Fossils in Field Jackets @fossils-in-field-jackets - Tumblr Blog

Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas They say the theropod tracks are probably acros.

#Dinosaurs #Dinosaur valley #Dinosaur footprints

I won't wake up at 7 am for class, but I'll definitely wake up at 7 to go see dinosaurs. Going to Dinosaur Valley today with kelseyeligrant!

#summer trip #Yay fossils

thebrainscoop

Hi! I went to the Arizona Natural History Museum today and was disappointed to discover that most of the bones on display were not real - they were casts/moldings of real bones. I understand that not everything can be on display, be that it's too fragile for display or they don't want to risk anyone stealing the bones. But my brother told me that in a documentary he watched that the bones/skeletons on display in MOST museums aren't real! Is this true?

Hey! The answer isn’t so straight forward. First, fossils are costly. They’re costly to go find (paying for the expedition’s travel, supplies, staff, and excavation), and they are costly to prepare (you’ve got to pay an expert preparator to spend hundreds of hours picking the fossil remains from its matrix - and provide them the adequate lab and supplies to do so.)

Then you’ve got to mount the skeleton, and understanding most fossil animals aren’t complete you will have to make casts and molds of certain bones to create an entire skeleton. Then, when all of that work is said and done, other museums are going to be excited about your rare and special find – but it’s very likely they will never have the money or time or expertise on staff to mount an expedition to find such a spectacular specimen of their own. Still wanting to share an appreciation of prehistoric life with their museum visitors, many museums find that purchasing a cast of a specimen achieves their educational goals.

Additionally, it is difficult to study specimens that are mounted and articulated on display – it’s easier for paleontologists to conduct their research from specimens in collections. Also, keep in mind fossil animals are typically excavated in fairly rough shape. The animal was crushed under thousands of pounds of force for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Removing all of the matrix to re-articulate the skeletal structures can risk the integrity of the specimen, so researchers may find that scanning or having an x-ray of the fossil will provide the information they need to reconstruct the animal with other materials, based off of a digital model.

tl;dr: fossil preparation and articulation is costly and many museums can’t afford to have originals but still want to inspire curiosity and wonder in their visitors.

EDIT: I received this question a while ago, right after I answered this one about how paleontologists determine new species from fossil bone fragments, so in answering I just assumed winterlotus90 was curious about fossil skeletons. Even though in rereading the ask it isn’t specific to that. #ohwell

mordicaifeed

The Dinosaur Lords interiors by Richard Anderson.

lostbeasts

also i’m not sure why they made the indominus look exactly like the dinosaur version of voldemort

2seat

dumbvie-deactivated20180207

Jurrasic World looks amazing 😩👏🏾

7/27/15 I made a painting of the top part of a Styracosaurus skull. The background is shiny metallic silver spray paint and the skull is black acrylic. 24" x 30" canvas. I thought the crest would be fun to paint, and I was right. Guys, paint a dinosaur. Relieve some stress. It doesn't have to be perfect just do it.

#Styracosaurus #Dinosaur #ceratopsian #Painting #Silver #Silhouette #Fossils #Skull #Bones

gingerhaze

fossils-in-field-jackets

gingerhaze:

“That sounds like something out of science fiction!”

“We live in a space ship, dear.”

cheewiee

ARK: Survival Evolved | Dinosaur Guide Part 1

#pretty

un-rare-deactivated20151106

let’s stop seeing sex as the biggest thing you can do to show someone you love them

huntinthedwellin98

everyone knows that the real way to show someone you love them is to find them a really cool rock. not a diamond. just a neat rock that you think they will enjoy

un-rare-deactivated20151106

honestly ? you’re so right

#Please #Like really #I want one

infinitemachine

Dinosaur of the Day: Coahuilaceratops by Vitor-Silva

(Coahuilaceratops)

missmaybe

I caught these geckos doing something. Not sure what.

markscherz

Asserting dominance over the younger generation.

a-dinosaur-a-day

Inspired by speaksforthebreeze cladograms for Diapsida and Mammalia, I decided to do my own with Chordata - especially since some of their clade names were out of date (as well as clade placement, since the genetic analysis of Testudines (turtles) placed them as more closely related to archosaurs than to lepidosaurs ^_^)

I used Ornithodira instead of Avemetatarsalia and Lepidosauria instead of Lepidosauromorpha simply to make the words fit neatly - even though I would have preferred to have Lepidosauromorpha to better match Archosauromorpha. Still, nothing about this is incorrect; I simply don’t use every single clade name (and to have done so would have been… impossible).

Names in all caps are groups that dinosaurs/birds are a part of. The image is obviously compressed for tumblr; I’ve uploaded it on Deviantart as well and you can find it here: http://dinolove453.deviantart.com/art/Cladogram-of-Chordata-549407880

I used Wikipedia as reference for most of it; the paper that found testudines to be part of Archosauromorpha used both fossil and genetic evidence; you can find it here. (Citation: Lee, M. S. Y. 2013. Turtle origins: Insights from phylogenetic retrofitting and molecular scaffolds. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 26 (12): 2729 - 2738).

Let me know what you think and if I should do another (probably for Dinosauria)!

myloverhammurabi

Whats the possibility of Sauropods having trunks?

None. Darren Naish wrote about this but I’ll summarize his points here. (All of the images here are borrowed from his post.) First of all, for the unaware:

Now, unlike most tetrapods, sauropods have the openings of their nostrils located on top of their skulls. In extant animals, nostrils on top of the skull means a trunk. This has been an oft-postulated hypothesis over the years, appearing in books such as The Dinosaur Heresies and When Dinosaurs Ruled the World.

It was first proposed by Coombs (1975) in a paper proposing that sauropods were primarily terrestrial, not aquatic; he noted that the “size, shape and position of the bony nostrils in sauropods ‘is similar in some respect to mammals which have, or are thought to have had, either a proboscis or at least a very large nose’” but also expressed scepticism due to the fact that tapir- or elephant-like trunks don’t exist in reptiles and they also lack the necessary musculature.

Another variation is Martin and Neave (2000)’s large-lipped Diplodocus - not even a trunk, just a giant, flexible lip with the nostrils just behind it. As far as we know, again, there’s no equivalent in reptiles of the muscles necessary for this, although this model is in fact unpublished.

But then, in 2008, Bill Munns produced the rather horrifying-looking Brachiosaurus at the top of this post. Latching onto Coombs’ (1975) hypothesis, he produced a full-blown elephantine tubular proboscis. It looks ridiculous and a tad nasty, but that’s just me - but there are also a variety of reasons why sauropods wouldn’t and shouldn’t have had trunks, and here’s why.

(From All New Dinosaurs and Their Friends)

Skull shape. In animals like tapirs, the protowhale Makaracetus, saiga antelope, Macrauchenia, and the whole lot, the end of the snout usually has to be quite narrow in order to allow a trunk to be there. On the other hand, sauropods (in particular titanosauriforms like Brachiosaurus) have particularly thick and robust rostra. While Deinotherium had a trunk but also a thick snout, it seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

Necks. Sauropods have long-arse necks and a very wide vertical and horizontal feeding range; on the other hand, most trunked animals (if not all) are short-necked. Even though Macrauchenia has a comparatively long neck, it’s still nowhere near the giant overkill plant-mowing crane of doom that is a sauropod neck.

(Not from his post, but from here instead)

Cranial musculature. Dinosaurs are lacking in facial muscles - in particular the muscles in modern animals that make trunks possible. Because phylogenetic bracketing indicates that there aren’t any close relatives of sauropods (crocodiles, birds, other dinosaurs) with trunks, it’s not very likely that they would have had trunks. Even if sauropods did evolve these muscles, they’d leave obvious scars, crests, or fossae that are indicative of attachment sites. See, for instance, the above tapir skull and its clearly visible lumpiness.

Nostril position and facial vasculature. Sauropod nostrils were not actually on the tops of their heads. People have imagined that the proboscis served as a kind of “nostril extension” that brought air upward from its tip to the top of the skull; we now have conclusive proof, however, that the actual openings of the nostrils were located at the front of the snout in a region called the nasal vestibular vascular plexus.

Cranial neurology. Trunks are complex organs that require complex muscle control through a large facial nerve - this is present in elephants (1 cm wide!) and tapirs, and the associated blood vessels are usually hypertrophied as well. Although a dinosaur skull is not exactly homologous to a mammal skull, the facial nerve roots in sauropods are tiny, and can barely support a trunk.

(Sauropod at left, elephant at right)

Tooth wear. The wear patterns on sauropod teeth indicate that they grabbed the foilage and tugged it sharply up or down in a practice called unilateral branch stripping - if there was a trunk there, it would almost certainly have gotten injured by the branch in some capacity. Plus, given how much we see sauropods using their teeth as shown by their fossils, wouldn’t you think that maybe a trunk would reduce tooth usage?

So, in essence, no trunk for sauropods, zip, zilch, ever. Hope this helps!

dinodorks

Do you think the typical depictions of pterosaurs are too shrink wrapped, or is is accurate for them to be so thin so they can fly? (Sorry I come here a lot)

I think pterosaurs do suffer the same skrink wrap syndrome as dinosaurs. Even if an animal is lightweight, you shouldn’t be able to count all the ribs and fenestra.