An inside look into my Culminating Project

[Dino_Bot]

Alright y'all. Here's the thing. Every year, the senior at my BELOVED school have to d a culminating project, about anything they want. They choose a mentor, they do the blasted paper, and then the project, which has to be minimum of 25 hours of work, w/o counting the paper. Then we do a 15 minute presentation on what we did.

My Mentor, is one of the greatest fossils in Pullman (no pun intended), he's got 50+ years of experience, and is a man I very much admire. I hope to get to his level of discipline some day. Thing is: he does invertebrate Paleontology. I do vertebrate paleontology. But its ok...I ain't complaining. WSU's got a building named after him.

Anyways, I chose to do my project on dinosaur reconstructions, which is much like forensic anthropology, but its not, since you're not dealing with humans or apes...

My thesis was that, for a species called Noasaurus leali, from Argentina, whose only recovered bones were a metatarsal II, an ungual with a strange claw, maxillia with teeth, a post orbital bone, and an elongated vertebra, one could reconstruct it using bits and parts from other dinosaurs (duh, its how its always done). But for this dino, it isn't easy, as this dino is morphologically unique compared with other..similar-average dinos of the same type. For 20 years since its discovery it wa thought to be convergent with Velociraptor and the likes (the claw, altough shaped differently, unlike a scythe, which is what raptors sport on their 2nd toes), but in 2000, a new dinosaur was found: Masiakasaurus knopfleri, from Madagascar, and it shed light on phylogenetical similarities between the two. Teeth were similar, as were the metatarsals, but Noasaurus' bones were proportioned differently, showing hat even now that it has a new family, it was still a very unique dinosaur. I also argued that this meant that 70 million years ago, southern Africa (including Madagascar), and South America were STILL together within the supercontinent Gondwanaland. And that was its main importance. But here's where the hard part begins:

Since Noasaurus is such an unique dinosaur, one can only estimate what it looked like, and perhaps infer parts from other dinosaurs. Nowdays, to reconstruct Noasaurus, one relies heavily on Masiakasaurus's bones (which aren't that many either)...

I spent lots of hours doing painstaking research, found a very useful article from 2002 by the discoverers of Masiakasaurus: Osteology of MAsiakasaurus knopfleri...blah blah don't have it next to me, by Carrano, et al, 2002.

So I began drawing some...informational sketches.

This is what Noasaurus looked like 'till 1999. (after Bonaparte, et al, 1980)

This is Velocisaurus, another Argentinian dinosaur also thought to be similar to Noasaurus, but I never aqcuired the paper for it. Reconstruction altered after Lio, Apestegu

[Norro]

Interesting... I've often been annoyed by dino reconstructions (though it is well beyond my area of knowledge) because as a layman reading the fine print you are shocked to find this massive model is based on <20 bones...

God Bless,

Nathan

[Dino_Bot]

Thats why its so interesting and takes lots of work.

[Asuka]

That

[Dino_Bot]

Coz...I was born there, and I never saw any dinos...