Mesozoic Marine Menu: Bone

A little over two years ago, I was contacted by science blogger, Gavin Hubbard, who, knowing I liked to illustrate palaeontological organisms, was interested to see if I had any marine reptile illustrations available to use in a planned article he was in the process of completing. Now, this wasn't an example of how well-known I had become, nor how targeted networking can result in commissioned work. Gavin and I were classmates at an East Anglian primary school from 1984 to '87 and he had remembered my enthusiasm for dinosaurs from then. Now, save for the briefest of encounters in a Wisbech pub circa 1999, I hadn't actually seen Gavin since 1987, when we were both seven years old, so it was touching that he'd remembered me for all the right reasons when he was writing this particular article.

Gavin's blog, aptly named 'ScienceHubb', offers commentary on subjects as disparate as they are interesting, from immunisation to the defensive strategies of moths, and he delivers it in an engaging and humorous way. As a box-ticking exercise, that's pretty much all I want in a blog, and I get to learn something as well. Back in March 2013, Gavin was dealing with a little-known organism going by the name of Osedax, which is a genus of polychaete which invades the bones of 'whalefall', that is, dead whales which die and come to rest on the seabed. Many of us are familiar with deep-sea footage of dead cetaceans being scavenged by crabs, hagfish and sleeper sharks, but often these programmes stop short of documenting what happens after the whale has been reduced to a seemingly-clean skeleton, and the last of the hagfish have swum off to choke some sharks to death.

Don't eat the yellow ones: from lion of the sea to fertiliser for bone-eating snot-flowers. The route by which a Mesozoic marine reptile might find its way to its permanent place on the seabed. (Copyright © 2015 Gareth Monger)

Osedax is the genus name, but these things also answer to 'boneworm', 'zombie worm' and, in case you've not met your word-count, 'bone-eating snot-flower worm'. So, what do these worms want with a whale skeleton? (I'll keep it short since Gavin's already said it perfectly well.) After the removal of all the obvious soft tissues, whalebone is still rammed full of nutritional amazingness, if you're equipped to get to it. Osedax secrete an acid which dissolves the bone mineral, allowing them to 'take root' in its surface. They then utilise their symbiotic chums, a type (or types) of bacteria, to digest the lipids and proteins within the bone; they have to do this since they possess neither stomachs nor mouths. It's not certain if they are specialised cetacean scavengers, or if they will colonise other skeletons and that whales just happen to be longer-lasting on the seabed, easier to find and, therefore, study. Towards the end of Gavin's article at ScienceHubb, he speculated as to whether Osedax's ancestors may have colonised the skeleton's of the Mesozoic's array of large, marine reptiles.

Main illustration: a pliosaur skeleton, representing 'plesiosaurfall'. Inset: an Osedax individual, established on a pliosaur vertebra. (Copyright © 2013 Gareth Monger)

So, in order to illustrate his point, he wanted an existing image of a pliosaur. As it happened, it was my day off, so I had some time to throw something together, rather than reuse an illustration. 'Thrown together' is probably about right. The inset image was easy-enough to sort out, as there was plenty of reference. The main illustration started out as an A3 print of an old illustration of 'Rhomaleosaurus' (now Meyerasaurus), which I photographed at a jaunty angle, reprinted, sketched out, and painted in gouache. (Richard Forrest, at Plesiosaur.com, later pointed out that this particular skeleton was found correctly oriented, but erosion had damaged some of the dorsal features, and the preparators had flipped the specimen onto its back in order to display its better-preserved ventral side!)

Roll on a couple of years, and researchers Silvia Danise and Nicholas Higgs have published a study showing how some Mesozoic marine reptile bones display the telltale signs of Osedax activity, down to the signature cavities produced by their chemical bone-boring. The study demonstrates that Osedax (or at least Osedax's ancestors - I guess we cannot be sure it's the same genus) did not initially co-evolve with cetaceans, but already existed in the Mesozoic, survived the KPg extinction event, and exploited other organisms' skeletons immediately after the Mesozoic reptiles went extinct. They also speculate that snot-worm activity may be responsible for the destruction of skeletons before fossilisation can take place so, presumably, they won't find their way onto the Palaeontology's Favourite Pets list any time soon. It's good to see Gavin Hubbard's speculation justified by a solid scientific study and, personally, it's nice to have provided an illustration for it.

References:

• Higgs, N and Danise, S (2015) Bone-eating osedax worms lived on Mesozoic marine reptile deadfalls. The Royal Society, volume 11, issue 4.
• Hubbard, G (2013) Osedax: Ancient Bone Eaters. http://sciencehubb.co.uk/osedax-ancient-bone-eaters/

LATE EDITION:

A Pteroformer article gets the majority of its hits in its first day, so I've not got long to add in this snippet of maximum importance.

Love In The Time Of Chasmosaurs's blogger, David Orr, and his wife, Jennie, have written 'Mammoth Is Mopey', a children's alphabet book which utilises illustrations of extinct taxa which are rendered as accurate caricatures. That is, they're caricatures, but they're not wrong. Pronunciations are explained, background info is supplied, and the illustrations are fun and engaging. And, let's face it, it'll appeal to the adults who look back at their own childhoods with a hint of sadness at having not had a book like this.

Here's the really important bit: this is a crowd-funded project. And it's all or nothing. Jennie and David are sixty-five percent of the way to their goal of $10K, needed in order to get this thing to press. There's a fortnight left. Two weeks to get the remaining three-and-a-half thousand dollars OR IT DOESN'T HAPPEN. So, if you've not looked at their page at Indiegogo, take a look now. If you've looked but not contributed, please consider contributing. Not your thing? Share the link - it'd help! But seriously, take a look at all the lovely, lovely incentives they offer! Fifteen dollars (what's that in pounds? A tenner?) gets you a book! That's a niece's or nephew's birthday gift sorted! So click the link ->> this one <<- and have a gander. Thanks.

In From The Cold: The Return Of Brontosaurus

I daren't let this story rumble on by without throwing in some of my own observations. Indeed, Brontosaurus was an important dinosaur during my early flirtations with dinosaurology when, perhaps, the palaeontologists of the early '80s would rather it hadn't been - or at least not by the that name. This is such a big story right now, that it's barely worth summarising it yet again, but for the benefit of someone finding this article out of the context of the media 'frenzy', we're talking about the the issue of the genus erected for a fossil sauropod discovered by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1879. In 1903 Brontosaurus was reclassified as a species of Apatosaurus, but despite this, the name Brontosaurus stuck fast. Whatever the actual reason, or reasons, it's not hard to see the appeal of Brontosaurus. It's the 'Thunder Lizard', a veritable superhero of the Mesozoic world, splitting the rocky ground upon which it walked and announcing its approach long in advance of its arrival. Apatosaurus, well, it just sounds kinda vague. Less thunder and more rain: A-pitter-patter-saurus. Apatosaurus is Betamax.

Exactly how it happened. (Copyright © 2015 Gareth Monger)

Back then, and compared with Brontosaurus, Apatosaurus lacked airtime. The authors of the kids' books I owned didn't really imbue it with any personality - if they mentioned it at all. Also discovered by Marsh, and only a couple of years earlier, Apatosaurus ajax shares the same overall 'layout' as Brontosaurus excelsus, being a heavy-set quadruped with an enormously long neck and tail. It's slightly stockier than Diplodocus and holds itself more-or-less horizontally, especially when compared with that other famous sauropod, Brachiosaurus. Certainly in the popular children's books of the '70s and '80s, Brontosaurus was depicted as Diplodocus's squatter cousin, and much of the scientific laziness can probably be attributed to their authors simply taking their lead from existing books they were hoping to emulate and, if only in terms of style, update. The reasoning behind the pair rarely receiving the same attention in the same book probably boils down to the simple reason that since both animals share very similar bauplans, why include both? After all, dinosaur-overview books tend to focus on the most famous and the most disparate forms.

Old and new (and old again). Interesting news but, unfortunately, it won't create much new work in the palaeoart community. (Copyright © 2015 Gareth Monger)

So what does this mean for Brontosaurus's future, as far as its ranking as a kids' favourite? Based on my horribly vague recollections of my friends' dinosaur knowledge in the mid-'80s, if I'd taken a poll and asked my five-year-old friends to name five dinosaurs, you'd almost certainly hear Tyrannosaurus (never "T. rex" back then), Brontosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus and perhaps Diplodocus - and probably not much else. Of course, if you asked the same demographic now, there'd be a whole host of new names, minus Brontosaurus. To be fair, it's to be expected, and for all the obvious reasons: new discoveries, better restorations, better reach, and everything in between - and several years of authors honouring Brontosaurus's 1903 reclassification. But for today's younger dinosaur enthusiasts, they may only have come across Brontosaurus whilst reading about Apatosaurus. For them, Brontosaurus is just an interesting little quirk of the scientific process recorded in the footnotes of an Apatosaurus profile. Whether it recovers its position as a firm favourite with the next generation of dinosaur fans remains to be seen. Can Brontosaurus bounce back from its second extinction?

Read the paper by Tschopp, Mateus and Benson here. It's got all the science bits I ignored in it.

Rhamphorhynchus Revisited

Here's a short post just to bridge the gap between the BAM contest and something more wordy. It's a brief overview of an illustration of Rhamphorhynchus which I completed around October 2013. At the time, I was working hard to build my portfolio of palaeontological images which was still full of a lot of old material from my uni days ('99 - '02) and old commercial work. There was no real rhyme or reason behind some of the choices, and I think, if I'm honest, a few years' palaeoartistic inactivity had panicked me into action. My existing work was out-dated and palaeontology moves quickly; for example, hedging my bets and not feathering some of my theropods rendered them obsolete pretty quickly. Velociraptor and Compsognathus were given some nice, feathery integumentary structures. Struthiomimus and, bizarrely, Utahraptor, were not.

One of my earlier efforts, maybe from only a few months before, was a depiction of a group of Pterodactylus and Rhamphorhynchus, all riding a coastal updraft. The decision to show them from beneath was inspired by a photograph of extant seabirds showing multiple species, each keeping roughly segregated, and with each group stacked above the other. I figured it could make for a striking image if I used pterosaurs instead, and so I took some online skeletal reference, cut out some paper silhouettes, and arranged them on a sheet of Perspex which I then photographed from below. I did this for each of the two genera and then arranged them with Photoshop. Once I had the outlines, I transferred it to paper and went at it with gouache (whilst at university, 'digital illustration' was something which largely happened to other people).

Rhamphorhynchus and Pterodactylus riding air currents. (©2013 Gareth Monger.)

Now, it's not a terrible painting, but it's certainly got problems. I should reiterate that this was more of an experiment than anything, but it didn't take long for it to sink in that I'd forgotten an awful lot of what I'd picked up during previous years. The trailing edge of the brachiopatagium most-likely attaches at the ankle (see here) and Rhamphorhynchus's uropatagium should form a deeper membrane, extending further down the tail. Its tail also looks a little on the heavy side, and the chests for both pterosaurs are far too narrow and lizard-like. Luckily, the online palaeo crowd doesn't shy away from offering constructive criticism and there's also a wealth of freely-available information in the form of diagrams, illustrations and papers (though be careful; take a look at Tetrapod Zoology's warning against unreliable sources).

And so, with nothing particular in the pipeline, I decided to rework Rhamphorhynchus, but in a more 'encyclopaedic' manner, i.e., no background and a more-static pose. Think 'pinned insect'. I also thought I'd go to town on colouration. Not so much Luis Rey (that's his thing!), but more Lepidoptera. I grew up with an extremely nature-aware family: my grandparents had several Buddleja in their garden, attracting some of Britain's brightest and most-colourful butterflies, and my Dad was trapping and recording (and releasing!) moths for his degree. With that, and living near to so many RAF airbases, it's hardly any wonder I was keen to sneak in some eye-spots and roundels.

Working with the same skeletal reference material I had used for the previous illustration, I corrected some of the anatomical issues such as the wings, pectoral girdle and muscle bulk, and fluffed it up a bit more. Between illustrations, Mark Witton's excellent Pterosaurs - Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy was released. If you're into pterosaurs and you don't have it yet, stick on your wish list. It's that good. Anyway, with the anatomical bits and bobs tweaked, I addressed the colour scheme. Rather than repeat the previous effort's colouration, or copy their obvious extant analogues, ocean-going seabirds, I looked to the diurnal cinnabar and burnet moths.

Rhamphorhynchus sporting perhaps-unlikely spots/roundels. But they look pretty. (©2013 Gareth Monger.)

Tyria jacobaeae by Sander van der Molen (under CC BY 2.5)

Not an obvious choice, but judging by the occurrence of large cranial crests in pterosaurs, vision presumably played an important part in their lives, and not just for hunting. So, the red and red-and-cream eyespots are based on burnets and cinnabars (with a dash of tiger moth). The black margins and tips have a deliberate smidge of greeny-blue, also discernible in burnets and cinnabars. They're colours which look good together. Now, these colours are not necessarily to be expected of this type of animal, with bright colours in extant aquatic birds seemingly restricted - with a few exceptions - to those frequenting freshwater environments. But we don't know, and as it wasn't a commission, I thought I'd have some fun with it.

More visible in this rhamph, and not so much in my first, are aktinofibrils, those stiffening fibres which are found in exceptionally well-preserved specimens and which helped to maintain an effective flight surface. I wanted to mix them up with a light rippling in the wing of the animal, not so much to imply a lot of flexibility, but to suggest the animal has a degree of control over it. As a 'specimen illustration', the subject in this image is dead, and is therefore not holding its wing membranes taut. Anyway, I may in the future go back to Rhamphorhynchus in order to correct the issues in this one, namely the ugly arrangement of its manus and the bunched up feet. Yes, it's dead and therefore probably not wrong, but people want to see something reflecting its life appearance, right?

January's 'Bob Art Models' Contest: Winner Announced

On January 22nd I asked three questions, and from the immense pile of names of those who answered correctly, I selected a winner at random. These were the questions:

1. Which famous Hollywood adventurer is best associated with Roy Chapman Andrews? 
2. Which late Jurassic theropod was named to honour Othniel Marsh?
3. Three types of (living) animal were present at Cope's funeral. What were they?

Two people entered, and one of those answered correctly. These are the answers:

1. Henry Jones Jr.

2. Marshosaurus.

3. Tortoise, Gila Monster, Human.

And here is the winner:

A hatful of winners.

Well done to Rob J. Gay, who wins a set of three Bob Art Models greetings cards, depicting Cope, Marsh and Andrews in typical Follenesque stylings. Big thanks to all who entered the competition and shared posts through social media, and to Robert Follen of Bob Art Models for supplying the prize.

Grumpy old men, courtesy of Bob Art Models.

Coming soon: Copy, Right? Plagiarism And Palaeoart. Oh, and that Nyctosaurus book I'm working on.

WIN STUFF At Pteroformer - BAM Greetings Cards

It's January and you lot in the Northern Hemisphere are all feeling low and depleted. So I've been to the bank, rearranged funds and borrowed some cash to bring you this blog's first ever competition. Now, the car I could afford on this blog's budget wasn't really worth towing home to photograph, so I've decided on something a little less corroded and a lot less expensive.

Up for grabs, courtesy of Robert Follen at Bob Art Models, is this set of three greetings cards, each bearing a different famous dinosaur hunter. Robert has spent the last eighteen months building a small company in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, and he wiles away the hours coming up with new and hideous ways to depict otherwise beautiful specimens of celebrity, including such megaliths as Mary Berry (from some cookery show), the befezzled Tommy Cooper and Hammer hero Peter Cushing.

Now, I've known Robert for a good few years; we were in a band and attended the same art college. He eventually went the route of model-making and visual effects and I took up illustration. So I exploited our friendship and pushed him to give the palaeontology community what it so desperately needs: hideously-rendered caricatures of three of palaeontology's best-loved heroes, Roy Chapman Andrews, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. Given how the three characters he chose all look a bit severe to begin with, I think they'd probably not be utterly, utterly offended by his efforts.

Old rivals Cope (left) and Marsh (right) with Roy Chapman Andrews keeping them in check. (©2015 Bob Art Models)

So, all you have to do to win this set of cards is answer these three questions:

1. Which famous Hollywood adventurer is best associated with Roy Chapman Andrews?
2. Which late Jurassic theropod was named to honour Othniel Marsh?
3. Three types of (living) animal were present at Cope's funeral. What were they?

Email your answers to microraptor_at_hotmail_dot_com, and don't forget your name and address.  I'll select a winner at random. Best of luck! Closing date is Thursday February 5th.

Alternatively, buy directly from Bob Art Models. Contact BAM here.

Small print: this competition is not open to employees of Bob Art Models. Sorry, Robert.

Coming up soon: an update and brief overview (so far) of my Nyctosaurus book.

Posterboy For Open Access: Aquilops

After tweaking the papercraft Aquilops americanus skull, made available at SV-POW!, I figured I'd throw together a desktop 'ornament'. A. americanus is fast becoming the unwitting poster boy for open access palaeontology, so it's an apt choice of dinosaur. In keeping with the intentions of the paper's authors, it's freely available. Download the image from here or, if you want the PDF of the Ai file so that you can edit it, email me at microraptor_at_hotmail.com.

Quadrupedal pose perhaps overstated. Don't like it? Change it!

This model is designed to work without glue BUT! glue will make it look better, giving closer, neater joins. It's up to you. Make it better!

Papercraft Aquilops americanus (by Gareth Monger)

It works best printed at the intended size of A3 (420x297mm) but A4 (297x210mm) will work at a push. Print onto thicker stock if possible, say, 250gsm. If you carefully trim the barbed tabs, they should 'click' into the receiver tabs without the need for glue. Score folds for a neater finish. A good craft-knife (or, better still, a scalpel) and a steel rule/straightedge give best results.

Edit it, share it, distribute it. Keep it fun and keep it free.

See SV-POW! for more Aquilops stuff.

New Year Blues Fix: Skulls, Papercraft and Aquilops

Woohoo! Those wonderful chaps at Sauropod Vertebra Picture Of The Week have made available a papercraft skull pattern for Aquilops. Sure, it's (intentionally) simple and it's only really meant to be taped together, but I wondered how far I could push it without extensively reworking it. Having printed it on 250gsm paper stock, I cut out all the fenestrae and orbits and then trimmed the main outline, having estimated where to leave tabs for adhesive. There was a couple of repeated elements, such as the upper margins of the orbits, owing to their being visible in the lateral and dorsal elevations from which the pattern was formed. I merged these where possible.

Partially trimmed skull pattern. (© Matt Wedel)

I used regular PVA as I didn't want any visible adhesives (i.e., tape) and it's pretty strong and easy to handle. All-in-all, it took about 90 minutes to complete. Two files are available at SV-POW! - a pair of smaller skulls and a larger one. I used the larger one, but printed it up twice on an A3 sheet. This was because I cut out some additional elements and attached them to the complete skull in order to give the cheeks and mandible that flared look.

Completed skull, showing additional cheek and mandible elements, cut from a second, identical pattern.

You'll see from the photos that I added various incisions in order to open up the skull so that it better resembled the real thing. Also, a small amount of black paper was inserted to get rid of that 'lit from within' look and keep the nares and orbits nice and shadowy. The result is a fairly pleasing paper skull, which compares fairly well with Garrett Stowe's digital sculpt, in the same article. What a great way to get hold of good, 3-D reference material! With luck, we might see more of these paper templates in the future.

Aquilops americanus papercraft skull, modified from original pattern.

Anyway, there you go. Just a quick one to see in the new year. Big thanks to Matt Wedel whom, along with co-blogger Mike Taylor, I was fortunate enough to meet at SVPCA, last September. Very nice guys. And go here to read the paper on Aquilops americanus.

Farke AA, Maxwell WD, Cifelli RL, Wedel MJ (2014) A Ceratopsian Dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Western North America, and the Biogeography of Neoceratopsia. PLoS ONE 9(12): e112055. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112055