Say hello to Cornelius! I got to meet him during a brief visit to the ROM last week, and he seems like a pretty nice guy.
This cool new ceratopsian is on display in the Age of Dinosaurs gallery in an exhibit called "New Dino Discovered", and was also featured in Dino Hunt Canada, which aired earlier this year. It should have a new name soon, but for now Canada voted to nickname it Cornelius. The really nice skeletal mount was put together by Research Casting International based on about a 50% complete disarticulated skeleton.
Here's a close-up of that winning smile. This new dude is a centrosaurine ceratopsid with some pretty neat ornamentation going on at the back of the frill.
I really liked the inclusion of a quarry map on the floor, which highlights some of the bones that are on display. The skeleton was found in southern Alberta in the Milk River area, and comes from the Oldman Formation.
The mounted skeleton is a cast, but there are some original bones on display, like the radius and ulna shown here.
In particular, I liked this set of panels on the wall showing differences in frill ornamentation between centrosaurines, and how we identify different species. On the right is the original frill material for Cornelius, the bottom left is Centrosaurus, and the top left is Styracosaurus.
And look, there was even an ankylosaur osteoderm on display! These are some of the fossils found in the Milk River area, which tell us a bit about the ecosystem that the new centrosaurine lived in.
It's a cool new dinosaur and a nice exhibit, so definitely don't miss it if you're visiting the ROM anytime soon!
And by hibernation, I mean grad school. The last few weeks have been pretty busy here in Edmonton and I've found myself without a lot of time to blog about interesting things that have been going on. Thankfully, that busy-ness is a result of research productivity and teaching, which are both good things! So, over the next few days, as we head into the (still somewhat cold) field season here in Alberta, I'll try to cover a bit of what's been happening for the last couple months...
First up: Alberta Paleontological Society Symposium
Because I was expecting a largely adult audience (rather than families or mostly small children), I had to come up with something a little different than previous dino-workshops I've given. What do you do that's hands-on, not super boring, and not a craft? Well, two years ago I, and my fellow grad student Mike Burns, had given a talk about the frequent (and usually hilarious) misrepresentation of ankylosaurs in the popular media, and it had been a big success. So I decided to run with that. I brought with me a bunch of ankylosaur casts (skulls, a tail club, a foot), and some real fossils (osteoderms, thin sections, teeth), and lots and lots of popular reconstructions of ankylosaurs, mostly in the form of toys (or, uh...scientific models?) and books. These were scattered around the lab, which holds about 20 people.
Over the course of the workshop, I talked for about 10-15 minutes at a time about the anatomy of ankylosaurs, starting with a general overview, then moving on to the skull, skin/armour, tail, and legs and feet. We finished up watching a couple of clips from various documentaries and talking about posture, movement, and behaviour. Each workshop attendee picked 2 or 3 reconstructions to evaluate during the workshop, and had a worksheet to make notes about the anatomy of their reconstructions. After I would talk about some aspect of ankylosaurs, there was 10-20 minutes for looking at specimens, discussing the pros and cons of different reconstructions, and asking questions. Then I'd call everyone back together and ask who had the worst/best reconstructions and why.
If you're ever called to do a dinosaur or paleontology workshop for adults - do this! It was lots and lots of fun. It required fairly minimal preparation, which is a plus if you're often asked to do this sort of thing. I spent a couple of hours at most putting together a powerpoint of mostly specimen images, picking out books and toys and fossils to bring with me, and making up some handouts). It's a great way to engage adult learners, and could probably easily be restructed to work for kids or families as well.
More importantly, I think this might be a really effective way of communicating a lot of information about paleontology in a way that will encourage the general public to look at popular science more critically. Since most people will generally not be going to the primary literature to answer their paleontology-related questions, their information is going to come from illustrated books, magazine
articles, computer animated documentaries, and museum exhibits. If I had just discussed the anatomy of ankylosaurs via presentation and specimens, I'm not sure a lot of the points I discussed would have sunk in as much as they did by critiquing the illustrations and toys most people are likely to encounter. This was an easy way to make a talk more hands-on, and the casual atmosphere and conversation between the workshop attendees was really great.
The next APS Symposium will be held on Saturday, March 16, 2013. The symposium is always held in the Jenkins Theatre at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta.
(Thanks to Angelica for taking some photos of the workshop!)
I was pretty sure I'd be hooked from the moment I saw the trailer and saw this recreated with Cryolophosaurus. Hot dang, the raging dino fanboy in me loves me some Charles Knight.
I have been following with great interest the various perspectives on Dinosaur Revolution at palaeoblogs around the net - see Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs, Dinosaur Tracking, and a whole slew of posts over on Art Evolved. As with any dino documentary (and probably ALL documentaries, regardless of subject matter), there are inaccuracies to point out. However, I was surprised by strong backlash Dinosaur Revolution has seemed to receive around the palaeo blogosphere. I've only caught the first two episodes so far, but I'm looking forward to seeing the next two.
I view Dinosaur Revolution as kind of like an animated children's storybook about dinosaurs - something like the A Day in the Life of... series, which has a story followed by a discussion of the scientific research behind the story. Would we criticize a children's storybook for using narrative and some anthropomorphism to get the story across? Or how about, would we criticize it based on its art style - cartoons get a pass (the I Am A... series), but more photorealistic portrayals don't?
I think the show does a pretty good job of getting some science across within the context of what the show is supposed to be. The short interstitials with the palaeontologists provide a bit of context for some of the ideas being presented, there's footage of fossils and fieldwork, and there's even AN EXPERIMENT! at the end of The Watering Hole. I agree with many reviews that the second episode was the stronger of the first two, and that the first episode was somewhat uneven. I didn't love every part of Dinosaur Revolution, but I liked more than I disliked. I disliked Gigantoraptor's crazy inflatable wattle, but not because it was crazy - I disliked it because it took away from the potentially more interesting story about display feathers in oviraptorosaurs. I disliked Saurosuchus not eating the Eoraptor that it bit and threw away, because that was crazy. But I liked a lot of the (I guess) controversial bits - the Looney Tunes homages, the therapsid getting thrown into the Saurosuchus' mouth, the Glacialisaurus hacking up a wad of sap. Those things were funny, and I think in the context of this particular program that the humour worked well and was ok.
And seriously, how cool is it to have the Ischigualasto, the Hanson, and the Iren Dabasu formations all in one episode? Have we ever seen Eoraptor, Glacialisaurus, or Gigantoraptor on TV before? I hope that the portrayal of all these marvelous dinosaurs inspires people to head to Wikipedia and learn more.
So I'm wondering - a lot of the controversial things in Dinosaur Revolution seem, well, cool to me. And I think it's ok to be cool. And I think that Dinosaur Revolution was marketed to be cool, and to be more storybook, less documentary sensustricto. They advertised it at Comic Con! How often do dino documentaries get advertised at geek conventions?
That Tyrannosaurus has a skull for a face, and that is cool. He's like Ghost Rider!
So I liked Dinosaur Revolution, and I think it's a shame more people didn't. Perhaps context is everything. Perhaps the biggest problem is that even though the marketing indicated this was not a typical documentary, airing this on the Discovery and Science Channels was just the wrong context.
I’m late to the party again with the recent spate of dino documentaries, but I thought I’d review a couple here on the blog over the next few weeks. Today I wanted to take a look at Dino Gangs, a documentary featuring my PhD supervisor Dr. Phil Currie as well as several scientists from the Royal Tyrrell Museum.
Dino Gangs explores the idea of gregariousness in tyrannosaurs, and especially the idea that some tyrannosaurs may have engaged in cooperative pack hunting. There are two versions out there, the one shown in the UK and the shorter one aired in the US, and I think I have watched the UK version.
Whether or not you agree with the gregariousness hypothesis, I think Dino Gangs does a bang-up job of showing the process of the science of palaeontology. It introduces a fairly contentious topic (gregariousness in dinosaurs) and the reasons why this idea exists, and then shows the various lines of evidence used to support this idea. We see palaeontologists working in two different field localities (Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park in Alberta, and Bugin Tsav in Mongolia). We see the prep lab in Hwaseong-si, South Korea, where I spent much of last summer. We see Dr. Larry Witmer’s lab in Ohio, and how we use CT scanners and 3D visualization software to learn more about the anatomy of dinosaurs. We see great footage of komodo dragons in Indonesia and lions and ostriches in South Africa, showing how we use extant animals as analogues for behaviour in extinct ones. We even get to see an ostrich leg dissected to examine the muscles. There’s discussion of ontogeny and allometry, taphonomy, and the great variety of social behaviours in extant animals. We also see dissenting opinions from scientists like Dr. David Eberth and Dr. Don Henderson, both from the Tyrrell. That’s a lot of fairly sophisticated concepts to deliver in a Discovery Channel special.
Brian Switek of Dinosaur Tracking has criticized the documentary for making overly bombastic claims that are as yet unsupported in the scientific literature. I think part of this stems from the fact that most people do not know that tyrannosaur is not synonymous with Tyrannosaurus, and unfortunately the documentary does not do a great job explaining that there are several species of tyrannosaurs presented in the film. In addition, I see some problems with the emphasis on the Mongolian finds. The documentary discusses at great length the large number of Tarbosaurus skeletons that have been found, and although they discuss the taphonomy of the Nemegt Formation at Bugin Tsav, there does seem to be some conflation with the Albertosaurus bonebed at Dry Island. The Albertosaurus bonebed is a true bonebed, containing more than 20 individuals in a relatively small area. In contrast, the Tarbosaurus skeletons at Bugin Tsav are generally separated from each other by some distance and do not really form any bonebeds (unless there have been some recent finds which I have not heard about). I was actually kind of disappointed that there was not more evidence on the Dry Island bonebed, which has been excavated extensively by Dr. Currie and formed the basis of a special volume in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences last fall. There are certainly a great number of Tarbosaurus known from Mongolia, and the unusually high ratio of Tarbosaurus to other dinosaurs in the Nemegt Formation is an area of active research. But to me, there is less evidence for sociality preserved in the Nemegt specimens than at the Dry Island bonebed. I suspect the emphasis on Mongolia over Alberta in the documentary is because of the more exotic setting offered by the Gobi Desert.
And that brings me to perhaps a less obvious but equally frustrating aspect of the documentary. I have written before about the absence of female palaeontologists in the popular media (and sadly, Dino Gangs is no exception to this), but also true is the absence of non-Caucasians in many documentaries. All of the Mongolian footage was shot during the Korea-Mongolia International Dinosaur Project’s recent expeditions, but Dr. Yuong-Nam Lee, the leader of the expedition, does not receive any name credit even though he appears on screen frequently. Nor is he featured in any of the interviews. I was particularly surprised by the description of the Gobi Desert, which is apparently “completely isolated from the outside world” and is “such a hostile environment that not even the local tribespeople can survive there”. The Gobi is rugged and relatively unpopulated, but to say these things overly romanticizes Mongolia. The Mongolians who continue to live the nomadic lifestyle certainly live very different daily lives than those of us in North America, but to use the word ‘tribespeople’ makes them sound primitive. Nearly every traditional ger that we passed had several dirtbikes, a satellite dish, and solar panels in addition to the horses, goats, and camels hanging around.
A final quibble: there was far too much reusing of animation from Clash of the Dinosaurs, Dinosaur Planet, and even When Dinosaurs Roamed America. Two abelisaurs, which are NOT known from Mongolia, were featured during a discussion of Tarbosaurus, Triceratops was presented as Protoceratops, and Parasaurolophus and ?Maiasaura stood in for Mongolian hadrosaurs. I know animation is expensive, but perhaps a nice illustration would do instead? For people interested in dinosaurs, it’s really, really jarring to see Triceratops, the last of the ceratopsians, presented as Protoceratops, one of the earliest.
In the end though, I liked Dino Gangs. I think the focus on the single question “were tyrannosaurs pack hunters?” was a real strong point for the documentary, since in essence this is what we do in science. We ask a question and then try to answer it. It was really nice to see this question explored in depth using many different lines of evidence, including counter arguments from dissenting voices. The Gobi desert looked great on film, and it was awesome to see Brian Cooley’s sculptures of Albertosaurus in the Cretaceous Alberta gallery at the Tyrrell get so much screen time. I would definitely be interested in hearing what non-palaeontologists took away from Dino Gangs.
