Radical Taxonomic Act by the Airfix Model Company

In 1979, the Airfix model company made a bold statement by rechristening the early Permian pelycosaur Dimetrodon as a dinosaur. What we now call the "Airfix Wars" raged throughout the eighties, resulting in rancorous disputes at toy fairs and SVP meetings alike which occasionally descended into fisticuffs.


Shared by combomphotos at Flickr.

I post this today not to reopen old wounds, but to remind the world of past mistakes so they might never happen again. Let's keep our toymakers out of taxonomy.

Ankylosaurus and Dimetrodon Slug It Out!

In 1977, the year I began, the Chivers Jelly company ran an advertising promotion which enticed consumers into purchasing their delicious gelatin products with that time-honored prize of little plastic prehistoric beasts. It also came with a book called "How The World Began," which hopefully was a bit more accurate than the lurid print ad they ran.

Image shared by Combombphotos at Flickr.

I love the Dimetrodon vs. Ankylosaurus battle. Such a wildly anachronistic fantasy. Seriously: drawing me fighting an Ankylosaurus would be less anachronistic by about 200 million years. That is staggering. It's also less likely: I'd rather be good buddies with the big lug than scrap with him.

Of course, I shouldn't make any hasty presumptions: this may very well be a stolen moment from an interspecies courtship ritual. This would certainly fit in with the ouevre of its illustrator, British comic artist Frank Langford, best known for his saucy romance comics. He also drew the space opera comic strip The Angry Planet. More on Langford at the romance comics blog Sequential Crush.

So, do you want to see what the Chiver's Jelly toys looked like? Of course you do. Little plastic dinosaurs: there is no more effective way to make children cajole their parents into buying them sweet treats.

Samuel W. Williston and the Meeting of Science and Art

Image provided by the HMNH, via flickr.

When the Houston Museum of Natural Science reveals its remodeled paleontology hall in 2012, its recent discovery of a nearly complete, articulated Dimetrodon will be a beautiful centerpiece for the portion dedicated to the Permian era. The Permian is well represented in the Lone Star State, and as the biggest predator of the time, sail-backed Dimetrodon is its most famous denizen. Often mistaken for a dinosaur, as most large, strange looking beasts of the past are apt to be, Dimetrodon was a synapsid, more closely related to you and I than to Apatosaurus and Triceratops. The branch of the evolutionary tree that bore Dimetrodon was an offshoot of the one that led to the early mammals of the Mesozoic era, though by that time, Dimetrodon was long extinct.

The beast's nickname, "Wet Willi," is a tribute to Samuel Wendell Williston, an American paleontologist who started his career as one of O.C. Marsh's fossil hunters during his Bone Wars with E.D. Cope in the last quarter of the 19th Century. Williston helped excavate the type species of Allosaurus and Diplodocus for Marsh, and like many paleontologists of the time, his interests were broad. Naming a Dimetrodon after him is fitting; he was active in the area where Wet Willi was found and in 1911, he wrote the book American Permian Vertebrates. Remarkably, Williston produced all of his own artwork for his books and papers, which included not only detailed reconstructions of fossil bones but life restorations.


Pelycosaur bones, as drawn by Williston. Fig. I - VI are radii and ulnae of Varanosaurus; Fig VII A-C are of an odontoid of an undetermined pelycosaur; and Fig VIII is the carpus, or wrist, of a Dimetrodon. From American Permian Vertebrates.

Williston was one of those special scientists who are lucky enough to possess artistic talents, as well. I'm always impressed by those who can do both. Both skills require keen observation, patience, and discipline. Both nurture each other. I really hope the museum can find some small way to pay tribute to this aspect of Williston's work in their exhibit- emphasizing the ways the creative and the analytical can work together can only help draw more youth to science.


Dimetrodon restoration by Samuel W. Williston, from his Water Reptiles of the Past and Present.

More:
Richard Swann Lull's biographical memoir of Williston
Excerpts from A Brief History of Fossil Collecting in the Niobrara Chalk prior to 1900
The Williston Facebook page

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Lewis Zacks

This week, the featured artist is Lewis Zacks. Unlike many illustrators put in the spotlight here, he has a solid web presence, including an honest-to-gosh website. However, most of what I've found has been the art he's produced later in life, after leaving the illustration game in the late sixties.

In 1963, Zacks illustrated In the Time of Dinosaurs, written by veteran children's book author William Wise. It's a run-of-the-mill kid's title, hitting all of the usual basic points: dinosaurs were big, dinosaurs were dumb, dinosaurs fought each other, dinosaurs died and no one knows exactly why. It starts with a typical mistake: the first critters shown aren't dinosaurs at all, and lived millions of years apart. Additionally - andI've admitted to my still-small knowledge of paleobotany before - I'm pretty sure that tree, which looks kind of angiospermy, wouldn't have been familiar to Dimetrodon.



It's not the only anachronism, either. Later, a Triceratops and Stegosaurus share a page. It seems that this book was published merely because dinosaurs are a safe gamble. The prose is pretty simple, and besides getting basic things like spelling right, not a lot of time or effort was put into the science. Zacks' illustrations seem to have been done pretty quickly, without much reference to fossils for accuracy. Take this Triceratops, whose beak sprouts from his face above the mouth, as if it's another horn.



Yet in this next drawing, the beak is clearly part of the mouth. Note that the Tyrannosaurus with which it's fighting has three fingers; this reflects then-incomplete knowledge of T. rex forelimbs rather than disregard for anatomy.



The book ends with this solitary T. rex, another common trope of kid's books.



I've done quite a bit of searching, and can find no other examples of work from Zacks' illustrating career. I don't know how the dinosaurs in this book fits in with his body of work. Some of the wider views, such as that last T. rex, are pretty nice, and I love the limited color pallettes of many of these old books. The larger close-ups aren't as nice. They seem both busy and rushed. Not that I doubt the artist's skills; I'm sure many of these illustrators were working under short deadlines.

Here's a recent interview with Zacks, concerning his current artistic interest in the architectural artifacts of the mid-20th Century, especially old signs. If you'd like to see more from this title, head over to the Vintage Dinosaur Art flickr group.

Dimetrodon Juan

Continuing this week's theme of frivolous dino-kitsch (necessitated by an unholy amount of work), I submit this piece of nondino-kitsch. I guess I'll call it pelyco-kitsch. It's my model of the Permian era's most recognizable beast, the finback pelycosaur Dimetrodon. I couldn't have been older than five or six when I got it, and I'd imagine it came from the Field Museum gift shop. My dad used to drive me up there, which I'm sure was fun for him, but it was also probably an excuse to drive his little MGB convertible on Lake Shore Drive.



I love the face; it almost has a Tlingit quality to it. I also remember the set anachronistically including a club-wielding caveman, presumably for scale purposes only. But I remember the caveman being absolutely tiny. He didn't even reach the dimetrodon's knee. This is comically out of whack; he should have been about have as tall as the dimetrodon is long. The caveman was lost a long time ago, so I can't confirm this hazy memory.

Who's Who of the Mesozoic, Part 2

The last post explained why pterosaurs aren't dinosaurs. Now we'll discuss a few other beasts commonly mistaken for dinosaurs.

Dimetrodon

This sail-backed predator is by far the most iconic of the synapsids. The obvious mascot for the Permian Period (the football team in Friday Night Lights really ought to be named for this bad boy). I fondly remember the blue-green Dimetrodon model I had as a kid, which came with a little club-wielding caveman. I assume he was included for scale, though if I remember correctly, Mr. Club was way-hay-hay too small - he may have reached the dimetrodon's chin. He should have been about half as long as the beast. Inaccurate model kit aside, dimetrodon is one of the most common pseudo-dinosaurs; in fact, google auto-fill just listed "dimetrodon dinosaur" as its second option. I'm assuming those options are ranked by frequency of searches.

As you can tell from the posture of the legs in the above image, dimetrodon has a classic sprawling leg like the reptiles. Only dimetrodon isn't a reptile, either. Dimetrodon was a synapsid, which used to be called the "mammal-like reptiles" for a reason: they are an early part of the line that eventually spawned the mammals. Dimetrodon's family are the most derived (a less loaded way of saying "advanced") synapsids and thus are the most closely related to the mammals. After thousands of generations, their siblings the therapsids would eventually bring about the mammals, who trolled around in the shadows as the dinosaurs had their way for a hundred and fifty million years or so. But by that time, dimetrodon was long gone. (Dimetrodon illustration by D. Bogdanov, via wikipedia)

Plesiosaurs, Icthyosaurs, and Mosasaurs

These, the most famous of the ancient marine reptiles, are also very frequently called dinosaurs. Plesiosaurs were long-necked, short tailed reptiles; popular depictions of the Loch Ness monster usually resemble them. Icthyosaurs are more "dolphin-like" in appearance, with slender snouts and long tails. Mosasaurs are just frickin' huge sea monsters, really, and a member of the proud tradition thatwould produce modern snakes and lizards: they are called squamates, and their scales overlap.They are all aquatic diapsids, reptiles who became adapted to a marine lifestyle but are descended from landlubbing ancestors. It's pretty easy: if it has flippers, it ain't a dinosaur. Dinosaurs didn't live in the water. (Illustrations of Plesiosaurs and Icthyosaurs by Heinrich Harder, public domain. Mosasaur by Arthur Weasley)

Mammoths and Glyptodonts
The mammoths look familiar enough, being big, hairy elephants, that it's only rarely that I see them called them a dinosaur. Glyptodonts, though... I've seen it happen quite a few times. I suppose because of their body plan, which superficially resembles the armored, club-tailed ankylosaurs. Well, they're mammals, so they're more closely related to dimetrodon than any dinosaur, and they lived a great many millions of years after the Cretaceous era, and the dinosaurs' reign, ended. In fact, the've only been gone for about 10,000 years, and our own ancestors walked among them in South America, using those big domes to create the Miocene version of suburban cul-de-sacs (JK, though they did use them as shelter). They actually are distant relatives of today's armadillos, so those of us who can't wrap our heads around the fact that superficial resemblance doesn't always correlate to evolutionary affinity can smile at that small victory. The Germans, by the way, call armadillos panzerschwein, which means armored pig, and that is totally boss. If you ever want to spend some good quality time with some panzerschwein, head down to Cumberland Island National Seashore. The place is lousy with 'em. (Illustration of Glyptodon and modern humans by Heinrich Harder, public domain)

Any damn thing with a name ending in "-saur"
It just means "lizard," people.