Vintage Dinosaur Art: Paper Dinosaurs

Hello faithful LITC readers! I'm back from 5 weeks in the wilderness and SVP, and have a pretty cute piece of vintage dinosaur art to share with you. Today we're looking at Paper Dinosaurs: 20 Model Monsters to Cut and Fold, by David Hawcock and published in 1988 by Marshall Cavendish Books.

First Look at the Oilsand Ankylosaur

The Calgary Herald has produced a video covering the removal of the Ankylosaur discovered in the oilsands of the Suncor Millenium mine recently. It's going to be a beautiful specimen. Donald Henderson, the Royal Tyrrell's dinosaur fossil curator, says it's one of the best fossils he's ever seen.

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.

Make Me This

Let's imagine that there's a parallel me whose tastes and interests were combined into a sort of mushy goo with those of my grandma.

That me would want this on his wall.



Come to think of it, this me kind of wants it, too.

The Open Dinosaur Project

So let's say you're interested in studying the ornithischian family tree. Particularly, you're interested in the ways they moved about and how they arrived at them. You've got a large group of dinosaurs who all share a bipedal ancestor, yet three divergent groups independently adopted quadrupedal locomotion: the stegosaurs and ankylosaurs, the ceratopsians, and the duckbills. It's a lot of convergent evolution for this sprawling dinosaur clan. It's a lot of data to collect for human paleontologists. A lot of work.

Solution? Open up the data-collecting end of the research. Thus, the Open Dinosaur Project is born. Using the internet, gather interested people who are willing to wade into the scientific literature to collect measurements of ornithischian limbs.

Living, accessible science. Cool.