The really, really big dinosaur

"'Biggest dinosaur ever' discovered"

by

James Morgan

May 16th, 2014

BBC News

Based on its huge thigh bones, it was 40m (130ft) long and 20m (65ft) tall.

Weighing in at 77 tonnes, it was as heavy as 14 African elephants, and seven tonnes heavier than the previous record holder, Argentinosaurus.

Scientists believe it is a new species of titanosaur - an enormous herbivore dating from the Late Cretaceous period.

A local farm worker first stumbled on the remains in the desert near La Flecha, about 250km (135 miles) west of Trelew, Patagonia.

The fossils were then excavated by a team of palaeontologists from the Museum of Palaeontology Egidio Feruglio, led by Dr Jose Luis Carballido and Dr Diego Pol.

They unearthed the partial skeletons of seven individuals - about 150 bones in total - all in "remarkable condition".

By measuring the length and circumference of the largest femur (thigh bone), they calculated the animal weighed 77 tonnes.

"Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth," the researchers told BBC News.

"Its length, from its head to the tip of its tail, was 40m.

"Standing with its neck up, it was about 20m high - equal to a seven-storey building."

This giant herbivore lived in the forests of Patagonia between 95 and 100 million years ago, based on the age of the rocks in which its bones were found.

But despite its magnitude, it does not yet have a name.

"It will be named describing its magnificence and in honour to both the region and the farm owners who alerted us about the discovery," the researchers said.

There have been many previous contenders for the title "world's biggest dinosaur".

The most recent pretender to the throne was Argentinosaurus, a similar type of sauropod, also discovered in Patagonia.

Originally thought to weigh in at 100 tonnes, it was later revised down to about 70 tonnes - just under the 77 tonnes that this new sauropod is thought to have weighed.

The picture is muddied by the various complicated methods for estimating size and weight, based on skeletons that are usually incomplete.

Argentinosaurus was estimated from only a few bones. But the researchers here had dozens to work with, making them more confident that they really have found "the big one".

Dr Paul Barrett, a dinosaur expert from London's Natural History Museum, agreed the new species is "a genuinely big critter. But there are a number of similarly sized big sauropod thigh bones out there," he cautioned.

"Without knowing more about this current find it's difficult to be sure. One problem with assessing the weight of both Argentinosaurus and this new discovery is that they're both based on very fragmentary specimens - no complete skeleton is known, which means the animal's proportions and overall shape are conjectural.

"Moreover, several different methods exist for calculating dinosaur weight (some based on overall volume, some on various limb bone measurements) and these don't always agree with each other, with large measures of uncertainty.

"So it's interesting to hear another really huge sauropod has been discovered, but ideally we'd need much more material of these supersized animals to determine just how big they really got."

T. rex has company

"Meet the newly discovered dinosaur that even tyrannosaurs were afraid of"

 
by

Lance Tillson

November 23rd, 2013

National Monitor

Researchers from The Field Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCMNS) and North Carolina State University (NCSU) note that the new dinosaur is the first of its kind to be found in North America.

More than 30 feet long and weighing more than four tons, Siats meekerorum was the top predator in its ecosystem.

“This dinosaur was a colossal predator second only to the great T. rex and perhaps Acrocanthosarus in the North American fossil record,” noted lead author Lindsay Zanno, Director of Paleontology at NCMNS/NCSU, in a statement.

The large predator was found in 2008 by Zanno during a trip to the Cedar Mountain Formation in Utah. It took two summers to remove the fossils of this giant animal.

According to the researchers, Siats is not a close relative of T. rex and other tyrannosaurs that were the prominent predators in North America for the last 20 million years of the age of dinosaurs. Siats belongs to the  carchardontosaurian group of theropods. Furthermore, the large predator belongs to a branch of the carcharodontosaurian family tree that was previously unknown in North America.

“We were thrilled to discover the first dinosaur of its kind in North America and add to mounting evidence that dinosaurs were widely dispersed across the globe 100 million years ago,” posited study co-author Peter Makovicky, Curator of Dinosaurs at the Field Museum.

The teeth of tyrannosaurs from the Cedar Mountain Formation suggest that the tyrannosaurs living alongside Siats were a lot smaller in size.

“The huge size difference certainly suggests that tyrannosaurs were held in check by carcharodontosaurs, and only evolved into enormous apex predators after the carcharodontosaurs disappeared,” added Makovicky.

The study’s findings are described in detail in the journal Nature Communications.

Cretaceous creatures changing

"What Happened to My Brontosaurus?"

The scaly, dimwitted monsters of our childhood have been killed off by fluffy, feathered, sprightly dinosaurs.

by

Brian Switek

April 16th, 2013

Slate

Triceratops can be an elusive creature. The 30-foot-long, tri-horned herbivore would have been hard to miss on the Cretaceous landscape, but 66 million years later, what’s left only peeks out of the rock in shards and fragments. When I tried to find this great dinosaur in July of 2010, I didn’t have any luck. As I scuffed around a barren outcrop near Elk Ridge, Wyo.—slightly nauseated from the oil drilling fumes I and the rest of the New Jersey State Museum field crew had inhaled as we passed rig after rig on the way out—I kept looking for some glint of ancient enamel or the spongy texture of broken bone. I found the sunbleached, cracked remains of deer, as well as rabbit jaws that were torn out of their skulls by birds of prey, but no skeletons quite as ancient as I was hoping for.

Triceratops is elusive not only in a physical sense. Paleontologists have been struggling to resurrect the dinosaur as a living animal since the early days of the discipline. The bones haven’t changed since the time our ancestors were little fur balls snuffling around a post–mass extinction world, but our conception of what a Triceratops really is has been changing since before the Yale paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh even named the dinosaur. There is constant tension between the dinosaurs we used to know and the ones paleontologists continue to tweak and redefine.

In 1887, Colorado school teacher George Cannon discovered two large horns and part of a skull roof in rock near Denver. He sent these bones to Marsh, who thought the remains belonged to an ancient ungulate—Bison alticornis he dubbed the beast—and Marsh changed his mind only after receiving a mostly complete skull of the creature two years later, showing that the “bison” was really a dinosaur. Marsh named it Triceratops horridus, the first step in an attempt to understand the nature of this fantastic animal that continues to this day. Just before I left for Wyoming, in fact, paleontologists John Scannella and Jack Horner proposed a twist in the natural history of Triceratops that spurred intense debate among paleontologists. When the public heard about the proposal (in a form garbled by confused news reports), the response was a howl of anguish. With Triceratops and other classic dinosaurs, the animals researchers know so intimately conflict, sometimes dramatically, with the cherished monsters of our childhood.

I had plenty of time to think over Scannella and Horner’s hypothesis as I hiked over the exposed remnants of Cretaceous floodplains. The scientists suggested that another horned dinosaur found in the same rocks as Triceratops, named Torosaurus, was not a separate genus of dinosaur after all. Instead, it was actually the fully mature form of Triceratops. Late in life, the paleontologists suggested, the flaring frill at the back of the Triceratops skull changed from a solid structure to a more elongated frill perforated by two large holes. The classic image of Triceratops was of an animal that hadn’t fully grown up. Since no one had apparently found a juvenile Torosaurus, and because it’s unusual to find fully mature dinosaurs, this connection could explain the close resemblance of the two dinosaurs and the rarity of Torosaurus.

Marsh named Triceratops in 1889, and two years later he named Torosaurus. According to the arcane rules of taxonomy, this means Triceratops has precedence and the name would not be eliminated; instead, the name Torosaurus would be sunk. Whether that happens depends on whether or not future studies uphold the idea that the dinosaurs belong to the same genus or scuttle it.

Some journalists came to the mistaken conclusion that paleontologists were about to eliminate Triceratops, one of the most beloved dinosaurs of all time! Dinosaur fans were outraged at the news, voicing their discontent in Internet comment threads and on Facebook. (My favorite protest was a mock-up of a T-shirt featuring three Triceratops howling at Pluto, the recently demoted dwarf planet.) Eventually, word went out that Triceratops was safe, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the public reaction as I searched fruitlessly for more dinosaurs in Wyoming. The Triceratops debacle perfectly highlighted the tension between the pop culture dinosaurs we love and the science that is spurring the evolution of dinosaurian visions.

This isn’t the first time paleontology has rocked our relationship with a charismatic dinosaur. Dinosaur expert Elmer Riggs recognized more than a century ago that “Brontosaurus” was not a valid name and that the long-necked, hefty dinosaur should really be called Apatosaurus. For reasons that have never been clear, though, museums and paleontologists continued to use the name Brontosaurus, promoting the image of a dinosaur that never truly existed. No wonder the loss of the great “thunder lizard” still stings. In fact, there’s no better symbol of the constant clash of old and new dinosaurs than that sacred sauropod, which is why the twice-extinct dinosaur became the mascot of my book My Beloved Brontosaurus. From names to the very nature of the animals themselves, new science is pushing the greatest dinosaurian transformation ever seen.

Alterations to our favorite dinosaurs filter into the public consciousness only slowly, often taking a generation or more to become accepted. I’m now an unabashed advocate for fuzzy, fluffy, bristly, and feathered dinosaurs, but before I knew better I couldn’t believe that dinosaurs were different from the scaly monstrosities I grew up with. The fact that Jurassic Park 4 is supposed to feature naked dinosaurs—contrary to the overwhelming evidence science has to offer—confirms that many paleo fans of my generation and older prefer the comfort of recognizable pseudo-dinos to the more realistic ones paleontologists are reviving. But the latest generation of little dinosaur maniacs is fully onboard with the latest science. Then again, today’s dinosaur dreams might become fossilized in their minds, too. I wonder what they will scoff at when they grow up and see future museum displays or films that depict dinosaurs in ways that are strange and unfamiliar from what they learned in their childhoods.

Dinosaur dork that I am, though, I loved every new discovery and change, even if the new discoveries replaced the dinosaurs I grew up with. Paleontologists were digging into details of dinosaur biology—social behavior, reproductive habits, coloration, senses, evolutionary origins, and ultimate extinction—with greater clarity than ever before. Most wonderful of all: One lineage of dinosaur is still with us in feathery, avian form! Dinosaurs are not strange beings dredged from the badlands and left to collect dust in museum displays. Every single skeleton and even bony scrap contains tales of survival, evolution, and extinction, and researchers were pioneering new ways of drawing secrets from those bones. And somehow, no one was talking about this trend, which paleontologist Thomas Holtz Jr. calls the “Dinosaur Enlightenment.” I saw my chance to be an ambassador for the bizarre, enfluffled ranks of new dinosaurs.

Dinosaur books are not an especially varied lot. There are children’s books, popular and technical encyclopedias, and autobiographical accounts of fieldwork by paleontologists. The weight of the literature is as heavy as a hadrosaur skeleton, the advancing wave presenting new images of dinosaurs without accounting for why old images were cast out. Old myths—that Stegosaurus had a brain in its butt, that sauropods were swamp bound, or that dinosaurs went extinct because of some internal inferiority—hung on because no one addressed why those ideas were tossed out. I didn’t want to wait for today’s dinofans to grow up and bring new studies with them, especially since their image of dinosaurs might be updated by then, anyway. As a tribute to my favorite dinosaurs—Allosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Apatosaurus, and other classics—I aimed to explain why the slow, tottering, stupid versions of these dinosaurs I grew up with had been ripped apart by dynamic, colorful, and often fuzzy dinosaurs.

The Triceratops and Torosaurus debate gave me a reason to tie together all the new science. Even though my initial inspiration came from this ceratopsid controversy—which is still ongoing, by the way—I eventually picked “Brontosaurus” as my book’s champion. The defunct dinosaur has clung to our imagination with such tenacity that seemingly no one can dispel the sauropod’s ghost. That may not be a bad thing. To understand how far our understanding of dinosaur lives has come, we need a baseline to measure our scientific journey against. What better than a scrapped dinosaur that perfectly encapsulates the outdated notion of idiotic, swamp-bound dinosaurs that nature deservedly wiped out to make way for us? I don’t miss “Brontosaurus”—Apatosaurus is a far more fascinating titan—but I nevertheless cherish the dinosaur because the animal is an icon of the old, slain dinosaurs as well as of how science keeps moving forward by re-examining the old from new perspectives. The book is my tribute to dinosaurs old and new, and writing their stories only fueled my resolve to keep chasing them down.

I’ve been back to the field quite a few times since my 2010 foray into Wyoming’s badlands. All I’ve found of Triceratops is a single tooth from a low hill near Ekalaka, Mont., and I haven’t had the chance to explore the nearby Late Jurassic strata for Apatosaurus. (Though I did purchase a cast of the dinosaur’s skull from the estate sale of the late Utah state paleontologist James Madsen Jr. How could I not?) But I’ve savored every moment I’ve spent shuffling and scrambling over ancient outcrops, wondering about dinosaurs as I try to spot a dinosaur peeking out of the stone.

The best part of the search for dinosaurs is knowing that spotting the clues of a skeleton still resting in rock is just the very beginning of scientific investigation and debate that will continue long after I’m gone—that visions of dinosaurs will continue to change as researchers continue to tap into prehistoric bone. Even though I’ve tried to restore dinosaurs with as much clarity as I’m able to in My Beloved Brontosaurus, I know that the book will ultimately become like Brontosaurus—a time capsule of how we once understood dinosaurs. My scientific spirit overrides my writer’s lament on that point. The transmutation of dinosaurs will continue with every new field find and journal issue, filling out our own evolutionary context with ever-greater clarity. After all, our ancestors scurried under the feet of dinosaurs for more than 150 million years. Dinosaurs undeniably shaped our evolutionary history, just as their extinction allowed mammals a chance to proliferate. The better we can understand dinosaurs and their lives, the better we can envision our own prehistory—their story is our story.

My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs

ISBN-10: 0374135061
ISBN-13: 978-0374135065

Science and art...especially dinosaurs

"Dinosaurs and Progress"

 

by

Shawn Mintek

The Seattle Critical Review

Many claim that art and science are radically different: "two cultures." For example, Karl Popper argued that "while there is progress in the sciences there is no progress in the arts." Others disagree. For example, Paul Feyerabend countered that the possibility of comparing the content of different scientific theories and thereby judging the truthfulness of each is an illusion: "The refutation of this belief eliminates an important difference ... between science and the arts and makes it possible to speak of styles and preferences in the first and of progress in the second."[1] Feyerabend wanted to crack the wall separating science and art. I want to make that crack wider. A recent field in natural science suggests that (at least some) scientific progress depends on--or cannot do without--artistic representations. So let us consider dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs are new to natural science--the term "paleontology" was coined only in 1834, "dinosaur" in 1841. But dinosaur bones have been eroding out of the ground for tens of millions of years. So why the delay in recognizing dinosaurs? The ancient Chinese talked of dragons' bones, and many cultures have had stories about giants and their skeletal remains.Yet only recent history has much that looks like a scientific description of ancient creatures.

To be sure, dinosaur bones are rare, and easily crumble when exposed unless treated. More common, and more sturdy, are fossilized shells, often picked up as curiosities, as collectibles. Some marine shells have been found high in the mountains, which is curious. Herodotus concluded they had been left there by the sea. But that now common-sense view was ignored for millennia and was replaced, if the issue came up at all, by fantastic and mystical explanations. Robert Plot, for example, in the 1600's denied such "stones" any organic origin and surmised instead that "stones in the form of shellfish" were "naturally produced by some plastic nature latent in the rock," a view with Platonic overtones.[2] Another European explanation of marine fossils is the diluvial theory, that these rocks were remnants of actual creatures, deposited by a great flood. This told a better story, with drama and a moral, and it had some empirical plausibility--tsunamis can carry ocean sediment hundreds of miles inland and upland.

But a science needs more than a collection of curiosities, scattered observations, and localized generalizations. A science needs to be somehow systematic. The systematizing of these collected fossils and descriptions needed a group of collectors and researchers. The first fossil collectors were amateurs. Visiting collections beyond one's neighborhood could hardly have been practicable. There needed to be long-distance communication and comparison of findings. Words alone could not have sufficed, especially for strange (that is, ancient and not yet understood) physical characteristics. In order to agree on terminology, so as to agree on the questions to pursue and the hypotheses to suggest, researchers needed to look at the same evidence, which came with scientific illustrations, more easily transported (and reproduced) than the fossils themselves. Progress in the dawn of paleontology depended on the work of visual artists.

As more and more descriptions of fossils with illustrative engravings were published, it became evident that fossilized shells are not scattered in confusion, as they might by a flood, but frequently occur in groups and families, and that different kinds of deposits contain different types of fossils. Robert Hooke in the late 1600's compared using dug-up Roman coins to identify who walked that ground and when, with using fossilized shells and impressions to identify who swam that sea and (relatively) when. This led to a different kind of map, a geological map of the strata or layers--and thus ages--of the earth.[3] The work of visual artists in communicating what was in collections of remains of ancient creatures was seldom credited. "The non-visual (or even anti-visual?) tradition ... dominates social and historical studies of science."[4] Yet it was that artistry that made possible a collaborative understanding of how species came into and went out of existence through time, and just how long a time that involves, without which any notions of dinosaurs would hardly have made sense. Art and science were significantly intermixed.

At the end of the 18th century experts in comparative anatomy (of contemporary vertebrates) were able to elucidate the fossilized remains of back-boned creatures that no longer existed. Cuvier showed in 1796 that huge tusks found in digging the Paris subway were bones of extinct elephant-like creatures. By 1840 others were arguing that huge fossils were remains of fearfully great "lizards": Dinosauria.

The next hundred years brought a plethora of new discoveries. Anecdotes from this first century of dinosaur studies include uneducated Mary Anning's skill in finding, collecting, and describing marine reptiles out of the Dover Cliffs at Lyme Regis ("she sells seashells by the seashore"); Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' fabulous life-sized (and lumbering) restorations of Iguanodon and Megalosaurus for the Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park (and for New York, that now lie buried in Central Park because of the thuggery of Tammany politics); the articulated Archaeopteryx skeleton with impressions of feathers from the shale beds of Germany; the bone hunters of the American West, graduate students in Professor Marsh's class at Yale, competing for the most and largest dinosaur finds for their museums back east; and the real-life model for "Indiana Jones", Roy Chapman Andrews, finding dinosaur eggs in Mongolia.

Progress in this science of paleontology, particularly regarding dinosaurs, was not simply a matter of collecting fossils, naming species, and devising taxonomies. Concomitant with fossil discoveries and careful descriptions came stories about the dinosaurs themselves. Initially told in paintings and murals and museum mountings, these stories not only presented the science of the time but also provided speculations about that life of the Mesozoic era, guesses about dinosaurs' behavior and surroundings, abductive stimulation for further scientific research. These artistic productions were paleontological thought-experiments that were then tested (and perhaps disconfirmed) by further evidence from the field and from the basements of football stadia, where such bones were often stored.

These artistic productions provided inspiration for future paleontologists, which is necessary for a science to continue. You don't know what to look for unless you've some idea of where you might be. As R.G. Collingwood put it, every question needs a context. Understanding what dinosaurs were like is akin to understanding the characters in a play or novel. Details can be provided by the scientist, or the science popularizer, or the novelist, or the paleoartist, and sometimes we in the audience "get it" and are swept up in the story as the characters, the creatures, come alive. Personal anecdotes abound, how now-important paleontologists were inspired to become dinosaur researchers by the murals of Charles Knight, or the stop-action animation of Willis O'Brien in King Kong (and soon the computer graphics of Jurassic Park will be in this list). Investigating dinosaurs is painstaking and time-intensive, not for the uninspired. Art is important for the inspiration to do science.

The role of art in paleontology might be dismissed as harmless and any claims for art's importance called misguided. This seems to be the view of Douglas Henderson, a first-class paleoartist:

Depicting dinosaurs as living animals has little part to play in the actual science of paleontology. Scientists are mainly concerned with seeing their observations and interpretations expressed and disseminated in objectively written publications intended primarily for the scientific community. While technical drawings of fossil material or simple diagrams and reconstructions may serve this purpose, fully rendered images of great beasts passing in silhouette against western sunsets and the like generally do not. These more romantic works ... are akin to the arts of theatre and literature .... When the concern of science is to be empirical and documented, imaginative is regarded as the wrong language.[5]

Henderson, however, is assuming the wall between art and science that I'm trying to crack; he's assuming the bifurcation--that art and science are separate activates--that I would bust. Tellingly, for what I'm trying to show, he goes on to say the following:

On the other hand, ... paleontological art has considerable value for writers and editors of books and magazines, museum curators, paleontologists, and others concerned with interpreting and presenting the science of paleontology to the general public.[6]

Art, particularly the poetics of telling a good story, is as a practical matter a necessity for paleontological success. In inquiry the words and depictions we use (and the presuppositions behind them, including those needed to provide the sorts of questions the inquiry is a response to) provide (or continue) a certain background (or interpretation, or paradigm) for what counts as evidential (or sensible, normal, or compelling) for present results and future regard.

Consider "selling points" in political discourse. The "frame" must be right to make the pitch, to get a hearing. As Aristotle tells us, rhetoric is essential for communication. What is true in politics is also true in science. Indeed, science, or the scientific enterprise, doesn't exist in isolation from the political and economic structure of a community. Without intercommunication among scientists and others within that superstructure of society, scientific views don't get refuted--they go bankrupt, they expire.

The "selling points" of a view, be it political, social, or scientific, when "purchased" by the electorate, or culture, or community of inquirers, depend as much on presentation style as on evidence. (Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations, like Machiavelli's Prince, ought to be read as a how-to manual.) Consider the frequent successes of political propaganda, the overpowering waves of fads for "the newest thing" in fashion or electronica (with sometimes devastating economic consequences for individuals or businesses), and the now-laughable views of some fundamentalist sects (which yet proscribed science) as regards the age of the earth.

It is not truth but rhetoric that wins debates, and there is no final "end of the day"; it is not what you say but how you present it; it is not the facts that you bring to your case but how you bundle them into a story; not scientific truth, but aesthetics. Science is a social/economic activity, not only part of society's superstructure but also part of its means of production, of how we work and live. It is also a matter of money. Artistic skill, in rhetoric and marketing and public interest and appeal is needed to foster and mobilize resources for continued research in a scientific field. Paleontology is a tough business, and expensive. Without a "pitch", without interest in dinosaurs by public or university or government funding agencies, projects don't happen.

Consider the extinction of dinosaurs. Over 150 years of knowing about their past existence provided dozens of hypotheses to explain their disappearance--but no large-scale projects to investigate it. But after the serendipity of the Alvarez team's discovery of high-levels of iridium in the clay separating the Mesozoic from the Cenozoic and their readable and dramatic 1980 story in Science magazine, the possibility of an extraterrestrial cause of the dinosaurs' demise became not only popular but also funded: projects all over the globe contributed to a new and fuller understanding of asteroids and extinctions (and of "nuclear winter") and to hundreds of scientific papers, hundreds of artistic representations of an asteroid collision, several movies and dozens of television specials. It is not cynicism, but realism, to say that science, at least in the case of the natural science of paleontology, depends on art.

In trying to widen the crack in the bifurcating wall between art and science I've used three examples: (i) scientific illustrations allowed for communication among the first paleontologists, (ii) artistic portrayals of what dinosaurs might have been like have provided inspiration and impetus for new researchers in the field, and (iii) rhetorically powerful, dramatic stories about the lives and times of dinosaurs have engaged the resources of various institutions for further research in the field.

Scientist is not just engineers, or tinkerers, who want to make things work, and not just theoreticians, but is rather a collective that wants to understand why things work, or what and how something worked or lived. Charles Peirce saw scientific activity as inquiry sparked by the tension of doubt, by questions that somehow matter--the end of scientific inquiry is the dissolution of doubt, a completion. Art, as behavior, is a constructive activity that makes something special.[7] Art also makes something complete; it gives us something that nature cannot: a sense of closure, or completeness.[8] Aristotle, discussing what makes good plays, emphasized the plot: a beginning, middle, and end. It is part of our psyche to find comfort in a well-finished tale. These two sets of activities--from science and from art--are not mutually exclusive.

Consider the following related, and too often misleading, bifurcations:

    the natural world versus the mind
    seeing versus representing
    the facts versus statements
    experimental results versus stories
    photographs versus paintings
    theory versus plot
    scientific rigor versus artistic license

All of these oppositions are ultimately faulty. To the questions, why one ought to care whether these supposed bifurcations are faulty, and what advantage there might be in seeing science as intermixed with art, I have five responses.

First of all, not many people become scientists. Those that do should be encouraged to consider new ideas, far-fetched schemes, and bold hypotheses, with artistic license. As Freeman Dyson put it, "There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions ... rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture.... Poetry and science are gifts given to all of humanity."[9] The more that beginning scientists accept and act on such a view, the better they may develop as scientists.

Secondly, the vast majority of us, as non-scientists, will be better off if we understand science as an open-ended endeavor akin to art. Without such an understanding of how wrong and far-fetched most science actually is, we are too easily swayed by propaganda and pseudo-science dressed up in authoritative clothing. Consider scientism's far-reaching acceptance in society--with no Heaven to guide us, those that claim the most knowledge about the world we live in may sway us to conform and follow their edicts. (Can you hear that mantra of current business organizations and institutionalized education: "Research shows ..."?)

Thirdly, the community as a whole will be better served by understanding science as allied with art. Without such an understanding, public funding of scientific endeavors may not adequately recognize the importance of fringe science, and thereby may miss the opportunity to get better evidence of the truth. (Consider the fate of the twentieth-century electric cars.) Various writers "argue that less than ideally rational individual scientists [who pursue a less likely heuristic] can actually benefit the scientific community ... if some individuals pursue the less promising of two [complex and expensive research heuristics], thereby dividing the communities labor between the two strategies."[10]

Fourthly, promoting a view of an aesthetic science may help the community as a whole get closer to the best way to live. The fallibilism and corrigibility of science, implied in seeing artistic license and scientific rigor as necessarily intertwined, parallels the freedom of speech and openness of dissent in a liberal democracy. Paul Feyerabend appealed to Mill's On Liberty for this interpretation of successful science. The physicist Richard Feynman also found such a connection.

The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, tossed out, more new ideas brought in; a trial and error system. This method was the result of the fact that science was already showing itself to be a successful venture at the end of the 18th century. Even then it was clear to social-minded people that the openness of the possibilities was an opportunity, and that doubt and discussion were essential to progress into the unknown. If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.[11]

One last point. My view is that to make progress science should freely mingle with art and poetics. Why might this be objectionable? Most likely the complaint would be that science must be objective, unbiased, and non-ideological, that the sensibilities of the scientist must be neutral, unlike the artist's, and hence aesthetic considerations should not be part of natural science. But doesn't such a complaint presuppose Nature does not care about Beauty? What's the metaphysical rationale for that?

A different metaphysics has different presuppositions. If one is ever to be lucky or persistent enough to climb out of this cave of shadows to see the truth about what really is, if one is ever to attain perpetual possession of the good, if one is ever to attain what love strives for, one will recognize that Truth and Beauty are one. To understand the world is also to stand in awe of its overwhelming beauty, even if one does not get very far. As Newton reflected, "To myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."[12]

1. "Consolations for the Specialist", in Lakatos & Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge U. Press, 1970) p.228, n.2.
2. W.N. Edwards, Early History of Paleontology, (Trustees of the British Museum--Natural History, 1967) p.3.
3. His surveying for England's canal-building helped William "Strata" Smith produce such a map.
4. Martin S. Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), p.262, n.18.
5. "Restoring Dinosaurs as Living Animals," in Farber & Brett-Surman, eds., The Complete Dinosaur, Bloomington (Indiana U. Press, 1997), 165-172.
6. Ibid.
7. "We don't have a verb 'to art', but ... artists, dancers, poets [are] taking the ordinary and making it special. You create a bowl of mud but you don't leave it ordinary, you make it special by engraving a pattern or figures on it. A poet takes ordinary words and makes them special." Ellen Dissanayake, UW Columns (Seattle, March 2009). 8. "One of art's greatest attractions is that it offers 'the sense of an ending' ... found nowhere else in our lives. ...This is the triumph of [artistic] from. It is a deception, but one that we desire, and require." John Banville, "Beauty, Charm, and Strangeness: Science as Metaphor," Essays on Science and Society, www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/281/5373/40, 3/28/2009.
9. "The Scientist as Rebel." New York Review of Books, May 25, 1995.
10. Todd Grantham, "Philosophical Perspectives on the Mass Extinction Debates?" Biology and Philosophy 14: 143, 1999.
11. Richard Feynman, "The Value of Science," in Frontiers of Science (1958).
12. Often repeated, originally in David Brewster's 1855 Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton.


Charles R. Knight...father of dinosaur art

Gruesome dwarf herbivores...the Pegomastax

"Bizarre Species of Miniature Dinosaur Identified"

by

John Noble Wilford

October 3rd, 2012

The New York Times

Not every dinosaur grew up to be a mighty predator like Tyrannosaurus rex or a hulking vegan like Apatosaurus. A few stayed small, and some of the smallest dinosaurs that ever lived — tiny enough to nip at your heels — were among the first to spread across the planet more than 200 million years ago.

Fossils of these miniature, fanged plant-eaters known as heterodontosaurs, or “different toothed reptiles,” have turned up as far apart as England and China. Now, in a discovery that has been at least 50 years in the making, a new and especially bizarre species of these dwarf herbivores has been identified in a slab of red rock that was collected in the early 1960s by scientists working in South Africa.

In a report published Wednesday in the online journal ZooKeys, Paul C. Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and a dinosaur specialist, described the strange anatomy of the newfound member of the heterodontosaur family and gave the new species the name Pegomastax africanus, or “thick jaw from Africa.” He also apologized in an interview for not getting around sooner to this piece of research.

When he first viewed the specimen at a Harvard laboratory, Dr. Sereno said, “my eyes popped, as it was clear this was a distinct species.”

Embedded in the rock were remains of a creature with a short parrotlike beak, one-inch jaws, sharp teeth and a skull no less than three inches long. The entire body was less than two feet in length and probably weighed less than a small house cat.

“I’m embarrassed to say how many years ago that was — 1983,” he said. “But I was an enterprising graduate student then at the American Museum of Natural History. All the while since then, I wondered if anyone else might spot the creature hiding among the lab drawers.”

The Pegomastax fossils were eventually returned to the South African Museum in Cape Town, the true nature of the one slab still undiscovered, Dr. Sereno said. The main researcher responsible for collecting the fossils was Alfred Crompton, a Harvard professor now retired. Part of Dr. Sereno’s research was supported by the National Geographic Society, where he also is an explorer-in-residence.

His close examination showed that behind the parrot-shaped beak were a pair of stabbing canines up front and a set of tall teeth tucked behind for slicing plants. These teeth in upper and lower jaws operated like self-sharpening scissors, Dr. Sereno said, with shearing facets that slid past each other when the jaws closed. The parrotlike skull, he noted, may have been adapted to plucking fruit.

Dr. Sereno said it was “very rare that a plant-eater like Pegomastax would sport sharp-edged enlarged canines.” Some scientists suggested that the creature may have consumed some meat, or at least insects.

In his new study, Dr. Sereno concluded that the creature’s fangs, unusual for a herbivore, were probably “for nipping and defending themselves, not for eating meat.” Other aspects about the new species and other heterodontosaurs, including their chewing mechanism, are evolutionary surprises, he said, and “their anatomy is key to understanding the early evolution of this great group of plant eaters.”

Another possible characteristic of the new species, Dr. Sereno said, is that its body might have been covered in quills, something like those of a porcupine. If so, he pictured that in life Pegomastax would have scampered around in search of suitable plants, looking something like a “nimble two-legged porcupine.”

Raptorex--T. Rex precursor and how science works

This is a fine example how some areas of science are subject to change. Science is an evolving disciple of knowledge.

"Fossil Find Challenges Theories on T. Rex"

by

Henry Fountain

September 18th, 2009

New York Times

Paleontologists said Thursday that they had discovered what amounted to a miniature prototype of Tyrannosaurus rex, complete with the oversize head, powerful jaws, long legs — and, as every schoolchild knows, puny arms — that were hallmarks of the king of the dinosaurs.

But this scaled-down version, which was about nine feet long and weighed only 150 pounds, lived 125 million years ago, about 35 million years before giant Tyrannosaurs roamed the earth. So the discovery calls into question theories about the evolution of T. rex, which was about five times longer and almost 100 times heavier.

“The thought was these signature Tyrannosaur features evolved as a consequence of large body size,” Stephen L. Brusatte of the American Museum of National History, an author of a paper describing the dinosaur published online by the journal Science, said at a news conference. “They needed to modify their entire skeleton so they could function as a predator at such colossal size.”

The new dinosaur, named Raptorex kriegsteini, “really throws a wrench into this observed pattern,” Mr. Brusatte said.

The nearly complete fossil was found in northeastern China and bought by a collector, Henry J. Kriegstein, who alerted Paul C. Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and lead author of the paper. The fossil, which was illicitly excavated, will be returned to a museum in China.

Dr. Sereno said the fossil was that of a young adult, about 5 or 6 years old and near the end of its growth period. Besides the oversized head, jaws and legs, it had long shinbones and long, compressed feet that helped it run fast after smaller dinosaurs and other prey. “We see this all, to our great surprise, in an animal that is basically the body weight of a human,” Dr. Sereno said.

Raptorex, like T. rex, would have killed animals with its teeth and jaws. The forelimbs would not have been the primary means for attacking prey. In fact, Dr. Sereno said, the forelimbs would have gotten smaller as the head got larger. “This is an agile, fast-running animal,” he said. “By adding a lot of weight at the top, something has to give way. What gave way was the forelimb.”

Thomas R. Holtz Jr., a paleontologist at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the work, said the discovery helped “clear up the origin of the characteristic features of the Tyrannosaurs.”

Dr. Holtz, who cautioned that the findings needed to be independently confirmed, noted that there had been a gap in the family tree between earlier, more primitive Tyrannosaurs that had relatively short legs and long arms and the later giants with opposite features. “This clarifies the sequence,” he said.

Dino wars

Legal wranglings over some old bones...money always appears to be a factor.

"The Dinosaur Fossil Wars"

Across the American West, legal battles over dinosaur fossils are on the rise as amateur prospectors make major finds

by

Donovan Webster

April 2009

Smithsonian

Editor’s note: On August 6, 2009, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling that Ron Frithiof did not engage in fraud and that he and his team can retain ownership rights of Tinker the Tyrannosaurus .

Buried beneath a barren stretch of South Dakota badland, the deceased appeared small for its species. As Ron Frithiof, an Austin, Texas, real-estate developer turned dinosaur prospector, dug cautiously around it in a rugged expanse of backcountry, he was growing increasingly confident that he and his partners were uncovering a once-in-a-lifetime find.

Ever since he had heard about a private collection going up for sale in the mid-1990s, Frithiof, now 61, had been hunting dinosaurs. "I'd thought fossils were things you could see only in museums," he says. "When I learned you could go out and find stuff like that, to keep or even to sell, it just lit a fire in my imagination. I studied every book I could, learned techniques of extraction. Fossils inspire a powerful curiosity."

Frithiof was keenly aware that the skeleton of a mature Tyrannosaurus rex ( "Sue," named in honor of prospector Sue Hendrickson, who made the find in western South Dakota in 1990) had been auctioned off-at Sotheby's in New York City in 1997-for more than $8 million. The specimen that Frithiof and his fellow excavators began unearthing in 1998, in a painstaking, inch-by-inch dig was about four feet tall, less than half Sue's height. With unfused vertebrae and scrawny shin and ankle bones, the skeleton was almost certainly that of a juvenile. If so, it would likely be the most complete young T. rex ever discovered. A find of this magnitude, Frithiof knew, would create a sensation. Its value would be, as he put it, "anyone's guess." $9 million? $10 million? This was uncharted territory.

For nearly three years, the excavators-including longtime fossil hunter Kim Hollrah, who had first investigated the site-continued their meticulous work. Whenever Frithiof, Hollrah and their companions could coordinate time off from work, they would drive 24 hours straight, from Texas to the dig site, north of Belle Fourche, South Dakota, which Frithiof had leased from a local rancher in 1998. "Most years, we'd spend about a month working," he recalls. "Thirty or 40 days a summer, before the weather would drive us off."

Braving blistering 100-degree temperatures, the crew took every precaution to keep the specimen intact. At the same time, they were attempting to wrest it from the ground before South Dakota's brutal winter set in. "That's one of the paradoxes of fossil collecting," says Frithiof. "Once a specimen is exposed to the elements, it's a race to get it out in as responsible a way as possible, to protect it from wind and rain and weathering. It's like a slow-motion race."

Paleontological excavation is nothing if not grueling. "We worked inch by inch, brushing bits of rock and soil away, taking a pin to strip away just that next little bit of rock and earth [to reveal the rough contours]," Frithiof told me. On a good day, an experienced fossil excavator might uncover only a few inches of skeleton. Frithiof and the others gingerly pried out each section, still enclosed in the crumbly chunk of rock matrix that had originally surrounded it. In preparation for transport, the prospectors then wrapped the sections in layers of tissue paper, aluminum foil and plaster.

As the dig moved forward, Frithiof's colleagues, with a nod to "Sue" (today a centerpiece attraction at Chicago's Field Museum), decided the new T. rex needed a name. The one they came up with honored Frithiof's role as the project's financial backer. "I don't know why my parents started calling me Tinker," says Frithiof. "Somehow, it stuck."

In 2001, as the excavation of Tinker headed toward completion, the team made another remarkable discovery: evidence of two additional T. rex skeletons on the site. By that point, a children's museum in the Midwest had indicated its willingness to pay up to $8.5 million for Tinker. During the prospective purchaser's pre-transaction research, however, a massive legal hiccup was uncovered-one that Frithiof and his lawyers would later insist had been an honest mistake.

Tinker, as it turned out, had been found not from local rancher Gary Gilbert's land but from adjacent property owned by Harding County, South Dakota. In November 2000, Frithiof, he says, with an eye to future excavations, had leased the parcel from the county; the agreement stipulated that the county would get 10 percent of the sale price for any fossils uncovered there. Now, in August 2004, Harding County filed a civil lawsuit in Federal District Court against Frithiof and his partners alleging fraud, trespass and conspiracy.

Frithiof's world caved in. After devoting years to Tinker, the prospector was suddenly in danger of going to jail for his efforts. "This whole experience has been a disaster," he says. "[With] all the lawyers' fees, not to mention the disruption of my life, it's cost me a fortune. And it's been very hard on my family. You gotta remember, I've never been in trouble in my life. Not even a traffic ticket." The disputed dinosaur, according to Frithiof's attorney Joe Ellingson, "wrecked my client's life."

Moreover, the fossil was consigned to limbo. As a result of byzantine twists in the litigation, Tinker's bones would soon be placed under another lawyer's supervision, stored in plastic tubs at an undisclosed location in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-1,400 miles from the excavation site.

Across the American West and Great Plains, an intensifying conflict over the excavation of fossils-everything from a five-inch shark's tooth, which might sell for $50, to Frithiof's spectacular T. rex-has pitted amateur excavators against both the federal government and scientists. Scores, perhaps thousands, of prospectors-some operating as poachers on federally protected land-are conducting digs across hundreds of thousands of square miles from the Dakotas to Texas, Utah, Wyoming and Montana.

"In terms of digging for fossils, there are a lot more people" than there used to be, says Matthew Carrano, curator of dinosauria at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. "Twenty years ago, if you ran into a private or commercial fossil prospector in the field, it was one person or a couple of people. Now, you go to good fossil locations in, say, Wyoming, and you find quarrying operations with maybe 20 people working, and doing a professional job of excavating fossils."

Fueling the frenzy is skyrocketing market demand, as fossils, long relegated to the dusty realm of museum shelves, have entered the glitzy spheres of home décor and art. "There have always been private fossil collectors," says David Herskowitz of Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas. "The difference is, historically, a private fossil collector was wealthy. But today, interest in fossils has grabbed the attention of a broad swath of the population. That means a lot more people are collecting."

Who's buying these days? Just about anyone. With prices to suit virtually any budget, one can own an ancient remnant of life on earth: a botanical fossil, such as a fern, may cost as little as $20; a fossil snail, perhaps, may well go for $400.

The real action, however, is in the big vertebrates: dinosaurs that roamed the earth between 65 million and 220 million years ago. These are the specimens attracting the high rollers-serious collectors. Actors Harrison Ford and Nicolas Cage, for example, are rumored to have impressive collections.

The paleo-passion, however, extends far beyond celebrities. "The group who used to be serious fossil collectors-that's really grown," says money manager Charles Lieberman of Advisors Capital Management in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. At his office, Lieberman displays several impressive specimens, including a three-foot-long Cretaceous herbivore, Psittacosaurus. "Since the book and movie Jurassic Park," he adds, "interest in fossil collecting has gone into overdrive, affecting demand and elevating prices."

The rise in prices is fueling the prospecting boom in the Great Plains and West-not necessarily because of a higher concentration of fossils there, but because the American West is one of the world's easiest places to find them. "If you had flown around the world 150 million years ago, the West wouldn't be more populated by dinosaurs than anywhere else," says the Smithsonian's Carrano. "But in the West, the rock layers laid down during the age of dinosaurs are currently exposed. It also helps that the landscape is dry, so there's not a lot of vegetation covering the rock. And it's erosive, so new rock is constantly being uncovered."

While fossils can now be found in stores from Moab to Manhattan, the most unusual (and valuable) specimens tend to show up at auction houses-or vanish into the shadowy world of private purchasers, some of whom are buying on the black market. At the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, for instance, it is possible to obtain illegally taken fossils. While Carrano does not attend the show, it's well-known, he says, that, "if you spend the week building trust with some of the sellers, you’ll get invited back to a hotel room and be shown exquisite fossil specimens that were probably taken illegally. We’re talking museum-grade specimens that are going to disappear into private collections."

The auction houses, of course, make sure their offerings come with documented provenance. In only a few hours in April 2007, Christie's in Paris gaveled off fossils worth more than $1.5 million-including a dinosaur egg that went for $97,500 and the fossilized skeleton of a Siberian mammoth that fetched $421,200. In December 2007, a 70-million-year- old mosasaur a-30-foot carnivorous underwater reptile excavated in North Africa-brought more than $350,000 at Los Angeles auctioneer Bonhams & Butterfields. In January 2008, Heritage Auction Gal­leries in Dallas sold the largest mastodon skull ever found for $191,000 and a 55-million-year-old lizard from the Dominican Republic, its flesh and skin preserved in amber, for $97,000. "The day's tally was $4.187 million," says auction director Herskowitz. "While I can't disclose who my buyers were, I can say many of them have small to substantive museums on their properties."

Then there's eBay. When I logged on recently, I discovered 838 fossil specimens for sale, including a spectacular ammonite-an ancestor of today's chambered nautilus-expected to go for upward of $3,000. Very little was disclosed about where any of the fossils came from. "Here's what I can tell you about eBay," says Carrano. "If a fossil being sold there comes from Morocco, China, Mongolia, Argentina or a number of other nations, at some point it was part of an illegal process, since those countries don't allow commercial fossil export."

In the United States, the law regulating fossil excavation and export is far from straightforward. Property statutes state that any fossil taken with permission from privately owned land may be owned and sold-which is why legitimate excavators usually harvest fossils from individual landowners. A complex series of regulations apply to fossils removed from federal and state land (including Bureau of Land Management [BLM] tracts, national forests and grasslands, and state and national parks) and what are known as jurisdictional lands-for example, the public land held by Harding County, South Dakota.

To complicate matters, some fossil materials-limited amounts of petrified wood or fossil plants, for example-may be removed from certain public lands without oversight or approval. In most cases, however, permits are required; applications are reviewed according to a time-consuming process. Prospectors who want to cash in quickly on a single find are often reluctant to abide by the law. Given that there are nearly 500 million acres of publicly held land in the United States (two-thirds of which contain some of the best excavation zones in the world), prospectors who dig illegally are not often caught. "Newly harvested fossils are flooding the commercial market," says Larry Shackelford, a special agent with the BLM in Salt Lake City. "Running down each one and checking where it came from? We don't have the manpower."

In fact, law enforcement officials can barely keep up with prosecutions already underway. Although state and federal officials may not discuss cases currently in litigation, they acknowledge that volume is increasing. "In most districts, we easily see one or two new leads a month," says Bart Fitzgerald, a BLM special agent in Arizona. "Mostly these become civil cases. We understand that enthusiasm gets the best of people sometimes. Someone finds an amazing fossil and they take it home. Mostly we just want to recover the fossil-it's government property. But once in a while, we see a case where clearly the intent was criminal: where people were knowingly extracting fossils from public land for private profit. Those we prosecute criminally."

A major criminal case began unfolding in 2006, when a largely intact Allosaurus-a meat-eating older cousin of T. rex-was taken from public land in Utah. The excavator went to great lengths to look legitimate, including creating bogus letters of provenance. The dinosaur bones were first transported from Utah to a U.S. buyer, then to a purchaser in Europe, before finally being sold to a collector in Asia. In February 2007, the Allosaurus poacher-who had been turned in anonymously-was convicted on one count of theft of federal property.

Several years earlier, a high-profile case involved paleo-prospector Larry Walker, who discovered a cache of fossil Therizinosaurs-a rare dinosaur/bird hybrid-in the desert outside his Moab, Utah, hometown. Working at night beneath camouflage netting, Walker excavated 30 to 40 of the creatures' distinctive ripping claws, then sold the specimens at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show for a total take of roughly $15,000.

"He knew what he was doing was illegal," says Loren Good, a special agent for the BLM's Idaho district. "Working with the FBI, we did a joint investigation into the source of the claws and prosecuted Mr. Walker. He received a ten-month incarceration and a $15,000 fine."

"These cases come in all forms," says the BLM's Fitzgerald. "Take the example of some tour operators in Montana. They took a group of tourists out recently on a fossil-hunting trip, strayed onto public land and extracted fossils from a good site there. Was it an honest mistake or a calculated commercial move?" Fitzgerald asks. "After all, the tour operators carried GPS units; they knew precisely where they were." (Charges have not yet been filed.)

In the Tinker case, the prosecution claimed that Frithiof knew he was on county property when he found the Tinker specimen, that he had signed the agreement with Harding County without informing officials of the find and that he had negotiated a perhaps $8.5 million sale without telling the county. "Harding County believes Mr. Frithiof first discovered the specimen's location, then induced the county into a lease, knowing the value of what existed on the property without disclosing it to us," says Ken Barker, a Belle Fourche, South Dakota, attorney retained by the county to prosecute the case. "Because of this, we seek to void the lease agreement, entered into fraudulently, and to recover the county's property."

Frithiof sees things differently. It wasn't until the prospective purchaser's survey in 2001, he says, that all parties learned that the Tinker site was on county land. "We were something like 100 feet across the [county] property boundary," he says. "Even the rancher we were working with believed we were on his land. It was an honest mistake. And I already had a lease on that land with Harding County."

"It wasn't like we were sneaking around," Frithiof adds. "Our find had been in the newspaper. We'd been on the Discovery Channel. We'd had prominent paleontologists, like Bob Bakker from the University of Colorado, out to look at it. What we were doing was all out in the open. Nobody thought we were doing anything illegal...at all."

In June 2006, Judge Richard Battey of the United States District Court voided the agreement between Frithiof and the county and ruled, on the basis of a technicality, that Tinker belonged to Harding County. Frithiof appealed. In September 2007, a United States Court of Appeals panel reversed the decision. The Tinker fossil, they ruled, was Frithiof's property; only the original contract's 10 percent payment was owed to Harding County. The appeals court then sent the case back to Federal District Court for final disposition. Frithiof had no choice but to wait.

In the meantime, the location of Tinker-and the fossil's condition-had become a source of contention. Before the legal wrangling began, Frithiof had delivered sections of the skeleton to private curators Barry and April James, who specialized in preparation of paleontological specimens for display, at their Sunbury, Pennsylvania, firm, Prehistoric Journeys. (The process involves removal of the stone matrix encasing the excavated bones.) Once the litigation proceeded, however, the Jameses, who say they had put $200,000 worth of labor and more than two years into the project, were barred from completing the work or collecting payment from Frithiof. Their company filed for bankruptcy in 2005.

"Now I have the Tinker fossil in my possession," says Larry Frank, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, attorney who is trustee of the James bankruptcy. "I've filed an artisans' lien against the value of the specimen. Until the matter is resolved, the skeleton will sit in large plastic containers in my possession. We believe that's a good, safe place for it."

For scientists, commercial excavation of fossils-legal or not-raises troubling questions. "For me," says Mark Norell, chairman and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, "the big concern with all this private digging is that it may be robbing science of valuable knowledge."

Norell believes that anyone harvesting fossils "needs to be considerate of scientific data surrounding the specimen." Context is important. "A lot of the guys out there digging commercially are just cowboys; they don't care about the site where the fossil sits, how it's oriented in the earth, what can be found around it to give us clues to what the world was like when that fossil animal died." Some commercial excavators "want only to get the specimen out of the ground and get paid-so we lose the context of the site as well as the fossil itself."

The Smithsonian's Carrano says all scientifically significant fossil specimens, whether from public or private lands, should be placed into museums for study in perpetuity. "Any unique fossil has more value scientifically and educationally than we can ever place a cash value on," he adds. "In a perfect world, there'd be a way to vet every fossil collected: the significant ones would be retained and studied; others could go to commercial use. Not every fossil shark's tooth is significant, but some are. Let's retain those significant ones for study."

For the past several years, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, one of the fossil world's preeminent professional organizations, has lobbied in support of Congressional legislation that would protect fossils taken from public lands. Since 2001, a bill introduced by Representative James McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts-the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act-has languished in both the House and Senate. The delay, some proponents believe, stems from some western lawmakers' reluctance to add any regulations regarding public lands. If passed into law, the act would require that only trained, federally certified professionals be allowed to extract fossils from public lands-and would substantially increase penalties for illegal fossil excavation.

The proposed legislation has galvanized critics, from mining company executives to paleontology prospectors, many of whom argue that improved enforcement of existing laws is all that is needed. "This new bill provides no funding for additional federal agents to police these areas, meaning it has no teeth," says Jack Kallmeyer, a paleontological prospector. "As long as there is demand for the commodity, without sufficient enforcement personnel, nothing will stop illegal collecting."

Kallmeyer also notes that proposed and existing fossil-extraction laws do not address a critical threat to the nation's fossil heritage. "There are a number of dinosaur and [other] vertebrate fossils out there [on public lands] that are not rare. Professional paleontologists aren't interested in excavating them, as those specimens are well known and well studied. Why shouldn't amateur or commercial collectors be allowed to extract those?" Fossils left exposed over years, Kallmeyer adds, will eventually erode away.

But paleontologist James Clark of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who serves on the government liaison committee for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, disagrees. "Nobody knows how much fossil material is being taken off public lands and smuggled out," he says. "We don't know the scale of what's being lost." Clark, who sees the proposed federal bill as a step forward, believes that existing legislation is too nonspecific and confusing. "As it stands now, the situation is a free-for-all," he says.

Through the winter of 2007-2008, as Frithiof awaited another ruling from Federal District Court, he and lawyer Joe Ellingson hunkered down. "We don't want to say much," Ellingson told me. "We don't want to antagonize anyone in any way. We just want to wait and get our ruling."

The delay, however, proved excruciating for Frithiof, who continued living near Austin, selling real estate. "There's not one hour," he says, "that it wasn't in the back of my mind. And that takes a toll. Even a physical toll." Frithiof says he developed cardiac problems. "I just want this all to be over," he says, "so I can go back to my site and keep working. We've found evidence of two other T. rex specimens there, but we don't know if they're complete or not. We've covered them up to protect against the elements. Until all this is resolved, we've been barred from working."

At last, on February 5, 2008, Judge Battey ruled that Frithiof's lease with Harding County was legal and enforceable. Frithiof owned Tinker, though he would have to give the county 10 percent of any profits from its sale. Harding County, the decree said, "knowingly entered into this contract, and now must live with the consequences of its actions." For Frithiof, the ruling meant "a huge weight had disappeared off my life."

But within weeks of the ruling, Harding County appealed yet again, sending the case back into court and consigning Frithiof once again to legal limbo. After more than four years of litigation, disposition of the appeal is expected within weeks. "This experience has removed the joy of fossil hunting for me," says Frithiof. "I haven't done one day of digging since the day initial charges were brought."

And yet, Frithiof tells me, an even larger question preoccupies him. "My thoughts always return to the exposed fossils out there on our public land," he adds. "Fossils that are going unexcavated due to lack of interest. The ones paleontologists are never going to extract because they are fossils that are too common, but which some collector might cherish."

Frithiof insists that careful amateur excavators can make a significant contribution to science. "The fossils are out there, wind and rain weathering them, while people argue about who is allowed to collect them and who isn't. After a year or two of exposure, any fossil begins to disintegrate and crumble to dust." And then, he adds, "Well, nobody gets them. They're just gone."

Writer Donovan Webster lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Photographer Aaron Huey is based in Seattle, Washington.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of paleontologist Bob Bakker and incorrectly stated he is with the University of Montana. He is with the University of Colorado.

Samson is up for auction--3rd complete T-Rex

Samson is up for auction--3rd complete T-Rex

Sampson, the third most complete T-Rex dinosaur, will be auctioned in October. Who owns this massive skeleton? Was it found on public land and if so doesn't it belong to the public? Tom Lindgren [member of the auction house Bonhams & Butterfields] wants this to be the most expensive item of natural history sold. The article also mentions something that I have never understood or even seen a printed document on what it means..."museum standard" or "museum quality". I suppose it varies from one category of items to another but still what does it mean? Ask the Keno brothers?

"Third Most Complete T. Rex to Be Auctioned in Vegas"

by

Betsy Mason

August 18th, 2009

Wired

One of the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever discovered is set to go on the auction block in Las Vegas in October.

The 66 million-year-old fossil was found 22 years ago in South Dakota and has come to be known as Samson. It is 40 feet long and 15 feet tall and consists of around 170 bones, more than half of a complete skeleton.

“In the last 110 years, there’s been a total of 46 specimens found of Tyrannosaurus rex of which this is the third most complete and has the finest skull,” said Tom Lindgren, who is co-director of natural history for the auction house Bonhams & Butterfields.

The last time a T. rex was auctioned, the most complete specimen ever found, known as Sue, went for more than $8 million dollars. The winner was the Chicago Field Museum.

Sue was still in pieces and unprepared when she was put on the block, and was only expected to fetch around 1 or 2 million dollars. Lindgren hopes Samson will exceed his estimated worth. One thing he has going for him is that he is fully prepared and mounted and ready to go on display.

“I’m going to estimate it’s in the neighborhood of 2 to 8 million, but it could easily go for upwards of $10 million,” Lindgren said. “I want to hold the record for a natural history auction.”

Samson is clearly the star of the upcoming auction, which will be held October 3 at the Venetian casino, but there will be more than 50 other lots of rare specimens.

Highlights include a 25-foot long shark, the largest fossil shark ever found.

Lindgren has also secured a reconstructed shark jaw with a full set of real teeth that stands eight feet tall and 10 feet wide and belonged to a shark that was probably around 80 feet long.

He’s trying to finalize the largest bony fish skeleton ever found, which is 17 feet long. Just 10 minutes before speaking with Wired.com, Lindgren learned he also has a woolly mammoth that stands around 12 feet tall.

“The items we have in this auction are definitely museum standard, or better,” he said. “Most of the museums in the world don’t have anything near what we have in this auction.”

The auction items will be on display to the public during Labor Day weekend, as well as for the two weeks preceding the auction.

Samson’s skull was discovered intact, unlike most skulls, including Sue’s, which are in pieces. There are bite marks from other dinosaurs and places where the bone has been eaten away by infection.

“This animal, when it died, was in a lot of pain,” Lindgren said. “But we don’t know what killed it.”

After Samson was originally excavated from a ranch by fossil collectors, it was sold to a private buyer from the Isle of Man, who then sold it to its current American owners.

Lindgren is hoping Samson lands somewhere the public will be able to appreciate him for years to come and is pushing for museums to participate.

At least 20 institutions have shown interest, “but then there’s always the elite that have a lot of money and like unique and unusual items, especially the Hollywood types,” he said. “There are a couple of major actors that are collectors of dinosauria.”

Because T. rex is only found in North America, Lindgren hopes it stays here. “It would be a shame if the third most complete specimen, with possibly the finest skull, went to another country,” he said.

“A specimen like this, it needs to be seen by everyone. It’s just spectacular.”

I wonder how much this T-Rex would bring...

Get It On

by

T-Rex

1972

Well you're dirty and sweet, clad in black
Don't look back and I love you
You're dirty and sweet, oh yeah
Well you're slim and you're weak
You've got the teeth of a hydra upon you
You're dirty sweet and you're my girl.

Chorus:
Get it on, bang the gong , get it on
Get it on, bang the gong, get it on

You're built like a car, you've got a hub cap diamond star halo
You're built like a car, oh yeah
You're an untamed youth that's the truth with your cloak full of eagles
You're dirty sweet and you're my girl.

Repeat chorus

You're windy and wild, you've got the blues in your shoes and your
stockings
You're windy and wild, oh yeah
You're built like a car, you've got a hub cap diamond star halo
You're dirty sweet and you're my girl.

Repeat chorus

You're dirty and sweet, clad in black, don't look back
And I love you
You're dirty and sweet, oh yeah
You dance when you walk so let's dance, take a chance, understand me
You're dirty sweet and you're my girl.

Repeat chorus and fade