Smithsonian.com

Halloween is almost here, and soon the streets will be swarming with little ghosts, witches, and—sad as I am to say it—sparklepires. Dinosaurs are classic costume choices, too, and in case you need some last-minute ideas for this year’s spooky holiday, we here at Dinosaur Tracking have you covered.

For kids:

There are more dinosaur and pterosaur costumes out there than I can count, and many of them are more elaborate than the green jumpsuit with spikes sewn on that I wore as a little tyke. Toddler-sized pterosaur, tyrannosaur, Triceratops, and generic dinosaur costumes are common, but if you want to do things the old fashioned way there are plenty of directions online on how to make a child-size dino costume. eHow has two different sets of instructions for quick-and-easy outfits, and PBS has even put up directions for making a costume of the baby Tyrannosaurus “Buddy” from their Dinosaur Train show.

For adults:

Dinosaurs aren’t just for kids, though dressing up in a big fuzzy dinosaur suit is more likely to make people think of Barney than a terrifying theropod. (I would also avoid dressing up as a Sleestak, unless you want your friends to question your bad taste in movies.) Granted, this custom pterosaur get-up is pretty cool, as is the self-made dinosaur exoskeleton in the video above, but you’re more like to find dinosaur masks than full costumes. If that’s the way you want to go, have some fun with it. Pair up a Dilophosaurus mask with some camouflage fatigues to be a dinosaur soldier or throw on some scrubs to be a dino doctor (this way you can take the mask off if it gets too hot and still be in costume). If all else fails, just pick up some fake blood, tear up an old t-shirt, and say that you’re a Deinonychus victim.

For pets:

If you really must have your whole family go as a pack of dinosaurs, there are dinosaur costumes for pets, too. Your dog may tolerate it, but your cat will probably hate you for it and cast up a hairball in your shoes for making it wear such a ridiculous getup.

Other fun stuff:

Maybe dressing up as a dinosaur isn’t for you, but what about carving a dinosaur themed jack-o-lantern? There are a few patterns available on the web, though, with a little imagination, some really awesome designs are possible.

If you end up dressed up as a dinosaur this year or make a dino jack-o-lantern, snap a photo and send it to us at dinosaursightings@gmail.com. We’ll collect whatever photos we get and put them into the next edition of our Dinosaur Sightings.

Whatever you and your family end up doing, though, we here at Dinosaur Tracking want to wish everyone a safe and happy Halloween!

David Hone uses these dog tracks for a lesson on dinosaur fossils

Walking the Walk: Two paw prints on a beach; both are from the same dog, yet completely different from one another. At Archosaur Musings, David Hone explains how these prints reveal the pitfalls of reading too much into fossilized dinosaur tracks: “Quite simply, tracks will vary and you want a decent set of them to make sure that any variations are accounted for, and therefore one must be especially careful with unusual, isolated tracks.”

Dinosaurs of a Feather: “Even when the colors of a prehistoric feathered dinosaur haven’t been revealed by studies of feather microstructure, there are ways to infer which colors were and were not likely,” notes DinoGoss, who offers a detailed guide to several processes that add pigmentation to the feathers of birds and, presumably, their oversized ancestors.

Eureka? The latest cartoon at Walcott’s Quarry mocks the flashy unveilings of “game-changing” fossil discoveries. “They’re usually pretty heavy on media coverage, and pretty light on science.”

The Paleo-Justice League: At ArtEvolved, read the thrilling tale of how dinosaur bloggers banded together to catch an online art thief.

“There Are No Known Aetosaur Fossils From Madagascar!”: A glaring paleo-error prompts Chinleana to offer a timely reminder that Wikipedia remains a work in progress.

Taking a Stand: “Dinosaurs walked on their toes, unlike us humans who walk on the whole of the foot,” notes Everything Dinosaur. “Most reptiles sprawl with their legs at the side of the bodies, but dinosaurs carried their limbs directly underneath their bodies, just like mammals.  This is a much more efficient method of walking about when compared to the sprawling stance of lizards and crocodiles for instance.”

That’s good news if you’re a dinosaur, but not such good news if you’re trying to get your authentic plastic model of a dinosaur to stand upright. Fear not: Everything Dinosaur has produced a short video on how to fix a wobbly dinosaur.

Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That: Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs reveals that famed paleontologist Barnum Brown (Feb. 12, 1873 – Feb. 5, 1963) had a “dinosaur foot fetish.”

A restoration of the early bird Jeholornis by artist Matt Martyniuk. From Wikipedia.

Since the description of the fuzzy-feathered dinosaur Sinosauropteryx in 1996, paleontologists have been inundated with a still-flowing flood of fossil evidence confirming that birds are living dinosaurs. More than that, many of the characteristics we once thought were unique to birds—from air-sacs to infestations of peculiar microorganisms—were common among dinosaurs, too, and every year it seems that dinosaurs become just a little more bird-like. This does not mean that we now understand everything we need to know about the origin of birds, however. With so many unique fossils changing our understanding at such a rapid rate, the exact details of when the first birds evolved and which lineage of feathered dinosaurs they originated from are still unclear.

Our changing understanding of bird origins is addressed in the Chinese Science Bulletin by paleontologists Xu Xing, Ma Qing Yu and Hu Dong Yu. The key to this evolutionary pattern is Archaeopteryx, a 150-million-year-old feathered dinosaur traditionally regarded as the earliest known bird. This sets the origin of birds in the Late Jurassic, but many of the feathered coelurosaurs—the larger group of theropod dinosaurs which birds are nested in—known so far lived after Archaeopteryx. The earlier, Jurassic dinosaurs that would have been ancestral to both birds and the other feathered dinosaurs have been notoriously difficult to find, but better sampling of Jurassic-age strata have provided more context for the origin of birds and feathered dinosaurs.

In their review, the authors list the recent discovery of many Jurassic and Early Cretaceous coelurosaurs, from the early tyrannosaur Proceratosaurus to the strange, tiny dinosaur Epidexipteryx. Together these specimens help flesh out the pattern of early coelurosaur evolution by allowing scientists to determine which traits are archaic and which are later specializations, and this may shake up the traditional picture of bird origins.

Two scenarios for the relationships of early birds and their closest relatives among dinosaurs. On the left, dinosaurs such as Epidexipteryx are the closest relatives of early birds, including Archaeopteryx. On the right is an alternate scenario in which Archaeopteryx is closely related to dinosaurs such as Troodon and Velociraptor, while all other early birds were more closely related to oviraptorosaurs and Epidexipteryx. In this arrangement, the authors propose that all these dinosaurs could be rightly called "birds." From Xu, et al. 2010.

Parsing the evolutionary relationships of birds requires a fair amount of esoteric scientific terms. Even though the deinonychosaurs—a group made up of troodontids such as Saurornithoides and dromaeosaurids such as Velociraptor—have typically been taken as the closest relatives of the first birds, the new paper proposes that they are a bit further removed from bird origins. The breakdown would look something like this. Archaeopteryx, placed in the context of all the feathered dinosaurs we now know of, would group with the deinonychosaurs, whereas all definitive early birds would be more closely related to Epidexipteryx and oviraptorosaurs such as Citipati and Incisivosaurus. (See the evolutionary tree on the right above.)

This new arrangement has yet to be fully tested and analyzed—it is a provisional hypothesis which will rest on further discoveries—but if correct it raises the sticky question of what we call a bird. If we keep Archaeopteryx as a bird in this arrangement, then all the deinonychosaurs, the oviraptorosaurs, and Epidexipteryx would be birds, too. Then again, we could strip Archaeopteryx of its long-held title of “earliest known bird” and give that title to Jeholornis, thus keeping the more traditional image of what a bird is. Admittedly, the latter option makes more sense to me than extending the “bird” designation to such a wide group of feathered dinosaurs, but no doubt what is or is not an early bird will be something that paleontologists will be grappling with for some time to come. Frustrating, perhaps, but it is also wonderful that we have so many well-preserved fossils that the distinction between bird and non-avian dinosaur has become so difficult to figure out!

References:

Xu, X., Ma, Q., & Hu, D. (2010). Pre-Archaeopteryx coelurosaurian dinosaurs and their implications for understanding avian origins Chinese Science Bulletin DOI: 10.1007/s11434-010-4150-z

I have a soft-spot for outdated dinosaurs. The modern restorations of active, brightly-colored, feathered dinosaurs are fantastic, but I grew up with gray, tail-dragging tyrannosaurs and swamp-bound sauropods. The “Brontosaurus” of my childhood—with the wrong head and regularly depicted as under siege by Allosaurus—was a particular favorite, and there are a few places where you can still make your own “classic” (vintage?) sauropod dinosaur.

I have never run into one of these machines myself, but last week the Chicago Sun-Times ran a story about the beloved Mold-A-Rama machines still working in several Chicago zoos and museums. The machines have been operating since the 1950s, and while those operating in Chicago are among the last of their kind, they are kept running by Brookfield resident William Jones and his sons. Thanks to them, machines like the one in the museum continue to churn out green “Brontosaurus” and red Tyrannosaurus figures and—as the video above shows—one Mold-A-Rama enthusiast even took his little green dinosaur on a pilgrimage to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History!

[Hat-tip to the Chicagoist]

The new IMAX 3-D film Sea Rex starts off with a groaner. Standing in front of a shark tank, a young woman named Julie gazes wistfully into the blue water and imagines a plesiosaur paddling through the open sea. “I just know marine dinosaurs still exist!” she says. At this point anyone with even a modest background in vertebrate paleontology would probably facepalm and start mumbling “they weren’t dinosaurs, and they have been extinct for millions of years,” but just then one of the giants of paleontology steps out of the shadows to tell Julie just that. Stripped of his French accent, but not his early 19th-century garb, the ghost of Georges Cuvier introduces himself to Julie and takes her on a prehistoric sight-seeing tour to set her straight on the science of marine reptiles.

Focused on marine reptiles that were contemporaries of non-avian dinosaurs, Sea Rex follows two different threads: the discovery of the first mosasaur and the succession of ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs in the fossil record. The first thread is set up in a historical reenactment showing the delivery of one of the first mosasaur skulls ever found to Paris in 1794. Originally found in a Dutch mine around 1770, the fossil was obtained by the French army, according to paleontological lore, in exchange for 600 bottles of wine. The story is a bit oversimplified, but it goes on to show how the eventual realization that the skull belonged to an ancient marine reptile supported the fact that extinction was real (something which Cuvier had first shown using fossil elephants before turning his attention to the mosasaur in 1808).

The bulk of the film, however, consists of Cuvier showing Julie the highlights of the fossil record. Apparently the ghost of the French naturalist kept up with modern science since his death, as he begins his tour of Deep Time by reviewing the timing of a few major events in evolutionary history to place the film’s marine reptiles in context. Once this is done, the documentary takes on a Walking With Dinosaurs theme, following Nothosaurus, Mixosaurus, Shonisaurus, Elasmosaurus, Liopleurodon, Mosasaurus and other marine reptiles as they swim, bite and otherwise mug for the camera.

The strangest part of this middle portion of the film was the appearance of several well-known marine reptile experts. The first to be introduced was University of California at Davis paleontologist Ryosuke Motani, but the man on the screen was not the same person who I had seen at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting a few weeks before. As the credits would later confirm, Motani and several of his colleagues did not actually appear in the film, but were played by actors impersonating real scientists. This was very odd—why not simply invite the real scientists to explain their work, or make up a fictional scientist rather than use the names and affiliations of actual scientists?

I was also disappointed that the evolution of marine reptiles was almost entirely left out of the film. Admittedly the origins of ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs have not been entirely worked out, but we do know enough that the filmmakers could have outlined how each lineage changed over time. Perhaps fitting for a film starring the ghost of Cuvier, the animals are simply presented as successive rulers of the sea, just as 19th century naturalists talked about series of successive worlds without drawing direct connections among them. If audiences are already being taken on a tour of Deep Time, it is a shame to waste an opportunity to talk about what fossils can tell us about how life has evolved.

While I have grown tired of the Walking With Dinosaurs type of storytelling, the film deserves credit for taking the time to place marine reptiles within the more expansive context of geological time. The historical aspect of the film, while not entirely accurate, also drove home the point that the study of the fossil record opened up entire vanished worlds of strange creatures the likes of which had never been seen before, and modern paleontologists are still carrying on in the tradition of Cuvier.