Smithsonian.com

"H" is for Hypsiloura helioscopus, according to the Disillusioned Taxonomist's Prehistoric Alphabet. Click the image for the rest of the alphabet

An Evolving Blog: Please welcome the latest blog to emerge from the primordial ooze of the Internet. Pick & Scalpel is the official blog of the WitmerLab. Their mission statement: “We’re a collection of scientists at Ohio University using 21st century approaches to ‘flesh out’ the past. Our mission is to use the structure of extinct and modern-day animals to interpret evolutionary history … we also recognize the power of the past…of paleontology…of dinosaurs!…to ignite interest in science among people of all walks of life and of all ages.”

Seasons Greetings: Blogger “Barbaraella Psychadella” has unilaterally declared that, henceforth, July 16 will be “Dinosaur Day”—a holiday when “we honor our long lost reptilian overlords, the dinosaurs, by going on Dinosaur Pilgrimage.” This year’s pilgrimage included a visit to a now-decaying dinosaur-themed miniature golf course and lunch at Peggy Sue’s Diner and Diner-saur park.

“G” is for Gammasaurus geophagus: The Disillusioned Taxonomist has some fun with taxonomic terms with the creation of his Prehistoric Animal Alphabet, where the letters are “styled to look like various prehistoric creatures, some are based loosely on existing types, others completely made up.” For instance, meet Jovigyrinus jocosus (“joking Bon Jovi’s salamander”), an early tetrapod from Devonian New Jersey.

Down to the Bone: “Very often the fossils that are seen on display in museums or in papers are beautifully clear of surrounding rock….When TV shows want to cover fossil preparation we see something rapidly fall out of sandstone, or delicate cleaning of the last bits of rock from a specimen,” observes David Hone at Archosaur Musings. What they don’t tend to show is that fossils are typically an “ungodly conglomerate” embedded in stone. Hone presents photos that vividly display why it requires hours of work just to expose one end of bone.

Honoring Trilobites: ArtEvolved has posted its gallery of trilobite-inspired artwork, including “Trilobite Deco” and “Trilobite Dragon.” On the other hand, if building blocks are your medium of choice, I’d recommend this LEGO Trilobite.

Signs of an Economic Recovery? “After a couple of years in which many notable, well-preserved skeletons failed to meet their reserve price,” Bob’s Dinosaur Blog reports, “Sotheby’s of France is planning a huge dinosaur auction of, well, huge dinosaurs.” A 33-foot-long Allosaurus skeleton (originally unearthed in Wyoming) is expected to fetch a minimum of $500,000.

Lost Colony: The latest edition of Nature has a paper reporting that a 2.1 billion-year-old fossil of multicellular colonial organisms has been found in Gabon. (To date, the earliest evidence in the fossil record of such organisms is less than 600 million years old.) Ediacaran offers a detailed account of why he is skeptical of the new find.

In the Field: Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs takes us on a photo tour of Chicago’s Field Museum. One of the most popular dinosaur exhibits is the “musical” Parasaurolophus head, “which lets visitors hear what one of the big honkers may have sounded like.”

Microscopes on the Move: Having trouble transporting and using high-quality stereomicroscopes at excavation sites? At the Prep Room, Matthew Brown unveils his homemade solution.

I knew it was probably going to be bad, but when I saw that the prehistoric critter documentary series Monsters Resurrected was on Netflix, I couldn’t help but hit the “play” button. As I soon found out, the series represents everything I love and hate about modern dinosaur documentaries.

First broadcast in December 2009, the point of Monsters Resurrected is to reconstruct the habits of several extinct predators—Spinosaurus (dinosaur), Titanis (“terror bird”), Tylosaurus (mosasaur), Acrocanthosaurus (dinosaur), Amphicyon (“bear-dog”), Megalania (monitor lizard)—while employing as much hyperbole as possible. Where other documentaries have held back on gore, Monsters Resurrected reveled in blood-and-guts detail, often replaying the same graphic CGI scene selections over and over and over again. Seeing a Spinosaurus rip into the giant croc cousin Sarcosuchus was fairly impressive the first time, but by the fifth replay of the scene I had become inured to the violence.

But, unlike other recent documentaries, Monsters Resurrected does not exclusively feature computer-generated predators stomping about the place and roaring their lungs out. It mixes CGI vignettes with interview clips with scientists, and each show contains a metal shop component in which some part of each animal is cast in metal and set against a variety of objects—from fruit to cars—to show how powerful the ancient predators really were. Being that this blog is called Dinosaur Tracking, I will focus in on the two episodes that feature dinosaurs: “Biggest Killer Dino” and “Great American Predator.”

It is as if each of the two dinosaur-themed episodes had split personalities. On the one side they feature numerous paleontologists —big names in the paleo community including Thomas Holtz, Phil Currie, Ken Carpenter, Ken Lacovara, Jerry Harris, James Farlow and others—ably describing the science of the dinosaurs they knew so well, and on the other the show features scene-after-scene of Jurassic Park-type dino mayhem. In fact, the creators of Monsters Resurrected effectively recreated several scenes from the JP sequel The Lost World by placing Spinosaurus and Acrocanthosaurus in the modern day.

Likewise, the metal shop portions of each show seem to be a bit pointless. Acrocanthosaurus and Spinosaurus were not made of metal, nor did they attack cars or other modern-day objects, so I don’t really see what can be learned by slamming a rigid, metal Spinosaurus arm into a car door. In fact, these scenes are so over-the-top that they remind me of a recent parody of the Discovery Channel and similar networks by the Onion in which television programmers say they can’t dumb down their “science” programming any further.

What concerned me most of all, though, was the fact that the shows portrayed what were real animals as bloodthirsty monsters. The creatures in the show are shown as constantly killing and terrorizing the landscape, roaring every few seconds to announce their arrival. No living predators act like this, and there is no reason to think dinosaurs did. I can understand why the predatory habits of these animals might be played up for the show, but by presenting these animals as monsters, Monsters Resurrected presents a ridiculously hyperbolic view of what they were like in life.

In the end, Monsters Resurrected left me feeling very conflicted. It was wonderful to see scientists describing real fossil evidence and the minutiae of paleontology—in the wake of Walking With Dinosaurs-type shows, it’s good to see scientists make a comeback. Nevertheless, the action sequences of the show make me wonder how much of the scientific content actually got through to viewers. What did they remember after watching the show—the details of Acrocanthosaurus anatomy, or a Spinosaurus ripping into everything it came across with merciless abandon?

Have you seen Monsters Resurrected? What did you think of the show?

The skeleton of the weird sauropod Nigersaurus. From Flickr user Mr. T in DC.

I love visiting the fossil halls of natural history museums, but I have to admit that I sometimes yearn to see new specimens on display. Tyrannosaurus, Apatosaurus, Triceratops, Allosaurus, Edmontosaurus—their skeletons remains as impressive as ever, but given all the new dinosaur species discovered during the past century, it would be refreshing to see some new, lesser-known dinosaurs on display.

If I had free reign to set up a dinosaur hall as I saw fit, for example, I would want to create an exhibit all about the tyrannosauroid dinosaurs. It used to be that we knew only the last and the biggest of the tyrant dinosaurs, but during the past decade our knowledge of tyrannosauroids and their evolution has greatly expanded. Among others, I would love to see tyrannosauroids like Dilong, Appalachiosaurus and Raptorex on display next to their well-known relatives like Gorgosaurus and Tyrannosaurus to illustrate how these predators evolved.

The same could be done with sauropods. We’re all familiar with the classic sauropods such as Diplodocus and Camarasaurus, but what about some of the really bizarre sauropods few people know about? By presenting oddballs like the hoover-mouthed Nigersaurus, the sail-necked Amargasaurus and the armored Saltasaurus next to the classic forms, museum visitors could gain a fuller appreciation for sauropod diversity.

What about you? If you could design a museum dinosaur hall, what would you put in it?

A hypothetical "Tree of Life" drawn by Charles Darwin in his notebooks. Image from Wikipedia.

What do Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and dinosaurs have in common? According to Hollywood scuttlebutt, the answer is a soon-to-be-released film called The Tree of Life, but it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be your usual prehistoric-monsters-run-amok film.

Details of what the movie is actually going to be about are minimal. Set in the midwestern United States in the 1950s, The Tree of Life is said to be a drama about the lead character’s quest to find the meaning of his life. What dinosaurs have to do with that, we can only speculate. The presently favored hypothesis is that the dinosaurs are a holdover from an earlier film project by the director of The Tree of Life, a project that got scrapped. That unmade film, called Q, was meant to be about the life and death of the universe, and it appears that some elements of it has been brought into The Tree of Life.

Aside from the questions surrounding the plot of the film, however, it sounds like the dinosaur scenes will be quite impressive. As the movie will be presented in IMAX, the dinosaurs will be life-size, though I will wait to see some reviews before I shell out for a ticket.

A toe bone from a Tyrannosaurus collected by NJSM paleontologists near Billings, Montana. I hope to find more of this dinosaur in the field this week.

Over the past few years, most of what I have learned about dinosaurs has come from books and papers. I am constantly trying to keep up with the literature—both from my own edification and to bring you news of the coolest new discoveries—but there is only so much libraries can do for you. Sooner or later, you just have to get out into the field, and that’s what I am doing this week.

As you read this I am out in Montana with the New Jersey State Museum field crew to search for dinosaurs near Billings, Montana. I don’t know what we will find. Searching for fossils is a difficult process that requires a keen eye and a lot of patience, and, even when a fossil hunt is not fruitful, you can still learn a lot by reading the landscape for clues. Given that I have not had the chance to go fossil hunting very often, I don’t expect to find very much, but through my efforts I hope to learn a lot.

If you have been fossil hunting and have a cool story from the field, please share it in the comments.

(We’ll be updating the blog all week and Brian will report back from the field soon—Ed.)