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.

Daredevilnotaurus

Happy Boxing Day to all of my commonwealth country readers. Here's a little treat: David Resto is continuing his Superhero Dinosaurs series, and I think this one is my favorite yet, because it's such a perfect fit: Carnotaurus, that popular abelisaur, dandied up like Daredevil.



Resto has said that he intends to do some DC characters, too. It's fun to wait for new ones to pop up. Who's next? Will he do a Batman and Robin duo? Spiderman? Does he dare try to do the Lizard? And what new dinosaurs will receive the treatment? Oviraptor? Therizinosaurus? How about an all-alverezsaur Justice League? looking forward to see where he takes these.

Attaboy, Austrocheirus

Paleontologists from the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, led by Martin Ezcurra, have published a description of a new genus of large theropod in the journal Zootaxa. Based on its ankle structure, the authors have posited Austrocheirus isaasi as a basal member of a family of mid-sized theropods called the abelisaurs. As the tyrannosaurs dominated top predator niches in the northern hemisphere in the late Cretaceous, the abelisaurs performed that role on the southern continents (with the possible exception of Tarascosaurus from France, but its abelisaurid credentials have not been satisfactorily proven).

The most famous of the abelisaurs is without a doubt Carnotaurus, instantly recognizable for its blunt snout and twin horns above the eyes. And, of course, its tiny little arms. It was the main villain in the Disney Dinosaur movie; a smaller, more realistically-sized Carnotaurus also provided brief comic relief in Jurassic Park 3. (UPDATE - Kind reader Ivan brought to my attention that my memory was faulty here - it was a Ceratosaurus in JP3, not Carnotaurus.)

Carnotaurus, via wikimedia commons.

The only abelisaur forelimbs found to date have belonged to three large members of the group: Carnotaurus, its slightly smaller Argentinian neighbor Aucasaurus, and Madagascar's Majungasaurus. Aucasaurus is remarkable for its near lack of fingers, they're so stubby and tightly packed in. Thus far, how common such reduced forelimbs and hands are among other abelisaurs is unknown, but similarly-sized Austrocheirus sheds a bit more light on the subject. Its hands aren't nearly as small, demonstrating that perhaps the reduction in forelimbs didn't necessarily correlate with greater size.

For all of the dinosaurs' fantastic features, the hands of theropods are among the most important. They're the subject of a long, complicated, and colorful debate in paleontology, and for good reason. Birds evolved from dinosaurs, after all, so understanding the process of how a theropod's hand turned into a bird's wing is of obvious value. It's important to note that the abelisaurs aren't closely related to birds. But the way the fingers are expressed in different theropods is always worth noting.

As for where Austrocheirus may fit into the grand scheme of things, this paper places it somewhere near the bottom of the abelisaur family tree, closely allied to the recently described non-abelisaur Limusaurus. One of the reasons Limusaurus, a small Chinese herbivorous theropod of the Jurassic, made a splash last year was for its unique hand format. Apropos to this new discovery, Limusaurus possessed a more reduced hand which seemed to fit in well with its abelisaur relatives. Austrocheirus muddies the waters a bit here with its relatively more robust hands; it suggests that rather than being a shared adaptation, the hands of abelisaurs and of Limusaurus were coincidentally similar. Hopefully new discoveries will clear up this tangled little knot of the theropod family tree.

Carnalsaurus

Alright, Discovery Channel. If this Dinosaur Sex special isn't just an elaborate Valentine's Day prank, you'd better bring the goods. You'd better offer up at least one image that comes close to this, in terms of sheer epic awesomeness.


Carnotaurus Sex by the inimitable Luis Rey, from his site.

It's a subject perfectly suited to Rey's lurid colors and outlandish compositions. Only Rey would surround his subjects with a flock of pterosaurs radiating out around them. On the science of dinosaur sex, he elaborates thusly:

...males probably had similar penises to crocodiles as hypothesized by the sexual dimorphism in Tyrannosaurus rex, where gracile specimens with an extra tail chevron seem to indicate that these were males (the extra chevron serving to attach the penis muscles, just as in crocodiles). If this is correct, then by the fossil skeletons it must be assumed that females of T. rex were invariably bigger than the males.

I hope that at the very least, the DC special includes hilarious cutaways to tiny, frightened mammals who attempt to cover their eyes but find themselves transfixed by the glorious horror of what they're watching. Damn it all to hell, I need cable.

Carnotaurus by Sideshow

From Sideshow:

Over 60 million years ago, the once-lush jungles of what would later be known as Patagonia have withered, the dry ground cracked and thirsty. Food has become scarce for the prehistoric beings that roam these lands, and as the day comes to a close, the Carnotaurus has yet to find sustenance. With the sun setting, the young bull becomes agitated and wrestles in his hunt.

This dynamic maquette captures the grace and power of this ancient animal of the Cretaceous Period. Designed with the insight of renowned paleoartists, each piece is cast in high-quality polystone, hand finished and hand painted to exacting standards.

I can't really even imagine dropping almost two hundred dollars for something like this right now. First in line would be the Vasque Sundowners I've been eyeing for a while. But if four hundred dollars was handed to me, with the stipulation is must be spent on fun stuff, well, you'd soon find me wearing some fine hiking boots and figuring out where to place my new carnotaurus maquette. Sick.

Hat tip to the Dinosaur Toy Blog! Go there to see some fantastic close up photos, which show incredible detail.