Hashtagopteryx twitterensis

#PterosaurMyths: Pteranodon had the most frequent occurence of tooth decay in all of the pterosauria; in fact, sometimes individuals are found with no teeth at all! This restoration correctly depicts the animal with a full compliment of teeth. Photo by Arborwin, via Flickr.

The other day, I tweeted a link to my post about the Royal Tyrrell video of Dr. Michael Habib's pterosaur lecture. It's a great talk, and could bring the general public up to speed quickly on current pterosaur research, so I mentioned that it dispels some lingering myths about pterosaurs. Desert blogger Chris Clarke decided to make this joke.

Which led to this inspired bit of hashtaggery.

It slowly grew, with Chris and I trading tweets back and forth, then more of his followers joining in... and then the dark overlord himself, PZ Myers, joined in, bringing even more folks over. It's petered out a bit, but I have a feeling it's not quite dead, so hop on over to twitter and share your own ptweets. You should also check out Darren Naish's takedown of pterosaur tropes at Pterosaur.net. And if you aren't already, do follow Chris Clarke at @canislatrans as well as Coyote Crossing and Desert Biodiversity, where he cuts through a lot of BS and writes incisively about the state of desert ecosystems.

Michael Habib talks "Air Giants" at the Royal Tyrrell

Dr. Michael Habib of Chatham University, who along with Justin Hall blogs at H2VP, recently delivered a talk at the Royal Tyrrell Museum as part of their 2012 speaker series. Titled "Air Giants: Launch, flight, and ecology of Cretaceous pterosaurs," it is an hour of pure pterosaurian indulgence, an overview of pterosaur science that clears up many misconceptions the public has about these awesome creatures. Posted below for your viewing pleasure.



Dig that he took a moment to thank the artists whose work he used in the presentation! Extra props as well to the Royal Tyrrell for their super-cool interactive geological timeline on their main page.

The dinosaur grabs two cars and a bucket of fail

When visiting secondhand stores and browsing for dinosaur books, I buy less than I find. Often, books just aren't interesting enough to bother with. On a recent trip to a Goodwill store, I found a book that may have originally come with a Hot Wheels race track, filled as it was with Hot Wheels cars being victimized in various ways by prehistoric beasts. We often note that we don't blame illustrators for dinosaur art that is less than accurate. They're being paid to do a job, and probably don't have the luxury of fussing over details and corresponding with paleontologists. This book was the perfect example; whoever wrote it couldn't even be bothered to distinguish the animals from each other, calling each one "dinosaur." Which lead to this unfortunate page of fail.



Beyond the fact that it's sadly called a dinosaur, there's so much wrong here. The bizarre crest! The teeth! The outlandishly exaggerated scale! The gross wingy tendony things! The rest of the book couldn't quite match this level of doublefacepalmitude, but I had to snap a quick photo of this one.

Got to admit though, the dinosaur-themed Hot Wheels tracks look more fun than a barrel of anurognathids.



Beat that!

Caption Competition!

I realise that I've been very light on the content recently and I can only apologise. Please, accept this gift of a book cover of such flabbergasting wrongness that you won't sleep well for several nights. Because it'll haunt you. Its toothy grin and flouncing posture will lurk in the darkest recesses of your bedroom. You won't be able to see it, but it'll be there...waiting.

Once seen, never unseen.

And hey, Niroot had a good idea recently - a caption competition! Please, devise the best captions for the dancing dinosaur above, and the winner will receive fame beyond the wildest dreams of anyone ever mentioned on some blog about dinosaurs.

By the way, this is the work of Adrian Chesterman and forms the cover of The Explorer's Guide to Dinosaurs. Since most of the rest of the book consists of blatant copies of Sibbick illustrations and DK models from the 1990s, I'll let him off on the basis that he doesn't know dinosaurs too well. Although this book did have no fewer than two 'picture researchers', and you've gotta wonder about that...

Dinosaurs pop up in the strangest places

Sometimes I'll see a piece of the advertising flotsam that clutters the modern web and wonder what the person behind it was thinking.



Was this targeted at me because of my browser history? If I was a construction equipment buff would the characters be little backhoes and earthmovers? Or maybe the site just arbitrarily chose to stick little dinosaurs on its advertising for no real reason, with no relationship to the copy. Not even a "Don't go extinct! Get your degree!" Just weird.

Symphony of Science goes Mesozoic

I would be remiss not to post this. Electronic musician John Boswell is back with another video in his popular Symphony of Science series, this time dedicating a song to the dinosaurs.



I'm going to have that "the world of the dinosaurs" bit stuck in my head for days.

The Dinosaurs of the California Academy of Sciences

During a recent jaunt to San Francisco, Jennie and I visited the California Academy of Sciences, nestled in Golden Gate Park.



The entry is dominated by a cast of a mid-size Tyrannosaurus rex, which unfortunately isn't much more than a decoration. The provenance of the fossil casts isn't given. In my limited expertise I'd guess this is a teenage individual.



As for Mesozoic dinosaurs... that's it. Nice, but once you've spent quality time with Sue at the Field Museum or Stan and Bucky at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, not a huge draw. The CAS is a conglomeration of institutions, and paleontology is not one of its primary areas of focus. It seems that the inclusion of T. rex is a matter of protocol - you can't have a science museum without a dinosaur, right? (If you're in the Bay area, your other option is the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley, which does have a few fossils on display, though it is primarily dedicated to research and does not focus on being a destination for the public.)

The Academy of Sciences holds one other dinosaur mount, in the form of the recently extinct avian theropod Aepyornis maximus, the famed "elephant bird" of Madagascar.



A. maximus is mounted within the Academy's impressive evolution exhibit, which focuses on islands as venues for evolution. Therefore, the rationale for its inclusion is as an example of the island rule, and there really isn't anything specific to the dinosaur-bird transition here. I can understand why: this is clearly meant to give the lay audience a good, graspable, visual evolutionary concept - how the isolation of islands makes them perfect places to study macroevolution. I'd love to see an entire hall devoted to the evidence for the theropod - bird transition, but that's not the point of the exhibit at the CAS, and it's stronger for its clear narrative.

The highlight of our visit was the enormous terrarium of the Rainforests of the World exhibit, which had its fair share of extant theropods. They provide a great opportunity for photographers, as they aren't too bashful.


Blue-necked Tanager. Photo by me.


Saffron Finch. Photo by me.


Red-Legged Honeycreeper. Photo by me.

Two beautiful Blue-and-Gold Macaws, Ara ararauna, also live there, but I was one of the few people who took the Academy's "no photography" signs to heart (you can see a photo or two at the Academy's rain forest blog). Leaving the rainforest but keepking with the theme of extant theropods, the most inconspicuous yet utterly fascinating specimen I saw had to be this mounted Barn Owl wing.



The wing was set just inside one of those big windows through which visitors can watch Real Live Scientists do Real Live Science (I'd love to see a giant vacuum valve water bottle in one of these). Sitting on a little table, the Barn Owl wing didn't attract much attention. It certainly wasn't on any brochure or promotional item I saw before the visit. But that's one of the joys of visiting a museum: tucked between the blockbuster attractions that attract the crowds, the attentive visitor can find unexpected windows into entire worlds.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: José Olivier

This week's dip into the great swirling sea of paleoart past brings José Olivier into the "family." He seems to be a particularly obscure illustrator, which is a shame: his work is so dramatic and fun. It's definitely in the mold of Burian, but not slavishly so. The book these come from, the German publication of Michel Cuisin's Prehistoric Life, was published in the early eighties. There's not much information available on either Cuisin or Olivier, but as Cusin has been publishing since the seventies, I'll have to work on the assumption that Olivier's work comes from that time. These were shared with the Vintage Dinosaur Art pool by geoblogger David Bressan, who also shared images I wrote about in December.

First up is a tranquil scene of ceratopsian bliss, as a Triceratops pair takes a rare break from their usual schedule of battling Tyrannosaurus after Tyrannosaurus.



The proud tribe of sauropods are represented here by that old standby Diplodocus, in a composition reminiscent of the ever-popular How and Why Book of Dinosaurs (thanks to Niroot for helping me figure out the classic image I was thinking of, after mistakenly believing it was a Knight illo).



These Diplodocus bear necks with next to no musculature, an effect which is taken to its inevitable conclusion in this version of another LITC favorite meme, theropods chowing down on sauropod necks as the poor herbivores watch on in horror. I love how the tyrannosaur seems to be popping up straight out of the ground, like a jack-in-the-box.



Pterosaurs get their due, of course, in the form of this jolly Pterodactylus soaring with wings of plastic over a pair of Stegosaurus...



...and this woeful Pteranodon, who has sustained a terrible rip to his wing and plummets to the unforgiving Earth below. I love how the backgrounds in these eschew the antediluvian fecundity of so many other Mesozoic landscapes, favoring great glowering monoliths and stormy skies. There's something to be said for this moody, monochrome take on the Mesozoic; while it may have been overdone back in the stupid and swampbound days of yore, there's just something so right about the pairing of titanic dinosaurs and pterosaurs with menacing gloom (my favorite example of this off the top of my head is Skrepnick's Centrosaurus herd).



When I first saw the Flickr thumbnail of this next one, I thought for a split second that it would be Pachycephalosaurus. Then I realized that it's just an especially dome-headed T. rex. "Olivier deserves two thumbs up for this two-fingered rexy," said the hack movie critic watching over my shoulder as I wrote this. I agree, though I would never say it in such a goofy way.



I can't help but save especially silly illustrations for last. It's a crutch, what can I say. I can avoid wrestling with a summary paragraph and leave you instead with something like this: Allosaurus and Iguanodon, tearing up the Jurassic dance floor. Such a joyous scene.



This is what it was like in Eden, before Eve ate that stupid piece of fruit and carnivory happened. Thanks for sharing these with us, David!

Ode to Stegosaurus

Okay. Take two, since the blogger widget for android is weird and compresses uploaded images beyond all recognition. I came across this work of poetical genius in Chicago's pedway. Apparently, the work of a third grader.

Super Vintage Dinosaur Art Funtime Bonus Content

Yesterday, Mark Robinson commented that I'd missed one of the funniest illustrations in the Pocket Book of Dinosaurs - what he called the "'roid Iguanodon". Subsequently, Niroot requested that I scan it. So here it is. (Also, I felt the sudden urge to publish a blog post with a silly title.)

It didn't scan too well, alas, but I think one can still see what Mark was getting at. Looks like a terrible attempt at imitating Neave Parker...