A close, fast encounter with a pronghorn
July 29, 2022
I was in the Oklahoma panhandle in late June for fieldwork in the Morrison with Anne Weil and her crew at the Homestead Quarry. It’s always a fun trip, in part because we see a lot of wildlife out there. One of my favorite panhandle critters, and in fact one of my favorite animals, period, is the pronghorn, Antilocapra americana. Pronghorns are North America’s fastest land animals, and probably the fastest land animals in the world after cheetahs. That’s because they evolved to outrun American cheetahs, Miracinonyx, which went extinct about 12,000 years ago. Once you are familiar with pronghorns, you could never mistake one for a deer. Body profile alone is enough to tell, even at great distances: deer are graceful-looking animals with long, tapering legs, whereas pronghorns look like lozenges on stilts.
On June 21, we were heading back to Black Mesa after checking out some new-to-me Morrison outcrops north of Boise City, Oklahoma (see Richmond et al. 2020). I was driving my Kia Sorento, with a couple of students also in the truck. I came over a hill going about 65 mph (105 kph), and a female pronghorn that had been grazing in the ditch decided that would be the perfect time to bolt across the road. I thought I was about to have a fairly disastrous high-speed collision with a large-ish ungulate, but between my braking and her veering off a bit, we narrowly missed colliding. Instead, she ended up running down the road, parallel with my truck, seriously about 1 meter ahead and left of the driver’s side front tire. For a few seconds, I was driving 55 mph (89 kph) and she was keeping pace, and it didn’t look like she was really taxing herself. Then I realized that she was technically out ahead of the bumper and could still decide to run in front of the truck, so I accelerated and got past her, but the key point is that I had to speed up to about 60 mph (97 kph) to do it. Once I was past her, she trotted to a stop and stood in the middle of the road, watching me drive off (the road ahead was empty, and I was watching her in the rearview mirror).
I’ve read other anecdotal accounts of people driving alongside pronghorns that were really booking it — some memorable ones are recounted in the Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats (Wood 1982) — but I never imagined that I’d get to experience something like that. It was cool as heck, and one of the best wildlife encounters of my life. It all happened too quickly to get any photos, so I’m illustrating this post with pronghorn photos I got on a stargazing expedition to Black Mesa in September, 2020. I also have some half-decent pronghorn photos in this post from 2016.
References
- Richmond, D.R., Hunt, T.C. and Cifelli, R.L. 2020. Stratigraphy and sedimentology of the Morrison Formation in the western panhandle of Oklahoma with reference to the historical Stovall dinosaur quarries. The Journal of Geology 128(6): 477-515.
- Wood, G. L. 1982. The Guinness Book of Animals Facts & Feats (3rd edition). Guinness Superlatives Ltd., Enfield, Middlesex, 252 pp.
Apatosaurus louisae: shooting from the hip
April 30, 2022
Here at SV-POW! Towers, we like to show you iconic mounted skeletons from unusual perspectives. Here’s one:
Apatosaurus louisae holotype CM 3018, mounted skeleton in the public gallery of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History: head, neck, torso and hip in right posterolateral view. Photograph by Matt Wedel, 12th March 2019 (my birthday!)
Oh, man, I love that museum. And I love that specimen. And I love the one that’s standing next to it (Diplodocus CM 82, natch.) I’ve got to find a way to get myself back out there.
That’s all: just enjoy.
Henry and Cheeto
This past summer, I got into a Facebook conversation with Steve Kary about turtles and tortoises. He was posting photos of Henry, his Russian tortoise (Agrionemys horsfieldii, formerly Testudo horsfieldii), and I was struck by how not-big Henry is. I am not a tortoise expert and what little direct experience I have is with desert tortoises and the big-to-giant species like Sulcatas and the Galapagos and Aldabra giant tortoises. I know the popular pet species like Greek and Russian tortoises and the small African species much less well. Offhand, Henry looked about as big as our three-toed box turtle, Easty (Terrapene carolina triunguis), so I asked Steve if he’d mind posting a photo with a scale bar. This is what Steve sent:
Clockwise from the top we have an ink pen, a 75-million-year-old caudal centrum of a crocodile, a bottle cap, a Nebulon-B frigate from Star Wars Armada, a screwdriver, a nail clipper, a small bottle of Tylenol, and a coin. Oh, and a DVD of an awesome movie.
Naturally, I felt compelled to respond in kind:
Here we have Easty with a similarly eclectic selection of small objects. Again from the top: a rat skull in a plastic bottle, a bottle cap, a d20, a small Altoids tin, an ink pen, a nail clipper, a small metal toy from China, and a nickel. Oh, and a DVD of an awesome movie. Yes, Easty is investigating the d20 as a possible food item. She tried to bite it, but since it’s bigger in diameter than her head, all she achieved was to send it shooting across the floor when her beak slammed shut on one of the vertices.
Here I’ve scaled the two photos to the same size. Henry is definitely wider than Easty, and he has a bigger head and chunkier-looking limbs. In fact, having spent most of my life around box turtles, that’s always my thought when I see a small tortoise: “How do they get so much critter into such a small shell?” It may have to do with space packing. Box turtles have to be able to pull everything in all the way so they can raise the drawbridge, as it were, and use their hinged plastron to close everything up tight (hence the name). Most tortoises lack hinged shells and use the tough scales on their legs and feet to complete the defensive perimeter between carapace and plastron. The limbs don’t have to pull all the way in, so they can be a little bigger.
Anyway, if you’d like to join in this pursuit–photographing turtles with collections of random objects–let me know in the comments. You can post your photos there, or I can add them to the body of the post.
Other turtle posts:
More on varying colours of bones
June 27, 2019
Last time, I noted that photographs of the exact same object, even under the same lighting conditions, can come out different colours. That is one of the two reasons why I am not persuaded that the very different colours of my photos of the two Supersaurus scapulae is strong evidence that they are from different individuals.
The other reason is that, as BJ Nicholls pointed out in a comment on that post, “Color in fossils can be misleading even in real life. As bones erode out, surface float pieces can be bleached on exposed surfaces. Bones within a bed can vary a lot in color too.”
Here’s an example:
What we have here are some of bones from the skeleton of Charlie the monitor lizard. After I extracted these bones from Charlie’s decomposing carcass ten years ago (can it really have been that long?!) I have left them sitting on a tray, awaiting articulation.
At the top of this photo is a scapulocoracoid; at the bottom, some dorsal vertebrae. As you can see, the former has bleached white, while the latter have remained ivory coloured. Remember, these are bones from the same individual that were extracted at the same time (give or take maybe a day or two), and that have been in exactly the same situation (on a tray, on a window sill, in my office) ever since.
The moral: bone colour doesn’t really tell you much at all.
In part 5 of the Supersaurus series, I made the point that my photos of Scap A and Scap B seem to show them as being very different colours, suggesting different preservation. However …
I don’t trust that line of evidence as much as I might for two reasons. First, different photography conditions can give strikingly different coloured casts to photos, making similar bones appear different. And second, I know from experience that bones from a single specimen can vary in colour and preservation much more than you’d expect.
The first of these points has just been brought home to me by an unrelated experience. The rendering on an outside wall of our house had come loose, and needed to be removed and replaced. I am soliciting a quote for doing the re-rendering, and took some photos to send to the builder who might be doing the work. First, the whole of the relevant wall:
And now a close-up of the leftmost part, around shoulder level:
Now these photos were taken with the same pretty good camera (Google Pixel 4a), in the same place, under the same lighting conditions, eleven seconds apart. Yet in the first photo, the underlying brickwork is brown, and in the second it’s grey — presumably because the camera made a judgement about white balance based on what was in its viewfinder at the moment each photo was taken.
Here is the same part of the wall, juxtaposed, from both photos:
Let this be a cautionary tale: don’t over-interpret colour from photos. When comparing the colour of two fossils, the best thing to do is put them physically next to each other so you can see both at once under identical conditions. (Sadly, that wasn’t an option with the two Supersaurus scapulocoracoids.)
Death and life in the woodshed
June 11, 2018
Years ago, the roof of our summer-house suffered some water damage and had to be replaced. So I converted it into a woodshed which I attached to the side of our house. As well the store for our firewood logs, it’s also where I keep many of my decomposing corpses — most of them in boxes and bags, a few of them not. Recently, a self-seeded clematis Eccremocarpus scaber has worked its way through a crack and started growing over the specimens and the logs:
Most of the specimens are hidden from view, apart from a tortoise that you can make out in a translucent box over on the right. The centrepiece here is some kind of medium-sized mammal, consisting of the skull and much of the vertebral column and ribs, which my youngest son brought back from a camping trip for me. Elsewhere in various boxes and bags are multiple kestrels, a falcon, several other birds, a couple of bearded dragons, a snake, a mole, a rat, and miscellaneous small mammals. Some day, I will prep out all their skeletons. I really will.
Vertebrates and invertebrates of Nova Scotia
June 16, 2015
Last week I went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the twice-yearly meet-up with my Index Data colleagues. On the last day, four of us took a day-trip out to Peggy’s Cove to eat lunch at Ryer Lobsters.
We stopped off at the Peggy’s Cove lighthouse on the way, and spotted a vertebrate, which I am pleased to present:
It’s a whale skull, but I have no idea what kind. Can anyone help out?
So much for vertebrates — it was really all about the inverts. Here are six of them:
I have a 2lb lobster here; my colleague Jakub went for two 1lb lobsters, as did Jason and Wolfram (not pictured). That’s Wolfram’s lobster closest to the camera, giving a better impression of just what awesome beasts these were.
Peggy’s Cove: recommended. For vertebrates and inverts.
(Thanks to Wolfram Schneider for these photos.)
These animals experienced days less than 23 hours long, and years with close to 400 days.
Mounted skeleton of Emeus crassus
June 16, 2014
In a back room at the Field Museum, from my visit in 2012.
I took a lot of photos of the neck, which nicely records the transition in neural spine shape from simple to bifurcated–a topic of interest to sauropodophiles.
The holotype dorsal vertebra of Dystylosaurus
May 19, 2014
Now considered a junior synonym of Supersaurus, on very solid grounds.
Incidentally, unlike the neural spines of most non-titanosaurian sauropods, the neural spine of this vertebra is not simply a set of intersecting plates of bone. It is hollow and has a central chamber, presumably pneumatic. Evidence:
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 