Yes, I imagine it would be hard to explain to your 5 year old that mummies job is rummaging through fossilised dinosaur crap for a living but it has paid off for Caroline Strömberg, a palaeobotanist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm.
Researching the volcanic Deccan Traps of central India in order to study the diet of titanosaurs, the group of super-size dinosaurs that includes Diplodocus she has found silica based structures similar to grass. "Big deal!" I hear you say and you are right it is a big deal. You see grasses were not thought to exist until 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Grasses have an advantage over other plans in that they grow from the base of the plant rather than the tip. This means that when their top is munched off it does not have the same adverse effect on the plant. It has long been thought that the ascendancy of the grazing mammals, horses, cattle etc, was the kick start that grasses needed to establish themselves.
So did the mighty Diplodocus eat grass? Probably not, well not much anyway, its teeth were not suited to this kind of diet. Small mammals called gondwanatherians were more likely to be the main consumers.
Here is a pre-1923 drawing of Stegosaurus stenops, the most distintive of the Stegosaur family. The challenge for scientists is to make sense of the remains that they find which are essentially the solid parts of the animal which, in the case of the Stegosaur, included the twin plates running down the back and the spikes on the tail.
In the case of the Stegosaur several explanations have been proposed for the the plates running down the back and the spikes on the tail. Originally they were thought to be for protection. With the mindset of protection, little thought was given to the colour of the animal in general and the plates in particular. Colour depictions drew on the colour scheme of the dinosaurs living relatives, crocodiles. Thus were saw dinosaurs depicted as a brown-green colour as per the image below.
The structure of the plates, however, does not support their presence as a protective structure. They consist of a layer of dense bone surrounding a latticework of bone that would be like biting through a sandwich.
Kevin Padian, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley proposes that analysis of stegosaur plates supports the idea that they were decorative and served no function other than to differentiate species, akin to birds' colorful feather ornamentation. He says
We cut up and compared the internal structures of stegosaur plates and the smaller scutes of their ancestors, and found that a functional explanation for these plates doesn't make sense for all the stegosaurs. So we think that they're more likely involved in some type of species recognition, as with many African antelopes - you have to be different from all animals in the area so you don't get mixed up with other species.
If this is the case then there is little likelihood that they were dull monochrome structures as typically depicted. With this new purpose in mind it makes much more sense for the plates to be much more distinctive,
The same applies for the plate strutures of triceratops.
The planes of the Jurassic period, about 210 to 144 million years ago, may have been a lot more colourful than we originally imagined.
Having exchanged niceties with the Muttaburrasaurus, who I must say was being particularly stoic when faced with the indignity of having young children climbing all over her, I continued my exploration of the park.
Hmmm what is that I see in the distance?
Could it be?
Yes it is, a group of Bullockornis grazing in the picnic area of Kings Park, Perth.
Bullockornis are large flightless birds that derrive their name from Bullock Creek where their fossilised remains were first discovered.
Let's see if we can get a better look.
Can't get too close though, these birds are carnivorous. Their relatives lived in the Perth area around 15 million years ago and they are believed to be ancestors of the Cape Baron Goose. Here is a fossil skull that shows the massive beak that these birds used to carve up their prey.
The task for first day of The Green Man's trip to Perth was to fill in time while Mrs Green Man attended a conference, which was the reason for being over there. Faced with this task where better to occupy the better part of the day than the magnificent Kings Park.
Kings Park is situated on a hill overlooking Perth and the Swan River. It houses 400 hectares of land dedicated to the preservation of the natural flora and fauna of the area, which, like that of most of Australia is quite austere and unappealling to eyes accustomed to the rich greens of Europe.
The vegitation of Australia is old and unlike any other, evolving independantly from the rest of the world. Accordingly is was with some delight that The Green Man stumbled across a Muttaburrasaurus protecting it's nest within a small recreational area that is housed within the park. Unlike most of its relatives that died out around 90 million years ago this magnificent specimen survived by adopting the unusual strategy of being made of concrete.
These large lizards roamed most of Australia grazing on the vegitation of the time, like Macrozamia. Grasses as we know them had not evolved at this stage and the landscape was covered with these large palmlike plants which have the distinction of having the largest seed pod in the world.
The ones you can see in the photo to the left are located in northern Queensland near Muttaburra, the town which gave the Muttaburrasaurus its name. These ancient cycads are well adapted to the semi-arid terrain that is characteristic of so much of Australia.
The people of Drumheller, Alberta, Canada are big fans of Tyrannosaurus rex who, as his name suggests, is king of the dinosaurs and why wouldn't they be? They are home to Dinosaur Valley, one of the richest collection of dinosaur fossils in the world.
To celebrate the fact, they have a life sized model of a T. Rex. Here is a picture.
How old do you think he is, well more precisely how old do you think that the T. Rex he is depicting is? Well he may be as young as a two year old. New research by Gregory Erickson from Florida State University analysing fossilised bones shows that T Rexs lived between 2 and 28 years. They grew to their massive size of approx 5,000kg by stacking on around two kilograms a day. Now that is a lot of Jurassic Park actors.
When young, attaining speeds of up to 40km/hr along a made road, they probably hunted down actors in open jeeps (and we all know that Jeeps can't outrun that). As their weight passed 1,000 kilograms however this would have become impossible and they would have had to content themselves with extras and lesser members of the cast who were not afforded the luxury of a jeep. Finally, as the budget precluded the supply of additional extras they would have been reduced to scavaging carrion.
