Review: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, 2025 edition
July 29, 2025
Let’s start with the information you need most: Dougal Dixon’s speculative evolution classic The New Dinosaurs, which imagines the biota of today if the K-Pg extinction event had never happened, is being reprinted in a handsomely-produced new edition from Breakdown Press. Here’s the website, open for pre-orders (link); the book ships on August 11. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy of this absolute banger.
CHRONONAUT
Dougal Dixon’s books After Man (1981) and The New Dinosaurs (1988) both cast very long shadows over my intellectual development. I was maybe 7 or 8 years old when I first saw a thumbnail advertisement for After Man in a bookstore flyer. With nothing more than the cover art and a 2-3 sentence description to go on, my mind fizzed. To say that the mere idea of the book fired my imagination is an understatement so gross as to be a lie; more accurately it detonated an atomic bomb under my imagination, Project-Orion-style, and sent it rocketing into the stratosphere. When I finally found a copy at the local public library a couple of years later, I was not disappointed. The Gigantelopes, Raboons, and Porpins were awesomely strange and wonderful and inspiring. At about the same time in my life that The Dinosaurs by William Stout and William Service was making me a chrononaut in the Mesozoic, After Man was giving me a similarly vertiginous sensation of the distant future.
My 1988 first edition of The New Dinosaurs and my 2022 40th anniversary edition of After Man.
I have a very vivid memory of the first time I saw The New Dinosaurs on the shelf in my local Waldenbooks, a week before my 14th birthday. The book was on a display rack, cover facing out, and the image of the cutlasstooth made my stomach drop. The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution, by Dougal Dixon. “OMG it’s the After Man guy he did a dinosaur book OMG OMG OMG!!” crashed through my mind like a railgun projectile. The New Dinosaurs bent my brain no less than After Man, with its flightless pterosaurs, aquatic hypsilophodonts, and tiny, eusocial pachycephalosaurs. I cared for my first edition hardcover like it was a holy relic; even though I reread it countless times as a teenager and have revisited it many times as an adult, it still looks essentially brand new.
Fast forward to the 2020s. When Breakdown Press published the 40th anniversary edition of After Man in 2022, I bought a copy quick-quick. It’s sitting proudly on display across the living room from me as I type this. When the folks at Breakdown asked me if I’d be interested in reviewing the new edition of The New Dinosaurs, I felt like a kid who’d gotten the golden ticket. I’m excited to get to review the book, but even happier to live in a world where the book is in print again, from a publisher who cares about getting it right. I haven’t yet seen the reprinted book in the flesh — this review is based on digital files supplied by Breakdown — but based on the 40th anniversary edition of After Man my confidence is high. The new After Man has a thick, high-gloss cover, pages sewn in signatures, and excellent color reproduction, and I have every reason to expect the same from the 2025 edition of The New Dinosaurs.
This book taught me the fundamentals of biogeography. Palaearctic Realm opening spread, pp. 42-43 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.
CONCEPT
I’m not sure how well-known it is that the conceptual engine of The New Dinosaurs is not merely “Hey whoa weird critters”, but using the idea of imaginary saurians to explain biogeography. In an interview with Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology (link), Dougal Dixon said regarding the success of After Man:
“It made me think… there’s a future in this. That is, in popular-level books that use fictitious examples of factual processes, there’s definitely room for a few more. And that’s why I came up with the idea for The New Dinosaurs. Again, I wanted to do the same sort of thing but, this time, I was aiming to create a popular-level book on zoogeography, using fictitious examples to show what the dinosaurs might perhaps be like if they hadn’t become extinct.”
In the same interview Dixon wonders to what extent the book achieved that aim, rather than being just a gee-whiz spec evo book. It worked for me! When I learned about biogeography in college, the concepts of “Nearctic” North America, “Palearctic” Eurasia, and so on were already familiar to me from The New Dinosaurs. Similarly, I’m pretty sure that I first learned the concept of biomes from After Man.
As a lover of both turtles and sauropods, I was pre-adapted to be a Turtosaur stan. Pp. 42-43 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.
WHAT ABOUT THOSE NEW DINOSAURS?
I’m not the first to point out that The New Dinosaurs was eerily prescient in many ways — Darren has touched on this at Tetrapod Zoology, and Riley Black wrote a nice piece on the topic of 2022, which seems only be available via Wayback Machine now (link; I heap vile curses on Scientific American for being the digital graveyard of so much good science writing). Some things for which we had little to no evidence for the 80s but which are now either well-established or at least up for discussion include:
- fuzz
- small arboreal dinosaurs, esp. with skin-wings (e.g., the Flurrit)
- semi-aquatic dinosaurs
- arctic dinosaurs
- dwarf island dinosaurs
- insect-eating dinosaurs
- at least the specter of flightless terrestrial pterosaurs
To that list I’d add morphologically conservative sauropods. The awesome, glyptodont-analogue Turtosaur is an osteoderm-bedecked titanosaur taken to its logical conclusion, and there’s a little sidebar about a short-lived group of sprinting sauropods, but the sauropods in the book are all large-bodied, long-necked, long-tailed, mostly graviportal herbivores. Revisiting The New Dinosaurs for this review after a hiatus of some years, I was pleased to see that among the many radical evolutionary transformations postulated in other clades, the sauropods were all still recognizable sauropods, which nicely fits my ideas about the constraints on their bauplan.
Now, it’s both unrealistic and unreasonable to expect a book written in the mid-1980s to be scientifically up-to-date in 2025, and indeed there are many discoveries and developments in the past four decades that the book did not anticipate. Whole clades of dinosaurs that were known very imperfectly (therizinosaurs, rebbachisaurs) or not at all (alvarezsaurs, scansoriopterygids) when the book was created are now much better known both scientifically and popularly. To this we can add a vast ecological diversity of Mesozoic crocs, birds, squamates, and mammals. The sole mammal featured in the book is the semiaquatic Zwim, a small insectivorous placental, explicitly described as an outlier among the morphologically and ecologically conservative mammals. In the universe of The New Dinosaurs, arboreal, gliding, and digging mammals didn’t evolve in either the Mesozoic or the Cenozoic; in our own timeline, mammals were doing all of those things by the Late Jurassic at least. (Aside: I can’t remember if I’ve said this out loud anywhere, but the ecological diversity of Mesozoic mammals shouldn’t surprise anyone given that our surviving monotremes include an electrosensory swimmer and a spiny digger. The mere existence of platypuses and echidnas implies a whole zoo of ecological experimentation among early mammals.)
Similarly, we know a lot more about the biology of dinosaurs now. One thing that may jar modern dinosaur enthusiasts encountering the book for the first time is so many dinosaurs shown with very mammalian rear ends and skinny tails (depicted in the coelurosaurian arbrosaurs, in multiple hypsilophodonts and hadrosaurs, and even to some extent in the cover-adorning cutlasstooth), as opposed to the thick caudofemoralis-housing tails now known to be present in almost all non-avian dinosaurs. When I first encountered The New Dinosaurs at age 13, the furry dinosaurs blew my mind, and none moreso than the desert-adapted Taranter (see below). I suspect that the only integumentary surprise for readers now opening the book for the first time will be the absence of pennaceous feathers on any of the non-avian dinosaurs.
These observations are not intended as — and, I hope, could not be reasonably interpreted as — criticisms of the book. It is an artifact of the post-Deinonychus but pre-Sinosauropteryx Dinosaur Renaissance, not a forward projection of dinosaurs as we know them today but of dinosaurs as they were known back then. So here in 2025 the book rather mind-bendingly embodies the future (now) of the past (the 1980s) of the future (the Cenozoic) of the past (non-avian dinosaurs).
Probably my favorite paintings in the book. Pp. 86-87 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.
I can’t do a review without mentioning the art. My opinion there hasn’t changed much since I was 13. Like After Man, the ideas in The New Dinosaurs sometimes outrun their visual execution. Most of the art is serviceable, some of the pieces really shine — the painterly work on the Paraso in particular has always impressed me — and a few are so flat and indifferently rendered that my eyes tend to slide past them. My initial impression, unchanged almost four decades later, was that the artists either only had experience painting mammals and birds, or the publisher gave them the brief to render the alternative dinosaurs in the guise of mammals and birds. Weirdly, I find most of the black-and-white pencil sketches much more consistently well-executed than the full-color paintings; it’s hard for me to tell how much of that is real and how much is just my strong bent towards pencil sketches (about which see more here and here). Given that Dougal Dixon is himself a very gifted artist (see examples of Dixon’s work at his personal website and in various TetZoo posts: one, two, three), I’d love to see a version of the book someday that included his original sketches. Perhaps if there’s sufficient interest, such material could be included in a 40th anniversary edition of The New Dinosaurs, as Dixon and Breakdown Press did for After Man. One can hope. For now, let’s just say that the book runs on the strength of its ideas and the art mostly gets the job done.
I’ll close on a couple of high notes. First, I love the layout of the book, which is unchanged in the new edition. I find it interesting, drawing my eyes omnivorously around each spread, but uncluttered, with just the right amount of negative space to let each image and text block breathe. Also, and very fittingly for a book about zoogeography, the maps at the beginning of each section are fantastic, and would sit comfortably in a top-of-the-line science book today.
CH-CH-CH-CHANGES
The reprinted book does have some nods to the passage of human time and the accumulation of scientific knowledge since 1988. There’s a new Author’s Introduction credited to Dougal Dixon, 2024, and on the following page this note:
This is a facsimile reproduction of the 1988 first edition
of The New Dinosaurs by Dougal Dixon.
Some of the text has been changed at the request
of the author to reflect scientific discoveries
made in the intervening years.
The changes have been made in a slightly
different typeface to make their presence clear.
I really like having the updates in a different typeface; it’s the publishing equivalent of making sure that the cast and sculpted bits can be distinguished from real bone in a mounted dinosaur skeleton. Along the same lines, a minor but pleasing thing for anyone comparing both versions of the book is that the pagination hasn’t changed; the ever-contentious Lank is still on page 34, and so on.
How do I know when I got the first edition of The New Dinosaurs? Because, bless my geeky little heart, I inscribed each of my dinosaur books with my name and the date of acquisition.
So what’s updated? Mostly the front matter, with a few tweaks elsewhere in the book. The section on “The Great Extinction” (pp. 6-9) has been heavily revised to present the evidence for the impact hypothesis. In the “What is a Dinosaur” section (pp. 10-11), the left-hand page has been overhauled and now features a phylogenetic tree of dinosaurs and their outgroups rather than the hub-and-spokes “bubblegram” of the original book, in which saurischians, ornithischians, pterosaurs, and crocs all arose independently from thecodonts. The following right-hand page hasn’t been edited at all as far as I can tell. This creates a minor disjunct; the passage, “It is possible that warm-blooded dinosaurs may have had fur or down” appears unchanged on page 11, but on the revised page 10 the evolution of feathers in theropods has already been established as observed fact.
The following section, “The New Tree of Life” (pp. 12-15), is really, really new. Not only does it follow the fate of various vertebrate groups into a hypothetical mass-extinction-free Cenozoic, as in the original book, but the underlying relationship diagram has been substantially overhauled to somewhat better reflect current thinking on dinosaur evolution. I say “somewhat” because there are some peculiarities: tyrannosaurs and ornithomimids are on a common branch, separated from all other theropods; oviraptorosaurs are allied with a big swath of coelurosaurs that are in turn separate from therizinosaurs, maniraptorans, alvarezsaurs, and birds.
Not only is the phylogenetic arrangement a little odd, the fates of several clades and their surviving representatives (in the alternative Cenozoic) have changed from the original book. The Gourmand was originally a specialized scavenging tyrannosaur, but predatory tyrannosaurs apparently survived as well (according to the bubblegram; none were featured in the original book). In the new edition, all tyrannosaurs died out in the mid-Cenozoic and were replaced by abelisaurs that spread north from Gondwana. The Gourmand art is unchanged, but it is now described as an abelisaur, which is fine. With its long, low body, short hind limbs, and absent forelimbs, the Gourmand arguably reads better as an abelisaur than a tyrannosaur anyway, even if its scavenge-then-snooze biology is pulled from Lawrence Lambe’s sleepy post-prandial Gorgosaurus of the early 20th century.
There are a few other such phylogenetic reassignments, and they don’t all completely cohere. In the original book, Madagascar is a dinosaurian Australia, home to a relictual fauna of titanosaurian sauropods and Megalosaurus (not some generalized megalosaurid or megalosauroid, but good old William-Buckland-approved Megalosaurus, albeit as the new species M. modernus). This is now Megalodontosaurus, a carcharodontosaur; according to the revised text, abelisaurs and carcharodontosaurs both made it to Madagascar, but only the carcharodontosaurs survived. To fictionally wipe out the theropod clade that actually diversified in Madagascar (abelisaurs) and replace it with a clade with zero known Malagasy representatives (carcharodontosaurs) is, to say the least, an odd choice for a book founded in zoogeography.
The Mountain Leaper in the 1988 original (left) and the new 2025 edition (right). Note that the hands have been edited out of both the color art and the black and white sketches. I’m pretty sure the two standing Mountain Leapers have had raised feet removed as well. Differences in color and so on are down to my imperfect photography and photo-editing. P. 61 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.
In the original book, the Northclaw and the Mountain Leaper were generalized coelurosaurs, but now they are a therizinosaur and an alvarezsaur, respectively. According to the revised text, some therizinosaurs reverted to carnivory and those are the only ones that have survived. The Mountain Leaper is now described as an alvarezsaur, and its art is changed — the original art showed multi-fingered hands, which wouldn’t do for an alvarezsaurid, so the hands (and I think at least one raised foot) are painted over in the color art and simply erased from the accompanying pencil diagram. As far as I could tell, this is the only animal in the book to have its art revised. The fish-eating Dip, a small theropod (p. 76), is now described as being descended from ornithomimids rather than the Mountain Leaper, its first-edition forebear. But in the Dip’s description the parenthetical reference to page 61 is still to the Mountain Leaper, which is now an alvarezsaur and not an ornithomimosaur (some phylogenies find alvarezsaurs allied with ornithomimosaurs, but in the revised book the two clades are quite separate).
Am I picking nits? Most assuredly, and not because I don’t like the book but precisely because I do. For me the updates to the text fall between two stools; the new edition of the book is not a perfect time capsule reproduction of the first edition, but neither have the minor edits been integrated thoroughly enough to make a cohesive whole. Given that the book was never going to be completely up-to-date without a clean-sheet redesign, I think it would have been more elegant to leave it untouched, in all of its mid-80s glory. But I’m an old, pedantic curmudgeon, and in all honesty the edits are few and minor and unlikely to corrode anyone’s enjoyment of the book. In the interest of doing my due diligence as a reviewer, I may have already given them more attention than anyone else ever will.
In any case, Dougal Dixon himself is quite well-acquainted with the problem of always-advancing science inevitably outrunning any fixed publication. In the Afterword, subtitled “The Survival of Dinosaurs in Literature”, a paragraph has been added about Jurassic Park. It concludes with these lines (p. 111):
“Unfortunately for both the book and the films, dinosaur science moves on so quickly that many of the details have become very dated. The book has hypsilophodonts climbing trees (no longer believed) and the film has Velociraptor without the feathers we now know it to have possessed. Unfortunately, that is the fate faced by all writers who stray into the genre.”
The woolly Taranter so surprised me as an adolescent that I still have feelings about it today. Pp. 52-53 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.
VERDICT
So should you get the book? Of course! Certainly if you were curious enough to slog through this whole post. The New Dinosaurs is a stone classic, one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution, and almost four decades on it still has the power to delight, astonish, and provoke. I look at some of the new dinosaurs and think, “That’s too conservative” or “That’s too far out”, but then I remember that elephants’ closest living relatives are sirenians and they share their zoogeographic province with big flightless sprint-birds and bone-crushing feliforms and barely-endothermic eusocial rodents and flat tortoises that can inflate their shells to wedge themselves into cracks in the rocks, and I decide that my handle on “too conservative” or “too far out” is extremely poorly calibrated. As Ursula K. Le Guin observed, science fiction is not about the future, it is about the present, viewed “at certain odd times of day in certain weathers”.
Ultimately, The New Dinosaurs has given me things to think about for 36 years. I was born in the 1970s but grew up during what now seems like a golden age of semi-technical dinosaur books in the 1980s. I still have all of those books, and on occasion I dip into one or another for nostalgia. The New Dinosaurs is one of the very few I’ve revisited as a working scientist, to hold up against our ever-evolving understanding of the past and see how well my dinosaurometer is calibrated. The new edition costs £29.99 (about $40 as of this writing), but having this particular time machine on my bookshelf is nearly priceless. Here’s that link again — go do the right thing.
CODA: OTHER TIMES AND PLACES
It seems to be speculative evolution season. C.M. Kosemen’s All Tomorrows is being published in an expanded English-language print edition on August 25 (link), and Gert van Dijk’s Wildlife on the Planet Furaha will likely be available later this year (author’s announcement, publisher’s page). If I missed any other developments in this area, sing out in the comments.
Parting shot: you do have a 40th anniversary edition of After Man, right? If not, kindly sort yourself out (link).
I gave my keynote talk last evening at the 28th Annual Tate Conference. I also passed out the handout shown above so people could have a handy reference for sauropod biology while I was talking. I have a link to a PDF version at the bottom of this post if you’d prefer it that way.
Now that the talk’s done, I’m letting my “abstract” out into the world, here (link) and at the bottom of this post. I put “abstract” in scare quotes because it’s a short paper with references and figures. The freedom to go big with the abstract is what convinced me to take on what were for me new and ambitious subjects.
A few caveats. Just on this trip I’ve seen and heard some things that make me question the usefulness of postcranial fusions — of the neurocentral joints, sacrum, scapulocoracoid, and cervical ribs — for assessing sauropod ontogeny. I don’t think fusions are completely useless, just highly variable, even more so than I thought in previous years (see tables and discussions in Wedel and Taylor 2013a and Hone et al. 2016). But some things I’ve been calling “subadults” based on unfused joints may actually have been done growing. And on the flip side, I think some things with fused joints may have still been growing. We need more histology!
Apaldetti et al. (2021: fig. 1). Note the restricted morphospace of post-Toarcian sauropods. Compare to Benson et al. (2013: fig. 13).
Two papers I should have cited in the abstract are Benson et al. (2018) and Apaldetti et al. (2021), who showed with math what I argued in the abstract on qualitative grounds: after a period of experimentation with different shapes, sizes, and body forms in the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic, sauropodomorphs settle down into the sauropod body form by sometime in the Early Jurassic, and they never go back.
One thing I want to make clear: the fact that sauropods have a more conserved body plan that many other dinosaurian clades doesn’t make them bad dinosaurs, it makes them weird dinosaurs. Sauropods were phenomenally successful, precisely because they did everything right that big mammals do wrong — I started typing the list but just look at the handout up top. But that ecological and evolutionary success happened within pretty strict morphological boundaries; the shortest-necked sauropods were still long-necked compared to most other animals, the shortest-tailed were still long-tailed, and the smallest (as adults) were still pretty big. That sauropods didn’t transgress those boundaries, and as far as we can tell never went back to being prosauropod-like, in 135 million years of making bucket-loads of fast-growing, morphologically variable offspring, is interesting to me. And if it turns out that sauropods did transgress those boundaries, either because we find weird new sauropods, or dinosaur phylogeny gets some seismic shake-ups (you’ve read the new Lovegrove et al. paper, yeah?), that will be even more interesting.
Three sauropods from different times, places and clades, showing the conserved sauropod body plan. The basal eusauropod Spinophorosaurus from the Middle Jurassic of Niger, the turiasaur Mierasaurus from the Early Cretaceous of Utah, and a saltasaurine titanosaur Ibirania from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil (not to scale). Can you guess which is which? The 7th, 8th and 9th letters in the following sequence give the Left/Center/Right positions of Spinophorosaurus, Mierasaurus, and Ibirania, respectively: LCRCLRCRLRLC. Traced and lightly reposed from Remes et al. (2009), Royo-Torres et al. (2017), and Navarro et al. (2022). Wedel (2024: fig. 1).
My friend and colleague Jeremiah Scott helped me thrash through the literature on evolutionary ratchets, Mike Taylor and Brian Engh helped me refine my thinking on the science, its limits, and how to present it, and Jenny Adams helped me make the handout. Any errors are mine.
A big thanks to all of the other speakers at Tate 2024. I’d list them by name but it’s late, I’m tired, and the talks were uniformly excellent, so I’ll just go with this: every one of you gave me new facts to ponder and new ideas to think about. It was probably the most consistently interesting day of talks I’ve seen in my life.
I ended the talk with something that’s not in the abstract but should be: all of the ideas in the abstract are hypotheses, not conclusions. They’re crying out to be tested. In the last paragraph of the abstract I highlighted some recent work that I admire, that gives us examples to emulate in attacking the outstanding problems in sauropod paleobiology.
The closing slide from my talk.
I’ve been doing this for about a quarter century, and in that time the landscape of dinosaur science has shifted dramatically. I don’t know where we’ll be in another quarter century, but it won’t be where we are now, and that’s really cool and really exciting. Let’s roll.
References
- Apaldetti, C., Pol, D., Ezcurra, M.D. and Martínez, R.N., 2021. Sauropodomorph evolution across the Triassic–Jurassic boundary: body size, locomotion, and their influence on morphological disparity. Scientific Reports 11(1): 22534.
- Benson, R.B., Hunt, G., Carrano, M.T. and Campione, N., 2018. Cope’s rule and the adaptive landscape of dinosaur body size evolution. Palaeontology 61(1): 13-48.
- Hone, D.W.E., Farke, A.A., and Wedel, M.J. 2016. Ontogeny and the fossil record: what, if anything, is an adult dinosaur? Biology Letters 2016 12 20150947; DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2015.0947.
- Lovegrove, J., Upchurch, P. and Barrett, P.M., 2024. Untangling the tree or unravelling the consensus? Recent developments in the quest to resolve the broad-scale relationships within Dinosauria. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 22(1): 2345333.
- Wedel, M.J. 2024. The sauropod heresies: evolutionary ratchets, the taphonomic event horizon, and all the evidence we cannot see. The Jurassic: Death, Diversity, and Dinosaurs, 28th Annual Tate Conference abstract book: 35-38. (PDF handout: Wedel 2024 Tate handout FINAL)
- Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor. 2013. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications. Palarch’s Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology 10(1): 1-34.
Back in 2013, we showed you Bob Nicholls’ beautiful sketch “The Giant & Company”, featuring a giant Apatosaurus with a shaggy beard running along its neck. In the years since, I’d forgotten that he drew another sketch at the same time showing … well, he’s just posted both sketches on Mastodon, so let me show you:
I don’t know what taxon Bob intended this to be, but based on the relatively short forelimbs I’m seeing it as a diplodocine, and the length of the neck makes me think Barosaurus.
As with the beard in part 2, the sideburns here are purely speculative — we have no particular reason to think that Barosaurus had these, but it really wouldn’t surprise me at if at least some sauropod did. Until we start finding sauropod Lagerstätten, we won’t know.
But this is beautiful work. I often prefer sketches like these over finished pieces — they can have so much life in them.
Update (12 September 2024): Bob posted a photo on Mastodon of him drawing this during an SVPCA session:
I floated this idea on Fist Full of Podcasts, and Andrew Stuck gave it a shout-out in the comments, so I’m promoting it to a post.
The idea, briefly, is that sauropods grew fast and had enormous energy demands and even though horsetails and pine needles are surprisingly nutritious (Hummel et al. 2008), they probably suck to eat all the time. Extant herbivores are notoriously carnivorous when no-one is looking, and it’s silly to assume that extinct ones were any different. It seems likely that a big, hungry sauropod, gifted by natural selection with more selfish opportunism than compassion, would probably have viewed a turtle as a quick shot of protein and calcium, and a welcome hors d’oeuvre before stripping yet another conifer or tree fern. Furthermore, said sauropod would have been well-equipped to render the unfortunate chelonian into bite-size chunks, as shown above. The first time might even have been accidental. (Yeah, sure, Shunosaurus, I believe you. [rolls eyes])
Given that sauropods and turtles coexisted over most of the globe for most of the Mesozoic, I’ll bet this happened all the time. I don’t know how to falsify that,* but how could it not have? You’d have to assume that sauropods didn’t run into turtles, or that their mercy outweighed their curiosity and hunger. That’s even more bonkers than turtle nachos.** As Sherlock Holmes almost said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains – no matter how stupid/awesome – was probably done by sauropods.”
* “Oh, you found a boatload of turtle shell pieces at your fossil site? How tantalizingly unprecedented – please tell me more!” said no-one ever. Seriously, everyone who works on stuff younger than the Early Jurassic seems to bitch about all of the turtle frags they find, whether they’re looking for Apatosaurus or Australopithecus.
** Not to be all navel-gazey, but that is conservatively the greatest sentence I have ever written.
In conclusion, sauropods stomped on turtles and ate them, because duh. Fight me.
Further Reading
For more sauropods stomping, see:
- Genesis of an instant palaeo-art classic
- Sauropods stomping theropods: a much neglected theme in palaeo-art
- Sauropods stomping theropods, redux
- Greatest. Palaeoart. Ever.
- Brian Engh: Stomp time!
- Sauropods stomping theropods: Bryan Riolo’s Chaos Gigantes
- Greatest. Video. Ever. Starring sauropod-on-theropod violence!
And for sauropods not eating, but gettin’ et:
- Oblivious sauropods being eaten
- Oblivious sauropods being eaten, part 2: Bakker’s snoozing brontosaur
Reference
Hey sports fans! I met David Lindblad at Beer ‘N Bones at the Arizona Museum of Natural History last month, and he invited me to talk dinosaurs on his podcast. So I did (LINK). For two hours. Some of what I talk about will be familiar to long-time readers – dinosaur butt-brains and the Clash of the Dinosaurs saga, for example. But I also just sorta turned off my inhibitions and let all kinds of speculative twaddle come gushing out, including the specter of sauropod polyphyly, which I don’t believe but can’t stop thinking about. David was a gracious and long-suffering host and let me yap on at length. It is more or less the kind of conversation you could have with me in a pub, if you let me do most of the talking and didn’t want to hear about anything other than dinosaurs.
Is it any good? Beats me – I’m way too close to this one to make that call. Let me know in the comments.
Oh, I didn’t have any visuals that really fit the theme so I’m recycling this cool image of speculative sauropod display structures by Brian Engh. Go check out his blog and Patreon and YouTube channel.
Dinosaur life histories are plicomcated
February 18, 2016
Various methods that may be used to determine the age/ontogenetic status of a given dinosaur specimen. Central image is a reconstruction of the skeleton of an adult ceratopsian Zuniceratops, with surrounding indications of maturity (taken from multiple sources and do not necessarily relate to this taxon). (a) Development of sociosexual signals (adult left, juvenile right—modified from [9]), (b) surface bone texture (traced from [17]), (c) large size, represented here by an ilium of the same taxon that is considerably larger than that of a known adult specimen, (d) reproductive maturity, here based on the presence of medullary bone here shown below the black arrow (traced from [18]), (e) fusion of the neurocentral arch—location of the obliterated synchondrosis indicated by black arrow (traced from [19]), (f) asymptote of growth based on multiple species indicated by black arrow (based on [20]). Central image by Julius Csotonyi, used with permission. Hone et al. (2016: fig. 2).
The idea that dinosaurs had unusual life histories is not new. The short, short version is that it is usually pretty straightforward to tell which mammals and birds are adults, because the major developmental milestones that mark adulthood – reproductive maturity, cessation of growth, macro-level skeletal fusions, histological markers of maturity – typically occur fairly close together in time. This is radically untrue for most dinosaurs, which started reproducing early, often well before they were fully grown, and for which the other signals of adulthood can be wildly inconsistent.
Puny ‘pod
We don’t talk about this much in the paper, but one aspect of dinosaur life history should be of particular interest to sauropodophiles: most of the mounted sauropod skeletons in the world’s great museums belong to animals that are demonstrably not mature. They’re not the biggest individuals – witness the XV2 specimen of Giraffatitan, the giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus, and Diplodocus hallorum (formerly “Seismosaurus”).* They’re not skeletally mature – see the unfused scapulocoracoids of FMNH P25107, the holotype of Brachiosaurus mounted in Chicago, and MB.R.2181, the lectotype of Giraffatitan mounted in Berlin. And histological sampling suggests that most recovered sauropods were still growing (Klein and Sander 2008).
* The Oklahoma Museum of Natural History does have a mounted (reconstructed) skeleton of the giant Apatosaurus, and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History has a mounted reconstructed skeleton of Diplodocus hallorum. But as nice as those museums are, in historical terms those mounts are brand new, and they have not shaped the public – and professional – conception of Apatosaurus and Diplodocus to anywhere near the same degree as the much smaller specimens mounted at Yale, AMNH, the Field Museum, and so on.
Apatosaurs large and small at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
Basically, very little of what we think we know about sauropods is based on animals that were fully grown – and the same problem extends to many other groups of dinosaurs.
This is kind of a methodological nightmare – a colleague on Facebook commented that he had pulled his hair out over this problem – and in the paper we suggest some ways to hopefully alleviate it. I mean, the biology is what it is, but we can minimize confusion by being really explicit about which criteria we’re using when we assign a specimen to a bin like “juvenile”, “subadult”, and so on.
Supposed Former Evolution Junkie
Personally, I’m more excited about the possibilities that dinosaur life history weirdness open up for dinosaur population dynamics and ecology.
Confession time: I am a recovering and relatively high-functioning evolutionary theory junkie. In grad school I was on the heavy stuff – I read tons of Gould and Dawkins and admired them both without being smitten by either. I took seminars on Darwin and evolutionary morphology, and lots of courses in ecology – ever mindful of Leigh Van Valen’s definition of evolution as “the control of development by ecology”. I read a fair amount of Van Valen, too, until “Energy and evolution” (Van Valen 1976) burned out most of my higher cognitive centers.
I say “recovering” evolutionary theory junkie because after grad school I mostly went clean. The problem is that dinosaurs are good for a lot of things, but exploring the inner workings of evolution is usually not one of those things. As products of evolution, and demonstrations of what is biomechanically possible, dinosaurs are awesome, and we can look at macroevolutionary patterns in, say, body size evolution or morphospace occupation, but we almost never find dinos in sufficient numbers to be able to test hypotheses about the tempo and mode of their evolution on the fine scale. I suppose I could have switched systems and worked on critters in which the machinations of selection are more visible, but for me even the charms of evolutionary theory pale next to the virulent allure of sauropods and pneumaticity.
Anyway, keeping in mind that Van Valenian dictum that evolution stands with one foot in the organism-internal realm of genes, cells, tissue interactions, and other developmental phenomena, and the other in the organism-external world of competition, predation, resource partitioning, demographics, and other ecological interactions, then it stands to reason that if dinosaurs had weird ontogenies – and they did – then they might have had weird ecologies, and weird evolution full stop. (Where by ‘weird’ I mean ‘not what we’d expect based on modern ecosystems and our own profoundly mammal-centric point of view’.)
Three growth stages of Tyrannosaurus on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Hone et al. (2016: fig. 1).
Actually, we can be pretty sure that the weird ontogenies and weird ecologies of dinosaurs were intimately linked (see, for example, Varricchio 2010). Like the tyrannosaurs shown here – they didn’t all fill the same ecological niche. This casts some old arguments in a new light. Was T. rex adapted for fast running? Prrrrobably – just not as a full-size adult. The skeleton of an adult tyrannosaur is that of a 500 kg cursor pressed into service hauling around 10 tons of murder. And all of this has some pretty exciting implications for thinking about dinosaurian ecosystems. Whereas mammals tend to fill up ecospace with species, dinosaurs filled up their world with ecologically distinct growth stages.
Does all of this add up to weird evolutionary dynamics for dinosaurs? Possibly. As we say in the paper,
Correct identification of life stage also is relevant to fundamentals of evolution—if the onset of sexual reproduction substantially preceded cessation of growth in dinosaurs then the ‘adult’ phenotype may not have been the primary target of selection. In fact, once juveniles or subadults are capable of reproducing, it is conceivable a population could exist with potentially no individuals making it through the survivorship gauntlet into ‘adulthood’ and close to maximum body size. The occasional hints from the fossil record of anomalously large sauropods like Bruhathkayosaurus [51], and the Broome trackmaker [52] might be explained if many sauropods were primarily ‘subadult’ reproducers, and thus extremely large adults were actually vanishingly rare.
Did that actually happen? Beats me. But it’s consistent with what we know about sauropod life history, and with the observed scarcity of skeletally mature sauropods. And it might explain some other oddities as well, such as the high diversity of sauropods in seasonally arid environments like the Morrison Formation (see Engelmann et al. 2004), and the fact that sauropods – and large dinosaurs generally – are much larger than predicted based on the land areas available to them (see Burness et al. 2001). Because the age structure of sauropod populations was so skewed toward juveniles, the average body size of most sauropod populations was probably fairly modest, even though the maximum size was immense. So maybe a continuously reproducing population didn’t require as much food or space as we’ve previously assumed.
If we can falsify that, cool, we’ll have learned something. And if we can falsify the alternatives, that will be even cooler.
I’ll stop waving my arms now, lest I achieve powered flight and really inspire controversy. Many thanks to Dave and Andy for bringing me on board for this. It was a fun project, and we hope the paper is useful. You can read Dave’s thoughts on all of this here.
References
- Burness, G.P., Diamond, J. and Flannery, T., 2001. Dinosaurs, dragons, and dwarfs: the evolution of maximal body size. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(25), pp.14518-14523.
- Engelmann, G.F., Chure, D.J. and Fiorillo, A.R., 2004. The implications of a dry climate for the paleoecology of the fauna of the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation. Sedimentary Geology, 167(3), pp.297-308.
- Klein, N. and Sander, M., 2008. Ontogenetic stages in the long bone histology of sauropod dinosaurs. Paleobiology, 34(2), pp.247-263.
- Van Valen, L., 1976. Energy and evolution. Evolutionary Theory, 1(7), pp.179-229.
- Varricchio, D.J., 2011. A distinct dinosaur life history? Historical Biology,23(1), pp.91-107.
SO close
August 21, 2014
I have often argued that given their long hindlimbs, massive tail-bases, and posteriorly-located centers of mass, diplodocids were basically bipeds whose forelimbs happened to reach the ground. I decided to see what that might look like.
Okay, now obviously I know that there are no trackways showing sauropods actually getting around like this. It’s just a thought experiment. But given how close the center of mass of Diplodocus is to the acetabulum, I’ll bet that this pose was achievable in life. If diplodocids had just pushed the CM a few cm farther back, they might have dispensed with forelimbs entirely, or done something different with them, like re-evolved grasping hands.
Image modified from Gilmore (1932: plate 6). Here’s a horizontal-necked bipedal Diplodocus and the original pose:
UPDATE the next day: I had forgotten that Niroot had already done a bipedal Apatosaurus, and a much more convincing one than mine. Go see it.
UPDATE the next week: Well, heck. Looks like the primary value of this post was so that people would remind me of all the other places the same idea has already been covered better. As you can see from the comment thread, Mike blogged about this at the WWD site, Scott Hartman drew it, and Heinrich Mallison showed that it was plausible. Sheesh, I suck.
Reference
- Gilmore, C. W. 1932. On a newly mounted skeleton of Diplodocus in the United States National Museum. Proceedings of the United States National Museum 81, 1-21.
Five conversations
April 22, 2014
5. Brian Kraatz, 2004
In the spring of 2004, I was killing time over in Tony Barnosky’s lab at Berekeley, talking to Brian Kraatz about something–mammals, probably. Brian told me that I should consider going to the International Congress of Zoology that was happening in Beijing that fall. He’d actually told me about it several times, but I kept forgetting about it. It seemed remote from my concerns. Finally, though, the day before the abstracts were due, I thought, “Why not?” I could get travel money from the department and it would get me over there to see a lot of Asian dinosaurs in person.
I was also intrigued because presenters could submit either abstracts or short papers, and I had an idea for a short paper. I had been thinking a lot about how pneumaticity got started in dinosaurs and how much we could infer about that, so that evening I stayed up until about 3 AM banging out what would become Wedel (2006), pretty much as it was published, except for the figure, which was added later.
That got me to Beijing, where I spent a lot of time talking with Paul Barrett, who saw my talk and later invited me to contribute a talk to an SVP symposium on prosauropods, which grew into Wedel (2007) and became a chapter of my dissertation. And that got me an invite from Adam Yates and Matt Bonnan to join them in writing up the first really solid evidence of pneumaticity in prosauropods (Yates et al. 2012).
RESET
When I wandered over to the Barnosky lab to kill time that day, Brian wasn’t in. Instead I got to talking with Alan Shabel about food webs in East African riparian ecosystems. The habitats and faunas he was talking about put me in mind of the Morrison Formation of the American West. I wondered if the quantitative ecological analysis that Alan was working on would yield any insights into how Late Jurassic ecosystems worked. And that fired a few neutrons at the Van Valen papers I’d been reading for Kevin Padian’s paleobiology seminar, and precipitated a chain reaction. The paper that came out of that, “Sauropod dinosaurs as Van Valen’s energy maximizers”, was published in Paleobiology in 2007. That’s how I got into quantifying energy flow through dinosaur-dominated ecosystems.
I was presenting some of that work at an ecology conference in 2008 when I got invited to join a team of biologists going to the Galapagos. I was particularly interested in the role of extant dinosaurs (i.e., birds) in ecosystems dominated by bradymetabolic reptiles. Some of the data from that trip and one subsequent expedition went into my 2013 paper on the rise of dinosaurs during the Triassic. But most importantly, it got me working in the Galapagos, which I had wanted to do ever since I was a kid.
4. Mike Taylor, 2000
My first paper came out in the first issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2000. It was the one in which Rich Cifelli and Kent Sanders and I designated OMNH 53062, a string of four sauropod vertebrae from southeast Oklahoma, as the type specimen of a new dinosaur, Sauroposeidon proteles. I had been collecting business cards and mailing addresses from people at SVP since 1997, and I had a list of about 100 people that I thought would appreciate a reprint of the paper. So when the reprints arrived from the publisher, I printed out a bunch of form letters, made an assembly line of reprints, letters, and envelopes on the big table in the OMNH vert paleo library, and killed an afternoon getting everything assembled and ready to ship out.
Also about this time I received a polite email from some English guy named Mike Taylor, asking for a reprint. I wrote back and said that I’d be happy to send him one. I don’t know what he wrote back next, but it was sufficiently interesting that it kicked off a conversation that has now been going on for 14 years. When Vicki and I went to England on spring break in 2004, we stayed with Mike and Fiona in London. I went back over for SVPCA in London in 2005, and after 2009, I started going to SVPCA every year instead of SVP. That’s how I got to know Dave Hone. I got acquainted with Darren separately–we were sending each other reprints in 2001, I think, and talking sporadically about brachiosaurs. I think that Mike and Darren also met separately, and possibly if I hadn’t been around, they still would have ended up working together. But my papers with Mike–which account for seven of the nine I’ve published since my dissertation–wouldn’t have happened, or would have come out very differently. And you wouldn’t be reading this blog.
RESET
I first met Mike Taylor at the SVP meeting in Bristol in 2009. He had done that paper on that weird vertebra with Darren a couple of years before. We got together over a few pints and discovered that we had a lot of interests in common–Star Wars, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis–but c’mon, who can’t you say that about in this geek-infested business? He’s a nice guy, and we’re friends, but we’re not what you’d call close.
I spent most of my time at that meeting catching up with Matt Bonnan. We’d been friends since the late 90s, and we’d written the paper on the probable brachiosaurid metacarpal in 2004, but we hadn’t collaborated much. Well, we were both out of grad school and into stable jobs, and we really put our heads together that meeting. Two streams of papers came out of that: first, the sauropod biomechanics papers, which merged his limb development stuff with my pneumaticity stuff, and secondly, all of our work on quantifying serial variation using geometric morphometrics.
Although the first set of papers has attracted more attention–certainly more media attention–it’s the second set that give me more satisfaction. I’ve always been interested in serial homology, I just didn’t have a novel approach. But with Matt’s help I was able to combine morphometrics and phylogenetics to produce developmental phylogenies of serially repeated structures. That by itself is pretty cool, but when you bring it into the extant realm you can put the gene expression patterns right into the analysis. The stuff we’re doing with axial development in chickens right now–man, I don’t know if I’ll ever find the time to write another paper about extinct dinosaurs, when there’s so much fun to be had with the living ones.
3. Brooks Britt, 1997
In the summer of 1997, I was on a multi-thousand-mile quest to determine whether OMNH 53062 was a new dinosaur, or just a big example of something already known. Vicki and I had been to D.C. that spring, partly as our first vacation as a married couple, and partly so that I could see the Astrodon/Pleurocoelus material at the Smithsonian. That summer, I mapped out an epic tour of museums in the West. With our friend Tyson Davis, Vicki and I went to Dinosaur National Monument, the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake, the BYU Earth Sciences Museum in Provo, and the Museum of Western Colorado in Grand Junction.
The main reason we went to Grand Junction was because at the time, the MWC had some of the BYU Brachiosaurus material from Dry Mesa Quarry on exhibit. Rich Cifelli and I weren’t sure what OMNH 53062 was yet, but we thought it looked an awful lot like Brachiosaurus. Brooks Britt was the curator there at the time, and he took us down to the basement and showed us some of the sauropod material from the Lower Cretaceous Dalton Wells Quarry. Brooks was particularly excited to show us the pneumatic features in the vertebrae. I told him about the big vertebrae from Oklahoma that I was working on, and he said, “You should get those vertebrae CT scanned, to get a look at the pneumatic spaces inside.” I smiled and nodded and thought to myself, “Dude, you are completely crazy. I am an undergrad on an independent study. No way do I have the juice to get giant dinosaur bones CT scanned.” But I didn’t forget about what he’d said. When we got back to Oklahoma, I mentioned it to Rich–and then I forgot about it.
Happily for me, Rich did not forget about it. A few months later, he was at a university function with the director of OU’s University Hospital, and he mentioned the idea of CT scanning the dinosaur bones. The hospital director was all for it–the CT machines frequently had down time on Saturdays, and the hospital would trade time on the machines for publicity when we published our results. That December, I was in Rich’s office for one of our weekly meetings when he said, “Hey, are you still interested in CT scanning the vertebrae? Because if you want to, we can make it happen.” I don’t remember what I said, but I assume it was some variant of “Hell yeah!”
We took the first jacket up to the hospital in January, 1998. We got decent results. The vertebrae were so big and dense that the scans were plagued by beam-hardening artifacts, but we could see that internal structure was honeycombed by dozens or hundreds of thin-walled cavities. The problem was, we had no idea what that meant–a few physical cross-sections of sauropod vertebrae had been published over the years, most notably by Heber Longman in 1933 and Werner Janensch in 1947–but to my knowledge no CT scans of sauropod vertebrae had ever been published, and you could probably count on your fingers the number of published CT scans of fossils of any kind. Brooks had a bunch in his 1993 dissertation, but that was unpublished, and I wouldn’t get a copy for several more months. So we had no baseline.
But we did have Kent Sanders, a radiologist at the hospital who was hot on this stuff and helped us read the films. And we had a museum full of dinosaur bones and access to a CT scanner on the weekends. So that’s how I spent most of the Saturdays in 1998–drive to the museum, fill the trunk of the car with dinosaur bones, drive up to Oklahoma City and spend the day scanning with Kent. I wasn’t supposed to do my MS thesis on pneumaticity, but when the primary project I had been working on didn’t look like it was going to pan out, I realized that I had enough CT scans of sauropod vertebrae that with a little selective hole-filling I could describe the evolution of vertebral pneumaticity in sauropods. So that became my Master’s thesis.
RESET
That conversation with Brooks Britt in the summer of 1997 was a turning point for me. Until then I’d been interested in OMNH 53062 for what it could tell us about the animal that it had once been part of. But when Brooks started telling me about the taphonomy of the Dalton Wells Quarry, I realized that the Oklahoma vertebrae were telling another story, too: the story of what had happened to that animal. So that’s the angle we played up in the paper–how did these vertebrae get separated from the rest of the critter? Mesozoic murder mystery!
Then the next summer I was out with Rich’s crew in Montana, working in the Cloverly Formation. I actually spent most of my time with Des Maxwell and his group at the Wolf Creek quarry, which was a sauropod bonebed. I did a poster on that quarry for SVP in 2000, and I wrote my MS thesis on the taphonomy of the quarry.
While all of this was going on, I was spending more and more time talking with Brooks Britt. He had done his dissertation on pneumaticity in fossil archosaurs, but he had all kinds of interesting things going on related to taphonomy, including modification of dinosaur bones by termities, and evidence of fungal hyphae in dinosaur bones. Brooks had done his Bachelor’s and Master’s work at BYU before going to Calgary for his dissertation. He encouraged me to think about going to BYU for my PhD work. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made–I freaking love Utah, and the chance to go live and work there was too good to pass up. I started out as one of Ken Stadtman’s grad students, but when Brooks got the job at BYU in 2002, he agreed to come on as my co-advisor. I’m mainly interested in what you can infer about terrestrial ecosystems from tracks left on bones, so that’s what I did my dissertation on. Most of the chapters were on sauropods, naturally, but I did have that one project looking at invertebrates, fungi, and microbes–or their traces–in faunal bone I collected from Capitol Reef National Forest in the summer of 2005. Now that was a fun project.
While I was working at BYU, Vicki got her PhD in anthropology from the University of Utah. Both of us had field sites in southern Utah, and we really fell in love with that part of the state. After we finished our degrees we moved to St. George, which is just gorgeous. Vicki coordinates the excavation and repatriation of Native American remains and artifacts from Utah federal lands, and I teach geology at Dixie State University. When I’m not digging, teaching, or hiking, I blog about sauropod taphonomy. My friends tease me because it’s such a geeky niche thing, but it makes me happy.
2. Rich Cifelli, 1996
You know how sometimes you end up working on something just because it’s there? That’s how I started working on sauropods.
Immediately after I left Trish Schwagmeyer’s office, I marched down to the museum, barged into Rich’s office, threw myself in a chair, and asked him if he’d sponsor me on an independent study. He said that he’d be delighted to–what did I want to work on? Dinosaurs, I said, dinosaurs! “Well, we have these big sauropod vertebrae from southeastern Oklahoma that need to be identified.” We went and had a look. It wasn’t my dream project–I was more interested in big theropods and ceratopsians–but I said I’d take the job. There was a little paperwork to fill out. We conceived a one-semester project, to be completed in the fall of 1996, to identify the specimen, OMNH 53062, to the family level. Rich loaned me some of his sauropod papers to photocopy so that I could get up to speed on the anatomy. I spent the fall of 1996 grokking sauropod vertebral morphology and trying to figure out what this thing was.
RESET
Immediately after I left Trish Schwagmeyer’s office, I marched down to the museum, barged into Rich’s office, threw myself in a chair, and asked him if he’d sponsor me on an independent study. He said that he’d be delighted to–what did I want to work on? Dinosaurs, I said, dinosaurs–especially big theropods or ceratopsians! “Well, we have these ceratopsian odds and ends that Stovall collected back in the 30s and 40s. They’ve been catalogued all this time as Pentaceratops and Triceratops, but someone should probably check on those IDs.” Wow, my dream project–of course I pounced on it! There was a little paperwork to fill out. We conceived a one-semester project, to be completed in the fall of 1996, to identify the specimens to the genus level. Rich loaned me some of his ceratopsian papers to photocopy so that I could get up to speed on the anatomy. I spent the fall of 1996 grokking ceratopsian cranial morphology and trying to figure out what those things were.
Well, it turns out that they were Pentaceratops and Triceratops after all. So no big news, but I did learn a lot on that project: how to photograph and measure fossils, how to read scientific papers. Mostly it just got me back in the museum.
You know how sometimes you end up working on something just because it’s there? That’s how I started working on Tenontosaurus. I’ll confess, at first I didn’t have any deep, abiding love for “Tonto”. I scorned it as the world’s most boring dinosaur–no horns, spikes, frills, claws, or sails, basically just a scaly cow with a longer tail. But, man, these things were pouring out of the Antlers Formation like water out of a tap. We had adults, subadults, big juveniles, little juveniles, even a few bones from individuals so small they must have been yearlings. I started working on them in my spare time, and got a little project going on the post-hatching ontogeny of Tenontosaurus. When I graduated with my BS in the fall of 1997, it just made sense to stick around and keep working on Tenontosaurus for my MS.
Naturally I was presenting this stuff at SVP every fall, and that’s where I met Jack Horner. He thought my ontogenetic work on Tenontosaurus would be good preparation for tackling hadrosaur ontogeny and diversity. So I went to MSU for my PhD work. After I finished I got the job I have now, teaching geology in Missouri. Even when I was living in Montana, I’d still get into the OMNH collections for a day or two of research whenever I was back in Oklahoma. Now that I’m just five hours away, I’m back at OMNH all the time. There’s just so much to work on–Eolambia, the small ornithopod material from the Cloverly Formation, and especially the teeth. The OMNH has hundreds of these little ornithopod teeth from the microsites in the Cedar Mountain Formation, the Cloverly Formation, and the Antlers Formation. Nobody wants to work on them, except me. While I was working on Tenontosaurus I had to come up with some size-independent characters that I could use to determine the ontogenetic age of ornithopods based on their teeth. Once I had those, all of those teeth catalogued as “Ornithopoda indet.” became a goldmine.
I certainly never saw myself becoming “the ornithopod tooth guy”–what an oddly specific thing to be an expert on! But to me they are beautiful, intricate, and endlessly fascinating. Who knows, maybe one of these days I’ll take all of my best photographs and start a Tumblr.
1. Trish Schwagmeyer, 1996
Trish: “You’re blowing it. You want to do research, but no-one is going to trust you with a project if you can’t take care of the basic stuff like keeping your grades up.”
Me: [face-burning, fully convicted silence]
Trish: “You are capable of much more than this. I know that these grades are not reflective of your best work. This is your chance to prepare yourself for the career you want. You owe it to yourself to do better than this.”
Me: [sucking it up] “I understand. And I’ll do better. Other than getting my grades up, what else can I do to make myself attractive to graduate programs?”
Trish: “Find a professor that you like and do an independent study. Get some research experience.”
Yow. I will remember that for as long as I live. “You’re blowing it.” Thank God that alone out of everyone in my life, Trish Schwagmeyer had the guts to look me in the eye and call me out.
RESET
Trish: “Your grades last semester were a little rough.”
Me: “Yeah. O-chem II was murder.”
Trish: “And biochem.”
Me: “Yeah. Biochem.”
Trish: “Have you noticed that you get As and Bs in your language and history classes, and Cs in your math and science classes?”
Me: “Yeah, of course. Math and science are hard. Language and history are…”
Trish: “Are what?”
Me: “I dunno. Fun. More like play.”
Trish: “Maybe you’re in the wrong major.”
Yow. I will remember that for as long as I live. “Maybe you’re in the wrong major.” Thank God that alone out of everyone in my life, Trish Schwagmeyer had the guts to look me in the eye and diagnose the problem.
Immediately after I left her office, I marched over to the registrar and changed my major from Zoology to Letters. And breathed a huge sigh of relief. After that, I just cruised. I got my degree, stayed at OU for a Master’s in classical languages, and now I teach Latin at a private high school in Oklahoma City. I should have known that a career in science wasn’t in the cards. The evidence was written all over my transcript. Paleontology is still interesting to me–I doubt if I will ever stop being fascinated by dinosaurs–but it just wasn’t a realistic career option. I’m so glad I found my true calling.
Beards of the Mesozoic: Bob Nicholls edition
September 11, 2013
We’ve blogged a lot of Bob Nicholls‘ art (here, here, and here) and we’ll probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We don’t have much choice: he keeps drawing awesome things and giving us permission to post them. Like this defiantly shaggy Apatosaurus, which was probably the star of the Morrison version of Duck Dynasty. Writes Bob:
On my way home at the airport I did a sketch of your giant Apatosaurus* — see attachment. My thought was that massive thick necks were probably pretty sexy things to apatosaurs, so maybe sexually mature individuals used simple feathers (stage 1, 2 or 3?) to accentuate the neck profile. The biggest males would of course have the most impressive growths so in the attached sketch your giant has one of the biggest beards in Earth’s history! What do you think of this idea?
Well, I think it’s awesome. And entirely plausible, for reasons already explained in this post.
“Now, wait,” you may be thinking, “I thought you guys said that sauropod necks weren’t sexually selected.” Actually we made a slightly different point: that the available evidence does not suggest that sexual selection was the primary driver of sauropod neck elongation. But we also acknowledged that biological structures are almost never single-purpose, and although the long necks of sauropods probably evolved to help them gather more food, there is no reason that long necks couldn’t have been co-opted as social billboards. This seems especially likely in Apatosaurus, where the neck length is unremarkable** but the neck fatness is frankly bizarre (and even inspired a Star Wars starfighter!).
I also love the “mobile ecosystem” of birds, other small dinosaurs, and insects riding on this Apatosaurus or following in its train. It’s a useful reminder that we have no real idea what effect millions of sauropods would have on the landscape. But it’s not hard to imagine that most Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems were sauropod-driven in a thousand cascading and ramifying chains of cause and effect. I’d love to know how that worked. At heart, I’m still a wannabe chrononaut, and all my noodlings on pneumaticity and sauropod nerves and neural spines and so on are just baby steps toward trying to understand sauropod lives. Safari by way of pedantry: tally-ho!
For other speculative apatosaurs, see:
* “My” giant is the big Oklahoma Apatosaurus, which I gave a talk on at SVPCA a couple of weeks ago. See these posts for more details (1, 2, 3).
** Assuming we can be blasé about a neck that is more than twice as long (5 m) as a world-record giraffe neck (2.4 m), for garden variety Apatosaurus, or three times that length for the giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus (maybe 7 m).
My attempt at a fully Engh-ed out brachiosaur
July 26, 2013
Last Sunday I got to hang out with Brian Engh and some of his friends in LA. You may remember Brian from this, this, this, this, and, most notoriously, this. We got to drawing dinosaurs, naturally.
Now, for me to try to draw dinosaurs next to Brian is more than a little intimidating. I really felt the need to bring my A-game. So this is what I came up with. I’m posting it not because I think it is particularly likely* but because the blog has been a little sauropod-lite this summer, and heck, it’s Friday.
* Although frigatebirds and anoles and such might have some things to say about that.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
