Credit: Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory; Gregory Stewart, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Just a quick note that Science magazine’s website is running a live chat this afternoon at 3:00 about new techniques to reveal color in fossils. Phil Manning and Roy Wogelius will take your questions about “the latest insights into what ancient birds, mammals and dinosaurs really looked like—and how their appearance may have affected their behavior and evolution.”

A slab of Triassic rock containing dinosaur tracks. From Ichnology of New England.

Every now and then I stop and ask myself “Why dinosaurs?” Why spend 400 posts (and counting) tracking them across our cultural landscape, from B-movies to new discoveries? What is it about them that keeps me coming back?

As a child, I was enthralled by dinosaurs. They were real-life monsters that were both fascinating and terrifying, and I had high hopes that my amateur excavation in my grandparents’ backyard would yield a fully-articulated Triceratops skeleton (or at least a few dinosaur eggs). Being that I was shoveling through the topsoil of suburban New Jersey, that dream never materialized, but it hardly damped my enthusiasm for the prehistoric creatures.

But dinosaurs are not just kids’ stuff. Though often viewed as kitsch which has no real importance or relevance to the “real world,” dinosaurs have long played important roles in how we understand the world around us. Even before dinosaurs had a name, their bones fueled legends of dragons and monsters in cultures across the world, and when they were finally recognized by science in the early 19th century, they challenged the long-believed notion that the world was created “as is”—they were monsters bristling with spikes and teeth which spoke of a lost world separated from us by the gulf of time. Though they would not become symbolic of evolutionary change until a few decades later  (as in T.H. Huxley’s idea that birds had evolved from a dinosaur-like creature), they powerfully drove home the point that life had dramatically changed over time, and they became new cultural icons for the modern age.

Dinosaurs continue to cast long shadows over the cultural landscape. Families flock to museums to gaze at their remains, and despite being known for over 100 years, Tyrannosaurus is a celebrity few Hollywood stars can match in notoriety. Dinosaurs are everywhere, but they are much more than beloved monsters. Once scientists recognized that the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out in one of the worst mass extinctions in earth history 65 million years ago, it became apparent that we owed our existence to their demise—had the tyrannosaurs, hadrosaurs, horned dinosaurs and other Cretaceous lineages survived, mammals may never have been allowed to proliferate in the empty habitats the dinosaurs left behind. (Though, interestingly enough, the evolution of dinosaurs may not have happened had it not been for an earlier, even worse extinction which almost entirely wiped out the lineage of vertebrates to which we belong.) Perhaps even more fantastically, we now know that one lineage of dinosaurs survived in the form of birds. Many of the traits we consider unique to birds, from feathers to a unique series of air sacs that allow them to breathe efficiently as they flutter about, evolved in dinosaurs first, and we can quite confidently say that birds are living dinosaurs. These are not just bits of trivia—they are lessons from Deep Time which can drastically change the way we understand nature.

The skeleton of a dinosaur is not just a natural curiosity to be gawked at. It is a vestige of another time which simultaneously embodies the natural phenomena of evolution and extinction—the ever-changing nature of life. That is why I just can’t tear myself away from dinosaurs. Their story provides context for our own, and I will keep tracking dinosaurs for years to come.

If you want to enjoy Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, you are going to have to suspend your belief for a bit. There is no use nitpicking over a children’s movie featuring talking extinct species of mammals from different places and time periods (to say nothing of saber-toothed squirrels). The latest installment of the franchise is different, however, in that it introduces the unlikely herd of mammalian heroes to an underground world populated by dinosaurs.

It all starts to go wrong when Sid the ground sloth stumbles across some enormous eggs. Feeling left out by the fact that the mammoths Manny and Ellie are expecting a baby and are about to start a new family, Sid appoints himself the mother of the eggs. (Diego, the saber-toothed cat, is having his own worries about losing his predatory edge.) These soon hatch into baby dinosaurs, but the well-intentioned Sid has no idea how to properly care for them. Needless to say the real mother of the babies is none too happy when they go missing, and being that she is a rather large Tyrannosaurus, that is bad news for the mammals. In gathering up her young ones she picks up Sid, too, and his friends set off to rescue him.

The mammals quickly find that they are out of their depth, but they get some help from a crazed survivalist weasel named Buck. Buck has only one eye due to a past encounter with a large, whitish menace he calls “Rudy.” From that point on the film settles into its search-and-rescue theme, even as Sid somehow becomes accepted by the Tyrannosaurus mother. The visuals are spectacular and the direction is great, but the dinosaurs are sometimes annoyingly over-stylized. While most of the creatures in the film are embellished in one way or another, the dinosaur designs are a bit over the top (such as small, Monolophosaurus-like predators that have quills that shiver when the dinosaurs roar).

There are even some dinosaurs that never existed. When “Rudy” finally appeared on the screen, for example, my wife leaned over and asked, “what kind of dinosaur is that?” “It’s a nothing-o-saurus,” I replied, as the monster was more of a bipedal crocodile than a dinosaur. “Rudy” is a scary villain, especially in 3D, but with so many giant predatory dinosaurs now known I would have liked to have seen an attempt at one like Giganotosaurus.

If you liked the previous two Ice Age films then you will probably like the third one. It is a “safe” movie that is not especially exciting but still is funny enough to be enjoyable (unlike this summer’s other dino film). And if you are offended at dinosaur running around with Pleistocene mammals, just remember it could be worse: humans could be riding them.

Surprising Science is written by Sarah Zielinski, a biology-major-turned-journalist and an assistant editor at Smithsonian. She is interested in most types of science (“whatever is in front of me,” she says) but will focus on the subjects we tend to cover in the magazine: geology, archaeology, astronomy, animals (living or dead) and stories that have art or history or travel tie-ins. But above all, stories that are weird or quirky or unexpected or amusing. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

We’re looking for the Best Costume Ever, Dinosaur Division. Please email us at smithsonianmagazine@si.edu to submit your photos from this year or years past.

For inspiration, here are some last-minute costume ideas for your kids or even your pets.

And even though crocodilians and dinosaurs diverged hundreds of millions of years ago, you’ve got to see this.

The prize is Earth Science’s answer to the Nobel, the Vetlesen Prize.

The asteroid impact set off “a giant tsunami, continent-scale wildfires, darkness, and cold, followed by sweltering greenhouse heat. When conditions returned to normal, half the genera of plants and animals on Earth had perished,” Alvarez writes on his Website.

The impact also left two major clues: a layer of iridium, which is an element found in comets and asteroids but is rare on Earth, and a 110-mile-wide crater near what is now the Yucatan Peninsula. Alvarez dated both to 65 million years ago, a.k.a. End Times for the dinosaurs.

Several scientific fields that are snubbed by the Nobels have established their own “me too!” prizes. Math has the Fields Medal, for instance, and high tech has the Millennium Prize. (It’s administered by Finland, which might reflect a certain amount of rivalry with those other Scandinavian countries that are so prize-happy.) And purists know that the Nobel for Economics isn’t really a Nobel—it’s administered by Sweden’s central bank in honor of Alfred Nobel. But I know I’m forgetting some. Anybody? Help me out here—what other fields have their own versions of the Nobel?

And because dinosaurs play such a starring role in our imagination, from the
old Sinclair gas mascot to Barney to the evolution game Spore, we’ll also
cast a skeptical and (we hope) amused eye on dinosaurs in pop culture.

Our bloggers include several paleontologically inclined
Smithsonian magazine staff members (and a few who just like big scary
creatures or old movies) and Rutgers University ecology and evolution student
Brian Switek, whose enthusiasm for dinosaur-ology so bowled us over we
recruited him to our team.