Jake Battling The Hose

The Dinosaur Lords interiors by Richard Anderson.

Nola was born in the southern savanna woodlands of Sudan. In the mid-1970s she was captured to protect her from poachers, and in 1989 she moved to the San Diego Zoo. She shared her enclosure with buffalo, giraffes and gazelles, and enjoyed daily belly scratches. 

In 1990, a male rhinoceros named Angalifu joined Nola in San Diego, but she wasn’t interested in him. After hormone treatments, she mated with another male named Saut, but never became pregnant.

Saut died in 2004. Angalifu died last year. Nola was getting older, and suffering from a bacterial infection. Yesterday the zoo announced:

In the last 24 hours, Nola’s condition worsened and we made the difficult decision to euthanize her. We’re absolutely devastated by this loss, but resolved to fight even harder to #EndExtinction.

With the death of Nola this weekend, the northern white rhinoceros inches closer to true extinction. But it became extinct in the wild 2008, and the remaining rhinos have all been to old to breed for several of years. Still, there are plans to resurrect the subspecies using a preserved egg and sperm. The San Diego Zoo’s Institute has pledged $2 million to this difficult project. 

And there is reason to be hopeful. A cousin subspecies, the southern white rhino, has seen its population blossom from 20 to 20,000 in the last century thanks to the intervention of humans. 

Want to learn more? Check out this article by my friend (and housemate) Sarah Kaplan.

Image credits: Jeff Keaton, Make it Kenya, Ernst Schäfer, Colin P. Groves et al, TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images 

Ball is life.

The “dinosaur bones” that you see on display at the Museum aren’t really bones at all. Through the process of fossilization, ancient animal bones are turned into rock. 

Most ancient animals never became fossils. Their carcasses were likely consumed by other organisms, or worn away by wind or water. But sometimes the conditions were right and their remains were preserved. The most common process of fossilization happens when an animal is buried by sediment, such as sand or silt, shortly after it dies. Its bones are protected from rotting by layers of sediment. As its body decomposes all the fleshy parts wear away and only the hard parts, like bones, teeth, and horns, are left behind. Over millions of years, water in the nearby rocks surrounds these hard parts, and minerals in the water replace them, bit by bit. When the minerals have completely replaced the organic tissue, what’s left is a solid rock copy of the original specimen.

Learn more on the Museum’s Dinosaur website. 

Meet a Mount: Peabody Museum Stegosaurus

Taxon: Stegosaurus ungulatus

Specimen Number: PMNH 1853 and PMNH 1858

Year Created: 1910

Stegosaurus was a strange looking animal, but with its long, tottering legs and minuscule head, the Peabody Museum of Natural History Stegosaurus ungulatus mount is stranger still. This mount, constructed by Hugh Gibb and W.S. Benton under the supervision of curator Richard Lull, owes its bizarre proportions to the fact that it is a chimeric combination of at least five differently-sized individuals. 

 O.C. Marsh named Stegosaurus ungulatus in 1877 based on fossils found at Como Bluff, Wyoming, and illustrated it with eight tail spikes. Although modern researchers have since rejected this reconstruction, the mount at Marsh’s home institution still sports the extra-spikey tail. In another way, however, this Stegosaurus mount was ahead of its time. Lull insisted that the tail was held aloft, rather than dragging on the ground, to better function as a defensive weapon.

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