UPDATES

• The ecology of early angiosperms . October 5, 2004: update based on a paper by Feild et al. 2004 in Paleobiology.

Marine Reptiles

• The Oceans of Kansas Web site centers on large Cretaceous marine reptiles, though there is LOTS of other stuff as well. Revised to 2010.
• Visit the Hauff Museum in Holzmaden, Germany, which has some of the most beautiful fossil marine reptiles in the world (Jurassic age.)

Turtles

• The earliest well-known turtle is Proganochelys from the Late Triassic of Europe:
• UC Berkeley's Introduction to Turtles and their kin
• University of Michigan's Introduction to living Testudines (turtles)
• Turtle Web Links
• Charles Darwin's description of the Galapagos Tortoises

Crocodiles

• Deinosuchus, the giant Cretaceous crocodile that may have preyed upon dinosaurs. Wikipedia entry, revised to 2013.
• There's a whole book about Deinosuchus by David Schwimmer.
• Sarcosuchus, the Cretaceous "Supercroc" from Africa. National Geographic LOVES Supercroc
  • News release, National Geographic Society, October 25, 2001.
  • The bite of Supercroc. National Geographic News, April 8, 2002.
• And, for contrast, The "Duck Croc" from Geotimes. A very small Cretaceous crocodile, also from Paul Sereno's team.
• Crocodile site at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
• Gustave, the hungry crocodile. Not really paleontology, but hey, they are living fossils.
• Crocodile Web Links
• The endangered Chinese alligator (the only Asian alligator) . Press release, February 2000.
• Hear crocodiles talk

Protorosaurs

Placodonts

• Placodont page at the Oceans of Kansas Web site. Updated 2010.

Ichthyosaurs

• Ryosuke Motani published a review of ichthyosaur biology in the December 2000 issue of Scientific American. It's reposted here.
• Introduction to ichthyosaurs
• Some beautifully preserved ichthyosaurs were collected on a 1905 Expedition to the West Humboldt Range in Nevada
• Many ichthyosaurs had huge eyeballs, consistent with deep diving. Story from BBC News OnLine, Thursday, 16 December 1999.
• Ichthyosaur vomit? National Geographic News, February 12, 2002. The evidence is a bit circumstantial, but on the whole plausible.
• Gut contents of a Cretaceous ichthyosaur. National Geographic News, August 5, 2003. These included fishes, hatchling turtles, and a bird. I would guess the ichthyosaur was trolling just off the beach, waiting for its annual feast of baby turtles (and the fish and the bird were doing the same thing). Now I should go and read the paper when it's published and see what kind of sedimentary environment it's preserved in. Should be shallow water!!
• A pregnant Cretaceous ichthyosaur from Canada. The paper, by Mike Caldwell's team, is in Palaeontology, 2006.
  • PhysOrg.com.
  • National Geographic News

Sauropterygians

• The Plesiosaur Site, a one-stop compendium of plesiosaur information. Written by Richard Forrest at New Walk Museum, in Leicester (England). Updated to 2012.
• Kid's Guide to nothosaurs
• Good Overview of Plesiosaurs from the Oceans of Kansas site. Updated 2012.
• Good Overview of Pliosaurs from the Oceans of Kansas site. Updated 2012.
• Year 1 of Digging Up a Plesiosaur in Kansas
• and Year 2
• A bottom-feeding plesiosaur. Plesiosaurs have always been visualized as fish-eaters. This one has clams and so on preserved as gut contents, showing that it foraged on the bottom. The paper is: McHenry, C. R. et al. 2005. Bottom-feeding plesiosaurs. Science 310: 75; published October 7, 2005. National Geographic News
• A plesiosaur from Aramberri, Mexico generated a lot of press Check out this story from BBC News OnLine, December 30, 2002. But the reality is probably very different: see a perspective from Richard Forrest
• "Plesiosaur carcass" netted from the ocean in 1977 was more likely a basking shark
• The Loch Ness Monster is not a plesiosaur from Richard Forrest.

Mosasaurs

• By far the best single site for mosasaurs is the Oceans of Kansas Web site. Particular pages on that site deal with:
  • Web essay on mosasaurs written in 2000 by Mike Everhart, updated 2010 and included in his book "Oceans of Kansas".
  • Overview of mosasaurs, and mosasaur links, revised 2011.
  • Finding the first mosasaur , updated 2010
  • A particularly impressive specimen of Tylosaurus, updated 2011
  • Plioplatecarpus
  • A day in the life of a mosasaur by Mike Everhart. Blow your socks off! Updated 2009.
  • The "Ginsu" shark ate mosasaurs (but not fast enough!). Page at the Oceans of Kansas site, updated 2009.

Air Breathers at Sea

• My online article on How marine reptiles breathed.. The logical structure of the argument is still sound. However, ichthyosaurs solved Carrier's Constraint in a way that I had not thought of. Ryosuke Motani told me that ichthyosaurs have very large flat centers to their vertebrae, which indicates a big flat plate of cartilage between them. This system would not have allowed the ichthyosaur spine to flex, making it relatively rigid and thus solving Carrier's Constraint. So my inferences about ichthyosaurs having to leap like penguins do not hold. Ichthyosaurs could have done it, but that's speculation, not inference.

Mesozoic Floras

• The discovery of living Metasequoia, the "dawn redwood", previously known only from fossils.
• Metasequoia's very own Web site!. Updated to 2011.

Why Flowers Are Beautiful

• The diversity of flowering plants from Wayne's Word at Palomar College.
• The fossil record and diversification of flowering plants
• A fascinating side issue: carnivorous plants.

The Earliest Angiosperms

• The earliest flower, Archaeanthus, the earliest known angiosperm from the Liaoning beds of China.
  • National Geographic News
  • NSF press release
• Story from the New York Times on an astounding collection of charcoaled angiosperms, including their flowers, from a site in New Jersey, dating from 90 Ma.

The Most Primitive Living Angiosperm

• Amborella and waterlilies are co-champion "most primitive angiosperms". Press release from Penn State describing the new results, December 20, 2000. The same press release is found here, if the first link breaks.
• Story from the New York Times , 29 October 1999, reporting on a paper published in Science by Mathews and Donoghue.
• Growing Amborella at the UC Santa Cruz arboretum
• Image of Amborella

Gymnosperms and Early Angiosperms, and their Early Pollinators

• Jurassic Park plants from Wayne's Word at Palomar College.
• See also this page from Wayne's Word
• Cycads: an article from Fossil News, 1996.
• Cycads and their pollinators. August 1998.
• Pollinating cycads with a turkey baster.BBC News OnLine, September 9, 2003. I went on and on in the book about the ways in which plants can persuade pollinators to help them reproduce. But this is a new twist. My respect for cycads deepens.
• Images of Cycads
• The astonishing Welwitschia, now thought to be a relative of gymnosperms rather than angiosperms. From the Tree of Life site, 2008.
• The Wollemi pine of Australia, thought to have been extinct for over 100 million years. It is an araucarian tree, over 100 feet high, surviving in wild country only 100 miles or so from Australia's largest city, Sydney. From the brink of extinction to your flower pot: the Wollemi pine of Australia.BBC News OnLine, September 25, 2003. Here is an earlier story, from National Geographic News, March 2003. You can order your very own Wollemi pine in a pot. . $40 was the price in 2013.
• By the Early Cretaceous there were representatives of Winteraceae
• A newly discovered "living fossil" winteracean plant from Madagascar
• Another news story about this.
• Images of magnolias

Some Insect Pollinators

• Why is this important when you buy your groceries? Online guide to pollination from Wikiedia. Updated to 2013.
• Orchids and their pollinators. Blog by Carl Zimmer, January 2004.
• Another Carl Zimmer blog about an orchid and a fly, August 2005.
• Beetles
• Moths
• How smart are butterflies?

Pollen Robbers

• An insect crime scene...

Plants and Seed Dispersal

Seed dispersal by non-biological agents

• Wind dispersal of plant seeds.
• How plants disperse by floating seeds, part 1.
• How plants disperse by floating seeds, part 2.

Seed dispersal by biological agents

• Seed dispersal by hitch-hiking burrs, part 1
• Seed dispersal by hitch-hiking burrs, part 2