Thursday, July 30, 2009

True Joy Means Making a Difference

Joy.

The world needs more of it. You can provide it.

When I first got into fundraising, I thought it would be great helping people live better lives. The best part of my job, however, is witnessing the joy donors and volunteers experience when they shared their resources to help others.

I hear the sounds of joy every day at McWane Science Center. Sounds we wouldn’t hear if it weren’t for generous donors who provide exciting, fun, educational exhibits and programs.

If you have been a part of providing this joy for the 11 years that McWane has existed, thank you. We have depended on corporations, foundations, government entities and some individuals who have made major gifts. But Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore.

McWane is a thriving organization in terms of the experience, attendance and memberships. April and June of this year saw record attendance. Memberships are growing, yet there’s room to grow. Might I unabashedly say it’s a great deal if you come just twice a year?

Lots of folks don’t realize that McWane Science Center is a nonprofit. It costs us about twice as much to serve visitors as we charge. We want to remain affordable for everyone to enjoy the benefits of hands-on science education.

Science literacy is important. Our kids must grow up knowing how to solve problems with the environment, energy, technology, etc., McWane supports families and teachers in our mission “to change lives through science and wonder.”

True joy is watching another delight in something. Knowing a person is learning skills and that we are igniting a lifelong love of learning is icing on the cake. By donating to McWane Science Center, you can experience the joy of being a part of something really big - you can provide joy for thousands of kids.

From outside my office, I can hear hundreds of kids excited as they get off of school buses. In the lobby, I hear kids crying that they don’t want to leave. It’s in those moments that I know what we are doing is working. Kids love experiential learning. AND THEY NEED IT if there’s to be hope for our future.

We need your financial support more than ever. If you don’t have a membership, buy one. Tell others what a great value memberships to McWane are - give them as gifts. A donation of any size - $25 to thousands of dollars - will help our community. You can provide hope for the future. And when you do that, you can experience great joy.

l’ll step off of my soap box now.

Contributor Profile:
Linda H. Baker is the vice president of development and marketing for McWane Science Center and mother of three boys. After a tour in corporate communications and print media, she found her purpose for existing: to help people find true joy.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Birds of a Feather - Part 2

by James Lamb, Paleontologist
















There are to date at least 21 different types of dinosaurs that are known to have had feathers. Even Velociraptor, a well-established dinosaur, appears to have had a feather coating, as a recently discovered specimen shows that it had the bumps on one of its forearm bones called “quill nodes” that indicate where feathers attach in modern birds. In fact, it appears very likely that all carnivorous dinosaurs (the group called theropod dinosaurs) had feathers, at least as juveniles. It also seems that the dromaeosaurs, the specific group of theropods that Deinonychus belongs to, are the closest relatives to birds. Many of the feathered dinosaur skeletons have the switchblade claw on their hind feet. Recently, there have been discoveries such as the “bristles” on the back on the small Triceratops relative Psittacosaurus, and just two months ago of what appear to be feathers on the heterodontosaurid dinosaur Tianyulong, that indicate that perhaps all dinosaurs had feathers, at least originally (although they may have been lost later by such groups as the hadrosaurs (duck-bills) which we know from skin impressions did not have feathers). This is because Psittacosaurus and Tianyulong are plant-eating dinosaurs that are not close relatives to theropods, and in particular heterodontosaurids are near the base of the dinosaur family tree.

So what did a dinosaur need with feathers?

The key question about the origins of flight in birds if dinosaurs are indeed their ancestors, is how did ground-dwelling animals become flying animals? Looking at the range of feather types in modern birds, Dr. Alan Brush has worked out the probable sequence of the evolution of feathers from a reptilian type scale. The problem is that the intermediate stages in feather evolution, say, halfway between a scale and a feather, are not capable of sustaining flight. That means that feathers were originally evolved for a purpose other than flight, a purpose for which intermediate grade feathers provided some useful function. It appears that the answer to this riddle is that feathers originally were for insulation. We now know from a variety of evidence that dinosaurs almost certainly had some form of warm-blooded metabolism, and the earliest dinosaurs were all small animals. Small warm-blooded animals lose body heat more rapidly than a large animal with the same metabolism. To prevent the loss of body heat, small warm-blooded animals need insulation. Dinosaurs had feathers for the same reason that mammals have hair – to stay warm. Indeed, birds and mammals are the only warm-blooded animals. Mammals inherited fur from their ancestors, birds inherited feathers from their ancestors. The intermediate stage of a feather may not work for flight, but it does work as insulation, at least better than a scale. Only later were they co-opted for use in flight. For many years though there hasn’t been a satisfying explanation for how theropod dinosaurs made the transition into the air. The final piece came a few years ago with the work of Dr. Ken Dial, and is known as WAIR, or wing-assisted-incline-running. I’ll give an example from personal experience how this works.

Some years back, while searching for dinosaurs, umm, fossil ones, in central Alabama, I was walking through a stretch of woods to get to a site, when I scared up a wild turkey in the underbrush. I’m not sure which of us was more surprised; turkeys generally rely on camouflage, and will hide quietly in a bush and let you walk right past them. Evidently, this one decided at the last instant the camouflage wasn’t working because the turkey exploded out of a bush within arms reach in a cloud of leaves and feathers and with a noise equivalent to what I thought of at the time as a charging rhino crashing through the underbrush. The turkey sprinted across the clearing, heading towards a large cedar tree. And then it did the oddest thing – it waited until it was right at the tree and then flew vertically up it, it’s chest just inches away from the trunk. Heart pounding, still checking to see if my pants were still dry recovering from the initial surprise, the whole thing having taken less than 2 seconds, I began to wonder why it had waited until the last instant to fly up the tree instead of taking off and flying in a shallower trajectory into the tree. What WAIR proves is that in fact the turkey did not fly into the tree at all, it RAN into the tree – vertically up the trunk.

Dial has spent many hours filming birds running up the trunks of trees. He has shown that a bird can run up a tree quicker from a short distance than it can fly into the tree. In fact, this happens so quickly that it can only be seen in high-speed video footage, which is why the turkey appeared to me to have flown up the tree. Further, birds only a day or two old exhibit this behavior, and also sometimes run up inclined surfaces and use it as a launching point to glide away from danger long before their wings are developed enough for flight. He has documented that birds can run up completely vertical surfaces in this manner, flapping the wings both as a propulsive assist and to help keep the feet pressed against the tree. It also turns out that they move their arms/wings in exactly the same manner that they do during active flight. This is almost certainly the origin of flight in dinosaurs – small dinosaurs with feathers evolved for insulation modifying a predator-escape behavior for a new purpose.

Next week: Birds of a Feather Part 3

Contributor Profile:
James Lamb is a native Birminghamster with a nearly life-long interest in fossils. He collected his first fossil when he was 5 years old. Friends and family members assure him he has not matured much since then. James is curator of paleontology at McWane Science Center, and would like to one day see the absolute treasure trove of Alabama's fossil heritage revealed to the public. When not at work he wishes he were in the field digging up fossils. At home he enjoys reading, jogging, woodworking, and carving. He has been informed that he is in the habit of telling atrocious puns, but this comes as a surprise to him. James describes himself as a "science nerd".

Friday, July 3, 2009

Birds of a Feather - Part 1

by James Lamb, Paleontologist

The pair of fighting dinosaurs tumbled across the sidewalk in front of me, bringing me to an abrupt halt. Screeching, flipping tail over talon, grasping at each other with their sharp, three-toed hind feet and stabbing at each other with their mouths, they didn’t even pause when they rolled over a vertical drop twice their own body length. Finally they separated, each lying on its back, and continued to screech ferociously at one another. It was just in time too, as the drop off the curb had brought them perilously close to the street. Well, at least I didn’t have to jump in and break them up before they got in traffic. Then, as the two White-throated sparrows flew off to nurse their wounds in relative safety, I couldn’t help but think how glad I was that these little feathered dinosaurs were so tiny compared to their now extinct cousins. Imagine if they were the size of Deinonychus, the villains of Jurassic Park (incorrectly called Velociraptor in the movie) - no one would ever go outside.

At this point you are perhaps wondering if you read the previous paragraph correctly. Did I really mean that birds are little feathered dinosaurs? Well, yes. As amazing as it seems, birds are essentially the only group of dinosaurs to survive the global catastrophe 65 million years ago when something like 65% of all life on Earth became extinct. Dinosaurs had been the most successful terrestrial vertebrates ever; a group that dominated terrestrial ecosystems for 150 million years. And, except for birds, they’re all gone. But – dinosaurs? Really? Let me start the story at the beginning, always a good place to start.

The oldest known bird, Archaeopteryx, lived about 145-150 million years ago. The first specimen was discovered in 1861 and right from the beginning stirred controversy because of its mixture of avian (bird-like) features such as feathers, and more “reptile-like” features such as teeth and clawed, three-fingered hands. There were scientists even then who thought that the best match for bird ancestors were the dinosaurs. At the time though, there was only the one Archaeopteryx specimen and no particularly good match amongst dinosaurs for many features of the skeleton then known only in birds. The ancestry of birds remained in a sort of limbo for the next 100 years, with various groups of reptiles favored by different paleontologists. All that changed in 1969 with the publication of the formal description of Deinonychus. Deinonychus broke the mold of the old stereotype that dinosaurs were slow, lumbering, dim-witted animals with “extinction” stamped on their bony foreheads. Not only does the skeleton imply speed and grace, they had a sickle-shaped claw on the second toe of each hind foot that could be rotated through 180 degrees. The claw was held off the ground when running and then rotated into slashing/killing position once the prey had been captured. One of my college professors used to refer to Deinonychus and its kin as “Bobcats with a switchblade on each foot”. Perhaps equally as interesting were the skeletal similarities to birds.

One of the things that is unique about birds is the special arrangement of bones in the wrist that allows them to fold their hand, that is, the wing, which is mostly formed from an elongated hand, up against their body, and rotate the hand/wing properly to achieve the flight stroke. Deinonychus had this same feature. Deinonychus also possessed what until then was a uniquely bird characteristic called the “triosseal canal”, a trough formed by three bones in the shoulder region that allows the flight muscles that attach to the sternum, the breastbone, to loop over the shoulder like a pulley and power the recovery stroke of the wing during flight. Deinonychus appears to have evolved these features to use its long and mobile arms in capturing prey. Finding these features in Deinonychus started a flurry of renewed interest in the dinosaur/bird connection, and over the next couple of decades, as new dinosaur discoveries were made, and more Archaeopteryx and other early birds were found, paleontologists documented over 100 skeletal features shared uniquely in the animal world by only dinosaurs and birds.

Then came the fossils from dinosaur-aged lake deposits in China. The chances of any particular organism being preserved in the rock record are not good. The main reason for this is that most animals don’t die in an environment where they will be quickly covered up by rock-forming sediments such as sand or clay. The ancient freshwater lake deposits in China are an exception. Animals were buried quickly in fine-grained sediment that not only preserved the skeleton in near life position, but also so effectively sealed the fossil from the air that traces of soft tissue are often preserved. Many of the fossils coming from these deposits are of feathered dinosaurs. That is, traces of feathers, in some cases surrounding the skeleton in a sort of halo are preserved as a carbonaceous film. Not only did scanning electron microscope images show that these have the highly distinctive structure of modern bird feathers, they also have the same chemical signature as feathers. Feathers are made from a tough structural protein called keratin. Hair, fingernails and claws are other examples of biological structures made from keratin. However in the animal world only feathers are made solely of a single type of keratin, called beta-keratin.

Next week: Birds of a Feather Part 2

Contributor Profile:
James Lamb is a native Birminghamster with a nearly life-long interest in fossils. He collected his first fossil when he was 5 years old. Friends and family members assure him he has not matured much since then. James is curator of paleontology at McWane Science Center, and would like to one day see the absolute treasure trove of Alabama's fossil heritage revealed to the public. When not at work he wishes he were in the field digging up fossils. At home he enjoys reading, jogging, woodworking, and carving. He has been informed that he is in the habit of telling atrocious puns, but this comes as a surprise to him. James describes himself as a "science nerd".