Paleoblogology: Feathered Theropods Part #2

I confess: I spent a lot of last night reading dinosaur blogs. Seriously.

The reason that I spend a large portion of last night reading dinosaur blogs is because they are both interesting-- for someone who enjoys general science and paleontology-- and often very funny. It seems to me that the paleobiologists and the paleontologists of the blogosphere have the acerbic scholarly opinions and bizarre and biting sense of humor that I find characterizes classicists in general, so I felt oddly at home reading about taxons and morphology.

One of the things that I thoroughly enjoyed was a series of commentaries on a television show called Jurassic Fight Club created and/or financed by a guy named "Dinosaur" George and shown on the History Channel. The show used dinosaur fights hypothesized from bite marks and other signs of distress on bones, and employ CG to recreate dinosaur fights, and then has paleontologists comment on these recreations. I came upon the show while reading Nick Gardner's Blog. This entry pointed me to Sean Craven's blog Renaissance Oaf, which provided a hilarious three part commentary on the TV show: Part #1, Part #2, Part #3.

I have no idea whether ever responded to Craven's incisive attacks, but an earlier criticism by another dinosaur blog apparently raised an extreme response from "Dinosaur" George.

If you're interested in this ridiculously melodramatic and scientifically quetionable [1] but enjoyable show, you can watch the first episode here:





Endnotes

1. Even with my limited knowledge, I can tell that some of the assumptions are treated as fact and that the fact that all the scientists are portrayed as being in agreement is bogus (scientists rarely agree this strongly on anything, even Time Team acknowledges that).

Feathered Theropods

Until three days ago, I could not identify a theropod. According to an article about the Dilong paradoxis, theropods are two-legged, meat-eating dinosaurs (see the article). However, listening to an NPR piece, I heard mention of a feathered tyrannosaurus. I decided to investigate. It turns out that the Dilong paradoxis is a tyrannasaurid, who roamed in China about 60 million years before the T-rex (rather than North America, the home of the Tyrannasaurus rex [1]).

This picture is from the slideshow that accompanied this National Geographic article.

According to both the National Geographic article and the American Natural History article, the Dilong paradoxis was covered with protofeathers, which were presumably to keep the dinosaur warm. Unlike the Dilong paradoxis, the Tyrannasaurus rex, because of its large body mass, would have more difficulty expelling heat than generating it, so it is reasonable to suppose that the T-rex did not have feathers. However, according to the American Natural History article, it is plausible that the young Tyrannasaurus rexes might have had protofeathers for warmth which they molted as they matured.

There is a great NPR piece on the Dilong paradoxis. Also, if you were like me and you grew up reading about dinosaurs and watching Walking with Dinosaurs over and over again there is apparently a paleontological blogging community (I love the internet!) that is out there. As I was doing research, I stumbled across the blog of a Marshall student named Nick Gardner, called "Why I Hate Theropods." I immediately decided to find out what a theropod was (see the top of this blogpost). He wrote an blogpost on the subject, which illuminates some of the scientific debate on the subject. Overall, I am sorry to say, that Nick's terminology is too technical for my classicist mind (although I once had some aspirations of becoming a paleontologist, those went by the wayside when I realized that I neither have the patience nor the complexion for the incredible and painstaking art of uncovering dinosaur bones), but his blog is quite fascinating nonetheless and even disregarding the jargon of biological classification his overall points are generally clear.

Endnotes

1. Tyrannasaurus Rex more or less translates as "the tyrant king" which is pretty amusing considering that tyrannos, tyrant, was set in oppositition to basileus (and in Latin rex) because tyrants were considered to be those who did not inherit the thrown, whereas a king came to the position by birth.