Reposted from: http://perpetualartistsblock.tumblr.com/post/7795344449/how-to-identify-inaccuracies-about-dinosaurs
I’m a stickler for accuracy when it comes to dinosaurs, so I felt like making a quick list of inaccuracies. Obviously, no one cares, but it makes me feel better, so yeah.
Pronated Hands - If you see a theropod dinosaur like Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor with its hands parallel to the ground, that’s inaccurate! All theropod dinosaurs (along with their close relatives, sauropodomorphs like Plateosaurus and Massospondylus) could not rotate their arms to have their palms face the ground, and thus always kept them facing each other.
Tripod Stance - Next up on the list of inaccuracies with theropods is the tripod stance, in which the tail is dragging on the floor, and the dinosaur’s body is held vertically. It’s now known that dinosaurs always held their tails up in the air, and kept their backs horizontal. (Thus, this also applies to sauropods who have their tails dragging on the ground behind them, but this obviously isn’t tripod stance) It is thought, however, that diplodocid sauropods and stegosaurs may have gone into a tripod-like stance to reach higher vegetation, so an image depicting this shouldn’t be thought as inaccurate.
Vertical Neck Sauropods - Now, to clarify, this only really applies to diplodocid sauropods like Diplodocus and Apatosaurus, as macronarians like Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus definitely held their necks higher up, so as not to compete with diplodocids. Diplodocid sauropods usually held their necks horizontal, which, along with their tail being held up, would help in balance. Now, this isn’t to say that they couldn’t raise their neck up and down, but they didn’t hold them up completely vertical like say, a giraffe.
Dromaeosaur Tail Flexibility - Dromaeosaurs like Deinonychus and Velociraptor had tails supported by what are called “ossified tendons”, which act as stiff rods that kept the tail straight for the most part. Thus, they could not perform any serpentine wiggling or curling. Now, this isn’t to say that they were completely inflexible, but they couldn’t curl to a very great degree.
Theropod Digits - Basically, most theropods have three digits. Some, like tyrannosaurs, only had two (although more basal species had three). So any “Tyrannosaurus” depicted with three fingers is inaccurate. No theropods had any number greater than three (some older species had a small protrusion where the fourth digit was, and Carnotaurus had a spur-like fourth digit)
Non-Dinosaurs - One of the most wide-spread of inaccuracies is basically just mistaking other ancient reptiles for dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are purely terrestrial (unless of course you bring birds into the equation) archosaurs (Archosauria being the group which contains dinosaurs, crocodiles, pterosaurs, and birds, as well as some others) that lived solely in the Mesozoic (again, unless you count birds). This means that pterosaurs (or pterodactyls) are not dinosaurs, since although they are also mesozoic archosaurs, they were capable of flight, and thus not fully terrestrial. Even farther from dinosaurs are ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and pliosaurs, groups of marine reptiles that lived in the Mesozoic, since these aren’t even in Archosauria. Ichthyosaurs are off by themselves, while plesiosaurs, pliosaurs, and mosasaurs are in Lepidosauromorpha, plesiosaurs and pliosaurs being in their own group of Sauropterygia while mosasaurs are in Squamata. These groups were completely marine, and most likely never came ashore, and thus, are not dinosaurs. Another group confused with dinosaurs are the reptiles of the Permian, like Dimetrodon (a quadrupedal sail-backed reptile). There were no dinosaurs in the Permian, since dinosaurs only appeared in the Mesozoic, while the Permian is in the Paleozoic.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Hadrosaurus
The first complete dinosaur skeleton ever was found in Haddonfield, NJ in 1958. This statue was built in the dinosaurs honor in 2003.
More info here: http://hadrosaurus.com/1858.shtml
Friday, June 10, 2011
Deinonychus Toe Claw
We were driving in the car yesterday and Desmond told Matt that he was a deinonychus. Matt said it would be hard to drive with the toe claw. The toe claw would probably make a hole in the car.
Des said "Daddy, you just lift the toe claw up."
Of course.
Deinonychus means "terrible claw", but this claw may not have been so terrible.
Scientists used to think that the deinonychus used its toe claw to rip open its prey, thinking that the claw was sharp enough to slash through skin. They have done tests and now think that the toe claw was used to stab and puncture. Their teeth was probably what killed their prey.
Deinonychus did lift the large toe claw up when it walked.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinonychus
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Daspletosaurus
Ever since I've seen the Dinosaur Train episode "My Great Big Stomping Dinosaur Feet," I've been interested in Daspletosaurus.
My favorite part is the song they sing, which I cannot find video for. It's an awesome song about having big dinosaur feet.
I did find a video of Daphne Daspletosaurus and Buddy comparing features.
Dr. Scott talks about Daspletosaurus
Pronunciation: dass-PLEE-tuh-SAWR-us
Translation: Frightful Lizard
Also known as:
Description: Carnivore,Bipedal
Order: Saurischia
Suborder: Theropoda
Infraorder: Tetanurae
Micro-order: Carnosauria
Family: Tyrannosauridae
Height: 16 feet (4.9 meters)
Length: 30 feet (9.1 meters)
Weight: 5,950 lbs (2,700 kg)
Period: Late Cretaceous
Notes: Discovered in Alberta, Canada, Daspletosaurus was a contemporary of Albertosaurus. A marginally smaller, close relative of Tyrannosaurus, Daspletosaurus' possessed the typical tyrannosaurid two-fingered hands, but its powerful jaws were equipped with larger (although fewer) teeth than Tyrannosaurus. It is conjectured that the heavily-built Daspletosaurus preyed upon ceratopsians.
Source: http://www.dinodictionary.com/dinos_d.asp
More info on Daspletosaurus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daspletosaurus
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Dino Diarrhea....and God!
The other night Des asked if dinosaurs had diarrhea. I told him probably and am now doing research.
First site I found: http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/dinodeath.html
"I believe that Dinosaurs were created on Day 6, the same day as Adam. I believe that they lived for a few thousand years, until the flood came. Noah took 2 of every kind of animal onto the ark, including dinosaurs. The harsh post-flood environment made it hard for the dinosaurs to live long after this. Some may have been hunted to extinction, and others were unable to survive as they degenerated (part of the curse God placed on the earth when Adam sinned), and lost some of their original abilities (the T-rex lost use of its arms for instance, as they shriveled and became useless).
How dinosaurs became extinct is one of the greatest questions of all time.
Those who do not believe the Biblical account of Creation have to come up with other theories.
Some have suggested that the dinosaurs were killed when a giant meteor hit the earth.
Some people believe that the dinosaurs died from diarrhea,
and others believe that they died of constipation.
(seriously.. they've spent millions of your tax dollars trying to prove this!)"
I'm laughing so hard right now!
First site I found: http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/dinodeath.html
"I believe that Dinosaurs were created on Day 6, the same day as Adam. I believe that they lived for a few thousand years, until the flood came. Noah took 2 of every kind of animal onto the ark, including dinosaurs. The harsh post-flood environment made it hard for the dinosaurs to live long after this. Some may have been hunted to extinction, and others were unable to survive as they degenerated (part of the curse God placed on the earth when Adam sinned), and lost some of their original abilities (the T-rex lost use of its arms for instance, as they shriveled and became useless).
How dinosaurs became extinct is one of the greatest questions of all time.
Those who do not believe the Biblical account of Creation have to come up with other theories.
Some have suggested that the dinosaurs were killed when a giant meteor hit the earth.
Some people believe that the dinosaurs died from diarrhea,
and others believe that they died of constipation.
(seriously.. they've spent millions of your tax dollars trying to prove this!)"
I'm laughing so hard right now!
Monday, February 28, 2011
Dinosaurs and Plant Evolution
Text from this article: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2011/02/flowers-pine-cones-and-dinosaurs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+smithsonianmag%2FDinosaur+%28Dinosaur+Tracking%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
When we think about the Mesozoic world, dinosaurs often dominate our attention. They are the stars of countless museum displays and restorations, and everything else about their world just seems like window dressing. When visitors to Yale’s Peabody Museum look at Rudolph Zallinger’s beautiful (if outdated) “Age of Reptiles” mural, their attention is drawn to the tubby Allosaurus and the “Brontosaurus” wallowing in the swamp. The plants and animals Zallinger painted around the dinosaurs simply provide the setting for the more charismatic monsters.
But as with modern ecosystems, we can’t fully understand the lives of dinosaurs without knowing something about the supporting cast of organisms they lived alongside, especially plants. After all, plants were food to many, many dinosaur species, and plants undoubtedly influenced the evolution of dinosaurs just as dinosaurs influenced the evolution of plants. In fact, in a 1978 Nature paper, paleontologist Robert Bakker went so far as to suggest that dinosaurs had “invented” flowers.
Bakker’s reasoning went like this. During the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous many of the large herbivorous dinosaurs—especially the stegosaurs and sauropods—fed on plants like cycads and conifers. Given the size of these dinosaurs, they would have consumed massive amounts of plant food, and their preferences at the prehistoric salad bar opened up opportunities for fast-growing plants that were able to quickly grow in disturbed environments—namely, the angiosperms, which include flowering plants. Dinosaurs effectively cleared away the competition and allowed flowering plants to proliferate, and in turn, the changes in the plant communities influenced the evolution of dinosaurs with heavy batteries of chewing power, such as the hadrosaurs and horned dinosaurs.
It is a lovely idea—we can thank dinosaurs for flowers—but studies conducted during the past 30 years have scrapped the hypothesis. Better sampling of the dinosaur and flowering plant fossil records caused the correlation between the two to fall apart. There is no strong evidence that dinosaurs had anything to do with the origin or initial spread of flowers. Many dinosaurs ate angiosperms at the end of the Cretaceous, but that is about all we know for sure about their relationship.
Nevertheless, dinosaurs probably did have some effect on plant evolution. Think of herbivorous dinosaurs as plant predators. Unlike animals, plants can’t run away or otherwise evade their attackers, and so many plants have evolved defenses to discourage animals from eating them. Burning oils, toxic chemicals, thorns, microscopic spicules of silica and more—for plants, it’s war, and a paper published this week suggests that sauropod dinosaurs may have influenced the evolution of one plant defense.
Published by Andrew Leslie in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study looked at changes in the anatomy of conifer cones over the past 300 million years. Among the trends Leslie noticed was that seed-containing cones began increasing the amount of protective tissue around their seeds during the middle of the Jurassic. In particular, a group of trees technically known as the Araucariaceae and popularly called monkey puzzles was among the first conifers to develop large, well-protected cones, and these trees have been cited as an important food source for the large sauropod dinosaurs that proliferated during this time. Perhaps, Leslie suggests, the feeding habits of the large, long-necked dinosaurs of the Jurassic provided the evolutionary pressure for the development of well-protected seed cones.
But dinosaurs were not the only plant predators around. Early birds and small mammals may have fed on the seeds of conifers and been even more important to the evolution of well-armored cones, Leslie noted, and the diversification of insects with powerful piercing, sucking and chewing mouth parts during the Jurassic probably played a role in seed cone changes, as well. Many animals, both large and small, fed on various parts of conifer trees, but figuring out the exact details of these interactions is extremely difficult from our current vantage point.
References:
Bakker, R. (1978). Dinosaur feeding behaviour and the origin of flowering plants Nature, 274 (5672), 661-663 DOI: 10.1038/274661a0
BARRETT, P., & WILLIS, K. (2001). Did dinosaurs invent flowers? Dinosaur–angiosperm coevolution revisited Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 76 (3), 411-447 DOI: 10.1017/S1464793101005735
Hummel, J., Gee, C., Sudekum, K., Sander, P., Nogge, G., & Clauss, M. (2008). In vitro digestibility of fern and gymnosperm foliage: implications for sauropod feeding ecology and diet selection Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 275 (1638), 1015-1021 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2007.1728
Leslie, A. (2011). Predation and protection in the macroevolutionary history of conifer cones Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2648
When we think about the Mesozoic world, dinosaurs often dominate our attention. They are the stars of countless museum displays and restorations, and everything else about their world just seems like window dressing. When visitors to Yale’s Peabody Museum look at Rudolph Zallinger’s beautiful (if outdated) “Age of Reptiles” mural, their attention is drawn to the tubby Allosaurus and the “Brontosaurus” wallowing in the swamp. The plants and animals Zallinger painted around the dinosaurs simply provide the setting for the more charismatic monsters.
But as with modern ecosystems, we can’t fully understand the lives of dinosaurs without knowing something about the supporting cast of organisms they lived alongside, especially plants. After all, plants were food to many, many dinosaur species, and plants undoubtedly influenced the evolution of dinosaurs just as dinosaurs influenced the evolution of plants. In fact, in a 1978 Nature paper, paleontologist Robert Bakker went so far as to suggest that dinosaurs had “invented” flowers.
Bakker’s reasoning went like this. During the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous many of the large herbivorous dinosaurs—especially the stegosaurs and sauropods—fed on plants like cycads and conifers. Given the size of these dinosaurs, they would have consumed massive amounts of plant food, and their preferences at the prehistoric salad bar opened up opportunities for fast-growing plants that were able to quickly grow in disturbed environments—namely, the angiosperms, which include flowering plants. Dinosaurs effectively cleared away the competition and allowed flowering plants to proliferate, and in turn, the changes in the plant communities influenced the evolution of dinosaurs with heavy batteries of chewing power, such as the hadrosaurs and horned dinosaurs.
It is a lovely idea—we can thank dinosaurs for flowers—but studies conducted during the past 30 years have scrapped the hypothesis. Better sampling of the dinosaur and flowering plant fossil records caused the correlation between the two to fall apart. There is no strong evidence that dinosaurs had anything to do with the origin or initial spread of flowers. Many dinosaurs ate angiosperms at the end of the Cretaceous, but that is about all we know for sure about their relationship.
Nevertheless, dinosaurs probably did have some effect on plant evolution. Think of herbivorous dinosaurs as plant predators. Unlike animals, plants can’t run away or otherwise evade their attackers, and so many plants have evolved defenses to discourage animals from eating them. Burning oils, toxic chemicals, thorns, microscopic spicules of silica and more—for plants, it’s war, and a paper published this week suggests that sauropod dinosaurs may have influenced the evolution of one plant defense.
Published by Andrew Leslie in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study looked at changes in the anatomy of conifer cones over the past 300 million years. Among the trends Leslie noticed was that seed-containing cones began increasing the amount of protective tissue around their seeds during the middle of the Jurassic. In particular, a group of trees technically known as the Araucariaceae and popularly called monkey puzzles was among the first conifers to develop large, well-protected cones, and these trees have been cited as an important food source for the large sauropod dinosaurs that proliferated during this time. Perhaps, Leslie suggests, the feeding habits of the large, long-necked dinosaurs of the Jurassic provided the evolutionary pressure for the development of well-protected seed cones.
But dinosaurs were not the only plant predators around. Early birds and small mammals may have fed on the seeds of conifers and been even more important to the evolution of well-armored cones, Leslie noted, and the diversification of insects with powerful piercing, sucking and chewing mouth parts during the Jurassic probably played a role in seed cone changes, as well. Many animals, both large and small, fed on various parts of conifer trees, but figuring out the exact details of these interactions is extremely difficult from our current vantage point.
References:
Bakker, R. (1978). Dinosaur feeding behaviour and the origin of flowering plants Nature, 274 (5672), 661-663 DOI: 10.1038/274661a0
BARRETT, P., & WILLIS, K. (2001). Did dinosaurs invent flowers? Dinosaur–angiosperm coevolution revisited Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 76 (3), 411-447 DOI: 10.1017/S1464793101005735
Hummel, J., Gee, C., Sudekum, K., Sander, P., Nogge, G., & Clauss, M. (2008). In vitro digestibility of fern and gymnosperm foliage: implications for sauropod feeding ecology and diet selection Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 275 (1638), 1015-1021 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2007.1728
Leslie, A. (2011). Predation and protection in the macroevolutionary history of conifer cones Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2648
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