Raptor's Nest

Palaeontologists have commented a lot on the inaccuracies in Jurassic World , so I'm not gonna repeat that here. What I want to do instead is to provide my ideas on how the concept of Indominus rex could have been better, in my eyes. I actually don't really like the idea of genetically engineering a hybrid dinosaur - that kind of goes against what made the original Jurassic Park  (both novel and film) so "magical" (for want of a better word). As a kid enthusiastic about dinosaurs, the idea of bringing dinosaurs back to life from fossilised DNA was really breathtaking and exciting (yeah, yeah - they weren't real dinosaurs because their genome were augmented with amphibian DNA, blah, blah), but the core concept was that resurrecting past life may have unpredictable and undesirable consequences - like  JP  staff not being able to control their dinosaur population despite their genetic engineering - "life finds a way". So in that vein, I would have made...

I thought I'd do a fun post for once. And since list based articles are the norm for fun on the internet, I thought I'd do one on dinosaurs, but given that I know most about theropods, I've decided to restrict my list to theropods (...maybe in a future post, I'll do other clades). My ranking is based mostly on scientific importance so it may not reflect awesomeness, and it is obviously subjective as to how I rank importance to science. For instance, interesting discoveries or unique palaeobiology are ranked relatively low compared to wealth of information and data or completely revolutionising our understanding of the evolution of theropods. So here are my top 10 scientifically important theropod dinosaurs of all time (off the top of my head) 10. Megalosaurus Being the first dinosaur to be named, Megalosaurus automatically deserves a spot on this list, but given the fragmentary nature of known fossil specimens, and being mostly useless as a meaningful source ...

It is probably safe to say that to many, the idea that dinosaurs were slowly in decline , or that they weren't 'evolving' as fast as they should have been, is an uncomfortable thought. I thought some context will make this idea easier to appreciate. Palaeontologists are generally happy to say that Velociraptor is a very close relative of birds. It is morphologically very similar to birds, and there is even strong evidence that it possessed secondary feathers on its forearms ( Turner et al., 2007. Science 317 : 1721 ). Velociraptor lived during the Campanian Stage of the Late Cretaceous, 83.6 - 72.1 million years ago (Ma). Velociraptor from Wikimedia Commons On the other hand, the oldest bird known to date, Archaeopteryx , is known from the Tithonian Stage of the Late Jurassic, 152.1 - 147.7 Ma. Archaropteryx as a Blue Jay Archaeopteryx with red plumage So that's on average about 72 million years (Myr) between these two dinosaurs, with a...

There is no dispute that non-avian dinosaurs went extinct at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, most likely owing to a large asteroid hitting the Earth, but what has been debated for decades is whether dinosaurs were reigning strong up to the end of the Cretaceous, or whether they were already in decline and were on their way out only to be killed off by the asteroid impact 66 million years ago (Ma). That is the question that Mike Benton, Chris Venditti and I hopefully helped resolve with our new paper that came out electronically Monday in PNAS. The paper is pretty straightforward, and we provided lots of details in the supplementary information, so it shouldn't be a difficult read. Please do have a read . Below I provide a brief summary. 1. Previous studies The majority of previous studies dealt with counting the number of dinosaur species in geologically defined time bins (such as geological stages), charting the resulting diversity curve through time, and making ...

The title says it all... But to reiterate: Why did Jurassic World, supposedly the world's biggest theme park, hire a former Navy Seal to train their velociraptors? Could they not attract the top expertise in animal training? Or any of the surviving Jurassic Park veterans? Or was Owen Grady THE top raptor trainer in the world? I am confused. I liked Owen Grady as a character; he was funny and charismatic. And I enjoyed Chris Pratt's portrayal of Grady. But suspension of disbelief went flying out the window as soon as he was revealed to be a former Navy Seal and not Steve Irwin...

I finally saw Jurassic World. It was pure entertainment. An action flick or a monster movie. Lots and lots of carnage. ...but not really in league with the original Jurassic Park. There is no sense of awe, like the first time I saw the Brachiosaurus rear up. Definitely not sci-fi. There is a ton of articles written by prominent palaeontologists on the internet already about the scientific inaccuracies of JW, so I'll keep that brief, and maybe touch a bit more on the sci-fi and plot aspects that JW missed. Obviously, SPOILERS! But first, the obligatory palaeo-sins (like  cinema sins ): The dinosaurs all look rubbery and early 20th century like. Never mind the featherless-ness, these dinos looked worse than how they looked in the original 1993 JP. You can really see what I mean in the skin texture of the herbivores like Triceratops  or any of the sauropods, especially in the scenes with the gyrosphere. The JP Triceratops and Brachiosaurus didn't l...