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Movie reel, courtesy of Flickr user gomattolson

As sorry as I am to admit it, most movies with dinosaurs in them are not very good. It is far easier for me to think of bad dinosaur movies (I still have nightmares from Theodore Rex, and that was meant to be a comedy) than good ones, but there are a few shining examples of what dino-cinema can be if done right.

Jurassic Park (1993)

This is the high-water mark for dinosaur films. Based upon the novel of the same name, this 20th-century “Frankenstein” fable featured some of the best-looking dinosaurs ever seen on film and ushered in a new age of dino-mania. Sure, there were a lot of scientific problems and inaccuracies with the movie, but the fact of the matter is that, 17 years after it was released, Jurassic Park is still a lot of fun to watch. (The first film was followed up by two so-so sequels.)

King Kong (1933)

Even though a giant gorilla was the tragic star of King Kong, when I first saw it I was rooting for the dinosaurs. It didn’t matter that they were stop-motion creatures filmed in black-and-white five decades before I was born—the Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, and other assorted prehistoric monsters in the film were every bit as threatening as the movie’s star. The battle between Tyrannosaurus and King Kong, especially, is one of the most exciting confrontations ever projected onto the silver screen.

King Kong (2005)

Ok, it might seem like a bit of a cheat to list a remake as a separate movie, but I think the 2005 version of King Kong deserves special mention. While the story generally hewed to the one laid out in the 1933 original, the creature creators working on the 21st-century remake envisioned what the living descendants of prehistoric creatures might look like. The modern-day descendant of T. rex, dubbed Vastatosaurus rex, got most of the attention, but there were also “raptors” (Venatosaurus), Brontosaurus and a slew of other imaginary dinosaurs. In fact, more dinosaurs were imagined than made it into the film, and the book The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island describes them in detail.

The Land Before Time (1988)

Given the number of annoying sequels this film has produced, I had some qualms about placing it on this list, but since it was the first dinosaur movie I ever saw in theaters it holds a special place in my heart. The tale of a group of anthropomorphic misfit dinosaur trying to make it to the “Great Valley,” The Land Before Time fit in with the notion (still relatively new when it was released) that dinosaurs had family lives and were not just dumb reptiles. Spike, the mute Stegosaurus youngster, was my favorite character, and I think I still have a stuffed animal version of him around here somewhere….

Gojira (1954)

This movie monster, essentially a radioactive dinosaur, has starred in over 28 films to date, but the original 1954 Japanese film is by far the best. As much a social commentary on the use of atomic weapons on Japan during WWII as a straight-up monster flick, the first Godzilla film is arguably one of the most important movies ever made (if for no other reason that its star has had such enduring popularity—a series reboot is already underway).

What makes for a “good” dinosaur film is largely subjective, though. What are your favorites?

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Restorations of the young (foreground) and older (background) juvenile Similicaudipteryx. Artwork by Xing Lida and Song Qijin.

Over the past decade and a half paleontologists have found the remains of numerous feathered dinosaurs, but, as announced in this week’s edition of Nature, a new pair of specimens may show how the feathers of some of these dinosaurs changed as they grew up.

Among birds, feather growth is relatively straightforward. They are covered in a downy coating of fuzz as hatchlings but quickly grow their adult plumage, and they remain at this stage of feather development for the rest of their lives. Dinosaurs may have been different. In scrutinizing a young juvenile and an older juvenile of the recently-discovered oviraptorosaur Similicaudipteryx, paleontologists Xing Xu, Xiaoting Zheng and Hailu You noticed that there was a significant difference in the feather types. The long feathers on the arms (remiges) and those on the tail (retrices) of the younger individual were wide and ribbon-like where they attached to the body, whereas on the older individual these feathers were connected by central shafts and resembled the same feathers seen in living birds.

What does this disparity in feather construction mean? The authors of the new study suggest that, rather than transitioning from down to fully-developed feathers, there was a longer period of feather change in Similicaudipteryx in which a successive series of molts allowed the dinosaurs to grow slightly different feathers (the feathers themselves are not changing, in other words, but are being replaced by different feathers after being shed). If this hypothesis is correct, then it is the first known indication that dinosaur feathers went through a longer stage of transitions than that seen in modern birds.

But there may be other explanations for the differences between the two fossils. It may be that the younger individual was molting at the time it died, meaning that the more ribbon-like feathers were ones which were just emerging and do not actually represent a different feather stage. This hypothesis is not beyond criticism, either, and to resolve the question more fossils from juvenile Similicaudipteryx will be needed to better understand the growth of these dinosaurs.

Regardless of which hypothesis turns out to be correct, this new study raises some interesting questions about the origins and growth of feathers among dinosaurs closely related to the ancestors of birds. Studies of the genetics and development of living birds will be just as important to resolving these issues as more fossils, and through the combination of these different lines of evidence scientists will not only be better able to identify transitions such as these, but they will be developing new ways to investigate how they actually happened.

For more on this study, see Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Xu, X., Zheng, X., & You, H. (2010). Exceptional dinosaur fossils show ontogenetic development of early feathers Nature, 464 (7293), 1338-1341 DOI: 10.1038/nature08965

A photo of the dinosaur outside the office of orthodontist Dr. Max. Sent in by reader Jason Brunet.

Among other things, dinosaurs are well known for having big mouths full of teeth, so it is not altogether surprising that at least one orthodontist has taken a dinosaur as a mascot. Sent to us by reader Jason Brunet, this week’s dinosaur sighting features a Jurassic Park-style Velociraptor outside the office of orthodontist Dr. Max in Monroe, Washington. It is probably best that there are no dinosaurs around to actually visit the clinic, though; can you imagine trying to fit braces on a Tyrannosaurus?

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!

The first mounted skeleton of Tyrannosaurus, on display at the American Museum of Natural History in 1906. From the New York Times.

It has now been 105 years since the famous dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex was described by the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, and just about every major dinosaur museum has at least one skeleton of the terrifying predator in their paleontology exhibits. Thanks to the discovery of numerous individuals and nearly-complete specimens, there is perhaps no dinosaur that is better known, but the first Tyrannosaurus to be put on display for the public was largely incomplete.

On December 30, 1906, the New York Times ran an article on the debut of the first Tyrannosaurus mount. Consisting of little more than the legs and hips of the animal, the partial skeleton was set up in the fossil halls of the American Museum of Natural History, and the skeleton of a large bird was set up between its legs to further impress visitors with just how enormous the dinosaur was. (Little did paleontologists know that Tyrannosaurus was a relatively close relative of birds and may have even been covered in feathers during some part of its life.) It would not be until some years later, with the discovery of a much more complete skeleton from the famous Hell Creek Formation, that the rest of the skeleton would be put into place, creating the towering reconstruction that delighted me when I first visited the museum as a child in the late 1980s.

Despite the fact that most of the skeleton could not be put on display, however, the New York Times reporter heralded the mount as representing the fiercest predator to have ever lived. “Prize Fighter of Antiquity Discovered and Restored” the headline crowed, and there could be little doubt that the size and stupidity of Tyrannosaurus made it a ravenous meat-eater always on the  hunt for its next meal. Given that Triceratops was known to be a contemporary of the giant carnivore, the reporter speculated that it was the preferred prey of Tyrannosaurus and wrote:

So long as this three-horned monster [Triceratops] faced his adversary he must have been quite invulnerable. But he was a vegetarian, his teeth were comparatively harmless, and he was as slow in his movements as the brontosaurus. Thus, pitted against the alert and towering tyrant lizard, who ran with great agility on his two hind feet and could play frightful havoc with his savage canine teeth, the triceratops must have waged a rather unequal combat.

Tyrannosaurus was unstoppable. No horns, hide, or armor would give its victims a reprieve, yet ultimately it was a failure. The article celebrating the partial restoration of Tyrannosaurus closed by reminding the readers that it left no descendants, hence “an evolutionist would classify him as a leafless, flowerless branch on the tree of animal life.” Clearly the dinosaurs had done something wrong, perhaps growing too big for their brains, and this allowed mammals to regain their birthright as the giant Mesozoic monsters began to fade away.

Today, of course, we know differently. Dinosaurs were a highly successful group of animals that were not as slow, stupid, or drab as early 20th-century paleontologists presumed, and while the Tyrannosaurus left no living descendants, at least one group of predatory dinosaurs did give rise to birds. Nevertheless, Tyrannosaurus was such an imposing predator that over a century after its discovery by science it still causes us to gossip about its life and habits. It remains the “Tyrant king” of the dinosaurs.

In November of last year paleontologists working in South Africa announced the discovery of Aardonyx celestae, a sauropodomorph dinosaur which has helped scientists better understand the evolution of the immense sauropod dinosaurs. It took quite a bit of work to get those bones out of the ground, though, and the new BBC documentary “Museum of Life” provides a behind-the-scenes look at the site from which this strange dinosaur has been recovered.