Yep, it’s that time of year again, kiddies! Well, technically it’s been a year and a half since the last one of these, but no matter! Time waits on no man, woman, or reptile, as we all know and lament. It marches on, on, on, steadily dragging you and each and every other living thing inexorably towards the grave in fractions we are forever unable to measure without error.
So anyways, dinosaurs!
Now it often happens in science that we find out new stuff. And since it’s been three yearsish since the last time I wrote anything about dinosaurs, there’s been a ladel-ful or two of new discoveries and debates and so on. Let’s take a look and try to pretend once again that we live in a time where multi-ton land predators were a thing!
The Dinosaur that Wasn’t (But Then Was [Unless it Wasn’t])
This here era ain't big enuff fer the two of us. Plus Jimmy over there. Heya, Jim, how ya doin'?
Good ol’ Triceratops. What could be more iconic and truthful and mesozoic-as-conifer-pie than that old-time image of a Triceratops tussling with a T-rex in front of some trees and a sunset or something? It’s the reptilian version of the high-noon shootout. The biggest and first-discovered of the ceratopsians, who (obviously) were named for it, Triceratops is just peachy.
Also, according to a smidgen of research occurring from 2009 to 2010, it didn’t exist. At least not as we knew it.
This skull alone is so much bigger than your entire body that you should feel physically ashamed of yourself.
A light bit of research and poking around by paleontologists John Scannella and Jack Horner (the latter is partially the inspiration for Jurassic Park’s Dr. Grant, the co-discoverer of Maiasaura, and a generally gung-ho dinosaur guy for decades) ended in a fun conclusion: Triceratops was actually the immature form of fellow ceratopsian Torosaurus, whose equally impressive and even-more-elongated noggin is shown above. Triceratops, as it aged, must have grown a pair of big ol’ holes in its (peculiar for a ceratopsian) solid-bone frill, where two rather thin spots had already been noted to exist. Rather magnanimously of them, they decided that if one of the dinosaurs had to go it would be Torosaurus, given its later date of naming.
Then in 2011 Andrew Farke, a paleontologist with a ceratopsian bent, said that was all twaddle and required a bunch of things unknown in ceratopsians, such as the opening-up of the holes in its skull later in life, the bone texture of the skull swapping itself from an adult’s to a juvenile’s and then back again, and the addition of little bitty nubbly bumps around the frill’s edges (the term, apparently, is “eppoccipitals”). So now who knows what the hell’s going on. Maybe Torosaurus is an adult Triceratops. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe oh who the hell knows we’ll find out in the next few decades if we’re lucky.
Evidence For an Immature Designer
The feet that launched a thousand children under the covers whenever they heard scraping noises in the hallway.
We all know the dromaeosaurs. Okay, fine, we all know the RAPTORS, even if most of our knowledge is as inaccurate as all-get-out. Everybody loves a good terrifying predator, and switchblade feet are suitably creepy for an already alarming concept: big lizardy thing that wants to eat you. That reminds me, they’re definitely feathered nowadays. Yup. Irrefutable proof of feather knobs on boatloads of ’em, PLUS big ol’ feathers all over their arms and tails and down elsewhere. Outright scaly’s been out for a long time, but feathered is the new leathered. Just don’t let it get to you – anyone who disputes the fearsomeness of big feathery animals has never been attacked by a goose. The entire dromaeosaur family remains every bit as graceful, sinister, and elegantly razorbladed as before, and nobody can prove differently. Up until the summer of 2010, when a new species was discovered in Romania.
Oh what the flipping bicycle-pumping Christ is this.
Yes, your eyes are not fooling you. Two. Claws. Well, the usual number of five, but two BIG claws, the ones that flip and slash and hack. That’s right, we found the dinosaur you all drew when you were six. Sometimes nature just has no class or restraint whatsoever. What next, we’re going to find a two-headed hundred-foot tyrannosaur?
The new arrival to the family is named Balaur, and it seems to be one of those wonderfully weird little evolutionary runarounds you get when you maroon animals for a few million years on tiny little islands: it shares its territory (Hațeg, Romania, which was Hațeg Island more than 65 mya) with a petite 20-foot titanosaur named Magyarosaurus, a miniscule 7-8-foot nodosaur known as Struthiosaurus, a teeny 16-foot hadrosaur called Telmatosaurus, and possibly one of the largest pterosaurs ever to live, named Hatzegopteryx, unless it was really a species of Quetzlcoatlus. Who knows.
Balaur does contain one crucial detail that both separates it from a juvenile’s daydream and brings it closer to both its island peers and the majority of the dromaeosaur family: it was really tiny, and would’ve been lucky to break 7 feet in length.
The Deadliest Budgie
An ordinary human just like me or you drew this. But it would not be strange to suggest that he may have also been a wizard.
Feathered dinosaurs. Old hat! Been there and done that and purchased the t-shirt, lunchbox, action figure, and app! Related to birds? Damned right! This is the twenty-first century and we are no longer a bunch of idiotic rabble huddled together around the campfire of ignorance babbling about how birds are somehow related to crocodiles and Archeopteryx doesn’t mean a damned thing. Why, we had Microraptor over for dinner just the other night. So top THAT.
Fine. Have a feathered full-grown tyrannosaurid.
Now let’s not get super-excited and carried away here. Tyrannosaurids are the superfamily, tyrannosaurs are the family – this isn’t a close, personal cousin of T-rex here that we’ve learned was probably coated in 15-cm fibrous feathery filament fuzzies from snout to tail-tip, it’s a second cousin once removed or something. Let’s stay calm and reasonable here as we look at these facts. Calm and reasonable.
Yutyrannus (Feathered Tyrant) was named in 2012, measured roughly thirty feet long, and was coated in plumage (species name huali: beautiful). It probably lived in an area with a climate about ten degrees above zero. It is currently the largest known feathered dinosaur.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Jesus Christ it’s Over and Done With
Thankfully, 65 million years too late to be scavenged.
The last person who firmly believed that Tyrannosaurus rex was an obligate scavenger died in captivity today as doctors attempted desperately to operate and remove a fatal clot of obstinance from his brain. To his last breath he stubbornly refused to admit that practically every damned vertebrate carnivore ever that wasn’t a big lazy soaring flappy thing was entirely unopposed to killing its own food now and then, because there’s utterly no advantage in being a slow-moving land-dwelling schlub that refuses to make its own meals. A memorial service is planned Tuesday.
Picture Credits:
Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus: A really nice mural painted by Charles R. Knight back in 1927.
Torosaurus Skull: Public domain image from wikipedia.
Deinonychus Foot: Image from Didier Descouens on Wikipedia, taken June 4th 2011.
Balaur Foot: Image from Ghedoghedo on Wikipedia, taken October 30th 2011 at Munich Fossil Show.
Yutyrannus: Ridiculously beautiful image taken from http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2012/04/04/giant-feathered-tyrannosaurs/, and drawn by Brian Choo 2012.
Cemetary at Worms: Public domain image from Wikipedia.