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The cover for Age of Reptiles: The Journey

Usually when dinosaurs appear in comic books or on screen they are there to menace the human protagonists of the story. Rarely do we get to see tales in which dinosaurs themselves are main characters, but Ricardo Delgago’s Age of Reptiles series is a notable exception.

Age of Reptiles started off as a four-part comic miniseries in 1993 with the story “Tribal Warfare.” There were no thought bubbles or pieces of dialog, only a visual story of a deadly rivalry between a pack of Deinonychus and a family of Tyrannosaurus. Delgado bent the science a bit to make a more action-packed story, but this is a comic book we’re talking about, after all.

The next entry in the series was called “The Hunt” and was released as a five-part series in 1997. It was another tale of species-on-species rivalry, this time between a pack of Ceratosaurus and a young Allosaurus seeking revenge for the death of his mother. Delgado’s artwork was a little more polished in this run, though it followed the previous installment of creating implausible scenarios with known dinosaurs.

Now, after a hiatus of more than a decade, Age of Reptiles is back with a new story, “The Journey.” The first issue was published earlier this month, and it appears to be a story about a massive group of dinosaurs migrating south for the winter. Where will the story go? I guess we’ll have to wait for the next issue (due out in January) to find out.

[Hat-tip to Zach for bringing this story to our attention.]

A dinosaur threatens a duo of English adventurers. From "The Last Haunt of the Dinosaur" in The English Illustrated Magazine.

We just can’t let dinosaurs stay dead. They were real dragons that (notwithstanding their bird descendants) lived and died millions and millions of years before our species evolved, and they are so fascinating that we keep finding new ways to bring them into our world. Among the various ways humans and dinosaurs have been brought into contact, the idea that some dinosaurs might have survived in some pocket of unexplored wilderness has been a staple of science fiction and adventure stories for some time. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World is the classic prototype for this subgenre, but one of the lesser-known variations on the theme was a 1908 story by Henry Francis called “The Last Haunt of the Dinosaur.”

While not an outright copy of Doyle’s story, Francis’ tale is another “Lost World” type of adventure that was standard for pulp magazines of the time (which included, I am sorry to say, racist undertones). Where Francis had a bit of trouble, though, was deciding what kind of dinosaur should menace the intrepid English explorers central to his story. It was a carnivorous dinosaur, the salacious descriptions of gore in the story make that clear, but Francis gave his dinosaur a long neck and small head like that of a sauropod. A case could be made that early sauropodomorph dinosaurs like Aardonyx would fit Francis’ description for body type if not dietary habits, but I am not feeling so charitable. It seems to me that he was confused and combined features from several dinosaurs to make a monster. (Francis covers his own tracks later on by having the scientists revise a restoration of a dinosaur skeleton they had been working on to fit the creature they saw in the jungle.)

Contrary to Francis’ imaginary tale, however, there is no reason to think that there are non-avian dinosaurs still inhabiting tropical jungles. Even if some lineages managed to survive the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous 65 million years ago, their descendants would have continued to evolve and would probably look very different from their Mesozoic ancestors. Nevertheless, “Lost World” type stories give us an excuse to wonder what life would be like if the dinosaurs we know only as fossils actually lived alongside our species, and I have little doubt that this kind of tale will be around, in one for or another, for some time to come.

The skull of an Allosaurus skeleton on display at the Museum of Ancient Life in Utah.

Looking over our blogroll the other day I noticed that a number of the blogs have either moved, disappeared, or have not been updated with anything about dinosaurs in ages. It is high time for a blogroll revamp.

In order to make sure that our blogroll represents the best of dino bloggers, though, I need your help. Are there any blogs not presently on our list that you think we should add? Let us know in the comments, and tell us why you like the blog.

All the blogs that are mentioned might not necessarily make the final cut, but I will definitely have a look at each of them. Please submit your suggestions by next Wednesday (the 25th) and we will have our new blogroll up after Thanksgiving. Thanks!

When will we humans ever learn? Many of us would love to see dinosaurs in the flesh, but if we ever actually got the chance it would probably be a terrifying experience.  Numerous movies, comic books, and video games have been based upon this love-hate relationship, and last week saw the release of video game that carries on in this tradition called Jurassic: The Hunted.

Asking about the story played out in the game is a bit superfluous. Any plot that involves dinosaurs, the Bermuda Triangle, and a gritty heavy-weapons expert does not merit too much thinking about. The entire reason for the game’s existence is to allow players to run around shooting dinosaurs with a variety of big, highly destructive weapons.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Another dinosaur shoot-’em-up, Turok, was released early in 2008. In fact, the new game shows many similarities with Turok, and it looks like Jurassic: The Hunted is a game meant to satisfy players who want to keep blasting away at dinosaurs. I have to admit that Turok had a pretty good storyline, though, something that this new game seems to have foregone.

Though gaming systems are continually changing, dinosaur hunting games have been around for a while and probably will continue to pop up for many years to come. Such games allow virtually anyone to be a heroic monster slayer without leaving the comfort of their couch. It seems that the only thing more fun than bringing dinosaurs back to life is sending them into extinction again.

'Jingo' the Stegosaurus.

By the spring of 1916 it seemed inevitable that the United States would enter World War I. This prospect unsettled those opposed to our country’s involvement, and there was no better symbol for the military buildup these people feared than the great armored dinosaurs.

The papier-mâché Stegosaurus featured in the April 1, 1916 issue of the magazine The Survey was no joke. Created by the “Anti-’Preparedness’ Committee” the dinosaur carried the slogan “All Armor Plate – No Brains” beneath it as a jab at those who preferred trench warfare to diplomacy. Walter G. Fuller, a member of the organization that promoted the statue, explained:

It is difficult to conceive any more proper and appropriate symbol of militarism than that which the Anti- Preparedness’ Committee has hit upon. What could be more like the heavy, stumbling, clumsy brutal foolery which is destroying Europe than those old monsters of the past, the armored dinosaurs? These beasts, all armor-plate and no brains, had no more intelligent way of living than that of ‘adequate preparedness.’ All their difficulties were to be met by piling on more and more armor, until at last they sank by their own clumsy weight into the marsh lands …

Here was an animal unable to do even a little intelligent thinking. Its brain cavity in proportion to the size of its body was more diminutive than that of any other vertebrate. Like the militarist, therefore, it was unable to conceive of any intelligent foreign policy. Moreover, its vision was limited. Its eyes were small and could look only in a sidewise direction. It could not look ahead.

Such a strategy, Fuller argued, could only lead to extinction; just look at what happened to the slow, stupid, and overburdened dinosaurs! At the time no one had any idea why the dinosaurs had become extinct, and the belief that dinosaurs were large in size but diminutive in brain power made them perfect for caricaturing all that was perceived as brutish, dumb, and obsolete.  “Anti-preparedness” activists drove this point home by naming their dinosaur “Jingo,” a reference to “jingoism” or a feeling of nationalism so extreme that threats of violence against other nations becomes acceptable.

Reactions to Jingo’s tour of American cities were mixed. Anti-war activists, of course, loved Jingo while those who supported American involvement in the “War to End All Wars” thought it was a dumb public stunt. According to a later report, however, some Christian fundamentalists were upset that anyone would suggest that Jingo and his kind had been poorly made; God had created dinosaurs perfectly during the Creation week, after all. Nor was paleontologist W.D. Matthew of the American Museum of Natural History particularly impressed. Regardless of whether herbivorous dinosaurs escaped the claws of predators by virtue of their armor, speed, or wits, Matthew argued, they all became extinct. Even if there were “smart dinosaurs,” something that was in extreme doubt at the time, they fared no better than the massive, armored species when it came to survival.

In a cartoon published in The Survey, "Professor Theophilus Piffle" fails to morally persuade "Jingo" the Stegosaurus that brains are superior to brawn.

Ultimately Jingo and his message could not keep America out of war. Despite earlier isolationist and anti-war sentiments, the threat of unrestricted submarine warfare, an alliance between Mexico and Germany, and the Preparedness Day Bombing turned both politicians and the public towards war. Nearly one year after Jingo made his public debut, the United States declared war on Germany, and new laws such as the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 restricted the free speech of Americans. To speak out against the war was treasonous, and so Jingo was forced into extinction.

The dinosaur outside the "Dinosaur Inn" in Vernal, Utah.

While driving through northern Utah on the way to Dinosaur National Monument this past summer, my wife and I passed through Vernal, Utah. There were dinosaurs everywhere. Big ones, small ones, green ones, pink ones… it was hard to look in any direction and not see a dinosaur.

One of the most prominent dinosaurs was this fellow outside the Best Western “Dinosaur Inn.” I stopped to snap a picture, but only for a moment. As much as I love roadside dinosaurs I was more anxious to see the ones still encased in rock.

Have you stumbled across a dinosaur in an unexpected place? If you have, and have a photo of the encounter, send it to us via dinosaursightings@gmail.com!

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

The sauropod dinosaurs were the largest animals to have ever walked on the earth. They were so incredibly huge, in fact, that they had to move about on four legs—but since the earliest dinosaurs were bipedal, paleontologists have long known that the ancestors of giants like Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus actually trotted about on two legs. A dinosaur just described in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B sat close to this major transition in sauropod evolution.

Recovered from Early Jurassic (about 183 – 200 million year old) rock in South Africa, Aardonyx celestae was an approximately 20-foot-long dinosaur that combined elements that are both strange and familiar. It had a small head, a long neck, a large body, and a long tail, but it still had relatively short forelimbs compared to its hind legs. While it could occasionally walk on four legs, its limbs indicate that it primarily walked around on two , and an evolutionary analysis that was part of the new study placed it relatively close to the earliest sauropod dinosaurs (thus fitting Aardonyx within the larger category of dinosaurs called sauropodomorphs).

Aardonyx was not actually ancestral to the larger,  four-feet-on-the-floor sauropods—it lived during a time when such dinosaurs already existed—but it preserves some of the transitional features that we would expect to find in the actual ancestor. (Contrary to a headline published by the BBC, it is not a “missing link” and the entire concept of “missing links” is a hopelessly out-of-date idea that was discarded by scientists long ago. The phrase goes back to a time when life was viewed as proceeding from “lower” forms to “higher” ones in a straight line, and scientists have rightly rejected it in favor of a branching bush of evolutionary diversity.)

While not a direct ancestor of dinosaurs like Diplodocus, this new dinosaur will help us better understand how sauropod dinosaurs evolved. If you would like to know more about it check out the blog of the lead author of the new description, Adam Yates, where he summarizes the important details about Aardonyx. It is good to see working paleontologists take a more active role in communicating their discoveries to the public, and I hope that other dinosaur specialists will follow the example made by Yates and others.

The outline of a Tyrannosaurus showing the measurements used in the PLoS One study.

When dinosaurs were first recognized by European naturalists during the early 19th century, they were interpreted as being immense, lumbering reptiles similar to iguanas and crocodiles. Since that time our understanding of dinosaurs has changed substantially; early paleontologists such as Gideon Mantell, William Buckland, and Richard Owen would not recognize dinosaurs as we know them today. The once revolutionary idea that dinosaurs were dynamic creatures is now the standard view, yet the details of dinosaur physiology are still not completely known. A new study published in the journal PLoS One adds to the ongoing debate about dinosaur biology, and it suggests that dinosaurs might have actually inherited the physiology necessary to lead very active lives.

Most of the debate has centered on whether dinosaurs were endothermic like birds (i.e. internally regulated their body temperature through their metabolism) or ectothermic like living reptiles (i.e. had body temperatures that fluctuated more widely according to their surrounding environment). As some scientists have pointed out, it is not necessary to think that dinosaurs were precisely like living birds or reptiles—they could have had a unique physiology all their own—but the broad questions of whether dinosaurs were more like endotherms or ectotherms has remained.

Given that all the non-avian dinosaurs are extinct, though, we can’t simply stick a thermometer into a dinosaur and take their temperature. (Nor would such an activity be necessarily advisable, at least without wearing a protective suit of armor.)  The questions that remain must be approached more indirectly, and  in the new study scientists Herman Pontzer, Vivian Allen, and John Hutchinson looked at how much energy it would take for dinosaurs to walk and run. If they could figure out the cost of moving around, they reasoned, they could determine whether an ectothermic or endothermic metabolism would be able to provide the amount of energy the dinosaur required.

The team estimated the leg length of the bipedal dinosaurs, as this measurement has been used to estimate the cost of walking and running in living animals. They also estimated the volume of the muscles that would have attached to the leg bones based upon the size of muscles required to move the legs of the dinosaurs. These estimates could then be compared to what has been observed in living animals, providing an indirect way to see whether dinosaurs were more like ectotherms or endotherms.

What the scientists found was that the largest dinosaurs in the study (Plateosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Allosaurus, Gorgosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus) would have required an endothermic metabolism to move around, while the smaller dinosaurs, such as Archaeopteryx, fell more within the range expected for ectotherms. This created something of a paradox as the small, feathered dinosaurs are the ones thought to be most bird-like in terms of physiology.

Size might have made all the difference. While the study produced clear results for the larger dinosaurs the results for the smaller dinosaurs were ambiguous. Even though the smaller dinosaurs in the study (such as Archaeopteryx, Compsognathus, Velociraptor, and Microraptor) had anatomical traits suggestive of endothermy, the study placed them into the ectotherm range. What this probably means, the authors argue, is that energy expenditure in these smaller animals might have been different than in the large dinosaurs, but the technique they used could not successfully distinguish between the two metabolic ranges in the smaller dinosaurs.

More certain were the results of the larger dinosaurs. It had been proposed that large dinosaurs could afford to be ectothermic as their large body size would have allowed them to retain heat, thus living a “warm-blooded” lifestyle without actually being endothermic.  If the new analysis is correct, however, then it is more likely that the largest dinosaurs would have to have been endotherms. And since they evolved from small ancestors, that makes it possible that the smaller dinosaurs were also endotherms. The fact that pterosaurs, close relatives of dinosaurs (which were not included in the present study), also have traits that seem to indicate more bird-like metabolic rates suggests that endothermy either evolved multiple times or that it is an ancestral trait for the common ancestor of both pterosaurs and dinosaurs. Determining which scenario is the case, however, will require further study in combination with other lines of evidence from the fossil record.