Ice Age Vogue

From the Denver Museum of Natural History

     
  Suddenly, quite suddenly actually, extinct mammals have shown up in documentaries and traveling exhibits. Granted they are still the "giants," "titans," and "other impressive adjectives" versions of the creatures that took over after the dinosaurs died out. These guys are every bit as diverse and impressive as their non mammalian counterparts, they may not be 125ft long with supersonic tail whips, (the blue whale is still the largest thing on the planet. ever.) But their biodiversity and niche filling adaptations make them quite incredible to study. Here is a little preview of a traveling exhibit called Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age," which, as I write this, is currently on display at the Denver Museum of Natural History. Check with your local (or close-ish) museum to see if they are going to be getting in the next few years.

You may remember her taking National Geographic by storm in 2009.
Waking the Baby Mammoth

If you want a bit of interaction you can go here and play in a virtual lab with more details on Lyuba, the baby mammoth. 

What is really exciting is the upcoming BBC spectacular: Ice Age Giants. I just looked at some of teh storyboard drawings released to the BBC and they are great. I mean, these are enlarge frame and hang in your office good. That is, of course, you have some strange office decorations like I do. Guess what University now has a policy on shrunken heads? The link for the image slideshow is over at BBC News. But, here are a couple that I really liked:

 The trailers for this look fantastic. The CGI has improved so much from when they first started making these kinds of things. I do miss the animatronic stuff, but that usually shows up in larger budget productions. Here is a brief trailer and a bit of the behind the scenes talk with the animators and twitchy digital programs that make animal hair move how its supposed to when an extinct animal walks.

There is a second trailer here that has even better quality previews of the animals. For whatever reson that video will not embed, so you are stuck going over to youtube. It's worth it though. 

To say that people were just beginning to notice these large hairy mammals is quite untrue. They have always been around. They were some of the first vertebrate fossil remains discovered. Some have even been the basis for national identity as well as bodies of mythological heroes. 

Since the discovery of dinosaurs, however, they have been pushed into the wings, awaiting their cance to shine after big meetings where dino groupies roll like some quasi-scientific wave over the newest argument of Tyrannosaur feathers. Once the scaly/feathery goo has sloughed off the street you can get a clearer view of these impressarios as they were, as they were interpreted, and as they are now. Always, there, they are far more than a dinosaurs understudy. Don't believe me? Read this. 

                   

They are as part of America as baseball, apple pie, and cliches. Once the dust settled, the revolutionaries turned scientist. Our Founding Fathers worked with Our Founding Fossils. I am working on a paper discussing that which will, hopefully be finished end of June. Look for it in a future post. Until the next time we meet, keep reading the bones.

Higher Quality over on YouTube.

Let's go out on the porch.

    I grew up in the South. Technically I still live in the South I suppose. There are things that happen down here that are alien to most other folks. Porches are one. I have seen sunrooms in the north, and for good reason, sometimes it is just too cold to be outside up there. Porches, well if there isn't a subset study on Porch Culture there should be. Most of the summer is spent on the porch for the practical reason that it is far too hot inside to live. It looks like I keep creating new blogs instead of creating new posts. This is a holdover from my life with journals and an unadmitted battle with OCD. I have carried journals for as long as I can remember, but I hate having thoughts and topics arranged in places they don't go together. I don't want to talk about fossils or extinct animals over at The Platypus and the Dodo, but it is still an important part of my daily news intake as well as my research. So instead up random incoherentness on one blog I have decided to have random incoherentness on 3. I also write Life's Marginalia to capture all the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere and never had enough to put together a theme.

This is also a joint venture with something I have had the opportunity to do while at the University of Oklahoma--internet radio. The good folks at The Wire have given the Graduate College a two hour slot to discuss everything that is going on with our Graduate Student Life. Currently our slot is from 9:00am to 11:00 am every Thursday. I have the first hour to myself to discuss science news and research. After working solo for a couple of weeks it became apparent that most of the shows ended with a talk about paleontological endeavors. After talking to a few people after the last show, I realized that these were exactly like the stories I heard from my grandparents and their friends while sitting on the porches at their houses. Well, not exactly, there wasn't much talk about fossils, unless a find was announcement in National Geographic.

For the facebook inclined you can like Paleo Porch there too. I upload paleontology related news, photos, threads, or profiles that may be of interest to paleo-nerds. Hopefully this will start to balance out the heavily skewed dinosaur groupie-ism that is so rampant. I will post dino stuff, but mostly focus on the non dinosaurs--pterosaurs, aquatic reptiles, and mammals. I will just hold out until this idea is picked up by PBS or BBC. I would even settle for a kids show. Something needs to give the giant mammals some screen time, after all the Dinosaur Train doesn't stop in the Eocene.

The plan is to overview and summate the goings on each week in the word of paleontology. In addition to the new and noteworthy, I will try to shed some light on historical connections either with the finds, the paleontologists that discovered them, or the localities where they are digging. By updating every week, I will not only be able to keep abreast of all the goings on in the world of paleo, but also give a little more coherence to the show. Please click on The Wire to stream our show as well as others ( I have no idea what some of them are or when, so join at your own risk. There is also streaming video if you just want to see what is going on in the studio. Same link, just click on "video.") I will also upload the media file on facebook hosted through dropbox downloads in case you want to have a sorta amateur podcasts to listen to later.

If anyone has any questions or ideas for topics, leave them here in the comments, or send them to me on facebook. I live with this stuff and take it for granted that many people know more about the backstories of famous fossils than might actually be the case. Welcome aboard, come up and sit a spell. If you are really lucky, you will be able to say that you followed the Paleo Porch blog from the beginning and feel a closer connection as I start a lifetime of hosting the Paleo Porch show. Enjoy They Might Be Giants--they sing about this too.