dinosaurs
laelaps | September 6, 2008When we last left Gary Owens he had been turned into a mustachioed dinosaur. The good news is that he apparently found a cure and again teamed up with Eric Boardman for another dinosaur documentary. (It's not like being eaten by a dinosaur stopped them before or anything.) It's called "Son of Dinosaurs," and this time the duo get caught up with some Russians with a viable dinosaur embryo. I think they jumped the Tenontosaurus with this one, but it's still fun;
laelaps | September 5, 2008By way of checking up on this blog's traffic the other day, I came across the "Dawn of Time" web comic, which features a cavewoman and a friendly Triceratops (the first strip is here). Some of the scenes seem a little Edenic and humans never lived alongside non-avian dinosaurs, of course, but it is still fun to read. With the introduction of two bickering Victorian scientists into the story line, things are just starting to get interesting..
laelaps | September 4, 2008It always amuses me how irritatingly dull school mascots often are. How many schools have the cougars, knights, bears, or some other cliched mascot? (A notable exception is the University of California Santa Cruz, home of the fighting Banana Slugs.) Given that, I was certainly glad to hear that paleontologist Jerry Harris is pushing to have his institution, Dixie State College, accept a dinosaur as the new school mascot.
Jerry needs your help, though. The college is accepting nominations for mascot suggestions and if you want to see the "Dixie Dinosaurs" come out on top go to the voting page…
laelaps | September 2, 2008It is amazing what a little perspective can do. For most of August I was hard at work on the chapter on whales, ignoring nearly every other section. This allowed me to focus on what I wanted for one of the most important chapters of the book, but now that I have gone back to some of my earlier writing I have to admit I am horrified. When I opened up the chapter on the evolution of birds I could not believe what I was reading. How could I have written such drivel?
I started to edit the first part of the bird chapter, but no matter what I did I could not see a way to turn what I had already…
laelaps | August 31, 2008
When I wrote my essay on violent interactions between prehistoric monsters in art, I thought I had touched on something intriguing. I penned a proposal for a more focused article on the topic and sent it out to magazines purported to feature articles at the intersection of science and culture. The response I got was almost uniformly the same. Not only were the magazines not interested in dinosaurs, but illustrations of dinosaurs were not art. As M.J.T. Mitchell explained in his interesting (yet deeply flawed) The Last Dinosaur Book, illustrations of prehistoric animals are often seen as "…
laelaps | August 31, 2008Henry de la Beche's "Duria Antiquior," an image of the carnage along the shores of ancient Dorset.As I've been reading Jane Davidson's A History of Paleontology Illustration I have been thinking about my favorite paleo artists. Late at night, when I am settling down to sleep, I sometimes just like to pull a few books off the shelf and just look at the work of people who have attempted to "burst the limits of time" with their art. Indeed, we fortunately live in a time when there is a glut of good paleo artists, each with their own style, but before I share my favorites why not share yours in…
laelaps | August 29, 2008Just in case you haven't had enough of the "classic" (vintage?) Eric Boardman & Gary Owens dinosaur documentaries, here's the sequel to "More Dinosaurs" called "Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs."
laelaps | August 26, 2008When I was growing up, dinosaurs were almost always on television for one reason or another. From movies to commercials, from cartoons to documentaries, there was always some ancient creature on the screen. Among the panoply of prehistoric programming the documentaries featuring Eric Boardman and Gary Owens were among the ones I remember most fondly, and I just happened to stumble across a few of the old shows on YouTube. Here's one from a series the two hosted, "More Dinosaurs," that was one of my favorites (although the ending gave me nightmares);
laelaps | August 23, 2008I normally don't care when I miss television documentaries, but I'm going to have to find some way to see this when it airs in three weeks;
So... freakin'... cool... And remember some of those exclusive clips (which are not associated with the Discovery Channel program) that I told you about a while ago? The Houston Museum of Natural Science has been kind enough to upload some of them to the web. Here's Bob Bakker on "duckbills";
laelaps | August 18, 2008
I haven't had much time to sit down and watch any movies lately, but this past weekend I did make a little time to watch at least some of the Jurassic Park films. There's a lot I could complain about in each installment, but I have to admit that it's nice to just sit down and watch what almost look like real-life dinosaurs running around on screen. Indeed, the films have had an immense impact on popular culture and ushered in a new wave of dinomania, and 15 years after the release of the first film (and 7 years since the last installment) paleontologists are still fielding questions inspired…
laelaps | August 17, 2008Say what you like about the new History Channel series Jurassic Fight Club, but I have to give the network credit for putting up the full episodes for free viewing.
Sure, you have to wait a few weeks, but at least you don't have to worry about missing it. From what I heard this week's installment featuring Deinonychus was par for the course (which isn't a good thing), but at least now those of us without cable can watch at our leisure and be paleontological pedants.
laelaps | August 12, 2008The skull of a Tyrannosaurus at the AMNH. This is the actual skull that served as the model for the replica shown here yesterday. Photographed August 9th, 2008.
laelaps | August 11, 2008The head of the Tyrannosaurus mount at the AMNH. Photographed August 9th, 2008.
laelaps | August 7, 2008 Hadrosaurs are often called the "cows of the Cretaceous." They were common, had few defenses compared to their armored ornithischian kin, and were a favorite prey for predatory dinosaurs. Natural selection appears to have applied sufficient pressure for at least one genus of hadrosaur, Hypacrosaurus, to change, however. It did not develop horns or spikes or a club, but instead ontogenetically outpaced their predators.
The key to determining how theropods and Hypacrosaurus grew can be found inside their bones, and a new study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B using histological…
laelaps | August 6, 2008I didn't get a chance to see last night's Jurassic Fight Club (you can see my thoughts on the first episode here) but someone has put the "main event" up on the web. I don't know whether to laugh or cry;
I know I promised to try to be more even-handed in reviewing science media but there are some real howlers in that clip. First is that it has yet to be conclusively established that Nanotyrannus was an actual distinct genus of tyrannosaurid; the fossils attributed to the "pygmy tyrant" may just be young Tyrannosaurus. The debate is ongoing, and I hope that this point was made in the show.…
edyong | August 6, 2008A good defence was a vital part of life in the Cretaceous. Plant-eaters needed effective ways of warding off the crushing jaws of Tyrannosaurus and its kin. Some species like Triceratops and Ankylosaurus had fairly obvious protective equipment, including horns, frills and armoured plates. But others lacked defensive armaments, and had to fend off predators through subtler means.
Take Hypacrosaurus. It was one of the duck-billed dinosaurs known as hadrosaurs, and like most other members of the group, its soft body lacked any obvious protection. Its main advantage was size; a fully-grown adult…
laelaps | August 4, 2008On Saturday it was announced that Polish paleontologists have uncovered the remains of an ancient predatory animal, heralded as an ancestor to Tyrannosaurus in the mass media accounts. Nicknamed "the Dragon" the fossil remains were recovered from Lisowice and are of Triassic age, the large size of the animal (~16 feet) suggesting that it ate almost anything it wanted. Yet there are some questions about this fossil, especially since it has not yet been published in the technical literature. Is it really a Triassic representative of the Tyrannosaurus family tree?
If you take a look at the…