The Boneyard XIII

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr....

Welcome to the Lucky 13th Edition of The Boneyard ... the Web Carnival about Bones and Stuff.

"The Boneyard is a blog carnival covering all things paleo, from dinosaurs to pollen to hominids and everywhere in between. It's held every two weeks (the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month), traveling around to a different blog for each installment, connecting some of the best blogging on ancient life."

The previous edition of The Boneyard is here, at Dragon's Tales. The next edition of The Boneyard will be Here at Archaeozoology. If you would like to submit an entry to the next edition, you may do so here. As always, thanks to Brian for originating and managing this carnival.

Wrong Jawbone, Dude! at Dinosaurs and The Bible: A Creationist's Fairy Tale

Recently, a fossil jawbone was discovered on a bus. In a way it's a good thing because this is part of helping the Peruvian authorities deal with illegal fossil smuggling plaguing the nation. But, what's so wrong about this article is that the author of the article have incorrectly identify the jawbone as a dinosaur jawbone belonging to a Triceratops! ... WRONG ANIMAL, DUDE! That jawbone actually belongs to ...

Review of Pop-up Facts Dinosaurs at Everything Dinosaur

A hardback book that is beautifully illustrated contains lots and lots of facts and information about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Young readers can wonder at the huge plant-eating Sauropods that pop out of the page at you, examine fossil evidence of the colossal meat-eating dinosaurs and study marine reptiles as well as Pterosaurs. Page after page of truly impressive pop-ups...

Enigmatic Triassic Hellasaur Thursday - Part the first at microecos is a look at the dawn of the dinosaurs in the Triassic....

It's true that the first dinosaurs appeared in the Triassic, along with a staggering number of other familiar animal groups including turtles, "modern" amphibians (lissamphibians), "modern" sharks (neoselachians), pterosaurs, lizards, mammals, "modern" corals (scleractinians), several important plankton lineages (coccolithophores, radiolarians, possibly diatoms) and I could go on and on. ... But Triassic ecosystems were also filled a variety of ridiculous, absurd and downright protarded creatures that would (and probably have) make Dougal Dixon weep.

356 Fossil Animals Found in X-Rayed Amber at The Other 95%

"Opaque amber accounts for up to 80% of the amber found in Cretaceous sites like those in Charentes. From the outside, it is impossible to tell whether something may be contained inside. Malvina Lak and her colleagues from the University of Rennes and Paul Tafforeau of the ESRF, together with the National Museum of Natural History of Paris, have applied a synchrotron X-ray imaging technique known as propagation phase contrast microradiography to the investigation of opaque amber."

... And as you may imagine, they got results...

Permian Meanderings at the Hair Musuem of Natural History.

Sulfur and Chlorine in Late Cretaceous Deccan Magmas and Eruptive Gas Release

"Large-volume pahoehoe lava flows erupted 67 to 65 million years ago, forming the Deccan Traps, India. The impact of these flood basalt eruptions on the global atmosphere and the coeval end-Cretaceous mass extinction has been uncertain."

Once Upon the Permian: Beaked Bites of a Lost Lineage at The Dragon's Tales

Imagine you were standing out in the field and there grazing was a herd. It wouldn't be a herd of cattle. It couldn't be. Cows didn't exist. Mammals didn't exist. ... In fact, even if there were cattle, they would probably starve: there was nothing even closely related to grass or any other flowering plant rooted anywhere in the world. No, in the days of the end Permian, when Gorgons ruled the world, the thing that looked up at you in the field as a member of the heard ... Also from Dragon Tales, two other excellent posts: Once Upon the Permian: Beaked Bites of a Lost Lineage and Nonfossilized Cellulose from the Permian Period

Return to the Crinoids at Catalogue of Organisms

For the second time at Catalogue of Organisms, I'm presenting a fossil crinoid family as taxon of the week. However, while the last crinoid family I covered belonged to the subclass Camerata, today's family, the Sostronocrinidae, belongs to the Cladida (figure above from Waters et al., 2003).

Horse Hunting in Magdalenian France at Archaeozoology

The site of Roche de Solutre is one of a series of ridges or cuestas in the southern part of the Maconnais region of Burgundy, France. The cuestas are oriented from east to west and are separated by broad valleys with minor streams. The archaeological site at Solutre is located at the base of the southern face of the Roche de Solutre. ... The discoverer and first investigator of the site, Adrien Arcelin, tried to explain the mass of horse bones revealed during the 19th century excavations by describing Palaeolithic hunters driving herds of up to 600 animals at a time over the edge of the rock.

Climate change knocked mammoths down, humans finished them off at Not Exactly Rocket Science

Did our ancestors exterminate the woolly mammoth? Well, sort of. According to a new study, humans only delivered a killing blow to a species that had already been driven to the brink of extinction by changing climates. Corralled into a tiny range by habitat loss, the diminished mammoth population became particularly vulnerable to the spears of hunters. We just kicked them while they were down.

(My own version of this will be out some time Monday. Please check back.)

Effigia: The Jar-Jar Crurotarsian at When Pigs Fly Returns

I don't mean to insult the coolest example of convergent evolution since the marsupial mole, but it's tough to not get a kick in when Effigia's species name is okeefae. It sounds like something you'd hear while watching The Phantom Menace, as in "Ooh! Meesah like Effigia okeefae!" ... At any rate, Effigia is another subject for the Archosauria art show.

Reconstructing "the Chambered Saurian" at Laelaps

Camarasaurus is an unappreciated sauropod. It wasn't the heaviest or longest of the earth-shaking dinosaurs, but the blunted skull and large teeth of the Jurassic sauropod indicate that it had a different lifestyle than the more famous Diplodocus and Apatosaurus. In 1920, paleontologists at the AMNH created a skeletal and muscular reconstruction of the dinosaur, Camarasaurus being proportionally bulkier for its size than other sauropods then known.

And while you are at Laelaps, check this out as well: Diplodocus according to H.F. Osborn

For my own part, I have these contributions: The earliest well dated human fossil in Europe, this older item which was not read by enough people so I'm sending you there again: Darwin and the Voyage: 09 ~ Fossil Quadrupeds and this repost that I stuck up during a stint out of town: Mammals and the KT Event.

And finally, this: