The Dinosaur Thread

Monthly update, and I'm pretty excited to share this one.

In relevant news, we have a bunch of decently significant discoveries and otherwise interesting arguments:
  • The ornithischian family tree got another shake-up with the publication of a new cladistics study that put the formally non-dinosaurian Triassic-aged group Silesauridae into Dinosauria, squarely at the base of the Ornithischia clade. This is significant for a number of reasons, chiefly that it offers a solid answer to the question of exactly how the ornithischians actually originated; before this, it wasn't clear exactly how the group actually first appeared and what they originated from. Of course it also adds a new group of animals to the dinosaur family tree, which is always cool.
  • Two bits of sauropod news, one being the discovery of a skull of a hatching titanosaur from South America that shows how weird-looking some baby dinosaurs could get; the other being a proposal by illustrator Mark Hallett that suggests that sauropods might've had their nostrils more atop their heads than currently commonly imagined, due to their head angle and nostril placement preventing them from drinking and breathing simultaneously when they went to a waterhole.
  • Proto-mammals like the tusked dicynodont Lystrosaurus seem to have been able to essentially hibernate, which may provide an explanation for how these animals were able to survive the Permain-Triassic Great Dying, generally considered the biggest mass extinction event in Earth history.
  • Another example of grand specimen reexaminations, the holotype specimen (and the first full dinosaur skeleton to be discovered and recognized as a dinosaur) of the Early Jurassic English dinosaur Scelidosaurus was finally anatomically reconstructed. Aside from fully and thoroughly examining the skeletal anatomy (which make up three of the four papers linked), it was found that it was an early ankylosaur, which contradicts traditional hypotheses that posit that Scelidosaurus was close to, if not the ancestor of both stegosaurs and ankylosaurs.
  • A beautifully preserved new ornithopod from China named Changmiania liaoningensis, with fossils indicating that it was a burrower.
  • A study of the brain cases and inner ear of two Triceratops revealed that they held their heads at a 45-degree angle, likely to better show off the frill. It was also found that their sense of smell was relatively underdeveloped compared to other dinosaur groups, and their hearing, while limited, was sensitive enough to pick up low-frequency sounds.
In other paleo-media, there's a couple good ones:
  • Mark Witton continues his rampage across the ancient world with his pair of clippers, shaving the fur and feathers off of all of your favorite extinct megafauna. This time he's coming after mastodons.
  • A beautiful Majungasaurus model from digital sculptor Max B.

  • The channel Ben G Thomas has a video out on five beautifully preserved species of animals preserved in ice, including the two cave(?) bear specimens that were discovered a few weeks ago in Siberia.
  • The annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology is next month, and as usual they just posted the annual abstract book. For the uninitiated, these meetings are conferences where researchers present new work that hasn't yet been published; every year there's a few really exciting projects and discoveries, and when it gets closer to SVP time I'll probably look through the abstract and post what I consider to be the highlights in addition to whatever else I manage to hear about from social media activity. I'd like to eventually attend a meeting myself; this year is virtual but it's usually a 3-day event held in-person. This year's was supposed to be in Cleveland I think; last year was Australia if I recall correctly.
  • This descent into madness.
  • Finally, the thing I saw and wanted to post about:

    I haven't been following the development of this game as closely as I've been following Saurian, but it's on my short list of games I'd like to get. It's an indie project that's been in the works since 2014 and I really like how it's turning out; arguably far better looking than its more mainstream competitor, Jurassic World: Evolution. (I've heard nothing about that game in a good while now.) Plus they got a certain time-traveling wildlife expert to narrate this. It's really nice and I suggest giving the trailer a watch at least.
  • Major P.S. since I don't want to triple-post: the Jon Favreau-directed BBC/Apple TV documentary is going to officially start production soon, based on this tweet. From folks I know who've spoken to others closer in these circles, it's likely that the story and some creature designs have already been commissioned by this point.
 
Last edited:
I’ve been giving dinosaur lessons to my niece recently (3 years old). She loves them and knows the names of the main ones already. :D
 
I just happened upon this video review of a new book that she may very well enjoy!
 
I'm 98% certain that those two just washed together via a flood or something and weren't even aware of each other in life, but of course "Dinosaurs locked in battle!" sounds a lot more fun and eyeball-catching. (Not to mention that during the years it was in private hands, it certainly helped drive up the perceived monetary value of the thing.) But yeah, this is great news for dinosaur paleontology, especially after losing the beautiful T. rex specimen "Stan" to the private collecting sector via an auction back in October to the tune of ~$32 million.

I'm a bit late for my usual paleo-news round-up for this thread and there's been a decent amount of news in the last few months; few particularly Earth-shattering but still interesting. To that end though, a bunch of the bigger paleontology YouTubers are putting together a whole series summing up the paleontology discoveries of 2020. There's isn't a proper playlist yet, but you can see them linked in the description of this video from the host channel, E.D.G.E.

As for little ol' me, I just released a new video this morning for my Triassic fauna series. It's my longest one yet, but consider it a special holiday episode to make up for lack of content for that series since May. :funny:

If you peak around on my channel you'll also see my reaction to the emerging and evolving fiasco around the new Brazilian dinosaur Ubirajara, which is basically a compy with bird of paradise-type display feathers. Very cool, very exciting, too bad it seems to have been poached and published by a bigot who doesn't want to follow international law: One-of-a-kind dinosaur removed from Brazil sparks backlash, investigation

The video game Saurian is back to posting development logs after working on the fixes to their playable Triceratops patch, with the official announcement that development on playable T. rex is on the horizon. I don't have the hardware to run the game myself, but it'll be very exciting to see packs of juvenile and subadult T. rex roaming the virtual landscape in people's play-through videos. Their presence will be a literal game-changer.

In the spirit of the December holiday season, Mark Witton has a piece out on the general biology of Megaloceros, a.k.a. the giant Irish elk. (Even though it wasn't an elk nor from Ireland; I'm still confused as to where that name came from.) Apparently they were very fast, which you don't usually think about since art of them is almost always in a stoic pose. Mark Witton.com Blog: Megaloceros giganteus: behind the antlers

Some cool paleoart, including the best Spinosaurus I've ever seen (so far), a giant calamari, a giant sloth animation that I hope is for a new documentary, and hands-down the best video on Microraptor ever.

And finally, I might've heard through a few grapevines that the Favreau-directed BBC Earth documentary might be dropping a trailer sometime next year, so... Get ready to get hype.
 
Last edited:
Big announcement from yesterday; some online acquaintances of mine in the paleontology circle have been putting together a 40-minute documentary, complete with narration by Nigel Marvin (Chased by Dinosaurs, Chased by Sea Monsters, and Prehistoric Park, as well as narrating the recent trailer for the video game Prehistoric Kingdom). No release date yet, but it's already looking good based on the posters and prior work (most notably their recreation of this iconic scene) I've seen from the modelers and animators.

 
I'm a bit late for my usual paleo-news round-up for this thread and there's been a decent amount of news in the last few months; few particularly Earth-shattering but still interesting. To that end though, a bunch of the bigger paleontology YouTubers are putting together a whole series summing up the paleontology discoveries of 2020. There's isn't a proper playlist yet, but you can see them linked in the description of this video from the host channel, E.D.G.E.
An update to this, I've curated a proper playlist now that most of the videos have come out, for anybody interested. There'll be one big compilation video at the end that I'll add on January 1 when it's released, but all twelve months are currently there.

 
Here's the full study for that new titanosaur: Report of a giant titanosaur sauropod from the Upper Cretaceous of Neuquén Province, Argentina - ScienceDirect
This might be somewhat heretic, but I don't really find sauropods, or at least titanosaurs, all that interesting. Don't know why, don't @ me, just is.

January has been a pretty productive month for paleontology on all three fronts that I usually cover when making these posts here. As far as discoveries go, we've got (putting it in a spoiler tag just for space):
  • A new ichnofossil (fancy word for trackway/footprint) of what's probably a tyrannosaur getting up from a resting position. Seems the arms were indeed at least somewhat useful. Technically this is from December but it didn't get published until the first few days of 2021.
  • A new paper about the growth rate of the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis based on a set of remains of three individuals found together at a site in Ecuador, likely forming a family group of two offspring and their mother. The offspring, assumed to be brother and sister based on their relative bone size and structure, are about 2 years old and roughly 70% the size of their adult mother, so it suggests that they had an initial growth spurt similar to tigers but then slowed for about 2-3 more years until they reached full adulthood, like lions. That they were found with their mother also suggests that S. fatalis had a longer period of parental care, again more similar to lions than tigers which tend to be independent after about 2 years.
  • A new genetics study revealing the evolutionary relationships of the famous Ice Age dire wolves to other living canines. Turns out that dire wolves weren't actually closely related to modern gray wolves as commonly thought, but are instead the last surviving members of their own unique branch of the canine family tree that separated from other groups about 6 million years ago and evolved in relative isolation in both North and South America to the point that they couldn't actually interbreed with wolves and coyotes when they arrived about a million years ago or less. (Canine species that are closely enough related tend to interbreed a lot for some reason, so it's quite telling that there's no dire wolf genes in any extant canine lineages.) You might see a lot more art reflecting this distinctiveness by giving dire wolves patterns more akin to those of modern South American and African canines, though there hasn't actually been a study on their coloration yet.
  • A new study on the growth rate and life history of everyone's favorite overhyped giant shark, Otodus megalodon, which showed a multitude of things that mostly got overlooked in the press articles in favor of what is in my opinion the least interesting part. (And the part that was kind of already known/inferred from an earlier study or two.) By counting growth rings from some rare vertebrae, the researchers were able to find that this particular individual that measured about 9 meters (~30 feet) long was 46 years old when it died. (Contrary to popular belief, this is actually the average size of these sharks.) Conservatively extrapolating a growth curve outward based on various factors, they found that O. megalodon was around 2 meters (~6 feet) at birth and the giant 15 meter (~50 feet) individuals would've been at least nearly a century old, if not possibly up to 400 years depending on the parameters of the model. Lots of fascinating implications for their life histories and ecology, but the only thing the news reports generally focused on was the baby shark size and the implication that they were practicing intrauterine cannibalism like some modern live-bearing sharks.
  • Those were the main ones that caught my attention. There were also studies on the seed dispersal potential for various herbivorous dinosaurs, a new hadrosaur from Eastern North America (dinosaur fossils from Appalachia are pretty rare and fragmentary, so every find is rather big news), the brain case of an early sauropodomorph from the Triassic, a beautiful fossil ammonoid from Germany preserving a bunch of soft tissue features, and the cloaca of Psittacosaurus (courtesy of the same fossil that preserved bristles on its tail and the coloration of its scales).
Not too much caught my eye recently in terms of paleo art, but the recon of Spinosaurus by Chris Masna is really nice. (Part 1, Part 2.) This short animation also nicely illustrates why the concept of dromaeosaurs taking on large herbivorous dinosaurs is a dumb idea. There's also this dramatic piece of a fallen Bajadasaurus and a speculative piece of Carnotaurus that is... quite a thing.

In media I follow, there's some new videos out from a few of my favorite paleo YouTubers, particularly Henry the PaleoGuy's piece on the famous Triassic dinosaur Coelophysis and videos from E.D.G.E. on both the aforementioned Bajadasaurus and dire wolf study, as well as the iconic but dubious ceratopsian Agathaumus. I myself have been planning out some long-form pieces I want to do this year on my channel, which may or may not include something for next month, but there'll definitely be something in March.

Most notably though, the teaser trailer for this:
Big announcement from yesterday; some online acquaintances of mine in the paleontology circle have been putting together a 40-minute documentary, complete with narration by Nigel Marvin (Chased by Dinosaurs, Chased by Sea Monsters, and Prehistoric Park, as well as narrating the recent trailer for the video game Prehistoric Kingdom). No release date yet, but it's already looking good based on the posters and prior work (most notably their recreation of this iconic scene) I've seen from the modelers and animators.


just came out today and is set for a 2022 release. I'm very much looking forward to it.

 
Last edited:
Alright, so I guess I'm just gonna revive this thread then. :funny: (I really should start a blog...)

Spoiler tags are just to keep things short for casual scrolling's sake.

So it's been about two months and there've been a couple big stories in the paleontology/natural history sphere.
The biggest came only a few days after my last post (and I'm surprised nobody mentioned it here), which was the publication of a paper that analyzed the anatomy of Spinosaurus and concluded that despite its clear semi-aquatic adaptations -- including the finned tail -- it was not an active underwater pursuit predator like everyone was depicting throughout 2020. The researchers instead proposed that it was more like a bear or heron (reviving the traditional hypothesis for spinosaur ecology), wading in shallow water to hunt and using its aquatic adaptations for just traveling between different fishing spots, since North Africa was at the time a massive mangrove river system. Like anything Spinosaurus related, the story caused a bunch of controversy and arguments that have mostly died down at this point but there's rumors of more follow-ups and rebuttals in the works that are set for publication this year, so this might be a long year for our sail-backed friend. I made a video on the topic that blew up and should serve as a nice little tl;dr version of the story:


The other most popular thing was the publication of a new species of shark about a week ago that lived in the seas that covered northern Mexico ~93 million years ago called Aquilolamna. It's basically a miniaturized version of a basking shark crossed with an eagle ray and is officially one of my favorite sharks of all time. There's only one fossil specimen and it doesn't provide much info on the animal's age, so it's unclear if it could get bigger (the fossil is ~2 meters long with a ~2 meter 'wingspan') and if so, how much bigger, but I really hope they were giants. I also made a video on this, because it turns out there's some controversy developing over the fossil's discovery and long-term housing:

Handful of other notable stories that were on my radar:


Not much in the blogosphere insofar as writing works are concerned, though there is an interesting piece in the New York Times regarding the history of racism and colonialism in paleontology as a whole: Decolonizing the Hunt for Dinosaurs and Other Fossils

YouTube-wise, E.G.D.E. made a video on dinosaur sex for Valentine's Day, Nature's Compendium covered the giant Jurassic fish Leedsichthys, Ben G Thomas has a video out on horse evolution (a 45-minute part 1 no less), Henry the PaleoGuy made one on Homo erectus, North 02 talked about the evolution of religion and hypothesized about the origins of human head hair, and I added to my Triassic series on World Frog Day (March 20) with an entry about the 'first' frog.

On the art and media front, the park builder game Prehistoric Kingdom just released their closed alpha build (which was for certain early backers on Kickstarter if I understand correctly). So far it only has 6 species (technically 9 but some of them are more or less treated as alt skins/models rather then their own creatures wholesale) and seems to have some bugs as expected, but overall I'd say it looks very nice. Haven't played it myself nor do I have the hardware for it, but hopefully one day I will.


Saurian released their February devlog (Saurian DevLog #98 — Saurian) detailing their work and plans for the next game update, mostly some new minor features like a new tracking system, improvements for weather patterns and their effects on the map environment (like flooding), and new A.I. diurnal and nocturnal spawn rates, as well as a new A.I. species that'll be a nocturnal threat to hatchling and juvenile players. The next devlog should be out in a few days since they're now released at the end of each month, and I'll post it here when that happens.

A new creature design has been revealed for the documentary Forgotten Bloodlines: Agate:

And finally, some great art, in geochronological order:


 
Last edited:
It's that time of the month...

Starting as usual with the new discoveries and such, I'm actually gonna skip over the five or six (literally) tyrannosaur-related stories that came out in the last week and a half, partly because I'm officially tired of hearing about them and more so because I just published a whole video yesterday talking about some of them and I figure it'd be more entertaining to watch that than read through however many paragraphs I'd end up writing to debunk/correct some of the headlines:


There was also news regarding mosasaurs via a tooth isotope study that showed that these sea lizards were regularly moving into freshwater rivers on a weekly or biweekly basis, perhaps to drink. Apparently some sea snakes actually do this as well. Yes, I did also make a video about this as well, but of the joke kind.

More here:
There was this study about the tail anatomy of these weird little dinosaurs called alvarezsaurs that had short but powerfully built arms with only one big clawed finger on each hand; it's thought that they were using said claw to scratch at termite mounds or other substrates to find bugs, and the study suggests that their tails were more flexible and even slightly prehensile than typical dinosaur tails, and so they might've been used to help stabilize them during this digging activity.

Stuff on the media front:
Not too much art-wise, but here's some concept art from Forgotten Bloodlines: Agate:

And someone redid the Jurassic World Allosaurus:
 
Last edited:
'Once in a lifetime find': Dinosaur tail discovered trapped in amber | CNN


vm7RqaM.jpeg


Five years old story but still... Neat.
 
Been a minute since I posted in this thread. Won't bother recapping the discoveries made in the months I've missed since PaleoRewind 2021 is coming up soon and it's a fun thing to follow, so I'll post links to that once it drops. I am very much a fan of the new war club-tailed ankylosaur though. Between it and another basal ankylosaur that was described a couple months back, it definitely seems like those wonky toys of then-fictional dinosaurs I used to collect actually have some newfound backing to them!

There's some decent stuff in the paleo YouTube sphere. Not to toot my own horn, but I just released a video (possibly my best so far) reviewing the first part of When Dinosaurs Roamed America, one of the original (and still best) CGI-heavy prehistory documentaries that aired on Discovery Channel back in 2001. Elsewhere, Ben G Thomas recently covered the problematic topic of figuring out exactly which dinosaur was the biggest; they also went on a South African fossil hunting expedition and got interviews with some of the local paleontologists. E.D.G.E. covered a ton of stuff, but I particularly enjoyed his explainer of this new hypothesis that some compsognathids were actually the hatchlings of larger theropods like allosauroids. (This would also mean that these animals like Allosaurus and Giganotosaurus might've had feathers, at least during part of their lives.) Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong did a nice video on Iguanodon, and Animal Origins did a great overview of elephant evolution. All around good time to be had.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top
monitoring_string = "afb8e5d7348ab9e99f73cba908f10802"