Big news at Flickr

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

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

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

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

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

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:

1. To advance the science of vertebrate paleontology throughout the world;
2. 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;
3. To support and encourage the discovery, conservation and protection of vertebrate fossils and fossil sites;
4. 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.

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.