Horniman bonus dinosaurs

As an addendum to my previous post, it's worth mentioning that there's some dinosaur material on permanent display at the Horniman...just not very much. Perhaps the most noteworthy dinosaur display consists of a series of very dated scale models. They're most definitely of the pre-Renaissance, cold-blooded old school, but very charming with it. Here's a selection.

I Wrote a Song About Triceratops

Ceratopsidae family crest by yours truly; it could be yours, truly.

I'd like to invite you all over to my tumblog, The Gallant Cannibal, to feast on a song I wrote several years ago as an ode to that iconic three-horned juggernaut, Triceratops. It's short and sweet. I tell the whole story of its creation over there, so I won't repeat it here. Suffice to say: if you like Triceratops, this is definitely a song about Triceratops.

Uncle Beazley

As another winter storm bears down on Indiana, I feel for poor old Uncle Beazley, the subject in this 1977 photograph shared by the Smithsonian Institution on their Flickr photostream.


Image courtesy the Smithsonian Institution, via flickr.

Uncle Beazley has led quite the picaresque life for a fiberglass archosaur. He's even been an actor. In 1968, NBC aired an episode of "NBC's Children's Theater" called The Enormous Egg. It was an adaptation of Oliver Butterworth's 1956 children's story, in which a 12 year old farm boy's life is made a bit more interesting when one of his chickens lays a Triceratops egg. The dinosaur is played by Uncle Beazley, and as F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre writes in a wonderfully thorough review,

The most interesting thing in this TV adaptation is, of course, the triceratops. 'The Enormous Egg' could be sub-titled 'The Microscopic Production Budget'. I think they spent about 29 cents on the dinosaur ... and yet all of the dinosaur sequences are very impressively done. The triceratops in this film is 'played' by a huge dinosaur-shaped piece of moulded fibreglass which does NOT have articulated limbs, so the individual portions of the triceratops cannot move separately. The thing is like a child's toy plastic dinosaur (all in one piece) except that it's life-size.

I haven't found any video of it, unfortunately. The review also mentions that Uncle Beazley is one of the Sinclair dinosaurs from the New York World's fair.


Image from Jordan Smith, via Flickr. There's Uncle Beazley in the center of the exhibit.

Garland Pollard of BrandLandUSA confirms that he is indeed from the World's Fair. The fate of the dinosaur models from the various world's fairs is something I'm pretty interested in, and it's really cool that Uncle Beazley has survived, now residing at the National Zoo, while his brethren enjoy a Texas retirement.


Uncle Beazley at the National Zoo. Photo by Mo Kaiwen, via flickr.

Getting Over TriceraFAIL

Illo by Homie Bear, via Flickr.

The world-devouring juggernaut that is TriceraFAIL continues to wreak its singularly depressing breed of havoc. Check out this weird piece from the Chicago Tribune. Or this one, from yet another clueless tech site with easily provoked commenters. Like ducks and bunnies on a carnival midway, the mistakes and lazy inaccuracies tick by, begging to be shot down.

TriceraFAIL isn't simply about sloppy, bandwagon-jumping reporters. It's a viral phenomenon, too. It appeals to some strong impulses. There's the distrust of science. There's nostalgia. There's the goofin' around factor. I don't blame the folks who start "Save our Triceratops" campaigns. In a strange way, it's comforting. People still have emotional attachments to these long-dead animals. That's cool! It's unfortunate that their actions have been inspired by crappy reporting, but at least they care.

Despite the debilitating rage I feel when I read another TriceraFAIL story, I think I've finally convinced myself that really, it's not that big a deal. I'm done feeling the need to respond to them. Science has plenty of problems with the media, and this isn't a particularly interesting one; I mean, it has to do with nomenclatural rules. No one who seriously wants to tell science stories thinks that naming standards or cladistics are going to ignite anyone's passion for science (anyone lining up for the first issue of Willi Hennig Adventure Comics?). And that's fine. Part of the challenge of writing about science is figuring out what needs to be communicated. I believe strongly in the elegance of simplicity, and if you look at those moments that nature made the biggest impact on you, I'd wager that most of them were pretty simple. The same goes for learning scientific concepts. That's why Don Herbert is so fondly remembered.

TriceraFAIL is a failure of science reporting, which is bad enough. Worse, it's a failure of science storytelling. It's a lack of imagination. It's being too bored to do more than a perfunctory scan of the source material.

If you're looking for another beacon of light in this TriceraFAIL mess, I have a suggestion. George Hrab deals with the Scannella/ Horner Triceratops paper on the latest episode of his Geologic Podcast, thankfully not misinterpreting the paper or freaking out about it. Instead, he sees it as a sterling example of science's ability to adapt as facts become clearer. There may be an odd little issue here and there - for example, I've heard nothing about the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature ruling on the matter - but such things are easier to forgive in this case. Hrab saw precisely what is wonderful about this story, and didn't get derailed by screams of misguided protest.

Leaping Laelaps, Indeed

In Friday's Vintage Dinosaur Art post on Charles R. Knight, I couldn't resist including his famous painting of E.D. Cope's theropod Laelaps, (which his bitter rival O.C. Marsh would rename Dryptosaurus in 1877 when it was discovered that a mite had the name Laelaps first). This sparked a conversation in the comments about the general reputation of large theropods in the late 19th century. In the early 20th century, the "ladder of progress" idea of evolution came into vogue and the dinosaurs became exemplars of evolutionary failure: beasts too stupid and ponderous to survive the mammalian apocalypse.

But it wasn't always like that; I knew Knight's painting reflected the view of the theropod as a dynamic, active predator and I wanted to dig into some literature and find where this began. It's not a completely thorough review of every mention of Laelaps, but I think I've dipped into enough from the era to give a good impression of just how dynamic a predatory dinosaur was thought to be. One quick note: I'll use both Dryptosaurus and Laelaps in this post, the former when discussing the modern knowledge about it, the latter when referring to it in a historical context.

As noted in the previous post and its comments, Knight was not an artist who did his own research, as Gregory S. Paul does today. Knight followed the most contemporary knowledge of the paleontological community and his individual patrons, which in this case was Cope. Indeed, in an early account of his work in The American Naturalist, Cope himself would invoke a modern analog when discussing Laelaps when he wrote that the long legs of the dinosaur...

...joined with the massive tail points to a semi erect position like that of the Kangaroos while the lightness and strength of the great femur and tibia are altogether appropriate to great powers of leaping.

Hardwicke's Science-Gossip, a short-lived 19th century pop-sci magazine, echoed this in an 1891 story and added a bit of gory detail:

The Laelaps was forty feet long, stood twenty-five feet high on its hindlegs, and was built like a kangaroo. It was the most astonishing jumper that ever existed, with teeth for cutting and sharp claws on the front feet, evidently designed for tearing out its adversary's eyes.

Taking it even further, Sir John William Dawson wrote a colorful passage on Laelaps in his 1873 pop-sci book The Story of Earth and Man, culminating with this image:

Had we seen the eagle clawed Laelaps rushing on his prey; throwing his huge bulk perhaps thirty feet through the air, and crushing to the earth under his gigantic talons some feebler Hadrosaur, we should have shudderingly preferred the companionship of modern wolves and tigers to that of those savage and gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic.

Dawson accorded Laelaps an even higher standing than mammals, a comparison that would be considered a bit absurd once dinosaurs fell from grace. Even today, when theropods are generally considered to be the "peers" of today's dynamic mammalian predators, few paleontologists would conjure the image of a large one leaping thirty feet.


A more modern look at Dryptosaurus, the artist formerly known as Laelaps. By Frederik Spindler, via Wikimedia Commons.

We now understand Dryptosaurus to be a primitive throwback compared to its more advanced tyrannosaur contemporaries; while the best known Late Cretaceous North American tyrannosaurs are from the west, Dryptosaurus lived on the other side of the Western Interior seaway that split the continent in two, on a land mass called Appalachia. Unlike its western counterpart Laramidia, we have precious few geological windows into this time in the eastern US. Dryptosaurus is an intriguing critter. Why did it preserve more primitive tyrannosaur features? What was its environment like? The Earth's geological processes have unfortunately hidden many of these answers from us, then made the region attractive to human settlement, limiting our access to Mesozoic rock further.

I can't end this without contrasting the taxonomic change of Laelaps to Dryptosaurus with Torosaurus being possibly absorbed into Triceratops. While Scannella and Horner have their work cut out for them if their lumping of the two genera is to be accepted, at least they don't have to deal with the level of rancor that existed between Marsh and Cope. After all, renaming a species because its name is already taken is pretty cut-and-dry, and requires little evidence to justify: just show that it's been given to an organism in the scientific literature, and the matter is settled. But notice that a couple decades after Marsh reassigned it to Dryptosaurus, Knight still chose Cope's original Laelaps for his title.

Is Triceratops a Damsel In Distress?

"The Triceratops May Not Be A Real Dinosaur," reads one headline, currently on the first page of Google results for Triceratops.

"The Triceratops Never Existed, It Was Actually a Young Version Of Another Dinosaur," says Gizmodo.

"The Three-Horned Dinosaur Triceratops Never Existed, Say Scientists," reads another.

A Boing Boing post, while not nearly as bad, also expresses confusion over the issue, with a predictably depressing comments section.

A facebook page called Save the Triceratops has also been set up. Part of the page description reads, "science wants to take away the Triceratops with its recent findings that suppose that the three horned beast never existed." It's also on Buzzfeed. The Facebook page has gained five followers in the last twenty minutes, as I write this. Clearly, this has struck a chord. (Update: After I commented on the Facebook page, the moderator sent the word out that it's all good. At least one subsequent commenter believes that the page succeeded.)

It's understandable. Triceratops is friggin' awesome. People love Triceratops. They love saying Triceratops. They love the funny way their children mispronounce Triceratops. I love all of it, too. I like the name Brontosaurus more than the name Apatosaurus. The thought of Triceratops being an invalid name is not cool to me. I wouldn't like it.

The really good news: Triceratops is safe.

Sometimes, especially in paleontology, a single species might be given two different names. This may have happened with Triceratops and a larger, similar animal called Torosaurus. When they were originally discovered, described, and named, scientists had good reason to believe they were different. But we progress, we learn more, we develop new ways of studying fossils. Science is a self-correcting process. Paleontologists John Scannella and John Horner studied many fossils of both dinosaurs and determined that the evidence heavily favored that Torosaurus is a more fully-grown version of Triceratops. When these issues are found precedence is given to the first name. Triceratops was first, therefore it's not in danger of being stricken from usage. For more on this issue, I suggest the thorough post at Dinosaur Tracking.

This mess is another reminder of just how much of paleontology is alien to most people. Not that I needed another reminder. There aren't many shining examples of nuanced portrayals of scientists in the media. Too often, they're either doddering boobs so obsessed with minutia that they're divorced from the reality they're supposed to explore, or they are rigidly deductive and cold to the point of amorality.

Are there scientists who fit those stereotypes? Probably a few. There are cops, teachers, and plumbers who probably do, too. Scientists are regular human beings. They've pursued specialized education, sure. They use jargon while debating ideas with peers, naturally. They approach their work with a high degree of skepticism and critical thinking, ideally. And none of this means that they're not emotional, passionate, messy people like everyone else. They have families and pets. They like certain foods more than others. They play video games. They worry about money. They're capable of mercy and kindness and rudeness and anger. On top of all this, they've devoted their lives to ordering the natural world for the benefit of our entire species. It's not an easy job, and it's not fun to clean up messes created in the early days of a discipline, when rules, processes, and standards were still being sorted out. So when you read a story about scientists debating a change in classification - like the Pluto thing - cut them some slack.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: German Dinosaur Cards

Today, we're taking a look at some more from the collections of Norman Felchle. These are from a collection of German dinosaur cards. Not sure who the illustrator(s) might be, but they are pretty fantastic. I'm a sucker for ancient prints like this. If you have any information on who published or illustrated them, let me know.

Update: Thanks to commenters, I learned that these are the work of German artist Heinrich Harder, and the series is titled Tiere der Urwelt, which translates to "Animals of the Prehistoric World." He was an art instructor and landscape painter who became involved in natural history illustrations in the early part of the last century. I'll probably do a future VDA post dedicated to him.

Here's a strange Triceratops; it looks like the artist worked from a verbal description rather than physical specimens. It's much more reptilian than our modern conception of the ceratopsians, with their pebbly skin and occasional quills.


The thirsty hadrosaur: another classic meme of paleoart.


This painting of rhamphorhynchid pterosaurs by the shore at sunset has a great moody feel to it.


Here's a great depiction of the antiquated notion of the "sprawling sauropod." My knees are aching in sympathy for this poor Diplodocus.

Video Roundup

I've come across some pretty sweet dinosaur videos at the ol' Youtube website, so it's high time to share some of them here.

Some Japanese dinosaur robots. Sounds like the Parasaurolophus has a bit of a cold.


Triceratops: the Mesozoic's answer to Nate Dogg.


Um, I think this is a musical tribute to Mononykus olecranus, the alvarezsaur. I'd love to see a Fantasia-style animated dinosaur movie, and this would be perfect for a segment on the alvarezsaurs. You can just imagine the little buggers darting about to this.



Tip o' the hat to James Gurney for sharing this video over at Gurney Journey. Looks like a demo of some of the Walking with Dinosaurs live show dinosaur suits, featuring a tyrannosaur and a Utahraptor. Too cool not to post!

Vintage Dinosaur Art: John Francis

I think it's only proper to put the spotlight on a ceratopsid this week. These illustrations of the most famous of all,Triceratops, come from a 1981 title in the Rourke Publishing series of dinosaur books. Like the Janet Riehecky series from which last week's Baryonyx title came from, each book focuses on one dinosaur. Rather than presenting a series of facts or conjectures as in the Riehecky books, the Rourke books tell stories. This title is written by Angela Sheehan, but the google machine tells me that there were a number of authors who participated in the series.

The illustrator is John Francis, who has a long record of quality work, and a special interest in natural history.



The story begins with a female trike laying her eggs and leaving them. The nest is plundered by an Ornithomimus - an activity I doubt one would engage in - but Sheehan depicts Triceratops as a disinterested mother. She's exhausted from the egg-laying and chills out in some ferns. At one point, a T. rex rouses her ire and she takes a swing at him. Then, after watching some Stegoceras engage in some ritual head-butting, she dozes off.



Francis doesn't go for photorealism or strict anatomical accuracy; the design of his dinosaurs reflect older ideas in paleoart that Gregory S. Paul would effectively put an end to later in the decade. But I like these illustrations for their vibrant, punchy quality, and the way they're embellished with details like the spider spinning its web in the last image. So many children's books on dinosaurs are quickly and sloppily put together, and it's nice to see illustrations done with care. You can check out more of Francis' dinosaurs at his site's gallery.

Playmobil Dinosaurs

So, apparently Playmobil released a dinosaur series in 2008. I had no idea, and I have to admit: they're durned cute. If you're into expensive toys, check 'em out here.

Deinonychus

Spinosaurus


Triceratops

All images by TimSpfd, via flickr.

Dinosaur National Monument Goes Social

Photo by BruceandLetty, via flickr.

In the old days, you might read one or two articles about a big project at a national park. Now, you can follow everything in real time. For instance, Dinosaur National Monument is currently overhauling its Quarry Visitor Center. To put a finer point on it, it's being completely replaced. Construction began last month, and the new visitor center should be complete by fall of 2011. But interested parties don't have to rely on the fickle decision-makers of the print media to learn more. These days, you can follow news about the project and the park in general at Twitter and Facebook. The park service also has a blog at the DML site.

For more in-depth information, check out DNM paleontologist Dan Chure's blog chronicling the process. He gets into the complicated business of relocating the site's fossil collection - including an utterly beautiful Allosaurus fragilis skull - and protecting the monument's crown jewel: the wall of Jurassic sandstone housing an amazing array of dinosaurs and other critters. While the wall isn't available to visitors during this painstaking process, there is no reason to keep away from the monument until its new house is built. This year, entrance fees have been waived to the park and to the temporary visitor center, so there's no reason to avoid Dinosaur National Monument, which contains a landscape that is spectacular in its own right.

1968 postcard of the quarry wall, from Baltimore Bob, via flickr.

When you look at the quarry wall, you're looking at the remains of an ecosystem from the Morrison Formation, one of the great dinosaur-bearing rock formations in the world. Apatosaurus, Barosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, Camptosaurus, Allosaurus, and Ornitholestes are all known from sites with Morrison outcrops dating in the neighborhood of 150 million years ago. I'm going to steal Scott Sampson's comparison here. Take a denizen of the Morrison, say Stegosaurus. Then take another dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous, like Triceratops. Stegosaurus is even further removed in time from Triceratops than we are, having lived about 80 million years prior. That tacks another 25 million years onto the 65 that separate us from Triceratops. It's actually less of an anachronism to draw a human next to a Triceratops, rather than a Stegosaurus. That blows my mind every time I think about it. Coincidentally enough, the latest post at Dot Dot Dinosaur features a piece of artwork from Etsy that highlights this very fact. Check it out!

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.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: High-Kickin' Allosaurus

Here's a two-page spread from a 1979 Scholastic book called the First Picture Encyclopedia. It's a pretty sweet piece, complete with a gaggle of erupting volcanos, anachronistic fauna, Rudolf Zallinger-inspired Stegosaurus, and one heck of a high-kickin' Allosaurus, which I find particularly amusing. Not only would it be a crazy way for a big theropod to attack its prey, the stance looks pretty implausible.

The book credits four illustrators: Roy Coombs, Cliff Meadway, Mike Atkinson, and Graham Allen, with Coombs' name most prominent. None of them are particularly visible on the web. Mr. Atkinson has a website, but the style doesn't quite match what we see here.

Paleo Plushies

Solid. Cartoonist, illustrator, and toymaker Megan Baehr, who runs an Etsy shop called Nonesuch Garden, has begun creating a series of dinosaur plush dolls. The first two are a Stegosaurus and a Triceratops, and she says that she is working on more, inluding a Brachiosaurus. I'd love to see how she pulls it off. They really are more works of art than toys.


Jenski the Stegosaurus, via Etsy


Tertia the Triceratops, via Etsy

Megan has crafted a menagerie that ranges across the animal kingdom and beyond, including mythical creatures. Bully to her for digging into the Mesozoic! You can also check out her creations on her Flickr stream. Her comics and illustrations also reflect a major paleo interest, so be sure to take a good, long gander.

Yale's Torosaurus

I'd never seen the bronze Torosaurus statue outside Yale's Peabody Museum until Carl Zimmer used it in a recent post on his great blog The Loom, preparing for a speech there.


The Peabody TOROSAURUS, via altopower @ flickr.

The life-size statue was created by sculptor and museum preparator Michael Anderson and revealed to the public in October of 2005. Especially cool is that it's been placed within a Cretaceous-themed garden, stocked with plants related to those that Torosaurus and its kin would have been familiar with, including ferns and magnolia trees. It's a terrific, dynamic sculpture - the only minor demerit I can give is that it's missing is a saddle. Next time I'm in the northeast, I'm definitely checking this bad boy out.

If you've got a notion to, go ahead and buy a book about the statue's creation from the Peabody's poorly designed on-line store. They claim there's also DVD, but finding it on the site is harder than finding an actual Torosaurus fossil. Especially if you accept Jack Horner's assertion that Torosaurus is not a genuine genus, but is merely the most mature form of Triceratops.

Jack Horner on Skeptic's Guide

Dr. John Horner was the guest on a recent episode of the podcast "The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe." It's a really well conducted interview, which you'd expect from the Skeptic's Guide crew. It mainly deals with Horner's recently published paper which proposed that Stygimoloch, and Dracorex are not distinct species, but are younger forms of Pachycephalosaurus.

They touch on Dr. Robert Bakker's contention that this is not the case, and that he is in possession of a genuine juvenile Pachycephalosaurus that does not resemble either Stygimoloch or Dracorex. You can hear a bit of Horner's irritation as he basically dares Bakker to either publish about it or shut his trap. Juicy.

Save a Triceratops, Ride a Cowboy

That old Merle Travis* tune is running through your head, and as you drive down a rural Kentucky highway on your way to meet some good friends, it seems pretty accurate: You take a K and an E, an N and a T, a U and a C-K-Y; that spells Kentucky, but it means paradise. The moon is fat and bright, and all around you is the chorus of thousands of insects searching for a choice reproductive partner. Yup, ol' Merle had something there.

Then, a truck passes in the other lane. Carrying this:

Photo via Pharyngula

A few explanations pop into your head:

1. Someone made out real good at the Neverland auction.
2. City slickers need to be mighty careful at livestock auctions.
3. I've missed the annual Lawn Ornament Exposition and Trade Show. Again!
4. LARPers have seized upon Dinotopia. Finally.

The truth, however, is that the Creation Museum, in anticipation of today's visit from a swarm of scientists, decided it might be best to move out its most laughable example of grafting dinosaurs into their young-earth model of natural history. Maybe they were afraid that someone might deface their star attraction. You know, the way they deface our country's star attraction: science. More at PZ Myer's Pharyngula!

UPDATED! Apparently, my guess was wrong:

PZ Myers, Trikerider. via islanddave @ flickr

*I love me some Merle Travis, one of the great country guitarists of all time and a multi-talented dude, but I have to admit a certain gleeful sense of vengeance at using one of his tunes in a post mocking young-earthers... the one thing he's done that really gets under my skin is a song in which he derides evolution by saying something along the lines of "if you believe that monkey story, I'd rather be the monkey than you." Now we're even, Merle.

Maybe a Dino Ate Your Baby

Paleontologist Dave Hone, who writes one of my favorite paleoblogs, Archosaur Musings, is in the news this week for a paper he wrote with Oliver Rauhut of the Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology and Geology in Munich. The hypothesis they put forward is that theropods likely preyed upon juveniles much more than full-grown adults. It makes a lot of sense to me - predators go for easy meals, and I don't look at Edmontonia or Styracosaurus or Anatotitan and think "fast food." Hone and Rauhut also bring up the fact that compared to today's mammalian megafauna, large dinosaurs probably reproduced in much greater numbers - as evidenced by the nesting colonies of large herbivores we've found, or the egg sites of sauropods (which are more like those of sea turtles, indicating they didn't rear their young). A sure way to ensure the survival of your genetic material is to make a whole lot of it, something we see in all sorts of extant species. The greater number of babies hanging around, the greater the opportunities for predators.

This view is, of course, at odds with fantasies like T. rex squaring off against a snorting, dust-kicking Triceratops bull. Again, we are held down and forced to consider the idea that the more spectacular exercises of our imaginations may not be plausible. I would argue that this is just another example of why we "set childish things aside." Once we drop the idea that the natural world is there to perform a pageant for the entertainment of Homo sapiens, we take a step closer to developing a more profound (and I would argue, much more entertaining) appreciation of the world and our place in it.

I just started this blog (though for a few months I did weekly dino posts at Gentleman's Choice), and maybe have brought this up twice, and I already feel like I'm endlessly harping on it. I also feel like I endlessly harp on dumb science reporting, so...

Scientific Blogging writes,

"The 21st century has been a real disappointment for Tyrannosaurus Rex, by far the most famous dinosaur. Not even recent finds of slightly bigger, and maybe even more terrifying, species like Giganotosaurus could dent the aura of "T-Rex". But if 'The King' turns out to be just a baby killer the party may be over.

Yes, the party is over. You'll see T. rex suddenly disappear from coloring books and place mats and cartoons. Heartbroken kids will dump their lovingly painted models in the rubbish bin! They might even spit on them! It will be like the deep pain I felt when one of my heroes, Sergeant Slaughter, did the unthinkable and switched to the Iraqi side during the first Gulf War. Trust me, it was not pretty! I'd also like to know where they got the idea that Giganotosaurus was "more terrifying." I don't think a relatively small difference in size would make Giganotosaurus or Spinosaurus much more terrifying than T. rex. Despite the few feet of difference, my level of unease would be about the same in the presence of any of the three.

The last sentence in the excerpt annoys me as well, the "just a baby killer" part. Or, as the Telegraph's headline reads, "Tyrannosaurus rex 'picked on baby dinosaurs and ate them whole'". These just smack of anthropomorphism. I guess I'm nitpicking here. It's not the worst science reporting I've seen. At least the stories give a bit of space to quotes from Hone. Science reporting is probably a thankless job, especially in today's journalistic environment. I'm sure there's pressure to amplify things, to give John and Jane Public a single, quickly sketched image of the story before they click the animated ad next to it, and are suddenly enrolled in an online college.

Also, I had a sort of watershed moment this week: I commented on an Archosaur Musings post, an honest question, and recieved a thoughtful, illuminating answer from Hone. This is the first time I've ever asked a question of a scientist and gotten a response. Let me tell you, it's cool. If you think I'm not slapping myself for taking so long to figure out how great the internet can be as a source of scientific learning... trust me. I am. On to more catching up...

We Heart Dinosaurs

I tried to explain why I like dinosaurs so much yesterday. It's hard, because it's essentially an exercise in complicating something pretty simple. I suppose my reasons, and most of ours, can be pretty well expressed by this compilation of Google results. Most of which, I'd guess, are from children.

I like dinosaurs because...
...they are humongous!
...I live with them!
...they go rahrrrr!!
... they give you a real sense of the vastness of time.
...it fascinates me that millions of years
ago these big creatures lived on our planet Earth and that
they would still be alive if it hadn’t been for the disastrous
comet.
...they're so interesting.
...Triceratops eats plants.
...they are fun to read about.
...they are so fierce and they ruled the earth many times.
...they are fierce.
...they were big, fierce, and extinct.
...they tell me about distant times and lands and they are visually striking.
...they beat each other up and they have stinky breath.
... they lived log ago and I read lots of books about them and I know lot of them kinds I want to visit natural museum.
...they are special to me.
...they are purdy.
...they are my best animal.
...they are big and they have very sharp teeth like no other animal.
...they're really awesome, and I like the Tyrannosaurus Rex's teeth because they're really sharp.
...they are so different from anything today.
...I was excited when I think of them.
...they are good.

Mitikusa via Flickr

But we also have our favorites from within the ranks of the dinosaurs. So to get more specific...

I like velociraptor because...
...he is smart,fast,neat and COOL!!
...it's fast, has sharp claws and it's real cool!!
...they are swift and sneeky and you would never know there was one behind you until your flesh is getting torn off your bones.
...they hunt in packs and eat meat like me.
...it has a big claw.
...it could take down almost any dinosaur!

I like stegosaurus because...
...of those cool fans on its back.
...it had bony plates on its back.
...they have many ways to protect themselves.
...THEY HIT OTHER DINOSAURS WITH THEIR SPIKED TAILS.
...it has spikes on it and I spikes.
...he has four spikes on his tail for protection and I think thats really neat!
...I like my meat to be grass-fed and free range.
...its plates could turn red.
...they always appear to me as the "intelligent noble" dinosaur.
...he looks good.
...of those cool fans on its back.

I like triceratops because...
...it has three horn.
...he's the bestest herbivore fighter!
...they are cleaver and tuff.
...he is smart and he is cute.
...I'm in a band called the dinosaur project and we all have stage names, and mines the best because it's tri-sarah-tops.
...he has horns and fights T-Rex.
...THEY HAVE 3 HORNS.
...it was not afraid to stand up to any other dinosaur.
...of what it's name means - 3 horned face.
...it is a plant eater.
...it has a cool head with the sticky-uppy crown thing and three horns.
...it is big.
...he has big horns.
...it had three horns to protect it'sself from danger.
...of its three horns.
...they have my name in them.
...it is a cool name.