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A teaser poster for Terra Nova shows off an imaginary dinosaur called the "Slasher."

Predatory dinosaurs keep getting stranger. Like many budding dinosaur fans, I was introduced first to the classic carnivores Ceratosaurus, Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, but since my early encounters with meat-eating dinosaurs in the mid-1980s a startling variety of bizarre predators have been discovered and popularized. The crocodile-snouted and sometimes sail-backed spinosaurs, snaggle-toothed predators like Masiakasaurus and Balaur, a dromaeosaur with double sickle-claws on each foot—among many others—have vastly expanded our understanding of the diversity and disparity among predatory dinosaurs. That’s why I’m pretty disappointed by a preview of an imaginary predatory dinosaur called the “Slasher” from the forthcoming sci-fi show Terra Nova.

Compared with actual predatory dinosaurs, the Slasher looks, well, pretty lame. I can almost imagine the design meeting that churned out the dinosaur: “OK, we all know Velociraptor is awesome, right? So just stick a crest on it and it will be even cooler!” But it isn’t. The Slasher looks like a generalized dromaeosaur with a Citipati-type crest glued onto its head and a few wispy feathers. For a menacing, imaginary dinosaur that will no doubt harry the time-traveling inhabitants of the upcoming show, I was expecting something a little more exceptional.

I’m also sad to see that the creators of the Slasher made two mistakes for which there is no excuse anymore. First, the Slasher holds its hands palms-down—a position predatory dinosaurs were not actually capable of. Yeah, everytime someone does a dinosaur impression they hold their hands out palms-down (“I’m a T. rex, RAWR!”), but the wrists of “raptors” and other predatory dinosaurs did not have the same range of motion as ours. When extended, their hands would have faced each other, as if holding a basketball, and all you have to do to see how a dinosaur wrist would have worked is look at the wrist of a bird. (And is it just me, or does the Slasher in the promotional image appear to have two right hands?)

The second problem is even more aggravating. It is now 2011. Paleontologists have been finding many, many feather-covered dinosaurs for 15 years now, and there is even solid evidence that the famous Velociraptor had feathers. Feathers were a widespread and common trait among the coelurosaurs—the large dinosaur group to which the sickle-clawed dromaeosaurs belonged—and any raptor restoration should sport a comfy coat of feathers. Granted, the creators of the Slasher gave the dinosaur an embarrassing pate of wispy fuzz which makes the dinosaur look as if it needs to subscribe to the “Feather Club For Dinosaurs,” but it’s not nearly enough. The Slasher is a naked dinosaur, and I can’t help but feel sorry for it.

According to Hollywood scuttlebutt, Terra Nova was pushed back to a fall release date so that the show’s creators would have more time to work on visual effects. If the Slasher is any indication, though, the new dinosaurs the show is playing up are not going to be nearly as impressive as I had hoped. (As Stephen Colbert might ask, is the Slasher a lame imaginary dinosaur, or the lamest imaginary dinosaur?) Flip through paleontologist Thomas Holtz’s recent encyclopedia Dinosaurs and you will meet a dazzling array of weird and wonderful dinosaurs. By comparison, the Slasher is a turkey—give me Suchomimus, Acrocanthosaurus, Cryolophosaurus and Austroraptor any day.

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A Tyrannosaurus busting out of a fiberglass shop near Hindsville, Arkansas. Photo courtesy Ryan Haupt.

Tyrannosaurus truly is the tyrant king of dinosaurs. This magnificent Late Cretaceous predator is arguably the most prominent ambassador for paleontology, and one of the most frequently sighted roadside dinosaurs. Ryan Haupt, one of the hosts of the often paleo-themed Science… Sort Of podcast, adds another sighting to the list, this time of a Tyrannosaurus busting out of a fiberglass shop near Hindsville, Arkansas. To me, it looks like the dinosaur is trying to do a Kool-Aid Man impression: Oh Yeah!

Have you seen a prehistoric creature in an unusual place? Submissions of dinosaurs—and other ancient beasts—should be sent to dinosaursightings@gmail.com.

A view of the Dinosaur National Monument quarry before it closed for renovations in 2006. Photo by Flickr user larock.

On Thursday, August 17, 1909, paleontologist Earl Douglass made a wonderful discovery. After spending two weeks enduring the searing summer temperatures in the vicinity of Jensen, Utah and feeling “disgusted” by the poor quality of the fossil bones he was finding, Douglass spotted part of an enormous dinosaur. He later recorded the moment of discovery in his journal:

At last, in the top of the ledge where the softer overlying beds form a divide, a kind of saddle, I saw eight of the tail bones of a brontosaurus in exact position. It was a beautiful sight. Part of the ledge had weathered away and several of  the vertebra had weathered out and the beautifully preserved centra lay on the ground. It is by far the best looking dinosaur prospect I have ever found. The part exposed is worth preserving anyway.

This was a dream come true for Douglass. As expressed in a partial biography and reprint of selected journal entries organized by his son Gawin and others, published under the title Speak To the Earth and It Will Teach You, Douglass sometimes daydreamed of finding a near-perfect, articulated dinosaur skeleton sticking out of a rock formation. (A dream shared by many paleontologists.) Strangely, though, Douglass did not feel very enthusiastic about his assignment from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to look for dinosaurs.

Douglass had spent much of his fossil-hunting career looking for mammals. Prehistoric horses, camels, elephants and other mammals were what drew him into paleontology in the first place, but in August of 1909 he received a letter from his boss, museum director William Jacob Holland, that the Carnegie needed dinosaurs. The great natural history museums of Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York City were all hungry for impressive sauropod skeletons—the paleontological one-upmanship was detailed by Paul Brinkman in The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush—and Douglass was drawn into the mostly friendly competition despite his other interests.

Douglass’ dinosaur discovery—a partial Apatosaurus now at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History—would mark the beginning of his long tenure at what would become part of Dinosaur National Monument. The paleontologist’s dream of having an in situ museum showcasing the Jurassic dinosaurs there would be realized in 1957. Long before this, though, visitors came in droves to see Douglass at work on the dinosaurs he was extracting from the Morrison Formation. In fact, no sooner did Douglass find the Apatosaurus than curious townspeople began to show up to see the dinosaur for themselves. In a journal entry dated Sunday, August 22, 1909, Douglass wrote:

Today two loads of people came from Vernal to see the dinosaur and there were several loads from other places. For a time the rocks that never had the impress of a woman’s foot, and seldom that of a man’s, swarmed with people of all ages. Mothers and grandmothers ascended the steep, almost dangerous, slopes with babies and there were men and women well along in years.

The stream of visitors continued for days. On August 29, Douglass noted, “A lot of people came from Vernal again. … The strong, the lame, the fat and the lean went up [to the quarry].” Not all the visitors to the site were respectful of Douglass’ work, though. Before taking them out, Douglass attempted to secure the fossil bones with plaster, paste and other materials, which some of the local rodents quite liked. In journal entry marked Monday, October 11, 1909, Douglass wrote, “Went up to the dinosaur again this morning. … Took my gun along. Got some shot gun shells yesterday. Killed three of the chipmunks that have been pestering us so by eating paste off from the specimens.”

Visits to Douglass’ quarry became less frequent as work continued, and stopped as the excavations there were completed, but they picked up once again with the establishment of the quarry visitor’s center in 1957. The site became a must-see dinosaur landmark, though the famous quarry visitor’s center had to be closed in 2006 due to structural problems related to the building’s placement on unstable ground. The good news is that a new, improved visitor’s center is nearing completion. In just a few more months, visitors will once again be able to see the spectacular quarry wall, dotted with the remains of fantastic Jurassic dinosaurs.

Part of Plate XII from Leidy's Cretaceous Reptiles of the United States, showing some vertebrae from Hadrosaurus.

By the time the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge series published Joseph Leidy’s monograph Cretaceous Reptiles of the United States in 1865, dinosaurs were already famous. The English anatomist Richard Owen had coined the term “Dinosauria” more than two decades earlier, and South London’s “Dinosaur Court” was a popular destination. But paleontologists knew relatively little about North American dinosaurs. The infamous “Bone Wars” of the late 19th century—which would yield fossil celebrities like Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Allosaurus—had not yet begun, and naturalists had no idea of just how many spectacular dinosaurs would be found in the American West.

Though all the fossils Leidy described were from North America, his monograph could have been called “Cretaceous Reptiles of New Jersey (And a few tidbits from elsewhere).” Many of the fossils within the report’s pages were found in the dark, wet marl of southwestern New Jersey. They included seagoing crocodylians, enormous marine lizards called mosasaurs and most importantly, the partial skeleton of Hadrosaurus foulkii. The remains of this herbivorous dinosaur made up the first partial dinosaur skeleton to be found in the United States, and within three years Hadrosaurus would become the first dinosaur to have its skeleton fully reconstructed. (Frustratingly, this sole skeleton of Hadrosaurus may have been even more complete, but the farmer whose land the dinosaur was found on, John E. Hopkins, gave away a number of bones which may have belonged to the Hadrosaurus before he knew the scientific significance of what he had accidentally turned up.)

Hadrosaurus has since been overshadowed by other dinosaurs, but at the time, its discovery was one of the most important finds in the history of paleontology. The skeleton Leidy described, though incomplete, showed that at least some dinosaurs had shorter forelimbs than hindlimbs and had a starkly different bodyplan from the weird, almost mammal-like designs Richard Owen had proposed two decades before. The close similarity between the bones of Hadrosaurus and Iguanodon from Europe, especially, appeared to indicate that dinosaurs were quite different from earlier representations of them—a notion confirmed through the discovery of a partial skeleton in 1866 belonging to a dinosaur now recognized as a tyrannosaur and named Dryptosaurus. The two dinosaurs from the New Jersey marl—Hadrosaurus and Dryptosaurus—were more bird-like in proportion and form, and therefore some paleontologists of the era supposed that, like birds, dinosaurs had active lifestyles.

Leidy’s monograph was historically significant for another reason. In addition to the fossils he described from New Jersey and other Eastern states, Leidy also mentioned a handful of fossils collected from sites further west by the young geologist Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden. This was the man who would later gain fame for exploring the Rocky Mountains and the area that would become Yellowstone National Park in the years after the American Civil War, but when he began collaborating with Leidy, Hayden was a 24-year-old student with an itch to explore the American badlands.

Hayden was an irrepressible and energetic field naturalist—scientific lore holds that he earned the nickname “Man Who Picks Up Stones Running” from the Sioux for the rapidity with which he collected fossils—and during his first trip into the field in 1853 he collected a few dinosaur teeth and bones from sites along the Missouri River. He sent these along to Leidy for description. The paltry lot included scraps of other hadrosaurs—to which Leidy applied the now-discarded names Trachodon and Thespesius—and a misidentified tooth which paleontologist John Bell Hatcher would later recognize as the first piece of a horned dinosaur ever described. Despite the fact that he visited some of the most dinosaur-rich formations in the west, Hayden was not especially impressed with what he found. Writing to Leidy about the Judith River Formation—a formation which has yielded many fine specimens of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs—Hayden said “I find that the Bad Lands of the Judith are scarcely less interesting than those of the White river,” referring to a geologically younger slice of time known to contain the impressive skeletons of prehistoric mammals. Even though Hayden was right in the middle of dinosaur country, he just was not lucky enough to find more than a few scraps.

Leidy’s monograph was not meant to be an interpretative document. Even though Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection had sparked a great deal of interest in evolution following the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, Leidy did not attempt to place the fossils he was describing in an evolutionary context. Cretaceous Reptiles of the United States was meant to form a base of knowledge from which to extend investigations and observations. Not everyone appreciated Leidy’s choice to describe rather than interpret. A scathing, anonymous review—signed simply “H”—in London’s Geological Magazine read, “Altogether we must, while expressing our thankfulness for the memoir, such as it is, say that it is the least able contribution to palaeontology that we remember. Its best praise is that it contains no quackery; its worst condemnation is that it contains no science.”

As historian Keith Thomson points out in his book The Legacy of the Mastodon, H’s criticism of Leidy was unfair and cruel. Leidy perceived his role to be a describer and observer of prehistoric life—the point of Cretaceous Reptiles of the United States was to create an inventory of what had been found and communicate those findings in detail. More than that, though, Thomson points out that vertebrate paleontology in North America was still a young science. Naturalists had only just begun to discover the different species which existed and sort out the geology of the layers they were entombed in. Without this basic knowledge—the sort Leidy was attempting to accumulate—any attempts at theorizing or interpreting the implications of the fossils for the pattern of evolution would be marred by a weak understanding of what actually existed within the North American formations. If the strata of New Jersey had been as extensively mapped and understood “as that for the Paris basin or English Wealden,” Thomson asserts, “the comments by ‘H’ about the lack of analysis would have been appropriate.” Given the young state of American paleontology, they were not.

Contrary to the snarky comments of H, Leidy’s monograph is one of the most important works ever published in the history of vertebrate paleontology. Given the fact that the original Hadrosaurus site has been paved over and very few Cretaceous fossil sites in New Jersey remain accessible to paleontologists, especially, the work is an indispensable catalog of what once lived in the Garden State and surrounding area. Cretaceous Reptiles of the United States is a dinosaur classic.

References:

Leidy, J. 1865. Cretaceous Reptiles of the United States. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge 14:1-193

Thomson, K. 2008. The Legacy of the Mastodon. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 126-144

Rex Riders, by J.P. Carlson

The rocky, shrub-covered landscape of the American West looks like it should be home to living dinosaurs. Even though Apatosaurus, Allosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus and many, many other dinosaurs inhabited a variety of environments quite different from the landscape as it is today, the places where dinosaur bones are found feel as if prehistoric creatures should still be making their homes there. The very geological formations which contain the dinosaurs create beautiful and strange landscapes of crumpled and shifted rock dotted with twisted junipers and fragrant sagebrush—these wild places have an air of the ancient to them, and it is difficult to resist imagining an Allosaurus lurking around the massive rock fins of a place like Arches National Monument or a Diplodocus set against the backdrop of Dinosaur National Monument. Sharon Farber drew out this idea in her short story “The Last Thunder Horse West of the Mississippi,” in which the feuding 19th century paleontologists E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh compete for a modern-day dinosaur. New author J.P. Carlson has followed suit with his novel Rex Riders.

Much like the graphic novel Tommysaurus Rex, Carlson’s book is not so much a dinosaur tale as it is a coming-of-age story. Zeke Calhoun, a 14-year-old boy living on his uncle Jesse’s ranch, is out of place in late 19th century Texas. Talkative and whiny, he often gets on his uncle’s nerves, and he stirs up a mess of trouble when he tries to return a rich rancher’s prize stallion and ends up looking like a horse thief in the process. Zeke’s mistake plays right into a long-running rivalry between his uncle and the wealthy rancher Dante D’Allesandro, but just when it looks like the teen has ruined his uncle’s business, a serious of fortuitous events gives him the chance to save the ranch and prove himself.

Zeke’s adventure, played out in three acts, is what you might get if you threw The Valley of Gwangi, The Lost World and One Million Years B.C. in a blender with just a dash of Cowboys & Aliens. Cowboys, dinosaurs, aliens and prehistoric people all have their own roles to play, starting with a Triceratops that rampages through the middle of town. Things get even stranger when Zeke stumbles across a small Tyrannosaurus outfitted with riding gear and the wounded, tough-skinned humanoid who controls the dinosaur, and this discovery draws Zeke, his family and his friends into a dangerous conflict between the inhabitants of a prehistoric world and the nefarious D’Allesandro.

Rex Riders contains plenty of complicated plot elements, but Carlson admirably balances them as the plot unfolds. The focus on Zeke’s personal development is the anchor for the story (though the reader does lose sight of the main protagonist for a while during the second act). Dinosaurs and numerous action scenes liven things up, but most play a role in getting Zeke to realize something about himself rather than just being there for their own sake. A few black and white illustrations by Jim Calafiore are a welcome addition to the book as well, particularly since they mix modern restorations of dinosaurs with a classic, Ray Harryhausen feel. There was only one aspect of the book I felt disappointed by: a group of native warriors called the Cragnon receive almost no description, making it difficult to imagine what they look like.

Naturally Rex Riders leaves the door wide open for a sequel, but the books also stands well on its own. Young sci-fi and dinosaur fans will almost certainly love it, and the book reminded me of many of the classic stop-motion dinosaur movies I spent countless afternoons watching when I was a kid. If you like Westerns but wonder what it would be like to replace cattle with Triceratops and horses with Tyrannosaurus, definitely give Rex Riders a look.