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ANTEDILUVIAN SALAD







SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020

 Yes family it is here!! My magnum opus Dinosaur Enlightenment: Piercing the
Veil on Dinosaur Kaiju in an Age of Disruption is available as an ebook on
Amazon kindle direct

If you liked antediluvian salad, this is like that but ratcheted up to 11 on a
saurian DMT speedball!!






I have to say that writing this book was like an intellectual enema, I just had
to get it out of me!! Ever since I wrapped up my blog antediluvian salad I have
had this vision of producing my stab at a dinosaur magnum opus - a stand alone
piece of work that can serve both as a bench mark for the ideas I developed on
my blog and a launchpad for other strange and exciting new vistas. I succeeded
in this quest in a manner that even I did not anticipate and, more than that,
the breadth of ideas developed here offer more than enough cannon fodder for
future works. This book does not shy away from the disruption of our times, but
hugs it in an almost incestuous manner. Is this book a documentation of one
man's descent into lockdown madness? An ecological-political manifesto, subtly
(or ham handedly) designed to corrupt the youth? A confusing tirade against
establishment ideas? All of the above? I'll let you decide and marinate on these
ideas as you see fit. But I assure you that you will be hard pressed to find
another book quite like it in the cannon of not only dinosaur books, but
ecological/nature/biology books in general. Buckle up kids, cuz this is just the
opening salvo!!

For several decades a glut of new information has created a golden era in
dinosaur studies. While the scientific methodology underpinning this sustained
revolution has been robust, myopic tendencies have created entrenched gaps in
our idea making and narrative creation. This book is a bold attempt to fill in
some of these narrative blank spots, often times in strange, unexpected, and
utilitarian ways. Nash offers a customized "bounded speculation" approach to his
idea making, resulting in a breadth of new thought for dinosaurs including their
anatomy, physiology, ecology, diet, biting technique, soft tissue and
reproductive strategies. Not since Robert Bakker's Dinosaur Heresies has a
dinosaur book offered such a bold, compelling, vast and visceral shotgun blast
to not only dinosaur establishment, but academia and the dominant Neo-liberal
cultural underpinning. Nash seamlessly blends the kaiju/archetypal sensibility
of dinosaurs with their biological and ecological reality but suggests that this
blending is not only unavoidable but ultimately useful. Dinosaur Enlightenment
is a book that can be seen on many levels and in many directions all at once.
And in era of ecological, environmental, social, and political disruption
Dinosaur Enlightenment offers the hint of an unexpected, but strangely familiar,
path forward.

With over 160 visuals including 50 never before seen illustrations and over 15
reworked images; 420 pages, and 20 chapters Dinosaur Enlightenment is a
juggernaut hail marry of paleo provocation!! You might feel alternatively happy
or elated at the ideas I present but one thing is for certain - you might never
look at dinosaurs, birds, or even our own species the same!! Making the strange
normal, and the normal strange!!




Cheers!!

contact dinoenlightenment@gmail.com





Posted by Duane Nash at 1:11 PM No comments:
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TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2017


I'M KILLING ANTEDILUVIAN SALAD BUT EVEN IN DEATH THERE IS REBIRTH...


I am alive!! And I have completed my magnum opus Dinosaur Enlightenment:
Piercing the Veil on Kaiju Dinosaur in an Age of Disruption available on Amazon
kindle ebook.  I am accepting "peer review" questions, comment, critiques, and
suggestions @ dinoenlightenment@gmail.com that can further hone an eventual
print version. Cheers!! 







So I am laying antediluvian salad down to rest. It's been real. The idea really
came to me where almost all of my ideas come from - out of the blue and when I
was driving behind the wheel. It is due to no lack of creativity or passion on
my part. I'm as excited about exploring deep time as I ever was. There is a
consternating problem at hand but it is the sheer amount of ideas and thoughts
that I have, exceeding the pace to which I can actively document them even in
blogging format.  However this problem - if you can call it that - has so far
only been exacerbated through the pace of discovery and I guess it is just my
cross to bear.  Nor is my ending antediluvian salad due to lack of appreciation
from the community. I've been getting lots of positive comments on my ideas,
Plos One and the dinosaur mailing list often link to my articles. Even my most
vociferous critics have either melted away or simply don't come around anymore.
The blog is approaching one million unique page views. Nor do I want to leave
the impression that ending this blog rather abruptly and at a time when I was
getting consistent attention and laudable comments is due to some great malaise
or depression.

I want to end it at an apogee, I want to end on a high note. I want to end it on
my own terms.

I simply think I have throttled, shook, used and abused the medium of blogging
for all its worth. I still believe and am excited by the medium. Watching the
evolution of an idea unfold; the immediacy; the interaction are all very good
and fun things. Unfortunately we live in a culture where blogging is not a
recognized form of science communication. Even the most liberal of scientists
seem to walk in lock step with this notion. Technologically we live in a world
where even a simple observation or comment can be archived and, potentially,
cited. I do believe in a day where what you say matters more than who is saying
it or in what format they are saying it in. Culturally that day has not come and
we are still split up between the workers and the amateurs, between blogging and
scholarly journals. I was never one for such binary distinctions - I don't
believe in high brow versus low brow art for instance. I'm always caught between
the ghetto and the glamour in my life. Maybe that is why drawing such a
distinction is so problematic for me…

So instead of letting antediluvian salad devolve into an increasingly
frustrating morass of success and failure - where I am consistently lauded for
my ideas but ignored because they are "not in the literature" I decided to nip
it all in the bud. Every minute I spent researching, writing, illustrating, and
fawning over some new idea to be put into (scientifically unrecognized) blog
format I was letting some other equally important idea languish in the
background, also condemned to some weird limbo level of purgatory in blogger
hell. Intuitively plausible to any knowledgeable reader but in a strict "no
touch" sub level of academic discourse. Again, I don't agree with this system. I
think a truly liberal open science paradigm shift would account for people like
me inclusively and could archive even blogs as part of the academic discourse.
But I know we are not there yet. And we will probably need to take baby steps to
get there.

That is why I will be dedicating the time I would have spent blogging and
documenting my ideas (both new and old) at antediluvian salad but instead
archiving them on the open science paleontology platform PaleorXiv, spearheaded
by Jon Tennant of the blog Green Tea and Velociraptors. I was completely
ignorant that an actual open science paleontology hub was already in place when
I wrote that piece on open science recently. Well the future is already here it
seems. Jon is very prescient in establishing such an open science platform
especially geared towards paleontology. So I will be going over some of my most
promising ideas I documented in blog form, cleaning them up a bit, putting a
nice bow tie on them and uploading them there. I know, I'm such a sell out.
However the future of science is open science and to what ends I can spread and
inform people about the benefits to such a system I will move in that direction.
I think some of my higher profile ideas can create substantial excitement and
knowledge of open science if archived at PaleorXiv.

I look forward to tinkering in this new format and seeing what we can get out of
it through a new interactive form of open critique, review, and collaboration. I
do think that once it grows into more of a community and people see the obvious
merits of it, the dam will be split wide open, as it already is starting to
break in other sciences. It should be fun for those people who have been along
for the ride on antediluvian salad for some time to see the evolution of an idea
from a blog post, to a pre-print, to a more finalized copy - and to know that
they were in fact part of the whole process. I will be on the lookout for
collaborators who want to give my ideas a more refined, finalized copy. I need
people good at math, stats, all that numbers stuff, which my mind reels at. More
visual artists needed. Bringing in multiple strata of people into scientific
idea making and testing hypothesizing has always been one of my personal
mandates for the blog and to see an avenue open up right now that meets those
ends is a fortuitous synchronicity.

I have learned, through my introduction of new ideas and "outside the box
thinking" ( I loathe that term btw) that people, for the most part, need to be
coddled along into considering and accepting new ideas. I predict that this will
be the path for open science as well. Small little baby steps are needed. The
good news is that such baby steps will not be needed for the youth. If you are a
young person reading antediluvian salad you might already have an intuitive
understudying of open science and won't need your hand held like many adults.
You grew up in an era of social media and the immediacy of communication. You
will hit the ground running. You are the future.



On My "Process"

There is a rational, evidence based approach to science that most subscribe to
and advocate. Science by incrementalism where step 1 leads to step 2, step 3,
and so forth… never skipping a step, never deviating and never jumping too far
ahead of the prescribed format. As you may guess this is not the format of
science I adherently subscribe to or utilize in mine own thinking. Some may say
this means I am not a scientist… so be it. Instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…. I go 1, 2,
3, 4….7 - you can see I skip a whole bunch of steps. But by going straight to
step 7 and skipping 5 & 6 I usually go to an answer that explains a whole bunch
of stuff that  step 1, 2 & 3 did not explain or simply ignored. And then later
on steps 5 & 6 get filled in with new data and evidence and then step 7 - the
step I skipped to - starts to make a whole lot of sense. Instead of step 7 being
the weird, outlier it starts to look like the more pragmatic, utilitarian
answer. Such a methodology comes naturally to me but I recognize that it may
cause a lot of consternation to others of a more rational mindset… that is
because it is not strictly rational per se but encourages a sort of intuitive,
artistry of truth seeking.

And now after some time many of my ideas are beginning to bear fruit and a
palpable shift in perspective is being witnessed. Plesiosauromorphs are
undergoing a bit of renaissance; it is now generally regarded that they were
substantially plumper than depicted in the past; notions of complicated social
groupings and mesopredator inclinations are gaining traction. Dinosaur
integument is still very wide open; neither feather nazis or scale loyalists
stand on firm ground, I like this chaos and uncertainty. More and more data is
coming to light discrediting the notion of cursorial T. rex; opening up the
playing field for night-stalker rex. Various skin derived display features are
now common place in dinosaur art; even vulturine dromaeosaurs is becoming a meme
at this point. Talk of omnivorous ankylosaurs is now common place; some would
say even tentatively accepted. Spinosaurus… well people need to be coddled along
with that one for just a bit more, but more and more people are coming around to
what I have suggested. People at least have the breathing room to talk about
unorthodox facial tissue on saber-toothed predators without being laughed out of
the room (which is what my point was all along). While I can't lay full claim to
all of these ideas you can trace back a lot of the discussion stimulated and
thought provided from this blog. And for those reasons I consider the blog and
the thoughts and ideas pushed forth from it a resounding success.

But let it be known that the genesis for my ideas is not strictly "rational"
although rationality is the ultimate dividing line between those ideas I scrap
and those that I continue to develop...

The Four Table Legs of Truth Seeking

Truth seeking is like a table with four legs that are needed to stand up - cut
off one leg and the table topples.

One leg is intuition - that insight, that emotional plea that causes interest
and an unyielding curiosity to dive into a particular avenue of discourse, even
when it offers no immediate reward. You don't know why you are interested in
this particular subset of a field and that it gobbles up all of your free time.
When you start to neglect social obligations, work, eating. Listen to that
intuition, it is there for a reason!! The greatest horror of modern science
culture is that it has so negated intuition in favor of rationality that whole
personality subtypes are being eschewed from the process. Intuition is perhaps
the greatest leg needed for advancement but is perhaps the most discredited and
neglected. That intuition is often credited as a feminine trait and that both
intuition and females are neglected in modern scientific culture I don't
consider a coincidence. I know intuition is important in science because every
single one of my insights and ideas occurred in a flash - through a subconscious
reaction where knowledge met insight. Not strictly rational.

Another leg is creativity. This is the anarchic throw everything at the wall
approach to truth seeking that is so difficult for many that have shifted too
far over into the rationalistic approach to reconcile within the confines of
modern science. Truth seekers need this freedom and more than anything they need
permission to make mistakes. Everyone needs a little bit more permission to make
mistakes and to be able to acknowledge that mistakes were made. The problem is
not mistakes being made, it is doubling down on mistakes after they occur -
because of the ego - that is the problem.

Spirit is a leg needed for truth seeking. I prefer to speak of spirituality in
the most nebulous terms capable: the subtle acknowledgment that the universe
within is in a two way communication with the outside universe. When inward
looking truth is compromised by outside ego-mediated mandates (i.e. organized
religion) then spirituality gets a bad name. Right now scientific culture is
beholden to the ego. Scientists need to disavow the ego in its most extreme
permutations in order to advance science. This is a spiritual struggle in
science. A little ego is good for the fight, good for passion. But too much can
hold new ideas and thoughts at hostage - where simply the power of ones name is
enough to hold sway over better dissenting opinions and thoughts. It should not
go unnoticed that open science offers a path to remedy this malady that modern
scientific culture is thrall to. When you are walking the path with your spirit
in lockstep towards truth seeking things will start to happen, synchronicities
will occur. Don't bother trying to convince others or even argue about it. Just
take the subtle acknowledgement that the  universe  within is - and always has
been - in communication with the outside universe. And that the outside universe
is giving you a gentle nudge and an "atta boy" in walking your path...

The fourth leg in truth seeking is rationality. Many consider this leg the only
leg that matters or is of importance in science. This is a table with only one
leg, it is inherently unstable. Even with a broad base, lean on that table too
much in any one direction and it wilt topple. Inversely a truth seeking paradigm
based wholly on intuition is also unstable, liable to topple and easily poisoned
by the ego. Rationality is the filter, it is the final step in filtering out the
noise of information that intuition, creativity, and spirit foster us with. But
a culture of science that advocates rationality - and only rationality - is
doomed for failure. I will say it already is failing us and one need look at the
outside world to see proof of this.

When a table sits with all four legs flush and equal in length and strength - it
will stand strong. When scientific culture begins to accept and laud the values
of intuition, creativity, spirit, and rationality - not placing one before the
other, lauding some but disavowing others - then science and scientific culture
(because the two are separate and don't always walk in lockstep) can walk the
path towards truth seeking and become truly unstoppable. The future is not
wholly Dr. Spock nor is it wholly Captain Kirk - but a blending of the two.
Rationality and logic acting as a filter to intuitive creative anarchy, all
moving with a cadence of emotionally charged synchronicity.

Many fear that we are moving into a new sort of dark ages… you know of what I
speak of... even towards end times - an extinction event that we should not be
too confident that we will get through. This is entirely possible. That these
collapsing systems of institutionalized power of the press, government, science
are presenting us with a vacuum to be filled with all of the wickedest things.
Which is entirely possible. What is discouraging to me is not that the center is
not holding; not that systems are collapsing; not that the worst of things are
often times creeping into newly opened spaces; what is discouraging to me is
that often times our first instinct is to assume that the worst of things will
and should be assuming power and precedence in these newly opened vistas. That
our de facto response should be that not only is the fox in the hen house but
that it belongs there. Pessimism and lack of faith in humanity have replaced any
sort of courage or audacity in the vacuum created by change.

It is also entirely possible that the darkest hour is before the dawn: that the
dissolution of traditional institutions offers a vacuum to be filled with all of
the best things. That we are in fact on the edge of an old cycle poised to start
a new cycle. Know that at each step in the advancement of human consciousness
there were nay sayers stipulating you can't change the way things are because;
"that is just the way things are"; "that is how the real world is"; "know your
place son"; "don't rock the boat if you are in it". There has always been that
voice in humanity saying "don't play with fire you will get burnt"; "don't
question the king"; "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down"; "don't
challenge the slave master"; and "act like a good little boy/girl should ". That
these voices are and have always been around and that they (your parents,
relatives, teachers, friends) purport to act in your best (short term) interests
is self evident. You will in fact have a safer, more secure and probably happier
life by following and not questioning the system. Until you wake up one day and
realize that the system you are living in is really a nightmare. That the people
who have loved and coddled you your whole life have been working in your best
short term interests - go to school, get a good job, get married, procreate -
are in fact unwittingly codifying a system that is killing us and killing the
planet.

Modern scientific culture serves too many masters - academia, business, ego -
and it has lost track of the original intention of science, an unfettered and
free quest for knowledge. For these reasons science will continue to lose its
battle for the human soul and scientific culture has nothing to blame for this
except its lack of self correction. It seems science can correct all of the
world's problems except its own - a self imposed slavery towards ego, academic
culture, and business - all at the expense of expanding a scientific citizenry
and a truly open and free scientific discourse.

Ok last rant on antediluvian salad, so I had to give it a little extra oomph…

To end on a slightly less dystopian nod…

Some of the things I am most proud about from antediluvian salad:

I always wrote with the mindset "what would 13 year old Duane have wanted to
read about?" and tried to convey my ideas in a language easily grasped by a
relatively knowledgeable young enthusiast, unencumbered by overly technical
language.  I wanted to at least impart the sort of enthralling, immersive
experience I got when I was a young grommet and I got hold of books like Robert
Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies or Gregory S. Paul's Predatory Dinosaurs of the
World. I don't know how well I succeeded in this? Some have told me as such,
that they looked forward to my posts and got a certain evocative thrill from
them. I think in part paleontology and even dinosaur paleontology has lost some
of this evocative story telling as it has strived to become a more respected
science. The problem that occurs when paleontologists stop telling speculative,
amazing stories is that franchises like Jurassic World write the stories, they
get to own the narrative… and we know how that panned out.

I always maintained an artistic integrity and wrote from the heart about what I
was interested in at the time. This means that I never took requests for
articles because I did not want things to come off as too contrived.  Even if I
wrote about highly exposed items (i.e. T. rex or Spinosaurus) I always think I
added something new and captivating to the subject. I also never put those ugly
blogger ads on my site. I did not market myself as a commercial venture. These
ethics might not be important to the average reader but they are important to
me.

I laid myself bare. I never pretended to be without strengths and weaknesses,
implicit biases of mine own. As much as I could I tried to come to terms with
how mine own intrinsic likes and tastes color mine own interpretations and
depictions of things. I know that this "wallowing" in mine own biases probably
put off some, I say that they were put off by my honesty and courage of
expression. That I lay bare an uncomfortable truth that other paleoartists might
be averse to coming to terms with for fear of appearing less scientifically
"legit":  how their own intrinsic likes and dislikes colors their own creations.
There always is some of the artist in their art. Personally I don't think this
is something to run away from in both the artist, scientist, and creator.

I broke the top down flow of information in paleontology. There are only so many
paleontologists out there and in any one speciality they all tend to know one
another. It is a social group and they do exchange ideas, photos, manuscripts,
and specimens all the time. Stuff that the general public is not privy to. When
a new "revelatory" paper is unleashed I truly doubt it as all that "new" to a
great many career academics. They have heard about it, maybe even reviewed it.
They feign surprise on social media but a great many probably knew its coming
down the pike. Embargoes due to fear of pilfering of information and ideas is
usually cited. l consider these practices all part of the old skool academic
mentality thrall to egos, "first authorship", and priority. Such notions are
discontinuous with an open science paradigm shift and will become transparently
ludicrous with some cultural shifting. If I introduced a new idea or hypothesis
on my blog you can rest assured that the 13 year old enthusiast is getting it
just as soon and as transparently as the career academic. Open science would
allow us all to see the genesis of an idea or hypothesis from start to finish, a
much more inclusive and exciting process.

I maintained academic honesty. I never once fabricated or misled people on
primary data. Despite covering very controversial and unsettled subject matter
and often taking stances contrary to or opposed to prevailing sentiment or
consensus I have never once been found in corruption of telling the truth as
goes source material. A bit sloppy on always writing full zoological names or
spellings or compiling neat and tidy reference lists - yes. But never once have
I willfully misled or misstated others data or stances on issues and ideas. I
have tried as best I could to make a distinction between what I think is going
on and where and when the settled science starts and my speculation begins - if
others can't make that distinction I'm sorry but I can't let that fear sway me
from mine own thought process. As best as I could I tried to include ideas and
arguments counter to mine own and unflinchingly consider them. I have and will
continue to evolve my thinking and have changed my stance on a number of issues,
including scrapping some of my own ideas. I consider this a trait that sets me
apart from many of the "fringe" players in paleontology who continue to double
down on outdated ideas/methodologies. Even some career academics are guilty of
beating the dead horse of a bad idea for far too long. For this legacy I am
proud of having achieved this during the several years and hundreds of posts I
wrote at antediluvian salad. I think this is no small feet.

I laid eggs in people's brains, some of the eggs are hatching. For me my
crowning achievement and what makes me most proud of antediluvian salad is not
when a reader replies with praise or reverence, or that there is unanimous
agreement on some idea or notion I bring up (that kinda annoys me tbh), but when
they simply say "that really made me think". Thinking and causing others to
think and question things is, and I'm only just beginning to realize this at age
38, no simple feat and not to be taking lightly. Maybe I take the notion for
granted because I am always thinking and poring things over in my own head.
 Maybe my brain is just wired a little differently? Sometimes it is like an open
faucet that I need to shut it off. But I wonder just how much active thinking,
questioning, and analysis goes on in others heads. When I look back at a lot of
my ideas I documented here at antediluvian salad they are due to not some
intricate morphometric analysis or computational algorithm but simply flipping
the paradigm of how we think about things. Inverting the equation. When I did
that , what happened more often than not is that "flipping" or "inverting" an
idea caused a whole bunch of other problems and issues to simply melt away.

Sometimes I look at science communication or simply information exchange as one
brain opening up and barfing its contents into another persons brain with no
filter. An exchange of information yes, but are we teaching how to discriminate
the good from the bad? In any exchange of information - a blog post, science
editorial, or peer reviewed paper - there is invariably going to be some good
stuff and some bad stuff to varying degrees. How to tease apart the relevant and
the useful from the not so relevant and not so useful is a skill that I feel
needs sharpening.

There are some recurring themes that should have become quite apparent to
regular readers. These are sins of paleontology that, upon analysis, show
themselves more and more.

If a researcher posits an animal as a "failed evolutionary experiment" run to
the hills. Failure to explain a feature or trait of an extinct animal reflects
more on the failure of the researcher than the animal itself. Failed
evolutionary experiments are a myth. If they were so prevalent in the past, then
where are all the failed evolutionary experiments of the present?

When an extinct animal is consistently failing the test regarding believability
maybe it is time to look at it with fresh eyes. When you start to look at
potential problems as potential positives and then other issues start to melt
away and vanish, you are on the right track.

All things being equal if you have to choose between a trait being adaptive,
negative, or neutral always side with adaptive. Part of the legacy of Gould's
Spandrels of San Marco is that adaptive explanations have become frowned upon.
Gould was less than precise in actually giving many good examples of modern
Spandrels of San Marco in biology but the damage has already been done. It
somehow become wittier and more precise to say a feature has no value or
negative value than simply putting forth a cognizant and logical argument that a
feature does indeed have positive adaptive value. Not all adaptationist
arguments are good: some are rubbish but simply to dismiss everything as
non-adaptive and under the control of genetic controls of the bauplan is not
good and needlessly dismissive.

Popular culture and modern ecosystems does influence paleontological thinking,
even amongst researchers.

Future Works

As I mentioned earlier I will be dedicating more time to cleaning up some of the
more promising ideas I advanced on antediluvian salad to be archived on
PaleorXiv. This includes some of my more high profile pieces and it is my hope
that uploading them there will create a system to reference and site them as
well as spreading awareness about what open science actually is. Of course there
is a downside to this in that I have to put on hold many ideas I have not even
put forth on my blog. Again, the stopping of antediluvian salad has nothing to
do with my own mental state, or frustration with critics, or lack of inspiration
on my own part - I'm caught amongst the cogs of a scientific machinery that has
no home for my ideas as I currently put them forth. This is the crux of the
problem in that on one hand I'm getting lots of page views, supportive comments,
and generally feedback that a lot of my ideas are valid and need more attention
but I'm caught against a system that does not recognize blogging as a valid form
of scientific communication and documentation. PaleorXiv is at least ethically
consistent with what I'm aiming for.

Unfortunately for my readers that means that I will not put forth bloggery type
pieces on my ideas yet disclosed on ankylosaur mastication; ornithischian cheeks
or lack-there-of; dinosaur sexual politicks; komodo dragon envenomation;
plesiosaur buoyancy control; new plesiosaur necks and feeding hypothesis;
theropod omnivory and beak evolution; why sauropods survived but prosauropods
did not; amongst others. Hopefully I will document these ideas on PaleorXiv
after cleaning out the closet of my older promising ideas. I do hope that those
who have been along for the ride on antediluvian salad come over to PaleorXiv
and encourage other researchers to submit there and grow an open science
community. If I do choose to breath life into antediluvian salad in the future
it will be of a more typical blogger/researcher format, basically to augment or
supplant my research on PaleorXiv. You will not see the mega-posts I have been
doing. They simply take so long; take a lot out of me for energy and spare time;
and people will not reference them anyways… There is a price to pay for change
and growth, some things must be dispensed with.

A book(s)? I have been asked several times if I'm planning a book or told that I
should write a book. I have entertained the notion and I think I have at least
one potentially important book in me. I would aim for a no holds barred Dinosaur
Heresies for the new millennium type book, something that communicates to a
popular lay audience my ideas on dinosaur ecology, behavior, eating
biomechanics, plant-herbivore interaction. It will, like Dinosaur Heresies
actually was, be unapologetically speculative in some areas but touching upon
more rigor and testability in others. I think it could be quite profound. The
point of the book would not to be "right" about everything as the Dinosaur
Heresies is most certainly not right about everything as well. The purpose is
brain stimulation and intellectual fodder.

I then have an idea for a comprehensive book on plesiosaurs - that is much
needed actually. Probably compile skeletals and illustrations on all
species/specimens and give some review on necks/locomotion/feeding/and the whole
intricate history of research into this group. I want to make it good and
comprehensive. Such a volume has never been attempted before for this group to
my knowledge. I will be seeking out collaborators for this project.

There probably is a book on theropod predators. It would draw an ecological
distinction between predators and omnivovores/herbivores so I would forego most
maniraptorans except for dromaeosaurids but include phorusrhacids, teratornids,
and vultures/birds of prey/skuas/petrels. Go across all of the ideas I have
advanced and maybe even a timeline comparing theropod predators to synapsids.

I probably have a book on herbivorous dinosaurs/plant interactions/ and Mesozoic
ecosystems terra forming in there too somewhere.

I also have the skeletal outline for a paleofiction novella taking place in Hell
Creek. Let me tell you this: it is brutal. I'm comparing it to a cross between
Game of Thrones and Pulp Fiction. There are no good guys, no heroes - you will
have no one to root for. It will make Raptor Red look like Blues's Clues. You
will come away slightly disturbed and icky feeling.

So I hope that by seeing the ambitious list of projects I want to complete that
it now becomes evident why I have to discontinue blogging. It was simply
gobbling up too much of my time, energy, and resources, especially when you
consider I usually work 6-7 days a week often 9+ hour shifts. So instead of
mounting frustration and disillusionment I'm going in for the clean kill of
antediluvian salad - it must die. I have a lot more to say but I feel in my
heart that this piece of me has run its course. But blogging is like a toy for
me that I can't be trusted with… I do have so much fun with it and the immediacy
and lack of filter is compelling but I fear I will never get off of it if I
don't kill it now.

Even writing this now and this part of the journey palpably coming to an end I
feel a bit misty eyed. I know that I have a small but dedicated group of
followers and I hope that you understand why I had to end it, that I had to end
it on a high note, and that by ending it like I did on my own terms I will have
the time and energy for much more permanent and audacious projects.

Of course life is unpredictable and my mind wanders so I can't hold myself to
any one of these projects as of yet because I always follow my muse. That is
just part of the deal. I can't promise when I will be back but for now I just
have to decompress from constant blogging fatigue.

Best,

Duane Nash
















Posted by Duane Nash at 11:11 PM 37 comments:
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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2017


ENTERING THE NTH DIMENSION OF TERRA-FORMING, MACRO-PLANT SCAVENGING, HIVE-MINDED
HADROSAURS


Yes I am alive!! And my magnum opus Dinosaur Enlightenment: Piercing the Veil on
Kaiju Dinosaur in an Era of Disruption is available as an ebook on Amazon
kindle!! Enter the hive mind!!




Do you have a drink handy? Down it. Or any inebriating substance, might be time
to imbibe. I can assure you that I wrote this stone cold sober but I realize
that a good portion of my audience, rationally minded, might be better served
with a little bit of chemical disequilibrium to help foster nth dimensional
Mesozoic astral projecting. 

Buckle up kiddos, hold on to your butts...

The following, although couched in as much science as I can drape it in, is not
necessarily strictly science per se. I make a lot of assumptions that prove
necessary to accept in order to come up with my grander ideas here. It requires
a certain amount of suspension of disbelief... so be it.  I will at times wear a
scientific hat, at others a more deductive, intuitive, detective methodology
will supersede the limits of the available science.  It does therefore harken
back to a largely eschewed paleontological tradition of detective work, coming
up with the best possible scenario with the best possible evidence.  As such it
is an adventure in story telling, but I think the story is a good one - quite
possibly the best one - and worth sharing. I will gladly change my take on the
subject with new or better data available. Until then I think the following
ideas as I outline here best answers the question of how large nesting colonies
of mega-herbivorous hadrosaurs operated ecologically and, as far as I have seen,
sits comfortably in the available data. 

But be forewarned: things will get weird.



To bring you up to speed it might prove useful to go review these old posts I
put forth on the subject way back in the day.

Following the Poop Trail: Can Dinosaurs Be Blamed For Termites?

Some of the finer points may have changed but here I argued for unusual and
novel food chains in Mesozoic ecosystems and possibly a conserved gut flora from
sauropods to termites!! This idea is certainly due for a revisit.

Dinosaur Alternative Food Stuffs

Lichen munching dinosaurs? Sauropods browsing foliose lichens in high latitude
polar beech forests? How did these cool, temperate high latitude forests
operate?

Rot N' Roll in the Mesozoic Muck

It is in this post, from way back from May 21, 2013, that I first ventured forth
an idea that I was very smitten with at the time and which has stayed with me
since.

In short format: that the consumption of decayed sequoia coniferous wood by
large ornithischians documented via coprololite remains from the Two Medicine
Formation and often attributed to Maisaura peeblesorum (Chin, 2007) document a
novel ecological relationship. Namely Maisaura was consuming rotten wood and
fungi in order to deposit and provision hatchling Maisaura with a ready supply
of beneficial gut flora via coprophagy (consumption of dung) but also grow
tremendous fungal gardens that further nourished and provishioned young
hatchlings with a readily digestible and nutritious bumper crop of mushrooms.
Like a giant version of a banana slug spores would pass through the parent's
digestive system and find a nice dinosaur dung patty to set up shop in. Because
fungi have a more complete and easily digestible protein profile than raw plants
they serve as a nice energy and growth boost for the hatchling hadrosaurs.
Basically the best analogy being to the large underground fungal gardens leaf
cutter ants create. A very simple, diffuse, and elegant energy transfer from
detrital food chains to parent hadrosaur to offspring. Because the environmental
conditions could not be controlled as in the underground gardens of leaf cutter
ants, some years would be better than others in terms of fungi production.
Furthermore it is not an obligate food source, the dung and whatever foodstuffs
come with it - insects, mollusks, crustaceans, fungi - merely augment the
growing hatchlings needs. If there is no fungal bloom of sporocarps, the
hatchlings feed on other stuff.

At the time I wrote it I didn't have much readership, nor was there any more
compelling evidence at hand to argue such a hypothesis past the point of
imaginative fantasy so I kinda let the idea sit fallow for a couple of years.
Until I woke up the other day to check out my news feed to unexpectedly discover
more evidence of rotten wood munching giant ornithischians has been unveiled via
Karen Chin!! Only this time the coprololites hail from the Kaiparowits formation
of Utah across multiple horizons and not only contained rotten conifer wood but
sizable bits from crustaceans and mollusks!! Like mana from heaven these
heavenly piles of shit keep dropping on my doorstep like flaming bags of shit!!
But they are bags of poop I certainly don't want to stamp out!!

While the shellfish eating aspect of this study is getting the most attention,
it really is the confirmation of rotten wood munching ornithischians - probably
hadrosaurs - that has the most far reaching implications. This revelation
confirms that dinosaurs tapping into detrital food chains was not some aberrant
activity, or the result of some ecological catastrophe but really was just a
pretty regular menu option. Let me restate the obvious - multiple instances of
rotten wood riddled dung from multiple horizons confirming that this ingestion
was not accidental or aberrant and that it was spread across at least two
species of hadrosaurs!!

From Chin et. al., 2017:

"The sizes of the exposed deposits are variable, ranging from sub-decimeter
sized fragments to masses that cover several square meters and appear to
represent multiple defecation events. More than 15 discrete coprolite deposits
were discovered within at least three stratigraphic levels in the lower half of
the middle unit of the Kaiparowits formation (Eric Roberts personal
communication) at sites up to 20 kim apart."

After reading Chin's latest study and especially after reading this piece I hope
we are done with the hadrosaurs as the "cows of the Cretaceous" comparison. I
mean, how can you be like a cow without giving milk and eating grass anyways?
Aren't those two fundamentally cow like attributes that hadrosaurs lacked? When
I'm done with you I hope you start seeing hadrosaurs as more analogous to giant
kaiju hive forming colonial terra forming insects as opposed to dumb ol' cows.

Indeed a main thrust of the Chin paper is that modern large mammalian herbivores
in general don't compare favorably to the large ornithischians that harvested
rotten wood, fungi, mollusks, and crustaceans - because quite literally large
mega-herbivorous mammals don't really go after these resources to any
appreciable extent. This is not to suggest that the paucity of large
mega-herbivorous mammals around today shows the full extent of dietary
flexibility of the recently extinct gompotheres, ground sloths, notoungulates,
and others. And sure everyone loves to point out the occasional deer eating
field mice or eggs or whatever BUT no one is suggesting that natural wild
populations of modern mammalian herbivores are stuffing their guts full of
rotten wood and crabs, they simply don't go after detrital and invertebrate
resources as a way of life… they are a lot more conservative dietarily compared
at least to a subset of late Cretaceous ornithischians, most parsimoniously
hadrosaurs according to Chin.

I think it is also important to make an important distinction that was perhaps
not hammered in hard enough in the popular discussions of the most recent Chin
paper. The Kaiparowits formation records a much wetter, lacustrine subtropical
environment compared to the drier, more temperate Two Medicine. It therefore
stands to reason that the exploitation of rotten wood was not due to severe
environmental stress as has been stipulated for the Two Medicine coprolites -
that there was some sort of drought or environmental degradation that forced
these animals into an unusual food resource. In short the repeated documentation
of rotten wood foraging across at least two species, from multiple occurrences
across multiple horizons forces us to conclude that this is not an aberrant or
unusual adaptation - that we should not feel compelled to "explain it away" -
but that it was a systematic and deliberate exploitation of a food source not
usually associated with mega-herbivores. But why?

The recent Chin paper is on the right track. They link wood rotten wood
consumption to reproductive activities both in terms of sequestering necessary
proteins and elements needed for egg laying and possible latrine behavior:

"There is no definitive evidence linking the Kaiparowits coprolites with
reproductive activities. However the large, multi-deposit coprolite masses may
provide some indirect support for correlation of reproductive activities with
the woody coprolites because latrine behavior (repeated defecation in a confined
area) can be indicative of animals that are spatially constrained. Nesting
activities would have necessarily curtailed nomadic movements by breeding
dinosaurs."

I think Chin et. al. is correct here to link wood consumption with reproductive
actives, especially colonial nesting. Unfortunately due to the limiting nature
of peer reviewed scientific product they can't or won't go far enough. They are
not thinking BIG ENOUGH. The truth as I will lay out is entirely more
interesting and answers some very pertinent questions regarding colonial nesting
hadrosaurs. Not only is it time to stop thinking about hadrosaurs as "cows of
the Cretaceous" we have to re-imagine what it means to be mega-colony forming
mega-herbivore because such situations are not seen today except in artificial
human feed lots of factory animal buffets. It is time to start opening up the
speculative vistas wider and wider...

I believe the key line of inquiry lies in elucidating the unique nature and
ecology of dinosaurian reproductive biology, long incubation periods, nesting
ecology, and the flow of nutrients in Cretaceous Laramidia.

Before I do that I want to stipulate two assumptions that will color my
interpretations and which I shall disclose now. Keep in mind that these
assumptions are not settled science, there is still disagreement. However for
simplicities sake they are assumptions I will be working from.  1) Nesting
colonies of hadrosaurs were in fact, real, and they were large. The parent(s)
did stick around to at least guard the nest from predators until hatching. Given
the long incubation time (Erickson et. al. 2017) for Hypacrosaurus (6 months)
such nest guarding activities were substantial investments in time and energy.
2) Hatchlings were at least semi-precocial (Geist & Jones, 1996). They could and
did upon hatching forage and move around on their own. This does not preclude
some amount of direct provisioning by parents, but it is no required. The young
continued to use the nest for creche style groups, sleeping and protection
especially huddling for warmth,  for some time after hatching (nidicolous i.e.
nest bound vs nidifugous i.e. nest leaving). Parental provisioning may or may
not have been negligible or non-existent, food stuffs gathered in the immediate
vicinity of the nest by the hatchlings on foraging expeditions of the abundant
invertebrates, fresh greens and fungi all of which were fostered by the parent
hadrosaurs woody dung.

The Elephant(s) in the Room - Long Incubation Periods & Mega-herbivore Nesting
Colony Environmental Dilemma

There is an elephant in the room that no one is talking about with regards to
nesting colonies of hadrosaurs. For some reason(s) these issues never seem to
crop up in discussions of hadrosaur nesting colonies. In fact there are two
elephants in the room that need to be coupled and dealt with.

Elephant in the room #1: Large herbivores don't stay tethered to one spot very
long, they will quickly strip it of vegetation. 

Elephant in the room #2: Dinosaurs are showing strong signs of long incubation
periods.  

Notice that elephant #2 collides with elephant #1 and exponentially increases
the dilemma of large colonially nesting hadrosaurs. If you have 6 months of
incubation, that gives you a minimum of six months of nest guarding duties.
Those six months will create an increasingly large radius of environmental
devastation around the nesting colony. The hatchlings inherit a wasteland - not
good!!

Although John  Horner does not mention the dilemma of feeding stationary
colonies of nesting hadrosaurs in his influential book Digging Dinosaurs he does
at least acknowledge the destructive powers in the 10, 000 strong mega-herds of
Maisaura he claims are represented at site Camposaur (pg. 138) :

" I wonder a bit about how these kinds of herds affected the environment.
Certainly the herds had to keep on the move. They must have stripped one area
and then moved on to the next."

Probably the best treatment of the environmental carnage nesting hadrosaurs
colonies would impose is taken from Dale Russel's epic tome An Odyssey in Time:
The Dinosaurs of North America page 151:

"… Nearby sources of food would soon be depleted, and the parents would had to
range ever more widely each day… The rains came, the brushlands greened, and the
nests burgeoned with stumbling, chirping hatchlings. Lines of parents streamed
along muddy, dung-filled paths to and from the colony. The air was rent by
sounds of breaking branches, as trees and shrubs were stripped of their foliage
in an ever-widening circle of environmental devastation… Carcasses of dead
hadrosaurs began to dot the stripped shrublands, and the area began to acquire
something of the appearance of a battlefield."

At least in the case of Maisaura, suggestions that not just one, but maybe
several hundred or even thousand multi-ton herbivorous dinosaurs hunkered down
for maybe half a year in a rather concentrated locale is mind boggling. There
would be an ever increasing radius of devastation surrounding such colonies,
making it increasingly hard for nesting hadrosaurs to guard their nest and
giving hatchling hadrosaurs a veritable wasteland to inherit.

Overall, the prospect of hadrosaur nesting colonies does not paint a pretty
picture but just wait, it gets even bleaker...

The pesky little problem that Dale Russel did not foresee is the long incubation
period of non-avian dinosaurs, especially pronounced in hadrosaurs. While the
recent Chin paper is correct in pointing its nose in the direction of
reproduction (but not for ecological reasons for replenishing calcium and other
nutrients) it does not go far enough in making the link between long incubation
times, colonial nesting, and the unusual situation of many tons of
mega-herbivores remaining in a relatively small area.

The recent work on dinosaur incubation times (Erickson et. al. 2017) is
potentially every bit the game changer on the behavioral front as
ornithoscelidia is on the phylogenetic front - I don't know why people have been
sort of, "whatever" about it? Or just glossed right over it. Maybe they can't
see the forest from the trees on this one, but, well, I'm not waiting for
them… Hypacrosaurus was one of the dinosaurs in the Erickson study and analysis
reveals it to have an incubation period of… wait for it… six months!! Which
implies that other hadrosaurs - such as the ones that putatively laid those
rotten wood coprolites in the Kaiparowits and Two Medicine formations
respectively - had similarly long incubation periods. Not to mention that there
is abundant evidence for large Hypacrosaurus nesting colonies (Horner & Currie,
1994). This chain of thought should get us thinking: how did such nesting
colonies not become ecological wastelands, given the long incubation periods?

From Dinosaurs' Long Egg Hatching Times Might Have Led to Their
Demise paleontologist David Varricchio said:

"These long incubation times likely restricted dinosaurs… If they had parental
care, for example, parents would be bound to a specific spot for months (up to
six months) of a given year. This would limit migration. Perhaps it would also
hinder dinosaurs' response to environmental change."

No wonder so many people are dismissive of the long incubation periods of
dinosaurs, it creates a scenario too weird and unstable to justify ecologically.
That is until we stop thinking so narrowly about what it means to be a
dinosaurian "herbivore" and how long incubation periods are not the "negatives"
so many people ascribe them to be but absolute positives.

There is a way to flip this predicament of large mega-herbivorous mega-colonies,
long incubation, and environmental degradation on its head. We can actually
inverse this equation to come up with a spectacularly novel, productive, and
intuitive outcome that better explains the success of these colonies and is not
disharmonious with the evidence at hand.

Long incubation periods and nest guarding - potentially via bonded mates - set
the stage not for evolutionary failure but forced hadrosaurs into a unique kaiju
hive mind of ecological terra-forming. It was the long incubation periods that
let hadrosaurs exquisitely render and shape their own environment. They were not
victims of long incubation times as often posited from the Erickson study but
beneficiaries of them.

The key to imagining long incubation periods as absolute positives is the woody
coprolites - the rotten wood consumption that Karen Chin has been documenting
for some time now. Hadrosaurs learned how to crack the code of exploiting old
growth coniferous forests in a manner that no mammal has done. This allowed
hadrosaurs to graft themselves into ecosystems that are today not notable for
large abundant mega-herbivores but which dinosaurs, especially hadrosaurids,
thrived in: large old growth coniferous forests. Even today large old growth
coniferous forests are powerhouses of life, just not necessarily powerhouses of
large vertebrate life like they were in the Mesozoic.





Imagining Hadrosaurs as Analogous to Sea Birds - "Hunting Down" Patches of
Rotten Wood




Big Sur redwoods Duane Nash


Ever wander through the redwood cathedral forests of Northern California or the
old growth coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest? These temperate rain
forests certainly inspire the mind, and if you are inclined towards Mesozoic
musings, they certainly bend the mind towards thoughts of how dinosaurs slotted
into these settings as forests very similar harken back to those days. An
interesting dilemma occurs though in such mind questing: such forests today are
not known for a particularly diverse or large mega-herbivorous bestiary. Sure
you have your bears, deer, elk and what not. However during the Pleistocene
there is not much suggestion that things were much different with the large
megafauna preferring open grasslands, savanna, and hardwood forests. Dinosaurs
were doing something very different from mammals. Sauropods answer the question
in part by being large enough to push over the great conifers or simply reach up
and bite their foliage. Hadrosaurs were doing something completely different
from even sauropods. Hadrosaurs cracked the code, that mammals have so far
failed at cracking, by consuming the entire tree itself after it died. They
outsourced the initial digestion - the delignification - to fungal partners and
then, in an exquisite transfer of nutrients, they shuffle the organic wealth of
the old growth forest to their nesting colonies - in more open conditions -
which benefits hatchling recruitment. They also eventually die, quite possibly
in a forest, where they return the nutrients they stole. They thus speed up the
"slow" transfer of nutrients in modern old growth coniferous forests.



Hypacrosaurus foraging on rotten wood resources by Duane Nash



The reason detrital wood resources are important is that they let us think about
hadrosaur nesting colonies less like giant conglomerates of typical
mega-herbivores and more like nesting colonies of seabirds. Seabirds provide a
model for how large groups of active, high energy homeotherms can nest together
for several months at one location. They venture to sea to forage for high
quality, dependable food stuffs. They can follow other birds and marine life
(like cetaceans) to predictably rich foraging grounds. Hadrosaurs actively
nesting, I will venture, switched from a foraging strategy of mainly green, live
growth towards detrital rotten wood resources not immediately prior to egg
laying but subsequent to egg laying and during the nest guarding phase. Like
seabirds that depart breeding colonies to locate highly discrete but dependable
food sources parental nesting hadrosaurs departed the nesting colony to locate
highly discrete but dependable rotten wood resources, completely or largely
eschewing live plant resources en route. This ensured several critical aspects
that ameliorated conditions for the hatchlings;

1) Vegetal resources were not demolished in the immediate vicinity of the
nesting colony which ensured adequate forage and hiding for the hatchlings at a
critical juncture;

2) Parent hadrosaurs could follow known paths to localized patches of dead and
rotten wood falls. A type of hadrosaur "hive mind" comes into play here that as
soon as some hadrosaurs know where to find the rotten trees, they all just
follow along (like seabirds);

3) Because these dead trees might be several kilometers away from the nesting
colony the net movement of rich partially degraded dung brings a net influx of
nutrients into the immediate vicinity of the nesting colony;

4) This flips the notion of nesting grounds becoming "ecological wastelands" on
its head, hadrosaurs were terraforming the area around nesting colonies to favor
their own hatchlings - indeed the highest concentration of dung would be
adjacent to the nesting areas;

5) Hatchling dinosaurs could forage on dung itself via coprophagy, invertebrates
attracted to dung, fungi within the dung, spores and seeds sprouting from the
dung. In short, imagining detrital wood foraging in this manner solves every
problem that long incubating, high metabolism, nesting "mega-herbivorous"
hadrosaurs presents. Nesting grounds don't become run down ecological wastelands
but booming dinosaur baby powerhouses, the actions of the parents directly
terra-forming the immediate vicinity of the nesting colony for the hatchlings
benefit. The richest foraging grounds are actually those in the immediate
vicinity of the colony!!

Karen Chin has been documenting a particularly nuanced and diverse invertebrate
interactions with dinosaur dung, especially from the Two Medicine formation. No
less than seven taxa of terrestrial and aquatic snail were found within
coprolites from that formation by Chin (2009). Throw in the abundant evidence of
back filled burrows of dung beetles and one has a good buffet for young, growing
hadrosaurs. For me, this diet of dung based resources is a much more plausible,
nutritious, and easily obtainable diet than predigested gruel or some sort of
crop milk. One has to imagine that such rough, fibrous plant stuffs as adult
hadrosaurs were consuming is not going to produce the richest, most protein
laden gruel or crop milk for young and quickly growing hadrosaurs. However if
young hadrosaurs can tap into the riches provided by six months or more of woody
dung accumulating adjacent to their nest their you have a much more nutritious
buffet of insects, gastropods, small invertebrates, fungi, young seedlings, fern
fiddleheads, and coprophagous delights. Much more simpler and direct in my
estimation.



Maisaura kindergarten by Duane Nash



A Transfer of Nutrients: Dinosaur Terraforming



Duane Nash w/fallen coastal redwood. Jedidiah Smith Park CA



As we start to flip off the switch in our brains of giant "Cretaceous cow "and
on to giant Cretaceous macro-plant scavenging, detrital hunting seabird-banana
slug,  the ecological scenario starts to switch. Large coniferous dead fall
trees are predictable in old growth coniferous forests and they stick around for
hundreds of years. A massive fallen old growth redwood Sequoia would provide
adequate forage for possibly hundreds of Maisaura!! Indeed massive dead trees
are the largest biological caloric windfalls of all, more than dead sauropods or
whales. These are truly massive stockpiles of carbon, nitrogen, fungi, and
invertebrates. Hadrosaurs would tap into the most productive and important
trophic category in old growth forests - the detrital food chain - a niche
largely unexploited by modern mega-herbivorous mammals. Once located or "hunted
down" - hadrosaurs may have had to march several kilometers to find them -
hadrosaurs would make periodic trips from the nesting colony, perhaps even
switching egg guarding duties between mates, to the dead falls. We start to
imagine these hadrosaurs less like typical herbivores but more like giant macro
plant scavengers that let fungi do the hard work of digestion while they reap
the rewards. All the while a transfer of nutrients is occurring as dino dung
patties are being deposited away from the old growth forests and adjacent to the
nesting colony. This energy transfer creates a very different sort of ecosystem
from the old growth coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest of North
America. Here decaying trees take centuries to break down and the nutrients stay
in the forest. In hadrosaur mediated old growth forests the transfer of
nutrients may have been much more rapid and multifaceted. Nutrients being cycled
out of the forest to the nesting colonies and possibly back into the forest as
hadrosaurs died in secluded forest haunts or dragged into deep redwood groves by
tyrannosaurids.





When the hatchling hadrosaurs emerge, precocial and ready to fend for
themselves, hopefully coincident with rains they are met with a riot of new -
dino dung fertilized - growth. The carbon and nitrogen rich chewed up rotten
wood dino patties built up over six months of nest guarding and potentially
several hundred years worth of colony fidelity is literally dinosaur
terra-forming. They have ameliorated conditions for their progeny on a grand
scale. Far from being an ecological wasteland the areas around hadrosaur
colonies may have been almost preternaturally abundant with life!!

Today redwoods can thrive in small microclimates in borderline semi-arid
conditions, as I documented in Redwood Grove Along the Big Sur Coast: Southern
Limits where I explored some of the southernmost occurrences of redwoods along
the California coast.



southern Redwood Big Sur coast credit Duane Nash


As the picture above attests you can actually see redwood groves growing on the
fog enshrined cooler north facing slopes and ravines right adjacent to the
traditional xeric chaparral of California. Similar micro habits may have allowed
patches of large conifers and sequoia to thrive in semi-arid habits, like in Two
Medicine, where colonies of hadrosaurs may have been in striking distance of
such stands and their bounty of decaying wood.





A Diffuse Hive Mind Emerges: What is Good for the Colony is Good For the
Individual

When we start to look at hadrosaur nesting colonies not as individuals in a
collective but more as a meta-organism a "hive" if you will we can start to
better make sense of how these giant amalgamations of bio-mass operated in a
manner that did not ravage their environment but actually enhanced it. They were
terraforming it. Remember that these were nesting operations that - at a minimum
- may have required parental supervision of the nest for over half a year. When
every rule of modern mega-herbivorous mammals is broken by remaining stationary
in a locale for such an extended time it is time to invent new rules. It is
actually not hard to imagine a certain evolutionary feedback loop coming into
play.

Rule #1: Clutch-mates are the social basis. Your clutch mates are family. You
share a genetic heritage. Whatever you do to augment their chance of survival
also enhances your genetic legacy via shared genes.

Rule #2: The nesting colony is sacrosanct. Just as clutch mates form the basis
for social groupings in dinosaur life, it is indeed clutch mates that establish
and form the nucleus for new breeding colonies. Over time these breeding
colonies grow in size and scope but their is still a shared genetic legacy.
 This is part of the reason, I will venture, Laramidia was so diverse in giant
herbivorous dinosaurs. Colonial nest site fidelity and shared genetic heritage
decreed a more insular evolutionary swap stakes.

Rule #3: Large colony size is inevitable. Playing the numbers game against
predators would push colonies towards the largest possible size. As colonies
grew in size and scope they would reach an ecological imbalance. Food resources
would become so impoverished and ravaged that the travel time to good patches of
vegetation for adults would become untenably long. They could no longer make the
treks to food and return to guard eggs in a timely and efficient manner.
Likewise in such a scenario hatchlings would emerge to a world of utter
devastation - all available vegetation was scoured to the ground in the vicinity
of the colony ( I am going with the notion that hadrosaurs were fairly
precocial, but may have still sheltered in the nest). In such scenarios we would
see colony collapse. The increasingly long treks for vegetal resources by adults
coupled with the increasing radius of environmental degradation would spell
disaster for adults - increasingly exposed to predators, fatigue, disease, and
stress - and hatchlings inheriting an impoverished ecosystem. Colonies would
have to change their current ecological course OR FACE OBLITERATION. Unless such
large colonies could find a way to skirt the issue of environmental devastation
then small grouping or solitary egg laying would be more beneficial than
colonies.

Corollary 1: Solution - for adults during nesting periods they eschew greenery
and tap into detrital food chains. This solves the problem of environmental
collapse within the vicinity of the colony. Such a diet, bolstered with fungi
and animal protein, is evinced by the coprolite remains. Hadrosaurs now go on
long distance foraging ventures to secure rotten wood, largely foregoing the
greenery around the colony. It allows us to compare hadrosaur colonies to sea
bird colonies: which instead of "hunting down" discrete patches of rich oceanic
life, hadrosaurs "hunted down" discrete patches of dependable detrital
resources. Large dead coniferous trees are, then as now, the largest organisms
that have ever lived. The haul of carbon, nitrogen, fungal, and animal resources
is immense. In processing these giants hadrosaurs circumnavigated the
"stationary megaherbivore dilemma", avoided competition with their offspring,
and actually transferred nutrients via dung to the immediate vicinity of the
colony. They thus terraformed their environment for the benefit of their
offspring and enhanced their genetic legacy. It was a WIN-WIN situation for the
hadrosaurs.





Corollary 2: The colony becomes a semi-permanent home. Once the
detrital-dung-fertilizer feedback loop is set in motion, the bigger the colony
gets the more successful the colony becomes. Quite simply the more animals are
spreading dung around the vicinity of the colony, the better quality forage is
produced for the young i.e. fresh growth, invertebrates, fungi, the more
juvenile recruitment succeeds. The colony becomes a sort of metropolis where the
richness provided actually allows hadrosaurs to remain there well past the
hatchling stage - a phenomena evinced by the multiple growth stages present
at Maisaura nesting colonies and mass death assemblages. In fact I will venture
a speculative guess that many or most hadrosaur mass death assemblages do not
represent migrating herds but more of a time averaged death assemblage pulled
from hadrosaurine colonial metropolises.

Corollary 3: The glass ceiling, a potential limit to colony growth at which
stage colonies may shrink or experience collapse. It is not necessarily the
availability of green growth but the availability of dead growth. Once colonies
have cleared all of the old, dead, rotten logs out of the area adjacent to their
colony it may in fact be time to move the colony. The hive relocates. It secures
a territory with untapped detrital resources and sets in motion the terraforming
process anew.

Migrating Mega-Herds or Hadrosaur Metropolises?




credit Metropolis © Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Foundation fair use


And here is where I want to really go for it - really blow your mind... that all
of this was a warm up, I mean, why stop now? A fascinating topic in
paleontological musings is the holes in the fossil record and how, slipping
between the cracks, could be lost and vanished "higher" beings perhaps not
unlike ourselves in some scope of magnitude, some ability to shape and
manipulate their environment. Let me offer that such beings might not be
entirely reminiscent of us in shape or appearance - but still are like us in
some quintessential way set apart from other animals in the magnitude of their
effect. And let me offer such beings have been staring at us in the face all
along that colony forming terraforming hadrosaurs were modifying and shifting
environments on a grand scale far beyond that of even typical mega-herbivores.
That hadrosaurs were not only ameliorating conditions for their hatchlings but
for all growth stages "ontogimorphs" of their  individual species as well. That
their terraforming via dung actually created, over generations, prolific
hadrosaur citadels or metropolises. Thriving with multiple generations and
growth stages of hadrosaur as well as a panoply of commensal, symbiotic,
predatory, and commensal species. That these metropolises, somewhat like our
own, had their own cadence of birth, growth, decay, and renewal. That these
hadrosaur modified environments - metropolises based on an economic driver of
conifer dung - not only existed but that we might have tantalizing proof of
them.

Although not as well known as the saga of Egg Mountain and the miraculous
nesting colonies of Maisaura and Hypacrosaurs that Jack Horner is famed for it
is his sight called Camposaur where, "conservatively", 10,000 animal strong
Maisaura herd death assemblages are located. No one really knows how these death
assemblages formed, if they were just one single event or multiple events. The
story usually goes something like this: volcanic out gassings killed a migrating
herd of at least 10,000 Maisaura. Volcanic soils partially preserved the bones
as fossils, later redeposited in floods.

But let me paint another picture that this "herd" actually represents a
primarily residential assemblage of Maisaura killed over time in one locale. An
astonishingly productive Maisaura metropolis fertilized not just by conifer dung
but by periodic volcanic ash falls. They were double dipping. But there was a
price to be paid for this Maisaura heaven. Periodic out gassings of the volcano
would kill off vast droves of Maisaura. Bones would be partially fossilized in
the volcanic soils, seldom disturbed by scavengers due to the sheer volume of
animal mass and volcanic killing fields and periodically swept away via floods
for later deposition and preservation.

Altogether this scenario of multiple killing events of a primarily residential
Maisaura metropolis is not at all incompatible with the data as we know it. As
opposed to one giant migrating herd dying en masse in a single volcanic killing
event, multiple killing episodes of perhaps a more modest residential colony
might actually be a more parsimonious explanation for Camposaur.





All of this is very typical of our species in-born bias that we would not
recognize such complex biological ecological systems from the past because we
are looking for something that resembles our own tool mediated civilizations.
Instead we should expect such systems more to resemble the most dominant,
successful and ubiquitous colonial living arrangements known - social insect
hives. That dinosaurs would evolve such systems that parallel insect societies
should really not be that surprising in hind sight, they had more than enough
time to evolve such complexity - even if it was not tool mediated or under the
auspices of some great intellect.





Brigitte Helm Metropolis




There is perhaps a moral in all of this. Perhaps colonial hadrosaurs that tapped
into detrital ecosystems, cracked the code of conifer forests, and broke all the
rules of what it means to be a mega-herbivore… perhaps they offer a model of
right living in hot house worlds. That using dung to form metropolises and
outsourcing digestion to fungi - maybe these are tricks we can learn something
from?

Anyways, something to chew on...

Best,

Duane




References

Chin, K., Feldmann, R.M., and Tashman, J.N. 2017. Consumption of crustaceans by
megaherbivorous dinosaurs: dietary flexibility and dinosaur life history
strategies. Scientific Reports 7, article number 111163. online

Chin, K., Hartman, J.H., and Roth, B. 2009. Opportunistic exploitation of
dinosaur dung: fossil snails in coprolites from the Upper CretaceousTwo Medicine
Formation of Montana. Lethaia 42: 185-198.

Chin, K. 2007. The paleobiological implications of herbivorous dinosaur
coprolites from the Upper Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation of Montana: why eat
wood? Palaios 22: 554-566.


Erickson, G.M., Zelenitsky, D.K., Kay, D.I., and Norell, M.A. 2017. Dinosaur
incubation periods directly determined from growth line counts in embryonic
teeth show reptilian-grade development. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. vol 114, no. 3. online

Geist, N.R., Jones, T.D. 1996 Juvenile Skeletal Structure and the Reproductive
Habits of Dinosaurs. American Association for the Advancement of Sciences.
online

Horner, J., and Gorman, J. 1990. Digging Dinosaurs

Russel, D.A. 1992. An Odyssey in Time: The Dinosaurs of North America

Posted by Duane Nash at 10:04 AM 24 comments:
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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2017


ENTERING THE HIVE MIND OF TERRA-FORMING HADROSAURS


The following, although couched in as much science as I can drape it in, is not
necessarily strictly science per se. I make a lot of assumptions that prove
necessary to accept in order to come up with my grander ideas here. It requires
a certain amount of suspension of disbelief... so be it.  I will at times wear a
scientific hat, at others a more deductive, intuitive, detective methodology
will supersede the limits of the available science.  This might not sit well
with some of you, that I will voluntarily admit to not following a strictly
scientific approach but adamantly follow my intuition, hunch, gut feeling, and
embark on the quest for knowledge with an anarchic spirit and emotional cadence
not becoming of modern academia or paleontology. But that has always been my
style - follow my intuition, move to an emotional cadence of discovery, and
explore with an anarchic open mindedness that others - sensitive to not being
seen as "scientific enough" - simply do not have the freedom to move in. Say and
think what you will of this but it has been my methodology from day one... you
can't argue you with results and if I'm one thing, I am prolific. As such it is
an adventure in story telling, but I think the story is a good one - quite
possibly the best one, and worth sharing. I will gladly change my take on the
subject with new or better data available. Until then I think the following
ideas as I outline here best answers the question of how large nesting colonies
of megaherbivorous hadrosaurs operated ecologically.



Before bottom punting spinosaurs, covered lipped saber toothed predators and
night stalking meat curtain lipped megatheropods it was my often overlooked
earlier pieces on dinosaur plant interactions/niche partitioning versus
commensal relationships/and unusual detrital food chains among dinosaurs that I
actually count among my most original and thought provoking ideas. It's a pity
that the the page views are not nearly so high for these earlier posts but the
material is much more interesting and edgy I would say. Big lips in theropods
and sabertooths - so boring!! That many of the ideas I presented in these
earlier posts have sit fallow is part of the grander scheme. Something had to
awaken them, and something has...

To bring you up to speed it might prove useful to go review these old posts I
put forth on the subject way back in the day.

Following the Poop Trail: Can Dinosaurs Be Blamed For Termites?

Some of the finer points may have changed but here I argued for unusual and
novel food chains in Mesozoic ecosystems and possibly a conserved gut flora from
sauropods to termites!!

Dinosaur Alternative Food Stuffs

Lichen munching dinosaurs? Sauropods browsing foliose lichens in high latitude
polar beech forests? How did these cool, temperate high latitude forests
operate?

Rot N' Roll in the Mesozoic Muck

It was in this last post Rot N' Roll in the Mesozoic Muck, from way back from
May 21, 2013, that I first ventured forth an idea that I was very smitten with
at the time and which has stayed with me since.

In short format: that the consumption of decayed wood by large ornithischians
documented via coprololite remains from the Two Medicine Formation and often
attributed to Maisaura peeblesorum (Chin, 2007) document a novel ecological
relationship. Namely Maisaura was consuming rotten wood and fungi in order to
deposit and provision hatchling Maisaura with a ready supply of beneficial gut
flora via coprophagy (consumption of dung) but also grow tremendous fungal
gardens that further nourished and provishioned young hatchlings with a readily
digestible and nutritious bumper crop of sporocrops i.e. mushrooms. Like a giant
version of a banana slug spores would pass through the dinosaurs' digestive
system and find a nice dinosaur patty to set up shop in. Because fungi have a
more complete and easily digestible protein profile than raw plants they serve
as a nice energy and growth boost for the hatchling hadrosaurs. Basically the
best analogy being to the large underground fungal gardens leaf cutter ants
create. A very simple, diffuse, and elegant energy transfer from detrital food
chains to parent hadrosaur to offspring. Because the environmental conditions
could not be controlled as in the underground gardens of leaf cutter ants, some
years would be better than others in terms of fungi production. Furthermore it
is not an obligate food source, the dung and whatever foodstuffs come with it -
insects, mollusks, crustaceans, fungi - merely augment the growing hatchlings
needs. If there is no fungal bloom of sporocarps, the hatchlings feed on other
stuff.

At the time I wrote it I didn't have much readership, nor was there any more
compelling evidence at hand to argue such a hypothesis past the point of
imaginative fantasy so I kinda let the idea sit fallow for a couple of years.
Until I woke up the other day to check out my news feed to unexpectedly discover
more evidence of rotten wood munching giant ornithischians has been unveiled via
Karen Chin!! Only this time the coprololites hail from the Kaiparowits formation
of Utah across multiple horizons and not only contained rotten conifer wood but
sizable bits from crustaceans and mollusks!! Like mana from heaven these
heavenly piles of shit keep dropping on my doorstep like flaming bags of shit!!
But they are bags of poop I certainly don't want to stamp out!!

While the shellfish eating aspect of this study is getting the most attention,
it really is the confirmation of rotten wood munching ornithischians (probably
hadrosaurs) that has the most far reaching implications. This revelation
confirms that dinosaurs tapping into detrital food chains was not some aberrant
activity, or the result of some ecological catastrophe but really was just a
pretty regular menu option.

If after reading Chin's latest study you come away thinking that mammalian
mega-herbivores are the best analogy to dinosaurian megaherbivores I really
can't do much for you. In fact you might just want to stop reading right now.
Far from being the most "vanilla" of dinosaurs you might start to think of
colony forming hadrosaurs as the most interesting of dinosaurs by the completion
of this piece. Time to drop whatever preconceived notions you have of how
dinosaurian herbivores operated ecologically compared to modern ones. Far from
being the "cows of the Cretaceous" - really how can you be a cow without eating
grass anyways (?!) - such a simplistic comparison belies the far more
interesting ecology of these animals and how they slot into a non-grass world.

Indeed a main thrust of the Chin paper is that modern large mammalian herbivores
don't compare favorably to the large ornithischians that harvested rotten wood,
fungi, mollusks, and crustaceans - because quite literally large
mega-herbivorous mammals don't really go after these resources to any
appreciable extent. This is not to suggest that the paucity of large
megaherbivorous mammals around today shows the full extent of dietary
flexibility of the recently extinct gompotheres, ground sloths, notoungulates,
and others. And sure everyone loves to point out the occasional deer eating
field mice or eggs or whatever BUT no one is suggesting that natural wild
populations of modern mammalian herbivores are stuffing their guts full of
rotten wood and crabs, they simply don't go after detrital and invertebrate
resources as a way of life… they are a lot more conservative dietarily compared
at least to a subset of late Cretaceous ornithischians, most parsimoniously
hadrosaurs according to Chin.

I think it is also important to make an important distinction that was not
hammered in hard enough in the recent Chin paper. The Kaiparowits formation
records a much wetter, lacustrine subtropical environment compared to the drier,
more temperate Two Medicine. It therefore stands to reason that the exploitation
of wood was not due to severe environmental stress as has been stipulated for
the Two Medicine coprolites, that there was some sort of drought or
environmental degradation that forced these animals into an unusual food
resource. In short the repeated documentation of rotten wood foraging across at
least two species, from multiple occurrences across multiple time periods forces
us to conclude that this is not an aberrant or unusual adaptation - that we
should not feel compelled to "explain it away" - but that it was a systematic
and deliberate exploitation of a food source not usually associated with
megaherbivores. But why?

I believe the key line of inquiry lies in elucidating the unique nature and
ecology of dinosaurian reproductive biology, long incubation periods, nesting
ecology, and the flow of nutrients in Cretaceous Laramidia.



Before I do that I want to stipulate two assumptions that will color my
interpretations and which I shall disclose now. Keep in mind that these
assumptions are not settled science, there is still disagreement. However for
simplicities sake they are assumptions I will be working from.  1) Nesting
colonies of hadrosaurs were in fact, real, and they were large. The parent(s)
did stick around to at least guard the nest from predators until hatching. Given
the long incubation time for Hypacrosaurus (6 months) such nest guarding
activities were substantial investments in time and energy. 2) Hatchlings were
precocial (Geist & Jones, 1996). They could and did upon hatching forage and
move around on their own. They continued to use the nest for creche style
groups, sleeping and protection for some time after hatching (nidicolous i.e.
nest bound vs nidifugous i.e. nest leaving). Parental provisioning may have
been negligible or non-existent, food stuffs gathered in the immediate vicinity
of the nest by the hatchlings on foraging expeditions.


The Elephant(s) in the Room - Long Incubation Periods & Mega-herbivore Nesting
Colony Environmental Dilemma

There is an elephant in the room that no one is talking about with regards to
nesting colonies of hadrosaurs. In fact there are two elephants in the room that
need to be coupled and dealt with. Elephant in the room #: Large herbivores
don't stay tethered to one spot very long, they will quickly strip it of
vegetation. Elephant in the room #2: Dinosaurs are showing strong signs of long
incubation periods.  Notice that elephant #2 collides with elephant #1 and
exponentially increases the dilemma. This is not just some elephants in the
room, this is a freaking blue whale in the room creating some titanic problems
that are being ignored. There has been some scarce sentiment that hadrosaur
nesting colonies posed some interesting environmental dilemmas, but as far as I
know no one has attacked this question head on much less with respect to long
incubation times.

If you have 6 months of incubation, that gives you a minimum of six months of
nest guarding duties. Those six months will create an increasingly large radius
of environmental devastation around the nesting colony. The hatchlings inherit a
wasteland - not good!!

Although John R. Horner does not mention the dilemma of feeding stationary
colonies of nesting hadrosaurs in his influential book Digging Dinosaurs he does
at least acknowledge the destructive powers in the mega-herds of Maisaura he
postulated (pg. 138) :

" I wonder a bit about how these kinds of herds affected the environment.
Certainly the herds had to keep on the move. They must have stripped one area
and then moved on to the next."

At least in the case of Maisaura, suggestions that not just one, but maybe
several hundred or even thousand multi-ton herbivorous dinosaurs hunkered down
for maybe half a year in a rather concentrated locale is mind boggling. The
thought that several hundred tons of mega-herbivores could just hunker down in a
small location for half a year and that the environment would just be Ok with
that? Mega-herbivores don't do that, they keep on moving!! It should set your
sense of ecological justice and reason on fire!! There would be an ever
increasing radius of devastation surrounding such colonies, making it
increasingly hard for nesting hadrosaurs to guard their nest and giving
hatchling hadrosaurs a veritable wasteland to inherit.That pesky little problem
people keep dancing around is the long incubation period of non-avian dinosaurs,
especially pronounced in hadrosaurs. While the recent Chin paper is correct in
pointing its nose in the direction of reproduction it does not go far enough in
making the link between long incubation times, colonial nesting, and the unusual
situation of many tons of mega-herbivores remaining in a relatively small area.

The recent work on dinosaur incubation times (Erickson et. al. 2017) is
potentially every bit the game changer on the behavioral front as
ornithoscelidia is on the phylogenetic front - I don't know why people have been
sort of, "whatever" about it? Or just glossed right over it. Maybe they can't
see the forest from the trees on this one, but, well, I'm not waiting for them…
Hypacrosaurus was one of the dinosaurs in the Erickson study and analysis
reveals it to have an incubation period of… wait for it… six months!! Which
implies that other hadrosaurs - such as the ones that putatively laid those
rotten wood coprolites in the Kaiparowits and Two Medicine formations
respectively - had similarly long incubation periods. Not to mention that there
is abundant evidence for large Hypacrosaurus nesting colonies (Horner & Currie,
1994). This chain of thought should get us thinking: how did such nesting
colonies not become ecological wastelands, given the long incubation periods?

No wonder so many people are dismissive of the long incubation periods of
dinosaurs, it creates a scenario too weird and unstable to justify ecologically.
That is until we stop thinking so narrowly about what it means to be a
dinosaurian "herbivore" and how long incubation periods are not the "negatives"
so many people ascribe them to be but absolute positives.

From Dinosaurs' Long Egg Hatching Times Might Have Led to Their Demise
paleontologist David Varricchio said:

"These long incubation times likely restricted dinosaurs… If they had parental
care, for example, parents would be bound to a specific spot for months (up to
six months) of a given year. This would limit migration. Perhaps it would also
hinder dinosaurs' response to environmental change."

Long incubation periods and nest guarding - potentially via bonded mates - set
the stage not for evolutionary failure but forced hadrosaurs into a unique kaiju
hive mind of ecological terra-forming. It was the long incubation periods that
let hadrosaurs exquisitely render and shape their own environment. They were not
victims of long incubation times as often posited from the Erickson study (let's
flip that on its head) but beneficiaries of them.

The key to imagining long incubation periods as absolute positives is the wood,
the rotten wood. This allowed hadrosaurs to exploit a niche that no mammalian
herbivore has done and really graft themselves into ecosystems that are today
not notable for large abundant mega-herbivores but which dinosaurs, especially
hadrosaurids, thrived in: large old growth coniferous forests.



Imagining Hadrosaurs as Analogous to Sea Birds - "Hunting Down" Patches of
Rotten Wood




public domain credit Duncan Wright USFWS. Seabird colony with Great
Frigatebirds, Red-tailed Tropicbird, Red-footed Boobies, Sooty Terns and Black
Noddies. Tern Island, French Frigate Shoals, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands


Ever wander through the redwood cathedral forests of Northern California or the
old growth coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest? These temperate rain
forests certainly inspire the mind, and if you are inclined towards Mesozoic
paleontological musings, they certainly bend the mind towards thoughts of how
dinosaurs slotted into these settings as forests very similar harken back to
those days. An interesting dilemma occurs though in such mind questing: such
forests today are not known for a particularly diverse or large mega-herbivorous
bestiary. Sure you have your bears, deer, elk and what not - but even during the
Pleistocene there is not much suggestion that things were much different with
the large megafauna preferring open grasslands, savanna, and hardwood forests.
Dinosaurs were doing something very different from mammals. Sauropods answer the
question in part by being large enough to push over the great conifers or simply
reach up and bite their foliage. Hadrosaurs cracked the code, that mammals have
largely failed at, by consuming the entire tree itself after it died. They
outsource digestion to fungal partners and then, in an exquisite transfer of
nutrients they shuffle the organic wealth of the old growth forest to their
nesting colonies - in more open conditions - which benefits hatchling
recruitment. The also eventually die, quite possibly in a forest, where they
return the nutrients they stole. They thus speed up the "slow" transfer of
nutrients in modern old growth.

The reason detrital wood resources are important is that they let us think about
hadrosaur nesting colonies like nesting colonies of seabirds. Seabirds provide a
model for how large groups of active, high energy homeotherms can nest together
for several months at one location. They have wings and the means to venture to
sea to forage for high quality, dependable food stuffs. They can also follow
other birds and marine life (dolphins) to predictably rich foraging grounds.
Nesting hadrosaurs, I will venture, switched from a foraging strategy of mainly
green, live growth towards detrital rotten wood resources not immediately prior
to egg laying but subsequent to egg laying and during the nest guarding phase.
This ensured several critical aspects that ameliorated conditions for the
hatchlings; 1) vegetal resources were not demolished in the immediate vicinity
of the nesting colony which ensured adequate forage and hiding for the
hatchlings at a critical juncture; 2) parent hadrosaurs could follow known paths
to localized patches of dead and rotten wood falls, the hadrosaur hive mind
comes into play here that as soon as some hadrosaurs know where to find the
rotten trees, they all just follow along (like seabirds); 3) because these dead
trees might be several kilometers away from the nesting colony the net movement
of rich partially degraded dung brings a net influx of nutrients into the
immediate vicinity of the nesting colony; 4) this flips the notion of nesting
grounds becoming "ecological wastelands" on its head, hadrosaurs were
terraforming the area around nesting colonies to favor their own hatchlings; 5)
hatchling dinosaurs could forage on dung itself via coprophagy, invertebrates
attracted to dung, fungi within the dung, spores and seeds sprouting from the
dung. In short, imagining detrital wood foraging in this manner solves every
problem that long incubating, high metabolism, nesting "megaherbivorous"
hadrosaurs presents. Nesting grounds don't become run down ecological wastelands
but booming dinosaur baby metropolises the actions of the parents directly
terra-forming the immediate vicinity of the nesting colony for the hatchlings
benefit.


A Transfer of Nutrients: Dinosaur Terraforming



Duane Nash w/fallen coastal redwood. Jedidiah Smith Park CA



As we start to flip off the switch in our brains of giant Cretaceous cow to
giant Cretaceous detrital hunting seabird-banana slug, the ecological scenario
starts to switch. Large coniferous dead fall trees are predictable in old growth
coniferous forests and they stick around for hundreds of years. A massive fallen
old growth redwood Sequoia would provide adequate forage for possibly hundreds
of Maisaura!! Indeed massive dead trees are the largest biological caloric
windfalls of all, more than dead sauropods or whales. These are truly massive
stockpiles of carbon, nitrogen, fungi, and invertebrates. Hadrosaurs would tap
into the most productive and important trophic category in old growth forests -
the detrital food chain - a niche largely unexploited by modern megaherbivorous
mammals. Once located or "hunted down" - hadrosaurs may have had to march
several kilometers to find them - hadrosaurs would make periodic trips from the
nesting colony, perhaps even switching egg guarding duties between mates, to the
dead falls. We start to imagine these hadrosaurs less like typical herbivores
but more like giant macro plant scavengers that let fungi do the hard work of
digestion while they reap the rewards. All the while a transfer of nutrients is
occurring as dino dung patties are being deposited away from the old growth
forests and adjacent to the nesting colony. This energy transfer creates a very
different sort of ecosystem from the old growth coniferous forests of the
Pacific Northwest of North America. Here decaying trees take centuries to break
down and the nutrients stay in the forest. In hadrosaur mediated old growth
forests the transfer of nutrients may have been much more rapid and
multifaceted. Nutrients being cycled out of the forest to the nesting colonies
and possibly back into the forest as hadrosaurs died in secluded forest haunts
or dragged into deep redwood groves by tyrannosaurids.





When the hatchling hadrosaurs emerge, precocial and ready to fend for
themselves, hopefully coincident with rains they are met with a riot of new,
dino dung fertilized, growth. The carbon and nitrogen rich chewed up rotten wood
dino patties built up over six months of nest guarding and potentially several
hundred years worth of colony fidelity is literally dinosaur terra-forming. They
have ameliorated conditions for their progeny on a grand scale. Far from being
an ecological wasteland the areas around hadrosaur colonies may have been almost
preternaturally abundant with life!!

A Diffuse Hive Mind Emerges: What is Good for the Colony is Good For the
Individual

When we start to look at hadrosaur nesting colonies not as individuals in a
collective but more as a meta-organism a "hive" if you will we can start to
better make sense of how these giant amalgamations of bio-mass operated in a
manner that did not ravage their environment but actually enhanced it. They were
terraforming it. Remember that these were nesting operations that - at a minimum
- may have required parental supervision of the nest for over half a year. When
every rule of modern megaherbivorous mammals is broken by remaining stationary
in a locale for such an extended time it is time to invent new rules. It is
actually not hard to imagine a certain feed evolutionary back loop coming into
play.

Rule #1: Clutch-mates are the social basis. Your clutch mates are family. You
share a genetic heritage. Whatever you do to augment their chance of survival
also enhances your genetic legacy via shared genes.

Rule #2: The nesting colony is sacrosanct. Just as clutch mates form the basis
for social groupings in dinosaur life, it is indeed clutch mates that establish
and form the nucleus for new breeding colonies. Over time these breeding
colonies grow in size and scope but their is still a shared genetic legacy.
 This is part of the reason, I presume, Laramidia was so diverse in giant
herbivorous dinosaurs. Colonial nest site fidelity and shared genetic heritage
decreed a more insular evolutionary swap stakes.

Rule #3: Hatchlings are the future of the colony. Playing the numbers game
against predators would push colonies towards the largest possible size. As
colonies grew in size and scope they would reach an ecological imbalance. Food
resources would become so impoverished and ravaged that the travel time to good
patches of vegetation for adults would become untenably long. They could no
longer make the treks to food and return to guard eggs in a timely and efficient
manner. Likewise in such a scenario hatchlings would emerge to a world of utter
devastation - all available vegetation was scoured to the ground in the vicinity
of the colony ( I am going with the notion that hadrosaurs were fairly
precocial, but may have still sheltered in the nest). In such scenarios we would
see colony collapse. The increasingly long treks for vegetal resources by adults
coupled with the increasing radius of environmental degradation would spell
disaster for adults - increasingly exposed to predators, fatigue, disease, and
stress - and hatchlings inheriting an impoverished ecosystem. Colonies would
have to change their current ecological course OR FACE OBLITERATION. Unless such
large colonies could find a way to skirt the issue of environmental devastation
then small grouping or solitary egg laying would be more beneficial than
colonies.

Corollary 1: Solution - for adults during nesting periods they eschew greenery
and tap into detrital food chains. This solves the problem of environmental
collapse within the vicinity of the colony. Such a diet, bolstered with fungi
and animal protein, is evinced by the coprolite remains. Hadrosaurs now go on
long distance foraging ventures to secure rotten wood, largely foregoing the
greenery around the colony. It allows us to compare hadrosaur colonies to sea
bird colonies which instead of "hunting down" discrete patches of rich oceanic
life, hadrosaurs "hunted down" discrete patches of dependable detrital
resources. Large dead coniferous trees are, then as now, the largest organisms
that have ever lived. The haul of carbon, nitrogen, fungal, and animal resources
is immense. In processing these giants hadrosaurs circumnavigated the
"stationary megaherbivore dilemma", avoided competition with their offspring,
and actually transferred nutrients via dung to the immediate vicinity of the
colony. They thus terraformed their environment for the benefit of their
offspring and enhanced their genetic legacy. It was a WIN-WIN situation for the
hadrosaurs.

Corollary 2: The colony becomes a semi-permanent home. Once the
detrital-dung-fertilizer feedback loop is set in motion, the bigger the colony
gets the more successful the colony becomes. Quite simply the more animals are
spreading dung around the vicinity of the colony, the better quality forage is
produced for the young i.e. fresh growth, invertebrates, fungi, the more
juvenile recruitment succeeds. The colony becomes a sort of metropolis where the
richness provided actually allows hadrosaurs to remain there well past the
hatchling stage - a phenomena evinced by the multiple growth stages present at
Maisaura nesting colonies and mass death assemblages. In fact I will venture a
speculative guess that many or most hadrosaur mass death assemblages do not
represent migrating herds but more of a time averaged death assemblage pulled
from hadrosaurine colonial metropolises.

Corollary 3: The glass ceiling, a potential limit to colony growth at which
stage colonies may shrink or experience collapse. It is not necessarily the
availability of green growth but the availability of dead growth. Once colonies
have cleared all of the old, dead, rotten logs out of the area adjacent to their
colony it may in fact be time to move the colony. The hive relocates. It secures
a territory with untapped detrital resources and sets in motion the terraforming
process anew.









Posted by Duane Nash at 11:38 AM 1 comment:
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