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Not quite the Dinosaur Capital of the World

When Brian Switek polled readers about the Dinosaur Capital of the World, he included “Bedrock” as a gag answer. It did pretty well—beating out “Other” but losing, as did Liaoning and Glen Rose, to Drumheller. An astute reader pointed out that there is a way to visit Bedrock aside from being a cartoon character—it’s a campground just south of the Grand Canyon.

It was sort of surreal to go from one of the most spectacular geologic sites in the world (where I saw fossil sponges and Paleozoic trackways last week) to a kitschy roadside attraction. The cartoon-land colors are faded in the desert sun, and Fred’s wooden-wheeled car looks a bit lopsided. But sure enough, there is a dinosaur statue in the parking lot. And some sort of yellow pterosaur behind the wall, perched on a volcano.

Have you seen a dinosaur in an unusual place? Snap a photo and send it to dinosaursightings@gmail.com and you may see it here!

Croutons Not Recommended: Paleochick points us to this blast from the past: Julia Child turns her kitchen into a biolab and cooks up a batch of primordial soup. (The video played in the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum’s now-closed “Life in the Universe” gallery.)

Worst. Article. Ever. The recent discovery of Darwinopeterus has “ensured that everyone has jumped on the pterosaurs-are-cool bandwagon,” writes David Hone over at Archosaur Musings. The predictable result—lots of inaccurate, sensationalist media coverage. David points us to one newspaper article that he feels may take the prize for “getting as much wrong as it is possible to in the least words while massively misrepresenting the science and introducing a ton of irrelevant nonsense that the researchers never commented on or mentioned at any point in order to try and ramp up the interest levels.”

Why You Should Always Clean Your Pool: Paleoblog scrutinizes a new theory explaining the mass extinction of the dinosaurs: toxin-producing algae.

Speaking of Mass Extinctions: Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University thinks that a giant basin in India, called Shiva, could be the impact crater of the meteor that is believed to have killed off the dinosaurs. Bob’s Dinosaur Blog reports that the theory got a “mixed reception” at the latest meeting of the Geological Society of America.

Whose Life is it Anyway? Catalogue of Organisms presents another “Taxonomy Trivia Quiz,” which challenges readers to guess the identity of 15 organisms “previously placed in quite different taxonomic positions from the ones they occupy now.” Answers are posted here. (No cheating!)

Art in Real Time: Canadian artist Peter Bond treats us to another “live blogging” art session, as he sketches an allosaur-barosaur smackdown.

What a Ness: At Tetrapod Zoology, Darren Naish compiles a list of his favorite sightings of the Loch Ness monster—on land.

Update: As I noted in my previous Blog Carnival, the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton “Samson” went up for auction in Las Vegas. Despite my fears that it would end up in Kid Rock’s basement, nobody purchased it. According to TheStreet.com, “The lack of qualified buyers for Samson was blamed on the fact that the skeleton was put on the market rather hastily by its seller, leaving many interested parties unable to pull together financing.”

Maybe paleontologists could “rescue” Samson by holding a telethon. Any volunteers?

A pair of pachycephalosaurs face off. Photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.

If you knew nothing at all about dogs, but you were presented with a lineup of the skeletons of a variety of breeds from chihuahua to bulldog to German shepherd to mastiff, you could be excused for thinking they were different species. Their skeletons seem to be so different, yet we know they are all just varieties of one subspecies, Canis lupus familiaris, that have been created through artificial selection. Paleontologists, on the other hand, do not have breeder’s records and must think carefully about what distinguishes one species of dinosaur from another. A new study by Jack Horner and Mark Goodwin in the journal PLoS One suggests that some dinosaurs previously thought to be separate species, even genera, were really just the growth stages of one species of dinosaur.

The dinosaurs that are the focus of the new study are three “bone-heads,” or pachycephalosaurs: Pachycephalosaurus, Stygimoloch, and Dracorex. These were bipedal ornithischian dinosaurs that had hard bony domes on their heads, often complemented with an array of spikes. Dracorex was small with a relatively flat head with small spikes, Stygimoloch was mid-sized with a small bony dome and huge horns, and Pachycephalosaurus was large with a large bony dome and relatively small horns. Together these dinosaurs appear to represent a growth series from juvenile to adult, all grouped together as Pachycephalosaurus, and the evidence can be found in the makeup of the bones.

Even though bones are hard they are not static things. They are constantly being remodeled; the change may be difficult to see from day to day but bone is still constantly being reabsorbed and laid down. The same processes happened in these dinosaurs, allowing for major modifications of the skull.

Looking at the microscopic structure of the skull bones, Horner and Goodwin found that the horns on the skulls they examined started off small, grew large, and then were reorganized as smaller structures around the edge of the solid dome of the skull. The young dinosaurs were not born with adult ornamentation but grew into it over time. Why large spikes were a juvenile characteristic and a bony dome was an adult characteristic, however, is still unknown.

Extreme changes in skull shape during growth can also be seen in hadrosaurs, where what were considered “small” species turned out to be juveniles of already known species, and in horned dinosaurs. In fact, at this year’s Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, Horner and paleontologist John Scannella proposed that Triceratops is a growth stage of the larger horned dinosaur presently known as Torosaurus. This hypothesis has yet to be fully supported, but it does seem that many Cretaceous ornithischian dinosaurs underwent major anatomical changes during their lifetimes. No doubt this area of research will generate much discussion and debate in the years to come.

A sculpture of an Acrocanthosaurus attacking a sauropod dinosaur at the Maryland Science Center. From Flickr user Jeff Kubina.

Documentaries often show scientists digging for dinosaurs in places like the Badlands of the American West or the hot sands of the Gobi Desert, but people in the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area are a lot closer to a dinosaur bone-bed than they may know.

This week the state of Maryland is establishing a new park to preserve Cretaceous-age fossil deposits in Prince George’s County. Dinosaur fossils have been coming out of the site for over a century and a half, but it is only now that the site is going to be formally protected. According to the Baltimore Sun, amateur and professional paleontologists will still be allowed to work the site, but whatever is removed will be carefully documented and offered to the Smithsonian Institution for study and storage.

While most visitors will not be allowed to take any dinosaurs home with them, organizers behind the park plan to launch public programs about the fossils in the park. These plans are still in development, however, as protecting this unique fossil site was the major goal of the project.

A restoration of Fruitadens. From the Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper.

From movies to museums, the most famous dinosaurs are among the largest. We like superlatives, and want to know what the biggest, fastest, and fiercest dinosaurs are. Yet, just like living animals, dinosaurs came in a variety of shapes and sizes, and a team of paleontologists has just announced, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, one of the smallest dinosaurs yet discovered

Named Fruitadens haagarorum, this diminutive dinosaur from the 150-million-year-old strata of western Colorado was only about two-and-a-half feet long. It was a heterodontosaurid, or a member of a group of ornithischian dinosaurs that split off early from the family tree and persisted for millions of years. It is the first time a heterodontosaurid dinosaur has been found in North America.

While many other ornithischian dinosaurs like hadrosaurs and horned dinosaurs were herbivores, though, it appears that Fruitadens was an omnivore. Like other heterodontosaurids it had at least three kinds of teeth: peg-like teeth at the front of the jaw, a single large “tusk” or canine-like tooth, and a series of leaf-shaped teeth good for shearing plants. This would have allowed it to eat a variety of foods, including meat, and its small body size probably meant that it had to.

The bodies of small animals are typically more energetically expensive than those of large ones, meaning that small animals have to find high-quality food like fruit and flesh and consume a lot of it. They cannot get by eating only relatively poor-quality food such as leaves. Such is the price of small body size, and thus Fruitadens may have been a late-surviving relic of an early radiation of small, omnivorous dinosaurs that later gave rise to more specialized plant-eating giants.

A Tyrannosaurus greets visitors at an IGA supermarket. From reader Cameron.

Today’s Dinosaur Sighting comes to us from reader Cameron, who snapped this photo of a Tyrannosaurus popping out of an IGA grocery store wall in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. The dinosaur may look mean, but I’m sure he’s just enthusiastic about helping shoppers take bags to their cars. Too bad he’s got such tiny arms….

Have you seen a dinosaur in an unusual place? Snap a photo and send it to dinosaursightings@gmail.com and you may see it here!

Dinosaur Odyssey by Scott Sampson

Given the number of books that are published about dinosaurs, there is bound to be some overlap among them. Most titles fall into a handful of categories: the “menagerie” approach, where a collection of various dinosaurs is prefaced by a few short summaries of paleontology; the “life in the field” perspective, in which the scientific content is tied to the author’s experiences, and the “Age of Reptiles” summaries, which focus on which dinosaurs lived when.

But paleontologist Scott Sampson’s new book, Dinosaur Odyssey, cannot be pigeonholed into these categories. Relatively late in the book, Sampson recounts how paleontologist Jack Horner, harried by reporters asking whether a meteor had wiped out the dinosaurs, replied that he didn’t give a whit how dinosaurs died, he wanted to know how dinosaurs lived. Sampson uses this as his guiding principle throughout Dinosaur Odyssey, and gives readers a rare peek at what dinosaurs might have been like as living, breathing creatures.
Sampson starts things off not by diving into a discussion of bleeding-edge research, but by gradually setting the scene. Using dinosaurs as examples, Sampson discusses evolution, ecology, geology, biogeography and other concepts that provide essential background for the latter half of the book. In different hands, this material could easily be the stuff of dry, textbook-type recitation, but Sampson’s use of dinosaurs as examples and his injection of personal anecdotes into the storyline keep the text flowing nicely.

The second half of the book builds upon these topics by looking at looking at how dinosaurs interacted with one another and their world. Did the origin of flowering plants influence dinosaur evolution? Were the fancy horns on dinosaurs such as Triceratops for fighting or for display? Were dinosaurs really “warm-blooded”? How could so many different kinds of large predatory dinosaurs have lived at the same time? In answering these and other questions, Sampson refers to specific localities and studies, allowing the reader to get a better understanding of what particular places were like during the age of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs might seem almost like mythical creatures now, but Sampson shows that they were real animals that were affected by phenomena that are still shaping our world. His “dinosaur odyssey” offers a new way of linking the past to the present.

Part of the Dalton Wells bonebed exacavation. From the Palaeo paper.

It is often assumed that dinosaur paleontologists are interested only in getting the fossils they discover out of the ground as quickly as possible. This is not true. Paleontologists generally take great care to document and catalogue every fossil removed from a dig site, because the position and surroundings of those fossils may say something about where the animal lived and how it died. This can be especially important when multiple skeletons are found together. Were the animals part of a herd? Did they die at the same time? Were their bones washed to the same place by a river? Did scavengers pick at the bones?

Paleontologists studying the Dalton Wells bone beds near Moab, Utah, have grappled with such questions for a long time. Dated to the Early Cretaceous, about 127-98 million years ago, the site contains the remains of at least 67 individual dinosaurs of eight different genera. Bones from sauropods, ankylosaurus, Iguanodon-like herbivores and the predatory Utahraptor are all mixed together, and many of them appear to have been trampled. What happened?

In a new study published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, researchers led by Brooks Britt of Brigham Young University try to envision how the massive bone bed was formed.  As scientists excavated the bone bed, they found not a collection of articulated skeletons, but a heap of bits and pieces jumbled together. This suggested that the dinosaurs did not die all at once in an event that covered up the bones en masse, but that the bodies probably accumulated over a relatively short span of time, maybe as the result of a drought, and were subjected to the elements. The bones show little sign of scavenging by predatory dinosaurs, but they were extensively damaged from being scattered by water, trampled by other dinosaurs and eaten by insects. Eventually, the dinosaur graveyard was covered with sediment and preserved for tens of millions of years.

Given the damage to the bones, it’s surprising that there is a bone bed to study at all. Anyone who has spent a lot of time on the African savanna can tell you that the skeletons of even large animals, such as elephants, can be reduced to splinters within a relatively short time if they are not covered up. Scavengers, insects and the trampling feet of herbviores can soon turn a full skeleton into bone shards. This fact makes every fossil important, and at places like the Dalton Wells bone bed, even heavily damaged bones can provide us with a window into the distant past.