Blue Collar Scientist

One of the things I emphasize to my students is that a lot of the better research going on today is interdisciplinary, in which scientists from completely different fields collaborate to study a phenomenon and the scientific results are improved from the participation of folks that have different knowledge and different backgrounds.

Yesterday I spent a little time in my own cross-disciplinary scientific world. I wasn’t really contributing anything, I was soaking up the awesome coolness that is Tom Kaye.

Tom’s a sort of modern gentleman-scientist, of the sort that nearly went extinct shortly after Darwin’s time when the cost of doing scientific research began to require funding that was not available even to the very rich. I’ve known Tom by reputation for years; back in 2000, he had a telescope set up at a friend’s observatory where he made the first amateur astronomer detection of an exoplanet using the radial velocity method. He’s also the guy that got hold of Norm Oberle’s 1-meter mirror blank; I knew Norm back when I lived in Ohio, have seen the blank, and knew that someone had bought it, but never knew who until I went to dinner with Tom a few nights ago.

Tom’s neck-deep in astronomy, but he’s also a paleontologist, and he’s specifically looking at a possible connection between gamma-ray bursters, the K-T boundary extinction, and the Chicxulub impactor. To support this research, Tom has a bunch of fossils, K-T boundary samples, microscopes, and atomic composition analysis equipment.

And when I say microscopes, I mean microscopes. He’s got everything from a simple stereo microscope, to a couple of the nicest compound binocular microscopes ever made, and even two electron microscopes. We slapped a spider leg into one of the electron microscopes and took a look at it in all its hairy, spikey glory. Really cool stuff - I’ve never had a chance to play with a microscope before.

Tom was kind enough to donate a bunch of hadrosaur teeth to me for use in my educational programs, along with a sauropod stomach stone and some 35 million year old fossilized poop. And we’re going to work at the beginning of next school year on putting together some brief educational videos for use in the classroom, and maybe even set him up so that he can visit my classes through webcam to talk about his research.

It’s amazing the people you meet in my line of work.

The BBC, LiveScience, and others are reporting on the discovery of a new pterosaur found in north-east China. The find also confirms a prediction of evolution. From the BBC story:

“It is very likely that this pterosaur represents a lineage of arboreal creatures that lived and foraged for insects in the gymnosperm forest canopy of north-east China during the Early Cretaceous,” the researchers write in PNAS.

They conclude this from curved bones in the feet, which are similar to those found in perching birds. This pterosaur is also smaller than most others, of a size that makes sense for perching on branches. Cladistics suggest that this pterosaur was close to the ancestors of the giant pterosaurs, including Quetzalcoatlus, which had a 30-foot wingspan. Thus the new fossil is transitional, being in some ways less derived than later specimens but more derived than the pterosaur’s hypothesized concestor.

“It is interesting to see some clear arboreal adaptations in this species,” said [Smithsonian paleontologist Matthew] Carrano, who was not on the research team.

“It confirms a suspicion we had, that pterosaurs were more diverse in their habitats than we knew from the [fossil] record.”

Let’s be a bit more direct here, in the interests of effective science outreach and clear communication. The notion that pterosaurs were more diverse (in their habitats, or in their phenotype - both apply) than the fossil record previously demonstrated is a prediction of evolutionary theory, not merely a suspicion of paleontologists. There are actually two predictions here, both of which are confirmed by this fossil.

1. Evolution predicts that some species will be absent from the (known) fossil record, and that some of them, if they were known, would illuminate the evolutionary development of their lineage. Here we have an example of a fossil which was unknown until recently, and which does just this. Score one for evolution.
2. Evolution makes the more specific prediction that, when you have lots of fossils of lots of species with specialized adaptations - such as pterosaur fossils - that less derived species will exist earlier in the lineage. Not only that, but it says that most of the characteristics that are common to most or all of the more specialized species will be present in the less derived one. Again, from what’s been published, this fossil confirms this prediction.

Seems I’m on a paleontology kick lately. Undoubtedly this is a result of spending so much time in museums over the last month, looking at fossils. Fair warning - there’s at least one more of these in the pipeline. I’ve had some interesting information and photos from the PI of the crayfish fossils I reported on earlier that I’m working up.