Tag: Michael J. Polcyn

SMU 2015 research efforts broadly noted in a variety of ways for world-changing impact

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 8, 2016

SMU scientists and their research have a global reach that is frequently noted, beyond peer publications and media mentions.

By Margaret Allen
SMU News & Communications
It was a good year for SMU faculty and student research efforts. Here is a small sampling of public and published acknowledgements during 2015:

Hot topic merits open access
Taylor & Francis, publisher of the online journal Environmental Education Research, lifted its subscription-only requirement to meet demand for an article on how climate change is taught to middle-schoolers in California.

Co-author of the research was Diego Román, assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.

Román’s research revealed that California textbooks are teaching sixth graders that climate change is a controversial debate stemming from differing opinions, rather than a scientific conclusion based on rigorous scientific evidence.

The article, “Textbooks of doubt: Using systemic functional analysis to explore the framing of climate change in middle-school science textbooks,” published in September. The finding generated such strong interest that Taylor & Francis opened access to the article.

Research makes the cover of Biochemistry
Drugs important in the battle against cancer were tested in a virtual lab by SMU biology professors to see how they would behave in the human cell.

A computer-generated composite image of the simulation made the Dec. 15 cover of the journal Biochemistry.

Scientific articles about discoveries from the simulation were also published in the peer review journals Biochemistry and in Pharmacology Research & Perspectives.

The researchers tested the drugs by simulating their interaction in a computer-generated model of one of the cell’s key molecular pumps — the protein P-glycoprotein, or P-gp. Outcomes of interest were then tested in the Wise-Vogel wet lab.

The ongoing research is the work of biochemists John Wise, associate professor, and Pia Vogel, professor and director of the SMU Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery in Dedman College. Assisting them were a team of SMU graduate and undergraduate students.

The researchers developed the model to overcome the problem of relying on traditional static images for the structure of P-gp. The simulation makes it possible for researchers to dock nearly any drug in the protein and see how it behaves, then test those of interest in an actual lab.

To date, the researchers have run millions of compounds through the pump and have discovered some that are promising for development into pharmaceutical drugs to battle cancer.

Click here to read more about the research.

SMU, Simpson Rowe, sexual assault, video

Strong interest in research on sexual victimization
Teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and after practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment, according to three professors from the SMU Department of Psychology.

The finding was reported in Behavior Therapy. The article was one of the psychology journal’s most heavily shared and mentioned articles across social media, blogs and news outlets during 2015, the publisher announced.

The study was the work of Dedman College faculty Lorelei Simpson Rowe, associate professor and Psychology Department graduate program co-director; Ernest Jouriles, professor; and Renee McDonald, SMU associate dean for research and academic affairs.

The journal’s publisher, Elsevier, temporarily has lifted its subscription requirement on the article, “Reducing Sexual Victimization Among Adolescent Girls: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Trial of My Voice, My Choice,” and has opened it to free access for three months.

Click here to read more about the research.

Consumers assume bigger price equals better quality
Even when competing firms can credibly disclose the positive attributes of their products to buyers, they may not do so.

Instead, they find it more lucrative to “signal” quality through the prices they charge, typically working on the assumption that shoppers think a high price indicates high quality. The resulting high prices hurt buyers, and may create a case for mandatory disclosure of quality through public policy.

That was a finding of the research of Dedman College’s Santanu Roy, professor, Department of Economics. Roy’s article about the research was published in February in one of the blue-ribbon journals, and the oldest, in the field, The Economic Journal.

Published by the U.K.’s Royal Economic Society, The Economic Journal is one of the founding journals of modern economics. The journal issued a media briefing about the paper, “Competition, Disclosure and Signaling,” typically reserved for academic papers of broad public interest.

Chemistry research group edits special issue
Chemistry professors Dieter Cremer and Elfi Kraka, who lead SMU’s Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Group, were guest editors of a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Physical Chemistry. The issue published in March.

The Computational and Theoretical research group, called CATCO for short, is a union of computational and theoretical chemistry scientists at SMU. Their focus is research in computational chemistry, educating and training graduate and undergraduate students, disseminating and explaining results of their research to the broader public, and programming computers for the calculation of molecules and molecular aggregates.

The special issue of Physical Chemistry included 40 contributions from participants of a four-day conference in Dallas in March 2014 that was hosted by CATCO. The 25th Austin Symposium drew 108 participants from 22 different countries who, combined, presented eight plenary talks, 60 lectures and about 40 posters.

CATCO presented its research with contributions from Cremer and Kraka, as well as Marek Freindorf, research assistant professor; Wenli Zou, visiting professor; Robert Kalescky, post-doctoral fellow; and graduate students Alan Humason, Thomas Sexton, Dani Setlawan and Vytor Oliveira.

There have been more than 75 graduate students and research associates working in the CATCO group, which originally was formed at the University of Cologne, Germany, before moving to SMU in 2009.

Vertebrate paleontology recognized with proclamation
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings proclaimed Oct. 11-17, 2015 Vertebrate Paleontology week in Dallas on behalf of the Dallas City Council.

The proclamation honored the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which was jointly hosted by SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College and the Perot Museum of Science and Nature. The conference drew to Dallas some 1,200 scientists from around the world.

Making research presentations or presenting research posters were: faculty members Bonnie Jacobs, Louis Jacobs, Michael Polcyn, Neil Tabor and Dale Winkler; adjunct research assistant professor Alisa Winkler; research staff member Kurt Ferguson; post-doctoral researchers T. Scott Myers and Lauren Michael; and graduate students Matthew Clemens, John Graf, Gary Johnson and Kate Andrzejewski.

The host committee co-chairs were Anthony Fiorillo, adjunct research professor; and Louis Jacobs, professor. Committee members included Polcyn; Christopher Strganac, graduate student; Diana Vineyard, research associate; and research professor Dale Winkler.

KERA radio reporter Kat Chow filed a report from the conference, explaining to listeners the science of vertebrate paleontology, which exposes the past, present and future of life on earth by studying fossils of animals that had backbones.

SMU earthquake scientists rock scientific journal

Modelled pressure changes caused by injection and production. (Nature Communications/SMU)

Findings by the SMU earthquake team reverberated across the nation with publication of their scientific article in the prestigious British interdisciplinary journal Nature, ranked as one of the world’s most cited scientific journals.

The article reported that the SMU-led seismology team found that high volumes of wastewater injection combined with saltwater extraction from natural gas wells is the most likely cause of unusually frequent earthquakes occurring in the Dallas-Fort Worth area near the small community of Azle.

The research was the work of Dedman College faculty Matthew Hornbach, associate professor of geophysics; Heather DeShon, associate professor of geophysics; Brian Stump, SMU Albritton Chair in Earth Sciences; Chris Hayward, research staff and director geophysics research program; and Beatrice Magnani, associate professor of geophysics.

The article, “Causal factors for seismicity near Azle, Texas,” published online in late April. Already the article has been downloaded nearly 6,000 times, and heavily shared on both social and conventional media. The article has achieved a ranking of 270, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 144,972 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and 98th percentile of 626 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.

“It has a very high impact factor for an article of its age,” said Robert Gregory, professor and chair, SMU Earth Sciences Department.

The scientific article also was entered into the record for public hearings both at the Texas Railroad Commission and the Texas House Subcommittee on Seismic Activity.

Researchers settle long-debated heritage question of “The Ancient One”

The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)

The research of Dedman College anthropologist and Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory David Meltzer played a role in settling the long-debated and highly controversial heritage of “Kennewick Man.”

Also known as “The Ancient One,” the 8,400-year-old male skeleton discovered in Washington state has been the subject of debate for nearly two decades. Argument over his ancestry has gained him notoriety in high-profile newspaper and magazine articles, as well as making him the subject of intense scholarly study.

Officially the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 and radiocarbon dated to 8500 years ago.

Because of his cranial shape and size he was declared not Native American but instead ‘Caucasoid,’ implying a very different population had once been in the Americas, one that was unrelated to contemporary Native Americans.

But Native Americans long have claimed Kennewick Man as theirs and had asked for repatriation of his remains for burial according to their customs.

Meltzer, collaborating with his geneticist colleague Eske Willerslev and his team at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, in June reported the results of their analysis of the DNA of Kennewick in the prestigious British journal Nature in the scientific paper “The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man.”

The results were announced at a news conference, settling the question based on first-ever DNA evidence: Kennewick Man is Native American.

The announcement garnered national and international media attention, and propelled a new push to return the skeleton to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Bring the Ancient One Home Act of 2015 and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has offered state assistance for returning the remains to Native Tribes.

Science named the Kennewick work one of its nine runners-up in the highly esteemed magazine’s annual “Breakthrough of the Year” competition.

The research article has been viewed more than 60,000 times. It has achieved a ranking of 665, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 169,466 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and in the 94th percentile of 958 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.

In “Kennewick Man: coming to closure,” an article in the December issue of Antiquity, a journal of Cambridge University Press, Meltzer noted that the DNA merely confirmed what the tribes had known all along: “We are him, he is us,” said one tribal spokesman. Meltzer concludes: “We presented the DNA evidence. The tribal members gave it meaning.”

Click here to read more about the research.

Prehistoric vacuum cleaner captures singular award

Paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU)

Science writer Laura Geggel with Live Science named a new species of extinct marine mammal identified by two SMU paleontologists among “The 10 Strangest Animal Discoveries of 2015.”

The new species, dubbed a prehistoric hoover by London’s Daily Mail online news site, was identified by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, and paleontologist and SMU adjunct research professor Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.

Jacobs and Fiorillo co-authored a study about the identification of new fossils from the oddball creature Desmostylia, discovered in the same waters where the popular “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed. The hippo-like creature ate like a vacuum cleaner and is a new genus and species of the only order of marine mammals ever to go extinct — surviving a mere 23 million years.

Desmostylians, every single species combined, lived in an interval between 33 million and 10 million years ago. Their strange columnar teeth and odd style of eating don’t occur in any other animal, Jacobs said.

SMU campus hosted the world’s premier physicists

The SMU Department of Physics hosted the “23rd International Workshop on Deep Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects” from April 27-May 1, 2015. Deep Inelastic Scattering is the process of probing the quantum particles that make up our universe.

As noted by the CERN Courier — the news magazine of the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, which hosts the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest science experiment — more than 250 scientists from 30 countries presented more than 200 talks on a multitude of subjects relevant to experimental and theoretical research. SMU physicists presented at the conference.

The SMU organizing committee was led by Fred Olness, professor and chair of the SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College, who also gave opening and closing remarks at the conference. The committee consisted of other SMU faculty, including Jodi Cooley, associate professor; Simon Dalley, senior lecturer; Robert Kehoe, professor; Pavel Nadolsky, associate professor, who also presented progress on experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; Randy Scalise, senior lecturer; and Stephen Sekula, associate professor.

Sekula also organized a series of short talks for the public about physics and the big questions that face us as we try to understand our universe.

Click here to read more about the research.

Tags Alan Humason, Alisa J. WInkler, Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development, Anthony Fiorillo, Beatrice Magnani, Bonnie F. Jacobs, Brian W. Stump, Chris Hayward, Christopher Strganac, Dale A. Winkler, Dani Setlawan, David Meltzer, Dedman College, Diana Vineyard, Diego Román, Dieter Creme, Elfi Kraka, Ernest Jouriles, Fredrick Olness, Gary Johnson, Heather R. DeShon, Jodi Cooley, John F. Graf, John Wise, Kate Andrzejewski, Kurt Ferguson, Lauren Michael, Lorelei Simpson Rowe, Louis L. Jacobs, Marek Freindorf, Matthew Clemens, Matthew J. Hornbach, Michael J. Polcyn, Neil Tabor, Pavel Nadolsky, Pia Vogel, Randy Scalise, Renee McDonald, Robert Gregory, Robert Kalescky, Robert Kehoe, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Santanu Roy, Simon Dalley, SMU Department of Anthropology, SMU Department of Biological Sciences, SMU Department of Chemistry, SMU Department of Economics, SMU Department of Physics, SMU Department of Psychology, Stephen J. Sekula, Thomas Sexton, Timothy S. Myers, Vytor Oliveira, Wenli Zou

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

KRBD FM: Local artist illustrates newly identified species

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 22, 2015

Ray Troll holds a Desmostylus tooth. (Leila Kheiry)

KRBD Radio reporter Leila Kheiry covered the research of SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and paleontologist Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Dallas, and an adjunct research professor at SMU.

Jacobs and Fiorillo are co-authors of a study about the identification of new fossils from the oddball creature Desmostylia, discovered in the same waters where the popular “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed. The hippo-like creature ate like a vacuum cleaner and is a new genus and species of the only order of marine mammals ever to go extinct — surviving a mere 23 million years.

The KRBD coverage was included in a piece about Ketchikan artist Ray Troll, who contributed illustrations of the new species.

Troll is the artist who has most illustrated desmostylians, prompting Jacobs to dub a “group” of desmostylians a “troll.” KRBD is the Ketchikan FM community radio covering southern southeast Alaska.

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Paleontologists Louis Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from Unalaska, a North Pacific Aleutian island. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU) — Paleontologists Louis Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from the Aleutian island Unalaska in the North Pacific. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU)

Desmostylians, every single species combined, lived in an interval between 33 million and 10 million years ago. Its strange columnar teeth and odd style of eating don’t occur in any other animal, Jacobs said. The new specimens — from at least four individuals — were recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific.

Jacobs and Fiorillo reported their discovery in a special volume of the international paleobiology journal, Historical Biology. The article published online Oct.1 at http://bit.ly/1PQAHZJ.

The KRBD story aired Oct. 21, 2015.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Leila Kheiry
KRBD Radio
Paleontologists recently announced the discovery of a new species of prehistoric marine mammal, found in Unalaska. While the fossils were discovered many years ago, the announcement in early October that they were of a separate species was new information.

Ketchikan artistand self-described paleo-nerd Ray Troll had an inside line on the story, and contributed illustrations of the new species for the scientists.

Ray Troll has made a name for himself among the nerdy set with his scientifically accurate paintings, most often depicting fish and, more recently, extinct creatures known only by the fossils they’ve left behind.

Troll arrived at the station carrying a fossil that someone gave him many years ago in Oregon. Troll said that person thought it was a fossilized tooth from an ancient horse.

“Twenty-some years later, I start getting interested in this animal, and I was literally sitting there, googling Desmostylus tooth, looking at them on eBay, and I looked over and said, ‘I’ve got one! That’s what that is! It’s not a horse tooth!’”

The tooth is an odd-shaped square, a little more than an inch on each side. It’s made up of columns, each about the width of a pencil, and one edge of the tooth is worn smooth. Troll said Desmostylia’s name comes from its unusual dental development.

“Desmo means a bundle, it’s Latin for bundle. Stylus means a pillar,” he said. “So, it’s a bundle of pillars. It looks like a little six-pack.”

Desmostylia lived for about 23 million years, and then just died out, leaving behind its fossils.

“They’re found in the Pacific. The north Pacific, to be specific. Ba-dum-bump,” Troll said. “They range from the tip of Baha all the way over to Japan.”

Troll said he became interested in Desmos through his friend, Kirk Johnson, who worked with Troll on a book, “Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway.”

Johnson was the connection between Troll and Dr. Louis Jacobs, a Texas paleontologist and one of the researchers who determined that the Unalaska fossils were a previously unidentified species.

Jacobs said he had been at the Smithsonian, looking at Desmostylian skeletons, and was about to leave for the day.

“And then, there was the Director of the National Museum of Natural History, Kirk Johnson, coming in,” Jacobs said. “We shook hands and said hello, and he asked me what I was doing. I told him, looking as Desmostylians. He said, ‘I love Desmostylians!’ he said, ‘Ray Troll and I are working on those things now, because we’re doing another book.’”

Read the full story.

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Tags Anthony Fiorillo, Dedman College, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Yuri Kimura

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news Slideshows SMU In The News

KERA: Thousands Of Vertebrate Paleontologists Descend On Dallas

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 21, 2015

SMU faculty and students presented research and led field trips for various sessions of the 2015 annual meeting in Dallas of the international Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Reporting for KERA News, North Texas’ public media news source, journalist Kat Chow covered the 2015 annual meeting in Dallas in October of the international Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The meeting was hosted locally by the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas. SMU faculty and students presented research and led field trips for various SVP sessions.

Chow’s coverage also covered the research of SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

He carried out the study with paleontologist Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Dallas, and an adjunct research professor at SMU.

The authors reported their discovery in a special volume of the international paleobiology journal, Historical Biology. The article published online Oct.1 at http://bit.ly/1PQAHZJ.

The KERA article aired and published Oct. 14, 2015.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Kat Chow
KERA News
Everything I knew about paleontology conferences, I learned from TV and “Friends.” There was that time Ross and his girlfriend were prepping for a conference in Barbados.

“By using CT scans and computer imaging, we can in a very real way bring the Mesozoic era into the 21st century,” Ross says.

In the real world, at the conference put on by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, the lingo isn’t so simple. Here are some of the session titles:

“A new large non-pterodactyloid pterosaur from a late-Jurassic interdunal desert environment with a neo-eolian nugget sandstone of Northeastern Utah.”

“The hemodynamics of vascular retia: Testing a hypothesis of blood pressure regulation through the artiodactyl carotid rete.”

“The effects of substrate, body position, and plasticity on the morphology of ruminant unguals.”

Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University, and Anthony Fiorillo, a paleontologist at Dallas’ Perot Museum, are helping organize the conference. Walking with them is like trailing a rock star — they’re inundated with fans and well-wishers.

”We specialize in animals with backbones, and how they’re preserved in the rocks, and what they mean, and what they tell us about the earth got to be the way it is,” Jacobs explains.

Read the full story.

Tags Anthony Fiorillo, Dedman College, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

Daily Mail: The prehistoric hoover — 23 million-year-old fossils reveal how giant hippo-like creature used its snout to suck up food

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 19, 2015

Writing for London-based the Daily Mail, the world’s largest online news source, science news journalist Ellie Zolfagharifard covered the research of SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, and paleontologist Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Dallas, and an adjunct research professor at SMU.

The authors reported their discovery in a special volume of the international paleobiology journal, Historical Biology. The article published online Oct.1 at http://bit.ly/1PQAHZJ.

The Daily Mail article published Oct. 8, 2015.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Ellie Zolfagharifard
Daily Mail
A bizarre hippo-like creature, that lived 23 million years ago, had a long snout that allowed it to suck up food like a vacuum cleaner.

This is according several fossils of the species which were discovered on the island of Unalaska in the North Pacific.

They reveal a unique tooth and jaw structure for the creature, which scientists believe belonged to a group of aquatic mammals called Desmostylia.

Desmostylians lived between 33 million and 10 million years ago. But unlike other marine mammals alive today, they went completely extinct.

Researchers have named the vegetarian species Ounalashkastylus tomidai, and describe it as having strange columnar teeth that allowed it to vacuum food.

While alive, the creatures lived in what is now Unalaska’s Dutch Harbor, where fishing boats depart on Discovery channel’s ‘Deadliest Catch’ reality TV show.

‘The new animal — when compared to one of a different species from Japan — made us realise that desmos do not chew like any other animal,’ said Professor Louis Jacobs at the Southern Methodist University in Texas.

‘They clench their teeth, root up plants and suck them in.’

To eat, the animals buttressed their lower jaw with their teeth against the upper jaw, and used the powerful muscles that attached there.

Combined with the shape of the roof of their mouth, this allowed them to suction-feed vegetation from coastal bottoms.

Read the full story.

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Tags Anthony Fiorillo, Dedman College, Huffington, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Yuri Kimura

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Videos

New fossils intensify mystery of short-lived, toothy mammals unique to ancient North Pacific

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 5, 2015

Oddball creature, Desmostylia, from waters where “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed, ate like a vacuum cleaner and is new genus and species of the only order of marine mammals ever to go extinct — surviving a mere 23 million years

Identification of a new species of the marine mammal Desmostylia has intensified the rare animal’s brief mysterious journey through prehistoric time, finds a new study.

Desmostylians were a big, hippo-sized animal with a long snout and tusks. The new species is 23 million years old and has a unique tooth and jaw structure, said vertebrate paleontologist and study co-author Louis L. Jacobs, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

Those features indicate it was not only a vegetarian, but literally sucked vegetation from shorelines like a vacuum cleaner, Jacobs said.

But unlike other marine mammals alive today — such as whales, seals and sea cows — desmostylians went totally extinct. Desmostylians, every single species combined, lived in an interval between 33 million and 10 million years ago.

Its strange columnar teeth and odd style of eating don’t occur in any other animal, Jacobs said.

The new specimens — from at least four individuals — were recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific.

While alive, the creatures lived in what is now Unalaska’s Dutch Harbor, where fishing boats depart on Discovery channel’s “Deadliest Catch” reality TV show.

“The new animal — when compared to one of a different species from Japan — made us realize that desmos do not chew like any other animal,” said Jacobs, a professor in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. “They clench their teeth, root up plants and suck them in.”

To eat, the animals buttressed their lower jaw with their teeth against the upper jaw, and used the powerful muscles that attached there, along with the shape of the roof of their mouth, to suction-feed vegetation from coastal bottoms. Big muscles in the neck would help to power their tusks, and big muscles in the throat would help with suction.

“No other mammal eats like that,” Jacobs said. “The enamel rings on the teeth show wear and polish, but they don’t reveal consistent patterns related to habitual chewing motions.”

The new specimens also represent a new genus — meaning desmostylians in the same family diverged from one another in key physical characteristics, particularly the tooth and jaw structure, said Jacobs, who is one of 10 scientists collaborating on the research.

Discovery of a new genus and species indicates the desmostylian group was larger and more diverse than previously known, said paleontologist and co-author Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Dallas, and an adjunct research professor at SMU.

“Our new study shows that though this group of strange and extinct mammals was short-lived, it was a successful group with greater biodiversity than had been previously realized,” said Fiorillo.

Unique from other marine mammals in their diet, eating, lifespan
A large, stocky-limbed mammal, desmos’ modern relatives remain a mystery. They’ve been linked previously to manatees, horses and elephants.

Compared to other mammals, desmos were latecomers and didn’t appear on earth until fairly recently — 33 million years ago. Also unusual for mammals, they survived a mere 23 million years, dying out 10 million years ago.

Unlike whales and seals, but like manatees, desmos were vegetarians. They rooted around coastlines, ripping up vegetation, such as marine algae, sea grass and other near-shore plants.

They probably swam like polar bears, using their strong front limbs to power along, Jacobs said. They walked on land a bit, lumbering like a sloth.

Adult desmostylians were large enough to be relatively safe from predators.

The authors report their discoveries in a special volume of the international paleobiology journal, Historical Biology. The article published online Oct.1 at http://bit.ly/1PQAHZJ.

The research was funded by the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, U.S. National Park Service — Alaska Region Office, and SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.

Home was the North Pacific, on wave-battered “Deadliest Catch” island
The newest desmo made its home on Unalaska Island, the farthest north of any occurrence of the group, which only lived along the shores of the North Pacific.

“That’s the only place they’re known in the world — from Baja, California, up along the west coast of North America, around the Alaska Peninsula, the storm-battered Aleutian Islands, to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island, to the Japanese islands,” Jacobs said.

The Unalaska fossils represent at least four individuals, and one is a baby.

“The baby tells us they had a breeding population up there,” Jacobs said. “They must have stayed in sheltered areas to protect the young from surf and currents.”

In addition, “the baby also tells us that this area along the Alaska coast was biologically productive enough to make it a good place for raising a family,” said Fiorillo.

Just as cattle assemble in a herd, and a group of fish is a school, multiple desmostylians constitute a “troll” — a designation selected by Jacobs to honor Alaskan Ray Troll, the artist who has depicted desmos most.

To make the Unalaska and Japanese specimens readily available to scientists anywhere in the world, each fossil was modeled as a 3-D image to reconstruct the skull and provide interactive animations of the fossils, said Michael J. Polcyn, research associate and director of SMU’s Digital Earth Sciences Laboratory.

Also, 3-D renders of the digital models are available to download without restriction at http://bit.ly/1JWbLLy, including instructions for downloading. The renderings are in QuickTime Virtual Reality format, QTVR, and are large files that take time to download. Once downloaded, each fossil can be virtually examined and manipulated.

Journey from the land to the ocean to a quarry
The first Unalaska fossils were discovered in the 1950s in a rock quarry during U.S. Geological Survey mapping.

Others found more recently were on display at the Ounalashka Corporation headquarters. Those specimens were offered to Fiorillo and Jacobs for study after Fiorillo gave a public presentation to the community on his work in Alaska.

“The fruits of that lecture were that it started the networking with the community, which in turn led us to a small, but very important collection of fossils that had been unearthed in the town when they built a school a few years earlier,” Fiorillo said. “The fossils were shipped to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science for preparation in our lab and those fossils are the basis for our work now.”

From there, the researchers discovered that the fossils were a new genus and species.

The researchers named the new mammal Ounalashkastylus tomidai. “Ounalashka,” means “near the peninsula” in the Aleut language of the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands.

“Stylus” is from the Latin for “column” and refers to the shape of cusps in the teeth.

“Tomida” honors distinguished Japanese vertebrate paleontologist Yukimitsu Tomida.

The article appears in a special volume of Historical Biology to honor the career accomplishments of Tomida upon his retirement from the Department of Geology and Paleontology in Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science.

In addition to Jacobs, Fiorillo and Polcyn, other authors were Yosuke Nishida, SMU; Yuri Kimura, Smithsonian Institution and the Tokyo Museum; Kentaro Chiba, University of Toronto; Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, Hokkaido University Museum, Naoki Kohno, National Museum of Nature and Science; and Kohei Tanaka, University of Calgary.

The Historical Biology article is titled “A new desmostylian mammal from Unalaska (USA) and the robust Sanjussen jaw from Hokkaido (Japan), with comments on feeding in derived desmostylids.” It appears in the special issue “Contributions to vertebrate palaeontology in honour of Yukimitsu Tomida.” — Margaret Allen

Tags Anthony Fiorillo, Dedman College, Huffington Departhment of Earth Sciences, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Ray Troll, Yuri Kimura

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NBC, CBS & CW33: Jurassic Jackpot — 5-Year-Old Finds Dinosaur in Mansfield

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 9, 2015

The folks at SMU say a find like this is extremely rare, and for a five-year-old kid to have found it, may be more rare than the Dino itself.

The fossil bones of a 100 million-year-old dinosaur discovered at a shopping center construction site will be studied and identified by paleontologists at Southern Methodist University’s Shuler Museum of Paleontology.

The bones were discovered by a Dallas Zoo employee and his young son. The fossils have been transported to SMU’s Shuler research museum in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

The discovery of the bones, believed to be from the family of armored dinosaurs called nodasuaridae, was covered by local TV stations NBC Channel 5, CBS Channel 11 and Channel CW 33.

Dale Winkler, SMU, paleontologist, dinosaur

mike-polcyn, SMU, paleontology, Huffington

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Dale Winkler in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

To book a live or taped interview with Michael Polcyn in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

To book a live or taped interview with Louis Jacobs in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

The Huffington Post: 4-Year-Old Boy Finds Rare 100-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Bones In Texas

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 9, 2015

The SMU scientists started excavating the dinosaur bones on Friday. They speculate the bones belong to a group of dinosaurs called Nodosaurs — herbivorous creatures that lived in the late Jurassic to early Cretaceous periods.

The bones were discovered by a Dallas Zoo employee and his young son. The fossils have been transported to SMU’s Shuler research museum in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

The discovery of the bones, believed to be from the family of armored dinosaurs called nodasuaridae, was covered by journalist Dominique Mosbergen, reporting for The Huffington Post.

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Dale Winkler in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

To book a live or taped interview with Michael Polcyn in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

To book a live or taped interview with Louis Jacobs in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

KERA: 4-Year-Old Texas Boy Finds 100-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Bones

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 9, 2015

Nodosaurs are plant eating animals that are built a little like tanks with a relatively broad body with armor in their skin.

The bones were discovered by a Dallas Zoo employee and his young son. The fossils have been transported to SMU’s Shuler research museum in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

The discovery of the bones, believed to be from the family of armored dinosaurs called nodasuaridae, was covered by science journalist Lauren Silverman, reporting for KERA public radio.

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Dale Winkler in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

To book a live or taped interview with Michael Polcyn in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

To book a live or taped interview with Louis Jacobs in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

More SMU Research news

17 million-year-old whale fossil provides 1st exact date for East Africa’s puzzling uplift

The story aired April 8, 2015.

Hear the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Lauren Silverman
KERA Public Radio
A Dallas Zookeeper went on a fossil hunt with his little boy at a construction site. And the 4-year-old picked up what turned out to be a dinosaur bone – likely 100 million years old. On Wednesday, scientists found another key bone.

Wiley Brys and his dad Tim were digging through the dirt, just looking for some shark teeth last August when it happened.

“My son walked ahead of me and walked back with a chunk of bone that looked like rib bone,” Brys says.

Wylie Brys, now 5-years-old, discovered a bone in a construction site behind a Mansfield shopping center.
Wylie Brys, now 5-years-old, discovered a bone in a construction site behind a Mansfield shopping center.

A few inches long, it was a bit moist and a purplish gray. The bone, experts say, is likely 100-million years old.

For a kid who still counts half birthdays, that many years is hard to imagine.

“I don’t think he completely understands what’s going on,” Brys, a zookeeper who works with reptiles at the Dallas Zoo, says. “He’s just as interested in as playing in the dirt as the fossils I think.”

What Brys and his kid uncovered behind a Mansfield shopping center is thought to be part of a group of dinosaurs called Nodosaurs. They’re plant eating animals that are built a little like tanks.

“They’re these little armored, squatty-looking animals, relatively broad body with armor in their skin,” says Mike Polcyn, director of SMU’s Digital Earth Sciences Lab.

Polcyn has been working at the dig site, preparing the bones to be moved. Just when the team thought they’d uncovered it all, Polcyn says, they unearthed the Nodosaur’s upper leg bone.

Hear the full story.

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Tags Dale A. Winkler, Dedman College, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Shuler Museum of Paleontology

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

Los Angeles Times: Fossilized whale bone in African desert holds clues to human evolution

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 23, 2015

Ancient whale swam hundreds of miles up African river and left behind clues about geology and climate change

Paleontologist James G. Mead excavating a whale specimen in an open-pit mine in Kenya in 1964. The long-lost specimen has helped date the onset of uplift on the East African Plateau, a change that altered the local environment and shaped the evolution of human ancestors. (Courtesy of James G. Mead)

The Los Angeles Times covered the research of SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences of SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

Jacobs is co-author of a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Findings of the research provide the first constraint on the start of uplift of East African terrain from near sea level.

Uplift associated with the Great Rift Valley of East Africa and the environmental changes it produced have puzzled scientists for decades because the timing and starting elevation have been poorly identified.

Jacobs and his colleagues tapped a fossil from the most precisely dated beaked whale in the world — and the only stranded whale ever found so far inland on the African continent — to pinpoint for the first time a date when East Africa’s mysterious elevation began.

The 17 million-year-old fossil is from the beaked Ziphiidae whale family. It was discovered 740 kilometers inland at a elevation of 620 meters in modern Kenya’s harsh desert region.

supervolcano, fossil, Italy, James Quick, Sesia Valley

The article published March 16, 2015.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Geoffrey Mohan
Los Angeles Times
A 22-foot beaked whale that apparently took a wrong turn up an African river about 17 million years ago may offer clues to the climate-change forces that shaped human evolution.

Lost for more than 30 years, the fossilized beak with part of the jaw bone helps determine that the East African Plateau probably began rising no earlier than 17 million years ago, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That geologic upheaval in an area known as the cradle of humankind is believed to be responsible for the gradual conversion of dense, humid forests into more sparsely treed grasslands that made upright locomotion on two feet advantageous to evolving human ancestors.

“The whale is telling us all kinds of things,” said study coauthor Louis Jacobs, a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “It tells us the starting point for all that uplift that changed the climate that led to humans. It’s amazing.”

Jacobs had been searching for the specimen since 1980, when he was head of paleontology at the National Museums of Kenya. He had read about the 1964 find, by James G. Mead of the Smithsonian Institution, in a 1975 research paper.

Every time Jacobs visited Harvard, Washington or Nairobi, he would try to find it.

“It was protected by a plaster jacket, so you couldn’t really see it,” he said. “I suspect nobody knew what it was. It was just kept in the collections there.”

Finally, just before another trip to Kenya in 2011, a collections official at Harvard located the fossil, sheathed in the protective jacket, Jacobs said.

Jacobs had the specimen scanned and analyzed, then contacted Henry Wichura, a structural geologist at the University of Potsdam in Germany, who had been studying plateau region, trying to determine when it started rising. He had found evidence that rivers and lava had flowed east from high points on the plateau at least 13 million years ago.

Read the full story.

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Tags Andrew Lin, Dale A. Winkler, Dedman College, Louis L. Jacobs, Matthew Clemens, Michael J. Polcyn, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

Daily Mail: The 17 million-year-old whale that reveals when man first walked on two feet: Mammal’s wrong turn up river sheds light on Africa’s ancient swamplands

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 18, 2015

The marine mammal’s remains were unearthed 459 miles from the ocean; East Africa was flatter, wet and covered in forest.

17 million year old fossil whale, kenya, Louis Jacobs

London’s Daily Mail covered the research of SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences of SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

Jacobs is co-author of a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Findings of the research provide the first constraint on the start of uplift of East African terrain from near sea level.

The 17 million-year-old fossil is from the beaked Ziphiidae whale family. It was discovered 740 kilometers inland at a elevation of 620 meters in modern Kenya’s harsh desert region.

The article published March 17, 2015.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Richard Gray
Daily Mail
A whale that swam hundreds of miles up an African river after taking a wrong turn 17 million years ago is helping shed light on a key moment in human evolution.

Palaeontologists discovered the fossilised remains of the ancient ancestor to modern beaked whales in the middle of one of the harshest desert areas of Turkana, Kenya.

It has allowed scientists to pinpoint when the landscape in east Africa began to change as the land around the Great Rift Valley began to rise up.

This was a crucial moment in human evolution from primates as it created the dry open habitats that led our ape-like ancestors to walk upright for the first time.

They say that for the whale to have travelled so far inland in a river the area must have been much wetter, far flatter and dominated by forests.

Professor Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate palaeontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who led the study, said: ‘The whale was stranded up river at a time when east Africa was at sea level and was covered with forest and jungle.

‘As that part of the continent rose up, that caused the climate to become drier and drier. So over millions of years, forest gave way to grasslands.

‘Primates evolved to adapt to grasslands and dry country. And that’s when – in human evolution – the primates started to walk upright.’

The whale fossil was first discovered in Loperot, west Turkana, Kenya in 1964 by palaeontologist James Mead, a curator at the Smithsonian Instution at the time.

Read the full story.

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Tags Andrew Lin, Dale A. Winkler, Dedman College, Huffington Departhment of Earth Sciences, Louis L. Jacobs, Matthew Clemens, Michael J. Polcyn

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Slideshows

17 million-year-old whale fossil provides 1st exact date for East Africa’s puzzling uplift

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 16, 2015

Uplift and aridification of East Africa causing changes in vegetation has been considered a driver of human evolution. Now a fossil whale stranded far inland in Kenya marks the first time scientists can pinpoint how many millions of years ago the uplift began.

Uplift associated with the Great Rift Valley of East Africa and the environmental changes it produced have puzzled scientists for decades. Timing and starting elevation have been poorly understood.

Now paleontologists have tapped a fossil from the most precisely dated beaked whale in the world to pinpoint for the first time a date when East Africa’s mysterious elevation began. The stranded whale is the only one ever found so far inland on the African continent.

The 17 million-year-old fossil is from the beaked Ziphiidae whale family. It was discovered 740 kilometers inland at a elevation of 620 meters in modern Kenya’s harsh desert region, said vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

At the time the whale was alive, it would have been swimming far inland up a river with a low gradient ranging from 24 to 37 meters over more than 600 to 900 kilometers, said Jacobs, a co-author of the study.

A map of Africa and Kenya showing where a 17-million-year-old whale fossil was found far inland . (Wichura/PNAS)

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides the first constraint on the start of uplift of East African terrain from near sea level.

“The whale was stranded up river at a time when east Africa was at sea level and was covered with forest and jungle,” Jacobs said. “As that part of the continent rose up, that caused the climate to become drier and drier. So over millions of years, forest gave way to grasslands. Primates evolved to adapt to grasslands and dry country. And that’s when — in human evolution — the primates started to walk upright.”

Identified as a Turkana ziphiid, the whale would have lived in the open ocean, like its modern beaked cousins. Ziphiids, still one of the ocean’s top predators, are the deepest diving air-breathing mammals alive, plunging to nearly 10,000 feet to feed, primarily on squid.

In contrast to most whale fossils, which have been discovered in marine rocks, Kenya’s beached whale was found in river deposits, known as fluvial sediments, said Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences of SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

The whale fossil bones were originally thought to be those of a turtle specimen, as was recorded in the fossil catalogue for the Harvard Loperot Expedition in 1964. (Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.)

The ancient large Anza River flowed in a southeastward direction to the Indian Ocean.

The whale, probably disoriented, swam into the river and could not change its course, continuing well inland.

“You don’t usually find whales so far inland,” Jacobs said. “Many of the known beaked whale fossils are dredged by fishermen from the bottom of the sea.”

Determining ancient land elevation is very difficult, but the whale provides one near sea level.

“It’s rare to get a paleo-elevation,” Jacobs said, noting only one other in East Africa, determined from a lava flow.

Beaked whale fossil surfaced after going missing for more than 30 years
The beaked whale fossil was discovered in 1964 by J.G. Mead in what is now the Turkana region of northwest Kenya.

Mead, an undergraduate student at Yale University at the time, made a career at the Smithsonian Institution, from which he recently retired. Over the years, the Kenya whale fossil went missing in storage. Jacobs, who was at one time head of the Division of Paleontology for the National Museums of Kenya, spent 30 years trying to locate the fossil. His effort paid off in 2011, when he rediscovered it at Harvard University and returned it to the National Museums of Kenya.

The fossil is only a small portion of the whale, which Mead originally estimated was 7 meters long during its life. Mead unearthed the beak portion of the skull, 2.6 feet long and 1.8 feet wide, specifically the maxillae and premaxillae, the bones that form the upper jaw and palate.

The researchers reported their findings in “A 17-My-old whale constrains onset of uplift and climate change in east Africa” online at the PNAS web site.

Modern cases of stranded whales have been recorded in the Thames River in London, swimming up a gradient of 2 meters over 70 kilometers; the Columbia River in Washington state, a gradient of 6 meters over 161 kilometers; the Sacramento River in California, a gradient of 4 meters over 133 kilometers; and the Amazon River in Brazil, a gradient of 1 meter over 1,000 kilometers.

Besides Jacobs, other authors from SMU are Andrew Lin, Michael J. Polcyn, Dale A. Winkler and Matthew Clemens.

From other institutions, authors are Henry Wichura and Manfred R. Strecker, University of Potsdam, and Fredrick K. Manthi, National Museums of Kenya.

Funding for the research came from SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man and the SMU Engaged Learning program. — Margaret Allen

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Tags Andrew Lin, Dale A. Winkler, Dedman College, Featurette, Louis L. Jacobs, Matthew Clemens, Michael J. Polcyn, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

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International Business Times: Angola — Ancient Mystery Mammal Tracks Found in Angolan Diamond Mine

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 5, 2014

Tracks of an unknown mammal dating to the Early Cretaceous are discovered along with tracks of a crocodile and a dinosaur

The creature was about the size of a raccoon, researchers said. (Photo: Marco Marzola)

The research of an international team co-led by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs is receiving worldwide coverage for discovery of the first dinosaur tracks discovered in Angola, including those of a mysterious mammal from 118 million years ago.

Reporter Hannah Osborne wrote about the discovery Nov. 5 for The International Business Times in the article “Angola: Huge Mystery Mammal Tracks from Early Cretaceous Period Discovered in Catoca Diamond Mine.”

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology announced the discovery in a press release Nov. 5, “African diamond mine reveals dinosaur and large mammal tracks.”

The discovery was made by a Octávio Mateus, a member of Projecto PaleoAngola.

Jacobs, a professor of earth sciences at SMU, is a former president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. His research focus is the interrelationships of biotic and abiotic events through time.

His fieldwork is currently focused through Projecto PaleoAngola on the iconic, puzzle-like fit of Africa and South America, as viewed through the rocks and fossils of coastal Angola.

SMU paleontologist Michael J. Polcyn is also a member of the Projecto PaleoAngola team.

The PaleoAngola researchers have described Angola as a “museum in the ground” for the abundance of fossils there.

A professor in Dedman College’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Jacobs joined SMU’s faculty in 1983.

In the laboratory, Jacobs’ research utilizes advanced imaging and stable isotope techniques to investigate paleoenvironmental, biogeographic and phylogenetic issues of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras.

Polcyn is director of the Visualization Laboratory in SMU’s Department of Earth Sciences and an SMU research associate.

A world-recognized expert on the extinct marine reptile named Mosasaur, Polcyn’s research interests include the early evolution of Mosasauroidea and adaptations in secondarily aquatic tetrapods. Polcyn’s research also includes application of technology to problems in paleontology.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Hannah Osborne
International Business Times
The tracks of a huge mysterious mammal dating to the Early Cretaceous period have been discovered in the world’s fourth-biggest diamond mine in Africa.

Dating to 118 million years ago, researchers discovered the tracks of a crocodile, a dinosaur and a large unknown mammal inside the Catoca Diamond Mine in Angola.

Over 70 tracks were uncovered by researcher from the PaleoAngola Project, a programme that researches vertebrate palaeontology in Angola.

The dinosaur tracks – the first to be found in the African nation – were from a sauropod and were discovered with a preserved skin impression. The crocodile, a crocodilomorph trackmaker, was from a group that includes all modern species.

However, the most important find was that of the large mammal. Researchers believe it was about the size of a raccoon – huge compared to all other mammals at the time, which were mostly no larger than a rat.

Marco Marzola, one of the study authors, told IBTimes UK there is no way of telling to what species the mystery mammal belongs as you cannot identify animals by their tracks – “the most you can say is that the track resembles the anatomy of that animal,” he explained.

“We cannot narrow down to a species but we can say they do belong to – they were made by an exceptionally large mammal – that we can say for sure.”

Read the full story.

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Tags Dedman College, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

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NatGeo: Shark-like Tails Sped Ancient Sea Monsters Through Oceans

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date September 13, 2013

A new study finds that the prehistoric predators of the ocean, mosasaurs, were not as slow as scholars once thought.

The first mosasaur tail on record with a preserved soft tissue outline (top picture). In similarity with whales and ichthyosaurs, Mosasaurs gradually attained a shark-like appearance (bottom picture) Image courtesy NatGeo.

Science journalist Jane J. Lee with National Geographic reported on the research of SMU Research Associate Michael J. Polcyn, who co-authored a new study that found the ancient sea monsters known as mosasaurs were not as slow as paleontologists once thought, thanks to their shark-like tails.

The National Geographic article, “Shark-like Tails Sped Ancient Sea Monsters Through Oceans,” was published in September.

Polcyn is a vertebrate paleontologist and director of the Visualization Laboratory in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences whose current research interests include the early evolution of Mosasauroidea and adaptations in secondarily aquatic tetrapods. His research involves the application of advanced imaging techniques and other computer-based technology to problems in paleontology. Polcyn’s fieldwork is currently focused in Upper Cretaceous marine deposits of Angola.

Read the National Geographic article.

EXCERPT:

By Jane J. Lee
National Geographic
Sea monsters lying in wait for unsuspecting prey sounds scary enough. But slap on a tail that let them run down their dinner—much like today’s great white sharks—and mosasaurs could truly be considered one of the ancient world’s nightmares.

And that’s exactly what a new study published September 10 in Nature Communications has confirmed.

A 72-million-year-old fossil specimen of Prognathodon—a genus of mosasaur—found in a Jordanian quarry in 2008 revealed fin-like soft-tissue imprints along its tail. Those imprints demonstrate that this group of ancient sea monsters possessed powerful tails similar to ones seen on sharks today, rather than the puny ones on eels or sea snakes.

Mosasaurs were aquatic reptiles that prowled the seas and freshwater streams toward the end of the age of dinosaurs, about 98 to 66 million years ago.

Although they are fairly well represented in the fossil record, finding soft-tissue evidence for shark-like tails on these lizard ancestors isn’t something that study co-author Michael Polcyn, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, expected to come across in his lifetime.

This fossil is so well preserved that researchers can discern the direction of stiffening fibers in the tail, he added.

“You can [also] see the outlines of scales,” said study co-author Johan Lindgren, a vertebrate paleontologist at Lund University in Sweden.

Questioning the Past
For over 200 years, scholars thought mosasaurs sported paddle-shaped tails much like sea snakes, said Lindgren. Since mosasaurs are true lizards, scholars formerly thought that the ancient reptile’s tail should look like those on their living lizard relatives.

But this limited mosasaurs — some of which could grow to over 33 feet (10 meters) long — to short bursts of speed typical of ambush predators.

“It was generally assumed that their swimming speeds were low and at best they could do a quick lunge,” said Bruce Young, a researcher at the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in Missouri who is studying how reptiles move.

Read the National Geographic article.

Tags Dedman, Michael J. Polcyn, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

Dallas Morning News: Paleontologist puts passion for fossils to use as curator at Perot Museum

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 3, 2013

Anthony Fiorillo excavates a Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum at a quarry in Alaska. (Credit: Dallas Morning News)

Dallas Morning News reporter Katharina Marino covered the research of Anthony Fiorillo, who is Perot Museum Curator of Earth Sciences at the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Victory Park.

Fiorillo is an adjunct research professor of paleoecology in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College. The article, “Paleontologist puts passion for fossils to use as curator at Perot Museum,” was published in the Dec. 31 issue of the Dallas Morning News.

Michael Polcyn, director of SMU’s Digital Earth Sciences Laboratory, is also quoted in the article. Polcyn put his expertise to work providing technical assistance for the museum’s Ocean Dallas marine reptile exhibit.

An expert in mosasaurs, Polcyn created digital reconstructions of Dallasaurus, named for the city of Dallas, and physically reconstructed the skeletons of Dallasaurus and another mosasaur, Tethysaurus, for the exhibit.

Anthony Fiorillo and Michael Polcyn with the Perot Museum’s mosasaur exhibit. (Credit: Hillsman Jackson, SMU)

Fiorillo, Anthony, Perot Museum, SMU 130x165

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Katharina Marino
Staff Writer
Dallas paleontologist Anthony Fiorillo’s line of work has taken him from Bolivia to Big Bend to northern Alaska.

“I’ve tended to work in places where people hadn’t been,” he said.

But Fiorillo didn’t have to venture far for his latest project: chief curator of earth sciences at the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Victory Park.

Fiorillo became chief paleontologist for the museum’s forerunner in Fair Park in 1995. Launching the museum’s T. Boone Pickens “Life Then and Now” exhibition hall gave him the opportunity to build an exhibit reflecting some of the locations where he’s conducted field work.

“You can see Tony’s influence throughout the Perot Museum,” said Mike Polcyn, director of SMU’s Digital Earth Sciences Laboratory. “He should be very proud of
what he and his team have accomplished.”

As curator of the new exhibit, Fiorillo said he wanted to spark the same enthusiasm and curiosity he has for dinosaurs and science in museum visitors.

“There had to be a reason for people to come here,” he said.

Read the full story.

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For more SMU research see www.smuresearch.com.

Tags Anthony Fiorillo, Dedman College, Michael J. Polcyn, Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences

Culture, Society & Family Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Learning & Education Plants & Animals Researcher news Slideshows

SMU contributes fossils, expertise to new Perot Museum in ongoing scientific collaboration

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date December 3, 2012

From dinosaurs to sea turtles, and from technical assistance to advisory roles, SMU faculty and students, the SMU Shuler Museum, and the SMU Innovation Gymnasium have teamed with the nation’s new premier museum of nature and science in Dallas

Toxochelys, Perot Museum, SMU Shuler Museum of Paleontology

Fossils on loan by SMU to the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science include those of animals from an ancient sea that once covered Dallas.

The fossils represent a slice of SMU’s scientific collaboration with the Perot Museum and its predecessor, the Dallas Museum of Natural History.

Items from SMU’s scientists include a 35-foot skeletal cast of the African dinosaur Malawisaurus standing sentry in the spacious glass lobby of the Perot, which opened Dec. 1 near downtown Dallas.

“The new museum building itself is an icon, but it’s also a statement by the city about taking the advances of science to the public,” said vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, an SMU Earth Sciences professor, who serves on the Perot Museum’s Advisory Board and Collections Committee.

Reidus hilli, John Graf, SMU, coelacanth, Dipluridae,

Jacobs, who was ad interim director of the Dallas Museum of Natural History in 1999, led the team that discovered Malawisaurus in Africa. He provided the cast to the museum.

A 35-foot skeletal cast of the African dinosaur Malawisaurus, discovered by a team led by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, is on display at the Perot Museum. (Image: Rich Tate, Alford Media)

“Here at SMU we train students and create new knowledge. The museum’s mission is to take the stories of science out to the general public so they can be used,” said Jacobs. “Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum Curator of Earth Sciences, is a world-class scientist with whom we work. We have a junction between the mission, training and knowledge we have here, infused into and enhanced by what the museum does. That’s why the museum is important to SMU and that’s why SMU is important to the museum.”

Fossils on loan are from the collection of the Shuler Museum of Paleontology in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. SMU scientists provided technical expertise for exhibits and serve on the Perot Museum’s advisory committees.

Also on exhibit from SMU is a miniature unmanned autonomous helicopter designed for fighting fires that was built by SMU engineering students.

Herbivorous dinosaur is exhibited with ancient Texas plant fossils
Shuler Museum fossils can be viewed in the T. Boone Pickens Life Then and Now Hall. They include an unnamed 113 million-year-old herbivorous dinosaur discovered in 1985 at Proctor Lake southwest of Stephenville, Texas.

For perspective on that exhibit’s paleoenvironment in Texas at the time, SMU paleobotanist Bonnie F. Jacobs provided fossil wood, fossil cones, fossil leaves and images of microscopic pollen grains from the Shuler Museum. The fossils provided information used to create a model of an extinct tree to accompany the exhibit.

Fossil cones and leaves discovered in Hood County are from an extinct ancient tree, says SMU paleobotanist Bonnie F. Jacobs. (Image: SMU)

Plant fossils inform scientists of the ecological setting in which dinosaurs lived and died, said Bonnie Jacobs, an SMU associate professor in the Huffington Department. Her collaboration with the Perot’s Fiorillo, who also is an adjunct research professor of paleoecology in the SMU Earth sciences department, includes fossil plants from Alaska.

“Understanding past climate and climate change will help us understand what may happen in the future,” she said. Bonnie Jacobs is featured in a Perot Museum Career Inspirations video that is part of the permanent exhibit and also advised on the text of some exhibits.

“The world of the past is a test case for global climate models, which are computer driven,” she said. “If we can reconstruct climates of the ancient Earth accurately, then we can create better models of what may happen in the future.”

Understanding paleoclimate through fossil soils is the expertise of Neil Tabor, an SMU associate professor in the Earth Sciences Department whose Perot Museum video discusses ancient soils, environments and the biggest extinction event in Earth’s history.

Fossils date from period when D/FW was covered by ancient sea
The plant fossils are from the geologic period called the Cretaceous, from 146 million years ago to 66 million years ago. They were discovered at the prolific Jones Ranch fossil beds southwest of Fort Worth in Hood County.

At that time, the Jones Ranch — famous as the discovery site of Paluxysaurus jonesi, the state dinosaur of Texas — was not far inland from the muddy coastal shore of a vast shallow sea that a dozen years later would divide North America.

Giant fossil sea turtles were discovered in northeast Texas in 2006 by a 5-year-old girl, Preston Smith. SMU paleontologist Diana Vineyard identified the giant turtles as Toxochelys. (Image: SMU)

Other SMU fossils on loan also date from that period. They include sea turtles, as well as mosasaurs, which were ancient sea lizards that evolved flippers and streamlined bodies for life in the sea.

Stunning examples of fossil sea turtles were discovered in 2006 by a 5 year-old girl, Preston Smith, during a family outing along the North Sulphur River near Ladonia in northeast Texas. The turtles were stacked one on top of the other as if caught in sudden death 80 million years ago.

Diana Vineyard, director of administration and research associate at SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man, identified the turtles as Toxochelys while an SMU graduate student.

Also on loan from the Shuler Museum, and also identified by Vineyard, are 110-million-year-old sea turtles from the Early Cretaceous of Texas, discovered near Granbury. They represent early specimens in the transition of turtles from land and shallow marine animals to fully developed sea turtles, Vineyard said.

Exhibit includes mosasaur named for the city of Dallas

A Perot Museum exhibit includes a giant fossil sea turtle discovered in northeast Texas in 2006 by a 5-year-old girl. SMU paleontologist Diana Vineyard identified the giant turtles as Toxochelys. (Image: SMU)

Michael Polcyn, director of SMU’s Digital Earth Sciences Laboratory, put his expertise to work providing technical assistance for the museum’s Ocean Dallas marine reptile exhibit.

“The Ocean Dallas exhibit was a great opportunity to showcase the extraordinary story that the rocks in the Dallas area tell us about life in the deep past,” said Polcyn, whose mosasaur fieldwork extends from the United States to Angola.

“It was a great experience working with the museum’s creative and technical professionals on this project,” Polcyn said, “but it should be mentioned that many of the fossils in the exhibit were found by interested citizens walking the local creeks and rivers in search of these beasts, and it is they who deserve tremendous credit for bringing these finds to the public.”

Polcyn, who also is featured in a Perot Museum Career Inspirations video, created a skull reconstruction of the Perot Museum’s duck-billed dinosaur Protohadros, named by former SMU doctoral student Jason Head.

Other SMU fossils include dino footprint, croc egg and giant ammonite

The ammonite Parapuzosia, more than 3 feet in diameter and discovered in Dallas County, is on loan from SMU’s Shuler Museum to the Perot Museum.

SMU vertebrate paleontologist Dale A. Winkler, SMU research professor and director of the Shuler Museum, said other fossils on loan include:

a rare 110 million-year-old crocodile egg discovered with specimens of the crocodile Pachycheilosuchus trinquei west of Glen Rose. Pachycheilosuchus trinquei was named by Jack Rogers, a former SMU student. Rogers also found and identified the egg.
an ammonite, Parapuzosia, more than 3 feet in diameter and discovered in Dallas County.

In 2006, two SMU doctoral students assisted with excavation of the new species of dinosaur named for the museum’s namesakes, Margot and Ross Perot.

The dinosaur, Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, was discovered by the Perot Museum’s Fiorillo and prepared by Perot Museum researcher Ronald Tykoski.

Using portable 3D laser technology, SMU scientists preserved electronically a rare 110 million-year-old fossilized dinosaur footprint from ichnospecies Eubrontes glenrosensis. The model is on display in the Perot Museum. (Image: SMU)

SMU doctoral student Christopher Strganac and former SMU doctoral student Thomas L. Adams helped dig Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum in Alaska. The only skeletal mount of its kind in the world, the 69 million-year-old skull is on display in the Life Then and Now Hall of the Perot Museum.

Also on view in the museum is a 3D cast of a dinosaur footprint that Adams and Strganac created from the laser scan of a 110 million-year-old fossilized dinosaur footprint, from ichnospecies Eubrontes glenrosensis, that was previously excavated and built into the wall of a bandstand at a Texas courthouse in the 1930s.

Another former SMU doctoral student highlighted among the exhibits is Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, who describes in a video the mentoring he received from the Perot’s Fiorillo while the two worked together in Alaska’s Denali National Park.

SMU’s Shuler Museum is named for Ellis W. Shuler, founder of the University’s geology department. Shuler was a driving force behind the precursor to the Perot Museum, the Dallas Museum of Natural History, established in 1936, said geologist James E. Brooks, SMU professor emeritus and SMU Provost emeritus. Brooks served on the Dallas Museum of Natural History’s board of directors from the 1980s until 2005.

Perot Museum presents a strong scientific face of Dallas
“Any first-rate city needs a strong public scientific face with which it’s identified,” Brooks said. “The Perot Museum is going to be that organization.”

Brooks was instrumental in the negotiations with Egypt that enabled the Dallas Museum of Natural History to bring Ramses the Great, its first major exhibit, to Dallas in 1989.

“Museums, in addition to educating children and the general public, also have the responsibility to generate new knowledge, because that makes the city a more intellectually vibrant place,” he said.

Brooks and Louis Jacobs serve on the Perot Museum’s Collections Committee, which serves in an advisory role to Perot Earth Sciences Curator Fiorillo. He and other SMU faculty and staff collaborate on field expeditions to Alaska and Mongolia.

SMU’s Innovation Gymasium contributes to Perot exhibit

Pegasus, an unmanned autonomous helicopter that can fight fires, was designed and built by Lyle Engineering students under Innovation Gymnasium Director Nathan Huntoon. (Image: SMU)

SMU’s Innovation Gymnasium is featured in an exhibit in the Texas Instruments Engineering and Innovation Hall at the Perot Museum, said Nathan R. Huntoon, director of the Innovation Gymnasium at the SMU Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering.

Central to the Engineering and Innovation Hall exhibit is an unmanned autonomous helicopter that can fight fires, built by SMU engineering students.

The Innovation Gym enables SMU students to hone their engineering and creative skills by working on real world, design challenges. Companies, researchers and non-profits all provide real challenges for the students to develop innovative solutions, often under intense time and financial pressure.

The firefighting helicopter featured in the new museum was the first such project.

Accompanying the helicopter is a video demonstration of the helicopter fighting simulated fires, as well as a touch-screen application with interviews of Huntoon and SMU students discussing engineering and innovation.

Huntoon has been a member of the Technology Committee and the Engineering and Innovation Committee for the Perot Museum.

James Quick, a professor of Earth sciences, as well as SMU’s associate vice president for research and dean of graduate studies, applauded the establishment of the Perot Museum, the result of decades of work by many people.

“Every great urban center should have an outstanding museum of nature and science to stimulate the imaginations of people of all ages and attract them to science,” Quick said. “The contribution the Perot Museum will make to North Texas cannot be overstated.” — Margaret Allen

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Tags Anthony Fiorillo, Bonnie F. Jacobs, Christopher Strganac, Dale A. Winkler, Diana Vineyard, Ellis W. Shuler, Institute for the Study of Earth and Man, James E. Brooks, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Neil Tabor, Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Shuler Museum of Paleontology, Thomas L. Adams

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Dallas Morning News: Prehistoric crocodile thought to have originated in Europe may be a native Texan

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 20, 2011

Dallas Morning News reporter Marc Ramirez has written about the big prehistoric crocodile identified by SMU paleontologist Thomas L. Adams, a doctoral candidate in Dedman College’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

The story, “‘Prehistoric crocodile thought to have originated in Europe may be a native Texan,” published in the Tuesday, July 20 edition of the Dallas Morning News.

Making its first appearance in Texas, the genus known as Terminonaris was thought to have originated in Europe, but Adams’ research indicates it now appears to have been a native of the Lone Star State.

The switch in origins for Terminonaris is based on the identification of a well-preserved, narrow fossil snout that was discovered along the shoreline of Lake Lewisville near Dallas.

The 96-million-year-old fossil from Texas is the oldest prehistoric crocodile of its kind in the world, says Adams. A distant cousin of modern crocodiles and alligators, Terminonaris was similar to the modern-day Indian gharial, only much larger.

Full story available to Dallas Morning News subscribers.

EXCERPT:

By MARC RAMIREZ
Dallas Morning News
Thanks to a mail carrier’s discovery, it now appears the Beast from the East was actually a Guest from the West.

About five years ago, Brian Condon got tired of being cooped up at his Lakewood Village home and figured he’d go out and find a fossil.

What he found that day at Lewisville Lake would ultimately brand a supposedly European-based prehistoric crocodile as a native Texan instead.

Meet Terminonaris — a 25-foot-long reptile predating the Lone Star State by about 96 million years.

SMU paleontologist Thomas Adams was among the team that identified the creature. The team’s findings were published in May???s issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The animal is a cousin to today’s crocodiles and alligators, the largest of which is the saltwater crocodile, which can reach 20 feet in length.

Previously, most of the few known Terminonaris specimens were from North America. The oldest known, however, was linked to a single 94 million-year-old jawbone found in Germany, leading scientists to surmise that the animal had originated in Europe and found its way westward.

That theory has probably been upended, with the Texan croc apparently outdating its German counterpart by about 2 million years.

“We have to really rethink: Did this group really originate in Europe and disperse west?” said Adams, who now has the fossilized snout stored in his office. “Or is it more likely that it originated in Texas?”

The discovery of a local Terminonaris now indicates the animals originated in what is now the southern U.S., then spread north along the shallow Western Interior Seaway, which stretched from what is now the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.

Condon, the amateur collector, was used to finding ammonites and shark teeth near the end of the peninsula dividing the two northern forks of Lewisville Lake. Ten years earlier, he’d found most of a plesiosaur.

Full story available to Dallas Morning News subscribers.

Tags Dale A. Winkler, Dedman College, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Institute for the Study of Earth & Man, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Thomas L. Adams

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Daily Mail: Meet the 25 ft prehistoric Texas crocodile who lived 100 million years ago

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 19, 2011

London Daily Mail reporter Mark Duell has written about the big prehistoric crocodile identified by SMU paleontologist Thomas L. Adams, a doctoral candidate in Dedman College’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

The story, “‘Its fossil looked like a loaf of bread from Subway’: Meet the 25ft prehistoric Texas crocodile who lived 100 MILLION years ago,” published in the Sunday, July 17 edition of the Daily Mail.

The switch in origins for Terminonaris is based on the identification of a well-preserved, narrow fossil snout that was discovered along the shoreline of Lake Lewisville near Dallas.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

Mark Duell
London Daily Mail
He measured 25ft, weighed more than a ton and lived almost 100 million years ago.

A palaeontologist has identified the oldest prehistoric crocodile of its kind in the world after the fossil of a Terminonaris was found at Lake Lewisville near Dallas, Texas.

The realisation by Thomas L. Adams has also changed what we know about the species originally thought to have originated in Europe, because it now appears it was a native of Texas.

Mr Adams, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, identified the reptile from its long snout which is more than 2ft long and 7in wide, reported Physorg.com.

It was discovered by Dallas amateur fossil enthusiast Brian Condon, who found the heavy pieces of the snout and a vertebrate in 2005 while fossil hunting, and donated them to the university.

Mr Condon had originally thought the pieces were petrified wood.

‘This piece looked like a loaf of bread from Subway,’ he said. ‘It was all wrinkled. Then I picked it up and turned it over and saw it had big round conical teeth. I thought: “This is amazing. It’s a jaw.'”

The discovery of the 96-million-year-old reptile’s fossil suggested that its head would have been about one metre long, Mr Adams said.

The Terminonaris is a cousin of the modern-day Indian gharial but was much larger — and it is a distant cousin of modern-day crocodiles and alligators, reported Southern Methodist University.

Mr Adams revealed the find ‘changes a lot about what we thought we knew about this group.’

‘Now we know the group had a wider distribution range, and that it’s much older,’ he said. ‘It represents a unique find for Texas. This is the first occurrence of Terminonaris in Texas.

‘It’s also the oldest occurrence of Terminonaris in the world and it’s also the southernmost occurrence of Terminonaris anywhere.’

Read the full story.

Tags Dale A. Winkler, Dedman College, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Institute for the Study of Earth & Man, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Thomas L. Adams

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New Texas Native: 96-million-year-old crocodile Terminonaris makes its first appearance in Texas, switches origins

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 13, 2011

Rare find alters origins and distribution of Terminonaris; first home was Texas and North America — not Europe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHS6vE4o3XY

Making its first appearance in Texas, a prehistoric crocodile thought to have originated in Europe now appears to have been a native of the Lone Star State.

The switch in origins for the genus known as Terminonaris is based on the identification of a well-preserved, narrow fossil snout that was discovered along the shoreline of a lake near Dallas.

The 96-million-year-old fossil from Texas is the oldest prehistoric crocodile of its kind in the world, according to paleontologist Thomas L. Adams at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, who identified the reptile.

A distant cousin of modern crocodiles and alligators, Terminonaris was similar to the modern-day Indian gharial, only much larger.

“With the recognition of Terminonaris here in Texas, this actually changes a lot about what we thought we knew about this group,” Adams said.

“Now we know the group had a wider distribution range, and that it’s much older. It represents a unique find for Texas. This is the first occurrence of Terminonaris in Texas. It’s also the oldest occurrence of Terminonaris in the world, and it’s also the southernmost occurrence of Terminonaris anywhere.”

There are six other known Terminonaris fossil specimens: five from North America and one from Europe. The European specimen, from Germany, previously was thought to be the oldest. Scientists had concluded that Terminonaris originated in Europe and then traversed the Atlantic and dispersed throughout North America.

“Now we know Terminonaris most likely originated here in Texas and dispersed northward,” said Adams, a doctoral candidate in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU.

Big Texas crocodile swam the shores of North America’s prehistoric seaway
Adams identified the reptile primarily from its long snout, which measures more than 2 feet long and 7 inches wide, or 62 centimeters. With a snout that long, Adams estimates the head would have been about one meter long.

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“Based on Nile crocodiles and the Indian gharial, which are both large crocodiles, a regression analysis indicates this Terminonaris probably would have been 23 to 25 feet long,” said Adams. “The largest living crocodile today is the saltwater crocodile, which can reach up to 20 feet in length.”

The Texas Terminonaris was an adult and most likely weighed more than a ton, he said.

Adams identified the fossils in “First Occurrence of the Long-Snouted Crocodyliform Terminonaris (Pholidosauridae) from the Woodbine Formation (Cenomanian) of Texas” in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Prehistoric crocodiles such as Terminonaris together with living crocodiles make up a large group called crocodyliformes. While technically there are differences between living crocodiles and each of the different types of fossil crocodile forms, all of them are often commonly referred to as crocodiles.

Today there are only 23 species of living crocodiles, a small number compared to the many species of mammals, birds, lizards, snakes and fish alive today, Adams said. That’s in stark contrast to prehistoric times.

“In the past, the crocodilian forms were very diverse and they were very successful. There were hundreds of species. Even at the time of the Texas Terminonaris, they were found everywhere,” Adams said.

Texas specimen fills gap, expands age and range of group
Texas Terminonaris was discovered by Dallas-area amateur fossil enthusiast Brian Condon, a rural mail carrier. Condon discovered the heavy pieces of the snout and a vertebrate in 2005 while fossil hunting near his home on Lake Lewisville, a 26,000-acre recreational and fishing lake managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He spotted the first of the pieces along the shoreline. Condon donated the fossils to SMU’s Shuler Museum of Paleontology.

In prehistoric times, Texas Terminonaris would have made its home in a marine setting, along the eastern shore of North America’s vast prehistoric Western Interior Seaway. One hundred million years ago the seaway was a wide, shallow sea that split the North American continent in half from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, said Adams, lead author on the scientific article. The seaway would have covered Lake Lewisville’s location.

In its day-to-day life on the seaway, Terminonaris would have kept close to shore, perhaps in a shallow lagoon or estuary, also venturing into the seaway’s warm salty water to hunt for fish. Like modern crocodiles and alligators, Terminonaris would have eaten whatever it could catch, Adams said. Its long, slender snout was well-suited for devouring fish, small mammals and even small dinosaurs.

North America’s other Terminonaris fossil specimens also were found along the seaway. A Kansas specimen is the youngest, about 91 million years, while those from Saskatchewan, Canada, and Montana are 93 million years old. The German specimen is 94 million years old.

“Terminonaris now here in Texas fills in a gap that we didn’t have information for,” Adams said. “It tells us that as a group, as a genus, they were around much longer, because we extend the age back to 96 million years. The range for them is now expanded, because this is the most southern occurrence of them.”

Well-preserved fossil offers no clues to adult reptile’s cause of death
While the Texas fossil is well-preserved, how the reptile died remains a mystery since only the snout was found.

It probably died in the water or washed out into the open sea, where it floated to the bottom and was buried very quickly, said Adams. The discovery of seven Terminonaris fossil specimens worldwide is significant, he said.

“To be fossilized, it requires they die at the right time in the right place, be buried very quickly, then eventually be exposed and uncovered,” he said. “So the odds of being fossilized and being found as a fossil are very slim.”

Condon found one piece at the water’s edge of Lake Lewisville. The other pieces were further up a bank that sloped toward the shore, Condon said. The pieces had been deposited on the ground by receding water, pulled from the Woodbine Formation by constant waves that had washed away a soil bank and uncovered the heavy fossils. The outcrop of the Woodbine Formation visible at Lake Lewisville starts at the Red River in North Texas and thins as it nears Dallas.

Condon, who had previously found other fossils in the area, initially thought the pieces were petrified wood.

“This piece looked like a loaf of bread from Subway. It was all wrinkled,” Condon said. “Then I picked it up and turned it over and saw it had teeth — big, round conical teeth — and I thought, ‘This is amazing. It’s a jaw.'”

Co-authors on the article were SMU paleontologists Michael J. Polcyn, Dale A. Winkler and Louis L. Jacobs, and also paleontologist Octavio Mateus, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal.

The research was funded by Southern Methodist University???s Institute for the Study of Earth & Man. — Margaret Allen

Tags Dale A. Winkler, Dedman College, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Institute for the Study of Earth & Man, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Thomas L. Adams

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Youtube: Trailer of Projecto PaleoAngola documentary

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 8, 2011

SMU paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs and Michael J. Polcyn appear in a new documentary about Projecto PaleoAngola, a collaborative international scientific research program focused on the ancient life of Angola.

“The results of our fieldwork in the Cretaceous of Angola have been extraordinarily spectacular,” says Jacobs.

Besides the discovery of the first dinosaur of Angola the team has uncovered mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, turtles and other Cretaceous marine animals, but the aim is also to create a strong and lasting institutional and scientific collaboration that has a multiplier effect in Angolan academia.

A trailer of the upcoming documentary is available on YouTube. The film was written, directed, and produced by Kalunga Lima of LS films, based in Luanda Angola, and edited by Helena Alves. Lima interviewed Jacobs and Polcyn, who are both members of the Projecto PaleoAngola team.

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To book a live or taped interview with Louis Jacobs or Mike Polcyn in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu. (Photo: Octavio Mateus)

Earth magazine: “Mapping Dino Footprints in 3-D”

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date May 2, 2011

Earth%2C%20TAdams%2C%203D%2C%20May%202011.jpg

The May 2011 issue of Earth Magazine reports on the research of SMU paleontologists in the SMU Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

In a project led by SMU paleontologist Thomas L. Adams, the scientists used portable laser scanning technology to capture field data of a huge 110 million-year-old Texas dinosaur track and then create to scale an exact 3D facsimile.

They have shared their protocol and findings with the public — as well as their downloadable 145-megabyte model — in the online scientific journal Palaeontologia Electronica.

The model duplicates an actual dinosaur footprint fossil that is slowly being destroyed by weathering because it’s on permanent outdoor display, says Adams. The researchers describe in the paper how they created the digital model and discuss the implications for digital archiving and preservation.

Scientists increasingly are using computed tomography and 3D laser scanners to produce high-quality 3D digital models, say Adams and his colleagues, including to capture high-resolution images from remote field sites. SMU’s full-resolution, three-dimensional digital model of the 24-by-16-inch Texas footprint is one of the first to archive an at-risk fossil, they say. Click here to see a large image of the Earth magazine cover.

EXCERPT:

Sam Lemonick
for Earth Magazine

Dinosaurs are now leaving their footprints on computers — in 3-D. Having 3-D scans of dinosaur footprints in a computer database could be the surest form of preservation of these delicate fossils, researchers say.

Dinosaur tracks found outdoors can’t always be excavated and moved indoors for preservation and study. That includes a theropod dinosaur footprint that is embedded in a bandstand made of limestone and fossil wood in Glen Rose, Texas — a town just southeast of Dinosaur Valley State Park. So a team led by Thomas Adams of Southern Methodist University in Texas decided to create a 3-D model of the print.

They used a high-resolution laser scanner the size of a small briefcase to map the shape of the footprint with beams of laser light from multiple angles. The laser scanner produces what is known as a point cloud, with each point representing a part of the object. The point cloud is then “smoothed” by software to produce a continuous surface.

Tags Christopher Strganac, Dedman College, Ellis W. Shuler, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Thomas L. Adams

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Associated Press: Projecto PaleoAngola discovers Angola’s first dinosaur

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 23, 2011

The research of an international team co-led by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs is receiving worldwide coverage for discovery of the first fossil of a dinosaur from Angola. A paper published in the “Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Science” described the long-necked, plant-eating sauropod based on a fossilized forelimb with unique skeletal characteristics that indicates it’s from a previously unknown dinosaur.

An Associated Press story covering discovery of the 90-million-year-old fossil has been published and aired by numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, Newsday, NPR, Forbes, The Daily Mail, and the Hamburger Abendblatt,

SMU paleontologist Michael J. Polcyn is also a member of the Projecto PaleoAngola team.

The PaleoAngola researchers have described Angola as a “museum in the ground” for the abundance of fossils there.

A professor in Dedman College’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Jacobs joined SMU’s faculty in 1983.

Besides Angola, Jacobs also does field work in Mongolia. His book, “Lone Star Dinosaurs” (1999, Texas A&M University Press) was the basis of an exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that traveled the state. He consulted on the new exhibit, Mysteries of the Texas Dinosaurs, which opened in 2009.

Polcyn is director of the Visualization Laboratory in SMU’s Department of Earth Sciences and an SMU adjunct research associate.

A world-recognized expert on the extinct marine reptile named Mosasaur, his research interests include the early evolution of Mosasauroidea and adaptations in secondarily aquatic tetrapods. Polcyn’s research also includes application of technology to problems in paleontology.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By The Associated Press
Scientists say they have discovered the first fossil of a dinosaur in Angola, and that it’s a new creature, heralding a research renaissance in a country slowly emerging from decades of war.

A paper published Wednesday in the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences describes a long-necked, plant-eating sauropod, among the largest creatures ever to have walked the earth. The international team that found and identified the fossilized forelimb bone say it is from a previously unknown dinosaur, citing unique skeletal characteristics.

The fossil was found along with fish and shark teeth in what would have been a sea bed 90 million years ago, leading its discoverers to believe the dinosaur might have been washed into the sea and torn apart by ancient sharks.

The new dinosaur has been dubbed Angolatitan adamastor — Angolatitan means “Angolan giant” and the adamastor is a sea giant from Portuguese sailing myths.

Matthew F. Bonnan, a sauropod expert at Western Illinois University, was not involved with the Angolan research. But after reading the report, he said he expected their claim to have found a new dinosaur to hold up.

“I think they’ve been very careful,” he said, adding the find could add to knowledge about how sauropods adapted to different environments.

Bonnan also said it was “really cool” to see such research coming out of Angola.

“The neat thing about dinosaur paleontology is that it’s becoming more global,” he said, saying that was giving scientists a global perspective on the evolution of dinosaurs.

“The more people and places that we involve in science, the better off we all are,” Bonnan said.

Read the full story.

Tags Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn

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3D digital download of giant Glen Rose dinosaur track is roadmap for saving at-risk natural history resources

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 7, 2011

Paleontologists propose the new term “digitype” for full-resolution three-dimensional digital models that preserve and archive endangered fossils

Portable laser scanning technology allows researchers to tote their latest fossil discovery from the field to the lab in the form of lightweight digital data stored on a laptop. But sharing that data as a 3D model with others requires standard formats that are currently lacking, say paleontologists at Southern Methodist University.

The SMU researchers used portable laser scanning technology to capture field data of a huge 110 million-year-old Texas dinosaur track and then create to scale an exact 3D facsimile. They share their protocol and findings with the public — as well as their downloadable 145-megabyte model — in the online scientific journal Palaeontologia Electronica.

The model duplicates an actual dinosaur footprint fossil that is slowly being destroyed by weathering because it’s on permanent outdoor display, says SMU paleontologist Thomas L. Adams, lead author of the scientific article. The researchers describe in the paper how they created the digital model and discuss the implications for digital archiving and preservation. Click here for the download link.

“This paper demonstrates the feasibility of using portable 3D laser scanners to capture field data and create high-resolution, interactive 3D models of at-risk natural history resources,” write the authors.

“3D digitizing technology provides a high-fidelity, low-cost means of producing facsimiles that can be used in a variety of ways,” they say, adding that the data can be stored in online museums for distribution to researchers, educators and the public.

SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs is one of the coauthors on the article.

“The protocol for distance scanning presented in this paper is a roadmap for establishing a virtual museum of fossil specimens from inaccessible corners across the globe,” Jacobs said.

Paleontologists propose the term “digitype” for digital models
Scientists increasingly are using computed tomography and 3D laser scanners to produce high-quality 3D digital models, say Adams and his colleagues, including to capture high-resolution images from remote field sites.

SMU’s full-resolution, three-dimensional digital model of the 24-by-16-inch Texas footprint is one of the first to archive an at-risk fossil, they say.

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The SMU paleontologists propose the term “digitype” for such facsimiles, writing in their article “High Resolution Three-Dimensional Laser-scanning of the type specimen of Eubrontes (?) Glenrosensis Shuler, 1935, from the Comanchean (Lower Cretaeous) of Texas: Implications for digital archiving and preservation.”

Laser scanning is superior to other methods commonly used to create a model because the procedure is noninvasive and doesn’t harm the original fossil, the authors say. Traditional molding and casting procedures, such as rubber or silicon molds, can damage specimens.

But the paleontologists call for development of standard formats to help ensure data accessibility.

“Currently there is no single 3D format that is universally portable and accepted by all software manufacturers and researchers,” the authors write.

Digitype is baseline for measuring future deterioration
SMU’s digital model archives a fossil that is significant within the scientific world as a type specimen — one in which the original fossil description is used to identify future specimens. The fossil also has cultural importance in Texas. The track is a favorite from well-known fossil-rich Dinosaur Valley State Park, where the iconic footprint draws tourists.

The footprint was left by a large three-toed, bipedal, meat-eating dinosaur, most likely the theropod Acrocanthosaurus. The dinosaur probably left the footprint as it walked the shoreline of an ancient shallow sea that once immersed Texas, Adams said. The track was described and named in 1935 as Eubrontes (?) glenrosensis. Tracks are named separately from the dinosaur thought to have made them, he explained.

“Since we can’t say with absolute certainty they were made by a specific dinosaur, footprints are considered unique fossils and given their own scientific name,” said Adams, a doctoral candidate in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU.

The fossilized footprint, preserved in limestone, was dug up in the 1930s from the bed of the Paluxy River in north central Texas about an hour’s drive southwest of Dallas. In 1933 it was put on prominent permanent display in Glen Rose, Texas, embedded in the stone base of a community bandstand on the courthouse square.

The footprint already shows visible damage from erosion, and eventually it will be destroyed by gravity and exposure to the elements, Adams said. The 3D model provides a baseline from which to measure future deterioration, he said.

In comparing the 3D model to an original 1930s photograph made of the footprint, the researchers discovered that some surface areas have fractured and fallen away. By comparing the 3D model with a synthetically altered version, the researchers were able to calculate volume change, which in turn enables reconstruction of lost volume for restoration purposes.

Model comprises 52 scans totaling 2 gigabytes
Adams and his research colleagues took a portable scanner to the bandstand site to capture the 3D images. They employed a NextEngine HD Desktop 3D scanner and ScanStudio HD PRO software running on a standard Windows XP 32 laptop. The scanner and laptop were powered from outlets on the bandstand. The researchers used a tent to control lighting and maximize laser contrast.

Because of the footprint’s size — about 2 feet by 1.4 feet (64 centimeters by 43 centimeters) — multiple overlapping images were required to capture the full footprint.

Raw scans were imported into Rapidform XOR2 Redesign to align and merge them into a single 3D model. The final 3D model was derived from 52 overlapping scans totaling 2 gigabytes, the authors said.

The full-resolution 3D digital model comprises more than 1 million poly-faces and more than 500,000 vertices with a resolution of 1.2 millimeters. It is stored in Wavefront format. In that format the model is about 145 megabytes. The model is free for downloading from a link on Palaeontologia Electronica‘s web site.

3D digital footprint also available as a QuickTime virtual object
A smaller facsimile is also available from the journal as a QuickTime Virtual Reality object. In that format, users can slide their mouse pointer over the 3D footprint image to drag it to a desired viewing angle, and zoom and pan. Click here for the link to the QuickTime video.

Besides the 3D model, included with the Palaeontologia Electronica article is a link to a pdf of the original 1935 scientific article in which SMU geology professor Ellis W. Shuler described and identified the dinosaur that made the track.

Shuler’s article, no longer in print, is “Dinosaur Track Mounted in the Band Stand at Glen Rose, Texas,” published in Field & Laboratory. The clay molds and plaster casts Shuler made of the bandstand track are now lost, Adams said. Click here for the article.

Besides Adams and Jacobs, other co-authors on the article are paleontologists Christopher Strganac and Michael J. Polcyn in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU.

The research was funded by the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man at SMU. — Margaret Allen

SMU is a private university in Dallas where nearly 11,000 students benefit from the national opportunities and international reach of SMU’s seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility on campus for live TV, radio or online interviews. To speak with Adams or to book him in the SMU studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Christopher Strganac, Dedman College, Ellis W. Shuler, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Thomas L. Adams

Fossils & Ruins Researcher news SMU In The News Videos

BBC Radio: PaleoAngola project unearths ancient vertebrate fossils

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 9, 2010

BBC Radio covered the research in Angola of SMU paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs and Michael J. Polcyn.

Journalist Louise Redvers in August interviewed Jacobs and Polcyn, both members of the Projecto PaleoAngola team.

A professor in Dedman College’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Jacobs joined SMU’s faculty in 1983.

Besides Angola, Jacobs also does field work in Mongolia. His book, “Lone Star Dinosaurs” (1999, Texas A&M University Press) was the basis of an exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that traveled the state. He consulted on the new exhibit, Mysteries of the Texas Dinosaurs, which opened in 2009.

Polcyn is director of the Visualization Laboratory in SMU’s Department of Earth Sciences and an SMU adjunct research associate.

Listen to the podcast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uic2WosjxWM

Tags Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

National Geographic: Texas pterosaur Aetodactylus Halli in the spotlight after 95 million years

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date May 10, 2010

National Geographic News interviewed SMU postdoctoral researcher Timothy S. Myers about the new species and genus of pterosaur he identified and named, Aetodactylus Halli.

In the April 28 article “Toothy Texas Pterosaur Found; Soared Over Dallas” reporter John Roach talked to Myers about the 95 million-year-old jaw that was discovered by Lake Worth resident Lance Hall.

The pterosaur flew over the ancient sea that used to cover much of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. A rare species of pterosaur in North America, Myers named the new flying reptile after Hall.

Others who wrote about Myers’ Aetodactylus Halli research include:

The Christian Science Monitor with “Aetodactylus halli fossil: a clue in North American mystery”
CBS 11 with “Texas Man Makes Fossil Find While Out Walking”
Fort Worth Star-Telegram with “New Honor For Ancient Find”
Dallas Observer with “95 Million Reasons Why Unfair Park Needs More Dallas Dinosaur News”
Discovery News with “Texas Has A New Toothy Pterosaur.”

Others who published a story about the find were: American Scientist, MSNBC, FOX News, the San Diego Tribune and many others.

EXCERPT:

By John Roach
National Geographic News
Long before six flags flew over Texas, a newfound species of winged reptile
with an exceptionally toothy grin owned the skies over what is now the Lone
Star State.

The recently discovered pterosaur, dubbed Aetodactylus halli, was identified based on a 95-million-year-old lower jawbone found outside of Dallas by amateur fossil hunter Lance Hall.

The pterosaur had a relatively slender jaw filled with thin, needlelike teeth, which might have helped the creature pluck fish from the shallow sea that once covered the region, a new study says.

“It was hanging out near the ocean, and that is probably where it derived its food from,” said study leader Timothy Myers, a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

By comparing the jawbone to more complete pterosaur fossils, Myers and his team think A. halli was a medium-size animal with a nine-foot (three-meter) wingspan and a short tail.

Texas’s Toothy Pterosaur a Rare Find
Pterosaurs ruled the skies from the late Triassic period, more than 200 million years ago, until dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago.

Read the full story

Tags Bonnie F. Jacobs, Dedman College, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Institute for the Study of Earth and Man, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Timothy S. Myers

Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Slideshows

Texas discovery: Rare 95 million-year-old flying reptile Aetodactylus halli is new genus, species of pterosaur

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 26, 2010

A 95 million-year-old fossilized jaw discovered in Texas has been identified as a new genus and species of flying reptile, Aetodactylus halli.

Aetodactylus halli is a pterosaur, a group of flying reptiles commonly referred to as pterodactyls.

The rare pterosaur — literally winged lizard — is one of the youngest members in the world of the pterosaur family Ornithocheiridae, says paleontologist Timothy S. Myers, who identified and named Aetodactylus halli.

The newly identified reptile is only the second ornithocheirid ever documented in North America, Myers says. He is a postdoctoral fellow in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Aetodactylus halli would have soared over what is now the Dallas-Fort Worth area during the Cretaceous Period when much of the Lone Star state was under water, covered by a vast ancient sea.

Click here to view larger image of Aetodactylus halli

While rare in North America, toothed pterosaurs belonging to the Ornithocheiridae are a major component of Cretaceous pterosaur faunas elsewhere in the world, Myers says. The Texas specimen — a nearly complete mandible with most of its 54 teeth missing — is definitively younger than most other ornithocheirid specimens from Brazil, England and China, he says. It is five million years younger than the only other known North American ornithocheirid.

Myers describes the new species in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Myers named the pterosaur Aetodactylus halli after Lance Hall, a member of the Dallas Paleontological Society who hunts fossils for a hobby. Hall found the specimen in 2006 in North Texas. It was embedded in a soft, powdery shale exposed by excavation of a hillside next to a highway. The site was near the city of Mansfield, southwest of Dallas and west of Joe Pool Lake. Hall donated the specimen to SMU.

Pterosaurs ruled the skies from the late Triassic, more than 200 million years ago, to the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago, when they went extinct. They represent the earliest vertebrates capable of flying.

Fossil hunter saw long row of teeth sockets
The Aetodactylus halli jaw was discovered in the geologic unit known as the Eagle Ford Group, which comprises sediments deposited in a shallow sea, Myers says. Outcrop of the Eagle Ford Group extends northward from southwestern Texas into southern Oklahoma and southwestern Arkansas.

“I was scanning the exposure and noticed what at first I thought was a piece of oyster shell spanning across a small erosion valley,” Hall recalls of the discovery. “Only about an inch or two was exposed. I almost passed it up thinking it was oyster, but realized it was more tan-colored like bone. I started uncovering it and realized it was the jaw to something — but I had no idea what. It was upside down and when I turned over the snout portion it was nothing but a long row of teeth sockets, which was very exciting.”

SMU vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a dinosaur expert internationally recognized for his fossil discoveries in Texas and Africa, and SMU paleontologist Michael J. Polcyn, recognized for his expertise on the extinct marine reptiles called mosasaurs, both told Hall it was a pterosaur and an important find.

Unique jaw differs from others
The 38.4-centimeter Aetodactylus jaw originally contained 54 slender, pointed teeth, but only two remain in their sockets, Myers says. The lower teeth were evenly spaced and extended far back along the jaw, covering nearly three quarters of the length of the mandible. The upper and lower teeth interlaced when the jaws were closed.

In Aetodactylus, changes in tooth size along the jaw follow a similar pattern to those of other ornithocheirids. However, Aetodactylus differs from all other ornithocheirids in that its jaws were thin and delicate, with a maximum thickness not much greater than 1 centimeter, Myers says. But the specimen does compare favorably with Boreopterus, a related pterosaur from the Early Cretaceous of China, in terms of the number of teeth present in the lower jaw, he says.

Myers has estimated the wingspan around roughly 3 meters, or about 9 feet, indicating Aetodactylus would have been a “medium-sized” pterosaur, he says. While it’s not known how Aetodactylus died, at the time of death the reptile was flying over the sea and fell into the water, perhaps while fishing, Jacobs says.

Find hints at new diversity of pterosaurs
North American pterosaurs that date from the Cretaceous are all toothless, except for Aetodactylus and Coloborhynchus, Myers says. The thinness of the jaws, upward angle of the back half of the mandible and the lack of a pronounced expansion of the jaw tips indicate that Aetodactylus is different from other ornithocheirids and represents a new genus and species of pterosaur.

“Discovery of another ornithocheirid species in Texas hints at a diversity of pterosaurs in the Cretaceous of North America that wasn’t previously realized,” Myers says. “Aetodactylus also represents one of the final occurrences of ornithocheirids prior to the Late Cretaceous transition to pterosaur faunas that were dominated by the edentulous, or toothless, species.”

Texas now claims the only two of their kind
Hall on April 14 was presented with the Dallas Paleontological Society’s highest honor, the Lloyd Hill award. The award is named for the late Lloyd Hill, an amateur fossil hunter and longtime member of the Dallas Paleontological Society. Hill wrote the well-regarded novel The Village of Bom Jesus.

Much of Texas was once submerged under the Western Interior Seaway. The massive sea split North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean.

On shore, the terrain was flat and flowering plants were already dominating flora communities in this part of North America, according to paleobotanist Bonnie Jacobs, associate professor of Earth Sciences at SMU.

“There were still conifers and ferns as well, but mostly of the sort that had tiny needle leaves, like junipers,” says Bonnie Jacobs. “Sycamores and their relatives would have been among the flowering plants.”

The first ornithocheirid remains from North America, discovered in Fort Worth, were described by former SMU student Young-Nam Lee and donated by amateur collector Chris Wadleigh, says SMU’s Louis Jacobs.

“The ancient sea that covered Dallas provided the right conditions to preserve marine reptiles and other denizens of the deep, as well as the delicate bones of flying reptiles that fell from their flight to the water below,” says Louis Jacobs, a professor in SMU’s Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

“The rocks and fossils here record a time not well represented elsewhere in North America,” says Louis Jacobs. “That’s why two species of ornithocheirids have been found here but nowhere else, and that’s why discoveries of other new fossils are sure to be made by Lance Hall and other fossil lovers.”

Myers’ article in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology is titled “A new ornithocheirid pterosaur from the Upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian-Turonian) Eagle Ford Group of Texas.”

The research was funded by SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences and SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.

Tags Bonnie F. Jacobs, Dedman College, Institute for the Study of Earth and Man, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Timothy S. Myers

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

SMU’s Polcyn, Jacobs in Discovery Channel’s “Prehistoric Dallas”

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 23, 2010

Dallas — and much of Texas — was once submerged by a sprawling, blue-water ecosystem called the Western Interior Seaway, which split North America in two from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, according to a new video documentary by the Discovery Channel.

“Prehistoric Dallas” includes commentary from two SMU paleontologists, Michael J. Polcyn and Louis L. Jacobs, both of whom have expertise in Texas’ ancient sea and the life that inhabited it from more than 90 million years ago until the extinction of the dinosaurs at 66 million years ago.

Watch “Prehistoric Dallas”

From Dallasaurus to Mosasaur
That animal life included the three-foot-long Dallasaurus, which represents an intermediate stage between land-dwelling lizards, similar to the modern day Komodo dragon, and fully marine-adapted Mosasaurs equipped with fin-like limbs and a fish-like tail.

Starting at about 100 million years ago, these small lizards took to the water, but quickly evolved into the huge marine creatures that grew to 50 feet in length by the end of the Cretaceous.

“(Dallasaurus) probably retained a swimming behavior very similar to what you see in modern lizards,” says Polcyn, whose appearance starts 38 seconds into the “Ocean Pioneer” segment.

The ancient sea covering Texas was clean, deep water, says SMU vertebrate paleontologist Jacobs at the start of the “Texas Submerged” segment. Evidence of that sea exists today in the 86-million-year-old fossils in the geological layer known as the Austin Chalk.

The layer is formed by plankton, Jacobs explains, which are minute organisms that live on the surface of the ocean, then die and filter down to the bottom.

“There was no mud and silt here, washed in from the land,” Jacobs says. “This represents the bottom of the sea, when the sea was at its deepest in this area.”

Polcyn and Jacobs are in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College.

Internationally recognized for his fossil discoveries, Jacobs joined SMU’s faculty in 1983. Currently he has projects in Mongolia, Angola and Antarctica. His book, “Lone Star Dinosaurs” (1999, Texas A&M University Press) was the basis of an exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that traveled the state.

Jacobs consulted on the new exhibit “Mysteries of the Texas Dinosaurs” at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. It includes the world’s first skeletal mount of the Texas state dinosaur Paluxysaurus jonesi. Jacobs narrates the video portion of the exhibit, which also includes SMU students Yuri Kimura, Dan Danehy and Kyle Paterson.

Polcyn, director of the Visualization Laboratory in the SMU Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, is an SMU adjunct research associate.

Polcyn is a world-recognized expert on the extinct marine reptiles called Mosasaurs.

Polcyn’s research also includes application of technology to problems in paleontology.

He recently created computer models to produce life-sized physical models of some of the Paluxysaurus jonesi bones for “Mysteries of the Texas Dinosaurs” at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.

Tags Dedman College, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn

Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news Slideshows

World’s first full skeletal mount of Paluxysaurus jonesi dinosaur reveals new biology

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date December 10, 2009

The Early Cretaceous sauropod Paluxysaurus jonesi weighed 20 tons, was 60 feet long and had a neck 26 feet long, according to the scientists who have prepared the world’s first full skeletal mount of the dinosaur.

The massive Paluxysaurus jonesi, prepared for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History in Fort Worth, was unveiled Nov. 20 when the museum opened in a new $80 million facility. The Paluxysaurus mount enables Texans to see their state dinosaur in three dimensions for the first time.

The reconstructed skeleton is yielding clues to the biology of the animal and its relationship to other similar dinosaurs, says Dale Winkler, lead consultant for anatomy and posture on the skeletal mount.

Winkler is director of the Shuler Museum of Paleontology at SMU and a research professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. Winkler has worked with Paluxysaurus bones since crews from SMU and the Fort Worth museum began to unearth them in the early 1990s.

In preparing the mount, Winkler said he was surprised at how extremely long the neck was — at 26 feet — compared to the tail, and he found the head especially striking.

“It was really exciting to see what the head looked like,” Winkler says. “Paluxysaurus had very high cheeks compared to its relatives. Once the bones defining the opening of the nose were connected, it showed that the nostrils were turned up on top of the snout, instead of out like Brachiosaurus.”

Skeletal mount reveals animal’s anatomy, size and stature
A relative of Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus, Paluxysaurus lived about 110 million to 115 million years ago. The dinosaur was identified and named in 2007 by Peter J. Rose. The Fort Worth skeleton was assembled from a combination of actual fossil bones from at least four different dinosaurs found on private ranch land in North Central Texas and from cast lightweight foam pieces modeled on original bones. The mount enables scientists to better understand the animal’s anatomy, size and stature on questions like “How were the legs situated, and how did the shoulders relate to the hips?”

From the skeletal mount, the scientists learned that Paluxysaurus was more than 6 feet wide and nearly 12 feet tall at the shoulder, although built fairly light, Winkler says. Its teeth are a lot slimmer than those of its closest relatives, indicating Paluxysaurus gathered and processed food differently, using its teeth not for chewing, but to grab food, he says.

Paluxysaurus had a long neck like Brachiosaurus, and a tail almost as long, but wasn’t quite so gigantic. Scientists also learned Paluxysaurus had relatively long front arms, unlike Diplodocus, making its back more level. The dinosaur’s shoulder turned out fairly high, and the hips were wide, Winkler says, and it had reached a more advanced stage of evolution than Late Jurassic sauropods.

Paluxysaurus’ massive pelvis and its sacrum have never before been viewed by the public, he says. Its ilium, the largest bone in the pelvis, is similar to that of titanosaurids of the Late Cretaceous, mainly found in South America. However, one titanosaurid, called Alamosaurus, entered North America and is known from Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas.

The bones assembled for Fort Worth’s Paluxysaurus mount were recovered by students, faculty, staff and hundreds of volunteers over the past 16 years.

DFW’s ancient Cretaceous past included dinosaurs along a shallow sea
Most bones were found in masses of hardened sandstone dug from a Hood County quarry on the private ranch of Bill and Decie Jones.

It took more than a decade to remove the specimens because they were embedded in a hard sandstone matrix, said Louis L. Jacobs, a world-renowned paleontologist, dinosaur fossil hunter and a professor in the Earth Sciences department at SMU. Jacobs helped unearth and prepare the bones.

The end result is a skeleton that is “absolutely awe-inspiring,” Jacobs says. “Paluxysaurus and the plants and animals it lived among show us the truly unique position Texas held in the Cretaceous world. The exhibits at the Fort Worth museum tell that story to the people who now live where the giants used to walk.”

Sauropods weren’t common during the Early Cretaceous. The Fort Worth specimen is morphologically distinct from all other sauropods described and named in North America at that time, according to the research of Rose, who is now a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota. Rose identified the type specimen and named the animal while a graduate student in geology at SMU.

The Paluxysaurus dinosaurs lived near the shore of the rising Cretaceous seas that eventually covered Texas, amid large-trunked conifer trees that are now extinct. The semi-arid environment nurtured relatives of sago palms but few flowering plants, which were just beginning to spread out across the Earth, Winkler says.

The scientists say the Jones Ranch bone bed is one of the richest accumulations of sauropod bones in North America.

A group apparently died together there in a common death, perhaps a forest fire, according to earlier research of Winkler and Rose.

The quarry has produced hundreds of bones, all within an area of 400 square meters. Fossil hunters found 60 to 70 percent of the bones needed to reconstruct a single Paluxysaurus skeleton, says Aaron Pan, curator of the Fort Worth museum. Most of the bones, however, are too fragile or deformed to be mounted 15 feet in the air, Pan says.

“We were happy to have as much of it as we do,” Pan says, noting that the museum welcomes fossil researchers. “Most of our material is available. So if a researcher did want to see any of it, we’d be happy to have them come.”

Huge, multi-year project recreated skeleton with bones and casts
Paleontologists from both the museum and SMU helped exhibit fabricator and model-maker Robert Reid Studios, located near Fort Worth, mount the bones. About 15 percent to 20 percent of the skeleton is actual fossil bone, while the remaining bones are casts, says Pan.

Preparing the fossils for mounting and modeling was a huge, multi-year project. The cast bones were computer modeled using laser scanning, says Michael J. Polcyn, director of the Earth Sciences department’s image analysis lab at SMU.

“I was able to scan available bones in 3D and manipulate them in the computer to remove distortion, create mirrored pieces — for example right or left — and model missing portions,” Polcyn says. “I was then able to use the computer models to produce life-sized physical models of the bones using computer-controlled machining techniques.”

Many of the very large bones remain all or partially embedded in blocks of quarry rock, due primarily to the logistical challenge of removing them. For example, the 11-ton block containing the pelvis and sacrum required hoisting with an industrial crane. For some large blocks, tons of rock were painstakingly cut with diamond-blade saws from around the various bones to make them manageable in the SMU labs, Winkler says.

Rock was partially removed from the pelvis and sacrum so that Polcyn could scan them. The scientists then constructed a model using dense foam that was cut to form the basic shape. Crews from Robert Reid Studios coated them with epoxy resin to give them hardness, then added a layer of bone texture and painted them to match.

In the case of the long neck, much was preserved, but many of the bones were distorted by sediment load, which essentially crushed the bone, Polcyn says. He studied the neck vertebrae and made a model. Only two of the skull bones were recovered: the left maxilla and a nasal bone, which defined the top front of the face. Polcyn worked closely with a sculptor to reconstruct the skull by studying related groups of dinosaurs.

Preparation of the skeletal mount was funded by the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. — Margaret Allen

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SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

Tags Aaron Pan, Dale Winkler, Dedman College, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Paluxysaurus jonesi, Peter J. Rose

Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Slideshows Student researchers

Portable 3D laser technology preserves Texas dinosaur’s rare footprint

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 2, 2009

Using portable 3D laser technology, scientists have preserved electronically a rare 110 million-year-old fossilized dinosaur footprint that was previously excavated and built into the wall of a bandstand at a Texas courthouse in the 1930s.

The laser image preserves what is called a “type specimen” footprint — an original track used many years ago to describe a new species of dinosaur, says paleontologist Thomas L. Adams at SMU.

Portable 3D laser scanners capture original fossil morphology and texture, making it possible to use the data for rapid 3D prototyping in foam or resin, Adams says.

The footprint embedded in the bandstand has been exposed to the elements for nearly 75 years, causing portions of it to erode, Adams says. Erosional loss has affected the outer edge of the toes and heel, altering the initial shape of the track impression.

The track of the ichnospecies Eubrontes glenrosensis was excavated in 1933 from a main track layer in a riverbed in what is now 1,500-acre Dinosaur Valley State Park in Somervell County near Glen Rose. Not long after the track was excavated, the citizens of Glen Rose built a stone bandstand and embedded the track within one of its walls.

The track was described in 1935 by Ellis W. Shuler, SMU’s first geology professor.

Adams says the footprint is that of a three-toed, bipedal, meat-eating dinosaur, with the most likely candidate being the theropod named Acrocanthosaurus, found mostly in Texas, North Carolina and Oklahoma.

“The track is scientifically very important,” says Adams, who is earning his doctoral degree in paleontology at SMU. “But it’s also a historical and cultural icon for Texas.”

Dinosaur Valley State Park boasts the ancient shoreline of a 113 million-year-old sea and is renowned for some of the best preserved dinosaur footprints in the world. The bandstand track is a popular draw for tourists passing through Glen Rose, which is one hour southwest of Dallas.

In an effort to preserve the specimen, as well as to compare its present state with the original description, Adams used a portable 3D laser scanner to perform in situ digitization of the track.

The scans were post-processed to generate high-resolution 3D digital models of the track. Finally the models were rendered in various media formats such as Quicktime VR Virtual Reality and Tagged Image File Format for viewing, publication and archival purposes.

Adams will make the raw scan data and industry-standard 3D object files format available for download.

The research demonstrates the advantages of using portable laser scanners to capture field data and create high-resolution, interactive models that can be digitally archived and made accessible to others via the Internet for further research and education.

“It’s a nice way to share scientific data,” Adams says.

Adams’ research was funded by the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man at SMU. He presented the research at a scientific session of the 2009 annual meeting of The Geological Society of America in Portland, Ore., Oct. 18-21. His co-researchers are Christopher Strganac, Michael J. Polcyn and Louis L. Jacobs, all three in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU. — Margaret Allen

Tags Dedman College, Ellis W. Shuler, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Michael J. Polcyn, Thomas L. Adams

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news

Polcyn in New Scientist’s “Real Sea Monsters: Hunt for Predator X”

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 28, 2009

Paleontologist Michael J. Polcyn, director of the Visualization Laboratory in the SMU Huffington Department of Earth Sciences and SMU adjunct research associate, is quoted as an expert source in “Real Sea Monsters: The Hunt for Predator X.” The article by reporter James O’Donoghue was published in the October 2009 issue of the magazine New Scientist.

Polcyn is a world-recognized expert on the extinct marine reptile named Mosasaur.

His research interests include the early evolution of Mosasauroidea and adaptations in secondarily aquatic tetrapods. Polcyn’s research also includes application of technology to problems in paleontology.

Tags Dedman College, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Michael J. Polcyn

Fossils & Ruins Researcher news

Polcyn in Discovery Channel’s “Mega Beasts: T-Rex of the Deep”

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date September 14, 2009

Paleontologist Michael J. Polcyn, director of the Visualization Laboratory in the SMU Huffington Department of Earth Sciences and SMU adjunct research associate, appears as an expert source in “Mega Beasts: T-Rex of the Deep,” a science documentary that aired Sept. 13 on the Discovery Channel.

Polcyn is a world-recognized expert on the extinct marine reptile named Mosasaur.

Tags Dedman College, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Michael J. Polcyn

Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Student researchers

Mistaken ID for official Texas state dinosaur; name to change

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 13, 2009

It’s a case of mistaken dino-identity. The official State Dinosaur of Texas is up for a new name, based on Southern Methodist University research that proved the titleholder has been misidentified.

State Rep. Charles Geren of Fort Worth filed a resolution January 7 to change the name of the state dinosaur from Pleurocoelus to Paluxysaurus jonesi to correctly name the massive sauropod whose tracks and bones litter the central Texas Jones Ranch.

Peter J. Rose is the scientist behind the name change: His master’s level study of dinosaur bones at SMU eventually led him to dispute the long-accepted notion that the large, sauropod bones found in and around the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, were the same as Pleurocoelus bones first found in Maryland in the late 1800s.

Rose determined it was a different dinosaur altogether — a previously unrecognized genus and species he named Paluxysaurus jonesi, after W.W. Jones, the owner of the land on which the fossils were found. Once Rose’s discovery was published in 2007, Pleurocelus’ grand Texas title no longer fit.

Geren filed his resolution on behalf of constituents at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, which is a partner with SMU in ongoing research at the Glen Rose site, about 60 miles southwest of Fort Worth. Aaron Pan, Ph.D., the museum’s curator of science, believes it’s crucial to get the record corrected.

“I think it’s going to be good for Texas paleontology and dinosaur research in general,” Pan said. “Peter Rose’s research has found that it is a new genus and a new species. This dinosaur is unique to Texas, and it is the most abundant dinosaur fossil found in the Glen Rose area.”

SMU geological sciences professor Louis L. Jacobs, who was Rose’s mentor, said that nobody before Rose had made an adequate study of the sauropod bones found at the Glen Rose site. Jacobs has described Texas as a kind of “free trade zone for the age of reptiles” since dinosaurs from three different geologic time periods have been found in three different geographic areas of the state. Paluxysaurus jonesi is believed to have lived 112 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period.

“It just goes to show that Texas is a great place to make great discoveries — even when you might think everything has been found,” Jacobs said.

Rose, 29, received his master’s degree in geological sciences from SMU in 2004. Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in paleontology at the University of Minnesota, he concedes he is excited about the proposal to change the state dinosaur’s name to correspond with his research.

“But when you come down to it, whether it’s a new species is not the big question. More important are some of the bigger picture ideas about how these organisms evolved and what they were doing when they were alive,” Rose said. “I hope the future work I do has some broader implications. Currently I’m doing more climate research with implications, I hope, for global climate change.”

Tags Aaron Pan, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Paluxysaurus jonesi, Peter J. Rose

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