Mesozoic dinosaurs
tetrapodzoology | February 12, 2008
Panoplosaurus mirus was a large nodosaurid (reaching 6 m) and a particularly close relative of the even larger Edmontonia (for a quick intro to nodosaurids see the day 2 article). One of several Canadian dinosaurs from the Campanian Dinosaur Park Formation named by Lawrence Lambe, Panoplosaurus was described in 1919 for a skeleton collected by Charles M. Sternberg. As in Edmontonia but unlike other nodosaurids, Panoplosaurus lacked premaxillary teeth and grew an oval scute in the cheek cavity adjacent to its teeth. These nodosaurids must, therefore, have possessed fleshy cheeks (an…
tetrapodzoology | February 11, 2008
Originally discovered in 1987 by Bradford Riney during a palaeontological surveying trip, the only known specimen of Aletopelta coombsi [shown here] is from an outcrop of the Campanian Point Loma Formation at Carlsbad, California. It's one of several ankylosaur specimens whose remains come from marine sediments: an occurrence which has led several palaeontologists to suggest that some ankylosaurs frequented beaches, or even that they swam in the shallows eating marine plants, like armour-plated manatees. Of course these ideas are possible but difficult to confirm (actually, it might be…
tetrapodzoology | February 11, 2008
Welcome to day 2 of the 'ankylosaur week' series - for the background on this go see day 1 on Hungarosaurus. Before talking about today's ankylosaur, here's a quick 'everything you wanted to know about ankylosaurs but were afraid to ask'. Ankylosaurs were ornithischian dinosaurs from the Jurassic and Cretaceous, they have a highly modified skull where the sutures are closed, the external openings are mostly or entirely closed, the dorsal surface is covered with thick bony layers and bony bosses, and the small teeth are inset from the jaw margins. Horns often project from the cheek and rear…
tetrapodzoology | February 10, 2008
My to-do list has once again reached epic proportions, and includes three technical projects that now need urgent attention, about ten editorial jobs that need to be dealt with, several overdue book reviews, a lot of consultancy work, and a book synopsis. Plus of course this is all done in 'spare time' given family life and the day-job. In an effort to catch up with this back-log I'm going to let Tet Zoo lay fallow for a week, sort of. We haven't really had enough dinosaurs on Tet Zoo lately and, frankly, most of the stuff that I have lined up for the near future isn't on dinosaurs either,…
tetrapodzoology | January 26, 2008
2007 - Tet Zoo's second year of operation - has come and gone. The previous article was a brief personal review of the year, and here's more of the same (sort of) if you can handle it...
As if Tet Zoo wasn't enough to deal with, in September my partners-in-crime Mike P. Taylor and Matt Wedel [shown here; Mike is the less big one] decided, with me, to start up a new zoological blog, but this time devoted to something a little more specific: namely, sauropod vertebrae (and nothing else, pretty much). So on October 1st, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, or SV-POW!, was born. Despite…
tetrapodzoology | January 18, 2008
Those of you with particularly good memories might recall the little references I've been making here and there to a 'big, personally-relevant publication', and those asides to new papers about pleurodires and enantiornithines. Following horrific delays (caused by amphibians, dinosaur growth rates, ichthyosaurs and conferences) I am, finally, pleased to announce that Cambridge University Press' huge new book, The Crato Fossil Beds of Brazil: Window into an Ancient World (Martill et al. 2007), was published in December 2007 and is now available. If you're interested in Cretaceous anurans,…
tetrapodzoology | January 16, 2008
Or - alternative title to this article - 'It will be the best conference of all time' (no hyperbole at all). Do you like dinosaurs? Are you particularly interested in our changing ideas about dinosaurs, about key discoveries and concepts, or about the evolution of our ideas, reconstructions and theories about dinosaurs? If the answer is yes then get ready to come to London in May 2008 for Dinosaurs - A Historical Perspective...
On May 6th and 7th this year, Burlington House in Piccadilly (London) will be hosting this most prestigious of meetings. We've arranged it through the History of…
tetrapodzoology | January 15, 2008
It seems that this story is already all over the internet - I would have posted on it sooner this morning but was busy with amphibians! Anyway... back in 2005 Mary Schweitzer and colleagues dropped a bombshell into the world of dinosaur palaeontology: they reported the discovery of medullary bone within a Tyrannosaurus rex specimen (Schweitzer et al. 2005). Medullary bone is a specialized, densely mineralized, highly vascularized tissue laid down on the endosteal surface of long bones: its formation is triggered by hormones that are produced during ovulation, and it functions as a calcium…
tetrapodzoology | January 8, 2008
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you read Tet Zoo, you're in very good - nay, famous - company. I've lost track of how many famous zoologists, palaeontologists, artists, TV personalities and Hollywood starlets are among the regular visitors. Among the many is Mike Skrepnick, who of course needs no introduction. Inspired by my previous article on that god-awful How to Keep Dinosaurs book, he told me about a similar project he's been working on himself...
And here are some pictures to prove it. The image above features a Daspletosaurus, a tyrannosaurine tyrannosaurid…
tetrapodzoology | January 2, 2008
As a dinosaur specialist I often get asked about Robert Mash's 2003 book How to Keep Dinosaurs (Mash 2003). It seems that most people (usually those who haven't read it) think that this book is good, or funny. Don't get me wrong - I think a book dedicated to dinosaur husbandry is an excellent idea; the problem is that Mash didn't do it well.
I should explain to begin with that How to Keep Dinosaurs is set on a parallel Earth where Mesozoic non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other ancient reptiles live alongside humans. A while back I reviewed How to Keep Dinosaurs for Fortean Times and,…
tetrapodzoology | December 9, 2007
If you read the ceratosaurid article from yesterday (here), you'll understand what's going on here. I drew it in a diary in 1992 (specifically, on Wednesday 29th April 1992, the day I learnt that Toby the cat had died, and also the day on which the borg [of Star Trek: The Next Generation] made their first appearance on British TV). The caption reads 'Ceratosaurus and Thylacinus contemplate their predicament'. Anatomical errors abound, but I can live with that.
tetrapodzoology | December 8, 2007
One of my most favourite dinosaurs has always been Ceratosaurus but, given that I mostly work on Lower Cretaceous dinosaurs, I've never had the chance to look at it much (Ceratosaurus is Upper Jurassic). Imagine my surprise then when, during a recent visit to Glasgow (Scotland), I was confronted with a complete mounted (replica) skeleton of this neat beast at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. First named by Othniel Marsh in 1884, Ceratosaurus is best known for the type species, C. nasicornis from the Morrison Formation of Colorado...
Less well known is that two additional Morrison…
tetrapodzoology | November 15, 2007
By now you might have heard the thrilling news that Britain has a brand-new sauropod dinosaur: it's an animal that I've obliquely alluded to many times here at Tet Zoo (since February 2006 in fact), and its study and publication have been many months - in fact years - in the making. Yes, it's (arguably) the world's most amazing sauropod... Xenoposeidon proneneukos Taylor & Naish, 2007, an enigmatic and morphologically bizarre Lower Cretaceous neosauropod from the Wealden Supergroup rocks of East Sussex, described in the new issue of Palaeontology (Taylor & Naish 2007). At last,…
tetrapodzoology | November 7, 2007
Again, no time to complete any articles, sorry. Bloody annoying. Attended Witton pterosaur talk yesterday (it included revelations on winged hatchet-headed ptero-squirrels) as well as a Peter Burford talk on Gambian birds. Have found ten mins to post the above: fantastic pic from Matt Wedel (aka Dr Vector). Few quick factoids on Stegosaurus...
Stegosaurus is no longer unique to the USA (now known from Portugal too), it's not definitely the biggest stegosaur (European Upper Jurassic Dacentrurus might have been as big or bigger), it's possibly the only stegosaur that lacked parascapular spines…
tetrapodzoology | October 4, 2007
I used to have a deep-seated sense of guilt that I didn't post enough dinosaur stuff here at Tet Zoo. After all, I might be the only writer at scienceblogs involved in palaeontology, so I have a duty to remind the world how incredibly cool and scientifically relevant long-extinct dinosaurs are. Well, yeah, you can argue that Mesozoic dinosaurs aren't that 'relevant' to the big things we all worry about* - but, as is so often pointed out, an interest in dinosaurs is actually one of the first things that gets a lot of people, particularly kids, interested/involved in science. Vertebrate…
tetrapodzoology | October 2, 2007
As discussed in previous articles on the 55th SVPCA, I've decided to publish a version of my talk here on the blog. Some time ago I published a collection of theropod images (go here), some of which might have seemed a bit random or unconnected. As we'll see here, those images are indeed connected, sort of, and now all will be revealed...
Ok, so, the talk was titled The large theropods Becklespinax and Valdoraptor from the Lower Cretaceous of England. I might get into the habit of publishing other talks that I give or, at least, I might in those cases where there's a script or pile of notes…
tetrapodzoology | September 30, 2007
How did the centenary workshop on mammal bone identification go, I hear you cry? It went very well, thank you very much. Anyway, as promised here are more of various recollections from the 55th SVPCA, held at the University of Glasgow between August 29th and September 1st. For previous of my thoughts visit part I here, and for abstracts, photo galleries and more, visit the SVPCA site here. In this article, I'm going to review the dinosaur talks. You have been warned.
[I should explain the photo montage used here. For reasons that might have been mysterious to him, Bob Nicholls (of…
tetrapodzoology | September 27, 2007
Having spent the better part of the day recovering from the birthday celebrations of last night (and working, of course), I regret that I haven't had the time to post any of the promised articles (more SVPCA stuff to come next). So here's a picture of the day: it depicts the incredible mounted Pentaceratops sternbergii skeleton on display at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, and comes courtesy of Matt Wedel...
First described by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1923, P. sternbergii is a deep-snouted chasmosaurine/ceratopsine ceratopsid known only from the Fruitland Formation and Lower…
tetrapodzoology | September 24, 2007
It's my birthday this week (the 26th), so how timely that that most long-awaited of books - Tom Holtz and Luis Rey's Dinosaurs should arrive this morning (Holtz 2007). This huge, lavishly illustrated work - it's one of those volumes that will get called 'the ultimate dinosaur book' a lot - has been in the pipeline for, I dunno, months and months and months, and I'm very pleased to see the final finished version. After visiting Luis and seeing some of the artwork he was preparing for the volume (see his thoughts here), I previously blogged about it (at ver 1) here and here. The official…
tetrapodzoology | July 26, 2007
Hello loyal readers: I know you're still there. Yet again I can't resist the lure of posting something new when I really shouldn't. Most of you, I'm sure, think that archaeopterygids - the archaic basal birds of Late Jurassic Germany (and Portugal too if Weigert's (1995) identification of isolated teeth is correct) - are long extinct, but here is evidence indicating otherwise. Ha ha ha. This is actually a monument at Dotternhausen in Bavaria; it's near a bridge that crosses the Altmühl, but I forget the exact location. If you want to see more of those archaeopterygid statues...
... below is…