You may remember when the pachycephalosaur Dracorex hogwartsia was revealed to the public. The reason it garnered the amount of publicity it did was that its specific name (that would be the "hogwartsia") was inspired by a certain series of novels which in turn inspire hysteria in children. It was considered striking enough to grace the cover of the December 2007 issue of Nat Geo, featuring the John Updike article Big Bad Bizarre Dinosaurs.
T-rex was a wimp. The recent discovery of a fossilized skull in England crowns the new king of predatory dinosaurs: a 53-foot “sea monster” called a pliosaur.Want another gem? Cool, okay!
Experts believe that the skull - which measures over 6-feet - contains the largest dinosaur jaw ever found in England, or the world, and that it means pliosaurs were powerful enough to rip a small car in half.Seriously? We've confused people enough by calling a pliosaur a dinosaur. We're going to muddy it further by saying it could rip a small car in twain? If vehicular destruction is going to be our preferred measure of a prehistoric beast's bite strength, couldn't we pick a small submersible or motorboat?
"Now the place where the griffins live and the gold is found is a grim and terrible desert. Waiting for a moonless night, the treasure-seekers come with shovels and sacks and dig. If they manage to elude the griffins, the men reap a double reward, for they escape with their lives and bring home a cargo of gold—rich profit for the dangers they face."Paleontology is a young science. It required quite a bit of set-up; the long history of the Earth and the workings of its rock strata had to be established by geologists. But the subjects of its study, the fossilized bones of ancient animals, have been around millions of years, exposed by the implacable processes of erosion. So before the first paleontologists took to the field, what did we humans make of these odd, bone-like rocks sticking out of the ground, gazing down at us from cliffs?
—Greek author Aelian, c. AD 200, courtesy AMNH
[The mastodon nasal cavity] looks like a gigantic eye socket. And so, you find the skull inside of a cave when you're shipwrecked. Sailors probably told these tales, and they said, "We found not only the skull of the giant ogre, but there were all sorts of bones throughout the cave! It obviously preys on shipwrecked sailors like us. We were lucky to escape."She also notes that until Alexander the Great's conquests, the Greeks would not have been familiar with elephants at all. Nor would the ancient Scythians have known what a dinosaur was. But, as Mayor explains, they certainly used fossilized dinosaur skeletons to their advantage:
It turns out that just by following that story from the Scythians who lived in Central Asia back to its source, I did discover that that area where they were mining gold was also perhaps a nesting ground of protoceratops dinosaurs. When I look at the skeleton of a protoceratops dinosaur, it's about the size of a wolf or a lion; it's got four legs. But its head has a beak. There is a frill on the back of the neck that could be taken for wings in and profile. These fossils are found just before you reach the gold which is eroding down from mountains. That could be said to be guarding the gold.Pretty cool stuff. But you know, for as much mythology has contributed to our culture, and though mythological stories can be deeply resonant... I'll take a scientific understanding of dinosaurs any day.
Jetpack Brontosaurus (Coming Soon!) from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.
This problem arose from specimens collected from the Cambridge Greensand. The specimens were deposited within the Greensand from elsewhere, perhaps from moving sediments or as fossils eroded from other rocks and re-deposited. In many cases, the age and location of the original deposition is unknown.So, we've got a group of pterosaurs which are known from bits and pieces, a number of which were redeposited from their original resting places.
