MV Blog

Artist Joceline Lee has spent her last few Wednesdays in the basement of the Royal Exhibition Building among the palaeontologists, geologists, rocks and fossils. She is working on drawings for her first solo exhibition, Rendered Bones.

Joceline draws skeletons and anatomical forms in pen and ink which makes palaeontological specimens the ideal material for her. When I visited her at work, she was drawing an echidna skeleton that she'd selected from the collection. She was accompanied by her mentor Rob Delves, a sculptor who has worked with Joceline for seven years at Art Day South. This project is run by Arts Access Victoria in Melbourne's south-east to give artists with disabilities opportunities to develop their artwork through workshops, mentorships, collaborations and exhibitions.

  Joceline Lee and Rob Delves working on an echidna skeleton in the Museum Victoria Palaeontology Department.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Rob said that when she first came to Art Day South, her drawings were intricate and very tiny. "Her linework was amazing in these little drawings and they just said 'skeletons'." He started bringing her photographs and models of animal skeletons about three years ago, and Joceline was hooked. "Then we brought in bigger things and it's grown from there." In July this year, MV's Discovery Program visited Art Day South bringing a tortoise shell, a huge model dinosaur leg, fossils and more for the artists to explore.

Joceline works slowly but steadily for hours at a time, with each drawing taking two to three weeks to complete. Rob loves her unique style of drawing. "She goes off in beautiful directions, with all this contrast... dark and fine lines."

Rendered Bones is part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival program from 4 to 9 October in the No Vacancy Project Space in the Federation Square Atrium. Be sure to visit the exhibition if you'd like to see Joceline's distinctive interpretation of fossils, bones and skeletons.

Flyer for Rendered Bones exhibition.
Image: Arts Access Victoria
Source: Arts Access Victoria

Links:

Melbourne Fringe Festival: Rendered Bones

No Vacancy Gallery: Rendered Bones

Imagine that your face was articulated so that your jaw could split down the middle and expand sideways until the tips were out as wide as your ears. Imagine that you could move all the bones of your face... not just the soft tissue, but the bones themselves.

Sound bizarre? Alien, even? Yet this is exactly what happens every time a Blue Whale takes a gulp of water. The filter-feeding whales, otherwise known as baleen whales or mysticetes, have feeding adaptations that are unique among mammals. Their intriguing evolutionary history is the subject of Dr Erich Fitzgerald's research, and today he's published a paper that overturns a long-held belief about how the baleen whales evolved.

Illustration of the biggest mouth in history at work. The Blue Whale can expand its mouth to gulp huge volumes of krill-filled water.
Image: Carl Buell
Source: Museum Victoria  

For several years, he has worked on an extraordinary 25 million-year-old species known from fossils that were found in the 1990s near Jan Juc on Victoria's west coast. Called Janjucetus, this early baleen whale predated the evolution of baleen – the hairy structure used by modern baleen whales to filter tiny crustaceans from the sea. Instead, Janjucetus had the large eyes and ferocious teeth of a hunter.

Dr Erich Fitzgerald holding the jaws of Janjucetus with Melbourne Museum's massive Blue Whale skeleton in the background.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

There are two key changes in the skull that permit the filter feeding of modern whales. The first is a lower jaw that can split down the middle. In humans, the seam (or symphysis) where the two halves of the jawbone meet at our chin is fused, thus our jaws are rigid. In contrast, baleen whales have greatly elongated jawbones that do not meet in the middle. The second change is in the width of the upper jaw; baleen whales have evolved a wide mouth, allowing them to engulf massive volumes of water.

"Previously it was thought that the origins of both features were intimately linked to filter-feeding and that's what differentiated baleen whales from toothed whales and dolphins," explains Erich. His research has just overturned this theory since Janjucetus had a wide upper jaw yet its lower jaw had a tightly connected, immobile symphysis. "So, the loose symphysis is not typical of all baleen whales, it's a later innovation. The earliest baleen whales could not expand and contract their lower jaws so were anatomically incapable of filter-feeding, yet they had these wide upper jaws."

The fossilised jaws of Janjucetus, clearly showing the immobile symphysis at the tip.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

What Erich describes is an elegant example of an exaptation, where a feature evolved to serve a particular function but was later co-opted into a new role. Erich believes that its wide jaw helped Janjucetus to suck in large singe prey items, such as squid or fish, and didn't evolve for filter-feeding at all.

Says Erich, "Charles Darwin reflected upon this in The Origin of Species. He wondered how you could go from a whale that has big teeth like Janjucetus does and catching fish and squid one at a time, to something like a modern Blue Whale that feeds en masse. This is the kind of fossil palaeontologists dream of finding because it shows a transitional form."

"It's an exciting discovery, but actually not as surprising as you might think," concludes Erich. "Evolution by natural selection implies that we should expect to find these kinds of fossils in the rocks." The next question he looks forward to answering is how whales shifted from suction feeding to filter-feeding. "I think we're really close to finding a transitional series of fossils that illuminate this."

Erich's paper about this discovery, 'Archaeocete-like jaws in a baleen whale', is published today in Biology Letters.

Links:

Video: Erich discusses whale evolution

MV News: Ferocious fossil

Dr Erich Fitzgerald

Baleen and toothed whales

Priscilla is a Program Coordinator for Life Sciences and works on education programs at Melbourne Museum. She has been a regular dinosaur digger for over 10 years!

I'm often asked what it's like at a dinosaur dig. The romantic view most people have, fuelled by films like Jurassic Park, is that we simply sweep away the sand with a brush, use high-tech gadgets to locate the exact location of the bones, and get flown to tropical islands with Jeff Goldblum.

Over 100 years ago the first dinosaur fossil, the Cape Paterson Claw, was found on the coast of Victoria at a site known as Eagles Nest. Nothing much else was found until two young palaeontologists in the making, Tim Flannery and John Long, spent their youth searching the rocks along the coast of Victoria, eventually finding more fossil booty. Their finds have led to decades of dinosaur digs along the coast of Victoria.

From Cape Otway to Inverloch, the Cretaceous-aged sandstone rocks have been blasted, bashed and bored to reveal what life was like 120 million years ago in Victoria. Each year the work at the Dinosaur Dreaming Dig, which is a joint project between Museum Victoria and Monash University, recruits numerous volunteers who spend hours breaking rock. Over the years, the same volunteers return, making the whole experience more like a giant family gathering at Christmas. Uncle Norman, Mother Lesley, Sister Alanna, and Grandma Mary are all there. Gerry and his rock, Doris and her eggnog, Mike and his poems, Nick and his telescope, Nicole and her berry crumble are all part of the experience.

And yes, there are the dinosaur bones. Each year some 800 new bones are found and catalogued. Just like a Christmas stocking, you never know what you are going to find inside each rock – will it be the discovery that changes theories of evolution or another disappointment? Yet despite so many fruitless ‘stocking openings’, I and many others are lured back. After so many years of digging, amazing fossils have been found. Many of these incredible specimens are now on display in 600 Million Years: Victoria evolves. Hopefully, this clip gives you some insight into just how we find them...

Download the Video from Dinosaur Dreaming Dig video

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Dinosaur Dreaming: the Inverloch Fossil Site infosheet

Fossil collecting sites in Victoria infosheet

Dinosaur Walk

Dinosaur Dreaming blog

Ben designs exhibitions at Scienceworks, Melbourne Museum and the Immigration Museum. He has previously worked designing sets for theatre, and running workshops for kids. Ben loves surprises and performing silly dances.

Over the next couple of months I’ll be working on the new animatronic dinosaur exhibition at Scienceworks called Explore-a-saurus. The dinos we’ve been given by Questacon are in need of a bit of a repair, repaint, and re-interpretation. We decided we needed to supplement the existing dinosaurs with new exhibits to present more scientifically-based themes and a more contemporary approach to palaeontology. No more daggy cargo pants and pith helmets for our paleos!

Our first step was to look at interesting overarching themes to base our interpretation on. They needed to respond to current research since paleontologists regularly make new discoveries that overturn previous understanding. They must be engaging for kids, put kids in the shoes of palaeontologists and demonstrate scientific practice. One element I am particularly interested in is the idea of absolute knowledge. The evidence is open to interpretation, and thus, our knowledge about dinosaurs changes due to new research on old material and discovery of new fossils.

An example of how our understanding of dinosaurs evolution has changed: this old chart in the MV collection suggests the dinosaur branch of the evolutionary tree was a dead end, but current research suggests some dinosaurs evolved into birds.
Source: Museum Victoria  

We decided the most interesting angle would be forensic palaeontology – a kind of CSI Cretaceous. We’re using the phrase ‘how we know what we know’ as the exhibition focus. Our interactives will use evidence-based research to demonstrate particular theories, and, if possible, show the palaeontologist’s methods,

With this in mind we turned to popular dinosaur culture – what do people want to know? What are the interesting facts which we can debunk or expand upon? We started with the way dinosaurs are portrayed in films and TV because this is the most prevalent form of education for kids! We looked at the way dinosaurs moved, how we know the sounds they made, the colour of their skin, whether they evolved to become birds or reptiles; and how well they could see. We came up with a 'how we know what we know' list and then another list of types of exhibit that we know Scienceworks visitors have liked in the past.

The interactive elements of the exhibition are now in the final stages of design before we move on to the manufacturing side, then comes the exhibition installation! Before you know it, it will be June 1, when Explore-a-saurus will open and visitors can come and try the interactive components for themselves.

Links:

Explore-a-saurus

MV Blog: Open wide!