DinoMania!

Happy New Year!  This post was meant to go up a lot sooner (like, before Thanksgiving...heh), but well, holidays and kids and business and excuses, etc, etc.  Anyway, without further ado- it's time for DinoMania!

 

When I was a kid, I loved dinosaurs.  ‘Love’ probably isn’t even a strong enough word.  I was infatuated with them.  From the time I was about six years old, I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up.  I checked out nearly every dinosaur book in the children’s section of our small town library, and spent many, many weekends with my Dad at the Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill.  Of course my favorite place to go was the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, where I would wander the Great Hall of Dinosaurs and marvel at the massive brontosaurus skeleton, trying to imagine what it would have been like to stand next to these great and terrible lizards (dinosaur is Latin for “terrible lizard”). 

Fortunately (or unfortunately), when I was around eight years old, Steven Spielberg went right ahead and did the imagining for me with a little movie called “Jurassic Park”, which basically ruined dinosaurs for me forever.  To this day I can’t eat jello without scrutinizing it for a rhythmic jiggle, indicating I’m about to be ambushed by a massive T. rex with a taste for man-flesh.  And let’s not forget that gratuitous doghouse-eating scene from one of the horrifically bad sequels.  Totally unnecessary, Steven. 

Rather than stoke my interest in a particular career path, movies have kind of a history of turning me off of a field.  “Jurassic Park” crushed my paleontology dreams.  “Apollo 13” made me rethink my plans of becoming an astronaut- I didn’t think it was possible to be any more emetophobic until I watched Bill Paxton puke in zero gravity- thanks Ron Howard!  My interest in ancient civilizations?  Destroyed by nightmares after watching “The Mummy” in a hotel room on a rainy vacation to Salem, Massachusetts around Halloween time.  Bad combination.  Weirdly enough, the movie “Outbreak” did not manage to scare me away from virology, and I became a virologist anyway, but I digress. 

The point is, don’t get your career aspirations from movies.  It’s much better (and much more accurate and informative) to stick with books, obviously.  Nice, safe, papery, books.

Cake that took me fifty million years to complete.

In my house it seems that my love of dinosaurs has not skipped a generation, and my four-year-old son owns lots and lots of books about them. We just threw him a dinosaur-themed birthday party a few months ago, and he loves to talk about dinosaurs for hours on end, which isn’t all that unusual for children his age.  In fact my husband and I have a theory that a general fascination with dinosaurs is a normal developmental stage for all mini-humans.  Much like when I was a kid, my son has read through practically the entire dinosaur section of our local library, and anytime we are in the vicinity of our favorite Barnes and Noble we somehow manage to return home with a new tome full of the beasts.  

One book in particular, “PrehistoricPredators”, by Brian Switek, is our all-time favorite and I highly recommend it to anyone who has a dino-loving child at home.  The illustrations are beautiful, the facts plentiful, and the pronunciation key is clutch.  My son’s obsession with this book has spawned his favorite, self-invented game, which he has christened “the dinosaur game”.  The idea is that you take turns going back and forth naming dinosaurs until one person can no longer think of dinosaurs to name.  Sounds easy, but it turns out some four year olds play for keeps.

            Four year old: “Okay, I’ll go first.  Diplodocus.”

            Me: “Ummm, Tyrannosaurus rex”

            Him: “Giganotosaurus”

            Me: “Uh, velociraptor.”

            Him: “Dilophosaurus.”

            Me: “Dilopho…What? Uhhh, umm.  Stega, uh, rapta… don.”

 Him: “Haha! Mommy! ‘Stegaraptadon’ is NOT a dinosaur. You just made that up!    You could’ve said stegasaurus or dimetrodon. Duh, silly! I win. Now I get ice cream!”

Sheesh.  I didn’t realize there was ice cream at stake.  Silly me; ice cream is always at stake when you have a preschooler around.  Guess I should pay more attention during story time.

The mighty Stegaraptadon.  Totally real, I swear.

Part of the collection.

Image from Goodreads.com

Well, speaking of story time, I happened to be browsing the new nonfiction section of the library recently when I stumbled upon an eye-catching title.  “TheTyrannosaur Chronicles: the Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaur” by Dr. David Hone jumped out at me without warning*. And I’m glad it snared me because it is a fantastically interesting read for grown ups that never quite “grew out of” their dinosaur phase.

Dr. Hone has written a comprehensive field guide about everyone’s favorite dinosaurs, the tyrannosaurs, and contains beautiful illustrations and figures by Scott Hartman.  Hone covers the history of the discovery of the large family (yes, family- did you know that more than 30 species of tyrannosaur has been discovered so far?), with the mighty T. rex being named in 1905. Tyrannosaurs first appeared in the Jurassic period, but unlike the massive apex predator depicted in the infamous film, the first tyrannosaurs were small, about the size of a horse.  Over time the general trend was for tyrannosaurs to get bigger, and eventually they did resemble the monster we now think of when we think of T. rex. 

But they may not have looked so much like the scaly reptiles of our time.  It’s generally accepted that birds are the living descendants of dinosaurs, having evolved from some avian theropod ancestor.  Think chickens, not crocodiles.  And man, do chickens creep me out- those ugly feet! Those staring, unblinking eyes!  As far as I’m concerned, the resemblance to the terrible lizards is clear (apologies to my Mother, the crazy chicken lady).  And phylogenetically speaking, there is goodevidence to support this relationship.  Although tyrannosaurs themselves are probably more closely related to crocodiles than the “bird-like” dinosaurs were, it is now believed that they (as well as many other dinosaurs) were covered in a downy plumage, perhaps for insulation and for attracting mates.

A few of my other favorite tyrannosaur facts that I picked up from this book include that they had large air spaces in their skulls and highly developed nasal cavities for smelling.  And much like birds, tyrannosaur bones had pneumatic air sacs that were filled by air from the lungs.  In a section discussing the ecology of tyrannosaurs, it is explained that far from modern imaginings of T. rex battling a triceratops, tyrannosaurs actually battled each other both for sexual dominance and for food (yep, they ate each other sometimes).  And they did far more chewing of their prey than wholesale “gulping”, as suggested by the discovery of pulverized hadrosaur bones in fossilized tyrannosaur droppings.  Most of all, I was fascinated to learn that it is incredibly difficult to determine the sex of a dinosaur from its fossil, or whether a smallish fossil is a juvenile, an outlier, or a new species entirely.  It truly is a remarkable researcher that can be satisfied working with such “bare bones” (pun intended). 

Overall, I enjoyed the book, though at times it got fairly academic and may not be for the casual reader.  But if you loved dinosaurs as a kid and you enjoy some pop-sci nonfiction, check out this book. 

To wrap up this “dino-mania” post, I just want to mention that it was reported recently in Current Biology that a dinosaur tail covered in primitive plumage was discovered, preserved in amber (here’s the link to a Sciencepiece about the article since the article itself is not open access).  The images are beautiful, and although dinosaur-era feathers preserved in amber are nothing new, this is the first time a mummified piece of dinosaur skeleton and tissue has been found along with the feathers.  An actual dinosaur tail.  But before you start freaking out, thinking, “this is exactly how Jurassic Park got started!” (I mean, I didn’t think that or anything…) it turns out that no dino DNA could be recovered from the sample, so we’re still safe.  For now.

*Note that they don’t allow jello or other food in the library, even just to serve as an alarm against imminent dinosaur attack (“No Ms. Librarian, I am not going to eat this jello, I’m just going to stare at it to make sure it doesn’t start to jiggle…”).