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The DVD cover for Clash of the Dinosaurs.

No matter how much we learn about the lives of dinosaurs, much of the public’s attention is focused on issues of attack and defense. How powerful was a Tyrannosaurus bite? How did Deinonychus hunt? Why did ankylosaurs have such impressive armor? Did Triceratops form herds to defend themselves? Again and again these questions pop up, and they are the focus on the program Clash of the Dinosaurs, just released on DVD.

Divided into four episodes—Extreme Survivors, Perfect Predators, The Defenders and Generations—Clash of the Dinosaurs breaks from the recent trend of all-cgi dinosaur docudramas to give paleontologists a prominent role in explaining the biology of several dinosaurs (and one pterosaur) that lived in North America during the Cretaceous. The standards Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus are present, as well as several other predators and herbivores such as Deinonychus and the large sauropod Sauroposeidon. Compared to other recent shows, the special effects used to bring these dinosaurs to life look pretty good, and I was happy to see some feathers on Deinonychus for once. Even so, the impressiveness of the reconstructions quickly fades as the same footage is used over and over and over again. The near-constant reuse of the same scenes makes one episode feel much the same as all the others, with the comments of the paleontologists representing the majority of the new content in each episode.

The educational content of each episode varies significantly, from accessible explanations of dinosaur anatomy to some unsupported speculations about dinosaur behavior (such as Bob Bakker’s suggestion that a herd of Parasaurolophus could use low-register sounds to “scramble the brains” of an attacking predator). The trouble with this approach is that the documentary never really explains how we know what we say we know about dinosaurs. Watching the first two episodes with my in-laws during a visit, they were nearly constantly turning to me and asking, “how do they know that?” It would have been far better to get the talking heads of the program to discuss particular studies and dig a little deeper into the science on which the show was based. As is, the show paints a series of vignettes featuring dinosaurs but never really explains how we have come to understand these things about dinosaurs. Documentary filmmakers should stop being afraid of digging into science; people want to know the details of how we have come to understand the lives of dinosaurs. (And, speaking for myself, programs that showed the process of science were what inspired my interest in paleontology.)

What I was most curious to see, however, was whether the creators of the show made good on their promise to amend the program. As I wrote last December, paleontologist Matt Wedel was shocked to see the original run of the program twist his words to make it sound like he was saying something he did not actually say. Wedel had explicitly attempted to debunk the idea that dinosaurs had a “second brain” in their rumps, yet Clash of the Dinosaurs presented a bit of film suggesting that Wedel endorsed such a view. After hearing Wedel’s complaints the filmmakers agreed to edit the DVD release, and, to their credit, they appear to have removed it. Hopefully such incidents will not repeat themselves.

The DVD also includes a “preview” of the documentary When Dinosaurs Roamed America, but it is not much of an extra. Cobbled together out of clips from another show called When Dinosaurs Roamed North America and a few scenes shot at Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument, this extra show is a throwaway which is not worth watching if you have any familiarity at all with dinosaurs.

In the end, Clash of the Dinosaurs feels like a wasted opportunity. The filmmakers assembled an all-star cast of paleontologists and had some great computer graphics, yet the sensationalistic and repetitive presentation of the show began to feel grating after the first 15 minutes. Instead of a detailed look at the physiology and biomechanics of dinosaurs, Clash of the Dinosaurs samples just enough paleontology to restore scenes of prehistoric violence replayed more times than I care to count.

Apatosaurus as it stands today in the Carnegie Museum. From Wikipedia.

A few weeks ago, someone decapitated the dinosaur standing outside Norman, Oklahoma’s only Sinclair station. The sculpture—put in place five years ago and named “Dino”—was a beloved local landmark, and fortunately the head was eventually recovered. This wasn’t the first time a dinosaur’s head has been stolen, but, in an odd way, it is a case of vandalism imitating one of the most frustrating aspects of dinosaur paleontology.

More often than not, sauropod dinosaurs are found without heads. Whereas their thick limb bones and complex vertebrae have often made it into the fossil record, their small and often fragile skulls are exceedingly rare. Any discovery of a sauropod skull is cause for celebration.

The rarity of sauropod skulls has had a major influence on what scientists have thought some dinosaurs were like. Take, for example, the search for the head of Apatosaurus as recounted by Keith Parsons in the book Drawing Out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars. Even though O.C. Marsh had published a full restoration of the dinosaur—called Brontosaurus at the time—in his famous reference book The Dinosaurs of North America, no skull had actually been found. What kind of noggin Brontosaurus had was up to speculation, and Marsh used a Brachiosaurus skull (thought to belong to Camarasaurus at the time) found at a different site to complete his restoration.

Marsh was reluctant to create a reconstruction of his nearly complete sauropod, but the next generation of paleontologists was not so reticent. The American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, and the Carnegie Museum all competed with each other to find exquisite specimens of large, Jurassic dinosaurs suitable for mounting in their exhibition halls. Of these institutions, the Carnegie had some of the best luck, including the discovery by fossil hunter Earl Douglass of the fossil jackpot in northern Utah known today as Dinosaur National Monument.

Among the most promising specimens Douglass found was what appeared to be a nearly-complete Brontosaurus. The first parts to be uncovered were portions of the hip, hind limb and spine, but perhaps—all the way at the end of the vertebral column reaching into the rock—there was a skull, too. As Douglass began to uncover the skeleton in September and October of 1909, he frequently wrote back to the Carnegie museum staff that he was confident that he would eventually find a skull at the end of the long chain of vertebrae, but in a November 11 letter, he reported defeat. The dinosaur’s neck had been thrown backwards over the middle part of its body—a very common condition among dinosaur skeletons—and when Douglass excavated the front portion of the neck he did not find any skull. The neck ended just a few vertebrae short of where the head should have been, a discovery Douglass reported was “disappointing and sickening.”

Doulgass continued his work at the Utah site, eventually recovering a Diplodocus skull, and it was this skull that led the fossil hunter to wonder if he had been looking for the wrong thing all along. In a letter to the museum’s director, W.J. Holland, Douglass wondered, “has a skull or part of a skull of Diplodocus ever been found in such a position that we can be positively sure that it belongs to Diplodocus?” The particularly robust Diplodocus skull Douglass had found was in close association with the Brontosaurus skeleton at the quarry, so, just maybe, the skulls which had been called Diplodocus really belonged to a different dinosaur. Douglass’ supervisor was clearly struck with this line of argument. In December 1914 Holland delivered a lecture to the Paleontological Society of America in which he asserted that the large “Diplodocus” skull Douglass had found really belonged to the Brontosaurus body. At long last, Brontosaurus had a head.

Curiously, however, Holland did not immediately install a head on the Brontosaurus at the Carnegie Museum. The skeleton, given the designation Apatosaurus today, remained headless for almost 20 years. Why Holland was so reluctant to install a skull on the skeleton is uncertain. As Holland would later suggest in his own writings, that Marsh was wrong seemed more certain than Holland’s own selection of the Diplodocus-like head for his Apatosaurus, and as long as Douglass was working in the quarry it was possible that a skull found connected to an Apatosaurus skeleton would turn up. If such a specimen was found and Holland was wrong it would certainly be an embarrassment, and in 1934 someone decided to fix the situation by placing a Camarasaurus head on the Carnegie’s Apatosaurus skeleton (especially since the paleontologist C.W. Gilmore was coming to the museum explicitly to examine the skeleton). At the time it was believed that Apatosaurus and Camarasaurus were more closely related to each other than either was to Diplodocus anyway, so it seemed like the reasonable position to take despite the opinions of Douglass and Holland. It would not be until 1979, after an in-depth study by paleontologists David Berman and John McIntosh showed that Holland had been right, that Apatosaurus would be mounted with the right head.

The shell of the fossil snail Lioplacodes embedded in the coprolite of an herbivorous dinosaur. From the Lethaia paper.

One of the many reasons I love paleontology is that every now and then I stumble across a paper on some aspect of ancient life I had never considered before. There is much more to the science than descriptions of new species, and one of the studies that most recently caught my eye carried the title “Opportunistic exploitation of dinosaur dung: fossil snails in coprolites from the Upper Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation of Montana.”

As reported in the 2009 study, paleontologists digging at a 76-million-year-old site within the well-known Two Medicine Formation have found more than 130 snail specimens closely associated with—and sometimes even within—the fossilized feces of herbivorous dinosaurs. Scientists had long recognized that the snails were present in the same deposits as the dinosaurs, indicating that they shared the same habitat, but no one had systematically documented interactions between the large vertebrates and the small gastropods. In fact, up to seven different snail taxa were found in close association with the dinosaur coprolites. Apparently dinosaur poo was a regularly-used resource by many species of snail.

The occurrence of snail fossils within the dinosaur dung was also used by the scientists behind the study to reconstruct what kinds of habitats the animals were living in. Since the most common snails on and within the coprolites were terrestrial snails, the authors of the study propose that the dinosaurs left their droppings on dry land before their feces were subsequently flooded (which would have filled in dung beetle burrows also seen in the coprolites). Although they noted that some of the snail shell fragments within the coprolites could have come from snails that were accidentally ingested while the dinosaurs were eating leaves and rotting wood, at least half of the snail fossils were intact and show no signs of being digested. This suggests that the snails made their way to the dino pats after they were deposited, with the dinosaur feces providing warm, wet, food-rich mini-environments that the snails could comfortably exploit.

CHIN, K., HARTMAN, J., & ROTH, B. (2009). Opportunistic exploitation of dinosaur dung: fossil snails in coprolites from the Upper Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation of Montana Lethaia, 42 (2), 185-198 DOI: 10.1111/j.1502-3931.2008.00131.x

Brachiosaurus, photo by Brian Switek

On my way back from Montana, I had a layover in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, and it was there that I spotted this impressive mount of Brachiosaurus altithorax. Another skeletal restoration of the immense dinosaur stands outside the city’s famed Field Museum. I have to say that seeing this one near my departure terminal made me think about heading right back out into the field.

Whenever I pass construction sites, I sometimes imagine that some of the heavy, earth-moving machines are mechanical dinosaurs. Big, loud, and powerful, they fit the caricature of dinosaurs as bellowing monsters from my childhood, but the late sculptor Jim Gary actually went a step beyond seeing vehicles as just dinosaur-like. He actually made old vehicles into dinosaurs.

A fellow New Jersey resident, Gary created a variety of artistic works, but he was best known and loved for his “Garysauruses.” Everyone from young dino-fans to professional art critics appreciated Gary’s brightly colored creatures made from various auto parts, and these monstrous creations helped land him his own solo show at Smithsonian’s own National Museum of Natural History (among many other places) in 1990. I’m no art critic, but I always loved how Gary’s dinosaur sculptures combined the anatomy of flesh and bone (or their automotive equivalents) in the same piece—the sculptures were skeletal, but also looked almost like living animals, perfectly capturing the mix of perspectives paleontologists have on the past.

Sadly, Gary passed away in 2006, but his dinosaurs continue to enthrall visitors to the various institutions in which they are kept. In fact, Gary’s former publicist is trying to find a permanent home for many of the dinosaur sculptures that belonged to a touring collection so that the artist’s legacy can be preserved. I hope the effort is successful. Gary may have made sculptures of prehistoric animals from outdated auto-parts, but his works are timeless.