Can America Kick the Hobbit?

Personally, the online archives of LIFE at Google Books have replaced TVTropes as my favorite source of procrastination. There are hours of fun to be had tracing cultural, social, political, and scientific trends across the decades, and of course you have the justly famous photos and art to go with it. I'm still riled up at their clipping off the first few pages of The Earth is Born and most of the tundra panorama (not to mention including a damn Post-It note in Zallinger's Age of Mammals!), but nobody's perfect, I guess.

The Letters columns are about as interesting as the text, too. In particular, I'd like to mention one instance, which followed an essay on Tolkien. The February 24, 1967 issue had, on page 10, a book review on J. R. R. Tolkien's works, in which the author bemoaned the resurgence in popularity of the fantasy author. In it, he claims that "success seems to have spoiled Tolkien" and that "[t]he notion of fan clubs devoted to discussions of the history and linguistics of Middle Earth fills me with horror". Not only does he lament the fact that Middle Earth was spoiled by no longer belonging to a literary elite, but he also claims - of all things - that The Lord of the Rings is an "undemanding, comfortable, child-sized story" with "no symbolism, no sex, no double meanings" and "innocent of ideas".

What.

Fortunately, the March 17, 1967 issue had the responses. One reader agreed, one disagreed, and one... answered in Tengwar. Rather messy Tengwar, but Tengwar nonetheless.

I'm uncertain about classifying the critic as an orc, though - wouldn't troll be a more suitable epithet?

Ironically, the one writing the letter probably is one of those complaining about LOTR's new post-movie popularity. You can't please everyone, I suppose.

Everything copyright LIFE magazine and Google Books.

Pics or it didn't happen?

In response to Pavel's response, which was "...to prove words from book, you must scan the part of page where these words are printed... you must show THEIR words, not re-typing the sillyness", here is the entirety of the infamous dinosaur section of the The Wonderful World.

See, here's the Compsognathus we all know and love...

...so why is it an ancestor of mammals? I'm inclined to agree with Jerry D. Harris that they must have mixed it up with Cynognathus. Still a weird error, though. Maybe they're pushing the stem-haematotherm hypothesis?

I do like the "dinosaur-of-prey" term to describe the tyrannosaur. Can't remember seeing that anywhere.

Oh, and their unusual idea of dinosaur extinction and biogeography. It speaks for itself.

So, in short...

Happy 4th blogiversary!

This blog was established January 31, 2006. It was started merely as a dump for Spec-related stuff, and then, well, it got rather out of hand when I found out this blogging lark was rather more fun than expected.

And then... 4 whole years? I don't believe it myself.

I'd like to take this moment to thank any readers I might have, as well as the creative team behind Spec, without whom this would never have come to pass.

Good night. That's all folks.

The best worst dino-art?

Earlier on, I had the chance to review McLoughlin's Archosauria. While the author did have some weird ideas, the art was reasonably well-executed.

This time around, though, the spotlight will shine on a book whose dinosaur art is so bad that it wraps all the way round and goes right into awesome. I'm talking, of course, about The Wonderful World.

Clarifications are in order. As the single most influential popular science book of the baby-boom generation, LIFE magazine's The World We Live In serial spawned countless imitators, some more inspired than others. The Wonderful World: The Adventure of the Earth we Live On was one of the more obvious clones (it's in the title, f'goshsakes!), and is currently much rarer than its superior predecessor. Canny book retailers will sell it to you at an extortionate price, sadly.

Thankfully, it doesn't attempt to imitate The World We Live In too much; a lot of the book is taken up by man's interactions with his planet, demographics, and suchlike. The brief section on prehistoric life, however, is so obviously cribbed from The World We Live In that it isn't funny. Take a look at the examples from "The First Age of Life" and decide for yourself; TWWLI is on your right, TWW is on your left.

The similarity is certainly striking.

The best (or worst) part is the dinosaur section, which is - thankfully - only 2 pages long. Besides being based on Zallinger's Age of Reptiles mural, it was drawn by someone with no knowledge of dinosaurs whatsoever, resulting in three truly bizarre beasts.

Sauropods did have small heads; and yet, this Diplodocus has a head that vanishes into the horizon.

That has got to be the most horrifying duckbill I've ever seen. It's got a strangely misshapen head, knobbly skin, human (!) hands, and is either swimming through quicksand or phasing through mud, Kitty Pryde-style. And that stare is going to haunt my nightmares for years.

Worst. Tyrannosaur. EVER.The head is all wrong, as are the arms. It's decked out in bad military camo. Its leg defies all laws of physics and biology. And it's eating... well... a Stegosaurus...

Even the text has nuggets of insanity. For a start, the generic names are all uncapitalized. And this sentence, reproduced verbatim below made me do a double-take:

Compare vast brontosaurus and stegosaurus with compsognathus, an ancestor of the mammals. Some dinosaurs flew on bat-like skin-wings stretched on their little fingers. Some returned to the sea and evolved there into whale-like creatures.

O RLY? Dinosaurs were not aerial (birds notwithstanding) and were not pterosaurs, nor did they take to the sea. And as for compsognathus [sic] being an ancestor of mammals... I don't know where they got that, and your guess is as good as mine.

We were lucky, it seems, not to have had a longer prehistoric-life section in The Wonderful World. Chances are it would have set science back several decades.

Sauropod stomps snare smaller saurians, suggest scientists

The Late Jurassic "death traps" of the Shishugou formation, notable for having yielded the likes of Limusaurus and Guanlong, as well as a National Geographic documentary, are pretty much unique. Hundreds of dinosaur skeletons have been mired in them, most notably small theropods like the aforementioned taxa. When together, Limusaurus (the most common theropod there by far) tend to be found towards the bottom. while Guanlong is near the top (represented in the figure below).

The pits themselves indicate that a redbed crust on top collapsed, revealing mud below that managed to trap small animals. How did these death pits come to be?

Eberth et al. (2010) believe they have the answer. The pits are newly interpreted as none other than sauropod footprints, albeit virtually unrecognizable sauropod footprints. This conclusion was based on several observations: the omnipresence and regularity of the pits, preservation of two or more pit assemblages that can be interpreted as linear pathways, and the existence of large sauropods in the area such as Mamenchisaurus (Eberth et al., 2010).

Something like this would happen. A sauropod, ambling nonchalantly across the landscape as sauropods are wont to do, would stray onto the death-pit field, composed of a dry reddish crust masking the semisolid mud layers underneath. As it walked there, it would crunch through the crust into the mud; however, its great size and strength prevented it from getting stuck, and it would pull its feet out, proceeding across the flat with "a loud squelching noise similar to that made by a hippopotamus when lowering its foot into the mud on the banks of the Limpopo River" (Dahl, 1988).

Small theropods where not so lucky. Stumbling into the death pits, they were quickly trapped and sucked down to their doom. The pits show a definite bias towards animals less than 3 meters long and 1 meter tall; no sauropods are preserved anywhere. The large number of Limusaurus is likely due to their having existed in large flocks. Finally, the stratification seems to be based on the fact that Limusaurus would get caught first, and the scavenging Guanlong would get caught last. The pits themselves are a succession in time of different victims (Eberth et al., 2010).

Whatever the cause of the death traps of Shishugou, we remain thankful that they should have preserved all those otherwise hard-to-find little theropods. Props to Eberth et al. for bolstering the hypothesis that sauropods were the driving force for the evolution of flight in... nah, just kidding. It's still a cool thought.

All images from Eberth et al. (2010).


References

Eberth, D. A.; Xing, X.; and Clark, J. M. (2010) Dinosaur death pits from the Jurassic of China. Palaios, 2010, v. 25, pp. 112-125

Dahl, R. (1988) Matilda. Puffin Books.

An exercise program that actually works!

Via failblog.

The end of Bothriospondylus

Bothriospondylus has had a long and rocky history. Initially named by Owen in 1875 on the basis of an English fossil, it subsequently became a gigantic wastebasket taxon, with new specimens from France, Portugal, Madagascar, and Argentina. It was never one of those dinosaurs that everyone (indeed, anyone) has heard of, although it did get full 3-page coverage in The Humongous Book of Dinosaurs, in which it looked like a purplish Brachiosaurus. And now, we may have to say goodbye to it, for good.

Owen's Bothriospondylus suffossus was named in 1875 on the basis of some poorly-preserved vertebrae from Wiltshire. A single dorsal, also from Wiltshire, formed the basis of Bothriospondylus robustus, while Bothriospondylus elongatus from Sussex was another dorsal vertebra. And Ornithopsis hulkei, named by Seeley in 1870 and pictured below (image from Mannion, 2009), was assigned to Bothriospondylus magnus! (Mannion, 2009)

In 1895, Lydekker followed suit by naming a collection of bones from Madagascar Bothriospondylus madagascariensis. Nopcsa followed in 1902 by referring an Argentinian vertebra to Bothriospondylus. Finally, a partial specimen in France was described by Dorlodot and de Lapparent in the 1930s and 40s, and some Portuguese teeth were also referred to as Bothriospondylus in the 70s. (Mannion, 2009) In short, you have a ghastly mess.

In Mannion (2009), some sense is whipped into said mess, with a redescription of Bothriospondylus madagascariensis (photo of B. madagascariensis foot from Wikipedia). It would appear that Bothriospondylus madagascariensis was a non-neosauropod eusauropod, and not a brachiosaur as previously speculated. The material described by Owen as Bothriospondylus was deemed undiagnostic, as the characters used (e.g. deep vertebral foramina) are common to many sauropods. B. magnus is a junior synonym of Ornithopsis, which remains valid. B. madagascariensis does have a couple of distinguishing characters (a horizontal scapular ridge and a rugosity on the coracoid); however, the dubious and fragmentary nature of the fossils themselves preclude assigning a name with certainty (Mannion, 2009).

As for the other specimens - well, the future doesn't look rosy for them either. Some better-preserved B. madagascariensis were renamed Lapparentosaurus. The South American one proved to be a rebbachisaurid, either Limaysaurus or a new genus Nopcsaspondylus. The French Bothriospondylus is under study, and the Portuguese teeth have been labeled as titanosauriform (Mannion, 2009). In short, the future looks bleak for Bothriospondylus... and we hardly got to know it either.

Oh, in case you were wondering, the top image from Wikipedia shows the Brachiosaurus/Giraffatitan brancai at the Humboldt Museum. If 'Bothriospondylus' had been valid and had been a brachiosaurid, it would have looked something like that.


References

Mannion, P. D. (2009) A revision of the sauropod dinosaur genus 'Bothriospondylus' with a redescription of the type material of the middle Jurassic form 'B. madagascariensis'. Palaeontology, 2009, pp. 1–20