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The hottest piece of prehistory this holiday season is bound to be KOTA, Playskool’s two-and-half-foot-tall baby Triceratops robot, who is popping up on the Christmas lists, and gadget blogs, of the in-crowd. (The guys at Popular Mechanics have already proclaimed it a “chick magnet.”)

This plush animatron is equipped with 11 sensors and can wiggle its horns and make all sorts of endearingly quizzical expressions and “realistic” dinosaur movements.

Speak to KOTA and he (she?) roars back; tickle KOTA, KOTA laughs. KOTA also snores and sort of snuffles – to be honest, kids, KOTA at times sounds very much like your father on a slow morning. The $300 dino even makes a munching noise when devouring leafy snacks, which come included with the toy. Also included is a volume-control device – you’re welcome, Mom! The only bad news for us big folks is that KOTA’s spring-loaded saddle has a 60-pound weight limit.

– Abigail Tucker

T.H. Huxley

According to paleontological lore, the 19th century naturalist T.H. Huxley was carving a goose for a holiday feast when he noticed something peculiar. The anatomy of the cooked bird was very similar to that of some dinosaurs, and soon afterwards Huxley proposed that dinosaurs were the animals from which birds evolved.

It’s a great story, but unfortunately, it isn’t true. Huxley had been teaching his anatomy students that reptiles and birds were very similar anatomically as early as 1863, but he wasn’t thinking in evolutionary terms. His conception had more to do with anatomical “groundplans”; birds and dinosaurs shared a number of skeletal similarities. It was only after he read the German embryologist Ernst Haeckel’s Generelle Morphologie, published in 1866, that Huxley started to go beyond similarities and think about how birds might have evolved from reptiles.

About this time Huxley visited the museum at Oxford under the care of the geologist John Phillips. While the pair examined the skeleton of Megalosaurus there, Huxley noticed that what had been part of the dinosaur’s shoulder was really part of the hip. Once the bones were rearranged, the dinosaur seemed a lot more avian than the elephant-like creatures the anatomist Richard Owen had conceived. This fit well in Huxley’s new concept of what the dinosaurs looked like and what they were related to.

Huxley produced a slew of papers on the topic, but he did not go so far as to say that birds evolved from any known kind of dinosaur. He thought that dinosaurs like Compsognathus were proxies for what bird ancestors might look like. The fossils that had been recovered by his time revealed the general way birds had evolved, even if direct ancestor-descendant relationships were still unknown.

Even if Huxley was not inspired by a Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas goose, however, the apocryphal story has inspired some paleontologists to use their dining room tables as a classroom. When their families sit down to a holiday dinner, these scientists point out the skeletal evidence that allows everyone at the table to say they had dinosaur for dinner.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! The Smithsonian staff will be taking the day off tomorrow to gather with family and eat our preferred turkey variant (turkey, tofurkey, turducken, etc.).

So, with food on everyone’s minds, now seemed as good a time as any to address the inevitable question: What did dinosaurs taste like?

And, yes, the inevitable answer: Chicken.

Well, possibly chicken. The best clue comes from two studies conducted in 2007-2008, by John Asara of Harvard Medical School and Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University (whose work on soft tissue in dinosaurs was described in Smithsonian magazine’s “Dinosaur Shocker.”) As the Washington Post reported:

“Protein retrieved from a 68 millon-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone closely resembles the main protein in chicken and ostrich bones and is only distantly related to lizards’, strengthening the popular idea that birds, and not reptiles, are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs.

In the new analysis, the team compared the order of 89 amino acids from the T. rex sample to the equivalent collagen sequence from a chicken, an ostrich, an alligator and a green anole lizard, a reptile commonly used in laboratory research.

The results indicate that T. rex, chickens and ostriches are evolutionary siblings, all descended from a single unidentified predecessor. Alligator collagen is more distantly related, and lizard collagen is more distantly related still.”

When the research team first released their findings in 2007, the New York Times wryly observed: “The scientists resisted being drawn into speculation on the likely taste of a T-rex drumstick.”

But, by 2008, Asara felt sure enough of his latest study to note, “Based on this data, you can be very confident that T. rex would taste more like chicken than it did last year.”

Our distant ancestors could have confirmed this theory—and, no, I’m not talking about cavemen like the fur bikini-clad Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. I’m referring to a shrew-like mammal named Repenomamus robustus, which lived 130 million years ago. In 2005, scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York announced they had found a fossilized specimen, with a baby dinosaur still in its gullet. “This is the first direct evidence that mammals fed on dinosaurs,” said Jin Meng, a paleontologist at the museum. “Now we can say that dinosaurs could be very tasty, which is good news.”

Well, good news if you’re not a dinosaur. In the meantime, the precise answer to the question of what dinosaurs tasted like will remain a mystery.

However, this much we know for certain: They weren’t kosher.

Dinosaur Kingdom, courtesy of Flickr user Mr. Kimberly

In 1863, a group of paleontologists discovered an abandoned mine shaft in Natural Bridge, Virginia. They were shocked to find that it led to a lost world where dinosaurs still lived, a discovery of great interest to the Union Army. The Yankees devised a plan to unleash some of the toothy beasts against the Confederacy, but the dinosaurs, were not keen on complying. The carnage is captured at a roadside attraction called Dinosaur Kingdom:

As you enter, a lunging, bellowing T-Rex head lets you know that the dinosaurs are mad — and they only get madder. A big snake has eaten one Yankee, and is about to eat another. An Allasaurus [sic] grabs a bluecoat off of his rearing horse while a second soldier futilely tries to lasso the big lizard. Another Yankee crawls up a tree with a stolen egg while the mom dinosaur batters it down. Mark [the proprietor] has augmented some of these displays with motors: toothy jaws flap, tails and tongues wag.

This is all fiction, of course; dinosaurs and humans never co-existed. The fiberglass monsters that are now seen in the park, though, have only recently begun munching on 19th century soldiers. They first appeared in the nearby town of Glasgow as part of a “Town That Time Forgot” promotion. It was a success, and Dinosaur Kingdom is so outlandish that it almost has to be seen to be believed. The next time I’m traveling through Virginia, I think I might have to make a side trip.

The staff here at Smithsonian seems to have developed a strange fascination with dead things. There’s the Dinosaur Tracking blog, of course, which is concerned with a superorder that went extinct 65 million years ago. And at our new sister blog, Surprising Science, some of the first posts are about woolly mammoths (a mere 10,000 years dead) and the bones of astronomer Nicolaus “the earth is not the center of the universe” Copernicus (d. 1543).

Surprising Science is written by Sarah Zielinski, a biology-major-turned-journalist and an assistant editor at Smithsonian. She is interested in most types of science (”whatever is in front of me,” she says) but will focus on the subjects we tend to cover in the magazine: geology, archaeology, astronomy, animals (living or dead) and stories that have art or history or travel tie-ins. But above all, stories that are weird or quirky or unexpected or amusing. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

In response to my recent post “Dinosaurs Ain’t What They Used to Be,” reader romunov asks:

I remember one of my friends having a stack of dinosaur magazines, probably a translation from an American magazine (I was around 10 at the time) and found “dinosaurs” quite interesting. I’ve been studying for my vertebrate class for the past few weeks and “dinosaurs” have somehow stood out. Can you recommend any good text books on them that I could benefit from? While the magazines would probably be worth digging up for the pictures, but I’m a tad more interested in technical stuff, especially ecology.

There are certainly a lot of dinosaur books out there, enough to build a library entirely devoted to them, but which ones are the best for people who want to know more than that Apatosaurus was really big? The field changes so quickly that no one book can cover everything, but there are a few reference titles in my own library that I use more than others.

- Dinosaurs: The Most Complete, Up-To-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages by Thomas R. Holtz, illustrations by Luis V. Rey

It may look like a book designed for children, but (as the title says) this is presently the most complete and up-to-date book on dinosaurs you can get your hands on. All the major groups of dinosaurs are covered, reconstructed in eye-popping colors by Luis Rey, and it is a good resource to quickly become familiar with dinosaur diversity. The author of the book, paleontologist Thomas Holtz, has also been updating the list of known dinosaur genera on an online appendix, which is one of the most useful resources available to those wanting to keep up with new discoveries.

- The Dinosauria, 2nd edition, edited by David Weisamphel, Peter Dodson, and Halszka Osmolska

This is generally regarded as THE reference book on dinosaurs. While the technical terms in the massive book might be daunting, there is no other resource presently available that is as informative. If you want something a little more challenging and detailed, this book is a must-have.

- The Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs edited by Philip Currie and Kevin Padian

While it is now a little bit dated, this volume is still a useful A-to-Z guide to dinosaurs. More than just covering the animals themselves, this book also has entries on bone structure, biostratigraphy, and other topics related to the study of dinosaurs. For someone just becoming familiar with dinosaur paleontology, it provides a way to quickly catch up with the field.

- The Complete Dinosaur edited by James Farlow, M.K. Brett-Surman, and Robert Walters

This easy-to-understand compendium introduces the reader to the study of dinosaurs as well as the dinosaurs themselves. While it might be best used as a reference, this is the kind of book that can be read from cover-to-cover with relative ease, and covers topics of paleobiology (or how dinosaurs lived) in addition to the characteristics of each group. It is an excellent book to start with if you want a more technical understanding of dinosaurs but feel awash in a sea of unfamiliar scientific terms.

Allosaurus Fossil

Among paleontologists, there is sometimes a feeling that dinosaur research is overhyped. Later this month at the Grant Zoology museum of University College London, paleontologist Mark Carnall will deliver a talk called “Dinosaurs are Pointless.” The description of the lecture describes dinosaur documentaries as hackneyed, and claims that dinosaur specialists have a “Freudian obsession” with finding the biggest dinosaurs. The attention given dinosaurs, according to the announcement, is disproportionate to their scientific value, and Carnall will attempt to put dinosaurs in their “proper place.”

It is true that dinosaurs have certainly had more than their fair share of media attention, but I must defend them. Dinosaurs are far from pointless. When dinosaurs were first scientifically described during the first half of the 19th century, for instance, the presence of such animals, along with the flying pterosaurs and ancient marine reptiles, indicated a world much older than previously thought and challenged religious ideas about the history of the earth. While the science of geology was already casting off religious strictures, dinosaurs helped convince people that the world had changed dramatically over long periods of time.

Then, as more dinosaurs were discovered, their disappearance became more troubling. How could such a diverse array of animals disappear entirely? During the 1980s, debates about the meteor that struck the earth 65 million years ago provided a compelling explanation for the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Contemplating their extinction helped motivate more philosophical considerations about our own extinction and global nuclear war.

Even more recently, the flood of feathered dinosaurs from China has provided some of the most striking evidence for evolution ever found in the fossil record. During the middle of the 20th century, some scientists felt that paleontology had little to offer the study of evolution. But in the past 20 years dinosaur specialists have ably demonstrated that the study of dinosaurs and evolution are inseparable.

Is a fragmentary dinosaur skeleton especially informative in fine-tuned studies of ancient ecology? Perhaps not, but the scientific value of dinosaurs should not be tarnished because of their popularity. They have been important to scientists studying evolution, extinction, and the history of life on earth, not to mention their role as ambassadors for science. It would be wonderful if members of the public took a greater interest in small Mesozoic mammals or ancient insects, but for better or worse dinosaurs have grabbed the imagination of the public in a unique way. They are modern day dragons that not only terrify, but educate.

I could survive for 1 minute, 13 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor

Created by Bunk Beds.net

Like many children, I was sometimes scared of monsters lurking in the closet or under the bed when I was young. What I would have done if one came after me, I don’t know, but thankfully the issue never came up.

A new online quiz gives me some idea how I would fare in such a situation, though. Placing you in the unenviable place of being chained to a bunkbed with a Velociraptor, the quiz isn’t about whether you could defeat the raptor, but how long you could last against your toothy adversary. Apparently I would barely survive long enough to call for help; how would you fare?

And as an aside, I hope this doesn’t inspire a reality TV show…