First class

I collect teeth and £2 coins. I used to collect the little grey rubbery bits from the inside of fizzy drink bottles. Despite once being given a packet of sticky, fiddly little paper hinges and an envelope of stamps of the world, I've never collected stamps.

This morning, as my normal Post Office is closed for refurbishment, I went a little further afield. And there, off-guard, in the unfamiliar surroundings of St Mary's Street Post Office, I accidentally collected some stamps. It was a set of ten, in a clear envelope, called Dinosaurs - Fossil Reptiles From The UK. Of the ten, only six are actually dinosaurs, but I guess Dinosaurs makes for a more immediate title, and it'll surely sell more than Massive Reptiles of the Olden Days would have.

The set I got comes on a fold-out backing card, with lots of information on the timeline of dinosaur discoveries, pioneering palaeontologists, important localities, and then stuff on the reptiles themselves. I suppose I should actually get some to use as stamps, too. I had a look at the Royal Mail site to see how they were being sold. Being new to stamp collecting, I didn't realise there was a considerable range of options. Framed sets, canvas prints, badges... Anyway. I suppose my point is that were you ever to consider collecting stamps, these ones are nice. 

In the garden

 I've been asked to give a talk on fossils to accompany an art exhibition currently running at the Botanic Gardens. It's by the artist Andy Hope 1930, and called When Dinosaurs Become Modernists. He is fond of superheroes, dinosaurs and the collision of cultural iconography. I went to have a look a couple of weekends ago.

I have to tailor the talk to echo the themes of the exhibition somehow, which means I can't very easily rework talks I've given in the past on the fossil trade, and fossils in general. I thought maybe a way in would be to look at how dinosaurs are effectively the pop stars of palaeontology, and how perhaps that draw can be used to engage people with the less spectacular aspects of the science. There's no denying the appeal of dinosaurs. The artist is happy to place them in the same frame of reference as superheroes - though dinosaurs have the added benefit of having actually lived. Their reality is at the comfortable distance of tens of millions of years, but these icons once walked the same planet we do.

Our perception of dinosaurs is undeniably influenced by popular culture, and probably more than popular culture is influenced by scientific discovery. It'd be nice to have the bulk of our information a little more first-hand, but realistically that's not likely to happen, despite the success of such series as Walking with Dinosaurs and Planet Dinosaur. There's a celebrity pecking order of dinosauria which has changed a little over the years. The hall of fame of twenty years ago - Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops et al - that informed the production of plastic toys and the cast of movies has lost Brontosaurus to the rigours of scientific nomenclature, but gained (a heavily made-over) Velociraptor and Spinosaurus. Entry to the hall of fame requires a prominent role in a blockbuster, not an 80% percent complete spinal column or well-preserved dentition.

Moving away from dinosaurs I think I'll be able to drift into the role of fossils in mythology and folklore. There are plenty of stories there - ammonites as snakestones, belemnites as thunderbolts, the origins of dragons, Nessie, and so on. I'll see what I can find by way of physical example to illustrate a few points. That always helps. Anyway. The talk is at Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Garden, on Saturday the 15th of December. By then, hopefully, I'll have worked out what I'm going to say.

Feathered

The idea that birds and dinosaurs were closely related actually appeared fairly early on - Archaeopteryx had been named in 1861, two years after Darwin had published some book or other, and the first complete specimen was discovered later in the same year. From the same Solnhofen limestone, the little theropod Compsognathus had been known for a couple of years, and Thomas Huxley compared the two, concluding birds were obviously descendants of carnivorous dinosaurs.

There was some opposition to this idea at the time, and thinking on the origins of birds drifted for a while before more evidence was uncovered in the 1960s and 70s. By the end of the 70s the academic world had been convinced and the concept that birds were pretty much dinosaurs began to filter through to general public consciousness. The ash deposit finds at Liaoning in China in the 90s proved a real treasure trove and are still producing a string of important feathered dinosaur discoveries. I was at the Tucson trade fair when National Geographic's Archaeoraptor was bought by The Dinosaur Museum. The magazine were contacted and made a big splash with this supposed dinosaur-bird, which embarrassingly turned out to be two animals pieced together. The story had a happy ending, though, as a trip to the source turned up the other half to one of specimens - Microraptor - which in itself was hugely significant. 


A recent find from the Solnhofen formation, the awkwardly titled Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, is the first theropod found with feathers that's not a close relative of birds. This seems to confirm suspicions that feathers were more than just the privilege of a certain group - coelurosaurs - and were more widely developed amongst theropods in general. There will be a lot more to learn about dinosaur feathers - as more are found, and as the techniques for studying them develop.

Editorial

There's a story on The Guardian's site at the moment that's not of great interest for its content, but is well worth a look for the strange title and sub-heading that have been chosen to introduce the piece.

The article itself is about the recent research which suggests dinosaurs may have been lighter than we'd previously thought. Not really a huge surprise, and obviously our understanding of dinosaur anatomy has always been an on-going process. The title, weirdly, is:

If dinosaurs weren't actually that big, what else don't scientists know?

Firstly, the article doesn't refer to any new perception of their size - just their weight. Dinosaurs were actually 'that big'. If anything, estimations of size have tended to be on the increase recently as soft tissue in the spinal column is factored into the figures a little more heavily. Secondly, there's an awful lot scientists don't know. Is that any surprise? Not to scientists. Moving on to the sub-heading:

News that dinosaurs were not the lumbering beasts that Jurassic Park led us to believe shows that science is not infallible

Again, slightly bizarre, certainly in relation to the actual content of the piece below it. Jurassic Park didn't really hold itself up as a documentary based on cutting edge palaeobiology. It was a blockbuster movie. Besides - a few of the dinosaurs featured weren't really lumbering much of the time. Often it was the jumping, running and biting that made them exciting and the film such a success. And then to the end of the sentence - 'shows that science is not infallible'. There really seems to be an agenda here; science doesn't claim to be infallible. Far from it. Palaeontology is a science, and like other sciences, it's largely dependent on new information, new finds informing a constantly changing (evolving?) best-fit scenario. Mistaken ideas and views from the past are tweaked or discarded as and when we find out more, and the process moves on. The author spends pretty much all of his article discussing the history of dinosaur anatomical theory, so the clash in tone of the body of the piece with its headers is so jarring you have to assume they were written by somebody else. I think I'd be more than a little irritated were I the journalist. Headlines are written in bigger type for a reason; they catch the eye and give the reader some indication of whether or not the text below will be of interest to them. Those that don't bother reading the piece will be left with an unrepresentative and unfair perception of the author.