The Boneyard #10 is now online at Self-designed Student. There has been a plethora of paleontological press and postings over the past two weeks, and Amanda has done a fantastic job of pulling them all together. Check it out!
Several interesting tidbits of paleo news have been reported this week:
First up, a fossil claw of the eurypterid (sea scorpion) Jaekelopterus rhenaniae could have come from the largest arthropod that ever lived. The claw, described in Biology Letters, measures 46 cm in length, and presumably was part of a Jaekelopterus individual 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) long. The story has been well-covered by National Geographic News, The Loom, and Palaeoblog.
This week’s issue of the journal Science has a few brief articles on research presented at last month’s Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting. One provocatively titled story, “Did Horny Young Dinosaurs Cause Illusion of Separate Species?”, reports on the work of John Horner, Mark Goodwin, and Holly Woodward, which suggests that the spiky-headed pachycephalosaurs Dracorex hogwartsia and Stygimoloch spinifer might, in fact, be juvenile forms of the knobby domehead Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis. Update (11/24): Manabu Sakamoto has a summary of Horner et al.’s presentation up at his blog, Raptor’s Nest.
Finally, researchers at the Royal Tyrrell Museum have announced the discovery of a new ceratopsian dinosaur: Eotriceratops xerinsularis (ee-oh-try-SAIR-ah-tops zeer-in-soo-LAIR-iss), the “Dawn Three-horned face from Dry Island (Buffalo Jump Provincial Park)”. This 68,000,000 year old dinosaur is a couple of million years older than Triceratops, and it may be the ancestor of that well-known genus. Eotriceratops and Triceratops shared several features such as large brow horns and a solid frill, but Eotriceratops also possessed some more primitive characteristics than its younger relative, according to this story in the Edmonton Journal. The three-meter-long skull of Eotriceratops (reconstructed in this photo) would seem to put it in the running for the largest head of any terrestrial animal, alongside other ceratopsian contenders such as Torosaurus and Pentaceratops.
A Brief Review of Offbeat Prehistory in Popular Culture
In a well-coordinated bit of publishing, National Geographic has followed up Thursday’s Nigersaurus announcements with its December 2007 issue featuring a spiky Dracorex hogwartsia glaring out from the cover, with the promise of “Big Bad Bizarre Dinosaurs” featured within. The article itself is titled “Extreme Dinosaurs,” and features a gallery of anatomical sketches and computer-generated recreations of fossil oddities such as the sailed-sauropod Amargasaurus, the giant-armed Deinocheirus, and, yes, the wide-mouthed Nigersaurus.
The National Geographic website has a slew of added content, including a gallery of the dinosaurs highlighted in the article, a critique of dinosaur art from previous issues, highlighting what’s changed in our understanding of dinosaurs, and an interview with article author John Updike. Over at Stones, Bones, and Things, National Geographic staffer Chris Sloan is holding a “Bizarre Dinosaur ‘Beauty’ Contest,” inviting readers to suggest their picks for the most unusual dinosaur ever discovered.
I’m glad to see National Geographic following in a grand tradition of pop-paleontology by bringing a handful of weird and wonderful dinosaurs to millions of readers this month. Ten years ago, a similar sentiment formed the core of the Hairy Museum of Natural History’s first web-based offering: each week (more or less), visitors to the HMNH could access a new online trading card in the Goofy Dinosaurs of the World series. The 45-card set came to a close in 1998, so the science and art is a bit dated, but you can still access the complete collection in the “back rooms” of this website.
Figure 1: A Photoshopped packet of GDOTW Trading Cards
With hundreds of millions of years of evolution to look back on, it should come as no surprise that plenty of other artists and writers continue to draw inspiration from the more mind-boggling forms revealed in the fossil record. While working on the Goofy Dinosaurs, I came across Ray Troll’s Strange Critters of the Deep, and the similarities between our two projects sparked a decade of conversations, collaboration, and comraderie. In 2001, the talented Luis Rey published his version of Extreme Dinosaurs, which included both obscure and familiar dinosaurs restored with his signature vibrant colors, dramatic ornamentation, and dynamic perspective. Artist Gary Staab is currently traveling an exhibit that covers the evolutionary gamut of goof called Bizarre Beasts, Past and Present. And over at the blog When Pigs Fly Returns, Zach Miller occasionally weighs in on all manner of Prehistoric Weirdness, including, most recently, a promising start to a new series of posts on unusual sauropods.
But this is by no means a recent phenomenon. One of my favorite books as a child was titled Prehistoric Monsters did the Strangest Things, published in 1974. This was part of a series of books (written by Leonora and Arthur Hornblow and illustrated by Michael K. Frith) about the strangest things done by different types of animals, but Prehistoric Monsters was the only one I read as a child, which served as my first introduction to such worthies as Diplocaulus, Glyptodon, and Paraceratherium (as “The Beast of Baluchistan”).
Figure 2: The cover of Prehistoric Monsters did the Strangest Things, by Leonora and Arthur Hornblow, 1974.
In 1948, A. Hyatt Verrill published Strange Prehistoric Animals and Their Stories, a charming volume that not only covers bizarre forms of the past, but also has chapters on “Sea Serpents and Loathly Worms”, “Fantastic Creations, Past and Present”, and “Monstrosities of Today”.
Figure 3: The title page of Strange Prehistoric Animals and Their Stories, by A. Hyatt Verrill, 1948.
The book was illustrated by the author, and while the restorations were not terribly accurate (even for their time), they do have a certain colorful personality:
Figure 4: Color Plate from Strange Prehistoric Animals and their World.
The earliest example of weird prehistory that I’ve come across dates back to the early years of popular paleontology in America. In 1897, William H. Ballou published a nine-page article in The Century magazine titled, “Strange Creatures of the Past,” which included reproductions of several early paintings by a young Charles R. Knight.
Figure 5: Detail from “Strange Creatures of the Past,” showing a serpentine Elasmosaurus painted by Charles R. Knight, 1897.
Cornell University Library has made the article (along with several years of The Century magazine) available to view online here.
Whether labeled as extreme, bizarre, goofy, or strange, the presentation of dinosaurs and other extinct animals as sensationally mind-boggling has a long, rich history. (I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface here, and I’d very much like to hear of any other examples I’ve missed—especially from outside the U.S.) It certainly deserves its own place alongside the other well-worn tools of the paleontological promoter: Prehistoric Animals as Monsters, Paleontologists at Work, Prehistoric Animals as Living Animals, New Discovery overturns Old Theory, Prehistoric Animals as Collectibles, etc.
Ultimately though, “strange” only exists in the eye of the beholder. Simply because an animal appears unusual to us as Holocene hominids doesn’t make it intrinsically weird. As Smithsonian paleontologist Hans-Dieter Sues is quoted in the National Geographic article, “In evolution nothing is really bizarre. Every structure makes perfectly good sense to the organism. In the case of extinct animals the challenge is to identify what the purpose might have been.”
Still, I’m very glad that, somewhere along the evolutionary twists and turns that led to Homo sapiens, we developed some capacity to understand, admire, and be amazed by them.
The sauropod news is coming in fast and furious today, but at the moment I only have time for the briefest of comments.
Mike Taylor and Darren Naish have described a new genus and species of sauropod, Xenoposeidon proneneukos (ZEE-no-puh-SYE-d’n pro-nen-YOO-koss), “the forward-sloping, strange earth-shaker”, based on a single bizarre vertebra from East Sussex, England. Darren and Mike have it covered on Tetrapod Zoology and at SV-POW!, the paper is available to download here, along with supplemental information, and spiffy introduction to the fellow here.
Also in the news, a team of scientists led by Paul Sereno have described the absolutely bizarre cranial anatomy and possible feeding habits of the rebbachisaurid sauropod Nigersaurus taqueti. The paper is freely accessible through PLOS-ONE, a Nigersaurus homepage is here, the press release is here, and the story is currently covered at A Blog Around the Clock and Laelaps. I’m looking forward to reading more about this one.
Check out Laelaps for more details about these stories (and a whole slew of sauropod posts today).
Anoplotherium skeletal diagram from copyrightexpired.com
Over at Catalogue of Organisms, Christopher has put up an interesting post about recently described bipedal adaptations in an extinct relative of camels, the tylopod Anoplotherium. Well worth a read!
