New Video: Looking for the Iberian Lynx
Hello again everybody,
Today seems like a good day for trying to compensate for long weeks without posting, so here is another little bit of almost fresh news: last month I joined a group of friends in a trip to Sierra Morena mountains in southern Spain, with the rather ambitious aim of seeing the famously endangered Iberian lynx in the wild. Sierra Morena is a part of Andalucía where I had never been before, so if nothing else this trip was an excellent opportunity to know a fascinating ecosystem. The place certainly delivered, and the weather was friendly as well, allowing us to spend all day out in the open, enjoying the beautiful landscapes and wildlife. And in the last day of our stay, the lynx finally showed up. It was far away -almost too far for filming- but the experience was beautiful and the animal was seen in gorgeous detail through the telescopes of some naturalists who graciously allowed us to take a look. Also our son Miguel managed to make a few nice stills of the animal. I have put together a modest video journal of our trip, I hope you will enjoy it!:
Photo of the Iberian Lynx by Miguel Antón
New Scientific Papers
A special volume of the journal Estudios Geológicos published in memory of French paleontologist Leonard Ginsburg has just been published. It includes several contributions on mammal evolution and anatomy coauthored by me. One of these papers, titled “Changing ideas about the evolution and functional morphology of Machairodontine felids” is one of our last collaborations with great paleontologist and friend Alan Turner, who sadly passed away last January. This paper is an overview of the evolution of sabretooth cats which, while being undeniably technical, is written in a way that can be accesible to non-specialists who want a serious update on the subject. Alan lives on in our memories and in his vast contribution to academic and general knowledge about the evolution of carnivores and their world. This paper is just one example of that. You can access PDF format files of all the contributions to this volume in the following link:
http://estudiosgeol.revistas.csic.es/index.php/estudiosgeol.
Cover Estudios Geologicos
¡¡BIODIARIO!!
Dear all,
I hope life is treating all of you well. Here life has been intense which as usual in my case has left little or no time for blogging, but I want to take a minute now to let you know that on february the 15th, Spanish National TV channel “TVE 2” broadcasted a special episode of the series “Biodiario”, devoted to my work. The programme is created with the usual expertise of Luis Miguel Dominguez and his team from “Avatar Producciones”, who have protraited in just 5 minutes the essentials of my work, and especially of my reconstructions of sabre-toothed predators. You can watch the video (entirely in Spanish) following this link:
http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/biodiario/biodiario—15-02-12/1323429/
Queridos amigos,
Espero que todo os vaya bien. Por aquí la vida ha sido intensa lo cual, como suele ser el caso conmigo, ha significado poco o nigún tiempo para dedicar al blog. Sin embargo, ahora quiero dedicar un minuto a contaros que el 15 de Febrero la 2 de TVE emitió un episodio especial de “Biodiario” dedicado a mi trabajo. Realizado con la habitual maestría de Luis Miguel Domínguez y su equipo de Avatar Producciones, el vídeo transmite en menos de 5 minutos lo esencial de mi trabajo y en especial de mi labor en la reconstrucción de los depredadores de dientes de sable.
http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/biodiario/biodiario—15-02-12/1323429/
Biodiario
Alan Turner’s and my book “The National Geographic Book of Prehistoric Mammals” was originally published in 2004, and since them it has been translated to 12 different languajes. The latest to appear is the italian edition, published by National Geographic and Edizioni White Star under the title “Mammiferi Preistorici”. It is a great satisfaction to think that people, and especially children from so many countries, are getting to know better the evolution of mammals thanks to our book!
Book cover for Mammiferi Prehistorici
Looking for leopards in Samburu -New Video!
Hello everybody!
Here I am after another of my long silences - not the best way to become popular in Planet Blog, I know!
To partly compensate, I offer you a little treat: a recent video-chronicle of my trip to Samburu National Reserve in Kenya in 2010. It is a quick portrait of one of the most beautiful wildlife reserves in Africa, and a celebration of the ultimate big cat: the leopard. Such first-hand observations of the big cats in the wild help me to create more believable and life-like reconstructions of their extinct relatives, including the sabretooths. You can watch the video here
Meanwhile I take the opportunity to send you all my best wishes for the holidays and for the New Year!
A leopard in Samburu National reserve, Kenya. Photo by Miguel Anton
My profile is now in the Science Visualization site
Hello everybody,
Many things seem to slow down in summer and this is specially true here in Madrid where it gets SO hot… This serves me as a nice excuse for posting even less than usual, but anyway I take this opportunity to let you know that I have been profiled in Chris Sloan’s nice site “Science Visualization”. You can see my profile following this link:
http://www.sciencevisualization.com/2011/05/mauricio-anton/
Chris Sloan was for many years senior editor of art at the National Geographic Magazine and I had the privilege of working with him in several exciting assignments. I learned a lot during those collaborations and even had the good fortune of having one of my illustrations appearing in the cover of NGM. It was the reconstruction of the snarling Dmanisi hominid, an oil painting the resulted from a looong exchange of sketches, emails and phone conversations with Chris.
Reconstruction of Homo georgicus from Dmanisi
Now Chris has started Science Visualization and I wish him every success. It is one of the rare places in the web where you can find in-depth, insightful analysis about how scientific art is being done today and what should be its standards.
Sabretooths left footprints, too.
After reading my previous post, readers may think, OK, these early felid footprints look interesting but, did not sabretooths leave footprints too?. Obviously they did, but the fossil record of their tracks is very poor. This is unfortunate because not everyone agrees on the details of sabretooth locomotion, and some specialists have proposed that animals like Smilodon, or the nimravid sabretooths, were plantigrade, walking on the soles of their feet like bears, rather than walking on digitigrade, cat-like feet. We would need several fossil tracksites similar to Salinas de Añana, but from different times and places, to help us solve these uncertainties. There are, anyway, a few sites that have yielded the footprints of sabretooths, and in one of these sites we have the uniquely lucky coincidence of finding both the footprints and the direct fossil remains of the animals themselves. That place has been known for many decades, and is one of the classic sites that helped define the Hemphillian, an age within the late Miocene of North America (formerly thought to be part of the Pliocene): Cofee Ranch, in Texas (see: Johnston, C. S. 1937. Tracks from the Pliocene of West Texas. Am. Midl. Nat., 18(1): 147-152).
At Cofee Ranch, the most complete skeleton known to date of the sabretooth Machairodus coloradensis was found not far from the footprint of a large cat-like animal. The well preserved footprint measures 13,2 by 11 cms, and is thus larger than most modern lion footprints. At that time, conical-toothed cats of the modern subfamily felinae were smallish animals, none of them larger than a lynx, and the only cat around that was large enough to leave such a huge footprint was Machairodus. The morphology of the Cofee Ranch cat print is quite modern, with paraxonic shape, retracted claws, and a reduced interdigital pad, and indicates a fully digitigrade posture. This morphology nicely fits what the known osteology of Machairodus and its relatives of the Homotherin tribe already told us – that these cats walked and ran much in the same way as our lions and tigers do. The detailed anatomy of Smilodon suggests so much as well, but the animal was much more robust and short-limbed than Machairodus, so a nice set of footprints from some Ice Age fossil site would not hurt. And the nimravid and barbourofelid sabertooths, with their primitive-looking feet are more difficult to interpret in terms of locomotion, so we must hope that more Miocene tracksites will be discovered in the future, including some sabretooth trackways. Meanwhile, functional anatomy will be our only guide to reconstruct their locomotion, and detailed, updated studies are urgently needed on that field too.
Tracking the oldest cats
Hello everybody,
It has been a few hectic weeks with many interesting things going on but no time at all for blog-writing. Late last month I travelled to Vitoria (Alava, Basque Country) to give a talk about a truly unique fossil site: the Miocene fossil tracksite of Salinas de Añana. Preparing that talk helped me refresh my mind about a site that had kept us busy for years with the task of deciphering an incredibly rich treasure of paleobiological information.
The Salinas site preserves uniquely long trackways of 3 species of carnivores of early Miocene age (a lynx-sized felid, a domestic-cat sized felid or primitive hyaenid, and a mongoose), plus a couple of artiodactyles and two birds. But as you can see in the images below, not only the trackways are exceptionally long, but the quality of the preservation is simply miraculous. The shape and texture of the foot pads are recorded as finely as if the cat had freshly walked on wet cement in front of your eyes. Such unusual preservation revealed to us that some cats of the lower Miocene were almost, but not not quite as fully digitgrade as our modern felines; that they “changed gears” from walk to trot with increased speed in a thoroughly cat-like manner, and that they travelled as family units of mother and young at least until the cubs were fully adult sized. We also found that the foot morphology and locomotion of early Miocene mongooses were fully modern, which was a welcome piece of information since the post-craneal skeleton of those creatures was and remains virtually unknown.
The amount of information contained in the bare 70 square metres of exposed sediment was so huge it took us years to publish our interpretation of the carnivore trackways . But the delicate nature of the sediments made them quite fragile too. After the second field campaign in 1993 the site was re-buried, and has remained so since then. If we should open the site without proper protection it would quickly erode away under the weather, so until the regional authorities provide some sort of legal protection and funding for preservation, the trackways will remain hidden from view.
It is ironic that, after 18 million years under rock, the site has spent 18 years under earth. Not only is this a lost opportunity for refined research and for paleontological tourism at the locality, but also it is to be expected that, if we excavate a larger area, more ichnological surprises will appear.
By the way here is the reference to our Salinas publication: Anton, M., G. López y R. Santamaría, 2004. Carnivore trackways from the Miocene site of Salinas de Añana (Álava, Spain)Ichnos11: 371-384 .
Trackways of three species of Miocene carnivores from Salinas de Añana, Spain
Trackway of a lynx-sized Miocene felid from Salinas de Añana.
Reconstruction of the Miocene Felid from Salinas, based on the trackway measurements
Podcast de la entrevista
He aquí el link para escuchar o descargaros el podcast de la entrevista en Radio 5 emitida el 13 de Junio de 2011:
Entrevista a la vista
Hola a todos,
Para aquellos de vosotros que escuchen la radio, y que además lo hagan en horas de trabajo, os comunico que el lunes día 13 de junio a las 11:45 me entrevistan en Radio 5 de RNE. El tema de la entrevista será nuestro nuevo libro “La Gran Migración” (Jordi Agustí y Mauricio Antón 2011, Crítica).
Aquí incluyo una de las ilustraciones inéditas incluídas en este nuevo libro, concretamente una reconstrucción del entorno de Damnisi, Georgia hace 1,8 millones de años.
A scene in the early Pleistocene of Dmanisi, Georgia
