dinosaurs
laelaps | April 3, 2008
A cartoon of Diplodocus from Simpson's letter. The accompanying text reads (starting at the head); Diplodocus longus; CRANIUM, or to use the technical term, BEAN; Beaming Orbs; Neck like a tail; The Rest of Him (or Her as the case may be); Diplodocus tootsies; Relative size of a man (Homo sap) of relative size; Irregularity due to being dropped by nurse in infirmary; Tail like a neck; (From a late Jurassic Tintype).
Earlier today I reviewed Oliver Hay's ideas about the habits and posture of Diplodocus, and being that today was already history-heavy I thought it fitting to put up a poem by…
laelaps | April 3, 2008
A famous illustration of a swamp-bound "Brontosaurus" by Charles R. Knight. From Dinosaurs by William Diller Matthew (1915).
As I've been slowly reorganizing the mass of technical papers on my computer (1,600+ and counting), I've occasionally blundered into an old paper or two that I had forgotten about. I've already used two to create a somewhat superficial post about reconstructions of phytosaurs earlier today, so I'll run with the theme of paleontological reconstruction with Oliver Hay's ideas about the lifestyle of Diplodocus.
Published in 1908, the article seems like a good textual…
laelaps | April 1, 2008One of the first things I was ever told about what makes reptiles different from mammals was that reptile teeth were the same all throughout their jaws (called a homodont condition) and that mammal teeth were different throughout their jaws (called a heterodont condition). The fact that mammals had fur, mammary glands, and had a high metabolism/constant body temperature were all obvious, but I had never heard about the difference in teeth. That was elementary-school simplification, though, and the fact of the matter is that the distinction is not so sharp. There have been both homodont…
laelaps | March 31, 2008Someone has been kind enough to upload "Dinosaurs!: A Fun-Filled Trip Back in Time!" to YouTube and it has definitely made me feel a bit nostalgic. Now the trouble is that I've got "Mesozoic Mind" stuck in my head...
laelaps | March 31, 2008I love the concept of paleo-labs in museums where visitors can watch fossil preparators and paleontologists work on fossils brought in from the field (I've heard that the one at the Page Museum in L.A. is the best, although the one at the Academy of Natural Sciences isn't too shabby, either). If you live near Los Angeles and enjoy such exhibits, too, then you're in luck; the L.A. County Natural History Museum just opened the "Thomas the T. rex Lab" where you can see researchers working on the skeleton of a young Tyrannosaurus.
The preservation and restoration of "Thomas" is part of a larger…
laelaps | March 29, 2008
"Leonardo," the mummy dinosaur.
News of the well-preserved skeleton of the Edmontosaurus "Dakota" have been featured prominently in the news lately, but according to an announcement made this weekend, another exquisitely-preserved hadrosaur is going to be put on public display this coming September. "Leonardo," a beautifully-preserved Brachylophosaurus, will be presented to the public starting September 19, 2008 in the exhibit "Dinosaur Mummy CSI: Cretaceous Science Investigation" at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Eventually the exhibit will tour the country, but if you want to…
laelaps | March 27, 2008Crappy anime, claymation, and hand puppets? Watch if you dare...
From the series "Kyoryu Tankentai Born Free."
laelaps | March 27, 2008According to a Daily Mail article released yesterday, a 19 lb. jawbone from an extinct elephant relative was found in an unmarked package in a bus compartment. There isn't much else to the story, except that the mandible was misidentified by the "expert" called to look at photos of the fossil (and hence the error was repeated in the newspaper). According to the report, the jaws were from a Triceratops;
Pablo de la Vera Cruz, an archeologist at the National University in Arequipa, said examined police photos of the fossil. He said: "The jawbone that was found could be from a triceratops, even…
laelaps | March 25, 2008Anyone else remember this one?
To young-earth creationists, that's practically a documentary.
laelaps | March 25, 2008The study of the evolution of avian dinosaurs is one of the most active and exciting areas of paleontology (if not science in general) today, and I've been fortunate enough to see a revolution in this field during my own lifetime. When I was first learning about dinosaurs as a child, a few documentaries and books mentioned that dinosaurs and birds were probably related to each other, the overall tone being very cautious, but now there is little doubt that ornithology is really "extant dinosaur biology." Still, some old hypotheses die hard, and even though I greatly appreciate the beauty and…
laelaps | March 24, 2008
"An Iguanodon proper," as it appears "on the dexter side" of the Maidstone coat of arms, added in 1949.
Although the teeth of Iguanodon were discovered in 1822, more definitive skeletal remains of the dinosaur did not appear until 1834, which were discovered in Maidstone, Kent in England. These remains, as well as others from the same locality and elsewhere, allowed for skeletal reconstructions to be made of this animal, although the similarity of the teeth of Iguanodon to a living iguana seemed to dominate artistic depictions until the famous Belgium fossils were discovered. Over a…
laelaps | March 18, 2008Remember "Dakota," the exquisitely-preserved hadrosaur that was the selling point of a book that barely featured it? (See here for more gripes) It turns out that it's an Edmontosaurus, although the species name is left off so I have no idea whether the specimen represents a new variety of Edmontosaurus or not.
There is some distressing news, though. According to the man who found the skeleton, Tyler Lyson, he's planning on taking "Dakota" on a world tour, eventually finding a home in a museum Lyson hopes to create in his hometown of Marmath, North Dakota. "Dakota" will first go on display at…
laelaps | March 17, 2008
The lower jaw of Megalosaurus, presently the only fossil that can accurately be attributed to this enigmatic genus.
Although it was one of the first dinosaurs to be scientifically described during the early 19th century, the theropod Megalosaurus remains one of the most enigmatic (and problematic) large dinosaurs known. Even though an entire family, the Megalosauridae (established by Huxley in 1869), bears the name of this famous dinosaur, the group has come to be seen as a taxonomic wastebasket with no real meaning. Indeed, a new paper in the journal Palaeontology advocates dropping the…
laelaps | March 11, 2008You know documentaries have fallen into a sorry state of existence when their primary draw is the destruction of expensive objects just to fill up a few minutes (or even seconds) or airtime. I haven't seen the whole documentary, but the first installment of the BBC's The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs thought it would be fun to crunch up a car;
Of course, that clip is essentially a rip-off of a scene from the second Jurassic Park film, The Lost World;
The worst representations of the "destructive documentary," however, can be found in the Discovery Channel's "Animal Face Off" series. In…
laelaps | March 8, 2008
Smilodon
It's been two weeks since the last Boneyard weathered out of the blogosphere. Here's a look at what present excavations have revealed over the past two weeks;
Carnivorous mammals have evolved saber-teeth many times in the past, but just how they used their teeth to kill prey has been more difficult to ascertain. Nimravid presents a short review of how creatures so equipped may have caught and killed their prey.
Paleontology isn't only focused on nightmarish creatures that ripped other extinct animals to shreds; the Ethical Palaeontologist reports on an amazing fossil of a…
laelaps | March 7, 2008
One of Gerhard Heilmann's color illustrations of Archaeopteryx that graced his classic book The Origin of Birds. For more of Heilmann's excellent artwork, see this website.
Birds are extant dinosaurs; it's a phrase that (while initially quite stimulating) has been expressed so often that it borders on being trite. There are dozens of technical papers, popular books, collections of scholarly essays, and feathered dinosaur toys to drive the point home, but I've often been led to wonder what ornithologists make of all this. Paleontologists have been the main architects that have strengthened…
laelaps | March 4, 2008The New York Times has two new articles out today, one involving dinosaurs in Argentina and another about the social life of the spotted hyena. The article about the southern hemisphere dinosaurs is another reminder of the controversy between private collectors, academics, and the public, and the hyena article is a must-read piece about social intelligence by Carl Zimmer. (This piece is even more relevant given that the Berkley hyena research program is in definite danger of being dismantled.) Each of the articles is also accompanied by a slide show.
There is one mistake in the dinosaur…
laelaps | March 3, 2008
Gerhard Heilmann's often-reproduced illustration of running Iguanodon. This is the version I am most familiar with, but there was actually an earlier version in which the dinosaurs lacked the crest of scutes they possess in the above drawing.
Last night I picked up Gerhard Heilmann's The Origin of Birds and rediscovered a passage that is one of my favorites in the whole of paleontological literature. Addressing an absurd hypothesis for the origins of birds (and flight), Heilmann sarcastically tears down the fanciful speculation and provides a wise warning about books written by authors…
laelaps | March 1, 2008A few days ago I mentioned that paleontologist Terry Gates was going to appear on Bill O'Reilly's show to speak on the subject of whether global warming killed the dinosaurs. As we all know, FOX News = Fake News, and I don't understand why Gates agreed to be on the show. It was the absolute worst interview I've ever seen, and basically consisted of a lot of clips of dinosaurs killing each other interspersed with a few questions that made it seem like scientists don't know what the hell they're talking about when it comes to the K/T extinction (which, of course, marked the extinction of groups…
laelaps | February 28, 2008
A clip form the 1993 PBS documentary The Dinosaurs!
For everyone who missed it (or wanted to see it again), the NOVA documentary on Microraptor is available for viewing online here. I started watching it, but there were so many little things that irked me that I couldn't keep my trap shut. My primary gripe is that documentaries are still using Deinonychus and large dromeosaurs as the model for the bird ancestor, especially since birds like Confuciusornis were already flying by the time the larger, terrestrial predators were on the scene.
Further, while the trees-down/ground-up issue…