dinosaurs
laelaps | November 29, 2007According to a new article in The Times, an extremely productive Cretaceous bone bed has been found at Lo Hueco near the city of Cuenca (somewhere between Madrid and Valencia) in Spain, diggers for a rail project stumbling across the site. They're in a bit of a rush, though; they only have until the end of the month excavate the site before the diggers come back in. I guess there's just not stopping "progress," and although I'm sure the researchers will have plenty of time to study the bones in the lab a month is not enough time to give the fossils they attention that they need (or even to do…
laelaps | November 29, 2007A close-up of the Triceratops mount on display at the AMNH.Ornithischian dinosaurs don't often get much attention, perhaps because some groups (i.e. hadrosaurs) are often viewed as the "cows" of the Mesozoic, having almost the exact same body plan only differing in head ornamentation. Members of the family Ceratopsidae often have better publicists, though, Triceratops being one of the most recognized and popular of dinosaurs despite public unfamiliarity with many other ceratopsids.* It might come as a bit of a surprise, then, to learn that a new ceratopsid closely related to Triceratops has…
laelaps | November 28, 2007
Tyrannosaurus rex is by far the most famous of dinosaurs, a creature that looms large in the field of paleontology as well as in the media. This amount of attention has caused plenty of controversy but it has also resulted in many studies of various aspects of one of the largest and most well-known extinct carnivores ever to have lived, and a new paper in the journal Paleobiology by Snively and Russell examines the prospect of "inertial feeding" in this titanic terror.
Tyrannosaurus and its close relatives (i.e. Tarbosaurus, Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Daspletosaurus, etc.) were definitely…
laelaps | November 22, 2007One of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving growing up was watching some of the natural history programs that would often air during the day, anxiously awaiting the later galliform feast. One such show I remember quite well was a PBS series called The Dinosaurs! (Part 1: "The Monsters Emerge," Part 2: "Flesh on the Bones," Part 3: "The Nature of the Beast," and Part 4: "Death of the Dinosaur"). Unfortunately, the series is only available on VHS today (yet another reason for me to eventually purchase a DVD burner with a VHS deck in it), but someone has been kind enough to upload some of the…
laelaps | November 20, 2007The new issue December issue of National Geographic, a Dracorex peering at me from the cover, arrived in the mailbox today, and I can't say that I was a big fan of the dinosaur feature that I blogged about a few days ago. While the main body of the article, an essay by John Updike, is alright, the thing that first grabbed my attention was the mention that perhaps Spinosaurus was "buffalo-backed," the elongated neural spines along its back supported masses of fat or muscle rather than a sail. Some pencil sketches illustrate the differing hypotheses, although I have to say that the "hump"…
laelaps | November 19, 2007
Although the dinosaur halls of the AMNH are perhaps the most popular of all the exhibitions in the museum, the Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs usually doesn't get as much attention as the Hall of Dinosaur Superstars Saurischian Dinosaurs. A few stop and look, but most pass right on through. "Triceratops? Great. Stegosaurus? Wow. Hadrosaurs? You've seen one, you've seen 'em all." This is a shame, especially because tucked away on the left hand side of the hall is a growth series of Protoceratops this is simply amazing, and right across from it is the famous diorama of a male and female…
laelaps | November 16, 2007Just in case you haven't had enough of enigmatic dinosaurs over the past 24 hours, National Geographic is apparently planning a new article all about "Bizarre Dinosaurs" in their December 2007 issue. How do I know this? If you go to the National Geographic Society website featuring some reconstructions of a certain sauropod celebrity and click the "Dinosaur Wallpaper" button on the left, a chorus line of odd dinosaurs shows up with the caption "From 'Bizarre Dinosaurs,' National Geographic, December 2007." There's Amargasaurus, Carnotaurus, Dracorex, Epidendrosaurus, and (one of my personal…
laelaps | November 15, 2007Paleontologist Paul Sereno with the bizarre skull of the strange sauropod Nigersaurus taqueti, announced today in the open-access journal PLoS.When you hear the word "sauropod," what's the first image that comes to mind? For many people it's an immense, dull colored behemoth lumbering across the landscape (or perhaps wallowing in a swamp if you were first introduced prior to the Dinosaur Renaissance), its long neck stretching out to crop conifers from the high branches of nearby trees. Edwin Colbert pins down this classical image of "Brontosaurus" in his book The Year of the Dinosaur (1977…
laelaps | November 15, 2007Barosaurus lentus by Michael SkrepnickBarosaurus lentus is one of the many dinosaurs that are both familiar and rare, one skeleton being mostly complete but the 5 others that are currently known are much less so. Known from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of the western United States, this dinosaur is perhaps most famously (and controversially) reconstructed in the Grand Rotunda of the American Museum of Natural History, rearing up to protect a juvenile from a marauding Allosaurus, although a recent news story from the Royal Ontario Museum tells of the second most complete specimen being…
laelaps | November 15, 2007
There could scarcely be a better name for the skeletal remains of the extinct sauropod pictured above; Apatosaurus, the "deceptive lizard," proving to be the center of controversy for many years. The "tale of the missing skull" and the Apatosaurus/"Brontosaurus" controversies are perhaps the most well known, coming to a head when the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp mixing the right body with the wrong name, but the debate over which name is right (and which skull should be on the mounts) has often centered on preference as much as scientific reality. The skeletons have been corrected and…
laelaps | November 5, 2007A mother Tyrannosaurus rex and her offspring at the end of the WWD live show.Robotic dinosaurs have long been a thorn in the side of students of paleontology; the rigid, roaring robots of the "DinoMotion" craze of the 1990's did little more than get more people into museums without providing them with any actual information about the extinct animals. Stephen Jay Gould laments this theme park treatment of dinosaurs in his essay "Dinomania" (compiled in Dinosaur in a Haystack);
As a symbol of our dilemma, consider the plight of natural history museums in the light of commercial dinomania. In…
laelaps | October 31, 2007
Happy Halloween, everyone! In searching for a somewhat frightening image (I already recently used Prestosuchus and Amphicyon), I recalled this photo of the AMNH Tyrannosaurus rex mount. Most of the photos I have of the reconstruction are of the whole head or body, but I especially like this one for far more subtle reasons; the close-up makes it appear as if the dinosaur is just beginning to open its jaws, my imagination filling in the sound of heavy breaths escaping the cavernous tooth-lined maw.
laelaps | October 30, 2007The sculpted skull of the AMNH Deinonychus mount.For nearly as long as I can remember, artistic depictions of Deinonychus and related dromeosaurs have featured the dinosaur as a pack hunter, often pouncing on a hapless ornithischian like Tenontosaurus (see here, here, here, and here for examples). After being confronted with such imagery time and time again I didn't think twice about the pack-hunting behavior in Deinonychus as a kid, but I started to wonder on what evidence all these gory illustrations were based. The popular books in my own library treated the behavior as a fact and gave no…
laelaps | October 22, 2007This past week I managed to read Peter Dodson's very helpful book The Horned Dinosaurs from cover-to-cover (in addition to finishing some books on Megalania, dinosaur reproduction, philosophy, etc. A massive book review is forthcoming), one of my most favorite sections being where Dodson walks the reader through reconstructing a Chasmosaurus skeleton bone-by-bone. Oddly enough, I came across the a YouTube video of a self-assembling Chasmosaurus skeleton (embedding was disabled for this video), although unfortunately for curators I have not known skeletons to acquiesce to fully leaving their…
laelaps | October 22, 2007Unfortunately, I didn't get to attend to the annual SVP Meeting in Austin, TX this year, and I can hardly wait to hear about all the interesting talks and papers from those who attended. My curiosity as to the proceedings has been mildly sated, however, by a news report about one of the interesting discoveries announced at the convention; a mid-Triassic (225 Ma) track found near Melbourne, Australia that has been attributed to a theropod dinosaur.
The 14cm-long tracks seem to indicate the presence of a theropod (or, as Zach has pointed out, some as-yet-unknown bipedal crurotarsian) that stood…
laelaps | October 22, 2007
An artist's reconstruction, released by the National Museum of Brazil, of the paleoecology inhabited by Futalognkosaurus (left). It is being menaced by Megaraptor, now known to be a tetanuran theropod.
For quite some time it was thought that after the Jurassic period the massive sauropods that roamed North America were all but extinct, a radiation of ankylosaurs, ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, and other ornithischians becoming the primary herbivores in place of the massive long-necked saurischians. At least one genus did hang on until the Late Cretaceous, the titanosaur Alamosaurus sanjuanensis…
laelaps | October 11, 2007Part of the joy of blogging about paleo is that there's always something going on, and this year there seems to be no shortage of prehistoric news. This also seems to be a year marked by lots of IMAX paleo films, so here's a quick rundown of what's out there right now;
Dinosaurs 3D: Giants of Patagonia
South America has yielded some of the weirdest and most wonderful dinosaurs discovered in recent years, in addition to some of the biggest. The "Giants of Patagonia" have shown that sauropods didn't just disappear at the end of the Jurassic and that South America has its own fearsome theropod…
laelaps | October 11, 2007My wife merely considers it a quirk a living with a paleontologically-oriented husband; whenever I feel like my efforts are futile, I hold my hands up against my chest with two fingers extended to represent the "useless forelimbs" of Tyrannosaurus. The evolutionary narrative of how Tyrannosaurus came to have such a massive head and such small limbs is a familiar one, physical constraints determining that the development of a large, terrible head would cause a reduction in limb size. This doesn't make the relatively minuscule limbs of Tyrannosaurus and its close relatives any less puzzling,…
laelaps | October 11, 2007When I was first becoming acquainted with dinosaurs during the latter half of the 1980's, the standard "rule" for theropod dinosaurs was that as they grew bigger through the course of time their heads became more robust and their arms grew smaller. Just comparing the Jurassic predator Allosaurus with the Cretaceous Tyrannosaurus rex (numerous pictures of both filling the books I constantly begged my parents to purchase for me) seemed to confirm this, but there was always one very special set of fossil remains that seemed to contradict the prevailing trend. Hung up in the corner at the…