Smithsonian.com

Stegosaurs of Terror!!!! “Most of us think as Stegosaurus as plodding, dimwitted giants only fit to end up as plates of meat for a hungry predator,” observes the World We Don’t Live In. “And yet, despite all this negative publicity, Stegosaurus has had its shining moments. Various authors have latched onto stegs as a potential deadly killer.” Be sure to check out this lively, pop-culture overview of lethal Stegosaurs…if you dare.

Archival photo from Cleveland Natural History Museum collections. Courtesy of Palaeoblog

Of course, a Brontosaurus would prefer a convertible: A classic photo from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History Archives, courtesy of Palaeoblog.

It’s a British Thing: “What is it with English people and dinosaurs?” asks Bob’s Dinosaur Blog. (Haven’t we all asked that question?) In March, a group of drunk college students from Kingston Maurward College in Dorchester were caught trying to steal a 20-foot-long Triceratops model from the local museum. And now, thieves have made off with dozens of valuable artifacts from Dinostar, “Yorkshire’s only dinosaur visitor attraction.”

Pit Stop: Dinochick alerts us to a new blog—“The Burpee Museum of Natural History”—which will feature ongoing updates on the excavation of a recently discovered dinosaur bone pit in southern Utah.

Next Time You’re in Poland: The “Thrifty Expat,” always on the lookout for cheap entertainment options when abroad, recommends two dinosaur parks in Warsaw: Park Dinozaurów and Zaurolandia (which has an English-language website where you can play Jurassic versions of popular video games such as Zauropac and Dinotris).

Handiwork: Could a Velociraptor really turn a doorknob, as in Jurassic Park? David Hone explains why theropods are “clappers, not slappers.” The news, however, offers little comfort to the folks over at Tyrannosaur Chronicles, who regale us with their harrowing photoshopped exploits when they were attacked by raptors in their own museum.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

There appear to be three themes that pop up in many of the major summer blockbusters being released this year: time travel, robots, and dinosaurs. I have already covered two of this summer’s bigger dino-flicks, Ice Age 3 and Land of the Lost, but the newly-released Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian also features a CGI-created dinosaur.

Unlike the dinosaurs in the other two films, the Tyrannosaurus in Night at the Museum 2 is only partially brought back to life. It is the skeleton from New York’s Natural History Museum that goes rollicking through the halls when the museum closes its doors, not unlike the one that begged for french fries in that old McDonald’s commercial. That, of course, is fantasy, but the similar dinosaur skeletons housed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History must look pretty imposing when all the lights go off.

Some museums (but so far not including NMNH [Ed note: oops.]) are allowing visitors to spend the night. Boston.com contributor Geoff Edgers recently wrote of his experience staying overnight at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York regularly runs sleepovers for children. I wish such events were not just offered to kids though; I would love to spend a night at the museum, too!

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Part of the femur of an unknown theropod. From the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology paper.

Weird new dinosaurs and exquisltely-preserved fossils regularly make headlines, but these discoveries make up only a tiny portion of what paleontologists actually discover and work with. The majority of the fossil record is far more fragmentary, and while little scraps of bone might not cause journalists to start drooling they are just as important to understanding ancient life.

Take the case of a bit of femur, or thighbone, described in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Described by Catherine Forster, Andrew Farke, Jacob McCartney, William De Klerk and Callum Ross, the small bit of bone was recovered from rock in South Africa dating to about 140 million years ago. The fossils in that area are very fragmentary, it is not the sort of place you would expect to find an articulated skeleton, but there is enough there to know the area was once roamed by a diverse group of dinosaurs.

Among the collection of dinosaurs at the site was a small predatory coelurosaur called Nqwebasaurus (try saying that 10 times fast), but when scientists described it they found fragments from a second, unknown theropod dinosaur. This is the dinosaur the recently described femur came from, but what sort of dinosaur was it?

With so little to go on, the authors of the new paper were unsure of precisely what sort of dinosaur it might be, but it seemed to belong to the tetanurae, one of the great groups of theropod dinosaurs. There was another group of varied theropods during the time called the abelisauridae, but a number of characteristics of this fossil do not match that group. Instead it does seem to be a tetanuran, but more fossils will be needed to more fully understand what it is. For now this nameless fossil hints that there is much more yet to find, and I certainly hope that paleontologists can recover the rest of this tiny, ancient predator.

Sequels and remakes have been the name of the game for Hollywood during the past few years. Every summer sees re-imaginings of television shows or movies I saw as a kid, but there is one that is probably better left alone: Denver, the Last Dinosaur.

The basic plot of Denver is pretty standard (and would later be echoed by the movie Encino Man). A group of kids finds an unattended dinosaur egg in a pit. The egg promptly hatches, revealing a green dinosaur with a mohawk-like spike on its head. As per convention, the dinosaur (named Denver, of course) is not only friendly but pretty darned smart, and together he and the kids have lots of wacky adventures.

Maybe this general storyline could be resuscitated, but Denver was the kind of show that could have only existed in the 1980s. Pink sunglasses, spandex-wearing metal bands, big hair, skateboarding, and garishly colored clothes made up much of the background of the show. As painful as it would be to watch, if Denver were brought back without these little touches it just wouldn’t be the same.

I don’t think anyone is thinking of bringing Denver back to life, though. The show attempted to capitalize on the dino-mania sparked by the animated film The Land Before Time, but by the end of the second season the dinosaur craze had ebbed. The producers let the show go extinct. While it might be fun to go back and watch the cheesy original episodes, I think Denver has had enough adventures.

An illustration of Caudipteryx

If you are a dinophile in the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland, you may want to clear your plans for this weekend. Tomorrow, the Maryland Science Center in the city’s Inner Harbor will raise the curtain on the traveling exhibit “Chinasaurs-Dinosaur Dynasty.” The webpage promoting the exhibit promises over 20 dinosaur skeletons, animatronic dinosaurs, and lots of artwork connecting dinosaurs to China’s cultural heritage.

I am sure there will be some casts of feathered dinosaurs in with the rest of the skeletons, and it looks like this is an exhibit that is not to be missed. It will run through September of this year. Even if you can’t make it, though, the Maryland Science Center has a whole hall dedicated to dinosaurs and is chock-full of other fantastic skeletons. I may just have to make a trip to Baltimore soon!

The exceptionally-preserved skeleton of Darwinius. From PLoS One.

This week news services were all a-twitter about a 47-million-year-old fossil primate from the famous Messel deposits of Germany. Named Darwinius masillae and described in the journal PLoS One, the lemur-like primate was heralded as being a transitional form between a group of extinct primates called adapids and anthropoid primates (monkeys and apes). As it turns out the fossil may not be all it has been cracked up to be, but it is still a spectacular find that represents one branch of the primate radiation that occurred after the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. Creatures like Tyrannosaurus perished, but primates survived.

Tracing the record of the earliest primates is a challenge. Since primates started off small and lived in forested habitats their fossils are extremely rare, and most fossils that are found are teeth. This can make comparisons between these creatures difficult, and the relationships among early primates or primate-like creatures are controversial. The fact that some molecular studies places the origin of primates even further back in the Cretaceous, about 85 million years ago, makes things even more complicated as no verifiable primate fossils have yet been found from that age. Despite these complexities, however, scientists do have a broad outline of early primate evolution.

One of the earliest primate-like creatures was Purgatorius, a tree-shrew-like mammal that lived right around the end of the Cretaceous 65 million years ago. Whether it was one of the first primates or only closely related to the first primates is still controversial, but it does seem to represent what the ancestors of primates were like during the time that dinosaurs were the dominant land-dwelling vertebrates.

After the mass extinction, mammalian evolution exploded. Mammals were no longer under the feet of dinosaurs, and among the groups that diversified were primate-like creatures called plesiadapiformes. Whether these creatures were true primates or just very primate-like is still being debated, but they underwent a boom and bust during the Paleocene (about 65 to 55 million years ago). In many ways these creatures were somewhat squirrel-like, with clawed hands and eyes on the sides of their heads, but at the very least they seem to be the closest extinct relatives to other primates.

The creatures that are regarded as “true” primates flourished during the Eocene (about 55 to 33 million years ago), and can largely be placed into two groups: the adapids and omomyids. The adapids were lemur-like primates, while the omomyids closely resembled living tarsiers, but both had forward-oriented eyes and adaptations to life in the trees. Both these groups are relevant to yesterday’s big announcement.

According to the new paper, Darwinius is an adapid, and many scientists presently regard this group as being more closely related to modern lemurs and lorises than to monkeys or apes. Many paleontologists who study extinct primates favor omomyids and ancient tarsiers as being closer to monkeys and apes, but the authors of the new paper don’t think so. In the paper itself they claim that Darwinius belongs to the same large group of primates, haplorrhines, as tarsiers, monkeys, and apes, thus placing adapids in a position to potentially become our ancestors. This conclusion has caused the scientists involved in the study and the popular media to herald it as a “missing link” that connects us to other primates.

Unfortunately, however, the scientists who wrote the paper did not conduct a detailed evolutionary analysis of the new fossil or its relationships to other primates. The fossil is spectacular, the first fossil primate to be find in such a state of exceptional preservation, but it has been oversold by the History Channel (who organized the media hype) and the scientists involved in the study. They simply did not do the work to support the conclusions they drew from the fossil, and the real relationship of Darwinius to other primates will have to wait for further studies.

A pair of Iguanodon on a riverbank, from Current Literature.

Outside of Hollywood films, dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops never coexisted with humans, and no case can be made that The Flintstones is an accurate depiction of prehistory. That has not stopped young-earth creationists from maintaining otherwise, though, and this has led to some rather silly statements.

Attempts to squeeze paleontology into a literal interpretation of Biblical timelines have a long history. A 1912 issue of Current Literature featured some excerpts from a book about paleontology called Evolution in the Past by H.R. Knipe. The article itself is not terribly interesting, but the captions accompanying the article’s illustrations are. Several dinosaurs and extinct mammals are featured and each caption explains the benefits or dangers these animals would have posed to early humans. The caption beneath a pair of Iguanodon reads:

THE TERROR OF THE RIVERBANK IN THE GEOLOGICAL PAST

The iguanodonts [sic] fought with their tails, and in the course of the combat rendered life precarious in the vicinity for all living creatures. It is difficult to see how prehistoric man could have made his abode along the main streams while these monsters flourished.

In truth, early humans had nothing to fear from Iguanodon. The herbivorous dinosaurs had been extinct for about 114 million years by time the earliest humans evolved in Africa. To suggest otherwise would require some startling evidence indeed! It should be noted that the tone of some of the captions makes it seem like they are not to be taken seriously, but even if this is true they are not out of line with what many creationists truly believe. (Don’t even get me started on their ideas about what Tyrannosaurus would have eaten in the Garden of Eden.)

If humans did live alongside dinosaurs, though, it does raise the question of how our kind survived. Why wouldn’t our species have been consumed by a horde of hungry tyrannosaurs, or our early attempts at agriculture destroyed by herds of sauropods? There is simply no record of any kind of Dinotopia, and most of the “evidence” creationists offer are like Rorschach tests; they see what they want to see. Watching humans flee from dinosaurs might make for exciting cinema, but it is absolutely awful history.

Nicki Conaway next to her creation

Studying dinosaur fossils can be hard work, but imagine building a dinosaur from scratch. That was the task given to St. Louis Community College art student Nicki Conaway, who created a 12-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus skeleton (nicknamed “Lola”) for a production of the play Pterodactyls at her school. The sculpture was mostly constructed of Styrofoam.

Don’t be deceived by the title of the play, though. You won’t see people in pterosaur costumes running about the stage. Instead Pterodactyls (which ran last month) was a black comedy about a dysfunctional family. The Tyrannosaurus comes in when one of the characters finds its bones in the backyard and is more interested in putting them together than in paying attention to the rest of the family. I’m sure it was an interesting performance, but I would have loved to have seen an all-pterosaur cast.