Vintage Dinosaur Art: Mickey and Goofy

Volume 6 of Walt Disney's Fun-To-Learn Library, published by Bantam in 1983, was titled Real Life Monsters. In it, Mickey takes Goofy on a globe-trotting, time-traveling trip to find well, real life monsters. This mainly means "reptiles." No illustrators or writers were credited.

Through the magic of Disney, Mickey takes Goofy back in time to check out some dinosaurs. It isn't long before Goofy witnesses something that will surely scar him, robbing him of the innocence that makes up such a big part of his bumbling charm. Mickey, hardened to the reality of nature's brutality, watches the slaughter as Goofy turns away in a vain attempt to erase the horror from his memory. It is futile, Goofy. You will never be the same.

Yes, Goofy, sauropods were the ultimate moveable feast, spending their lives dimly dreading the moment when some bored theropod decided he was a bit peckish, and might enjoy gnawing on a sauropod neck while it groaned in half-interested protest. Damn, I love the expression on bronto's face there. "Aggghhh, that's my neck, moron!"

Mickey might be forgiven if he at least gave Goofy a sound education. But alas, he commits that most basic of errors, calling any big old dead reptilian thing a dinosaur.

Maybe he doesn't explicitly call Dimetrodon a dinosaur, but what else is poor Goofy supposed to think? It's included with the dinosaurs, and Mickey makes no effort to explain what it really is. So shame on you, Mickey.

The idea that the sail was used to help Dimetrodon "keep its balance in the swampy land where it walked" might be the dumbest hypothesis I've ever heard. If anything, I imagine it would make balancing harder... oh balls, I've fallen into Mickey's little trap. I'm not going to debate him. He'll just Gish gallop me and I'll never finish this post. So here's a pretty blue Stegosaurus. I'm out.

Playmobil Dinosaurs

So, apparently Playmobil released a dinosaur series in 2008. I had no idea, and I have to admit: they're durned cute. If you're into expensive toys, check 'em out here.

Deinonychus

Spinosaurus


Triceratops

All images by TimSpfd, via flickr.

Ahoy hoy, Aetodactylus!

Thus far, North America has not produced a wealth of toothed Cretaceous pterosaurs. One was discovered sixteen years ago: Coloborhynchus wadleighi from the mid-Cretaceous of Texas. Now the total has been doubled with the discovery of the slightly later Aetodactylus halli, also hailing from the Lone Star State. It was discovered by fossil hunter Lance Hall, then studied and described by paleontologist Timothy S. Myers of Southern Methodist University. Myers has published his description in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Like so many pterosaur fossils, the remains of Aetodactylus aren't exactly complete. All Myers had to work with was a fifteen-inch lower jaw, but it differs enough from similar pterosaurs to warrant the designation of a new genus. Myers classifies Aetodactylus as one of the last known ornithocheirids, a family of toothed pterosaurs. Assuming that this classification is borne out as other paleontologists weight in, and that the jaw represents a full-grown specimen, Aetodactylus would have been one of the smaller members of the family, with an estimated wingspan of nine feet.

While not all pterosaurs fit the stereotype of being soaring fish-eaters, Aetodactylus fits the lifestyle nicely. The fine sandstone in which this jaw was found was at one time the sediment of a shallow, abundant coastal area, and the rock around the jaw was littered with bits of fish bones. And the fifty-four teeth studding the lower jaw would have been perfect for snaring a tasty seafood dinner.

More: Discovery, Science Daily, Southern Methodist University.

UPDATE: Foxnews.com just dropped a whole bucket of fail on this puppy, with a story headlined New Toothy, Flying Dino Discovered in Texas. They must have deemed fact-checking optional for this sloppy regurgitation of the SMU press release. Aetodactylus is called a dinosaur four times in the story, all within passages added to link together quotes from the press release. Fair, balanced, and frickin' lazy!

UPDATE 2: Edited to reflect debate over exactly how Aetodactylus fits in with other pterosaurs taxonomically.

Sauropod on Ice

The Denver Museum of Nature and Science ran this ad, featuring a gorgeously animated ice-skating sauropod, a couple winters ago.

Dinosaur National Monument Goes Social

Photo by BruceandLetty, via flickr.

In the old days, you might read one or two articles about a big project at a national park. Now, you can follow everything in real time. For instance, Dinosaur National Monument is currently overhauling its Quarry Visitor Center. To put a finer point on it, it's being completely replaced. Construction began last month, and the new visitor center should be complete by fall of 2011. But interested parties don't have to rely on the fickle decision-makers of the print media to learn more. These days, you can follow news about the project and the park in general at Twitter and Facebook. The park service also has a blog at the DML site.

For more in-depth information, check out DNM paleontologist Dan Chure's blog chronicling the process. He gets into the complicated business of relocating the site's fossil collection - including an utterly beautiful Allosaurus fragilis skull - and protecting the monument's crown jewel: the wall of Jurassic sandstone housing an amazing array of dinosaurs and other critters. While the wall isn't available to visitors during this painstaking process, there is no reason to keep away from the monument until its new house is built. This year, entrance fees have been waived to the park and to the temporary visitor center, so there's no reason to avoid Dinosaur National Monument, which contains a landscape that is spectacular in its own right.

1968 postcard of the quarry wall, from Baltimore Bob, via flickr.

When you look at the quarry wall, you're looking at the remains of an ecosystem from the Morrison Formation, one of the great dinosaur-bearing rock formations in the world. Apatosaurus, Barosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, Camptosaurus, Allosaurus, and Ornitholestes are all known from sites with Morrison outcrops dating in the neighborhood of 150 million years ago. I'm going to steal Scott Sampson's comparison here. Take a denizen of the Morrison, say Stegosaurus. Then take another dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous, like Triceratops. Stegosaurus is even further removed in time from Triceratops than we are, having lived about 80 million years prior. That tacks another 25 million years onto the 65 that separate us from Triceratops. It's actually less of an anachronism to draw a human next to a Triceratops, rather than a Stegosaurus. That blows my mind every time I think about it. Coincidentally enough, the latest post at Dot Dot Dinosaur features a piece of artwork from Etsy that highlights this very fact. Check it out!

I Guess It Wasn't His Spider-Sense Tingling...

T. rex makes an appearance with Spider-Man, a superhero of some note, in this Russian advertisement for soundproof windows.



Chain of hat-tips: Michael May, /Film, Coloribus.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Lewis Zacks

This week, the featured artist is Lewis Zacks. Unlike many illustrators put in the spotlight here, he has a solid web presence, including an honest-to-gosh website. However, most of what I've found has been the art he's produced later in life, after leaving the illustration game in the late sixties.

In 1963, Zacks illustrated In the Time of Dinosaurs, written by veteran children's book author William Wise. It's a run-of-the-mill kid's title, hitting all of the usual basic points: dinosaurs were big, dinosaurs were dumb, dinosaurs fought each other, dinosaurs died and no one knows exactly why. It starts with a typical mistake: the first critters shown aren't dinosaurs at all, and lived millions of years apart. Additionally - andI've admitted to my still-small knowledge of paleobotany before - I'm pretty sure that tree, which looks kind of angiospermy, wouldn't have been familiar to Dimetrodon.



It's not the only anachronism, either. Later, a Triceratops and Stegosaurus share a page. It seems that this book was published merely because dinosaurs are a safe gamble. The prose is pretty simple, and besides getting basic things like spelling right, not a lot of time or effort was put into the science. Zacks' illustrations seem to have been done pretty quickly, without much reference to fossils for accuracy. Take this Triceratops, whose beak sprouts from his face above the mouth, as if it's another horn.



Yet in this next drawing, the beak is clearly part of the mouth. Note that the Tyrannosaurus with which it's fighting has three fingers; this reflects then-incomplete knowledge of T. rex forelimbs rather than disregard for anatomy.



The book ends with this solitary T. rex, another common trope of kid's books.



I've done quite a bit of searching, and can find no other examples of work from Zacks' illustrating career. I don't know how the dinosaurs in this book fits in with his body of work. Some of the wider views, such as that last T. rex, are pretty nice, and I love the limited color pallettes of many of these old books. The larger close-ups aren't as nice. They seem both busy and rushed. Not that I doubt the artist's skills; I'm sure many of these illustrators were working under short deadlines.

Here's a recent interview with Zacks, concerning his current artistic interest in the architectural artifacts of the mid-20th Century, especially old signs. If you'd like to see more from this title, head over to the Vintage Dinosaur Art flickr group.

New at the National Museum of Natural History

The National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Insititution, opens a brand new dinosaur exhibit next Wednesday, April 28. "Dinosaurs in Our Backyard" focuses especially on those dinosaurs local to the Baltimore/ Washington DC area.

Photo from the Smithsonian Institution Archives, via Flickr.

The fossils come from Prince George County, Maryland's Dinosaur Park, which was dedicated just last fall. To learn more about efforts to preserve important localities like Dinosaur Park - in particular a quarry that is New Jersey's only window into the Mesozoic - click here. The Baltimore Sun's report on the dedication of Dinosaur Park is here.

Dinosaur Dig

Dinosaur Dig was an Apple IIC game. Never played it, but it looks pretty, pretty, pretty solid. That's all I got right now. My 'puter won't let me rock this bad boy. If any of y'all have better luck, let me know!

Fungasaurus and the Three-Fingered T. rex

It's been a while since I've gotten nit-picky with a piece of sloppy journalism. I've kind of missed it, to be honest. If you're getting paid to write this stuff, get it right. And often, following up on something that sounds a bit shady leads to some new knowledge, which is a spiffy thing.

For instance, this article contains some small problems that would have been solved with basic fact-checking or additional clarification. The story concerns the Highlands Prehistoric Museum, run by Jerry Jacene, who runs a fossil recreation business called The Prehistoric Exhibits Company in the same space. The museum had a "soft opening" on Saturday, April 17, after moving from Cookeville, TN to Kingsport, TN. When reading the article, three things immediately popped out at me:

1. The stale old mistake of calling pterosaurs "flying dinosaurs." It's possible that the article is referring to birds, of course, but it's relatively rare for that phrase to be used in that way. It's almost always a misidentification of a pterosaur.
2. Something called "fungasaurus." Googling the word leads to either the article itself or references to a video game character.
3. A three-fingered Tyrannosaurus rex

Here's the twist. Number three is basically true. I had not heard of it, and investigating the claim has been a lot of fun. Here's what I've learned.

The T. rex display at the HPM is a restoration of the Fort Peck Rex, the first specimen found that preserves a "third digit" on the hand. The Fort Peck Rex was unearthed in 1997 by a team led by J. Keith Rigby of Notre Dame University, and was also the subject of one of those messy battles over who has rights to the fossils: the property owner or science. The specimen was then subjected to years of study, and it has popped up occasionally on the Dinosaur Mailing List, where paleontologists and other dinosaur researchers engage in debate over matters mesozoic. At the 2007 meeting of the Geological Society of America, a presentation was given about the specimen by paleontologists from Fort Peck Paleontology, Inc.

Fort Peck Rex reconstruction at the Maryland Science Center. Photo by arborwin, via flickr

Calling the Fort Peck Rex "three fingered" is a bit of an exaggeration. It's not as if paleoartists are going to revert back to the practice of giving T. rex a more Allosaurus-like, three-fingered hand, as they had before good T. rex forelimbs were discovered in the latter half of the last century. The bone is actually a metacarpal, not a true digit, and is about the size of a human finger. It had no condyle, or knuckle, and didn't have phalanges connected to it. It wasn't a jointed "finger." Further examination of the third metacarpal in this and other T. rex specimens reveals that it appears to have had some use in life, as it's rather knobby, suggesting it had been injured and healed. [UPDATE: A kind commenter clarified, as I should have, that the metacarpal would have been "contained" within the hand, and not an extremity poking out of it. It's likely that the injury that may have occured to it was incidental, and not because it was specifically being used for something.]

Peck's Rex also provides further evidence that those widely derided arms of the T. rex didn't just flop uselessly. The left arm shows signs of having a bad muscle tear, either due to repeated stress or a struggle in which it essentially was pulled in a "tug of war" between its owner and another animal. I'd like to put forward the entirely reasonable hypothesis that it got stuck in a Mesozoic vending machine.

More:

• Here's the Science Daily article about the Fort Peck Rex from 1997.
• Notre Dame Magazine published an interview with Rigby in 2003.
• Brian Switek wrote about the find at Laelaps, prior to the 2007 GSA Meeting.
• Looking Again at the Forelimb of Tyrannosaurus rex, a chapter by Christine Lipkin and Kenneth Carpenter in the volume Tyrannosaurus rex: The Tyrant King (Indiana University Press), is available at Google books.
• Here's a local PBS interview with Jacene.
• Or maybe you just want to own a replica of the "pinkie."

Back to the really important stuff. What the hell is a fungasaurus?