Dinosaurs are much more than real monsters that fire our imaginations, but, let’s face it, part of their persistent appeal is that many were enormous prehistoric oddities. And it’s just that aspect of dinosaurian nature that is raising ire in a historically-rich California town and on an Australian golf course.

San Juan Capistrano, California is famous for the local cliff swallows and the historic Spanish architecture, but the town has recently been in the news because of an unwelcome dinosaur. According to the LA Times, a huge sauropod statue erected in the town’s petting zoo has drawn the ire of those who seek to retain some semblance of southern California’s past. Where kids and the zoo’s owner sees the dinosaur as a fanciful distraction, local historians argue that the dinosaur is totally out of place with the rest of the town’s decor. The dinosaur is staying put for now, but may yet be removed if the city decides that there’s just no place for a dinosaur in a place where Californian history and modern life already mix.

A different dinosaur is frustrating Australia’s professional golfers. The wealthy owner of the Palmer Coolum Resort has installed a 26 foot long, animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex in the middle of the course. Along with other recent installations, ESPN reports, the dinosaur is expected to adversely affect the games of Australian PGA Championship golfers set to play there. With the resort’s owner promising more dinosaurs on the way, the sports group has decided to move the tournament elsewhere after this year. Whether a sauropod looks out of place is one thing–having a T. rex get in the way of your shot is another.

Not everyone is so bothered by giant dinosaurs, though. A Best Western hotel in Colorado is taking on an entirely prehistoric theme, including fossil casts and dinosaur sculptures. In addition to attracting tourists, the hotel’s owner says he wants to draw attention to Colorado’s exceptional fossil sites, such as the nearby track site at Dinosaur Ridge. Dinosaur sculptures are frustrating eyesores to some and paleo-vacation essentials to others.

The giant sauropod Futalognkosaurus (at left) with some of its Cretaceous neighbors. Art by Maurilio Oliveira.

Which was the biggest dinosaur ever? We don’t know. Even though the size-based superlative draws a great deal of attention, paleontologists have uncovered so many scrappy sauropod skeletons that it’s difficult to tell who was truly the most titanic dinosaur of all. But, among the current spread of candidates, Futalognkosaurus dukei is one of the most complete giant dinosaurs yet found.

Discovered in 2000, and named in 2007 by Universidad Nacional del Comahue paleontologist Jorge Calvo and colleagues, Futalognkosaurus was one of many dinosaurs found in an exceptionally rich, roughly 90-million-year0old deposit in northwest Argentina. From fossil plants to pterosaurs, fish and dinosaurs, the one site entombed vestiges of a vibrant Cretaceous ecosystem. And, on that landscape, no dinosaur was as grand the newly named titanosaur.

Contrary to what you might expect given their skeletal sturdiness, the biggest sauropods are often found as partial skeletons. Our knowledge of Argentinosaurus, Puertasaurus, Supersaurus, Diplodocus hallorum and other giants is frustratingly incomplete, and figuring out how large they truly were relies on estimation from more complete representatives of other species.

The lack of complete tails from these dinosaurs makes the matter even more problematic. Dinosaur tails varied in length from individual to individual, and different subgroups had proportionally longer or shorter tails. In the case of Diplodocus hallorum, for example, a great deal of the dinosaur’s estimated  100-foot-plus length comes from the fact that other Diplodocus species had very long, tapering tails.

We don’t really know how long Futalognkosaurus was because, with the exception of a single vertebra, the dinosaur’s tail is entirely missing. Nevertheless, the sauropod that Calvo and coauthors described is remarkable for encompassing the entire neck, back and associated ribs, and the majority of the hips. Together, these elements represent over half the skeleton and comprise the most complete giant sauropod individual yet known.

Even if skeletal incompleteness keeps us from knowing exactly how big Futalognkosaurus was, the collected bones can leave no doubt that this was a truly enormous dinosaur. Calvo and coauthors estimated that the whole animal stretched between 105 and 112 feet in length, which would put it in the same class as the more famous (and less complete) Argentinosaurus. As the paleontologists at SV-POW! said when they posted images of Futalognkosaurus bones next to Juan Porfiri, who helped describe the dinosaur, there’s no doubt that the sauropod was “darned big.” The challenge is finding and filling in the parts of the dinosaur’s body that have not yet been found. There will undoubtedly be other challengers for the title of biggest dinosaur, but, for now, Futalognkosaurus remains our most detailed representative of the biggest of the big.

References:

Calvo, J., Porfiri, J., González-Riga, B., Kellner, A. 2007. A new Cretaceous terrestrial ecosystem from Gondwana with the description of a new sauropod dinosaur. Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências. 79, 3: 529-541

Calvo, J., Porfiri, J., González-Riga, B., Kellner, A. 2007. Anatomy of Futalognkosaurus dukei Calvo, Porfiri, González Riga, & Kellner, 2007 (Dinosauria, Titanosauridae) from the Neuquen Group, Late Cretaceous, Patagonia, Argentina. Arquivos do Museu Nacional 65, 4: 511–526.

Novas, F. 2009. The Age of Dinosaurs in South America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 201-202

Mamenchisaurus, one of the longest-necked dinosaurs of all time, perfectly represents the bizarre nature of sauropods. Art by Steveoc 86, image from Wikimedia Commons.

Sauropods were extreme dinosaurs. From the relatively small dwarfed species–still a respectable 12 feet long or so–to giants that stretched over 100 feet long, these small-headed, column-limbed, long-necked dinosaurs were among the strangest creatures ever to walk the earth. Don’t be fooled by the familiarity of species like Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus; the anatomy of sauropods was so strange that paleontologists are still debating basic issues of their biology. How sauropods mated, fed, pumped blood from their hearts to their heads and even how they held their necks have all provided rich grounds for debate among specialists. Among the longest-running mysteries is how such enormous and undoubtedly active animals prevented themselves from overheating. Perhaps the solution lies in an anatomical quirk shared with birds.

Diplodocus and kin might have had a problem with body temperature. Multiple lines of evidence, from histology to limb proportions, have indicated that extinct dinosaurs had physiological profiles more like those of avian dinosaurs and mammals than any reptile, but maintaining an active metabolism and high body temperature came at a cost for gigantic dinosaurs. The bigger the dinosaur, the more difficult it would have been to dump excess heat. If a hot-running sauropod had to hoof it to catch up with a mate or escape a stalking theropod, the dinosaur could run the risk of overheating through exercise.

The difficulty big sauropods must have faced with shedding heat has sometimes been cited as a reason that these dinosaurs must have had an ectothermic, crocodile-like physiology, or that they were “gigantotherms” that only maintained relatively high body temperatures by virtue of their size and therefore had a little more leeway with heat generated through exercise. As paleontologist Matt Wedel argued in a 2003 review of sauropod biology, though, these positions are based upon assumptions about dinosaur respiratory systems and physiology that used crocodylians as models. Not only has evidence from bone microstructure indicated that sauropods grew at an extremely rapid pace on par with that of mammals, but paleontologists have found that sauropods had birdlike respiratory systems that combined lungs with a system of air sacs. Such a system would have been attuned to cope with an active, endothermic lifestyle, including a way to dump excess heat.

We know sauropods had air sacs because of their bones. In the neck, especially, air sacs stemming from the core of the respiratory system invaded the bone and left distinctive indentations behind. (While not always as extensive, theropod dinosaurs show evidence of these air sacs, too. To date, though, no one has found solid evidence of air sacs in the ornithischian dinosaurs, which includes the horned ceratopsians, shovel-beaked hadrosaurs and armored ankylosaurs.) In addition to lightening the skeletons of sauropods and boosting their breathing efficiency, this complex system may have played a role in allowing sauropods to dump heat through evaporative cooling in the same way that large birds do today. The concept is similar to what makes a swamp cooler work–the evaporation of water in the moist tissues of a sauropod’s trachea during exhalation would have helped the dinosaur dump heat into outgoing air.

But the role of air sacs in such a system, much less an animal 80 feet long or more, is unclear. The inference is obvious–like birds, sauropods had the anatomical hardware to cool themselves–but the mechanics of the process are still obscure given that we can’t observe a living Mamenchisaurus. Earlier this fall, however, biologist Nina Sverdlova and colleagues debuted research that may help paleontologists more closely examine sauropod breathing.

Using observations from living birds, Sverdlova created a virtual model of a chicken’s trachea and air sac with an eye towards simulating heat exchange. The researchers found that their relatively simple model was able to approximate experimental data from living birds, and so similar models may help paleobiologists estimate how sauropods dumped heat. We’ll have to wait for what future studies find. This line of evidence won’t totally resolve the debate over sauropod physiology and body temperature, but it may help paleobiologists more closely investigate the costs and benefits of being so big.

References:

Sander, P., Christian, A., Clauss, M., Fechner, R., Gee, C., Griebeler, E., Gunga, H., Hummel, J., Mallison, H., Perry, S., Preuschoft, H., Rauhut, O., Remes, K., Tutken, T., Wings, O., Witzel, U. 2011. Biology of the sauropod dinosaurs: the evolution of gigantism. Biological Reviews 86: 117-155

Sverdlova, N., Lambertz, M., Witzel, U., Perry, S. 2012. Boundary conditions for heat transfer and evaporative cooling in the trachea and air sac system of the domestic fowl: A two-dimensional CFD analysis. PLOS One 7,9. e45315

Wedel, M. 2003. Vertebral pneumaticity, air sacs, and the physiology of sauropod dinosaurs. Paleobiology 29, 2: 243-255

A mount of Cetiosaurus at the New Walk Museum in Leicester. While the neck of this sauropod is almost completely known, no skull has ever been described. Photo by Flickr user Paul Stainthorp.

Sauropods were magnificent dinosaurs. These long-necked, small-headed titans were unlike anything that has evolved before or since, and they were so strange that paleontologists are still debating the basics of how Apatosaurus and kin actually lived. As iconic as their skeletons are now, though, the first sauropod ever described was initially envisioned as a very different sort of creature. The great Cetiosaurus was originally seen as a gargantuan, plesiosaur-crunching crocodile.

In 1841, the British anatomist Richard Owen described a curious collection of limb bones and vertebrae found at various locations in England. The limb elements reminded Owen of the same bones in crocodiles, and the vertebrae were reminiscent of those in whales. The scattered elements seemed to correspond in structure to aquatic animals, and since function was dictated by skeletal form, Owen believed that Cetiosaurus–the “whale lizard”–must have been a marine predator larger than anything that had been found before.

The following year, in his massive Report on British fossil reptiles, Part II, Owen reassessed the various prehistoric reptiles from his country. This was the landmark monograph in which Owen coined the term “Dinosauria,” but he didn’t include Cetiosaurus within the newly named group. The animal seemed vastly different from Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus. Dinosaurs, in Owen’s view, were terrestrial animals with upright limbs, and he saw Cetiosaurus as a marine carnivore. Owen grouped the poorly known animals with crocodiles, instead.

It wasn’t until 1869 that Cetiosaurus was formally recognized as a dinosaur. Thomas Henry Huxley, Owen’s chief academic rival, proposed that Cetiosaurus was a close relative of Iguanodon, although he later changed his mind and suggested that the puzzling animal was an oddball that didn’t belong with crocodiles or dinosaurs. Other researchers were more confident that Cetiosaurus belonged among the dinosaurs. John Phillips, in an 1871 monograph, proposed that Cetiosaurus was an herbivorous dinosaur, and in 1875 Owen conceded that his creature was a huge, aquatic dinosaur.

Like many other early dinosaur finds, the identity of Cetiosaurus was obscured by a lack of material and the unfamiliarity of the Mesozoic curiosities. When O.C. Marsh, E.D. Cope and other North American paleontologists began to uncover relatively complete skeletons of dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and “Brontosaurus” from the American West during the late 19th century, a more accurate vision of Cetiosaurus as a sauropod started to come into focus. All the same, researchers named multiple species of this dinosaur from various sites of different ages. Cetiosaurus became a taxonomic wastebasket for numerous scrappy sauropods found in England.

Paleontologists Paul Upchurch and John Martin sorted out the mess in 2003. Out of 13 different species named from bones belonging to different kinds of sauropods that lived millions of years apart, Upchurch and Martin recognized only one valid taxon–Cetiosaurus oxoniensis. This sauropod trod Jurassic England around 170 million years ago. And even though our knowledge of this dinosaur’s skeleton isn’t yet complete, discoveries both old and new have helped paleontologists outline what this historically significant dinosaur was like.

In 1868, quarry workers at Bletchingdon Station (near Oxford, England) uncovered a Cetiosaurus bonebed containing a trio of skeletons, one being much larger than the others. These bones formed the basis of Phillips’ study of the dinosaur, and, as Upchurch and Martin noted, “potentially represents one of the best preserved sauropods from the Jurassic of Europe.” A century later, in 1968, workers at Williamson Cliffe Brickworks in Rutland discovered bones in their quarry, and some of the remains were briefly described by M.D. Jones in 1970. Upchurch and Martin reexamined the Rutland material as part of their bigger Cetiosaurus project and found that the individual dinosaur is represented by an almost complete neck, various parts of the spinal column and limb elements, making it one of the best-preserved Cetiosaurus ever found.

Altogether, the bones of Cetiosaurus indicate that the sauropod was medium to large in size, though exactly how big this dinosaur was isn’t clear. (Estimating the length and mass of incompletely-known dinosaurs is a difficult task.) What makes Cetiosaurus of special interest to paleontologists, though, is that it was a relatively archaic form of sauropod. Most of the famous sauropods–Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus and their ilk–belong to lineages within a big group called the neosauropoda. Cetiosaurus seems to fall just outside this group, and so the dinosaur might clue paleontologists in to what sauropods were like just before the fantastic radiation of neosauropods during the Late Jurassic. It took three decades to change the animal from a crocodile to a dinosaur, and a century more for the sauropod’s identity to be untangled, but, now that the dinosaur has a definite name and evolutionary identity, paleontologists can start to investigate the biological secrets locked inside Cetiosaurus bones.

Check out previous entries in the Dinosaur Alphabet here.

References:

Naish, D. 2009. The Great Dinosaur Discoveries. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 30-31

Upchurch, P., Martin, J. 2003. The Anatomy and Taxonomy of Cetiosaurus (Saurischia, Sauropoda) from the Middle Jurassic of England. Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology 23 (1): 208–231

Upchurch, P., Martin, J. 2002. The Rutland Cetiosaurus: the anatomy and relationships of a Middle Jurassic British sauropod dinosaur. Palaeontology, 45: 1049–1074.

Wilson, J. 2005. Overview of sauropod phylogeny and evolution, pp. 15-49  in Curry Rogers and Wilson (eds.), The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology, Berkley: University of California Press.

One of the vertebrae–as seen from the front (a) and back (b)–used to name the dinosaur Arkharavia heterocoelica. Although originally thought to come from a sauropod, it turns out that this bone belonged to a hadrosaur. From Alifanov and Bolotsky, 2010.

Dinosaurs come and go. Even though paleontologists are naming new dinosaurs at a fantastic rate–hardly a week seems to go by without the announcement of a previously-unknown species–researchers are also sinking and revising previously-discovered taxa as new finds are compared against what has already been found. The ever-growing ontogeny debate–which threatens the horned dinosaur Torosaurus and the hadrosaur Anatotitan, among others–is just one part of these paleontological growing pains. Sometimes dinosaur identity crises can be even more drastic.

Yesterday I wrote about a new paper by paleontologist Pascal Godefroit of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and co-authors that redescribes the charismatic hadrosaur Olorotitan. As I read through the paper, a brief, but significant, side note caught my eye. In the section describing the deposits in which the known Olorotitan skeletons were found, the paper mentions that paleontologists V.R. Alifanov and Yuri Bolotsky described a sauropod–one of the long-necked, heavy bodied dinosaurs–from the same locality. On the basis of a tooth and several isolated tail vertebrae, Alifanov and Bolotsky named the dinosaur Arkharavia in their 2010 description. Since the encasing rock was deposited during the latest Cretaceous, around 70 million years ago or so, this was apparently one of the last sauropods on earth.

Only Godefroit and colleagues, including Yuri Bolotsky, have now revised the identity of Arkharavia. In their paper on Olorotitan, the paleontologists make the passing comment that “those vertebrae [used to name the sauropod] likely belong to hadrosaurid dinosaurs.” Rather than being a previously-unknown kind of sauropod, then, the fossils used to name “Arkharavia” probably belonged to one of the two hadrosaurs that dominate the locality–Olorotitan or Kundurosaurus.

This isn’t the first time a hadrosaur has been confused for a sauropod. Two years ago, paleontologists Michael D’Emic and Jeffrey Wilson of the University of Michigan and Richard Thompson of the University of Arizona determined that so-called “sauropod” vertebrae found in the 75-million-year-old rock of Arizona’s Santa Rita Mountains should actually be attributed to a hadrosaur akin to Gryposaurus. Fragmentary dinosaurs can be extremely tricky to identify correctly.

These changes aren’t frivolous. Identifications of isolated bones affect our understanding of dinosaur evolution and history. In the case of the misidentified hadrosaur bones from Arizona, the revised diagnosis altered the picture of when sauropods returned to North America after an absence spanning tens of millions of years. (This is called the “sauropod hiatus” by specialists.)

In the case of Arkharavia, the fossils represented one of the last dinosaurs in eastern Russia before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Misunderstood as sauropod bones, the fossils appeared to be the scrappy evidence for an entire group of dinosaurs at the locality. Properly understood as hadrosaur tail bones, though, the fossils become isolated elements from a group already known to be numerous in the fossil beds. While these changes might sound small, they can certainly influence grand-scale analyses of when certain groups of dinosaurs appeared or went extinct. There’s a big difference between sauropods living alongside hadrosaurs just before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction and a habitat dominated by hadrosaurs and devoid of sauropods. Even isolated bones can make a big difference.

References:

Alifanov, V., Bolotsky, Y. (2010). Arkharavia heterocoelica gen. et sp. nov., a New Sauropod Dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of the Far East of Russia Paleontological Journal, 44 (1), 84-91 DOI: 10.1134/S0031030110010119

Godefroit, P., Bolotsky, Y.L., and Bolotsky, I.Y. (2012). Olorotitan arharensis, a hollow-crested hadrosaurid dinosaur from the latest Cretaceous of Far Eastern Russia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica DOI: 10.4202/app.2011.0051

A sculpture of Pentaceratops outside the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. Could sexual selection account for the prominent ornaments of this dinosaur? Photo by the author.

Non-avian dinosaurs were weird. That’s one of the reasons we love them so much. There’s nothing quite like a slender-necked Barosaurus, a beautifully-crested Dilophosaurus or lavishly-ornamented Pentaceratops alive today. If such dinosaurs were anything, they were bizarre, but why were they so strange? Each case demands its own explanation, and paleontologists have continuously tussled over whether particular ornaments were weapons, sexual displays or something else.

According to an in-press paper at Trends in Ecology & Evolution, at least some weird dinosaur features may best be understood in the context of mate competition, mate choice and sexual signalling. The paper, by entomologist Robert Knell and colleagues, is the latest in a long-running debate over whether sexual selection had any influence on dinosaur lives and how to detect the hallmark of such pressures.

The debate has been going on for years but only recently increased in intensity. In a 2010 study, paleontologists Kevin Padian and Jack Horner rightly noted that sexual dimorphism–or a significant anatomical difference between the sexes–has never been conclusively demonstrated among non-avian dinosaurs. The idea had been proposed for a variety of dinosaurs using a number of skeletal landmarks, but none of the hypotheses have stuck. Even if sexual dimorphism existed among dinosaurs, we lack the sample size to identify the phenomenon. More than that, Padian and Horner cited the lack of sexual dimorphism as a sign that sexual selection probably wasn’t an important facet in the origin and modification of bizarre dinosaur features. Instead, the researchers hypothesized, the various horns, crests, plates and other ornaments evolved because of species recognition–the ability for dinosaurs to quickly and easily identify members of their own species.

Other researchers disagreed. Knell and Scott Sampson had a brief exchange in the journal pages with Padian and Horner. This was followed by a paper by Dave Hone and co-authors that suggested that mutual sexual selection might explain the mystery of why dinosaurs had bizarre ornaments but don’t seem to exhibit sexual dimorphism. Under this hypothesis, both males and females may prefer mates with elaborate visual signals, and therefore the same prominent structures would be expressed in both sexes. This kind of sexual selection has been documented in modern avian dinosaurs, but, until now, hasn’t been considered as an explanation for the ornamentation of non-avian dinosaurs. Even though mutual sexual selection has not been proven as an evolutionary driver among extinct dinosaurs, it’s a possibility worth considering.

The new paper by Knell and co-authors also draws on modern examples to investigate how we might identify examples of sexual selection among prehistoric species. The paper covers a wide variety of creatures, from ammonites to birds, but, since this is the “Dinosaur Tracking” blog, I’ll focus on how the argument applies to the ever-controversial adornments of non-avian dinosaurs.

As the researchers state, there’s no simple, tell-tale way to identify sexual selection. This is partly because many strange structures are multifunctional, and structures may be co-opted for different functions during the course of their evolution. Think of sauropods. The elongated necks of these dinosaurs allowed them to feed over a wide swath of greenery, but they could have also been used as visual displays. A big fleshy neck is prime advertising space. In this case, a feeding advantage appears to have preceded any signalling function, but the mosaic nature of evolution hinders our efforts to tease apart the influence of different, interacting pressures.

All the same, there are a few clues that can help paleontologists identify possible cases where sexual selection was at play in the deep past. One possible line of investigation is sexual dimorphism, although, as I said above, this has yet to be conclusively demonstrated in dinosaurs. (And, as Knell and co-authors argue, sometimes the sexes might differ for reasons other than sexual selection.) The way prominent displays grew is another phenomenon worth looking into. We would expect that features that make a difference in mating would only appear as the dinosaur approached sexual maturity. Juvenile, and presumably sexually-immature, Lambeosaurus don’t have the full-blown crests of older individuals. Perhaps this is because the crests are sexual signals that only grow as the dinosaurs approach mating age, although it’s possible that the development of crests are related to the overall growth of the dinosaur’s skeleton.

The diversity–or disparity–of ornament shapes among closely-related species may also be important. Even closely-related species of ceratopsid dinosaurs, Knell and collaborators note, had very different horn shapes and arrangements. This could be a sign of sexual selection by way of competition and mate choice, but, as Padian and Horner pointed out, the same evolutionary pattern could be the result of selection for distinct-looking species. Finally, Knell and co-authors cite “costliness” as another potential indicator–if a trait is flashy, requires a good deal of energy to grow and comes at a cost to the organism’s survival potential, then it may be a sexually-selected trait.

Obviously, each line of evidence comes with caveats. Sexual selection can be difficult to identify even among living species, much less extinct ones. It would be strange if sexual selection played no role in dinosaur evolution, but we’re left with the question of how to detect and test the hypothesis of sexual selection. Paleontologists will have to very carefully test hypotheses about bizarre structures, paying careful attention to distinguish between competing alternatives. Ultimately, paleontologists may only be able to identify possible scenarios for the origin and evolution of bizarre features, but studies of modern species can at least provide guidelines for what researchers should look out for.

If we’re truly going to understand the visual signals of dinosaurs, though, we need better sample sizes. We need to know how individuals of the same species varied from one life stage to the next. Without this anatomical foundation, researchers will be left to argue from a typological standpoint that may misconstrue how certain features changed with age and evolved over time. Recall the “Toroceratops” debate–if Triceratops changed into a Torosaurus-form late in life, most likely beyond the onset of sexual maturity, that is certainly going to influence how paleontologists investigate and discuss dinosaur visual signals.

The influence of sexual selection, or lack thereof, will undoubtedly be debated for some time to come. But, as Knell and colleagues conclude, investigating the possible influence of sexual selection in prehistory “is neither a forlorn nor impossible task.” We may yet find out what’s sexy to a dinosaur.

For more on this study, see this post by Dave Hone, one of the paper’s authors.

[My thanks to Darren Naish, another of the paper's authors, for sending me the new study.]

Reference:

Knell, R., Naish, D., Tomkins, J., Hone, D. (2012) Sexual selection in prehistoric animals: detection and implications, Trends in Ecology & Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2012.07.015.

Contrary to a popular myth, Stegosaurus did not a have a butt brain. Photo by the author at the Utah Field House of Natural History in Vernal, Utah.

There’s no shortage of dinosaur myths. Paleontologist Dave Hone recently compiled a list of eight persistent falsehoods over at the Guardian–from the misapprehension that all dinosaurs were huge to the untenable idea that Tyrannosaurus could only scavenge its meals–but there was one particular misunderstanding that caught my attention. For decades, popular articles and books claimed that the armor-plated Stegosaurus and the biggest of the sauropod dinosaurs had second brains in their rumps. These dinosaurs, it was said, could reason “a posteriori” thanks to the extra mass of tissue. It was a cute idea, but a totally wrong hypothesis that actually underscores a different dinosaur mystery.

Dinosaur brain expert Emily Buchholtz outlined the double brain issue in the newly-published second edition of The Complete Dinosaur. The idea stems from the work of 19th-century Yale paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. In an assessment of the sauropod Camarasaurus, Marsh noticed that the canal in the vertebrae over the dinosaur’s hips enlarged into an expanded canal that was larger than the cavity for the dinosaur’s brain. “This is a most suggestive fact,” he wrote, and, according to Buchholtz, in 1881 Marsh described a similar expansion in the neural canal of Stegosaurus as “a posterior braincase.”

Sauropods and stegosaurs seemed like the perfect candidates for butt brains. These huge dinosaurs seemed to have pitiful brain sizes compared to the rest of their body, and a second brain–or similar organ–could have helped coordinate their back legs and tails. Alternatively, the second brain was sometimes cast as a kind of junction box, speeding up signals from the back half of the body up to the primary brain. That is, if such an organ actually existed. As paleontologists now know, no dinosaur had a second brain.

There are two intertwined issues here. The first is that many dinosaurs had noticeable expansions of their spinal cords around their limbs–a feature that left its mark in the size of the neural canal in the vertebrae. This isn’t unusual. As biologists have discovered by studying living species, the enlargement of the spinal cord in the area around the limbs means that there was a greater amount of nervous system tissue in this area, and dinosaurs with larger expansions around the forelimb, for example, probably used their arms more often than dinosaurs without the same kind of enlargement. The expansion of the neural canal can give us some indication about dinosaur movement and behavior.

But the so-called “sacral brain” is something different. So far, this distinct kind of cavity is only seen in stegosaurs and sauropods and is different than the typical expansion of the neural canal. There was something else, other than nerves, filling that space. Frustratingly, though, we don’t really know what that something is.

At the moment, the most promising idea is that the space was similar to a feature in the hips of birds called the glycogen body. As sauropod expert Matt Wedel has pointed out, this space stores energy-rich glycogen in the hips. Perhaps this was true for the sauropods and stegosaurs, too. Again, though, we hit a snag. We don’t really know what the glycogen body does in birds–whether it helps with balance, is a storehouse for nutritious compounds that are drawn upon at specific times or something else. Even if we assume that the expansion in dinosaurs was a glycogen body, we don’t yet know what biological role the feature played. Dinosaurs didn’t have hindbrains, but the significant spaces in the hips of stegosaurs and sauropods still puzzle paleontologists.

All the non-avian dinosaurs are gone. The last of them died out 66 million years ago. All the same, living dinosaurs – birds – aren’t exactly a substitute for Apatosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and Stegosaurus. We miss the truly spectacular, bizarre dinosaurs that lived and died so long ago. At least we can catch brief glimpses of our favorite prehistoric creatures in the ever-increasing list of dinosaur movies, and among the upcoming titles is a film that uses actual legends for its launching point.

When I was young, one of the first dinosaur movies I ever saw was Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. Drawing from myths and unsubstantiated rumors, the film imagined what would happen if scientists discovered living sauropods in the Congo Basin. Indeed, this part of Africa has been the frequent focus of cryptozoologists and creationists who believe that some sort of swamp-dwelling brontosaur is hiding in the swamps and lakes of the region. There’s not even a single shred of evidence that there are sauropods or other dinosaurs in those wetlands, but that hasn’t stopped naive and self-styled explorers from trying to bring a prehistoric beast back alive.

We can still have a little fun with the idea of living sauropods in the realm of fiction, though. Now, almost 30 years after Baby debuted, The Dinosaur Project is taking a darker spin on the same legend.

According to Empire, The Dinosaur Project is another found-footage horror flick that follows a television crew who ultimately stumble upon dinosaurs that were thought to have disappeared millions of years ago. The movie’s official website doesn’t reveal much – it’s just a fake landing page for the “British Cryptozoological Society” with a plea for any information about the missing expedition – although the film’s trailer offers a few glimpses at the various prehistoric creatures that will thin out the cast. Sadly, though, the dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts look like stiff plastic toys come to life. This isn’t the awesome dinosaur movie we’ve been waiting for, but another piece of stinky movie cheese.

The Dinosaur Project debuts next month in the UK.

A reconstructed Acrocanthosaurus at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Photo by the author.

Compared to mounted dinosaur skeletons, fossil footprints might seem like mundane objects. They only record one small part of a fantastic creature, and it is harder to envision a whole dinosaur from the ground up than the wrap flesh around a skeletal frame. But we should not forget that dinosaur footprints are fossilized behavior—stone snapshots of an animal’s life. And sometimes, trackways record dramatic moments in dinosaur lives.

In 1938, American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Roland T. Bird traveled to Glen Rose, Texas to investigate rumors of huge dinosaur tracks found in the vicinity of the Paluxy River. Bird found them in abundance, but one site was especially intriguing. Set in 113-million-year-old rock were the footprints of a huge sauropod dinosaur—and it seemed that the long-necked giant was followed. The large, three-toed footprints of a predatory dinosaur, probably the ridge-backed Acrocanthosaurus or a similar theropod, paralleled and eventually converged on the footsteps of the sauropod. And at the point of overlap, the predator seemed to skip a step—a little hop that Bird took to mean that the carnivore had sunk its teeth into the herbivore and was lifted out of its tracks a short distance.

Bird excavated the trackway in 1940. About half of the long trail went to the AMNH and can now be seen stretching out behind the museum’s Apatosaurus mount, despite the fact that Apatosaurus lived millions of years before the tracks were made. The other portion is housed at the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin. Bird’s hypothesis about how the tracks were made has inspired exhibits at other museums, such as the Maryland Science Center and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Yet not everyone agrees about what the tracks represent. Do they record an Acrocanthosaurus attack as it happened? Or could the trackway simply be a fortuitous association of tracks from dinosaurs that walked the same ground at different times?

Artist David Thomas and paleontologist James Farlow went back to Bird’s notes and the trackway evidence to reconstruct what might have transpired. The association between the sauropod and theropod tracks seemed too tight to just be coincidence. The predatory dinosaur very closely followed the pathway of the larger herbivore, both moving along a broad left curve. Near the end of the excavated area, both the theropod and sauropod turned abruptly to the right. If the two dinosaurs had passed at different times, then we’d expect that the sauropod or theropod would have continued on in the same trajectory and crossed another set of tracks preserved nearby. Based on the fully reconstructed image, the sauropod and theropod were interacting with each other.

And there’s something else. Just before the enigmatic double-right-footprints made by the theropod, there is a drag mark made by the sauropod’s right hind foot. This might be where the titan was attacked and faltered, or maybe the sauropod threw its weight to avoid being bitten. Frustratingly, we can’t know for sure. And the missing left theropod footprint isn’t a clear sign of an attack, either—all we know is that there’s a missing track right where the animals were in close proximity.

Whether or not the Paluxy River Trackway records a successful Acrocanthosaurus assault is uncertain. But the tight connection between the theropod and sauropod tracks suggests that the carnivore at least stalked the herbivore, and perhaps even took a swipe at it. Specimens like this test our ability to draw brief moments in time from stone. The task is made all the more complicated by the gradual loss of information contained within the rock. While they look sturdy, trackways are actually fragile fossils, and the half of the trackway at the Texas Memorial Museum has significantly deteriorated since it was put on display. The museum is trying to raise a million dollars to properly conserve and house this historically and scientifically significant fossil. If you wish to learn more about their campaign, you can find more information here.

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.

The rebbachisaurid Limaysaurus. This sauropod was similar to the ones discovered by Salgado and colleagues in the Patagonian bonebed. Image by FunkMonk, from Wikipedia.

Dinosaur skeletons are marvelous things. The reconstructed bones of Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Styracosaurus, Barosaurus and the like are beautiful monuments of natural architecture. But what really makes the skeletons so fantastic is that we know they once cradled viscera and were wrapped in flesh. It’s impossible to look at a dinosaur’s skeleton and not wonder about how the animals looked and acted in life.

How social dinosaurs were is one of the most persistent mysteries of their natural history. Rare trackways record the steps of dinosaurs that walked together, and bonebeds containing the bones of multiple individuals of a particular species have sometimes been taken as evidence that the dinosaurs must have been traveling together when they died. But the evidence is never straightforward. Sometimes multiple dinosaurs walked over the same patch of ground at different times, creating trackway slabs that record the independent activities of several dinosaurs rather than a coordinated herd. And just because dinosaurs were preserved together doesn’t necessarily mean that they composed a social group—natural disasters such as drought and flood, as well as transportation of carcasses by water, can create assemblages of animals that didn’t actually flock together in life. Great care is required in piecing together dinosaur lives.

With this in mind, I was curious to read a paper by Leonardo Salgado and colleagues in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology about possible evidence for social sauropods from Cretaceous Patagonia. While searching for a previously discovered dinosaur quarry in Argentina, Salgado and collaborators stumbled across a small bonebed containing the jumbled remains of three sauropods. The deposit was formed over 100 million years ago.

The largest dinosaur at  the site—presumably an adult—was primarily represented by strings of articulated vertebrae arranged in the classic dinosaur death pose, while two smaller sauropod skeletons were scattered in other parts of the quarry. The dinosaurs are still undergoing study and don’t have a formal identity yet, but they appear to be rebbachisaurids, a group of sauropods that were distant cousins of the more familiar Diplodocus.

The juvenile dinosaurs alone were a significant find—no one had identified juvenile rebacchisaurids before. But the association of those skeletons is the focus of the new paper. Evidence from trackways and bonebeds has hinted that different sauropods had distinct social structures. Some, such as Alamosaurus, seemed to group together in small herds as juveniles and either become solitary as they grew or form age-segregated adult herds. Other sauropods seemed to live in mixed-age herds, where juveniles remained with older individuals. In the case of the bonebed in Argentina, it would seem that juveniles and adults traveled together.

But how do we know these dinosaurs really lived together? The skeletons are incomplete and mostly disarticulated—perhaps they were all washed up to the same spot and buried. Salgado and co-authors present a different interpretation.  The bonebed doesn’t seem to be a trap or mire, and the paleontologists noted that the skeletons show “few signs of transport.” It would seem that the sauropods died all at once. The reason why is a mystery. While they frustratingly do not provide details about this scenario, the researchers speculate that “the death of the adult triggered the death of the two juvenile individuals.”

The fact that the three dinosaurs were preserved in place, without evidence of transport, seems to be fair evidence that this species of sauropod was social. But even that hypothesis brings up a series of other questions. Did individuals stay with the herd from the time they were born? Was there any form of parental care after the babies left the nest? Did these dinosaurs really form large herds, or did the young simply stick with one of their parents? We still have a lot to learn about the lifestyles of the big and extinct.

References:

Myers, T., & Fiorillo, A. (2009). Evidence for gregarious behavior and age segregation in sauropod dinosaurs Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 274 (1-2), 96-104 DOI: 10.1016/j.palaeo.2009.01.002

Salgado, L., Canudo, J., Garrido, A., & Carballido, J. (2012). Evidence of gregariousness in rebbachisaurids (Dinosauria, Sauropoda, Diplodocoidea) from the Early Cretaceous of Neuquén (Rayoso Formation), Patagonia, Argentina Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 32 (3), 603-613 DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2012.661004

That sauropod looks quite frustrated. These dilapidated dinosaurs rest at Berlin's abandoned Spreepark. Photo by Flickr user davidrush.

In an abandoned Berlin amusement park, dinosaurs are slowly suffering a second extinction. The creatures, attractions at what was once the German Democratic Republic’s Kulturpark Plänterwald, have toppled over, are decorated with graffiti and are slowly rotting away in a setting perfect for a Scooby-Doo episode or another tedious found-footage horror film (your choice).

A felled Stegosaurus at Berlin's Spreepark. Photo by Flickr user extranoise.

Kuriositas recently laid out the park’s backstory. When the static dinosaurs were put in place, Kulturpark Plänterwald was in Soviet-controlled East Berlin. The theme park was the only one on the communist side of the Berlin Wall. But when East and West Germany reunited in 1989, the park quickly collapsed. Even though the attractions at the relabeled Spreepark were expanded, a lack of parking and an unpopular single-price entry fee rapidly cut attendance. By 2001, the park was mired in a pit of debt with no way out. Spreepark closed, and the dinosaurs have gradually been decaying ever since.

For more photos, see the Kuriositas blog post about Spreepark.

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

Camarasaurus, as envisioned by Erwin Christman. From Osborn and Mook, 1921.

Sauropods were swamp monsters. At least, that’s what books, movies, and illustrations taught me when I first encountered the huge dinosaurs. If Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus didn’t actually spend most of their time in the water, then the dinosaurs always stayed close to watery refuges where they could escape from Allosaurus and other predators.

But starting in the 1960s, a renewed scientific interest in dinosaurs overturned this cherished imagery. Sauropods were wholly terrestrial creatures. These giants did not possess any features related to an aquatic or amphibious lifestyle—Apatosaurus and kin were often plunked down into bogs and lakes in reconstructions because that environment seemingly answered nagging questions about the biology of these animals. But early 20th century paleontologists didn’t think that all sauropods were equally adept at life in the water. Rather than take the line that all sauropods were skilled swimmers, paleontologists identified at least one Jurassic sauropod that probably spent more time on land.

In 1920, a trio of American Museum of Natural History scientists published a pair of short papers on the sauropod Camarasaurus. This dinosaur, with a blunt head and spoon-shaped teeth, was one of the better-known members of the classic Morrison Formation fauna, and the AMNH paleontologists had just completed a major reexamination of the dinosaur’s remains. In the first note, Henry Fairfield Osborn and Charles Mook briefly summarized the results of their study, and in a second, accompanying missive, William Gregory outlined the dinosaur’s life habits.

Camarasaurus didn’t seem suited to a life wallowing in a Jurassic lake. While Gregory mentioned that the dinosaur “might well have been an efficient wader,” the dinosaur was also “positively devoid of special adaptations for swimming.” The dinosaurs limbs, shoulders and hips were clearly suited to supporting the animal’s bulk, and Gregory considered the “relatively small and feeble” tail of Camarasaurus to be of no help in swimming. While Gregory did waffle on the habitat the dinosaur preferred, the overall picture was of a relatively straight-limbed dinosaur that carried its body high off the ground. Sauropods did not drag their bellies through the Jurassic mud, as other paleontologists had suggested under the supposition that sauropods were like lizards or crocodiles, writ large.

The following year, when Osborn and Mook published their massive revision of sauropods collected by Edward Drinker Cope, they similarly cast Camarasaurus as a dinosaur that was “terrestrial in gait but adapted to an amphibious life.” And the plates of that paper present some of the restorations and reconstructions previously mentioned in the PNAS papers. A model of Camarasaurus, created by artist Erwin Christman under Gregory’s direction, showed the dinosaur walking on land with slightly bent forelimbs, similar to how the museum mounted its great “Brontosaurus” skeleton years before. Christman and Gregory also collaborated on a pair of skeletal reconstructions—one with the head of Camarasaurus held high, and the other in a droopy pose, with neck and tail slung low.

Osborn, Mook and Gregory’s insistence that Camarasaurus was an amphibious dinosaur, or at least frequently waded, is puzzling. The paleontologists didn’t justify this part of their argument. Sauropods were simply considered synonymous with warm, luxuriant swamps. Contrary to this belief, the experts explicitly pointed out evidence that Camarasaurus walked tall and had a skeleton well-suited to holding up the animal’s weight while walking on land. Even before the “Dinosaur Renaissance” forever changed dinosaurian imagery, early 20th century paleontologists were already cataloging the same evidence. They just saw that evidence differently, in the context of a lazy Mesozoic world filled with shuffling, basking sauropods.

References:

Gregory, W.K. 1920. Restoration of Camarasaurus and life model. PNAS. 6, 16-17

Osborn, H.F., Mook, C.C. 1920. Reconstruction of the skeleton of the sauropod dinosaur Camarasaurus Cope (Morosaurus Marsh). PNAS. 6, 15

Osborn, H.F., Mook, C.C. 1921. Camarasaurus, Amphicoelias, and other sauropods of Cope. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, new series, 3, 247-387 (plates LX-LXXXV).

Taylor, Michael P. 2010. Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review. pp. 361-386 in: Richard T. J. Moody, Eric Buffetaut, Darren Naish and David M. Martill (eds.), Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: a Historical Perspective. Geological Society of London, Special Publication 343.

Dinosaurs, such as this Apatosaurus at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, were landlubbers, not aquatic creatures. Image from Wikipedia.

In 1941, Czech paleo-artist Zdeněk Burian created one of the most iconic dinosaur images ever. I saw it four decades later, in one of my childhood science books, and the illustration amazed me as soon as I saw it. I still love it. Not because it’s correct, but because the painting so beautifully captures an obviously incorrect idea.

The painting, in careful detail, shows a trio of Brachiosaurus neck-deep in a prehistoric lake. Two poke their grinning heads above the surface, while a third plucks a gob of soft aquatic plants from the silty lake bottom. It was reproduced in a TIME/LIFE young readers nature library book on evolution, and I fondly remember opening the book to that page and taking in the Jurassic scene.

I am surprised this strange sauropod imagery was cherished by so many for so long. Brachiosaurus was a little more streamlined than an office building, and if the dinosaur led a watery life, it looked capable only of sticking its pylon-like legs into the muck and waving its head around to strain algae. And then there was the Goldilocks problem—an aquatic Brachiosaurus would require rivers and lakes of just the right size and depth to survive. To make matters worse, Brachiosaurus would have needed to haul themselves out and go looking for mates in other hot tubs if the species was to continue. Despite recent suggestions that these huge dinosaurs were capable of amorous aqua-acrobatics, I’m not convinced the exceptionally air-filled, buoyant sauropods could have pulled off the required underwater maneuvers. Brachiosaurus, and its counterpart Giraffatitan from the Jurassic of Tanzania, were creatures of the terrestrial realm, just like all other sauropods.

In fact, with the exception of feathery dinosaurs that took to the air, all dinosaurs were land-dwellers. This fact has been amply documented by studies of dinosaur anatomy and trackways and by attempts to reconstruct the habitats where dinosaurs actually lived. After all, paleontology relies on a combination of anatomy and geology, and by pulling at those two threads paleontologists have been able to investigate how dinosaurs interacted with the various habitats they called home—be they fern-covered floodplains, dense forests, or sandy deserts. To pick just one example, paleontologists Chris Noto and Ari Grossman recently reviewed the pattern of global ecology during the Jurassic dinosaur heyday and found that aridity—which affected vegetation in prehistoric forests—influenced the abundance and variety of herbivorous dinosaurs present in different parts of the world. As paleontologists keep digging and poring over what has already been found, the ecology of the dinosaurs is coming into clearer and clearer focus.

All of which is to say that I was dumbfounded when the BBC’s Today program ran a sensationalist story about a so-called dinosaur debate that isn’t really a debate at all. You can listen to the brief story yourself here, presented by journalist Tom Feilden. (I have clashed with him about dinosaur journalism before.) The upshot is that dinosaurs should be shown wading through prehistoric lakes, not walking along the edges of prehistoric forests.

Feilden talks to Brian J. Ford—identified as a cell biologist and with no apparent expertise in paleontology—about why dinosaurs seem to be all wrong. Ford is given relatively little time to explain himself, but insists that dinosaurs were simply too big to have walked on land. “The tail of a dinosaur could weigh ten, twenty tons,” Ford says, which isn’t a precise statement or one that seems to be derived from evidence. Let’s assume that “a dinosaur”—which dinosaur is unclear—had a 20 ton tail. To put this in perspective, in his revision of Brachiosaurus, sauropod expert Mike Taylor estimated the huge Giraffatitan to be about 23 tons in life. Ford is suggesting that some dinosaurs had tails about as heavy as an absolutely huge sauropod, but not surprisingly, where he is drawing this information from isn’t mentioned. Things don’t get better from there.

To Ford, dinosaurs must have lived in perpetually flooded habitats. His whole argument boils down to “Dinosaurs look big!” A popular-audience article in Laboratory News gives Ford some additional space to spell out his ideas, though this does the reader little good. Dinosaurs were big and had heavy tails, Ford tells his audience, ergo, they make no sense on land. That’s it—that’s the whole basis for his speculation. Ford does not appear to have reviewed any of the literature on dinosaur biomechanics or body mass. He just flatly says that dinosaurs, as often depicted, aren’t right. Or as Ford succinctly frames his idea in the final paragraph, “Dinosaurs look more convincing in water.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Ford isn’t just talking about sauropods. He applies his idea to all large, multi-ton dinosaurs, and goes so far as to suggest one of the strangest ideas I have ever heard for the relatively small forelimbs of tyrannosaurs. Again, Ford uses an aquatic environment as an answer. “The fact that the limbs [of Tyrannosaurus] became foreshortened is entirely reasonable,” he wrote, since “animals like to inspect their food as they eat, and holding it closer to the face is normal behaviour.” Imagine a submerged Tyrannosaurus, trying to peer down at a fish in its arms. If you have ever looked at a tyrannosaur skeleton at all, you can see how downright silly this is. Tyrannosaurus would have to strain its neck pretty hard to get even a glance at whatever it might try to hold in its two-fingered hands. This is the sure sign of a rather crummy idea—the idea is not only unscientific, but it attempts to answer almost every question about dinosaur evolution, biology and extinction.

And there’s an important fact Ford totally missed in his position piece. While he criticizes interpretations of the dinosaur track record, Ford doesn’t mention that there are actually rare traces of dinosaur swim tracks. The majority of dinosaur tracks indicate that the animals primarily lived on land,  but some dinosaurs, primarily medium-sized carnivores, sometimes went into the water. If dinosaurs really did live in water, we’d expect to see many more swim tracks in the fossil record, but these trace fossils are a rarity. We know the kind of tracks dinosaurs left on land, and we know what kind of tracks at least some made in water. Based on the track evidence, Ford’s idea immediately sinks.

Ford’s ideas are zany. That’s not a crime. There are plenty of weird ideas about prehistoric life around the web—the idea that tyrannosaurs hugged trees to hide from prospective prey is probably my favorite nonsense idea. But Feilden did not do his due diligence as a journalist. He reported this story as if there actually was a shred of merit to it, when all that was behind the story was a cell biologist who entirely ignored paleontology. Ford’s comments seem to stem from watching Walking With Dinosaurs—there’s no indication that he has carefully researched the subject he pontificates upon. (In searching for depictions of dinosaurs to criticize, Ford takes an image created for a creationist website as the best science can offer. Oops.) As paleontologists Mike Taylor and Dave Hone have already pointed out on their blogs, there’s not even really a discussion worth having here. Ford presents no actual evidence for his claims, and Feilden uncritically ran with the unsupported assertions.

To his credit, Feilden spoke to dinosaur expert Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum for a second opinion, but that’s small consolation in a story that didn’t deserve the attention it received in the first place. If there is a story here, it’s about how a cell biologist arrogantly ignored the evidence collected over decades in a different field in an attempt to foist his own just-so stories on dinosaurs to ease his own discomfort at seeing landlubber Diplodocus. Even worse, Feilden makes a connection between the dissenting Ford and Galileo—Galileo, for crying out loud—to hint that Ford’s idiosyncratic views, unfettered by the problem of actually looking at the evidence, may turn out to be right. No. Just no. The accumulated tonnage of evidence places dinosaurs as primarily terrestrial beings, and simply ignoring all of that for the sake of controversial isn’t amazing news. It’s bad science communicated by bad journalism.

Burning the midnight sauropod. Photo courtesy Cody Burkett.

Dinosaurs are excellent April Fool’s prank inspiration. We want to see a living ceratopsian or tyrannosaur so badly that it’s easy to whip up a fake press report about someone finally finding a surviving non-avian dinosaur. But reader Cody Burkett decided to do something a little different. Burkett explains:

So as an April Fool’s joke this year, I made a sauropod candle, lit it, and put it under the icons at my church, which also happens to be the seminary in which I attend graduate classes.  Everyone seemed to be amused, except for the ecclesiarch, but I suppose that’s to be expected.

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