Stegoceras was not related to Stegosaurus, despite their similar names. it was a member of a group of dinosaurs called the Pachycephalosaurs (previously mentioned here ) that had rounded, bony skulls. When first

Two Stegoceras have a disagreement.

discovered, these animals were suspected to have butted heads, like rams or bighorn sheep. But opinion changed. Some argued that such behavior would have harmed the animals and they were more likely to have rammed each other in the flanks. Some went still further and posited that the animals didn’t use their bony heads for anything more then sexual display.

However, a new study published in PLoS has determined that Stegoceras very likely did ram heads with others of its kind. Researchers Eric Snively and Jessica Theodor ran CT scans on several modern animals, such as Musk Oxen and Bighorn Sheep, and compared their findings to the CT data from Stegoceras. What they saw confirmed that the original theory had been basically correct. Stegoceras, like modern day bruisers, possessed a thoroughly reinforced brain-case that was covered by spongy bone and shielded by the distinctive hardened skull. However, unlike modern head butting animals, Stegoceras had an additional layer of bone sandwiched between these layers. In other words, repeated blunt head trauma–such as the kind gained from smacking the hell out of your head via inter-species  contests–would have had relatively little effect on the animal.

A predator manages to avoid a deadly strike.

Kentrosaurus, by contrast, was clearly a dangerous animal. A member of the Stegosaur family, it had traded in its plates for a row of long, wicked spikes down its tail. Clearly the thagomizer, as the spiked tail has come to be called, was capable of doing damage. But how much? The answer, according to Heinrich Mallison, was a horrific amount. Using computer modeling software, he determined how hard and how fast Kentrosaurus could  swing its tail. With a strike speed of over 40 mph, the spikes were easily capable of killing a human with only a glancing blow. A predatory dinosaur that misjudged its strike could potentially have been fatally wounded.

With more research ongoing, it’s entirely likely that soon we’ll have more information on dinosaur weaponry. And perhaps some of the hypotheses and reconstructions will once again change. At any rate, it is still clear that even herbivorous dinosaurs were capable of packing a wallop.

Debuted by Atari as an arcade game in the 90′s, Primal Rage was a traditional 2D “versus” simulator set in the very traditional mold. Players selected from a menagerie of quasi-prehistoric beasts and battled it out across a variety of landscapes. In this, it was not particularly different from the later Jurassic Park: Dinosaur Battles, although the latter was arguably far better animated. What sets Primal Rage apart, however, is its back story.

Picture a world much like our own. A series of cataclysms wrought by a falling asteroid kill millions of people and transform the worlds surface. Out the devastation come the new gods; massive prehistoric beasts that symbolize various states of being. The carnosaurs Diablo and Sauron represent Chaos and Hunger, respectively. The velociraptor Talon is the god of survival, while Vertigo is a lovecraftian, serpentine monstrosity that embodies madness. The herbivorous Armadon is lord of life. Finally, the two giant apes (for since King Kong, giant apes and dinosaurs have gone together like chocolate and peanut butter) Blizzard and Chaos represent Good and Evil. The surviving remnants of humanity worship these beasts as totems, but the new gods hate one another, and one of them will eventually seek to rule over the entirety of the new world.

There’s something strangely compelling about this scenario, relayed in bits and pieces through images and text throughout the game.  Owing a little to classic kaiju films and a lot to Topps “Dinosaurs Attack!” trading cards, Primal Rage went above and beyond in delivering an entertaining world, and one that held a good deal of potential for an actual story. Indeed, Atari must have thought so as well, since they more or less immediately put a sequel into development, released a licensed comic and novel, and put out toys to allow children to bash their favorite monstrosities together in the real world. Unfortunately, this flood of merchandise ran headlong into the game’s other defining feature: bloody violence.

Primal Rage was a gory game. Its characters bit, smacked, clawed, and tore bloody chucks from each other, in addition to a variety of special attacks that ranged from the predictable (super powered bite) to the gag inducing (acidic golden showers.) There was something of an uproar when parents discovered that not only were the dinosaur attacks exceedingly visceral, but other unpleasant bodily fluids were involved. Understandably perturbed, they kicked up enough of a ruckus that Atari rapidly pulled the game off the market and released a censored version that kept most of the blood but removed the more objectionable content. But this was the end of Primal Rage’s brief brush with any kind of relevance, and the game sank into obscurity, dragging down the sequel with it. There were and are a few die hard fans of the game, but by and large people moved on to other things and the franchise never really recovered.

I think it’s a shame. While vile and nasty, it had more of a story then others of its type, and the creature designs were rather creative. Perhaps if Atari or some other company remade it, it would finally find the audience that it deserves, and we could once more have a chance to bang our toothy toys together and growl.

No single issue haunts popular ecology and meteorology more than the specter of global warming. Documentaries, television specials, op-eds and magazine articles, there is a ceaseless stream of press and punditry from both sides, a flow as inexorable as water off a melting glacier. Many argue that it’s a real and present threat, and others just a vehemently argue it’s nothing much to worry about. But despite what the media would have you believe, there isn’t any real disagreement that global warming exists; the real disagreement comes from what its effect on our world will be. How should we react to this all encompassing change?

By not panicking, argues paleoclimatologist Curt Stager in his new book Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life On Earth. The world is going to change in new and unexpected ways–we are past the point of no return. The arctic ice is going to shrink, the glaciers will recede and leave new and fertile lands, and the ocean waters will grow progressively more acidic. Beach front property will be submerged, and countries such as Greenland will finally start to live up to their name. Some dry areas will grow wet, and others will parch. Stager spins a vision of a radically changed but still viable world, and takes pains to point out that while a global warming trend is going to be ecologically painful, it may yield some good down the line.

That said, we should by no means dismiss global warming as an over hyped issue. In various chapters, Stager describes the harrowing results of carbon saturation; massive acidification in the oceans, parching in the interiors of the continents, and other ecological changes that will make life very difficult in some parts of the world. In one particularly harrowing passage, he describes the effect of oceanic acidification on plankton, the foundation on which the ocean food chain is built. The reader is left wondering if perhaps the real horror stories of global warming are going unreported.

Chapters such as this contribute to the book’s rather odd tone. It’s an improbably relaxed book, one that jettisons the hysteria of other such studies. Stager writes with an engagingly open style, although in a few places he struggles to simplify certain concepts in a satisfactory manner. On the whole, however, he does an excellent job of making himself understood in a lucid and occasionally witty fashion. Every now and then, however, the prose takes a dark turn: Stager makes it very clear that while we should not panic about the coming change, it would be catastrophic for us to continue with business as usual.

The pacing is also worth noting. Many books on the subject of global warming are not well organized, their arguments either lost in the welter of data or running roughshod over it. Stager opts for a slightly different tack–he allows the data to guide and support the narrative, while  mostly being deft enough to preventing it from taking over the work. There are a few points in which he loses the thread somewhat, particularly toward the middle, but such lapses are rare and brief.

On the whole, Deep Future is a clear, concise, and thought provoking work, one that takes a refreshingly frank look at the science behind global warming and, more importantly, what is coming next. In a field where hyperbolic claims and bitter skepticism prevail, the clarity and unflappability of Stager’s account is like a breath of fresh, slightly heated air.

Then, a few days ago on the Dinosaur Mailing List, Gregory S. Paul decided he’d had enough. In a long series of posts, he railed against those artists who were working in his style and underbidding him and, to a greater extent, the media and museum people who encouraged it. Finally, he made a sweeping statement to the paleoart world: stop using my skeletal reconstructions.

This sparked a massive discussion on the list serve, one that has had artists and scientists from the professional to the amateur weighing in. Several issues were raised with Paul’s position. Was Paul attempting to copyright specific postures, as he’d implied in one of his emails? Did he have the right to prevent artists from making use of his technical and scientific skeletal illustrations for the purposes of their own reconstructions? How far did his copyright claims extend? And most importantly, can you copyright the exact proportions of an animal skeleton?

These are all important issues, and for simplicities sake let’s make a few things clear. First, Paul has every right in the world to try and protect himself from copyright infringement–indeed, he pointed out that if it weren’t for the significant lost revenue, he wouldn’t have said anything. I fully encourage him to go after people who have been ripping off his distinctive life reconstructions. It’s his duty as an artist.

However, many of his arguments have devolved into a good deal of pointless name calling and this is starting to cloud what is a very important issue–the need for a uniform price index or guild for paleoartists. How do Paul’s complaints stack up against this need? Which of his demands are reasonable and which aren’t?

Paul is demanding that other skeletal artists start using a different standard pose then the one he pioneered. Scott Hartman, among others, has graciously agreed and is changing his illustrations to new, original poses. But it’s clear to me that Paul has no legal grounds to claim copyright or brand on this so called “Paul Look.” His argument, in essence, is one of squatter’s rights; he’s been doing it for the longest, so it belongs to him. Copyright, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t work that way.

Similarly, he claims that a standard skeletal pose is bad science when used by different illustrators. Others have argued, I think correctly, that in fact standard poses tend to highlight errors made in the reconstructions, especially when compared to other artist’s work.

There’s more. What if an artist wishes to use another person’s skeletal references on a commercial illustration? Are royalties in order? Paul overreached again, making a blanket assertion that artists should simply create their own. Nothing wrong with that, but some of us have neither the money nor the access to papers or bones necessary for such work. Paul’s response to this issue is simply to say that we should stay out of the business and leave it to the professionals, but that is tamping down on valuable creative competition and is dangerously close to blaming younger artists for what is basically a problem with the employers.

These issues are going to need to be solved, and while I wish Mr. Paul only the best in protecting his interests, I also cannot in good faith support him any longer. Some of his ideas are good, and I suggest we should use them–perhaps a different standard pose can be found, one that we can all agree will not be subject to such debates in the future. Price indexing is long overdue, as well. But when it comes to the kind of old guard vs. new guard arguments that he is espousing, his ludicrous claim to brand, and his frankly shocking behavior on the DML, I have to say that I have had enough.

Gregory S. Paul is correct in that there are serious issues in the paleoart world. But the way to deal with is is not to try and restrict others usage of scientific artwork–rather, it is to encourage others to produce work that has a distinct visual flavor, and can be valued at set prices. Otherwise, much like the dinosaurs we illustrate, we’re ignoring the wider troubles headed our way.

Elsewhere on the blogosphere: Love in The Time of Chasmosaurs, Art Evolved, Scientific American. We haven’t heard the last of this, folks. Not by a long shot.

A few days ago, a new sauropod from the Early Cretaceous of Utah was announced to the nation. Called Brontomerus, or “Thunder Thighs,” it’s notable for a few reasons. First, its hips had massive grooves for muscle attachments, meaning that the beast could potentially have packed a remarkably nasty kick.  Second (and to my mind more interestingly) it tells us something about the nature of how groups of animals appear to die off and return.

For a long time, the end of the Jurassic was considered to be the end of the sauropods. Sure, a few were still straggling around, but for the most part their heyday had passed for good. Conventional wisdom had it that the giants of North America and Europe were, by the early Cretaceous, pretty much gone. Why this might have happened, or how, nobody was sure. However, recent discoveries in both continents have begun to fill in the empty space, showing that what appeared to be a great die off was, in fact nothing of the kind–a gradual dwindling, perhaps, but nothing like the catastrophic event that early sauropod paleontologists envisioned.

Brontomerus belongs to that new paradigm. Like Astrodon and other Early Cretacious sauropods, it is something that according to our knowledge of sauropods shouldn’t have existed. And yet here it is. What implications does this have for other extinction events in the fossil record?

The term “Lazarus Taxon” is defined as a member of a group thought extinct that turns up alive and well (though this is relative when you’re studying fossils) in a later era. There are a few good examples; the giant amphibians of  Cretaceous Antarctica that ought to have been extinct millennia earlier, or the Coelocanth that were found in the deep waters of the continental shelf. While the “reappearance” of sauropods is not a case of Lazarus Taxa, it begs the question of whether other extinction events, such at the KT event that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs, were quite as violently sudden as they seemed. Perhaps for a few million years after the impact, a few remnant populations of terrible lizard withered away under the new sun of the Cenozoic.

To finish off this rank speculation, I will leave you with the image of Brontomerus that accompanied the paper. While I’m not wild about the actual style (it looks a little to much like bad CGI to me) the concept of a raptor-punting-sauropod is foolproof and needs to be animated immediately.

Eodromaeus

Eodromaeus murphii is a small predator from the almost ludicrously productive Ischigualasto Formation, which holds rock about 231 million years old. Like its contemporary (and better known) relative Herrerasaurus, Eodromaeus is certainly a theropod. It has all the hallmarks;  a long, low skull filled with sharp, recurved teeth and the the long, lanky build common to early predatory dinosaurs. It comes from a time when the various families of dinosaurs were beginning to split off into the families we would come to recognize; theropod relatives evolving into the massive sauropods, the herbivorous ornithopods beginning a massive adaptive radiation that would see them become everything from duck-billed hadrosaurs to the horned ceratopsians.

However, it’s rather unclear how many of these transitions took place. The recently discovered Panphagia is an example of where the theropod/sauropod devide may have been, but it still left some unanswered questions concerning how exactly theropods got to the point of exchanging their sharp pointy teeth for ones better suited to devouring greens.

Eoraptor

It’s the teeth, actually, that lead to the other, more startling assertion. The previous holder of the title for earliest theropod was a small predator known as Eoraptor, also discovered by Mr. Sereno. According to the hypothesis put forward in the paper, though, Eoraptor is actually a transitional phase between theropod dinosaurs and the massive long necked sauropods–much like Panphagia. The authors point to its teeth–which are rather more leaf shaped then its contemporary killing cousins–as an excuse to place it more on the sauropod side of the taxonomic barrier. This means that it took a while for the two families to properly split, and that the shift to herbivory was not as clean cut as we may have thought.

Whether this sticks will remain to be seen, but at present its an interesting new twist on the continued search for the origins of dinosaurs.

2010 has been the Year of the Ceratopsian, and for excellent reasons. A veritable flood of new horned dinosaur research came down the pipe, much of it from the finally released New Perspectives On Horned Dinosaurs. Among the highlights from this and other papers are these.

“Torosaurus” may be a junior synonym of Triceratops, which means the former name will be defunct. This is a story that got a lot of play this year, and as per usual, most of the reports managed to get stuff wrong. No, Triceratops is still a valid genus and probably always will be. In this case, the loser is the massive frilled Torosaurus, which appears to be a large adult for of Triceratops. The facts of the matter are still being worked out, so expect some news about it in the coming year.

Welcome to the newest members of the Ceratopsian Class of 2010. Koreaceratops, a swimming, primitive member of the family, was joined by two other Asian finds; Zuchengceratops and Sinoceratops. Europe welcomed its first known horned dinosaur with the arrival of Ajkaceratops. And from Utah came the intriguingly odd Utahceratops and Kosmoceratops, as well as the entertainingly named Medusaceratops. And finally, breaking news; introducing the fantastic Titanocaratops, a re-description of a Guinness World Record breaking skull previously thought to belong to  Pentaceratops. There’s undoubtedly going to be a lot more cool stuff next year, so keep your eyes peeled.

Some fairly interesting predatory dinosaurs were discovered or announced over the course of the year. Two of them–the bizarre humped Concavenator and the double bladed Baluar–hailed from Europe, a place with a paucity of good theropod remains. The small Linheraptor was described as well, with some fairly gorgeous fossils. As is right and proper, the bounty of horned dinosaur discoveries was matched by a good deal of new research on the Tyrannosaurs. First was the fun news that apparently, Barney got back–the nether ends of T.rex and other predatory dinosaurs were a good deal thicker then previously thought. A new tyrannosaur called Bistaheiversor was announced from New Mexico, and we learned that the great predators could be dainty with their dentition or cannibalistic in their consumption.

Finally, 2010 was a banner year for insights into the lifestyles of predatory dinosaurs. A dietary study revealed that many small predatory dinosaurs were, in fact, at least partially omnivorous. For those that weren’t, it became clear that occasionally they dug for their food, as evidenced by a trace fossil showing a predator clawing at a mammal burrow. Most importantly, the discovery of a method of determining color in fossils allowed for the reconstruction of two theropod color schemes; the tawny Sinosauropteryx and the woodpecker colored Anchiornis.

Overall, 2010 provided some excellent discoveries. With new species and studies due to be written up and released, the next twelve months promise to change our view of dinosaurs forever….at least until next year.

(Hat tip to Brian Switek, both on the publication of his new book Written in Stone and for his excellent blogs, both of which were a great help in putting this together.)

News recently emerged from Korea concerning a fairly interesting new dinosaur. Called by the imaginative name of Koreanosaurus, it at first glance appears to be a very typical ornithopod–small head, long tail and legs, etc. But a few small anatomical details have revealed something rather more interesting about it. Like its earlier cousin Oryctodromeus from North America, it apparently burrowed its way through the loam and dirt tha characterized its Cretaceous habitat.

How do we know? Namely, the stoutness of the arms and hands and the way in which its legs could splay. Much like a wombat which braces itself on its thick legs as it digs with its paws, Koreanosaurus had legs that could assume a position somewhat similar to that of other burrowing mammals. Likewise, its stout hands and arms would have assisted in tunneling.

It should be noted, however, that Koreanosaurus probably did not live underground. Instead it likely dug burrows that served as shelter for the night, like the aforementioned Wombat or Badger, and sallied forth during the day to devour the tender plants that grew on the floodplains around it.

Go here and here for more information.

(And yes, I’m back. Posts are going to be a bit shorter for a while while I catch up on the back log.)

What makes this important (or at least swings it withing the purview of this column) is one simple detail. Enshrined within the sandstone walls of the pit lie the preserved footprints of dinosaurs, tracks from the ancient and mysterious Triassic/Jurassic boundary. Should the development project go forward, these fossils and any others that lie as yet undiscovered will be lost.

The resistance to this, as the AP reports, is fairly widespread. There have been petitions to the county for the area to be folded into the adjacent state park, and the idea is currently winding its tortuous way through the state bureaucracy. But it’s taking too long; the bulldozers have started to move, and already a shroud of dirt covers the wall and its long preserved tracks. It’s gotten to the point that the scientists in the area, resigned to the wall’s destruction, have decided to simply salvage as much as they can, as quickly as they can, before it’s all gone.

All of this raises a question; who owns these fossils?

The quick, obvious answer is that the developer does, and in a legal sense this is true. Whatever is on the land is theirs to do with as they please, to preserve or destroy. If they want to cut down the trees, they can. If they want to keep them there and make it into a park, they could. Why does it matter what they chose to do with their land? They have the legal right.

But here’s the thing; once a fossil is gone, it is gone. All that we could have learned, all that we could have seen, that tiniest connection we can glean from a touch, the connection that brings us back to a time when life on earth was wondrous and strange–all of that will vanish. And we can never get it back.

Destroying fossils, whether through poaching or development or neglect, is destroying our chance to understand out history, the history of life on earth. It is a crime against knowledge, and a crime against all of us. These fossils are part of our shared heritage, not as humans but as living things. And when we lose a piece of that heritage, we lose a chance at understanding who we are and where we came from.

I should point out here that I don’t believe the developers are evil. They are simply doing what they have to do, like all of us. Why should they care about fossils in the rock? It’s not their business. It doesn’t affect them.

But the fossils don’t belong to them. Legally, yes, but not morally. They belong to Humanity as a whole, and Humanity as a whole will be much the poorer for their loss, whether that loss is in New Jersey or China or Sudan. Let the Developers develop, but let it be somewhere else.

Here’s a petition to save the quarry. I urge you to sign it. The records of our natural history cannot be given a price, for they belong to all of us.

It’s a tough question, considering that the family contains a staggeringly diverse amount of forms (try generalizing the behavior of a shrew from an elephant, and see how that works.) It’s made even tougher by the fact that the dinosaurs are, of course, dead.

Given that, those who seek to animate dinosaurs in film and television tend to stick to the basics, the inimitable rules set down by films from King Kong to Jurassic Park 3 and everything in between. Big carnivorous dinosaurs are (usually) solitary and awfully persistent, with body language culled from crocodiles and big cats. Duckbilled dinosaurs are jumpy but ultimately placid, grinding around like elephants. Sauropods are apparently far to large to receive any characterization, and the horned and armored dinosaurs are stupid and aggressive. Raptors, of course, hunt in gangs.

It’s gotten to the point that in any given film, you know precisely what you will see. The Land of the Lost reboot film and Caveman (which starred, of all people, Ringo Starr) mixed it up a bit by making their leading dinosaurs mighty persistent bastards, and it cannot be denied that there is some joy in watching a T.rex attempt to prove, via consumption, that it finds Will Ferrell just as irritating as we do. But these are happy exceptions. For the most part, cinematic dinosaurs are character actors: they deliver a reliable, predictable performance, collect their paycheck, and go home.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. As demonstrated by Mathew Polaschek at http://digitalmedia.massey.ac.nz/exposure/student.php?id=44, a routine encounter between two Tyrannosaurs demonstrates the amazing difference between the conventional behavior animation and that influenced by a more birdlike ideal. An excellent example of how amazing this can look on the big screen can easily be seen in Avatar, which gave its dragons a whole range of subtle mannerisms that would not have looked out of place on a bird of prey. Contrast this with the V.rexes in Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake. While they hunted in a trio (rare for big predatory dinosaurs on film) they otherwise behaved as movie monsters, frantically attempting to devour Naomi Watts–a delectable morsel to be sure, but one that cannot possibly have been worth their time.

I’m not saying that this is wrong, necessarily—it was a fantastic sequence and it fit the films pulp aesthetic, and there’s a need for snapping monsters in movies. But what about the dinosaur animation of something like Clash of the Dinosaurs, or any of the numerous Walking with Dinosaurs spin offs? For programs that purport to show naturalistic behavior, these shows too often simply repeat the performances of their silver screen brethren. Dinosaur enters, roars, flexes, or poses, and that’s it. Boring!

I recommend, instead, a different ideal. A new paradigm for dinosaur animators, and for dinosaur behavior on screens large and small. Turn away from the Tyrannosaurus of Jurassic Park, and embrace something different. Use reference material from creatures that share your subject’s niche, yes, use the mammalian body language if you must. But mix in some bird, or some reptile. It will yield a dinosaur that is a character in its own right, and much more memorable.