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Welcome a New Paleoblog: Why I Hate Theropods ironically calls our attention to a new site: The Theropod Database Blog.

Dinosaur snow sculptures. H/T to SV-Pow!

Going for Broke: What do you do if you break a bone? (A dinosaur bone, that is.) Well, once you get over the humiliation of breaking something that has remained intact for several million years, David Hone at Archosaur Musings has a practical guide on how to deal with the problem.

The Young and Restless: Young Earth Creationists contend that all life on the planet was created sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago. The blog Stupid Dinosaur Lies presents a detailed taxonomy and debunking of these arguments, otherwise known as “The Seven F’s of Young Earth Creationism: Fictional, Framed, Foredoom, Fascism, Fanaticism, Feint, and Folly.”

Connective Issue: The Disillusioned Taxonomist challenges readers to solve a photographic puzzle: “What’s the connection between the following animals?” (Including a fossilized trilobite and a lion.) The answer is here.

Interpretative Art: Peter Bond at ART Evolved presents a gallery of therizinosaur sketches and paintings. (One portrayal resembles an oversized, carnivorous zebra-striped turkey.) “Therizinosaurs have had a long and convoluted history when it comes to reconstructions. Meat-eater or plant-eater? Prosauropod or coelurosaur?  Skin or feathers? These questions led to wild variations in what a therizinosaur looked like!”

Blasts From the Past: Catalogue of Organisms presents “A Beginner’s Guide to Blastoids.” (Coolest. Species. Names. Ever.)

Psychedelic Trilobites: Walcott’s Quarry bemoans the lack of color in fossils, prompting two trilobites to experiment with a bold new look.

Saltasaurus and Peppernychus: Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs exalts over a discovery in an antique shop: A vintage pair of dinosaur salt and pepper shakers. Apparently, the design concept is quite rare: “This is, in my opinion, one of the most grievous oversights in the history of kitchenware. Disgraceful.”

Ice Age: SV-POW! posts remarkable photos that are a guaranteed cure for the winter blues: giant sauropod snow sculptures.

A T-Rex Walks Into a Bar: “Perhaps because they’re no longer around to lodge any objections, dinosaurs (and other prehistoric reptiles) have increasingly become the butt of kindergarten-level knock-knock jokes,” notes Bob’s Dinosaur Blog, which presents a few of his own humorous quips.

Earlier this month, I shared a how-to video of how to make a balloon Tyrannosaurus, but if you don’t like balloon animals there is another way to make a neat little dino. With just a square piece of paper you can make your very own “snapping” dinosaur, and the above video will show you how.

A specimen of Microraptor gui under UV light. The white arrows point to preserved tissue, the black arrows point to a "halo" around the body where feathers are not present, and the gray arrows point to preserved feathers. From the PLoS One paper.

Since 1996 paleontologists have found so many feathered dinosaurs that it has been impossible to keep up with them all. There are scores of exceptionally preserved specimens that have yet to be fully studied and published upon, but, according to a new study in PLoS One,  there is still plenty to learn about the few that have already been introduced in the literature.

Of the feathered dinosaurs discovered so far, Microraptor gui is among the most famous. Long flight feathers which were attached to its arms and legs and are plainly visible to the naked eye, made it a four-winged dinosaur. But until now scientists have been unsure whether some of the other preserved feathered around the body remained in their natural position (i.e. attached to the body) or had been moved around afterwards. To resolve this question, paleontologists David Hone, Helmut Tischlinger, Xing Xu and Fucheng Zhang decided to use UV light to see how the preserved feathers related to the rest of the body.

Paleontologists have been using UV light to study the details of fossils for a long time, but the practice had not yet been extended to the feathered dinosaurs of China. Under this light details that might elude scientists under normal lighting can more clearly be seen, and what the paleontologists found was that the feathers of Microraptor did indeed extend into the “halo” around the fossil that represented its body, and sometimes the feathers extended almost all the way to the skeleton. The feathers were not just strewn about as if they had fallen off after death; they were preserved in their natural positions.

This finding is important for two reasons. The first is that paleontologists can now be confident that the Microraptor specimen that was studied provides a good look at the external anatomy of the animal. More importantly, however, this sort of technique can be extended to the scores of similarly-preserved fossils from the same region. Using UV light, paleontologists will be able to better understand how feathers were attached to the bodies of dinosaurs, and added to new findings about the colors of feathered dinosaurs, scientists will be able to bring the past to life like never before.

For more on this study see the blog of its lead author, David Hone, called Archosaur Musings.

Hone, D., Tischlinger, H., Xu, X., & Zhang, F. (2010). The Extent of the Preserved Feathers on the Four-Winged Dinosaur Microraptor gui under Ultraviolet Light PLoS ONE, 5 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009223

At the climax of the silent 1925 adaption of The Lost World, a living “Brontosaurus” brought back from a remote Venezuelan plateau wreaks havoc in London. The scene was obviously fiction, but a new exhibit in the heart of the city now allows residents and visitors to imagine what such prehistoric beasts would have been like in an urban setting.

Called “Dinosaurs Unleashed,” the exhibition features two dozen dinosaurs that will be on display along Oxford Street until the end of April. While some of the dinosaurs are placed around prehistoric-looking plants, the real draw is the chance to see the animatronic robots in the middle of the city. Who knows? Maybe anachronistic displays of dinosaurs in the city will even inspire someone to write the next “dinosaurs run amok” blockbuster.

An early restoration of a vaugely crocodile-like Megalosaurus.

Dinosaurs as depicted in museums, movies and art today are sleek, brightly-colored and often feathered. This was not always the case. When dinosaurs were first recognized by science at the beginning of the 19th century, naturalists like Gideon Mantell and William Buckland thought they looked like enormous lizards and crocodiles. Iguanodon, as its name might suggest, was thought to be a gigantic version of the tropical lizards, and Megalosaurus was envisioned as a more crocodile-like beast.

Buckland, in particular, was enthralled by these ancient creatures. They were the petrified evidence of a past world that had flourished and been destroyed during a past beyond memory, and (as later recounted by his son Francis) Buckland once described the great Megalosaurus this way:

During this period of monsters there floated in the neighborhood of what is now the lake of Blenheim – huge lizards, their jaws like crocodiles, their bodies as big as elephants, their legs like gate-posts and mile-stones, and their tails as long and as large as the steeple of Kidlington or Long Habro’. Take off the steeple of either church, lay it in a horizontal position, and place legs on it, and you will have some notion of the animal’s bulk. These stories look like fables, but I ask not your indulgence to believe them. There the monsters are, and I challenge your incredulity in the face of the specimens before your eyes; – disbelieve them if you can.

It was impossible not to be fascinated by such creatures, and they were so spectacular that Buckland thought the fossils of these dinosaurs may have inspired myths and legends:

May not the idea of the dragons, curious stories of which are chronicles in various parts of England, owe their origin, in some way or other, to the veritable existence of these large lizards in former ages? To point out the train of ideas or circumstances which led to these ancient dragon stories is of course impossible, particularly as man was not coexistant with Megalosaurus and Co. – still there is a certain shadow of connexion between them.

Buckland left this question open, but over a century and a half later the historian Adrienne Mayor would illustrate that he was on the right track. The mythology of many cultures, from Native American tribes to the Greeks, was heavily affected by the discovery of fossil bones. The Thunderbird, the Cyclops, Griffins, dragons and more were not just figments of our imagination, but early attempts to make sense of strange fossil bones found throughout the world.