National Fossil Day 2014

I just looked at my calendar and realized that it was about time for National Fossil Day!
This year celebrates the Mesozoic ecosystems, and we have evidence of one of these right here in Connecticut! Head out to visit Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill!

It's Cephalopod Week!

Things are busy, so you won't hear too much from me, but it is Cephalopod Week!
Learn more about our nautiloid and coleoid friends from NPR's Science Friday.
Here's an extinct ammonoid for you from the Yale Peabody Museum:

Geolex gets a facelift

Nancy Stamm and the USGS have performed those of us who work in natural history collections a huge service by developing and maintaining the Geolex site. For those of you who don't know, this is a huge compilation of stratigraphic names from around the United States. It includes reference histories for units, preferred names, and updated names. You might be asking yourself how could it possibly get any better, right?
Well, it did. The new and improved Geolex interface is sleek and useful. Added benefits to the new version of the site include additional "Stratigraphic Resources." Here you'll find the old card files scanned and uploaded, pdfs of lexicons and stratigraphic revision papers, links to state surveys, an interactive geologic mapview, and an interactive topographic mapview.
My thanks to Nancy Stamm and her helpers at the USGS!

iDigBio's Push for Digitization

Some of you may have heard of a little group called iDigBio. It started a few years back with a big grant from NSF. It is working to help natural history collections around the United States (both university collections and museum collections) digitize their materials. I have worked with iDigBio on various projects over the last few years, and I wanted to extol their virtues here briefly.

iDigBio (which stands for Integrated Digitized Biocollections) has been the first group I know of that has really had the funding, the national scope, and the cooperation of many different institutions and groups to be able to bring together researchers and staff from all types of biological collections. iDigBio has hosted workshops on a variety of topics. They have put together working groups that have created documents to help guide other institutions as they begin (or continue) their digitization journey. If you haven't encountered iDigBio yet, take a minute to check it out: http://www.idigbio.org.
Consider this the first of a series of posts about different aspects of iDigBio, and what it is doing to help our country's museums, university collections, researchers, students, and you.

The government is still shutdown.

National Fossil Day is still going to happen!!! Though you can't check things out on the National Parks Service website, you can still check with your local museum to see what's happening. Here are links to just a few of the fun activities going on around the country tomorrow:
Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati, OH http://www.cincymuseum.org/events/fossil-week
American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY http://www.amnh.org/plan-your-visit/school-or-camp-group-visit/getting-started/programs-for-school-groups/drop-in-events-for-school-groups/national-fossil-day
Field Museum, Chicago, IL http://fieldmuseum.org/happening/national-fossil-day
Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, MT http://www.museumoftherockies.org/Calendar/tabid/62/ItemId/1845/d/20131015/vw/3/Default.aspx

Check out your local museum's website to see if they have anything fun planned for tomorrow!

It's coming!

National Fossil Day 2013 is just around the corner!

See if your local museum is doing anything special to celebrate! If they've got nothing planned, then plan your own special activities. Learn about your state's official fossil or organize a fossil drawing contest!
http://nature.nps.gov/geology/nationalfossilday/overview.cfm

Moroccan Marrellomorphs part 2

It took me forever and a day, but here are the closeups of the marrellomorph I mentioned back in February:

Besides the sheer aesthetic beauty of the specimen, it has lovely preservation of gill-like appendages on its trunk.

Here's a closeup of the bottom left photo: 

Moroccan Marrellomorphs

It's a wintry morning here in Connecticut, so I decided to add a little bit of desert sunshine to the world. I have been unpacking a new shipment of Moroccan fossils that we just received, and I came across this little beauty:

I know the picture isn't great, but I don't have a full camera set up out there. Maybe soon I'll take some close up shots with the microscope so that you can see its gills!

Selling science

A colleague of mine recently posted this article about the commercialization of fossils and its detrimental effect on the science of paleontology.

Merry Christmas!

An extremely belated Happy Fossil Day!

I'm exactly two months late, but I love all of the artwork associated with this wonderful day, so here goes:
Happy Fossil Day!

No. 7. Isotelus megistos

"No. 7. Isotelus megistos, with cotemporary fossils, Adams County, Ohio. Restored from fragments Nos. 1 to 5 inclusive, by Locke." - thus reads the label on the back of my favorite specimen in the entire collection. It's a plaster reconstruction. It's a little bigger than it should be (but only a little). It has plaster casts of other critters that lived at the same time surrounding it like garnishes around a Thanksgiving turkey. I love it. No matter what kind of beautiful specimens I come across, I always fall back on my old favorite - No. 7.

Lobsters vs. crabs - a crustacean showdown!

In cataloging some reprints here at the museum, I came across a guide leaflet from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) from 1929. It is a small leaflet entitled, "Outposts of the Sea," by Roy Miner, and it details some aspects of intertidal and shallow sea life. It also has an awesome subtitle, "The animals of the tidal realm - Marine hosts that today assail our continental borders, endeavoring to repeat the conquest attained ages ago by the ancestors of the present land-animals." How awesome is that? I am now envisioning an army of lobsters crawling onto the beach with their chelae (claws) raised in protest at our occupation of the land.
Roy Waldo Miner (curator of Marine Life at the AMNH) wrote an informative and enlightening look at the shallow seas that surround our country and the creatures who inhabit it. He touches on all of the major groups including arthropods, echinoderms, molluscs, cnidarians, and an assortment of "worms".

What initially caught my eye about this leaflet is the drawing on the cover that shows a lobster attempting to grab a crab in its claws. My first thought was that this was a cute bit of whimsy, but not knowing much about lobster and crab interactions I left it at that. There is another picture in this leaflet that shows the same type of scene: a photograph of a diorama in which a lobster is attempting to "catch" a crab.

Curiosity finally getting the better or me, I asked our resident crab expert about the paper. Much to my surprise, I learned that the American lobster (Homarus americanus) does indeed catch and eat crabs (notably Cancer borealis and C. irroratus). A recent paper published by J. M. Hanson found that half of a lobster's diet (this being a lobster with a carapace of at least 4cm) was made up of rock crabs (Cancer irroratus). While it has been suggested (see Drew, 2011) that the Cancer crabs are evolving thicker, stronger carapaces in the eternal arms race of the sea, my money is definitely on the lobster winning in the lobster-crab showdown.

Drew, D. J. 2011. "A Comparative Morphometric Analysis of Cancer borealis Stimpson, 1859 and C. irroratus Say, 1817 (Decapoda: Brachyura: Cancridae) in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean." Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, vol. 52, no. 2, p.241-254.

Hanson, J. M. 2009. "Predator-prey interactions of American lobster (Homarus americanus) in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada." New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, vol. 43, no. 1, p.69-88.

Snorkeling the past

A friend of mine is on her way to China to study the end-Permian mass extinction. Follow her exploits here.

Genus of the day!

Occasionally I come across an awesome genus. Not necessarily amazing in appearance, not always really cool in its mode of life, but definitely bearing an intriguing name. Today's come from the nautiloids. Mysterioceras - an Ordovician orthocerid nautiloid from Tasmania and the former USSR. We don't actually have any in our collection; I was cataloging a specimen of Campyloceras, and Mysterioceras is on the same page in the Treatise.

snails in the desert

When I think of deserts, I think of sand, heat, and aridity. Now, I know this isn't true for all deserts, but I think it's fair to describe the Sahara Desert in this way. What I don't think of when I think of deserts are snails - small molluscs who have a shell and an operculum (think of it as the front door of the snail's house that he can close as needed), but who also need to keep their muscular foot moist.
I was a little surprised to come across some snails from the Kurkur Oasis in Egypt here in the collection. Okay, so they're terrestrial (good because there's no ocean in the Sahara Desert) and they're from the Pleistocene (also good because there wasn't an ocean there at this point in time either), and they lived in an oasis (which by its very name suggests there is some moisture). But they're still snails. How do snails cross an 'ocean' of sand to find these oases? Darwin suggested passive dispersal that was probably carried out by birds, and this explanation has been fairly well accepted ever since.
More recently human movements and fishery activities have further spread certain organisms, but this is almost certainly not the case for these Pleistocene snails. At any rate, these snails made it into the desert and then back across the ocean to Connecticut.

 As described by the collector, Egbert Leigh, Jr., "this fauna bears a striking resemblance to a fauna in a small, nearly stagnant cove of Lake Carnegie, Princeton, New Jersey" (p.514, Desert and River in Nubia, Butzer and Hansen, 1968).
So, there you have it - stagnant pools in the middle of the desert.

A little bit of whimsy

I am generally fairly serious in this blog, but every now and then a fossil comes along that makes me giggle. Today it came from Florida. More specifically, it came from the Pleistocene deposits south of Lake Okeechobee. These deposits are renowned for the molluscan fauna that is present in them (and if you want to check out more of the molluscan fauna, I recommend Heilprin's Explorations on the west coast of Florida and in the Okeechobee wilderness from 1887 - some of the taxonomic names have been revised, but it is still a great overview).
 Today's specimen comes from a lot of five Trivia pediculus collected by a CT resident, and then donated to the Peabody Museum in 1947. Four of the specimens were typical Trivia specimens. The fifth had been colonized by two barnacles.

YPM.069233 - Trivia pediculus

Locke's Cabinet

Dr. John Locke was a professor in Cincinnati between 1835 and 1856. He was interested in several subjects ranging from geology and hydrology to electricity and magnetism. Locke invented many things, but his most significant invention was an electro-chronograph developed for the U.S. Coast Survey in 1848.

According to the American National Biography, "When attached to the second hand of a clock and connected to a telegraphic circuit, the electro-chronograph made clocks beat simultaneously all along the telegraph line and produced a paper strip chart that recorded events with an accuracy of one hundredth of a second. In an era before the development of time standards, this instrument was invaluable for determining longitudes and for precise observations in physics, geophysics, and astronomy. He received an award of $10,000 from Congress for his invention"
Of more interest to me is Dr. Locke's fossil cabinet. He was active in local scientific societies, and he even described a few species of trilobites (1838, "Prof. Locke's geological report, communicated by the Governor to the General Assembly of Ohio. December, 1838." Second Annual Report on the Geological Survey of Ohio, p.201-286. [in which he describes Isotelus maximus], and 1843, "Notice of a new trilobite, Ceraurus crosotus." American Journal of Science. 44: 436). In our collection we have several plaster casts of specimens from Dr. Locke's cabinet. I intend to photograph and include these here on this blog.

So, first up is Number 39. Strophomena alternata with an encrinite [Streptaster vorticellatus] attached, 6 miles of Cincinnati. (YPM 112989).

AnomaLOLcaris

For the last few years, cats have been talking on the internet. I am referring to the prevalence of lolcats on the internet. For those who are not familiar with lolcats, here is a definition from the icanhascheezburger.com website: "a Lolcat is a funny pic of a cat paired with a caption (usually in lolspeak) that makes you lol! It’s pronounced as LOL-cat. Lolspeak is a language built on bad grammar, and Internet slang. For example: 'omg, uz don know lolspeak? srsly!!!1?'
At this point you are probably wondering what a blog about invertebrate fossils has to do with captioned photos of cats. Well, the idea of lolcats has spread to other animals, and following a recent article in Nature, the lolcat idea has spread all the way back to the Burgess Shale. Ed Yong, a science writer in London, has made an AnomaLOLcaris.  

For those who may have a hard time reading lolspeak, this anomalocaridid is saying, "I am in your Burgess Shale, confusing your scientists." This refers to the history of the discoveries and reconstruction of Anomalocaris. Initially, the forward appendages were described as Anomalocaris - "strange shrimp" - because they were never found with heads. A round 'jellyfish'-like specimen was described as Peytoia. It wasn't until 1979 that the 'shrimp' were recognized as appendages in a paper by Derek Briggs (Palaeontology. v. 22, part 3; pp.631-664. "Anomalocaris, the largest known Cambrian arthropod"). In a 1985 paper entitled, "The largest Cambrian animal, Anomalocaris, Burgess Shale, British Columbia," (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B v.309, pp. 569-609) Dr. Briggs and his colleague, Dr. Harry Whittington, redescribe Anomalocaris as a swimming arthropod with shrimp-like appendages at the front, and a round disc-like mouth ("Peytoia").

"Peytoia" YPM 5825

Anomalocaris YPM 35138

National Fossil Day 2011

My apologies for being behind the times! It seems that National Fossil Day always falls on a Wednesday, so if you celebrated yesterday, good for you! If (like me) you missed it, go ahead and celebrate today - the fossils won't mind. Honestly, what's an extra day when you've been dead for four hundred million years?
 Here's the link to this year's winning entries in the National Park Service's art contest. And here's my favorite from the drawings:

This year's theme was "Fossils in my backyard." This lovely drawing was done by Daniel, a 12 year old from Sharon, WI. I especially love the corals encrusting the letters - very nice!

And for my mollusk-loving friends, check out the honorable mention in the 19 and up category (courtesy of H. Sherrie Shepherd in North Little Rock, AR: