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Other fossilized beasts might be more intimidating than Archaeopteryx, but few others have played such an important role in our understanding of evolution. Courtesy of Brian Wolly.

A dispatch from Smithsonian.com’s associate web editor Brian Wolly:

Earlier this month, I took an extended vacation overseas ostensibly for a friend’s wedding but also to explore continental Europe. The wedding date conveniently allowed me to be in Munich for the start of Oktoberfest, an overwhelming experience in and of itself that’s better left for another Smithsonian blog. But when I read in my guidebook that Munich had a paleontology museum, and a free one at that, I couldn’t pass up the chance to contribute to Dinosaur Tracking. Since Bavaria’s very own Archaeopteryx was named 150 years ago today, on September 30, 1861, here’s my account of the small but charming Paläontologisches Museum München.

Located on the campus of Ludwig Maximillian University, the museum has a quaint, meditative quality that outstrips its otherwise aged appearance. When I visited, high school art students were sketching the fossils of their choosing; had they not been there, I’d have been mostly on my own. All the captions were in German, understandably, so I was left with just my imagination to decipher the stories behind these dinosaurs and other fossils. Considering that most of what I know about dinosaurs I learned from Brian, I had a great time comparing notes from three years of producing the blog to the objects in front me. For instance, on the second floor was the museum’s shrine to Archaeopteryx, including a couple of model reconstructions and the Munich specimen, a subject that we’ve covered heavily in this space. The 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx historically has been considered the direct ancestor of birds, a designation that is recently under dispute.

On a rainy Sunday afternoon, the museum was the perfect antidote for my Oktoberfest-addled brain. For more photos, check out the gallery and let us know in the comments what other great paleontology museums you’ve discovered on your vacations.

View our gallery of photos from the Munich Paleontology Museum.

The logo for Planet Dinosaur.

Dinosaurs have been on-screen quite a bit lately. Dinosaur Revolution, Terra Nova and Planet Dinosaur have all brought a number of the prehistoric creatures—mostly carnivorous ones, of course—to television screens. We’re certainly not in want of scenes featuring sharp-toothed theropods chasing down hapless victims, human or otherwise, and Planet Dinosaur continued in the grand tradition of paleo-violence with the second and third installments of the documentary miniseries.

Episode two of Planet Dinosaur focuses on creatures vastly different from the stars of the first show. Instead of huge, carnivorous bruisers such as Spinosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus, we meet the small and feathered dinosaurs that once inhabited prehistoric China. Given the reluctance or inability of many dinosaur shows to depict fully feathered theropods, I was elated to see so many dinosaurs with plumage. And once again, the show did an admirable job of pausing the action now and again to inject some science.

Nevertheless, there were a few things about episode two that made me cringe. First was the flying Sinornithosaurus—as far as I am aware, there has not been a study suggesting this ability for the dinosaur. It appeared to be entirely a plot invention to put little Microraptor in peril (notice there was no “We know Sinornithosaurus was a glider because…” moment). What really made me facepalm, though, was the assertion that Sinornithosaurus was probably venomous. This idea was based on research that has been debunked—the structures thought to indicate a venomous bite were misinterpreted by the researchers who forwarded the hypothesis. I can understand why the show’s creators thought a venomous dinosaur would make an excellent clincher to episode two, but the science just isn’t there.

On to episode three. Whereas the first two episodes focus on a particular region, the third is wider-ranging and includes several different impressive theropods under the heading “Last Killers.” First up was Daspletosaurus, one of the lesser-known tyrannosaurs from North America. The predatory dinosaur is presented as part of a long-running evolutionary arms race with horned dinosaurs, but the only evidence is that both lineages became larger over time. The connection is tenuous. Furthermore, the frills and horns of the ceratopsian dinosaurs were so varied that their evolution was probably influenced by selective pressures such as the need to distinguish between species occupying the same landscape and, perhaps, competition between members of the same species for mates, rather than defense against tyrannosaurs or other predators. What we see as weapons that evolved for defense may actually be ornaments that primarily served in communication and competition among the horned dinosaurs themselves.

Planet Dinosaur also falls into the “dino gangs” trap. Just because multiple individuals of Daspletosaurus were found together does not necessarily mean that the dinosaurs lived in groups or hunted together. There are many ways to make a bonebed, and detailed study is required to figure out how all those bones came to rest in the same place. The idea of pack-hunting theropods is so strong, though, that it’s apparently difficult to dissuade documentary makers from going that route. In the show’s second vignette, a pack of the small, sickle-clawed predator Troodon was shown working together to take down a much larger hadrosaur, despite there being no evidence that these dinosaurs acted this way. (And, as pointed out in the recent description of the dinosaur Talos, many of the so-called “Troodon” fossils found across North America may truly belong to yet-undescribed genera and species, including those found in the Arctic.)

The show fares better with its Majungasaurus storyline. This was a different sort of predatory dinosaur—one of the stubby-armed abelisaurids—and Planet Dinosaur did a fair job fleshing out the fossil evidence suggesting that these dinosaurs sometimes cannibalized each other. (Paleontologists also proposed that Tyrannosaurus was an opportunistic cannibal on the basis of bite-damaged bones.) Our time with Majungasaurus is short, though. Planet Dinosaur quickly races back to meet Daspletosaurus during a migration of Centrosaurus at the finale.

Sadly, the second and third episodes of Planet Dinosaur sometimes fall prey to sensationalism rather than science. The show is at its weakest when science is either glossed over or ignored. While still better than many other recent documentaries, I still found myself being disappointed by these two installments in the series. And, on that note, we could use a documentary that doesn’t simply treat sauropods, hadrosaurs and horned dinosaurs as prey. Since the 19th century, restorations of dinosaurs have been so focused on prehistoric predators that it’s easy to believe that herbivores never did anything interesting outside of becoming a meal. There is far more to dinosaur science than figuring out just how vicious the tyrannosaurs were. Perhaps the next three installments of Planet Dinosaur will fare better than these two. At least, I hope so.

Old dinosaurs have a way of hanging on. New discoveries are announced every week, and our understanding of how dinosaurs actually lived is constantly changing, but the public image of dinosaurs doesn’t always keep up with the pace of scientific discovery and debate. I was reminded of this tension after stumbling upon a short, 1970 documentary called Dinosaurs: The Terrible Lizards.

Dinosaurs regularly popped up during my early elementary school education. From preschool through third grade, at least, dinosaurs made a cameo or more during the school year, and I remember at least one field trip to see the animatronic dinosaurs at the Monmouth Museum in central New Jersey. The dinosaurs jerked and bellowed, as the robotic creatures are wont to do, but what really stuck with me was seeing Dinosaurs: The Terrible Lizards in one of the museum’s little alcoves. Animatronic dinosaurs were nice and all, but in the era before computer-generated dinosaurs were the rule, the stop-motion dinosaurs in the film were the closest thing to seeing the real animals come alive.

Created by special effects artist Wah Chang, the dinosaurs of the short film were as I had always known them. They dragged their tails, moved slowly and were generally covered in a drab palette of muted greens, browns, greys and reds. All the standard behavioral tropes were there, too: “Brontosaurus” lived near the side of the swamp, hadrosaurs escaped danger by fleeing into the water and Tyrannosaurus was such a force of destruction that not even the armor of ankylosaurs could stop it. In some cases, the film looked like the paintings of 20th century paleo artist Zdeněk Burian come to life, and since Burian’s art filled many of my dinosaur books I had no reason to think that scientists had already eviscerated this older image of slow, stupid dinosaurs.

I can’t blame the creators of the original film for portraying the 20th century image of dinosaurs as plodding, dim-witted animals. That was the general view at the time the movie was made. But the film was still playing in the museum I visited in 1990. By this time the scientific “Dinosaur Renaissance” had already been in full swing for well over a decade, but the big-time dinosaur image shift hadn’t happened yet. The dinosaurs in the 1970 video fit in perfectly with the ones I saw in museum displays, books and in the classroom. I had little understanding of just how much had changed since the time the stop-motion film was made.

Even though we’re not due for another wholesale shift in our understanding of dinosaurs, I think that we’re still suffering from the same science communication problems. Science continues, but library books and museum displays continue to present outdated information. That’s just the way things go, yet this fact is especially frustrating during a time when discovery and discussion are accelerating. How many students are initially meeting outdated dinosaurs, rather than the dinosaurs we know now?

After a long wait, the dinosaur-haunted, sci-fi family drama Terra Nova premiered last night on FOX. The first episode did not leave me with a particularly strong impression. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it, either.

The hype for Terra Nova been over the top—we’ve been told time and again just how much went into creating the show’s special effects—but the first two-hour episode was so heavy on exposition that it is difficult to judge how the show will fare. (Rather than fill in the background gradually through events in the story, various characters delivered short speeches in which they provided all the essential details required by viewers.) Everything about episode one was about setting up the show’s premise, from family tensions to cryptic mumblings that will undoubtedly turn into major plot points in future episodes.

Terra Nova is far from original. The show borrows heavily from other science fiction sources. Bits and pieces—including actor Stephen Lang, who portrays Commander Nathaniel Taylor in the show—were lifted from Avatar, there’s a line about dinosaurs mostly hunting at night that is right out of ALIENS, and a few clues at the end of the first episode sound awfully close to the theme of Poul Anderson’s short story “Wildcat,” in which an oil company maintains a base to collect resources from the Jurassic and send them to the energy-starved future. Perhaps future episodes will take the show in unexpected directions, but as far as the first episode goes, Terra Nova is a mish-mash of various sci-fi tropes and references to other stories.

But what about the dinosaurs? As happy as I am to see some of my favorite prehistoric creatures running around on television, the dinosaurs had relatively little screen time and generally served to intensify already complicated situations. When your base camp is already under attack by a rival group, a rampaging Carnotaurus is the last thing you need. A sluggish herd of noodle-necked Brachiosaurus also makes an appearance, though the show’s real villains are imaginary theropods called “Slashers” (more on them in a moment).

In the few moments they did appear on screen, though, I wasn’t exactly blown away by the computer-generated dinosaurs. As in some recent documentaries, the dinosaurs of Terra Nova did not seem to blend well with their backgrounds. They often looked as if they were on another plane of existence. For all the hubbub about how the show’s creators spared no expense on the special effects, the dinosaurs did not look that much better than their counterparts in basic cable documentaries, and they even paled in comparison to the dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s other big dinosaur project, 1993′s Jurassic Park. Creating realistic, high-definition dinosaurs is still a tough challenge for animators.

So, about the slashers… I have said some unkind things about this speculative dinosaur before, and after seeing it in action, I stand by my comments. The dinosaur looks like the product of a board meeting in which everyone agreed to throw a few more bells and whistles on the “raptors” of Jurassic Park. (Upon seeing these dinosaurs, my wife said: “It’s like those poor alligators and lizards from those old dinosaur movies, the ones they’d stick all the fins and horns on to make them look more menacing.”) As I have pointed out before, paleontologists have discovered the remains of actual theropods that were far more fantastic and, I think, scary than the Slasher. As might be expected, these dinosaurs act more like plot devices than actual animals. At the climax of episode one, a mob of unorganized slashers—they are said to hunt in packs—surrounds an armored vehicle and spends much of the night trying to get at the tasty teens inside. I guess they were either bored, or easier prey is just so difficult to find that the dinosaurs decided to keep trying their luck with the metallic snackbox.

Terra Nova has potential. Now that everything has been set up and introduced—the relationships, rivalries, dangers and all that—the show’s creators can, I hope, strike a bit of new ground. Then again, maybe the program will continues to borrow tidbits of plot and setting from stories we’ve already seen. Only time will tell.

Anchiceratops ornatus, on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Canada. Photo by Flickr user Ricky Romero.

Variation is one of the basic elements that makes evolution possible. The tiny differences between individuals in a population provide the raw material for natural selection to act upon and cause evolutionary changes. This can readily be seen among living animals, but identifying and understanding variation among dinosaurs is much more difficult. Paleontologists typically have only a handful of specimens, represented by incomplete materials, from a range of sites which may span hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. Nevertheless, studying how individual dinosaurs of well-sampled species vary from one another can help researchers investigate details of dinosaur diversity and dinosaur lifestyles. Among the latest dinosaurs to be studied this way is Anchiceratops ornatus, a relatively obscure horned dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Canada.

As reviewed by paleontologist Jordan Mallon and colleagues in the recent Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology study, Anchiceratops has had a tangled history. Fossil hunter Barnum Brown named the first species, Anchiceratops ornatus, in 1914, and in 1929 experienced dinosaur excavator Charles M. Sternberg described a second species he called Anchiceratops longirostris on the basis of what he thought was a more gracile, slender skull. The two species were later lumped together into just one, A. ornatus, and despite a lack of rigorous testing, the disparity between the two skulls has been attributed to sexual differences between males and females. (Though sexual dimorphism has often been proposed for dinosaurs, no clear-cut, entirely convincing case has been found.)

But there are more than two Anchiceratops skulls. The trouble with dinosaur discoveries is that additional fossils of already named genera or species often don’t get described unless they are exceptional in some way or are used in a project that requires comparisons between multiple individuals. In the case of Anchiceratops, a total of ten more or less complete skulls have been found that can be attributed to the genus, and these fossils form the basis of the new study. Each of the skulls varied significantly from others in the sample—something that was expected based on big samples of other horned dinosaurs such as Triceratops and Centrosaurus. But did any of the differences hint that some of the dinosaurs belonged to a separate species, or that certain characteristics could be used to distinguish the dinosaur sexes?

Mallon and co-authors used measurements of particular parts of the skull to compare the ten specimens in the sample in what’s called a morphometric analysis. The results of each test plotted the skulls out on a graph that represented the variation in the sample. If there were two different species or sexes, then the scientists would expect to see two distinct clusters of skulls on the graphs. No such pattern was found. Even though the sample size was small, the results indicated that there was no detectable male-female split. Additionally, the anatomy of the skulls and the lack of clustering offered no support to the idea that there was more than one species of Anchiceratops. There appears to have only been one species, Anchiceratops ornatus, preserved in the rocks of the Horseshoe Canyon Formation dating between about 71 million to 69 million years ago. Two million years is a pretty good run compared to the amount of time other horned dinosaur species persisted: In the older Dinosaur Park Formation in the same area, horned dinosaur species appear to have hung on for only about 700,000 years or so.

Why Anchiceratops ornatus was a longer-lived species than geologically older dinosaurs in the same neighborhood is unknown, but Mallon and colleagues offer several hypotheses. Perhaps, due to the lower dinosaur diversity in the Horseshoe Canyon Formation, Anchiceratops had less competition for food from other herbivores and therefore was able to persist for longer. Then again, the shrinking of the Western Interior Seaway during that time may have affected the history of the species. During the days of the Dinosaur Park Formation, the sea may have created fragmented habitats that resulted in the isolation of dinosaur populations which evolved into new species. Since the seaway was receding during the time of Anchiceratops, habitats were less fragmented and those environmental pressures were released, and so fewer species may have taken up the roomier and more continuous habitats. Alternatively, Anchiceratops may have been a relatively hardy species that could better cope with the environmental changes created by the regression of the sea and, as a result, persisted for longer than species that relied on specialized foods or habitats. At the very least, though, Anchiceratops appears to be a small dinosaur success story.

References:

Mallon, J., Holmes, R., Eberth, D., Ryan, M., & Anderson, J. (2011). Variation in the skull of (Dinosauria, Ceratopsidae) from the Horseshoe Canyon Formation (Upper Cretaceous) of Alberta Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 31 (5), 1047-1071 DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2011.601484