Smithsonian.com

Even though the basics of finding fossils in the field has not changed much since the dawn of paleontology, today’s paleontologists have a few advantages over their 19th and early 20th century counterparts. Aside from being able to drive over tough terrain and transport large slabs of bones with heavy machinery, one of the most important tools a paleontologist can have is a cell phone.

The site Mobile Maven recently posted a list of all the ways in which cell phones might be of use while out in the field. You will need some fancier hardware like an iPhone, but top-tier cell phones can be used as GPS units or cameras and can send e-mail in a pinch. An iPhone can’t replace dedicated GPS units or cameras, but when you’re working in the field it doesn’t hurt to have something that can double as a spare.

If you would rather not take your iPhone into the field, though, you can still put some dinosaurs on it. Pangea Software has released a game called Nanosaur 2 for the iPhone in which you play a pterosaur sent from the future to save dinosaur eggs. It sounds like fun, but given that my phone can barely run Tetris, I don’t think I’ll be playing it anytime soon.

There is always plenty of work to do at a fossil dig, but every now and then there’s a lull in the activity. While I was volunteering with some graduate students at a site in New Jersey a few years ago, I had the pleasure of playing a paleo name game with some of the other volunteers during a break. The objective was to make it all the way from A to Z by giving a genus name of a prehistoric creature for each letter of the alphabet. I got stumped on a few, but now that someone has made a “paleobet,” I’ll have a good starting place for next time.

K is for Kentrosaurus

The cute drawings feature a variety of fossil organisms, from Fukuiraptor to the sponge Vauxia, and it is be just the thing to put on a little paleo-fanatic’s wall. Quetzalcoatlus might be a bit of a tongue-twister for those just mastering the alphabet, but it is less frightening than the inflatable “letter people” that introduced me to the ABC’s.

When new dinosaur documentaries and feature films come out, lots of dino-fans debate the accuracy of the re-created beasts. How the dinosaurs held their hands, what size they were, whether they were covered with feathers or not; it’s all grist for the mill among those who have carefully studied paleontology.

Every now and then, though, it’s fun to just watch something outlandish that makes no pretensions to scientific accuracy. A good example of this is “Buddy’s Lost World,” a 1935 cartoon about a dinosaur-ridden hidden island that paleontologist Michael Ryan recently shared on his blog, Palaeoblog:

A Robert Walters drawing on a museum shopping bag frightens a tiny dog

Paleo artist Robert Walters is well known for his vivid and life-like depictions of dinosaurs, and it is to his credit that his artwork is so good that it can apparently frighten chihuahuas.

You can see more of Walters’ award-winning art at his Web site.

Illustration is from the Godefroit et al paper, showing the locations of northern polar dinosaur discoveries.

Imagine, for a moment, an ideal habitat for a dinosaur. What does it look like? Many people think of them crashing through tropical forests and wallowing in swamps, but in truth dinosaurs inhabited a wide range of ecological settings. That includes the temperate forests of the cold northern latitudes, and as a new paper published in the journal Naturwissenschaften shows, dinosaurs were thriving there right to the end.

Last year I wrote about a PBS special that focused on the polar dinosaurs of Alaska, and Smithsonian magazine ran a story on dinosaurs in Alaska and the South Pole. But the new journal paper is concerned with a different chilly location just on the other side of the Bering Strait. At Kakanaut, in northeastern Russia, paleontologists have found a fossil assemblage dating to the very end of Cretaceous, 65 to 68 million years old. Like the sites in Alaska, it is within the Arctic Circle, and even in the time of the dinosaurs it was apparently so cold that no small reptiles or amphibians lived there. This is because these smaller animals were ectothermic, meaning that their body temperature was fluctuated with the surrounding environment. That dinosaurs not only lived in such a place, but seemed to thrive there, adds evidence to the growing understanding that they were not cold-blooded creatures.

Much like sites in Alaska, at Kakanaut paleontologists have found many remains from hadrosaurs, horned dinosaurs, ankylosaurs, tyrannosaurs and dromeosaurs. There were herbivores and carnivores both large and small, and it seems that a large variety of dinosaurs were able to survive the cooler temperatures. The real surprise, however, was fragments of dinosaur eggshell. It has long been debated whether polar dinosaurs lived in the cold year round or migrated at particular seasons. The eggshell indicates that at least some dinosaurs reproduced in this habitat, which means they were remaining there for a long period of time. Some might have even stayed year-round, particularly if their young required parental care.

This has important implications for the extinction of the dinosaurs, too. There is an ongoing debate whether the dinosaurs died out gradually due to some unknown cause or whether they became extinct suddenly, perhaps because of the impact of a meteor 65 million years ago. The Russian site affects both ideas. If dinosaurs were this diverse at the very end of the Cretaceous, it is unlikely that their global extinction was gradual. At the same time, it has been suggested that a meteor strike would have caused cooler global temperatures which would have ultimately killed off the dinosaurs. The existence of so many polar dinosaurs, however, shows that some dinosaurs were capable of occupying cold regions. Thus cooling temperatures alone cannot explain why all the dinosaurs disappeared (at least, the ones that had not evolved into birds).

The extinction of the dinosaurs is still one of the most complex murder mysteries ever known.