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A screenshot from the forthcoming Jurassic Park game by Telltale Games. Image from Gameinformer.

What is going on with the Jurassic Park franchise? For the past decade rumors have circulated about a fourth installment of the dinosaurs-gone-wild series, and for every report that a sequel is in the works there is another denying such plans. The latest episode involved a daily shooting schedule at Universal Studios that said Jurassic Park 4 was filming on several stages, though studio spokespeople have said this was not true.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding the feature films, the Jurassic Park stories are continuing in other venues. Last year saw the debut of the poorly-executed Jurassic Park: Redemption comic series, and Telltale Games is working on an adventure game that will return players to the doomed theme park. There’s already a fair amount of buzz around the game, especially since it won’t be another dinosaur shoot-em-up like so many others.

Famed director and producer Steven Spielberg is still involved in bringing dinosaurs to the screen, too. He, among others, is an executive producer for the forthcoming TV series Terra Nova, a show about a group of humans hoping to save humanity from ecological disaster by settling 85 million years in the past. The show will most definitely feature dinosaurs, although some of the prehistoric cast will be entirely new. On a recent publicity tour, series producer Brannon Braga said, “we have dinosaurs we know existed from the fossil record but you get to make up your own dinosaurs as well.”

These won’t be the only dinosaurs to stomp across the screen in the near future. The Discovery Channel series Reign of the Dinosaurs is set to debut this year, and in 2012 Walking With Dinosaurs 3D will take audiences back to the Mesozoic. Jurassic Park 4 or no, dinosaur fans certainly have a lot to look forward to in the next year.

The Darwinopterus specimen M8802 (left), showing a close-up of the pelvis and egg (right). From Lü et al., 2011.

Just a few hours after yesterday’s post on dinosaur embryos went up, another major egg-based discovery was announced, in the journal Science.

In October of 2009, paleontologists first described the flying reptile Darwinopterus, a pterosaur that lived in what is now China over 160 million years ago. Since then, multiple other specimens have been found, including a well-preserved specimen purchased by the Zhejiang Museum of Natural History from a local farmer. This slab, given the designation M8802, preserves the nearly complete skeleton of this pterosaur, but what makes it truly remarkable is that it also contains a pterosaur egg.

The egg can be seen directly behind the pelvis of the Darwinopterus specimen—confirming that this individual was a female—but this pterosaur was not fossilized in the act of egg-laying. Her skeleton tells of a more tragic end. Based upon a break in the skeleton and the way in which the slab formed, the scientists state:

We suppose that this individual experienced a violent accident that fractured the forearm, rendering the pterosaur incapable of flight and precipitating her into a water body. After this, she drowned, her carcass became waterlogged, sank to the bottom, and, as decay processes began, the egg was expelled from her body.

It is rare that we can glean such stories from the fossil record, but the real significance of this discovery is that it gives us a few new insights into the biology of these long-dead animals. For one thing, this find may allow paleontologists to determine the sex of these pterosaurs. The hips of M8802 and another specimen from a different museum (YH-2000) are wide and have a relatively large canal that would have allowed the egg to pass through. Other specimens, which may be males, have narrower hips, and this is consistent with the idea that females would require larger hips to lay eggs.

The difference between the sexes may be apparent in the headgear of these pterosaurs, as well. Both of the female specimens lacked crests on their heads, while the narrow-hipped, possibly male specimens had crests. A larger sample size will be needed to test this idea, but the presence of crests does seem to be associated with the more narrow-hipped specimens.

As for the egg itself, close examination showed that it had a leathery shell. It did not have a hard, mineralized outer coating like a chicken or dinosaur egg. Rather than being closed off from the outside world, then, the paleontologists state that the pterosaur egg would have increased in volume by taking up water after being laid.

This same mode of reproduction is seen among lizards and snakes today, and the authors of the new paper argue that, like these reptiles, pterosaurs did not provide care for their newly-hatched young. Rare pterosaur hatchlings show that they were well-developed very early on and may have been able to fly out of the nest quickly, although these inferences about behavior can only be approached indirectly for the moment. Further discoveries will inform our still-growing understanding of how these flying reptiles reproduced.

References:

Lu, J., Unwin, D., Deeming, D., Jin, X., Liu, Y., & Ji, Q. (2011). An Egg-Adult Association, Gender, and Reproduction in Pterosaurs Science, 331 (6015), 321-324 DOI: 10.1126/science.1197323

The reconstructed skeleton of an embryonic sauropodomorph dinosaur. From Reisz et al., 2010.

Baby dinosaurs are hard to find. While the bones of large, adult dinosaurs were often sturdy enough to survive the processes involved in fossilization, the bones of young dinosaurs were small and delicate and have rarely made it into the fossil record. In many cases we just don’t know what baby dinosaurs looked like. Now a pair of well-preserved eggs has allowed paleontologists a rare look into the early growth of one species.

The eggs in question were part of a clutch found in the approximately 200-million-year-old, Lower Jurassic rock of South Africa. They were discovered in 1976, but the tiny skeletons inside two of the eggs were found only during more recent preparation of the fossils. The analysis of these tiny dinosaurs was published late last year in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Although the species of dinosaur that laid the eggs cannot be known with absolute certainty, the most likely candidate is Massospondylus carinatus. This was one of the long-necked sauropodomorph dinosaurs which were early cousins to later giants such as Apatosaurus. Based on the anatomy of the newfound embryos, though, these dinosaurs underwent some major changes between hatching and adulthood.

Compared to skeletons seen in other dinosaur eggs, the Massopondylus embryos were well-developed and were probably close to hatching. They did not look very much like their parents. Instead of being long and slender, these baby dinosaurs were relatively short and squat. Their heads were huge compared to their body size, and their eye sockets were proportionally quite large. They also probably started life walking around on all fours—only later did they gain the ability to switch between walking on two legs and all four.

In fact, many dinosaurs appear to have undergone major changes during their lives. Baby dinosaurs were not just smaller copies of adults. As dinosaurs grew, their proportions changed, and thanks to finds like these paleontologists are beginning to understand how these impressive animals got their start in life.

References:

Reisz, R., Evans, D., Sues, H., & Scott, D. (2010). Embryonic skeletal anatomy of the sauropodomorph dinosaur Massospondylus from the Lower Jurassic of South Africa Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30 (6), 1653-1665 DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2010.521604

The label for paleontologist Phil Currie's homebrew, created by artist Mark Schultz. Image courtesy Casey Tucker.

University of Alberta scientist Phil Currie is one of the most famous paleontologists in the field today, but what many people don’t know is that he’s also a brewer of his own brand of beer. Sent to us by reader Casey Tucker, the above label came from a homebrew Currie made in the 1990s, and the art was created by Mark Schultz of Xenozoic Tales fame. Even the dinosaur on the label is a personal flair: the creature is Monolophosaurus, a dinosaur Currie described with Xi-Jin Zhao in 1993.

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!

A cake of a rather sad, trunked dinosaur. From Cake Wrecks

There are many ways to make a dinosaur cake. You could bake one in the shape of a dinosaur, you should create an icing dinosaur on the cake, or otherwise give your delicious creation a prehistoric theme. Unfortunately, this means that there are just as many ways to screw up making a dinosaur cake, and the blog Cake Wrecks has a small gallery of some hilariously bad dinosaur cakes.

Thanks to Sarah Zielinski of our own Surprising Science for pointing me to these catastrophic confections.