Dino wars: is that dinosaur Kiwi or Aussie?

It's a cheap piece of rhetoric to invoke the long-running if affectionate New Zealand-Australian rivalry, but what with the current campaign to redesign the New Zealand flag in order to differentiate it more its trans-Tasman neighbour, I thought it would be a good opportunity to discuss a science-themed story along these lines. In fact, the account bears some resemblance to the years spent arguing over Otzi, the Copper Age man found preserved in ice on the Austrian-Italian border. Although in this case, the focus of the disagreement isn't as clear-cut, since it concerns ancient remains found in both nations.

Even for a country with a population under five million, New Zealand has a seemingly minimal number of professional palaeontologists. That is, until you consider that the lack of industry application for the discipline's findings means its pretty good that there are any practitioners whatsoever. Numbers vary, but figures I have seen for the past few decades vary from less than a dozen to thirty or so professionals, most working for universities or state bodies. By comparison France, with twice the geographic area of New Zealand, has around one hundred professionals.

It isn't just the current financial crisis that has caused problems for would-be kiwi fossil hunters: funding has been steadily decreasing for the past half century and the emphasis shifted towards environmental research. This latter focuses on exploring the (very) long term changes that have affected not just the landmass as it is today but the largely submerged (90% or so) continent of Zealandia. This is of course extremely timely but it does enhance the idea that without much in the way of obvious practical returns, New Zealand palaeontology could dwindle to almost nothing. As it is, the country doesn't have a specialist palaeontological journal or even a dedicated palaeontological society.

The funding issue is claimed to be responsible for the loss of basic knowledge within the discipline, leading to problems such as taxonomic confusion and a backlog for formal descriptions, perhaps numbering some thousands of species, that are new to science. Of course New Zealand's distance from other nations doesn't help either, since the internet has frequently to be relied upon in lieu of direct representation at international conferences and the like. Therefore perhaps it's not surprising that there are only a couple of professional palaeontologists (part-time, at that) working on Mesozoic flora and fauna, including that much-loved clade, dinosaurs.

Luckily, this lack of professional numbers is partially redressed by dedicated amateurs, some of whom have played a pivotal role in dinosaur discoveries. The most famous is the late Joan Wiffen, who discovered New Zealand's first dinosaur fossils in 1974 after experts had proclaimed it unlikely any would be found (on the basis of the geological history of the current above sea-level land masses). I'm all for amateur fossicking and Joan Wiffen's four decades of dedication is an example to us all.

The heart of this piece concerns the discovery of the ninth dinosaur species found in New Zealand and serves as an instructive example of scientists at work knee-deep in messy reality rather than the unreachable ideal. One specimen that you won't find on FRED - the 95,000+ localities' Fossil Record Electronic Database - is the young theropod (carnivorous dinosaur) discovered in 2008 in New Zealand's dinosaur heartland, the Mangahouanga Stream between Taupo and Hawke's Bay. The specimen is only about forty centimetres long and is largely intact: a fully articulated skeleton only lacking a toe and a few tail end vertebrae. After 18 months careful preparation the reptile was in a suitable condition for high-level analysis, having - due to lack of budget - only received cursory examination during the removal of the overlying matrix. Having assessed the deposition layer as mid-Cretaceous the next obvious question was presumably which species did it belong to?

The most likely candidate for a species already scientifically described is the 5-6 metre gracile carnivore Australovenator wintonensis, which is known from fragmentary remains in central Queensland. At less than half a metre long, the New Zealand find would have to be a very young individual, which was the original opinion of the preparators. But the brief analysis of a visiting British palaeontologist put this into question, for although the upper jaw is missing from the adult Australovenator specimen, enough was present to suggest that the New Zealand skull is both too deep and too robust to be the same species. In addition, the kiwi remains has forearms that appear too long when compared to Australovenator, even accounting for variation in growth between youngster and adult.

Then in late 2009 the Australian Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology published an article claiming the New Zealand specimen was just an infant Australovenator. At this point patriotism started to kick in. Even though 'Australo' only means 'south' the word is close enough to the name of the larger nation to provoke the kiwi fossil community into a counter attack. A core group of Hawke's Bay-based amateur fossil hunters nicknamed the little dinosaur 'Hillaryonyx' (named after Everest pioneer Sir Edmund, of course) and the scene was set for a brontosaurus-sized brouhaha.

Although largely powerless, the passion of the non-professional fossicking community should not be underestimated. Everything that could be done to raise funding for a full analysis of the young reptile was undertaken: web articles were written, t-shirts were printed, even lyrics for a song called 'He's ours' (to the tune of the folk song 'No Moa!') On the basis of this, questions were asked in New Zealand parliament and as a result, and a bit of a whipround by some of the universities, money was found for eight months of part-time analysis by two palaeontologists with some experience on Mesozoic vertebrates. As mentioned previously, the reduction in funding for the discipline meant that there wasn't - and still isn't - a single full-time professional scientist dedicated to the era.

Once the analysis was complete the intention was to have a monograph published by GNS Science, a government-owned research institute, prior to public exhibition of the fossil. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, until several visiting Australian palaeontologists asked to see the prepared slab. They were at first stalled, and then later denied access, even to just photographs of the bones. Several arbitrary reasons were given, but the most likely motive for this behaviour was that the kiwi scientists were still assessing the species of the dinosaur. Which, given the loss of taxonomic knowledge mentioned above, was a tricky business if restricted to just New Zealand scientists. So much so, that it took the next two and a half years before anything further was heard.

It's not known who was allowed to examine the fossil during this time but by late 2013 rumours surfaced that the dinosaur had been finally identified as a species new to science. A badly scanned interim report was leaked, containing several figures of the prepared fossil, included the photograph above. More significantly, the report listed eleven points of fundamental anatomical disparity with Australovenator, which have since proved enough to convince the majority of naysayers. The few who are still doubtful are all, needless to mention - but I will anyway - Australian. Until the beginning of this year it seemed the specimen would remain in limbo, but someone, somewhere, perhaps a leading university figure or government official, has pulled their finger out and New Zealand's latest endemic dinosaur species may soon be appearing in the records of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN).

So not exactly an ideal way to pursue science by any stretch of the imagination. But the story is proof that cuts in funding can cause all sorts of problems for science in the long-term, even if the matter appears trivial to the layman.

Oh, and as for the official name for the creature: Stultusaurus aprillis. How appropriate!

The great outdoors: getting children back to nature

With Christmas just around the corner it seems like a good time to look at the benefits of persuading children to swap their hi-tech electronic gadgets for the wonders of the great outdoors. The recently-slated Toys 'R' Us television advert that promotes their plastic junk at the expensive of a 'dull and boring' nature field trip only highlights a trend that as the rural population decreases, natural phenomena such as animals, weather and good, clean soil are deemed solely of interest to farmers. Some years ago, a London acquaintance who teaches English at a senior school reported that during a woodland walk - to explore nature poetry rather than nature itself - several of her female teenage students cried due to getting mud on their shoes. Just how distanced are children becoming from the world beyond their front door!

A sense of scale: humans against California redwoods

The last few decades have seen a move away from the outdoor adventures that typified my childhood: catching butterflies; building woodland dens; even exploring a derelict house. Instead, sitting in front of computers, TVs and games consoles has become prevalent, sometimes all at once. Not that this has gone unnoticed, as discussed in Richard Louv's best-selling Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. Although the phenomenon is common across the developed world, some countries fare better than others. For example, recent reports suggest New Zealand children (feeling a bit smug at this point) spend rather more time outdoors than their Australian, American or British counterparts. However, I'm sure there's room for improvement just about everywhere. There are many reasons behind the stay-at-home trend in addition to the obvious delights of being cosily tucked up with digital devices, but I believe it is more important to explore the effects this is having on our children:

1. The most obvious problem caused by a shortage of physical activity outdoors - which after all is free, compared to the indoor play centres often used for children's parties - is the lack of opportunity to develop coordination and motor skills beyond the mouse or joystick. Since we've experienced a generation-on-generation increase in the number of calories, sugar and fat in our diet, then clearly there should also be an increased amount of time spent burning this off. Obviously this hasn't happened, and various groups such as the International Association for the Study of Obesity have tracked the post-war growth in overweight children. If you haven't seen any of the resulting graphs, they make for troubled reading...
2. But it isn't just physical health that is affected. As a species, we are still coming to terms with urban living and the psychological problems of existence in near-identical cuboids in residential estates frequently bereft of greenery. The World Health Organization's definition of health includes mental well-being, which can incorporate the notion that regular playing outdoors confers benefits on children. I don't consider this as just referring to strenuous exercise: exploring the randomness of nature - from building sand castles to snowball fights - as well as the simple joys of experiencing weather at first hand, are also important. As if to confirm the problems that a lack of balance in indoor/outdoor activities can lead to, a work colleague recently informed me that his twenty-year-old son, a business degree student, was reduced to tears when he was unable to log on to his online gaming account for a few days. Oh, for an adequate sense of perspective!
3. Does the changing emphasis from natural to man-made environments mean are we losing a vital part of our humanity? Or are we seeing a new form of evolution for our species? The differences between nature and artifice are profound, from the seemingly (although only from our viewpoint) haphazardness of the former to the non-messy convenience sought as a given via the latter. Even a basic understanding of processes from food at its source might be useful as an educative tool to engender empathy for a planet we are so rapidly despoiling. It's very easy for children to overlook the natural wonders that still exist in even the most densely populated of nations when they primarily associate the rural environment with the exotic non-developed locales usually favoured by natural history documentary programme makers.
   
   Viewing nature at second hand is no substitute for - literally - getting your fingers dirty, whether it is planting flowers or foodstuffs, or simply scrabbling over muddy terrain. A 2010 survey conducted in the UK indicated that between one quarter and one half of British children lack basic knowledge concerning familiar native and introduced species such as horse chestnut trees and grey squirrels. Not that I'm convinced an appreciation of the facts might lead to more environmental awareness; after all, how many times has the 'closer to nature' sustainability of pre-industrial societies been shown to be a myth? But considering for example the enormous amount of bought food that is thrown away uneaten (perhaps reaching over 40% in the USA) surely any understanding of the complex cycles within the far from limitless ecosystem may engender some changes in attitude towards reduce, reuse and recycle? As evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once said, we will not fight to save what we do not love.
4. Further to the last point, knowledge as a safety net might come in handy, should the need arise. There's an old adage that even the most 'civilised' of societies is only nine missed meals away from anarchy, as the citizens of New Orleans learnt all too well in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Considering just how much food manufacturers rely on oil for everything from transport to packaging (did you know North Sea prawns are flown on a 12,000 mile round trip to be cleaned and de-shelled?) it doesn't just have to be a natural disaster to generate such chaos. In October 2011 a leak in the Maui gas pipeline here in New Zealand led for a few days to empty bread shelves nationwide, highlighting the fragility of our infrastructure.
   
   A 2008 UK report concluded that British food retailers would exhaust their stocks in just three days in the event of a Hurricane Katrina-scale emergency, thus suggesting that those who follow chef and forager Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or adventurer/survivalist Bear Grylls will be the victors. I'm not suggesting children should be taught to distinguish edible from poisonous fungi but considering the potential dangers of even cultivated food crops (did you know that potatoes turning green may be a sign of the poison solanine?) any knowledge of foraging and food preparation may prove useful as well as fun.
5. Encouraging children to explore outside is as good a method as any to beget a new generation of biologists, ecologists and their ilk. Ironically, Toys 'R' Us list over 370 items in the science and discovery section of their online catalogue. Indeed, their advert includes several seconds' footage of a boy looking through the eyepiece of small reflecting telescope labelled 'science', although judging by the angle the telescope is pointing into the ground! As I've explored previously, doing practical science seems to be a far better way to introduce young children to the discipline than mere passive viewing or reading. It can also demonstrate that - with several exceptions such as high-energy physics - many of the basic structures of scientific procedure and knowledge are well within the grasp of non-scientists (perceptions are hard to shift: I recently heard a law graduate declare she wasn't sure she would be able to understand this blog, as science is of course 'very difficult'! )
   
   Each one of the above alone would be reason enough to encourage children to spend more time outside, but taken together they suggest that there is likely to be severe repercussions across many aspects of society if the adults of tomorrow don't get enough fresh air today. It may sound like something out of a Boys' Own Journal from the era of the British Empire, but there's something to be said for the simpler pleasures in life. I know I'd rather go for a forest walk or rock pooling than play Grand Theft Auto 5 any day...

Palaeontological pastimes: fossicking for all the family

What do the Isle of Wight, the Dorset coast and a park in south-east London have in common? Answer: they are all popular stomping grounds for amateur fossil hunters, adults and children alike. Discovering fossils in Britain has a long pedigree, as shown by the antiquity of common names for popular species such as the Jurassic oyster Gryphaea: the Devil's toenail. Equally telling are the museum specimens of ammonites with snake heads carved on them, which were sold over the centuries as 'petrified serpents'. Whilst carving heads doesn't exactly do much for fossils in scientific sense, it is at least an improvement on the Chinese folk tradition of grinding up 'dragon bones' to make medicines!

Fossicking as a popular activity has grown enormously over the past few decades, both in the UK and elsewhere. During the first half of the nineteenth century talented British amateurs such as Mary Anning and Gideon Mantell pioneered techniques to respectively excavate and examine Mesozoic fossils, but since then the field appears to have almost wholly dominated by professionals. So why is it that over the past few decades fossil hunting has become a widespread activity for both children and their parents?

It's probably best to start with two books concerning those ubiquitous prehistoric beasts, the dinosaurs. Until the 1980s most books portrayed them as lumbering, frequently swamp-dwelling animals: slow, simple-minded, and boringly monochrome. Then in 1986 American palaeontologist Robert Bakker wrote The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction, which promoted a more active, bird-like metabolism. Bakker's research (in many aspects now considered more mainstream than heretical) had the good fortune to be published at the same time that research into the 65 million year old iridium layer was gaining attention. In 1990, Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park became a bestseller shortly before the publication of a flurry of articles and papers discussing the Chicxulub crater in Mexico. For a while this enormous impact crater was combined with the worldwide iridium layer to offer a definitive solution to the dinosaurs' demise via asteroid impact, although the hypothesis has becoming increasingly untenable since. In the meantime, Steven Spielberg's 1993 film adaptation of Crichton's book became the highest-grossing film in history, confirming that dinosaurs were back in the public imagination on an unprecedented scale.

The continual development of computer-generated graphics has since led to numerous dramas and documentaries featuring these and other extinct ecosystems, often courtesy of the Discovery Channel and the BBC. Museums have also got in on the act, with dynamic, frequently animatronics exhibits ranging from the three-quarter sized Tyrannosaurus Rex at the Natural History Museum in London to the tiny hatchling at Oxford's equivalent. There have also been some international theatrical exhibitions featuring full-size reconstructions, including the £10 million Walking with Dinosaurs show at the O2 and Wembley Arena, as well as the new temporary exhibition at Parklife Oxford Street in London. Dinomania and then some!

Although these commercial enterprises have only been made feasible by the advances in animatronics and computer graphic technology, they appear closely tied to the flood of new finds and resulting theories. Many specialists now speak of a golden age of dinosaur discovery, supported by the recognition of a new species every few months and computers used to rapidly produce life-like reconstructions. The number of exciting finds, especially from China, supports the idea of a dinosaur renaissance, although hasty speculation on the dino-bandwagon often seems to drown out sober fact. One recent key discovery is the feathers and protofeathers found on various species: current research of their microscopic melanosomes has led to a claim of multi-coloured, possibly striped dinosaurs; a far cry from the bland grey and brown illustrations I remember from the 1970s. With embryo-containing eggs and nests also being found around the world, many aspects of dinosauria are becoming as well known as species alive today. Perhaps it is the increasing familiarity of some of these animals (as in their resemblance to giant proto-birds) which helps generate a feedback loop between scientific exploration and media exposition. The day of the dull dinosaur is over.

As for the British Isles, the popularity of dinosaurs has been used to generate enormous interest in amateur fossil hunting, with the Isle of Wight, home to the earliest ancestor of T-Rex, often considered the best location in Europe for finding dinosaurs. The island contains the Dinosaur Isle and the Dinosaur Farm Museum attractions, which combined with Norfolk's Dinosaur Adventure Park show there's no shortage of family-oriented 'edutainment'.

Of course there are many other genera to be found in the UK: the three-volume set of British fossils published by the Natural History Museum runs to over 500 pages. The main groups I have found whilst fossicking around the country are echoed by the limited choice of native specimens available in fossil shops, namely belemnites, ammonites, shark's teeth, and to a lesser extent, trilobites. Whilst these are mostly small specimens (anything large tends to be discovered by commercial operators after winter storms), there are still occasional finds showing the potential for amateurs. These include the 600,000 year old elephant found at West Runton beach in Norfolk; and Baryonyx, a 9.5 metre long fish-eating dinosaur that was discovered in a Surrey clay pit.

Many locations offered organised walks, including some just for one family at a time. Herein lies another reason for the popularity: many fossil-bearing strata are found in extremely accessible locations such as the coastline of popular holiday resorts, so it's far easier to combine a beach holiday with a fossil hunt than at equivalent, frequently remote sites in Australia or the USA. There is even a Family Fossil Hunt course on the Pembrokeshire Coast in Wales, aimed at introducing families to the joys of fossicking. For those who come away empty-handed (often the adults, since children usually have better eyesight and are closer to the ground), numerous gem shops and websites sell fossils in addition to paraphernalia such as geology hammers, goggles, and magnifiers. Again, many items are clearly aimed at children, including party bags (some with chocolate ammonites) and starter sets containing items such as dinosaur coprolites (fossilised dung).

By and large, fossil hunting is a fairly harmless activity. As long as you keep an eye on the tide and don't dig into cliff faces, there's not much that can go wrong with a leisure pursuit that can cost nothing more than some ziplock bags to contain your finds. If fossils are not extracted when exposed, the weather or wave action will soon erode or fragment them. As long as any unusual specimens are reported it's doubtful scientific information is being lost (unlike with metal detectorists, where archaeological context is everything). Without sounding too much like a public information film from the 1950s, fossicking is a healthy pursuit for all the family that can help promote interest in biodiversity and evolution (although if it is anything like what can be overheard at the Natural History Museum, the pre-teens often know more about it - Greco-Latin species names included - than their parents). And after all, in many locations as soon as you get bored you can always go back to building sandcastles!

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