Smithsonian.com

I’m always a bit amused by dinosaur shooters. For the first time in 65 million years or more, non-avian dinosaur species again roam the planet and the best thing we can think of is to turn ‘em into chunky cat food. And, given the quality of many run-and-gun dinosaur adventures, do we really need any more games that pit machine-gun-toting players against hordes of Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus? Isn’t it about time for something different?

Whether you’re as tired of dinosaur shooters as I am, though, there’s no doubt they’ll keep coming. The chance to virtually shoot a bazooka at a raptor seems too good to resist, and the next game due to pop up in this genre is Primal Carnage. The game has been in development for a while, but earlier this month the shooter’s creators released a short video that shows what the actual gameplay is going to be like for a few of the human and dinosaurian characters. You can either try to pick off your dinosaur enemies at a distance as one of the humans, or get up close and personal with teeth and claws as one of the several theropod classes. I have to admit, stomping around as a Tyrannosaurus is pretty tempting, but we’ll have to see whether Primal Carnage can really deliver what it promises.

The skeleton of Carnotaurus at the Chlupáč Museum in Prague. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Tyrannosaurus gets a lot of guff for having relatively small, two-fingered hands, but that isn’t really fair. Though small, the arms of Tyrannosaurus and other big tyrannosaurs were robust and heavily muscled, hinting that the dinosaurs may have used their arms like meat hooks while tangling with struggling prey. So let’s have no more of this “Tyrannosaurus had sissy arms” nonsense. If we’re going to poke fun at any dinosaur for having wimpy forelimbs, it should probably be Carnotaurus.

While tyrannosaurus were among the most formidable predators in North America and Asia during the Late Cretaceous, in South America the same roles were often played by a different breed of theropod dinosaur known as abelisaurids. Of these, Carnotaurus is probably the most famous—the fact that this “meat-eating bull” had two horns sticking out of its short, deep skull gave it an instant appeal. As fearsome as Carnotaurus looked, though, it’s hard not chuckle at the dinosaur’s arms—the hand and lower part of the forelimb were so reduced in size that some paleontologists have viewed them as vestigial structures that have almost entirely lost their ability to function in acquiring prey. In a new paper published in Palaeontology, researcher Javier Ruiz and colleagues reexamine the strange arms of this dinosaur and how they compare to those of other abelisaurid predators such as Majungasaurus and Aucasaurus.

As pointed out by Ruiz and co-authors, the arms of Carnotaurus have a robust lower portion, made up of the radius and ulna, that is about a quarter of the length of the upper arm bone (the humerus). The hand itself has four fingers, and unlike in the other abelisaurids considered in the paper, the fourth metacarpal bone is the biggest bone in the hand. This small and peculiar difference helps set Carnotaurus apart, but the comparisons among this dinosaur, Majungasaurus and Aucasaurus may also add some new information about how the arms of these dinosaurs got to be so wimpy.

In the big picture of theropod evolution, the abelisaurid dinosaurs belong to an even larger group called ceratosaurs. Earlier representatives of this group such as Limusaurus and Ceratosaurus already had relatively short and stubby hands in the Jurassic, and it appears that the hands of abelisaurids followed this evolutionary trend. The question is why this reduction in limb size happened. We can come up with “just so” stories in an attempt to explain the trend, but testing the idea is another matter entirely and something that is not touched on in the paper by Ruiz and collaborators. Equally perplexing is why the hand of Carnotaurus was so small while the other arm bones were thick and powerful-looking, even compared to other abelisaurids. We don’t yet have a good answer for why this should be so.  For now, Ruiz and colleagues conclude that the hands of the odd abelisaurids were as odd and diverse as the different arrangements of crests, horns and bumps which adorned their skulls. How the structures related to the lives of the animals themselves will require further study.

References:

RUIZ, J., TORICES, A., SERRANO, H., & LÓPEZ, V. (2011). The hand structure of Carnotaurus sastrei (Theropoda, Abelisauridae): implications for hand diversity and evolution in abelisaurids Palaeontology DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2011.01091.x

The poster for the 2001 b-movie Raptor.

You know a movie is going to be bad when the first scene is lifted directly from another b-movie.

When I flipped on Raptor (2001), I thought I had somehow made a mistake and rented the gory dinosaur flick Carnosaur (1993). The opening scene—in which a trio of airhead teens is ripped to shreds by the cutest little raptor puppet you have ever seen—was straight out of schlock legend Roger Corman’s earlier film. As I soon found out, this wasn’t the only thing the wannabe dinosaur horror lifted from other movies. In it’s own weird way, Raptor is the matryoshka doll of awful dinosaur cinema—there are at least three crummy films nested within the larger one.

There isn’t really much to say about the plot of Raptor. The movie relies almost entirely on recycled footage from Carnosaur, Carnosaur 2 and Carnosaur 3 for its dinosaur special effects shots. Raptor condenses those three movies into one pile of cinema mush so that all the dinosaur shots will have the right set up. (For sharp-eyed audiences, this explains why there are life preservers on the walls of the landlocked facility, because scenes reused from Carnosaur 3 originally took place on a boat. Whoops.)  A grumpy small town sheriff (Eric Roberts) and a plastic-surgery-enhanced animal control officer (Melissa Brasselle) take their sweet time scratching their heads at the dinosaur-bitten remains of multiple citizens, while the local mad scientist (Corbin Bernsen) pushes forward with his project to resurrect dinosaurs and adds a bit of humor by looking ridiculous in his nerd-glasses/beret combo.

Raptor really doesn’t need any of the principal characters, though. The same movie could have been created by simply re-editing all three Carnosaur films, especially since Roberts, Brasselle, Bernsen and the other actors don’t even seem to be in the same movie half the time. In the poorly-matched duel between a Tyrannosaurus and the sheriff in a skid loader—come on, how could the tyrannosaur possibly lose?—Roberts is shown bouncing around in a Bobcat while shots of the dinosaur from Carnosaur and Carnosaur 2 are edited in. The two may as well be in entirely different dimensions, the match up between the new footage and the old stock is so bad. But it gets even worse. The film’s director, Jay Andrews, brought in two supporting characters from the original Carnosaur to film some new shots that would set up the recycled clips of their deaths. (For a full list of all the silly mash-up moments between the new shots and the old death scenes, see the page for Raptor on WikiSciFi.) Not that Roger Corman minded. After all, he produced this bit of cinema trash. Never underestimate the eagerness of schlock horror filmmakers to go for the easy direct-to-video cash grab.

The articulated foot of Talos sampsoni. The second toe (DII) bore a retractable sickle claw. From Zanno et al., 2011.

September has been a good month for troodontid dinosaurs. Earlier this month paleontologist Xing Xu and colleagues described a new genus of the slender, sickle-clawed predators—Linhevenator—from Inner Mongolia in PLoS One. Now, in the same journal in which that dinosaur made its debut, paleontologists Lindsay Zanno, David Varricchio, Patrick O’Connor, Alan Titus and Michael Knell describe a similar creature from western North America during a time when a massive seaway divided the continent in two.

The new dinosaur has been named Talos sampsoni and is known from the hips, the nearly-complete remains of the hindlimbs and a few other elements. The bones were found in the roughly 75 million year old Kaiparowits Formation of southern Utah. This particular window into the past—much of it located within Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument—has allowed paleontologists to perceive a unique pocket of dinosaur diversity quite different from what has been found before.

At the time of Talos, the area that is now southern Utah was a costal environment located near the Western Interior Seaway, a shallow sea which divided North America into eastern and western subcontinents. This division affected dinosaur evolution—species found in the east significantly differ from those found in the west at the same time—but there was probably another barrier that divided the north half of the western subcontinent from the southern half. Horned dinosaurs such as Utahceratops and Kosmoceratops, tyrannosaurs such as Teratophoneus, and other dinosaurs found in the Kaiparowits Formation were quite different from members of the same groups found in the north. Over time, the isolation of different dinosaur populations led to the origin over strikingly different species.

As described by Zanno and co-authors, the discovery of Talos supports the idea that the dinosaurs found in the Late Cretaceous of southern Utah were part of an isolated pocket of evolution. The dinosaur was not just part of a southern extension of a genus already better known from skeletons found to the north. Instead, Talos was part of an aggregation of unique dinosaur species that appear to have evolved in the south. Additional discoveries, as well as the description of already-discovered specimens, will help fill out the history of why the southern dinosaurs were so different.

The dinosaur may also help sort out the history of troodontid dinosaurs in North America. Although many species from this group have been found in Asia, their record in North America is poorly understood. Other than new genus Geminiraptor named last year, most of the troodontid remains have been attributed to the genus Troodon. Even the remains of Talos were initially thought to be Troodon bones. As the authors of the new study point out, this state of affairs means that Troodon would appear to have a 20 million year history that extended over almost the entire northern half of North America, an unlikely scenario that has been created by our incomplete understanding of North American troodontids. Many of these partial skeletons  and teeth ascribed to Troodon probably belong to other, as-yet-undescribed species. Troodon has become something of a wastebasket for hard-to-identify remains, and the fact that some of those enigmatic remains turned out to be a new species makes it likely that other so-called “Troodon” specimens will also turn out to be distinct species of dinosaur.

References:

Zanno, L., Varricchio, D., O’Connor, P., Titus, A., & Knell, M. (2011). A New Troodontid Theropod, Talos sampsoni gen. et sp. nov., from the Upper Cretaceous Western Interior Basin of North America PLoS ONE, 6 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0024487

With dinosaur documentaries, quantity isn’t the problem. Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus and friends have a near-constant screen presence, and this year we’ve seen plenty of new prehistoric shows of varying quality. In fact, the dinosaur media market has been so saturated lately that sometimes I get a little sick of seeing bellowing theropods go tearing after hapless hadrosaurs. I was impressed, against the background of sub-par dinosaur dramas, by the first episode of BBC One’s new miniseries Planet Dinosaur.

I’ll admit that I was initially skeptical of Planet Dinosaur. The first promotional clip made it look like yet another CGI-fest focused entirely on dinosaur carnage with not a shred of science in sight. YAWN. More than a decade since Walking With Dinosaurs, the “day in the life of a dinosaur” schtick has been done to death and probably should be buried, at least for a little while. Plus, I wasn’t particularly taken with the show’s title. We’ve already had Dinosaur Planet and, near the bottom of the bad-dinosaur-movie chum bucket, Planet of Dinosaurs, but I’m glad I didn’t let my fanboy nitpicks dissuade me from actually sitting down to see what the show as all about.

Like many other recent programs of its kind, Planet Dinosaur doesn’t skimp on the dinosaur dramatizations. Episode one—”Lost World”—primarily focuses on the feeding habits of the great, sail-backed theropod Spinosaurus. Naturally, the critter gets into plenty of scuffs with giant sawfish, the enormous crocodylomorph Sarcosuchus and the gargantuan Carcharodontosaurus. There is some uncertainty as to how many of the show’s big predators actually lived alongside one another—a problem that stems from the way in which the Late Cretaceous fossil deposits of northern Africa have been sampled—but, admittedly, creating a compelling television storyline requires a bit of flexibility in reconstruction. That said, I do appreciate that the creators of the show have intentionally picked prehistoric settings outside the Late Jurassic and Late Cretaceous of North America (which can be said of Dinosaur Revolution, as well). Everybody knows Allosaurus and Apatosaurus from the Morrison Formation and Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus from the Hell Creek Formation, but there is a whole world of dinosaurs out there that most people know little or nothing about.

What sets Planet Dinosaur apart, and what I enjoyed most, is the fact that a modicum of science is woven into each episode to back up the different vignettes being presented. When a pair of Carcharodontosaurus duke it out over territory, for example, narrator John Hurt explains how theropod skulls with punctures and tooth slashes support the idea that big predatory dinosaurs often fought by biting each other on the face, as graphic illustrations of such fossils pop up on screen. At another point, the show briefly delves into the diet of spinosaurs by citing different gut contents found inside disparate members of the group found across the globe, and the show even mentions a relatively recent geochemical study which hinted that spinosaurs were primarily living and hunting along the water’s edge. There are a few hiccups—such as the notion that the theropod Rugops was a devoted scavenger and the suggestion the Spinosaurus sliced up its prey with its formidable arms when the forelimbs of this dinosaur are entirely unknown—but despite these nitpicks, it was quite refreshing to see the show fit recent discoveries into the narrative. Documentary creators, if you’re reading, we need more of this kind of mix of narrative and science.

Marc Vincent of Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs recently posted his own review of the show, as well. While I agree that Planet Dinosaur is not that perfect dinosaur documentary that we have all been hoping for, it is still far better than just about anything that I have seen lately. We’re always going to have bloodthirsty theropods roaring and slashing at everything that moves—nature documentaries of all kinds are dominated by violence—but accepting that doesn’t mean that we have to give up on trying to educate while we entertain. Planet Dinosaur shows one way that it can be done, and I look forward to seeing the remainder of the series.