Open Letter to the Universe, by Minute Physics, from YouTube.

Dinosaur farts make a lot of noise.  And I'm not talking about the actual act of flatulating.  I'm talking about the noise made by the media when a paper was published earlier this week.  What does the paper say? In short, that sauropod dinosaurs would have annually produced around 520 metric tons of methane as a result of their digestive process.  That's just about the same amount that we're currently pumping into the atmosphere today.  The paper, of course, simply presents a model for how they calculated this number, and it relies heavily on a lot of variables that are assumptions at best.  But what did the media say?  Some reliable, unbiased news sources immediately began running stories about how dinosaurs farted themselves into extinction, despite the fact that Wilkinson and his co-publishers never talked about extinction once in the paper.  This was immediately picked up by a number of other news outlets, and spread all over the internet.  Thankfully, there were a number of outstanding individuals at the helm ready to combat this ridiculousness with good science reporting.

Allosaurus (of course) on display in the center "stage" of the SNMNH's current Dinosaur Hall.

My humble submission to an excellent "Time Capsule".  Dave and his buddy play a dangerous game!

Here it is, one last afternoon of talks.  I planted myself firmly in Technical Session XVIII for this year's round of "croc" talks.  And the crurotarsan branch of the archosaur family tree was just as well represented as their sister clade had been this morning.  By the end of the session, three new crocodylomorphs were described, and some old misconceptions were (hopefully) dispelled.

A Cuban crocodile, Crocodylus rhombifer, basking at the National Zooloigical Park's Reptile Discovery Center.

Back in July I wrote about a paper by Xu, You, Du, and Han (2011) that described the new paravian, Xiantingia zheng, and what its discovery meant for the relationships of the "first bird", Archaeopteryx, to other dinosaur groups.   Well today I caught another talk, presented by Xing Xu (2011), on the same subject.  He proposed a new eumaniraptoran phylogeny where oviraptorosaurs are more closely allied with avialans, and Archaeopteryx is more closely allied with the deinonychosaurs.  I'm still not quite convinced that this phylogeny is the one that is going to stick, but the hypothesis is interesting, to say the least.  Regardless of how cladogram actually turns out, it is very cool to know that Archaeopteryx (or at least an isolated feather that has been associated with Archaeopteryx) had black upper primary covert feathers (Carney et al., 2011).

The second reason day two is usually a good one is because of the Student Roundtable Forum and Reprint Exchange. It's always a great chance for students to network and talk with professionals in the field of paleontology on a wide variety of subjects.  This year was no exception, and I'd like to thank all of the individuals who lent their time and talents to helping all of the students and post-docs.  I'd also like to thank everyone that donated their reprint collections to the exchange.  I noticed it took everyone a lot longer to move through the line this year, which indicated to me that there were a lot of good papers and journals out there, and students were having a hard time choosing.

Dr. John Merck talks to a group of enthralled students about graduate school opportunities at the Student Roundtable Forum.

There's nothing like starting your morning with a hearty does of vertebrate paleontology.  After the opening remarks, the first day of talks began.  I opted to spend some of my earliest time slots in talks on some of the earliest vertebrates during a symposium on fim and limb evolution.  The evolution of paired pectoral and pelvic fins in early vertebrates was a huge innovation.  It would eventually lead to the development of the tetrapod limb, which would be modified time and time again in different vertebrate lineages.  Looking at the arm of a human, the wing of a bird, and the flipper of a whale, one might not immediately see the similarities.  But if you look a little closer, you can see that they all have their roots in the paired lobe fins of a common sarcopterygian ancestor.  I'm not the most sentimental individual, but as I sat in those talks, and sit here now typing this with my extremely dexterous manual digits, I can't help but think about that ancestor, and pay my respects to all of the fins and limbs that came before mine.  Those early pioneers helped make the vertebrates one of the most successful groups of animals on the planet.

Fulica americana, the American coot, in front of a prominent Las Vegas casino and hotel.  I'm remiss to say that I had to travel all the way to Nevada to see my first coot in the "wild".