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The poster for the Asylum version of Sherlock Holmes.

It’s pretty common that when a blockbuster film premieres, there’s a cheesy direct-to-video version right on its heels, so it is not altogether surprising that the B-movie production company the Asylum recently released their own version of Sherlock Holmes. What is surprising, however, is that the Asylum adaptation features a pint-size Tyrannosaurus (among other beasties), and offers up a strange explanation for one of the most famous unsolved murder cases of all time.

Set in 1882, the film centers around the efforts of Holmes and Dr. Watson to stop Spring-Heeled Jack, a mechanical genius who has created a slew of mechanical monsters. Among the assortment of threatening creatures is a relatively small Tyrannosaurus (or, at least, one small enough to sneak through the London streets) which violently interrupts a business transaction between a prostitute and a client in the infamous Whitechapel district of London which “Jack the Ripper” prowled. While the actual case was much more convoluted, so much so that the killer has never been conclusively identified, in the film it is clear that at least one of the notorious Whitechapel murders was carried about by a robotic Tyrannosaurus.

Naturally there are all sorts of problems with this scenario, but, from a paleontological perspective, some of the biggest surround the way the Tyrannosaurus was presented. I could suspend my disbelief for a steampunk dinosaur, but in this film we see a modern version of a living Tyrannosaurus. Never mind that the dinosaur was not described until the beginning of the 20th century and that it was portrayed as a tail-dragging animal until the “Dinosaur Renaissance” of the 1970s; it seems that a spare dinosaur from another Asylum film, a loose adaptation of the Land That Time Forgot, was plopped into the Sherlock Holmes film. Personally, I would have found it much more interesting to have cast a Megalosaurus as anatomists would have pictured it at the end of the 19th century, but given the outrageous plot and low production values of this version of Sherlock Holmes I am not that surprised that getting the history of science right was not the first concern.

The skeleton of Limusaurus (the head is to the right).

Around 160 million years ago, an enormous sauropod dinosaur trudged across an ancient marsh in what is now Xinjiang, China. It was not easy going. The eruption of a nearby volcano coated the area in a layer of ash which formed a thin surface over a morass of mud and volcanic debris, and as it walked it left deep holes which quickly filled in with sticky muck. As some of the smaller dinosaurs that lived in the area would find out, these in-filled footprints would soon become dinosaur death traps.

As reported by paleontologists David Eberth, Xu Xing and James Clark in the journal Palaios, the sauropod-made pits created circumstances in which small theropod dinosaurs would be more likely to be preserved. Once filled in with mud, it would have been hard to see the large holes, and when a small dinosaur stepped into them they would have had a very difficult time getting out. As we can tell from the layers of fossils preserved within the footprints, many of the dinosaurs became permanently stuck and died, piling one on top of the other (although, in some cases, trapped dinosaurs might have been able to gain better footing on the remains of previously trapped individuals and push themselves out).

These dinosaur death traps have been especially significant because at least two previously-unknown species of dinosaur have been recovered from them. Guanlong, an early cousin of Tyrannosaurus, and the bizarre theropod Limusaurus were both described from the pile of skeletons contained within the footprints. Chances are that there are other yet-undescribed dinosaurs contained within similar assemblages in the area, too, showing how something as simple as a mud-filled footprint can tell us much about the life of the past.

EBERTH, D., XING, X., & CLARK, J. (2010). DINOSAUR DEATH PITS FROM THE JURASSIC OF CHINA PALAIOS, 25 (2), 112-125 DOI: 10.2110/palo.2009.p09-028r

A "Brontosaurus" outside a Virginia campground. Photo courtesy Callan Bentley.

Some of my favorite dinosaur sightings are ones in which a dinosaur was put in a certain place just for the heck of it. Photos from abandoned dinosaur sculpture parks are cool, but unexpected roadside dinosaurs are even better, and such was a photo sent to us by Callan Bentley. Just outside Elkton, Virginia on Route 33 there is a campground entrance guarded by this curious looking “Brontosaurus.” While not scientifically up-to-date, it looks like it would have fit right in among the animated cast of a Flintstones cartoon.

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 partial skull of Texacephale, as viewed from the top. From the Cretaceous Research paper.

In the entire history of life on earth, there was nothing quite like the pachycephalosaurs, or the “bonehead” dinosaurs. These herbivorous, bipedal dinosaurs were most recognizable by the array of bumps, knobs, and spikes on their reinforced skulls, and a newly discovered species of this kind of dinosaur might help explain the origins of this group.

Described by paleontologists Nicholas Longrich, Julia Sankey and Darren Tanke in the journal Cretaceous Research, the approximately 75-million-year-old dinosaur is primarily represented by parts of its nose and its heavy skull dome. In fact, this part of the pachycephalosaur skull was so sturdy that it is often all that is found of them, and though the specimens from Texas were originally referred to a different genus, the paleontologists eventually determined that they were from a new species they called Texacephale langstoni. It lived alongside the hadrosaur Kritosaurus, the horned dinosaur Agujaceratops, tyrannosaurs, the giant crocodylian Deinosuchus and other creatures, but what really makes this new form significant is its relationship to other pachycephalosaurs.

When the scientists compared Texacephale to other similar dinosaurs, they found that it was situated near the base of the pachycephalosaur family tree. This suggests that in some ways it might be more like the earliest members of the group than the more familiar forms like Pachycephalosaurus and Stygimoloch, and if this is the case it may mean that the group originated in North America. Although the authors state that this hypothesis is tentative, it would rearrange the pachycephalosaur family tree so that the flat-headed species from Asia, which were previously thought to represent what early pachycephalosaurs were like, would instead represent specialized varieties which evolved after the group spread to that continent. This, added to the recent discovery that pachycephalosaur heads might be drastically restructured as they age, means that further research will be likely to shake up the pachycephalosaur family tree.

Longrich, N., Sankey, J., & Tanke, D. (2010). Texacephale langstoni, a new genus of pachycephalosaurid (Dinosauria: Ornithischia) from the upper Campanian Aguja Formation, southern Texas, USA Cretaceous Research, 31 (2), 274-284 DOI: 10.1016/j.cretres.2009.12.002

How E.D. Cope envisioned "Laelaps" (now known as Dryptosaurus), standing among the other monsters of Cretaceous New Jersey.

In 1866, back when the scientific study of dinosaurs was only just beginning in North America, the naturalist E.D. Cope received word that workers at the West Jersey Marl Company in Gloucester County, New Jersey, had discovered the gigantic bones of an unknown fossil animal. As Cope did much of his work just across the Delaware River in Philadelphia, he did not have far to travel, and upon arriving at the site he was able to collect elements of the jaws, skull, legs, hip, tail and arm (including an immense claw) from the chocolate-colored Cretaceous marl. Altogether this material would come to represent a dinosaur Cope named Laelaps aquilunguis, named after the dog of Greek mythology which never failed to catch its prey (Laelaps) and for the large talon found among the remains (aquilunguis, meaning “eagle-clawed”). As he declared in its description, Cope believed it was “the most formidable type of rapacious terrestrial vertebrata of which we have any knowledge.”

Cope was enthralled by this discovery. It was the first partial skeleton of a predatory dinosaur found in the United States, and the fact that its arms were clearly shorter than its hindlimbs caused paleontologists to reconsider what dinosaurs looked like. Rather than being the squat, crocodile-like monsters that the English anatomist Richard Owen envisioned, dinosaurs were cast as being more bird-like in form and habit, and in his scientific work Cope himself appears to have taken great joy in envisioned Laelaps leaping upon its prey, tearing at the hide of Hadrosaurus (also discovered in New Jersey) and shattering the armor of ancient crocodiles. Today we know the dinosaur as a tyrannosauroid closely related to the recently-discovered Appalachiosaurus, and though hypotheses of what it looked like have changed a bit since the late 19th century Cope’s restorations of Laelaps was still pretty close to reality.

Yet Laelaps was not to keep its name. Unbeknown to Cope, that genus name had already been applied to a kind of mite, and this provided an opportunity for his rival, O.C. Marsh, to upstage him. Though they struck up a brief friendship upon meeting in Europe early in their career, back in the United States the two paleontologists quickly became fierce rivals, and the competition between them erupted into the famous “Bone Wars” of the late 19th century. Both in the field and in academic journals, both men vied for the unofficial title of “America’s greatest paleontologist”, and in the case of New Jersey’s predatory dinosaur Marsh had found a way to rename one of Cope’s most favorite discoveries.

In 1877, eleven years after it was first announced, Marsh renamed Cope’s dinosaur Dryptosaurus (“tearing reptile”) in a footnote of a description of another dinosaur, “Titanosaurus” (which, oddly enough, had already been used for another dinosaur, causing Marsh to later rename it Atlantosaurus). This must have been doubly frustrating for Cope. Not only had his “Laelaps” been renamed, but his rival had done so as an academic aside. While it is certainly true that the methods of writing scientific papers and descriptions have changed since 1877, I can’t help but wonder if Marsh intentionally renamed “Laelaps” in a footnote specifically to irk Cope. (Not surprisingly given his stubborn temperament, Cope continued to use the name “Laelaps” for the rest of his career.)

This was not the only time that a prehistoric creature had to be renamed because the name it had been given was preoccupied. Another fossil creature from New Jersey, a crocodile originally named Holops, had to have its name changed to Holopsisuchus because its original name had already been given to an insect. Even more recently, it was discovered that the horned dinosaurs Diceratops and Microceratops needed to be renamed for much the same reason. Today they are known as Diceratus and Microceratus, respectively. Such conflicts are inevitable, especially as biologists of varying fields continue to catalog new genera, and while I must admit I like some of the original genus names, we all have to play by the rules when it comes to science.