionary history of these ‘flying reptiles’ has seen several dramatic advances. Some of the most important discoveries, including the first eggs with embryos, have been made in China where Late Jurassic/Early Cretaceous rocks are currently producing new species of pterosaurs at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world. In recognition of this, the Third International Symposium on Pterosaurs “Flugsaurier 2010” will be held in China in August 2010. This will be the third international pterosaur symposium and follows successful meetings held in France in 2001 and Germany in 2007.

The meeting will be organized mainly by the China Geological Survey,
sponsored by the Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, and co-sponsored by:
China Fossil Preservation Foundation,
China Dinosaur Park of Changzhou,
The Bureau of Fossil Protection, Liaoning Provincial Department of National Land Resources,
The Government of Beipiao City.

The meeting is planned for the 5th-10th August, 2010. Talks, posters, at least one open discussion session and (subject to availability) examination of specimens are planned for the first three days of the meeting. This will be followed by an optional three day field excursion to view exposures of the Jehol Group and exhibitions/collections of fossils from this sequence which has yielded more than 100 specimens of pterosaurs in the last 10 years. All those interested in pterosaurs and the communities and environments in which they lived are encouraged to attend.

1. Meeting aims:

As in previous symposia, this meeting is intended to cover all aspects of pterosaur palaeobiology and the world in which they live, including:
(a) The origin and evolution of pterosaurs
(b) Taxonomy, systematics and phylogeny
(c) Palaeobiology including anatomy, functional morphology and ontogeny
(d) Taphonomy, sedimentology and preservational environments
(e) Ecosystems and contemporaneous fauna and flora

2. Preliminary schedule:

August 5th
Up to 17:00 Registration (exact location will be given in the third Circular)
18:30-20:00 Reception (exact location will be given in the third Circular)
August 6th
09:00-9:40 Opening ceremony
10:00-12:00 Oral presentations
13:30-18:00 Oral presentations
August 7th
09:00-12:00 Oral presentations
13:30-18:00 Posters and specimen examination (or visit to Forbidden City/Summer Palace/Great Wall)
August 8th
09:00-1200 Oral presentations/open discussion
13:00 Leave for Liaoning. Arrive Beipiao early evening.
August 9th
08:00-12:00 Visiting exposures of the Jehol Group.
14:00-17:00 Visit to Sihetun Fossil Museum.
August 10th
08:00-11:00 Visit to Chaoyang Geopark
1200: Return to Beijing.
19:00-21:00 Farewell party.

Oral presentations will consist of key-note lectures (45 minutes) and talks (30 minutes). These times include at least 5 minutes for questions and discussion. Attendees can apply to deliver more than one talk and /or poster.

Posters:
There will be at least one poster session (Posters should be prepared so that they fit onto a board with maximum dimensions of 90 cm (height) X 120 cm (width).

3. Abstracts and Symposium Volumes

An abstract volume will be prepared for distribution at the meeting. The abstract submission deadline is March 31st, 2010. No abstracts will be accepted after this date. Abstracts of up to two printed pages (A4; all text: Arial; title: 14pt, all caps; authors: 14pt, bold; address: 12 pt, italics; text: 12 pt, single spaced) including figures and references if desired are preferred, but longer abstracts will be considered. Preferred formats are “Word” for text files and “JPG” for figures. A symposium volume is planned for publication in 2011 and will be open to both attendees and non-attendees, with preference given to the former. The deadline for manuscript submissions will be December 31st, 2010.

4. Registration

Registration fee is $450 US for professional participants, $200 US for students and accompanying persons. The registration fee covers all the costs of the meeting: registration, the fieldtrip, accommodation for the duration of the meeting (including the fieldtrip) and all meals.

Please send payment to (Before the end of June)：
Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences
Bank name: BAIWANZHUANG SUBBRANCH, INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL BANK OF CHINA
ACCOUNT No. 0200001409008818443
ADDRESS: No.26 BAIWANZHUANG ROAD, XICHENG DISTRICT, BEIJING 100037, CHINA.
Tel.: 008610-68999665
Please note:
Payment of fees at the registration desk can be done by cash (US dollars or Chinese yuan). Credit cards and cheques can not be accepted.
All refunds (including non-attendance) will incur a 25% charge.
We will arrange accommodation for all attendees. If you have any questions regarding accommodation, or would prefer to organize your own accommodation please contact us immediately.

5. Symposium Committees

(a) Steering committee
Honorary Chairman: Wang Min
Chairman: Zhong Ziran
Vice Chairmen: Chen Xiaoning, Bai Xingbi, Dong Shuwen, Hou Zengqian
Secretary-general: Gao Jinxi
Vice-secretary-general: Yao Peiyi, Ji Qiang
Committee members: Ye Jianliang, Liu Fengshan, Ji Shu’an, Lü Junchang

(b) Academic committee:
Chairman：Unwin, David (UK)
Vice Chairmen: Ji Qiang, Lü Junchang
Committee members: Andres Brian (USA), Bennett Chris (USA), Buffetaut Eric (France), Ji Shu’an (China), Kellner Alexander (Brazil), Dong Zhiming (China).
Academic Secretaries: Ji Qiang, Ji Shu’an, Lü Junchang, Lee Yuong-Nam, David Hone

All correspondence (e-mail preferred), including any questions or suggestions, should be sent to Lü Junchang and Dave Unwin:

Lü Junchang
Institute of Geology
Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences
Beijing 100037
China
e-mail: Yilong2010@gmail.com or: lujc2008@126.com

Tel: 0086-1068999707 (0), 00-86-13717801392

David M Unwin
Department of Museum Studies
University of Leicester
103-105 Princess Road East
Leicester LE1 2LG
Tel: +44 (0) 116 252 3947
e-mail: dmu1@leicester.ac.uk

Pot-bellied Pteranodon

2010-02-02T18:51:00.000Z

Way back in 2008, I was working on a skeletal reconstruction of Pteranodon longiceps, sourced mostly from Chris Bennett's (1991) dissertation. It included a dorsal and a lateral view, and all I had left to do were the feet (feet are fiddly, annoying, and somewhat boring). While I was procrastinating about the feet, Mike Hanson beat me to the punch, and produced a skeletal reconstruction based on the same source. It wasn't just that he got there first, but it was better than mine to boot, with more views, and a more carefully drawn skull. So I gave up, and left my still footless Pteranodon to go mouldy on my hard drive.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to revisit my Pteranodon skeletal, to see if it was in a fit state to be incorporated into a new project. I also wanted to include the suggestion made by Claessens et al (2009) that the sternum sloped ventrally, rather than dorsally or flat and usually shown. As I started tweaking things, especially as I was working on an anterior view, I realised there was something quite wrong with my Pteranodon… the scapulocoracoid, when drawn in anterior view, was dorsoventrally way too short. I couldn’t get the coracoid to articulate with the sternum, not by a long shot.

My drawing matched Bennett’s (1991), Hanson’s (2008), Claessens et al (2009), and other drawings pretty well. So, if mine was wrong, then there was something wrong with a lot of the Pteranodon reconstructions out there.

Moving the sternum up posed something of a problem, however, because the ribs didn’t seem to fit. Looking into this more closely, it appears Bennett’s drawings show the ribs flattened toward the viewer. In other words, there is little accounting for curvature and foreshortening, which has the effect of making the ribcage far too deep.

Comparing different people's drawings, something quite interesting emerged, Pteranodon is nearly always reconstructed with a teardrop shaped trunk. Bennett’s original 1991 drawing and Hanson’s closely related 2008 drawing both have the error of an overly deep ribcage and scapulocoracoid. They also have the sternum sloping dorsally. These things combined give a strong teardrop shape. Greg Paul’s (2002) drawing has a similar shape, but it achieves this in a completely different way.* Paul seems to have the depth of the ribcage and scapulocoracoid right, and even has a gentle ventral slope to the sternum, but he also adds a deep keel to the sternum, which I presume is meant to be cartilaginous (it isn’t preserved in pterosaurs I’ve seen). So again, a classic teardrop shape. Claessens et al (2009) has a more pronounced ventral slope to the sternum, but it also has the overly deep ribs and scapulocoracoid; which makes for a slightly more portly teardrop.

If we combine a (keel-less) ventrally sloping sternum, and make the ribcage and scapulocoracoid shallower as I think they ought to be, we end up with a different sort of shape for Pteranodon's trunk. A distinctly pot-bellied one:

Sloping the sternum ventrally would make most pterosaurs deeper in the mid-trunk than we are used to drawing them, so I am looking forward to seeing whether other pterosaurs will turn out to be so hilariously shaped.

P.S. As fascinating as this navel-gazing is, you might be wondering what the whole thing looks like.

*Greg Paul's reconstruction seems to have radically different proportions to the others, this could be because it is based on different specimens.

References

Bennett, S.C., 1991. Morphology of the Late Cretaceous pterosaur Pterandon and systematics of the Pterodactyloidea. PhD. dissertation, University of Kansas.

Claessens, L.P.A.M., O’Connor, P.M., and Unwin, D.M., 2009. Respiratory Evolution Facilitated the Origin of Pterosaur Flight and Aerial Gigantism. PLoS ONE vol. 4 (2) pp. e4497 Online

Hanson, M., 2008. Pteranodon Skeletals. Online

Paul, G.S., 2002. Dinosaurs of the Air. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

More shameless self-promotion

2010-02-01T19:15:00.015Z

If 'gently piping' music means 'loud enough that you can't talk to your housemate several rooms away from the stereo', then this evening I was gently piping Portished's Third throughout my, and probably my neighbours, house. If you've not heard it, I recommend you immediately travel to your local music shop or favourite download site and grab a copy: it's great. In fact, if we lived in the same alternate reality that spawned the Flight of the Conchords track Mother Uckers, I'd say it was totally ucking brilliant. It's the sort of music that, using distorted electronic tones and unsettling beats to make sure you're paying attention, fills your ears with delicate, haunted tracks at times or, at others, makes you feel like you're marching into a war where Vangelis has provided the soundtrack. If intelligent, arresting and intense musical experience is what you're after, I can't rate it highly enough.

If you're not after something intelligent, arresting or intense, however, you could do much worse than check out my interview responses to questions asked and posted by David Orr, owner of Love in the Time of Chasmosaurus. LITC provides daily palaeo-themed posts on all manner of topics, ranging from news on recent discoveries, looks at butt-ugly roadside dinosaur models, palaeo-themed toys and, most importantly, the first episode of Dino Riders. I can honestly say I check it every day as part of my morning procrastination routine at work and consistently find it a sharp, punchy read. Much of the blog is devoted to vintage palaeoart and if, like me, you grew up reading dinosaur books, I guarantee you'll find waves of forgotten memories flooding back if you scroll through the LITC archives. There're also occasional interviews with palaeoartists - including real professionals like John Sibbick - and, a few weeks ago, David very flatteringly asked me if I'd be interested in answering a few questions. A good portion of the discussion concerned pterosaurs and, for those interested, you can find the interview, in its entirety, here.

The image above, incidentally, has nothing in particular to do with anything you've just read, but makes the post look nicer. It shows a profile of the large, snubbed-jawed ornithocheirid Coloborhynchus, commissioned as part of a series of pterosaur mug-sketches to show the diversity of their cranial morphology. Hopefully, the full complement of sketches will be published later this year.

The University of Portsmouth guide to building pterosaurs

2010-01-28T11:02:00.009Z

My bread and water is currently supplied via a post at the University of Portsmouth. Officially, I'm listed as a research associate, but, in actuality, that doesn't go anywhere near explaining how cool my job is. In a nutshell, I'm part of a three man team, the other men being my UoP colleagues Dave Martill Bob Loveridge, that is working on a sort-of top-secret project that will result in the errection of a number of giant pterosaur models in London later this year. I'm sure to blog about it some more at some point but, in the mean time, the BBC has just posted the second of a series of films documenting us building our models (above still from the film shows Dave Martill and Bob Rushton discussing a digital version of our 10 m span flying animal frame*). This edition features Dave Martill, noted pterosaur expert, explaining the manufacture of the all-important 'skeletons' that sit inside the models to support our styrofam bodies. They superficially resemble actual pterosaur skeletons but, for obvious reasons, differ in many respects to meet structural demands and economise on materials. You can find the BBC's second film here and, for those who missed the first one, you can watch some handsome devil outlining the first stage of construction here.

*Has anyone noticed how the volume on the BBC video player goes all the way up to 11? Most video players, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your video player. Where can you go from there? Where? 11. Exactly. One louder.

Pterosaur books to know and love, part 1: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs

2010-01-27T17:34:00.031Z

Your local bookshop is probably full of more popular books on dinosaurs than you would ever want to own. There’s the ‘spotters guide’ type, more encyclopaedic efforts, swish-looking coffee table tomes and even handy pocket-sized variants that ensure wherever you’re are, whatever you're doing, you can always find out if it was Ankylosaurus or Euoplocephalus that had the coolest dermal scutes. Of course, if you want to expand your knowledge of fossil forms beyond terrible lizards, you rapidly find that there’s a very short list of books to own. What popular books are there on marine reptiles, stem-mammals, basal archosaurs or the hundreds of other fossil tetrapods you may want to know about? Heck, what about fossil fish or even invertebrates, the forms that really make up the bulk of the fossil record? It’s no secret that there’re virtually no popular texts about these critters at all: despite the fact that they’re just as interesting as dinosaurs, publishers ignore them and push out the same rehashed texts on Tyrannosaurus and his chums again and again.

Dinosaur domination of bookshelves has meant that even extraordinary, spectacular fossil animals with a heavy palaeocult following – such as pterosaurs – are rarely given page space to shine. One of the first E-mails Pterosaur.net received was a suggestion from reader Bob Meek that we compile a list of recommended pterosaur books and, while it’s an excellent idea, I’m afraid the list of books we could recommend is very short. This isn't because we're snobbish and lazy (well, not entirely), but more reflective of the scant number of accessible pterosaur books. In fact, I can only think of two books that are really essential items for casual pterosaurophile bookshelves: the classic 1991 Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs by Peter Wellnhofer and David Unwin’s more recent The Pterosaurs from Deep Time (2005). Both are out of print and will require both sleuthing of online second-hand booksellers and probably a fair amount of cash to purchase, but, as I'll try to explain across my next two posts, there are plenty of reasons why budding pterosaur nerds should bother.

The Godfather of pterosaur books, by the Godfather of pterosaurs

We begin, then, with Wellnhofer’s 1991 encyclopaedia (cover shown above, stolen from here). You may be wondering why I’m recommending that you track down a volume that was written almost two decades ago, saw it’s last print run at the turn of the millennium and, in many respects, reports virtually no discoveries from the Golden Age of pterosaur research we’re now enjoying. Circa 1991, there was practically no consensus on pterosaur terrestrial locomotion, most of Azhdarchoidea was unheard of, the Araripe and Jehol Groups were only just beginning to yield pterosaur remains and modern methods of phylogenetic analysis were still being born. It's a valid question, then, to ask why you should bother buying a book that misses out so much new and exciting information. The answer is a wholehearted 'yes', and here's why.

Firstly, it's hard to think of an author who would be more suited to write a pterosaur encyclopaedia than Peter Wellnhofer. For those who don't know, Wellnhofer is the chap who virtually single-handedly resurrected pterosaur research with his landmark monographs on Solnhofen and Santana Formation pterosaurs (Wellnhofer 1970, 1975, 1985, 1991b), pterosaur handbook (the pterosaur researcher’s equivalent of a car owners manual; Wellnhofer 1978) and much else besides. In essence, Wellnhofer created the landscape on which modern pterosaur researchers would begin to work and, having watched that landscape begin to blossom throughout the 80s, it seems only fitting that Wellnhofer should be the man to summarise work on pterosaurs up to that point. What’s more, Wellnhofer’s thoroughness, comprehensive knowledge and accessible writing style – the same attributes that make his technical work so useful decades after their publication – are all evident throughout the book. The prestige of the author alone, then, tells you that The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs won't be garbage.

Wellnhofer’s encyclopedia was originally published as the sister volume to David Norman’s 1988 Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and the two would eventually be bound together in 2000. While both books devote their first chapters as introductions to their respective groups (discussing their ancestry, anatomy, role in popular culture and a history of their research), the pterosaur encyclopedia does not take a phylogenetic approach to reviewing genera like the dinosaur volume, instead progressing through geological time to introduce pterosaur taxa in their relevant stratigraphic positions. Wellnhofer does make comments about possible pterosaur relationships in his text (they’re quite archaic: Dimorphodon is suggested to be the direct evolutionary ancestor of Anuroganthus, for instance) but they have no relation to the structure the book. Most pterosaur genera known in the early 90s are mentioned and, by discussing and illustrating the majority of these with specimen photographs and life restorations (such as the adjacent John Sibbick illustration of Solnhofen pterosaurs found on p. 86-87, and lifted wholesale from here), this section makes up the meat of the book. The end chapters overview thoughts on pterosaur lifestyles, locomotion, extinction, reconstruction and key museums to visit to see pterosaur remains. As an overview of pterosaurs, then, it’s a pretty comprehensive piece of work and, to my knowledge, there’s not been a volume of similar scope published since.

Imagery is almost always given precedence over text with plenty of large, colour pterosaur paintings and sketches by John Sibbick, pterosaur restorations and technical drawings by the author, buckets of photographs and schematic diagrams of pterosaur anatomy adorning every page. The reliance on imagery gives the impression that the book is more suited to pterosaur enthusiasts or even children than researchers, but complementing the imagery is text loaded with citations of technical pterosaur literature. Granted, the citations are only listed once on context specific pages and finding a particular reference can be awkward but, seeing as some parts of the book stand out as the best available synopses of given topics (the chapter summarising the history of pterosaur research is worth pointing to here), these citations make the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs an incredibly useful research aid. Equally, some of the specimen images are the best – and occasionally the only - published photographs available of certain material (like the non-Quetzalcoatlus Javelina Formation azhdarchid, for instance [p. 144]*) and, to my knowledge, no resource published since has offered so many useful pterosaur images in a single volume.

*This rarely discussed specimen, TMM 42489-2, is actually really intriguing: represented only by a fragmentary rostrum and mandible (but still 80 cm long despite its incompleteness), Wellnhofer’s book mistakenly refers it to Quetzalcoatlus but, as demonstrated by Kellner and Langston (1996), it clearly belongs to another taxon. It’s since been called a ‘tupuxuarid’ (Kellner 2004, Martill and Naish 2006) but more recently referred to Azhdarchidae (Lű et al. 2008; Witton 2009). Whatever it is, it’s clearly distinct from Quetzalcoatlus and shows that another large, and apparently snub-nosed, pterosaur was present in the Javelina Formation. I reckon it should form the subject of a blogpost sometime, in fact.

The bad bits

Of course, it was be foolish to say that the book hasn’t dated: it has. The last two decades has seen so much pterosaur research published that many ideas familiar to modern readers are noticeably absent from The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs. There’s no sexy images of UV-illuminated pterosaurs, quad-launches, flamboyantly crested forms like Tupuxuara or Tupandactylus, no istiodactylids outside of southern England, no cladograms of pterosaur relationships, precious little on pterosaur trackways and much else besides. Equally, Sibbick’s restorations, though beautifully painted, are rife with anatomical inaccuracies such as pterosaurs demonstrating twiglet-like limbs, hanging, bat-like from tree branches by their feet, a considerably overly muscled tail on the Rhamphorhynchus (see image, above), a duck-billed Istiodactylus, an Anhanguera that is disarticulating its neck vertebrae to grab a fish (see Sibbick Santana Formation pterosaur spread from pages 128 - 129 of Wellnhofer [1991a], above. Swiped from here)... you get the idea. Many of these inaccuracies are classic problems with pterosaur palaeoart but, crucially, most could’ve been avoided if more attention had been paid to pterosaur anatomy. You couldn’t, for instance, fit the pterosaur arm skeleton within the restored forelimbs of Sibbick's pterosaurs, meaning it violates one of the most fundamental requirements of any palaeoart: the restored animal's flesh should fit around it's skeleton, right? The biggest gear grind, though, comes from the text: virtually every pterosaur in the book is suggested to eat fish regardless of skull moprhology, dentition, wing anatomy and everything else. Like, seriously: practically all of them. And the jaw morphology of Dsungaripterus is even favourably compared to that of modern skim-feeders. Sheesh.

But that’s OK

Still, these are minor niggles compared to what is offered in the rest of the book. Simply put, the comprehensiveness and straightforwardness of its approach mean it is the best summary of the first 200 years of pterosaur research out there, full stop. No serious pterosaur enthusiast or researcher should be without a copy and, although out of print for 10 years, you can still find some cheap(ish) copies online. Top buyer’s tip: if you’re not fussed about buying an original 1991 print, the combined Norman/Wellnhofer volume is often cheaper and, aside from the page numbers, presents exactly the same content as the standalone 1991 version. You can then use the money you save buying that to purchase Dave Unwin’s 2005 book, The Pterosaurs from Deep Time, which is what I’ll try to persuade you to read next time.

References

Kellner, A. W. A. 2004. New information on the Tapejaridae (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea) and discussion of the relationships of this clade. Ameghiniana, 41, 521-534.
Kellner, A. W. A. and Langston, W. Jr. 1996. Cranial remains of Quetzalcoatlus (Pterosauria, Azhdarchidae) from Late Cretaceous sediments of Big Bend National Park. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 16, 222-231.
Lü, J., Unwin, D. M., Xu, L., and Zhang, X. 2008. A new azhdarchoid pterosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of China and its implications for pterosaur phylogeny and evolution. Naturwissenschaften, 95, 891-897.
Martill, D. M. and Naish, D. 2006. Cranial crest development in the azhdarchoid pterosaur Tupuxuara, with a review of the genus and tapejarid monophyly. Palaeontology, 49, 925-941.
Norman, D. 1988. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs. Salamander Books, London. 208 pp.
Unwin, D. M. 2005. The Pterosaurs from Deep Time. Pi Press, New York, 347 pp.
Wellnhofer, P. 1970. Die Pterodactyloidea (Pterosauria) der Oberjura-Plattenkalke Süddeutschlands. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Mathematisch- Wissenschaftlichen Klasse, Abhandlugen, 141, 1-133.
Wellnhofer, P. 1975. Die Rhamphorhynchoidea (Pterosauria) der Oberjura-Plattenkalke Süddeutschlands. Palaeontographica A, 148, 1-33, 132-186, 149, 1-30.
Wellnhofer, P. 1978. Handbuch der Paläoherpetologie. Teil 19: Pterosauria. Gustav Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart. 82 pp.
Wellnhofer, P. 1985. Neue pterosaurier aus der Santana-Formation (Apt) der Chapada do Araripe, Brasilien. Palaeontographica. Abteilung A, 187, 105-182.
Wellnhofer, P. 1991a. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs. Salamander Books Ltd., London. 192 pp.
Wellnhofer, P. 1991b. Weitere pterosaurierfunde aus der Santana-Formation (Apt) der Chapada do Araripe, Brasilien (Translated title: Additional pterosaur remains from the Santana Formation (Aptian) of the Chapada do Araripe, Brazil). Palaeontographica Abt. A, 215. 43-101.
Witton, M. P. 2008. The Palaeoecology and Diversity of Pterosaurs. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Portsmouth. 307 pp.

Flugsaurier 2010 - Beijing

2009-12-10T05:49:00.005Z

The most obvious way to kick off this blog properly is to announce the 2010 international pterosaur meeting. Pterosaur.net began as a project over a drinks session after the fieldtrip of the 2007 meeting which was held in Munich and arranged by Dave Hone. Here we agreed that creating a website to talk pterosaurs to a lay audience was the way forward and while it may have taken us a while to get this all up and running, Pterosaur.Net was born.

The meeting itself was very successful with 50 pterosaur researchers from around the world attending the four day symposium. It was quickly decided that this should become a regular event and thus the plans for a second meeting in Beijing for mid 2010 was announced. While the final details have yet to be decided the basic arrangements are there. So, if you want to come to a meeting on pterosaurs then this is what you need to know:

Flugsaurier 2010

Third International Symposium on Pterosaurs

5-10 August, 2010

Beijing, China

Pterosaurs are amongst the most fascinating and enigmatic of all extinct creatures. Thanks to some spectacular fossil finds in recent years our understanding of the palaeobiology and evolutionary history of these ‘flying reptiles’ has seen several dramatic advances. Some of the most important discoveries, including the first eggs with embryos, have been made in China where the Late Jurassic/Early Cretaceous is currently producing new species of pterosaurs at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world. In recognition of this the Third International Symposium on Pterosaurs “Flugsaurier 2010” will be held in China in August 2010. This will be the third international pterosaur symposium and follows successful meetings held in France in 2001 and Germany in 2007.

The meeting will be organized by the Geological Survey of China, sponsored by the Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, and co-sponsored by the Bureau of Fossil Protection, Liaoning Provincial Department of National Land Resources, and the People’s Government of Yixian.

The meeting is planned for 5^th-11^th August, 2010. Talks, posters, at least one open discussion session and (subject to availability) examination of specimens, are planned for the first three days of the meeting. This will be followed by an optional three day field excursion to view exposures of the Jehol Group and exhibitions/collections of fossils from this sequence which has yielded more than 100 specimens of pterosaurs in the last 10 years. All those interested in pterosaurs and the communities and environments in which they lived are encouraged to attend.

1. Meeting aims:

As in previous symposia this meeting is intended to cover all aspects of pterosaur palaeobiology and the world in which they live:

(a) The origin and evolution of pterosaurs

(b) Taxonomy, systematics and phylogeny

(d) Taphonomy, sedimentology and environments of preservation

(e) Ecosystems and contemporaneous fauna and flora

2. Meeting Programme:

(a) Academic sessions (3 days):
Oral presentations will consist of key-note lectures (45 minutes) and talks (30 minutes). These times include at least 5 minutes for discussion.

Posters:
There will be at least one poster session (further details will be given in the second circular)

Language:
English

(b) Field excursion (3 days):
North-east China. This will include visits to field sites, exhibitions and collections primarily in Liaoning Province.

3. Abstracts and Symposium Volumes

An abstract volume will be prepared for distribution at the meeting. The abstract submission deadline is March 31^st, 2010. No abstracts will be accepted after this date. Abstracts of up to two printed pages (A4) are preferred, but longer abstracts will be considered. Preferred formats are “Word” for text files and “JPG” for figures. A symposium volume is planned for publication in 2011 and will be open to both attendees and non-attendees. The manuscript deadline will be December 31^st, 2010 (further details will be given in the second circular).

4. Expression of interest/information.

If you are interested in attending this meeting please send us an expression of interest indicating your plans to attend the academic session and the field trip, possible talk/poster title(s) and likelihood that you will be accompanied.

All correspondence (e-mail preferred), including any questions or suggestions, should be sent to Lü Junchang and Dave Unwin

Lü Junchang

Institute of Geology

Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences

Beijing 100037

China

e-mail: yilong2010 AT gmail.com or lujc2008 AT 126.com

Dave Unwin

Department of Museum Studies

University of Leicester

103-105 Princess Road East

Leicester LE1 2LG

e-mail: dmu1 AT leicester.ac.uk

Welcome to the Pterosaur.Net blog

2009-12-10T05:42:00.004Z

This blog is intended to act as a the 'current' and ongoing section for pterosaur information to compliment the main Pterosaur.Net site. The mainsite is there to proivde a general introduction to pterosaurs for the general public and while it will be updated periodically and new content will be added, the blog here is supposed to be far more dynamic.

Many of the Pterosaur.Net team run their own blogs (like Darren Naish and Mark Witton) and cover pterosaurs regularly in their pages. However, this blog provides a forum for all our pterosaur-related posts to come together. The idea being that pterosaur-bloggers can cross post this pterosaur related content directly onto this site and those who don't normally blog can pitch in too. Thus a whole raft of pterosaur experts should be putting in a whole raft of posts, comments, discussions and general information on those most interesting of Mesozoic flying vertebrates (birds? pah!).

If you have not found it already, then do head over to the main part of Pterosaur.net where you can get to grips with pterosaurs properly and read about the research of the people contributing here. Please do come back and do link to us and enjoy the site.