It's Utahraptor Week

We've talked about the Utahraptor Project a few times here at LITC, and three weeks ago we launched our latest art challenge to help promote it. To help combine efforts to spread the word about Jim Kirkland's crowdfunding effort to free those dinosaurs from that slab of rock, this week has been declared Utahraptor week, thanks to the Earth Archives/ Studio 252MYA crew. Check out the #utahraptorweek hashtag on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), and help spread the word by using it yourself and sharing others' posts.

Here are a couple videos about this pretty awesome discovery: Jim Kirkland tells the story of the find and National Geographic depicts the effort it took to move the block o' raptors from its original site of discovery.

To help support this research:

• Donate at GoFundMe
• Follow and share posts from the Utahraptor Project on Facebook and Twitter
• Take part in our art challenge (and be sure to share your work far and wide on the web)

Canadian paleontologists tell their stories in "Dino Trails"

A great new series of short documentaries on Canadian paleontology was just released on YouTube by TELUS Optik. "Dino Trails," a project by filmmaker Brandy Yanchyk, kicks off with a profile of Phil Currie and Eva Koppelhus. This episode also features our own Victoria Arbour, who talks a bit about our favorite clobberin' thyreophorans. Subsequent episodes give a chance to see the Suncor nodosaur in prep, tag along on a fossil hunt with Wendy Sloboda of Wendiceratops fame, and spend a nice chunk of time with the Tumbler Ridge dinosaur tracks, featuring friend of LITC Lisa Buckley. And so much more!

I appreciated Yanchyk's focus on the stories of discovery, study, and the people who do it. As researchers tell their stories, a running theme of the importance of protecting our fossil heritage emerges, and they offer impassioned arguments for their various fields of study. Sit back and enjoy!

DinosaurChannel.tv Needs You!

Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger, known for their terrific paleoart studio, have launched a multimedia educational website called DinosaurChannel.tv. In order to pack it full of cool content, they need a bit of help, and have launched a Kickstarter campaign. Here's their video.



The site is up, though not updated with a lot of content, but the Kickstarter project video here gives a good taste of what they'd like to do. I especially liked the illustrated title cards for the different series, which strike a great balance between "accurate" and cartoony, and the hand drawn lettering is terrific. There's a lot of potential, so hop over and throw some money their way - or at least spread the word so fellow paleo-geeks can help out. As an admirer of their work, I'd love to see what they can do with full funding.

The Meanest Landlord in the History of the World

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis should be well-known to long-time readers of this blog. It really is a standout as a science outreach organization in the midwest, and is a necessary regional antidote to the corrupting influence of a certain Kentucky "museum" which shall not be named. It's also another museum embracing YouTube to reach the public, with their weekly "This Week's WOW" features as well as charming little pieces like this one, in which children offer their own descriptions of dinosaurs.



I love the idea of Tyrannosaurus rex as a particularly awful landlord.

Carl Zimmer's Feather Evolution video

Science writer Carl Zimmer narrates a recent TED educational video summarizing our knowledge about the evolution of feathers. Part of a lesson at the TED-Ed site and animated by Armella Leung, it's a really well done crash course in current thinking on feather origins.



Did you note the derivatives from different pieces of paleoart? The Epidexipteryx is clearly based on the Qiu Ji and Xing Lida reconstruction, and the displaying Caudipteryx is Sydney Mohr's.

Those bits aside, I love the way the idea of deep time's mysteries and evolution's imperfect and haphazard processes are illustrated with the sketchy illustration style, and the use of the white feather silhouettes when Zimmer discusses the early functions of feathers is inspired.

Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie

Ceratopsia triumphant! The international trailer for Walking with Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie is here, giving us our first good look of what to expect. Pachyrhinosaurus takes center stage here, and among the supporting cast are mighty Edmontosaurs, feathered Troodons, and a few big nasty theropods. No Wittonesque shaggy coats or bristly bits on the Pachyrhinosaurs, but it's going to look mighty pretty. Guess I'll have to get over my aversion to 3D.



I'm feeling pretty stoked. This is exactly the kind of dinosaur story I want to see on the big screen. More to come, I'm sure.

C.M. Kosemen talks Bullet Point Paleontology

Artist and researcher C.M. Kosemen has begun a series of video blogs, and in his first installment, he rants about a certain habit of publishers when printing material about prehistoric animals: using "item mentality" or bullet points to describe them. He argues that it takes them out of ecological context and reduces them to mechanical objects.



A review of my library is in order to really respond to this, but I generally agree, and wouldn't you know it, I see it as a design problem. I think about my treasured DK Visual Dictionary of Dinosaurs, and one reason it was a favorite was that the spreads put all of the animals and their anatomical features in context. A reason I love the old Rourke books is that it does the same, though through narrative rather than informational graphics. I'm not quite sure how prevalent this "item mentality" is, but it may simply be that since I'm pretty stingy and choose where to spend my money carefully, I'm not paying attention to the lower-quality projects where it may be used as a quick way to fill in content.

And there's more! Kosemen recently uploaded a short video from 2008 called Tetrapod Zoology: the Movie, in which his All Yesterdays comrade Darren Naish shares his collection of animal toys and talks about how even the silly, inaccurate toys in his plastic menagerie can be useful for education.



Delightful stuff. Keep an eye on his Youtube channel for more.

Dinosaurs in Dominoes

A fun, no doubt laboriously conceived video by Youtuber named Flippycat.



My favorite bit was the T. rex skeleton.

Styracosaurs in Love and War

Ah, Dinosaur Revolution. Er, Dinotasia. Mishandled by the Discovery Channel, never allowed to blossom into its own splendid weirdness, reviled by critics (seriously, they did not like it). Director David Krentz has shared another bit of pre-production material on the Facebook page: an animatic depicting a story of Stryracosaurus intraspecific combat cut from the production. It's enjoyable on its own, but it would be wonderful to see it fully realized one day.



That desire to see it fully fleshed out just takes me back to those days of anticipating what I hoped would be a much larger phenomenon. It was always fun to see Krentz's promotional videos for DR before it aired; they were a perfect illustration of the joy so many of us take in prehistoric animals, as in this walkthrough of the Rahonavis sequence:


Regardless of the eventual handling of the work, Dinosaur Revolution must have been a joy to work on. And these rough sketches from Krentz's pen have more soul in one stroke than the entire horde of shoddy CG dinos populating the shelves of bookstores do (before you accuse me of prejudice, keep in mind that it's against the shoddy part, not the CG part). Eh. I'm feeling cranky. At least it doesn't seem that Krentz has given up; in a recent email to the Dinosaur Mailing List, he asked for other perspectives on the potential for scientific institutions to collaborate with media companies in mutually beneficial arrangements. I really hope we haven't seen the last of his work in documentaries.

UPDATE: Dinosaur blogger Mark Wildman has informed me in the comments of this post that in the UK at least, the production has been reaired under its original Reign of the Dinosaurs title. It will premiere this Thursday on the Discovery Channel at 9 o'clock GMT.

More on Dinosaur Revolution:
In Defense of Dinosaur Revolution
Review of Parts One and Two

A Whoopee Kind of Thing

The Washington Post reports on the discovery of a mid-Cretaceous nodosaur footprint discovered on the grounds of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It was found this summer by fossil hunter Ray Stanford, who spends his days searching for ichnofossils in Maryland. In the story, Stanford nicely captures one of the most poignant aspects of studying the animals of distant ages.

“I love the paradox,” said Stanford, 74. “Space scientists walk along here, and they’re walking where this big, bungling, heavy-armored dinosaur walked maybe 110, 112 million years ago. It’s just so poetic.”

Included with the story is short video about Stanford's love of paleontology. Bear with the ad; after that the feature is quite charming.

Reverse Jurassic Park

What if it was Velociraptors - in all of their feathered, pint-sized glory - digging up the fossilized remains of humans? TKToons has an idea of how it would go. Two episodes of Reverse Jurassic Park, AKA Quarternary Park have been shared at Youtube.





I wholeheartedly approve. Bobbing, fully feathered Velociraptors. Enough to bring a tear of joy to my eye. Son of a Baryonyx, they've done it!

Thursday: Live chat about Late Cretaceous dinosaur diversity

The American Museum of Natural History in New York will be hosting a live chat with paleontologists Mark Norell and Steve Brusatte this Thursday, May 10 at 1pm Eastern Standard Time. The topic will be recent research testing the idea of whether the dinosaurs were experiencing a long-term decline before the mass-extinction event that ended the Mesozoic era. From AMNH:

The team's research shows that hadrosaurs and ceratopsids, two groups of large-bodied, bulk-feeding herbivores, animals that did not feed selectively, may have experienced a decline in biodiversity in the 12 million years before the dinosaurs ultimately went extinct. In contrast, small herbivores, carnivorous dinosaurs, and the enormous sauropods remained relatively stable or even slightly increased in biodiversity.

As Brian Switek recently wrote at Dinosaur Tracking, this is a very complicated matter, and the oversimplification that casts a shadow over much popular thinking needs to be jettisoned. The dinosaurs were not marching in lockstep towards oblivion, and local trends can serve to distort what was happening globally because of selection bias. It should be a fun chat, and a great chance to get young minds to think more critically about nature (hint hint, teachers).

The AMNH also produced a summary video of the research, embedded below.



Questions can be submitted by email or via the Twitter hashtag #AMNHlive, and the chat will be hosted on the museum's site. Visit the AMNH website for more information.

Aquatic Dinosaurs in Saskatchewan

It was always one of the cardinal rules when I was younger: when shown a mosasaur or plesiosaur labeled as a dinosaur, one could quickly refute it by saying that dinosaurs were not aquatic. It missed the point, perhaps, but it was one pithy characteristic to keep at the ready.

Of course, that story is much more complicated now that the dinosaurian origin of birds is recognized, and the line between "dinosaur" and "bird" gets so fuzzy as to be absurd. As Craig Dylke pointed out recently, there certainly were marine dinosaurs, with Hesperornis as a good example.

Continuing its 2012 lecture series, the Royal Tyrrell Museum's YouTube channel recently shared a lecture from Joe Sanchez covering the hesperornithiforme fossil record in Saskatchewan. "Diving Birds in the Prairies: Late Cretaceous Hesperornithiformes" covers a general overview of the family as well as highlighting the bonebeds in Canada which have given us the oldest North American hesperornithiforme fossils, dating to about 95 million years ago. These fossils represent the genus Pasquiaornis, a basal member of the clade, and Sanchez demonstrates the way that its anatomy is transitional between wing-propelled divers and foot propelled divers like the famous Hesperornis. Enjoy!

Michael Habib talks "Air Giants" at the Royal Tyrrell

Dr. Michael Habib of Chatham University, who along with Justin Hall blogs at H2VP, recently delivered a talk at the Royal Tyrrell Museum as part of their 2012 speaker series. Titled "Air Giants: Launch, flight, and ecology of Cretaceous pterosaurs," it is an hour of pure pterosaurian indulgence, an overview of pterosaur science that clears up many misconceptions the public has about these awesome creatures. Posted below for your viewing pleasure.



Dig that he took a moment to thank the artists whose work he used in the presentation! Extra props as well to the Royal Tyrrell for their super-cool interactive geological timeline on their main page.

The dinosaur grabs two cars and a bucket of fail

When visiting secondhand stores and browsing for dinosaur books, I buy less than I find. Often, books just aren't interesting enough to bother with. On a recent trip to a Goodwill store, I found a book that may have originally come with a Hot Wheels race track, filled as it was with Hot Wheels cars being victimized in various ways by prehistoric beasts. We often note that we don't blame illustrators for dinosaur art that is less than accurate. They're being paid to do a job, and probably don't have the luxury of fussing over details and corresponding with paleontologists. This book was the perfect example; whoever wrote it couldn't even be bothered to distinguish the animals from each other, calling each one "dinosaur." Which lead to this unfortunate page of fail.



Beyond the fact that it's sadly called a dinosaur, there's so much wrong here. The bizarre crest! The teeth! The outlandishly exaggerated scale! The gross wingy tendony things! The rest of the book couldn't quite match this level of doublefacepalmitude, but I had to snap a quick photo of this one.

Got to admit though, the dinosaur-themed Hot Wheels tracks look more fun than a barrel of anurognathids.



Beat that!

Symphony of Science goes Mesozoic

I would be remiss not to post this. Electronic musician John Boswell is back with another video in his popular Symphony of Science series, this time dedicating a song to the dinosaurs.



I'm going to have that "the world of the dinosaurs" bit stuck in my head for days.

Ain'cha Anchiceratops?

Anchiceratops ornatus skull at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Photo by Ricky Romero, via Flickr.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum youtube channel recently posted a nifty thirty minute lecture from Jordan Mallon, "Variation in the Skull of Anchiceratops." For your enjoyment:



The Tyrrell does a super job of sharing stuff like this on their channel, so don't be a dillweed, subscribe already. Recent videos include one on the mosasaur Prognathodon and the sea-faring ankylosaur found last year at the Suncor mine. Also, Mallon is a DeviantArt member, so hop on that when you get the chance.

Weishampel Opens the Hadrosaur Symposium

If you hear the dulcet tones of honking Parasauropholi this week, it's likely coming from Drumheller, Alberta, where the Royal Tyrrell Museum has been hosting the 2011 Hadrosaur Symposium. Most of us aren't able to be there, but in the spirit of the shiny digital future, the Tyrrell is making presentations available via their Youtube channel. The first upload is David Weishampel's opening talk, giving historical context to the presentations to follow. Great stuff to see presented in this manner, so if you've got a spare 25 minutes, settle in and press "play." Embedded below for your convenience.



The Tyrrell is also sharing the symposium's content via Facebook and Flickr. Hopefully, more presentations will make their way online, and thanks to Dr. Tom Holtz again for helping to spread the word about nifty dinosaur happenings online.

Even More Dinosaur Revolution Goodies

With the premiere of Dinosaur Revolution inching closer and closer, Discovery is releasing more and more material about the miniseries. It's looking mighty, mighty fine, but to really understand why people are optimistic about the show, don't watch any of the teasers. Watch David Krentz narrate a storyboard. That's really all you need to see to understand why hopes are high.

Of course, you'll want to see the teasers, too. The narration is a bit annoying, but I can understand why the network would worry about the general public feeling lost. Hopefully the DVD and Blu-Ray will have the option to mute it. In a clip of a sleep-deprived mama allosaur, you can see a bit of the humor I've expressed mild concern over. More importantly, you can see a high level of sophistication in the storytelling. Another depicts the brutal comeuppance of a Torvosaurus (featuring Miragaia, which I'm pleased as punch about).

Concerning the slapstickyness... I think I'm converted. See the second link above: the headless dinosaur bit that made me skeptical last November is pretty funny and handled well. I was surprised by it, and I chuckled. It's going to be a moment the audience never forgets, like the water glass in that old Spielberg movie. The cinematic skill on display here is undeniable, so I'm eager to see how it's mixed with the hard science in the final product. I'm sure we'll cover it quite thoroughly here, and be sure to keep an eye on Dinosaur Tracking, where you'll see some exclusive coverage in the coming weeks.

The Field Museum's Antarctic Expeditions

In April, Chicago's Field Museum launched a podcast series called "Science at the FMNH." the last four episodes have focused on the museum's Antarctic expeditions led by Pete Mackovicky and Nate Smith. The team looks to flesh out our understanding of life there in the Mesozoic, when Antarctica was more like the Pacific Northwest than the icebound desert it is today. In these four videos, Mackovicky and Smith discuss what they aim to find, the difficulties of fieldwork at the South Pole, and what we know about the dinosaurs who lived there. For your convenience, here are those episodes. Grab a suitable portion of your preferred beverage, put your feet up, and enjoy.


Science at FMNH - Antarctica Paleontology from Science at FMNH on Vimeo.


Science at FMNH - Challenging Field Work from Science at FMNH on Vimeo.


Science at FMNH - Polar Dinosaurs from Science at FMNH on Vimeo.


Science at FMNH – Dinosaur Body Size and Environment from Science at FMNH on Vimeo.