Carnotaurus and Friends at the Kenosha Dinosaur Discovery Museum

As part of a family of die-hard Green Bay Packers fans, I've spent my share of time in the great Dairy State, Wisconsin. Having grown up in Northwest Indiana, my family would take yearly trips to visit family, see Packers training camp, and watch games when they still played in Milwaukee twice a year. I've been to the Dells. I've eaten at the Mars Cheese Castle. But I never knew that the city of Kenosha was home to a small population of immigrants from the Mesozoic, in the Dinosaur Discovery Museum. Dr. Thomas Carr of Carthage College, describer of the recent tyrannosaurs Teratophoneus and Bistahieversor, is the museum's curator. The Carthage Institute of Paleobiology ioperates a laboratory at the museum, as well.

According to the museum's website, the exhibit gallery "has more meat-eating dinosaurs on display than any other museum in the nation. Nine of the dinosaurs can be seen only at our Museum."

The photos below are by Scott Anselmo. He's got some nice frontal shots of Carnotaurus, showing just how narrow that skull was, for as boxy as it is in profile.



To its credit, the museum states up front that the skeletons on display are casts, and uses color to illustrate which bones are known from the skeletons and which were missing. I understand that many want to see the actual fossils, but it doesn't bother me at all. Cast or mounted fossil, I'd love to check out that Carnotaurus or the Suchomimus below. Just reminds me of how many dinosaur mounts I haven't seen.



They've even got little Eoraptor, recently traded from team theropod to team sauropod.



Visit Scott's Flickr photo set for more of the Dinosaur Discovery Museum's collection.

Bonjour, Bistahieversor

The badlands of the Bisti/De-na-zin Wilderness, by flickr user westernskies_de_2. More shots of the region here.

Multiple choice time. The "Bistahi destroyer" is:

A) A Pokémon
B) A guitar particularly well-suited to shredding of the most brutal kind. Crafted of polished obsidian.
C) The brand new tyrannosaur from New Mexico
D) All of the above

In a perfect world, the answer would be D. But this is a dinosaur blog, holmes. So C it must be. Paleontologists Thomas Carr and Tom Williamson, of Carthage College and the University of New Mexico, respectively, have published an introductory description of Bistahieversor sealeyi, a mid-size Late Cretaceous tyrannosaur from New Mexico. It appears in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Bistahieversor sealeyi is the first new species of tyrannosaur discovered in the western US in thirty years, and the first top predator paleontologists have definitively identified in this region. There have been other bits and bobs identifiable as tyrannosaur pieces found in the area, but the two specimens of B. sealeyi, a juvenile and an adult, are the first well-preserved skeletons. In a great interview with ReBecca Hunt-Foster at Dinochick, Dr. Carr promises a longer monograph on Bistahieversor later this year, and says that he's working on projects dealing with both Daspletosaurus and T. rex. It looks like the tyrannosaur news isn't going to let up just because we've passed the arbitrary temporal boundary called "New Year's Day."

Also, it would behoove you to check out the beautiful illustration of Bistahieversor at the Hairy Museum of Natural History.

I can't pass up mentioning this little gem. It's the very first sentence of the B. sealeyi press release put out by the SVP: "New Mexico is known for amazing local cuisine, Aztec ruins and the Los Alamos National Laboratory."

Aztec ruins in New Mexico? Really, SVP? You really want to stand by that?