AMERICAN V F PALEONTOLOGIST · Alicia Reynolds, Director of Museum Operations Rob Ross, Associate Director for Outreach Samantha Sands, Director of Public Programs Trisha Smrecak,

AMERICANPALEONTOLOGIST A MAGAZINE OF EARTH SCIENCE PUBLISHED BY THE PALEONTOLOGICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTION AND ITS MUSEUM OF THE EARTH

VOLUME 16, NUMBER 3FALL 2008

Mastodons

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F R O M T H E D I R E C T O R

Mastodons, Science, and EducationBy 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. Th e 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 ev-erything, of course, is available on the internet, but if pos-sible, 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.

Th e 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 fi nds that spanned nearly the entire breadth of New York State. Th ese excavations pro-duced 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 un-anticipated 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-million-dollar odyssey that included thousands of volunteers, a Dis-covery Channel documentary, coverage by Th e New York Times, NBC, NPR, People magazine, and newspapers in Tai-wan, more than 50,000 people in a hands-on science educa-tion project, and scientifi c studies that could set the standard for mastodon research for many years to come.

Th e staff at PRI have been wanting and waiting to pro-duce this issue of AP for years. Its appearance now coincides with the long-awaited publication of an issue of PRI’s sci-entifi c journal Palaeontographica Americana devoted to the results of research on these three mastodon discoveries. Th is 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 as-sembled this unique group of experts to “make the most” scientifi cally from what began as a project about public ex-hibit 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 Depart-ment, now renamed the Outreach Department. Even while we planned and built the Museum of the Earth (which opened fi ve years ago this September), PRI had been building a repu-tation as a provider of high-quality educational materials in informal (outside the classroom) Earth Science education. A combination of modest private and government grants sup-ported these eff orts, but never to a level suffi cient 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 fi ve years, will reach hundreds of thousands of students of all ages across the country.

With this NSF support, under the guidance of our tire-less Associate Director for Outreach, Dr. Rob Ross, the PRI outreach eff ort 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 eff ort to deter-mine 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 for-mat) on teaching evolution using clams, which can be easily found at the beach or purchased in the supermarket. In col-laboration 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 Exten-sion, we are prototyping an approach to teaching and learn-ing about Earth’s climate via educators in the extension and 4H networks that exist in virtually every county in America.

Scientifi c research is, of course, hugely valuable for its own sake, and for what it can teach us about nature and how to manipulate it. Th is 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 nonscientifi c public, to encourage them to experience the thrill that we do, and to give them more tools to make the decisions that increasingly aff ect us all. Th is 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 InstitutionF O U N D E D 1 9 3 2

BOARD OF TRUSTEESOffi cersPresident Rodney Feldmann, Kent, OHVice President Priscilla Browning, Ithaca, NYSecretary Philip Bartels, Riverside, CT

MembersLoren Babcock, Columbus, OHPhilip Bartels, Riverside, CTLarry Baum, Ithaca, NYPriscilla Browning, Ithaca, NYHarold Craft, Berkshire, NYHelene Dillard, Ithaca, NYRodney Feldmann, Kent, OHKarl Flessa, Tucson, AZLinda C. Ivany, Erieville, NYTeresa Jordan, Ithaca, NYStephan Loewentheil, New York, NYRobert Mackenzie, Trumansburg, NYJames Moore, Rochester, NYD. Jeff rey Over, Geneseo, NYJennifer Liber Raines, Buff alo, NYPhil Reilly, Concord, MADale Springer, Bloomsburg, PAEdward Wolf, Trumansburg, NYWilliam Young, Canandaigua, NY

Staff Warren D. Allmon, DirectorLeon Apgar, Maintenance and Operations SpecialistSara Auer, Education Programs ManagerCarlyn Buckler, Assistant to Associate Director for OutreachScott Callan, Associate Director for Institutional AdvancementEric Chapman, Exhibits ManagerSarah Chicone, Director of ExhibitsKelly Cronin, Assistant to the DirectorJames Dake, PRI-Cayuga Nature Center Collaborations CoordinatorSarah Degen, Development Operations ManagerGregory Dietl, Director of CollectionsDon Duggan-Haas, Education Research AssociateBrian Gollands, Web DeveloperMichael Griswold, Facilities ManagerJohn Gurche, Artist-in-ResidenceBilly Kepner, Director of MarketingRichard Kissel, Director of Teacher ProgramsTamsin Leavy, Museum Operations ManagerMichael Lucas, Associate Director for AdministrationPaula M. Mikkelsen, Associate Director for Science and Director of PublicationsSam Moody, Assistant Director of Museum Operations/Volunteer Coordinator Judith Nagel-Myers, Collections ManagerAlicia Reynolds, Director of Museum OperationsRob Ross, Associate Director for Outreach Samantha Sands, Director of Public ProgramsTrisha Smrecak, Evolution and Global Change Projects Manager

Trustees EmeritusJohn D. Allen, Syracuse, NYJames Cordes, Ithaca, NYJ. Th omas Dutro, Jr., Washington, DCShirley K. Egan, Aurora, NYHoward Hartnett, Moravia, NYRobert T. Horn, Jr., Ithaca, NYPatricia H. Kelley, Southport, SCHarry Lee, Jacksonville, FLHarry A. Leffi ngwell, Laguna Beach, CAAmy McCune, Ithaca, NY Samuel T. Pees, Meadville, PAEdward B. Picou, Jr., New Orleans, LAJohn Pojeta, Rockville, MDPhilip Proujansky, Ithaca, NYMary M. Shuford, Brooklyn, NYConstance Soja, Hamilton, NYJames E. Sorauf, Tarpon Springs, FLJohn C. Steinmetz, Bloomington, INPeter B. Stifel, Easton, MDWilliam P. S. Ventress, Lexington, OKArt Waterman, Metarie, LATh omas E. Whiteley, Rochester, NY

AMERICANPALEONTOLOGIST

VOL. 16, NO. 3, FALL 2008

Paula M. Mikkelsen, EditorWarren D. Allmon, Director

Other ContributorsStan Balducci

John A. CatalaniPeter DodsonDan Fisher

Michael A. GibsonElizabeth HumbertPatricia H. KelleyRichard A. KisselOlivia J. RebertSamantha SandsVerity Whalen

On the cover: Th e fully mounted Hyde Park Mastodon oversees the Quaternary world at the Museum of the Earth. Photograph by Rachel Philipson.

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 subscrip-tion. Individual subscriptions are also available for $30 per year. Advertising information is available on request by calling PRI ext. 20 or by emailing [email protected]. 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.

Come visit our

I N T H I S I S S U E

FEATURE ARTICLESNew Ideas About Old Bones 18

by Daniel Fisher .

Mastodons in Th eir Backyards 23by Warren D. Allmon .

FOCUS ON EDUCATION

Climate Change 101 10by Elizabeth Humbert .

From the Director 1At the Museum of the Earth 4

Briefl y Noted books of interest 12

Paleonews 14by Olivia J. Rebert .

From the Membership: Archelon & Chesapecten 16by Stan Balducci .

Fossil Focus: American Mastodon 17by Verity Whalen .

Dodson on Dinosaurs: Polish Women in the Gobi 30by Peter Dodson .

An Amateur’s Perspective: Cephalopod Intelligence 35by John A. Catalani .

Th e Nature of Science: What’s New, Pussycat? 40by Richard A. Kissel .

Book reviews: Evolution’s Embarrassment No Longer: Prothero’s Fossils Say YES! 43

by Patricia H. Kelley 00Th e Evolution-Creationism Controversy Encyclopedic Playbook 45

by Michael A. Gibson 00

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

18

23

4 AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008

A T T H E M U S E U M O F T H E E A R T H

and the Paleontological Research Institution

More New Staff Members!

PRI and the Museum of the Earth continue to grow! Th anks in part to new programming through grants aquired last fall, we welcome another group of exciting new staff members. Th ey are all talented, interesting people whom

you can meet at your next Museum of the Earth event! Please join us in welcoming them!

Eric Chapman, Exhib-its Manager, holds a BA from Cornell in Geologi-cal Sciences and an MS from University of Colo-rado in Museum Stud-ies. 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 perma-nent displays.

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 eff orts around our im-portant outreach initia-tives on global change and evolution.

James Dake, PRI-Cayu-ga Nature Center Col-laborations Coordinator, comes from Michigan with a BS in Education and a major in Earth Sci-ence. He is running day camps at CNC, writing a fi eld guide to the CNC property, and develop-ing outreach programs between the two orga-nizations. James is also a talented musician.

Scott Callan, Associate Director for Institutional Advancement, has an MA in interdisciplinary liberal arts from Dart-mouth, and has worked at a number of muse-ums, including Colonial Williamsburg where he wore 18th century cos-tumes to work everyday. He is eager to help PRI and the Museum of the Earth continue to grow.

Kelly Cronin, Assistant to the Director, was a member of the Cornell class of 2008, graduat-ing with a BA in Ecology and Evolutionary Biol-ogy. Assisting Director Warren Allmon and oth-er staff with their day-to-day duties is a challeng-ing task, and Kelly meets it all with a smile. She is looking forward to an ex-citing job here at PRI.

Don Duggan-Haas, Ed-ucation Research Associ-ate, has a PhD in science education. He is working on the pedagogy of the Teacher-Friendly Guides to geology and associ-ated teacher professional development for each region of the US. He is especially involved in “virtual fi eldwork,” to connect curricula to real-world geology.

AMERICAN PALEONTOLOGIST 16(3) Fall 2008 5



Tracey M. Roselle Jr. (1918-2008)Tracy Rozelle, one of the fi rst and most loyal volunteers of the modern era at PRI, died peacefully on July 11 at Hospi-care 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

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 success-ful aerospace engineer during WWII. Later he helped design the cockpit of the fi rst airplane that broke the sound bar-rier. 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 Presi-dent 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 pa-leontological “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 Volun-teer 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 memori-al gifts be directed to PRI and the Museum of the Earth.

Summer Symposium 2008In late July, more than 40 regional paleontologists and fos-sil enthusiasts gathered at Museum of the Earth for the Sec-ond 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, Cura-tor 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. Ste-phen 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, Paleontol-ogy and Evolution: the Beagle Years and its Aftermath.” Fri-day’s academic activities were followed by a full day in the fi eld with Dr. Carl Brett of the University of Cin-cinnati, examining local Devonian fossils and geol-ogy. Watch for this event again next summer and let us know if you’d like to be part of it!




Museum of the Earth Story Contest WinnersWe 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 diffi cult. Winners receive a two-year family membership plus two passes to a local fossil collecting fi eld trip, and have their story published in AP. Th e Museum of the Earth Story Contest is part of the Community Accessibility Program. Th is season’s contest was made possible by Th e Ithaca Journal.

Grades 0-6

By Riley Metzler, age 5, Ithaca, New YorkTh is is a duck-billed T-Rex pteranodon. It liked to fl y in the sky. It was discovered in my back yard in Fall Creek. Th ere 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 fl ying in the sky all his life and then the pterodactyl crashed into him. Th e duck-billed T-Rex pteranodon crashed into him at 500 miles a second. Th e one we found was a duck-billed T-Rex pteranodon baby – the grown-up is still alive. He fl ew all around the world only eating egg shells. By accident he fl ew up into the sky so high he went into outer space and then he fl ew back down to us. Th e End.

Grades 7-9Digging for the Jurassic TimesBy Seoyeon Ju, age 9, Ithaca, New YorkTh is 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 fi nd something new. I hiked up the steep cliff . Suddenly I saw a rattlesnake hissing at me with his forked tongue and

rattling his tail. Th en 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 . Th ey stood around the skeleton with their mouths hanging open. Th en we all got to work. After we dug for about an hour, we fi nally saw the entire dinosaur. Th e 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. Th e 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 fi nished, we carefully carried it back down, put it in our truck, and went back to the museum, feeling very proud. Th e End

Grades 10+Th e Fossil in the SandBy Liane Linehan, age 14, Th e Woodlands, TexasTh e glaring sun rains down iron beams onto the desolate land below. Creatures of this wasteland waste no time in avoiding the infi nite fl ames; they all seek the shadows of shade and shelter to shield them from the shining sun. Th e 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 fi nd 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. Th e 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 fi nd myself, like the creatures that fl ed long before me, seeking the coolness of the shadows. But unlike the critters that fi nd home in this desert biome, I require more than a rock or a cactus. Finally after several minutes of searching, I fi nd 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. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th e 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 fi nger. Fear ran through my body like wildfi re as I swiftly retracted my injured phalange. Th oughts 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. Th is 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. Th inking quickly, I ran up to a white-haired man who had just fi nished 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 confi rmed 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 back-slashing fi gure, it was impossible they could have eroded into this form. Th ey were, without question, the teeth of a carnivore.

Th e man had just fi nished examining the teeth when he suddenly jumped up and started brushing away the sand around the rib cage. At fi rst 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 fi nd a bone or something in the belly of the beast. So, I questioned him about it, to which he replied, “I did expect to fi nd a bone or skeleton of some creature, like a lizard, but this – I never – this is a hadrosaur bone.

Th e icy shock raced through my body. Th is creature, this hadrosaur (if it could still be called that) ate other hadrosaurs. Th e idea had occurred to me before when I fi rst 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 white-haired man declared, still in shock. I heard him call someone who was working about thirty yards away, but I didn’t catch the name. Th e 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 fl aming red bandanna.

“So, what’s the emergency?” the man with the fi ery coated head asked with a tinge of sarcasm. His remark was only


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.

“Th is isn’t possible,” the red-capped man gasped.“I know; it’s hard to even comprehend,” spoke the white-

haired man.Th e 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 fi nished contemplating those ideas, I noticed that the two men had just begun considering the thoughts I had long since fi nished. 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.” Th e white-haired man gave him a questioning look. Th e man continued, “heard on radio … there’s a tornado comin’.”

“You have got to be kidding me!” Th e words fell out of my mouth. I hadn’t the chance to stop them.

“We have to go.”Th is can’t be happening. Th e thought pounded in my

head. “Can we at least dig up the fossil?’ I pleaded.“We … have to go.”“Th ere’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. Th e white-haired man seemed to sympathize with me, but he said nothing. Adrenalized fear was running through me. Th inking 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. Th e

landscape is diff erent 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.

Forthcoming Book by PRI Staff Member

PRI’s new Director of Teacher Programs, Richard Kissel, is coauthor of a forthcoming new book, Evolving Planet, writ-ten to accompany a permanent exhibit by the same name at Th e Field Museum in Chicago, which Richard also helped to create. From single-celled organisms, to dinosaurs, to mam-mals, and fi nally 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 – fi ve 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 978-0-81098-486-7, $19.95 (full color hardcover), expected Sep-tember 2008.

Anybody Need a Mastodon?As Dan Fisher’s feature article in this issue describes, research-quality molds have been produced for every bone in the Mu-seum 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 symme-try by computer, and fabricating a mold from the inverted data. From this set of molds, hollow, fi berglass casts can be produced for the entire skeleton, and the fi rst such “replica” is now mounted and on display in an exterior, covered set-ting at the Mid-Hudson Children’s Museum in Poughkeep-sie, New York. Th e mastodon was scheduled to be unveiled this summer as part of the celebration of the Hudson-Fulton-champlain Quadricentennial. And more copies are possible! Any museum interested should contact D. C. Fisher (email dcfi [email protected]) at the Museum of Paleontology, Uni-versity of Michigan, 1109 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079 USA.


... And Visitor Favorite

Left: Director Warren Allmon lectures at a Community Foundation Meeting.

Right: Inspired photography by visitor Beth Swarecki.

Party Hot Spot...

Left: Vauda Allmon, Judith Nagel-Myers, and Mike Lucas.

Right: New Year’s Eve 2004.

Preparing the Bones for Display

Above: Bones in place, ready to be assembled.

Right: A preparator works carefully on the skull.

Below: Th e 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.

Building a Mastodon:Th e Hyde Park Mastodon at the Museum of the Earth

Educational MaterialLeft: Local boy collects data on the Pleistocene environment through the Mastodon Matrix Project.


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, fl ies, 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. Th ough 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 suff ering the majority of fatalities worldwide.

In addition to water-borne infectious diseases are the vector-borne illnesses. Th ese 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. Th e 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 ChangeAs 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

Part 5: Human Health and Climate ChangeTh e 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. Th e 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 fl uctuations of El Niño that disaster and outbreak of disease

often occur in response to climate changes that bring extremes in weather or storm activity. Th erefore, 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 fi rst 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 diffi cult 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

F O C U S O N E D U C A T I O N

Climate Change 101By Elizabeth Humbert


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 specifi c 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 diff erent 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. Th e 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 diff erent species, decreases dramatically. Th ere have been fi ve major mass extinctions through Earth’s history – one of the most well-known 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 defi nitely had a negative impact on the world’s biodiversity: we cut down trees and degrade entire ecosystems, we hunt and fi sh 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. Th e 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, off er 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. Th is will prevent destruction of habitats and resources that organisms need to survive. (2) Prevent invasive species introductions! Th ese (too) successful species, like garlic mustard or kudzu, wreak havoc when introduced to ecosystems that aren’t prepared for them. Th ey 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. Th is 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!

Th is is the third of a series of articles from our Global Change Initiative, originally printed in Th e 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].


PaleobiologyTh e Legacy of the Mastodon: Th e Golden Age of Fossils in America by Keith Stewart Th ompson. Descriptions of fi eldwork, discovery, and the personalities that made up the period of American fossil hunting that began with Th omas Jeff erson. Yale University Press, 424 pp., ISBN 978-0-30011-704-2, $35.00 (hardcover), May 2008.

Dogs: Th eir Fossil Relatives and Evolutionary History by Xiaoming Wang & Richard H. Tedford, with illustratins by Mauricio Anton. Honoring “man’s best friend” with a de-tailed and beautifully illustrated portrait of the origin and evolution of the dog family Canidae over the past 40 million years. Companion volume to “Th e Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives,” by Mauricio Anton (2000). Columbia University Press, 232 pp., ISBN 978-0-23113-528-3, $29.95 (hardcov-er), July 2008.

Unravelling the Algae: the Past, Present, and Future of Al-gal Systematics edited by Juliet Brodie and Jane Lewis. Con-tributed papers covering the most up-to-date thinking on the taxonomy and classifi cation of all groups of algae. CRC Press (Systematics Association Special Volume), 408 pp., ISBN 978-0-84937-989-5, $119.95 (hardcover), January 2008.

Glorifi ed Dinosaurs: Th e Origin and Early Evolution of Birds by Luis M. Chiappe. Using the latest bird fossil dis-coveries from the Cretaceous rocks of Argentina, Spain, Mongolia, and China, Chiappe discusses the origin and di-versifi cation of birds. Wiley and Sons, 263 pp., ISBN 978-0-47124-723-4, $69.95 (hardcover), February 2007.

Dominican Amber Spiders: A Comparative Paleontologi-cal-Neontological Approach to Identifi cation, Faunistics, Ecology, and Biogeography by David Penney. Th e world’s leading expert on fossil spiders provides a comprehensive synthesis of current knowledge about the Dominican Re-public amber spider fauna, complete with over 300 images for identifi cation. Siri Scientifi c Press, 176 pp., ISBN 978-0-95586-360-8, $110.00 (paperback), May 2008.

Th e 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 evolution-ary events shaped the global environment and how major scientifi c discoveries were made about these events. Oxford University Press, 288 pp., ISBN 978-0-19280-602-4, $29.95 (hardcover) April 2007.

Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Mil-lion 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 (paper-back), May 2008.

T. rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez. Th e story behind the discovery and advancement of the asteroid impact theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs told by one of the men who fi rst discovered the evidence. Princeton University Press, 216 pp., ISBN 978-0-69113-103-0, $16,95 (paper-back), June 2008.

Th e Saber-toothed Cat of the North Sea by Dick Mol, Wil-rie 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 saber-toothed 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 978-0-52183-575-6, $130.00 (hardcover), May 2008.

Fossil Ecosystems of North America: A Guide to the Sites and Th eir 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. Th e Crato Fossil Beds of Brazil edited by David M. Mar-till, Günter Bechly, and Robert F. Loveridge. Describes the fl ora and fauna of the Lower Cretaceous Crato Formation of Brazil. Cambridge University Press, 625 pp., ISBN 978-0-52185-867-0, $150.00 (hardcover), February 2008.

Maine’s Fossil Record: Th e Paleozoic by Lisa Churchill Dickson. Intended as a stand-alone reference for Maine’s Pa-leozoic paleontology, for the interested layperson or profes-sional geoscientist. Maine Geological Survey, 500 pp., ISBN 978-0-97981-260-6, $40.00 (hardcover), December 2007.

B R I E F L Y N O T E D

books of interest


Evolution and DarwinAutomated Taxon Identifi cation in Systematics: Th eory, Approaches, and Applications edited by Norman Mac-Leod. Contributed papers exploring contemporary ap-proaches to the problems of species identifi cation, including DNA barcoding, digital imaging, automatic measurement, and other automated tools. CRC Press, 368 pp., ISBN 978-0-84938-205-5, $99.95 (hardcover), January 2008.

Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Chris-tianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design by Peter J. Bowl-er. 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 978-0-67402-615-5, $24.95 (hardcover), September 2007.

Th ank 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 meaning-ful truce between the two sides of the debate. Council Oak Books, 432 pp., ISBN 978-1-57178-210-6, $24.95 (hard-cover), 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 978-0-80188-825-0, $35.00 (hardcover), July 2008. Earth ScienceCurrent 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 Th rough Watkins Glen – Water’s Sculpture in Stone by Tony Ingraham. A history and attractive photo-graphic essay of Watkins Glen State Park in upstate New

York. Owl Gorge Productions, 83 pp., ISBN 978-0-61520-121-4, $22.95 (hardcover), July 2008.

Global ChangeAcid 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 aff ect northern ecosystems, killing trees and fi sh. Cornell University Press, 256 pp., ISBN 978-0-80144-651-1, $65.00 (hardcover), 2007.

50 Ways to Save the Earth by Anne Jankélowitch, with photographs by Phillippe Bourseiller. Geared towards children, this book describes fi fty 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.

Th e Climate Diet: How You Can Cut Carbon, Cut Costs, and Save the Planet by Jonathan Harrington. A fi ve step climate diet plan can make your family – and the planet – healthier. Earthscan Ltd. 160 pp., ISBN 978-1-84407-533-1, $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 978-0-31334-691-0, $49.95 (hardcover), April 2008.

Th e Long Th aw: 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.

Th e 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.

B R I E F L Y N O T E D

books of interest


P A L E O N E W S

by Olivia J. Rebert

Hyde Park “Highlights” Th e May 2008 issue of “Highlights For Children” magazine features New York elementary school students sifting through soil, looking for fossils. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th e 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=mastodon&ArchiveSearchCats=) for three other cool articles about mastodons.

Mammoth Hair for DNAScientists 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. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th ey 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 AncestorsDNA 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 semi-aquatic 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

dried up. Th is new study could shed light on the behaviors of modern elephants, which are fairly mysterious. Th e researchers will continue to study the fragments and search for new evidence, with their greatest hope in fi nding another skeleton. Published in April 2008 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lyuba’s LegacyWhen 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. Th e mammoth, now named Lyuba after Khudi’s wife, was taken by scientists to the regional capital Salekhard to be studied. Th e female mammoth was no more than six months old at the time of its death and was approximately the size of a large dog. Th e 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 three-dimensional 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 CarvingUnderwater 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. Th e carving depicts what appears to be a mastodon with a spear in its side. Th e divers found the boulder 39 feet beneath the water while looking for shipwrecks. Th ey 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. Th e boulder, which is 3 feet high and almost 5 feet long, appears to have several fi ssures, some which appear to be natural while others, like the carving, appear to be man made. Michigan has two confi rmed petroglyphs, and this


P A L E O N E W S

Olivia Rebert is a writing major at Ithaca College

one will make three if its originality is confi rmed. Reported by Th e Canadian Press in April 2007.

First Observed Right Whale BirthSome people are lucky enough to see a Right Whale in its natural habitat. Monica Zani got to see one give birth – and is the fi rst 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, fl ew 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 fi rst, Zani could only expect the worst – she had seen whales killed by boats and fi shing 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. Th eir bodies contained the most valuable resources, and they swam near the shore and fl oated 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. Th e whale was 44 feet long and weighed 16 tons at its death, although it might have weighed twice that much at its healthy weight. Th e whale was 19 years old when it was killed by becoming tangled in a fi shing net. Reported online by the New England Aquarium (http://www.neaq.org) in May 2008.

Ecce EquusIn a May 2008 article in Natural History magazine, authors Jay Kirkpatrick and Patricia Fazio argue that the now-domesticated North American wild horse, Equus caballus, should be treated as a native, not intrusive, species by state and federal agencies. Th e 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. Th e last prehistoric North American horses died out between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene. Th e 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. Th e authors argue that the key elements for defi ning 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 BeautifulIt’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 fi ve 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. Th e 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 infl uence 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-amanderIn 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 mayfl ies for dinner using interlocking teeth in its mouth. Th e 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.


Chesapecten jeff ersonius, an extinct sea scallop, was the fi rst fossil described on the North American continent. In 1687, Jamestown settlers noticed Na-tive Americans using Chesapecten shells for bowls and tools. Later, in 1824, sci-entist Th omas Say named the scallop to honor both Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the world, and past-President Th omas Jeff erson, a well-known Vir-ginia naturalist.

Fossil Chesapecten are commonly found in the stream valleys and river beaches of Virginia and North Caro-lina. It lived in these waters during the early Pliocene Epoch, 4 to 4½ million years ago. Although it shared its habitat with other scallops, scientists say that C.

jeff ersonius was more abundant than its cousins. Today’s scal-lops live in shallow waters with sandy or muddy fl oors and it’s not unreasonable to think that this scallop did the same, although could thrive in waters as deep as 130 feet.

A mature Chesapecten could grow to 5 inches in diam-eter. Its shell was thick, radially ridged, and composed mostly of calcite, so it fossilized well. Like living scallops, younger individuals attached themselves to the sea fl oor whereas ma-ture scallops could swim by clapping their valves together to propel through the water to escape predators. As suspension feeders, scallops take nutrients from the water column and

have acclimated to many environmental situations.

Today scientists use Chesapecten jeff ersonius as an index fossil for the Lower Yorktown Formation. Th is means the species is used to defi ne and identify this particular geologic period. Although Chesapecten went extinct about 4 million years ago, possibly due to cooling of the oceans prior to the onset of the Great Ice Age, its memory lives on as the Virginia State Fossil, which it was recognized as in 1993.

Stan Balducci has been a member of PRI and its Museum of the Earth since 1999. He is a retired master gardener and self-taught paleontologist. He has enjoyed distance-ed courses in paleontology, evolution, biogeography, and historical geology. He is a single dad and avid tennis player, and resides in Mechanicsville, Virginia. Email [email protected].

When describing the mass of Archelon, a giant sea turtle of the Late Cretaceous Period, some say that it was the size of a car. Th e massive turtle was roughly 12 feet long and weighed up to 6,000 pounds. It swam the salty waters near today’s South Dakota, Kansas, and Ne-braska (now called the Pierre Shale). Archelon is the largest known marine turtle of all time.

Swimming in those waters 73 to 65 million years ago, Archelon most likely came in contact with Tylosaurus, a predatory marine lizard, Squalicorax, a scavenging and predatory shark, or Mosasaurus, a carnivorous aquatic lizard that looked like a crocodile with fl ip-pers. Although it’s doubtful that many predators dared to challenge the enormous Archelon, it must have had to fi ght off a few – the best known skeleton is miss-ing a hind paddle.

Archelon fed on planktonic animals such as ammonites and jellyfi sh with its weak jaws and toothless, hooked beak. Like other anapsids, its long, narrow skull (up to 3 feet long) had no openings except at its eyes and nostrils. It also had a wide, fl attened shell, paddle-like legs, and a short, point-ed tail. Anapsids, which include living turtles, are the most primitive group of reptiles, characterized by lack of an open-ing in the temple region of the skull.

Although Archelon’s size clearly de-fi nes it from its relatives, the large tur-tle’s shell is the key diff erence between Archelon and the turtles wandering on our roads or resting in our ponds. Archelon’s shell did not have the numer-ous separate shell bones of modern-day turtles. Its back probably had a leathery covering or bony plates protecting an equally bony framework underneath.

Th e genus Archelon is considered to be monophyletic, which means that its members descended from a common ancestor. It and other turtles possibly descended from captorhinids, a group of primitive anapsids that lived during the Carboniferous Period (340 MYA) and went extinct at the end of the Permian Period (250 MYA).

Archelon appeared in the BBC television program “Sea Monsters” narrated by zoologist Nigel Marvin. Archelon is also the name of the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece.

F R O M T H E M E M B E R S H I P A r c h e l o n & C h e s a p e c t e n

By Stan Balducci

PRI Acc. no. 1261, Cobham’s Wharf, Virginia, Pliocene, Yorktown Fm.


F O S S I L F O C U S A m e r i c a n M a s t o d o n

By Verity Whalen

F O S S I LF O C U S

Th is 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. Th ese specimens represent one of the best known Pleistocene mammals, which at one time inhabited most of North America.

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. Th e femur in particular exhibits evidence of scavaging by a prehistoric predator, Canis dirus, or the Dire Wolf. Th e 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 fl esh had been consumed.

Th is mastodon was found on the property of Robert Moff ett in North Java, New York, in the Summer of 2001. After Moff et contacted the staff of PRI and Cornell University, the remains were excavated and deposited in the collections of PRI. Th e 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).

LeftMammut americanum (Kerr, 1791)North Java, New YorkPleistocene EpochPRI 49618 (bone 141)

AboveMastodons 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.


F E A T U R E A R T I C L E

New Ideas About Old BonesBy Daniel C. Fisher

Th e life of a paleontologist is sometimes intensely interna-tional, exposing one to experiences that are raw, wild, and remote in every sense of the word. Th is is partly because fos-sils 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 fi eldwork to in-vestigate 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 fl ew across the frozen surface of the tundra through a spray of icy gran-ules thrown up by the relentless churning of broad hooves, and all thought slipped away, but for a wordless feeling of im-mersion in a lifestyle that was older than the tales of grandfa-thers’ grandfathers’ grandfathers.

I have since had to bid my Nenets hosts goodbye and return to a diff erent life. I walk in to my offi ce each morn-ing 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 meet-ings 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. Th e 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 fi nd 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 mast-odon, the now-celebrated subject of PRI’s recently published compendium of reports on three late Pleistocene proboscid-ean 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 try-ing to understand the characters and action without benefi t of reading the fi rst half. Th erefore, I need fi rst to go back to an earlier adventure, involving work on the Cohoes mast-odon, at the New York State Museum, in Albany.

A Little Background on Mastodons, Musth, and TusksAmerican mastodons (Mammut americanum), as most read-ers of AP will be aware, are relatives of living and extinct elephantids (elephants and mammoths), although they be-long to a diff erent family (mammutids) within the mamma-lian 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, fi tted with fi berglass tusk casts. Th e tusks are al-most 10 feet (3 meters) long and extend into deep sockets in the skull. Th e upwardly directed tusk tips were deadly weap-ons in breeding-season battles between rival males.


Mastodons were browsing herbivores, subsisting on a broad-spectrum diet of leaves, twigs, and weedy vegetation. Like elephants today, adult females and calves lived in matriar-chal family units, whereas adult males were mostly solitary. Although an image of mastodons feeding peacefully in late Pleistocene woodland meadows comes readily to mind, stud-ies 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. Th ese battles were probably one expres-sion of a seasonal “musth” phenomenon observed fi rst in liv-ing 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 fi gured in the paleobiology of mastodons was a com-bination 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 sus-tained 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 fi rst winter.

Admittedly, this is a highly circumstantial type of argu-ment, but in making inferences about past events, we are of-ten reduced to such a strategy. In its defense, the generaliza-tions on which this interpretation is based can all be tested by future discoveries that will either replicate current pat-terns … 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.

Th e 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 partici-pants. 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 confl icts? 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 magnifi cent, gives us nothing, or almost nothing, but dead organisms.

As it turns out, “almost” is the critical word. Skeletal tis-sues that grow by accretion (that is, localized addition of ma-terial to an existing structure, without disturbing prior incre-ments 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 envi-ronmentally 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 un-usually 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 matura-tion 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 ProjectTh en, in Summer 2000, came the recovery of the Hyde Park mastodon. Th e 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. Th is 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. Th e mounting strategy, although keeping the bones technically accessible for future research, would nonetheless complicate routine comparisons and re-search 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 fi nally 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


the excavation (before PRI became involved) and reserved for what I expected would be a routine analysis like others that I had done before. Th e right tusk had been returned to PRI to be exhibited on its own, and the mounted skeleton was to be fi tted with light, fi berglass 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 mold-ing process was as eff ective as we had hoped. Lest this seem inadequate for defi nitive 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, exam-ined under a microscope) and microsampling of the polished surfaces.

At fi rst, work went smoothly, with few surprises. In previ-ous 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 con-tent to address exactly the same issues on one specimen after another. Th e major escalation of analysis anticipated for the Hyde Park specimen was to increase the duration and preci-sion 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 ProjectImplementing a research plan always takes longer than ex-pected, but as you fi nally approach the “fi nish line,” there is a great sense of relief and satisfaction as the results are assem-bled, 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 le-sion and several other critical injuries in postcranial regions), and a growth history recorded as a time series of thicknesses of periodically formed incremental features.

Th e “periodically formed incremental features” require some explanation. Th e features we work with in mastodon tusks form on three diff erent, 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 mi-crostructure 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 fi rst erupt, they have a thin layer of enamel near their tip, but this soon abrades away, exposing the underlying den-

tin. Th roughout 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 diff erentiated by rhythmic physiological cycles that vary the physical properties of the dentin being produced. Th us, 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 re-cently weaned calf, an inexperienced adolescent, and a young adult. Th e time sequence of the animal’s life is recorded in the spatial sequence of increments, or layers, making up the entire tusk. Th ink 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 time-machine – that lets a fortunate observer travel back and forth through an animal’s lifetime.

Th e same periodically formed increments, whose thick-nesses 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 profi le, leading to some asymmetry. Fractures refl ect 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 thick-ness, but of increases in tusk length? I had tried this before (Fisher, 1996, 2001) and found that it off ered a comparable, but subtly diff erent perspective on the life of a proboscid-ean – 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 diff erent 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 measure-ments along the outer surface? Th e casts could be the answer! Yet another aspect of rhythms of tusk growth is that the ra-tio 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 fi ngertips, 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

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 fi rst reaction was consternation.

Th e 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 rep-resented a sequence of events in time. Th is combination of space and time was “old hat” to someone used to studying ac-cretionary growth (or, for that matter, stratigraphy, in which the spatiotemporal dimension is dominantly vertical). Th e 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?

Th ere had to be a resolution to this problem. At least one of the suppositions underlying the paradox had to be wrong, but which one? Th e consternation fi nally 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 se-quential 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, extend-ing 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.

Th e Origin of Cementum DefectsOnce 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

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. Th e defect in year 29 tusk is smaller than the others.


resulting impact could traumatize chewing muscles on the aff ected side and puncture the skull, causing massive blood loss. But what about the combatant that landed such a blow? Th e 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. Th is motion would drive the delicate growing margin of the tusk, especially that part along the outer curve, where cementum defects origi-nate, into the bony wall at the back of the tusk socket. Th e resulting damage would have been minor relative to other injuries sustained by combatants in such a fi ght, but if a male survived a musth battle in which he had infl icted 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 keep-ing it visible at the surface of the tusk.

Th e rest of the story fi lls in quickly. Th e Hyde Park mast-odon’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 mid- to 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 diff erent 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 popu-lation declines (marked by declining incidence of cementum defects) prior to extinction. A new vista opens.

“Adventures of Ideas”Th is title of a stimulating book by Alfred North Whitehead (1933) captures a great deal of this research experience. Th e greatest adventures of all are those that change the way we think about the world, and paleontology, more than most fi elds, 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 mast-odons and cementum defects are just tokens of greater prob-lems, but they remind us that new ideas often emerge from the resolution of apparent confl ict – 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 confl ict – on the chance, however remote, that it will lead to deeper insight. Enough said. I need now to prepare for my next adventure.

ReferencesAllmon, W. D., & P. L. Nester, eds. 2008. Mastodon paleobiol-

ogy, 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: Th e Proboscidea: Evolution and Palaeoecology of Elephants and Th eir 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 Mam-mut 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 Paleontol-ogy 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].


It isn’t in the Ice Age movies. It isn’t found frozen in Siberia or Alaska. You can’t buy cuddly stuff ed 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. Th is species also played a surprisingly important role in human under-standing of the history of the Earth and its life. Indeed, few fossil animals have been so broadly involved in human af-fairs, from science to politics. And New York State can in some sense be said to be the home of the mastodon. Th at 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 scientifi c specialists – still ripples across the Finger Lakes and far beyond.

A Short History of Mastodon DiscoveryHumans 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. Th e Chemung River and Chemung County in central New York, for ex-ample, 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 so-phisticated 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 vari-ous reasons had been killed, or driven underground, by su-perior beings.

Th e history of modern scientifi c understanding of mast-odons is closely connected to the history of our understand-ing of mammoths. What are today known as mammoths fi rst 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.

Th e fi rst mastodon bones to be specifi cally noted by Eu-ropeans were collected in New York in 1705, along the banks of the Hudson River, near what is now the town of Claver-ack 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. Th e fi rst fairly complete mastodon skeleton known was discov-ered 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 scien-tifi c entrepreneur Charles Wilson Peale, and two compos-ite skeletons assembled from this collection were displayed in London, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Th e 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 sever-al hands, lastly those of P. T. Barnum, and then mysteriously disappeared, turning up eventually at a museum in Darm-stadt, Germany, where it resides today. Th ese 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 infl uence on the debates over mastodon affi nities that were swirling on both sides of the Atlantic at the time.

Th e fi rst published illustration of a mastodon fossil ap-

F E A T U R E A R T I C L E

Mastodons in their Backyards: Th e Natural and Not-so-Natural History of Th ree DiscoveriesBy Warren D. Allmon

Th e teeth of mastodons (left) and mammoths (right) show substantial diff erences. Images from Schul-Naturgeschichte by Hubert Ludwig (1891; left) and Kameno Doba by Jovan Zujovic (1893; right), via Wikimedia Commons.


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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.

A Mastodon in Your Backyard? You never know what you might fi nd 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 fi nd 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.

Computer generated mastodon by Dantheman9758, via Wikimedia Commons

Photograph by Rachel Philipson

Mastodons and Mammoths

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 fl at 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.

Computer generated image by Dantheman9758, via Wikimedia Commons

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 fi nd 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 Jean-Etienne 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. Th e American mastodon was fi rst named scientifi cally as Elephas americanum by Scottish natu-ralist Robert Kerr in 1792 in the fi rst volume of his trans-lation and elaboration of Linnaeus’ landmark book Systema Naturae (1758). It is not clear what bones (if any) Kerr actu-ally examined before proposing the name. In 1799, German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach included in his list of “unknown animals” whose remains had been found bur-ied 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.”

Th e famous French anatomist Georges Cuvier studied the de Longueuil collection (and perhaps also mastodon mate-rial 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 defi nitively 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 con-vincing 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 fi gure of Guettard’s tooth, and he coined the name “mastodonte” in reference to the breast-like shape of the molar cusps. Th e rules of biological nomenclature give great weight to priority, and thus dictate that the American Mastodon is formally called Mammut americanum (Kerr).

Th e inconsistent use of the English words “mastodont” and “mastodon” is annoying and confusing. “Mastodon” has been proposed at various times and by diff erent authorities as a vernacular word referring specifi cally to members of the ge-nus Mammut, whereas “mastodont” would refer collectively to mastodons plus other elephant relatives known as gom-photheres. Purists have argued that the more inclusive term (with the “t” at the end) is appropriate, even when discuss-ing Mammut only, because proper English word formation from the Greek roots of the term requires the fi nal “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 Fairfi eld Os-born chose the entire 1806 illustration as “Cuvier’s types” – the offi cial 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 re-cently been recommended as the new “type specimen” (the offi cial name-bearer) of Mammut americanum.

Th omas Jeff erson 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. Jeff erson initially rejected the idea of extinction, and as President in 1803 charged Mer-riweather Lewis and William Clark with searching for living elephants on their expedition through the American west. Disappointed with the explorers’ failure to fi nd a living mast-odon, in 1807 Jeff erson sent Clark to Big Bone Lick at his own expense to collect additional fossils. Th e resulting collec-tion arrived at the White House in March 1808. Th ese were eventually divided into three groups: one went to the Ameri-can Philosophical Society (later transferred to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, where it would become known as the Th omas Jeff erson Fossil Collection); one was sent to the Natural History Museum in Paris; and the third, and smallest, became part of Jeff erson’s personal collection at Monticello. Jeff erson’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 coun-terparts that America was a vital and rising land. Th e oppo-

President Th omas Jeff erson was very interested in the early mastodon discoveries in the United States, specifi cally instructing Lewis and Clark to fi nd living mastodons during their expedition across the American west. Painting by Rembrandt Peale (1805).


site had recently been argued by the great French naturalist George Buff on, who suggested that the natural environment of the New World was unfavorable for life of all kinds, and led to degenerate forms. Th e discovery of these large bones, and the prospect that their owners might still walk the Amer-ican heartland, was to Jeff erson 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 mast-odons have been found in North America over the past 300 years. Reported mastodon fi nds are most abundant around the Great Lakes (Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and On-tario), but they are also common in Florida and New York, each of which has about ten percent of the known discover-ies. Countless other mastodon fi nds have undoubtedly been ignored, misidentifi ed, 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. Th us, 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 MastodonMastodons are more distantly related to modern elephants

than are mammoths. Th is is evident in a comparison of their teeth: mammoth teeth are more similar to modern elephant teeth, whereas mastodon teeth are very diff erent. 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.

Th e 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 mil-lion years ago). Although numerous species of Mammut have been recognized, there is general consensus among paleontol-ogists 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 stock-ier. Th e 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 diff erent 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 – interpret-ed as remains of their last meals – frequently contain abun-dant 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 ecol-ogy and behavior. Based on pollen and larger plant fossils associated with mastodon skeletal fi nds, Mammut appears to have inhabited wet, spruce-dominated woodland, where it might, at least occasionally, have had semiaquatic habits. Most mastodon fi nds in North America consist of single or a small number of skeletons, although some mass occurrenc-es are known, and most are interpreted as males, based on comparison with the size and shape of modern elephants. Th is 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.

Th e oldest known occurrence of Mammut is from White Bluff s in south-central Washington State, and dates to about 3.75 million years old. Th ese fossils are indistinguishable from the bones of M. americanum from 10,000 years ago, indicating a relatively long lifetime for this species. Th e latest known mastodon occurrence is at Pleasant Lake in southeast-ern Michigan, dated at 10,395 ± 100 14C yr BP.

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.


A Tale of Th ree FindsChemung. In the summer of 1999, John and Elaine Gil-bert were deepening a pond on their wooded property, about halfway between Elmira and Watkins Glen, in northern Chemung County, New York. Th e excavation produced sev-eral large bones. One of the family members contacted Cor-nell University, which eventually led to their identifi cation as either mastodon or mammoth, and an arrangement for excavation of the site to locate any other bones that might be present. Th is work proceeded throughout the Fall of 1999, ending in early December, and attracted considerable lo-cal, regional, and national media coverage. During the ex-cavation, 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. Unfor-tunately, 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 loca-tion 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 fi nd was at one point off ered 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. Th e 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 long-term 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 mast-odon and approximately 20% of an adult mammoth, the fi rst 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

a mastodon bone from the site yielding a date of 10,820 ± 50 years BP. Th ese 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 nev-er conclusively demonstrated. Th e 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. Th e 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 vis-ited Hyde Park in November 1999 and saw that a complete humerus (upper forelimb), as well as fragments of tusk, skull,

Th e Chemung mastodon exhibit at Cornell’s Snee Hall of Geological Sciences.

Th e Chemung mastodon’s jawbone is carefully excavated.Th e Hyde Park mastodon being excavated from the mud of Lozier’s drained pond.


and pelvis, had been found, suggesting that more of a skele-ton 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. Th is, coupled with near-record rainfall for the month of June, conspired to make the week of searching cold, frustrating, and unsuc-cessful. 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.

Th e Hyde Park excavation attracted even more media at-tention, including Th e New York Times, National Public Ra-dio, NBC News, and People magazine. Th e Discovery Chan-nel, which provided fi nancial support for some of the work, was on-site during the excavation and ultimately produced an hour-long documentary fi lm (“Mastodon in Your Back Yard: the Ultimate Guide”) which had its premiere in Octo-ber 2001 and is still occasionally shown.

Th e 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-res-olution molds were made of every bone under the supervi-sion 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 Corpora-tion to represent New York State on 600 of its rental trucks across the country.

Th e 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, paleo-ecology, and paleoenvironment of other less complete fi nds.

North Java. In the Spring of 2000, Robert Moff ett 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 identifi ed the remains as those of a mastodon. John Chiment and I negotiated an agreement

with Moff ett 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 Moff ett by PRI and are now part of the PRI collections.

Th e North Java fi nd consisted of approximately 25% of a mastodon skeleton. Radiocarbon dating of one of these bones gave an age of 11,560 ± 60 years BP. Th e North Java remains are especially interesting for their abundant evidence of scav-enging 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. Th e mastodon remains detailed here date from between 10,780 ± 60 and 11,560 ± 60 yr BP. With extinction imminent, these fi nds could represent members of the some of the last mastodon populations ever to have existed.

Mastodons Past and PresentTh e 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. Th e Discovery Channel fi lm on its excavation is still shown on various cable outlets, although we now know that many of the interpreta-tions 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 sci-ence. Like innumerable frozen mammoths, Sue the T. rex, or the recently discovered dinosaur mummy known as Da-kota, 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 diff erent fi nds in Chemung and Wyoming counties –

Excavating the North Java mastodon used a sediment shaker.

U-Haul’s interpretation of the Hyde Park Mastodon.


also became part of something else: one of the widest ranging and most intense scientifi c investigations of this extinct spe-cies that has been accomplished in many years, perhaps ever. Th us it was not only popularized, but scientifi cally valuable as well. In this respect, perhaps PRI’s unexpected “mastodon period” can serve as a model for other such fortuitous dis-coveries.

Further ReadingAllmon, W. D., and P. L. Nester, eds. 2008. Mastodon paleobiol-

ogy, 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. Th e Fate of the Mammoth. Fossils, Myth, and His-tory. 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: Th e 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. Th e 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 Prehis-toric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity. New York University Press, New York, 482 pp.

Tassy, P. 2003. Th e earliest tooth of the American mastodon and the emergence of the concept of fossil species. American Paleontolo-gist, 11(1): 3-5.

Warren Allmon is Director of Paleontological Research Institu-tion and its Museum of the Earth. Email [email protected].


D O D S O N O N D I N O S A U R S

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 Paleobi-ology, 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 de-scription of 15 genera of dinosaurs. She was solo author of four of these, and fi rst author of two more. Th e remarkable team of Maryańska and Osmólska was responsible for nam-ing 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 elect-ed to honorary life membership in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2003.

Women have long since come to the fore in dinosaur pa-leontology as in so many other fi elds. It has been my pleasure and pride to train outstanding women in dinosaur paleon-tology: Cathy Forster (Ph.D. 1990), Allison Tumarkin-Der-atzian (Ph.D. 2003), and Merrilee Guenther (Ph.D. 2007). Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan completed her Ph.D. in her na-tive 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 fi rm-ly set on top graduate schools. [Barbara Grandstaff (Ph.D. 2006) also bears my stamp, but works on fossil fi shes, 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. Th e good news is that this list wells annually.

Granted the important role women play in paleontol-ogy, 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

and 1971. Zofi a Kielan-Jaworowska led the great expeditions of 1965, 1970, and 1971. Poland has a long history in pa-leontology, but it is a country that is nearly devoid of dino-saur remains. Th e country is rich in Paleozoic invertebrates and also Cenozoic insect-bearing amber. Polish paleontolo-gists historically studied invertebrates. When Zofi a Kielan-Jaworowska 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 Creta-ceous mammals that fueled her imagination. Th e idea of go-ing 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 partici-pate, 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-Ja-worowska & Barsbold, 1972) and in a popular book (Kielan-Jaworowska, 1969). Th e 1963 expedition was for reconnais-sance of sites and no major digging took place. Th e 1964 and 1965 expeditions were in earnest, and the results were superb. Th e expedition photographs show the women who were to play such an important role in the scientifi c publications to follow: Magdalena Borsuk-Białynicka, Teresa Maryańska, Halszka Osmólska, and Zofi a Kielan-Jaworowska. Th e result of three expeditions was 35 tons of fossils, including Creta-ceous mammals, lizards, a large sauropod skeleton, two or-nithomimid 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 ex-peditions were held in 1970 and 1971. Mongolian paleon-tologists 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.


Th e Polish-Mongolian Expeditions were highly success-ful, and added greatly to our knowledge of the diversity of dinosaurs. Th e material collected in those few years provided material for major portions of the careers of fi ve or six Pol-ish scientists. What is striking to me is that the scientifi c de-scriptions of dinosaurs that soon began to fl ow from the ex-peditions were almost exclusively written by Polish women, women who up to then had published on Paleozoic inverte-brates. Th e expedition results were published in 10 volumes of Palaeontologia Polonica (PP) between 1968 and 1984. Th e handsome, folio-sized series was edited by Kielan-Jaworows-ka. Part I contained the narrative of the fi rst three expeditions by Kielan-Jaworowska & Dovchin (1968), as well as papers on geology, Cenozoic mammals and tortoises, and the fi rst of many important papers by Kielan-Jaworowska on Cretaceous mammals from the Gobi. My comments will focus narrowly on the dinosaurs, the fi rst description of which appeared in Part II. It was appropriately spectacular. Halszka Osmól-ska & Ewa Roniewicz (1970) announced the discovery of Deinocheirus mirifi cus (“unusual horrible hand”), a fossil col-lected during the 1965 fi eld season at Altan Ula III in the Nemegt Basin. Th e fi nd consisted of two nearly complete ar-ticulated forelimbs of a theropod of unprecedented size. Th e forelimbs were 2.4 meters (almost 8 feet) long. Th e claws on the three-fi ngered 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 magnifi cent juvenile skull of the nodosaurid an-kylosaurid, 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 orni-thomimid Gallimimus bullatus (“chicken mimic with a skull capsule”), described by Halszka Osmólska, Ewa Roniewicz & Rinchen Barsbold (1972), the Mongolian collaborator. Gal-limimus, 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 pachycephalo-saurs 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. Th e expedi-tions collected three skulls from two diff erent formations. Homalocephale calathocercos (“even-headed basket-tail”) from the Nemegt Formation is a fl at-headed pachycephalo-saur, the fi rst to be documented convincingly. Th e species was so named because the tail was heavily supported by a mesh of ossifi ed tendons. Tylocephale gilmorei (“Gilmore’s swollen-head”) is an imperfectly preserved domed-skull from the Barunguyot Formation. Prenocephale prenes (“sloping slope-head”) is a magnifi cent, 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. Th e ilium can be used similarly: those of both Prenocephale and Homalo-cephale 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. Th e female participants are Teresa Maryańska (seventh from left), Halszka Osmólska (fi fth from right), and Zofi a Kielan-Jaworowska (third from right).


Pachycephalosauria as an entirely new suborder of ornithis-chian dinosaurs. Th ey 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 & Os-mólska (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). Th ere they described the fi rst important new Asian ceratopsians in half a century. Bagaceratops rozhdest-venskyi (“Rozhdestvensky’s small horned face”) is a delicate little basal ceratopsian represented by more than 20 skulls and partial skeletons. Th e 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. Th ey described a second taxon as ?Protoceratops kozlowskii in honor of Professor Kozłowski. Th is species sub-sequently gave rise to a new genus, Breviceratops Kurzanov, 1990. Th ey 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 Gra-ciliceratops (“slender horn face”) on the reasonable grounds that Bohlin’s fossil was too fragmentary to contain diagnos-tic characters. One of the most important conclusions of the paper is that Psittacosaurus belongs in the Ceratopsia. It had been misclassifi ed since Osborn (1924) described it but failed to recognize the rostral bone that forms the upper half of the beak, one of the defi ning features of Ceratopsia. Our heroines confi rmed without a shadow of doubt the existence of the rostral bone in Psittacosaurus. Th e paper by Maryańska & Osmólska (1975) is a paleontological classic, rich in ana-tomical detail, analysis of diversity and variability, and cogent phylogenetic reasoning.

Th e women continued to write. In part VII appeared the description of Opisthocoelicaudia skarzynskii (“Skarżyński’s opisthocoelous tail vertebrae”) by Magdalena Borsuk-Białynicka (1977). Th is important sauropod was at fi rst 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. Th ese included fi ne specimens of previ-ously named taxa, Pinacosaurus and Talarurus, but also two new genera, both from the Barun Guyot Formation. Saicha-nia chulsanensis (“beautiful one from Khulsan, Gobi Desert”) is a large ankylosaurid, 7 meters (23 feet) in length. Its trian-gular 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

same size as Saichania, but has a skull that is much deeper and angled diff erently at the back, evidently in order to ac-commodate a large brain. Part VIII (1978), alas, contains no dinosaur papers. Part IX contains a review of Asian hadro-saurs, including new material of Saurolophus angustirostris (Maryańska & Osmólska, 1981a). Osmólska (1981) inves-tigated fossils of theropods with fused tarsometatarsals, di-nosaurs 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. Th e 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. Th e fi nal 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 & Os-mólska, 1984).

With the end of the formal volumes of Expedition Re-sults, 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 Bars-bold and W. Siciński) is the fi rst unequivocal lambeosaurine hadrosaur from Mongolia (Maryańska & Osmólska, 1981b). Mongolian Altangerel Perle joined the duo to describe an-other fl at-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 ([Mon-golian]: 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 collect-ed 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. Th e team wisely sought the collaboration of Halszka. Nomingia gobien-sis (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. Th us the distinction between theropods and birds, or rather avian theropods and nonavian theropods, continues to blur. Th e fi nal paper in the remarkable collaboration between Halszka and Teresa was a legitimate potboiler, a highly detailed cla-distic analysis of the position of the phylogenetic position of oviraptorosaurs among theropods (Maryańska et al., 2002). Th ey reached the extremely interesting conclusion that these strange toothless theropods are nested within the avialan rather than the “dinosaurian” side of the family. Th at is to say, their ancestors included fl ying animals like Archaeopteryx or Confuciusornis, rather than representing an ancestral type. Th is 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 fi nal 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 cere-brum and cerebellum, fi lled the space within the braincase completely, as in birds and mammals, and completely unlike living reptiles. Th is 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. Al-though all of her dinosaur papers were published in Eng-lish, 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 fi rst meet-ing of International Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Eco-systems (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 Th e Dinosauria, for Dave Weishampel and I invited this brilliant woman to be our coeditor, a task that she fulfi lled with the greatest distinc-tion. 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. Th e result, Th e 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), aff ording 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 idio-syncratic English. She was a fi ne raconteur, and her friends enjoyed her lively sense of humor. I wish that space permit-ted 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.

ReferencesBarsbold, R., H. Osmólska, M. Watabe, P. J. Currie, & K. Tsoftbaa-

tar. 2000. A new oviraptorosaur (Dinosauria, Th eropoda) from Mongolia: the fi rst dinosaur with a pygostyle. Acta Palaeonto-logica 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 archosauri-form from the Early Triassic of Poland. Acta Palaeontologica Po-lonica, 48: 649-653.

Clark, J. M., M. A. Norell, & R. Barsbold. 2001. Two new ovi-raptorids (Th eropoda: 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 re-lationships in ornithischian dinosaurs. Acta Palaeontologica Po-lonica, 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 Verte-brate 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. Pa-laeontologia Polonica, 27: 5-13.

Kielan-Jaworowska, Z., & N. Dovchin. 1968. Narrative of the Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expeditions 1963-1965. Pa-laeontologia Polonica, 19: 7-32.

Kurzanov, S. M., & H. Osmólska. 1991. Tochisaurus nemegtensis-gen. et sp. n., a new troodontid (Dinosauria, Th eropoda) from Mongolia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 36: 69-76.

Lü, J. 2002. A new oviraptorosaurid (Th eropoda: Oviraptorosau-ria) from the Late Cretaceous of southern China. Journal of Ver-tebrate Paleontology, 22: 871-875.

Maryańska, T. 1970. Remains of armored dinosaurs from the up-permost Cretaceous in Nemegt Basin, Gobi Desert. Palaeonto-logia Polonica, 21: 22-34.

Maryańska, T. 1971. New data on the skull of Pinacosaurns grangeri (Ankylosauria). Palaeontologia Polonica, 25: 45-53.


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 (Dino-sauria) of Asia. Palaeontologia Polonica, 33: 133-181.

Maryańska, T., & H. Osmólska. 1981a. Cranial anatomy of Sau-rolophus angustirostris with comments on the Asian Hadrosauri-dae. Palaeontologia Polonica, 42: 5-24.

Maryańska, T., & H. Osmólska. 1981b. First lambeosaurine dino-saur from the Nemegt Formation, Upper Cretaceous, Mongo-lia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 26: 243-255.

Maryańska, T., & H. Osmólska. 1984. Postcranial anatomy of Sau-rolophus angustirostris with comments on other hadrosaurs. Pa-laeontologia 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. Coossifi ed tarsometatarsi in theropod dino-saurs and their bearing on the problem of bird origins. Pala-eontologia Polonica, 42: 79-95.

Osmólska, H. 1982. Hulsanpes perlei n. g. n. sp. (Deinonychosau-ria; 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 troo-dontid 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 Palaeonto-logica 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 fam-ily of theropod dinosaurs. Palaeontologia Polonica, 21: 5-19.

Osmólska, H., E. Roniewicz, & R. Barsbold. 1972. A new di-nosaur, Gallimimus bullatus n. gen., n. sp. (Ornithomimidae) from the Upper Cretaceous of Mongolia. Palaeontologia Po-lonica, 27: 103-143.

Perle, A., T. Maryańska, & H. Osmólska. 1982. Goyocephale lat-timorei gen. et sp. n., a new fl at-headed pachycephalosaur (Omithischia, Dinosauria) from the Upper Cretaceous of Mon-golia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 27: 115-127.

Sereno, P. C. 2000. Th e fossil record, systematics and evolution of pachycephalosaurs and ceratopsians from Asia. Pp 480-516, in: Th e Age of Dinosaurs in Russia and Mongolia, M. J. Benton, M. A. Shishkin, D. M. Unwin, & E. N. Kurochkin, eds. Cam-bridge University Press.

Turner, A. H., D. Pol, J. A. Clarke, G. M. Erickson, & M. A. Norell. 2007. A basal droaeosaurid and size evolution preceeding fl ight. Science, 317: 1378-1381.

Weishampel, D. B., P. Dodson, & H. Osmólska, eds. 1990. Th e Dinosauria. University of California Press, 733 pp.

Weishampel, D. B., P. Dodson, & H. Osmólska, eds. 2004. Th e Dinosauria. 2nd ed. University of California Press, 861 pp.

You, H., & P. Dodson. 2004. Basal Ceratopsia. Pp 478-493, in: Th e 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 fi elds of biostratigra-phy, 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 infl uential papers for the Geo-logical Society of America, the International Union of Geological Sciences, the American As-sociation of Petroleum Geologists, and other geological associations. He served as President of both the Gulf Coast and Pacifi c 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.


A N A M A T E U R ’ S P E R S P E C T I V E

Cephalopod IntelligenceBy John A. Catalani

I love cephalopods, particularly nautiloids (but you knew this). Cephalopods are certainly the most specialized mem-bers of the mollusks and, “in terms of speed, intelligence, and sensory ability, they represent the acme of invertebrate evolu-tion” (Ward, 1988: 16). Th e class Cephalopoda consisted of three subclasses until the end of the Cretaceous Period when the Ammonoidea went extinct. Th e two extant subclasses, the Nautiloidea and the Coleoidea, diff er greatly physi-ologically and ecologically. Th e Nautiloidea is represented by only two genera, Nautilus and Allonautilus, and a handful of species, whereas the Coleoidea is represented by 600-700 species of squids, cuttlefi shes, and octopods. Although my research involves Ordovician nautiloids, I have an interest in all cephalopods, be they extinct or extant. Th e gen-eral perception is that the coleoids are sophisticated and “smart” whereas the nautiloids are primitive and “dim-witted.” Th ankfully, as we shall see, new research is challenging this perception and has provided me with yet another topic concerning cephalopods.

Let me begin by briefl y describing some of the char-acteristics of both groups of extant cephalopods. Th e major diff erence is imme-diately apparent: Nautilus and Allonautilus possess an external shell (“ectocochli-ate” in cephalopod speak) and coleoids do not. Th e external shell provides nautiluses with both protection and neutral buoyancy. Th is neutral (actually slightly negative) buoyancy is achieved through the removal of water from the chambers by osmosis and the diff usion of gas, which is at low pressures at normal Nautilus water depths, back into the chambers. Coleoids might or might not possess an internal shell. Th e internal shell of the squid provides support for the soft and streamlined body thus facilitating movement through the water. Th e internal shell of the cuttlefi sh aids in buoyancy (the cuttlebone is porous). Octopods contain no internal shell (the Nautilus-like shell secreted by Argonauta females is actually a brood chamber for their eggs). Th e loss of a protec-tive external shell is more than compensated for by the speed

and maneuverability that coleoids possess. Interestingly, from what we have been able to infer from the fossil record and presumed taxonomic lineages, ammonoids possessed traits of both nautiloids (external shell) and coleoids (biology and lifestyle).

Arms and tentacles are another characteristic feature of cephalopods. All coleoids are equipped with eight muscular arms. Squids and cuttlefi shes also possess two food-gathering tentacles that are usually much longer than the arms. Th e suction cups located on both the arms and the club-shaped end-process of the tentacles of squids and cuttlefi shes often possess chitinous “teeth” that facilitate the grasping of food as well as provide the animal with some defense. Th e smooth

suction cups of octopods are able to hold onto ob-jects and are equipped with chemoreceptors which al-low them to “taste” what they are touching. Jet pro-pulsion (accomplished by expelling water through the siphon), another clas-sic feature of cephalopods, is the preferred method of horizontal movement for the coleoids (and nauti-luses, although not nearly as effi ciently). Movement over the substratum, par-ticularly with octopuses, is facilitated with the eight arms. Some species of Octopus are even able to use

their arms to crawl out of the water for short forays onto land. Nautiluses are equipped with approximately 90 small tentacles, each consisting of a cirrus, with no suckers or arm hooks, and a sheath into which the cirrus can be withdrawn. Th e tentacles, which no longer contribute to the animal’s locomotion, serve many functions including food detection (using both chemosensory and tactile inputs), transportation of food to the mouth, and reproduction.

Much has been written about the large eyes of coleoids, particularly those of the squid. Th ey are very similar in struc-ture to vertebrate eyes, a classic example of convergent evolu-tion (the presence of Pax-6 gene homologs, along with other genes, suggests some homology, although this has been con-tested). Coleoid eyes consist of a lens (with a pupil that ad-

Living Nautilus pompilius, photographed alive at the Berlin Zoo Aquarium. Photograph by J. Baecker via Wikimedia Commons.


justs by changing shape with diff ering 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 photo-receptor cells. Th is allows the animal to detect both prey and predators against a refl ective background. Although the eyes of nautiluses have an adjustable pupil as well as retinal char-acteristics and musculature similar to those of coleoids, the eye itself is a primitive pinhole type with no lens, thus allow-ing seawater into the eye chamber. Th e Nautilus eye structure permits only poor resolution and appears to be more adapted at detecting light intensity than discrete objects. Th is limita-tion, along with the low ambient light present in their deep-water 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 diff er greatly between coleoids and nautiluses. Most coleoids live only one year, spawn only once (some species lay several batches of eggs but always dur-ing 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. Th e eggs laid by coleoids are small but are produced in the hundreds to thou-sands 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 aer-ated. 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 fi eld, studies of the oxygen isotopes present in diff erent parts of the shell indicate that the eggs are de-posited 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 tex-tures with blinding speed. Th e colors and patterns are gener-ated 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 fi -ber 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

chromatophore is controlled individually, a large repertoire of patterns and signals can be generated and modifi ed very quickly. Some species are also equipped with photophores that produce luminescent colors thus enhancing their dis-plays. Octopuses and cuttlefi shes can also achieve various skin textures by contracting muscles to form various protu-berances and tubercles. Th ese color, pattern, and texture dis-plays are not only useful in warning or intimidating preda-tors but also essential to mating challenges, courtship ritu-als, and general monospecifi c communication. In addition, when texture changes are coupled with color and pattern dis-plays, coleoids, particularly octopuses, can virtually disappear against a background, the ultimate in creature camoufl age, to either avoid predators or assist in stalking prey. Th e Nautilus shell provides the animal with limited camoufl age – the dor-sal surface has reddish-brown patterns to blend with the sub-stratum 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 col-ors 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 diffi cult task given the problems we have defi ning and quantifying human intelligence. For coleoid re-searchers, the next logical step was to conduct various fi eld observations and laboratory experiments to explore this pre-sumed 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 fi eld to classical conditioning in the laboratory.

Th e method(s) used by octopuses to fi nd 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 re-membered landmarks in their foraging area and used these to fi nd their way home. One study, reported by Mather (1991), used both fi eld and laboratory experiments in an attempt to determine the method used in navigation. In the fi eld, several individual Octopus vulgaris were observed during foraging. Maps were constructed of the ocean fl oor and the foraging paths taken by the animals were drawn on these maps. Several years later, a more experimental approach was taken in the fi eld when the animals were presented with artifi cial land-marks amid the natural ones. Th ese artifi cial 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-gle of return path averaged 30˚ from the outgoing path. On longer forays, the animals would jet out and jet back without making contact with the substratum, thus reinforcing the sce-nario of landmark-memory recognition. Additionally, when the artifi cial landmarks were moved, the animals were still able to return to their dens, suggesting that “they were ignor-ing the conspicuous but smaller artifi cial landmark because stable larger natural landmarks were more salient” (Mather, 1991: 494). Th e laboratory experiments, too involved to de-scribe here, reinforced the importance of landmarks to navi-gation. Th is study “suggests strongly that octopuses use visual spatial information for navigation within their home ranges and to guide their returns from hunting trips” (p. 496). It is as if the animals constructed a mental map of their immedi-ate vicinity and stored it in their long-term mem-ory. Because the animals foraged in diff erent ar-eas, returned by diff erent paths, and did not remain on the ocean fl oor while foraging, the chemotactile scenario was rejected.

More familiar to most of us are the classical-conditioning experiments performed on coleoids in the laboratory. It has been determined that octopus-es can distinguish between shapes and patterns when conditioned by a reward-punishment technique. Problem solving experi-ments in which, for ex-ample, the animal is pre-sented with food enclosed in a jar and must “learn” to open the container has also been observed and studied (Fiorito et al., 1990). Not only did the time required to “solve” the jar problem decrease with practice but the animals were able to repeat this task months after the initial conditioning, indicat-ing the presence of long-term memory. In another experi-ment (Fiorito & Scotto, 1992), the possibility of one octopus learning by observing another octopus was investigated. An unconditioned Octopus vulgaris was allowed to observe, from a separate but adjacent tank, a previously conditioned indi-vidual performing object recognition behavior. Th e observing animals selected the correct object around 80% of the time even when no reward was presented. A similar experiment was shown on an episode of Scientifi c American Frontiers

(PBS) in which one octopus observed another who had been previously conditioned to open a jar containing food. Th e observer octopus displayed an intense interest in the activity of the conditioned octopus. When presented with a jar, which the animal had not previously been able to open, the observer was successful in opening the jar to obtain the food.

Many additional observations and experiments of octo-puses have revealed that they exhibit rudimentary tool use by utilizing rocks to block their den openings or water jets from their siphons to clean debris from their dens, engage in “play” behavior, and appear to have distinctive personalities because they tend to react individually to the same stimuli – all evidence for some level of reasoning power.

Based on the amount of evidence acquired during these observations and experiments (and I have mentioned only a

few examples), it would seem illogical not to re-fer to these animals, par-ticularly octopuses, as intelligent. Th ey are able to input visual and tactile stimuli, store it in what appears to be long-term memory, and then recall it for use when needed, particularly for naviga-tion. From observations in the wild and labora-tory experiments, it has been demonstrated that “they evaluate sensory input and choose actions based on consideration of such input” and, al-though much of how data is actually processed remains unknown, what we do know about their abilities suggests that “we should add cephalopods to the groups of animals that might have primary

consciousness” (Mather, 2008: 45). Now, with all due respect, these researchers and authors

might state that their conclusions relate to the behavior and learning in “cephalopods” but they are in reality referring only to coleoids. To some extent this is understandable – be-cause they inhabit deep-water habitats, observing nautiluses in the fi eld presents researchers with innumerable challenges and it is very diffi cult to maintain these animals in aquaria. Recently, however, there has been an upsurge in published research detailing experiments involving nautiluses.

Much of this research has concentrated on the sensory ability, mainly odor detection, of nautiluses. In an early ex-

Living Octopus vulgaris, photographed alive at Suma Aqualife Park, Kobe, Japan. Photograph by OpenCage via Wikimedia Commons.


periment (Basal et al., 2000), it was determined that nauti-luses 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) iden-tifi ed four odor-detecting structures: the rhinophores, digi-tal tentacles, preocular tentacles, and postocular tentacles. Ciliated epithelial cells on these structures act as chemore-ceptors 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 ten-tacles, movement toward the substratum (or food source), and contact with the substratum with the medial digital ten-tacles. Th is 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 behav-ior 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 stim-uli underwater. As in some experiments with coleoids, chang-es in ventilation (respiratory) rates were used as a measure of response to stimuli. Th e test animals responded to vibratory stimuli in the water by lowering their ventilation rates. Th e ability to sense vibrations would obviously be advantageous in detecting potential predators and lower respiratory rates would be an eff ective strategy for predator avoidance.

Th ese 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 avoid-ance. 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 learn-ing, memory, and recall, “it is assumed that the absence of these regions should limit memory storage and recall in nau-tilus, but,” they continued, “this assumption has never been tested” (p. 1992). Th e authors further reasoned that, because Nautilus is the last representative of the lineage ancestral to

all extant cephalopods (either directly or indirectly) and pos-sesses a primitive brain when compared to coleoids, experi-ments on nautiluses “may provide important insights into the evolution of complexity in invertebrate nervous systems” (p. 1992).

Th e authors used Pavlovian conditioning to test learning, memory, and recall in Nautilus pompilius. Briefl y, the experi-ment involved 12 individual nautiluses that were conditioned in an experimental arena (separate from their home tank) us-ing 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 pro-ducing a food-odor stimulus. A preliminary test verifi ed that this solution elicited the normal food-detection responses from the animals – extension of the tentacles and elevated ventilation rates. Th roughout 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 wa-ter without food was released directly onto the rhinophores and tentacles while, simultaneously, a single pulse of the blue light was fl ashed. 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 presenta-tion of the blue-light with test-subject responses recorded on video tape.

Analysis revealed that food-detection responses to the un-rewarded 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 identi-fying two distinct memory peaks. At 1 hour and 24 hours after training, there was little diff erence in response between the experimental and the control groups. Although, as stated above, the brains of coleoids and nautiluses are structurally diff erent, 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 confi rmation in future physiological studies” (p. 1996). It was also discovered that short-term storage dura-tion for nautiluses was similar to coleoids but that long-term storage duration was signifi cantly shorter. In octopuses, for example, long-term memory can extend several months af-ter conditioning. A possible explanation for the diff erence in long-term retention between nautiluses and coleoids centers on the structural diff erences 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, be-cause 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).


Diff erences in the brain structure of these two groups of cephalopods have been linked to diff erences in their life-styles. 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 preda-tory lifestyle. Th e more complex brain of coleoids appears to have been essential to their adopting this aggressive lifestyle. Th erefore, divergence in Nautilus and coleoid lifestyles ap-pears to account, at least in part, for the diff erences in their brain structures. Clearly, further investigation of these struc-tural diff erences has the potential to “provide us with unique insights into the competing roles that a close evolutionary re-lationship and widely divergent ecology have played in shap-ing neuroanatomy of modern cephalopods” (p. 1997).

So, it appears that the “primitive” Chambered Nautilus has acquired new respect among researchers investigating ce-phalopod intelligence. Th ere is no question that coleoids are the most neurologically advanced invertebrates on the plan-et, 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 nauti-luses are genetically viable and appear to be diversifying.

I am in awe of these marvelously engineered animals. Th ey are a testament to evolution’s ability to solve a struc-tural problem, in this case neutral buoyancy of an externally shelled animal, with a design so successful not even the vaga-ries of deep time could toll their doom. And we are the ben-efi ciaries of this success because scientists are just beginning to appreciate what this “living fossil” can teach us.

Literature CitedBasil, J. A., I. Bahctinova, K. Kuroiwa, N. Lee, D. Mims, M. Preis,

& C. Soucier. 2005. Th e 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. Th ree-dimensional 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 vi-sual landmarks in octopuses. Journal of Comparative Physiology, 168A: 491-497.

Mather, J. A. 2008. Cephalopod consciousness: behavioural evi-dence. 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 [email protected].

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 fi rst conceived of a public museum for PRI as early as 1990 or 1991. Th en, 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.


Stretching high above city streets, the Sears Tower of Chicago is a symbol of humanity’s achievements in the fi elds of design and engineering. Th ousands of visitors ascend to its crown each year, acquiring not only a terrifi c 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. Th e 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 mam-mals called North America home. Here, mastodons roamed forests dotted with spruces and poplars, reaching for that next leafy bite. In neighboring grasslands, their distant cous-ins the mammoths gathered to feed alongside horses and bison. Camels and stag moose also thrived, as did the often-bizarre ground sloths, some of which reached sizes of one ton or more. Th eir eyes fi xed, waiting for even a fl eeting moment of opportunity, predators of the fantastic stalked their prey. With an estimated weight of 2000 pounds, the bear Arcto-dus 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, hunt-ing 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 with-in 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 classifi cation; together, a group of closely related spe-cies 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). Th us, although Panthera and Smilodon are both cats, they are very diff erent cats. Th e branches leading to each split apart from a common ancestor more than 10 million years ago, so they are only distant cous-ins on the felid family tree. Calling Smilodon a tiger is akin to labeling humans as orangutans; both are apes, yes, but they

are very diff erent apes.Th e 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 east-ern part of North America from 2.5 million to 500,000 years ago. Appearing around one million years ago, Smilodon popu-lator called eastern South America home. Reaching the size of today’s lions, it is the largest species. Th e third and fi nal species is Smilodon fatalis, known from the later stages of the Pleistocene across much of North America and the Pacifi c 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 in-credible window into the beast’s anatomy. And although these three species varied in the details of their skeletal architec-ture, 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 fl attened 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 scientifi c lit-erature, with the ultimate question relating to how it took down its prey. Th e skeleton tells the story. Th e 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

T H E N A T U R E O F S C I E N C E

What’s New, Pussycat?By Richard A. Kissel

Th e skull of the ice age cat Smilodon, with mouth agape, showing the saber-like canines of the upper jaws. From Merriam & Scott’s (1932) “Th e Felidae of Rancho La Brea.”


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 adapta-tion. Or, were they?

Two hundred and thirty million years ago, it was a much diff erent world. Th e continents had assembled to form a single landmass, Pangaea, and climates were warm the world over, with average temperatures exceeding those of the Pleis-tocene 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 fi rst dinosaurs darted through lush forests, ear-ly 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. Th e fi rst icthyosaurs possessed long bodies and lengthy tails to propel them through the water. Pointed snouts equipped with sharp, cone-shaped teeth caught slip-pery prey while fi ns 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, ichthyo-saurs 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 his-tories 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 an-cestor that had that trait. By comparing species and their traits, it is possible to connect the dots between them, arriv-ing 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-

ber of features found nowhere else in the animal kingdom, such as feathers and – think of that Th anksgiving turkey – a wishbone. Th e very uniqueness of birds made it diffi cult for scientists to fi nd 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, di-nosaurs and birds are now known to share more than 100 features. Th ese features permit scientists, now overwhelmed with evidence, to confi dently propose that birds evolved from a lineage of small, meat-eating dinosaurs; birds in-herited these features from their dinosaurian ancestors. You have your mother’s eyes; birds have dinosaurs’ wishbone.

But diff erent species, separated by millions of years and only distantly related, can sometimes look surprisingly simi-lar. Here, the similarities are the result not of direct inheri-tance, but of convergent evolution. Whenever diff erent or-ganisms 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 fl ukes. In the most ex-ceptional of ichthyosaur fossils, even a triangular fi n atop the back – a dorsal fi n – is readily apparent. Th e transition from land to sea was complete. And as ichthyosaurs diversifi ed 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. Th e evolution of dolphins is not dissimilar; their ancestry – and that of all whales – can also be traced back to a four-legged, terrestrial creature. Th e sleek, fi sh-like guise of ichthyosaurs and dolphins is an adaptation for swimming that evolved independently in the two lin-eages – a textbook case of convergent evolution. In another case, the mighty dinosaur Brachiosaurus sports a long, grace-ful neck, and its forelimbs are longer than those supporting its rear, further elevating the head to feed. Today’s giraff e – 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 fi rst cat walked the Earth, well before the origin of mammals, a beast called Lycaenops hunted across South Africa. An an-cient relative of mammals, fi ve-foot-long Lycaenops ran about on four legs and carried a dog-shaped body. It be-longed to the group known as gorgonopsians, which in-cluded 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. Th ere, projecting down from the up-per 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 bi-son, massive reptiles called pareiasaurs and relatives of mam-

An outstanding example of convergent evolution, fi sh-like ichthyosaurs were reptiles that evolved fi ns 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.


wounds on attacking animals. Similarly, the strictly herbivo-rous Chinese water deer, Hydropotes inermis, possesses sharp, saber-like upper canines. Especially large in males, the ca-nines 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 Paleon-tological Research Institution. His column is a regular feature of American Paleontologist. Email [email protected].

Th ylacosmilus 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 fl ange of bone present the lower jaw of Th ylacosmilus. Image modifi ed from one by Claire Houck via Wikimedia Commons.

mals called dinocephalians were the targets of their hunt.Five million years ago, the six-foot-long meat-eater Th yla-

cosmilus stalked South America. Although resembling a cat in its general form, Th ylacosmilus 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 diff erent ancestry, Th ylacosmilus sported long saber-like 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 diff erent branch of the felid evolutionary tree, so their saber teeth likely evolved conver-gently from those of Smilodon.

Th e multiple, independent origins of saber teeth through-out the history of life is a wonderful evolutionary story. Th at natural selection realized this structure in lineages far re-moved speaks to its success as an adaption, providing pre-historic predators with an eff ective 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 infl ict severe

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’ fi rst appearance. Image from the Russian Wikipedia Project.

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. Th e Editor, therefore, wishes to apologize to the readership for the following:• Th e 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. Th at was not a good choice on our part...• Th e Paleonews article “Flightless Birds Take Flight” was gleaned from an internet news item posted on April 4. Th at 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...


B O O K R E V I E W

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 978-0-23113-962-5 , $29.50 (hardcover), 2007.

Charles Darwin devoted Chapter 9 of On the Origin of Spe-cies (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 fi nely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. Th e explana-tion lies, as I believe, in the ex-treme imperfection of the geo-logical record.”

Although the fossil record was Darwin’s greatest embarrass-ment, the past 150 years have yielded numerous fossil discov-eries 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 creation-ism, 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 evolu-tion and religion do not need to confl ict (his “To the Reader: Is Evolution a Th reat to Your Religious Beliefs?” is answered with an emphatic “NO!”). His quarrel is with young-Earth creationists of the home-grown American variety, and espe-cially those who have repeatedly misunderstood or misrepre-sented the scientifi c 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 cours-es 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 theo-ry, and why science can’t use supernatural explanations. Th e second chapter takes up the Biblical creation accounts and argues convincingly that they should not be taken literally,

based on the fi ndings of Mod-ern Biblical Scholarship about the sources and history of these writings. Th e chapter also pro-vides a concise history of the cre-ationist movement, creationist views, and creationism’s current iteration, Intelligent Design. Th e next three chapters, on the fossil record, the history of evolution-ary thought, and systematics, provide background informa-tion needed for understanding Part II. Th is material is well writ-ten; 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 “Evolu-tion? Th e Fossils Say YES!” (in response to creationist Duane Gish’s 1972 book, Evolution? Th e Fossils Say NO!, San Diego, California, Creation-Life), is a detailed description of the fossil evidence for evolution. Prothero begins with “Life’s Origin,” dis-

cussing current hypotheses for the chemical evolution of life, the Precambrian microfossil record, and endosymbiotic ori-gin 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 tran-sitional forms in the fossil record. Unlike many books on


evolution that focus on vertebrates, Prothero includes a chap-ter on invertebrate transitions in addition to seven chapters on vertebrate evolution (chordate origins and fi sh, origin of tetrapods, amniote origins and marine “reptiles,” dinosaurs and birds, mammalian origins and Cenozoic radiation, un-gulates, whales, and proboscideans, and primates and human origins). A fi nal chapter, “Why Does it Matter?” makes an impassioned argument for the importance of evolution edu-cation and scientifi c literacy to our country’s economic and social well being.

Prothero’s writing is lively, and he explains complex con-cepts 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 fi nd this book an invalu-able reference in my teaching – as an invertebrate paleontolo-gist 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 fi g-ures). I would have liked to see more references cited in the text and page numbers provided for direct quotes, but this

uninterrupted fl ow of text does make the work more read-able 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 unscientifi c” (p. 335) behavior by creation-ists, often based on personal experience. At times I wondered if he was being too vitriolic, thus risking alienating moder-ate 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 creation-ist 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].


More Th an 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 978-0-313-34155-7, $85.00 (hardcover), 2008.

For the scientifi c community, evolution … whether organic evolution, geologic evolution, tectonic evolution, cosmic evolution, or human evolution … is a well-accepted fact, although the details and mecha-nisms of the changes are under continual study. But the teaching of evolution … whether organic evolution, geologic evolution, tectonic evolution, cosmic evolu-tion, human evolution, or evolu-tion 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 evo-lutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould, who was a major archi-tect of punctuated equilibrium, so eloquently defended evolu-tion in the Arkansas Edwards vs. Aguillard “equal time” court case, contributed so much to our bank of knowledge on evolution-ary processes, Earth history, and the history of science, and who popularized evolutionary litera-ture 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 Wil-liam 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 creation-ism” movement and Answers in Genesis programs. We recog-nize Duane Gish’s Creation Research Society and such books

as Evolution: Th e 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 eff orts 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 fi led 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 de-fend 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 de-cision 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 scientifi c theory only,” show-ing that he fi t well within the public’s general misunderstand-ing of the process, and leading to

a major educational push to explain how “scientifi c theory” diff ers from “just a theory”?

Who were James Bateman, Henry Walter Bates, William Bateson, or Alfred Russell Wallace, John Phillips, Plato, Da-vid 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 Ly-ell, 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 Ameri-

B O O K R E V I E W

Th e Evolution-Creationism Controversy Encyclopedia PlaybookBy Michael A. Gibson


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. Th is later fea-ture, from which the book is based, might well prove to be the more lasting legacy of the eff ort. Additionally the ency-clopedia has an extensive 24-page index containing who’s, what’s, and where’s in great detail, providing two ways to re-search 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 summa-ry and overview about the who’s, what’s, and where’s of the controversy, not to describe or evaluate the controversy per se. Th ey have achieved that goal, providing a book that will undoubtedly become heavily dog-eared on the bookshelves of evolutionists and creationists. More Th an Darwin has only been on my shelf for a couple months, but it has already gotten that well-used look. Th e 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 Associa-tion of Geoscience Teachers Neil Miner Award, and the Chair of Education and Outreach for the Paleontological Society. Email [email protected].

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 Geol-ogy,” “Father of the Geological Timescale,” “Father of Mod-ern 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 Th an Darwin. Moore has written several books on the evolution-creationism controversy and served as edi-tor for Th e American Biology Teacher. Decker brings his expe-rience as Associate Director for Scholarship and Teaching at the University of Minnesota and his “Evolution 101” pro-gram. More Th an 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 Th an 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. Th ese are tied to the book’s second useful feature, a succinct bibliography which

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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. 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.

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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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AMERICAN V F PALEONTOLOGIST · Alicia Reynolds, Director of Museum Operations Rob Ross, Associate Director for Outreach Samantha Sands, Director of Public Programs Trisha Smrecak,