Dinosaurs are often thought of as kid’s stuff. In America, at least, going through a “dinosaur phase” is just another part of childhood, and somewhere along the way we’re expected to stop acting like walking encyclopedias to Mesozoic life. Yet this narrow view of dinosaurs as nothing more than pre-teen kitsch obscures the essential truths these animals can share with us about evolution, extinction, and survival.

As paleontologist Michael Novacek argues in the video above, the history of dinosaurs is also our history–our mammalian ancestors and relatives snuffled and scurried through a dinosaur-dominated world for more than 150 million years. We can’t understand where we came from without considering dinosaurs. And, says paleontologist Matt Bonnan, “Dinosaurs put our place in the world into perspective.” By asking questions about dinosaurs–when did they live and what was the world like then?–the history of life on Earth comes into focus, and the answers to these queries help us better understand the pervasive forces of evolution and extinction through time.

These critical aspects of nature can be difficult to detect on the timescales of our lives, but become much more apparent when we can peek into deep time by sifting through the remains of creatures that roamed the Earth long ago. An individual dinosaur discovery might not have any practical use or even significantly change our understanding of the past, but when considered together with the ever-growing body of research about dinosaurs, it can help us understand how we came to be on this planet and may even give us some clues about the future–how species emerge and decline, how creatures adapt, and how life evolves after catastrophic extinction events.

What do you think is the best case for the importance of studying dinosaurs?

About 95 million years ago, in Cretaceous Australia, an aggregation of small dinosaurs scurried along an ancient lake margin in what is the world’s only known “dinosaur stampede.” Exactly what caused the dinosaurs to scatter is a mystery. A set of larger tracks, found at the same quarry, have been cast as the footprints of a big predator who was stalking the mixed herd. But, as the rock record shows, this bigger dinosaur passed by at a different time than that of the stampede. And that bigger dinosaur may not have been a carnivore. A recent reassessment of the site raised the possibility that a large herbivore, akin to Muttaburrasaurus, left the tracks. We really don’t know what caused so many little dinosaurs to skitter away, or even come together in such numbers.

Nevertheless, the dramatic imagery of something like Australovenator pouncing on little ornithopods is hard to beat, and the Lark Quarry site–where the stampede is preserved–recently spawned a hyperbolic documentary. Now there’s a musical version, too. At the 2012 Museum’s Australia National Conference in Elder Hall, Adelaide, performers Michael Mills, Amy Donahue, Tahlia Fantone, Morgan Martin and Tom Goldsmith played out their own version of the dinosaur stampede.

Sadly, the performance perpetuates the myth that the stampede was sparked by a prowling carnivore. The truth is that we don’t know. I can’t necessarily blame the creators, though. Singing “You have to run, run, run. You have to hit top speed. Why? We don’t really know. But there’s still evidence of a dinosaur stampede!” doesn’t work quite as well.

I’ve spilled a lot of virtual ink about feathered dinosaurs over the past few weeks. Despite assertions to the contrary, bristles, fluff and feathers make dinosaurs more interesting and exciting than they have ever been before. Of course, not every attempt to put plumage on dinosaurs does the animals justice. Case in point–Dino Time 3D.

I’ll watch just about anything with dinosaurs in it. This blog is all about tracking dinosaurs through science and pop culture, after all. But I am not going to subject my brain to Dino Time 3D  (formerly DinoMom). Anything that “stars” Rob Schneider and two (!) Baldwin brothers is best avoided, especially since the movie’s trailer is uncomfortably close to this parody trailer of a typical Rob Schneider film.

But the film’s attempt at fluffy dinosaurs may the worst thing of all. I don’t even have a clear idea of what the feather-bearing species are supposed to be–they look like failed attempts at Carnival costumes. And it’s not like it’s impossible to create roughly accurate cartoonish dinosaurs. Many of the animated species on PBS’ Dinosaur Train hit the right balance and show off feathers without looking ridiculous. With a little attention to detail, feathery dinosaurs don’t have to look stupid.

[Hat-tip to Talcott Starr for telling me about this movie.]

The reconstructed skeleton of a Deinonychus, a dromaeosaur, at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. Photo by the author.

From professional paleontologists to kids, there are dinosaur lovers of all ages. But one of the most enthusiastic I’ve ever seen is “the Tiny Paleontologist” – a 4-year-old dinosaur fan who shares his passion through occasional video updates on this blog. In the latest entry, the tiny paleontologists rhapsodizes about dromaeosaurs, or the group of carnivorous dinosaurs with retractable sickle claws on their toes. He’s a little off on some of the particulars, but there can be no doubt that this kid absolutely adores dinosaurs. I hope he holds on to that enthusiasm as paleontologists continue to discover more.

Apatosaurus means “deceptive lizard.” It’s really the perfect name for the bulky Jurassic sauropod. “Brontosaurus“—a dinosaurian fan favorite whose memory lives on even after being relegated to the taxonomic dustbin—turned out to be a species of Apatosaurus, and for decades, paleontologists assigned the wrong head to Apatosaurus because of a confused view of who the dinosaur was most closely related to. Apatosaurus continues to play tricks. The sauropod tracks placed behind the American Museum of Natural History’s Apatosaurus skeleton were actually made by much different sauropods that lived millions of years later.

The cartoon series “I’m a Dinosaur” presents a different interpretation of the sauropod’s name. A grey, blunt-headed Apatosaurus—who sounds like the Jurassic precursor to Mortimer Snerd—tells the tale, while delivering a few basic facts along the way.

Apatosaurus isn’t the only dinosaur to present a short cartoon autobiography. The same series also features a regal Tyrannosaurus, a Baryonyx suffering ennui, and an anxious Beipiaosaurus who dreams of flying. The educational content is pretty thin—generally how big the dinosaurs were, where they lived and what they ate—but this is cartoon kid’s stuff, after all.

Then again, if Apatosaurus is such a deceptive dinosaur, why should we believe anything he says?

Life for Tyrannosaurus was undoubtedly tough at the start. Not only were there huge, ornery Triceratops to worry about, but the young tyrants also had to watch out for bigger members of their own kind. (As the fossil record has shown, Tyrannosaurus weren’t above eating their own when the opportunity came up.) But it’s still fun to imagine big-eyed little tyrants running around the Cretaceous world, taking in the sights, sounds and smells of all around them. And while it’s definitely on the sillier side, that’s just what the animation trailer for Pangea – The Neverending World envisions.

I haven’t seen Pangea in its entirety. Until this morning, I didn’t even know the movie existed. The film’s official page describes it as a story within a story—a plastic Tyrannosaurus puppet a little girl receives from an old museum caretaker fires her imagination, and so little “Rexy” comes to life. (The style and tone remind me of a Stanley and the Dinosaurs, a claymation short film I saw as a kid.) As the trailer shows, Rexy wanders away from the nest to enthusiastically investigate everything from butterflies to pterosaurs and sauropods. Rexy is definitely a troublemaking little tyrant.

Get this kid a museum job. Stella, a four-year-old dinosaur expert, correctly points out that a so-called Triceratops toy is, in fact, a Styracosaurus. She even hits three of the major differences in skull anatomy—Triceratops had a shorter nasal horn, longer brow horns and smaller, triangular bones around the border of the frill. This has to be the most adorable dinosaur correction I have ever seen. I would love to see Stella give a talk at next year’s Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting.

New discoveries, historical tidbits and paleo-pop are all regular features here at Dinosaur Tracking, but there is far more dinosaur news out there than even this blog can cover. This week, especially, has seen a flurry of new research and dinosaurs in the headlines. I’ll be getting to some of the new papers during the remainder of this week and next, and here’s a rundown of recent dinosaur happenings.

Guard dinosaur: Need to leave your car unattended for a while? Why not employ a dinosaur to stand guard. That’s what an owner of a crashed car did in Clothiers Creek, Australia. Granted, the plastic Tyrannosaurus may not have been as frightening as an actual trained theropod, and the efficacy of toy dinosaurs as deterrents is unknown at this time, but it’s better than nothing.

Giants From Abroad: Last weekend, Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute opened the exhibit “Giant Mysterious Dinosaurs.” Among the featured guests, most being skeletal reconstructions of dinosaurs from Argentina and Mongolia, are the relatively small ceratopsian Psittacosaurus and casts of the immense sauropod Argentinosaurus. The exhibit also has a local hook: dinosaur aficionado and Philadelphia resident Don Lessem organized the traveling display.

Jersey Dinos: Pennsylvania isn’t the only East Coast town to be visited by dinosaurs. Earlier this month, New Jersey residents got a preview of Field Station: Dinosaurs, a temporary animatronic dinosaur park plunked down in the wetlands of Secaucus and due to open in May. (See the video above for footage from the press conference.) Early reports state that the park will include 31 robotic dinosaurs scattered across a path through the Jersey swamp. I hope some of New Jersey’s own dinosaurs make an appearance. Tyrannosaurus is an undisputed fan favorite, but I would love to see the garden state’s own tyrannosauroid, Dryptosaurus, on display along with the state dinosaur, Hadrosaurus.

Pleo, Take 2: Robotic dinosaurs aren’t just growling, jerking monsters of roadside prehistoric parks. In recent years toymakers have been trying to encapsulate dinosaur attitudes in home versions of the prehistoric creatures. Among the latest is Inu, a baby sauropod that looks like the next iteration of the previously released Pleo toy. With these little mechanical dinosaurs, at least you don’t have to worry about the complicated dietary needs of a real, fast-growing baby sauropod.

An Adventure How Many Years in the Making?: Jurassic Park IV will happen eventually. We have been hearing that for years now, and the series’ scientific adviser Jack Horner has even dropped a few hints about the plot. (Pssst… the genetically-modified dinosaurs may be altered even further to become true monsters). Now Steven Spielberg, the director and producer behind the series, has reaffirmed that the movie is on his to-do list, although who knows when the movie will actually make it to screens. Just remember what I said, Mr. Spielberg: We need feather-covered raptors this time. And please, please, avoid the family drama schtick of your other dinosaur project, Terra Nova.

Oh, to be a Dinosaur Hunter: Finally, the “Kids Post” section of the Washington Post has a profile of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s own paleontologist Matthew Carrano.

The Tyrannosaurus in Fantasia was given a nearly-accurate, tail-off-the-ground pose like this mount of Gorgosaurus at the American Museum of Natural History.From Matthew and Brown, 1923.

Dinosaurs have changed a heck of a lot since I was little. I’m not just talking about how science has altered what we know about their biology. During the early part of my dinomania in the mid-1980s, there were no computer-generated dinosaurs. Puppets, stop-motion creatures, and traditionally animated dinosaurs ruled the day. Some were better than others. Phil Tippett’s sauropods, ceratopsids, tyrannosaurs, and hadrosaurs in the documentary Dinosaur! were the best I had ever seen, while late-night showings of movies like Unknown Island, The Land Unknown and The Land That Time Forgot introduced me to bad puppet dinosaurs. But there was one film that kept showing up over and over again as representative of the Mesozoic: Disney’s mash-up of classical music and animation, Fantasia.

I didn’t care all that much for Mickey Mouse as the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” To me, the real stars of the movie were the dinosaurs. They made their appearance about midway through the film to the slightly rearranged melodies and dissonances of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring“—a composition meant to represent archaic humans choosing a sacrifice to bring back warm weather. The piece wasn’t just about dinosaurs. Although the word “evolution” was never actually said during the piece’s introduction in Fantasia, composer Deems Taylor told audiences that the animated interpretation was meant to be a “coldly accurate” retelling of the growth and development of life on this planet. The origin of the planet through the evolution of early, single-celled life is included, but dinosaurs take up a greater part of the screen-time than any Precambrian organisms.

Criticizing the accuracy of the dinosaurs in Fantasia by today’s standards—or even by the scientific image of dinosaurs when I first saw the movie—would be pointless. Fantasia premiered in 1940, and paleontologists have drastically revised their understanding of dinosaurs since then. The general image of dinosaurs from the Fantasia era is probably best represented by a huge mural made a few years later for Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History—Rudolph Zallinger‘s The Age of Reptiles. The fat, lumbering, splay-legged dinosaurs of Zallinger’s mural are a beautiful and well-rendered representation of everything that turned out to be wrong about dinosaurs, but the painting was considered to be scientifically accurate at the time. Many of the Fantasia dinosaurs look like moving versions of the dinosaurs Zallinger would paint a few years later.

But Disney’s animated dinosaurs created a contradictory image of what life was like during the reign of the non-avian dinosaurs. Before the start of “The Rite of Spring,” Deems Taylor told audiences that dinosaurs ranged from “little crawling horrors” to “100-ton nightmares.” They primarily ate plants and, as a rule, “they weren’t very bright.” Nevertheless, there were “bullies and gangsters among them”—towering predators such as the Tyrannosaurus that takes a starring role in the segment. This was the entrenched view of dinosaurs at the time. They were big, dumb, and ruled the world through brute force.

All of these points can be seen in the dinosaurs Disney’s animators created, but there was more to the segment than that. The dinosaurs were actually quite active and displayed some complex behaviors. Small groups of ornithomimosaurs strutted together through the forest, and cute baby Triceratops remained with their parents. The box-headed, three-fingered Tyrannosaurus was given a slightly more horizontal posture than was common for the time, and many of the dinosaurs appeared to be active, almost bird-like creatures. This was a common occurrence in restorations. The cold-blooded, ugly, reptilian nature of dinosaurs was emphasized in words, but the animals themselves were often restored as dynamic and agile.

There was plenty that Fantasia got wrong, but the film also got some things right by breaking from the scientific image of dinosaurs as crocodiles writ large. Maybe that’s part of why I kept seeing the film clip for so long during the dinosaur revival of the 1980s and 1990s. Fantasia‘s dinosaurs were squamous and drab, but they were also relatively nimble and social animals that fit into the emerging image of dinosaurs as unique, complex animals. How could anyone look at the skeleton of a dinosaur and not imagine the living animal as something more bird-like than reptile-like? It just took some time for science and art to really hear what the bones had to say.

A Triceratops jack-o'-lantern, sent in by Kevin McDunn.

Halloween has come and gone, but it’s never too late for a cool dinosaur jack-o’-lantern. And, if the two snapshots sent in by our readers are any indication, this is a good year for Triceratops. The first, above, was sent in to us by Kevin McDunn. Reader Nicole Sexton sent in a photo of her son’s own Triceratops carving (below). When it comes to pumpkin popularity, it looks like Tyrannosaurus has some competition.

A Triceratops pumpkin, sent in my reader Nicole Sexton.

Have you seen a dinosaur or other prehistoric creature in an unusual place? Please send your photo to dinosaursightings@gmail.com.

The juvenile tyrannosaur puppet at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Photo by author.

I love dinosaurs, and I love puppets. Put the two together and I can’t resist. Among other things—such as the brand new dinosaur hall, which I’ll talk about in a later post—that is what brought me to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County last week. The institution has put together several shows featuring beautifully designed dinosaur puppets, and after seeing a sneak peek on YouTube, I just had to check one out for myself.

I was probably the oldest dinosaur fan in attendance for the museum’s afternoon “Dinosaur Encounters” program. Shortly after I arrived at the North American Mammal Hall where the shows take place, a small collection of toddlers, young children and their parents gathered around. The kids looked astounded when the museum’s fuzzy Tyrannosaurus puppet came roaring out onto the stage. While our host talked about thinking like a scientist and making observations to better understand prehistoric life, the dinosaur walked around the hall, snapped its impressive jaws, and bellowed its heart out. I think many of the kids in attendance were too  young to even be scared. Most of them stared in wide-eyed amazement at what, to all appearances, was a real dinosaur right in front of them.

After the show I got a chance to get a closer look at the dinosaur thanks to its puppeteer, Brian Meredith. Drenched in sweat from running around in the hot suit for 15 minutes, Brian pointed out the relatively simple operation of the juvenile tyrannosaur. He simply steps into the dinosaurs body cavity and thinks like a tyrannosaur—as he walks, the dinosaur walks, and a series of strings and other instruments inside let him move the dinosaur’s body parts. The dinosaur’s deep-throated roaring, I was surprised to find out, was not pre-recorded but actually Brian growling through a sub-woofer to make what I consider to be some impressive dinosaur sounds. The hardest part of the operation, Brian said, is seeing where you’re going—the only view he gets of the outside is through a small opening in the tyrannosaur’s neck. Clearly, being inside a dinosaur isn’t easy.

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.

Plastic dinosaur toys. Image © Copyright Sharon Lynn Wegner-Larsen 2010

Long Live Rock! At Archosaur Musings, David Hone lists some musicians who have been honored by paleontologists. “In addition to Qiliania graffini [named for the lead singer of the punk band BAD RELIGION], the most obvious example would be the dinosaur Masiakasaurus knopfleri, named for Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. Trilobites, I know, cover the Beatles in some detail (even Pete Best gets one!) and there are ones for the Grateful Dead and Mick Jagger too.”

T-Rex Isn’t Going to Take It Anymore: Everything Dinosaur fact-checks a popular insult: “Using the term ‘dinosaur’ to represent an inefficient, outmoded person or organization seems a little bit unfair. On balance the Dinosauria were rather successful, arguably more successful than many orders of Mammalia, including our own part of the Mammalian family tree.”

Please Don’t Feed the Therapods: Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs points us to “Dinosaur Zookeeper,” a free online game at Adult Swim. “Take your fledgling dinosaur park from empty and safe to full and incredibly dangerous…. Remember, if too many visitors die it will be your job that’s going extinct.”

An Intersection of Time and Space: You can find Dinochick hanging out at the corner of Jurassic Avenue and Cretaceous Street.

All the Dinosaurs of the Rainbow: Sharon at Omegafauna shows off her impressive childhood collection of vintage “Dino Brights” toy figures.

The Pencil is Not Yet Extinct: At Paleo Illustrata, Stu Pond explains why, even in the age of sophisticated computer graphics, “the sketchbook is still arguably more important than any other tool an artist has at their disposal.”

Paleo Justice: At RMDC Paleo Lab, Anthony Maltese recounts how he and his team foiled a fossil poacher at a Kansas excavation site.

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.

Dinosaur Battle Town from Eddie West on Vimeo.

Dinosaurs undoubtedly played host to other organisms—parasites have a deep history—but animator Eddie West took the idea in a different direction. Part “Flintstones”, part “Dino-Riders”, West created this short film about dueling towns on the backs of enormous dinosaurs. Naturally, though, the cartoon leaves plenty of unanswered questions—like how often the town is partially demolished because the dinosaurs feel the need to itch some of the masonry off their backs.

[Hat-tip to ART Evolved]