Apes and Pyramides

I recently finished a nice book called ‘The Third Chimpanzee’ written by Jared Diamond. There is hardly a book I have ever read which such a variety of interesting themes. I knew Jared Diamond from a book – Collapse – I have read in my last Christmas holidays and back then I was very happy with that book, too.

Collapse is a very extended argumentation that all civilizations in history which collapsed had a similar pattern for their breakdown. Diamond is talking about the famous people of the Easter Islands (Rapanui) and about the Anazazi (natives of Northern America). I wisely chose the words ‘very extended’ for this book because it has 400 pages and sometimes it was hard to read everything without becoming bored. Nevertheless, after this book my general education had grown and now I understand social and cultural interdependencies on this planet a little bit better.

The main theme of the book ‘The Third Cimpanzee’ is supported by ‘Collapse’. First of all Dimond gives a good overview of how humans became like they are and what herritage we all have in our genes. He gives some good reasons why we could be called a ‘third chimpanzee’. After the first half of the book the theme is shrinking to the consequences of human culture and economy on this planet and where it leads to. It is hard to explain all the intersting facts and arguments in a short post but to give a little taste of some of them here some questions aswered inside the book:

• Why do humans have such a complex emotional and social sturcture, including love?
• Should we give chimpanzees human rights?
• Why was the past not a ‘Golden Age’ (contrary to Rousseau)?
• Why, based on our experiece, we will never meet alien life?
• Why there are human races and why it is an absolute nonsense to make a difference between races?
• Is it a sheer accident that the western world dominates the globe?
• etc.

Down Under – Part Three

After the death of the dinosaurs there was a new era to begin – the Cenozoic which is still ongoing in the present. Those eras are not as far away and there were some foundations set for our present life on earth. Again, enjoy it …

 Walking with Prehistoric Beast – Intro

Walking with Prehistoric Beast 1 (Part 1/3) – Eocene
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 1 (Part 2/3) – Eocene
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 1 (Part 3/3) – Eocene

Walking with Prehistoric Beast 2 (Part 1/3) – Late Eocene
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 2 (Part 2/3) – Late Eocene
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 2 (Part 3/3) – Late Eocene

Walking with Prehistoric Beast 3 (Part 1/3) – Oligocene
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 3 (Part 2/3) – Oligocene
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 3 (Part 3/3) – Oligocene

Walking with Prehistoric Beast 4 (Part 1/3) – Piacenzian
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 4 (Part 2/3) – Piacenzian
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 4 (Part 3/3) – Piacenzian

Walking with Prehistoric Beast 5 (Part 1/3) – Early Pleistocene
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 5 (Part 2/3) – Early Pleistocene
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 5 (Part 3/3) – Early Pleistocene

Walking with Prehistoric Beast 6 (Part 1/3) – Holocene
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 6 (Part 2/3) – Holocene
Walking with Prehistoric Beast 6 (Part 3/3) – Holocene

By the way, the Holocene is also know as the persent.

Down Under – Part Two

I hope you enjoyed the journey back into the days before the dinosarus. Now I want to give you the links for a new era in biodiversity: the Mesozoic. Enjoy the show!

Walking with Dinosaurs – Intro

Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 1 (1/3) - Late Triassic 
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 1 (2/3) - Late Triassic
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 1 (3/3) - Late Triassic

Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 2 (1/3) - Late Jurrasic
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 2 (2/3) - Late Jurrasic
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 2 (3/3) - Late Jurrasic

Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 3 (1/3) - Late Triassic/Sea
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 3 (2/3) - Late Triassic/Sea
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 3 (3/3) - Late Triassic/Sea

Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 4 (1/3) - Early Cretaceous
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 4 (2/3) - Early Cretaceous
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 4 (3/3) – Early Cretaceous

Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 5 (1/3) - Albian (Early Cretaceous)
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 5 (2/3) - Albian (Early Cretaceous)
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 5 (3/3) - Albian (Early Cretaceous)

Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 6 (1/3) - Maastrichan (Late Cretaceous)
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 6 (2/3) - Maastrichan (Late Cretaceous)
Walking with Dinosaurs – Episode 6 (3/3) – Maastrichan (Late Cretaceous)

Feathered Dinosaurs

Maybe you’ve realized that there are more and more pictures or movies where you can see dinosaurs covered with small feathers. Why did those artist do that? Are there profound fossils or other data which support that idea?

There are fossils which show feathers on dinosaurs. The earliest are dated at the Early Cretaceous (some 124 million years ago). It is important to add at this point that we cannot expect too much fossil founds with feathers in the future because there had to be a number of lucky circumstances in the past came together to preserve feather structures. Those circumstance must have been, for example, hot vulcano ashes. A blog fellow made this picutre at a Natural History Museum in Vienna:

He stated that it looks quite trashy and that the artists used feathers of emus or ostriches to cover the dinosaur. But these artist are not as wrong as it looked on the first sight. Ostriches, for example, have no feathers for flying as dinosarus had have, too. Today, scientists do not really know which type of feathers or fibres dinosaurs had. This demands further investigations. Meanwhile some are pretty sure that the fossils shows down-feathers which are similar to birds. Wiki states:

Despite doubts the fossil feathers have roughly the same appearance as those of birds fossilized in the same locality, so there is no serious reason to think they are of different nature; moreover, no non-theropod fossil from the same site shows such an artifact, but sometimes show unambiguous hair (some mammals) or scales (some reptiles).
— ‘Feathered Dinosarus, Fossil evidence’ / Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A big questions is the advantage of therapoda to have feathers. One is temperature isolation which helps mainly younger or smaller dinosaurs to regulate their heat in a desert environment. An other very plausible explanation is courtship. But now I want to show you how those ‘feathers’ look on a fossil. Therer are nice pictures on the website of the ‘American Museum of Natural History’. When you look on the detailed picutre it is not very hard to realize the feather strucutres. More data you can find on http://research.amnh.org/vertpaleo/dinobird.html

This example is only one of many but there aren’t enough fossils to determine which dinsaurs had feathers and which not. But it is possible to determine it without profound fossil documentation. Paleontologist use in such cases the cladistic analysis. They build ‘cladistic trees’ or ‘cladograms’ to order all life forms. An analysis on feathered dinosaurs allows to state that even the gigantic Tyrannosaurs had feathers but only in ‘an early stage after hatching’. Wiki states concerning this issue:

In particular, the smaller theropod species may all have had feathers and possibly even the larger theropods (for instance T. rex) may have had feathers, in their early stages of development after hatching. Whereas these smaller animals may have benefitted from the insulation of feathers, large adult theropods are unlikely to have had feathers, since inertial heat retention would likely be sufficient to manage heat. Retention of internal heat may even have become a problem, had these very large creatures been feathered.

Fossil feather impressions are extremely rare; therefore only a few feathered dinosaurs have been identified so far. However, through a process called phylogenetic bracketing, scientists can infer the presence of feathers on poorly-preserved specimens. All fossil feather specimens have been found to show certain similarities. Due to these similarities and through developmental research almost all scientists agree that feathers could only have evolved once in dinosaurs. Feathers would then have been passed down to all later, more derived species (although it is possible that some lineages lost feathers secondarily).
— Feathered Dinosaurs, Taxonomy and the inference of feathers in other dinosaurs / Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

When you want to read more of this stuff check out the ‘Journal of Dinosaur Paleontology’.

Down Under – Part One

After I visited the ‘Senkenberg Museum’ I asked myself all the time how it could have looked like in those past eras on this earht. But with the help of brilliant scientists and modern computer graphics it is possible to bring those eras back to life. BBC presented in the past years three series of documentaries which try to present us an example how those animals could have looked in reality.

In fact the series started with ‘Walking with Dinosarus’ but to be in the right time order I would start with the series ‘Walking with Monsters’ which includes the complete Paleozoic and ends in the dawn of the Early Triassic (already the Mesozoic):

Walking with Monsters (Part 1/12) – Intro
Walking with Monsters (Part 2/12) – Cambrian/Ordovician
Walking with Monsters (Part 3/12) – Selurian
Walking with Monsters (Part 4/12) – Devonian
Walking with Monsters (Part 5/12) – Carboniferous
Walking with Monsters (Part 6/12) – Carboniferous 2
Walking with Monsters (Part 7/12) – Early Permian 1
Walking with Monsters (Part 8/12) – Early Permian 2
Walking with Monsters (Part 9/12) – Early Permian 3/Late Permian
Walking with Monsters (Part 10/12) – Late Permian 2
Walking with Monsters (Part 11/12) – Late Permian 3/Early Triassic
Walking with Monsters (Part 12/12) – Early Triassic 2

Moving Continents

I searched at ‘Google Earth’ for some usable paleogeographic maps but did not find very useful overlays. So I decided to search for actual and good maps (2D) in the internet and laid them over the globe. I took the maps from

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/ 

Here you can find the KMZ-file:

Paleogeographic Maps

Jurrasic Day

In my vecations I had the chance to visit the ‘Senkenberg Museum’ in Frankfurt. It is a Museum of Natural History and concerning fossils and paleontology one of the first addresses in Germany. I am very interested in paleontology so it was very exciting for me to see all those ‘dead’ animals.

In fact it is an awesome feeling to stand beyond such an huge skeleton like the Tyrannosaurus. And when I imagined what this dinosaur had looked like with flesh on the bones – that made me very perplexed.

The whole museum is worth a visit. There are a lot of interesting fossils like dinosaurs, fish, and ‘modern day’ bones like whales. They have even some hair and real blood of a mammoth. What I found really interesting are some very old fossils dated in the Cambrium, a epoch I am especially interested in.

In the 2nd and 3rd floor there were mainly primed wild animals what was quite boring. After a short visit in these floors I returned to the 1st floor and studied some samples in detail. Have you ever seen real dinosaur skin in real? They have a mummified Edmontosaurs, very interesting!