Warning: Old Navy Helo Pilot story ahead...

Tragically, it's not mine. One of Jarrod's animator homies, Kent Lidke, used to fly helicopters for the Navy. In Antarctica. It is one of those jobs that is actually even more badass than it sounds, as Kent's stories attest. This one's a gem. Many thanks to Kent for letting me post it. I'll pester him for more.

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Warning: Old Navy Helo Pilot story ahead...

Back in the day, we flew some GPS surveyor guys from the New Zealand Geological Survey up to some unknown peak down on the ice. 60 kt winds, gusting to 80, the friggin' helo wanted to lift off at idle. They needed something like 45 minutes to an hour to get the precision they were looking for, so we shut down, and they climbed up the last 50 or a hundred yards to the top of the peak to set up their gear. After about an hour and 15 minutes, I finally decided I better go see what was up, so I pulled on my Korean War surplus Arctic parka over all the stuff I was already wearing, goggled up and climbed out. The wind would've just about blown me off the mountain, so I more or less crawled up to where they were. By the time I got there, my face was so frozen I couldn't talk clearly, so I had to gesture at my wrist and shrug in order to say "How much longer?" They said they needed about 15 more minutes, so I crawled back down to about 50 feet from the bird and curled up in the lee side of a rock to smoke a cigarette, more for the challenge and to kill time than anything else. The zippo lighter, contrary to claims, will not light in all circumstances, but the survival matches did the trick, and I sat on the side of a mountain in Antarctica no one had ever walked on before, smoking a cigarette in an 80 knot wind.

Anyway, after a while the guys crawled down from the peak and we all climbed into the helo. According the airspeed indicator, winds were still 60 to 80 kts. The book says the wind limits for starting up are 45 kts. Fortunately, in a completely unrelated chapter, the book also says the airspeed indicator is unreliable below 70 knots, so we decided it was fair to say that we didn't KNOW the winds were over 45, and hit the starter. Well, the damn thing was so cold soaked that the first engine wouldn't start, but the starter motor already had the rotors turning a little and if we didn't spin them up quick the wind would probably flap them right into the tailboom, so we flipped the starter over to the other engine hoping the battery wasn't dead yet. That engine lit, but hung up and didn't make it all the way to idle speed because half the fuel manifold was frozen shut. I opened the throttle wider, hoping if I let it run for a couple minutes the fuel lines would thaw out, and that when they did the sudden fuel surge wouldn't blow the engine up. Sure enough, after a couple a minutes there was a whump of compressor stall and a whine as the engine tried to overspeed, but we caught it with the throttle. After that getting the second engine started was easy, and all we had to do was manage to take off in a blizzicane.

We lifted off with the stick shoved almost all the way forward and still ended up backing out of the lz, and once we had a little room pulled the stick back to center. It was like popping a big parachute, 0 to 80 in no seconds with a right roll to get turned around in the direction we were going and diving down the mountain like Franz Klammer to try to pick up some airspeed to go with our ground speed. It seemed totally insane but it worked like a charm.

I would do that every day of the week and twice on Sunday if I could. That was a great f'ing day.

I would sincerely like to thank you all for paying me to do stuff like that.

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See ya. I'm off to be a helicopter pilot in Antartica. *Sigh*

In lieu of going to fly a helicopter myself, I will seriously bug Kent to let me put up his awesome post on how flying a helicopter in Antarctica is like being a real-life space explorer. It's possibly the most badass thing I've ever read. Stay tuned, true believers.

BIGGEST. DINOSAUR. EVER.

Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, in books or on Wikipedia, or in one of those so-called "scientific" journals, the largest dinosaur of all time was not Brachiosaurus, or Supersaurus, or Argentinosaurus, or Amphicoelias, or Bruhathkayosaurus. Not by a long shot.

The newly described Stratoposeidon taylori trumped them all. Represented by a complete articulated skeleton from Hell's Attic National Desert in Utah, Stratoposeidon was morphologically similar to Brachiosaurus, only eight times larger. With a shoulder height of 44 meters and a neck 68 meters long, Stratoposeidon was tall enough to browse from the payload compartment of a Saturn V rocket. If Stratoposeidon stepped on a bull elephant, its foot would entirely cover the resulting puddle of elephant juice. Stratoposeidon is estimated to have weighed 17,920 tons (35 x 8 x 8 x 8). When it defecated, a bolus of macerated plant material five meters in diameter and weighing 65 tons would drop from a height of 25 meters, fall for just over two seconds, and hit with enough force to level a barn. Stratoposeidon's feet had a total contact area of 650 square meters, and they exerted a pressure of 270,000 Newtons per square meter (39 pounds per square inch) when the animal was standing still.

Immediately following the publication of the initial description, an anonymous poster on the Dinosaur Mailing List pointed out that the specimens known as Brachiosaurus may simply be juvenile stratoposeidons, in which case Stratoposeidon would become an objective junior synonym of Brachiosaurus! However, this has not yet been demonstrated. Furthermore, the authors that described Stratoposeidon have already responded; they threatened to petition the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature to preserve the name. One possible outcome of an ICZN ruling would be to sink Brachiosaurus in favor of Stratoposeidon, on the grounds that the former is only represented by juveniles and does not reflect the mature morphology of the taxon.

Below is a reconstruction of Stratoposeidon with various objects for scale, including:
- a Boeing 747 jumbo jet (70.5 meters)
- a Boeing B-52 bomber (48.5 meters)
- a Rockwell space shuttle orbiter (37.25 meters)
- the Millenium Falcon (26.7 meters)
- Brachiosaurus altithorax (=juvenile Stratoposeidon? -- 5.5 meters tall at the shoulder)
- an AT-AT walker (22.5 meters tall)
- a bull elephant (3 meters tall at the shoulder)
- Mike Taylor (1.8 meters tall)
- a Saturn V moon rocket (111 meters tall)
- several double-decker buses (each 10.9 meters long)

I stole the comparative images from various places on the Internet. The 747 and AT-AT came from Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions, possibly the coolest site on the net.

Matt's Law

Self-explanatory.

If you'd like a version of this image that hasn't had some wiseacre's verbal diarrhea squirted all over it, dig this:

Photoshop posts will continue until morale improves.

Piling on the tetrapods

Here are three great tastes that taste great together: Balaenoptera musculus, Brachiosaurus altithorax, and Loxodonta africana. Plus Mike and me for scale. Many thanks to Photoshop for making this happy day possible.

The elephant and brachiosaur are both from the Field Museum in Chicago. Mike and I spent some quality time with them last summer, especially the Brachiosaurus skeleton. It is outdoors, so we could roam around it to our hearts' content, from the time the museum closed until it got too dark to see. One of the things we were trying to figure out is, how much might that animal have weighed?

This is not a trivial problem. Weighing large extant animals is no picnic. Almost all of the heights and weights of big elephants are to some extent estimates. When you shoot an elephant and it flops over, you can measure its length very accurately, but its giant body is no longer being compressed by gravity in the foot-to-shoulder axis and it stretches out some. Also, world record elephants tend to be shot out in the bush, very far from things like truck scales that would allow for accurate weight measurements. Usually the body is hacked up and weighed piecemeal, but there is some inevitable blood loss and so the summed weight of the chunks is not the weight of the animal in life. For both height and weight, a little guesswork is needed to figure out what the real measurement ought to be. The world record elephant was 13'8" lying on its side, and it is estimated to have been about 13'0" when standing. Conveniently, it weighed about 13 tons (these numbers are from the Guinness Book).

Now, using Photoshop and our not-yet-patented "stack of Mike" method, we pegged the mounted bull shown above with a shoulder height of 10 feet. In his paper on dinosaur models, Greg Paul (1997) cites a personal communication from someone at the Field Museum with the information that this animal weighed six tons. Because mass scales with the cube of the linear dimension, a 13-foot-tall elephant should weigh 2.2 times as much as a 10-footer, and indeed, 6 x 2.2 = 13.

One thing that occurred to us was to treat Brachiosaurus like a giant elephant. Brachiosaurus has a long pneumatic neck and the elephant has a big pneumatic head, so you can think of both of them as having a big air-filled mass of bone hanging off the front of their shoulders. In his book A Practical Guide to Vertebrate Mechanics, Chris McGowan gives some figures on a big bull elephant named Tantor. Tantor massed 6500 kg and his head was 750 kg, or a shade over 10% of his total mass. In the same paper mentioned above, Paul (1997) said that in sauropods the neck and head accounted for about 10% of the volume. So our elephant head/sauropod neck comparison is actually pretty close. The sauropod's tail is a bigger problem, but it probably only accounted for about 5% of the animal's mass, and the "stack of Mike" method is sufficiently non-rigorous for 5% error to be acceptable. On the flip side, elephants don't have air sacs or pneumatic postcranial bones, so a big sauropod would certainly have been less dense (but stupider).

BTW, the whale and elephant are in good lateral views, but the brachiosaur is foreshortened and that messes up the apparent proportions. The neck length is actually half again as long as the shoulder height, and the tail is about the same length as the neck. When you look at the composite photo, just imagine that the brachiosaur's tail is sticking out over the asphalt, and is not at all parallel to the whale's backbone.

Using the "stack of Mike" method, we found a shoulder height of 18 feet for the mounted Brachiosaurus. That fit well with what we've seen mentioned other places. If this Brachiosaurus was an elephant, it would have weighed 35 tons (1.8 cubed = 5.832, multiply that by six tons). For such a goofy method, that's a surprisingly satisfying answer. Colbert (1962) and Gunga et al. (1995) used volumetric methods and estimated the mass of Brachiosaurus at 78-80 tons, but in both cases the models are grotesquely obese, more like Macy's parade balloons than real animals. Alexander (1989) got 47 tons, but his model was also too fat, as Paul (1997) very convincingly demonstrated. Russell et al. (1980) used a limb regression equation to put the mass of Brachiosaurus at 15 tons. That just makes no sense. If a 13-foot-tall elephant weighs 13 tons, then an 18-foot-tall Brachiosaurus weighed a damn sight more than 15 tons. Anderson (1985) used limb bone regression and got 29 tons. Paul (1997) used volumetrics and got 32. Henderson (2003) used a digital volumetric model with realistic air sacs and got 26. Our 35 ton estimate is in pretty good company.

When we first cranked through these numbers last July, I wrote to Mike,

We can clearly disregard Russell's 15-ton estimate as crap, and anything over about 40 tons is ludicrous for that skeleton.

To which he replied,

Yes to 15 tonnes. I would not be so quick to dismiss over-forty estimates. Consider where the "shoulder" is. On the elephant, if you're talking about the highest point on the back -- which is a fairer comparison than the elevated head/neck -- then the height is maybe a little less than 10 feet. And it doesn't need to be much less to make a big difference. Six inches shorter, in fact, would bring the BOBA [Boring Old Brachiosaurus Altithorax] estimate up to 41 tonnes. Throw in the tail and I don't find 40 too extreme. (Dude!)

What is there left to say? This is the kind of thing I spend my time thinking about. And it illustrates a couple of points that you should always keep in mind:

1. Big animals are freakin' cool, man.
2. Measuring big animals is a kickass activity.

One last thing. None of the animals in the picture are record-holders. As I mentioned in the last post, the whale is, at 87 feet, about 80% of the size of the largest known individuals. The Brachiosaurus skeleton is about 85% of the size of the largest known specimens in the genus, and the elephant is 77% of the size of the world record. What a pathetic bunch of losers!

JK. They rule. Quite hard.

REFERENCES

Alexander, R.McN. 1989. Dynamics of Dinosaurs & Other Extinct Giants. Columbia University Press, New York, 167 pp.

Anderson, J.F., Hall-Martin, A., and Russell, D.A. 1985. Long-bone circumference and weight in mammals, birds and dinosaurs. Journal of Zoology 207:53-61.

Colbert, E.H. 1962. The weights of dinosaurs. American Museum Novitates 2076:1-16. (FREE online)

Gunga, H.C., Kirsch, K.A., et al. 1995. New data on the dimensions of Brachiosaurus brancai and their physiological implications. Naturwissenschaften 82:190-192.

Henderson, D. M. 2004. Tipsy punters: sauropod dinosaur pneumaticity, buoyancy and aquatic habits. Proceedings, Biological Sciences 271 (Suppl.): S180–S183.

Paul, G.S. 1997. Dinosaur models: the good, the bad, and using them to estimate the mass of dinosaurs. Dinofest International 1997:129-154.

Russell, D.A., Beland, P., and McIntosh, J.S. 1980. Paleoecology of the dinosaurs of Tendaguru. Memoirs de Societe Geologique de France 139:169-175.

The big'un

The other whale at the Long Marine Lab is a Blue (Balaenoptera musculus). It's an 87-footer. The longest known Blue Whale was 110 feet long, so despite its size, the one shown here is only 4/5 the size of the biggest individuals.

Here, at last, is something to stun even a sauropod worker. Check out this picture of Nick standing inside its jaws, and compare to the similar shot with the Gray Whale in the previous post. The Gray Whale could pass through the jaws of the Blue and not even scrape the sides.

Nick gave me an interesting perspective on how these big whales feed. They're not really filter feeders. A true filter feeder is something like a Basking Shark that just swims around with its mouth open and strains out whatever comes through. The big baleen whales pick their targets and engulf them with their giant jaws and extensible mouth/throat region. They are often feeding on swarms of krill that measure kilometers in extent. Rather than think of big whales as filter feeders, we should think of them as predators that take bites off of superorganisms that are hundreds of times larger. The fact that the krill are strained out of the water by the baleen is a matter of processing--it comes after the whale has taken a bite. Here Nick is measuring the mandibles, as part of a study on this very subject.

The size of the rib cage is staggering. As Nick pointed out in a recent joint talk that we gave at Berkeley, a 100-foot Blue Whale is approximately the same size as a Boeing 737, in both length and girth. So the next time you're on a 737 or equivalent, have a look around--you could be in the belly of a whale.

This one isn't that big, but still large enough to fit me inside with lots of room to spare. It is worth recalling that Elmer Riggs named the type species of Brachiosaurus altithorax in reference to a seven-foot rib, which was at that time the longest of any known sauropod. We didn't measure any of the ribs, but they're a darn sight longer than seven feet.

If you ever have the chance to go whale-watching, do it. I've been three times, all of them trips from Monterey into Monterey Bay. I've been fortunate in that I've seen new and bigger whales every time I've gone out. The first time we tailed a pod of half a dozen Gray Whales. It was just mind-blowing how big they were. Despite my derrogation of the Gray in the previous post, it is one thing to stand next to a skeleton and another thing entirely to see the animal in the flesh. It's a feeling that I always get when I'm around horses. They are just huge animals, way outside the human scale in terms of mass and strength. Multiply that by a thousand or so and you will know what it's like to see a Gray Whale in the flesh.

The second time I went out, we followed a momma Humpback Whale and her calf, which was about 2/3 grown. The Humpback was significantly larger than the Grays. But it didn't hold a candle to the Blue Whale that I saw the most recent time. From seeing the Grays and the Humpbacks, I had a feeling for how long it takes a whale to 'roll over' when it comes up and then goes back down. The Blue Whale blasted my expectation. It was almost stomach-turningly immense. After it spouted it would nose down and its back would break the surface in a long curve as it headed back down. But the back just kept coming, more and more whale emerging from the water until your mind rebelled: No living thing could possibly be that big. And yet it is.

These experiences have only sharpened my hopeless desire to see a sauropod in the flesh. What have saurichians come to?

Finally, a real live whole dead whale

The Long Marine Lab here in Santa Cruz has a couple of whale skeletons mounted outdoors, and Nick got permission for us to measure them. I'll start with the pathetically tiny one, a Gray Whale (Eschrichtius robustus, foo'). By "pathetically tiny" I mean a shade over nine meters long and probably not massing more than 10 tons (incidentally, 10 tons is Mike Taylor's threshold for considering something interesting). Some other things that are nine meters long are the Supermarine Spitfire and the neck of a good-sized (but not record-sized) Brachiosaurus. Gray Whales get up to about 15 meters long and about 35 tons, or so Wikipedia tells me. That's a little longer than a big T. rex--"Sue" is only 12.5 meters--and probably about as heavy as a good-sized Brachiosaurus, like the mounted skeletons in Berlin and Chicago.


Whoops, sorry, I'm trying to resist the siren song of sauropods for a few posts here, but it ain't easy. A-ny-way, the Gray Whale skeleton at Long Marine Lab is still under construction. It's mounted at an oblique angle because Gray Whales use their baleen to strain small crustaceans out of the sand and muck at the bottom of the ocean, and they turn on their sides to do it. Like almost everything under the sun, the whales show "handedness" and tend to preferentially feed on one side (other examples that I know of include elephants, crocodiles, and turtles--how has Darren not blogged about this yet?). The skeleton hasn't been weatherproofed yet, but hopefully it will be soon.

Anyway, I hope you can look past the animal's extremely small size and find something of interest in the pictures. This next picture is kinda cool on its own, but it will be a lot cooler after I get the next batch posted, so you'll have something truly impressive to compare it to.


As we were working, flights of pelicans kept zooming past, on their way who knows whither.

Stay tuned for the mother of all sea monsters. For real this time, not like my crab confusion episode.

More from New Brighton

More photographic booty from the New Brighton beach walk.


A shell bed from the top...



...and from below.



The biggest chunk of whale we found was this table-sized block with some ribs. That's Nick's hat for scale. The L stands for 'luscious'.

Now, seriously, there will be some respectable whales up next.

Miocene clams

No, really.

Nick Pyenson came down to Santa Cruz yesterday for some paleo and marine biology action. We met Kena Fox-Dobbs* and Patrick Wheatley of the Koch lab at New Brighton state beach in Capitola to walk the cliffs and see if anything interesting was exposed. The whole coast here is Miocene Purissima Formation, and there are definitely fossil whales in there. But mostly, there are bivalves. Herewith, some photos.

*If the name sounds familiar, you may be thinking of her work on condor diets (see, e.g., Chamberlain et al. 2005).


The Purissima in all its shelly glory.



Summa dem shells.



Here's what a fault looks like. With Kena (l) and Nick (r) for scale.



And here's what a fault does to fossils. The technical term is "hamburgerization".

Stay tuned for photos of Nick and me playing with whales.

REFERENCES

Chamberlain, C.P., J.R. Waldbauer, K. Fox-Dobbs, S.D. Newsome, P.L. Koch, D.R. Smith, M.E. Church, S.D. Chamberlain, K.J. Sorenson, and R. Risebrough. 2005. Pleistocene to recent dietary shifts in California condors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 102(46):16707-11.

The umbrella effect as applied to marine mammals

You know the umbrella effect: if you carry an umbrella, it may not rain, but if you don't, it's sure to. Same deal with taking a book when I hop in the car to go literally anywhere; about 95% of the time I don't need it, but any situation in which you're stuck for an hour or two and wish you had a book is by definition unforeseeable, so it's better to have a book along just in case.

Yesterday afternoon we went for a long walk along West Cliff. I almost grabbed my binoculars as we headed out the door. I consciously thought, "Hey, maybe I should take my binoculars." And then my stupid brain said, "Nah!"

Stupid, stupid brain.

Within five minutes of getting out of the car, we saw a pair of sea otters frollicking amongst the kelp. Just far enough out that some binoculars would have been great. Oh, and there was one rock a ways out where some sea lions were having a lay in the sun convention. And then on the way back we saw dolphins. I've never seen dolphins from shore at West Cliff. Finally, as we came around to Lighthouse Point there was another sea otter just about 50 yards from shore. Fortunately, I had a digital camera; unfortunately, it was the lo-rez POS we got for taking pictures of London. Here's my strikingly Nessie-esque photo of the alleged sea otter; you'd be forgiven if you thought it was a dead mime, or a really big bird dookie.


One of these days I'm going to get some of those binoculars with the digital camera built in, and I'm going to wear them everywhere. I don't care how stupid it looks. We can talk about stupid after I get ultrarich from selling my photos of Sasquatch and UFOs. I'll be that one guy who really did have binoculars and a camera ready when that once-in-a-lifetime event happened.

Yeah!

Oh, there were also shitloads of cormorants and pelicans, as always. Hardly worth mentioning. I'm just piling on the tetrapods to hopefully make Darren jealous.