Raptors Don't Grow On Trees

A few years ago, Phil Manning at the University of Manchester used a robotic simulation of the dromaeosaur sickle claw to determine how it may have been used - he wanted to test the assumption, popularized by Jurassic Park, that it was a disemboweling tool, perfect for slashing through the bellies of prey dinosaurs. The robo-claw wasn't actually able to slash through the flesh of a pig's carcass; rather, it punctured it. This led to the conclusion that raptors most likely used the claws to maintain a grip on their larger prey while ripping them up with their teeth, leading to a pretty awful, painful death by bleeding.

Manning is continuing to explore the use of dromaeosaurs' claws, and a recent study of the claws of their hands, published in the newest, dino-centric issue of the Anatomical Record, suggests that they could have supported their weight when climbing. In particular, the paper discusses the manual (hand) claws of Velociraptor mongoliensis, whose inner curve had an arc of 127 degrees, which falls between the upper limits of perching bird claws and the lower limits of trunk-climbing bird's claws. Manning also refers back to a 1969 study of Deinonychus antirrhopus, another small dromaeosaur; their pedal (foot) claws had an arc of 160 degrees, which is in line with the upper range of today's trunk-climbing birds, like woodpeckers or the nuthatches which frequent my suet block. Further studies will be devoted to Deinonychus foot claws, of which we have more good specimens than those of Velociraptor.

So the dromaeosaurs, at least the smaller ones, may very well have used their claws to climb trees as well as hang on to their dinners. Lacking any proper paleoart depicting this fascinating new idea, here's an incredibly crappy, dashed-off, proportionally inaccurate one from yours truly.

Image by me, via flickr

Off-Registry Dinosaur Goodies

As mentioned on Friday, I headed to a craft fair this weekend with the wife - the Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago, which was sort of a hipster mecca. I also had intended to get to the Field Museum, but my Cairn Terrier, Gregory, decided to get a case of the barf n' squirts, and it seemed inadvisable to leave him at the parents' house. So I'll have to get back there as soon as I can, and I will document it properly. The Field has been my "home museum" since I was little. It's still a great feeling to walk into the main hall.

The craft fair was packed to the gills and the sun was big, yellow, and relentless, so we didn't hang out too long there. There were a few dinosaurian crafts, intermingled among the ever-popular "cute monsters," ninjas, robots, and woodland creatures, but nothing that blew my top. I decided to take a look at etsy and find see what kind of dinosaurian goodness there was to see. After scanning fifty pages of results for the search term "dinosaur," these two items stood out:

The first is this nifty T. Rex print by Berkeley Illustrations. They do a lot of portrait-style drawings of animals in dapper clothing, and put the most famous dinosaur in a nudie suit.


This Etsy seller creates "make yourself" pop-up card and model kits, including a dinosaur series. Here's the Triceratops greeting card.


Nothing else dinosaur-related really grabbed me by the cajones, though there is certainly a lot of it. One exhibitor at the fair whose work I'm familiar with was Jay Ryan, the Chicago-based poster maker. He had a diptych of two Elasmosaurs (which are marine reptiles) done in his usual style. He was swarmed with people when I stopped by his booth, so I didn't get to speak with him. Unfortunately, the diptych is not displayed on his website, but his poster for the recent Pitchfork Music Festival features a generic sauropod. So that'll do.

Oh, before I go, the title refers to a term I learned from some soon-to-be-bride or another at the fair. Apparently, buying a gift that the blissful couple hasn't specifically registered for is called "going off-registry." As in, "oh yeah, I'd totally go off-registry for that." Just so you know.

Party Hard in the Mesozoic

My lovely wife Jennie sent me an email this morning to tell me, in her words, that "our blog worlds have collided!" At first it was a bit of a surprise, but it actually makes plenty of sense. A party planning blog she follows featured a "Dino Dig" party theme. You know, for kids! This is no surprise, indeed; as has been well-documented, kids love them their dinosaurs.

So, the gist is, you gather some kids up under whatever auspices are appropriate. After hours of preparation on your part, they'll don little $10 hats and throw themselves into digging for "fossils" in sand, making their own "fossils" with plaster, cracking geodes, and so on. Apparently, today's child expects and demands this level of party entertainment. Certainly a fine idea, but it becomes a positively super idea if you include an intense session of natural history education. It would be a good time, for instance, to distinguish between archaeology and paleontology (a spelling lesson ain't gonna hurt, either).

Another of the activities suggested by the good folks at Gala Goose is the papier maché volcano. Volcanoes and dinosaurs are one of those classic pairings in pop culture. In my mind, I connect dinosaurs much more with towering conifers and cycads. But I think I understand the connection. Volcanoes seem to conjure feelings of the primordial - the violent earth releasing its tormented materials in childish tantrums. It seems to be part and parcel with the old idea of the benighted dinosaurs sluggishly dragging their tails across a foreign, inhospitable, fume-belching world. It's a hard image to eject from the public consciousness, I suppose. Popular media like The Flinstones and the comic BC have accustomed us to dinosaurs being pictured next to smoking pillars of rock, portents of their doom. Of course they died: they lived in a world of constant explosions!

On the whole, there was a lot of geological activity during the dinosaur's time: At the beginning of the Triassic, the Earth bore one continent, Pangaea. By the end of the Cretaceous, the continents we know today were pretty well set in place. There were three major extinction events. But that's over 150,000,000 years. Over the course of a human lifetime, even over the span of human history, the dinosaur's world was basically as "stable" as ours. Cataclysmic events happened, but any period of time has its disruptions. Just because you wreck your car today doesn't make it a daily occurence.

Keeping with today's subject here, Jennie and I will be hitting both a craft fair and a museum this weekend. I'll keep an eye out for paleo-centric items at the former, and I'll be sure to fully document the latter, with a report to come next week. Anyhow, enjoy the weekend. Throw a dinosaur party!

The Open Dinosaur Project

So let's say you're interested in studying the ornithischian family tree. Particularly, you're interested in the ways they moved about and how they arrived at them. You've got a large group of dinosaurs who all share a bipedal ancestor, yet three divergent groups independently adopted quadrupedal locomotion: the stegosaurs and ankylosaurs, the ceratopsians, and the duckbills. It's a lot of convergent evolution for this sprawling dinosaur clan. It's a lot of data to collect for human paleontologists. A lot of work.

Solution? Open up the data-collecting end of the research. Thus, the Open Dinosaur Project is born. Using the internet, gather interested people who are willing to wade into the scientific literature to collect measurements of ornithischian limbs.

Living, accessible science. Cool.

The Carls, Buell and Zimmer

Image by Carl Buell, via flickr

Revered natural history artist Carl Buell doesn't do a lot of dinosaur art, but his flickr photostream is definitely worth a look. Some of the pieces are to be featured in The Tangled Bank, a new textbook on evolution by the fine science writer Carl Zimmer. It looks beautiful. Zimmer recently showed off some photos of the printed book on his Discover blog, The Loom. It includes a spread featuring a chart of theropod-bird evolution and a Buell painting of Archaeopteryx.

Zimmer also appeared on the season premiere of RadioLab, talking about one of his favorite subjects, parasites. And he discusses The Tangled Bank on the New York Academy of Sciences' podcast, Science and the City.

Dinosaur Train

Here's something called a "sizzle reel" for a new PBS kids show called "Dinosaur Train."

Sure, maybe we can't say for sure that corythosaurs used their crests to communicate, though it's very reasonable to assume so. But you can't make a kid's show and qualify every single statement with disclaimers. And heck, when I was a kid everything I read or watched about dinosaurs stated conjectures as facts. The important part: it's a really nice looking show that has a good chance of getting tykes hooked on science. And stating a theory like that of the corythosaur's crests plants a seed that gets kids thinking about evolutionary adaptations. The song at the end of the clip is pretty shrill, but I do like how the theme song harkens back to the train songs that made up such a substantial portion of early rock and roll. Nice touch. Some of the folks here have good taste.

Also on the kid's entertainment front: They Might Be Giants is back with a new album and DVD for kids called Here Comes Science. It includes a tune called "I'm a Paleontologist." As an old school TMBG fan, I wouldn't count it among their golden classics, but what the heck. Good on 'em for writing it. Kids should dig it heartily. Read about it at Dinosaur Tracking.

Have a hell of a weekend. Now. Go.

Compsognathus longipes

Photo by chris 9, via flickr

Here's a doozy of a fossil. It's Compsognathus, a small theropod of the Jurassic. This specimen is a female who apparently liked eating lizards. There's one in her tummy there. This is frameable, isn't it?

T-Rexterminator!

From artbyper.com, copyright 2008 Per Haagenson

Is that not one of the most completely boss things you've seen all week? It's by freelance artist Per Haagenson. Check out a big version of it here. It was a freelance piece done for an insecticide company called Orthene. I can only imagine it hanging behind the glowering, icy-eyed CEO of the company.

Tip of the pith helmet to Matt Tames, who happens to be on my production team at the publishing house where I work! He is, coincidentally enough, a paleoartist who has done work for the Indianapolis Children's Museum. He keyed me in on this painting, and it is also his desktop background.

More Threadless Dino-Love

Contributors to Threadless love their dinosaurs! Hot on the heels of the lovely pinata-ceratops and the "USA is Dino-Mite" designs comes "Jurassircus" by Florent Bocognani. Clicky-click the image to see the shirt's page, and if you're so inclined, exchange legal tender to acquire it!

Dinosaurs in Slate

You don't get too many dinosaur stories in the webzine Slate, but it happened on Friday, in an entry of the Explainer column titled "Will we ever run out of dinosaur bones?" The answer in part:

Since humans started searching for dinosaur bones in 1824, it's estimated that we've found remnants from 29 percent of these types, mostly in the last 20 years (a jump largely attributable to increased manpower and discoveries in Argentina and China). If we keep at the current pace of new discovery, it's likely that we'll hit something like "peak dinosaur," with 50 percent of all dinosaur genera discovered, by 2037. Within the next 100 to 140 years, we will have found 90 percent.

I didn't find much in the piece that seemed wrong to my layman's eyes, though I think it's a little weird to say that "paleontologists are always stumbling across new skeletal remains." From what I've read, they usually pick promising or proven sites for digs, and it's usually a rancher or hiker or other everyday bloke who "stumbles" across a bone.

Bad joke time! With a name like Slate, you think they'd have a lot more paleo-content.