Aye Aye, Ajkaceratops

I have a small request for paleontologists. Can we please give the letter "A" a rest when naming new dinosaur genera? See, I try to be cute when writing about new discoveries, and give the posts alliterative titles. It's only May and my options for "A" are wearing really thin. In the beginning, I planned on only using greetings. I figured that every letter of the alphabet would begin a greeting in at least one language. Well, that's out the window. So now, I'm reduced to pirate-talk when I want to write about the exciting European ceratopsian Ajkaceratops kozmai.

But maybe piratese isn't such a bad way to title a post about a dinosaur whose late Cretaceous habitat is likely due to an "island-hopping" radiation of Asian ancestors. Ajkaceratops (pronounced oikaceratops) is more similar to primitive ceratopsians like Bagaceratops than it is to the famous giants of the North American west.

Bagaceratops by Nobu Tamura. Via wikimedia commons.

Ajkaceratops is described in the new issue of Nature by Attila Osi, R.J. Butler, and David Weishampel. I find the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous European archipelago fascinating - as discussed previously, many of them are smaller or more primitively built than their better known contemporaries. Had the Chicxulub disaster not happened, who knows what kind of interesting routes their evolution may have taken?

More: Discovery News, SciAm.

Ta Prohm's "Stegosaurus"

The most recent episode of Brian Dunning's Skeptoid podcast deals with myths of contemporary dinosaurs or prehistoric beasts, from the famous "sauropod" Mokele Mbembe to widespread accounts of mysterious "lake monsters." There are plenty of anecdotal accounts of these beasts, either from people who believe they've seen them themselves or people interpreting local legends. As in other examples of cryptozoological beasties, good evidence seems stubborn to present itself. This isn't very meaty stuff, so Dunning focuses instead on purported evidence of dinosaurs living among people left behind by ancient artists. Despite the incredible burden of proof that would be required to overturn the volumes of solid evidence supporting the accepted story of Earth's history built by generations of scientists, these artworks are touted as fatal cracks. Dunning picks this "evidence" apart, not by dismissing it a priori, but by demonstrating how weak it is.


Photo by divemasterking2000, via flickr.

For instance, the "Stegosaurus" of the Cambodian temple Ta Prohm. Dunning points out that it really doesn't look like a Stegosaurus - that head is way too large, really, and that the "plates" are most likely background foliage. The other animals accompanying it all have foliage in the background. "If the Ta Prohm carving did indeed use a living Stegosaurus as its model," he concludes, "then its quality is grossly out of step with that of all the other animals carved at Ta Prohm, which are quite accurate and beautifully done."

Too bad Dunning neglects to mention that while the legends as told are extremely implausible, there is a grain of truth to the idea of living dinosaurs. For instance, there's the one I suspect of crapping on my windshield. He does get points for using the term "thagomizer," though...

The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs

This October, Princeton University Press will release Gregory S. Paul's new book, The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs. If you'd like a sneak peek, a twelve page preview is available right now (hat tip to Ian Paulsen for posting it to the Dinosaur Mailing List). This should sufficiently whet your appetite, and there's a lot more meat on the bone: 320 pages, to be exact, with over 500 illustrations.

Paul is renowned for his reconstructions of ancient life, and his Predatory Dinosaurs of the World is still held up as one of the great pieces of dinosaur literature, twenty-one years after its first publication. If you've seen an animated dinosaur from the last two decades, chances are it is strongly influenced by Paul - or directly guided by him. For more, visit his official site, which includes galleries of his work and an exhaustive autobiography.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Charley Harper

Man, I'd love to run across a book illustrated by Charley Harper during one of my thrift store excursions. His style is instantly recognizable to fans of Golden Books, and he's one of my favorite mid-century illustrators. His birds are especially cool, taking his "minimal realism" to an extreme, breaking them down to their simplest shapes. Here's a relevant sample of his work from 1961's The Giant Golden Book of Biology, chock-full of paleo yummies.


Image from Grain Edit, via flickr.

More: a Grain Edit post on this Golden title, the official site of the Charley Harper estate, and interview with Harper by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

JO, SJG

A couple little personal items today, if you'll pardon me. First of all, its my wife's birthday. Her name is Jennie, and she blogs here, mostly dealing with her addiction to thrifting and her appreciation of all things vintage. She also sells vintage clothing and housewares in her very own Etsy shop. If that's your thing, it would behoove you to take a gander and buy lots of things. It puts her in a super mood. The weekend trip I wrote about yesterday was part of her birthday present, so don't think the only thing I gave her was a free plug on this little blog!

Second, today is the eighth anniversary of Stephen Jay Gould's death. When I was a teenager, my brain flitted between pseudosciences (I wrote my senior term paper on UFO abductions), like a hummingbird trying to pull nectar from plastic flowers. Gould's eloquent writings on the history of science and evolution were in part what set me nice and straight, to flowers that don't just look pretty but offer actual nourishment. Thanks, Steve.

Painting by Carl Buell, via Flickr.

Dismal's Canyon

If you find yourself traveling through Alabama, make it a point to visit Dismal's Canyon, a privately run nature preserve. If you watched the Discovery Channel special When Dinosaurs Roamed America, you'll recognize the sandstone canyon that comprises most of the preserve. Because of its "primitive" look, it was used as a location for parts of the movie (I definitely recognize it from the Early Cretaceous New Mexico bit). The sandstone walls are, if my reading of the geologic map is correct, Cretaceous sandstone of the Tuscaloosa group's Gordo formation.

The loop through the canyon can be hiked in less than an hour, but you'll probably want to linger for a while. Jennie and I stopped there one afternoon, and unfortunately couldn't stick around until nightfall. I hope we can make it back, as nightly guided hikes reveal the canyon's claim to fame: colonies of glowworms, the bioluminescent larvae of the fly Orfelia fultoni. The canyon in daytime was gorgeous, too: quartz-riddled sandstone eroding into bumpy, knobby formations, walls carpeted in moss, abundant ferns, and cool, hemlock-shaded air offering relief from the stifling heat above. My favorite bit of the trail was the "Witch's Cavern," a maze formed by enormous blocks of fallen sandstone.

Here are some pictures from the trip. Unfortunately, we didn't bump into any Coelophysis.

More here.

Terra Nova

Note to producers: please try to remember that expensive visuals and quality storytelling aren't mutually exclusive. Please?



Fox has made a big commitment to the Spielberg-produced Terra Nova for 2011. It involves a family of time travelers from a hundred years in our future traveling back to the Jurassic. Spielberg's a big name, but I'd be more optimistic if it was Whedon, Lindelof, or Cuse. It would be really neat to have pretty dinosaurs and the kind of writing that will sustain them for more than one season.

Though in that case, maybe I shouldn't have invoked poor ol' Joss...

Pre-Fossil Fuel

Runned crossed this over at the ol' Flickr. Figgered on sharin' it with y'all.*


Illustration by Mystery Monotreme, via flickr.

The corny sterotypical southern US accent is due to my weekend trip to Alabama. More on that a bit later...

A Decade of Sue

I reckon there ain't nothin' more American than McDonald's and Disney tagteaming to buy a big-ass Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton for the Field Museum of Natural History. To make the story even more American, this occurred after the fossils' initial discovery on a ranch on an indian reservation by a private corporation and, once the landowner and the Sioux tribe each claimed ownership, subsequent seizure by the FBI. After a court battle, they were returned to the landowner, who auctioned them off.

Luckily, Sue ended up in the hands of the Field rather than a private collector with a nagging void in his foyer. Sue replaced the Albertasaurus mount in the Field's main hall. I was going to school in Chicago at the time and had a membership to the museum, which was within walking distance of my campus. I'd stop in once or twice a week, spending much of that time in Sue's shadow. I really miss having an easily accessible natural history museum in my life.

I'll need to make my way back up to Chicago soon to check out the spiffy, expensive new Sue exhibits, which you can preview at the Field's fancy-pants new site. Clicking on the "Celebrate Sue" link at the top of the page allows you to send Sue a birthday present. I sent a unicorn coloring book, which the site told me "was one of Sue's favorites." Honestly, I bet she would have preferred a goat tethered to a stake. In gratitude for your email address, you get access to four wallpapers and three "T. rex roar" ringtones.

The Chicago Tribune has written an article looking back on Sue's first ten years as a Chicago icon, as well as providing this video dating back to Sue's debut in 2000.



The beginning of this post is a remixed version of a Dino Friday post from Gentleman's Choice.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: John R. Jones

Here are some selections from Dinosaur Hunters, a little book that's as much about paleontologists as it is about dinosaurs themselves. It's pretty accurate, though there are some minor mistakes, such as using the name Brontosaurus instead of Apatosaurus, though the book was published in 1989, well after the renaming occurred. But overall, it's a good introduction to the science.



The credited illustrator is John R. Jones, whose name renders him hopelessly ungoogleable. I've tried, but come up with nothing more than a few listings with online booksellers. Some of the illustrations, such as this Iguanodon, demonstrate how ideas have changed with new evidence.



Here's the requisite T. rex vs. Triceratops page. Note the very Knightian posture of the T. rex in the foreground.



Finally, I really dig this little ankylosaur. Maybe not perfectly accurate, but plenty of character.



These images and many more are kept in the Vintage Dinosaur Art Flickr Pool.