Why Dinosaurs Matter

Why bother studying dinosaurs? I ask myself this question from time to time. I was spurred to consider it again, earlier today, by a post at Archosaur Musings. In it, Dave Hone lets loose on a sloppily designed pterosaur toy. I have to admit, it's really fun to see a paleontologist rip apart a bad toy like this. I enjoy writing the occasional rant, but I'm paranoid that I'll commit a factual blunder, which would be all the more embarrassing for the righteous anger with which it was delivered. I don't actually get spitting mad over a mislabeled duckbill figurine. Seriously, I don't. Really. Honest.

Hone's post made me question why I should feel this annoyance in the first place. What does it matter to me that some kid's toy Parasaurolophus looks more like Corythosaurus? Will it really make a difference? If he cares enough to actually read the packaging, he'll probably have forgotten by the time he grows up. I know in my gut that dinosaurs are worthy of study, and of public attention. And I know that it's not just for the sake of knowledge. Especially as we've learned that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, that they aren't just novelties. Their evolution has lasting effects on the world.

Conveniently enough, one of the next blogs on my reading list was Scott Sampson's new The Whirlpool of Life, and he was kind enough to answer this question quite eloquently. Here's an excerpt; be sure to head to the blog to read the whole post.

...dinosaurs offer an exceptional access point into the Great Story—our story. They can help us forge links between the distant past and the present day (e.g., modern birds as living dinosaurs) and insert us back into the flow of deep time (Tyrannosaurus lived closer to you in time than to Allosaurus or Stegosaurus). These ancient creatures can be used to demonstrate that every ecosystem on Earth, whether in the Mesozoic or the present day, is the culmination of millions upon millions of years of co-evolution between and among life forms.

I love his illustration of the immensity of time, comparing the time since the K-T event with the span of time between Cretaceous T. rex and Jurassic Allosaurus. Puts things in context in a handful of words. From what I've read at Whirlpool, Sampson is a fine writer and a great communicator of science. His recent book, Dinosaur Odyssey, is on its way to me and I'll be reviewing it shortly.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Questions Children Ask

I have an ever-expanding collection of vintage dinosaur art which I'm in the midst of digitizing. Most of it is in the form of obsolete children's books. I'm as big a sucker for old design and illustration as I am for dinosaurs. Mix the two, and I'm happy as a pillbug.

Here's a good one from a 1956 book called Questions Children Ask, published by the Standard Education Society (here's a Flickr set featuring other pages from the same book). It's credited to Henry Harringer (1892-1980), who seems to have been a Chicago-based illustrator who toiled away in obscurity. I can find little information about him, but everything he's connected to is out of Chicago. His only claim to modest fame appears to be a theater, proposed at the Century of Progress Exhibition, which would have brought Ziegfield Follies style shows to the Windy City.

I love this caption: "The Diplodocus was nearly 90 feet long. It had a very small brain and was clumsy and stupid." These old science books always made a point of impugning the intelligence of one dinosaur or another. I can't hold that against old Mr. Harringer, of course.

The dinosaur on your table

In the USA, today is Thanksgiving, a holiday calling for us to celebrate all of the blessings of being American by ratcheting up our everyday gluttony to extremes. What better way to prove our worth than to eat the avian theropod Meleagris gallopavo?

For a fun project, turn the carcass of your turkey into a paleontology lesson. Matt Wedel tells you how. He also has one of the best airport security stories I've heard. "Literally the bone of a cow." Hilarious.

PS. I would have turned the axe into a Quidditch broom if I wasn't so flippin' hungry right now.

It's the little things

If I was a big-time dinosaur paleontologist, and I had my druthers, I'd sure as hell be carrying the keys to my ultra-secure fossil locker on one of these bad boys!


I snagged these for a buck apiece at Joann Fabrics today. They were sitting with all of the other impulse-buy items in a little plastic tub marked "Animal Babies" and "Dino Babies." You want a closer look at the snout of that Spinosaurus?

Proper! I love the look on his face. Full of mischief and sass. I've got to give a hearty dollop of paleo-props to the good folks at Safari Limited, who also produce the Carnegie Collection replicas you see in finer museum gift shops across this land. They've bashed the ball out of the park with these keychains. I only had three dollars on me, so I had to leave a few dinos in the tub. When I go to sleep tonight, I'll hear them calling to me...

Maybe they'll drive me crazy enough to fork over $62.06 for a whole tub of 'em!

Aardonyx takes a bow

I've been so slammed with work that I've just now been able to dig into the details on the new prosauropod Aardonyx celestae, discovered in South Africa. Aardonyx was described in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B on November 11 and the lead author is Adam Yates, who writes the essential paleoblog Dracovenator. His excitement over the publication is obvious when you read his post. This is a perfect example of a scientist using his blog for the public benefit. His post breaks everything down into digestible bits, and without the hyperbole and knuckleheadedness the traditional media likes to throw in for extra flavor.

Aardonyx is one of those special creatures that sits somewhere in between two lineages. All dinosaurs are believe to have evolved from a bipedal common ancestor. The bipedal Aardonyx displays skeletal features which are consistent with what we would expect to see in a family of dinosaurs for whom large size is being naturally selected for. At some point, the increasing size of sauropods would have necessitated the greater weight-bearing capabilities of quadrupedalism. Aardonyx appears to be one of those dinosaurs who could employ either stance as the situation required.

Here's a video of coauthor Dr. Matt Bonnan of Western Illinois University explaining how Aardonyx was discovered and the implications:


There's a lot more great information at Western Illinois University's Aardonyx site. Also, just noticed a story in one of the Chicago papers about Bonnan.

Definitely Dinosaurs!

Definitely Dinosaurs! The classic Playskool dinosaur toys of the mid-eighties. Warning about the link: don't expect scientific accuracy. Psittacosaurus is all kinds of wrong. And after they slapped a sail on the back of their Spinosaurus, they stopped trying. The snout is waaaay too blunt. I don't understand why companies go to the trouble of making toys like this and then stop just short of making it reasonably close to the real thing in design. I mean, I don't expect perfection, but Spinosaurus should not look like Allosaurus with a sail. It should look like Spinosaurus.

Here are a couple of old commercials for the toys:

Oh, if only my parents had pushed me into child-actor auditions. I could have been one of those obnoxious little turds. They probably got paid in toys, which to me would have been worth the deep psychological scars of being a child actor.

If Definitely Dinos are a little too tame for you, alls I gotsta say is "teeth, claws, muscles and jaws!!!!"

Anyone know of any more recent toys that put feathers on their theropods? I mean toys meant to be played with, not models. I can understand video games, like the new Jurassic: The Hunted, skimping on feathers for budgetary reasons. But I don't see why we can't give the children of the world the luxuriously feathered Velociraptors they deserve.

What about "WhattaCroc?"

Araripesuchus wegeneri, from Nat Geo. Drawing by Todd Marshall.

National Geographic News is featuring a slideshow displaying the stars of their new special "When Crocs Ate Dinosaurs," premiering tomorrow, November 21 on the National Geographic Channel. Get a sneak-peak of the digital reincarnations of paleontologist Paul Sereno's RatCroc, DuckCroc, DogCroc, BoarCroc and...

Wait for it...

PancakeCroc. You know, because its head is flat. Flat like a pancake.

Seriously, it's bad enough to give these crocodiles nicknames that sound like creatures the Battletoads would kill. But PancakeCroc? Really? Really? Why not nickname Stegosaurus PlateBack? And we could just call elephants HoseHeads.

Because I don't believe that people are too stupid to handle the binomial names, let's just set the record straight.

• BoarCroc = Kaprosuchus saharicus
• RatCroc = Araripesuchus rattoides
• DogCroc = Araripesuchus wegeneri
• DuckCroc = Anatosuchus minor
• PancakeCroc = Laganosuchus thaumastos

The University of Chicago neglects to place the blame for these nicknames, so we have to assume that it's all on Sereno. I guess I see the reasoning here. The point is to grab people's attention. But the -suchus suffix (meaning crocodile) is such a good one. It's fun to say. I'd like to believe that these ugly compound nicknames aren't really necessary.

The root of this might be Robert Bakker, who repeatedly refers to Lagosuchus as "rabbit-croc" in The Dinosaur Heresies. Though in that case, I can see exactly why he would do so: in attempting to overhaul the popular image of dinosaurs, it helped to paint the image of one of their forebears as an active creature, an counterintuitive amalgam of reptile and mammal.

Doing it the old fashioned way

I'm just going to keep rolling with the recent burst of dino-history subjects. This time, we'll look at a modern attempt to get back to the way paleontology was done in the old days...

The AMNH Scow MARY JANE, 1912

Between 1910 and 1914, after his great successes in the badlands of Montana, paleontologist Barnum Brown led an AMNH team on a series of expeditions into Alberta via the Red Deer River. A Canadian team led by Charles Sternberg also took to the river, engaging in a friendly rivalry with the Americans. Their mode of transportation was a kind of flat-bottomed boat called a scow. It was a very sensible way to search for new fossils in the days before paved roads. The river which made transport so easy also eroded away outcrops of rock, exposing fossils that had been buried for 65 million years or more. One of Barnum Brown's great discoveries during these expeditions was the tyrannosaur Albertasaurus, which thrilled me on my trips to the Field Museum pre-Sue.

A senior fossil preparation technician for the Royal Tyrrell Museum named Darren Tanke plans on commemorating the centennial of the first of these scow expeditions by embarking on one of his own. Since August, his team has maintained a blog to chronicle the project's progress. As if you needed more proof of Tanke's devotion to and knowledge of paleontological history, the scow is to be named in honor of Peter C. Kaisen, a technician on those early expeditions whose work in preserving valuable new fossils was crucial to the trips' mission - though naturally he's been overshadowed by the huge figure of Brown.

The Dinosaur Hunting By Boat 2010 Facebook page goes into greater detail about the project. It looks like they intend to stay as faithful as possible to the technology of a century ago; this isn't going to be a cushy leisure cruise. As the FB page says, "Food will be preserved with ice (or canned/pickled/dried), cooking done on an antique wood burning stove, coal lanterns for light, etc. The replica scow will be a floating museum as it will be fully equipped with period antiques or modern replicas of same." The team's boat will be modeled after the Mary Jane, pictured above.

I'm just super-impressed with this undertaking. Amazing.

ALSO: In case you haven't had enough giant-crocodiles-attacking-giant-theropods action, Dave Hone has featured a nice painting by paleoartist Bob Nicholls in this post.

One way to mark your days

Making sense of time's ceaseless march is a real pain in the rear. But that's why we have calendars. Now that 2009 is nearly spent, it's time to think about how we'll keep track of 2010. Here's one way: an awesome toy dinosaur calendar.

It features such wicked imagery as this:


By lisbokt, via flickr.

But jeez, there really don't seem to be many dinosaur calendars. Not for 2010, at least. Here's one. And another. Maybe some more will be popping up in the next month or so. For example, the Smithsonian may announce a 2010 pop-up calendar, as they've done the last few years.

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.