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Tuesday, January 25, 2011

All About Dinosaurs

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A tiny cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex has been discovered in China with only a single claw on each upper limb.

Dating sheds new light on dawn of the dinosaurs
Careful dating of new dinosaur fossils and volcanic ash around them by researchers from UC Davis and UC Berkeley casts doubt on the idea that dinosaurs appeared and opportunistically replaced other animals. Instead — at least in one South American …

Triceratops: Not quite dead yet
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Have faith, o ye lovers of Triceratops. For the battle over dinosaur taxonomic delineation has only just begun to rage.
Last summer, many of you expressed dismay when a team of scientists at Montana's Museum of the Rockies published research suggesting that Triceratops were actually just juvenile Torosaus. In your sadness, ye cried out, and Andrew Farke of the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, California, saw your suffering and took pity upon you.
Farke reanalyzed the same set of fossils, and came to a different conclusion than the Museum of the Rockies team. The key was a skull that's long been classed as a third genera—called Nedoceratops hatcheri.
[The Museum of the Rockies team] called Nedoceratops an intermediate stage between Triceratops and Torosaurus. But [Farke] concluded that Nedoceratops was a distinct genera. In PLoS ONE, he reports that for the three genera to be different growth stages of a single dinosaur, "would require cranial changes otherwise unknown" in horned dinosaurs.
Who's right? Horned dinosaur fossils are common as fossils go, more research is in progress, and more debate is sure to follow.
In other words: However this shakes out in the end, though, you will be pleased to know that the name Triceratops is safe. Now, New Scientist says that because Triceratops was named before either Torosaurus or Nedoceratops, it's the moniker that takes precedence. So, either Triceratops are their own dinosaur, and the name stays. Or, the three genera are one, and they're all Triceratops.

How "Jurassic Park" got Velociraptors wrong
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The dinosaur called "Velociraptor" in the 1993 Jurassic Park movie was not actually a Velociraptor at all. They are much smaller, probably half the height of what you see in the film. If anything, that's a Deinonychus terrorizing everybody.
Depending on your particular sphere of geekery, this is either shocking news, or something you heard years ago and are sick of people complaining about. I'm closer to the latter, and I'd always assumed that the error was a simple case of Hollywood wanting a more impressive-looking monster. Not so, according to a 2008 article by dino-blogger extraordinaire Brian Switek. I saw this piece in a discussion on Twitter this morning, and was genuinely surprised to learn that the great Velociraptor/Deinonychus switcheroo had its origins in taxonomic confusion—similar, in some ways, to the debate currently going on with Triceratops and Torosaurus.
Discovered and described by Yale paleontologist John Ostrom in the 1960s, Deinonychus had a large sickle-claw on each foot, long arms with grasping hands, and a stiffened tail that would have helped the animal keep its balance as it ran after prey. The genus changed how people thought about dinosaurs, suggesting that they were much more active and dynamic than had been supposed previously.
This new view of dinosaurs, in part, inspired the 1988 book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World by paleo-artist Gregory S. Paul. Not only was the volume chock-full of illustrations of feathered dinosaurs, but it also attempted to revise some dinosaur taxonomy. Paul noted the similarities between the skeletons of the Velociraptor from Mongolia and the Deinonychus skeletons from North America. They were so similar, in fact, that he decided to group the Deinonychus fossils under the name Velociraptor, as the older name took precedence according to the rules by which organisms are named.
Paleontologists did not agree with this change--Velociraptor was kept distinct from Deinonychus--but Paul's book was a hit with the general public. And one of the people who read the book was author Michael Crichton.
Finally, since this is a 'they got it wrong' post, it would be terribly remiss for me not to point out that, whether you're talking about Velociraptor or Deinonychus, a proper illustration should probably include feathers.

Smithsonian Dinosaur Tracking blog: You say "Velociraptor", I say "Deinonychus"

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