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.

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.