Dinosaurs Life Size (Darren Naish)

Dinosaurs Life Size was written by Darren Naish, author of the Tetrapod Zoology blog. As the title implies, it's meant to give an idea as to just how large those critters were. Obviously, most of them are too big to fit into a children's book, but....

Twenty dinosaurs are included in the book, ranging chronologically from the Triassic Herrerasaurus to the late Cretaceous Citipati, and in size from Microraptor (which almost fits onto its page) to big sauropods like Diplodocus (up to 115 feet long) and Sauroposeidon (an estimated 40 tons). There are also several non-dinosaurs, including the plesiosaurs Plesiosaurus and Liopleurodon, the ichthyosaur Stenopterygius, the pterosaurs Pterodactylus and Quetzalcoatlus, and the early bird Archaeopteryx (which in many ways resembles its theropod ancestors more than its modern avian relatives).

The good: For each one, we get:

• A life-sized picture of the animal, of course - if it will fit on the page. If not, there's a life-sized picture of part of it, plus a picture of the complete animal with the part that's shown life-sized marked. The traditional human is included to provide scale; since this is a children's book, however, instead of the usual silhouette of a man there's a painting of a child interacting with the animal. (The kids with the aquatic reptiles have swimsuits and snorkels, of course!)
  
• A box showing where and when the fossils were first found.
  
• Another box, discussing its size, both weight height/length/wingspan.
  
• A couple paragraphs of text describing it.
  
• A "WOW!" fact or two. ("A Velociraptor specimen was discovered locked in combat with a Protoceratops. The Protoceratops had bitten onto the predator's arm, but the Velociraptor's left sickle-claw was pushed up against the herbivore's neck.")

The bad: My only complaint concerns the Pterodactylus picture: It says the critter was "roughly similar in size to a large gull," but that life-sized rendition doesn't look anywhere near as large as the gulls I see around here almost every day. Naish has mentioned in his blog, though, that "some of the 'life sized' animals are scaled wrong."

All in all, it's a very nice book, and I'd recommend it for any child who's interested in the subject.

Dinosaurs Life Size, by Darren Naish. Barron's, 2010. Children (4-8, according to Amazon). Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, of course. I haven't seen any other reviews, but Naish's own discussion of the book is here.


Nonfiction Monday is hosted this week by Sherrie, at Write About Now.

Ancient critters

Utahceratops gettyi. Kosmoceratops richardsoni. Concavenator corcovatus. Sarahsaurus aurifontanalis. Prorotodactylus. Inkayacu paracasensis. All sorts of fossils have been in the news lately.

To begin with, ZUI this article (dated 23 Sep) from Laboratory Equipment:

Two remarkable new species of horned dinosaurs have been found in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, southern Utah. The giant plant-eaters were inhabitants of the "lost continent" of Laramidia, formed when a shallow sea flooded the central region of North America, isolating the eastern and western portions of the continent for millions of years during the Late Cretaceous Period.

The newly discovered dinosaurs, close relatives of the famous Triceratops, were announced yesterday in PLoS ONE, the online open-access journal produced by the Public Library of Science.

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The bigger of the two new dinosaurs, with a skull about 7 feet long, is Utahceratops gettyi (U-tah-SARA-tops get-EE-i). The first part of the name combines the state of origin with ceratops, Greek for "horned face." The second part of the name honors Mike Getty, paleontology collections manager at the Utah Museum of Natural History and the discoverer of this animal.

In addition to a large horn over the nose, Utahceratops has short and blunt eye horns that project strongly to the side rather than upward, much more like the horns of modern bison than those of Triceratops or other ceratopsians. Mark Loewen, one of the authors on the paper, likened Utahceratops to "a giant rhino with a ridiculously supersized head."

Second of the new species is Kosmoceratops richardsoni (KOZ-mo-SARA-tops RICH-ard-SON-i). Here, the first part of the name refers to kosmos, Latin for "ornate," and ceratops, once again meaning "horned face." The latter part of the name honors Scott Richardson, the volunteer who discovered two skulls of this animal. Kosmoceratops also has sideways oriented eye horns, although much longer and more pointed than in Utahceratops.

In all, Kosmoceratops possesses a total of 15 horns-one over the nose, one atop each eye, one at the tip of each cheek bone, and ten across the rear margin of the bony frill-making it the most ornate-headed dinosaur known. Sampson, the paper's lead author, claimed that, "Kosmoceratops is one of the most amazing animals known, with a huge skull decorated with an assortment of bony bells and whistles."

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The dinosaurs were discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), which encompasses 1.9 million acres of high desert terrain in south-central Utah. This vast and rugged region, part of the National Landscape Conservation System administered by the Bureau of Land Management, was the last major area in the lower 48 states to be formally mapped by cartographers.

Today GSENM is the largest national monument in the United States. Sampson added that, "Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is now one of the country's last great, largely unexplored dinosaur boneyards."

For most of the Late Cretaceous, exceptionally high sea levels flooded the low-lying portions of several continents around the world. In North America, a warm, shallow sea called the Western Interior Seaway extended from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, subdividing the continent into eastern and western landmasses, known as Appalachia and Laramidia, respectively.

Whereas little is known of the plants and animals that lived on Appalachia, the rocks of Laramidia exposed in the Western Interior of North America have generated a plethora of dinosaur remains. Laramidia was less than one-third the size of present day North America, approximating the area of Australia.

Next, ZUI this article (dated 13 Sep) from the New York Times:

Researchers have discovered the most complete fossil of a meat-eating dinosaur from Europe in Las Hoyas, Spain. Curiously, it is humpbacked. The study appears in the journal Nature.

Named Concavenator corcovatus, the dinosaur belongs to the theropod family. In most ways, the dinosaur is not unusual, and it shares many characteristics with other medium-size theropods.

But the humplike structure on the 20-foot creature has previously never been seen in a dinosaur.

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The fossil also suggests that the dinosaur had bony bumps on its limbs, possibly structures from which feathers protruded. The dinosaur lived during the Early Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago. Earlier dinosaur fossils have shown evidence of feathers, and birds are now generally considered to be dinosaur descendants.

And this article (dated 6 Oct) from National Geographic:

The discovery of Sarahsaurus aurifontanalis, which roamed North America about 190 million years ago, also boosts the idea that at least some dinosaurs became masters of their domain less by dominance than by opportunistic behavior and a bit of good luck.

A remarkably complete Sarahsaurus skeleton, found in Arizona, shows that the early Jurassic herbivore was, at 14 feet (4.3 meters) long and 250 pounds (113 kilograms), smaller than its enormous sauropod cousins such as Apatosaurus, which arose later. (See a sauropod picture.)

Like the sauropods — the largest animals to walk Earth — Sarahsaurus featured a long neck and small head. But the newly identified creature also boasted strong teeth and an unusual clawed hand, that, while only human size, was clearly built for enormous power and leverage, according to paleontologists.

And this article (dated 6 Oct) from Fox News:

The oldest footprints of the dinosaur lineage have been found, dating back about a quarter-billion years.

The age of these prints reveals they were made in the immediate aftermath of the worst mass extinction in history -- the devastating Permian-Triassic event, which eliminated as much as 95 percent of the planet's species. As such, these findings suggest the roughly 160-million-year-long Age of Dinosaurs not only ended in disaster, but might have begun because of one as well.

"The Permian-Triassic was a time of global devastation, but also a time of great opportunity, because new groups had the space and freedom to evolve in the post-apocalyptic world," said researcher Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Scientists uncovered the roughly 250-million-year-old footprints in the Holy Cross Mountains of central Poland. They came from a housecat-sized creature [named Prorotodactylus] with feet only about three-quarters of an inch (2 cm) long. The animal walked on all four legs, and possessed much longer hindlimbs than forelimbs, given how its footprints apparently overstep the handprints.

The different lengths of the creature's toes and the way they were angled suggest it was an ancestor of the dinosaur lineage known as a dinosauromorph.

And finally, ZUI this article (dated 5 Oct) from ABC News:

The preserved feathers and scales of a giant fossilized penguin discovered on Peru's central coast provide a glimpse of Peru's Eocene period, and how the species evolved to its modern state, paleontologists say.

The ancient version of the marine bird was about 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall and weighed almost 60 kg (132 lb), dwarfing today's Emperor Penguin, the largest of the modern-day species."By looking at this fossil, we were prompted to ask new questions about living penguins and the world we live in today," said Julia Clarke, an expert in avian anatomy at the University of Texas at Austin.

The paleontologists date the remains to 36 million years ago. They dubbed the ancient penguin "Inkayacu paracasensis," which means "emperor of the water" in the indigenous language of Quechua.

(Links appear in original articles.)

Cretaceous birds

Darren Naish, at Tetrapod Zoology, has written a few interesting posts on (amongst other things) Cretaceous birds recently:

Aberratiodontus wui (China)
Alexornis antecedens (Mexico)
Protopteryx fengningensis (China)

Could extinct beasts walk the Earth again?

ZUI this article from New Scientist:

The recipe for making any creature is written in its DNA. So last November, when geneticists published the near-complete DNA sequence of the long-extinct woolly mammoth, there was much speculation about whether we could bring this behemoth back to life.

Creating a living, breathing creature from a genome sequence that exists only in a computer's memory is not possible right now. But someone someday is sure to try it, predicts Stephan Schuster, a molecular biologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and a driving force behind the mammoth genome project.

So besides the mammoth, what other extinct beasts might we coax back to life? Well, it is only going to be possible with creatures for which we can retrieve a complete genome sequence. Without one, there is no chance.

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The genomes of several extinct species besides the mammoth are already being sequenced, but turning these into living creatures will not be easy (see "Revival recipe"). "It's hard to say that something will never ever be possible," says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, "but it would require technologies so far removed from what we currently have that I cannot imagine how it would be done."

(Links in the paragraphs quoted above are those provided in the original article.)

The ten* creatures which the article suggests as possibilities for resurrection are:

Sabre-toothed tiger (Smilodon fatalis)
Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis)
Short-faced bear (Arctodus simus)
Tasmanian tiger** (Thylacinus cynocephalus)
Glyptodon (Doedicurus clavicaudatus)
Woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis)
Dodo (Raphus cucullatus)
Giant ground sloth (Megatherium americanum)
Moa (Dinornis robustus)
Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus)
Giant beaver (Castoroides ohioensis)

The woolly rhinoceros and the thylacine are listed as having the best chance of suitable DNA preservation, while the Neanderthal and the woolly rhino have the best chance of finding a surrogate mother to bear the first generation.

The gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) is also listed as a possibility - they're not extinct yet, but they're getting there. There are already samples of their DNA being preserved, and chimpanzees would make good surrogates.

Personally, I'd most like to see the mammoths, rhinos, sabre-tooths, short-faced bears and sloths brought back. As for animals not included in this list, I'd really, really like to see a living Titanotylopus nebraskensis.


* According to the article, but eleven by my count.
** Also known as the thylacine and the Tasmanian wolf.

Giant predatory opossums?

Darren Naish writes about borhyaenoids ("Invasion of the marsupial weasels, dogs, cats and bears... or is it?").


Update 1940 7 July: Continued here ("Long-snouted marsupial martens and false thylacines") and here ("Marsupial 'bears' and marsupial sabre-tooths").

More phorusrhacids

Darren Nash has another post about phorusrhacids at Tetrapod Zoology.

Walking, stalking pterosaurs

Darren Naish and Mark Witton recently published a very interesting paper on azhdarchids. They hold that these giant pterosaurs, which lived during the Cretaceous, hunted like storks - on foot, rather than on the wing. Dr Naish has a blog post which provides links to, amongst other things, the paper itself (Witton, M P & Naish, D, 2008, A reappraisal of azhdarchid pterosaur functional morphology and paleoecology), which is available on-line.

The picture above shows the largest azhdarchid (and pterosaur) known, Hatzegopteryx thambema from western Romania, with a 1.75m-tall human to provide scale.

Illustration: Mark Witton/University of Portsmouth


Update 1121 27 Jun: ZUI this post from SV-POW.

New dinosaur-killer theory

ZUI this article from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Now comes a team of planetary scientists who say they've pinned down the specific space object that did in all those dinosaurs, and killed off half of all the other species on Earth at that time.

It was, say the scientists, one huge asteroid that broke up in a violent collision 160 million years ago, sending a massive fragment careening out of the asteroid belt and eventually into the Earth's crust. The impact kicked up a storm of dust, cold and darkness that shrouded the world like a nuclear winter - and goodbye dinosaurs.

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In the journal Nature today a group headed by William F. Bottke, an asteroid expert at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., traces that impact back to one giant asteroid named Baptistina nearly 100 miles in diameter. Baptistina, the team of scientists say, was rammed by an unnamed asteroid at least 35 miles in diameter in a violent collision about 160 million years ago - give or take 20 million years.

The collision showered nearby space with at least 300 fragments bigger than 20 miles in diameter and more than 140,000 smaller asteroids, each one more than 3 miles around, Bottke contends.

The smaller asteroids are now known as the Baptistina family, and according to Bottke and his colleagues - David Vokrouhlicky of Chares University in Prague and David Nesvorny of Bottke's institute - it was one of those "refugees" from Baptistina that created the 110-mile-wide Chicxulub crater.

ZUI this article from Scientific American, as well.

The researchers say the same bombardment may also have blasted the 53-mile-wide lunar crater Tycho, formed about 109 million years ago during the shower's calculated peak.

Rewilding

15,000 years ago, the plains of North America looked like the Serengeti - large herds of animals everywhere. Then the animals started dying - the native American horses and camels, several types of large ground sloths, mammoths, mastodons, giant beavers, odd antelope species similar to pronghorn, short-faced bears larger than our present grizzly, sabertoothed and scimitar cats, and the American lion (which was larger than the current African lion), amongst others. Some blame the climate changes at the end of the last ice age, some blame the humans who invaded from Asia around that time, some suggest other causes, some say all of the above. Whatever the cause(s), some 40 species from 30 genera of large animals ("megafauna") became extinct.

This article from the Cornell University News Service was published two years ago:

If Cornell University researchers and their colleagues have their way, cheetahs, lions, elephants, camels and other large wild animals may soon roam parts of North America.

"If we only have 10 minutes to present this idea, people think we're nuts," said Harry Greene, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell. "But if people hear the one-hour version, they realize they haven't thought about this as much as we have. Right now, we are investing all of our megafauna hopes on one continent -- Africa."

Greene and a number of other highly eminent ecologists and conservationists have authored a paper, published in the latest issue of Nature (Vol. 436, No. 7053), advocating the establishment of vast ecological history parks with large mammals, mostly from Africa, that are close relatives or counterparts to extinct Pleistocene-period animals that once roamed the Great Plains.

The plan, which is called Pleistocene rewilding and is intended to be a proactive approach to conservation, would help revitalize ecosystems that have been compromised by the extinction of many of the continent's large mammals, many of them predators. It would also offer ecotourism and land-management jobs to help the struggling economies in rural areas of the Great Plains and Southwest.

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For example, 4 million years of being hunted by the now extinct American cheetah (Acinonyx trumani) was probably why the pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) -- an antelopelike animal found throughout the deserts of the American Southwest -- developed such blinding speed, clocking in at around 60 miles an hour. Introducing free-ranging African cheetahs back to the Southwest, the scientists assert, could restore strong interactions with pronghorns and provide endangered cheetahs with new habitat.

Other living species that are counterparts to Pleistocene-era animals in North America include feral horses (Equus caballus), wild asses (E. asinus), Bactrian camels (Camelus bactrianus), Asian (Elephas maximus) and African (Loxodonta africana) elephants and lions (Panthera leo).

Now it's being propsed that something similar be done in Europe. ZUI this article from the May issue of Scientific American:

In many ways, Europe is a more obvious candidate for re-wilding than North America. The reason: a large portion of species lost in the Americas do not have any close living relatives. Europe has also seen its share of extinctions, including the scimitar cat, cave bear, woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, steppe rhinoceros and giant deer, but many of Europe's lost species still survive or have close wild or domestic relatives elsewhere in the world. Europe also has a historical advantage: The disappearance of its megafauna to a large extent occurred more recently than in North America, with many species persisting well into the Holocene.

Europe has already succeeded in reintroducing some previously extinct species. The bison, which was extinct in the wild in the early 20th century, has now been reestablished in scattered populations across eastern Europe. Small populations of musk ox that lived in Europe in cold climates until the late glacial period have been successfully reintroduced in Scandinavia's mountains. The fallow deer, the closest relative of the now extinct giant deer, survived marginally into Europe's Holocene, but persisted in Asia Minor. After several millennia of reintroductions, the animal now prospers in most European countries. The successful re-wilding of these species bodes well for larger scale projects.

But re-wilding initiatives in Europe must also include reinvigoration of megafauna populations already there that have suffered severe range constriction. Among them: the wolf, brown bear, lynx and moose. Scientists should also consider reintroducing 11 additional megafauna species: the Asiatic lion, leopard, spotted hyena, dhole, horse, cattle, Asiatic wild ass, Asiatic elephant, hippopotamus, water buffalo and hairy rhinoceros.

Adriosaurus microbrachis

From MSNBC:

Remains from a 95-million-year-old marine creature with nubs for legs is clarifying how some lizards shed their limbs as they crept through evolutionary time and morphed into slinky snakes.

Described in the current issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the snake-like lizard had a small head and willowy body. Extending 10 to 12 inches from snout to tail, the aquatic creature also sported a lengthy neck and relatively large rear limbs. Missing were all the bones of its forearms, including the hands and digits found in modern lizards.

The oddball creature, Adriosaurus microbrachis, is a member of a lineage of lizards thought to be snakes' closest relatives.

More, including an artist's conception, here.

Burrowing dinosaurs in Montana

From the Beeb:

The fossil remains of small dinosaurs that burrowed into the ground have been found by scientists in Montana, US.

The 95-million-year-old bones are from an adult and two juveniles and were unearthed in a chamber at the end of a 2.1m-long sediment-filled tunnel.

The researchers say the discovery is the first definitive evidence that some dinosaurs dug dens and cared for their young in such structures.

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The Montana dinosaurs have not been seen by palaeontologists before and have been given the scientific name Oryctodromeus cubicularis, meaning "digging runner of the lair".

And from Montana State:

The 95-million-year-old bones of an adult Oryctodromeus cubicularis and two juveniles were found jumbled together in a burrow about 15 miles from Lima, Montana State University paleontologist David Varricchio said in an online paper published March 21 by the British scientific journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Co-authors were Yoshihiro Katsura, a former MSU graduate student, and Anthony Martin from Emory University in Atlanta.

"The presence of an adult and two juveniles within a denning chamber represents some of the best evidence for dinosaur parental care," Varricchio said. "The burrow likely protected the adult and young Oryctodromeus from predators and harsh environmental conditions. Burrowing behavior may have allowed other dinosaurs to survive in extreme environments such as polar regions and deserts and questions some end-Cretaceous extinction hypotheses."

Fascinating.

H/T to Afarensis.

Biggest squirrel ever

ZUI this post from Tetrapod Zoology.

Truly incredible....


Dr Naish also has a very interesting post about sebecosuchians (Mesozoic and early Cenozoic crocodilians).





Note: Baurusuchus picture from here.

More on ancient whales

Last week Olduvai George (who is really artist Carl Buell) wrote about Pakicetus inachus, a smallish (coyote-sized) middle-Eocene ancestor of today's whales.

Today, he has a post up about Ambulocetus natans, another "walking whale" from later in the Eocene, with a promise of more to come.

(Look at the rest of his blog, too. It's full of wonderful examples of his art.)

Early apes and earlier whales

Two interesting posts out there in the world of blogs today.

First, from Afarensis we have a review of The Ape in the Tree (Alan Walker and Pat Shipman), a new book about the Miocene ape called Proconsul.

And from Olduvai George, who after an absence of several months has recently rejoined the blogosphere (huzzah!), we have this post about Pakicetus, the coyote-sized Eocene "walking whale." And a hint at more to come....

Phorusrhacids again

Darren Naish wrote four posts recently on these fascinating prehistoric birds. I linked to the first couple earlier; for convenience's sake I'm going to link to all four of them now.

Terror birds

More on phorusrhacids: the biggest, the fastest, the mostest out-of-placest

Giant hoatzins of doom

Goodbye, my giant predatory, cursorial, flightless hoatzin



Phorusrhacos longissimus painting by Zdenek Burian (1905-1981).

More on phorusrhacids

I mentioned phorusrhacids the other day. Darren Naish has an interesting post on them at Tetrapod Zoology today.

Update 2 Nov: Part two of his post can be found here, with a statement of more to come. And if you read Portuguese, he links to this post from Cais de Gaia.

New Phorusrhacid skull found

As reported by Afarensis. At 716 mm long, it's one of the largest Phorusrhacid skulls yet found. Here's an artist's version:

Australopithecus afarensis

New reports are out about a 3.3-million-year-old partial skeleton found in 2000 in the Dikika region of Ethiopia. The skeleton belonged to a presumed female, about three years of age. A. afarensis, of course, is the species to which the specimen known as "Lucy" belonged. Details (and photos) here.

Hat tip to Afarensis.

Edit: Afarensis now has more here.

Bolivian dinosaur tracks

Did you know that the largest site for dinosaur footprints is in Bolivia? Unfortunately, however, that the site is in danger from erosion:

"It surpasses anything I've ever seen," said palaeontologist Christian Meyer, the director of Basel's Natural History Museum, who led the first team of scientists to map the site in 1998.

Around 68 million years ago herds of dinosaurs used to flock to Cal Orck'o, then a lakeside, in search of food and fresh water.

They left behind an extremely rich geological record: 350 trackways of over 5,000 footprints belonging to 330 different species.

Not to fear, though; a Swiss engineering firm, Gasser Felstechnik - the folks who recently secured the rock above the highway leading to the Gotthard tunnel - have been called in to protect the footprints.

To combat the damage caused by rainwater seeping through the cracks from above, the cliff-face at Cal Orck'o has been covered with a layer of clay and plastic. Plants have been ripped out and a layer of protective Goretex-like webbing is being tested. Detectors have been installed to measure movement.

The Swiss team is intending to sink up to 900 five-metre long, zinc-plated nails into the rockface to prevent its collapse. But this could be problematic.

"We are still trying to find machinery and heavy equipment to stabilise the wall, but nothing is available in South America," Meyer said. "But our main goal is to stop quarry workers from continuing to blast away – sometimes they are only 20 metres from the wall," he explained.

Ancient whales

The Loom has a very interesting post today about Janjucetus hunderi, a late Oligocene (25 MYA) relative of the baleen whales from a time before baleen had been developed.

Thanks to Afarensis for the tip.