We still know nearly nothing about synapsid integument

In 2018, I attended a talk about end-Permian ecosystem collapse by Smith et al. (2018) at that year's Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference in Albuquerque. The presenter mentioned a mass Lystrosaurus death site from earliest Triassic South Africa. That in itself is cool, but he offhandedly mentioned some preserved some individuals with mummified skin - …

20 Years of The Future is Wild

[This blog post is a written counterpart to my presentation at Specposium 2022] On June 25, 2022, a little show finished its run on educational TV stations in the UK. At the end of that year, an hour-and-a-half edit version aired on American television. It spawned a multimedia franchise that extended into publishing, museum exhibits, …

Plate tectonics of the far future

As we should all know, the earth's plates are on the move. The theory of plate tectonics is a well-supported mechanism for the movement of the continents in deep time. It explains many prior observations about geology and biogeography, and can be directly observed today via GPS. It makes sense that therefore plate tectonics will …

Cladistic ontogeny of Jiufotang tapejarids

As you probably already know, Sinopterus is a genus of tapejarid pterosaur from the Jiufotang Formation of China. The holotype of Sinopterus dongi was first named by Wang and Zhou (2003). Since then, a bunch of other species of tapejarid from the Jiufotang Formation have been named (incl. Li et al. 2003, Lü et al. …

Specposium 2021

Speculative evolution, aka speculative biology, is a fascinating field. I think it's really neat because it involves integrating creativity and a solid scientific grounding. Apparently a lot of other people think so too, because it's very popular among biology and paleontology enthusiasts on the internet. But there isn't really a centralized spec evo community on …

How to start an ice age

Glaciations are neat - we're currently in one, and the subjects of my undergrad research lived in the previous one, the Late Paleozoic Icehouse. The Phanerozoic has seen three glaciations so far: the Ordovician Glaciation, the Late Paleozoic Icehouse, and the Cenozoic Ice Ages (glaciation, icehouse, and ice age are often used interchangeably). There were …

Random movie review: Bringing Up Baby

I recently watched Bringing Up Baby, a 1938 screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks. Screwball comedies were common in the 30s-40s, taking a traditional romance story and turning it into a farce. Critics liked this movie, but it only did modestly at the box office. Its reputation has grown into it with time, however; …

Fossil Cycad National Monument

Now somewhere in the black mining hills of Dakota, there lay a rich Cretaceous fossil plant site. The tale of this site is a tale of obsession, "petrified pineapples", theft, and one of the very few U.S. National Monuments that has not only been decommissioned, but also lost pretty much all protections it had. That's …

The Dinosauroid sheds its feathers on our culture

Ah, the dinosauroid. At once loved and hated, the idea of troodontids evolving into sapient, even humanoid beings has probably piqued many of our interests at some point. Paleontologist Dale Russell's "lizard man" dinosauroid is the most infamous and well-known expression of the concept, but there are many other instances of the idea being explored, …

A Turonian pterosaur turnover?

The early Cretaceous had a great diversity of pterosaurs. All four major groups of pterodactyloid - Archaeopterodactyloidea, Dsungaripteridae, Pteranodontoidea, and Azhdarchoidea - are present, and very diverse (Barrett et al., 2008). Even a few anurognathids were still present until at least the Aptian. By the end of the Cretaceous, this diversity had been reduced to …