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 [↩]