Blue Collar Scientist

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.