AMERICAN
PALEONTOLOGIST
VOLUME 16, NUMBER 3
FALL 2008
A MAGAZINE OF EARTH SCIENCE PUBLISHED BY THE PALEONTOLOGICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTION AND ITS MUSEUM OF THE EARTH
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FROM THE DIRECTOR
Mastodons, Science, and Education
By Warren D. Allmon
In the late 1990s, as PRI was making plans for building the
Museum of the Earth, we decided to focus on the fossil and
geological history of the northeastern U.S. The largest and
most spectacular fossil animal in this region is undoubtedly
the American mastodon, Mammut americanum, and so we
needed one. But where do you get a mastodon? Almost everything, of course, is available on the internet, but if possible, we wanted a specimen from New York State. We knew
that they existed, but none of our sister institutions had one
to spare. So we let it be known that we were seeking a new
mastodon. Moral of the story: be careful what you ask for.
The results of this chain of events are the theme of this
issue of American Paleontologist. Between Summer 1999 and
Fall 2001, PRI – in collaboration with Cornell University –
excavated three separate mastodon finds that spanned nearly
the entire breadth of New York State. These excavations produced two partial mastodon skeletons, a partial mammoth
skeleton, and one of the most complete and well-preserved
mastodons ever found: the Hyde Park mastodon.
But the bones were just the beginning. A completely unanticipated combination of quirky institutional and personal
relationships, internet fossil sales, and the vagaries of media
coverage led PRI and Cornell into a multi-year, half-milliondollar odyssey that included thousands of volunteers, a Discovery Channel documentary, coverage by The New York
Times, NBC, NPR, People magazine, and newspapers in Taiwan, more than 50,000 people in a hands-on science education project, and scientific studies that could set the standard
for mastodon research for many years to come.
The staff at PRI have been wanting and waiting to produce this issue of AP for years. Its appearance now coincides
with the long-awaited publication of an issue of PRI’s scientific journal Palaeontographica Americana devoted to the
results of research on these three mastodon discoveries. This
476-page volume contains papers written by specialists from
around the world on a multitude of topics related to these
extinct mammals and their world – from the plants, insects,
and mollusks they lived with, to how they lived and died,
to the peat and mud in which they were preserved. PRI assembled this unique group of experts to “make the most”
scientifically from what began as a project about public exhibit and education. It is profoundly satisfying to all who
worked on this project at PRI over the past nine years that we
managed to meld research and public outreach in this way,
and we hope to continue to make this kind of connection
between science and education in the years ahead.
Also in this issue, we highlight the recent extraordinary
growth of PRI’s already very successful Education Department, now renamed the Outreach Department. Even while
we planned and built the Museum of the Earth (which opened
five years ago this September), PRI had been building a reputation as a provider of high-quality educational materials in
informal (outside the classroom) Earth Science education. A
combination of modest private and government grants supported these efforts, but never to a level sufficient to take any
initiative to a national level. In Summer 2007, however, the
National Science Foundation awarded almost $2.6 million in
grants to PRI for a variety of informal Earth Science outreach
projects that, over the next five years, will reach hundreds of
thousands of students of all ages across the country.
With this NSF support, under the guidance of our tireless Associate Director for Outreach, Dr. Rob Ross, the PRI
outreach effort will take our very popular Teacher-Friendly
Guide series to regional geology to all areas of the continental
U.S., starting next year with the south-central region (Texas,
Oklahoma, and vicinity). As part of the Assembling the Tree
of Life Project – a massive, multi-part research effort to determine the evolutionary relationships of all living things – PRI
will be developing a new traveling exhibit and accompanying
curricular materials (also in the Teacher-Friendly Guide format) on teaching evolution using clams, which can be easily
found at the beach or purchased in the supermarket. In collaboration with Cornell’s Department of Education, we are
developing materials to help teachers teach about evolution
using fossils in their local rocks, no matter where they might
be. And, in collaboration with Cornell Cooperative Extension, we are prototyping an approach to teaching and learning about Earth’s climate via educators in the extension and
4H networks that exist in virtually every county in America.
Scientific research is, of course, hugely valuable for its
own sake, and for what it can teach us about nature and how
to manipulate it. This was the fundamental basis on which
PRI was founded more than 75 years ago. It is also the major
focus of great research universities like Cornell. But as science
assumes a larger and larger role in our lives, and as nature
changes with increasing rapidity, it is increasingly incumbent
on science – even while it pursues fundamental knowledge,
be it on clams or mastodons – and the institutions that carry
it out, to engage the nonscientific public, to encourage them
to experience the thrill that we do, and to give them more
tools to make the decisions that increasingly affect us all. This
is the fundamental basis on which PRI operates today, and
we are proud to be able to assist Cornell in modest ways to
do the same.
Paleontological Research Institution
FOUNDED 1932
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Officers
President Rodney Feldmann, Kent, OH
Vice President Priscilla Browning, Ithaca, NY
Secretary Philip Bartels, Riverside, CT
Members
Loren Babcock, Columbus, OH
Philip Bartels, Riverside, CT
Larry Baum, Ithaca, NY
Priscilla Browning, Ithaca, NY
Harold Craft, Berkshire, NY
Helene Dillard, Ithaca, NY
Rodney Feldmann, Kent, OH
Karl Flessa, Tucson, AZ
Linda C. Ivany, Erieville, NY
Teresa Jordan, Ithaca, NY
Stephan Loewentheil, New York, NY
Robert Mackenzie, Trumansburg, NY
James Moore, Rochester, NY
D. Jeffrey Over, Geneseo, NY
Jennifer Liber Raines, Buffalo, NY
Phil Reilly, Concord, MA
Dale Springer, Bloomsburg, PA
Edward Wolf, Trumansburg, NY
William Young, Canandaigua, NY
Trustees Emeritus
John D. Allen, Syracuse, NY
James Cordes, Ithaca, NY
J. Thomas Dutro, Jr., Washington, DC
Shirley K. Egan, Aurora, NY
Howard Hartnett, Moravia, NY
Robert T. Horn, Jr., Ithaca, NY
Patricia H. Kelley, Southport, SC
Harry Lee, Jacksonville, FL
Harry A. Leffingwell, Laguna Beach, CA
Amy McCune, Ithaca, NY
Samuel T. Pees, Meadville, PA
Edward B. Picou, Jr., New Orleans, LA
John Pojeta, Rockville, MD
Philip Proujansky, Ithaca, NY
Mary M. Shuford, Brooklyn, NY
Constance Soja, Hamilton, NY
James E. Sorauf, Tarpon Springs, FL
John C. Steinmetz, Bloomington, IN
Peter B. Stifel, Easton, MD
William P. S. Ventress, Lexington, OK
Art Waterman, Metarie, LA
Thomas E. Whiteley, Rochester, NY
Staff
Warren D. Allmon, Director
Leon Apgar, Maintenance and Operations Specialist
Sara Auer, Education Programs Manager
Carlyn Buckler, Assistant to Associate Director for Outreach
Scott Callan, Associate Director for Institutional Advancement
Eric Chapman, Exhibits Manager
Sarah Chicone, Director of Exhibits
Kelly Cronin, Assistant to the Director
James Dake, PRI-Cayuga Nature Center Collaborations Coordinator
Sarah Degen, Development Operations Manager
Gregory Dietl, Director of Collections
Don Duggan-Haas, Education Research Associate
Brian Gollands, Web Developer
Michael Griswold, Facilities Manager
John Gurche, Artist-in-Residence
Billy Kepner, Director of Marketing
Richard Kissel, Director of Teacher Programs
Tamsin Leavy, Museum Operations Manager
Michael Lucas, Associate Director for Administration
Paula M. Mikkelsen, Associate Director for Science and Director of Publications
Sam Moody, Assistant Director of Museum Operations/Volunteer Coordinator
Judith Nagel-Myers, Collections Manager
Alicia Reynolds, Director of Museum Operations
Rob Ross, Associate Director for Outreach
Samantha Sands, Director of Public Programs
Trisha Smrecak, Evolution and Global Change Projects Manager
AMERICAN
PALEONTOLOGIST
VOL.
16, NO. 3, FALL 2008
Paula M. Mikkelsen, Editor
Warren D. Allmon, Director
Other Contributors
Stan Balducci
John A. Catalani
Peter Dodson
Dan Fisher
Michael A. Gibson
Elizabeth Humbert
Patricia H. Kelley
Richard A. Kissel
Olivia J. Rebert
Samantha Sands
Verity Whalen
On the cover: The fully mounted Hyde Park Mastodon
oversees the Quaternary world at the Museum of the Earth.
Photograph by Rachel Philipson.
Come visit our
American Paleontologist is published quarterly (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter) for its members by the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI), 1259 Trumansburg
Road, Ithaca, New York 14850 USA, Tel. (607) 273-6623, Fax (607) 273-6620. Individual membership is $35.00 per year, including American Paleontologist subscription. Individual subscriptions are also available for $30 per year. Advertising information is available on request by calling PRI ext. 20 or by emailing publications@
museumoftheearth.org. ISSN 1066-8772. We are not responsible for return of or response to unsolicited manuscripts. Information about PRI and the Museum of the
Earth is available on the worldwide web at http://www.priweb.org and www.museumoftheearth.org. Printed on recycled paper by Arnold Printing, Ithaca, New York.
© 2008 Paleontological Research Institution.
AMERICAN
PALEONTOLOGIST
A MAGAZINE OF EARTH SCIENCE PUBLISHED BY THE PALEONTOLOGICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTION AND ITS MUSEUM OF THE EARTH
VOLUME
16, NUMBER 3, FALL 2008
IN THIS ISSUE
FEATURE ARTICLES
New Ideas About Old Bones
18
by Daniel Fisher
.
Mastodons in Their Backyards
23
by Warren D. Allmon
.
Climate Change 101
10
by Elizabeth Humbert
.
From the Director
At the Museum of the Earth
Briefly Noted books of interest
1
4
12
FOCUS ON EDUCATION
18
23
Paleonews
14
by Olivia J. Rebert
.
From the Membership: Archelon & Chesapecten
16
by Stan Balducci
.
Fossil Focus: American Mastodon
17
by Verity Whalen
.
Dodson on Dinosaurs: Polish Women in the Gobi
30
by Peter Dodson
.
An Amateur’s Perspective: Cephalopod Intelligence
35
by John A. Catalani
.
The Nature of Science: What’s New, Pussycat?
40
by Richard A. Kissel
.
Book reviews:
Evolution’s Embarrassment No Longer: Prothero’s Fossils Say YES!
43
by Patricia H. Kelley
00
The Evolution-Creationism Controversy Encyclopedic Playbook
45
by Michael A. Gibson
00
AT T H E M U S E U M O F T H E E A RT H
and the Paleontological Research Institution
More New Staff Members!
PRI and the Museum of the Earth continue
to grow! Thanks in part to new programming
through grants aquired last fall, we welcome
another group of exciting new staff members.
They are all talented, interesting people whom
you can meet at your next Museum of the
Earth event! Please join us in welcoming them!
Kelly Cronin, Assistant
to the Director, was a
member of the Cornell
class of 2008, graduating with a BA in Ecology
and Evolutionary Biology. Assisting Director
Warren Allmon and other staff with their day-today duties is a challenging task, and Kelly meets
it all with a smile. She is
looking forward to an exciting job here at PRI.
Don Duggan-Haas, Education Research Associate, has a PhD in science
education. He is working
on the pedagogy of the
Teacher-Friendly Guides
to geology and associated teacher professional
development for each
region of the US. He is
especially involved in
“virtual fieldwork,” to
connect curricula to realworld geology.
4 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
Scott Callan, Associate
Director for Institutional
Advancement, has an
MA in interdisciplinary
liberal arts from Dartmouth, and has worked
at a number of museums, including Colonial
Williamsburg where he
wore 18th century costumes to work everyday.
He is eager to help PRI
and the Museum of the
Earth continue to grow.
Tricia Smrecak, Global
Change and Evolution
Project Manager, has
an MS in invertebrate
paleontology from the
University of Cincinnati,
where she studied the
organisms that encrust
on brachiopods. Tricia
is coordinating outreach
efforts around our important outreach initiatives on global change
and evolution.
James Dake, PRI-Cayuga Nature Center Collaborations Coordinator,
comes from Michigan
with a BS in Education
and a major in Earth Science. He is running day
camps at CNC, writing
a field guide to the CNC
property, and developing outreach programs
between the two organizations. James is also a
talented musician.
Eric Chapman, Exhibits Manager, holds a BA
from Cornell in Geological Sciences and an MS
from University of Colorado in Museum Studies. His master’s research
focused on tree fern casts
from the late Cretaceous
of Montana. Among his
responsibilities are the
update and maintenance
of the Museum’s permanent displays.
AT T H E M U S E U M O F T H E E A RT H
and the Paleontological Research Institution
Tracey M. Roselle Jr. (1918-2008)
Summer Symposium 2008
Tracy Rozelle, one of the first and most loyal volunteers of
the modern era at PRI, died peacefully on July 11 at Hospicare in Ithaca, at the age of 90. Tracy began volunteering at
PRI in August 1992, the same month that Director Warren
Allmon arrived in Ithaca. He was ever-after a hard-working
docent and irrepressible booster for PRI. His strength and
love was talking to people, and he never met a stranger. In the
In late July, more than 40 regional paleontologists and fossil enthusiasts gathered at Museum of the Earth for the Second Annual Summer Symposium. Last year’s event, called
PaleoHomecoming in recognition of PRI’s 75th anniversary
year, began the tradition. Besides hearing contributed talks
and posters by participants and networking with colleagues,
friends, and a wonderfully large crop of students, this year’s
highlight was a keynote address by Dr. Niles Eldredge, Curator in the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum
of Natural History in New York City. Eldredge is best known
for his research on trilobites and for the revolutionary theory
of punctuated equilibrium that he proposed with Dr. Stephen J. Gould in 1972. He also curated AMNH’s exhibit
“Darwin” which opened in New York in 2005 and is now
traveling the world. Eldredge spoke on “Darwin, Paleontology and Evolution: the Beagle Years and its Aftermath.” Friday’s academic activities were followed by a full day in the
field with Dr. Carl Brett
of the University of Cincinnati, examining local
Devonian fossils and geology. Watch for this event
again next summer and let
us know if you’d like to be
part of it!
years before the Museum of the Earth, Tracy toured countless
visitors through the old PRI building, sat at countless booths
at fairs and festivals, and talked up PRI wherever he went.
He was highly artistic and used his ceramic talents to create
a replica of a baby dinosaur for a temporary exhibit of real
dinosaur eggs at PRI in 1994.
Tracy was born in New York City. Although he showed
great promise as an artist at a young age, he became a successful aerospace engineer during WWII. Later he helped design
the cockpit of the first airplane that broke the sound barrier. In Michigan with his young family, Tracy began his long
career as engineer and information analyst for various large
companies including Chrysler and General Dynamics.
In midlife, Tracy began pursuing his love of archeology
and paleontology. He organized digs and served as President of the Michigan Paleontological Society. As a docent at
Cranbrook Institute of Science, he participated in local early
American and Native American digs. A highlight of his paleontological “career” was a dinosaur excavation in Montana
with paleontologist John (Jack) Horner. In Ithaca, Tracy also
volunteered at the Sciencenter, the Dewitt Historical Society,
the Chamber of Commerce, RSVP (Retired Senior Volunteer Program), and the BOCES Russian Exchange Program.
For his many volunteer activities, he was given the Tompkins
Trust Volunteer of the Year Award in 2002.
Tracy’s family generously suggested that memorial gifts be directed to PRI and the Museum of the Earth.
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 5
AT T H E M U S E U M O F T H E E A RT H
and the Paleontological Research Institution
Museum of the Earth Story Contest Winners
We recently presented school children with the following
challenge: “Imagine that you have discovered a new fossil.
Tell us in pictures or words about your discovery.” As always,
the entries were many, and the choices were difficult. Winners
receive a two-year family membership plus two passes to a
local fossil collecting field trip, and have their story published
in AP. The Museum of the Earth Story Contest is part of the
Community Accessibility Program. This season’s contest was
made possible by The Ithaca Journal.
Grades 0-6
By Riley Metzler, age 5, Ithaca, New York
This is a duck-billed T-Rex pteranodon. It liked to fly in the
sky. It was discovered in my back yard in Fall Creek. There
were other fossils in there – a trilobite, a horn coral, and a
lots-of-lines sea shell. It lived for 800 million years. He was
flying in the sky all his life and then the pterodactyl crashed
into him. The duck-billed T-Rex pteranodon crashed into
him at 500 miles a second. The one we found was a duckbilled T-Rex pteranodon baby – the grown-up is still alive. He
flew all around the world only eating egg shells. By accident
he flew up into the sky so high he went into outer space and
then he flew back down to us. The End.
Grades 7-9
Digging for the Jurassic Times
By Seoyeon Ju, age 9, Ithaca, New York
This afternoon, we were digging for fossils of dinosaurs. We
kept on digging as the hot Montana sun blazed down on
us in the Rocky Mountains. We decided to have a break. I
was eating my sandwich when I saw something very unusual.
Dinosaur footprints were covering the path up to a rocky
cliff. I decided to have a look up there and see if I could
find something new. I hiked up the steep cliff. Suddenly I
saw a rattlesnake hissing at me with his forked tongue and
6 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
rattling his tail. Then the snake went up the cliff and rested
underneath a rock. I followed the snake. I passed his rock
and saw an incredible sight. A fossil was sticking out of rocks
and pebbles. Luckily, I had brought my tools and camera so
I could go to work right away. I brushed and chipped away
gravel and dust. After a while, I found out it was a complete
skeleton! I was fascinated by its shape and size. I knew I needed
help, so I went to the edge of the cliff and saw my friends. I
shouted, “Hey guys – I found a dinosaur – help me get this
uncovered!” My friends heard me and came up the steep cliff.
They stood around the skeleton with their mouths hanging
open. Then we all got to work. After we dug for about an
hour, we finally saw the entire dinosaur. The most surprising
thing was that there was a piece of decaying skin left on the
dinosaur’s leg. It was brown and rough. However, there was
one problem. No one could identify this dinosaur. We all
knew it was a carnivore, because we saw huge needle-like
teeth in the mouth. The entire skeleton was 11 m long. We
decided to name it the Triosauras. We called it that because it
had three long sharp claws on its hands and feet. We all went
back down to wrap it up in plaster. When we were back up
with the plaster, we started wrapping. When we finished, we
carefully carried it back down, put it in our truck, and went
back to the museum, feeling very proud. The End
Grades 10+
The Fossil in the Sand
By Liane Linehan, age 14, The Woodlands, Texas
The glaring sun rains down iron beams onto the desolate land
below. Creatures of this wasteland waste no time in avoiding
the infinite flames; they all seek the shadows of shade and
shelter to shield them from the shining sun. The sand and
rock of the Earth give off a pale misty glow – a symbol that
night is buried, dawn is dead, and the reign of midday has
begun.
And here I find myself, covered in dust and sand from
when the wind blew strong this morning, although I doubt
it would do that now, or else the sun will kill it. The water
in my canteen seems to evaporate like smoke and I’ll swear
my watch is lying if it continues to insist it is only 11:14. Of
all the kings of time, surely the dictatorship of midday is the
most tyrannous.
As the sun continues to tediously rise into the sky, I find
myself, like the creatures that fled long before me, seeking
the coolness of the shadows. But unlike the critters that find
home in this desert biome, I require more than a rock or a
cactus. Finally after several minutes of searching, I find the
shade I require in the form of a beaten, raggedy old bush,
which I checked thrice for snakes and scorpions using the
forked end of my crowbar, before sitting down beside it –
resting in its thin shadow.
Perhaps I may not have seen it, perhaps I would have
overlooked, perhaps if that mosquito had not bitten me –
I would have not glanced by my foot. In the sand, hidden
before, now in plain view lay what appeared to be stone – but
I knew, somehow I just knew, it was bone. Call it beginner’s
luck, call it amateur’s mistake, call it whatever you will, but
the truth remains – I found it, with little experience or skill.
What I found was a bone of sorts, but I lacked the experience
to identify it. Was it a vertebrae or tail bone that lay before
me in the sand dune? Only time could tell, and time was all
I had. And so, masked by the shade of the tattered bush and
with brush and chisel, I began to remove the stone and sand
that entombed the once breathing creature.
My bone was not alone; there were other ones sleeping
beside it. And after a short while, I began to realize those too
seemed to carry on into a much larger creature. The fossil I
found turned out to be part of the tail, which became obvious
when I backtracked to the ribcage and hind legs. Most of the
tail was missing, probably eroded away and the front right
limb was missing, possibly torn off by a predator. Overall the
skeleton was in fair shape – at least until I accidentally dropped
the crowbar on it, which kind of broke the better of the two
femurs and, well, demolished a couple of ribs – but overall
it was still a pretty good specimen. About that time, I was
carefully removing the pale rock surface from the face of the
animal when I noticed a distinctive bone structure protruding
from the back of the head. It’s a hadrosaur, I said to myself
as I brushed away more sand, maybe a Parasaurolophus. The
fact that it may be a Parasaurolophus did not surprise me; one
of the leaders of the dig had already clearly stated that they
are fairly common in this area. I kept on digging. The sandy
remains of the rock began to congregate on the fossil, until
I could no longer see the shape of its skull. I instinctively
began to wipe away the sand with my hand, which worked
rather well. Suddenly I felt a sharp prick on my index finger.
Fear ran through my body like wildfire as I swiftly retracted
my injured phalange. Thoughts pounded strongly through
my head. Was it a scorpion? It was a scorpion. No, it couldn’t
be a scorpion. I surveyed the ground for sign of my stealthy
attacker. My eyes caught sight of a pointy object which
appeared to be a bit of metal or a piece of glass. This time,
using my brush, I removed the sand residue. And what my
eyes saw my mind could not comprehend…
“Hey! Hey!” I called as I ran down the sandy embankment
nearly tripping a time or two.”Hey!” I called again but no one
turned or answered. Thinking quickly, I ran up to a whitehaired man who had just finished explaining something to
another digger. “Hey” I said out of breath, “will you please
come look at a fossil I found?” “Um, sure,” he replied. I lead
the way back to the bush and showed him where my skeleton
lay.
“It’s a decent Parasaurolophus,” he said and was about to
turn away when he saw me pointing toward the skull. He
looked and nodded as if to say that it was in good condition,
then his expression changed and I knew he had seen it too.
He immediately pulled out his loupe, squatted down, and
began to examine the skull. When the expression on his face
did not change but instead increased in intensity, I knew he
had confirmed it. My Parasaurolophus, my gentle herbivorous
hadrosaur, had the jaws of a shark.
Its teeth were pointy and sharp like some of the sharks’
teeth I had collected. And judging from their perfect backslashing figure, it was impossible they could have eroded
into this form. They were, without question, the teeth of a
carnivore.
The man had just finished examining the teeth when he
suddenly jumped up and started brushing away the sand
around the rib cage. At first I didn’t know what he was doing
when it dawned on me, he was searching for the skeletal
remains of the creature’s last meal, if there, that would prove
undoubtedly that it was a predator and what it fed on. Sure
enough, he found a femur (or a humerus; they both look the
same to me). What confused me was the look of shock on the
man’s face; surely he expected to find a bone or something in
the belly of the beast. So, I questioned him about it, to which
he replied, “I did expect to find a bone or skeleton of some
creature, like a lizard, but this – I never – this is a hadrosaur
bone.
The icy shock raced through my body. This creature, this
hadrosaur (if it could still be called that) ate other hadrosaurs.
The idea had occurred to me before when I first noticed the
teeth, but I merely shrugged it off as a stupid illogical thought.
Now, that same thought had been proven true.
“I’m going to get someone else to look at this,” the whitehaired man declared, still in shock. I heard him call someone
who was working about thirty yards away, but I didn’t catch
the name. The man came over at what seemed a very slow
pace. I don’t remember what he looked like; all I remember
is that he wore a bright red ball cap on top of a flaming red
bandanna.
“So, what’s the emergency?” the man with the fiery coated
head asked with a tinge of sarcasm. His remark was only
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 7
answered by a point to the creature’s skull. He looked, and
like his predecessor, his face went very pale. His countenance
then further whitened (which I didn’t believe was possible)
when he viewed the ribs.
“This isn’t possible,” the red-capped man gasped.
“I know; it’s hard to even comprehend,” spoke the whitehaired man.
The two then began to discuss how it was completely
impossible then how it was completely true. I listened to
their conversation for a shore while, but my mind was drawn
to other thoughts, other questions. How did a creature like
this come to be? Was it a raptor species that had adapted
into the form of its prey in order to hunt more freely? Or
was it the result of some bizarre mutation? Is this the only
one of its kind, or are there others? I was then reminded
that often incomplete specimens are found – were some of
those this predator, misnamed as its prey? When I finished
contemplating those ideas, I noticed that the two men
had just begun considering the thoughts I had long since
finished. Youth may cause one to be impulsive, or prone to
unnecessary mistakes, but it also enables one to get things
done much quicker.
About that time another man, probably in his thirties,
ran up the embankment. “Guys,” he panted nearly out of
breath, “we all have to leave.” The white-haired man gave
him a questioning look. The man continued, “heard on radio
… there’s a tornado comin’.”
“You have got to be kidding me!” The words fell out of
my mouth. I hadn’t the chance to stop them.
“We have to go.”
This can’t be happening. The thought pounded in my
head. “Can we at least dig up the fossil?’ I pleaded.
“We … have to go.”
“There’s no telling how backed up the interstate will be
with the tornado coming and with it coming being stuck on
the interstate isn’t a good thing.”
“At least the skull,” I pleased again. The white-haired
man seemed to sympathize with me, but he said nothing.
Adrenalized fear was running through me. Thinking quickly
I asked, “Does one of you have a camera?!”
“I do,” replied the red-capped man, “but it’s one of those
cheap two-dollar ones and its all out of space. Sorry.”
“We have to go.”
“I know,” I said downtrodden. And so we left, and every
step of the way, I hated the cruel irony.
I did return to the site, this time not at midday. The
landscape is different than it used to be – I can thank the
tornado for that. My bush is gone; my ambiguous hadrosaur
is gone, tossed a thousand miles or buried in the endless sand
– I will never know. Without the surrounding land as clues
to where they might be, I will never know. I do not know
where my carnivorous Parasaurolophus is; I only know where
it was, on the small cliff, near the raggedy old bush, under
the midday sun.
8 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
Forthcoming Book by PRI Staff Member
PRI’s new Director of Teacher Programs, Richard Kissel, is
coauthor of a forthcoming new book, Evolving Planet, written to accompany a permanent exhibit by the same name at
The Field Museum in Chicago, which Richard also helped to
create. From single-celled organisms, to dinosaurs, to mammals, and finally to humans, Evolving Planet traces the path
of life that has been constantly evolving. With life comes
death, and the book discusses the mass extinctions – five thus
far – that have also shaped Earth’s history. Readers will see
the entire history of Earth in perspective in this fascinating
volume. From Abrams Amulet Books, 136 pp., ISBN 9780-81098-486-7, $19.95 (full color hardcover), expected September 2008.
Anybody Need a Mastodon?
As Dan Fisher’s feature article in this issue describes, researchquality molds have been produced for every bone in the Museum of the Earth’s Hyde Park Mastodon. Even the bones not
recovered were successfully molded by digitizing the same
bone from the other side of the body, inverting the symmetry by computer, and fabricating a mold from the inverted
data. From this set of molds, hollow, fiberglass casts can be
produced for the entire skeleton, and the first such “replica”
is now mounted and on display in an exterior, covered setting at the Mid-Hudson Children’s Museum in Poughkeepsie, New York. The mastodon was scheduled to be unveiled
this summer as part of the celebration of the Hudson-Fultonchamplain Quadricentennial. And more copies are possible!
Any museum interested should contact D. C. Fisher (email
dcfi[email protected]) at the Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan, 1109 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI
48109-1079 USA.
Building a Mastodon:
The Hyde Park Mastodon at the Museum of the Earth
Preparing the
Bones for Display
Above: Bones in place,
ready to be assembled.
Right: A preparator works
carefully on the skull.
Below: The tusks
are tested (!) before
mounting.
Since its excavation in 2000 and installment in the Museum of the
Earth in 2003, the Hyde Park Mastodon has delighted and educated
guests.
Party Hot Spot...
Left: Vauda Allmon,
Judith Nagel-Myers,
and Mike Lucas.
Educational Material
Left: Local boy
collects data on
the Pleistocene
environment
through the
Mastodon
Matrix Project.
Right: New Year’s
Eve 2004.
... And Visitor Favorite
Left: Director Warren Allmon
lectures at a Community
Foundation Meeting.
Right: Inspired photography by
visitor Beth Swarecki.
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 9
F O C U S O N E D U C AT I O N
Climate Change 101
By Elizabeth Humbert
Part 5: Human Health and Climate Change
The Earth itself is not a fragile item, but the ecosystems
and organisms that exist on it are another story. As the
Earth warms quickly, many species of plants and animals
will become extinct because of their inability to adapt to
new temperatures and ecosystems. One of the earth’s most
vulnerable organisms is also one of the most successful:
Human beings.
Human populations on Earth have always been directly
impacted by climate. The ancient Egyptians, Mayans, and
European civilizations experienced growth and success or
famine and disease based closely on climate cycles. Author
B. Fagan, who wrote Famines and Emporers: El Nino and the
Fate of Civilizations (Basic Books, 2000), surmised based on
fluctuations of El Niño that disaster and outbreak of disease
often occur in response to climate
changes that bring extremes
in weather or storm activity.
Therefore, as we enter this new
phase of climate change, we expect
to see some dramatic challenges to
human health. Rising temperatures
mean not only rising deaths due
to high temperatures and extreme
weather events, but also due to air quality issues and increased
incidence of infectious diseases, borne by water and insects.
With current climate change, the first obvious threat to
human health is warming itself. In New York State, the number
of days each year over 90oF is projected to increase to 40 or
more by the end of the next century. When the heat exceeds
97oF, it is considered an extreme heat, which is associated
with heat exhaustion, heat stroke, cramps, and fainting. If
heat waves last longer and recur more frequently, people will
be increasingly vulnerable to these health problems.
With heat waves, also comes the issue of air quality. Hot
days can exacerbate the production of ozone, which occurs
when nitrogen oxides and volatile compounds from tailpipe
exhaust, industrial emissions, gasoline vapors, and chemical
solvents interact in the presence of sunlight. Ozone, the
primary component of smog, compromises the air quality,
making it difficult to breathe. According to the EPA, high
levels of ozone pollution can cause lung irritation (much like
an internal sunburn), can cause wheezing and coughing during
outdoor activities, can aggravate asthma, increase incidence
of pneumonia, and could ultimately cause permanent lung
damage with repeated exposure.
An even greater concern about how human health will
10 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
be impacted by climate change is the likelihood of the
increased virulence and spread of infectious diseases – which
have traditionally been a threat during summer months or in
warmer areas. A warmer world can mean that diseases will
spread more easily; some borne by water, others by vectors
(organisms like rats, flies, mosquitoes, or ticks).
Water supply is often an issue when one considers
climate change, but it is more than just supply – it is also
about sanitation and cleanliness. In our country, we rarely
hear about major outbreaks of waterborne illnesses, but
with warmer weather comes the increased possibility of
contaminated water supplies. In many developing countries,
this is a fact of life. Often the entire supply for a region is
contaminated with various microbial agents that can cause
diarrheal diseases. Though diarrhea is imminently treatable
in our country, according to the World Health Organization,
it accounts for nearly 4.1% of daily global illness. It strikes
the most vulnerable individuals, with children suffering the
majority of fatalities worldwide.
In addition to water-borne infectious diseases are the
vector-borne illnesses. These include diseases like malaria,
the West Nile virus, and Lyme disease, which are spread
by insects. Changes to our climate, like increased rainfall
or warmer temperatures, could help these carrier insects to
achieve greater reproductive or survival success, allowing them
to become more of a threat in Upstate New York. According
to the Union of Concerned Scientists, certain vector-borne
diseases like Lyme disease and West Nile encephalitis have
expanded widely across our region. Although the current
increase is blamed on changes in land use, it is a good model
of how climate change could impact vector-borne diseases
close to home.
Humans have long been aware of the correlation between
warm weather and disease. The World Health Organization
points out that Roman aristrocrats would leave the hot
swampy city in the summer for the cooler hills to escape the
threat of malaria. South Asians curried, or highly spiced,
their food during the summer to avoid the threat of diarrheal
distress. We humans have many adaptive strategies, but rapid
climate change could leave us increasingly vulnerable to
illness of epidemic proportions.
Part 6: Biodiversity and Climate Change
As we talk about climate change and impacts on the world
around us, we often highlight what is occurring to the polar
bears and animals that live far away, and not what is happening
here in our own backyards. Climate change will impact the
biodiversity of the whole planet – all of the plants and animals
that exist in every widely varied environment. Biodiversity is
the variation of life-forms found in a specific environment, be
it the rainforest or the entire planet. We worry about species
variation, because the health of a biological system can often
be measured by the number of different species found in the
given study area.
Just like climate, the Earth’s diversity has changed
dramatically over time. It changes not only by the number
of species, but also in the composition of the species. For
example, dinosaurs dominated the world 100 million years
ago, but none exist today. Obviously a major change occurred
in biodiversity. The change, indicated by the complete
extinction of all dinosaur species, is a great example of a
mass extinction. Mass extinctions happen for many reasons
– climate change, continent placement, sea level change,
extra-terrestrial impact, or a combination of these – and are
times when the biodiversity, or number of different species,
decreases dramatically. There have been five major mass
extinctions through Earth’s history – one of the most wellknown being the Cretaceous-Tertiary Event, which brought
about dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago.
But what does this have to do
with our modern world? Are we
part of a mass extinction that is
happening right now? Shockingly,
70% of biologists think so,
according to a 1998 survey by
the American Museum of Natural
History, and they think that it is
possible that current extinction
rates herald the fastest mass extinction ever! Humans have
definitely had a negative impact on the world’s biodiversity:
we cut down trees and degrade entire ecosystems, we hunt
and fish to provide for our large populations, and now we
begin to understand that our impacts on climate will change
Earth’s global climate system.
Biodiversity on Earth is largely threatened by climate
change because of loss of habitat. As sea levels and
temperatures rise, plants and animals, just like humans,
will be forced to relocate. The most vulnerable species are
those that can only survive in a narrow zone of climate, such
as within a certain temperature or precipitation range. If
individuals cannot move quickly enough to stay within their
required climate zone, they will die. Most predictions for the
future of biodiversity in the coming century indicate that loss
of species will continue unless drastic measures are taken to
curtail habitat loss and climate change.
One might be tempted to think that changing biodiversity
is sad for the poor polar bears, but this doesn’t really impact
our immediate lives. In fact, the vast biodiversity of the
world helps to furnish us with medicines, maintain our food
supply, offer us natural pest control, and supply us with raw
materials like rubber or cotton.
So how can we slow biodiversity loss? (1) Most important
is to create protected areas where human activity of any
sort is limited. This will prevent destruction of habitats and
resources that organisms need to survive. (2) Prevent invasive
species introductions! These (too) successful species, like
garlic mustard or kudzu, wreak havoc when introduced to
ecosystems that aren’t prepared for them. They take over
habitats, destroying or driving out native species. Many
governments combat this by prohibiting bringing foreign
plants and animals into their countries; some even go so far
as to disinfect landing planes and the shoe-bottoms of people
on them. (3) Promote sustainable agriculture. This approach
to farming is less destructive of surrounding environments,
produces less pollution, uses less energy, and impacts fewer
species negatively, on the whole. (4) Work to slow climate
change! We should support groups, politicians, and research
that are working to solve this problem. Climate change is
already the documented cause of several extinctions we know
about, with many more to come!
This is the third of a series of articles from our Global Change
Initiative, originally printed in The Ithaca Journal. Parts 5 and
6 appeared in January-February 2008. Elizabeth Humbert is
the former Education Resources Manager and Global Change
Coordinator at PRI and its Museum of the Earth. Email [email protected]. For more information about this program,
please contact Tricia Smrecak [email protected].
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 11
B R I E F LY N OT E D
books of interest
Paleobiology
The Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils
in America by Keith Stewart Thompson. Descriptions of
fieldwork, discovery, and the personalities that made up the
period of American fossil hunting that began with Thomas
Jefferson. Yale University Press, 424 pp., ISBN 978-0-30011704-2, $35.00 (hardcover), May 2008.
Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago by Douglas Erwin. Provides an overview of
the possible causes of the end-Permian mass extinction and
the evidence for and against each one. Princeton University
Press. 320 pp., ISBN 978-0-69113-628-8, $19.95 (paperback), May 2008.
Dogs: Their Fossil Relatives and Evolutionary History by
Xiaoming Wang & Richard H. Tedford, with illustratins by
Mauricio Anton. Honoring “man’s best friend” with a detailed and beautifully illustrated portrait of the origin and
evolution of the dog family Canidae over the past 40 million
years. Companion volume to “The Big Cats and their Fossil
Relatives,” by Mauricio Anton (2000). Columbia University
Press, 232 pp., ISBN 978-0-23113-528-3, $29.95 (hardcover), July 2008.
T. rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez. The story
behind the discovery and advancement of the asteroid impact
theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs told by one of the
men who first discovered the evidence. Princeton University
Press, 216 pp., ISBN 978-0-69113-103-0, $16,95 (paperback), June 2008.
Unravelling the Algae: the Past, Present, and Future of Algal Systematics edited by Juliet Brodie and Jane Lewis. Contributed papers covering the most up-to-date thinking on the
taxonomy and classification of all groups of algae. CRC Press
(Systematics Association Special Volume), 408 pp., ISBN
978-0-84937-989-5, $119.95 (hardcover), January 2008.
Glorified Dinosaurs: The Origin and Early Evolution of
Birds by Luis M. Chiappe. Using the latest bird fossil discoveries from the Cretaceous rocks of Argentina, Spain,
Mongolia, and China, Chiappe discusses the origin and diversification of birds. Wiley and Sons, 263 pp., ISBN 978-047124-723-4, $69.95 (hardcover), February 2007.
Dominican Amber Spiders: A Comparative Paleontological-Neontological Approach to Identification, Faunistics,
Ecology, and Biogeography by David Penney. The world’s
leading expert on fossil spiders provides a comprehensive
synthesis of current knowledge about the Dominican Republic amber spider fauna, complete with over 300 images
for identification. Siri Scientific Press, 176 pp., ISBN 978-095586-360-8, $110.00 (paperback), May 2008.
The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth’s History
by David Beerling. Traces the evolution of plants from the
origins of life to the present, describing how major evolutionary events shaped the global environment and how major
scientific discoveries were made about these events. Oxford
University Press, 288 pp., ISBN 978-0-19280-602-4, $29.95
(hardcover) April 2007.
12 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
The Saber-toothed Cat of the North Sea by Dick Mol, Wilrie van Logchem, Kees van Hooijdonk, and Remie Bakker.
A discussion of the once-dry North Sea as a rich fossil bed
for Pleistocene mammals and an examination of the sabertoothed cat’s behavior and ecology (translated from Dutch).
DrukWare, 160 pp., ISBN 978-9-07870-704-2, $52.50
(hardcover), December 2007.
Plants and the K-T Boundary by Douglas J. Nichols and
Kirk R. Johnson. Describes the fate of plants over the K-T
extinction and how fossil plants can be used to understand
the events that took place. With case studies from over 100
localities. Cambridge University Press, 280 pp., ISBN 978-052183-575-6, $130.00 (hardcover), May 2008.
Fossil Ecosystems of North America: A Guide to the Sites
and Their Extraordinary Biotas by John R. Nudds and Paul
A. Selden. Describes fourteen major Fossil-Lagerstätten in
North America. University of Chicago Press, 288 pp., ISBN
978-0-22660-722-1, $39.00 (paperback), November 2007.
The Crato Fossil Beds of Brazil edited by David M. Martill, Günter Bechly, and Robert F. Loveridge. Describes the
flora and fauna of the Lower Cretaceous Crato Formation of
Brazil. Cambridge University Press, 625 pp., ISBN 978-052185-867-0, $150.00 (hardcover), February 2008.
Maine’s Fossil Record: The Paleozoic by Lisa Churchill
Dickson. Intended as a stand-alone reference for Maine’s Paleozoic paleontology, for the interested layperson or professional geoscientist. Maine Geological Survey, 500 pp., ISBN
978-0-97981-260-6, $40.00 (hardcover), December 2007.
B R I E F LY N OT E D
books of interest
Evolution and Darwin
Automated Taxon Identification in Systematics: Theory,
Approaches, and Applications edited by Norman MacLeod. Contributed papers exploring contemporary approaches to the problems of species identification, including
DNA barcoding, digital imaging, automatic measurement,
and other automated tools. CRC Press, 368 pp., ISBN 9780-84938-205-5, $99.95 (hardcover), January 2008.
Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design by Peter J. Bowler. A professor of the history of science at Queen’s University
in Belfast, Bowler portrays a broad movement, lead by liberal
Christians and religious evolutionists, to interpret evolution
as God’s plan. Harvard University Press, 272 pp., ISBN 9780-67402-615-5, $24.95 (hardcover), September 2007.
Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science
and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World by
Michael Dowd. A former anti-evolutionist explores the links
between theology and science and encourages a meaningful truce between the two sides of the debate. Council Oak
Books, 432 pp., ISBN 978-1-57178-210-6, $24.95 (hardcover), November 2007.
God – or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age
by Constance Areson Clark. Clark shows how visual media
were employed by scientists and anti-evolutionists to win the
public over during the evolution debates of the 1920s. Johns
Hopkins University Press, 312 pp., ISBN 978-0-80188-8250, $35.00 (hardcover), July 2008.
Earth Science
Current Developments in Bioerosion by Max Wisshak and
Leif Tapanilla. A collection of studies that presents a current
perspective on bioerosion patterns and processes. Springer,
499 pp., ISBN 978-3-54077-597-3, $189.00 (hardcover),
June 2008.
Language of the Earth by Frank H. T. Rhodes, Richard O.
Stone, and Bruce D. Malamud. A literary anthology of man’s
2,500 year history on Earth from scientists, social scientists,
artists, writers, and others. Blackwell Publishing, 328 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-40516-067-4, $34.95 (hardcover), May 2008.
A Walk Through Watkins Glen – Water’s Sculpture in
Stone by Tony Ingraham. A history and attractive photographic essay of Watkins Glen State Park in upstate New
York. Owl Gorge Productions, 83 pp., ISBN 978-0-61520121-4, $22.95 (hardcover), July 2008.
Global Change
Acid Rain in the Adirondacks by Jerry Jenkins, Karen
Roy, Charles Dricoll, and Christopher Buerkett. Compiled
acid rain studies show that sulfur and nitrogen oxides from
Midwestern power plants, despite notable reduction in recent
years, still affect northern ecosystems, killing trees and fish.
Cornell University Press, 256 pp., ISBN 978-0-80144-6511, $65.00 (hardcover), 2007.
50 Ways to Save the Earth by Anne Jankélowitch, with
photographs by Phillippe Bourseiller. Geared towards
children, this book describes fifty simple actions that can
have a positive impact on the planet. Abrams Books for
Young Readers, 128 pp., ISBN 978-0-81097-239-1, $17.95
(hardcover), June 2008.
The Climate Diet: How You Can Cut Carbon, Cut Costs,
and Save the Planet by Jonathan Harrington. A five step
climate diet plan can make your family – and the planet –
healthier. Earthscan Ltd. 160 pp., ISBN 978-1-84407-5331, $15.95 (paperback), April 2008.
Global Warming 101 by Bruce E. Johansen. A high-school
textbook that examines the basic issues surrounding, science
and current state of and possible solutions to global warming.
Greenwood Publishing Group, 216 pp., ISBN 978-0-31334691-0, $49.95 (hardcover), April 2008.
The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next
10,000 Years of Earth’s Climate by David Archer. A look at
the serious damage that could be done to Earth’s climate due
to carbon dioxide emissions on a scale of thousands of years
instead of the usual hundreds. Princeton University Press,
192 pp., ISBN 978-0-69113-654-7, $22.95 (hardcover),
December 2008.
The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the
Environment by Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich.
Explores how the environment and genetic and cultural
evolution each shaped the other during human evolution and
applies this evolutionary history to our current environmental
problems. Island Press, 440 pp., ISBN 978-1-59726-096-1,
$35.00 (hardcover), June 2008.
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 13
PALEONEWS
by Olivia J. Rebert
Hyde Park “Highlights”
The May 2008 issue of “Highlights For Children” magazine
features New York elementary school students sifting
through soil, looking for fossils. The soil is from Hyde Park,
New York, where a nearly complete mastodon skeleton was
discovered by workers enlarging a backyard pond in 1999.
Scientists from the Paleontological Research Institution
excavated the skeleton and gathered 800 buckets of soil
from the surrounding area. Samples of the soil have been
shipped to classrooms around the United States, where
students pick through them, discovering anything from snail
shells to evergreen cones. The article, entitled “When Kids
Hunt Fossils,” contains quotes by several Ithaca students,
participants in the GIAC (Greater Ithaca Activities Center)
afterschool program, as they worked with Dr. Rob Ross of
PRI. The story was written by Gail Jarrow, former science
teacher and local author who has published other childrens
books. See also the “Highlights” website (http://highlightskids.
com/Science/h9SearchScienceArchive.asp?searchTerm=mastod
on&ArchiveSearchCats=) for three other cool articles about
mastodons.
Mammoth Hair for DNA
Scientists from Pennsylvania State University have discovered
a new way of extracting DNA from a mammoth, and it’s as
easy as pulling out a few hairs. The researchers learned that the
coat of a mammoth has DNA that is cleaner and more intact
than DNA found anywhere else on its body because the hair
is encased in keratin, and is protected against contaminants.
The scientists will extract this DNA to learn more about
mammoths and how they went extinct, and to help today’s
endangered animals avoid similar fates. They are also excited
about the possibility of being able to extract DNA from other
specimens such as from museum collections and even those
animals collected by naturalists Charles Darwin, Alexander
von Humboldt, and Carl Linnaeus. Reported in September
2007 by the Associated Press.
Watery Elephant Ancestors
DNA evidence already shows that modern elephants are
closely related to both aquatic and land-based animals. A
new study by Oxford University and Stony Brook University
scientists suggests that some elephant ancestors led a semiaquatic lifestyle, much like that of a hippo. Barytherium and
Moeritherium looked much like tapirs but were comfortable
living in and out of water and thrived on freshwater plants in
rivers and swamps more than 37 million years ago. Scientists
theorize that these semi-aquatic animals were forced out of
the water at the end of the Eocene when rivers and swamps
14 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
dried up. This new study could shed light on the behaviors
of modern elephants, which are fairly mysterious. The
researchers will continue to study the fragments and search
for new evidence, with their greatest hope in finding another
skeleton. Published in April 2008 in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Lyuba’s Legacy
When Yuri Khudi went hunting one day in the Russian
permafrost, he thought he saw a deer carcass lying in the
snow. But taking a closer look, Khudi realized he was staring
at the remains of a young mammoth. The mammoth, now
named Lyuba after Khudi’s wife, was taken by scientists to
the regional capital Salekhard to be studied. The female
mammoth was no more than six months old at the time of
its death and was approximately the size of a large dog. The
scientists estimate that it was frozen in the ground for up to
40,000 years. Although missing its furry coat, it is otherwise
intact and scientists are excited to take a closer look at its
internal organs, which were protected from microorganisms
during the mammoth’s time in the ice. One scientist
researching the mammoth, Alexei Tikhonov, believes that the
animal is an unprecedented specimen and will lead to future
genetic, microbiological and molecular studies. After her
stay in Salekhard, the mammoth will travel to the Zoological
Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and will be joining Dima,
another mammoth from Magadan, Russia. From there,
Lyuba will be taken to Jikei University in Japan for threedimensional computer mapping of her body. She will then
return to St. Petersburg for an autopsy before being put on
display in Salekhard. Reported by Reuters in July 2007, and
updated by AOL News in November 2007.
Mastodon Carving
Underwater archeologists in Michigan have discovered an
ancient petroglyph, or a stone carving, on a granite boulder
in the bottom of Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay. The
carving depicts what appears to be a mastodon with a spear
in its side. The divers found the boulder 39 feet beneath the
water while looking for shipwrecks. They believe the carving
is real, but others are not so sure. Mastodons were not known
to be in the Michigan area, though fossil remains have been
found in the southern part of the state. It’s possible that
human hunters who were aware of the existence of the large
animals migrated north and later carved the mastodon’s image
into the rock. The boulder, which is 3 feet high and almost 5
feet long, appears to have several fissures, some which appear
to be natural while others, like the carving, appear to be man
made. Michigan has two confirmed petroglyphs, and this
PALEONEWS
Olivia Rebert is a writing major at Ithaca College
one will make three if its originality is confirmed. Reported
by The Canadian Press in April 2007.
First Observed Right Whale Birth
Some people are lucky enough to see a Right Whale in its
natural habitat. Monica Zani got to see one give birth – and
is the first person ever to witness this! Zani, a whale researcher
for the New England Aquarium, expected to spend hours
staring out the window of a plane, searching for the rare
whale, of which only about 350 still survive. She and one
other researcher, along with two pilots, flew above the coast
of Georgia and Florida as part of the Aquarium’s 28-year-old
North Atlantic Right Whale Research Program. Although
they did catch glimpses of several Right Whales on their trip,
it was a whale named Catspaw that caught Zani’s eye. She
said the whale was thrashing in the water and blood clouded
the blue waves. At first, Zani could only expect the worst
– she had seen whales killed by boats and fishing nets, and
thought that this whale had met the same fate. But moments
later, a calf appeared on Catspaw’s back. Right Whales got
their name from hunters who considered them the “right”
or correct whale to hunt. Their bodies contained the most
valuable resources, and they swam near the shore and floated
after they were killed. As a result, the Right Whale is now
on the threatened species list. PRI’s Museum of the Earth
has a Right Whale skeleton on permanent display just inside
its main doors. The whale was 44 feet long and weighed 16
tons at its death, although it might have weighed twice that
much at its healthy weight. The whale was 19 years old when
it was killed by becoming tangled in a fishing net. Reported
online by the New England Aquarium (http://www.neaq.org)
in May 2008.
Ecce Equus
In a May 2008 article in Natural History magazine, authors
Jay Kirkpatrick and Patricia Fazio argue that the nowdomesticated North American wild horse, Equus caballus,
should be treated as a native, not intrusive, species by state
and federal agencies. The fossil record indicates that the
genus Equus (horses, zebras, and asses) originated in North
America nearly four million years ago before spreading to
Asia, Europe, and Africa. The last prehistoric North American
horses died out between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago at the
end of the Pleistocene. The modern horse, which was bred
from several wild varieties by Eurasian herders, originated
between one and two million years ago. Domesticated horses
were reintroduced to North America during the Spanish
conquest, from which escaped horses spread throughout the
Great Plains. DNA evidence indicates that all of these horses
belong to a single biological species, yet government agencies
treat the descendant horses as intrusive, and horses that died
at the end of the Pleistocene as native. The authors argue that
the key elements for defining an animal as a native species are
where it originated and whether it coevolved with its habitat.
Equus caballus did both, and so should enjoy the levels of
protection given to native wildlife.
Endangered ... and Beautiful
It’s a rare thing to see art and science blend into one.
However, at the U. S. National Academy of Sciences in
Washington, DC, artist Isabella Kirkland is meshing them
together, and the outcome is both beautiful and shocking.
Kirkland’s Taxa is a series of five nature paintings that beckon
viewers to look at the beautiful, mysterious creatures on her
canvas and think about human impact on the environment.
Each work features a massive number of species, in which
birds, mammals, insects and plants abound. The canvases
are visually stimulating, with vibrant, busy colors. Perhaps
her most interesting piece is “Gone,” in which the artist
predicts that many of the depicted animals will be lost in the
coming sixth extinction. Scientists say that species will be lost
because of increasing land transformation, overexploitation
of commercial species, pollution, and the introduction of
alien species. And sadly, these are all things introduced by
humans. Kirkland paints these subissues in her other works,
“Ascendant” and “Trade.” She was working on paintings with
endangered subjects before she started Taxa, but decided
to take her paintings to a new level, spending numerous
hours researching her subjects to paint truthful pictures of
the Earth’s present state. Kirkland hopes her paintings will
influence others to pay attention to biodiversity and the
human impact on nature. See Taxa and other Kirkland works
on her website, http://isabellakirkland.com.
Frog-amander
In 1995, paleontologists discovered the remains of
Gerobatrachus hottoni, a half-frog, half-salamander that
lived nearly 290 million years ago. Although unnoticed for
more than a decade, Gerobatrachus is now being billed as a
“transitional amphibian,” equally comfortable when it was
alive in water or on land. It walked like a salamander, had
tympanic ears like frogs, and trapped mayflies for dinner
using interlocking teeth in its mouth. The fossil supports
the theory that frogs and salamanders evolved from an
ancient amphibian group, the temnospondyls, and separated
between 240 and 275 million years ago. Published in the 21
May 2008 issue of the journal Nature.
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 15
FROM THE MEMBERSHIP
Archelon & Chesapecten
By Stan Balducci
Chesapecten jeffersonius, an extinct sea
When describing the mass of Archelon,
a giant sea turtle of the Late Cretaceous
scallop, was the first fossil described
Period, some say that it was the size of
on the North American continent. In
a car. The massive turtle was roughly
1687, Jamestown settlers noticed Na12 feet long and weighed up to 6,000
tive Americans using Chesapecten shells
pounds. It swam the salty waters near
for bowls and tools. Later, in 1824, scitoday’s South Dakota, Kansas, and Neentist Thomas Say named the scallop to
braska (now called the Pierre Shale).
honor both Chesapeake Bay, the largest
Archelon is the largest known marine
estuary in the world, and past-President
turtle of all time.
Thomas Jefferson, a well-known VirSwimming in those waters 73 to
ginia naturalist.
65 million years ago, Archelon most
Fossil Chesapecten are commonly
likely came in contact with Tylosaurus,
found in the stream valleys and river
a predatory marine lizard, Squalicorax,
beaches of Virginia and North Caroa scavenging and predatory shark, or
lina. It lived in these waters during the
Mosasaurus, a carnivorous aquatic lizard
early Pliocene Epoch, 4 to 4½ million
that looked like a crocodile with flipyears ago. Although it shared its habitat
pers. Although it’s doubtful that many
with other scallops, scientists say that C.
predators dared to challenge the enormous Archelon, it must
jeffersonius was more abundant than its cousins. Today’s scalhave had to fight off a few – the best known skeleton is misslops live in shallow waters with sandy or muddy floors and
ing a hind paddle.
it’s not unreasonable to think that this scallop did the same,
Archelon fed on planktonic animals such as ammonites
although could thrive in waters as deep as 130 feet.
and jellyfish with its weak jaws and toothless, hooked beak.
A mature Chesapecten could grow to 5 inches in diamLike other anapsids, its long, narrow skull (up to 3 feet long)
eter. Its shell was thick, radially ridged, and composed mostly
had no openings except at its eyes and nostrils. It also had
of calcite, so it fossilized well. Like living scallops, younger
a wide, flattened shell, paddle-like legs, and a short, pointindividuals attached themselves to the sea floor whereas maed tail. Anapsids, which include living turtles, are the most
ture scallops could swim by clapping their valves together to
primitive group of reptiles, characterized by lack of an openpropel through the water to escape predators. As suspension
ing in the temple region of the skull.
feeders, scallops take nutrients from the water column and
Although Archelon’s size clearly dehave acclimated to many environmental
fines it from its relatives, the large tursituations.
tle’s shell is the key difference between
Today scientists use Chesapecten
Archelon and the turtles wandering
jeffersonius as an index fossil for the
on our roads or resting in our ponds.
Lower Yorktown Formation. This
Archelon’s shell did not have the numermeans the species is used to define and
ous separate shell bones of modern-day
identify this particular geologic period.
turtles. Its back probably had a leathery
Although Chesapecten went extinct
covering or bony plates protecting an
about 4 million years ago, possibly due
equally bony framework underneath.
to cooling of the oceans prior to the
The genus Archelon is considered to
onset of the Great Ice Age, its memory
be monophyletic, which means that its
lives on as the Virginia State Fossil,
members descended from a common
which it was recognized as in 1993.
PRI Acc. no. 1261, Cobham’s Wharf, Virginia, Pliocene, Yorktown Fm.
ancestor. It and other turtles possibly
descended from captorhinids, a group of primitive anapsids
Stan Balducci has been a member of PRI and its Museum of the
that lived during the Carboniferous Period (340 MYA) and
Earth since 1999. He is a retired master gardener and self-taught
went extinct at the end of the Permian Period (250 MYA).
paleontologist. He has enjoyed distance-ed courses in paleontology,
Archelon appeared in the BBC television program “Sea
evolution, biogeography, and historical geology. He is a single dad
Monsters” narrated by zoologist Nigel Marvin. Archelon is
and avid tennis player, and resides in Mechanicsville, Virginia.
also the name of the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece.
Email [email protected].
16 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
FOSSIL FOCUS
American Mastodon
By Verity Whalen
Above
Mastodons on South Hill by William C. Dilger,
1952, gouache on paper. Original on display at
PRI’s Museum of the Earth, Ithaca, New York.
Reproduced with permission of the artist.
Left
Mammut americanum (Kerr, 1791)
North Java, New York
Pleistocene Epoch
PRI 49618 (bone 141)
This femur head belongs to the extinct proboscidean, Mammut americanum, commonly known as the American Mastodon.
First described by Kerr in 1791, it is the same species as the Hyde Park Mastodon on display in the Museum of the Earth. These
specimens represent one of the best known Pleistocene mammals, which at one time inhabited most of North America.
FOSSIL
FOCUS
By examining the damage to the bones of this Mastodon skeleton, it is possible to reconstruct some of the events which occurred
after its death. The femur in particular exhibits evidence of scavaging by a prehistoric predator, Canis dirus, or the Dire Wolf. The
size and type of knaw marks on the femur, consisting of both tooth punctures and furrows, match those commonly made by the
Dire Wolf. Furthermore, the heavy gouging of the femur indicates an attempt by a large predator to access the grease inside the
bone, which would only have occurred once all the flesh had been consumed.
This mastodon was found on the property of Robert Moffett in North Java, New York, in the Summer of 2001. After Moffet
contacted the staff of PRI and Cornell University, the remains were excavated and deposited in the collections of PRI. The complete
taphonomy and geology of the site is described by Jennifer Hodgson and her coauthors the latest issue of Palaeontographica
Americana (see inside back cover of this issue).
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 17
F E AT U R E A RT I C L E
New Ideas About Old Bones
By Daniel C. Fisher
The life of a paleontologist is sometimes intensely international, exposing one to experiences that are raw, wild, and
remote in every sense of the word. This is partly because fossils have no special predilection for parts of the world where
the hand of industrial and agricultural development has been
heavy. Indeed, they often are found in greatest abundance
where the veneer of civilization obscuring the Earth is thin.
Just a few months ago, in the course of fieldwork to investigate a recently discovered woolly mammoth calf on the
Yamal Peninsula, in northwestern Siberia, I sat on a sled that
was a miracle of mortise and tenon joinery, held together by
rawhide and pegs made of antler tines, hitched by leather,
antler, and ivory harness to a team of reindeer with stamina
in their legs and lungs that were the legacy of a long line of
ancestors outrunning packs of Arctic wolves. We flew across
the frozen surface of the tundra through a spray of icy granules thrown up by the relentless churning of broad hooves,
and all thought slipped away, but for a wordless feeling of immersion in a lifestyle that was older than the tales of grandfathers’ grandfathers’ grandfathers.
I have since had to bid my Nenets hosts goodbye and
return to a different life. I walk in to my office each morning through the quiet, green neighborhoods of Ann Arbor. I
spend my days at my desk, on the computer, or in my lab,
working to prepare specimens for analysis or peering down a
microscope. More frequently than I would like, I go to meetings that drag on longer than expected. Do I regret giving up
a life of excitement for one of monotony? Not in the sense
you might expect, much as I do miss life on the tundra. The
world I inhabit “back home” might seem far from any fron-
tier, and to be sure, it contains its share of the mundane, but
perceptions can be misleading. In fact, I struggle daily to find
my way in the nearly trackless wilderness where the known
gives way to the partly understood, and beyond that, to the
unknown. And here, from time to time, I stumble across new
vistas that change forever the way I look at some part of the
world. It is here, on the frontier of ideas, that the greatest
adventures are born.
One of those adventures involved the Hyde Park mastodon, the now-celebrated subject of PRI’s recently published
compendium of reports on three late Pleistocene proboscidean sites in New York State (Allmon & Nester, 2008). I want
to relate part of this adventure now, but doing so without
preparation could leave readers with the feeling of picking up
a book, opening to some chapter midway through, and trying to understand the characters and action without benefit
of reading the first half. Therefore, I need first to go back to
an earlier adventure, involving work on the Cohoes mastodon, at the New York State Museum, in Albany.
A Little Background on Mastodons, Musth, and Tusks
American mastodons (Mammut americanum), as most readers of AP will be aware, are relatives of living and extinct
elephantids (elephants and mammoths), although they belong to a different family (mammutids) within the mammalian order Proboscidea. Mastodons had more heavily built
skeletons than do living elephants or extinct mammoths,
and they were probably every bit as massive as elephants
or mammoths, even though their shoulder heights fell just
short of those of the largest of their proboscidean relatives.
Oblique view (from front right) of the skull of the Hyde Park
mastodon, fitted with fiberglass tusk casts. The tusks are almost 10 feet (3 meters) long and extend into deep sockets in
the skull. The upwardly directed tusk tips were deadly weapons in breeding-season battles between rival males.
18 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
Mastodons were browsing herbivores, subsisting on a broadspectrum diet of leaves, twigs, and weedy vegetation. Like
elephants today, adult females and calves lived in matriarchal family units, whereas adult males were mostly solitary.
Although an image of mastodons feeding peacefully in late
Pleistocene woodland meadows comes readily to mind, studies of the Cohoes mastodon and others like him showed that
adult males sometimes fought and died in battles with other
adult males that occurred predominantly at one time of year:
mid- to late spring. These battles were probably one expression of a seasonal “musth” phenomenon observed first in living Asian elephants and later recognized in African elephants
(Poole & Moss, 1981). Musth is a hormonally mediated state
of increased aggressiveness and sexual activity that can recur
annually in healthy, fully mature male elephants. Although
well documented in living elephants, the only evidence that
musth figured in the paleobiology of mastodons was a combination of the following observations: (1) some adult male
mastodons, the Cohoes mastodon among them, engaged in
bone-smashing, tusk-cracking, hide-rending battles shortly
before the time of their death; (2) the injuries that provide
the evidence for these battles broadly resemble injuries sustained by elephants in musth battles today; (3) the deaths
of these mastodons were concentrated in one time of year,
suggesting some common cause; and (4) this season was
consistent with the expected timing of mating activity in a
large mammal with a 22-month gestation period, like that
of elephants, in which birth would probably have occurred
as early as possible in a growth season, so that calves could
be as large and well nourished as possible as they approached
their first winter.
Admittedly, this is a highly circumstantial type of argument, but in making inferences about past events, we are often reduced to such a strategy. In its defense, the generalizations on which this interpretation is based can all be tested
by future discoveries that will either replicate current patterns … or not. In addition, there is explanatory power in
the resulting interpretation – it links otherwise disparate facts
that, if not interpreted in this way, have no evident common
cause to explain their apparent regularity. In the end, this
interpretation will stand or fall based on its ability to explain
observations and lead to new insights – the same criteria by
which we judge any interpretation, whether in science or in
other domains of human enterprise.
The most notable feature of the evidence for musth in
mastodons is that it is ultimately associated with death – that
is, musth battles that ended in the death of one of the participants. We might imagine – how could we not do so, based on
what we know of elephants – that male mastodons entered
and came out of the musth state many times during their
lives, but at what age did this begin, how often did it occur,
and how often did it result in serious conflicts? Surely, these
questions would be forever unanswerable, precisely because
their answers are embedded in the context of a long, full life,
not associated with the time of death, and the fossil record,
however magnificent, gives us nothing, or almost nothing,
but dead organisms.
As it turns out, “almost” is the critical word. Skeletal tissues that grow by accretion (that is, localized addition of material to an existing structure, without disturbing prior increments to the structure) have special properties that include
the potential to preserve evidence of events and trends that
played out over the course of life and are recorded because a
shell, a bone, or a tooth developed through time, in an environmentally mediated manner, encoding information about
life events in its structure and composition.
Tusks of proboscideans are particularly rich sources of
information on life events of the animals that grew them,
and this has become the foundation for much of my research
(Fisher, 2008, and references therein). Most tusks are greatly
enlarged, upper second incisors – the permanent successors
of deciduous, or “milk” tusks that are replaced early in life.
Some permanent tusks actually begin formation before birth,
and all continue growing until death, making them an unusually broad window on the life of a proboscidean. We have
learned a great deal about how tusk growth and composition
encodes aspects of a mastodon’s growth history, its diet, its
physical environment, and even life events such as maturation and the seasonal timing of death, but the suite of traits
on which most of my work used to focus included no clear
indication of musth or musth battles. Such events, it would
seem, must be hidden, or at least unresolvable, in the fog of
time and the tusk record.
Early Stages of the Hyde Park Project
Then, in Summer 2000, came the recovery of the Hyde Park
mastodon. The initial stages of excavation, conservation, and
curation were handled ably by PRI staff. Aside from brief
participation in the excavation, my involvement came later,
with the decision to compile a complete photographic record
of the bones of the Hyde Park mastodon and to make molds
of each of them to permit us later to produce research-quality
copies of the entire skeleton. This last objective was driven by
the decision to mount and display the actual bones in PRI’s
new Museum of the Earth, already on a tight schedule of
construction and opening. The mounting strategy, although
keeping the bones technically accessible for future research,
would nonetheless complicate routine comparisons and research use of the specimen, so molding was a high priority,
even if cast production was deferred to a later date. Logistics
and timing of the project compressed the molding phase into
a dense nine-month interval, ending just hours before we had
to ship the specimen to the company that was to mount it
for exhibit.
It thus happened that when I finally could devote time
to detailed analysis of the Hyde Park tusks and skeleton, the
original fossil material left behind for study was limited to
fragments of the left tusk, broken during an early stage of
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 19
the excavation (before PRI became involved) and reserved for
what I expected would be a routine analysis like others that
I had done before. The right tusk had been returned to PRI
to be exhibited on its own, and the mounted skeleton was to
be fitted with light, fiberglass tusk casts, to avoid having to
provide structural support for the massive originals. Apart
from pieces of the left tusk that remained, I was limited to
photographs and a few casts, made to insure that the molding process was as effective as we had hoped. Lest this seem
inadequate for definitive analysis, recall that many hours had
been spent on the originals during photography and mold
design; in addition, the information that at the time seemed
most important was inside the fragments of the left tusk, to
be accessed by thin sections (cut and polished slices, examined under a microscope) and microsampling of the polished
surfaces.
At first, work went smoothly, with few surprises. In previous studies, I and my students had developed methods for
studying tusk structure and growth rate and for sampling
compositional variation. However, we are generally not content to address exactly the same issues on one specimen after
another. The major escalation of analysis anticipated for the
Hyde Park specimen was to increase the duration and precision of the temporal (time) record extracted from the tusk.
We had done detailed analyses of short intervals of time, and
broad-brush analyses of the entire run of years preserved in
a tusk, but we had not done detailed analyses of an entire
tusk.
Late Stages of the Hyde Park Project
Implementing a research plan always takes longer than expected, but as you finally approach the “finish line,” there is
a great sense of relief and satisfaction as the results are assembled, and as previously envisioned objectives come to fruition.
Analysis of the left tusk of the Hyde Park mastodon yielded
a total number of years in the tusk (32 complete years, plus
partial years at each end of this sequence), an estimated age
at death (36 years), a season of death (mid-spring), a cause of
death (victim of a musth battle, as evidenced by a cranial lesion and several other critical injuries in postcranial regions),
and a growth history recorded as a time series of thicknesses
of periodically formed incremental features.
The “periodically formed incremental features” require
some explanation. The features we work with in mastodon
tusks form on three different, but “nested,” time scales: days,
fortnights (two-week intervals), and years. In each case, the
increment itself is essentially a layer of the tooth tissue known
as dentin. Dentin in tusks has a similar composition and microstructure to the dentin in our teeth, and like our dentin,
it makes up most of the mass of the tooth and is located in
the tooth interior, except where it is exposed by abrasion or
loss of the other tooth tissues, enamel and cementum. When
tusks first erupt, they have a thin layer of enamel near their
tip, but this soon abrades away, exposing the underlying den20 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
tin. Throughout growth, thin layers of cementum are added
around the entire tusk root, which later is displaced outward
as the growing tusk erupts. Once erupted, cementum also
abrades, sometimes enough to expose the dentin, especially
near the tip, on the outwardly convex side of the tusk.
Returning to the dentin increments in tusks, each one,
no matter what its time scale, has the geometry of a curved
cone, and successively formed increments, each with its apex
toward the tusk tip and its open end toward the tusk base, are
“stacked” in a sequence running from the tip toward the base.
Although this “stack of cones” analogy implies (erroneously)
that the cones have a separate identity apart from the stack,
in reality, each cone is formed “in place” by cells lining the
wall of a conical pulp cavity in the tusk base. Each increment
is structurally continuous with increments formed before and
after, and yet each is structurally differentiated by rhythmic
physiological cycles that vary the physical properties of the
dentin being produced. Thus, at successive positions along
an adult mastodon’s tusk, far from the site of current dentin
formation, it is possible to recognize daily, fortnightly, and
annual increments that formed when that animal was a recently weaned calf, an inexperienced adolescent, and a young
adult. The time sequence of the animal’s life is recorded in
the spatial sequence of increments, or layers, making up the
entire tusk. Think of a tusk, then, as much more than a static
structure for defense or feeding (for example, bark stripping
or branch breaking); it is also a diary – or perhaps a timemachine – that lets a fortunate observer travel back and forth
through an animal’s lifetime.
The same periodically formed increments, whose thicknesses record rates of dentin formation in a dimension lo-
Transverse cross section of the left tusk of the Hyde Park mastodon, 7.5
cm behind the tip. Parts of eight concentric annual increments can be
seen. Unlike tree rings, earlier years in a tusk are toward the outside.
Abrasion on the outer curve of the tip has removed material from the
lower profile, leading to some asymmetry. Fractures reflect drying and
shrinkage following excavation.
cally perpendicular to each tusk layer, also add – bit by bit
– to the length of a tusk. How about using these increments
to compile a record, not of local increases in dentin thickness, but of increases in tusk length? I had tried this before
(Fisher, 1996, 2001) and found that it offered a comparable,
but subtly different perspective on the life of a proboscidean – so wouldn’t it be interesting to try this on the already
remarkably complete history of the Hyde Park mastodon?
Sure, but that would take more time, and my chapter for the
compendium was already overdue. Still, science is all about
testing and retesting our generalizations, and how better to
test a narrative of the life of the Hyde Park mastodon than to
examine how it might be portrayed in a different modality?
It Can’t Be … But It Is!
Knowing that much of the outside of the left tusk and the
entire right tusk were already back in Ithaca, how could I
compile a record of tusk length increase requiring measurements along the outer surface? The casts could be the answer!
Yet another aspect of rhythms of tusk growth is that the ratio of dentin thickness increase and tusk length increase is
often seasonally variable, producing a subtle undulation of
the tusk surface, forming ridges and valleys that encircle the
tusk, most conspicuously near its base, where the cementum
masking this topography is thin. A replica of this surface was
at my fingertips, on the casts of both Hyde Park tusks, and
I could “read” the record of the last dozen or so years of life
like a blind man reading Braille. Here was the shoulder of a
ridge, where tusk circumference declined – that was winter –
followed by a zone where tusk circumference increased again
– that was spring – leading to a broader plateau of roughly
constant girth – that was summer through autumn.
But what was this? On the outer curve of the tusk, where
the increasing girth of spring met the plateau of summer, was
Upper panel: Part of the surface near the base of the left tusk of the Hyde
Park mastodon, showing an area with four arcs of cementum defects
(photographed with light coming from the upper left corner). Lower
panel: Same area as above, on a cast of the left tusk; cementum defects
(numbered according to the year in the tusk when they formed) appear
more clearly. The defect in year 29 tusk is smaller than the others.
an array of small pits arcing partway around the tusk, parallel
to seasonal topographic features – and there was another, and
another! I had not noticed this pattern before, and might not
have seen it then, except that the casts, with their uniform
color, made topographic features clearer than they were on
the mottled surfaces of the real tusks. As I surveyed this new
set of features, my first reaction was consternation.
The scene before me was full of contradictions. On one
hand, the direction along the tusk axis was both a spatial
and a temporal dimension – nearer the tip was farther back
in time, and nearer the base was closer to the time of death
– and any series of features repeating along this direction represented a sequence of events in time. This combination of
space and time was “old hat” to someone used to studying accretionary growth (or, for that matter, stratigraphy, in which
the spatiotemporal dimension is dominantly vertical). The
problem was that the surface that I was examining was the
outer surface of cementum. As such, it had been deposited as
a broadly continuous cylindrical layer, or series of cylindrical
layers, across the entire part of the tusk that lay within the
tusk socket at the time of death. From this perspective, the
arched arrays of pits all had to be recently formed features –
products of the last increment of cementum formed shortly
before death. But how could these features be both sequential
and simultaneous?
There had to be a resolution to this problem. At least one
of the suppositions underlying the paradox had to be wrong,
but which one? The consternation finally resolved when I
realized that the surface manifestation of cementum defects
(as I began to call them) could be recent and simultaneous
(formed shortly before death), and yet the defects themselves
might have longer histories, stretching back to a series of sequential events earlier in time. I tested this idea by sectioning
a few cementum samples, and indeed, the defects extended
to the base of cementum stratigraphy – and an earlier time
– at the cementum-dentin interface. Rewinding tusk growth
processes to the origin of a given defect brings us to a time
when this defect was located at the growing margin of the
tusk. Subsequent tusk growth had added dentin, extending the tusk, and subsequent deposition of cementum had
buried the earliest stage of each defect under an increasingly
thick sequence of cementum laminae, each propagating an
abnormally contorted pattern all the way to the outer surface
of the tusk, where the contortions appeared as pits.
The Origin of Cementum Defects
Once the dynamic, time-transgressive nature of cementum
defects became clear, the paradox of their place in space and
time disappeared, but additional pieces of the puzzle were still
needed to explain their origin. Fortunately, these fell quickly
into place, because my earlier work (Fisher, 2003) had shown
that a stereotypic, lethal blow in mastodon musth battles was
a powerful upward thrust of a tusk tip, slamming it into the
cheek of an opponent. If such a blow was not parried, the
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 21
resulting impact could traumatize chewing muscles on the
affected side and puncture the skull, causing massive blood
loss. But what about the combatant that landed such a blow?
The impact of the upwardly directed tusk tip on any part
of an opponent’s body would induce a downwardly directed
reaction force, rotating the tusk on a transverse axis located
near the upper end of the tusk socket. This motion would
drive the delicate growing margin of the tusk, especially that
part along the outer curve, where cementum defects originate, into the bony wall at the back of the tusk socket. The
resulting damage would have been minor relative to other
injuries sustained by combatants in such a fight, but if a male
survived a musth battle in which he had inflicted such a blow,
the damaged cementum-producing cells at this position on
the tusk deposited contorted cementum layers for many years
to come, propagating a cementum defect outward and keeping it visible at the surface of the tusk.
The rest of the story fills in quickly. The Hyde Park mastodon’s cementum defects recorded his own history of musth
battles survived, if not won. His onset of musth occurred
about age 25, and he fought musth battles annually, in midto late spring, until his death. Musth itself, and recuperation
from injuries sustained in musth battles, must have been a
major drain on his time and energy, and the local population
of mastodons must have been quite large if he encountered
adult males with whom he traded life-threatening blows on
an annual basis. We have here a very different picture of the
lives of male mastodons than we get from considering other
aspects of their biology. Perhaps we also have an explanation
for their massive skeletons and a new way of tracking population declines (marked by declining incidence of cementum
defects) prior to extinction. A new vista opens.
“Adventures of Ideas”
This title of a stimulating book by Alfred North Whitehead
(1933) captures a great deal of this research experience. The
greatest adventures of all are those that change the way we
think about the world, and paleontology, more than most
fields, has had a major impact on our understanding of our
place in space and time. Such adventures await any of us
willing to probe nature deeply, whether we live and work in
the midst of civilization or in its borderlands. Fighting mastodons and cementum defects are just tokens of greater problems, but they remind us that new ideas often emerge from
the resolution of apparent conflict – that inconsistencies are
not necessarily impediments to science, but can act as stimuli
for new synthesis. We instinctively attempt to order what we
know of the world, and if successful, that can be a step on
the road to understanding, but we should also try to cultivate
a nose for paradoxes – a rebellious willingness to embrace
conflict – on the chance, however remote, that it will lead to
deeper insight. Enough said. I need now to prepare for my
next adventure.
22 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
References
Allmon, W. D., & P. L. Nester, eds. 2008. Mastodon paleobiology, taphonomy, and paleoenvironment in the late Pleistocene
of New York State: studies on the Hyde Park, Chemung, and
North Java sites. Palaeontographica Americana 61, 476 pp..
Fisher, D. C. 1996. Extinction of proboscideans in North America.
Pp 296-315, in: The Proboscidea: Evolution and Palaeoecology
of Elephants and Their Relatives, J. Shoshani & P. Tassy (eds),
Oxford University Press, Oxford, U. K.
Fisher, D. C. 2001. Season of death, growth rates, and life history
of North American mammoths. Pp 121-135, in: Proceedings of
the International Conference on Mammoth Site Studies, D. West
(ed.), Publications in Anthropology 22, University of Kansas,
Lawrence, Kansas.
Fisher, D. C. 2003. Combat-induced injuries in adult male Mammut americanum (abstract). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology,
23 (suppl. to no. 3): 50A.
Fisher, D. C. 2008. Taphonomy and paleobiology of the Hyde Park
mastodon. Pp 197-289, in: Mastodon Paleobiology, Taphonomy,
and Paleoenvironment in the Late Pleistocene of New York State:
Studies on the Hyde Park, Chemung, and North Java Sites, W. D.
Allmon & P. L. Nester (eds), Palaeontographica Americana 61.
Poole, J. H., & C. J. Moss. 1981. Musth in the African elephant,
Loxodonta africana. Nature, 292: 830-831.
Whitehead, A. N. 1933. Adventures of Ideas. Macmillan, New York,
392 pp.
Daniel Fisher is the Claude W. Hibbard Professor of Paleontology and Curator of Paleontology in the University of Michigan
Museum of Paleontology, Department of Geological Sciences,
and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Email
dcfi[email protected].
F E AT U R E A RT I C L E
Mastodons in their Backyards: The Natural and Not-so-Natural
History of Three Discoveries
By Warren D. Allmon
It isn’t in the Ice Age movies. It isn’t found frozen in Siberia or
Alaska. You can’t buy cuddly stuffed versions of it in museum
shops. Yet, although it is not as familiar to the general public
as its distant cousin, the Woolly Mammoth, the American
Mastodon was one of the most successful and wide-ranging
large mammals of the last several million years. This species
also played a surprisingly important role in human understanding of the history of the Earth and its life. Indeed, few
fossil animals have been so broadly involved in human affairs, from science to politics. And New York State can in
some sense be said to be the home of the mastodon. That was
long ago, but thanks to an unlikely series of events, and some
institutional risk-taking, mastodons came back to upstate
New York starting in 1999, and their impact – on museum
visitors, the general public, and scientific specialists – still
ripples across the Finger Lakes and far beyond.
A Short History of Mastodon Discovery
Humans clearly co-occurred with mastodons and mammoths
in New York State as early as 11,000 years ago, and probably
hunted them. In the period immediately before European
contact, Native Americans were aware of the large bones that
could be found in what is today New York. The Chemung
River and Chemung County in central New York, for example, are named after the Native American word (used by
both the Delawares and Cayuga nation within the Iroquois
confederacy) meaning “great horn” in reference to large tusks
that were found in the area. Native Americans from the Ohio
Valley to the Hudson had numerous, ancient, and quite sophisticated stories to explain the presence of the giant bones
that they occasionally found. Most of these legends involved
giant beasts which had once inhabited the Earth but for various reasons had been killed, or driven underground, by superior beings.
The history of modern scientific understanding of mastodons is closely connected to the history of our understanding of mammoths. What are today known as mammoths first
came to the attention of modern Europeans in 1692 when a
Dutch traveler named as “mammot bones” the large bones
long known to Siberian natives. For much of the next century
what are now recognized as mammoths and mastodons were
considered together as “the mammoth” or “the incognitum,”
as Europeans struggled to understand the large bones that
were found in the unconsolidated near-surface sediments in
increasing numbers.
The first mastodon bones to be specifically noted by Europeans were collected in New York in 1705, along the banks
of the Hudson River, near what is now the town of Claverack in Columbia County. Other mastodon bones from the
Hudson Valley found in the early 1780s were examined with
interest by, among other notables, George Washington. The
first fairly complete mastodon skeleton known was discovered in Newburgh, in Orange County, New York, in 1799.
Ultimately two fairly complete skeletons and part of a third
from Orange County were acquired by the artist and scientific entrepreneur Charles Wilson Peale, and two composite skeletons assembled from this collection were displayed
in London, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The better of the
two (the famous “Peale’s mastodon”) was the centerpiece of
the pioneering but ill-fated Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia.
When the Museum failed, the skeleton passed through several hands, lastly those of P. T. Barnum, and then mysteriously
disappeared, turning up eventually at a museum in Darmstadt, Germany, where it resides today. These skeletons were a
sensation, among both scholars and the general public. Peale’s
son Rembrandt published two treatises on the bones in 1802
and 1803 which, despite a number of inaccuracies, had some
influence on the debates over mastodon affinities that were
swirling on both sides of the Atlantic at the time.
The first published illustration of a mastodon fossil ap-
The teeth of mastodons (left) and mammoths (right) show substantial
differences. Images from Schul-Naturgeschichte by Hubert Ludwig
(1891; left) and Kameno Doba by Jovan Zujovic (1893; right), via
Wikimedia Commons.
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 23
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FOSSIL STUFF
VOLUME 12
NUMBER 3
A NEWSLETTER FOR KIDS FROM
THE MUSEUM OF THE EARTH
FALL 2008
CREATED BY SAMANTHA SANDS, DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Mighty Mastodons!
Until 10,000 years ago, mastodons
could be seen roaming much of North
America. Mastodons are extinct
relatives of modern elephants that
branched off of the elephant family
tree 15 million years ago. They lived
in the large spruce forests common
during the last glacial period or Ice
Age. Mastodons went extinct, along
with most of the other large mammals
on our continent, 10,000 years ago.
Computer generated mastodon by Dantheman9758, via Wikimedia Commons
A Mastodon in Your Backyard? You never know what you might find in your own
backyard. In August 1999, The Lozier family in Hyde Park, New York, discovered
something amazing on their property. An excavator hired to deepen a pond
discovered a huge bone. The family contacted paleontologists to come find more
of the skeleton and a year later, in August 2000, staff and volunteers from PRI
excavated an amazingly complete skeleton in just six weeks. 95% of the bones
were found, including the skull, both tusks, and all
four legs! It was a muddy mess, but worth every
minute! The mastodon was determined to be an
old male that lived around 11,500 years BCE.
Other amazing clues about the past were found in
the pond, including tree fragments, pollen, insects,
and snail shells. The skeleton, now called the
Hyde Park Mastodon, stands on exhibit at PRI’s
Museum of the Earth in Ithaca.
Photograph by Rachel Philipson
Mastodons and Mammoths
Computer generated image by Dantheman9758, via Wikimedia Commons
What is the difference between these two animals? Although mastodons and
mammoths look very similar, they are actually very different. Mastodons, mammoths,
and elephants all shared a common ancestor 15 million years ago when mastodons
split from the family. It was only about 4 million years ago that mammoths and
elephants diverged. The tall animal on the left is a mammoth and the short animal on
the right is a mastodon. Let’s discover what makes these animals unique!
Teeth – Their teeth are very different, which
tells scientists that they ate different things.
The mastodon tooth, on the left, is a molar, just
like ours! Mastodons are browsers and these
teeth are great for eating tough plant material
like twigs, bark, and tree branches. Mammoths
are grazers and had flat teeth (on the right)
with ridges. These teeth worked very well for
chewing soft plant material, like grasses.
Tusks – Look at the tusks! Mammoth tusks are usually longer and curve much more
than those of mastodons.
Size – Do you notice any difference in size? Mammoths are usually larger than
mastodons. Mammoths were about 14 feet (4.3 meters) tall and mastodons were
about 10 feet (3.0 meters) tall.
Pleistocene Pals
Meet our friend the American mastodon (Mammut americanum) and his Pleistocene
friends: a saber-toothed cat (Smilodon fatalis), a dire wolf (Canis dirus), and a ground
sloth (Paramylodon harlani).
There are seven differences in the two pictures of our friends below. Can you find
and circle all seven differences? (answers below)
Answers: mastodon eyes, mastodon tail, cat right ear, cat hair, dog back fur, dog ears, sloth hair.
peared in 1756 in a memoir by the French naturalist JeanEtienne Guettard, based on a tooth collected in 1739 by
Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil along the Ohio River at
what is now known as Big Bone Lick, in Boone County,
Kentucky. It was not until four decades later, however, that
the mastodon got its name. The American mastodon was first
named scientifically as Elephas americanum by Scottish naturalist Robert Kerr in 1792 in the first volume of his translation and elaboration of Linnaeus’ landmark book Systema
Naturae (1758). It is not clear what bones (if any) Kerr actually examined before proposing the name. In 1799, German
naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach included in his list
of “unknown animals” whose remains had been found buried in the Earth “the colossal monster of an earlier world,
the Ohio mammoth (Mammut ohioticum), whose bones had
been dug up in quantity near the Ohio River in America,
and which is notable ... by the unusual shape of its enormous
molar teeth.”
The famous French anatomist Georges Cuvier studied the
de Longueuil collection (and perhaps also mastodon material from New York that had found its way to Paris), which
formed an important part of the basis for his famous address
to the Institut de France on January 21, 1796. He concluded
definitively that there were species of elephants, including the
American Mastodon, that were distinct from living elephants
and were now extinct. (Several other authors had previously
proposed that these and other bones might represent extinct
species, but none had done so in so conclusive and convincing a way as Cuvier, who is therefore frequently given
the credit for “discovering” extinction.) Cuvier published
the comparative anatomical evidence for this conclusion in
1806, including a figure of Guettard’s tooth, and he coined
the name “mastodonte” in reference to the breast-like shape
of the molar cusps. The rules of biological nomenclature give
great weight to priority, and thus dictate that the American
Mastodon is formally called Mammut americanum (Kerr).
The inconsistent use of the English words “mastodont”
and “mastodon” is annoying and confusing. “Mastodon” has
been proposed at various times and by different authorities as
a vernacular word referring specifically to members of the genus Mammut, whereas “mastodont” would refer collectively
to mastodons plus other elephant relatives known as gomphotheres. Purists have argued that the more inclusive term
(with the “t” at the end) is appropriate, even when discussing Mammut only, because proper English word formation
from the Greek roots of the term requires the final “t.” But
this is likely too arcane to have much chance of catching on
very widely, and we are therefore probably stuck with the two
words being used interchangeably.
American vertebrate paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn chose the entire 1806 illustration as “Cuvier’s types”
– the official name-bearing specimens – for the mastodon in
his massive two-volume 1936 work on the Proboscidea, and
Guettard’s tooth from Kentucky (cataloged in the Natural
History Museum in Paris as MNHN 1643) has therefore recently been recommended as the new “type specimen” (the
official name-bearer) of Mammut americanum.
Thomas Jefferson developed a famously strong interest in
America’s fossil elephants, especially the mastodon, devoting
an entire section to the subject in his 1785 book, Notes on the
State of Virginia, and attempting to purchase the New York
bones ultimately acquired by Peale. Jefferson initially rejected
the idea of extinction, and as President in 1803 charged Merriweather Lewis and William Clark with searching for living
elephants on their expedition through the American west.
Disappointed with the explorers’ failure to find a living mastodon, in 1807 Jefferson sent Clark to Big Bone Lick at his
own expense to collect additional fossils. The resulting collection arrived at the White House in March 1808. These were
eventually divided into three groups: one went to the American Philosophical Society (later transferred to the Academy
of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, where it would become
known as the Thomas Jefferson Fossil Collection); one was
sent to the Natural History Museum in Paris; and the third,
and smallest, became part of Jefferson’s personal collection at
Monticello. Jefferson’s interest in mastodons was driven not
only by his omnivorous curiosity; he and others among the
“founding fathers” were eager to show their European counterparts that America was a vital and rising land. The oppo-
President Thomas Jefferson was very interested in the early mastodon
discoveries in the United States, specifically instructing Lewis and Clark
to find living mastodons during their expedition across the American
west. Painting by Rembrandt Peale (1805).
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 25
A sphagnum bog in Ontario, Canada, is an example of the type of
habitat in which most mastodon skeletons are found. Photograph from
Wikimedia Commons.
site had recently been argued by the great French naturalist
George Buffon, who suggested that the natural environment
of the New World was unfavorable for life of all kinds, and
led to degenerate forms. The discovery of these large bones,
and the prospect that their owners might still walk the American heartland, was to Jefferson and others powerful evidence
that America could produce the equal of anything known in
the Old World.
Bones and teeth of more than 1,400 individual mastodons have been found in North America over the past 300
years. Reported mastodon finds are most abundant around
the Great Lakes (Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Ontario), but they are also common in Florida and New York,
each of which has about ten percent of the known discoveries. Countless other mastodon finds have undoubtedly been
ignored, misidentified, or unreported, suggesting that these
animals were common to abundant over tens to hundreds
of thousands of years, a situation that ended only around
10,000 years ago. Thus, as strange as it may seem now, until
relatively recently America was “elephant country” – perhaps
comparable to parts of Africa today.
A Brief Natural History of the American Mastodon
Mastodons are more distantly related to modern elephants
26 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
than are mammoths. This is evident in a comparison of their
teeth: mammoth teeth are more similar to modern elephant
teeth, whereas mastodon teeth are very different. Mammoths
and modern elephants last shared a common ancestor around
four million years ago; the evolutionary split with mastodons,
however, happened around eleven million years earlier.
The genus Mammut appears to have originated in the
New World, following a single immigration of its ancestor
from Siberia sometime during the Pliocene Epoch (2-5 million years ago). Although numerous species of Mammut have
been recognized, there is general consensus among paleontologists that the great majority of specimens belong to a single,
highly variable species, Mammut americanum, known from
Alaska to Nova Scotia to Florida to Central America.
At a distance, mastodons would have generally resembled
modern elephants, but up close, one would have noted that
their body and head were somewhat lower, longer, and stockier. The largest individuals were probably somewhat shorter
at the shoulder but heavier than the largest modern African
elephants, perhaps reaching weights in excess of 10 tons. Like
modern elephants, mastodons had four cheek teeth, two on
each side. As already mentioned, these teeth, however, had
a different shape, one that suggests that mastodons ate
mostly softer vegetation than either mammoths or modern
elephants, including leaves of conifer and deciduous trees, as
well as wetland plants. Masses of plant material found in the
center of a number of fossil mastodon skeletons – interpreted as remains of their last meals – frequently contain abundant spruce needles. Chemical analysis of mastodon bones
and teeth, furthermore, suggests that they ate a lot of alder,
known to be an early occupant of recently deglaciated areas.
We know a considerable amount about mastodon ecology and behavior. Based on pollen and larger plant fossils
associated with mastodon skeletal finds, Mammut appears
to have inhabited wet, spruce-dominated woodland, where
it might, at least occasionally, have had semiaquatic habits.
Most mastodon finds in North America consist of single or
a small number of skeletons, although some mass occurrences are known, and most are interpreted as males, based on
comparison with the size and shape of modern elephants.
This pattern has been interpreted as indicating that male M.
americanum were non-herding loners, behaving much like
modern moose. As is the case in modern elephants, younger
males might have spent much of their lives alone, until they
could challenge a dominant male for access to females, which
probably lived more socially, farther from the ponds and bogs
in which most mastodon skeletons are found.
The oldest known occurrence of Mammut is from White
Bluffs in south-central Washington State, and dates to about
3.75 million years old. These fossils are indistinguishable
from the bones of M. americanum from 10,000 years ago,
indicating a relatively long lifetime for this species. The latest
known mastodon occurrence is at Pleasant Lake in southeastern Michigan, dated at 10,395 ± 100 14C yr BP.
A Tale of Three Finds
Chemung. In the summer of 1999, John and Elaine Gilbert were deepening a pond on their wooded property, about
halfway between Elmira and Watkins Glen, in northern
Chemung County, New York. The excavation produced several large bones. One of the family members contacted Cornell University, which eventually led to their identification
as either mastodon or mammoth, and an arrangement for
excavation of the site to locate any other bones that might be
present. This work proceeded throughout the Fall of 1999,
ending in early December, and attracted considerable local, regional, and national media coverage. During the excavation, it became clear that remains of more than a single
animal were present; the discovery of a mastodon mandible
with teeth and a mammoth hyoid (one of the small bones
associated with the tongue and throat) proved that at least
one mammoth and one mastodon were represented. Unfortunately, the topography and ground water at the site made
it impossible to completely drain so that the bones might be
precisely located and mapped before removal; detailed location data for individual bones were therefore not available.
During the excavation, the bones were stored in the Gilbert’s
garage, which unfortunately led to some damage caused by
too-rapid drying.
Although the find was at one point offered for sale on
eBay, in the end Cornell University negotiated with the
family to purchase all of the skeletal remains as well as a
dumptruck load of mud excavated from around the bones.
The bones arrived at the Paleontological Research Institution
(PRI) in late December 1999, where they were cleaned and
curated, and where most are still housed, still the property of
the University. In 2006, some of the bones were put on longterm display in Snee Hall of Geological Sciences at Cornell.
Subsequent analysis of the Chemung bones showed that
they included approximately 80% of an adult male mastodon and approximately 20% of an adult mammoth, the
first record of a mastodon and a mammoth occurring in such
proximity in New York State. Radiocarbon dating of one of
the mammoth bones gives an age of 10,780 ± 60 yr BP, with
The Chemung mastodon’s jawbone is carefully excavated.
The Chemung mastodon exhibit at Cornell’s Snee Hall of Geological
Sciences.
a mastodon bone from the site yielding a date of 10,820 ± 50
years BP. These dates are indistinguishable within the limits
of the dating technique, leading to the tantalizing possibility
that mastodon and mammoth lived (or at least died) literally
side-by-side, something that has long been assumed but never conclusively demonstrated. The bones also have a complex
history of postmortem wear and tear, including extensive
trampling, presumably by other mastodons or mammoths.
Hyde Park. Also during the Summer of 1999, Larry
and Sheryl Lozier of Hyde Park, in Dutchess County, New
York, were having a pond deepened behind their suburban
home. The excavator doing the work uncovered several large
bones, but did not tell the Loziers, and the bones did not
come to their attention until after the work was complete.
Mr. Lozier had seen some of the media coverage surrounding
the Chemung excavation and contacted PRI. PRI staff visited Hyde Park in November 1999 and saw that a complete
humerus (upper forelimb), as well as fragments of tusk, skull,
The Hyde Park mastodon being excavated from the mud of Lozier’s
drained pond.
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 27
U-Haul’s interpretation of the Hyde Park Mastodon.
and pelvis, had been found, suggesting that more of a skeleton might be present. PRI arranged with the Loziers to return
to the site in June 2000, drain the pond, and search for more
bones. Unfortunately, the exact location of the bones in the
pond beneath the sediment was not known. This, coupled
with near-record rainfall for the month of June, conspired
to make the week of searching cold, frustrating, and unsuccessful. Returning to the site in August, however, PRI staff
discovered the rest of the skeleton still in place in the center
of the pond. Excavation of the site proceeded over the next
several weeks, and was completed in mid-October.
The Hyde Park excavation attracted even more media attention, including The New York Times, National Public Radio, NBC News, and People magazine. The Discovery Channel, which provided financial support for some of the work,
was on-site during the excavation and ultimately produced
an hour-long documentary film (“Mastodon in Your Back
Yard: the Ultimate Guide”) which had its premiere in October 2001 and is still occasionally shown.
The skeleton and associated matrix were purchased from
the Loziers by PRI. In 2002-2003, the Hyde Park skeleton
was shipped to the University of Michigan, where high-resolution molds were made of every bone under the supervision of paleontologist Daniel Fisher. In 2003, the complete
skeleton was mounted in the new Museum of the Earth at
PRI, which opened to the public in September of that year
(see cover of this issue). In 2005, an image of the Hyde Park
mastodon was developed by U-Haul International Corporation to represent New York State on 600 of its rental trucks
across the country.
The Hyde Park skeleton is among the most complete and
best-preserved mastodons ever found, and it therefore serves
as a model for interpreting the taphonomic history, paleoecology, and paleoenvironment of other less complete finds.
North Java. In the Spring of 2000, Robert Moffett of
North Java, Wyoming County, New York, had a pond dug
on his property. Over the next few months, as he walked
over the spoil piles from the excavation, he found several
bones and a tooth. In June 2001, he contacted Cornell staff,
who visited the site, and identified the remains as those of
a mastodon. John Chiment and I negotiated an agreement
28 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
Excavating the North Java mastodon used a sediment shaker.
with Moffett to excavate and acquire the bones. Work began
on the site in July and was completed by late September. All
materials from the excavation were purchased from Moffett
by PRI and are now part of the PRI collections.
The North Java find consisted of approximately 25% of a
mastodon skeleton. Radiocarbon dating of one of these bones
gave an age of 11,560 ± 60 years BP. The North Java remains
are especially interesting for their abundant evidence of scavenging on the bones (by wolves and foxes, among others),
and the conclusion that it likely represents a female, which is
relatively rare in the mastodon fossil record.
Relatively few mastodon remains in New York have been
accurately dated. At the most thoroughly studied Pleistocene
site in the state, Hiscock in Livingston County, the oldest
mastodon date is 11,033 ± 40 yr BP and the youngest is
10,515 ± 120 yr BP. The mastodon remains detailed here
date from between 10,780 ± 60 and 11,560 ± 60 yr BP. With
extinction imminent, these finds could represent members
of the some of the last mastodon populations ever to have
existed.
Mastodons Past and Present
The Hyde Park mastodon is one of the centerpiece exhibits in
the Museum of the Earth, and its image now rides America’s
highways on thousands of U-Haul trucks. The Discovery
Channel film on its excavation is still shown on various cable
outlets, although we now know that many of the interpretations presented in it are incorrect. In other words, like so
many other momentarily famous vertebrate fossils, this most
perfect of mastodon skeletons has had something of a life of
its own, separate from its interpretation as an object of science. Like innumerable frozen mammoths, Sue the T. rex,
or the recently discovered dinosaur mummy known as Dakota, the Hyde Park mastodon became known to the general
public as an individual animal, much in the way a beloved
zoo animal might. Yet, like many but not all of these other
celebrity fossils, the Hyde Park skeleton – together with the
very different finds in Chemung and Wyoming counties –
also became part of something else: one of the widest ranging
and most intense scientific investigations of this extinct species that has been accomplished in many years, perhaps ever.
Thus it was not only popularized, but scientifically valuable
as well. In this respect, perhaps PRI’s unexpected “mastodon
period” can serve as a model for other such fortuitous discoveries.
Further Reading
Allmon, W. D., and P. L. Nester, eds. 2008. Mastodon paleobiology, taphonomy, and paleoenvironment in the Late Pleistocene
of New York State: sstudies on the Hyde Park, Chemung, and
North Java sites. Palaeontographica Americana, no. 61, 476 pp.
Cohen, C. 2002. The Fate of the Mammoth. Fossils, Myth, and History. Translated by William Rodarmor. University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 297 pp.
Haynes, G. 1991. Mammoths, Mastodonts, and Elephants. Biology,
Behavior, and the Fossil Record. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 413 pp.
Hedeen, S. 2008. Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleon-
tology. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 182 pp.
Holman, J. A. 2001. In Quest of Great Lakes Ice Age Vertebrates.
Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 230 pp.
Mayor, A. 2005. Fossil Legends of the First Americans. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 446 pp.
Rudwick, M. J. S. 1976. The Meaning of Fossils. Episodes in the
History of Palaeontology, 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 287 pp.
Sellers, C.C. 1980. Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and
the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art. W. W.
Norton, New York, 370 pp.
Semonin, P. 2000. American Monster. How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity. New York
University Press, New York, 482 pp.
Tassy, P. 2003. The earliest tooth of the American mastodon and the
emergence of the concept of fossil species. American Paleontologist, 11(1): 3-5.
Warren Allmon is Director of Paleontological Research Institution and its Museum of the Earth. Email [email protected].
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 29
DODSON ON DINOSAURS
Polish Women in the Gobi – In Loving Memory of Halszka
Osmólska (1930-2008)
By Peter Dodson
With the passing of Halszka Osmólska on March 31, 2008,
dinosaur paleontology has lost a giant. She was one of the
most productive dinosaur paleontologists of her generation.
Halszka Osmólska was Professor at the Institute of Paleobiology, Polish Academy of Sciences, and was director of that
Institute from 1984 to 1989. She edited Acta Palaeontologica
Polonica from 1975 to 1992. She was responsible for the description of 15 genera of dinosaurs. She was solo author of
four of these, and first author of two more. The remarkable
team of Maryańska and Osmólska was responsible for naming eight genera. She was honored in the names of a basal
archosaur, Osmolskina czatkowicensis (Borsuk-Białynicka &
Evans, 2003) and two dinosaurs: the oviraptorosaur Citipati
osmolskae (Clark et al., 2001), and most recently (June 2008)
Velociraptor osmolskae (Godefroit et al., 2008). She was elected to honorary life membership in the Society of Vertebrate
Paleontology in 2003.
Women have long since come to the fore in dinosaur paleontology as in so many other fields. It has been my pleasure
and pride to train outstanding women in dinosaur paleontology: Cathy Forster (Ph.D. 1990), Allison Tumarkin-Deratzian (Ph.D. 2003), and Merrilee Guenther (Ph.D. 2007).
Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan completed her Ph.D. in her native South Africa, but spent two highly productive years as
a postdoctoral fellow in my lab. She has vigorously pursued
the study of bone histology of dinosaurs and birds, and has
literally written the book on the topic (Chinsamy-Turan,
2006). South African “Woman of the Year” in 2005 and
winner of all kinds of awards, this vivacious woman of color
and mother of two boys is regarded as one of South Africa’s
top international scientists. Two of my students in progress
are grad student Emma Schachner and undergraduate Jessie
Atterholt. Jessie spent a month in China with me working
on projects for her senior thesis, and now has her sights firmly set on top graduate schools. [Barbara Grandstaff (Ph.D.
2006) also bears my stamp, but works on fossil fishes, not
dinosaurs.] Other women in dinosaur paleontology whom I
admire greatly include Mary Schweitzer, Julia Clarke, Kristi
Curry Rogers, Brenda Chinnery-Allgeier, Darla Zelenitsky,
Angela Milner, and the late Betsy Nicholls, to name but a
few. The good news is that this list wells annually.
Granted the important role women play in paleontology, is it possible to imagine a paleontological expedition
in which women have actually played a starring role? It has
already happened, not once but three times, between 1965
30 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
and 1971. Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska led the great expeditions
of 1965, 1970, and 1971. Poland has a long history in paleontology, but it is a country that is nearly devoid of dinosaur remains. The country is rich in Paleozoic invertebrates
and also Cenozoic insect-bearing amber. Polish paleontologists historically studied invertebrates. When Zofia KielanJaworowska was a young student in Warsaw after the Second
World War, she was fascinated to learn of the Central Asiatic
Expeditions to the Gobi Desert by the American Museum
of Natural History (1922-1930). It was actually the Cretaceous mammals that fueled her imagination. The idea of going to exotic Mongolia seemed less remote to her two years
later when she learned of the Soviet-Mongolian expeditions
(1946, 1948, 1949) then underway. In 1962, a delegation
from the Mongolian Academy of Sciences visited Warsaw,
and Polish Academician Roman Kozłowski, a paleontologist,
proposed a joint expedition, and the proposal was accepted.
Kozłowski, then 72 years old, was himself too old to participate, but turned the organization of the expedition over to
Kielan-Jaworowska. She was given four months to prepare
supplies and equipment for shipment by rail from Warsaw
to Ulan Bator, a journey of some 8,000 km (5,000 miles).
She meticulously documented the process in two expedition
narratives (Kielan-Jaworowska & Dovchin, 1968; Kielan-Jaworowska & Barsbold, 1972) and in a popular book (KielanJaworowska, 1969). The 1963 expedition was for reconnaissance of sites and no major digging took place. The 1964 and
1965 expeditions were in earnest, and the results were superb.
The expedition photographs show the women who were to
play such an important role in the scientific publications to
follow: Magdalena Borsuk-Białynicka, Teresa Maryańska,
Halszka Osmólska, and Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska. The result
of three expeditions was 35 tons of fossils, including Cretaceous mammals, lizards, a large sauropod skeleton, two ornithomimid skeletons, ankylosaurs, a pair of fore limbs of a
large but enigmatic theropod, six specimens of Tarbosaurus,
the great tyrannosaurid discovered by the Russian expeditions
and described by Maleev in 1955, as well as some Cenozoic
mammals. More modest collecting trips were made to proven
localities in 1967, 1968, and 1969. Two more large scale expeditions were held in 1970 and 1971. Mongolian paleontologists on the later expeditions included the now-famous
Mongolian dinosaur paleontologists Rinchen Barsbold and
Altangerel Perle. In addition to dinosaurs large and small,
fossil mammals and lizards proved to be abundant.
The Polish-Mongolian Expeditions were highly successful, and added greatly to our knowledge of the diversity of
dinosaurs. The material collected in those few years provided
material for major portions of the careers of five or six Polish scientists. What is striking to me is that the scientific descriptions of dinosaurs that soon began to flow from the expeditions were almost exclusively written by Polish women,
women who up to then had published on Paleozoic invertebrates. The expedition results were published in 10 volumes
of Palaeontologia Polonica (PP) between 1968 and 1984. The
handsome, folio-sized series was edited by Kielan-Jaworowska. Part I contained the narrative of the first three expeditions
by Kielan-Jaworowska & Dovchin (1968), as well as papers
on geology, Cenozoic mammals and tortoises, and the first of
many important papers by Kielan-Jaworowska on Cretaceous
mammals from the Gobi. My comments will focus narrowly
on the dinosaurs, the first description of which appeared in
Part II. It was appropriately spectacular. Halszka Osmólska & Ewa Roniewicz (1970) announced the discovery of
Deinocheirus mirificus (“unusual horrible hand”), a fossil collected during the 1965 field season at Altan Ula III in the
Nemegt Basin. The find consisted of two nearly complete articulated forelimbs of a theropod of unprecedented size. The
forelimbs were 2.4 meters (almost 8 feet) long. The claws on
the three-fingered hand measured 323 mm in length (nearly
13 inches). A possible ornithomimosaur, the animal remains
enigmatic decades later, pending further discoveries. In the
same volume, Teresa Maryańska (1970) added a description
of ankylosaurian materials. In Part III, Maryańska (1971)
described a magnificent juvenile skull of the nodosaurid ankylosaurid, Pinacosaurus grangeri. Using the skeleton associ-
ated with this specimen, she wisely deduced that Syrmosaurus
Maleev, 1952, is the same animal as Pinacosaurus Gilmore,
1933. Part IV saw another new theropod, the giant ornithomimid Gallimimus bullatus (“chicken mimic with a skull
capsule”), described by Halszka Osmólska, Ewa Roniewicz &
Rinchen Barsbold (1972), the Mongolian collaborator. Gallimimus, familiar to viewers of Jurassic Park, was 5 meters (16
feet) long. It had rather short feet and a distinctive bulla deep
in its skull, perhaps for producing resonant sounds.
In Part V, very importantly, Maryańska & Osmólska
(1974) described new genera and species of pachycephalosaurs or dome-headed dinosaurs. Up until that time, only
two pachycephalosaurids, Stegoceras Lambe, 1902, and
Pachycephalosaurus Brown & Schlaikjer, 1943, were known
from good skulls, both from North America. The expeditions collected three skulls from two different formations.
Homalocephale calathocercos (“even-headed basket-tail”)
from the Nemegt Formation is a flat-headed pachycephalosaur, the first to be documented convincingly. The species
was so named because the tail was heavily supported by a
mesh of ossified tendons. Tylocephale gilmorei (“Gilmore’s
swollen-head”) is an imperfectly preserved domed-skull from
the Barunguyot Formation. Prenocephale prenes (“sloping
slope-head”) is a magnificent, full-domed species with a skull
somewhat larger than little Stegoceras but barely a third the
size of Pachycephalosaurus, which it resembles in the fullness
of its cranial dome. Both Prenocephale and Homalocephale
turn out to be roughly 2 meters (6 feet) long. The ilium can
be used similarly: those of both Prenocephale and Homalocephale are barely longer than their respective femurs: 225
mm and 230 mm. Maryańska & Osmólska described the
Polish members of the 1965 Expedition in Altan Ula camp. The female participants are Teresa Maryańska (seventh from left), Halszka Osmólska
(fifth from right), and Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska (third from right).
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 31
Pachycephalosauria as an entirely new suborder of ornithischian dinosaurs. They recognized distinctive characters in the
skull and skeleton that separate pachycephalosaurs from all
other ornithischians. One such character is the exclusion of
the pubis from the hip joint, and another is the great breadth
of the sacrum.
In Part VI comes my favorite paper, Maryańska & Osmólska (1975) on Protoceratopsidae (never mind that in
these latter days of enlightenment we no longer use that
term, but speak instead of basal neoceratopsians; see You &
Dodson, 2004). There they described the first important new
Asian ceratopsians in half a century. Bagaceratops rozhdestvenskyi (“Rozhdestvensky’s small horned face”) is a delicate
little basal ceratopsian represented by more than 20 skulls
and partial skeletons. The skulls range between a tiny 47
mm and 170 mm (7 inches) in length. Despite its small size,
there is evidence of a nose horn more prominent than that of
Protoceratops. They described a second taxon as ?Protoceratops
kozlowskii in honor of Professor Kozłowski. This species subsequently gave rise to a new genus, Breviceratops Kurzanov,
1990. They referred a third species to Microceratops gobiensis,
a fossil that the Swedish paleontologist Anders Bohlin had
named in 1953 from Gansu, northwestern China. Whereas
Bohlin had only fragments, Maryańska & Osmólska had a
skull and partial skeleton, and the little animal turned out
to be less than 1 meter long, true to its name. Sereno (2000)
erected a new genus for their fossil, which he named Graciliceratops (“slender horn face”) on the reasonable grounds
that Bohlin’s fossil was too fragmentary to contain diagnostic characters. One of the most important conclusions of
the paper is that Psittacosaurus belongs in the Ceratopsia. It
had been misclassified since Osborn (1924) described it but
failed to recognize the rostral bone that forms the upper half
of the beak, one of the defining features of Ceratopsia. Our
heroines confirmed without a shadow of doubt the existence
of the rostral bone in Psittacosaurus. The paper by Maryańska
& Osmólska (1975) is a paleontological classic, rich in anatomical detail, analysis of diversity and variability, and cogent
phylogenetic reasoning.
The women continued to write. In part VII appeared the
description of Opisthocoelicaudia skarzynskii (“Skarżyński’s
opisthocoelous tail vertebrae”) by Magdalena BorsukBiałynicka (1977). This important sauropod was at first
thought to be a camarasaurid, but we now recognize it as a
titanosaur. In a second solo-authored paper in this volume,,
Teresa Maryańska (1977) reviewed ankylosaurids collected
by the expeditions. These included fine specimens of previously named taxa, Pinacosaurus and Talarurus, but also two
new genera, both from the Barun Guyot Formation. Saichania chulsanensis (“beautiful one from Khulsan, Gobi Desert”)
is a large ankylosaurid, 7 meters (23 feet) in length. Its triangular skull is nearly a half-meter wide across the back, and it
has large osteoderms or bony plates fused to the top. Tarchia
kielanae (“Kielan-[Jaworowska’s] brainy one”) is almost the
32 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
same size as Saichania, but has a skull that is much deeper
and angled differently at the back, evidently in order to accommodate a large brain. Part VIII (1978), alas, contains no
dinosaur papers. Part IX contains a review of Asian hadrosaurs, including new material of Saurolophus angustirostris
(Maryańska & Osmólska, 1981a). Osmólska (1981) investigated fossils of theropods with fused tarsometatarsals, dinosaurs with strikingly bird-like characters in their feet. She
named Elmisaurus rarus (“rare foot reptile”), and proposed
the family Elmisauridae. She pointed out that the Canadian
fossils Macrophalangia and Chirostenotes showed a similar
suite of characters. The current thinking (Osmólska et al.,
2004) is that the North American representatives belong to
the Oviraptorosauria, and Elmisaurus is likely also to belong
to this interesting group of theropods. The final volume in
the remarkable 16-year series of Expedition Results is Part
X, which contains an analysis of the postcranial skeleton of
Saurolophus and of posture in hadrosaurs (Maryańska & Osmólska, 1984).
With the end of the formal volumes of Expedition Results, publication of occasional dinosaur papers continued in
Acta Palaeontologica Polonica (APP), still presenting analysis
of expedition fossils, and Teresa and Halszka continued to
take the lead. Barsboldia sicinskii (honoring Rinchen Barsbold and W. Siciński) is the first unequivocal lambeosaurine
hadrosaur from Mongolia (Maryańska & Osmólska, 1981b).
Mongolian Altangerel Perle joined the duo to describe another flat-headed pachycephalosaur, Goyocephlae lattimorei
(“Lattimore’s decorated or elegant head”) (Perle et al., 1982).
Most of Halszka’s later publications were on Mongolian small
theropods. She named Hulsanpes perlei (Perle’s foot from
Khulsan”), an important dromaeosaurid (Osmólska, 1982)
from the Barun Guyot Formation, Borogovia gracilicrus
(“slender-shinned fantastic creature [from Lewis Carroll]”)
from the Nemegt Formation, and Bagaraatan ostromi ([Mongolian]: Ostrom’s small predator”), a tyrannosauroid from
the Nemegt Formation (Osmólska, 1996). In 1991, Halszka
Halszka Osmólska in Philadelphia, 2000.
collaborated with the Soviet paleontologist S. M. Kurzanov
to describe a troodontid from the Nemegt Formation collected by the Soviet-Mongolian Expedition in 1948. Tochisaurus
nemegtensis ([Mongolian] “ostrich reptile from the Nemegt”)
(Kurzanov & Osmólska, 1991) represents the only complete
troodontid metatarsus from Asia. In 1994, a most interesting
specimen of oviraptorosaur was discovered at Bugin Tsav in
the Gobi by the Japanese-Mongolian Expedition. The team
wisely sought the collaboration of Halszka. Nomingia gobiensis (from the name Nomingiin Gobi, part of the Gobi Desert)
(Barsbold et al., 2000) is a theropod dinosaur that shows a
short tail with fused tail vertebrae at the end, a pygostyle,
previously thought to be an exclusively avian feature. Thus
the distinction between theropods and birds, or rather avian
theropods and nonavian theropods, continues to blur. The
final paper in the remarkable collaboration between Halszka
and Teresa was a legitimate potboiler, a highly detailed cladistic analysis of the position of the phylogenetic position of
oviraptorosaurs among theropods (Maryańska et al., 2002).
They reached the extremely interesting conclusion that these
strange toothless theropods are nested within the avialan
rather than the “dinosaurian” side of the family. That is to
say, their ancestors included flying animals like Archaeopteryx
or Confuciusornis, rather than representing an ancestral type.
This idea is highly controversial, being supported by some
authors (e. g., Lü et al., 2002) but rejected by others (e. g.,
Turner et al., 2007 – who ignored Maryańska et al., 2002).
Although the idea of oviraptorosaurs as birds is more than I
can bear, the concept is an exciting and stimulating one that
really forces us to think carefully and clearly about just what
is and is not a bird. Halszka’s final report (Osmólska, 2004)
is a brief but interesting note about the size of the brain in
the oviraptorosaur Ingenia. Impressions of blood vessels on
the under side of the skull roof demonstrated that the cerebrum and cerebellum, filled the space within the braincase
completely, as in birds and mammals, and completely unlike
living reptiles. This had been shown previously in only one
other dinosaur, but now has been reported in a hadrosaur
and a pachycephalosaur as well (Evans, 2005).
Halsza Osmólska was the most modest of women, and
much beloved by all with whom she came in contact. Although all of her dinosaur papers were published in English, nearly all of them appeared in Polish journals, either
PP or APP, which have only recently, with the advent of the
world wide web, become widely available. It was my great
pleasure to meet Halszka in Paris in 1978 at the first meeting of International Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems (MTE), and our friendship dated from that time,
renewed at MTE II in Warsaw in 1981, and again at MTE
III in Tübingen in 1984. At this meeting, we convened the
inaugural session of the editorial board of The Dinosauria, for
Dave Weishampel and I invited this brilliant woman to be
our coeditor, a task that she fulfilled with the greatest distinction. Halszka hosted Dave and me in Warsaw in 1988 for a
grueling three-week editorial session, and I hosted those two
colleagues in Philadelphia in 1989 to complete the task. The
result, The Dinosauria (Weishampel, Dodson & Osmólska,
1990), speaks for itself, although I do not mind speaking for
it either! She came twice more to Philadelphia for editing the
second edition (Weishampel, Dodson & Osmólska, 2004),
affording my students an invaluable opportunity to meet
her and get know her. I knew Halszka as the most genial of
friends. She expressed herself in excellent but distinctly idiosyncratic English. She was a fine raconteur, and her friends
enjoyed her lively sense of humor. I wish that space permitted to share some witty anecdotes. She was a lady of culture.
Dave and I attended opera with her in Warsaw; I attended
concerts with her Philadelphia, and worshipped with her as
well. It was a great privilege to have known and loved Halszka
Osmólska. Paleontology mourns her loss.
References
Barsbold, R., H. Osmólska, M. Watabe, P. J. Currie, & K. Tsoftbaatar. 2000. A new oviraptorosaur (Dinosauria, Theropoda) from
Mongolia: the first dinosaur with a pygostyle. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 45: 97-106.
Borsuk-Białynicka, M. 1977. A new camarasaurid sauropod
Opisthocoelicaudia skarzynskii, gen. n. sp. n. from the Upper
Cretaceous of Mongolia. Palaeontologia Polonica, 37: 5-64.
Borsuk-Białynicka, M., & S. E. Evans. 2003. A basal archosauriform from the Early Triassic of Poland. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 48: 649-653.
Clark, J. M., M. A. Norell, & R. Barsbold. 2001. Two new oviraptorids (Theropoda: Oviraptorosauria) Upper Cretaceous
Djadokhta Formation, Ukhaa Tolgod, Mongolia. Journal of
Vertebrate Paleontology, 21: 209-213.
Evans, D. C. 2005. New evidence on brain−endocranial cavity relationships in ornithischian dinosaurs. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 50(3): 617-622.
Godefroit, P., P. J. Currie, H. Li, C.Y. Shang, & Z. Dong. 2008.
A new species of Velociraptor (Dinosauria: Dromaeosauridae)
from the Upper Cretaceous of northern China. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 28: 432-438.
Kielan-Jaworowska, Z. 1969. Hunting for Dinosaurs. MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 177 pp.
Kielan-Jaworowska, Z., & R. Barsbold. 1972. Narrative of the
Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expeditions 1967-1971. Palaeontologia Polonica, 27: 5-13.
Kielan-Jaworowska, Z., & N. Dovchin. 1968. Narrative of the
Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expeditions 1963-1965. Palaeontologia Polonica, 19: 7-32.
Kurzanov, S. M., & H. Osmólska. 1991. Tochisaurus nemegtensisgen. et sp. n., a new troodontid (Dinosauria, Theropoda) from
Mongolia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 36: 69-76.
Lü, J. 2002. A new oviraptorosaurid (Theropoda: Oviraptorosauria) from the Late Cretaceous of southern China. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 22: 871-875.
Maryańska, T. 1970. Remains of armored dinosaurs from the uppermost Cretaceous in Nemegt Basin, Gobi Desert. Palaeontologia Polonica, 21: 22-34.
Maryańska, T. 1971. New data on the skull of Pinacosaurns grangeri
(Ankylosauria). Palaeontologia Polonica, 25: 45-53.
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 33
Maryańska, T. 1977. Ankylosauridae (Dinosauria) from Mongolia.
Palaeontologia Polonica, 37: 85-151.
Maryańska, T., & H. Osmólska. 1974. Pachycephalosauria, a new
suborder of ornithischian dinosaurs. Palaeontologia Polonica,
30: 45-102.
Maryańska, T., & H. Osmólska. 1975. Protoceratopsidae (Dinosauria) of Asia. Palaeontologia Polonica, 33: 133-181.
Maryańska, T., & H. Osmólska. 1981a. Cranial anatomy of Saurolophus angustirostris with comments on the Asian Hadrosauridae. Palaeontologia Polonica, 42: 5-24.
Maryańska, T., & H. Osmólska. 1981b. First lambeosaurine dinosaur from the Nemegt Formation, Upper Cretaceous, Mongolia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 26: 243-255.
Maryańska, T., & H. Osmólska. 1984. Postcranial anatomy of Saurolophus angustirostris with comments on other hadrosaurs. Palaeontologia Polonica, 46: 110-141.
Maryańska, T., H. Osmólska, & M. Wolsan. 2002. Avialan status
for Oviraptorosauria. Acta Palaeontologia Polonica, 47: 97-116.
Osborn, H. F. 1924. Psittacosaurus and Protiguanodon: two Lower
Cretaceous iguanodonts from Mongolia. American Museum
Novitates, 127: 1-16.
Osmólska, H. 1981. Coossified tarsometatarsi in theropod dinosaurs and their bearing on the problem of bird origins. Palaeontologia Polonica, 42: 79-95.
Osmólska, H. 1982. Hulsanpes perlei n. g. n. sp. (Deinonychosauria; Saurischia; Dinosauria) from the Upper Cretaceous Barun
Goyot Formation of Mongolia. N. Jb. Geol. Paläontol. Mh.,
1982: 440-448.
Osmólska, H. 1987. Borogovia gracilicrus gen, et sp. n., a new troodontid dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia. Acta
Palaeontologica Polonica, 31: 133-150.
Osmólska, H. 1996. An unusual theropod dinosaur from the Late
Cretaceous Nemegt Formation of Mongolia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 41: 1-38.
Osmólska, H. 2004. Evidence on relation of brain to endocranial
cavity in oviraptorid dinosaurs. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica,
49: 321-324.
Osmólska, H., & E. Roniewicz. 1970. Deinocheiridae, a new family of theropod dinosaurs. Palaeontologia Polonica, 21: 5-19.
Osmólska, H., E. Roniewicz, & R. Barsbold. 1972. A new dinosaur, Gallimimus bullatus n. gen., n. sp. (Ornithomimidae)
from the Upper Cretaceous of Mongolia. Palaeontologia Polonica, 27: 103-143.
Perle, A., T. Maryańska, & H. Osmólska. 1982. Goyocephale lattimorei gen. et sp. n., a new flat-headed pachycephalosaur
(Omithischia, Dinosauria) from the Upper Cretaceous of Mongolia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 27: 115-127.
Sereno, P. C. 2000. The fossil record, systematics and evolution of
pachycephalosaurs and ceratopsians from Asia. Pp 480-516, in:
The Age of Dinosaurs in Russia and Mongolia, M. J. Benton, M.
A. Shishkin, D. M. Unwin, & E. N. Kurochkin, eds. Cambridge University Press.
Turner, A. H., D. Pol, J. A. Clarke, G. M. Erickson, & M. A. Norell.
2007. A basal droaeosaurid and size evolution preceeding flight.
Science, 317: 1378-1381.
Weishampel, D. B., P. Dodson, & H. Osmólska, eds. 1990. The
Dinosauria. University of California Press, 733 pp.
Weishampel, D. B., P. Dodson, & H. Osmólska, eds. 2004. The
Dinosauria. 2nd ed. University of California Press, 861 pp.
You, H., & P. Dodson. 2004. Basal Ceratopsia. Pp 478-493, in:
The Dinosauria, 2nd ed., D. B. Weishampel, P. Dodson, & H.
Osmólska, eds. University of California Press.
Peter Dodson is Professor of Anatomy in the School of Veterinary
Medicine and Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Science in the
School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
His column is a regular feature of American Paleontologist.
Email [email protected].
Albert David Warren (1929-2008)
A. D. Warren, geoscientist and life member of PRI, passed away on May 19 after a prolonged
illness. He enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a micropaleontologist and consultant in
the petroleum industry, contributing key innovations as a pioneer in the fields of biostratigraphy, foraminiferans, nannoplankton, and ecology. Also an avid naturalist, he was an amateur
herpetologist, a keen birdwatcher, and was credited with one of the last known sightings of
the endangered Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Born in New Orleans, he served in the Marines and
attended Tulane University and Louisiana State University, earning degrees in geology and
micropaleontology. Warren published and presented numerous influential papers for the Geological Society of America, the International Union of Geological Sciences, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, and other geological associations. He served as President
of both the Gulf Coast and Pacific Sections of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and
Mineralogists. He was one of those lucky individuals whose career was his passion, his hobby, and his life’s work. He is
survived by his wife of 50 years, Gloria Turner Warren, of La Jolla, California, three children, and seven grandchildren.
Memorial remembrances can be made to the San Diego Natural History Museum’s Department of Paleontology.
34 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
A N A M AT E U R ’ S PE R S PE C T I V E
Cephalopod Intelligence
By John A. Catalani
I love cephalopods, particularly nautiloids (but you knew
and maneuverability that coleoids possess. Interestingly, from
this). Cephalopods are certainly the most specialized memwhat we have been able to infer from the fossil record and
bers of the mollusks and, “in terms of speed, intelligence, and
presumed taxonomic lineages, ammonoids possessed traits
sensory ability, they represent the acme of invertebrate evoluof both nautiloids (external shell) and coleoids (biology and
tion” (Ward, 1988: 16). The class Cephalopoda consisted of
lifestyle).
three subclasses until the end of the Cretaceous Period when
Arms and tentacles are another characteristic feature of
the Ammonoidea went extinct. The two extant subclasses,
cephalopods. All coleoids are equipped with eight muscular
the Nautiloidea and the Coleoidea, differ greatly physiarms. Squids and cuttlefishes also possess two food-gathering
ologically and ecologically. The Nautiloidea is represented by
tentacles that are usually much longer than the arms. The
only two genera, Nautilus and Allonautilus, and a handful
suction cups located on both the arms and the club-shaped
of species, whereas the Coleoidea is represented by 600-700
end-process of the tentacles of squids and cuttlefishes often
species of squids, cuttlefishes, and octopods. Although my
possess chitinous “teeth” that facilitate the grasping of food
research involves Ordovician nautiloids, I have an interest
as well as provide the animal with some defense. The smooth
in all cephalopods, be they
suction cups of octopods
extinct or extant. The genare able to hold onto oberal perception is that the
jects and are equipped with
coleoids are sophisticated
chemoreceptors which aland “smart” whereas the
low them to “taste” what
nautiloids are primitive and
they are touching. Jet pro“dim-witted.” Thankfully, as
pulsion (accomplished by
we shall see, new research is
expelling water through
challenging this perception
the siphon), another clasand has provided me with
sic feature of cephalopods,
yet another topic concerning
is the preferred method of
cephalopods.
horizontal movement for
Let me begin by briefly
the coleoids (and nautidescribing some of the charluses, although not nearly
acteristics of both groups
as efficiently). Movement
of extant cephalopods. The
over the substratum, parmajor difference is immeticularly with octopuses, is
diately apparent: Nautilus Living Nautilus pompilius, photographed alive at the Berlin Zoo Aquarium. facilitated with the eight
and Allonautilus possess an Photograph by J. Baecker via Wikimedia Commons.
arms. Some species of
external shell (“ectocochliOctopus are even able to use
ate” in cephalopod speak) and coleoids do not. The external
their arms to crawl out of the water for short forays onto
shell provides nautiluses with both protection and neutral
land. Nautiluses are equipped with approximately 90 small
buoyancy. This neutral (actually slightly negative) buoyancy
tentacles, each consisting of a cirrus, with no suckers or arm
is achieved through the removal of water from the chambers
hooks, and a sheath into which the cirrus can be withdrawn.
by osmosis and the diffusion of gas, which is at low pressures
The tentacles, which no longer contribute to the animal’s
at normal Nautilus water depths, back into the chambers.
locomotion, serve many functions including food detection
Coleoids might or might not possess an internal shell. The
(using both chemosensory and tactile inputs), transportation
internal shell of the squid provides support for the soft and
of food to the mouth, and reproduction.
streamlined body thus facilitating movement through the
Much has been written about the large eyes of coleoids,
water. The internal shell of the cuttlefish aids in buoyancy
particularly those of the squid. They are very similar in struc(the cuttlebone is porous). Octopods contain no internal
ture to vertebrate eyes, a classic example of convergent evolushell (the Nautilus-like shell secreted by Argonauta females is
tion (the presence of Pax-6 gene homologs, along with other
actually a brood chamber for their eggs). The loss of a protecgenes, suggests some homology, although this has been contive external shell is more than compensated for by the speed
tested). Coleoid eyes consist of a lens (with a pupil that adAMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 35
justs by changing shape with differing light intensities) and a
retina (with densely packed cells) providing excellent object
resolution. Advanced musculature allows tracking of moving
objects. Even though virtually all coleoids are color blind, they
can detect polarized light due to the arrangement of photoreceptor cells. This allows the animal to detect both prey and
predators against a reflective background. Although the eyes
of nautiluses have an adjustable pupil as well as retinal characteristics and musculature similar to those of coleoids, the
eye itself is a primitive pinhole type with no lens, thus allowing seawater into the eye chamber. The Nautilus eye structure
permits only poor resolution and appears to be more adapted
at detecting light intensity than discrete objects. This limitation, along with the low ambient light present in their deepwater habitat, suggests that sight is much less important to
nautiluses as a sensory mechanism than either odor or tactile
stimulation – more on this later.
Growth and reproduction differ greatly between coleoids
and nautiluses. Most coleoids live only one year, spawn only
once (some species lay several batches of eggs but always during a single spawning cycle), and quickly die after mating
(males) or after egg laying (females). In contrast, nautiluses
grow slowly and can live for 10-20 years or more (there is a
lot of uncertainty when dealing with nautiluses). After sexual
maturity is reached, breeding, which occurs during a single,
annual breeding season that can last several months, occurs
many times during the animal’s life span. The eggs laid by
coleoids are small but are produced in the hundreds to thousands by individual females. Although most coleoids simply
deposit the eggs with no further involvement, the females
of many species of Octopus deposit their eggs in a den and
care for the eggs not only by guarding them but also, for
example, by passing water over them so that they remain aerated. During this time, the females do not eat and essentially
waste away until they die, usually just after the eggs hatch.
By contrast, the dozen-or-so eggs laid by female nautiluses
are usually 25-35 mm in diameter – the largest eggs laid by
any invertebrate. Although no nautilus eggs have ever been
observed in the field, studies of the oxygen isotopes present
in different parts of the shell indicate that the eggs are deposited in warm, shallow water and that the animal assumes
a normal deep-water lifestyle immediately after hatching. If
the eggs are indeed laid in shallow water, odds are that there
is no subsequent parental care.
Possibly the most spectacular adaptation of coleoids is
the ability to create and alter skin colors, patterns, and textures with blinding speed. The colors and patterns are generated mainly by chromatophores, which are cells that contain
sacs of pigment and are located just below the surface of the
skin, but are assisted by other cells called iridophores and
leucophores. Each chromatophore is controlled by a nerve fiber that either contracts the surrounding muscles expanding
the sacs and making the color visible or relaxes the muscles
contracting the sacs thereby muting the color. Because each
36 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
chromatophore is controlled individually, a large repertoire
of patterns and signals can be generated and modified very
quickly. Some species are also equipped with photophores
that produce luminescent colors thus enhancing their displays. Octopuses and cuttlefishes can also achieve various
skin textures by contracting muscles to form various protuberances and tubercles. These color, pattern, and texture displays are not only useful in warning or intimidating predators but also essential to mating challenges, courtship rituals, and general monospecific communication. In addition,
when texture changes are coupled with color and pattern displays, coleoids, particularly octopuses, can virtually disappear
against a background, the ultimate in creature camouflage, to
either avoid predators or assist in stalking prey. The Nautilus
shell provides the animal with limited camouflage – the dorsal surface has reddish-brown patterns to blend with the substratum when viewed from above and the ventral surface is
white to blend with the bright surface waters when viewed
from below.
Field observations of both the remarkable range of colors and patterns that coleoids are able to generate and the
interactions of these animals with each other, led scientists
to speculate that they were observing not only same-species
communication but also some degree of intelligence. When
discussing intelligence, however, it must be understood that
researchers were attempting to correctly identify (for example
coleoids are, nautiloids are not) and measure intelligence in
other species – a difficult task given the problems we have
defining and quantifying human intelligence. For coleoid researchers, the next logical step was to conduct various field
observations and laboratory experiments to explore this presumed intelligence. Experiments on a variety of coleoids have
been conducted for 60-or-so years but the most common
subject of these studies has been various species of Octopus.
Experiments range from simple observations in the field to
classical conditioning in the laboratory.
The method(s) used by octopuses to find their way back
to their dens after foraging for food was one behavior that
puzzled researchers. One possibility was that the animals used
their chemotactile ability to retrace their outgoing path back
to their dens. Another possibility was that the animals remembered landmarks in their foraging area and used these to
find their way home. One study, reported by Mather (1991),
used both field and laboratory experiments in an attempt to
determine the method used in navigation. In the field, several
individual Octopus vulgaris were observed during foraging.
Maps were constructed of the ocean floor and the foraging
paths taken by the animals were drawn on these maps. Several
years later, a more experimental approach was taken in the
field when the animals were presented with artificial landmarks amid the natural ones. These artificial landmarks were
changed once the animals became accustomed to them and,
once again, maps were made of their paths. Analysis of both
sets of foraging maps revealed that not only was the amount
of outgoing-path/return-path overlap small but also the an(PBS) in which one octopus observed another who had been
gle of return path averaged 30˚ from the outgoing path. On
previously conditioned to open a jar containing food. The
longer forays, the animals would jet out and jet back without
observer octopus displayed an intense interest in the activity
making contact with the substratum, thus reinforcing the sceof the conditioned octopus. When presented with a jar, which
nario of landmark-memory recognition. Additionally, when
the animal had not previously been able to open, the observer
the artificial landmarks were moved, the animals were still
was successful in opening the jar to obtain the food.
able to return to their dens, suggesting that “they were ignorMany additional observations and experiments of octoing the conspicuous but smaller artificial landmark because
puses have revealed that they exhibit rudimentary tool use
stable larger natural landmarks were more salient” (Mather,
by utilizing rocks to block their den openings or water jets
1991: 494). The laboratory experiments, too involved to defrom their siphons to clean debris from their dens, engage in
scribe here, reinforced the importance of landmarks to navi“play” behavior, and appear to have distinctive personalities
gation. This study “suggests strongly that octopuses use visual
because they tend to react individually to the same stimuli –
spatial information for navigation within their home ranges
all evidence for some level of reasoning power.
and to guide their returns from hunting trips” (p. 496). It is
Based on the amount of evidence acquired during these
as if the animals constructed a mental map of their immediobservations and experiments (and I have mentioned only a
ate vicinity and stored it
few examples), it would
in their long-term memseem illogical not to reory. Because the animals
fer to these animals, parforaged in different articularly octopuses, as
eas, returned by different
intelligent. They are able
paths, and did not remain
to input visual and tactile
on the ocean floor while
stimuli, store it in what
foraging, the chemotactile
appears to be long-term
scenario was rejected.
memory, and then recall
More familiar to most
it for use when needed,
of us are the classicalparticularly for navigaconditioning experiments
tion. From observations
performed on coleoids in
in the wild and laborathe laboratory. It has been
tory experiments, it has
determined that octopusbeen demonstrated that
es can distinguish between
“they evaluate sensory
shapes and patterns when
input and choose actions
conditioned by a rewardbased on consideration
punishment technique.
of such input” and, alProblem solving experithough much of how
ments in which, for exdata is actually processed
ample, the animal is preremains unknown, what
sented with food enclosed
we do know about their
in a jar and must “learn”
abilities suggests that “we
to open the container Living Octopus vulgaris, photographed alive at Suma Aqualife Park, Kobe, Japan. should add cephalopods
has also been observed Photograph by OpenCage via Wikimedia Commons.
to the groups of animals
and studied (Fiorito et
that might have primary
al., 1990). Not only did the time required to “solve” the jar
consciousness” (Mather, 2008: 45).
problem decrease with practice but the animals were able to
Now, with all due respect, these researchers and authors
repeat this task months after the initial conditioning, indicatmight state that their conclusions relate to the behavior and
ing the presence of long-term memory. In another experilearning in “cephalopods” but they are in reality referring
ment (Fiorito & Scotto, 1992), the possibility of one octopus
only to coleoids. To some extent this is understandable – belearning by observing another octopus was investigated. An
cause they inhabit deep-water habitats, observing nautiluses
unconditioned Octopus vulgaris was allowed to observe, from
in the field presents researchers with innumerable challenges
a separate but adjacent tank, a previously conditioned indiand it is very difficult to maintain these animals in aquaria.
vidual performing object recognition behavior. The observing
Recently, however, there has been an upsurge in published
animals selected the correct object around 80% of the time
research detailing experiments involving nautiluses.
even when no reward was presented. A similar experiment
Much of this research has concentrated on the sensory
was shown on an episode of Scientific American Frontiers
ability, mainly odor detection, of nautiluses. In an early exAMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 37
periment (Basal et al., 2000), it was determined that nautiluses could detect and track odors at a distance of 10 meters
(33 feet). However, when the rhinophores (olfactory organs
located below each eye) of test animals were blocked, it was
discovered that odors could be detected but not tracked. A
more comprehensive investigation (Basil et al., 2005) identified four odor-detecting structures: the rhinophores, digital tentacles, preocular tentacles, and postocular tentacles.
Ciliated epithelial cells on these structures act as chemoreceptors allowing for both remote and contact odor detection.
When odor stimuli were presented directly (within 1 cm)
to test animals, several behaviors were elicited. Stimulation
of the rhinophores resulted in the digital tentacles spreading
out into the “cone-of-search” odor-detection behavior used
by nautiluses to track distant odors. Stimulation of the digital
tentacles resulted in the extension of the lateral digital tentacles, movement toward the substratum (or food source),
and contact with the substratum with the medial digital tentacles. This behavior is used by the animals as they near the
food source. Stimulation of the preocular tentacles elicited
similar reactions although not as intensely for either behavior whereas the other odor-detecting structures were of lesser
importance. Non-odor control stimuli elicited no reactions.
It appears that chemotactile sensory mechanisms are indeed
much more important to nautiluses than vision for food
detection and, probably, predator detection and avoidance.
Additionally, although the eyes of nautiluses are inferior to
those of other cephalopods, the rhinophores, as well as the
olfactory lobes in the brain, are similar to, but larger than,
those possessed by coleoids and represent another adaptation
for living in a low-light deep-water habitat.
Another study (Soucier & Basil, 2008) investigated the
ability of nautiluses to detect mechanical and acoustical stimuli underwater. As in some experiments with coleoids, changes in ventilation (respiratory) rates were used as a measure of
response to stimuli. The test animals responded to vibratory
stimuli in the water by lowering their ventilation rates. The
ability to sense vibrations would obviously be advantageous
in detecting potential predators and lower respiratory rates
would be an effective strategy for predator avoidance.
These experiments have given us a clearer picture of how
nautiluses interact with their environment in terms of food
acquisition as well as possible predator detection and avoidance. However, classical conditioning experiments similar
to those performed on coleoids described above have been
lacking for the Chambered Nautilus. Why? Crook & Basil
(2008, and the article that provided me with the incentive
to write this essay) reasoned that, because nautiluses lack
coleoid-like regions of the brain that are dedicated to learning, memory, and recall, “it is assumed that the absence of
these regions should limit memory storage and recall in nautilus, but,” they continued, “this assumption has never been
tested” (p. 1992). The authors further reasoned that, because
Nautilus is the last representative of the lineage ancestral to
38 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
all extant cephalopods (either directly or indirectly) and possesses a primitive brain when compared to coleoids, experiments on nautiluses “may provide important insights into
the evolution of complexity in invertebrate nervous systems”
(p. 1992).
The authors used Pavlovian conditioning to test learning,
memory, and recall in Nautilus pompilius. Briefly, the experiment involved 12 individual nautiluses that were conditioned
in an experimental arena (separate from their home tank) using a pulse of blue light of a wavelength visible to nautiluses,
which elicited no unconditioned response, and a solution (no
solids) of home-tank water and food substances thus producing a food-odor stimulus. A preliminary test verified that
this solution elicited the normal food-detection responses
from the animals – extension of the tentacles and elevated
ventilation rates. Throughout the conditioning phase of the
experiment, each training episode consisted of 10 trials with
three minutes between each trial. During training, either the
food-odor solution or the control solution of home-tank water without food was released directly onto the rhinophores
and tentacles while, simultaneously, a single pulse of the blue
light was flashed. Retention testing, performed randomly at
time intervals of 3 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours, 12
hours, and 24 hours, consisted of an unrewarded presentation of the blue-light with test-subject responses recorded on
video tape.
Analysis revealed that food-detection responses to the unrewarded blue light were higher with animals conditioned
with the food-odor solution than those receiving just water
when tested 3 minutes and 30 minutes after training and
then again 6 hours and 12 hours after training thus identifying two distinct memory peaks. At 1 hour and 24 hours
after training, there was little difference in response between
the experimental and the control groups. Although, as stated
above, the brains of coleoids and nautiluses are structurally
different, the two distinct memory peaks (termed biphasic) in
nautiluses are similar to those exhibited by coleoids and can
be tentatively described as short-term memory storage and
long-term memory storage although, as the authors stated,
“this awaits confirmation in future physiological studies” (p.
1996). It was also discovered that short-term storage duration for nautiluses was similar to coleoids but that long-term
storage duration was significantly shorter. In octopuses, for
example, long-term memory can extend several months after conditioning. A possible explanation for the difference in
long-term retention between nautiluses and coleoids centers
on the structural differences in their brains – coleoids have a
vertical-lobe complex whereas nautiluses do not. In coleoids,
it has been determined experimentally that the vertical-lobe
complex is necessary for visual-stimulus memory but, because nautiluses as well as some noncephalopod mollusks
also exhibit long-term memory, it appears that “the presence
of a vertical lobe is not a necessity for long-term storage and
recall of conditioned behaviours” (p. 1997).
Differences in the brain structure of these two groups
of cephalopods have been linked to differences in their lifestyles. Nautiluses, with their more primitive brains, are for
the most part scavengers that inhabit low-light water depths
where chemotactile sensory inputs are more important than
visual inputs when foraging for food items. Coleoids, on the
other hand, have adopted a fast, active, visual, and predatory lifestyle. The more complex brain of coleoids appears to
have been essential to their adopting this aggressive lifestyle.
Therefore, divergence in Nautilus and coleoid lifestyles appears to account, at least in part, for the differences in their
brain structures. Clearly, further investigation of these structural differences has the potential to “provide us with unique
insights into the competing roles that a close evolutionary relationship and widely divergent ecology have played in shaping neuroanatomy of modern cephalopods” (p. 1997).
So, it appears that the “primitive” Chambered Nautilus
has acquired new respect among researchers investigating cephalopod intelligence. There is no question that coleoids are
the most neurologically advanced invertebrates on the planet, but don’t ignore nautiloids – they have been around a lot
longer. And to those who say nautiluses are on the way out,
I hasten to remind them that several times in Earth history
nautiloids have been down but have not yet been counted out
(as opposed to the obviously inferior ammonoids). In fact,
several studies have revealed that the populations of nautiluses are genetically viable and appear to be diversifying.
I am in awe of these marvelously engineered animals.
They are a testament to evolution’s ability to solve a structural problem, in this case neutral buoyancy of an externally
shelled animal, with a design so successful not even the vagaries of deep time could toll their doom. And we are the beneficiaries of this success because scientists are just beginning
to appreciate what this “living fossil” can teach us.
Literature Cited
Basil, J. A., I. Bahctinova, K. Kuroiwa, N. Lee, D. Mims, M. Preis,
& C. Soucier. 2005. The function of the rhinophore and the
tentacles of Nautilus pompilius L. (Cephalopoda, Nautiloidea)
in orientation to odor. Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and
Physiology, 38: 209-221.
Basil, J. A., R. T. Hanlon, S. I. Sheikh, & J. Atema. 2000. Threedimensional odor tracking by Nautilus pompilius. Journal of
Experimental Biology, 203: 1409-1414.
Crook, R., & J. Basil. 2008. A biphasic memory curve in the
chambered nautilus, Nautilus pompilius L. (Cephalopoda:
Nautiloidea). Journal of Experimental Biology, 211: 1992-1998.
Fiorito, G., & P. Scotto. 1992. Observational learning in Octopus
vulgaris. Science, 256: 545-547.
Fiorito, G., C. von Planta, & P. Scotto. 1990. Problem solving
ability of Octopus vulgaris Lamarck (Mollusca, Cephalopoda).
Behavioral and Neural Biology, 53: 217-230.
Mather, J. A. 1991. Navigation by spatial memory and use of visual landmarks in octopuses. Journal of Comparative Physiology,
168A: 491-497.
Mather, J. A. 2008. Cephalopod consciousness: behavioural evidence. Consciousness and Cognition, 17: 37-48.
Soucier, C. P., & J. A. Basil. 2008. Chambered nautilus (Nautilus
pompilius pompilius) responds to underwater vibrations.
American Malacological Bulletin, 24: 3-11.
Ward, P. D. 1988. In Search of Nautilus. Simon and Schuster, New
York, 239 pp.
John Catalani is retired from teaching science at South Hill
High School in Downers Grove, Illinois. His column is a regular
feature of American Paleontologist. Email fossilnautiloid@aol.
com.
Has it Really been Five Years ??
On September 27, 2003, under a tent shielding honored
guests from threatening skies, Trustee Raymond Van
Houtte, assisted by Director Warren Allmon, cut the
ribbon opening the Museum of the Earth. It was Van
Houtte who first conceived of a public museum for PRI
as early as 1990 or 1991. Then, in an impassioned speech
at the April 1994 meeting of the PRI Board of Trustees,
he proposed the project seriously. It would take nearly 10
years and $11 million to make it a reality.
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 39
T H E N AT U R E O F S C I E N C E
What’s New, Pussycat?
By Richard A. Kissel
Stretching high above city streets, the Sears Tower of Chicago
is a symbol of humanity’s achievements in the fields of design
and engineering. Thousands of visitors ascend to its crown
each year, acquiring not only a terrific vantage upon which
to view its steel and glass brethren, but also a sense of awe
for the accomplishment in which they stand. At a height of
1,451 feet, its black frame divides the horizon in two. But a
mere 20,000 years ago, if it had existed, the tower would have
been completely engulfed by ice, dwarfed by massive glaciers
that extended down from the north. The Pleistocene Epoch –
that span of Earth’s history from 1.8 million to 10,000 years
ago – knows nothing but this great ice age.
Just south of the ice, a truly marvelous parade of mammals called North America home. Here, mastodons roamed
forests dotted with spruces and poplars, reaching for that
next leafy bite. In neighboring grasslands, their distant cousins the mammoths gathered to feed alongside horses and
bison. Camels and stag moose also thrived, as did the oftenbizarre ground sloths, some of which reached sizes of one ton
or more. Their eyes fixed, waiting for even a fleeting moment
of opportunity, predators of the fantastic stalked their prey.
With an estimated weight of 2000 pounds, the bear Arctodus was not only the largest predator of the ice age, but also
one of the largest mammalian carnivores to ever walk the
Earth. Lions also stalked the plains of North America, hunting alone or in pairs. Much smaller, the Dire Wolf probably
relied on numbers for success, with packs of 25 or so tackling
their prey in coordinated, cooperative strikes. But despite
this impressive cast, perhaps the most celebrated member of
the ice age fauna is that proclaimed acme of felid evolution:
the saber-toothed Smilodon.
Smilodon was an impressive creature. Firmly nested within the felid branch of the mammalian family tree, Smilodon
is a cat, but its designation as a “saber-toothed tiger” within
the vernacular is simply incorrect. In the biological sciences,
including paleontology, species represent the fundamental
unit of classification; together, a group of closely related species composes a genus. Known to zoologists as the species
Panthera tigris, tigers are a member of the genus Panthera.
Other living species of Panthera include lions (P. leo), jaguars
(P. onca), leopards (P. pardus), and – although there is some
debate – snow leopards (P. uncia). Thus, although Panthera
and Smilodon are both cats, they are very different cats. The
branches leading to each split apart from a common ancestor
more than 10 million years ago, so they are only distant cousins on the felid family tree. Calling Smilodon a tiger is akin to
labeling humans as orangutans; both are apes, yes, but they
40 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
The skull of the ice age cat Smilodon, with mouth agape, showing the
saber-like canines of the upper jaws. From Merriam & Scott’s (1932)
“The Felidae of Rancho La Brea.”
are very different apes.
The three known species of Smilodon – S. gracilis, S.
populator, and S. fatalis – all lived during the recent ice age.
Smilodon gracilis was the earliest species, inhabiting the eastern part of North America from 2.5 million to 500,000 years
ago. Appearing around one million years ago, Smilodon populator called eastern South America home. Reaching the size
of today’s lions, it is the largest species. The third and final
species is Smilodon fatalis, known from the later stages of the
Pleistocene across much of North America and the Pacific
coastal region of South America. Fossils recovered from the
famed tar pits at Rancho La Brea have yielded more than
150,000 bones of S. fatalis, providing scientists with an incredible window into the beast’s anatomy. And although these
three species varied in the details of their skeletal architecture, all possessed the singular trait that established Smilodon
as an icon of prehistory: the saber-like teeth of the upper
jaw. Greatly elongated canines, these teeth grew to lengths of
up to 12 inches from root to tip. Seven of those inches were
exposed below the gum, where the teeth were flattened from
side-to-side to form blade- or saber-like killing tools. Because
of their fantastic form, or perhaps because of humankind’s
fascination with (and fear of ) top predators, Smilodon has
attracted much attention in the popular and scientific literature, with the ultimate question relating to how it took
down its prey. The skeleton tells the story. The relatively short
hind legs were not designed for chasing prey at high speeds,
but heavy forelimbs were well equipped for tackling animals
much larger than the cat. Smilodon might have relied on the
element of surprise, ambushing its prey and taking it to the
ground; there, a lethal bite with dagger-like canines pierced
the windpipe and nearby arteries. Perfectly evolved for the
hunt, the saber teeth of Smilodon were a truly unique adaptation. Or, were they?
Two hundred and thirty million years ago, it was a much
different world. The continents had assembled to form a
single landmass, Pangaea, and climates were warm the world
over, with average temperatures exceeding those of the Pleistocene by nearly 20 degrees. It was a hot-house world, with
no ice at the poles. It is the dawn of the Mesozoic Era. On
land, the very first dinosaurs darted through lush forests, early mammals scurried about, and crocodiles and turtles began
their evolutionary course. Flying reptiles called pterosaurs
soared through the air. And in the seas, a lineage of reptiles
called ichthyosaurs adopted an aquatic lifestyle, leaving land
behind forever. The first icthyosaurs possessed long bodies
and lengthy tails to propel them through the water. Pointed
snouts equipped with sharp, cone-shaped teeth caught slippery prey while fins that had evolved from limbs ensured
quick twists and turns during the chase. But over millions of
years, ichthyosaur bodies changed from long and lizard-like
to shorter and deeper. By 200 million years ago, they had all
but forgotten their terrestrial reptilian roots, taking on forms
similar to the dolphins of today. But how did ichthyosaurs
and dolphins develop such similar forms? After all, ichthyosaurs were born of a reptilian lineage, whereas dolphins and
other whales are mammals. Why do similar traits appear in
species only distantly related on life’s family tree? It’s a process
known as convergent evolution.
When paleontologists reconstruct the evolutionary histories of lineages, they look at the features, or traits, that
organisms possess. In general, two or more species possess
similar traits because they inherited them from a shared ancestor that had that trait. By comparing species and their
traits, it is possible to connect the dots between them, arriving at an idea of how they might be related. For centuries,
the ancestry of birds was a mystery that no scientist could
comfortably solve. Highly specialized, birds possess a num-
An outstanding example of convergent evolution, fish-like ichthyosaurs
were reptiles that evolved fins and streamlined bodies after adopting a
life in the sea. Millions of years later, dolphins independently developed
a similar appearance. Illustration by Heinrich Harder via Wikimedia
Commons.
ber of features found nowhere else in the animal kingdom,
such as feathers and – think of that Thanksgiving turkey – a
wishbone. The very uniqueness of birds made it difficult for
scientists to find their ancestral roots. But in recent years,
fossils of certain meat-eating dinosaurs have been found
that have not only wishbones, but feathers, too. In fact, dinosaurs and birds are now known to share more than 100
features. These features permit scientists, now overwhelmed
with evidence, to confidently propose that birds evolved
from a lineage of small, meat-eating dinosaurs; birds inherited these features from their dinosaurian ancestors. You
have your mother’s eyes; birds have dinosaurs’ wishbone.
But different species, separated by millions of years and
only distantly related, can sometimes look surprisingly similar. Here, the similarities are the result not of direct inheritance, but of convergent evolution. Whenever different organisms inhabit environments that present similar challenges,
perhaps related to a particular lifestyle or climate, it’s not rare
for evolution to arrive at similar solutions. As ichthyosaurs
took to life in the sea, no longer useful were their long limbs
for scampering over rock, or their wispy tails. Instead, limbs
shortened and digits widened into paddles, and anchored to
shortened tails were broad, vertical flukes. In the most exceptional of ichthyosaur fossils, even a triangular fin atop the
back – a dorsal fin – is readily apparent. The transition from
land to sea was complete. And as ichthyosaurs diversified in
the seas, natural selection favored a body type suited for life
in the water, ultimately leading to the form for which they
are most commonly known. The evolution of dolphins is not
dissimilar; their ancestry – and that of all whales – can also
be traced back to a four-legged, terrestrial creature. The sleek,
fish-like guise of ichthyosaurs and dolphins is an adaptation
for swimming that evolved independently in the two lineages – a textbook case of convergent evolution. In another
case, the mighty dinosaur Brachiosaurus sports a long, graceful neck, and its forelimbs are longer than those supporting
its rear, further elevating the head to feed. Today’s giraffe –
a mammal – keeps a similar form. Indeed, throughout the
history of life on Earth, useful traits often appear again and
again. As it turns out, saber teeth are one such trait.
Some 250 million years ago, long before the first cat
walked the Earth, well before the origin of mammals, a
beast called Lycaenops hunted across South Africa. An ancient relative of mammals, five-foot-long Lycaenops ran
about on four legs and carried a dog-shaped body. It belonged to the group known as gorgonopsians, which included many similar forms that spread across Africa and
into Russia. When presented with the fossilized remains of
a gorgonopsian, the eye is immediately drawn to the tip of
its elongated snout. There, projecting down from the upper jaw are long, saber-like teeth, much like those of ice age
Smilodon. And like Smilodon, gorgonopsians were predators
in a world of large prey, but instead of mastodons and bison, massive reptiles called pareiasaurs and relatives of mamAMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 41
Saber-like canines would have helped Lycaenops tackle the large prey
of its day. An ancient relative of mammals, Lycaenops inhabited the
planet more than 200 million years before cats’ first appearance. Image
from the Russian Wikipedia Project.
mals called dinocephalians were the targets of their hunt.
Five million years ago, the six-foot-long meat-eater Thylacosmilus stalked South America. Although resembling a cat in
its general form, Thylacosmilus was a marsupial. Marsupials,
such as kangaroos and koalas, are born before they are fully
developed, continuing to grow outside of the womb, often in
a pouch. Cats are placental mammals, as are dogs, elephants,
whales, humans, and many other species, which develop
completely in their mothers’ wombs before birth. But despite
its very different ancestry, Thylacosmilus sported long saberlike canines very similar to those of Lycaenops and Smilodon.
Finally, the term “saber-toothed cat” is typically applied
to Smilodon only, but the fossil record has actually revealed
a host of felids bearing saber teeth. In addition to Smilodon,
the cats Megantereon, Machairodus, and Homotherium all had
dagger-like canines. Megantereon and Smilodon are thought
to be closely related, so their dental similarities could have
originated from a direct common ancestor. But Machairodus
and Homotherium reside on a different branch of the felid
evolutionary tree, so their saber teeth likely evolved convergently from those of Smilodon.
The multiple, independent origins of saber teeth throughout the history of life is a wonderful evolutionary story. That
natural selection realized this structure in lineages far removed speaks to its success as an adaption, providing prehistoric predators with an effective tool to help tackle large
prey. And elongated canines are not necessarily restricted to
hunters, either. Today, baboons possess extremely long and
sharp canines, particularly in males. With a diet composed
largely of fruit and other vegetative sources, these teeth are
used extensively for display, although they can inflict severe
Thylacosmilus is a marsupial, not a cat, and its long saber teeth are the
result of convergent evolution. One feature not shared between the two
forms is the long flange of bone present the lower jaw of Thylacosmilus.
Image modified from one by Claire Houck via Wikimedia Commons.
wounds on attacking animals. Similarly, the strictly herbivorous Chinese water deer, Hydropotes inermis, possesses sharp,
saber-like upper canines. Especially large in males, the canines are used by bucks during competitive bouts, sometimes
causing deep cuts and gashes. Observations of such behavior
beg the question: Did the saber-teeth of Smilodon and others
evolve strictly for capturing prey, or did display play a role,
too? Function aside, these extraordinary teeth have fascinated
scientists and nonscientists alike for over 100 years. Smilodon
is perhaps the most spectacular of the ice age hunters, and
it will forever remain an icon of prehistory. But as unique
as its hallmark saber teeth might initially appear, Smilodon
is just one of many animals throughout life’s long history to
possess such wicked teeth. What’s new, pussycat? Turns out,
not much at all.
Richard Kissel is the Director of Teacher Programs at Paleontological Research Institution. His column is a regular feature
of American Paleontologist. Email kissel@museumoftheearth.
org.
So Sorry ...
Letters and emails from readers about the Summer issue of American Paleontologist were generally positive about our new “more
magazine-like” format. However, two glaring errors were also brought to our attention. The Editor, therefore, wishes to apologize
to the readership for the following:
• The yellow font color, chosen to coordinate with the Colgate dinosaur egg, worked nicely against the black background on the
cover, but caused problems for many sets of eyes on the interior white pages. That was not a good choice on our part...
• The Paleonews article “Flightless Birds Take Flight” was gleaned from an internet news item posted on April 4. That should have
been a clue – the entire article was a hoax, on April Fool’s Day – but it slipped past us. We hate when that happens...
42 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
BOOK REVIEW
Evolution’s Embarrassment No Longer: Prothero’s Fossils Say YES!
By Patricia Kelley
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, by Donald
R. Prothero, Columbia University Press, 408 pp., ISBN 9780-23113-962-5 , $29.50 (hardcover), 2007.
Charles Darwin devoted Chapter 9 of On the Origin of Species (1859, London, John Murray) to the imperfections of
the fossil record. After stating that numerous “intermediate
varieties” must have existed in the past, Darwin (1859: 280)
asked “Why then is not every
geological formation and every
stratum full of such intermediate
links? Geology assuredly does not
reveal any such finely graduated
organic chain; and this, perhaps,
is the most obvious and gravest
objection which can be urged
against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.”
Although the fossil record
was Darwin’s greatest embarrassment, the past 150 years have
yielded numerous fossil discoveries that provide some of the
strongest evidence for evolution.
Donald Prothero has assembled
much of this evidence in a form
both accessible to the lay person
and invaluable to the professional
paleontologist.
Prothero’s book is, to quote
Darwin (1859: 459) again, “one
long argument” against creationism, including intelligent design.
Unlike other opponents of creationism such as Richard
Dawkins, Prothero does not have a vendetta against religion
in general; in fact he goes out of his way to argue that evolution and religion do not need to conflict (his “To the Reader:
Is Evolution a Threat to Your Religious Beliefs?” is answered
with an emphatic “NO!”). His quarrel is with young-Earth
creationists of the home-grown American variety, and especially those who have repeatedly misunderstood or misrepresented the scientific work on evolution in general and fossils
in particular.
I really like the structure of the book, which is in two
parts. Part I, “Evolution and the Fossil Record,” begins with
a chapter on the nature of science, which covers clearly all of
the key points that I try to make in my introductory courses and public lectures on evolution: the work of science is
hypothesis testing, science is tentative and never proves but
only tests, the distinction between fact, hypothesis and theory, and why science can’t use supernatural explanations. The
second chapter takes up the Biblical creation accounts and
argues convincingly that they should not be taken literally,
based on the findings of Modern Biblical Scholarship about
the sources and history of these
writings. The chapter also provides a concise history of the creationist movement, creationist
views, and creationism’s current
iteration, Intelligent Design. The
next three chapters, on the fossil
record, the history of evolutionary thought, and systematics,
provide background information needed for understanding
Part II. This material is well written; for instance, his explanation
of cladistic methodology is one
of the most reader-friendly that I
have seen in a book of this type.
Part II, entitled “Evolution? The Fossils Say YES!” (in
response to creationist Duane
Gish’s 1972 book, Evolution?
The Fossils Say NO!, San Diego,
California, Creation-Life), is a
detailed description of the fossil
evidence for evolution. Prothero
begins with “Life’s Origin,” discussing current hypotheses for the chemical evolution of life,
the Precambrian microfossil record, and endosymbiotic origin of eukaryotes. I think that this chapter would have been
stronger if it began with a statement that biological evolution
only applies once life is present on the Earth (a throw-away
sentence at the end of the chapter, on page 158, does say,
“Whether or not you agree that we can explain life’s origins
by naturalistic methods, the fact that life has evolved since
its origins is not subject to dispute”). Part II then goes on
to refute favorite creationist arguments: that the Cambrian
Explosion contradicts evolution and that there are no transitional forms in the fossil record. Unlike many books on
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 43
evolution that focus on vertebrates, Prothero includes a chapter on invertebrate transitions in addition to seven chapters
on vertebrate evolution (chordate origins and fish, origin of
tetrapods, amniote origins and marine “reptiles,” dinosaurs
and birds, mammalian origins and Cenozoic radiation, ungulates, whales, and proboscideans, and primates and human
origins). A final chapter, “Why Does it Matter?” makes an
impassioned argument for the importance of evolution education and scientific literacy to our country’s economic and
social well being.
Prothero’s writing is lively, and he explains complex concepts in a way that makes them accessible to the nonscientist.
He is also very good at clearing up common misconceptions
(for example, what is meant by such terms as “theory” and
“transitional form”). Personally, I’ll find this book an invaluable reference in my teaching – as an invertebrate paleontologist teaching a Prehistoric Life course that deals largely with
vertebrates, I know that I will consult this book often in class
preparation.
I found few quibbles with the book – it is well written,
with very few grammatical or typographical errors, and richly
illustrated. Carl Buell’s drawings are especially helpful, and
the color plates capture the details of important fossils well
(unfortunately, page layout inconveniently requires a turn of
the page to match some captions with the corresponding figures). I would have liked to see more references cited in the
text and page numbers provided for direct quotes, but this
44 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
uninterrupted flow of text does make the work more readable for the nonspecialist. In general, the text is thorough
and accurate; there were only a few places where I felt that
additional material would have been helpful (for example,
introduction of the principle of superposition earlier in the
book, discussion of the development of the geologic time
scale, a discussion of more recent explanations for stasis, and
the hypotheses for the origin of jaws).
Prothero scathingly points out instances of “dishonest,
unethical, and unscientific” (p. 335) behavior by creationists, often based on personal experience. At times I wondered
if he was being too vitriolic, thus risking alienating moderate readers. Still, Prothero makes it clear that his dispute is
not with religion in general (he describes his own religious
upbringing). I doubt that he will change the minds of many
fundamentalists but, for those who are open to reason, this
work provides a strong counterargument to favorite creationist arguments. I will recommend it to my students who want
to explore further the fossil evidence for evolution.
Charles Darwin, on the eve of his 200th birthday, would
be delighted to know that the fossils enthusiastically say,
“YES!” Don Prothero is commended for giving these fossils
a voice!
Patricia Kelley is Professor of Geology at the University of North
Carolina Wilmington. Email [email protected].
BOOK REVIEW
The Evolution-Creationism Controversy Encyclopedia Playbook
By Michael A. Gibson
More Than Darwin: An Encyclopedia of the People and Places of
the Evolution-Creationism Controversy, by Randy Moore and
Mark D. Decker, Greenwood Press, 415 pp., ISBN 978-0313-34155-7, $85.00 (hardcover), 2008.
For the scientific community, evolution … whether organic
evolution, geologic evolution, tectonic evolution, cosmic
evolution, or human evolution … is a well-accepted fact,
although the details and mechanisms of the changes are under
continual study. But the teaching
of evolution … whether organic
evolution, geologic evolution,
tectonic evolution, cosmic evolution, human evolution, or evolution of the concept of evolution
… remains controversial for the
general public, many of whom
remain ill-informed or confused
by misinformation.
Most people know of evolutionary biologist Stephen J.
Gould, who was a major architect of punctuated equilibrium,
so eloquently defended evolution in the Arkansas Edwards
vs. Aguillard “equal time” court
case, contributed so much to our
bank of knowledge on evolutionary processes, Earth history, and
the history of science, and who
popularized evolutionary literature through his monthly articles
in Natural History magazine.
Who is not aware of the “Scopes
Monkey Trial” that took place in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925
and Clarence Darrow’s famous trial confrontation with William Jennings Bryan, in which high school biology teacher
John Scopes was found guilty of teaching human evolution
in violation of the Tennessee Butler Act? Most have almost
certainly seen the 1955 movie of this event, Inherit the Wind,
with Spencer Tracy, Frederic March, and Gene Kelly – but
did you know that there was a 2007 Broadway play by the
same name? Most of us know about William Paley and about
Australian-born Ken Ham and his “young Earth creationism” movement and Answers in Genesis programs. We recognize Duane Gish’s Creation Research Society and such books
as Evolution: The Fossils Say No! (1972, Creation-Life, San
Diego). We have heard of the Institute for Creation Research,
have watched the “intelligent design” movement, and know
of the National Center for Science Education’s efforts to keep
evolution from being removed from science education – but
have you ever heard of the Michael Polanyi Center?
Are you aware of Fairbault High School Principal Ken
Huber’s reassignment of teacher Rod LeVake for refusing to
teach evolution? LeVake later
lost a lawsuit filed on his behalf
by Pat Robertson’s American
Center for Law and Justice. In
2002, the U. S. Supreme Court
refused to hear his appeal. Did
you know that 1924 Presidential
candidate John W. Davis was the
ACLU’s original choice to defend Scopes in the ACLU test of
the Tennessee Butler Act? Do you
know how Of Pandas and People
was conceived and written? Were
you aware that President Jimmy
Carter, a theistic evolutionist,
publically responded in 2004 to
the “embarrassment” of Georgia
Superintendent Kathy Cox’s decision to remove all reference to
evolution from Georgia’s State
Science Curriculum? Do you
recall President Ronald Reagan’s
1980 statement that “evolution
is a scientific theory only,” showing that he fit well within the
public’s general misunderstanding of the process, and leading to
a major educational push to explain how “scientific theory”
differs from “just a theory”?
Who were James Bateman, Henry Walter Bates, William
Bateson, or Alfred Russell Wallace, John Phillips, Plato, David Hume, and William Dembski, and what were their roles
in the controversy? What were the contributions of Henry
Ward Beecher, Edward Larson, Sinclair Lewis, Charles Lyell, Aimee Semple McPherson, Wilbur Nelson, Noah, H.
G. Wells, and Jonathan Wells? What are the origins of the
American Anti-Evolution Association, Institute for Creation
Research, AAAS, National Center for Science Education,
Deluge Society, Bible Crusaders of America, or the AmeriAMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 45
can Civil Liberties Union? What is the history behind such
court cases as Hendrin vs. Campbell, Selman vs. Cobb County
School District, Bishop vs. Aronov, Moeller vs. Schrenko, and
Torcaso vs. Watkins? Who was the “Father of English Geology,” “Father of the Geological Timescale,” “Father of Modern Geology,” “Father of Paleontology,” and “Father of the
Modern Creationist Movement”? Wouldn’t it be nice if all
of this wide-ranging information was condensed into a book
easily carried and read on an airplane or an easy chair?
Randy Moore and Mark Decker have produced such a
book in More Than Darwin. Moore has written several books
on the evolution-creationism controversy and served as editor for The American Biology Teacher. Decker brings his experience as Associate Director for Scholarship and Teaching at
the University of Minnesota and his “Evolution 101” program. More Than Darwin is an encyclopedic, fresh approach
to the evolution-creationism literature because it is not about
taking sides. It is intended as a compendium of people,
places, events, and famous quotes that are the history of the
controversy. Moore and Decker include 500 entries, and 82
illustrations, and although one could probably suggest many
more possible entries, More Than Darwin is comprehensive.
Additionally the book includes three useful follow-up tools
that provide interested readers with next steps. Most entries
have a “For More Information” endnote that provides useful
references for more detailed research. These are tied to the
book’s second useful feature, a succinct bibliography which
is not intended as an exhaustive literature compilation, but
contains more salient references for the reader. Finally the
authors have developed a website that contains the expanded
information archive and is readily updatable. This later feature, from which the book is based, might well prove to be
the more lasting legacy of the effort. Additionally the encyclopedia has an extensive 24-page index containing who’s,
what’s, and where’s in great detail, providing two ways to research a topic in the book. It has one appendix – a unique
Scopes Trial Trail guide to the town of Dayton.
Moore and Decker intended to provide a concise summary and overview about the who’s, what’s, and where’s of the
controversy, not to describe or evaluate the controversy per
se. They have achieved that goal, providing a book that will
undoubtedly become heavily dog-eared on the bookshelves
of evolutionists and creationists. More Than Darwin has only
been on my shelf for a couple months, but it has already
gotten that well-used look. The book has taken a spotlighted
place on the “useful resources” list that I give students and
teachers that ask about teaching evolution and is already on
my required reading list for my teaching evolution course.
Michael A. Gibson is Professor of Geology at the University of
Tennessee at Martin, 2008 recipient of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers Neil Miner Award, and the Chair of
Education and Outreach for the Paleontological Society. Email
[email protected].
Make your memory last by
adopting a piece of time
Tile 430 (C) Barbara Page
Rock of Ages, Sands of Time is a
remarkable mural in the Museum of the
Earth by artist Barbara Page. Made
up of 544 tiles, the mural explores the
history of life from the Cambrian explosion
to modern-day humans. Through the
Museum’s Adopt-a-Tile program, you can
adopt one of these tiles and name it in
honor of yourself, a special someone, or
an important event. Supporters receive a
print of their tile signed by the artist.
46 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
Your support of the Adopt-a-Tile program
helps the Museum of the Earth continue its
tradition of offering the very best in Earth
science education for learners of all ages.
To learn more about the Adopt-a-Tile
program, please visit
www.museumoftheearth.org/giving/
adoptatile/ or contact us at:
[email protected]
607.273.6623 x11
New at the Museum of the Earth Store
• Agate Bookends - $35
• “Hunting Dinosaurs,” by Louie
Psihoyos - $40
• Trilobite Water Bottle: BPA
free, in four colors, illustration
by local artist - $10
• New Youth T-Shirts, in a variety of colors, illustrations by
local artist - $12 - $15
Visit the Museum of the Earth Store on
Trumansburg Road (Rte. 96) in Ithaca, for
these exciting items and much, much more.
Or order by phone by calling 607-273-6623,
ext. 33, and one of our Museum Associates will
help you. A $5.00 flat fee will be added to all
phone orders to cover shipping and handling.
AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 47
V
I
e
v
i
l
A
T.REX
join us
as we transform Museum of the Earth for an evening of
fine food, dancing, and a raffle to support science
Saturday, September 27, 2008
6:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.
Five years ago, the Paleontological Research Institution
opened Museum of the Earth to help advance its mission
to increase knowledge about the history and evolution
of the dynamic Earth and its life. Help us celebrate our
“wooden” anniversary this year by joining us at our
annual fall fundraising gala, T.REX Alive IV! It will be a
birthday celebration worth remembering!
For more information or to purchase tickets visit www.
museumoftheearth.org, call 607.273.6623 x11, or email
[email protected]
Rock of Ages, Sands of Time Tiles 250-251 (C) Barbara Page
mcut herem
herem
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48 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008
New from Paleontological Research Institution …
Mastodon paleobiology, taphonomy, and
paleoenvironment in the Late Pleistocene of
New York State: studies on the Hyde Park,
Chemung, and North Java Sites, edited by
Warren D. Allmon and Peter L. Nester,
Palaeontographica Americana, no. 61, 2008.
© Paleontological Research Institution, ISSN 0078-8546, ISBN-13 978-0-87710479-7 (softcover), 476 pp., $80.00 + shipping/handling
Mastodons have played an important role in human
understanding of the history of the Earth and its life. Indeed, few
fossil animals have been so broadly involved in human affairs,
from science to politics. The first mastodon bones to be
specifically noted by Europeans were collected in New York in
1705, along the banks of the Hudson River, and the first fairly
complete mastodon skeleton was discovered in Newburgh, in
Orange County, in 1799. So, New York State can in some sense
be called the home of the mastodon.
This volume is based on three mastodon discoveries made
on private lands in New York State in close succession in 1999
and 2000. All three sites date to the latest Pleistocene, and
each has its own unique postmortem history, leading to widely
variable states of preservation. The trio of sites therefore
provides a distinctive opportunity for analysis and comparison
with other Pleistocene sites from North America.
Twenty papers, written by more than 40 authors, comprise
this volume. Subjects include technical excavation accounts,
taphonomic studies of the mastodon bones themselves, the
educational use of mastodon matrix in classrooms, and
analyses of the wood, other plants, ostracodes, beetles,
diatoms, and mollusks excavated with the mastodon remains.
This volume is dedicated to Jeheskel “Hezy” Shoshani, one
of the contributors to the volume, who was killed by a bomb
attack on a public minibus in Ethiopia during the final stages of
production.
This publication, and others from PRI, can be ordered online at http://www.priweb.org.
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John R. Nudds and Paul A. Selden introduce fourteen North American
Fossil-Lagerstätten and place the fossil findings in geologic and
evolutionary context. They go on to describe the history of research at
each site—the sedimentology, stratigraphy, biota, paleoecology—and
offer comparisons to other localities of similar age or environment.
Contains guides to: The Gunflint Chert, Mistaken Point, The Burgess
Shale, Beecher’s Trilobite Bed, The Bertie Waterlime, Gilboa, Mazon
Creek, The Chinle Group, The Morrison Formation, The Hell Creek
Formation, The Green River Formation, Florissant, Dominican Amber,
Rancho La Brea
288 p., 258 color plates
Paper $39.00
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