Journey to the Centre of Wales Part 2

On Saturday - my last full day in Wales - I paid a visit to Erwood Station, an arts colony founded in 1984 and based within the now disused train station.

There was lots of lovely ironwork and pottery and prints by local artists. But my favourite work was the beautiful turned wood of James Smith; I especially liked his reclaimed fencepost vases.

From Erwood I drove to Dan yr Ogof to visit the National Showcaves of Wales. Now, I have a confession to make here ... my actual reason for going was seeing this photo online:

I am a sucker for piss-poor dinosaur models and these looked a bit ropey - especially the iguanodon in the foreground who has neither of the distinctive thumb 'horns' that make his/her species unique. I expected lots of such crappiness ... but was delighted to be completely surprised by what I found.

You arrive at the showcase site and are immediately greeted by a life-sized diplodocus that, actually, was pretty well sculpted. Behind this behemoth an equally well-rendered brachiosaurus rose above the trees. These were great models!

 

 You actually have to walk under the diplodocus to get inside the park where there's lots to do - for free! How many venues can say that? There are lots of dinos around (even on the roof of the café), you can pan for gold, and there's a farm with shire horses, emus, alpacas and other creatures.

But should you decide to spend some money on the caves, you get much more to see. For a start, lots more dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasties. I read somewhere that there are around 200 life-sized models, which is pretty cool for the kids. And big kids like me.

 

Then there are the caves themselves, which are stunning. Cathedral Cave in particular, with its high stalactite peppered ceiling and waterfalls, is magnificent. The only let down was the Bone Cave, which entailed popping on a hard hat and stooping along a low roofed walkway just to see a rather poor audio-visual display with mannequins about the human habitation of the caves.

 

'But Steve! What about the crappy dinosaurs?' I hear you cry. Well, I'm delighted to report that they are still there. However, the people who run the place are pretty shrewd; as newer, more accurate and better made dinos have been installed, they've moved the older ones deep into the bushes or set them at a distance so that they still provide some spectacle but don't stand out. That said, I did go dino-hunting and found myself a crop of brilliant bad ones. 

 



I can't leave Wales without mentioning the countryside through which I drove - often having to avoid sheep with no concept of the Green Cross Code - to visit these places. Late Saturday and my drive home on Sunday was wonderfully sunny and showed the landscape off beautifully. I just had to keep stopping the car to get out and snap a few pics. Sadly, no photo can capture the sheer scale of my surroundings. Glorious.

 

Dino snores! More! More!

Friday night was all about dinosaurs, insect sex and arthropod cuisine.

Let me explain.

The Natural History Museum in London was hosting one of its occasional Dino snores sleep-over events and I was invited to come along and join in by my friend Dr Erica McAlister. She's curator of flies at the NHM and a fantastic science communicator (here's her blog).

There are two types of Dino snores events; one for kids, one for adults. At the kids' event, some 500 tiny excited persons cram into the dinosaur hall to sleep (or not) in the shadow of the iconic Dippy the Diplodocus (I have an interesting connection to her. See here). They're also entertained with talks, activities and stories. The adult event is much the same; there are just fewer attendees (the practicalities of space), and the talks and activities are more grown up. Plus, there's a three course meal. Or four, if you count the insects. But I'm getting ahead of myself ...

I arrived at 7.30pm at the grand entrance in Cromwell Road and there was already a queue. Some had embraced the 'fun' aspect of the event and had turned up in their onesies.

After a while we all traipsed inside and this is when the seasoned campaigners had the advantage over us newbies. They headed straight for the many alcoves dotted around the outside of the grand hall, ensuring some small degree of privacy during the night. The rest of us slapped our foreheads and set up camp around Dippy herself. Then, naturally, we hit the bar.

Several drinks later we were given a very nice three course meal and a more detailed description of the events we could look forward to. Oh, and a list of things we shouldn't do such as roaming off around the museum and touching things we shouldn't touch - including each other. To be honest, I don't think that sex was uppermost in most people's minds, especially given the huge doses of garlic the chefs added to the food.

There were raffles and prize-givings too and I got the chance to meet some of the people who'd be entertaining the crowds. First off was the extraordinary Luis V Rey, one of my favourite palaeo-artists and illustrator of countless dinosaur books, many of which I own. I'm a huge fan; his reconstructions are always dynamic and ground-breaking in terms of his use of colour and texture for dinosaur skin, feathers etc. but are always based on good science. He was way ahead of other palaeo-artists in adding wattles and crests to his dinos; something that has been recently confirmed as true. His blog is wonderful. Such a nice man too.

 

 

Then there was the aforementioned Erica (seen here with Luis' partner Carmen) who would later tell us all about insect how's-yer-father, and the ever-splendid Simon D Watt.

 

You may recognise Simon as one of the presenters of the TV series Inside Nature's Giants. He's also a great stand-up, a brilliant science communicator and the brains behind the Ugly Animal Preservation Society. His shows are a glorious mixture of science and comedy.

Food (and garlic) over, we then peeled off in different directions to watch the various events. I chose to watch Erica's talk and Luis's 'How to draw dinosaurs' talk. Sadly, this meant that I missed Simon's (Sorry!) but I've seen him speak many times before (he also performed at the live Museum Of Curiosity show we staged at the NHM in 2012) and I know he'll have been brilliant. Erica, as usual, regaled us with hilariously grotesque tales of traumatic insemination, insatiable weevil sex maniacs, female penises and plugging genital orifices with your head. The world of insect sex is nothing if not enertaining. Then Luis showed us all the process for putting the meat on the bones when drawing dinosaurs. Great talks, both.

As the clock approached Midnight, it was time for a feast ... of edible insects. Now, this is a subject I've written and spoken about many times, most notably here on one of my vodcasts. It bugs me (sorry) that so much edible protein is scurrying, flying, skittering, crawling and sliding across this planet and yet people are starving. It's madness. Even more annoying is the fact that insects are very tasty when prepared properly. Frankly, I can't see much difference between a handful of salty, crispy mole crickets and a handful of salted crispy wheat snacks. Both taste great.

 

Insects alone (I'm not counting any other invertebrates) make up a huge proportion of the planet's total biomass; ants and termites alone make up over a quarter. There are, at this moment, around 200,000,000 insects for every human on Earth (A recent article in The New York Times claimed that the world holds 300 pounds of insects for every pound of humans). There is no reason why anyone in the world should be hungry.

 

I do accept that image is everything. The wasabi-flavoured giant Chinese water bug was delicious but I can understand why someone would be daunted by its size and appearance (though the guy in the photo wasn't). But there's no reason why food manufacturers couldn't disguise the insects in some way. Most people looking at a packet of oaksmoked breaded Wiltshire ham don't think 'slices of pig muscle' do they?

 

Bug-munching done, it was time to listen to the gentle strains of a live harpist and snuggle down for the night in our sleeping bags and camp dragon onesies. Or, as some others did, watch monster movies all night.

The event ended with a fried breakfast, a fond farewell to Dippy the Diplodocus and gtting out of the building before the hordes of tourists arrived. What a fun event.

Fancy going to a future one? Here's the site. It's not cheap but, remember, you do get a really very good three course meal, breakfast, live shows and other entertainment. It's cheaper than a night at the theatre, a meal and hotel. And you're sleeping in one of the world's most beautiful and iconic buildings.

What's not to love?

I'm definitely going again.

Meanwhile ... do follow these lovely people on Twitter: @SimonDWatt and @FlygirlNHM (Erica). Luis isn't on Twitter yet but you can visit his blog.

Let me see you shake your tail feather

We've known for some time now that dinosaurs had feathers and that the theropod dinosaurs were the ancestors of modern birds. The proof is quite overwhelming - particularly the large number of feathered dinosaur fossils found in recent years in China. And then, last year, the first dino-feathers trapped in amber were discovered near Grassy Lake in Alberta - dating from the Late Cretaceous period. And they told a fascinating story.

"We're finding two ends of the evolutionary development that had been proposed for feathers trapped in the same amber deposit," said Ryan McKellar of the University of Alberta. The team's find confirms that individual filaments progressed to tufts of filaments from a single origin, called barbs. In later development, some of these barbs can coalesce into a central branch called a rachis. As the structure develops further, further branches of filments form from the rachis. "We've got feathers that look to be little filamentous hair-like feathers, we've got the same filaments bound together in clumps, and then we've got a series that are for all intents and purposes identical to modern feathers," says Mr McKellar. "We're catching some that look to be dinosaur feathers and another set that are pretty much dead ringers for modern birds."

We also now know that feathers appeared much earlier in dinosaur evolution than first thought. Fossils of Ornithomimus edmontonicus - which looked something like ostriches but were not previously known to have feathers - have recently been found to have hundreds of traces of filaments along the body and limbs. Moreover, as the team reported in Science, while one of the two adult skeletons showed evidence of possessing a pennibrachium = a forelimb bearing long feathers that form a winglike surface - the third specimen, a juvenile dinosaur about 1-year-old, lacked this structure, although it still had numerous feathers along its body. This marks the first time that wings and feathers have been identified in ornithomimosaurs. "Our specimens are currently the most primitive dinosaur to show winglike structures," says Dr Darla Zelenitsky, a geoscientist at the University of Calgary in Canada, "And because ornithomimosaurs were fairly large, weighing 150 kilograms or more, these earliest wings did not initially evolve for flight - they were obviously not flyers or gliders. Moreover, O. edmontonicus does not appear to have developed its full plumage until it reached the adult stage, which suggests that the wings and feathers served some sort of adult reproductive function such as courtship and brooding."

Meanwhile, another study of a 150 million year old dinosaur fossil has revealed it had multi-coloured feathers. The research, published in the journal Science, compared the structures which determine colour in living bird feathers with those in the fossil. "This would be a very striking animal if it was alive today," said Yale University's Professor Richard Prum, co-author of the report. It is believed the colours would have helped the dinosaur attract a mate. Anchiornis huxleyi is a four-winged dinosaur which lived in the late Jurassic Period in China. Researchers chose this particular fossil to work on because the feathers were so well preserved.

And why shouldn't dinosaurs have been colourful beasts? Just look at modern birds, reptiles and amphibians. But, more than that, look at how dynamic our modern animals are. Doesn't it seem likely that dinosaurs were just as active in their competition, mating and sexual attraction displays?

Well, another recent study suggests proof of exctly that. In an issue of the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, three paleontologists posit that fossilised oviraptors possessed structural features that are characteristic of those found in modern birds with ornamental tails. For example, in the early oviraptor Similicaudipteryx, the last caudal vertebrae (the tip of the “tailbone”) are fused into a structure known as a “pygostyle," which was long thought to be a feature exclusive to modern birds. There is no evidence that Similicaudipteryx was a flying species, and the authors suggest that the bone and muscle structures that can be discerned from the fossil remains are consistent with those seen in birds with tail displays that don't aid in flying but do functional as flashy ornaments, such as peacocks, turkeys, and birds of paradise (note that these birds are not completely flightless, the tails just don't contribute to optimal flight). Some species do indeed favour form over function, and apparently the trend may have started way back in the Mesozoic.

These assertions are, of course, subject to scepticism due to the limitations of the fossil record. This is part of science - publishing new perspectives or conclusions and allowing the scientific community to contribute further analyses and information, ultimately either supporting or discarding the idea. What is unquestionable, however, is that this paper signifies just how far palaeontology has come in recent years. New finds and new technology have yielded broader and deeper information about the details of what dinosaurs actually looked like, how they moved, and how they might have interacted in their ancient world.

Sources:

SciLogs
ScienceMag
BBC News
BBC Science