In my estimation, paleoartists don't get much better than Carl Buell. I've mentioned him previously, but what the heck: this Pteranodon is fantastic. So is his other work, including my favorite rendering of the famous "walking whale" Ambulocetus. He hasn't done a lot of dinosaurs lately, but he's done some wonderful cenozoic mammals. Many of his paintings show his sense of humor, as well: for instance, the one in which he and an australopithecine knock back a couple brews. I'd imagine that the little hominid would be in for a pretty fun night around the campfire.
Be sure to check out Buell's flickr stream; he's apparently had some setbacks preventing him from establishing a better web presence, so it's the best collection of his work I've found. He was also interviewed a few years back by the science blog Unscrewing the Inscrutable.
Paleontologists from the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, led by Martin Ezcurra, have published a description of a new genus of large theropod in the journal Zootaxa. Based on its ankle structure, the authors have posited Austrocheirus isaasias a basal member of a family of mid-sized theropods called the abelisaurs. As the tyrannosaurs dominated top predator niches in the northern hemisphere in the late Cretaceous, the abelisaurs performed that role on the southern continents (with the possible exception of Tarascosaurus from France, but its abelisaurid credentials have not been satisfactorily proven).
The most famous of the abelisaurs is without a doubt Carnotaurus, instantly recognizable for its blunt snout and twin horns above the eyes. And, of course, its tiny little arms. It was the main villain in the Disney Dinosaur movie; a smaller, more realistically-sized Carnotaurus also provided brief comic relief in Jurassic Park 3. (UPDATE - Kind reader Ivan brought to my attention that my memory was faulty here - it was a Ceratosaurus in JP3, not Carnotaurus.)
Carnotaurus, via wikimedia commons.
The only abelisaur forelimbs found to date have belonged to three large members of the group: Carnotaurus, its slightly smaller Argentinian neighbor Aucasaurus, and Madagascar's Majungasaurus.Aucasaurus is remarkable for its near lack of fingers, they're so stubby and tightly packed in. Thus far, how common such reduced forelimbs and hands are among other abelisaurs is unknown, but similarly-sized Austrocheirus sheds a bit more light on the subject. Its hands aren't nearly as small, demonstrating that perhaps the reduction in forelimbs didn't necessarily correlate with greater size.
For all of the dinosaurs' fantastic features, the hands of theropods are among the most important. They're the subject of a long, complicated, and colorful debate in paleontology, and for good reason. Birds evolved from dinosaurs, after all, so understanding the process of how a theropod's hand turned into a bird's wing is of obvious value. It's important to note that the abelisaurs aren't closely related to birds. But the way the fingers are expressed in different theropods is always worth noting.
As for where Austrocheirus may fit into the grand scheme of things, this paper places it somewhere near the bottom of the abelisaur family tree, closely allied to the recently described non-abelisaur Limusaurus. One of the reasons Limusaurus, a small Chinese herbivorous theropod of the Jurassic,made a splash last year was for its unique hand format. Apropos to this new discovery, Limusaurus possessed a more reduced hand which seemed to fit in well with its abelisaur relatives. Austrocheirus muddies the waters a bit here with its relatively more robust hands; it suggests that rather than being a shared adaptation, the hands of abelisaurs and of Limusaurus were coincidentally similar. Hopefully new discoveries will clear up this tangled little knot of the theropod family tree.
Quick heads up: my local university's press is having a spring sale, with discounts of up to 80%, and free domestic shipping on orders of $25 or more. Click on over to Indiana University Press to check out the selection. Here's a shortcut to the paleontology titles included in the promotion, including the above title by Fernando E. Novas. The sale lasts until June 30.
If living dinosaurs are your special interest, and you happen to live in Indiana, this title is a ridiculously good deal.
There's only one reason that I own a Molly Hatchet record: the epically badass Frank Frazetta artwork on the cover far outclasses the riffery in the grooves. In truth, few bands can live up to the power of Frazetta's work. He passed away yesterday at 82.
In 1980, the Heinz company upped the ante in their endless war against Chef Boy-ar-dee by pulling in the big guns: dinosaurs. Here's a 1980 advertisement for a special offer from Heinz Spaghetti Hoops and Noodle Doodles.
Image from combomphotos, via flickr.
Looks like a pretty good deal. I especially like the gaping maw of that T. rex, virtually begging to be filled with delicious Noodle Doodles, a ravenous hunger that even the Chicxulub asteroid impact couldn't extinguish.
This, of course, leads to the question: anyone have one of these wall charts?
In the early 1970's, the Aurora company struck gold with their "Prehistoric Scenes" model kits of dinosaurs and other ancient beasts. There's a tribute site to the model kits, run by a fellow named Ian, located here. The images below come from the site; there is a wealth of background information, images, and even original kits for purchase. The site is very 1.0, but that's no deterrent if the content is cool.
Here's his T. rex box art, but unfortunately the Stegosaurus wasn't meant to be. It's a shame, because it easily twould have been one of Aurora's finest kits.
There's also a sketch of a proposed Parasaurolophus model on the tribute site, signed by Cockrum, but it must not have left the early planning stages. These old kits seem to inspire quite a bit of nostalgia, and I can see why. They have a pulpy sensibility to them, a mix of B-movie inspiration and scientific curiosity. When all of the kits were assembled, their bases could be fit together into a wild, improbable crowd of ancient beasts and cavemen. If I had been kicking in the early seventies, I would have been crazy for them.
Side note: sorry if this post popped up prematurely (and incompletely) in your blog reader of choice last night - I accidentally published it as I was starting the post. I deleted it immediately, but it's still sitting in my Google Reader.
On Tuesday, I wrote about Magyarosaurus, the diminutive sauropod of Haţeg Island. I referred to its discoverer, Franz Baron Nopcsa, as "flamboyant." This is, some may argue, a rather mild adjective. I wouldn't disagree. Of all the characters who populate the pageant of science through the ages, Nopcsa is one of the most captivating. He's almost too good to be true: proudly aristocratic, openly homosexual, a spy and adventurer, aspirant to the Albanian throne, and of course, a heck of a scientist.
Nopcsa, the scion of an aristocratic Hungarian family, was only 18 years old in 1895 when his sister asked him to examine some peculiar fossils found at the family estate in Transylvania. This spurred his studies at the University of Vienna, and thus began the career of one of the Europe's great scientists. As I discussed in the Magyarosaurus post, the dinosaurs of Haţeg were smaller than similar species from other parts of the world, which Nopcsa concluded was the result of insular dwarfism, the tendency for populations of large animals to become smaller in size when they are isolated on an island. He was the first to suppose that this occurred in dinosaurs. Nopcsa also identified other dwarf dinosaurs including the hadrosaur Telmatosaurus transylvanicus and an ankylosaurid called Struthiosaurus transylvanicus.
Nopcsa's achievements in paleontology reflect a keen eye and a deep curiosity about the lives of dinosaurs. He correctly interpreted the first example of dinosaur feeding behavior preserved in the fossil record, a Compsognathus bearing the skeleton of a lizard in its belly. He also stands out for championing the ideas that birds evolved from ground-dwelling theropods, based on an examination of the feet of Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus, and that at least some dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded. It would take the dinosaur renaissance of the 60's and 70's for these ideas to gain real traction.
His contributions to paleontology would be enough to distinguish him, but the story only gets crazier from there. He took his title seriously; in Edwin Colbert's The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries, he describes Nopcsa as actually having peasants bow to him as he traveled between his estates. Nopcsa also had an obsession with the land of Albania, and during his lifetime was the world's foremost expert on the troubled realm. In fact, after Albania was granted autonomy after the Balkan Wars freed it from Ottoman control, Nopcsa petitioned Vienna to allow him to take the throne; his plan was to ride into the country on a white horse, leading five hundred civilian-clad soldiers. The higher-ups of the Austro-Hungarian army weren't too keen on it. They were impressed enough by his talents to enlist Nopcsa as a spy, however, disguised as a peasant and gathering information along the Hungarian-Romanian border prior to and during World War I.
This presaged his fall from the aristocracy. After "the war to end all wars," with Austria-Hungary defeated, Transylvania was ceded to Romania and Nopcsa lost much of his land and fortune. As a consolation prize, he was appointed president of the Hungarian Geological Survey. Those qualities that make him such a fascinating figure seem to have made him ill-suited to institutional life, however, and his tenure was stormy and brief. In 1929 he left Hungary with his secretary, confidant, and lover Bayazid Doda, traveling Italy by motorcycle until his wallet was empty.
He wouldn't fade away quietly, though. After living a few years in a diminished state - he sold his entire fossil collection to the Natural History Museum in London to get by - he left this life in one final dramatic gesture. In what may have been the most heartbreaking tea service in history, Nopcsa drugged Doda, putting him to sleep. Then he shot him in the head. After writing a suicide note in which he explained his actions - he did not want to leave Doda sick, destitute, and alone - he took his own life.
As Weishampel has noted, Franz Baron Nopcsa aspired to do more than score fossils for museums. In his theories, he attempted to suss out what kind of lives dinosaurs and other extinct animals led. His insights were as remarkable as the uncompromising life he led.
More: GLBTQ, Wiki, Robert Elsie's Early Albanian Photography. Weishampel, an expert on the Transylvanian dinosaurs, is also an expret on Baron Nopcsa,as Steve Brusatte writes at Dino Data. Weishampel coauthored the 1995 article The Centennial of Transylvanian Dinosaur Discoveries: A Reexamination of the life of Franz Baron Nopcsa in Volume 15 of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. If anyone has a spare $85 for a back issue, I'm not too proud for charity...
This is the second repost of a "Dino Friday" post from my old general topics blog Gentleman's Choice. It appeared almost a year ago. It appears as it did then, with minor revisions to reflect the strict editorial standards of LITC.
I love my dinosaurs, but stuff like this is just kind of embarrassing:
Troodon was found to have the largest brain-to-body-mass ratio in all of dinosauria. This led to speculation about its possible IQ: while it was likely about as smart as a possum, it is the source of Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg's chimp-like Velociraptor.
Russell's wild conjecture was that maybe, just maybe, if dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct, Troodon or one of its close relatives may have been the progenitors of a line of increasingly intelligent dinosaurs, leading to a human-like dinosaur he called the dinosauroid:
This is really fanciful stuff, and Russell's logic has been pretty roundly criticized by other paleontologists, which seems entirely justified to me. While plenty of bodily features have evolved independently in unrelated species (such as the wings of insects and birds or the club-like tails of ankylosaurs and glyptodonts), it's a huge stretch to imagine the bird-like body of troodontids arriving at a bipedal, human-like form.
But while it has little scientific value, the thought experiment has certainly influenced popular ideas of dinosaurs, from the Jurassic Park raptors to UFO folks who have latched on to it as an example of the feasibility of the insidious "reptoid" form of alien.
Much more in-depth information and analysis on the dinosauroid thought experiment can be found at Darren Naish's old TetZoo location. And Troodon was in the news this week in reports about a Canadian dig site which appears to show that Troodons used a duckbill nesting site as a Cretaceous Golden Corral, though presumably the baby duckbills weren't doused in gallons and gallons of butter.
Mention sauropods, and most of us conjure images of giants. It's one of the classic dinosaur laws. But the fact is, they weren't all enormous. Case in point: cow-sized* Magyarosaurus dacus.
When flamboyant Transylvanian paleontologist Baron Franz Nopcsa first described the little sauropod at the end of the nineteenth century, he put forward the idea that it represented a case of insular dwarfism: when large species are confined to islands, which naturally possess a limited number of resources, they tend to get smaller over time. M. dacus wasn't the only example either; during the late Cretaceous, Europe was broken up into a bunch of islands. The Cretaceous rock of the Haţeg region where Nopcsa worked represents one of these islands and has produced a number of similarly "miniaturized" dinosaurs. Nopcsa's idea wasn't universally accepted though, and many claimed that his fossils represented juveniles.
While further discoveries have brought Nopcsa's hypothesis into the mainstream, it has now been pretty much validated by an international team of researchers led by Bonn University's Koen Stein and P. Martin Sander and Johns Hopkins' David Weishampel. By examining the microscopic structure of Magyarosaurus bones and comparing them to those of known adult sauropods, the team found that the little Transylvanian sauropods were, indeed, full grown. It's only one of several examples of island dwarfism among the dinosaurs, including the other denizens of "Haţeg Island." Recent work includes Sander's similar study of a Jurassic island sauropod, Europasaurus holgeri and last year's description of a new hadrosaur from Italy called Tethyshadrosinsularis.
On a side note, the story of Magyarosaurus dacus illustrates how political concerns sometimes influence the workings of science. When Nopcsa named his little sauropod, he initially called it Titanosaurus dacus. The name was changed to its current form by rival German paleontologist Freidrich von Huene after the Balkan wars to include the Hungarians in the fun; the Magyars are a Hungarian ethnic group (dacus refers to the historical name for Romania). I'm sure that this decision wasn't come to lightly by von Huene. He probably had hordes of angry Hungarians demanding it, pitchforks at the ready. I can't blame them.
Over at the ever-dependable Dinosaur Tracking, Brian Switek recently listed his top five dinosaur movies of all time. Topping it was Jurassic Park. I agree.
I have to admit, since committing myself to write about dinosaurs every day - even if just a little bit - I've started to feel some serious ennui regarding Spielberg's B-movie-on-roids. For the better part of twenty years, it's been the rare pop science article about dinosaurs that doesn't mention JP. And that fact has been magnified for me since starting LITC. I read a heck of a lot more than I used to: articles and news briefs and blurbs and remixed press releases from writers running the gamut from dedicated science journalists to bored interns. If a link can be drawn to JP, no matter how tenuous, many writers seem unable to resist. But for a moment, Brian's post made me consider Jurassic Park again. It was my favorite by default, but why?
I put myself in the shoes of 16-year-old-me. And this is what I came up with. This is why.
That shot. That one shot. Not T. rex eating Gennaro. Not the raptors stalking the kids in the kitchen. Not Nedry getting spanked by Dilophosaurus. Not Jeff Goldblum quipping about the size of a pile of Triceratops feces. Nope, it was a wide shot of a Parasaurolophus herd gathering at the side of a lagoon as a happy pair of brachiosaurs amble back to shore after a bit of a dip. When I think of Jurassic Park, this is the image that pops into my head.
Jurassic Park was my Star Wars, really. I was a big Star Wars fan, too, but I was born only a few months before the first movie was released. I don't lay claim to the collective experience a generation shared when ol' beard n' plaid's space opera hit the screens. It was something I came to know through video cassettes, role-playing games, and novels.
Not so with Jurassic Park. The road to my own Star Wars moment was paved with a fascination with dinosaurs going back as far as I could remember and repeated readings of Crichton's novel. The moment seared into my memory, when a movie actually made me see the world differently, was the first time I saw that shot. Certainly, Mr. Brachiosaurus showing off by standing on two legs was impressive. Absolutely marvelous. But it was just a set-up. When that shot was projected onto the screen, it was a punch to the gut. Suddenly, dinosaurs were alive again, and how I'd always dreamed of seeing them: casually going about their lives. Moving like animals move, with weight. Rendered a bit hazy by the distance. Put into better perspective by little white specks of birds flying over sparkling water. As if I was out hiking, and happened across the scene upon cresting a hill. It was a rush. A deep, satisfying realization of a wish I knew was foolish. And I realized it as it was happening: this is the closest you'll ever get to it.
That one shot is why, as obvious a choice as it is, Jurassic Park is my favorite dinosaur movie. That one shot is enough to forgive the movie's excesses: the ridiculously smart faux-Velociraptors, the majestic orchestral swells, goofy dialogue, actors doing the "Spielberg gawk," mysteriously reincarnated ancient plants, all culminating in an ending that could be described as deus rex machina. And though I do get tired of it being trotted out over and over again in articles, the fact is that JP is a big reason dinosaurs get the level of media exposure they do, and that's a good thing. As long as writers use it as a springboard to solid science content written clearly, there's nothing really to complain about.
You know what else was awesome? The Gallimimus stampede. And the goat leg scene. And when the girl beats the raptor with gymnastics in The Lost World...
