I have a soft spot for Dryptosaurus. The enigmatic tyrannosauroid was found in my previous home state of New Jersey, and, more than that, played a key role in helping 19th-century paleontologists revise their understanding of just what a dinosaur really was. I even took the theropod’s original name–”Laelaps“, sadly found to be preoccupied by a kind of mite–as my nom de blog. The dinosaur perfectly combines my love of tyrannosaurs and the history of science with a reminder of where I came from.

Despite the historic importance of Dryptosaurus, though, the Late Cretaceous predator has since been overshadowed by bigger, badder dinosaurian carnivores. While Dryptosaurus seemed to be the baddest the prehistoric Jersey shore had to offer when E.D. Cope first described the tyrannosauroid in 1866, and was forever immortalized by artist Charles R. Knight in his “Leaping Laelaps” painting, more complete skeletons of other theropods had relegated Dryptosaurus to the background. Even worse, there’s little hope that we’re ever going to completely comprehend this dinosaur. Many isolated bones have been attributed to Dryptosaurus over the years, but New Jersey’s Cretaceous dinosaurs are known from bits and pieces that were washed out into the primeval Atlantic. Even if there is another partial skeleton out there somewhere, the suburban sprawl of the Garden State has probably paved over it by now.

That’s why I’m ecstatic that the exceptional artist and sculptor Tyler Keillor is planning on creating a full-scale Dryptosaurus restoration. Even though much about this dinosaur remains unknown, I think Keillor’s Kickstarter project is a wonderful way to pay tribute to one of my favorite dinosaurs. Even better, the project will highlight the long history of American paleontology and the critical role East coast fossils played in our ever-shifting understanding of dinosaurs. I’m confident Keillor can successfully bring the dinosaur back to life, or as close to it as art supplies will allow–two years ago, I interviewed Keillor about a full-size, fuzzy Dryptosaurus head he had created. It’s a gorgeous sculpture that really captures the spirit of the dinosaur. Now it’s time to put the rest of the tyrannosauroid’s body in place.

The nodosaur Animantarx. While this dinosaur is from Utah, it represents the sort of dinosaur that made the track found at the Maryland NASA campus. Photo by Kabacchia, image from Wikipedia.

Last fall, fossil tracker Ray Stanford and paleontologists David Weishampel and Valerie Deleon announced something wonderful–a rare impression of a baby ankylosaur. The delicate specimen, officially named Propanoplosaurus marylandicus and on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, is an Early Cretaceous snapshot from Maryland that gives us a fleeting picture of how these armored dinosaurs started life. And the fossil is even more spectacular given the rarity of dinosaur bones found in the area. Paleontologists have discovered teeth and bone fragments over the years–including bones from “Capitalsaurus” in Washington, D.C.–but even partially complete skeletons remain elusive. Dinosaur tracks are far more common, and, according to the Washington Post, Stanford may have discovered a footprint of an adult ankylosaur in an unexpected place.

As reported by Brian Vastag, the print sits on the property of a NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Stanford stumbled across the lone track earlier this summer and recently led NASA scientists out to the site to show them the fossil depression. Though the track has started to erode, and may have been damaged by a lawnmower, the roughly 112-million-year-old track still shows four toe imprints. According to David Weishampel, the track could have been made by a nodosaur–a member of the heavily-armored ankylosaur subgroup that lacked tail clubs but often sported prominent spikes along their sides.

Officials at the NASA campus are already moving to protect the fossil, and they plan to bring in paleontologists to look for other dinosaur tracks. The NASA scientists want to keep the site a secret, Vastag reports, but ultimately want the public to be able to see the track. What happens next will depend on the laws that regulate how fossils can be removed and curated. But it seems that there is more than just a lone track at the spaceflight facility. When Stanford took the NASA scientists out to the site, he and other researchers found several more possible dinosaur tracks. The high-tech NASA facility may have been founded on a Cretaceous dinosaur stomping ground.

The reconstructed cast of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus in the NHMLA's centerpiece Dinosaur Hall display. Photo by the author.

There has never been a better time for dinosaurs. Skeleton by skeleton, museum by museum, the reconstructed frames of the prehistoric creatures are being updated and repositioned in shiny displays garnished with interactive screens and smartphone tours. The last of the tail-dragging holdouts – leftovers from before the “Dinosaur Renaissance” of the 70s and 80s changed our perspective of how a dinosaur should look – are being disassembled and reconstructed in more active, agile positions. Among the latest museums to revamp their dinosaur exhibits is California’s Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

The museum’s new dinosaur hall opened last July. I spent a day among the new exhibits a few months later. On the September day I visited, the windows encircling the hall let incoming sunlight wash over the skeletons and cast their shadows over the floor. This was quite different to the dark, dusty displays I encountered as a child, and more akin to the open, bright aesthetic New York’s American Museum of Natural History developed when they renovated their dinosaur halls in the late 90s.

Unlike the AMNH displays, which were arranged as an evolutionary tree of dinosaurs, the Los Angeles museum doesn’t seem to have any discernible floorplan. An elegant, ostrich-like Struthiomimus skeleton greets visitors to the lower gallery, while, just behind the mount, an Allosaurus harasses a Stegosaurus. The exhibit’s centerpiece – a three-part Tyrannosaurus growth series, from juvenile to young adult – looms nearby. From there the lower gallery displays continue on, past the shovel-beaked Edmontosaurus skull I recently wrote about and the resurrected frame of a stalking Carnotsaurus, before taking a turn into a larger room where models of the small, bristle-tailed dinosaur Fruitadens mingle with the skeletons of Mamenchisaurus and Triceratops. With the exception of a small subsection devoted to marine reptiles that lived at the same time as dinosaurs, the displays are not organized according to chronology, ecology, or evolution. Each is a little island to itself.

Upstairs is a different story. While the lower gallery is full of skulls and reconstructed skeletons, the exhibit’s upper floor is not as densely-populated by fossils. That’s a good thing. Downstairs visitors get to see the products of paleontology – genuine specimens and reconstructed hypotheses of what dinosaurs were like – but the top floor takes greater care to explain the science of what we know. The interactive displays explore the basics of fieldwork – with an amusing tabletop game that asks you to make decisions about how to spend a day in the badlands – and various aspects of dinosaur biology, including pathologies and senses. And, in a nice touch, the upper gallery empties out into a small alcove where  a few of California’s local dinosaurs are displayed. Almost every dinosaur exhibit makes room for Tyrannosaurus, but I think it’s especially important to show off local prehistoric notables to help local visitors understand just how much their home state has changed through the course of time.

Paleontologist Andrew Farke published a review of the same exhibits in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology issue. Farke was just as impressed as I was by the stunning visual displays, but came away with the same concern:

The exhibits make abundantly clear that dinosaurs and their aquatic counterparts were living, breathing animals, but in what context? Many of the most eye-catching sections in the Hall of Dinosaurs feel as if they’ve been yanked out of space and time, with little sense for how the organisms fit within their ancient ecosystems or the tree of life.

Dinosaurs are not only wonderful creatures to gawk at. Any dinosaur skeleton is a snapshot of evolution, ecology, and extinction – a thread we can follow back through time to understand the world as it once was. The NHMLA deserves credit for creating beautiful displays and showcasing a few of the ways we can extract delicate details from ancient bones, but, without their essential evolutionary context, the hall’s dinosaurs can easily be cast as prehistoric monsters that have no relevance to the modern world. We know that isn’t the case. Our mammalian ancestors and cousins evolved alongside dinosaurs, and, as one small display points out, dinosaurs live among us today as birds. The “Age of Dinosaurs” and “Age of Mammals” have always been the same – the earliest mammaliformes evolved around the same time as the first dinosaurs, and dinosaurs, in avian garb, are a beautiful part of our modern world. If we don’t highlight our connection to dinosaurs through time and evolution, we may let the magnificent creatures slowly slip away from us and turn into irrelevant, hoary monsters.

Post-Script: Paleontologist Jack Horner just happened to be visiting the same day I wandered the museum galleries. The museum’s fuzzy Tyrannosaurus puppet came out to greet Horner, and the paleontologist shook hands with the tiny tyrant. [Horner is the man in green in the video below]

A restoration of Futalognkosaurus. Art by Nobu Tamura, image from Wikipedia.

On June 23rd, the Royal Ontario Museum is going to open a tribute to some of the largest and strangest dinosaurs ever found, in Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants From Gondwana. The centerpiece of the celebration is a full-size mount of the huge sauropod Futalognkosaurus—a long-necked, 105-foot titan that was described in 2007. And as part of the lead-up to the exhibit’s debut, the Toronto Star is featuring a time-lapse video of how paleontologists put the dinosaur together. After just a few hours, an 87-million-year-old giant stands again.

A new reconstruction of Utahceratops at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Photo by the author.

Cretaceous Utah was a strange place. Today’s arid, sage- and juiper-covered badlands in the southern part of the state preserve the remnants of swampy prehistoric environments that sat along the coast of a vanished seaway. And these wet habitats were inhabited by an array of bizarre dinosaurs that paleontologists are still in the process of describing. Among the recent discoveries is Utahceratops gettyi, a roughly 76-million-year-old horned dinosaur that has just been put on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah. (Full disclosure: I am currently a paleontology volunteer at the museum.)

Even though the new Natural History Museum of Utah building opened last fall, the museum is still in the process of installing a few more fossil skeletons. Utahceratops is the latest to be added to the petrified cast, standing right next to the hadrosaurs Gryposaurus and Parasaurolophus. I was happy to see the dinosaur’s skeleton come together in the exhibit last week. There was a full artistic reconstruction in the 2010 paper that described the dinosaur, but it’s another thing altogether to see the dinosaur’s reconstructed skeleton—posed as if to walk right off the museum’s Cretaceous platform and head right out the door.

The head of Tyrannosaurus at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum. Photo by the author.

Las Vegas, Nevada, is not a city I immediately associate with dinosaurs. To judge by the billboards along Interstate 15 approaching town, slot machines, strip clubs and performances by has-been comedians is what the town is all about. But, strange as it may seem, Las Vegas has a natural history museum, and the small building is home to some of the worst dinosaurs I have ever seen.

In execution, the Las Vegas Natural History Museum feels less like a true museum and more like a curiosity cabinet cobbled together out of taxidermy mounts and anthropological items. A lion pouncing on a bucking wildebeest greets patrons along the main corridor, and a glass case shows off a collection of African ceremonial masks without providing any cultural context for the items. Splintering whale bones and life-size shark models decorate the nearby marine life gallery, and despite the fact that Las Vegas has no immediate connection to human origins, a gallery downstairs presents a series of disturbingly inaccurate early human mannequins. “Lucy” certainly deserves better. But I wasn’t there for the trophy room of stuffed mammals or the Egyptian tomb exhibit. I had come for the dinosaurs.

A truly terrible Deinonychus, on display at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum. Photo by the author.

The first thing I saw upon walking into the Engelstad Family Prehistoric Life Gallery was an utterly atrocious Deinonychus. Plastered with feathers, the sickle-clawed predator looked as if it had been tarred and feathered for some Early Cretaceous offense. While I have repeatedly griped that there are too many naked dinosaurs in books, movies and museum displays, this poor creature made me reconsider my insistence on this point. No wonder some people feel that feathered dinosaurs look stupid—when restored without careful reference to living birds, some downy deinonychosaurs really do strain our love for dinosaurs.

A few other creatures, such as our sail-backed cousin Dimetrodon and a model of the extinct whale Zygorhiza, inhabit the hall, but the dinosaurs are given top billing. Almost all are sculptures or animatronics. A brown, dopey-looking Herrerasaurus squats in the corner of one exhibit, sharing little resemblance with the actual predatory dinosaur, and visitors can push a button to make a seafoam green Allosaurus bellow ineffectually. Nearby, a small pack of Troodon pose to chase away a nest-raiding mammal, and while I was disappointed that these dinosaurs were not feathery, a look back at the dreadful Deinonychus made me feel that it may have been best to leave these dinosaurs without plumage. The grand centerpiece is a diorama of that most famous face-off: Triceratops versus Tyrannosaurus. The ornery horned dinosaur constantly jerked and snorted, and the Tyrannosaurus—a recent recipient of some mechanical surgery based on the square cut in its right side—was poised to charge.

I couldn’t figure out what the point of the exhibit was. The displays provided a minimum of educational tidbits, such as the difference between “bird-hipped” and “lizard-hipped” dinosaurs, but I did not see any of the visitors look at the other panels. The monstrous dinosaurs seemed to speak for themselves, at least with the help of pushbutton snarls. Fossils were almost absent from the hall. A few isolated dinosaur track slabs were scattered through the hall, and a small glass case contained a single vertebra from Camarasaurus, but that was nearly all. (There is another display about dinosaur eggs, but that part of the room was so dimly lit that I couldn’t read the explanatory panels or see the eggs.) Another exhibit, about Nevada’s changing landscape, noted that the time of the dinosaurs is poorly known in Nevada, and the prehistoric hall is certainly a testament to that.

There’s more than one way to display dinosaurs. Not every museum has to be Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History or the American Museum of Natural History. There are so many stories to tell about dinosaurs lives—how they grew, ate, fought, reproduced and more—that small, regional museums have ample opportunity to show off aspects of dinosaur biology that might get missed in the famous fossil halls of bigger, older institutions. And local museums can play an important role in displaying pieces of local geologic history that may be hidden in collections elsewhere. But the Las Vegas Natural History Museum’s paleontology hall feels more like a tourist trap, populated by low-grade dinosaurs presented without any unifying story or aim. Dinosaurs have much to tell us about evolution, extinction and past worlds, and it is a shame to see them treated as mere monsters made to roar on command.

An Allosaurus threatens a Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Photo by the author.

Wherever you go in the United States, you’re probably no more than a few hours away from a dinosaur skeleton. The “ruling reptiles” are virtually everywhere. From field sites to museum displays, the country is dotted with dinosaurs, and to coincide with Smithsonian magazine’s new Evotourism feature I have compiled a short “Dinotourism” subset of destinations for the Mesozoic-minded.

The Dinosaur Diamond: Utah and Colorado form the heart of dinosaur country. A scenic byway system called the Dinosaur Diamond links some of the top spots along the border of the two states. Among the highlights are the Allosaurus-rich bonebed at the Cleveland-Lloyd dinosaur quarry in the west; Dinosaur National Monument and the dinosaur-infested towns of Vernal and Dinosaur, Colorado to the north; Fruita, Colorado’s Dinosaur Journey Museum to the southeast; and dinosaur track sites around Moab, Utah to the south. Some of the points along the byway are also within a few hours of other dinosaur attractions around Salt Lake City and Denver, making the Dinosaur Diamond an especially handy system for anyone in want of a Jurassic road trip.

Dinosaur Park: Dinosaurs are not only found out West. Maryland recently set aside a small patch of exposed Cretaceous time in the form of Dinosaur Park in the town of Laurel. If you plan your trip right, you may even get to poke around the remaining fossil-bearing layers on open-house days. Don’t expect to find any complete dinosaurs, though—you need a sharp eye to detect the small, isolated bones and teeth that come out of this site.

American Museum of Natural History: No list of top dinosaur sites would be complete without the American Museum of Natural History. The Allosaurus vs. Barosaurus battle in the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda and the fourth floor dinosaur halls are magnificent galleries of dinosaurian celebrities, made all the more rich by the imprint of history. Even though the dinosaur halls received an overhaul in the 1990s—including some chiropractic work of Tyrannosaurus and the correct head for Apatosaurus—many of the old specimens could not be moved or altered, and so they remain in the same positions as they were mounted in when famous paleontologists such as Barnum Brown and Henry Fairfield Osborn stomped around the place. The AMNH is also remarkable for placing their dinosaurs in an evolutionary context. If you follow the pathways through the exhibits carefully, you can see the big picture of dinosaur evolution.

Petrified Forest National Park: Although this park in eastern Arizona does not boast many dinosaurs, that is exactly what makes it significant. Petrified Forest National Park preserves a spectacular landscape of the Late Triassic time before dinosaurs became the dominant vertebrates on land. The slender, graceful theropod dinosaur Coelophysis has been found here, but most of the animals this creature lived alongside belonged to groups such as the crocodile-like phytosaurs, the “armadillodiles” called aetosaurs, and powerful, deep-skulled predators called “rauisuchians,” among others you can see at the park’s visitor centers. If you want to see the vestiges of the early days of the dinosaurs, this national park is one of the most beautiful places to go.

Museum of the Rockies: There are plenty of dinosaur exhibits in American museums large and small, but the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana sets itself apart by putting research and significant specimens up front. The skull of a juvenile Daspletosaurus, the “Wankel rex,” parts of “Big Al” and a complete growth series of Triceratops skulls are just a few of the remarkable displays in the museum’s dinosaur hall. Even better for hardcore dinosaur fans, the museum updates the plaques attached to the exhibits to highlight recently published research and even provides citations for those who want to track down the relevant papers when they get back home.

Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History: Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History may initially seem to be a strange addition to this list. Their dinosaur hall is painfully drab and out of date (although a renovation is scheduled in the years to come). But what makes this place an essential stop for any dinosaur aficionado is Rudolph Zallinger’s Age of Reptiles mural. This fresco secco is a masterpiece of modern art and represents dinosaurs as paleontologists understood them during the mid-2oth century. (The often-reproduced smaller version on books and posters came from a draft Zallinger created for himself as a guide—the actual mural is different than the scaled-down reproductions you have seen before.) Even better, the dinosaur hall juxtaposes this outdated imagery with that which replaced it. At the back of the hall is a leaping Deinonychus—the sickle-clawed theropod described by Yale paleontologist John Ostrom in 1969 that helped spark the “Dinosaur Renaissance.” If you kneel down just right, you can see the predator against a background of Zallinger’s plodding dinosaurs.

St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm: Dinosaur bones are great, but tracks hold their own charms. After all, footprints represent the actual behavior of once-living animals, and the St. George dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm in southern Utah has an abundance of fossil tracks. Modeled after the working-museum model of Dinosaur National Monument, this site is a museum built over an early Jurassic track site covered by dinosaur footprints. Particular track specimens line a pathway around the museum, but visitors can also see the intact surface on which many footprints are still preserved.

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County: What’s better than one Tyrannosaurus? A Tyrannosaurus trio. That’s the view taken by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County‘s new dinosaur exhibit, which presents a growth series of three Tyrannosaurus rex as its centerpiece. But that’s not all. The new exhibit mixes updated skeletal mounts of Carnotaurus, Triceratops and other dinosaurs with beautiful artwork and interactive displays. The top floor of the exhibit, in particular, features multiple displays on paleobiology and how paleontologists extract information about dinosaur lives from fossil bone. An additional perk—the museum has detailed dinosaur puppets that regularly put on shows and sometimes wander the museum halls. The adorable, fuzzy Tyrannosaurus juvenile alone is worth a visit.

Fernbank Museum of Natural History: During the past two decades, South America has yielded some of the most impressive dinosaur giants. The casts of two such creature form the centerpiece of Georgia’s Fernbank Museum of Natural History. Although reconstructions of the enormous theropod Giganotosaurus can be seen at other museums, the Fernbank is special in presenting the carnivore alongside a cast of the absolutely immense sauropod Argentinosaurus—perhaps the largest dinosaur of all time. If you want to have that feeling of being dwarfed by Mesozoic giants, this display is what you might be looking for.

Field Museum of Natural History: If Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History has one claim to dinosaurian fame, it is “Sue,” a nearly complete Tyrannosaurus rex. There’s no better place to get a feel for what the great Cretaceous tyrant was actually like. But don’t let Sue’s star power outshine the museum’s other dinosaurs. In addition to the big Brachiosaurus out front, the Field also places dinosaurs in the context of evolution in their Evolving Planet exhibition. Paleo-art fans will also find much to enjoy—the Field is home to some classic renderings of prehistoric life by the highly-skilled paleo-artist Charles R. Knight.

Dinosaur Provincial Park: This isn’t an American dinosaur site, but is important enough and close enough to squeeze its way into the list. Located in Alberta, Canada, the strata of Dinosaur Provincial Park has supplied many of the world’s major museums, including the AMNH, with spectacular dinosaur fossils and continues to yield more information about dinosaur biology, ecology and evolution near the end of their reign. This park is also within a few hours’ drive of the Royal Tyrrell Museum and the dinosaur-populated town of Drumheller, Alberta.

This is just a short list of a few highlights—there are plenty of other field sites and museums out there, including Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (a.k.a. The Evolution Museum). Do you have additional recommendations? Let us know in the comments.

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 reconstructed skull of Marshosaurus at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Photo by the author.

Eastern Utah’s fossil-filled Cleveland-Lloyd quarry is best known for its fossils of Allosaurus. From the time the site was opened in 1929 to the present, the scattered remains of at least 46 Allosaurus have been collected from the roughly 147-million-year-old slice of Late Jurassic rock. But Allosaurus has not been the only dinosaur found there. Rare pieces the huge herbivores Barosaurus, Camarasaurus, Camptosaurus and Stegosaurus have been picked out of Cleveland-Lloyd, as have the remains of other predatory dinosaurs such as the early tyrannosauroid Stokesosaurus, the massive Torvosaurus, the well-ornamented Ceratosaurus and a poorly known theropod named Marshosaurus.

Up until about a year ago, I had never heard of Marshosaurus. Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus and, to a lesser extent, Torvosaurus were traditionally promoted as the predators of the Late Jurassic in North America. That’s why I was surprised to see the restored skull of Marshosaurus set into an explanatory display in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History during the reception at last year’s Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference. The skull looked slender and quite unlike the deep skulls of the bigger Morrison theropods I had previously learned about. What was this dinosaur?

Marshosaurus was not a new dinosaur that had slipped under my radar. Quite the opposite. In 1979 paleontologist James Madsen, Jr. named and initially described the dinosaur on the basis of a virtually complete pelvis and a few elements of the upper jaws found in the Cleveland-Lloyd quarry. Madsen acknowledged that this wasn’t much to describe a new genus from and lamented that there was simply not enough funding to sift through, prepare and study the dozens of other bones at the site that might belong to the new, relatively small dinosaur. Nevertheless, the known parts of the theropod were clearly different from those of other dinosaurs found at the site, including small Allosaurus, and so Madsen gave the creature the title Marshosaurus bicentismus in honor of the famous paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh and the bicentennial anniversary of the United States of America.

Parts of Marshosaurus later turned up in other dinosaur bonebeds. Additional skull material, a partial vertebral column, and other portions of the skeleton were found at northeastern Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument in a slightly geologically older part of the Morrison Formation called the Salt Wash Member. (The Cleveland-Lloyd site is part of the stratigraphically higher Brushy Basin Member.) Taken together, the collected remains of Marshosaurus seem to represent an approximately 18-foot-long predator which was in a lower weight class than the giant Allosaurus and Torvosaurus of the same environments. What variety of theropod Marshosaurus was, however, has been unclear until recently.

In his 2010 revision of the dinosaur Megalosaurus, paleontologist Roger Benson included Marshosaurus in his analysis of theropod relationships. Benson found Marshosaurus to be a relatively basal member of the Megalosauroidea—a large and varied group of predatory dinosaurs which presently includes the sail-backed spinosaurs in one subgroup and dinosaurs such as Torvosaurus and Megalosaurus in another. This would mean that Marshosaurus would be an early and archaic member within this large group which generally represents the form of the megalosauroids before the big split between the Spinosaurus and Torvosaurus lineages. Further analyses will test these hypothesized relationships, and perhaps additional Marshosaurus material will be identified from places like Dinosaur National Monument and the Cleveland-Lloyd quarry in the future. We still know very little about this dinosaur. For one thing, how did this relatively small carnivore make a living alongside so many other more imposing predators?

References:

Benson, R. (2010). A description of Megalosaurus bucklandii (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the Bathonian of the UK and the relationships of Middle Jurassic theropods
Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 158 (4), 882-935 DOI: 10.1111/j.1096-3642.2009.00569.x

Madsen, J. 1979. A second new theropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic of east central Utah. Utah Geology 3(1): 51–60.

When I was a young dinosaur fan, Spinosaurus was one of my most favorite dinosaurs. What could be more fantastic than a giant predatory dinosaur equipped with a bizarre sail? But Spinosaurus as I knew it during the 1980s—imagine a fin-backed Allosaurus—looked significantly different from the dinosaur as we know it today. The reason for the big change is largely attributable to the discovery of a different, related dinosaur in England.

In 1986, Alan Charig and Angela Milner described a very strange, crocodile-snouted dinosaur they called Baryonyx. The Cretaceous creature turned out to be the key to identifying what is now one of the most famous dinosaur groups, the spinosaurs. Paleontologists had been finding pieces of spinosaurs for over a century, but often the teeth of these dinosaurs were confused for those of crocodiles, and the original Spinosaurus fossils were destroyed during Allied bombing of Germany in WWII. When Baryonyx was discovered, however, paleontologists began to recognize the similarities between it, older discoveries and similar dinosaurs that were soon found in South America, Africa, Asia and Australia. Some, such as Suchomimus and Spinosaurus from Africa, had sails, while others—including Baryonyx—did not, but the initial discovery formed the basis for the great spinosaur makeover. (Even before new Spinosaurus material was found, the relationship between it and other spinosaurs like Baryonyx was used to restore the predator with heavy-clawed hands and an elongated snout.) In the above video, created by London’s Natural History Museum, paleontologist Angela Milner explains how the dinosaur was discovered and why Baryonyx is so peculiar compared to other predatory dinosaurs.

The reconstructed skeletal cast of the juvenile Apatosaurus that will go on display at the Sam Noble Museum. Photo courtesy the Sam Noble Museum.

Sauropod dinosaurs were some of the largest animals to walk the earth, but they started off small. Many newly hatched sauropods were so diminutive that they could have stood in the palm of your hand. It’s easy to forget this fact. Both because juvenile sauropod specimens are rare and because museums often make room for only the most impressive specimens, dinosaur exhibits the world over often feature the remains of adult (or near-adult) animals without providing any indication of how the behemoths started their lives. Now, with the addition of a small Apatosaurus, Oklahoma’s Sam Noble Museum will be among the exceptions.

The Sam Noble Museum will introduce the public to the reconstructed skeletal cast of a juvenile Apatosaurus on Friday, October 15. The dinosaur, which stands just under three feet high, will be placed beneath a much larger representative of the same genus in the museum’s “Clash of the Titans” centerpiece. According to a press release announcing the specimen’s unveiling, the cast is principally based on the bones of an incomplete young Apatosaurus found in Oklahoma by paleontologist John Willis Stovall in the 1930s. As far as I am aware, there is only one other baby Apatosaurus on display, an even smaller reconstructed skeletal cast nicknamed “Ajax” at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

Just a small part of the huge bonebed which is Dinosaur National Monument's quarry wall. Photo by the author.

Two summers ago, I visited Dinosaur National Monument for the first time. The park was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen, but, I have to admit, I left a little disappointed. Ever since I was a dinosaur-crazed kid I wanted to see the famous quarry wall strewn with hundreds of bones representing some of the most famous Late Jurassic dinosaurs. But when I arrived, the building that housed the bones had already been closed for three years. The geology of the site worked against the edifice by expanding and contracting by minute amounts over and over again—so much so that parts of the building had shifted dramatically and put the entire structure at risk of collapse.

Not long before my initial visit, though, it was announced that the park would receive more than $13 million to restore the building and welcome visitors once more. I couldn’t wait for the grand re-opening, especially after I spent more than a week and a half looking for new fossils at the monument with the Natural History Museum of Utah field crew this past summer. I saw the quarry building from the road every day I was in the field, but I had to wait until October 4, 2011 for the doors of the quarry to once again open to the public.

As it stands now, the famous quarry wall is only a portion of what once was. The site once extended about 100 feet to either side of the current quarry face, and the bonebed also extended upwards to a higher hill that paleontologist Earl Douglass and his co-workers removed during the early 20th century. Many of the fossils they discovered in those parts of the quarry can now be seen at museums such as the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. (Those old bones were recently refurbished in a new dinosaurs exhibit I got to see during last year’s SVP conference.) Nevertheless, the quarry face is still a beautiful site. Partially articulated limbs, a sauropod skull situated on the end of a vertebral string, parts of various spinal columns and numerous isolated bones can be seen poking out all over the rock face. That’s how they will remain—prep work has stopped on the fossils, and they will stay in their place as a lesson about life and death 149 million years ago.

An Allosaurus munches on a baby Stegosaurus in the new DNM mural created by Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger. Photo by the author.

The bones are the main draw, of course, but the new museum also boasts some impressive extras. Several skeleton casts on the lower level introduce visitors to some of the charismatic creatures seen scattered over the quarry wall, and a beautiful mural by artists Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger fleshes out Late Jurassic dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus, Torvosaurus, Dryosaurus and Apatosaurus, in addition to the many small mammals and reptiles that lived alongside them. Make sure you turn around to look at the mural behind the baby Stegosaurus cast when leaving the building—I don’t think I have ever seen an illustration of an Allosaurus chomping down on a baby Stegosaurus before.

More updates and improvements are scheduled but were not ready at the time of the big unveiling. The museum will include virtual displays that will explain how so many dinosaurs came to be accumulated in one spot, as well as what bones on the quarry wall correspond to which dinosaurs. Even without those extras, though, the new quarry wall is a fantastic testament to deep time, evolution and a lost world we are still striving to understand.

For more details about Dinosaur National Monument, see the Dinosaur National Monument Quarry Visitor Center Project blog. The blog is written by Dan Chure, the park’s paleontologist.

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.

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.

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?