Dinosaurs

Like most kids, I had a steady interest in dinosaurs when I was young. I never truly outgrew that interest, and the science magazines I read don’t have much to report on them very often. How disappointing. I long to learn all the new stuff they’ve learned since I was a kid. Can you imagine my surprise a few decades ago when I discovered Fred Flintstone’s powerhouse Brontosaurus never actually existed? It was the result of a few bones that did not necessarily belong together and a scientist’s active imagination while trying to put them together.

One of my school science projects was on dinosaurs. I bought several giant bars of Ivory soap and tried to carve them into various dinosaurs. The T-Rex didn’t want to stand up, the stegasaurus’ back plates were difficult to carve without breaking them off. The easiest to carve was the brontosaurus, which way back then still had a place on the dinosaur family tree.

I can’t do justice to dinosaurs in a few hundred words. After all, they were around - in one form or another - for millions of years. So I plan to look around, pick some interesting versions and report on them over the course of several months.

What do you think you know about dinosaurs? Were they all cold-blooded? Covered in reptile scales or simply skin similar to our own? Did they do any parenting of their young, or simply lay their eggs and move on through the countryside? Did they really evolve into birds? How big did they get? What was their smallest representative? Are there any ‘dinosaurs’ alive today, or maybe animals that look very similar to their ancient ancestors?

I remember a story - I don’t remember if I saw it visually or read it - where a group of hadrosaurs (That’s what I remember their type being, but I may be completely wrong.) had left Earth in some fashion back in the Long Ago, and established a home on another planet in another system. And now their descendants were space travelers and meeting humans in the vastness of space.

Wouldn’t that be something?

Well, since we’re approaching that point where we may be space traveling in a few generations (meaning, outside our home system), maybe we should be considering what evolved dinosaurs might be like. And to do that, we should start by learning what dinosaurs were actually like.

Any suggestions you want me to look at?

Can Dinosaurs Be New?

One of my Junior High science projects was a ‘diorama’ and report on dinosaurs. I carefully carved my 3 chosen specimen from Ivory soap bars and painted the inside of a cardboard box to be their home.

That was so long ago, the dinosaurs I carved out and reported on were the stegosaurus, tyrannosaurus rex, and the... brontosaurus. Nobody talks about brontos anymore. It’s kind of like they never existed. Actually, they never did. Somehow, somebody stuck the wrong head on another dino’s body, and nobody caught it until-- Well, I don’t know when they figured it out, sometime between my science project and the time my kids went into their ‘dinosaur’ stage.

Since then, there have been tons of dinosaurs and other creatures discovered. Instead of a world inhabited by a handful of giant, scaly lizards, we can now picture a world inhabited by any number of lizards, fish, insects, some mammals, and birds. Even some reptiles that disguised themselves as birds.

Take, for instance, the one I read about this week; the Changyuraptor yangi. It was covered in feathers, including foot-long tail feathers. It was a reptile, and it couldn’t fly. It might have been able to glide, or as one scientist put it, “... if you pushed them out of a tree, they'd fall pretty slowly.”

This despite being described as having 4 wings. Really? No, not exactly. The feathered forelimbs were somewhat akin to a bird’s wings. The backlimbs were also feathered, in such a way that they looked like wings. Lots of feathers, but not a bird.

The Changyuraptor was discovered in China, which seems to be THE place for any self-respecting feathered reptile to have lived. Stegosaurs lived in Western America some 25-30 million years earlier. Since they had armour instead of feathers, I guess they couldn’t aspire to live in China. T.Rex  and their relatives seemed to live where-ever they wanted.

I’m glad I didn’t have to try to carve 4 ‘wings’ and feathers on a creature for my science project. Still, my hackles rise a little when I see a headline about a ‘NEW’ dinosaur being discovered. Whatever their form, dinosaurs aren’t ‘new’. Their dead body has been sitting in the ground for millions of years. It’s not their fault if we’ve only just found them.