When dinosaurs won the Civil War

I've been out of the country and off the net for two weeks, so this is probably old news. Still, I felt the need to commemorate a disturbing episode in our national history. Full story here.

Get your giant robot dinosaur on

Full disclosure up front: about two months ago, someone associated with Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience got in touch with me to see if I'd be interested in blogging about the show. Tickets were mentioned.

I put him off for a LOOONG time. Mainly because the only two California shows are in late December and early January, and I thought I'd be unavailable for both. But it turns out I will be town the first week of January after all, so I'm accepting the tickets and blogging about the show.

Now that you know I'm a corporate shill, you can believe what follows or not. I'm gonna say it anyway. If you suspect contamination, feel free to compare this post with everything else I've ever said about pop-culture dinosaurs, big machines, and monster movies, and see if I'm writing true to form. To their credit, the folks at Insight Management have been tremendously patient and they haven't given me any pointers or restrictions on what to say, beyond asking that I direct folks to the official site for photos and videos. Fair nuff.

FIRST thing is that I've been meaning to blog about this anyway, because it looks awesome. Jarrod sent a link to one of the videos months ago. The animatronic dinosaurs are very smooth. I love robots. My affection for dinosaurs goes a few orders of magnitude beyond that. So I was already on board.

SECOND thing is that I am continually surprised at how unpopular dinosaur shows and movies are among paleontologists. At least recent ones. The consensus seems to be that Ray Harryhausen's work is beyond reproof (which is true, if a little patronizing given what follows), but bring up Jurassic Park or Walking With Dinosaurs or the new King Kong and it's carp carp carp carp. Some favorites:


"They're just exploiting dinosaurs to make money!"

Goodness gracious! Why, I never! Those horrible capitalists, making a killing by selling people what they'll pay for. I'm equally outraged by the science fiction workers (in any medium) who exploit my yen for creepy aliens, space battleships, and exploding planets. Which is to say, not outraged at all, and in fact quite in favor of it. I'm still a little put out about the general lack of exploding dinosaurs, which I've mentioned here twice before. What do I gotta do, write a paper about it? Oh, speaking of:

"But you're a scientist. You work hard. What if they take your work and use it to make a movie and you never see a penny?"

Yes, yes, I am put upon. But let me see if I can climb down off the Science Cross and take a stab at this one. The possibility that someone else will use my ideas without paying me is a side effect of the maxim that science should be free. Mine is. Don't get me wrong, I love consulting on media projects. Because the gig is basically answering questions about dinosaurs--something I like doing and usually do for free anyway--and the amount of money that media folks have to throw around is pretty sweet compared to what I make lecturing about photosynthesis. But better than the money is the ability to sleep the sleep of the innocent, knowing that I have given the fruits of my labor to all mankind. Sounds melodramatic, I know. But it's true. If someone uses that to make a better monster movie, that's gravy.

The granddaddy of all ex-paleo objections to pop culture dinosaurs, though, is that...

"That's so unrealistic! Why, just look at the external nostril! It must be at least two-thirds of the way back in the bony naris--it's nowhere near Witmer-compliant!"

Yes, it's true, pop culture dinosaurs always fall short of full scientific respectability. Always. If you can show me a counter-example, I can give you at least half a dozen reasons why it actually sucks. I can think of at least three reasons why this is so:

- Media folks are in the making money off dinosaurs business, not the making textbooks business. See above.

- Paleontologists rarely agree about anything. I'm not just talking about stuff like BADD vs BAND, boredothermic vs apathetothermic, etc. I mean everything, from nostril position and pupil shape and size on out to muscle mass, fat deposits, etc. Or rather, we do have broad areas of agreement where the scientific questions are pretty much settled. But those areas are generally not the ones that are of much use if you're trying to reconstruct a living critter that looks and behaves convincingly. Like it or not, the whole life restoration business has a bit of a stigma amongst some Serious Paleontologists. Even if one could generate a static restoration that satisfied everyone, as soon as it moved an inch someone would start bitching.

As a case in point, there are aspects of the WWD sauropods with which I disagree violently. And the advisors who told 'em to do it that way are friends of mine, whom I like personally and whose work I respect. But (#1) respect and agree with are not the same. And (#2) only the paleontologist part of me disagrees violently. The guy-who-likes-dinosaurs side, which has an 18-year head start, thinks CGI sauropods rock and has literally spent hours watching them stomp around.

- I don't even agree with myself. The paleontologist part of me is a bit over a decade old, and I look back at some of the stuff that came out of my word processor back then and just shake my head. There is a line from an SVP abstract that I would erase from all human memory if I could. It's so appallingly dumb I'll probably end up blogging about it. But I've made peace with all that. Scott Aaronson has opined that if you're not occasionally wrong, your science is boring (not in that specific post, I just like that one and can't be bothered to find the real one). My ambition since I started has been to push (my particular tiny corner of) the edge of the envelope. Not for fame or glory. For curiosity. As soon as I get to the top of one hill, I want to see what the view from the next one looks like. And occasionally I've been wrong. That's life. More importantly, that's also science.

This is the tip of whole 'nother rant, about how science actually works and about the entirely overdone phobia among scientists of ever admitting that we've ever been mistaken about anything, which I'll have to expand on later.


But back to task. There is the practical matter, which is that a documentary or book that followed every one of my ideas to the letter would be outdated in a couple of years even to me. And there is the not-being-a-colossal-hypocrite matter, which is that if I can cut myself that amount of slack, I should be equally easy on other scientists (not easier--birds really are dinosaurs, etc.--just equally easy). If we're all ever 100% right, then science is over and we can get back to Resident Metal HaloStrike III with a clear conscience. Or commit suicide because we're bored to tears. And if I can forgive my fellow scientists for occasionally veering away from the Word According to Matt, I should multiply that forgiveness a couple of times to non-scientists who do stuff with dinosaurs. Who, in my admittedly limited experience, usually do want to get it right and are often baffled by the contradictory cacaphony coming out of the Academy--even as those of us on the inside recognize that conflict is vital to the success of the scientific process.

And--importantly--there is the guy-who-likes-dinosaurs matter, because he doesn't really care where the external nostrils are. Hell, he's nearly cried just daydreaming about live dinosaurs (and been man enough to admit it), so he'll probably wet himself when the life-size animatronic T-rex comes out and starts wrecking shop.


I'm still not done.

The ultimate reason why I am blissfully unruffled about the perceived scientific failures of the recent CGI dinofests is that I cut teeth on Saturday afternoon reruns and 50s-vintage dinosaur books. When I was 5 I knew all about Antrodemus and Trachodon, both of which stood bolt upright and dragged their tails, just like God and Neave Parker intended. (How many of you Gen Z weenies know what the hell I'm talking about [without any help from Google or Wikipedia]?) Where I came from, you couldn't get through a dinosaur movie without a fur-clad stud chucking a spear at a carnosaur while a bat-winged pterodactyl made off with the scantily-clad object of his affection. Three-fingered tyrannosaurs duking it out with giant apes, submarines fighting Brobdingnagian cephalopods, pissed-off brontosaurs eating guys out of trees, and cowboys lassoing dinosaurs in a lost valley--we had it all.

And I turned out all right.

So I'm pretty sure that the current generation of up-and-coming paleontologists will survive near-sighted tyrannosaurs and Diplodocus ovipositors. In fact, given that many of the current (and, okay, slightly older) generation freely admit that they became paleontologists because of the efforts of Ray Harryhausen, Neave Parker, et al., I'm willing to bet that CGI dinosaurs are one of the best things that ever happened to this science, even (maybe especially) when said dinosaurs stomped in from off-campus.


That goes for immense non-CG robot dinosaurs that roam around live on stage, too.

Anyway, to reiterate the main points of this essay, WWD Live looks pretty sweet, it's playing in San Jose on Dec. 26-30 and in Sacramento on Jan. 3-6 (other cities and dates are listed on the site), and barring cosmic accidents or someone giving me the axe for overly-genocidey blogging, I'll be there. And then back here to give my honest opinion.

The first and last photos are off the WWD Live tyrannosaur, and were provided by the folks at Insight Management. The rest are screencaps from One Million Years B.C. (#2) and The Valley of Gwangi (3 and 4) borrowed from various places on the interwebs.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Hail Xenoposeidon!

I reckon the readership overlap between this blog and SV-POW! is near-total, but just in case some of you haven't seen it yet, my oft-mentioned homeboys Mike Taylor (right) and Darren Naish (left) have described a new sauropod dinosaur, Xenoposeidon. Xeno, of course, is Greek for "strange" or "alien", and "poseidon" means "based on very few vertebrae".


Here's Mike getting some quality time with the holotype and only known specimen of Xenoposeidon. Emotive hearts added by his junior author, oddly enough.

How strange is this thing (Xenoposeidon, that is, not Mike, Darren, or the hearts)? You'll be finding out all week at SV-POW, but if I had to sum it up in a soundbite I'd say it's officially Damn Weird.

Undeserved self-promotion and the protracted rise of dinosaurs

The cover art from today's Science. From front to back:
- the new basal dinosauromorph Dromomeron romeri
- a basal dinosauriform similar to the Polish Silesaurus
- the herrerasaurid Chindesaurus bryansmalli
- a coelophysoid theropod

Today was a good day for the Padian lab. Current Padianite Randy Irmis, former Padianite Sterling Nesbitt, and Kevin himself (plus some other folks) got the cover of Science today for their paper on basal dinosaurs and dinosauromorphs from New Mexico (Irmis et al. 2007).

The UC Berkeley press release is here, and a good overview is here. The latter site also includes super-humongous versions of the cover art and a nice comparative skeletal reconstruction, both of which I've stolen for this post. I recommend going there for the real story, but here's the short version:

The big news here is that basal dinosauromorphs, basal dinosauriforms, basal dinosaurs, and basal theropods--all the critters shown above and below--have all been found together at the Hayden Quarry in New Mexico. The age of the quarry is not wonderfully constrained, but it is probably about 215 million years old. The oldest dinosaurs are about 230 million years old, from Argentina. This is the first time that early dinosaurs have been found alongside their collateral ancestors (the dinosauromorphs and dinosauriforms), and the coexistence of all of these animals for ~15 Ma after the first appearance of dinosaurs shows that dinosaurs did not immediately replace their close relatives.

Randy and company describe a new genus and species of basal dinosauromorph, Dromomeron romeri (Romer's running femur), which is the sister taxon to Lagerpeton from the Chanares fauna in Argentina; Lagerpeton was described by A.S. Romer in the early '70s (Romer 1971, 1972).

Same critters, same order:
Dromomeron, 'silesaurid', Chindesaurus, coelophysoid.

Today was also a good day for me. Randy is out in the field, and Kevin is out of town, so I got to talk to the reporters instead. Totally unfair, but what are you going to do? The local ABC and Fox affiliates ran the story on the evening news; videos are here and here. Try not to laugh at my ultra-informal description of Postosuchus.

Naturally, they got some stuff wrong. I am not on this project and I've never been to the quarry; as I took pains to point out, I was just the closest available dino-doc. I don't think Postosuchus has been identified from the Hayden Quarry, I was describing it as an example of what a big predator was for that area and time. Still, I can't complain too much about making the evening news for work I didn't even do.

REFERENCES

Irmis, R.B., Nesbitt, S.J., Padian, K., Smith, N.D., Turner, A.H., Woody, D., and Downs, D. 2007. A Late Triassic dinosauromorph assemblage from New Mexico and the rise of dinosaurs. Science 317:358-361.

Romer, A.S. 1971. The Chanares (Argentina) Triassic fauna. X. Two new and incompletely known long-limbed pseudosuchians. Breviora 378:1-10.

Romer, A.S. 1972. The Chanares (Argentina) Triassic fauna. XV. Further remains of the thecodonts Lagerpeton and Lagosuchus. Breviora 394:1-7.

I'm dying...dying from all the sweetness!!

How, how did I not know about this sooner? In the 80s Topps released a series of cards and stickers that featured dinosaurs eating people and getting blown away in graphic detail. It's like someone dredged my unconscious and put the haul onto some poorly-painted collectibles (is there any other kind?). Why, right on this very blog I have expressed my heartfelt desire to see a giant theropod get blasted with a bazooka. If only we could get the serious dinosaur artists to draw some of this stuff . . . somebody could get rich.


Oh yes, my friends, that is a freakin' Parasaurolophus eating a freakin' baby. I was thirteen at the time. What. The. Hell!?*

* by which I mean, "How did these come into existence at all?", "Who thought it was a good idea to sell them to little kids?", and most importantly, "How come I never got any?"


Okay, this is not one of those cards. This is from I Can Has Cheezburger? I've just been dying to use it, and it does hail from the same realm as the dinosaur cards. A realm I call "Stupid Awesome!!!"

Hat tip to Sally, who you may remember from her own gory adventures.

My Dino Rocket to Mount Doom

Nineteen eighty-four was a banner year. I was nine years old and in fourth grade. That was the year that I got my first pocket knife. I also joined 4-H, discovered model rocketry, and built my first rocket. My friend Robbie Newberg sat at the next desk over and one day he had a copy of Ray Bradbury's Dinosaur Tales. That was my introduction to Ray Bradbury. Shortly thereafter I read R Is For Rocket and S Is For Space and my life was never the same. Next to Bradbury on the library shelf was this guy named Asimov who wrote books about robots and something called the Foundation. And not too far away was this book Dune. I knew that Dune existed because of the 1985 Estes model rocket catalog, which I had picked up at Hobby Lobby, featured a movie tie-in rocket called the Guild Heighliner.

I knew that Dune was about a desert planet, and I knew that it was something badass, like Foundation and 2001. And the back cover of Dune had a very curious blurb by none other than Arthur C. Clarke, who said that it was a towering work of the imagination and that, "I know nothing comparable to it other than The Lord of the Rings."

Say what now?

Lord of the Rings. Hmm. That looked like about a zillion pages. But evidently it was the sequel to something called The Hobbit. So I read The Hobbit and it was frankly pretty kickass. I really dug that Bilbo guy.

All of this had taken some time. Right after The Hobbit I started Fellowship, and I know it was the fall of 1987 because I was 12 years old and the upstairs room in our circa 1900 farmhouse was finally finished and I had taken up residence that summer. Lights out was 9:00, I think, so I spent the hours between 9:00 and midnight under a flashlight with John Carter and David Bowman and Calvin & Hobbes. But first with Frodo and Sam and Strider and the rest of the gang. At first Fellowship kinda bummed me out. I wanted to go on another adventure with Bilbo. I didn't trust this Frodo upstart. He'd never been to the Lonely Mountain; how did I know he wouldn't cave the first time he ran into a troll or some unnaturally large spiders? But he turned out okay.

So to quickly rehash:

4-H -> model rockets -> Hobby Lobby -> Estes Catalog -> *

Robbie Newberg -> Dinosaur Tales -> Ray Bradbury -> the science fiction section -> *

* Dune -> Arthur C. Clarke back cover blurb -> finding LOTR -> The Hobbit -> reading LOTR

Oh, don't try to read The Silmarillion without The Atlas of Middle-Earth handy. It makes a lot more sense if you can actually see what's going on and have some way of keeping the place names and people names separate.

If you're wondering why Tolkien is on my mind, it's because I've been trying to get hold of a copy of The Children of Hurin, but every bookstore in town is sold out. I'll keep you posted.

Playing Darwin's God

Figure 1. The Lesser Tadwee of southern Uqbar.

I don't want to play God.

All I want is the ability to live for billions of years, see and control everything that transpires on Earth, and speed up and slow down time at my leisure.

Why do I want these powers? I blame Dougal Dixon. His book After Man: A Zoology of the Future came out when I was still in grade school. I was freakin' fas-cin-ated. After After Man I was much taken with Dixon's The New Dinosaurs, Wayne Douglas Barlowe's Expedition, the awesome but dead-link-ridden Speculative Dinosaur Project, the creations of Nemo Ramjet, so on and so forth, imaginary zoology without end.

Figure 2. One of Nemo Ramjet's horrors.

I want the powers, obviously, so that I can tinker with evolution. Here are some experiments I have planned, just in case I wake up some morning with the aforementioned abilities. Most of them involve you either dying right now or never coming into existence, so I'll understand if you think they suck.

1. Humans go extinct immediately, and global temperatures rise to Jurassic levels over, say, 20 million years. When will Antarctica lose its ice cap? How fast? How much of the newly exposed land will be under water, and how fast will isostasy bring it back up? What will colonize this empty continent? Birds, obviously, but what else? What terrestrial flora and fauna will colonize Australia? How long will it take? It's a long haul to the nearest sizeable landmasses; on the other hand, transoceanic dispersal is apparently more common than we thought (de Queiroz 2005 Trends in Ecology and Evolution 20:68-73).

2. Another Antarctica experiment. The land bridge connecting Antarctica to South America never breaks. The circumpolar current never forms and Antarctica does not ice over. No polar ice caps, no ice ages. What survives on Antarctica? What happens in the rest of the world? In the warmer, wetter climate, Africa will probably be covered in forest, not savanna. What hominids, if any, evolve? Ooh, ooh, ooh--with the addition of Antarctica, South America ought to have more land area than North America. Maybe South America wins the Great American Interchange. That would be rad!

Figure 3. A truly fantastic image of SpecWorld.

3. Go back to the end of the Cretaceous. I know what you're thinking, but you're dead wrong, foo'. The dinosaurs DO go extinct. Everywhere except Australia. I don't care what the mechanism was, asteroid, or, uh, one of those lame reasons--whatever it is, it skips the Land of Oz. What do these dinosaur do with the Cenozoic? What do the monotremes and marsupials do with them dinosaurs? What happens during the Pleistocene? Do any of those dinAusaurs cross the ole Wallace Line and wreck some Asiatic shop? Or do the Aborigines smoke their asses 'til they ain't no moa? Ha ha hee hee.

4. Go back to the Permian. You know that part where the continents split up? Yeah, not so much this time. Fast forward to the Mesozoic. Any dinosaurs around, or did they lose out to the therapsids? Or did the harsh conditions on the mostly-desert supercontinent favor archosaurs right from the start, so that mammals don't even get a toehold? And what's going on geologically with this unnaturally large and long-lasting landmass? Those hot spots are still going to be burning. Maybe Pangaea is pocked with resurgent calderas. A desert supercontinent stocked with volcanoes and dinosaurs? Sounds like a nice getaway.

5. Starting now, all tetrapods go extinct except turtles. No more mammals, birds, crocs, lizards, snakes, amphibians... Obviously turtles are going to have to step up and take over the world. But how? I mean, they're turtles. Or maybe the turtles don't take over the world. Maybe fish beat them to the punch. Could they get out of the water in time to give the turtles some fight? Maybe not. But think about it, man! Super-tall giraffe turtles. Lean, mean cheetah turtles. Blind cave turtles. Giant whale turtles.

Top THAT.

Seriously. If you had the aforementioned powers, what experiments would you do?

Dr. Vector's field adventures

Hi folks, just some highlights from the Big Bend trip.




We spent most of our time looking for microfossils: teeth, scales, and scutes from fish, turtles, crocs, and dinos. The photo above shows (clockwise from left): my Swiss Army knife for scale, a little croc scute, a big gar scale, two halves of a dromaeosaur tooth that I found about a foot apart, and a big dead millipede. We found bleached-white millipedes and land snail shells all over the place.


We also did some big bone paleontology. Here I am jacketing a ceratopsian femur with Vanessa Meredith from Cal State Stanislaus. Everyone else on the crew was a current or former CSS person. Dr. Julia Sankey was in charge of the expedition. I was just along as a shovel jockey. It was a great vacation--hard on the body but great for the soul.


I spent a day with Bill and Mary Clark collecting desert ants. Bill is the director and curator of invertebrates at the Orma J. Smith Museum of Natural History in Caldwell, Idaho, and he's been surveying Big Bend ants for about seven years now. He is full of knowledge, generosity, and dry humor. Although I only got to spend a few days hanging out with him, he is one of my favorite human beings. I really hope I can go back to Big Bend next January, and if I do I hope to spend some more time chasing ants.

Now, for Darren's sake, some tetrapods.


These turkeys were always hanging around the campground. I don't know if people feed them or what, but they have very little fear of humans. You could walk up pretty close to them. If you got closer than 15 or 20 feet, they'd walk away until that invisible perimeter was reestablished, but they wouldn't flee. I'm sure they would have fled if we'd run at them waving our arms and screaming, but there's no reason to act like an asshole to a couple of agreeable critters who doubtless spend a lot more time in that campground than we do. We approached out of curiosity and admiration, not because we wanted to harrass some birds.


I spend the entire time wanting to see some javelinas, little peccaries (Tayassuidae) that are very common in Big Bend. We heard them rooting around at night and found their tracks and scat by day. Most everyone else on the crew saw a group (pack? peck?) of them down by the campground, but I think I was up at the ranchhouse cooking dinner at the time. I was getting a little desperate, but driving back from the quarry on the last day we surprised a big peck of paccaries crossing the road. Like idiots, we all bailed out of the van and ran into the bush trying to get photos of these diminutive but impressively beweaponed critters. We emerged unscathed, with photos ranging from completely incomprehensible to what I can only describe as "medium Bigfoot".


On the way back to California the next day, I got to kill some time in the Hip-O taxidermy shop in Alpine, Texas. I picked up a nice javelina skull on the cheap, and it will be gracing my wall very shortly. I'll put up some pictures as soon as I put up the skull; the photo above is stolen from Skulls Unlimited, which is currently having a sale on peccary skulls. You can see from the photo why pissing off a javelina is not smart: they have very large, very sharp canines, and they will use them. A gory warning poster at a Big Bend campground showed a domestic dog that had had one of its limbs ripped off by a javelina. Leash laws are there for a reason, folks.

Well, this post is threatening to become more about peccaries than about the desert (not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, I just have other things I want to do), so I'll wind it up with two last photos. The first one shows our breakfast and dinner table out behind the ranchhouse at Castolon. The cliffs in the distance are in Mexico; the Rio Grande flows at their base.

The last photo is my favorite from the trip. Gotta get back there.



Many thanks to Richard Peltier and Vanessa Meredith for sharing photos.

Superposeidon rears its ugly, chimaeric head

In the bookstore at the Big Bend National Park headquarters I picked up a pack of "Famous Dinosaur Playing Cards." Naturally I ego-surfed through them to see if Sauroposeidon made the cut. It did...sorta. See?


In case this doesn't strike you as funny, Sauroposeidon is a big brachiosaur from the Early Cretaceous of Oklahoma. Supersaurus is a big diplodocid from the Late Jurassic of Colorado and Wyoming. The two have nothing to with each other beyond being neosauropods and being rilly big. Superposeidon is a case of typographic and taxonomic confusion; there ain't no such beast. You can see that the creator of the card nicely combined the attributes of both real creatures. The geologic age is that of Supersaurus, the painting is clearly Sauroposeidon, and the length estimate is about right for Sauroposeidon but waaay too short for Supersaurus, which was probably more like 120-150 feet long. Which in turn brings up the issue of how big these critters really were and how we know, but that's a subject for another post.

This isn't the first time that I've run across Superposeidon. Although it first came to my attention on the net, apparently it started as bad copy in a popular dinosaur book. Full story here. You can buy a pack of "Famous Dinosaur Playing Cards" here.

Finally, a page dedicated to bootleg Transformers had this to say:

"Sea Bottom- Complex of Seabottom GG- superposeidon attack on enemy with top-class dynamic and destroying forces having a big sword with extremely great killing forces."


Thanks to Darren for the comic.

Sauropod explosion

I don't know if you've been paying attention, but new sauropods have just been pouring out of the ground lately. Actually, that's been true for a while, but getting the beasts prepped and written up takes just about forever--in some cases, literally decades. So it's even more remarkable that descriptions of new sauropods have been pouring out of journals and other scientific publications lately. Just trying to keep up with all the new coolness is getting to be a challenge. Accordingly, Mike and Darren and I started keeping a new sauropod list. Here are the preliminary results for the last three years. As far as I can tell, 2005 was the first year ever in which the number of new valid sauropod genera hit double digits. The tally for 2006 currently stands at 13. It may well go higher; I often don't find out about some of the more obscure ones until months after they are described. If you know of any that I've missed, please let me know and I'll add them.

Just for fun, I put the age and country of each new 'pod, so you can see where and when the hotspots are. I left out Limaysaurus because that is a new name for an already known beast; the things left on the list are truly new.

2004

Borealosaurus wimani, Late Cretaceous, China
Bonitasaura salgadoi, Late Cretaceous, Argentina
Suuwassea emiliae, Late Jurassic, United States
Tazoudasaurus naimi, Early Jurassic, Morocco

2005

Archaeodontosaurus descouensi, Middle Jurassic, Madagascar
Baurutitan britoi, Late Cretaceous, Brazil
Brachytrachelopan mesai, Late Jurassic, Argentina
Cathartesaura anaerobica, Late Cretaceous, Argentina
Chebsaurus algeriensis, Middle Jurassic, Algeria
Daanosaurus zhangi, Jurassic, China
Dashanpusaurus dongi, Middle Jurassic, China
Galvesaurus herreroi, Early Cretaceous, Spain
Karongasaurus gittelmani, Early Cretaceous, Malawi
Puertasaurus reuili, Late Cretaceous, Argentina

2006

Adamantisaurus mezzalirai, Late Cretaceous, Brazil
Erketu ellisoni, Early Cretaceous, Mongolia
Europasaurus holgeri, Late Jurassic, Germany
Fusuisaurus zhaoi, Early Cretaceous, China
Huanghetitan liujiaxiaensis, Early Cretaceous, China
Jiutaisaurus xidiensis, Early Cretaceous, China
Ligabuesaurus leanzai, Early Cretaceous, Argentina
Maxakalisaurus topai, Late Cretaceous, Brazil
Sonidosaurus saihangaobiensis, Late Cretaceous, China
Trigonosaurus pricei, Late Cretaceous, Brazil
Turiasaurus riodevensis, Late Jurassic or Early Cretaceous, Spain
Yuanmousaurus jiangyiensis, Jurassic, China
Zapalasaurus bonapartei, Early Cretaceous, Argentina

Here's the breakdown for the last three years by continent.

South America - 10 of 27 or 37%
Asia - 9 of 27 or 33%
Africa - 4 of 27 or 15%
Europe - 3 of 27 or 11%
North America - 1 of 27 or 4%

Couple of things worth mentioning here. North America is not booming the way China, Argentina, and Brazil are, but new sauropods are still be described from North America all the time. In the past decade we've had Eobrontosaurus (after talking to Ray Wilhite I am not convinced that this is just Camarasaurus, as Upchurch would have it--time to drive out and see the material for myself!), Sonorasaurus, Cedarosaurus, Sauroposeidon, Venenosaurus, and Suuwassea (did I miss anybody?). Many more are waiting in the wings:

- the Jones Ranch critter, which should be published any day now;
- the camarasaur and titanosaur from Dalton Wells;
- the CEU brachiosaur, which is neither Brachiosaurus nor Sauroposeidon and is awfully damned big, with a 1.4 meter cervical vertebra reported in an SVP abstract;
- the Dinosaur National Monument brachiosaur, which is also new and valid;
- the KU brachiosaur, which I hear is to be described as a new taxon;
- a new sauropod from the Morrison Formation, which was the subject of a recent SVP presentation;
- at least one new sauropod from the Cloverly and at least one more from the Morrison, about which I can say no more for the time being.

There are probably loads more than I don't know about or have forgotten. The point is, North America is not out of sauropods yet. If anything, we're going through a boom--sauropods haven't been named at this rate from this continent since the 1800s.

Still, it will probably be the better part of another decade before all those things listed above make it into print, and a decade's worth of new North American 'pods might equal the output of a single year from China or Argentina if they keep on producing like they have the last two years.

The other thing worth mentioning is that all these new critters really are contributing to our knowledge of sauropod diversity. The smallest known eusauropods (i.e., excluding reclassified prosauropods like Anchisaurus), Brachytrachelopan and Europasaurus, were just described in the past two years. Although none of them can claim the title of THE BIGGEST, some really whacking big animals--Puertasaurus, Turiasaurus, Paralititan, Sauroposeidon--have been described in the last decade, and bigger ones are waiting to be described. Erketu represents a previously unknown lineage of freakishly long-necked sauropods
and Brachytrachelopan has the shortest neck, proportionally and absolutely, of any eusauropod. These new discoveries are not just filling in the gaps in a mostly-painted picture--they are stretching our ideas about what sauropods are.

And that's pretty cool.

Unbelievable

File this under "Dissertation-related nerdosity".

Sauropods have big pneumatic vertebrae and I have been curious for a long time about the ratio of bone tissue to air in the skeletons of sauropods and other vertebrates. I made a stab at quantifying this with the Air Space Proportion (ASP), which is the volume of air in an element divided by the total volume of the element. A bone with an ASP of 0.60 is 60% air, by volume. Actually measuring volumes is a bitch, and for my current purposes no great precision is necessary, so I've been happy to take the area of air vs. bone in a two-dimensional slice (or, ideally, a series of slices) as an approximation of the volume. You can get 2D slices of bones with a CT scanner, which I've done, but you can also get them by photographing broken bones. That's nice because the world has a lot more broken fossils than it does CT scanners.

One problem with computing ASPs for sauropod vertebrae is that the air spaces that are actually enclosed by bone are a very small part of the total. The largest air spaces lay alongside the vertebrae, so they are only constrained by bone on one side. We don't know whether those air spaces were big and fat like balloons, or whether they just formed a thin skin of air over the surface of the bone, or what. So ASP is nice, but it only gets you so far.

About two years after I came up with ASP, I realized that if you have a stack of 2D slices through a bone, and if you know the density of bony tissue, you can easily compute the mass of a bone. In retrospect, that's really obvious, but it didn't occur to me until seven years after I first CT scanned a sauropod vertebra. So I guess it pays to keep thinking about some things, because you never know when you're going to spot something obvious.

Anyway, just knowing the masses of the vertebrae might tell you different things than you would find out by looking at ASP alone. For one thing, once you know the volume of a bone or a neck or a whole vertebral column, you can plug in whatever density you like and see how the mass changes. If you want to know how much the cervical column of Brachiosaurus would weigh if Brachiosaurus was a big giraffe, just switch the densities. (As it happens, giraffe vertebrae are a bit more than twice as dense as Brachiosaurus vertebrae, so the hypothetical Giraffasaurus would be screwed.)

It turns out that the 8.5-meter cervical series of Brachiosaurus only massed about 600 kg. That's really surprisingly light. The bones of that 28-foot neck weighed about as much as a small cow. In fact, the humeri of Brachiosaurus, each 2 meters long, weighed about as much together as the cervical series. That's because they are really dense, with a density of 1.8 or 1.9 g/cm^3. By comparison, the cervical vertebrae were about 70% air by volume, which would give them a density of 0.6 g/cm^3.

All of that is simple junior high math. But it's still a surprising result. Hence the title of this post. I've been over the numbers and it all checks out, but it still blows my mind.

Here's a graphical representation, which is going into my SVP poster. Comments welcome.

Dr. Vector returns

To blogging, that is. My physical body is still on the East Coast. And I'm only blogging to point you in the direction of my Flickr page, where I have posted some pix from the trip. Here are a couple of teasers, taken from underneath and on top of two of Manhattan's famous skyscrapers.

The herd

I'm a wreck. Everywhere I look, I see people who have their shit together to a higher degree than I do.

I don't have any data. No database, no big collection of specimens, no organized framework, no clear sense of where I'm going in the medium-to-long term--no program, in other words. Just a dubious stew of weird specimens, half-baked ideas, and curiosity. And, well, okay, I do have a little data. Little enough that just about everyone else has more.

A couple of clarifications here. First, I'm not complaining. My strategy of working on whatever's most interesting has gotten me this far and kept me happy in the meantime. Most of the people who do seem to have their shit together expend all that organizational energy on problems that seem deadly dull to me. I'm just worried that someday I'm going to be called to account--for example, by a job search committee--and when they ask, "Wedel, what the crap are you doing?" I won't have a satisfactory answer.

Second, I'm not kidding. I've tried to express this before, but no one believes me. Evidently I give off the air of someone who knows what he's doing. I'm just trying to give you the Wedel-internal view. Who knows, maybe everyone feels this way and I don't know that because no one ever talks about it.

Unless you're part of a search committee and you're checking up on me, in which case I am stone-cold badass researcher, and I'm just writing all this baloney to keep the proles from feeling too bad about how much their lives suck.

Anyway, that's not what I sat down to blog about. I also have a collection of toy sauropods. I'm sure it's nowhere near the world's biggest, and I'm not bragging, I'm just telling. I tend to pick up a new one whenever I take a trip somewhere. I can tell you that the NHM Cetiosaurus came from my first trip to London and the NHM Mamenchisaurus came from the second, and that the Brachiosaurus skeleton came from the gift shop at Dinosaur National Monument (the one at the Wall, not the one on the road in with the ride-able Diplodocus from the previous post). I'm not sure if it would be inspiring or pathetic if I could remember where I'd gotten every one. In any case, I can't.

There's only one that is really worth blogging about at all, and that's the plush Sauroposeidon. I found it in a Discovery Channel store in Dallas, Texas, late in 2000. They must have made them in a hurry, since we only announced the beast's existence in the late fall of 1999. And they made them without our knowledge or input, since I first learned that the toy existed when I saw it in the store. I'm not complaining, mind you. As far as I'm concerned, once the thing is out there, it's out there, and people can do with it what they want. I'm just saying that as the primary namer of the dinosaur, I was shocked to see it incarnated as a toy. Pleasantly shocked and flattered as hell, but shocked nonetheless.

Oh, and they're not available anymore. I wish I'd bought a dozen. As it is, I only have the one. I bought one each for my mom and my grandma, too. Mom ties a red ribbon around the neck of hers at Christmas, which is kinda touching.

About the only other thing to tell about it is something my brother Todd said. When I was all stressed out about my oral qualifying exams, he told me that I should just walk into the exam room, set the plush Sauroposeidon on the table, and ask, "Any questions?" I thought that was pretty funny, but I'm pretty sure my committee wouldn't have.

Anyway, here's a photo of the thing with the NHM Brachiosaurus for scale--and, conveniently, to scale.


P.S. If you're burning with curiosity about who's who in the photo at the top, here's the best I can do, from left to right by head position, with genus, maker, and purchase location where available.

Apatosaurus, Wild Safari
Brachiosaurus, Wild Safari
Brachiosaurus skeleton, maker unknown, DNM gift shop
Brachiosaurus (little rubber guy in front row)
Apatosaurus (plush)
Amargasaurus, Carnegie collection
Brachiosaurus (LRG in front row), tube 'o dinos from the Smithsonian
Cetiosaurus, NHM collection, NHM gift shop
Mamenchisaurus (head down near LRG), Carnegie collection
Brachiosaurus, Schleich collection, Stuttgart museum gift shop
Sauroposeidon, Discovery Channel store, Dallas
mystery sauropod skeleton, Arby's kids meal, San Jose
Brachiosaurus, NHM collection, gift from Tony Campagna
Apatosaurus, Schleich collection, hardware store in Enid, OK
Brachiosaurus, Carnegie collection
Brachiosaurus (LRG in front row), Cal Acad gift shop
Brachiosaurus (plush), Field Museum gift shop
mystery sauropod Mexican bobble-head, gift from Alan and Sophie Shabel
Mamenchisaurus, NHM collection, NHM gift shop
Corythosaurus (not a sauropod), found on beach in Santa Cruz
mystery caveman, ditto
baby Apatosaurus, Carnegie collection
LEGO Brachiosaurus, Wal-Mart
Brachiosaurus, Burger King kids meal, gift from Terry Cooper
Apatosaurus (pewter)
Brontosaurus, Mold-a-Rama machine, Field Museum

The last one is one of my favorites, and noteworthy because you can still get one if you can get your ass to Chicago. In the basement of the Field Museum, right outside the McDonalds, are four huge Mold-a-Rama machines from the 50s that will form a Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Apatosaurus out of hot stinking carcinogenic plastic right before your eyes. I really wanted to complete my set (of 1) when I was there last summer, but slave-driver Mike insisted that seeing the Brachiosaurus holotype was more important. Whatever!

Dr. Vector, interior decorator

I'm not going to lie to you: I like toys. Legos, Star Wars, Transformers, dinosaurs--all of that. Is it unseemly for a 31-year-old married father of one to want to acquire and play with toys? Not at all.

First, toys are cool. That's a tough one to argue with.

Second, there's Jarrod's infamous defense of adults playing with toys: someday our kids are going to be buying toys. We don't want them to be stuck with the pathetic offerings of a dried-up toy industry. Therefore it's our responsibility to support those toymakers now by buying and using their products.

Finally, it is reassuring to know that I am not alone.

Toys are on my mind right now because the move afforded me the opportunity to get a couple of things out of the box and put them up. One of them is the Lego Ultimate Collectors' Series Y-Wing, which is 26 inches long and a foot wide and contains 1473 pieces. But I'm going to wait and blog about that after I've gotten Vicki to take some good pictures of me holding it.

An equally large box contains the Lego Millennium Falcon that Mike Taylor sent me, apparently just for being a good person. I haven't gotten around to building that one, but it's coming. In the meantime, and to continue the run of photos of me in compromising positions, here's a photo showing how much I love my as-yet-unbuilt Millennium Falcon.

The other thing that I was able to get out of the box is my King Kong V-rex bust. This thing has a complicated history. I am often stumped when someone wants to buy me a big gift, because my day-to-day yearnings are for small, cheap things like paperbacks and comic books. I rarely want things that are both expensive and practical. If someone says they're looking to spend 50 bucks on me, I usually ask for something at least a little outlandish.

Last Christmas, Vicki asked me what I wanted and I told her that I was quite taken with the King Kong V-rex skull.

This is a nice little 8-inch model skull of the new movie's tyrannosaur, the fictional Vastatosaurus rex. It's comparable in size to a human skull, and I thought it would look cool next to the cast human skull I got Vicki for Christmas several years ago.

Vicki was game and ordered the thing well in advance of Christmas, which was good, because they were going to be shipping it from New Zealand. But it didn't arrive. When they missed the delivery window, Vicki got online and zapped a few e-mails around to try to find out what the hell was going on with her order.

At this point I have to express some serious admiration for the people at Weta. They had lost her order, but they were apologetic, and they promised to get it in the mail straightaway. And they did.
Shortly thereafter, an improbably large box arrived on our doorstep. Much too large and too heavy to contain a little 8-inch skull and stand, unless the skull was made out of collapsed matter. I tore open the shipping box and received one of the most pleasant surprises of my life. I don't know if it was just a mistake, or if the folks at Weta felt bad about depriving me of a Christmas present. Don't know, and don't care.

Because they didn't send me the V-rex skull, which retails for about $40 and which Vicki had paid for a month prior. They sent the V-rex bust, which retails over $200. And they sent it from New Zealand. So I could hardly send it back; the postage would be more than the cost of the item.

More to the point, I didn't want to send it back.

This is no small, tasteful knickknack like a model dinosaur skull on a stand. This imposing sumbitch is 10 inches wide, 18 inches tall, and stands out from the wall 18 inches. It is hideous...hideously AWESOME!!!!!

I really can't say enough good things about it. The modeling, casting, and painting are all first-rate. It looks like a damn tyrannosaur just busted through the wall looking for someone's ass to kick. And it looks pissed.

Purists will have noted that the movie tyrannosaur has three fingers per hand, when real-life tyrannosaurids only had two. But whoever sculpted this beauty was pretty savvy. Each hand does have three fingers, but they are cleverly arranged so that it's almost impossible to see more than two of them at once. So on casual inspection the V-rex looks like a T-rex. Which is nice, and may help Weta move a little more product. More power to 'em, sez me.

So of course I wanted to put it up in the living room, right over the entertainment center. You know, really make it the centerpiece of Casa Wedel. Well, Vicki was having none of that. She wouldn't let me put it up in our old place at all. She said I'd have to wait until we moved.

Well, as any decent negotiator can tell you, that was Mistake #1. We were only going to be in the other place for a handful of months. She should have let me put it up wherever I wanted in exchange for a reduced sentence after the move.

Our new front door opens onto a short hallway that takes you into the rest of the apartment. I really wanted to put the thing up at the front of the hallway, so that the first thing you'd see when you came in was a pissed-off tyrannosaur about your bite your head off. But Vicki wasn't having any of that, either. She said I could put it up over the aquarium, and only over the aquarium.

That was Mistake Numero Dos. If I'd gotten my way, Rex would be in the hallway and we'd only see it when we passed through. The kitchen/dining room/living room here is all one big, long space, and even though Rex is hanging in the far corner, it is amazing and gratifying to see how much it visually dominates the room. It's large enough to be visible from anywhere in the living area, and it draws the eye. It couldn't be more noticeable if pirates were riding around it on flying sharks and throwing bears at people.

That lamp in front of the aquarium has to go, obviously. I offered to set up my herd of sauropods somewhere else, but Vicki said she'd gotten used to them being on top of the bookcase. And they do make a nice visual segue to Rex.

More toy-related blogging soon.

Dr. Vector with friends

I don't blog enough about sauropods. I mean, nobody does, but c'mon. It's time for some sauroponderous action featuring yours truly. In rough chronological order, then...


About 20 miles outside of Vernal, Utah, is the turnoff for Dinosaur National Monument. Once you start on the road in, the only potential stop before you get to the Wall is an improbably large private gift shop. They have the best dino junk in the world, and outside they have this kickass lifesize Diplodocus you can get your picture taken on. I've actually ridden the dino twice, once in the summer of 1997 when I was hitting museums out west with Vicki and Tyson Davis, and once the next summer when Rich's field crew was passing through Vernal on our way home from the Cloverly. I assume that this photo is from 1997 since I'm (A) wearing pants--that is, as opposed to shorts, you perverts, (2) not visibly bearded, and (D) waving a ball cap instead of my big-ass Tilley T2.


Jump forward to June 2004, when I went back to the OMNH with Andrew Lee, who snapped this cool shot of me with an immense dorsal vertebra of Apatosaurus. This is probably D5 or D6, based on the incipient cleft in the neural spine (the thing on the left that would be the neck and headboard if this was a guitar). It's an even 140 cm tall, compared to 105 cm for the same bone in the mounted skeleton of Apatosaurus in the Carnegie Museum. The Carnegie animal is about 70 feet long, so . . . you do the math.



Last summer I went to Chicago and spend a couple of days rocking the Field Museum with Mike Taylor. The highlight of the trip was getting to have our way with the holotype of Brachiosaurus for an afternoon. It came out of the ground about the same time the Wright brothers were taking off. This is the beast's humerus (upper arm bone). The top end is up by my head, and the elbow end is, well, missing. At least 8 inches, maybe a foot. So it should be even longer than it is. How much does that rock? I'll tell you: a lot.


Time to break chronology. Back in 1999 or 2000 Matt Bonnan came to Norman and spent a few days crashing with Vicki and me and ransacking the OMNH collection. We eventually got a paper out of it, which is the second-best thing to come out of that visit. This is not the first-best thing, but it's close: me with an Apatosaurus femur. Just a normal-sized one; the femur from the monster whose backbone is shown above would be an even third larger.


Now this is the best thing from that visit.

Gigantic Dinosaur Expo 2006

If you happen to get to Chiba City (an hour southeast of Tokyo) between July 15 and September 10, check out the Gigantic Dinosaur Expo 2006. The centerpiece of the expo is a mounted skeleton of Supersaurus. Unlike most of the 'gigapods', including Bruhathkayosaurus and my own beloved Sauroposeidon, Supersaurus is actually represented by decent material (gasp!) from more than one individual (you lie!) from more than one quarry (GET OUT!!). So a skeletal reconstruction is more than a pile of guesswork. The mounted skeleton is based on the type material from Dry Mesa Quarry in western Colorado, which was collected by Jim Jensen in the 1970s, and a new skeleton from Wyoming that is being described by Scott Hartman and David Lovelace of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Check out Scott's bitchin' skeletal reconstructions of Supersaurus and other dinos here. And, uh, in the next paragraph.

If you can't get to Chiba City, not to worry. The Japanese newspaper Nikkei gave the expo some double-page, color-photo love. If you have sharp eyes and you've spent a lot of time at SVP lately, you might just make out a tiny Scott Hartman and Dave Lovelace in the photo with the mounted Supersaurus skeleton. Unless I miss my guess, Dave is third from the left, and Scott is fifth, with arm extended while he shows off his baby.


Naturally, I have an ulterior motive in posting all this. These folks at Nikkei are pretty sharp; when they do a story on giant dinosaurs, they go right to the experts. Namely, me. Get a load of my bad self, expounding on the mysteries of evolution in front of the VSLB tyrannosaur.


And in case you haven't had enough, here's one for the road. Not being able to read Japanese, I have no idea what the caption says. Possibly "fat dork shows the size of the hoagie he ate for lunch".

I can live with that.

BIGGEST. DINOSAUR. EVER.

Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, in books or on Wikipedia, or in one of those so-called "scientific" journals, the largest dinosaur of all time was not Brachiosaurus, or Supersaurus, or Argentinosaurus, or Amphicoelias, or Bruhathkayosaurus. Not by a long shot.

The newly described Stratoposeidon taylori trumped them all. Represented by a complete articulated skeleton from Hell's Attic National Desert in Utah, Stratoposeidon was morphologically similar to Brachiosaurus, only eight times larger. With a shoulder height of 44 meters and a neck 68 meters long, Stratoposeidon was tall enough to browse from the payload compartment of a Saturn V rocket. If Stratoposeidon stepped on a bull elephant, its foot would entirely cover the resulting puddle of elephant juice. Stratoposeidon is estimated to have weighed 17,920 tons (35 x 8 x 8 x 8). When it defecated, a bolus of macerated plant material five meters in diameter and weighing 65 tons would drop from a height of 25 meters, fall for just over two seconds, and hit with enough force to level a barn. Stratoposeidon's feet had a total contact area of 650 square meters, and they exerted a pressure of 270,000 Newtons per square meter (39 pounds per square inch) when the animal was standing still.

Immediately following the publication of the initial description, an anonymous poster on the Dinosaur Mailing List pointed out that the specimens known as Brachiosaurus may simply be juvenile stratoposeidons, in which case Stratoposeidon would become an objective junior synonym of Brachiosaurus! However, this has not yet been demonstrated. Furthermore, the authors that described Stratoposeidon have already responded; they threatened to petition the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature to preserve the name. One possible outcome of an ICZN ruling would be to sink Brachiosaurus in favor of Stratoposeidon, on the grounds that the former is only represented by juveniles and does not reflect the mature morphology of the taxon.

Below is a reconstruction of Stratoposeidon with various objects for scale, including:
- a Boeing 747 jumbo jet (70.5 meters)
- a Boeing B-52 bomber (48.5 meters)
- a Rockwell space shuttle orbiter (37.25 meters)
- the Millenium Falcon (26.7 meters)
- Brachiosaurus altithorax (=juvenile Stratoposeidon? -- 5.5 meters tall at the shoulder)
- an AT-AT walker (22.5 meters tall)
- a bull elephant (3 meters tall at the shoulder)
- Mike Taylor (1.8 meters tall)
- a Saturn V moon rocket (111 meters tall)
- several double-decker buses (each 10.9 meters long)

I stole the comparative images from various places on the Internet. The 747 and AT-AT came from Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions, possibly the coolest site on the net.

Matt's Law

Self-explanatory.

If you'd like a version of this image that hasn't had some wiseacre's verbal diarrhea squirted all over it, dig this:

Photoshop posts will continue until morale improves.