Reptilian Rants

Model organisms are a staple of biology. They are taxa that are used to answer larger questions about that group as a whole, or some general biological problem. Model organisms are chosen for their ease of handling, cheap acquisition, generally “generic” structures, or all of the above. Every major class has a model organism to represent it. Just among vertebrates we have:

A stillborn hatchling rests inside the left nostril of a large 3.7m (12ft) adult which is some 5000 times larger!

Mammals with mice (Mus musculus), dogs (Canis familiaris [or Canis lupus familiaris if you lean that way]), cats (Felis catus [or Felis sylvestris catus for the same reason as dogs]), guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus) and rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).

Birds with chickens (Gallus gallus), pigeons (Columba livia), and zebrafinch (Taeniopygia guttata).

Ray finned fish with zebrafish (Danio rerio), swordtails (Xiphophorous) and cichlids (Cichlidae).

Amphibians with the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), and axolotol (Ambystoma mexicanum).

Reptiles with anoles (Anolis), fence lizards (Sceloporous), painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) and finally, the American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis).

Alligators are relatively new to the model organism realm, but they have proven to be extremely informative. They seem to the be most even tempered of extant crocodylians, making them “more safe” for researchers to work with. Hatchlings start off as miniscule 68 gram (0.15 lbs) animals that later can grow to 363 kg (800 lbs) adults, passing through an enormous size range throughout ontogeny. This growth rate is very food dependent, making it possible to raise alligators almost as bonsai trees. Also, with their unique position on the organismal family tree, alligators are one of the closest living relatives to dinosaurs. Along with birds, they have the potential to help constrain our assumptions about dinosaurs; thus making them very popular subjects for paleontological research as well.

Today, alligators get to make one more stamp on human knowledge with the release of the 3D alligator project from the Holliday and Witmer labs.

Researchers from both labs went through the painstaking process of digitizing the skulls of an adult and a hatchling American alligator, and then digitally separated each bone. The result is a 3D model that can have each bone turned on and off at will. The neat thing is that both labs have made these data freely available for anyone to look at, and download as 3D pdfs, wirefusion models, and multiple movies.

So if one every wanted to know just how many bones make up a crocodylian skull, or how each bone aligns to each other, I highly recommend downloading the 3D pdfs of the adult and hatchling. Not only will one learn all the different bones that compose the skull, but by comparing hatchling to adult, one can see just how radically these bones change throughout ontogeny.

It’s neat, free, informative and reptilian. What more can one ask for. :)

~Jura

A classic regression line showing metabolism scaling with mass. From: universereview.ca

Last time I gave a brief (?) run through the various types of metabolic rates that we find in the animal kingdom, along with the various ways in which they were measured. There was one last metabolic rate type I wanted to cover, but instead only teased; that of mass specific metabolic rate (MSMR). This type of metabolic rate measurement is fundamentally different from all the others that we talked about previously, and coupled with the sordid history behind this concept, it seemed appropriate to give MSMR its own post.

So without further ado, let’s get this party started.

MSMR = Mass Specific Metabolic Rate

Dinosaur fanatics will no doubt recognize this infamous phrase. It tends to pop up a lot in literature dealing with dinosaur energetics. Mass specific metabolic rate differs from other MR measurements because it is not an actual measurement. Rather, MSMR is a mathematical abstraction taken from actual metabolic rate measurements of multiple taxa spanning a wide range of sizes. Ultimately what MSMR does is show us how metabolism scales with size. That in itself deserves a brief digression.

Scaling and biology

Size can radically change an organism’s structure, and function. The reasons for this relate back to some fundamental physical properties of all things.  For instance, consider the metrics of height, width and length. Each of these measurements, taken by themselves, represent one dimension only.  If one wants to get the idea of the size of a two dimensional object, one need only combine (multiply) any two of these measurements. If we combine all three we can get a good 3-D representation of how much space an object takes up.

If any structure is to grow isometrically (i.e. everything grows at the same rate) then for any increase in a linear measurement (length, width, or height) the area of that object will double, while the volume of the object will triple.

For instance, if an object that was 1 meter long, suddenly doubled in size isometrically, its area would increase by:

2m x 2m = 2m², or 4 meters in area.

While the object doubled its length, it quadrupled its area.

Physical laws on scaling mean that ants of this size and shape will always remain in the realm of fiction...on Earth. Pic from Undead Backbrain

Meanwhile the volume of that object will increase by a multiple of all three linear measurements:

2m x 2m x 2m, = 2m³, or 8 meters in volume/mass.

So now the object that has increased its linear measurements by 2, increased its surface area by 4 and increased its mass by 8.

This has immediate implications for any organism. If we look at just vertebrates we find that the strength of things such as bone and muscle are determined by their cross sectional area.

To put this in more practical terms: for any given change in length, width or height of an isometrically growing organism, strength is going to double while weight is going to triple. The obvious problem here being that eventually (and rather quickly) weight is going to outpace strength. This puts a limit on how big an organism can get. It also explains why the short guy in gym class can always do more chin ups than the taller guys.

The way that life has found around this isometry problem is to just dump the concept of isometry altogether. Instead, organisms will grow different body parts at accelerated, or decelerated rates (e.g. increasing bone density and muscle size faster than other organs for large animals). This is referred to as allometry. In general, allometric equations are generally some type of variable regressed against body mass. By doing so, one is able to determine how that variable is changing in relation to a change in size. It tends to look something like this:

y = aM_b^b

Where a is an experimentally determined allometric coefficient,  M_b is body mass, and b is the allometric exponent.

For the purposes of this discussion the general rule is that bigger vertebrates will have relatively bigger bones and muscles than a smaller vertebrates scaled up to their size.

Rubner, Kleiber and metabolic scaling: battle of the Maxes.

If bigger creatures generally show an allometric increase in size for various body parts, then one would expect to find some kind of  similar allometric effect for metabolism. After all, a bigger animal is going to be composed of more cells, which will require more energy to power. So then should we expect metabolic rate to scale to mass (i.e. to increase by the third power?). Perhaps, but one should also keep in mind that as each of these cells expends energy, they are also producing a little bit of heat. Thus more cells results in a hotter critter.  In animals, heat is lost primarily via conduction; a process that is intimately associated with surface area. Perhaps, then, it would be better if metabolic rate followed surface area instead, and increased by the second power.

However which way metabolism scales it looks like it should relate somehow to these two variables.

In order to figure this out, one must measure the lowest metabolic rate of one’s animals — the BMR/SMR. The reason for using BMR/SMR is that one is theoretically looking at the “metabolic floor.,” or the MR level that must be maintained to avoid death (and, thus the MR that is not likely to be affected by food acquisition, exercise, stress, etc.). The importance of using BMR will come up again further down.

One measures the BMR/SMR of one’s animals and plots those metabolic rates against the size of the animals measured. From this one should be able to acquire a ratio of metabolic rate to mass. Often the data must be regressed first in order to achieve any kind of statistical analysis.

The first attempts at this were done using mammals, and one of the most influential people to try this out was Max Rubner. Rubner measured the metabolic rate of dogs and regressed these data against mass. What he found was that as body size increased, metabolic rate increased by approximately 2.325 times. Rubner took this one step further and found that his exponent for metabolic rate could be made mass independent by simply subtracting it from the exponent for mass (3.0). The end result: mass specific metabolic rate for dogs appeared to increase by the 0.675 power, or the 2/3rds power (Rubner 1883).

So what does all of this mean? Essentially it means that metabolism increases slower than body mass. So if we were to graph out metabolism in relation to the amount of mass that that metabolism is powering, we would discover that the data form a negative slope, with bigger animals falling further towards the low end of the slope than smaller animals. To put it more succinctly, it takes less relative metabolic energy to power a larger mass than it does to power a smaller mass. This is mass specific metabolism.

A common misconception about MSMR is that metabolic rate goes down as one gets larger, but this is not the case at all. The metabolism of a large animal is still larger than that of a small animal, it is just that for a given mass, the increase in metabolism is less than one would expect. For example if you took the BMR of a large beagle (14kg) and the BMR of a boxer (30kg), one would expect the boxer to show a basal metabolic rate that is at least twice as fast as that of the beagle (since it is roughly twice the mass of the beagle). If we input the data into the allometric equation mentioned earlier, we get:

BMR = (89kcal/day/kg*)M_b^0.675

BMR = (89kcal/day/kg*)(14kg)^0.675 = 528.48 kcal/day

BMR = (89kcal/day/kg*)(30kg)^0.675 = 883.99 kcal/day

*The 89kcal/day/kg is the allometric constant given by Rubner 1883. It is the average BMR for his dogs after correcting for mass.

A (IMO) succinct visual for the scaling of metabolic rate.

What we find is that the boxer does have a higher metabolic rate than the beagle, but it is only 1.67 times greater, instead of 2. This lower than expected metabolic rate will translate to lower than expected food costs as well. To put it another way: it would be cheaper to feed one boxer than to feed two beagles of roughly the same size, or to shift things away from dogs: it is cheaper to feed one elephant than it is to feed an elephant’s weight in shrews.

Rubner’s discovery was amazing and his equation elegant. It became to be referred to as: Rubner’s surface law of metabolism; a law that would stay in practice for 50 years afterward. It wasn’t until 1932 that this law was officially challenged, and by another Max at that. Swiss agricultural chemist Max Kleiber studied MSMR in mammals ranging from rats to cows. He plotted their body masses and BMRs on a logarithmic scale, and came to the conclusion that Rubner’s 2/3rd surface area law was incorrect. Rather mass-specific metabolism followed a “higher power.” That of 3/4, or 0.75.  It’s interesting to note that the result Kleiber found was in fact not quite 0.75 (it was 0.73). This number was rounded to 0.75 in order to make it more “slide rule friendly” (Schmidt-Nielsen 1984)

Quarter power laws for everyone. 

A simple illustration based off of Brody's (1945) infamous mouse to elephant curve. Note the negative slope showing how much energy is used per hour by each gram of tissue

So Rubner’s law was broken, and Kleiber’s law came in to replace it. For over 70 years Kleiber’s law was held up as that rare case of a biological constant Subsequent BMR studies of mammals (Brody 1945) and other organisms including bacteria (Hemmingsen 1960) found results that “hovered” around 0.75, thus suggesting that this biological law was not just a mammal thing, but rather a hallmark of all organisms.

This leads us to the obvious question of why?

Typically, the response to this question is a thermal one. Small animals lose heat easier than large animals, due to their larger relative surface area. If a large animal has an easier time retaining body heat, then it would make sense that its body would need to produce relatively less of it. The problem with this answer is that it only works for automatic endotherms (i.e. mammals and birds). However the MSMR phenomenon is present in bradymetabolic thermoconformers too. Therefore this answer cannot be the only one.

The answer to this question had remained elusive up until 14 years ago, when West et al proposed that the quarter power scaling laws that we see in nature appear to be the result of the fractal nature of delivery networks (West et al 1997), which in the case of vertebrates, are blood vessels. West et al. proposed that the fractal nature of blood vessels, combined with area preserving branching patterns could be used to explain why metabolism scales to the 3/4 power. The work by West et al was the first real attempt to explain why metabolism should scale to the 3/4 power, and has since been referred to as the metabolic theory of ecology.

Data on MSMR calculations from Brody and Hemmingsen all seemed to show that everything followed the 3/4 exponent rule. These two papers, along with Kleiber’s influential work, are some of the most cited papers in the physiological literature. One the one hand this illustrates just how influential their findings were for biology in general, but on the other hand it also suggests that their work should be the most thoroughly scrutinized. Scientists occasionally take the work of others for granted. This can lead to unpleasant side effects and near dogmatic views of things (e.g. the old saw about swamp bound dinosaurs). In general, it is a good idea to occasionally go back to these seminal works and verify that the authors got things right the first time.

Dodds et al. (2001) did just that. The authors looked back at the work of Brody, Hemmingsen, Keliber and others in the field of MSMR, in order to see if the 3/4 power law was a real thing, or mathematical error. Their results found that data from as far back as 1982 suggested that there was a problem with the 3/4 power law. Much of the data that had come out since Kleiber, Brody and Hemmingsen’s time suggested that the exponent for metabolic power should lie much closer to 2/3rds than 3/4. Dodds et al. went even further and challenged the metabolic theory of ecology by citing apparent mathematical errors in the work by West et al. in 1997. This challenge to the model by West et al. remains controversial, with arguments that continue to sling back and forth (e.g. Kozlowski and Konarzewski 2004, Brown et al 2005). Dodds et al (2010) recently took on the nutrient supply approach spearheaded by West et al, but looked at it from a purely geometric point of view (rather than fractal.). Their results found strong support for nutrient networks being the limiting factor for metabolic rate. Their results also found that these structures scaled to the 2/3rd power.

Kleiber’s faux pas; or: why MR type matters.

In 2003, White and Seymour gave a critical re-evaluation of Kleiber’s initial work. Kleiber was an agriculturist, and at least part of his impetus for looking at MSMR was to produce a greater yield in biomass, for farm animals. It is no surprise, then, that most of Kleiber’s study animals were of the barnyard variety. The problem with using livestock to determine MSMR is that domestic animals — especially ones that are raised for food — have been under extensive selection to produce larger animals for less cost. Thus, they are unlikely to be accurate representatives of a “wildtype” metabolic rate.  Another, much larger, problem was the over-representation of artiodactyls in Kleiber’s study. In fact, both Kleiber, and Brody (and by extension Hemmingsen, as he re-used most of Brody’s data) had artiodactyls encompassing over 20% of their data.

Okay, so what exactly is the problem here?

The problem is that artiodactyls only make up approximately 5% of all extant mammals. To increase this representation by 4 times is going to skew the results. Also, as White and Seymour pointed out (2003), many of these animals were on the upper edge of the regression line, resulting in a disproportionate influence over the scaling exponent.

Topping it all off was the biggest issue of all, and one that crops up time and  time again with many metabolic studies. As mentioned in part 1 of this series, BMR and RMR are not the same thing. If one is going to measure the mass specific metabolism of an animal, one must get it from the basal metabolic rate. There are strict methods for acquiring these data (McNab 1997), not the least of which is the necessity of measuring the metabolism of an animal that is in a post-absorptive state. This is a time in between eating and fasting, where the body is not doing any digestion at all. This is important because digestion can actually ramp up basal/standard metabolism substantially over resting/fasting levels. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this would be data from Burmese pythons (Python molurus) in which feeding metabolism increases SMR by over 44 times the resting rate (Secor and Diamond 1996)!

Ensuring that an animal is in a postabsorptive state is no easy task. Some taxa, such as very small mammals (e.g. shrews, hamsters, etc) run so close to the thermal edge that it might be impossible to get them in a postabsorptive state without killing them. As Speakman et al (1993) wittingly put it: “Before small  shrews become post­absorptive  they enter a state of profound rest in which  they have zero me­tabolism and from which they never recover!” One might wonder, then, if BMR = RMR in such a situation (but see McNab 1997 for a counterpoint).

Guys like these can take up to 7 days to fully absorb a meal! cows from: icanhasinternets.com

The problem with artiodactlys is that they are ruminants. That is to say they rely on bacterial degradation of cellulose in order to extract nutrients from their food. Because of this, the digestive phase for ruminants can last for a substantially long time. Typically, artiodactyls are fasted for 72 hours before having their BMR measured, yet data on digestion in ruminants suggests that they can last as long as 7 days before entering a postabsorptive state (White and Seymour 2005), if at all (McNab 1997). When this is not taken into account, one winds up measuring RMR instead of BMR, which raises the overall exponent to the mass specific metabolic rate equation.

Now, to be fair, Kleiber did note that his extensive use of artiodactyls (three cows and a sheep) could have an unwanted effect on his data if they were not being measured in a postabsorptive state. Thus, he performed an analysis with and without his ruminants. Interestingly, the results still hovered around 3/4ths (0.72-0.73).  White and Seymour (2005) argued that the reason behind this still high exponent might be due to the relatively high BMRs of domestic carnivores (Kleiber used dogs) and humans. The authors later went on to show that the removal of these data points ultimately drops the exponent down to the 2/3rds that seem to be so commonplace among other metabolic studies.

Another aspect of BMR studies that tends to get overlooked when researchers attempt MSMR calculations is the need to measure animals in a thermoneutral environment. This is an environment in which the animal is not actively thermoregulating, otherwise known as the thermoneutral zone. Automatic endotherms are often lauded for their ability to maintain body temperatures regardless of the external environment. This seems to have lead to the assumption that the environmental temperature should not matter, which results in experiments that grab metabolic rate data from animals that are in fact, rather stressed (e.g. Hanski 1984, who measured “BMR” in shrews that were 7°C below their thermal neutral zone). White and Seymour noted that mass and body temperature showed an intimate relationship in mammals (White and Seymour 2003), and that in order to get a useful comparative estimate of BMR for mammals that encompasses the full range of masses seen in this group, BMR should be standardized to a common body temperature. This is very intriguing for White and Seymour have essentially taken BMR and converted it to SMR. As mentioned previously, automatic endotherms do not escape the Q10 effect, but instead keep it at bay by keeping their cells encased in a bubble of stable temperatures. This means that one can use Q10 values to adjust BMR to fit an appropriate “universal” temperature with which to compare taxa. That temperature turned out to be 36.2°C with a Q10 of 3.0.

White and Seymour discovered that when BMR was standardized to a universally comparable temperature, the mass specific exponent for metabolic rate was approximately 0.67, or 2/3rds. Even more fascinating: when data for birds are given the same rigorous treatment, they also scale to the 2/3rds power (McKechnie and Wolf 2004). So it appears that Rubner had it right all along. For seventy years we have been using a formula that suffered from some hefty methodological errors.

Well at least that’s all fixed now, right?

One power law to rule them all? Probably not.

Dodds, Rothman, Weitz (2001), White and Seymour’s (2003) works to turn over the established 3/4 power law belief in physiology did not go unquestioned Savage et al (2004) gave a particularly in depth critique of their analyses, pointing out some questionable assumptions that White and Seymour had made, as well as the disproportionate amount of data available for mammals (i.e. some genera were over-represented with multiple BMR measurements, while others might not have any data at all). This violates a fundamental assumption of practically every statistical analysis. Namely that data points are independent. Savage et al pointed out that most BMR data exists for mammals that are less than 1kg in size. This is going to bias the regression statistic (indeed, Dodds et al. [2001] noted that the 2/3rd power only seemed effective for mammals up to about 10kg. The authors cited a lack of data for larger taxa as a likely cause of this strangeness).

Savage et al decided to repeat the statistical analyses of White and Seymour, as well as a few other authors. In the process they found various errors in each analysis that resulted in some major discrepancies (e.g. basal metabolic rates that varied over an order of magnitude for the same species in the same study, the exclusion of large chunks of Mammalia that spanned the larger size ranges, thus reducing their dataset). The authors separated their taxa into “bins” that covered various size ranges. The idea being that by separating mass into sections like this, they could turn mass into a treatment effect, which should allow the statistical analysis to better analyze the effect of BMR as described by body mass.

The result of Savage et al’s study showed that the scaling exponent for BMR to body mass was around 0.712 +/- 0.012. This new regression suggested that the “true” exponent for BMR in relation to mass, was neither 2/3rds, nor 3/4ths, but something in between. The authors noted this unexpected result, but quickly pointed out that this was for data that was heavily biased for small size (mostly rodents). This was where the “binning” idea would come into effect. By essentially forcing a uniform distribution across the mass ranges available the authors results revealed an exponent of 0.737 +/- 0.025, or an exponent that lives around 3/4ths.

The authors took this a step further by looking for exponents to describe field metabolic rate and maximal metabolic rate. Their reasoning being that these are more easily obtained measurements that have more biologically meaningful results to them. I am less confident of these results, as FMR encompasses many aspects of an organism’s lifestyle, while MMR can be difficult to fully obtain. Further, I would argue that the benefits of BMR is that they indicate what the bare minimum energy requirements of an organism should be. That has the potential to be extremely useful for paleontology. Especially if one is looking to figure out how much food  (at minimum) an organism would need to eat to survive in some environment (and thus, infer something about thermophysiology).

White et al . (2006) responded back, by doing a more thorough analysis of available data. They disregarded Savage et al’s notion of mass “binning” (which was fine, as Savage et al. disregarded the need to adjust for temperature, citing negligibility of the results as the reason), and used data from 938 species ranging from 158mg (0.35 lbs) to 138kg (304 lbs), and covering every major vertebrate class. Data were only used if they fit the strict criteria for BMR mentioned previously, and each group was compared to a standard temperature (38°C and 20°C), after accounting for Q10 effects. Once again, White and Seymour found strong support for a 2/3rds exponent…for mammals and birds.

And this is where we come to the punchline in all of this. While the arguments had previously focused on automatic endotherms, data started to appear in both those groups, and (especially) the groups outside

Figure 1 from White et al 2006 illustrates the mess likely represents a more accurate look of how metabolism scales with mass. Note how the automatic endotherms actually scale up slower than everyone else.

Mammalia and Aves, that a universal metabolic exponent appeared not to exist. This was tackled more formally by White et al. (2007) who reviewed the current literature citing numerous examples where the single exponent view was not being met empirically.  This was followed up by a final analysis by the authors on 127 published allometric exponents for taxa that spanned the range of animal classes. Following Felsenstein (1985) they incorporated independent contrasts to remove the effects of phylogeny (which has a tendency to screw the pooch for independence of data points) . The authors then assigned the exponents found to one of three categorical variables:

1. Taxonomy (Amphibia, Arthropoda, Aves, Actinopterygia/Chondrychthys ["fish"], Mammalia, Reptilia, Prokaryotes)
2. Thermoregulation (automatic endotherm, or bradymetabolic “ectotherm”)
3. Metabolic state (FMR, RMR, MMR, BMR/SMR)

Then, after assigning some fancy statistical mojo (weighted generalized mix model, for those that are into that kind of stuff), the authors found that among their three categories, only thermoregulation seemed to show any real affect on where the exponent wanted to go (i.e. it “pushed” the exponent towards some kind of “true mean”). This suggests that a true discrepancy between these modes of thermophysiology ultimately affect metabolic rate. Surprisingly, White et al’s study seemed to show that automatic endotherms converge at an exponent closer to 2/3rds, while everyone else hovers closer to 3/4ths.  However there is still considerable sway around these exponents. So much so that White et al. urge researchers to do away with the 2/3rds 3/4ths argument altogether, as it has become quite apparent that choosing one, or the other is going to both bias results and obscure pertinent data. The authors do offer some alternatives that might be used such as statistics that incorporate multiple exponent models, accounting for body mass by using it as a variable in an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) model, or just choosing the right exponent for the job (e.g. the 3/4ths exponent seems to work well for FMR of mammals, but overestimates the FMR of birds).

Where are we now?

So here we are, finally at the end of this long winded blog entry, and what do we have to show for it? Well…mostly that biological laws are so few and far between that any relationship, or phenomenon that has the audacity to be referred to as a “law” or “rule” should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

Another thing to take away from this is just how complicated metabolic physiology studies really are. They have to account for so many unexpected variables that is amazing we can say anything at all about extant animals. One thing I did not touch upon was the fact that all MSMR equations use regression as their model of choice. A severe limit to this approach (and one that is violated all the time) is that regression models can really only predict — with any certainty — the estimated MSMR of an animal that falls within the size range measured. Once one starts to extrapolate beyond the maximum, or minimum size of the available data, one is practically just speculating.

Regression graph showing trend line for a range of predicted values (bold line) and possible real distributions that exist beyond the measured data (grey dotted lines). Hence why regression predictions should always be limited to the range of data used.

Lastly, given what little we are able to say about extant animal metabolism and its limits, just think about how much less we can confidently say about extinct taxa. This is especially true for paleontological studies that attempt to use metabolic scaling exponents to infer the possible thermophysiology of extinct organisms. Thus any study that attempts to do this kind of paleophysiology, would be best served by computing hypothetical BMR/SMRs that used a wide range of metabolic exponents.

And that, in a nutshell, is what all the fuss is about for MSMR.

~ Jura

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White, C. R., N. F. Phillips, and R. S. Seymour. 2006. The Scaling and Temperature Dependence of Vertebrate Metabolism. Biol.Letters Vol.2:125–127

White, C.R., Seymour, R.S. 2003. Mammalian Basal Metabolic Rate is Proportional to Body Mass 2/3. Proc.Natl.Acad.Sci. Vol.100(7);4046-4049

White, C.R., Seymour, R.S. 2005. Allometric Scaling of Mammalian Metabolism. J.Exp.Biol. Vol.208;1611-1619

From archaea to blue whales. Metabolism is a hallmark of all living things

Metabolism, and metabolic rate tend to feature pretty highly in literature related to dinosaurs and other reptiles. For instance it is often stated that reptiles have metabolic rates around 1/10th those of similar sized mammals and birds, but what exactly does that mean? Talks of thermoregulation focus heavily on the role of metabolism, while allometric studies focus on how metabolism is affected by size. Given the prevalence of metabolic terminology in dinosaur and reptile papers/books, I thought it might be best to quickly give a review of metabolism, metabolic studies, and what all of that means for real animals.

Metabolism is everything

Metabolism is defined as the sum total energy expenditure of an organism. That is to say metabolism is the total energy an organism uses during its life. It is often broken up into the chemical reactions that build up resources (anabolism) and the reactions that break those resources down (catabolism).  The amount of metabolism, or energy expenditure during a specific interval of time (seconds to days) is referred to as metabolic rate. From bacteria to blue whales, metabolism is the measure of all the energy that lets these critters go, and metabolic rates determine how much energy that is going to take. It can be measured in a variety of ways from respirometry to doubly labeled water and heart rate telemetry. The diversity of metabolic rate measurements is reflected in the units used to measure metabolism; which can range from watts/hour to milliliters of oxygen per minute, and even to joules per second.

Specificity is important

A key thing about metabolic rates is that they are plastic. They change depending on the situation presented. For instance one could measure the metabolic rate of a sleeping cat, and then compare it to measurements from that same cat while playing, or after eating a big meal. Metabolic rates ramp up when energy demand increases, and then ramp down when that energy demand decreases, or when the environment demands drastic energy cuts (e.g. starvation). Thus when measuring the metabolic rate of an animal it is important to decide exactly what kind of metabolic rate you are trying to measure.

And boy, oh boy are there a lot of different flavours to choose from.

One can measure: BMR, SMR, RMR, MMR, AMR, and FMR just for starters.

Those are a lot of initialisms, and they are just the most common ones. The choice of metabolic rate that one decides to measure is also going to dictate the technique that will be employed. So what do all these things stand for, and what technique is best for what? Let’s find out.
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Leatherbacks are already viewed as unique, but you might be surprised at just how strange this species really is. Picture from: amigosdomarnaescola.com

Continuing the series, let us now take a look at one weird turtle species in particular: Dermochelys coriacea, the leatherback sea turtle.

While the utter weirdness of D.coriacea is ultimately the main reason for why it wound up in this series, there is an ulterior motive. Having searched the internet for general information on the species I found myself rather disappointed with the amount of utterly generic / wrong info regarding leatherbacks. Its Wikipedia entry is particularly disappointing. So here’s hoping this influx of information can help alleviate that.

A turtle without a shell?

Yes, it’s true, leatherback turtles have lost their shells. Shell reduction is relatively common in turtles. It seems a little funny. After going through all the trouble of evolving impregnable armour, many taxa then went out and removed large chunks of it. We see shell reduction in snapping turtles (Chelydra and Macrochelys), soft-shelled turtles, and even other sea turtles. None of them, however, reduced their shells to the point of actually removing them.

In leatherbacks the “shell” is nothing more than a loose collection of osteoderms spread over the back and belly. There is no longer a definitive carapace, or plastron. In fact leatherbacks don’t even produce β keratin (the hard component of reptile scales). Instead this has all been replaced by thick, leathery skin.

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A Galapagos tortoise struts about, secure in the knowledge that no one will ever know where the hell it came from. Photo from petcaregt.com

This is a long overdue follow up to my original Turtle Power article back in…yeah never mind the date.

As established previously, turtles are a strange, and highly diverse group of animals, but how did they come to be this way?

The turtle bauplan has been a phylogenetic double edged sword. On the one hand, the unique shell design, and the necessary body contortions associated with it, make chelonians a very easy group to classify. However, it is these same peculiarities that keep us from finding the ancestor to turtles. To date, there are no “half-turtles.” No good transitionals between one reptile group to that  of turtles. As such, the list of turtle ancestors runs all over Reptilia. Some paleontologists believe the origin lies at the base with reptiles like procolophonoids, and pareiasaurs. Others believe turtles are a bit more closely related to extant reptiles, and belong in, or alongside the sauropterygians (plesiosaurs, nothosaurs, and placodonts). There is even some evidence to suggest turtles are actually in the same reptile group as dinosaurs and crocodylians (Archosauria).

Curse that shell! - Photo by tompain

How can the list be this extensive? Read on to find out.

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I apologize ahead of time for what will likely sound like spam, but:

Just a quick post to remind folks that today, and only today, Indiana University Press is offering a 60% off sale on all their books. That includes their famed Life of the Past series.

So if you have yet to get your copy of The Complete Dinosaur, or have been itching to snag the most comprehensive book ever written on Deinosuchus, ankylosaurs, or mosasaurs, but didn’t have the necessary funds; now is your chance to get them for cheap.

Just remember, the sale ends today.

~Jura

The old "cold blooded or warm blooded" argument once again rears its ugly head.

[Editor's note: A response from the authors can be found here. It answers many of the questions I had about the paper, though I feel the biggest question remains open for debate. I appreciate the authors taking their time to answer my questions, and PLoS ONE for allowing this type of open communication.]

This post has taken an inordinate amount of time to write up. Mostly because it required finding enough free time to sit down and just type it out.  So I apologize ahead of time for bringing up what is obviously old news, but I felt this paper was an important one to talk about, as it relied on a old, erroneous, but very pervasive, popular and rarely questioned hypothesis for how automatic endothermy (mammal and bird-style “warm-bloodedness”) evolved.

Back in November, a paper was published in the online journal: PLoS ONE. That paper was:

Pontzer, H., Allen, V. & Hutchinson, J.R. 2009. Biomechanics of Running Indicates Endothermy in Bipedal Dinosaurs. PLoS ONE.Vol 4(11): e7783.

Using muscle force data for the hindlimbs of theropods, and applying it to a model based on Pontzer (2005, 2007), the authors were able to ascertain the approximate aerobic requirements needed for large bipedal theropods to move around. Their conclusion was that all but the smallest taxa had to have been automatic endotherms (i.e. warm-blooded).

Time to stop the ride and take a closer look at what is going on here.

In 2004, John Hutchinson – of the Royal Veterinary College, London UK – performed a mathematical study of bipedal running in extant taxa. He used inverse dynamics methods to estimate the amount of muscle that would be required for an animal to run bipedally. He then tested his models on extant animals (Basiliscus, Iguana, Alligator, Homo, Macropus, Eudromia, Gallus, Dromaius, Meleagris, and Struthio). The predictive capacity of his model proved to be remarkably substantial and stable (Hutchinson 2004a).  A follow up paper in the same issue (Hutchinson 2004b) used this model to predict bipedal running ability in extinct taxa (Compsognathus, Coelophysis, Velociraptor, Dilophosaurus, Allosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and Dinornis).  Results from this study echoed previous studies on the running ability of Tyrannosaurus rex (Hutchinson & Garcia 2002), as well as provided data on the speed and agility of other theropod taxa.

The difference between effective limb length and total limb length in the leg of Tyrannosaurus rex

Meanwhile in 2005, Herman Pontzer – of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri – did a series of experiments to determine what was ultimately responsible for the cost of transport in animals. To put it another way: Pontzer was searching for the most expensive thing animals have to pay for in order to move around. One might intuitively assume that mass is the ultimate cost of transport. The bigger one gets, the more energy it requires to move a given unit of mass, a certain distance. However experiments on animals found the opposite to be the case. It actually turns out that being bigger makes one “cheaper” to move.  So then what is going on here?

Pontzer tested a variety of options for what could be happening; from extra mass, to longer strides. In the end Pontzer found that the effective limb length of animals, was ultimately the limiting factor in their locomotion. Effective limb length differs from the entirety of the limb. Humans are unique in that our graviportal stance has us using almost our entire hindlimbs. Most animals, however, use a more crouched posture that shrinks the overall excursion distance of the hindlimb (or the forelimb). By taking this into account Pontzer was able to find the one trait that seemed to track the best with cost of transport in animals over a wide taxonomic range (essentially: arthropods – birds).

This latest study combines these two technique in order to ascertain the minimum (or approx minimum) oxygen requirements bipedal dinosaurs would need in order to walk, or run.

As with the previous papers, the biomechanical modeling and mathematics are elegant and robust. However, this paper is not without its flaws. For instance in the paper the authors mention:

We focused on bipedal species, because issues of weight distribution between fore and hindlimbs make biomechanical analysis of extinct quadrupeds more difficult and speculative.

Yet this did not stop the authors from applying their work on bipeds, to predicting the maximum oxygen consumption of quadrupedal iguanas and alligators. No justification is ever really given for why the authors chose to do this. Making things even more confusing, just a few sentences later, it is mentioned (ref #s removed to avoid confusion):

Additionally, predicting total muscle volumes solely from hindlimb data for the extant quadrupeds simply assumes that the fore and hindlimbs are acting with similar mechanical advantage, activating similar volumes of muscle to produce one Newton of GRF. This assumption is supported by force-plate studies in other quadrupeds (dogs and quadrupedal chimpanzees)

The force plate work cited is for quadrupedal mammals. However, mammals are not reptiles. As Nicholas Hotton III once mentioned (1994), what works for mammals, does not necessarily work for reptiles. This is especially so for locomotion.

In many reptiles (including the taxa used in this study) the fore and hindlimbs are subequal in length; with the hindlimbs being noticeably longer and larger. Most of the propulsive power in these reptiles comes from the hindlimbs (which have the advantage of having a large tail with which to lay their powerful leg retractor on). The result is that – unlike mammals – many reptiles are “rear wheel drive.”

The last problem is by far the largest, and ultimately proves fatal to the overall conclusions of the paper. The authors operated under the assumptions of the aerobic capacity model for the evolution of automatic endothermy.

It is here that we come to the crux of the problem, and the main subject of this post.

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A colony of _Eumeces fasciatus_ brood their eggs.

Continuing my trend of “catching up,” an article in the November issue of Natural History magazine, talks about a new study in the Quarterly Review of Biology, that finds group nesting to be very common place among extant reptiles.

That study would be:

Doody, J.S., Freedberg, S., Keogh, J.S.� 2009. Communal Egg-Laying in Reptiles and Amphibians: Evolutionary Patterns and Hypotheses. Quart. Rev. Biol. Vol.84(3):229-252.

In the paper, Doody et al (no laughing) did a massive search through the herpetological literature (both technical journals, and hobbyist magazines) to look at instances of communal egg laying in reptiles and amphibians (herps). I’m not being hyperbolic here either, as the paper states:

In total, our assembled database was gathered from 290 different sources, including 176 different scienti?c journals, 72 books or book chapters, 29 unpublished reports, and 13 unpublished theses. We also have included a number of reliable personal communications from herpetologists.

What the authors found was that group gatherings of herps are vastly more common than previously believed.� Group egg laying was found to be present in 345 reptile species. Now you might be thinking 345 really isn’t all that much for a group composed of some 8700 species.

Well then aren’t you a Debbie Downer?

_Ophisaurus attentuatus_ brooding her eggs.

Seriously though, the authors address this by mentioning:

Although the dif?culty in locating nests hampers our ability to determine the actual frequency of communal egg-laying among species, we can better estimate this proportion by dividing the number of known communally egg-laying species by the total number of species, excluding those for which eggs have not been found. We conducted such a calculation for the three families of Australian lizards known to include multiple communally egg-laying species�Gekkonidae, Pygopodidae, and Scincidae�as gleaned from the Encyclopedia of Australian Reptiles database (Greer2004). Proportions of these lizard families known to lay communally were 4�9%, but, when we exclude species for which nests are not known, these values rise dramatically to 73�100%

The biggest take home message to get from Doody et al’s review, is just how much we don’t know about extant reptiles.

…the present review highlights our inadequate knowledge of the nests and/or eggs of reptiles. For instance, the eggs or nests are known in only 7% of Australian lizards of the three families that commonly lay communally (N = 411 oviparous spp.) (Greer 2004).The extent of this knowledge for Australian lizards is probably similar to that for reptile eggs on other continents, particularly South America, Africa, and Asia, where the reproductive habits of reptiles are poorly known. This is in stark contrast to other vertebrates such as birds, for which complete ?eld guides to the eggs and nests are available for several continents

Indeed, just by doing the brief research run needed to compile this blog post, it was apparent that communalism is much more common in reptiles than anyone ever thought. However, because so many of these reports are either anecdotal, or buried in obscure journals, it is easy to miss all the many cases where it is known.

This discovery lead the authors to the inevitable follow up question of: “why?” What benefit do mothers gain by nesting communally?

Numerous hypotheses for why animals nest communally, have been proposed.

• Saturated habitat (only so many suitable nest sites)
• Sexual selection (choice of males that live in a particular area)
• Artifact of grouping for other reasons
• Attack abatement (easier to hide a bunch of eggs in one site, than in multiple sites. Less chance that your eggs will be the ones that are eaten).
• Maternal Benefits (save time and energy finding a suitable nest site by “freeloading”
• Reproductive success (if the nest site worked once before…)
• Egg insulation

The authors reviewed all of these possible reasons for communal egg laying in herps.� In the end, they found evidence for both the maternal benefits hypothesis, and the reproductive success hypothesis, though they felt a mixed model better explained things.

Python brooding her eggs.

Sadly, though the authors mentioned how a lack of information on the natural history of most reptiles is largely responsible for this sudden revelation about their nesting behavior, they nevertheless make repeated mentions of how “social interactions are generally less complex in
reptiles and amphibians than in other tetrapods” or how herp sociality forms “relatively simple systems“.

The reality is that the old view of simplistic “loner” reptiles that only come together to mate, is not accurate.� This is especially true for parental care in reptiles.

The popular view (among the public, and the scientific community) is that reptiles are� “lay’em and leave’em” types when it comes to reproduction. Despite all the herpetological knowledge to the contrary, that has been acquired in the past 50 years, it is still popular to spout the party line about reptiles being “uncaring parents.”

Zoologist Louis Somma took issue with this view of reptilian (in particular, chelonian and lepidosaurian) parenting. He conducted a literature search to see how often mentions of parental care in reptiles are recorded. In the end he wound up finding 1400 references to parental care in reptiles (Somma 2003)!

Somma’s survey covered various aspects of parental care. He found reported evidence of nest building and / or� guarding in tortoises like Manouria emys (McKeown 1999),� Gopherus agassizii (Barrett & Humphreys 1986) and 4 other species of chelonian.

Turning to lepidosaurs, Somma found parental behaviour to be present in 133 species of lizards and 102 species of snakes. Even a species of tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is known to guard its nests (Refsnider et al 2009). Though these numbers appear small compared to the total amount of species that have been described; much like the Doody et al paper, this is just based off of species whose nesting behaviours we do know. That these taxa all span a wide phylogenetic range, suggests that parental care is more commonplace than initially thought.

Nest guarding is usually a maternal trait, but some squamates exhibit nest guarding behaviour in both parents, such as some cobra and crotaline snakes (Manthey and Grossman 1997) , as well as tokay geckos (Zaworski 1987).

Not only active guarding of the nest, but actual brooding of the eggs is also commonly reported in squamates such as various python species (Harlow & Grigg 1984,� Lourdais et al 2007), and skinks (Hasegawa 1985, Somma & Fawcett 1989). Some species are even known to groom their newly hatched young (Somma 1987).

More interesting still are various reports and observations of parental feeding in some reptile species, such as the skink Eumeces obsoletus (Evans 1959), and the cordylid lizard Cordylus cataphractus (Branch 1998). Not to mention recent evidence of parental feeding in captive crocodylians.

This leads me to the only reptile group where parental care is well publicized: that of the 23 extant crocodylian species. I could, at this point, list references for parental care in crocodylians. However because this behaviour is so well documented for this group, it would seem unnecessary. It is� better to shed light on the many (MANY) examples of parental care in other reptile species. I also didn’t include related examples like placental evolution in the skink genus Mabuya, or instances of egg binding in captive reptile mothers; due to a lack of appropriate substrate to lay their eggs.

In the end, the paper by Doody et al adds to a growing body of evidence which suggests that the “lay’em and leave’em” reptile species of the world, are the exceptions� and not the rule.

~ Jura

Next time: Biomechanics of running suggest “warm-blooded” dinosaurs. Or: why the aerobic capacity model needs to die already.

References

Barrett, S.L. & Humphrey, J.A. 1986. Agonistic Interactions Between Gopherus agassizii (Testudinidae)
and Heloderma suspectum (Helodermatidae). Southwestern Naturalist, 31: 261-263.

Branch, B.. 1998. Field Guide to Snakes and Other Reptiles of Southern Africa. Third revised edition. Sanibel Island: Ralph Curtis Books Publishing.

Doody, J.S., Freedberg, S., Keogh, J.S.� 2009. Communal Egg-Laying in Reptiles and Amphibians: Evolutionary Patterns and Hypotheses. Quart. Rev. Biol. Vol.84(3):229-252.

Evans, L.T. 1959. A Motion Picture Study of Maternal Behavior of the Lizard, Eumeces obsoletus Baird and Girard. Copeia, 1959: 103-110.

Harlow, P and Grigg, G. 1984. Shivering Thermogenesis in a Brooding Python, Python spilotes spilotes. Copeia. Vol.4:959�965.

Hasegawa, M. 1985. Effect of Brooding on Egg Mortality in the Lizard Eumeces okadae on Miyake-jima, Izu Islands, Japan. Copeia, 1985: 497-500.

Lourdais, O., Hoffman, T.C.M., DeNardo, D.F. 2007. Maternal Brooding in the Children’s Python (Antaresia childreni) Promotes Egg Water Balance. J. Comp. Physiol. B. Vol.177:560-577.

Manthey, U. and W. Grossman. 1997. Amphibein & Reptilien S�dostasiens. Natur und Tier Verlag, M�nster.

Mckeown, S. 1999. Nest Mounding and Egg Guarding of the Asian Forest Tortoise (Manouria emys). Reptiles, 7(9): 70-83.

Refsnider, J.M., Keall, S.N., Daugherty, C.H., & Nelson, N.J. 2009. Does nest-guarding in Female Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) Reduce Nest Destruction by Conspecific Females? Journal of Herpetology. vol.43(2):294-299.

Somma, L.A. 1987. Maternal Care of Neonates in the Prairie Skink, Eumeces septentrionalis. Great Basin Naturalist, 47: 536-537.

Somma, L.A. & Fawcett, J.D. 1989. Brooding Behaviour of the Prairie Skink, Eumeces septentrionalis, and its Relationship to the Hydric Environment of the Nest. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Vol.95: 245-256.

Somma, L. 2003. parental Behavior in Lepidosaurian and Testudinian Reptiles: A Literature Survey. Krieger Publishing Company. 174pgs. ISBN: 157524201X

Zaworksi, J.P. 1987. Egg Guarding Behavior by Male Gekko gecko. Bulletin of the Chicago Herpetological Society, 22: 193.

Once again the blog has taken a backseat to my real life work. It’s unfortunate too as there have been at least three really interesting news stories / technical papers that I feel the need to tackle. The first story I want to talk about is the news of the ancient Mediterranean goat: Myotragus balearicus, and its alleged “reptilian” physiology.

Myotragus balearicus reconstruction.

On the outset M.balearicus appears like your standard goat; complete with horns, hooves and (likely) a penchant for eating practically anything. The part that makes M.balearicus stick out the most� is that it was a native inhabitant of small islands in the Mediterranean.� Modern goats reach islands through human intervention. There, they become invasive elements that often damage the native flora and fauna. Without human intervention, it is hard for goats – and indeed� most mammals – to become established on islands. Both getting to the islands, and surviving on them tend to require animals that are more metabolically adaptable. Despite their catholic diets, goats are still limited by the “always on” nature of mammalian metabolism.

At least, that’s what we thought.

Researchers at the Institute of Paleontology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, looked at microslices of the bones in this goat. What they found was a pattern of bone deposition that is unusual for ungulates. Rather than have layers of bone strewn about in an interwoven pattern, the bone of M.balearicus was laid down evenly in concentric layers. The latter formation is often assumed to be a hallmark of reptiles and other “slow growing” animals. With this in mind, the authors suggest that M.balearicus had evolved a more plastic metabolism.

These findings lend support to the model that posits a shift in life history strategies to a lower end of the growth rate spectrum, in areas where mortality remains low.

The results, while interesting, bother me a bit, as they rely on certain views on reptile growth strategies that are known to be false.

For instance:

Ectotherm vertebrates have slow and flexible growth rates…

Ectotherms are characterized by lamellar-zonal bone throughout the cortex.

True zonal bone with growth marks deposited seasonally throughout ontogeny is a general ectotherm characteristic. In ectotherms, the bone matrix consists of slow growing lamellar bone.

While it is true that there are ectotherms that grow in a cyclical manner like this (especially animals from temperate regions), this is not a given for all ectotherms. In fact, it has since been well documented that fibrolamellar bone deposition occurs normally in crocodylians, as well as turtles (Reid, 1997).

It is a tad strange, as the authors do cite the Turmarkin-Deratzian gator paper, but they erroneously use it as an example of slow growth and contrast it with the fast fibrolamellar growth seen in most ungulates.� There is even a figure in the paper that shows, and even labels fibrolamellar growth in a crocodile, yet appears to get completely glossed over when it comes time to talk physiology.

Which brings me to my next point. The authors argue that the presence of lamellar zone bone in M.balearicus is suggestive of an ectotherm-like growth strategy. But does lamellar zone bone really indicate slow growth?

Work by Tomasz Owerkowicz on varanids (Owerkowicz 1997),� found that even the sedentary animals in his control group, could lay down bone at the same rate as his sedentary mammals (Morell 1996). Presumably this bone was lamellar zonal, though without the figures on hand, I can’t say for sure.

A more prominent example comes from Lieberman and Crompton (1998), who did a stress study on goats and opossums. The authors were looking at the remodeling response of bone to stress, and accidentally came across an interesting growth difference between these two taxa. They found that their opossums grew at a significantly faster rate than their goats, despite both taxa being of a developmentally equivalent stage. The interesting part is that the goat’s were depositing fibrolamellar bone, while the opossums were producing lamellar bone.

So no, lamellar bone need not be a hallmark of slow growth. Rather, it might be a response of the bones to specific stresses. Lamellar zonal bone is structurally stronger than fibrolamellar bone, so there might have been a more functional need for this type of bone.

Lastly, I have some issues with the final conclusions asserted by the authors in their closing comments:

The reptile-like physiological and life history traits found in Myotragus were certainly crucial to their survival on a small island for the amazing period of 5.2 million years, more than twice the average persistence of continental species. Therefore, we expect similar physiological and life history traits to be present in other large insular mammals such as dwarf elephants, hippos, and deer. However, precisely because of these traits (very tiny and immature neonates,low growth rate, decreased aerobic capacities, and reduced behavioral traits), Myotragus did not survive the arrival of a major predator, Homo sapiens, some 3,000 years ago.

Now I’m sure that there was a need to inject some melodrama at the end (as is typical for many papers), but the assertion that a “reptile-like physiological life history” must also incorporate a small aerobic scope, small neonates and reduced behavioural repertoire, is just uncalled for. All of these are frustratingly common misconceptions about reptiles, and bradymetabolic animals in general. Further, none of these assertions are based on any facts for M.balearicus. The only assertion that could really be tested is the small neonate one, and that appears to be falsified, as data on newborn M.balearicus show that newborns were large and precocial animals; pretty standard fare for an ungulate.

Overall the results of this study are interesting, and I look forward to seeing if pygmy elephants and hippos also display this apparent “slow growing” bone type. Comparing M.balearicus to reptiles based off this one similarity appears unjustified, and only goes to further perpetuate some common reptile misconceptions.

Needless to say, Myotragus balearicus was probably not “cold-blooded,” despite what the news headlines would have one believe.

Next up: Destroying the “uncaring parent” myth.

~Jura

References

Lieberman, D.E., & Crompton, A.W. 1998. “Responses of Bone to Stress: Constraints on Symmorphosis.” Principles of Animals design: The Optimization and Symmorphosis Debate. Weibel, E.R., Taylor, R.C., and Bolis, L. (eds). Cambridge U. Press. Pgs: 78-86. ISBN: 0521586674

Morell, V. 1996. A Cold, Hard Look at Dinosaurs. Discover. December. Available online.

Owerkowicz, T. 1997. Effects of Exercise and Diet on Bone-Building: A Monitor Case. Journal of Morphology. V. 232(3): 306

Reid, R.� 1997. �Dinosaurian Physiology: The Case for �Intermediate� Dinosaurs.�� The Complete
Dinosaur. Farlow, J.O. and Brett-Surman, M.K. (eds.)� Indiana U. Press. Pgs: 449 – 473. ISBN: 0253333490

Dr. Paul Sereno stands with others at a meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago. Note the wheelbarrow like retroarticular processes on the "boar croc."

After spending� a few years collecting and looking at the weirdness that is Gondwanan crocodyliformes, Dr. Paul Sereno has finally started to unveil stuff. With the help of National Geographic comes When Crocs Ate Dinosaurs. It appears to be a special that focuses on the remarkable – and often underrated – diversity seen within this group of animals. The highlight of the program (at least in my opinion) is the focus on all the very un-crocodile like crocodyliformes.

The National Geographic website has a special section that shows off the various, apparently unnamed, taxa. For now, there are just placeholder names that will likely hurt the eyes and ears of anyone who had to deal with the aftermath of The Land Before Time.

The artwork is by artist Todd Marshall. I’ve always enjoyed his portrayals of prehistoric reptiles (he tends to get almost too fanciful with dewlaps and spikes though). Sadly the accompanying animations do not do Marshall’s incredible artwork justice.� It will be interesting to see how it all gets integrated into the television show.

Also airing tonight is a special on NOVA entitled: Lizard Kings. It features the work of Dr. Eric Pianka; a well known and respected lizard ecologist who has focused on monitors for much of his career.� The special looks to be very interesting. Especially given that it appears to have taken years for the film crew to get the footage they needed. As you read this the special has already aired. However, PBS does make their shows avaialable to watch online for free, on their website. The show should also be viewable on Hulu by tomorrow.

A perentie monitor (_Varanus giganteus_) poses for the camera.

I realize that both of these options are only available in the states. To date there seems to be no international options. At best there are some workarounds.

Still, for those that can get them, both shows should prove to be entertaining.

~Jura