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As something of a sasquatch aficionado, I’m fairly well versed on the folklore of hairy wild men from different parts of the world. Though they go by different names, the general theme of a hairy, bipedal, giant, wildman/ape that lives in the thickest, wildest, most remote corners of our world is a fixture in North America, South America, Russia, China, Tibet, Nepal, Indonesia - even Australia. We rarely, however, gain a glimpse into the mythology of such a creature from the Indian subcontinent, so I was pleased to find this story posted today.

The “mande barung” is India’s wild man, a denizen of the thickest jungle and nearly inaccessible canyons of the Northeast. It is said to be large and heavily built. It is shy and avoids human contact, although it occasionally leaves large footprints behind to betray its presence. The locals know all about it, and have shared their stories of encounters with these creatures for centuries.

Sound familiar? This description could just as easily be applied to Australia’s “Yowie,” China’s “Yeren,” Nepal’s “Yeti,” or Canada’s “Sasquatch.” There’s one more thing mande barung shares with these others: there is not a scrap of indisputable physical evidence that they exist at all.

Stories are great, and evidence that can’t be easily ascribed to a known source keeps me interested and hopeful that spectacular creatures like this do still exist out there. But I ain’t holding my breath . . .

All right, let’s not overlook the big one:

“There are no transitional fossils.”

Dr. Steve called this “A flat-out factual galling lie.” There is no way to believe that we have no transitional fossils unless one simply ignores them.

I was once in the American Museum of Natural History when I encountered a group of creationists wandering through the museum and “debunking” all the allusions to evolution. I engaged one of these mental giants who asked me “Why is there no such thing as a half-lizard, half-fish?” I quipped “They’re called amphibians, and there are thousands of them downstairs!”

Just some of the beautiful transitional forms in the fossil record, displaying exactly what evolutionary theory predicts they should . . .

feathered dinosaurs - take your pick, there are probably a half dozen described by now

Australopithecines - upright, fully bipedal apes

“frogamander!”

Tiktaalik - the walking fish

The leggy snake, Eupodophis

And my all-time favorite, Cynognathus. (artwork here by Arthur Weasley.)

Cynognathus was a reptile, or a mammal, or a mammal-like reptile. It’s actually not that easy to say for sure. One the single most important skeletal criteria for defining a fossil as “mammal” or “reptile” is the jaw articulation - what specific bone in the jaw articulates with what specific bone in the skull. In reptiles, it’s the quadrate and the articular. In mammals it’s the dentary and the squamosal.

Several years ago while teaching “Mammalogy”, I studied the jaw arrangement of Cynognathus and came to the conclusion that the quadrate met the articular when the mouth was closed, but when the animal opened up wide, the dentary and squamosal were brought in contact. Hence this transitional animal was a reptile with its mouth closed and a mammal with it open! (It’s a mammal in the image above.)

Now I may not be 100% correct on that last bit, but clearly this endothermic, dog-looking reptile is properly placed at the crotch of the phylogenetic tree where the mammals and reptiles went their separate ways!

The gene-jockeys have now taken their craft to the strangest mammal on earth - the egg-laying, poison-spur wearing, nipple-less baby nursing, duck-billed, aquatic, electro-sensing platypus.

According to this story from the BBC, a scientific team headed by the University of Oxford sampled over 100 platypuses, comparing pieces of their DNA to the complete sequence obtained from a single female. The study, published in the journal Nature, confirms an ancient lineage for the platypus, and revealed a mix of mammalian, avian, and reptilian affinities.

Further proof of evolution in action, if you ask me.

Slam!

That sound you just heard is the door (yet again) slamming shut on the anti-evolution crowd and their ridiculous claims that there are no “missing links” in the fossil record to demonstrate transitional forms among divergent groups.

The latest? Alexandra Houssaye at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris has recently described completely articulated hindlimbs (femur, tibia, & fibula) in a fossilized snake (Eupodophis descouensi) from Cretaceous limestone unearthed in Lebanon. Yes Virginia, snakes evolved from leggy, lizard ancestors.

The full story is, of course, way cooler than I describe here, as it involves not just the revelation of a fascinating transitional form, but the researchers used some seriously advanced technology to illustrate the structure. Check it out, and this commentary is worth a look as well!

“Josephoartigasia monesi” - just rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it?A description of a new giant rodent from 2-4 million years ago in Uruguay wins my nomination for “coolest paleontological announcement of the new year”. According to this BBC news story on this paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, investigators Andres Rinderknecht and R. Ernesto Blanco have described Josephoartigasia monesi based on reconstruction from a fossilized rodent skull nearly two feet long. (more…)

It’s just an unusually well preserved hadrosaur fossil, and it’s exciting enough without journalists mis-representing it as a “mummy”:  Hadrosaur fossil story. To learn more, check out the Marmarth Research Foundation.

Neat story here on a new analysis of the bite force and likely killing behavior of the Pleistocene sabre-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis. (Great name, btw.)

The analysis suggests that Smilodon had a bite force probably 1/3 that of a modern African lion. Modern lions kill large prey by clamping down on the throat to suffocate their victims. The linked study contends that Smilodon’s jaws were not nearly strong enough to withstand the forces associated with this killing method. Instead, they suggest that Smilodon would wrestle its prey to the ground and get in position to adminster one good slash of the canines through carotid arteries, jugular veins, and trachea for a swift and bloody kill.

The BBC write-up of the work stresses how this extremely specialized form of hunting made Smilodon dependent on an abundance of large prey, and especially vulnerable to extinction when those large mammals became scarce. While that is probably true, we’ll never know to what degree the human hunters largely blamed for the “Pleistocene extinction” of large mammals contributed to the demise of sabre-tooths as well. Was it just competition among top predators? Did humans specifically hunt down sabre-tooths to reduce competition or reduce the chance of ending up in sabre-tooth bellies?

Also, comments about the extreme specialization and vulnerability of sabre-tooths in the face of environmental change can be misleading. They can create the impression that there was something “wrong” with these cats. Yet extremely enlarged canines were not unique to Smilodon; several species adopted this type of predation, judging by their teeth. (Check out the Nimravids!) Most dramatically, there was even a “sabre-toothed” marsupial from Australia that was also convergent on this body plan, with even more dramatically enlarged canines than Smilodon.

I’ve noticed a good number of folks finding us in searches for Tyrannosaurus information. Thanks for coming; I hope you find what you’re looking for here.

Today, there’s a widely circulating story about the top speeds modeled by a British team for theropod dinosaurs with the headline (CNN): Study: T-rex could outrun David Beckham. Apparently, T. rex could pretty easily run down and dispatch a healthy, athletic human - even a dashing young sports idol who dabbles in scientology. In the study, T. rex was modeled to top out at about 18 mph, while chicken-sized Compsognathus could have zipped past at about 40 mph. Not too shabby!

But then I found this story: T. rex was ’slow-turning plodder’. Here, an American team concluded that T. rex was not particularly fast or agile, but still rated its top speed as 15-25 mph.

So, the BBC reported on an American study that estimated speeds of up to 25 mph with the headline “slow-turning plodder.” But CNN reported on a British study that estimated top speeds of 18 mph using the headline “could outrun . . . Beckham.”

I guess that doesn’t say much about consistency and perspective in journalism. Of course either way, T. rex was a force to be reckoned with on the Cretaceous landscape.

Any kid will tell you that the cheetah is the fastest land mammal, and that it can sprint for short distances at speeds approaching 70 mph.

Okay, but what’s the second fastest land mammal? I bet it’s something pretty darned fast . . .

It is. The pronghorn of the North American plains is the sole survivor of a mammalian family (Antilocapridae) that once included multiple species of antelope-looking creatures in our temperate grasslands. Pronghorns are supremely adapted for running, both anatomically and physiologically, and they can sprint at least 60 mph - almost cheetah speed. But, pronghorns beat cheetahs over a distance - they can maintain high speeds like that for miles. I’ve read one estimate that pronghorns can maintain about 50 mph over 10 miles! Now that’s speed.

Why so fast? There is no predator in a pronghorn’s environment that really has a prayer of catching a healthy adult pronghorn, but there used to be . . .

Although its taxonomic affinity remains ambiguous, there was a big cat on the American Plains that was convergent with cheetahs in anatomy, probably could run as fast as any African cheetah today, and most likely fed on pronghorns and related American antelopes.

You can read a little more about the American cheetah here, and this link from the National Zoo includes a nice write up on our own American antelope, the pronghorn.

While I’m on the subject of movies, we got to see the exciting trailer for “10,000 BC” last night. Now this movie, due out next March, should be right up my alley - warring tribes, CGI prehistoric creatures, hot babes in ill-fitting hides. But I fear it may be a bust. Here’s why.

I noticed in the trailer - traveling before my eyes at light speed - things like metal weapons and soldiers riding animals. These Iron Age advancements strike me as anachronisms. So too the blending of Pleistocene fauna, e.g., mammoths, with something looking an awful lot like Diatryma, the ferocious and flightless avian predator of the Eocene. But I can look past things like this, it’s what they did to the mammoths that destroyed their credibility with me.

The mammoths in the trailer are clearly seen galloping like giant horses. Everyone knows that elephants don’t gallop, they pace, moving the legs on each side of the body forward or backward in unison. You can take a pacer and make it gallop (like a racing camel), but they don’t like it. I’ve never seen an elephant move this way -when they want to go fast they just pace faster, and they look like they’re speedwalking. By galloping their mammoths, the filmmakers for 10,000 BC took their expensive CGI skills and their otherwise beautiful mammoths and ruined them by making them do something that makes them look ridiculously fake.

Why didn’t these guys take 5 minutes to look at how real elephants move? If they had, I’d be a lot more excited about this movie . . .