Smithsonian.com

A screenshot of the Witmer Lab's 3D Alligator

Thirty Earths: ArtEvolved points us to this remarkable set of images depicting the changing physical appearance of the Earth over the last 750 million years. The thirty visual reconstructions were recently released by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. The research team was granted access to NASA’s Next Generation Blue Marble project, a computer program that generates realistic color renditions of an area based upon geographic information such as topography, elevation, climate and vegetation.

On the Virtues of Flossing: Everything Dinosaur reports on the world’s oldest toothache.

Dino Chow: SV-Pow! gives a glowing review to the now-open World’s Largest Dinosaur exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. Among the many nice details: a Plexiglas box filled with a one-day serving of sauropod food.

Battle of the Bulge: Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs presents a brief history of the Pot-Bellied Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Gator-Aid: At Jurassic Journeys, paleobiologist Matt Donnan raves about WitmerLab’s 3D Alligator project—a highly interactive, easily downloadable set of tools for understanding (or just playing with) alligator anatomy. As Donnan notes, “Alligators and the crocodylian kin form an important outgroup branch that we dinosaur paleontologists use to constrain and ‘root’ our anatomical reconstructions and inferences of dinosaurs as living animals.”

A Becklespinax By Any Other Name: Bob’s Dinosaur Blog lists ten dinosaur names that are so bad the creatures would “throttle some of the paleontologists that discovered them.”

A River Runs Through It: Grande Prairie, Alberta is home to Pipestone Creek, where hundreds of the horned dinosaur Pachyrhinosaurus perished millions of years ago. The blog Pseudoplocephalus informs us that members of the Grande Prairie community have spent the better part of a decade trying to find sponsors for their very own paleontology museum. Fundraisers have been a bit turned off by the proposed name of the institution: “The River of Death and Discovery Dinosaur Museum.” Fortunately, the museum organizers decided to opt for a less goth-sounding name: “The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum,” in honor of the world-renowned paleontologist.

The lower jaw of an Albertosaurus designated TMP 2003.45.64, with close-ups of a relatively fresh bitemark (left), healed bitemarks (middle), and a partially-healed puncture (right). From Bell, 2010.

TMP 2003.45.64 is not exactly a headline-making fossil. The left lower jaw of an Albertosaurus, most of the teeth have fallen out and the bone is only one part of a well-known species represented by many other skeletons. But, for those who know what they are looking for, this specimen bears the traces of ancient interactions between dinosaurs.

The Albertosaurus jaw portion is just one of many bones recovered during the past decade from a Late Cretaceous bonebed in Alberta, Canada’s Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park. This is a very unusual site. Remains from at least 26 Albertosaurus, ranging from about 2 to 24 years old, have been found from this deposit. Such a rich collection of skeletons from a single species has allowed paleontologists to better understand what the local population of Albertosaurus was like around 70 million years ago, including the prevalence of injury and disease.

What makes the lower jaw significant is that it bears a series of gouges. As determined by Phil Bell in his recent assessment of the pathologies in the Dry Island Albertosaurus, these furrows were driven into the bone by another tyrannosaur. This sort of damage has been seen before. Other fossils with pathology have indicated that tyrannosaurs often bit each other on the face while fighting, and this leaves a pattern of damage distinct from that created by microorganisms which open up smooth-walled lesions in the jaws.

Curiously, though, the Albertosaurus jaw Bell described was bitten at two different times. One long groove near the front of the jaw was smooth and relatively fresh, while three parallel toothmarks and a puncture wound further back on the jaw had healed. The repaired wounds showed that the Albertosaurus had survived a fight with another tyrannosaur, but the other bite was made near the time of death or soon afterward. As with a tyrannosaur jaw fragment with the tooth of another tyrannosaur embedded in it, described in 2009, the exact timing of the injury is practically impossible to determine.

The tooth-scored lower jaw was not the only injured bone found in the quarry. Bell listed five other pathological bones, including damaged ribs and toe bones from other individuals. The ribs had been fractured and healed, while the toe bones were marked by bony spurs called enthesophytes. These form at the attachments of ligaments or tendons. What this may mean for the Albertosaurus toe bones represent is unclear—enthesophytes can form for a variety of reasons, from repetitive stress to a simple genetic predisposition for them.

Future studies may identify other pathologies, but Bell points out that the occurrence of pathology among the 26 Albertosaurus individuals was low—only six injuries in as few as two individuals. Bonebeds of the large predatory dinosaurs Allosaurus and Majungasaurus both had higher incidences of pathology. It would seem that the Dry Island Albertosaurus population was not as injury-prone as some of these other dinosaur populations, but why this should be so remains a mystery.

References:

Bell, P. (2010). Palaeopathological changes in a population of Albertosaurus sarcophagus from the Upper Cretaceous Horseshoe Canyon Formation of Alberta, Canada Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 47 (9), 1263-1268 DOI: 10.1139/E10-030

Daniel Peterson's Jurassic Park jeep (with a dinosaur hitchhiker in the back). The soldier at right is 101st Airborne Division Historian Captain Jim Page. Photo courtesy Daniel Peterson.

If you spot a tiny tyrannosaur peeking out from the back of a jeep in the vicinity of Fort Campbell on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, you aren’t seeing things. The dinosaur and the custom-painted Jurassic Park jeep are the creations of Daniel Peterson, the director of the U.S. Army Museum at the military base. “I drive the jeep everywhere and it attracts a lot of attention,” says Peterson, and he even has plans for an even more impressive dinosaur display. “I am currently building a 22-foot-long T. rex that will appear to have ‘pounced’ on the back of the jeep,” though he notes that the bigger dinosaur “will only be installed on special occasions.”

If you see the tyrannosaur-toting jeep during your travels, snap a photo and send it to us! Submissions of dinosaurs—and other ancient beasts—in unusual places should be sent to dinosaursightings@gmail.com.

Annabelle's complaint about her visit to the MoMA.

The Museum of Modern Art needs dinosaurs. That was the conclusion of one young visitor named Annabelle after she failed to find any dinosaurs at the MoMA. “[Y]ou call your self a museum!” she chided on a comment cards, and her brief critique has been popping up all over the web this week.

Not everyone has been very sympathetic to Annabelle’s disappointment. At The Hairpin, Edith Zimmerman shot back the snarky reply: “Why don’t you figure out what museum you’re at.” Jezebel’s Margaret Hartmann wondered if Annabelle had been “confused about the field trip’s destination.” Hartmann might be right—I know I’d feel let down if I was expecting to visit the AMNH and wound up at the MoMA—but I think Annabelle has a point. The MoMA really could use some dinosaurs.

As popular as they are, dinosaurs don’t get very much respect in the art world. Dinosaurs are appraised as kitsch or kid’s stuff, and the fact that dinosaur art often strives for scientific accuracy would seem to separate it from artistic expression in modern art. Yet, as Stu Pond has pointed out, artistic representations of prehistory do not always have to be scientific illustrations. Dinosaurs are powerful embodiments of themes like evolution and extinction, and some artists have tapped into that symbolic pool in their works of art.

Artist Allan McCollum has drawn on dinosaurs for at least two of his pieces. In 1991, McCollum created an artificial bed of multicolored sauropod limb bones for his piece Lost Objects. (Dinosaur National Monument paleontologist Dan Chure has more about the details of the bones.) Two years later he arranged a gallery of dinosaur track casts taken from the coal mines of Price, Utah for an installation called Natural Copies. These pieces were cast as fine art rather than objects of scientific scrutiny, and as summarized on his site, McCollum intended these installations to invoke the diverse meanings of the fossils:

McCollum offers his Natural Copies as an allegorical presentation of the narrative attached to other kinds of collectibles and fine art objects: in their various modes of production, exhibit, distribution, and collection; their use and exchange value; their function as markers of natural history or embodiments of cultural memory; their ambiguous status as found objects, cultural artifacts, scientific specimens, or fine art objects; and their relation to local lore and folk stories of the region.

Sculptor Robert Smithson also found inspiration in prehistory. In 1970 on the northeastern shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, he created a huge rock installation known as Spiral Jetty. Though the theme of the piece is said to represent the decay of Smithson’s marriage, a film documenting the construction of the Spiral Jetty turns the heavy machinery used to create the work into modern-day dinosaurs that have come to re-shape the earth.

Dinosaurs have played more direct roles in fine art, too. One of the most famous images of prehistoric life is Rudolph Zallinger‘s The Age of Reptiles in Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. Illustrated by Zallinger between 1943 and 1947, the gigantic painting was created in a difficult style called fresco-secco, and that alone is an extraordinary achievement. But what is most impressive about the Age of Reptiles is that it draws the viewer through a sequence of beautiful prehistoric landscapes, from the time vertebrates first crawled out onto land to the end of the Cretaceous, where a smoking volcano symbolizes the impending doom the last dinosaurs face. Zallinger’s mural is not just a reconstruction—The Age of Reptiles is an exquisite work of art that captures our perception of prehistory’s flow.

A pair of Iguanodon created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in the early 19th century. From Wikipedia.

Zallinger was just one of a long line of exceptionally talented artists with a passion for prehistory. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins—the 19th-century artistic genius behind the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs—had planned a vast panorama of prehistory for New York’s Central Park, and during the early 20th century, AMNH artist Erwin S. Christman rendered illustrations of bones that are unparalleled in detail. Nor should we forget Charles R. Knight—arguably the most influential paleo-artist of all time—or those like Luis Rey and William Stout who carry on his legacy today. The late sculptor Jim Gary even played on Smithson’s perspective of trucks as dinosaurs and created prehistoric animals out of old car parts, bridging the gap between the modern and the ancient. Even if the work of some of these artists can’t be considered fine art, their skill and power of imagination should not be overlooked. Where scientific illustration stops and where artistic expression starts can be a subjective thing.

In a summary on their “About” page, the MoMA states that it “is dedicated to the conversation between the past and the present.” This is probably intended to apply to the art world itself—drawing connections between new works and what has come before—but why not broaden that a little more into the conversation between the deep past and the present? Why not bring dinosaurs into the modern art museum? A Stegosaurus or Albertosaurus skeleton would seem out of place, but dinosaurs are such potent cultural symbols that I would frankly be surprised if they were nowhere to be found in a modern art museum. So, if any MoMA staff happen to read this, I have one recommendation—follow Annabelle’s advice and find some dinosaurs for your museum.

An illustration of Hawkins' Central Park studio, depicting a sculpture of Hadrosaurus (left), the reconstructed skeleton of the dinosaur (background), and sculptures of the extinct Irish Elk Megaloceros (right). From Wikipedia.

I spent Sunday morning among the dinosaurs of Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The skeletons of the prehistoric creatures stood nearly shoulder to shoulder—the Tyrannosaurus appeared to snarl at a nearby Triceratops, and an Allosaurus stood dangerously close to the business-end of a Stegosaurus—and the numerous reconstructions of such dinosaurs are so common that it is easy to take them for granted. A century and a half ago, when dinosaurs were still new, the fact that an entire dinosaur could be reconstructed at all was a fantastic thing.

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was one of the greatest paleo-artists of all time. It does not matter that we now restore dinosaurs very differently from the way he did. At the time Hawkins was carrying out his work—including the creation of the famous Crystal Palace dinosaurs—paleontologists knew dinosaurs only from fragments, and there were no awesome, complete skeletons on display.

On January 27th, 1869, Hawkins delivered a lecture to the American Institute in New York about his work. He began by presenting his audience with the great skeletal framework of a dinosaur. “[T]he audience was taken completely by surprise by the unveiling of the restored skeleton of a huge reptile called the ‘Hadrosaurus‘” a reporter for the New York Evening Post later wrote, especially since the 25-foot-long skeleton of the “restored monster” had been “skillfully concealed behind curtains, which, covered with diagrams, left no suspicion of anything behind them.”

This was not the first public appearance for Hadrosaurus. Hakwins had initially created a cast of the reconstructed skeleton for Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences a few months before on the basis of an incomplete skeleton found in Haddonfield, New Jersey. His Hadrosaurus was the first complete dinosaur skeleton to be displayed anywhere. Giant sloths, mastodons and other prehistoric mammals had been seen before, but Hawkins—working with naturalist Joseph Leidy—was the first to actually reconstruct an entire dinosaur skeleton. (In 2009, the Academy ran a special exhibition on Hadrosaurus, displaying the original plaster skull from Hawkins’ reconstruction.)

But, as magnificent as it was, the Hadrosaurus skeleton was just a teaser of bigger things to come. Hawkins explained to his American Institute audience that he was applying his talents to creating a new vision of prehistoric life in North America for a grand museum in New York’s Central Park. The “Paleozoic Museum” would combine fossils with life-size restorations of Hadrosaurus and other prehistoric creatures, including plesiosaurs and the predatory dinosaur “Laelaps” (now known as Dryptosaurus), which the reporter described as, “very comfortable to look at in a defunct state, but very inconvenient to have about if clothed in flesh and blood.”

Sadly, Central Park’s great Paleozoic Museum was never constructed. Even though Hawkins had created several of the planned models in a New York studio by 1871, these were all smashed by cronies of the infamous politician William Marcy Tweed. Exactly why Tweed ordered the destruction of Hawkins’ work is difficult to ascertain. Tweed claimed that the project was a waste of money, but Hawkins had also publicly criticized the corrupt city boss. Whatever the reason, Hawkins’ creatures met a violent end and the project was scrapped.

One hundred and forty years later, there are many fine museums filled with dinosaur skeletons, but the death of the Paleozoic Museum remains a tragedy. Not only would the museum have introduced New Yorkers to the unique prehistoric history of North America, but had it survived to this day, the museum would have acted as a time capsule from the early days of American paleontology. All we have left are sketches of a prehistoric world that will never be brought to life.