A bit more about the AMNH Exhibit

Many thanks to Dave Hone for posting the great photos from Steve Cohen of the new AMNH Exhibit. I have been meaning to post about the exhibit over a month now, but April-May is the skeletomuscular course in the medical program at USC, so blogging has been on the back burner.

In any case, as Dave mentioned, I had a role in the new exhibit. In fact, I had a relatively substantial role. As full disclosure, I was a paid consultant on the exhibit (titled "Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs"). I worked with the staff there for a little over a year on the interactive flight simulations, and I did recorded interviews for use in the theater and iPad interactive displays. I also helped rather extensively with the script used for the theater presentation (which is mostly about flight). One thing that neither myself, nor Alex Kellner (the co-curator on the exhibit) were approached about were the promo images. I won't detail any politics on that front now, but some of you may be aware that there some issues that arose on that front. What I can say is that the animation and video folks were not involved in that process, either (and used entirely different models for their reconstructions), nor were the sculptors so far as I am aware. So the promo images seem to be a bit of an isolated entity.

In any case, the exhibit opened on April 5th, 2014. Here is the official website for the exhibit: http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/pterosaurs-flight-in-the-age-of-dinosaurs

They ran a promo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsI8ZtsSVqY

On April 1st there was a media preview event, with a panel composed of myself, Alex Kellner, Mark Norell and Michael Novacek. It was well attended, and yield quite a bit of press for the exhibit. Some of the popular articles can be found at:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140405-pterosaur-flying-reptile-museum-exhibit-paleontology-science/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/arts/design/natural-history-museum-explores-the-wonders-of-pterosaurs.html

http://worldsciencefestival.com/blog/pterosaurs_take_to_the_skies_of_new_york_city

http://mentalfloss.com/article/56005/qa-michael-habib-pterosaur-flight-expert

http://www.livescience.com/44556-how-pterosaurs-ruled-the-skies.html

http://mentalfloss.com/article/56021/10-pterosaur-facts-new-exhibit-american-museum-natural-history

As always, there is some variation in the quality of coverage, but overall I thought the writers did a good job of talking up the exhibit while hitting some of the interesting science involved. There will likely be more coming from Scientific American, as well, since I have chatted with them pretty extensively in the weeks following the opening (but more on that when the article(s) hit print).

Some things to look forward to in the exhibit (which stays at the AMNH through early January, at which point it will travel to other museums):

- Excellent specimens. Dave covered this already (see previous post) so I won't belabor it here. They have some awesome stuff, though (including the Dark Wing, which is on display outside Europe for the first time).

- Motion capture interactive animations that allow you to control launch, feeding, and flight in Pteranodon and Jeholopterus. The floating position of the Pteranodon was originally quite bird-like. It was updated using the floating paper by Hone and Henderson at my suggestion. The Pteranodon launch is a water launch and looks pretty wicked. The flight simulation includes basic physics like stall, L:D ratio transitions, and basic rate of climb estimates.

- A full-scale fleshed out reconstruction of Quetzalcoatlus northropi hanging from the ceiling just above reach, with a cutaway to show plausible flight muscle attachment. It's a great sculpture. Sadly, it came together just a little too soon to incorporate the updated proportions from my project with David Krentz. They did, however, feature David's 3D digital model on a sign near the sculpture showing how our reconstructions of Quetzalcoatlus have evolved over time.

- An amazing sculpture diorama (full size) of Tupuxuara - the models are by Jason Brougham, who is fantastic at paleo-reconstruction. The pair is shown feeding on fish in a traditional pluck-grab mode. As some know, Mark Witton and I both prefer an alternative ecology for these animals, but the sculptures are still magnificent (and to be fair, their feeding ecology is contentious - they can't just side with me every time). 

If you are in NYC, the exhibit is well worth a visit (the specimens alone make it worthwhile).

Cheers,

--MBH

Additional pterosaurs of the AMNH

You may be aware that there is currently a major new pterosaur exhibition opening at the American Museum of Natural History, entitled Pterosaurs: flight in the age of the dinosaurs. In addition to their existing collection going on show, a number of key specimens have been borrowed from China and Brazil in particular and there is new art, animations and life models of specimens.

Somewhat inevitably the Pterosaur.net crew are involved in at least some ways. I know that Mark has had an input on the reconstructions, and that Mike has talked to them about take off and flight. I've also heard that both terrestrial stalking an azhdarchids (from Mark and Darren) and floating posture (my recent work with Don Henderson) also get a look in as part of the displays, so even very new research is in there.

Here we are blessed with a few photos from the exhibit courtesy of reader Steve Cohen who is a volunteer there. Steve has generously taken photos before from the museum and passed them on, and here are a few more for the collection. Featured are Wukongopterus, Tapejara, Thalassodromeus and some other wonderful Brazilian and U.S. specimens, and I know material from the Solnhofen (including the dark wing, outside of Germany for the first time), pterosaurs tracks and even the first described egg are also on show. At least a couple of pterosaur researchers are planning a visit given the diversity of material and I hope to join the pilgrimage to see some of this stuff in the flesh. My thanks to Steve for taking the time to take these and send them on.

A young intermediate pterosaur from Germany

A paper has just today been published describing this lovely specimen of what is rather obviously a) a juvenile pterosaur and b) something that is an intermediate between basal and derived pterosaurs. I've got some more photos and written up a brief bit here on it.

Quad launching birds and relevance for pterosaurs

My recent G+ post has relevance to understanding pterosaurs. You can point your cursors here.

Bottom line is that quadrupedal launch is more common than it is typically given credit for. In fact, in terms of evolutionary origins, it has been more prevalent through time than bipedal launch.

Cataloging the Carnegie

 

Pterodactyloid specimen with the impression of a throat pouch preserved

The number of pterosaur specimens now known from the Solnhofen is very impressive, certainly in the hundreds, although with a good number sitting in private hands, plenty of information is kinda known about, without necessarily being in the literature. However, while it is easy to bemoan the inaccessibility of material that isn’t in museums, far too much that is available is not always looked at, and a great case in point is the collection of Solnhofen material in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. In the early 1900s, the Carnegie was able to acquire a large collection of fossils from a Belgian collector the Baron de Bayet, and this included considerable amounts of Solnhofen fossils including a dozen pterosaurs. This is arguably the best collection outside of Europe, or even outside or Germany, and includes material in 3D, with soft tissues, stomach contents and other rather nice details. However, in the following hundred years a total of just 10 papers even mention these specimens, and some of these are very much references in passing. The only even vaguely detailed mentions come from Peter Wellnhofer’s works from the 1970s, which are not easy to access these days, often available only with poor images, don’t illustrate all the specimens, and came in many cases prior to additional preparation or other modifications. In short, this is a major collection of pterosaurs which needs to be revisited.

While visiting Mike Habib in Pittsburgh, we were hunting for things to do and realised this was an area ripe for reappraisal and set to revising and updating the material. Joining forces with Carnegie curator Matt Lamanna, we have now published a long paper (appropriately enough in the Annals of Carnegie Museum) detailing the material and its history. Naturally we have not done detailed descriptions of the anatomy of the pterosaurs at hand – there are very good descriptions of  things like Rhamphorhynchus and adding to that would merely fill space without really conveying much useful information, so instead we focused on what is unique about each specimen (taphonomy, condition of the material, what is and isn’t present) and specific history of the material in places. For completeness, we even briefly covered the casts in the collection, and the skeletal models made by Wellnhofer when he was in the museum on a sabbatical many years ago. This still resulted in a manuscript of over 15 000 words (despite there being only a handful of references) and 15 figures (at least one of each specimen), while Mike rather heroically took dozens of measurements for each specimen and then repeated the exercise for accuracy. The paper is in black and white, but colour versions of the key figures are online here alongside the data.

Some of these specimens turned out to be much more interesting and potentially important than previously realised and we were also able to correct some previous problems and update the taxonomy. Recent revisions especially to the pterodactyloids has left a lot of collections lagging in their taxonomy, but there was also a large animal that was listed as Rhamphorhynchus, despite obviously being a pterodactyloid, and indeed actually doesn’t even bear much resemblance to any currently known Solnhofen pterosaur and is rather cryptic. Two specimens had been mistakenly thought to be a plate and counterplate and had been combined even though they were quite different. After much head scratching we realised the issue was that there was a plate and counterplate there, but thanks to effectively a typo, the wrong pair had been put together.

Rhamphorhynchus specimen prepared free of the matrix

Two specimens of Rhamphorhynchus have undergone pretty dramatic changes in recent years, having been fully prepared free of their matrix. In one case, this results in a very odd flat specimen (which is apparently now very fragile – I actually didn’t see either of these, they were away when I was at the Carnegie) but that is at least cleaned up, but the other is a near complete skull preserved in 3D. Many readers will remember the paper on pterosaur neuroanatomy led by Larry Witmer that compared the brain structures of Anhanguera and Rhamphorhynchus and this specimen was responsible for the data on the latter. Three dimensional material from the Solnhofen is not common, so a skull that is in 3D and prepared to the point that it can be seen in all views is a real treasure and while it has been scanned, we’ve included a series of large photos of it to help reveal the structure.

 

Rhamphorhynchus skull in near 3D (if lacking teeth) prepared free of the matrix

Several specimens show traces of soft tissues including the wings, throat sacs and tail vanes. None are especially well preserved, but nor ore these features that common either (in part perhaps because like the leg feathers of Archaeopteryx, they may have been destroyed in the past to ‘better’ prepare specimens), so any additional information is useful. Finally, one of them does appear to have some fish teeth associated with the stomach. We this is has been missed before by other people and so is a novel find, and that extends the set of Rhamphorhynchus specimens with fish gut contents and firms up the evidence for piscivory as a major part of the diet of these animals.

Hopefully therefore this paper will clarify a few issues with the collection, bring forwards some of the developments and details not previously seen or recognised and provides a basis for future research. Also of course it marks the beginning of the sad death of Matt Lamanna’s career as a researcher of dinosaurs and the slow and painful descent into working on pterosaurs and consorting with the kinds of people who actually quite like them. For this Mike and I can only apologise, or cackle wildly with unabandonned joy, depending on who is reading at the time.

Hone, D.W.E., Habib, M.B. & Lamanna, M.C. 2013. An annotated and illustrated catalogue of Solnhofen (Upper Jurassic, Germany) pterosaur specimens at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Annals of Carnegie Museum, 82: 165-191.Link to PDF here.

Pterosaur Aerodynamics at GWU

+Lorena Barba over at George Washington University had her students do some fun summaries of pterosaur aerodynamics at the end of the Fall Semester. She is a professor in engineering who runs a course on animal flight (she is also the CFD guru behind the latest analysis of gliding snakes with J. Socha). These topics followed from a discussion that Lorena and I had after some interesting (and amusing) trolling on my Google+ stream. We identified four topics for her students to look into more: pterosaur launch, pterosaur weight estimates, pterosaur wings and flight capabilities, and Wagner Effects. The students wrote blog posts, which can be found here:

http://lorenabarba.com/blog/student-guest-blog-post-pterosaur-quad-launch/

http://lorenabarba.com/blog/student-guest-blog-post-pterosaur-weight-estimation/

http://lorenabarba.com/blog/student-guest-blog-post-pterosaur-wings-and-flight-capabilities/

http://lorenabarba.com/blog/student-guest-blog-post-the-wagner-effect/

These students are all engineers, which adds a fun element because most were quite unfamiliar with pterosaur biology going into this project. There are some errors in the terminology and details of biology as a result, but it's quite good work, and brought some new things to light for me (especially the Wagner section). Enjoy!

Oh, and Happy New Year everyone...

So this is Christmas, and what have you done?...

...asked John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in November 1972, before most of the Pterosaur.net crew were even born.

This particular song is guaranteed to make me grind my teeth as I elbow my way through Aldi with a basket full of mince pies and a wet umbrella tucked under my arm. Yes, there's a bit of 'Bah Humbug' in me, I won't deny that, but that's not the whole reason. You will find other seasonal novelty songs on my iPod all year round, so why, I hear you ask, do I hate Happy Xmas (War is Over) with all my heart?

It's the opening lines really. So this is Christmas, and what have you done? Another year over, a new one just begun.

Groan. As if we need to be reminded that another year has shot by, and we haven't done half of the things that we wanted to. It's like being told off by your parents for dossing around in your pyjamas all day, instead of doing something useful.

But we haven't been dossing around in our pyjamas in the NHMUK pterosaur collection, contrary to any stories that you might have heard. It's been a busy year, as usual. I'd like to tell you how many collection visitors have been this year, but I don't have access to the stats right now, as I'm writing from the debris-strewn dining table at the Steel / Hume residence. Instead, let's go through the diary, and see what the NHMUK pterosaurs got up to in 2013.

The snout of the 'cookie-cutter' pterosaur Istiodactylus was CT scanned for a PhD project. At this stage I have no further information on what, if anything, this showed. The same project was to include SEM work on a single tooth. Several researchers are interested in this specimen, so I'm sure that this data will be useful to someone. Sadly, the student has decided not to continue with this project, making this the second time that a PhD project on Istiodactylus has stalled (if you'll pardon the pun). Perhaps it was cursed by the collector, Hooley, all those years ago.

Speaking of collectors, Heather Middleton kindly loaned her collection of Kimmeridge Clay pterosaur bones and teeth so that they could be photographed by those lovely chaps in the NHMUK photo studio. Some of Heather's specimens might feature in the pterosaur chapter of the forthcoming field guide to the Kimmeridge Clay (available in all good bookshops), which is edited by none other than Dangerous Dave Martill. He is also solely responsible for the pterosaur chapter, I believe. Heather's collection is far superior to the NHMUK material, and includes quite a few nice teeth.

The latest Isle of Wight pterosaur, Vectidraco, was described and named early this year.  For those that missed it, the specimen is a small pelvis that was found by a young girl about two years ago, and donated to NHMUK by her. News reached the ears of 'The One Show', a popular tea-time television programme, and to cut a long story short, I had about 24 hours notice to prepare the specimen and myself for live TV on April 11th. The museum's Head of Conservation made a mount and a box so that the specimen could travel safely to the studio without being handled. Daisy, the girl who found the specimen, was there too, with her whole family, but was a bit overwhelmed by the whole live TV thing, and went all shy. I was too busy trying to hold my tummy in, and worrying that I would forget the name Vectidraco.

I didn't make it to the Pterosaur Symposium in Rio de Janeiro this year, as it wasn't as heavily subsidised as the one in Beijing in 2010. But several people were kind enough to send me copies of the abstracts volume. Much appreciated. I have a couple of spares, if anyone missed out.

One of the Solnhofen pterosaurs travelled to Southampton University for a session in their big CT scanner. Unfortunately this didn't go as well as hoped. The images showed bedding in the matrix, but no contrast between it and the bones. Later in the year, I was back at Southampton again for the Wealden symposium, which was very well-attended. Dave Martill spoke about Istiodactylus. And the Great Wall of China.

One of the last big events of the year was 'Blast From the Past' at Dinosaur Isle. This is an open day at the museum in Sandown, Isle of Wight, with local collectors, palaeontologists, archaeologists and artists all showing their work and collections to the many visitors. For me it was a chance to see old friends and hear about some recent finds. I was expecting to meet up with Nick Chase to pick up a couple of Pholidosaurus skulls that he'd collected in Dorset in the late 1980s, but to my surprise he also donated a few other specimens from the Island. These include a few bits of small pterosaurs, and a theropod humerus. I also saw Mick Green for the first time in ages, and he brought along most of his pterosaur collection.

Finally, a painted cast of Dimorphodon has been exchanged with AMNH (for some casts of Mongolian dinosaur bones) and a cast of the snout of Istiodactylus will probably be exchanged with Dinosaur Isle for a cast of their new small croc. 

That's not all, of course. I won't bore you with all the croc-collection comings and goings, as presumably you came here to read about pterosaurs. So I will stop here, put on my pyjamas and watch my new DVD that I got for Christmas. It's called 'Flying Monsters' and it should be really good, because Sir David Attenborough is in it, and it has a blood-stained Dimorphodon on the front cover...

Yes, it's from the Solnhofen. Really.

I'll just leave this here. Enjoy.

Ornithocheirids on show

Yes more photos from Frankfurt, this time of a combination display that has more or less everything. First off there's a superb mounted animal on the wing hanging from the ceiling. Then there is a cabinet containing a cast of a superb specimen on Anhanguera laid out in something I assume is close to the mid-point of preparation, and finally there is the whole prepared piece: the skull is separated and on show, and running up the side of the cabinet is the assembled wing.

 

 

Also there is a sectioned longbone, showing the wonderfully thin bone walls. This one is especially nice since it has, unusually, not been infilled with matrix making it really clear and the internal trebeculae are also quite clearly preserved (and apparently calcite crystal free).

It's quite a set and does show just how much information can be crammed into surprisingly little space and while I can't read the text of the main display it is clearly talking about burial, preservation, preparation and the reconstruction of the animal. Great stuff.

Quetzy flying high

 I've just returned from a very quick trip to Germany, dropping in at the Solnhofen Museum, Jura Museum Eichstaett and then onto Frankfurt in just 3 days. The primary purpose was actually looking at birds ad various feathered creatures but of course I took in more than a few pterosaurs too. There's a few more photos to come on that score including one extraordinarily important specimen that few will have seen and many will not even have heard of. In the meantime though, have a tanking great azhdarchid.

This one is beautifully mounted and is several meters off the ground in the main hall of the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt and all but soars about the dinosaurs. Rather nicely one can stand almost right under it as well as seeing it from near eye-level from the higher balconies of the galleries above. Plenty of museums now have a cast / sculpt like this of a giant azhdarchid / Quetzalcoatlus, but this is a nice one (if imperfect) and while this may sound odd, it's nice that it is so high up in the rafters, it still looks big from ground level, but it gives a better sense of scale when you get to its level and discover that it is clearly even larger than it looked from below.

New pterosaurs, new phylogenies

People with an interest in pterosaurs will probably be aware of the recent passing of Wann Langston Jnr, the Texan palaoentologist who was responsible for a lot of the popularizing of Quetzalcoatlus. I was lucky enough to meet Wann at the 2007 Flugsaurier meeting in Munich where he was able to attend, despite being well into his 80s. Wann’s work covered a great many aspects of Mesozoic reptiles and the recent festschrift that has been published in his honour covers a raft of different taxa.

Of interest to us though are three papers on pterosaurs that between them name four new taxa! That’s quite an effort for a single volume that is not even devoted to pterosaurs. However, what I want to talk about here is the phylogeny that appears in the paper by Brian Andres and Time Myers. Many will know that since 2003 pterosaur phylognies can broadly be divided into two camps – those which look more like that of Dave Unwin’s 2003 paper (the one shown here in red and blue is from the Darwinopetus description) and those which resemble Alex Kellner’s effort from the same year (the one shown here is from the Wukongopterus description). They are not actually that different from each other, both have the same general arrangement of taxa but with some difference. Kellner-type phylognies have anurognathids before dimorphodonitds, Unwin the reverse. Unwin-types have ornithocheiroids before the ctenocasmatids, Kellner the reverse. Both have the rhamphorhynchines immediately before Darwinopterus and kin and those coming before the origin of pterodactyloids and both have dsungaripterids close to the azhdarchoids. In short, there’s a way to go to get a consensus and there are some fairly clear and consistent contradictions, but they are not so far apart.

 Interestingly, back in 2007, Brian Andres presented on some of his PhD work where he talked about how the two might be coming together, and Dave Unwin have a similar talk in Beijing in 2010. However, the phylogeny in this paper (below) is really rather different to both of those. This is the latest version of Brian’s analysis which has already popped up in a couple of papers, but frustratingly, the actual core of this (i.e. the actual character list and coding) still isn’t published –owing to the interminable delays on The Pterosauria book - so there’s no way at the moment to see what is causing these shifts.

The contrasts are quite dramatic though. Neither the dimorphodontids nor anurognathids are at the base (or close to it) of the phylogeny, but instead it is the eudimorphodontids and the anurognathids are in fact lying more derived than Darwinopterus and close to the pterodactyloids! The dsungaripterids are also now not sister taxon to the azhdarhoids, but lying within the clade as sister taxon to the thalassodromids and with the tapejarids as a basal clade to these plus the azhdarchids+chaoyangopterids.

In short, if anything, the phylogenies are getting further apart. Now I would expect them to converge again sooner or later: after all, there is only one correct solution. But as often lamented (and in particular by Darren), pterosaur phylogenies are generally rather character poor compared to many analyses of archosaur clades so there is much more to come. That said, I think some of the problem comes from the continued practice of doing analyses that cover the whole of the Pterosauria. Surely we are at the point where the rhamphorhynchoids and pterodactyloids are well separated and there’s no need to repeatedly include both in every analysis – it’s probably not helping the resolution of some trees where large chunks of the characters or states needed to help resolve one clade won’t add anything to the other. Devoting more time to better characters for smaller groups will probably be more productive than continuing to code up large numbers of taxa where large numbers of characters are inappropriate.

Anyway, that’s my 2p on the problem. Certainly the current conflicts are interesting and I look forwards to seeing what characters are supporting some of these unorthodox positions – there are likely to be some interesting convergences and codings in there. Obviously it’s hard to say much without the underlying data, but at face value I’m not overly convinced by some of those positions, but it will be especially interesting to see what these new positions mean for things like character support of branches and if it calibrates better temporally than the other current competing ideas. Now, we just need the book to get finished….

  

Andres, B. & Myers, T.S. 2013. Lone Star Pterosaurs. Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 103: Issue 3-4, p 383-398.

SVPCA 2013 - a pterosaur spectacular

Well SVPCA (Symposium for Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy) for 2013 has just ended in Edinburgh. As per usual, there was a good set of pterosaur-related talks and the P.net crew was heavily involved. Mark spoke about azhdarchid neck evolution, I had a talk (which included Mike Habib as an author) on a new Rhamphorhynchus specimen with new evidence on their diets and Darren spoke on sexual selection in the fossil record which naturally included pterosaurs (and which included me as an author). Not bad at all really, but then there was the fact that for the first time since way back in Munich 2007, nearly the entire P.net crew was together!

As can be seen here we have (L-R), Luis Rey, Mark Witton, Darren Naish, Lorna Steel, me, Mike Habib (over from LA), Ross Elgin and John Conway. We were only short of Dino Frey and Helmut Tischlinger, and as neither rarely leaves the confines of southern Germany. I don't think we've ever had this many people together - even Dino didn't make the Munich conference that ultimately spawned the website, and certainly when the idea formed about the site we weren't all together so this might be the biggest set of us ever. Ah fun times (as rather demonstrated by the second photo below).

Anyway, while on the subject of groups of people talking pterosaurs in the UK, the announcement was formally made that the next 'Flugsaurier' meeting will be in 2015 and hosted at Portsmouth. Dave Martill will be leading the charge, with myself, mark, Dave Unwin and others helping. The plan is to link this (in terms of time) to SVPCA that year (which does not yet have a venue) so that Flug will go immediately before or after and so that hopefully a few people who have come to the UK for the pterosaurs may stay for the other meeting (or vice versa) and both conferences may benefit. SVPCA is usually in early September and so while we do not yet have a definitive date for Flugsaurier, expect it to be the end of summer 2015 with a date between the last week of August and third week of September. Fieldtrips are planned to both the Jurassic Coast and classic localities for things like Dimorphodon as well as to the Isle of Wight for Istiodactylus. Keep your diaries free!

Pterosaur origins and the ‘protopterosaur’

One very interesting aspect of Mark’s new book is his take on the pterosaur ancestry issue. From decades people have reproduced an illustration by pterosaur researcher Rupert Wild that presented a hypothetical pterosaur ancestor. It was something rather lizard-like (since he considered pterosaurs closer to the prolacertiforms than current mainstream thinking of them as sister-taxon to the dinosauromorphs) but with elongating fingers and the beginnings of wing membranes. While often commented on that this probably wasn’t a great model anymore, it was pretty much the only nice illustration out there and so kept being re-used, and it did at least provide a conceptual idea of just what such an animal might look like. Lacking any transitional forms for pterosaurs, we do have to imagine a bit, and as I’ve long said, this is one area where palaeoart is key as it can communicate ideas like this to a lay audience in a way no amount of even florid prose can realistically do.

Mark’s approach however was not to produce a single transitional form but several of them. He worked his way through something very close to an archosaur so something nearly a pterosaur over three distinct stages. That gives a much more thorough take on this issue and allows him to explore not just what these things may have looked like, but also the evolutionary pressures and problems at different stages of their evolution. What’s interesting for me is that it also contrasts and compliments with something that I’ve been working on.

Most of you are probably aware that some years ago a major academic book was promised on the pterosaurs. The damn thing seems to be on near-permanent hiatus (I wrote my chapters back in 2008) but as part of the introduction I did on pterosaur origins I got together with Luis Rey and produced an updated ‘protopterosaur’ to take into account both the ornithodires, but also new data and hypotheses on wing evolution, basal pterosaurs and other issues. Luis has been kind enough to let me put up his effort and Mark has also passed on one of his intermediates for comparison (obviously these are copyright to these respective artists).

Marks' version of Rupert Wild's 'protopterosaur' (left) and his own suggested animal (right)

While obviously the art style is very different and we’ve got one image to covers everything (whereas Mark was working in stages) there are some strong similarities in places. The area of pterosaur origins came up in a chat between us perhaps two years ago and we soon discovered we’d both been producing protopterosaurs and that we’d independently struck on some strong connections. Sure this is all hypothetical, but it is interesting that we’ve headed down some similar lines in places starting from the same point and with the same assumptions.

For completeness and as a general guide, here’s the figure caption I produced for Luis’ art. I would have normally gone for a darker colour and less bright pattern to emphasise this as a small animal, vulnerable to predators, but when you ask Luis to illustrate and animal “not bold colours” should never be in your description. Still, the other bits of anatomy I wanted and the details are all in there and reflect various issues of pterosaur origins:

Luis Rey's version

Note that this is not being presented as a scientific hypothesis but is used to illustrate some of the profound changes that must have occurred to the ancestral species to become a pterosaur. This image was created in partial tribute to the oft reproduced ‘protopterosaur’ image by Wild (1984) which imagined a transitional form between prolacertiforms and pterosaurs. For this piece the ancestor was considered to be a dinosauromorph and with anurognathids or dimorphodontids as basal pterosaurs. The animal also includes new information on pterosaurs evolution (e.g. Bennett, 2008 on the origin of wing folding) to illustrate how some parts may have evolved. Different parts of this animal have been ‘allowed’ to evolve at different rate and thus some are much closer to the ornithodiran condition, and others to the pterosaur condition. Note the following features: the animal is arboreal; an archosauromorph-like head which is relatively short and tall, with and antorbital fenstra and archosaurian teeth; enlarged pterosaur-like orbit; head, neck, trunk and hind-limb proportions close to that of Scleromochlus; a relatively short and flexible tail exhibiting only a small tail-vane that is similar in shape to juvenile Rhamphorhynchus; an elongated wrist, but with no pteroid or propatagium; large manual digits 1-3 with large claws, a straight an elongate fourth finger that is still shorter than that of pterosaurs, this retains a small, anteriorly directed ungual; absent fifth finger; a relatively broad-chorded brachiopatagium that reaches only to the knee, but which is replete with actinofibrils; a simple archosaurian pes with an unmodified fifth toe and no webbing between the toes; a very limited uropatagium covering only parts of the legs and integrating with the base of the tail; only limited coverage of pycnofibers with much of the body still covered by scales.

More on Rhamphorhynchus biology

Over on his blog, Mark has put up a post about a recent popular science article on Rhamphorhynchus and in particular stuff on feeding and foraging behaviours. It's well worth a read and shows off a nice privately held specimen (that's mummified!) and discusses the undying issue of skim feeding. That's one of those ideas that just doesn't seem to go away no matter how hard it gets hit and Mark dissects the problem once again.

On a related note, the article Mark mentions was produced by Fred Weber for a French magazine. Mark did the art for it and similalry I borrowed to Witton materials for a piece I did with Fred on pterosaur ecology. It's in French (I wrote, he translated) but it does include some nice photos and art and can be downloaded from my site here if anyone is interested (scroll down).

Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy – a review

Right, let’s get the obvious bit out the way first. I’ve known Mark Witton for more than 5 years now and while we’ve never published a paper together, have certainly worked together, reviewed each other’s papers at times, and spent much time talking pterosaurs and of course doing things like Pterosaur.net. In short, he is both friend and colleague, and some people reading this review may not know that. However, I do also do my best to be fair and this is as honest a review as I feel I can produce. Added to that, while I’ve known this was in production for a long time, I can’t recall more than a couple of very minor conversations with Mark about the book – I really knew very little about what he had done, how and why, before I saw it, so I was coming to the book from a pretty unbiased standpoint in that sense at least.

Anyone familiar with pterosaurs will know that, kids books aside, there have barely been a handful of pterosaur books, well, ever. We have Seeley’s 1901 effort that is still fascinating for the professional, but just a wee bit dated. Wellnhofer’s 1991 Encyclopedia is a classic but again has faded a bit in recent years with so many new forms coming out and much more research, though it’s still a ‘must have’ for any serious pterosaur researcher or enthusiast. In 2004 David Unwin had his Pterosaurs of Deep Time which was a major update from Wellnhofer, but very different in style to that one consisting of a lot more text and relatively few figures, though lots of photos of key specimens. There has also recently been Andre Veldmeijer’s one (illustrated by Mark as it happens) which is (so I understand, I have only the Dutch and not the English version) relatively non-technical and aimed at a more general audience. So right off, Mark’s tome joins a pretty sparse collection, and any serious contribution is therefore going to be most welcome to this band.

In overall appearance it’s almost an exact fit between Wellnhofer and Unwin – with a great deal of text and detailed information, but not at the expense of numerous figures, both artworks (i.e. life restorations and palaeoart) and diagrams and more technical illustrations (graphs and skeletons) in addition to a good number of photos, though this is one area where it is a little short. Where Wellnhofer was organised primarily by time period, and Unwin by body parts or ecology / behaviour, the majority of Mark’s book is taxonomic, with a (nicely colour coded) chapter for each clade. It’s well put together, has a nice font (I’m not any kind of font geek, but it is annoying when something looks inelegant on the page) and is on high quality paper, the printing seems good too and the reproductions of the artworks and figures are good.

I’ll do the criticism bit first and get it out the way as there’s not much to criticise. In addition to the relatively limited number of photos, the introductory and concluding parts of the book are relatively short, and so while the main bulk is well done, there is a feeling that the overall picture of pterosaur evolution and the wider context of them in the Mesozoic is not given much space. It was also odd that there were no ‘further reading’ bits or a list of websites – one hopes that this book will inspire more people to read up about pterosaurs and while I obviously hope P.net will be a source for that, given the real problems pterosaurs do have online (there’s some really major and problematic sites out there) something that would help guide people to the good stuff would have been a useful addition.

My one real criticism would be that it’s a bit of a mix of styles and while Mark’s writing is generally breezy and very readable (and with little sarcastic comments, fun asides and generally friendly tone) but there are quite a few technical terms that get thrown at the reader from time to time that’ll have people reaching for a dictionary. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – I like being challenged, but I’m sure a few general readers will struggle at the first go to follow a few points and the odd paragraph without going to the bookshelf (or more likely, google, some of that anatomical stuff won’t be in your typical paper edition). It does mean though that in places it feel a bit odd with a very readable style littered with words you have to look up - a short glossary would certainly have been a help. Overall it’s not a huge issue though and again, given word limits and the (I assume) intended broad appeal of newbies through to real experts, there is a very difficult balance to strike here and it’s not going to stop people reading it or getting what they want from it.

To be fair though, one cannot cram everything about everything into a book of a limited word length, and so these comments are perhaps more of an observation of the route taken rather than an actual problem that could necessarily have been addressed while keeping the rest of the book the same. To add anything at this word length other stuff would have course have to go, and I’m sensitive that authors have their own intentions (and have to bow to the publishers) and the constraints of the formats. 

Right, with that out the way, let’s get onto the good. It is well written, and should appeal and be educational to those who know little to nothing about pterosaurs, as well as being a generally excellent summary of all things pterosaurian for experts. I found a few nuggets in there I didn’t know about or had long forgotten and the layout of the book is very easy to navigate as a reference piece. It is also accurate and about as up to date as it can be and while already there are new taxa and papers that affect things (such is life) this really will stand for a good few years to come as pretty close to cutting edge. Certainly this is the first book to include Darwinopterus and kin and to bring forwards some of the more recent developments and advances in our understanding of pterosaur biology. At the end of the book Mark argues something parallel to my own paper on the ‘pterosaur renaissance’ – pterosaur research is accelerating in complexity and detail and this book really helps trumpet that and bring it forwards.

The controversial issues are handled really well. Pterosaur research has some major splits within its ranks over some serious issues (origins and phylogeny especially) and Mark is careful to point out where things are contentious and what the alternates are, and why he (or the community) comes done on one side or another. However, he also deals with this pretty efficiently and avoids getting bogged down in details or the endless arguments that afflict some coverage of this kind of stuff. He’s also pretty clear as to what is already in the literature and which ideas are supported by what evidence (the book is superbly well referenced throughout) and when something is new and his own (i.e. this is the first appearance of an idea in the literature) he also makes that clear. Some of these are things various people have been knocking around for a while and if you’ve spoken to researchers or seen discussions online they will be well familiar, but it’s good to see them in print as more formal ideas and some of the evidence that may support them laid out.

The little reviews of each clade are very useful, and each section is broken down into sections on anatomy, locomotion and ecology, with key specimens of details illustrated and a map of the locations of major fossils. Each clade comes with a full skeletal reconstruction and a full life reconstruction alongside, so it’s very easy to get an idea of how each group differed and their diagnostic features and lifestyles. Some of the chapters are very short indeed, but it does make them easy to read and follow and with the subheadings it’s also easy to pick out key data – I think I’ll have an easier time dipping into this to re-read key points or check things that I would with any of the other previous pterosaur entries.

Although I have said I’d have liked to have seen some more photos, the book is very well illustrated. In addition to the skeletals and basic life reconstructions, most chapters have a full-page image or even two of pterosaur palaeoart. Although Mark regularly posts stuff on his blog, almost all the art in the book is new, so there’s no extensive recycling or anything like that. While hardly in ‘All Yesterdays’ territory, there are plenty of images of pterosaurs doing things not normally illustrated and interesting and new approaches to things like colour patterns and layouts of the images – there’s no memes here to be had. The technical figures are even better and are very well done with some nice stylistic flourishes in the phylogenies especially, but overall being very clear and really conveying the key points.

So, summing up. Whatever the intent of the author, the book does succeed at a number of levels. While probably a tricky read for those very unfamiliar with fossils, it should be easily accessible for anyone with a passing interest in palaeo as well as providing a solid review of the whole of the Pterosauria that’ll be genuinely useful for researchers for many years. I’m sure I’ll be typing “Witton, (2013) stated….” quite a lot in the future and that, if anything, should be a good measure of how I rate this as a scientific text. Now go buy a copy and read it, it really is very good. 

Mark P. Witton, 2013. Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy. Princeton University Press.  291pp.

Pterosaur books to know and love, part 3: Pterosaur Trouble

Pterosaur Trouble cover image, by D. Loxton and Jim W. W. Smith, courtesy of Kids Can Press.

What's this? A review of a children's story book on Pterosaur.Net? Isn't this site about pterosaur science, with specimen numbers, refutable hypotheses and that sort of thing? Relax, dear reader: this review is about pterosaur science, and specifically how it can be presented well to even very young audiences without dumbing down, compromising illustration quality or making up nonsensical stories about the past.

Pterosaur Trouble, penned and illustrated by Daniel Loxton, with some illustrative assistance from Jim W. W. Smith, is a recently published work of 'palaeofiction' aimed at 4-7 year olds. It's the second in the Kids Can Press 'Tales of Prehistoric Life' series, following the 2011 Ankylosaur Attack. The short story sees a 10 m span Quetzalcoatlus halting its long journey across Late Cretaceous Canada in search of food, but runs into a vicious pack of Saurornitholestes instead. Along the way, we see various other fauna expected in a story set in the latest Cretaceous North America, including a couple of tyrannosaurs and a herd of Triceratops. As may be expected for a book aimed squarely at young children, the pages are kept largely free of text and only a single page, a final 'information page' on Quetzalcoatlus and Saurornitholestes, has a significant amount of text. The story is thus mostly told through its illustrations, which is what we'll focus on first.

Pterosaur Trouble spread, featuring Quetzalcoatlus and some noisy dinosaurs, by D. Loxton and Jim W. W. Smith, courtesy of Kids Can Press.

Virtual reality
The illustrations of Pterosaur Trouble are entirely rendered through CG animal models composited into photographed backgrounds (Loxton speaks at length about his illustration process in an interview over at the CSI blog). This sort of illustration has become commonplace in children's books on prehistoric life, and, it must be said, has generated some pretty awful bits of art. Sadly, there's probably more bad bits of CG palaeoart around than good ones, and this may create low expectations for Pterosaur Trouble's illustrations. Happily, Pterosaur Trouble dodges the problems of  obviously photoshopped backgrounds and plastic-looking, poorly composited creatures to create images which look pretty convincing (as you can see for yourself with the spreads throughout this blog). I'm not sure that they're 100% photorealistic, which is clearly the effect being sought, but they're pretty durned near. And not in that creepy, Polar Express sort of way, either. I think my 7 year old self would be pretty convinced that I was looking at some photographs. Special mention should go to the little details embedded into some scenes. Feathers float through the air from attacking Saurornitholestes, water splashes reveal the trajectories of the animals making them and reflections are seen in still water.

A chief issue with many pieces of CG palaeoart is inaccurate portrayal of the animals themselves. Pterosaur Trouble largely avoids this problem too, suggesting the mind of Darren Naish, who's listed as the scientific consultant for the book, has been put to good use. The animals look, more or less, pretty good and can be identified as the species they're meant to represent. The basic proportions and appearances of the animals are fairly close to the mark, and I get the feeling that real effort was made to render animals which would satisfy fully fledged palaeontologists as much as children. Again, there are lots of little details to appreciate. The Quetzalcoatlus beak has a chipped and rough appearance reminiscent of the beak of a marabou stork, the back of its neck has relatively long pycnofibres (as indicated by some specimens of Pterodactylus - see Frey and Martill 1998) and the primary feathers of the Sauronitholestes forelimb seem to attach to digit II (on correctly orientated hands, no less). The poses of the animals are also well chosen. There's a much appreciated deficit of roaring and hyperdynamic postures, and the points of view are sensibly placed so that we can clearly see the action, but the animals never look strange and distorted.

Pterosaur Trouble spread, showing Quetzalcoatlus in some Top Gun valley action, by D. Loxton and Jim W. W. Smith, courtesy of Kids Can Press.

As may be expected, I do have a few niggles. The faces and anterior neck regions of the star animals are devoid of fluff, a trope which I wish would politely clear off. Well known fossils of both dromaeosaurs and pterosaurs show that their necks and faces bore filamentous integuments, and we should reflect this in our reconstructions (Sharov 1971; Xu et al. 1999). The Saurornitholestes forelimbs could do with some more feather groups, and both star animals show some slight shrink wrapping on their heads. The uropatagium of the pterosaur attaches to the tail, which has never been found in any pterosaur specimen despite its prevalence in artistic reconstructions, and eye of the Quetzalcoatlus is set way too high in the skull (see my Quetzalcoatlus sp. skull reconstruction, below). Perhaps most glaringly, the wing finger of the pterosaur does not fold up against the body when the animal is grounded. These, and a few other nitpicks didn't really irk me that much however, probably because the overall illustration quality is pretty good and I enjoyed the other components of the book.

Skull reconstruction of Quetzalcoatlus sp., based on Kellner and Langston (1996). Note the ventrally displaced orbit, well below the top half of the skull. From Witton (2013).

Text me
The images of Pterosaur Trouble are embellished with short passages of text on each page which provide details on the accompanying image. The text scores highly for avoiding anthropomorphising its animals too much, a major pitfall of much 'palaeofiction' . Instead, we have the actions of the animals being described more than their emotional states, often with neat bits of information sneaked into the same sentences. For instance, Quetzalocatlus is described as 'a giraffe-sized giant landing as a gently as a dragonfly' at one point. In one sentence we're given a sense of the size, mass and flight capabilities of this animal, and all in concise and evocative language that a 4 year-old could understand. The text is pretty on the ball scientifically, too. Pycnofibres, pterosaur 'fuzz', are described as 'hairlike fibers' rather than feathers or fur. The azhdarchid is said to eat 'anything that walked or slithered', which sounds like a reference to the terrestrial stalking hypothesis of Witton and Naish (2008) to me, and the animal vocalisations are the clicks, coos and chatters of an avian-like syrinx rather than the snarls, roars and bellows of a mammalian larynx. Given that many children's books on prehistoric life simply rehash information from other, sometimes much older children's books on the same topic, or else make mistaken claims that simply aren't true, it's refreshing to see Pterosaur Trouble presenting these new ideas to young audiences.

Pterosaur Trouble spread, showing Quetzalcoatlus apparently approaching Isla Nublar, by D. Loxton and Jim W. W. Smith, courtesy of Kids Can Press.

The story itself has one foot in the science camp, too. The overall premise was inspired by a Saurornitholestes tooth left in a large azhdarchid tibiotarsus, an indication that this dinosaur once ingested pterosaur meat (Currie and Jacobsen 1995). Whether the dromaeosaur actually attacked and killed the azhdarchid in that case is debatable, and I do agree with Currie and Jacobsen (1995) that the body size difference between the dinosaur and pterosaur suggests scavenging activities rather than predation. However, we're all aware that remarkable and unexpected feats of predation can occur in modern animals, such as lions attacking fully grown elephants and adult giraffes, so we can't rule out the occurrence of similar events in the Mesozoic. Happily, Pterosaur Trouble acknowledges this ambiguity on its final page along with a host of other factoids on its star animals. (Anyone interested in the logistics of dromaeosaur predation on pterosaurs should check out this post and its comments at Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings, which go into some detail on these issues.)

I couldn't feel like I've reviewed this book fairly without mentioning one particular part of its story, which may serve as an excellent case study as for how well put together this little book is. At one pivotal moment, the Quetzalcoatlus has to escape its dinosaur attackers, leading to it quad launching into the air while carrying a couple of dinosaurs. How cool is that? This one moment in the story, and its accompanying spread, is an awesome hat-trick of splendidness. Firstly, it reaffirms that Loxton has really been paying attention to the cutting edge of pterosaur research. Pterosaur quad launch is still a fairly fresh idea that, as a fully fledged hypothesis, was proposed as recently as 2008 (Habib 2008). Secondly, it features a simply terrific (and convincing) reconstruction of an azhdarchid mid-launch (below), with dromaeosaurs being cast from the launching pterosaur like feathery rodeo cowboys. Thirdly, it completely disregards the idea of pterosaur as weak, flimsy fliers, showing its star animal breaking free of its attackers and taking off despite being weighed down with unintended passengers. This is yet another nod to new research which indicates that giant azhdarchid humeri were extremely strong, and capable of launching animals far in excess of their estimated body weights (Witton and Habib 2010). As someone with a direct hand in this research, it's great to see these ideas being picked up here. Finally, the fact that a children's book is featuring quad launch makes me feel very warm inside, as a generation of people can now grow up with quad-launch in mind whenever they think of pterosaur takeoff. Wait, that's four things, which is one more than a hat-trick, right? Whatever: I don't do football.

Pterosaur Trouble spread, showing Quetzalcoatlus quad launching into awesomeness while shaking off some feathery vermin. Image by D. Loxton and Jim W. W. Smith, provided by M. Cornell

So, in sum...
While I can't claim any great expertise in children's books on prehistory, I've seen enough attempts to bring extinct species to popular audiences to know that I often find more things to dislike than praise. Because it uses up to date science, high quality illustrations and some clever text, Pterosaur Trouble is a fantastic little book that should greatly please and educate any little pterosaurologists you may know. I'll go so far as to say that Pterosaur Trouble is a terrific example of how to make a popular book on prehistoric animals both exciting and scientifically sound, an accolade that is all the more remarkable when you consider that a part of its targeted demographic is still learning to read. As a final recommendation, I could see myself reading a copy of this to my own kids, should I ever have them, without any muttering or wry comments. And if it can please a bitter old thing like me, then it must be doing something right.

If you're after a copy of Pterosaur Trouble, check out the Kids Can Press website, or log onto Amazon. The first book in the series, Ankylosaur Attack, is being published again by Franklin Watts in August, 2013 under ISBN: 9781445119427.

References

• Currie, P. J. and Jacobsen, A. R. 1995. An azhdarchid pterosaur eaten by a velociraptorine theropod. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 32, 922-925.
• Frey, E. and Martill, D. M. 1998. Soft tissue preservation in a specimen of Pterodactylus kochi (Wagner) from the Upper Jurassic of Germany. Neuhes Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie, Abhandlugen, 210, 421-441.
• Habib, M.B. 2008. Comparative evidence for quadrupedal launch in pterosaurs. Zitteliana, B28, 161-168.
• 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.
• Sharov, A. G. 1971. [New flying Mesozoic reptiles from Kazahstan and Kirgizija]. Transactions of the Paleontological Institute, Academy of Sciences, USSR, 130, 104-113. [In Russian]
• Witton, M. P. 2013. Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy. Princeton University Press, 336 pp. In press.
• 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.
• Xu, X., Wang, X. L., and Wu, X. C. 1999. A dromaeosaurid dinosaur with a filamentous integument from the Yixian Formation of China. Nature, 401, 262-266.

Can you identify this cast?

Some of you may know that I've been trying to track down all manner of 'missing' Solnhofen pterosaurs. All kinds of specimens have been sold off over the years and are in collections all over the world. Many of these are 'known' to curators and visitors, but they don't realise that the material has never been described in the literature and is not readily known to the scientific (or at least pterosaur) community. If any of you do know of pterosaurs languishing in collections that have not been described, do please let me know in the comments.

The flip-side of this, is that things turn up that need to be identified. The other day Matthew Parkes, a curator in Dublin, e-mailed with with this photo. It's a plaster cast of a pterodactyloid pterosaur from the Solnhofen and labeled as being Pterodactylus longicollum (which has only just got a new generic name of Ardeadactylus). This seemes reasonable, the unusually long and tube-like cervical centra of this taxon are visible at the upper left part of this cast and the size and gross proportions are about right (even if few details are visible). However, Matthew wanted to know what original specimen this could be a cast *of* and that's where I'm stuck. I've seen most Ardedactylus specimens and don't recognise it, and I've checked through my extensive collection of photos and papers of all manner of Solnhofen material and can't find a match.

The records in Dublin show that it has been in their catalogue since 1891, so it's at least this old and probably rather older. The catalogue suggest it may be figured as a plate in von Meyer's 1854 Neues Jarbuch paper, but I don't have, and can't find, a copy. Matthew suspects it may be a lost specimen and in which case, this may be the only remainder. Of course if we can work out which it pertains to, we can check at the original institute, but the first step eludes us. So, anyone recognise it? Has it been spotted in Frankfurt or Haarlem? Or is there a figure in some obscure Wellnhofer paper I've missed?

Any help is welcome, and I'm still on the lookout for other Solnhofen pterosaurs, so please let me know of any you've spotted. Thanks and good hunting.