Very Posh Dinosaur Dinnerware

Greetings from England! Jennie and I just visited from York, and while I was disappointed to find that the Yorkshire Museum was closed for refurbishing until next year, I did run across a nifty dinosaur item in an unexpected place - a fancy kitchen store in the city centre.

The collection is made by Emma Bridgewater and is probably the finest dinosaur dinnerware I've ever seen. I especially like the lunchbox. But it's tiny, because like the rest of the collection, it's meant for children. Because the only people who deserve cool dinosaur things are children.

Stinky little buggers.

For When You're Snowed In

I'm from the midwest, so I'm accustomed to the occasional snow day. Here are a few full-length dinosaur videos you can stream for free online. Nine out of ten Helens agree: it beats the bejeezus out of shoveling the car out of its snowy prison.

Discovery's Dinosaur Central has two episodes of Dinosaur Planet available, as well as clips from the new Clash of the Dinosaurs series, which is about as much as you need to see.

Giants of Patagonia, which is what it says its about, is available at Hulu.

The cult classic Dinosaurus! is available for instant play at Netflix, as is the BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs, Allosaurus: A Walking With Dinosaurs Special, and Chased By Dinosaurs.

The Dinosaur That (Almost) Ate Christmas

Dinosaur Christmas Part 2

The apparently drunk dinosaur is back for more yuletide merriment...

Dinosaur Christmas Part 1

Yeah. I don't know, either.

The Christmas Dinosaur

1. That's a crappy soundtrack.
2. That's not a dinosaur, it's a pterosaur.
3. Ah hell, Merry Christmas.

Dinosaur in Christmas

And now begins the Christmas week dinosaur video marathon. Enjoy!

Insight into the way my little brain works: the main reason I'm posting this is because it's the only dinosaur connection I've been able to make for Perfect Strangers star Mark Linn-Baker, whose wife is the daughter of Arnold Lobel, the illustrator of the recently-featured book Dinosaur Time. Why that strikes me as being important/relevant/neato/cool? I have no idea.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Long Gone

This poem appeared in a Macmillan reading textbook called Snails to Whales, published in 1989. I picked it up used in a Lafayette, IN thrift store. Emily Wakefield or Mary Bauer, I've got your book if you ever want it back.

Bob Shein is credited as the artist. Long Gone comes from a collection of kid's poems called Zoo Doings by Jack Prelutskey, who also published a collection called Tyrannosaur Was a Beast, illustrated by Arnold Lobel, who you may remember from last week's vintage dinosaur art post.

77 Years Ago in Popular Science

The upcoming Dinosaur National Monument warranted a short blurb in the September 1932 issue of Popular Science. Dig those clown shoes on the sauropod. Thx Google Books.

Backlash of the Dinosaurs.

Now that Clash of the Dinosaurs has been out for a couple weeks, the scientists involved have had a chance to see it... and it's not pretty. Matt Wedel, one of the paleontologists behind the fine, enthrallingly-titled blog Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, posted a scathing review today. He describes the process of being contacted by Dangerous, Inc. (the production complany behind the series), consulting with them, and filming his talking head segments. He includes emails and diagrams that he sent Dangerous. As he does on the blog, he went to great lengths to explain sauropod anatomy. I can't imagine working on the series and not being totally thrilled and thankful to have an engaged scientist consulting me.

Instead, the producers took his efforts to debunk the old, tired, dead-in-the-water idea that sauropods had "two brains" and flipped it to make it wound like he endorsed the idea. Really. Read his righteous anger here.

That this kind of spectacle-over-science is done by what is supposedly a science channel is a complete shame. Complete, bitter, miserable freaking shame.

I'm glad the Onion came through when I needed a laugh today.

Away We Go

Jennie and I leave tomorrow for the UK, to spend two glorious yuletide weeks in a veritable winter wonderland. From what I understand, the English do possess rather advanced technology, and the internet should be accessible. But I've taken the precaution of scheduling a full slate of LITC posts for the duration of the trip. No slackin' off here!

We'll be flying in an Airbus A319, apparently. If only I flew in true style. Like the mighty Rasp.

Image courtesy dinoriders.com

The Glob

Here's a really cool Walt Kelly illustration from the February 18, 1952 issue of LIFE Magazine. It accompanied an abbreviated version of The Glob, a children's story by John O'Reilly.



Kelly is a legendary cartoonist, the creator of the classic comic Pogo. Most of his other drawings in LIFE are pretty small, but you can see more at a blog called Satisfactory Comics, including a nasty Allosaurus. It doesn't look like The Glob became a lasting hit, but you certainly can't blame it on Kelly's drawings. They're killer. It's out of print, but there are some used copies to be had. If you're looking to thrill your kids with an "evolutionary fable," you could do a lot worse.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaur Time

In 1974, two giants of children's literature collaborated on a dinosaur book for young readers called Dinosaur Time. Peggy Parish found fame a decade earlier with her first Amelia Bedelia book. Her illustrator was Arnold Lobel, the writer and illustrator of the Caldecott Medal-winning Frog and Toad series.

Lobel's illustrations, as you'd expect from his other work, are fanciful and full of personality. I'm especially fond of this saggy-skinned Stegosaurus...

...and this roly-poly ankylosaur.

I'd like to share some of the cool two-page spreads, such as a Pentaceratops, but my copy, an old hardcover cast-off from Burtsfield School in West Lafayette, IN, is super fragile. If you don't want to take my word for it, it looks like a softcover version is still in print.

Tawa Hits

Illustration by Jorge Gonzalez, courtesy National Science Foundation

Tawa hallae, a new Triassic theropod, hit the nets today in a big way. It's very exciting, because we have two skeletons which are pretty complete. We need more Triassic dinosaurs! This one is especially cool because of the way it fits in between Herrerasaurus and Coelophysis on the dinosaur evolutionary tree. Herrerasaurus is more like pre-dinosaur archosaurs, and for a while has existed in a fuzzy nether-region between the two, with its status as a dinosaur subject to debate. Melding the more primitive characteristics of Herrerasaurus with those of Coelophysis, Tawa shows that Herrerasaurus was a dinosaur.

The National Science Foundation has a special report on Tawa at their website with tons of information.

Six Oviraptors a-laying...

Looking for a cheap gift? Buy this positively Luis Rey-ian nesting Oviraptor for someone you feel affection for.

Speaking of Rey and Oviraptor, one thing I love about Gee and Rey's largely speculative A Field Guide to Dinosaurs is the description of Oviraptor's nesting habits. Gee writes that Oviraptor and Protoceratops nest in mixed colonies, and that one way Oviraptor pays its keep is by preying on small mammals and reptiles, potential egg-stealers. It's a bit of dino-humor, because Oviraptor literally means "egg-thief," based on the fact that the original fossil was found near a nest of what were believed to be Protoceratops eggs. We've found fossils of brooding oviraptorids (as well as actual fossilized embryos in their eggs), so the name isn't quite accurate anymore.

Then again, that little contradiction may not matter at all. The only specimen we have of Oviraptor philoceratops itself has a badly damaged skull which does not bear the kind of crest you see in the model above. That head more looks like that of the closely related Citipati. And the brooding oviraptorids? They're all Citipatis. My guess is that the people at Safari, makers of the figure, chose name recognition over accuracy here.

O. philoceratops nest at the AMNH, via Wikimedia Commons. Uploaded by FunkMonk

Dino-Riders

Here's the whole first episode of the classic toy-based cartoon Dino-Riders. Why? Because this the pinnacle of televised entertainment for suburban American caucasian males growing up in the 1980's. And probably for everyone else, too.

Clash of the Dinosaurs

The Amazing Transparent Deinonychus from Clash of the Dinosaurs

The Discovery Channel's hype machine has been in high gear lately in anticipation of the premiere of Clash of the Dinosaurs last night. I haven't had a chance to watch it and probably won't until it comes to Netflix or Discovery puts it on their website. However, reviews are popping up on the paleoblogosphereorama. Matt Martyniuk of Dinogoss, Asher Elbein of The Faster Times, and Brian Switek of Dinosaur Tracking and Laelaps have all posted reviews that are well worth reading.

All three have reservations; they agree that the animated sequences are too short and are repeated too often, and that substantial illustration of the scientific process is all but missing. Animation may expensive, but communicating a scientific concept really doesn't have to be. Discovery has to realize this' look no further than their long-running Mythbusters for an example of a show that gets plenty of science into an entertaining hour.

Martyniuk's review goes into detail about the good and bad points of the dinosaurs' anatomy. This is stuff that the average viewer probably doesn't care about - things like the number of claws on Triceratops' front foot, for example. Keep in mind that this is ostensibly a science program, on a science network, and the producers of the show should be held to a high standard. Comparing COTD to the History Channel's Jurassic Fight Club, Elbein writes, "In both shows, the proportion of evidence to evisceration is badly skewed. What little science is present is hidden in a welter of didactic pronouncements, half truths, and speculation." Speculation like COTD's assertion that "Quetzalcoatlus had excellent vision and could detect the UV traces of urine trails from miles up.” This is a non sequitir; it has no basis in science. I've also heard that Iguanodon was the dinosaur with the best penmanship.

Speculation is interesting and fun. Michael Crichton's frilled, poison-spitting Dilophosaurus was a huge leap. But he was writing a mass-market thriller, which has no burden of accuracy (not only that, Jurassic Park starts with a disclosure of such flights of fancy). If there is some kind of basis for a theory of how a long extinct creature saw, we should be presented with the reasoning behind it. That actually reveals something of the scientific process, and that should be the ultimate goal.

I'm not saying I'm not going to catch COTD the first chance I get. I set grievances aside to watch animated dinosaurs go buck wild. It's one of those cases in which we need a bit of nutrition with our dessert, though. The nice thing is that eventually, knowledge about the natural world exceeds the thrill of spectacle. I know I'm not alone in that sentiment.

Dino Stuff @ ThinkGeek

So... rumor has it that there is a holiday swiftly approaching, during which a sizable portion of the Earth's human population endures each other's presence long enough to exchange gifts. Here are, in my humble estimation, the three best dinosaurish items at the popular web retailer ThinkGeek. Why only three? Well, for being a nerd-centric store, they have surprisingly few dinosaur items.

1) The Dinosaur Plant

Yes, this falls into the category of "things unnecessarily described with the word 'dinosaur' because they happen to be really, really old." Generally, this kind of annoys me. But I have to admit, the idea of a plant even I could not kill by neglect is okey-dokey.

2) DIY Dinosaur Lamps

THESE ARE INCREDIBLY AWESOME!

3) Evolvems Evolutionary Transforming Plush Toys

There are five varieties of Evolvems, and thankfully, one of them is a dinosaur. Rather, it's a pair of dinosaurs. Evolvems are reversible plush toys: unzip them, turn them inside out, and get a different critter. They score huge ChasmoPointsTM for picking interesting, left-field dinosaurs. Instead of a boring, safe pairing like Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, the clever devils at Flying Monkey picked the obscure basal, Jurassic ceratopsian Yinlong and its cretaceous descendant Styracosaurus (bonus ChasmoPointsTM for not picking Triceratops). This is one of the coolest ways to get kids thinking about natural history real young. Also, buy one for me.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Tyrannosaurus by Janet Riehecky

The Child's World published a series of dinosaur titles for young readers in the eighties, written by Janet Riehecky. I got my hairy little primate hands on their Tyrannosaurus title recently. It features illustrations by Diana Magnuson, a veteran children's book illustrator. Magnuson doesn't have a whole lot of paleoart on her resume, but she illustrated about half of the books in this series. Judging by the watercolor pages she did for this title, she did a fine job.

The colors aren't lurid, sticking to muted greens, grays, and browns. Naturally, most of the book depicts the Late Cretaceous which T. rex inhabited, but an early spread accurately depicts a Jurassic environment with an Allosaurus, some Camptosaurus, and a Stegosaurus. A keen-eyed child would easily be able to differentiate the Allosaurus from T. rex, by virtue of its lighter build, bulkier, three-fingered hands, and smaller head.

This one has to be one of my favorites, if only for the gore factor. I'm pretty sure that the stance would have been impossible for a T. rex. But what the heck. That's a big hunk of neck-meat.

Throughout the rest of the book, T. rex is depicted with the correct, horizontal-backbone posture. Riehecky is a bit of a dinosaur nut, and she consulted with the Field Museum to ensure the accuracy of the information.

I'm really eager to find more titles in this series - what's most intriguing is that Riehecky strays from the big names, devoting titles to Hypsilophodon, Saltasaurus, Baryonyx, and Oviraptor. I just found a used copy of the Baryonyx book on Barnes and Noble, by a different illustrator. Look for that one soon...

Eocursor

I have a soft spot for the humble dinosaurs. The dinosaurs that didn't sport outlandish spines, crests, and claws. The dinosaurs who mainly interest paleoartists for their ability to fit in the mouths of larger theropods. If you were to time travel back to the Mesozoic with the intent of bringing back a pet, I think these guys would have been your best bet. Smallish herbivores like Hypsilophodon, Drinker, Othnielsaurus, Fruitadens, or the subject of today's post, dog-sized Eocursor.

Eocursor parvus by ArthurWeasley, via Wikimedia Commons

Eocursor parvus was discovered in South Africa in the early nineties and finally named and described by Richard Butler, Roger Smith, and David Norman in 2007 (Eocursor means "dawn runner," due to those long runner's legs it sports). Butler just published a fuller description of Eocursor's anatomy in the journal of the Linnaean Society.

By the Cretaceous period, the great limb of the dinosaur family tree known as the ornithischians had flowered into a diverse group which comprised the dominant herbivores in a variety of environments. They included the horned ceratopsians, the many flavors of duckbills, the spiked and armored ankylosaurs, and the dome-heads. Iguanodon, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Ankylosaurus were all ornithischians.

Of the precious few Triassic ornithischians paleontologists have found, Eocursor is the best known, and is as close as we've come to a shared ancestor for all of those important groups. All of the Triassic ornithischians are known from a pretty small area- they've all been found in Argentina and South Africa, which during the Triassic period were connected as part of the great southern continent called Gondwana. During the Jurassic and Cretaceous, they spread all over the globe. According to Butler, Eocursor's general similarity to ornithischians of the Early Jurassic period - primarily Lesothosaurus, Heterodontosaurus, and Scutellosaurus - lends support to the idea that the great diversification in the ornithischian family occured after the extinction event that ended the Triassic and began the Jurassic. As new ecological niches opened up, the ornithischians adapted to them. They developed new ways to get around and to eat. As predatory theropods likewise evolved to take advantage of the new prey species, the ornithischians evolved defensive mechanisms. It's an evolutionary cascade that would result in all of the wonderfully bizarre forms dinosaurs would take.

The Triassic is a mysterious time in the evolution of the dinosaurs, and as noted above, has not offered up the great bounties of fossils the Jurassic and Cretaceous have. But new discoveries have the potential to shed a lot of light on how the early dinosaurs split into the groups we know well. A great place to find out about new developments in Triassic paleontology - which includes plenty of interesting non-dinosaurs - is a blog called Chinleana.

UPDATED - Just saw that Zach Miller wrote about one of those cool non-dino Triassic critters at When Pigs Fly Returns!

UPDATED AGAIN - And Chinleana writes about the same critter, which is called Vancleavea. I love the artist's rendition. Very dragon-like.

Trilobites

Remember the Jurassic ammonite model I featured in October? It was by Leif Beckmann, (flickr user Callovium Shale) and it was the bomb. Well, the trilobite I mentioned in that post is now complete. The species is identified as Olenoides serratus, a denizen of the distant Cambrian era.

Dorsal:


Ventral:

Incredible. I love trilobites. Good stinkin' job, Leif!

Playful Paleo Portraiture

Flickr user Niznoz takes some damn splendid pictures of dinosaur toys. It appears, to my untrained eye, that the subjects are Jurassic Park figures. There are a bunch of them, but here are a few of my favorites.

Good on you, Niznoz!

Dinomite!

My wife recently returned home from a thrift store with a really special treat for me: Dinomite, the dinosaur adventure game for dinosaur lovers.

I was so ready to just rip this one apart. It has it all! A Charles Knight Laelaps redrawn as Allosaurus! A suspiciously brachiosaurid Diplodocus! A mishmash of extinct creatures that aren't dinosaurs, including cavemen! A back-of-the-box blurb that refers to "Stone Age Dinosaurs!" I was so ready to write up the cattiest board game review in the history of catty board game reviews. It's a long and storied history, trust me.

Then, after a quick check of the googles, I found out that Joshua White, the man credited with creating the game, wasn't a man at all. He was a little boy. A little boy who was bored one rainy day, so he decided to create his own board game.

Fine, Joshua White. You're a kid (well, you were a kid). I guess I can't rip you too badly. Mostly, I wonder what's become of you. What do you do to follow up getting a board game published at nine years old?

More importantly, my game is missing two playing pieces. Can you hook me up with a couple more? I have a feeling I'm in for some long nights of heated Dinomite competition with 1-5 of my closest friends.

Why Dinosaurs Matter

Why bother studying dinosaurs? I ask myself this question from time to time. I was spurred to consider it again, earlier today, by a post at Archosaur Musings. In it, Dave Hone lets loose on a sloppily designed pterosaur toy. I have to admit, it's really fun to see a paleontologist rip apart a bad toy like this. I enjoy writing the occasional rant, but I'm paranoid that I'll commit a factual blunder, which would be all the more embarrassing for the righteous anger with which it was delivered. I don't actually get spitting mad over a mislabeled duckbill figurine. Seriously, I don't. Really. Honest.

Hone's post made me question why I should feel this annoyance in the first place. What does it matter to me that some kid's toy Parasaurolophus looks more like Corythosaurus? Will it really make a difference? If he cares enough to actually read the packaging, he'll probably have forgotten by the time he grows up. I know in my gut that dinosaurs are worthy of study, and of public attention. And I know that it's not just for the sake of knowledge. Especially as we've learned that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, that they aren't just novelties. Their evolution has lasting effects on the world.

Conveniently enough, one of the next blogs on my reading list was Scott Sampson's new The Whirlpool of Life, and he was kind enough to answer this question quite eloquently. Here's an excerpt; be sure to head to the blog to read the whole post.

...dinosaurs offer an exceptional access point into the Great Story—our story. They can help us forge links between the distant past and the present day (e.g., modern birds as living dinosaurs) and insert us back into the flow of deep time (Tyrannosaurus lived closer to you in time than to Allosaurus or Stegosaurus). These ancient creatures can be used to demonstrate that every ecosystem on Earth, whether in the Mesozoic or the present day, is the culmination of millions upon millions of years of co-evolution between and among life forms.

I love his illustration of the immensity of time, comparing the time since the K-T event with the span of time between Cretaceous T. rex and Jurassic Allosaurus. Puts things in context in a handful of words. From what I've read at Whirlpool, Sampson is a fine writer and a great communicator of science. His recent book, Dinosaur Odyssey, is on its way to me and I'll be reviewing it shortly.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Questions Children Ask

I have an ever-expanding collection of vintage dinosaur art which I'm in the midst of digitizing. Most of it is in the form of obsolete children's books. I'm as big a sucker for old design and illustration as I am for dinosaurs. Mix the two, and I'm happy as a pillbug.

Here's a good one from a 1956 book called Questions Children Ask, published by the Standard Education Society (here's a Flickr set featuring other pages from the same book). It's credited to Henry Harringer (1892-1980), who seems to have been a Chicago-based illustrator who toiled away in obscurity. I can find little information about him, but everything he's connected to is out of Chicago. His only claim to modest fame appears to be a theater, proposed at the Century of Progress Exhibition, which would have brought Ziegfield Follies style shows to the Windy City.

I love this caption: "The Diplodocus was nearly 90 feet long. It had a very small brain and was clumsy and stupid." These old science books always made a point of impugning the intelligence of one dinosaur or another. I can't hold that against old Mr. Harringer, of course.

The dinosaur on your table

In the USA, today is Thanksgiving, a holiday calling for us to celebrate all of the blessings of being American by ratcheting up our everyday gluttony to extremes. What better way to prove our worth than to eat the avian theropod Meleagris gallopavo?

For a fun project, turn the carcass of your turkey into a paleontology lesson. Matt Wedel tells you how. He also has one of the best airport security stories I've heard. "Literally the bone of a cow." Hilarious.

PS. I would have turned the axe into a Quidditch broom if I wasn't so flippin' hungry right now.

It's the little things

If I was a big-time dinosaur paleontologist, and I had my druthers, I'd sure as hell be carrying the keys to my ultra-secure fossil locker on one of these bad boys!


I snagged these for a buck apiece at Joann Fabrics today. They were sitting with all of the other impulse-buy items in a little plastic tub marked "Animal Babies" and "Dino Babies." You want a closer look at the snout of that Spinosaurus?

Proper! I love the look on his face. Full of mischief and sass. I've got to give a hearty dollop of paleo-props to the good folks at Safari Limited, who also produce the Carnegie Collection replicas you see in finer museum gift shops across this land. They've bashed the ball out of the park with these keychains. I only had three dollars on me, so I had to leave a few dinos in the tub. When I go to sleep tonight, I'll hear them calling to me...

Maybe they'll drive me crazy enough to fork over $62.06 for a whole tub of 'em!

Aardonyx takes a bow

I've been so slammed with work that I've just now been able to dig into the details on the new prosauropod Aardonyx celestae, discovered in South Africa. Aardonyx was described in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B on November 11 and the lead author is Adam Yates, who writes the essential paleoblog Dracovenator. His excitement over the publication is obvious when you read his post. This is a perfect example of a scientist using his blog for the public benefit. His post breaks everything down into digestible bits, and without the hyperbole and knuckleheadedness the traditional media likes to throw in for extra flavor.

Aardonyx is one of those special creatures that sits somewhere in between two lineages. All dinosaurs are believe to have evolved from a bipedal common ancestor. The bipedal Aardonyx displays skeletal features which are consistent with what we would expect to see in a family of dinosaurs for whom large size is being naturally selected for. At some point, the increasing size of sauropods would have necessitated the greater weight-bearing capabilities of quadrupedalism. Aardonyx appears to be one of those dinosaurs who could employ either stance as the situation required.

Here's a video of coauthor Dr. Matt Bonnan of Western Illinois University explaining how Aardonyx was discovered and the implications:


There's a lot more great information at Western Illinois University's Aardonyx site. Also, just noticed a story in one of the Chicago papers about Bonnan.

Definitely Dinosaurs!

Definitely Dinosaurs! The classic Playskool dinosaur toys of the mid-eighties. Warning about the link: don't expect scientific accuracy. Psittacosaurus is all kinds of wrong. And after they slapped a sail on the back of their Spinosaurus, they stopped trying. The snout is waaaay too blunt. I don't understand why companies go to the trouble of making toys like this and then stop just short of making it reasonably close to the real thing in design. I mean, I don't expect perfection, but Spinosaurus should not look like Allosaurus with a sail. It should look like Spinosaurus.

Here are a couple of old commercials for the toys:

Oh, if only my parents had pushed me into child-actor auditions. I could have been one of those obnoxious little turds. They probably got paid in toys, which to me would have been worth the deep psychological scars of being a child actor.

If Definitely Dinos are a little too tame for you, alls I gotsta say is "teeth, claws, muscles and jaws!!!!"

Anyone know of any more recent toys that put feathers on their theropods? I mean toys meant to be played with, not models. I can understand video games, like the new Jurassic: The Hunted, skimping on feathers for budgetary reasons. But I don't see why we can't give the children of the world the luxuriously feathered Velociraptors they deserve.

What about "WhattaCroc?"

Araripesuchus wegeneri, from Nat Geo. Drawing by Todd Marshall.

National Geographic News is featuring a slideshow displaying the stars of their new special "When Crocs Ate Dinosaurs," premiering tomorrow, November 21 on the National Geographic Channel. Get a sneak-peak of the digital reincarnations of paleontologist Paul Sereno's RatCroc, DuckCroc, DogCroc, BoarCroc and...

Wait for it...

PancakeCroc. You know, because its head is flat. Flat like a pancake.

Seriously, it's bad enough to give these crocodiles nicknames that sound like creatures the Battletoads would kill. But PancakeCroc? Really? Really? Why not nickname Stegosaurus PlateBack? And we could just call elephants HoseHeads.

Because I don't believe that people are too stupid to handle the binomial names, let's just set the record straight.

• BoarCroc = Kaprosuchus saharicus
• RatCroc = Araripesuchus rattoides
• DogCroc = Araripesuchus wegeneri
• DuckCroc = Anatosuchus minor
• PancakeCroc = Laganosuchus thaumastos

The University of Chicago neglects to place the blame for these nicknames, so we have to assume that it's all on Sereno. I guess I see the reasoning here. The point is to grab people's attention. But the -suchus suffix (meaning crocodile) is such a good one. It's fun to say. I'd like to believe that these ugly compound nicknames aren't really necessary.

The root of this might be Robert Bakker, who repeatedly refers to Lagosuchus as "rabbit-croc" in The Dinosaur Heresies. Though in that case, I can see exactly why he would do so: in attempting to overhaul the popular image of dinosaurs, it helped to paint the image of one of their forebears as an active creature, an counterintuitive amalgam of reptile and mammal.

Doing it the old fashioned way

I'm just going to keep rolling with the recent burst of dino-history subjects. This time, we'll look at a modern attempt to get back to the way paleontology was done in the old days...

The AMNH Scow MARY JANE, 1912

Between 1910 and 1914, after his great successes in the badlands of Montana, paleontologist Barnum Brown led an AMNH team on a series of expeditions into Alberta via the Red Deer River. A Canadian team led by Charles Sternberg also took to the river, engaging in a friendly rivalry with the Americans. Their mode of transportation was a kind of flat-bottomed boat called a scow. It was a very sensible way to search for new fossils in the days before paved roads. The river which made transport so easy also eroded away outcrops of rock, exposing fossils that had been buried for 65 million years or more. One of Barnum Brown's great discoveries during these expeditions was the tyrannosaur Albertasaurus, which thrilled me on my trips to the Field Museum pre-Sue.

A senior fossil preparation technician for the Royal Tyrrell Museum named Darren Tanke plans on commemorating the centennial of the first of these scow expeditions by embarking on one of his own. Since August, his team has maintained a blog to chronicle the project's progress. As if you needed more proof of Tanke's devotion to and knowledge of paleontological history, the scow is to be named in honor of Peter C. Kaisen, a technician on those early expeditions whose work in preserving valuable new fossils was crucial to the trips' mission - though naturally he's been overshadowed by the huge figure of Brown.

The Dinosaur Hunting By Boat 2010 Facebook page goes into greater detail about the project. It looks like they intend to stay as faithful as possible to the technology of a century ago; this isn't going to be a cushy leisure cruise. As the FB page says, "Food will be preserved with ice (or canned/pickled/dried), cooking done on an antique wood burning stove, coal lanterns for light, etc. The replica scow will be a floating museum as it will be fully equipped with period antiques or modern replicas of same." The team's boat will be modeled after the Mary Jane, pictured above.

I'm just super-impressed with this undertaking. Amazing.

ALSO: In case you haven't had enough giant-crocodiles-attacking-giant-theropods action, Dave Hone has featured a nice painting by paleoartist Bob Nicholls in this post.

One way to mark your days

Making sense of time's ceaseless march is a real pain in the rear. But that's why we have calendars. Now that 2009 is nearly spent, it's time to think about how we'll keep track of 2010. Here's one way: an awesome toy dinosaur calendar.

It features such wicked imagery as this:


By lisbokt, via flickr.

But jeez, there really don't seem to be many dinosaur calendars. Not for 2010, at least. Here's one. And another. Maybe some more will be popping up in the next month or so. For example, the Smithsonian may announce a 2010 pop-up calendar, as they've done the last few years.

Yale's Torosaurus

I'd never seen the bronze Torosaurus statue outside Yale's Peabody Museum until Carl Zimmer used it in a recent post on his great blog The Loom, preparing for a speech there.


The Peabody TOROSAURUS, via altopower @ flickr.

The life-size statue was created by sculptor and museum preparator Michael Anderson and revealed to the public in October of 2005. Especially cool is that it's been placed within a Cretaceous-themed garden, stocked with plants related to those that Torosaurus and its kin would have been familiar with, including ferns and magnolia trees. It's a terrific, dynamic sculpture - the only minor demerit I can give is that it's missing is a saddle. Next time I'm in the northeast, I'm definitely checking this bad boy out.

If you've got a notion to, go ahead and buy a book about the statue's creation from the Peabody's poorly designed on-line store. They claim there's also DVD, but finding it on the site is harder than finding an actual Torosaurus fossil. Especially if you accept Jack Horner's assertion that Torosaurus is not a genuine genus, but is merely the most mature form of Triceratops.

Jack Horner on Skeptic's Guide

Dr. John Horner was the guest on a recent episode of the podcast "The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe." It's a really well conducted interview, which you'd expect from the Skeptic's Guide crew. It mainly deals with Horner's recently published paper which proposed that Stygimoloch, and Dracorex are not distinct species, but are younger forms of Pachycephalosaurus.

They touch on Dr. Robert Bakker's contention that this is not the case, and that he is in possession of a genuine juvenile Pachycephalosaurus that does not resemble either Stygimoloch or Dracorex. You can hear a bit of Horner's irritation as he basically dares Bakker to either publish about it or shut his trap. Juicy.

Paper Dinosaurs

Edward Drinker Cope's reconstruction of Laelaps, from PAPER DINOSAURS

The Linda Hall Library of Kansas City, MO hosts a very cool on-line exhibit called Paper Dinosaurs. It is well-worth a few minutes of your time. It's chronologically organized, and all of the images have nice, long descriptions.

From the site:

In 1996, the Linda Hall Library mounted an exhibition of original printed materials related to the history of dinosaur discovery. On view were most of the classic papers of dinosaur lore, including original publications by Gideon Mantell, Richard Owen, Othniel Marsh, Roy Chapman Andrews, and a host of others; there were forty-nine items in all. The original exhibition ran from October 17, 1996 through April 30, 1997.

There is a lot of great stuff featured here, from the iconic, such as Robert Bakker's Deinonychus, to the obscure. It's also a good primer on the colorful history of dinosaur paleontology (a subject I fully intend to write more on in the future). If you'd like to order a copy of the catalog from the original exhibition, it is available from the library for the reasonable sum of twelve US dollars.

Diplodocus Diplomacy

In 1907, the American Museum of Natural History made the remarkable gift of a Diplodocus skeleton to Kaiser Wilhelm II for display in the then-brand-new Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt. While the Carnegie Musem had given a Diplodocus mount to the British Museum in 1905, it was a plaster cast, a replica. This AMNH gift to the Germans consisted of actual fossil bone, mounted in relief on a wood-framed slab of plaster.


From the July 1907 issue of WORLD TODAY

Here's an excerpt of an article from the July 1907 issue of a magazine called World Today about the gift - it starts on page 846 if you care to check out the original. It's a nice piece of old-timey dinosaur lore. My favorite bit describes an ingenious (if utterly silly) hypothetical function of a sauropod's tail:

One of the most remarkable structural features of the diplodocus was the whip-like and powerful tail, thirty feet long, over half the length of the body. This served the creature as a propeller, enabling him to swim very rapidly through the water when attacked and pursued by the carnivorous dinosaurs of the same period. Another peculiar function of this ponderous tail was that it acted like a lever and balanced and supported the animal when he assumed an upright position, which he is thought to have done both in water and on land.

Silly but harmless outdated thinking (the article entitled "The Negro Situation - One Way Out" is not so harmless). I'd love to know what happened to this mount. I haven't been able to find any recent pictures of it, though the Senckenberg Museum does have a free standing Diplodocus mount in their dinosaur hall, and a statue outside. Very curious.

Evidence For Dinosaurian Warm-Bloodedness

A very neat study came out today in the open source on-line journal PLos ONe. The matter of dinosaur metabolism has been long-debated. For a long time, dinosaurs were characterized as sluggish reptiles, cold-blooded and dim-witted. That thinking changed with the work of paleontologist John Ostrom in the sixties, and by the mid-nineties, pop culture had warmed to the idea of active, warm-blooded creatures. Just remember that signature moment in Jurassic Park when the raptor exhales and fogs up the window on the kitchen door.

This study, led by Washington University anthropologist Herman Pontzer, draws on the biomechanics of living animals to determine the metabolic cost of walking and running in bipedal dinosaurs. Why would an anthropologist have a unique insight into this issue? Pontzer has had previous experience in the energy cost of bipedalism and was the lead author of a 2008 study seeking to shed light on the evolutionary pressures that led to increasing bipedalism in hominids. As it turns out, the length of the leg - or distance of the hip from the ground - is a great way to determine how much energy a biped uses when walking about.

For this new paper, Pontzer and his colleagues analyzed dinosaurs ranging in size from tiny Microraptor up to giants like T. rex. In addition to the rather simple leg-length measurement, they also used a more complex method which figures up the amount of energy that would be needed to activate leg muscles for walking and running. For all dinosaurs, it was found that a slow run required more energy than cold-bloodedness can provide. To walk slowly, the results for the smaller dinosaurs were more ambiguous. But for the large ones, they still pointed clearly to warm-bloodedness. This doesn't necessarily mean that the dinosaurs possessed the kind of warm-bloodedness you and I do. It may very well be that there was a uniquely dinosaurian method of regulating temperature. But it certainly distances them from cold-blooded, sun-bathing reptiles even further.

Plateosaurus (big guy in the middle) by Luis Rey, from A Field Guide to Dinosaurs by Rey and Henry Gee

What's really interesting here is that this result doesn't just apply to the most bird-like dinosaurs, or the ones we might expect to have the most active lifestyle, such as T. rex. In fact, it held true for Plateosaurus, a familiar early ancestor of the giant sauropods from the Triassic era. this would indicate that warm-bloodedness, or something very much like it, was present down low on the dinosaur family tree. This issue is much like the bird origin issue: there's an ever-growing heap of evidence. It makes sense, really - consider that dinosaurs were the dominant form of large land-dwelling animals on the planet for nearly two-hundred million years. They occupied all kinds of niches in a great diversity of habitats. To be that widely successful, they had to have been very adaptable. Warm-bloodedness is a basic requirement for being able to take advantage of so much opportunity.

Check out Palaeoblog and Dinosaur Tracking for more info.

From the LOC: NY Trib Sauropods

A tail draggin' Diplodocus and a pair of "amphibious" brontosaurs, published in the December 11, 1904 New York Tribune Illustrated Supplement. Via the LOC Flickr stream.

Here's a delightful excerpt from the accompanying story:

The appearance of a herd of these great monsters of past ages trooping down Broadway, uncontrolled, would cause an absolute cessation of business there. The street would be cleared with alacrity. The hallways of every building along the street would lie tilled instantaneously, and every elevator glutted with humanity fleeing for safety to the upper stories of the sky-scrapers. Those who preserved their mental equilibrium sufficiently to gaze calmly forth upon the procession of strange beasts as they passed in front of the buildings would be struck with several things. Perhaps they might think of Noah's problem with added respect...

There's a lot more where that came from, too. I may not have gotten it totally correct - the scan was full to the brim with OCR errors. Check out a PDF of the page here.

Name of the Year

I'm a huge fan of giving new species, especially dinosaurs, names relevant to the places where they're found. Though I admittedly used to recoil at the odd-looking names coming out of China, that was just me being a spoiled American brat. After all, if I could handle Parasaurolophus or Deinonychus, I should have had the moxie to figure out Tuojiangosaurus. In hindsight though, I guess I can't expect the younger me to understand the importance of engaging all kinds of people in science.

The point is, I love the name of the newly described Early Cretaceous ankylosaur out of Montana: Tatankacephalus cooneyorum. Bill Parsons, who discovered the fossils with his wife Kris, chose the name to honor Native American culture. Tatanka is the Oglala word for buffalo, and if you don't believe me, ask my friend Mike, who has pretty nearly memorized Dances with Wolves.

T. cooneyorum by Bill Parsons

Tatankacephalus is closely related to Gastonia, which featured prominently in Robert Bakker's paleofictional novel, Raptor Red. Both are basal in the ankylosaurid family; Tatankacephalus exhibits some "transitional" features which distinguish the well-known ankylosaurids from later in the Cretaceous. Unfortunately, we don't know for sure whether for not Tatankacephalus bore the familiar tail-club many of its relatives had.

Never Forget

If I was still in the midst of my ruff n' tumble, rowdy teenage days,* I'd be taggin' the "Never Forget" sauropod all over. Apparently, they almost exclusively occur in Granville Island, Vancouver.


By flickr user oblique


By flickr user mlaaker

But here's one from the UK, with a different design, a brachiosaur.

By flickr user demosthien

*Ruff n' tumble, rowdy teenage days not guaranteed to have actually occurred.

Tyrannosaur Tid-Bits

Well, guess what? There's more Tyrannosaur goodness in the news. It's about time; I was starting to fear that we'd run out of discoveries. It had been weeks since some new detail about that most iconic of dinosaur families came out. Weeks!

First up, a bit of phylogenetic housekeeping. Proceratosaurus bradleyi, a theropod of the Middle Jurassic, has been placed within the Tyrannosauroidea. The paper was first published in March, but just now came on-line, though it's unfortunately not available in its entirety. A British-German team of paleontologists created a 3D image of the skull using computed tomography technology. This new examination of the skull revealed that, like all tyrannosaurs, the bones of its skull were highly pneumatized, meaning they were chock full of air chambers. It also bears the distinctive D-shaped teeth at the front of the upper jaw as do other tyrannosaurs. Check out the BBC for an absolutely lovely little video summing up this new knowledge.

It's been a long and bumpy ride for P. bradleyi, first called Megalosaurus, then believed to be a relative of Ceratosaurus. About ten years ago, it inched a bit closer to home when a University of Maryland study placed it within the Coelurosaurs the group which contains the tyrannosaurs. This analysis makes it the oldest known of T. rex's relatives, a few million years older than the Chinese Guanlong. And it reveals that the early tyrannosaurs had a large range: P. bradleyi was found in a British quarry.

Next: Yet more evidence that Tyrannosaurs were given to rather vicious intraspecific tussles. A new paper in the journal Palaios describes a team of Northern Illinois University paleontologists' analysis of a juvenile tyrannosaur nicknamed "Jane." A series of lesions on her skull were found to have been left by the teeth of another tyrannosaur, and though they healed, the wound was serious enough that as "she" grew, her snout was warped to one side.

One of the things I love about paleontology is that though we can never hope to have a complete view of the ancient world (or worlds), we'll always have more to learn. And each discovery colors in that picture a bit more.

Proceratosaurus drawing from the British Natural History Museum.

Arctic Dinosaurs

On Monday, John Sibbick kindly supplied me with an image of one of his pieces which depicted dinosaurs below the Antarctic circle. If you're wondering what may have been happening on the other side of the globe, the NOVA episode Arctic Dinosaurs may clear it up for you.

It deals with our attempts to build an accurate picture of what life was like in Late Cretaceous Alaska, where we've found evidence of a thriving ecosystem, despite the fact that it was much closer to the North Pole than it is today. The most fascinating segment deals with British paleobotanist Robert Spicer, who developed a technique to tell average temperature in an area based on the ratio of smooth-edged to jagged-edged leaves. Spicer determines that in the Late Cretaceous, the Alaskan north slope had a climate somewhat like that of modern Canada's Pacific coast. I love the way disparate disciplines converge to increase our understanding of prehistoric life.

I was surprised that every dinosaur was depicted naked - no feathers. This despite the fact that there are plenty of animated troodons scampering around. It is very likely that Troodon bore feathers, even more likely if some of them lived north of the Arctic circle. Of course, feathers are much harder to animate than smooth or scaly skin... another reason to kick some loose change PBS's way.

Baby

Anyone remember this classic from the mid eighties? Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. It freaked me out.


These sauropods move a bit like Snuffaluffagus. I wonder what the good folks at SV-POW would make of their rather noodly necks? Though I suppose wallaby butchering is of greater import at the moment.

An Interview with John Sibbick

A scene from Antarctic Australasia by John Sibbick

A couple of weeks ago, a brief post at Palaeoblog about Scottish geologist Roderick Murchison used an image of a sea scorpion hunting on the floor of a Silurian sea to tie into Murchison's role as the man who named the Silurian period (about 445 to 415 million years ago). That image grabbed my attention, and I embarked on a short quest to identify the responsible artist. I found that his name is John Sibbick, and I was already quite familiar with his work.

Sibbick's artwork has been seen in museums all over the world, as well as bringing life to many articles in National Geographic Magazine; wander through the galleries on his website and put a name to the work you've surely seen. Beyond prehistory, he has done work for the role-playing game series Warhammer 40,000 and has illustrated books on mythology.

Mr. Sibbick recently took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions about his work.

What was your first piece of palaeoart?

The first collaboration with a palaeontologist was in the early 80's. I was commissioned to illustrate a general book on dinosaurs and other mesozoic life. There were over 40 illustrations - most of it in colour with a limited schedule and budget. I struck lucky with the author, David Norman. The title was eventually called When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and was aimed at juvenile dinosaur enthusiasts. The first painting was the front and back cover featuring a mature Triceratops posturing and raising dust in a Cretaceous landscape. Norman was great to work with and we developed a working routine which I still stick to: a lot of sketches and questions, back and forth until the detail and composition is right. The book was completed and immediately shelved for 4 years. Eventually it surfaced at the same time as another David Norman collaboration, which was The Encyclopaedia of Dinosaurs.

How much time do you devote to keeping up with new developments in paleontology?

My painting technique is pretty labour-intensive and up to recent years involved working long hours. I tend to collect information on new developments as they become published, and take any new data on board if it is relevant to the job in hand and question how it affects the present work. I also take note on various differing opinions and who sides with what. In general I try and keep up to speed and gather as much material as possible.

Have any recent paleontological discoveries excited you? What about a discovery makes your neurons fire?

Many things get me going, and I try to gather all I can about the fossil material and to see the evidence for myself. Of course the relentless discoveries from China are fabulous and it was a great privilege to get to see some of the actual prepared specimens a while ago at the Natural History museum in London. These are some of the most beautiful fossils I've seen.

I am fascinated by dinosaur trackways and the recent sauropod sequences in France and other European sites are astonishing. This is as direct contact as we can get with these giants and can indicate detail of posture and sometimes behaviour if enough material is revealed. I would be very interested in attempting to reconstruct the landscapes of some of these classic dinosaur highways.


A Triassic Trackway in South Wales by John Sibbick

Do you have a favorite era of Earth's history to depict?

Not really. But there are periods I would like to revisit perhaps. The Carboniferous Coal Measures in the UK interest me and it would be nice to draw a series of scenes of the same area at times of fluctuating water levels indicating the rates of decay and growth of forests and marginal plants. The Permian/Triassic boundary is also fascinating, perhaps more than the KT event...

How were you informed that the pterosaur Ludodactylus sibbicki would be named in your honor? Did you know the paleontologists already? Do you receive any sort of plaque or ribbon to commemorate the honor?

All very informal. I had worked on Arambourgiana with David Martill previously, and a crocodile illustration with Dino Frey. D.M. emailed me or phoned me to let me know of the plan, and later I met him on the Isle of Wight at a conference and he confirmed that it was published in a paper and the volume "Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs" from the Geological Society, London 2003. There was no blue plaque or secret handshake involved - or was there?

Are there any subjects you would like to get another crack at, to incorporate new discoveries?

For some time I have hoped to focus more on marine reptiles, homing in on UK finds. I have not done much more than a few ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs up to now. The recent pliosaur skull discovered in Weymouth Bay in Dorset has drawn my attention away from dinosaurs for a while. This was an 8 ft. long skull of a proposed 60 foot long pliosaur from around 150 mya. Maybe I will try and fit it in some time next year!

Finally, are there any unsung organisms of Earth's history you'd like to bring more attention to? Some critter that doesn't have the fame it deserves?

There are so many critters that I haven't given my attention to over the last 30 years, so many. As a freelancer you don't always have a choice of subjects you want to work on. I have worked on some Burgess Shale and Ediacaran organisms and coral reef assemblages but there are great gaps. I would also like to get back to the mammal like reptiles - gorgonopsids and dicynodonts, and the evolution of whales from Pakistan. Not to mention the dinosaurs...

Raúl Martín

Just got the new issue of Nat Geo, and I was happy to find that Raúl Martín has a nice two page spread in the feature on ancient crocodiles. It depicts the giant cretaceous crocodile Deinosuchus lunging for the tyrannosaur Albertosaurus. The image was not made available online, but Martín has covered similar territory for the magazine before. Here is a piece he did several years ago; this time setting is Africa and the players are the giant croc Sarcosuchus and the spinosaurid Suchomimus. Though I must say that this illustration definitely distorts the scales of the two by placing Suchomimus so far in the background - the new one places Albertosaurus the same distance from the viewer as Deinosuchus.

The crocodile article is, in true Nat Geo style, a tie-in to an upcoming special on their cable channel. Here's a preview.

Just because I'm feeling frisky, here's another take on Suchomimus v. Sarcosuchus by the always entertaining Luis Rey.

There probably isn't any better way to depict a giant crocodile than by letting it prey on a giant, snaggle-toothed theropod.