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The cover of Jurassic Park: Redemption issue three.

When we last left IDW’s new Jurassic Park: Redemption comic series, things were quickly getting out of hand. A rogue Carnotaurus was tearing up the Texas countryside, some kind of crocodile-like creature had taken up residence near a nuclear facility, and the family-friendly, all-herbivore dinosaur park Tim Murphy thought he was funding has turned out to be a full-scale Jurassic Park operation in the American heartland. Now, in the third installment of the five-part series, events approach the tipping point that will send the series hurtling through its conclusion.

To a great extent, Part 3 of the series is an exercise in getting all the characters into position. Tim’s (literally) shadowy business partner is due to meet him at the dinosaur holding facility, but this mastermind’s intentions are less than benevolent. At the close of the last issue he ordered the death of the scientist Dr. Wu, and soon after his arrival at the dinosaur pens he shows his other scientist, Dr. Backer, who is in charge by ordering one of his cronies to taze the paleontologist. His welcome to Tim is none-too-friendly either, despite being another familiar character, and I am sure we will hear all about his devious plans in the next issue.

While Tim is busy realizing just how deep the pile of dino guano he has stepped in is, his sister Lex meets up with the local sheriff to try and figure out who—or what—has been tearing down the fences surrounding her organic crop fields. A few tell-tale signs make it clear that something other than vandals is causing all the damage, and the full-on dinosaur stampede at the climax of the issue confirms that, if Ian Malcom were around, he would have plenty of fodder for his long discourses on chaos theory.

The problem with all this is that the issue contains more quick-cuts than a Michael Bay movie. It can be difficult to bring together the disparate threads introduced in the book in the space of 22 pages, but the story skips across various time points and several venues. One moment we’re with Lex and the sheriff in her fields, the next with Tim and his antagonist, the next with truckers in a bar, and the next with a dinosaur herd before zipping off again. This approach makes the story feel a little forced and disjointed. Additionally, it was a bit of a cheap trick to have Dr. Backer lying at the mercy of the Carnotaurus at the end of the last issue but to have him just pop up intact in issue 3. “I barely escaped with my life last night!” Backer yells at a nefarious co-worker, but just how he did it is left up to the reader’s imagination. I hope that the following two issues will feel a little more cohesive.

Unfortunately, Nate Van Dyke’s artwork has not improved, either. In fact, the artwork in issue three seems even rougher than in the previous two issues, and the dinosaurs are still relatively drab and disproportionate. I will try not to harp on this point, but it is frustrating to see  these poor creatures in a franchise chiefly based around dinosaurs. (Again, to see comic-style dinosaurs done right, check out Brett Booth’s blog.)

Will the concluding issues lift the quality of the series? The cover of the next issue—featuring a large carcharodontosaurid—hints that there is more dinosaur mayhem on the way, but awesome dinosaurs aren’t everything. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Submit your own pink dinosaur to ArtEvolved to raise money for cancer research.

In the Pink: October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and ArtEvolved is doing its part by organizing a Pink Dinosaur fundraiser to benefit medical research. Be sure to check out the gallery of brightly colored dinosaurs, and, if you wish to make a donation, visit the Pink Dinosaur Event Page.

A Discovery That Might Not Hold Water: At Ediacaran, Chris Nedin expresses his well-documented doubts about a recent discovery of fossilized 640-million-year-old, sponge-like organisms in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia: “Frankly, the Proterozoic [era] is weird. Most of what you think is organic, isn’t. The vast majority of the rest is microbial mats. And the stuff you really, really think could be metazoan, is usually microbial mats playing silly buggers.”

Bidding Farewell: At DinoGoss, Matt Martyniuk argues that—while it might be legal to auction off dinosaur fossils on sites such as eBay—“that doesn’t mean it isn’t ethically questionable and actively detrimental to science.”

Gothic Paleontology: Bob’s Dinosaur blog provides a round-up of the weird species of dinosaurs that have been discovered in Transylvania (such as the raptor Balaur bondoc, which Brian Switek wrote about here in August). “What’s the explanation?” Bob asks. “Well, these dinosaurs lived on islands dotting the shallow seas that covered much of Central and Eastern Europe at this time, and we all know from Charles Darwin that organisms trapped on island habitats can evolve in some very strange directions.”

Taking Flight: Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs points us to these cool videos of engineering hobbyist Kazuhiko Kahuta test-flying his radio-controlled pterosaur ornithopters. (Disappointingly, unlike other Japanese gadgets, this one does not appear to transform into a giant, samurai robot.)

A Star is Born: Palaeoblog commemorates the 1914 premiere of Gertie the Dinosaur, considered by many to be the first true animated character to be featured in a film.

Zip It: Matthew Brown at Prep Lounge discovered a rather innovative design for a casting mold in his basement: “From most angles, it looks like a leathery old, uh, leather purse. And why? Because it has…a ZIPPER! Casting material was poured in from the pour spout on the top, and when the plaster set, the mold was unzipped, allowing the cast to be pulled free of the mold. Wowee.” The design is credited to Jim Quinn, a University of Chicago grad student who finished his Ph.D. in 1954.

A patriotic theropod in the vicinity of Beloit, Wisconsin. Photo submitted by David Rice.

Today’s Dinosaur Sighting comes to us from David Rice, who spotted this star-spangled theropod dinosaur in the vicinity of Beloit, Wisconsin. As David pointed out in his e-mail, the top half of the dinosaur is reminiscent of a tyrannosaur, but the feet have weird lumps which look like the sickle claws of the “raptors;” maybe it is some kind of hybrid. Whatever the theropod is meant to be, though, it is hardly the only patriotic dinosaur around—in previous posts we’ve featured a Stegosaurus covered in stars and stripes and “George Washasaurus.”

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!

Last Monday's 'Get Fuzzy' strip featuring Satchel the dog and Bucky the cat. By Darby Conley

What killed off the non-avian dinosaurs? Over the years climate change, mammals with a taste for dinosaur eggs, the laziness of dinosaurs, and even hungry, hungry caterpillars have been blamed, with the current favored culprit being an asteroid that struck in the vicinity of today’s Yucatan peninsula about 65 million years ago. But Bucky the cat from the comic strip Get Fuzzy isn’t convinced that scientists are any closer to solving the mystery.

In a string of strips that started on September 20, Bucky goes off on a tear about science when Satchel tells him that dinosaurs were killed by “a rare kind of flying rock” (which Bucky misinterprets as a “space hemorrhoid”). From there Bucky’s idle speculations begin to spin a little out of control—I won’t spoil it for you; go read the strips—but I think Bucky’s wild ideas underscore an important lesson. While it was controversial three decades ago, today we take the idea that the end-Cretaceous extinction was caused by an asteroid for granted. Many books and documentaries refer to it, but relatively little detail is ever given about the ecological crisis it caused or how the impact could have killed so many forms of life. (And, of course, there are still some who argue that the impact would have been insufficient and that intense volcanic eruptions or some other cause triggered the extinction.) If we really want to inform the public about science, just saying a flying rock did it doesn’t cut it.

In order to understand the ecology of any environment, past or present, you must be able to change the scale of your perspective. Large animals are readily apparent, but what about the interactions between the plants they eat, the insects on those plants, the pollen on those insects, the many microorganisms in the habitat and so on? It is practically impossible to keep all these parts of an ecosystem in mind at once, but if we alter the scale of our perspective, we can better appreciate a greater array of interactions that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Artist John Conway has just created a stunning example of the nested levels of interactions between organisms in a new video. The scene is of prehistoric China’s famous 133-million to 120-million-year-old Jehol biota. At first only the dinosaur Jinzhousaurus and a pair of the pterosaur Jeholopterus can be easily seen, but as the camera zooms in the wasp Tanychora beipioensis comes into view, and it is covered with the pollen grains Protoconiferous funarius. The painting is an amazing reminder that there was much more to prehistoric ecosystems than dinosaurs and the plants they ate, but how did Conway create it? In an interview with paleontologist David Hone on the Archosaur Musings blog, Conway briefly explained the method and motivation behind the piece:

It’s a series of paintings done in Photoshop at successively smaller scales, then stitched together and animated in After Effects.

I was looking for a way to get across the sheer breadth of scale in the fossil record, from dinosaurs to pollen in this case. I was also looking for a way to make picture of a biota without having to do a “menagerie” painting, which is otherwise a necessary evil if you want to get a lot of animals in the one scene.