Blue Collar Scientist

Virtual-friend of BCS Zach Miller has posted his impressions of the NOVA Microraptor documentary that I wrote about a couple weeks ago in what has somehow become one of the most popular posts on this blog. With Zach’s thoughts on his blog, you shouldn’t be wasting your time reading what I had to say, although it is worth reading Zach and Scott’s comments there.

My favorite bit from Zach’s blog:

Norell et al. create their skeleton by measuring and averaging the lengths and structure of every single bone in the animal’s body, based on more than 30 specimens (I was unaware that so many were known!). Martin uses a single specimen that was crushed by a Cretaceous steamroller.

Not surprisingly, Norell’s team creates what appears to be a normal theropod skeleton, while Martin’s model looks like a paper airplane.

Hilarious. And dead-on accurate.

Microraptor fossil. The image is from Wikimedia Commons, where it is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license. Unfortunately, no author name is provided.

I’ve just finished watching the latest Nova, which aired last night (all praise be to TIVO). The episode was about Microraptor.

The early part of the documentary set up some controversy by contrasting the ideas of Larry Martin with those of various AMNH paleontologists and staff, and their collaborators at other institutions. Martin proposes that the development of flight from ground-dwelling dinosaurs¹ doesn’t make much sense, without really giving any compelling reasons. He also says that this model is necessary for the evolution of birds from dinosaurs, and again, I don’t fully understand why he thinks that. As I’m fond of saying here, just because you say something doesn’t make it true. I’m unable to think of a reason that arboreal dinosaurs developing flight means that birds can’t have evolved from dinosaurs.

He did make a reproduction of Microraptor which featured splayed femurs. The documentary covered pretty convincingly why the reproduction was not plausible - even I could see that Martin’s pelvis was flatter than a pancake. The documentary covered the similarity of the splayed rear-limb model to lizard anatomy, but I don’t think I really understood why Martin believed - even if everything else he said was true, which I wasn’t convinced of - that Microraptor could not have secondarily splayed rear limbs.

Anyone?

The AMNH team certainly seemed to be doing the better science from what Nova presented. Not only was their model constructed with some pretty rigorous methods, they recruited a multidisciplinary team of experts in various fields and hiked out to a wind tunnel to test it. It made Martin’s approach look a bit parochial. The latter half of the documentary seemed to abandon any further coverage of Martin’s work.

The wind tunnel scene was pretty interesting. I’ve been part of similar groups of scientists trying out and testing new ideas, and what Nova showed is pretty much how scientists act - on the whole very competitive, but very collegial and with few exceptions willing to admit it when the data proves them wrong. As usual, Nova was well worth watching.

1. the “ground-up” model, as he puts it, which for some reason has me picturing dinosaurs flying into airplane propellers end ending up as ingredients in my hamburger [↩]

I am sitting in the airport in Portland, Oregon, fresh from an outing to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. I was fortunate to fly first class from Anchorage to Orlando and back for the princely sum of twelve dollars (thanks to frequent-flier miles), but the cost of getting such a good ticket for such a good price is a lengthy ten-hour layover in Portland. Careful advance research revealed that the exhibit of China’s dinosaur and bird fossils, called China’s Ancient Giants, had opened at OMSI just a week ago.

Naturally, I left the airport and hopped a cab for this. I even packed my carry-on very carefully - with a maximum of, uh, minimalism, so that I could comfortably spend the day at OMSI.

First, let me report that OMSI gets crowded on a Saturday. Incredibly crowded. I stood in line for about twenty minutes to pay my admission. About 3/4 of the human beings in the place were under 12 years of age, and to them all the other people in the joint were completely invisible. Most of the kiddies were accompanied by what I presume were their genetic forebears - I deliberately don’t say parents, because from what I could see the reason many of them had brought their children to the museum was to preserve their living rooms from destruction by transferring the damage to a public place that had a high probability of overstimulating their unruly progeny.

Well, it’s my bad for going on a Saturday.

The quality of the exhibit was decidedly mixed. Many of the specimens were casts, and I have no problem with that - in fact, as I’ve said elsewhere, I think exhibiting casts of megafaunal fossils is a good thing. The thing is, they have to be good casts. Some of these weren’t. There was at least one fossil with most of the knee joint surface wiped out by what I presume was an internal support, which was colored as though it were bone, and which made the whole knee anatomy suspect to me. Also, casts should be declared as such, and these weren’t. Only the actual fossils were disclosed, and I’m pretty sure there were a few actual fossils I saw that weren’t labeled as such (because you wouldn’t mount casts with such heavy ironwork, I wouldn’t think). Finally, the specimens were poorly interpreted by the signs. The curator should go check out the Orlando Science Center and see how it should be done. I was grateful that I had carried a lot of my own dinosaur knowledge into the place and didn’t have to rely on the signs.

On the other hand, they did have actual fossils of actual Liaoning birds and feathered dinosaurs, which were most impressive. These were, by and large, in large display cases off to the side of the large mounts, and relatively neglected by the children. That’s a mixed blessing, if you ask me. It was great that I was able to take long looks at these fossils without getting jostled out of the way by an insistent seven year old boy whose mother is training her son for a career in the demolition derby. But it is a tremendous lost opportunity to not have children seeing, and understanding, these fossils that were only discovered in the last 15 years or so.

In some of these fossils, the wishbone was conspicuously visible. In others, it was conspicuously absent. Right there you’ve got an accessible educational opportunity, but most of the adults I chatted with about the specimens didn’t know what the difference was and couldn’t have cared less.

Still - I’ve now seen fossils of feathered dinosaurs. With obvious feathers, right there in the rock, where anyone can see them and say “hey, that’s a feather.”

That’s way cool.

I’ll also give them full credit for hanging some cladograms of dinosaurs, and for having some excellent interpretive material on dinosaur hips and pelvises. This is fundamental evolutionary information, right out of a 101 class (and fully understandable by sixth graders), and it is always nice to see an exhibit like this take the opportunity to do some teaching about details such as these.

The rest of the museum was well designed and I think better maintained than most examples in the genre. All of the little electrical gadgets that I played with were in good working order, which is not the norm at most science and technology museums. They also had a substantial amount of floor space devoted to ecology, and human anatomy and development. They also have a planetarium and something called an Omnimax movie theater, neither of which I sampled.

It was a great way to spend an afternoon - especially considering the alternative of sitting around in an airport all day, but it was good in its own right. I’d recommend the museum to anyone in Portland, or anyone who visits the city. I’d also recommend not going on the weekend - museum staff assures me that today was typically busy for a Saturday.

I was driving through Orlando, Florida the other day and saw a billboard advertising the Orlando Science Center, so, on a whim, I decided to go. (When you are nearly 4,000 miles from home, you might as well take advantage of these opportunities.)

On the night I went (January 20), the Center was having a big video game convention, so it was crawling with hyped-up overstimulated teenagers who were, by and large, not interested in the exhibits proper. But this didn’t bother me too much - the gaming was going on mainly in the large atrium and in some meeting rooms and hallways, and the exhibit halls were just fine - in fact, it was as though I was there on a slow night.

The Center has the usual exhibits pitched at kids that seek to demonstrate forces, material strength, elastic rebound, electricity, conversion of energy, and other physical concepts with ingenious hands-on devices. They do a nice job with that, and I have nothing bad to say about them.

They also have an excellent cabinet of partial fossils, including some very old mammal skulls, which was absolutely fascinating. I’ve never seen mammal fossils that old before.

But what really stood out was their dinosaur hall. It was absolutely outstanding.

They do not have an especially large space devoted to the topic, but they’ve made very good use of what they have. Most of the mounted skeletons are high-quality casts. They have a cast of Stan, the the Tyrannosaurus rex (BHI 3033), and it is sufficiently good to easily discern the broken ribs and fused cervical vertebra that this skeleton is famous for. It stands as a tribute to the Black Hills Institute’s work (who I presume provided the cast). It is mounted in what I understand to be a more or less proper theropod posture - the spine and tail are roughly horizontal, and although the head is elevated nobody will confuse the posture with that of the old tripod pose with the animal balanced on its tail. It is mounted with a Triceratops in way that suggests interaction.

Remarkably, they also have a cast of the Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis called “Sandy” (the original is on display at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center. Sandy’s skeleton was partially preserved, making it unique in the genus, and this apparently makes Orlando Science Center’s display more up-to-date than the Wikipedia entry on this dinosaur. In any case, it was a great thrill to see a mounted cast of this very interesting dinosaur.

Other mounts include a cast of the hadrosaur Edmontosaurus annectens, a cast Xiphactinus audax (a big teleost fish, not a dinosaur, this specimen found flattened in the fossil bed and laboriously pieced back together in 3-D), a cast Platecarpus ictericus (a mosasaur, a very long, serpentine marine reptile), a cast Elasmosaurus platyurus (a plesiosaur, another long-necked marine reptile), a Clidastes propython (another mosasaur), and a cast Hesperornis gracilis (a late Cretaceous bird). I may be overlooking a few mounts, but just what is mentioned here makes the exhibit very impressive indeed.

(I am, by the way, very much in favor of the disclosed use of casts, particularly in a museum that attracts a lot of kids. Not that casts are cheap by any means - but they are at least not irreplaceable. The culture of mounting skeletons has at times resulted in exhibit curators conning the viewer by completing a partial skeleton with bones from other specimens, and sometimes even other species. I recall seeing an Allosaur once that had at least ten bones in the leg and foot that were out of place. My observation with casts is that exhibits tend to be - on average - more honest, with replacements more likely to be noted. But this is also true of recently-updated mounts of skeletons, so it may just be a “standards and practices” thing.)

Rounding out the collection is an excellent cast of the famous Oviraptor nest that contained a preserved embryo (see “A Theropod Dinosaur Embryo and the Affinities of the Flaming Cliffs Dinosaur Eggs” by Mark Norell et al, in Science, sometime in 1994). Oviraptor was discovered on a dinosaur nest by Roy Chapman Andrews in 1924, and was famously presumed to have been an eater of eggs. By 1977, someone had noticed that the jaw was awfully strong for such a purpose, and discussion ensued about what the diet of Oviraptor really was; but the 1994 paper really blew the lid off things and established that Andrews’ Oviraptor was actually caring for its eggs. The nest that is cast for the Orlando Science Center, with its embryo, established that Oviraptor embryonic development was strikingly similar to that of birds. Oviraptor is considered the most bird-like non-bird dinosaur and therefore its existence is a significant confirmation of evolutionary theory.

They’ve also got a cabinet of small specimens that includes a Pterosaurid skull (labeled Tapejara wellnhoferi, and not a cast, though I thought only one skull of the species had been found). It also included two bird skulls, one toothed (Hesperornis gracilis, again), the other toothless and slightly hook-billed (Paleospheniscus). This is not entirely surprising, since Hesperornis is Cretaceous, or 65+ mya, while Paleospheniscus is from the Miocene, 20 to 5.3 mya. As the theory of evolution predicts, the more recent bird shares more attributes with modern specimens. So right there in that cabinet were two of the “transitional fossils” that the religious extremist evolution deniers swear by the name of their alleged god don’t exist. *

They also had one of the most kick-ass posters I’ve ever seen (A Correlated History of Earth, published by Pan Terra) positioned in the cabinet to provide a context - geographic, deep timeline, and and evolutionary - for the various specimens. I’ve rarely seen a more information-dense tool and I’ve already ordered a copy for myself.

The exhibit was unashamedly evolutionary. There must be a lot of temptation to buckle under to the so-called “controversy” and soft-pedal evolution in a museum that sits in the middle of one of the most backwards states since Kansas, but the people that run the Orlando Science Center are doing the right thing. Interpretive signs discuss in some detail the evolutionary implications of the specimens on exhibit, and explain what elements of the specimen’s anatomy has led to which conclusions by the paleontologists and multi-disciplinary scientists who study these creatures. For someone who is a bit of a lay expert, or at least a lay enthusiast, there is sufficient information to put the specimens in context and think about them intelligently. (Being a real geek, I also looked up some details on a couple of the specimens on my Blackberry.)

Anyway - if you are ever in or near Orlando - go visit the Orlando Science Center. This one room is well worth the price of admission. (Which I think was fifteen bucks - this, in the city of the $120 ticket that gets you into entirely artificial corporate-built “attractions.”)

* The Blue Collar Scientist accepts cladistics and the implications of that discipline on the concept of transitional forms.