Two troodontids

Unfortunately this is the only one of my pics of this that came out. The real exhibit is perhaps a smidgeon smaller than it appears on my screen in this picture. The exhibit displays an excellent example of a finely turned troodont ankle, and although the picture doesn't show it, a toe-2 claw which seems to me to be a tad larger than normal for a troodont though I may be wrong. The hands also seem to be a bit on the big side in troodont terms, though again perhaps that's my imagination. (Perspective expands them relative to the feet in this picture.) Yes, I didn't get the head in. Apparently it resembles Protoavis', and doesn't have a postorbital. Unfortunately simply by looking at the fossil it didn't seem possible to tell whether that bit had been eroded away or was never present in life. Going from what I remembered of Sankar's pictures in "The Rise of Birds", the resemblance didn't grab me as irresistible.

Hopefully this grotty pic will be replaced by one of Tracy's. This fossil however was the one I flew the atlantic to see. If this had turned out to be close to being volant - say as close as Bambiraptor is, then there would have been good evidence for both dromaeosaurs and troodonts having flown. This is impossible in the standard theory since it would show two lines converging and having evolved flight almost simultaneously. This would in turn be a reversal of entropy, and would strongly suggest the true picture was the reverse of this.

Unfortunately I'm not convinced from what I saw of this fossil that it was that volant. Let's hope I'm wrong ;-).

This troodont nest is very nice, showing a very rare good troodont skeleton (a young one) along with the associated eggs. The real exhibit is perhaps 25%-40% bigger than it appears on my screen in this picture.

Unfortunately the small triangular thing in the bottom left egg is probably not a Troodon tooth as suggested, but a piece of eggshell. It doesn't have serrations on it let alone the expected serrations for that kind of troodontid tooth, and if they separated it from the matrix I suspect it would be too thin for a tooth. Never mind though, still a superb specimen. Unfortunately I can't remember if the skeleton was actually found in that exact position on top of the eggs.

The Byronosaurus jaffei skull is also in the exhibition, as is some good alvarezsaur material.



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