DinoGoss: humor

Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Clever Girl...

In honor of the Jurassic Park re-release...

Monday, May 16, 2011

There's been a lot of debate about Confuciusornis lately. Could it fly? If so, how? And how well? It probably wasn't doing anything like a modern bird does. Studies of its feather strength suggest it couldn't do more than glide (or could it?). But studies of its forelimb and shoulder girdle show it couldn't lift its arm much above the horizontal plane, making flapping pretty much impossible. Unless that huge, fenestrated deltopectoral crest gave it a rather unique flight stroke that only minimally involved the humerus.

Or, maybe this was a small theropod with enormous, high-aspect ratio wings larger than those of any other early bird, with asymmetrical feathers, puny feet and short legs ill suited for running and a small, barely reversed hallux ill suited for climbing, which couldn't flap and could barely glide with its thin feather shafts, yet is consistently found preserved as enormous flocks at the bottom of deep lake deposits. In which case the giant wings would be for display, obviously, to hopefully impress a predator so much that they decline to eat the poor bird which has no means of escape or defense other than to flee into the depths of the water like a 1960s brontosaur, only to remember that it also can't swim. No wonder they're extinct! Anyway... I hope much, much more study (and some wind tunnel tests) will eventually help untangle this mystery. For now, I was struck by something a little more frivolous. Working on a lateral view of Confuciusornis sanctus, checking and re-checking papers to make sure proportions are right, it started to look unmistakably like the profile of a... rhamphorhynchid pterosaur? Between this, and basal paravians with expanded, diamond-shaped vanes on the tips of their tails, in terms of general body plan there are some curious similarities (convergences?) between the first gliding/flying birds and primitive, long-tailed, high-aspect ratio-winged pterosaurs. My PhyloPic style silhouette version above.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Chicken vs. Egg

Above: Whichever came first, they're equally delicious. Egg photo by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos, licensed. Chicken photo by 3268zauber, licensed.

Today I read possibly one of the dumbest science news articles of all time, or at least the most condescending. Somewhere in here is news of an interesting study. English scientists have isolated the protein responsible for the formation of hard-shelled eggs in chickens, a step forward in developmental science that could potentially yield applications for materials science. So, how to make sure this mildly interesting study grabs the attention of Joe Six-pack? Put out a press release to every major media outlet claiming to have solved the "age old problem" (really?) of which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The Chicken and the egg: Ancient mystery solved?

Not only is this silly eyeball-grabbing headline a blatant attempt to pander to the lowest common denominator and point out what a complete joke science reporting has become, it assumes the absolute worst about the reader's level of science comprehension and interest. And it's obviously completely wrong!

The articles in question "argue" that because a protein for forming eggshells is found inside chickens, this proves that the chicken came before the egg.

Not only is this severely flawed logic, you don't need a discovery to prove the answer one way or the other: If you really want an answer to this rhetorical philosophical conundrum, it's obvious using simple logic and knowledge of how evolution works.

Let's define some terms first. I think implicit in this old riddle is the fact that we're talking about chickens Gallus gallus and chicken eggs here, specifically.

Nothing in the report suggests that proteins for hard shells originated with modern chickens. In fact, we know from observation that all other bird species, including those more primitive than chickens, lay hard-shelled eggs (though as PZ Myers points out in the link below, they often use a different protein). We know based on fossil evidence that hard-shelled eggs were laid by not only non-avian theropods but also sauropods and ornithischians. In contrast, softer shelled eggs are found in crocodilians and pterosaurs. So we know that the hard-shelled egg this protein (or the genes coding for it or similar proteins) allows evolved among ornithodirans sometime after pterosaurs diverged but before ornithischian and saurischian dinosaurs split. So, let's ballpark it to the early-mid Triassic period for the appearance of hard-shelled eggs. Even allowing for the broadest possible definition of "chicken" (Galliformes), the earliest you can say chicken-like creatures walked he earth is the late Cretaceous, when the stem-anseriform Vegavis lived (so we know that the chicken line must have split from the duck line by that time).

That covers the hard shelled egg in general, which clearly came long before the chicken. What about modern chickens specifically and their eggs? This gets down to the biological species concept, of which there are many and they all overlap. Is a chicken anything that can successfully breed with any random clucker down at the farm? If so, we're getting into some sticky concepts of ring species and sub-species here, which just muddy the waters, especially when ancestral species are taken into account. Let's just say for our purposes, a "chicken" means the type specimen of Gallus gallus domesticus, and its specific genome. The species this bird belongs to, however you define it, diverged from an ancestral population that we can say was non-chicken. The relevant mutations or changes in allele frequency that define the line between chicken and non-chicken almost certainly did not occur inside the living adult non-chicken and were then passed on to its offspring in some kind of Lamarckian evolutionary event. Rather, they would have taken place in the cell divisions leading to the formation of the first true chicken egg.

Put more simply, a non-chicken did not spontaneously transform into a chicken via some kind of Fantastic Four style cosmic wave, and it did not spring spontaneously with all its essential chickenness in place from the head of Zeus. Rather, a non-chicken had to have laid an egg containing a chicken embryo. Can this be said to be a chicken egg, if it was laid by a non-chicken? I'd day yes, as it contains a chicken. Though ultimately, maybe this classic paradox is better left to philosophers after all.

PZ Myers of Pharyngula has done his own write-up on this travesty of science reporting and goes into more detail on the protein angle, well worth a read here. PZ says that "you simply can't make the conclusion the reporter was making here" but, given the prevalence of this exact conclusion in other articles from other news sources, everybody is simply copying one idiot science writer or, more likely, this conclusion was actively promoted by a press release. I can't decide which would be worse.

EDIT: This is getting hilarious. No, not the plethora of tragically inevitable comments from creationists, but watching the American media slowly realize that every single one of their science writers who allowed this nonsense to be repeated on their pages are being laughed at by people who took middle school biology, even in their own comments. Case in point: A single editor's note has been made on the CNN Article headline: "Maybe." Not, "Sorry, our so-called journalists are too stupid to recognize an obvious load of crap when they see it, or at the very least point out the crap being served to them in press release form. The people responsible have been fired and we're hiring a literate this time."

Just, "Maybe. Maybe not. Reality: you decide!"

*head-desk*

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Trendsetting 2: Return of the Dork

A few weeks ago I told the story of the Pioneer Dork and how he's catching on in dinosaur scale diagrams thanks to the ones I've been doing for Wikipedia over the last four years. Well this is getting out of hand, because now there is an actual t-shirt company marketing a shirt about the Dork's suicidally placid wave.

You can buy the official Dork t-shirt here for US$18.95. I don't see a dime of that but I'm looking at this as more of an homage (it doesn't even use any of my original silhouettes, even though the Dork himself is public domain, which is why I started using him in the first place).

Friday, April 2, 2010

Dinogoss: Trendsetting

One more really short post... Because it's time to claim tenuous credit for starting a trend!

This is another image that caught my attention today as I finally took some time to catch up on my Google Reader blog subscriptions. Also at Michael Ryan's Palaeoblog, I found the above size comparison of the cool new sauropodomorph Seitaad with a human. But not just any human, it's the Pioneer Dork's girlfriend!

Above: The Dork poses dorkily with the smallest dinosaur, Anchiornis huxleyi. Say, "Hi dork!" Image by Matt Martyniuk, licensed.

The Pioneer Dork is of course the male figure from the gold plaque sent along with the Pioneer probes 10 and 11. When I first started doing size comparison diagrams for Wikipedia in 2006 or '07, I used this public domain image for the human and have done so since (and so have a few others). We Wiki editors lovingly referred to him as the 'Dork', due to, well, his dorky pose. Several Wiki readers have posted comments on talk pages noting how hilarious it is to depict a happy, waving man inches away from the maw of a charging Albertosaurus. But they just don't understand the Dork's simple charm. There was a brief push to replace the Dork with something a bit edgier, namely a silhouette of Catherine Zeta Jones. Cooler heads prevailed and pointed out that dammit, Jim, this is an encyclopaedia, not a trucker's mud flaps! (I, however, have opted to use her in the scale charts I make for my own site).

I choose to believe the Dork's female counterpart was done as an homage to those Wiki scale charts and will not listen if somebody comes up with an alternate explanation. Note that this must be a press release only image, as the skeletal in the free open-access paper lacks a human figure. Bummer. Maybe the next paper can include CZJ to make up for it.

Above: Yowza.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

How Mimsy Was Zanabazar?

No, not the early Mongolian Buddhist leader.

Above: Not a troodontid.

Zanabazar is the newly-coined name for the troodontid previously known as Saurornithoides junior. A new review of the genus Saurornithoides by a heap of authors including Mark Norell and Rinchen Barsbold himself (who named S. junior in 1974) found that the evidence linking S. junior to S. mongoliensis as each others closest relatives is lacking, so a new genus name was needed for junior (I would have gone with "Henryjonesius" in honour of Sean Connery).

Above: Zanabazar junior by FunkMonk, licensed.

But wait a second... there's been talk for some time now that S. junior may be synonymous with another small troodont, a contemporary from the Nemegt Formation with one of my personal favourite dino-bird names, Borogovia (after one of the nonsense creatures in Lewis Caroll's poem Jabberwocky.) I haven't read the paper yet so I'm not sure if this issue was addressed, but as it stands now, there still is no overlapping material to directly compare the two troodonts, so it's impossible to prove synonymy at the moment (Borogovia is known from leg and foot bones lacking the rest of the skeleton, Zanabazar is known from a partial skeleton lacking leg and foot bones). But if any further material for either species turns up, and they turn out to be synonyms, Borogovia will win the day as the older name. Not that Zanabazar isn't a cool name in and of itself. But how boss would it be to name a hypothetical new Nemegt therizinosaur (with their long necks, giant claws, and overall freakish appearance) after the Jabberwock itself? A mammal called "Momerathobataar"? "Tovia slithius" the nematode to complete the set? Will, 70 years later, an oviraptorid have to be re-named "Toviamaia"? Too many Nemegt fauna inside jokes? Yeah, I'll stop.

Above: The resemblance is uncanny! Left: Jabberwock by John Tenniel, 1871. Right: Therizinosaurus by Apokryltaros, licensed.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

How Science News Works

Ok, not DinoGoss, but one of my main ideas for this blog that I haven't (fortunately!) gotten to delve into yet is "science reporting so tragically bad it's almost funny." You all know what I mean, so I'll just show this awesome comic I picked up from Brian Switek's blog Laelaps:

(click for full size).