Day of the Diplodocids

Welcome, true believers, to a Very Special installment of Noah's Ravens. As you have no doubt seen while scrolling through Facebook or Twitter or while idly surfing the web, yesterday marked the appearance of a new (very long) paper reviewing the diplodocid sauropods, 'A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)' by Emanuel Tschopp, Octávio Mateus, and Roger B J Benson, published open-access in PeerJ. Although I'm certain you've all had time to read it, pore lovingly over the cladograms, savour each and every word about each and every specimen, and completely lose yourself in the figures depicting small chunks of bone, I thought it might be nice to have a brief(ish) round-up post that covers some of the big ideas of the paper in a condensed(ish), hopefully-easy(ish) read.

It was nice knowing you, Diplodocus longus, but all good things
must come to an end. Read on to find out why. Legs belonging to
The Sauropod Formerly Known As Diplodocus longus at centre.
[photograph by the author]

Smiley Smilodon

...Meow? [photo by the author]

If there is one animal that could be considered the living (or, ah, once-living) emblem of the Ice Age, that animal is undoubtedly the woolly mammoth. But second place is nothing to sneeze at, and second place is firmly defended by a pair of 20-centimetre-long canine teeth. Yes, in the popular imagination, the second-most iconic animal of the Ice Age is the ferocious sabretooth tiger.

It's rather shame that there's not really such a creature as a sabretooth tiger.

Frederic Loomis Discovers Everything, Episode 1: Raiders of the Lost Continent

Around three million years ago, South America became connected to North America via the Isthmus of Panama, and an event called the Great American Biotic Interchange took place, where wildlife from South America moved north and vice versa. Prior to this, South America had been isolated from most of the rest of the world since the Cretaceous Period, and connected only to Antarctica until they separated about 30 million years ago, allowing little exchange of wildlife from other places in world. As such, South America was a 'lost continent,' a strange land cut off almost completely from the rest of the world, with its own array of unique organisms, the characters in their own isolated evolutionary story. It was into this strange world that the North American emigrants came some three million years ago, and it was into the fossil echoes of this world that a very different group of North Americans came in the early 20th century.

Some Patagonian fossils from the Cenozoic Era. They include notoungulates (top row
and left middle row) such as the sheep-sized digger Mesotherium (top centre), superficially
elephantine astrapotheres (lower jaw of Parastrapotherium, middle right), and the extant
xenarthrans (bottom row), including the flattened armour of an armadillo.
[photograph by the author]

'Footmarks On Stone,' or, Why This Blog Is Called Noah's Ravens

The year is 1802. In South Hadley, Massachusetts, a farmer called Pliny Moody discovers something strange in a slab of rock. Closer investigation seems to indicate that the unusual markings in the rock are footprints, with three narrow, spread-out toes, very similar to the footprints of birds.

The mysterious track-maker was referred to as 'Noah's Raven,' in reference to the first bird set out from the ark after the flood in the book of Genesis; presumably these footprints were thought to have been made by the raven, which flew 'back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth,' and, apparently, eventually came to land in western Massachusetts.

The 'Noah's Raven' specimen at the Beneski. [photograph by the author]

Welcome To the Museum

Welcome to Noah's Ravens, the blog where I'll explore the collections of the Beneski Museum of Natural History, the natural history collection at Massachusetts's Amherst College. It is also my current place of employment; I'm a first-year student at Amherst and work shifts as a museum docent and tour guide. As a hopeful future palaeontologist, it's basically a dream job made real.

Here on Noah's Ravens, I intend to take a closer look at some of the specimens in the Beneski's rather extensive collections, which include giant mammals of the Pleistocene, one of the world's largest assemblages of dinosaur tracks, and a lot of oreodonts. Seriously, there are loads of oreodonts.

The author, with the skull of one of the aforementioned oreodonts. 

I'm going to look for stories behind the fossils, to catch a glimpse of their often-interesting human histories as well as their natural histories. There will likely be diversions from the Beneski Museum as well, and maybe even slight dips into my personal life (natural history-related dips, of course). I do hope you'll find this blog interesting, and — if you don't already — come to share my fascination with the specimens that call this museum home.

— M

(PS — Wondering about the blog title? That'll need a post of its own...)