Raptormaniacs

Favorite Maniraptor of 2010 Results

2012-01-03T05:26:00.000-08:00

Last year I put up a poll on the blog for everyone's favorite newly-named maniraptor genus. Here's a pie chart showing the results.

Balaur won, what a surprise (by which I mean not a surprise at all). Fortunately, Haplocheirus came in second place, followed by Linheraptor. I was surprised to see that Xixianykus had gotten a (comparatively) decent amount of votes.

Now, the time has come for a new poll. I have tried to avoid taxa that are technically still in press and will probably be officially published later this year. We didn't get a double-killing-clawed dromaeosaurid last year, so this one looks somewhat more unpredictable. Let the voting begin!

Edit: Pamparaptor is misspelled on the poll. As I can no longer edit the poll, it'll be there for the rest of the year.

Another Attempted Revolt Part II

2011-12-19T18:39:00.000-08:00

The second half of the story.

Uh, yeah.

There's a perspective thing in the last panel that I didn't have room to fully establish. Ostrom is supposed to be in the extreme foreground, which is why he looks almost the same size as Ebeff.

Apologies for the frivolous nonsense. If it explains anything, this was originally intended for April Fools', but I managed to come up with something more sophisticated and decided to save this for later.

Another Attempted Revolt Part I

2011-12-17T06:36:00.001-08:00

Told you I hadn't given up on the comics.

I get fanart!

2011-12-03T22:09:00.000-08:00

No, I didn't believe it either. But really! Imagine my surprise when I found this in my messages on Deviant Art, titled "Raptormaniacs doodles".

For a moment I thought that someone else might have come up another maniraptor-related project titled "Raptormaniacs" independently of mine. But when I clicked in to take a closer look, sure enough, those were my characters and there was a link to this blog in the artist's comments.

The piece of fanart itself is courtesy of Scott Potter, who goes by bOBsHMINKLE on Deviant Art. Fantastic work if I may say so myself, and not just because it's the first Raptormaniacs fanart I've ever seen. How good is it? The characters are almost exactly how I'd imagine them if they were drawn by a competent artist (in this case Scott). I'd be stoked to see Scott's renditions of the rest of the Raptormaniacs cast as well if he plans on doing them. Thanks and good job once again, Scott! I was already quite excited on the day I found this because I'd recently received a huge packet of papers on feathered dinosaurs through e-mail, but this was the icing on the cake.

Speaking of my comics, I know I haven't done any new ones for months, but I did give fair warning. Don't worry though, they're coming...

Planet Dinosaur: The Great Survivors

2011-11-26T07:15:00.000-08:00

Here we go, the sixth and last episode of Planet Dinosaur. The show took a break from maniraptors in the fourth and fifth episodes. The fourth episode showcased large Jurassic predators, specifically the allosaurid Allosaurus and a yet undescribed pliosauroid, the first discovered specimen of which has been nicknamed "Predator X". The fifth episode on the other hand discussed the giant sauropods Argentinosaurus and Paralititan, as well as their respective potential predators, the carcharodontosaurids Mapusaurus and Carcharodontosaurus. Maniraptors return in this last episode, however. Spoilers ahead.

One of the less desirable characteristics of Planet Dinosaur is that it's very theropod centric. Plesiosaurs and sauropods get some spotlight in the fourth and fifth episodes respectively and the giant pterosaur Hatzegopteryx gets good airtime in this one, but by and large it's theropods that get the main roles. If (the broadcast version of) Dino saur Revolution should have been called "Saurischian Revolution", Planet Dinosaur probably should have been called "Planet Theropod". But then, as a maniraptor fan myself I can't complain too much.

The first maniraptor to make an appearance is Bradycneme. This maniraptor is known only from fragmentary remains. It was first thought to be a giant owl, but nowadays a troodont or alvarezsaurid identification is more common, and the show depicts it as a troodont. Once again the model is unsatisfactory. It's something of a shame that troodonts get the most screentime out of all maniraptor groups in this show when the troodont models are the most inaccurate. It was amusing though to see Bradycneme being shown while the narration was discussing threats to the sauropod Magyarosaurus, only to have Bradycneme attack... a lizard. The real threat is then shown to be Hatzegopteryx. Bradycneme also gets some airtime toward the end of the episode when the show does its obligatory K-Pg sequence, as another continuation of the "troodonts were probably the last non-neornithine dinosaurs to die off" meme, I guess. It was interesting to see a K-Pg setting not at Hell Creek.

Next up is the therizinosaur Nothronychus, which is shown browsing and using its claws to fight off predators (in this case a group of an undescribed tyrannosauroid taxon, nicknamed "Zunityrannus" in the show), as therizinosaurs tend to be. Although it is depicted with protofeathers, I felt the feathers were a little too contour hugging. Feathers we know of on Beipiaosaurus (which, granted, was much smaller than Nothronychus and probably lived in a more temperate environment) were very long and shaggy. It would have been nice to see bristle-like EBFFs (known on Beipiaosaurus and possibly some undescribed basal coelurosaurs) as well. The show points out that Nothronychus was a herbivore that descended from carnivorous ancestors, another good effort to include recent research.

It goes on to mention another group of herbivorous and omnivorous maniraptors, the oviraptorosaurs, and the giant oviraptorosaur Gigantoraptor makes a return. A pair of Gigantoraptor brood their nest and defend it from smaller oviraptorids (that also appeared in the second episode; I've been told that the accompanying book for Planet Dinosaur calls these Oviraptor) as well as the tyrannosauroid Alectrosaurus. This sequence was arguably my favorite of this episode; the one nitpick (besides the usual wing feather attachment issue) I have to make is that the smaller oviraptorids do the weird digging with their wings thing again. The movements and behaviors of the Gigantoraptor though are very reminiscent of large ground birds, particularly the leaping attacks they make towards the Alectrosaurus. At the end of the segment the show talks about how oviraptorosaurs are often found having been buried alive on their nests...

Then we come to the K-Pg segment that I mentioned earlier. I don't have a whole lot to say about it, other than the fact that it contains an anomaly that may be my least favorite part of the entire series. As the show talks about how the K-Pg event impacted different animal groups (Wikipedia regulars keep an eye out during the sequence, by the way; some of the silhouettes they use will look very familiar), it claims that 100% of "dinosaurs" became extinct, while 95% of birds became extinct... wait, what? It's almost understandable if they'd wanted to avoid the birds are dinosaurs thing for the sake of brevity, but the funny thing is they do get this right in the second episode! So much for consistency! I know that the whole "actually some dinosaurs are still alive today" is something of a cliched ending for dinosaur documentaries these days, but given the fact that this important discovery has not yet fully entered public consciousness, I don't think it's cliched enough. Only until birds being dinosaurs becomes as common knowledge as bats and whales being mammals would I suggest that it's remotely "safe" to drop opportunities to hammer home this fact.

So there we have it. I liked this episode, other than the ending, and as far as science communication goes the series as a whole is very good. (Any dinosaur documentary that can teach Mickey Mortimer something new has to be.) If you want a dinosaur show that actually incorporates science (and isn't Dinosaur Train), then be sure to check this one out.

Planet Dinosaur: Last Killers

2011-11-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

The third episode of Planet Dinosaur, this one deals predominantly with recent research on large predatory theropods from the end of the Late Cretaceous, namely the tyrannosaurid Daspletosaurus and the abelisaurid Majungasaurus. However, there is one maniraptor-centric segment featuring Troodon. Some spoilers ahead.

A flock of the Troodon are shown attacking the hadrosaur Edmontosaurus. Normally I'd complain, but this is actually one of the few situations where such a scenario would be acceptable: the Troodon are based on the giant Troodon teeth found in Alaska, and the Edmontosaurus is a juvenile, while an adult Edmontosaurus easily chases the Troodon off (though the juvenile still dies later on from its injuries). In fact, the reason the Troodon are in the episode is because they represent the top predators in a unique Late Cretaceous ecosystem that wasn't dominated by either tyrannosaurids or abelisaurids. Unfortunately, the plumage of the Troodon suffer from the same problems as that of the Saurornithoides in the second episode.

Another maniraptor, Rahonavis, makes a brief appearance in the Majungasaurus segment, though it doesn't do much except feed from a carcass. It uses the same model as Sinornithosaurus (from the second episode) and comes with the same strengths and flaws thereof.

Not that much to say for this one (at least regarding maniraptors). Still decent stuff.

Planet Dinosaur: Feathered Dragons

2011-11-02T05:25:00.000-07:00

Besides Dino saur Revolution, the other big dinosaur documentary that came out this year was Planet Dinosaur. Naturally, this invites comparisons between the two, but, aside from both being about dinosaurs, they are really very different shows.

Though with scientific basis (and for most part accurate dinosaur models), Dinosaur Revolution is an experiment in storytelling that was unfairly shoehorned into a documentary format. Planet Dinosaur, on the other hand, is a bona fide dinosaur documentary. And I mean bona fide dinosaur documentary! Instead of putting a lot of focus into story or unsupported speculation, the real highlights of Planet Dinosaur are the cutaway segments throughout each episode that (get this) explain the fossil evidence for the behaviors its animals are shown engaging in and the form and function of each animal based on actual scientific research. Science in a dinosaur documentary, people! Take note, this is how a dinosaur documentary should be done, or at least it's a step in the right direction.

It's not that Planet Dinosaur doesn't engage in the occasional wild speculation now and then. It does. It's not that it gets everything right. It doesn't. But the fact it uses science as a focal point instead of an occasional aside or a way to make itself resemble a documentary makes it worthy of being a true documentary.

The first episode of Planet Dinosaur, "Lost World", focuses on two giant African theropods, the spinosaurid Spinosaurus and the carcharodontosaurid Carcharodontosaurus. It was a good start to the series, but there were no maniraptors in it.

The second episode, on the other hand, showcases maniraptors almost exclusively, and this is the episode I'll review here. Some spoilers ahead, even though plot isn't a big deal in this show.

A recurring theme throughout Planet Dinosaur is that it discusses mostly very recent dinosaur discoveries (made within the last decade). This episode, titled "Feathered Dragons", covers the discovery that some non-avian dinosaurs had feathers. The episode is split up into several segments that each features a different maniraptor taxon and talks about a different function feathers may have served in these dinosaurs.

First up is the strange Epidexipteryx, a possible basal avialian. First scansoriopterygid on TV! It is shown escaping from a juvenile Sinraptor by climbing into the trees and hunting for grubs using its long third finger and unique dentition. It also encounters a rival Epidexipteryx and engages in a threat display using its four long strange tail feathers. It looked to me as though the Epidexipteryx had pronated hands in a number of shots, and we see its eyeball swiveling in its socket as it hunts. Modern birds can't do this, and that's why they often need to cock their heads at weird angles, which, confusingly, the Epidexipteryx is also shown doing. Otherwise though I have very little to nitpick (I want to say "pun intended" here, but I'd be lying) about this segment, though that might be at least partly because there isn't much about scansoriopterygids that we can even be reasonably certain of at the moment.

Next we see a Saurornithoides brooding its nest. Not a fan of Saurornithoides model, which lacks pennaceous feathers entirely and has only a very thin covering of feathers on the body, plumage befitting of a compsognathid perhaps, but not of a maniraptor. When the Saurornithoides leaves its nest temporarily, the nest is raided by an oviraptorid (which isn't specifically named). Evidence for omnivory in oviraptorosaurs is brought up, though unfortunately the evidence they put forth for predation (the discovery of hatchling Byronosaurus skulls in a Citipati nest) may soon fall victim to science marching on. This is of no fault of the show, as this data is still unpublished and has only been mentioned in a DML post, but they might have had better luck had they used the lizard in the body cavity of Oviraptor. The generic oviraptorid engages in some strange behavior of digging the eggs from the nest using its wing claws, in spite of the long wing feathers attached to its hands (which it commendably has). Digging using the feet as in modern ground-dwelling birds might have been more plausible, and indeed there is evidence of such behavior in Mesozoic aviremigians. Another anomaly regarding the oviraptorid is that even though it has wing feathers, they attach to the third finger (instead of the second as they should be). In fact, this is the case for every aviremigian in this show (or at least the ones that are lucky enough to have been given wing feathers).

Either way, the Saurornithoides manages to chase off the oviraptorid, only to be eaten by a much larger oviraptorosaur, Gigantoraptor, and the spotlight shifts. The show explains that large maniraptors might have kept feathers for display purposes, which is something straight out of the Gigantoraptor description paper. It's interesting that both Dinosaur Revolution and Planet Dinosaur have a sequence on the speculative display behavior of Gigantoraptor. The different approaches the two shows have are readily apparent: the Dinosaur Revolution Gigantoraptor is extremely flashy and extravagant with heavily speculative soft tissue structures, while the Planet Dinosaur Gigantoraptor is altogether more conservative. Aside from the wrong wing feather attachment, I quite like the ostrich-like plumage of the Planet Dinosaur Gigantoraptor and I find it quite plausible.

Finally, we get a sequence featuring the Jehol biota. There's a bit of anachronism here. We see a Microraptor hunting the gliding lizard Xianglong, and then being hunted itself by a Sinornithosaurus. The problem is that Microraptor is known only from the Jiufotang Formation, which is slightly younger than the Yixian Formation that Xianglong and Sinornithosaurus come from. I won't hold this too much against the show, as it is a common mistake. (It's even been made in the technical literature before!) In fact, even knowing that Microraptor is from the Jiufotang, I still find it hard to disassociate it from the Yixian. The Microraptor and Sinornithosaurus models are excellent, and aside from the usual wing feather attachment issue are some of the best deinonychosaur models on television I've seen to date, at least in terms of plumage. The chase scene that unfolds as the Microraptor tries to escape shows off (one of) the (hypothesized) gliding posture of Microraptor well. The legs looked a little splayed to me, but the show appears to have been going for Dr. Xu Xing's hypothesis presented in "The Four-winged Dinosaur" on Nova, and in any case there appears to be some possible evidence that microraptorines could splay their legs slightly more than other dinosaurs can. The really strange part in this sequence is that Sinornithosaurus is also shown to be capable of gliding, which is one of the few baseless speculations this show indulges in. Gregory Paul would be proud, I assume, but it appears that the wings of Sinornithosaurus were not large enough for actually gliding with (which is why there's hardly been any technical papers discussing the flight of Sinornithosaurus, as there has for Microraptor).

The last part of the show also happens to be the worst science wise. It features a trio of Sinornithosaurus hunting a family of the ornithopod Jeholosaurus. That alone isn't anything bad, and they even get in some impressively up-to-date info, namely the sclerotic ring study (published earlier this year) that indicates Sinornithosaurus may have been cathemeral, being active at intervals both in the day and at night. Things go downhill though when the Sinornithosaurus bring down one of the Jeholosaurus... using venom. That's right, the dreaded venomous Sinornithosaurus hypothesis. Granted, the show does use cautious qualifiers when dealing with the idea, but the fact that the Sinornithosaurus are actually shown in a way that endorses the hypothesis will probably leave a greater impact on laypeople than the narrative language. Frankly, in my opinion such fringe hypotheses should preferably not make their way into these serious documentaries at all, or only be mentioned to be dismissed as fringe hypotheses.

The show concludes with the concept that some feathered dinosaurs are still with us today, which of course is always a good idea to reinforce. Besides the venomous Sinornithosaurus slip up, this was a decent episode. As a dinosaur enthusiast it's easy (and, to be honest, fun) to nitpick and criticize, but I'll bet that most of the information presented here will be new to the average viewer and will greatly help in bringing them up to speed with the many wonderful new dinosaur discoveries made in recent years.

Dinosaur Revolution: End Game

2011-10-15T07:05:00.000-07:00

The last episode of Dinosaur Revolution (for now) is End Game. Like the second episode, this episode focuses on a single storyline instead of multiple largely unrelated shorts. Obligatory spoiler warning!

This episode is the obligatory Maastrichtian North America story (set just a little while before the K-Pg, naturally) for this series. Although the first half of the story is about the tyrannosaurid Tyrannosaurus (again, naturally), there is one maniraptor taxon in the story, Troodon, which even gets the spotlight shifted to it during the second half of the episode after the K-Pg extinction happens (where it is depicted as being one of the last non-neornithine dinosaur species to die out).

I was very pleased with the portrayal of the Troodon. Dinosaur Revolution gets everything March of the Dinosaurs got right and more. The Troodon models are very good, very likely the best I've ever seen on screen. Paternal care, brooding, and (probably for the first time ever on TV) omnivory are shown. Also, no ridiculous hadrosaur hunting here either, they are instead shown feeding on insects, stealing eggs, and chasing juvenile pachycephalosaurs.

There's one running theme (that is present throughout the series) that bothers me, however. The familial structure of almost every single theropod taxon in the entire series is the same. Nearly all the theropods go around in mated pairs, and those that have young commonly have just one with them, even though most dinosaur clutches we know of have many eggs. This actually isn't a huge problem here because the show does depict many of the theropods as starting out with an entire clutch of eggs, most of which simply don't survive (which is fairly realistic). The monogamous pairs, however, are more curious. There's nothing (as far as I'm aware) inherently improbable about monogamous Mesozoic theropods, but there's no good evidence for such, while on the other hand there is some evidence (such as clutch size) that at least some Mesozoic theropods (such as Troodon) may have been polygamous. Not to mention many of the theropods have very pronounced sexual dimorphism, even though in modern animals extreme sexual dimorphism is generally an indicator of polygamy. In these cases it appears to me that this was for the sake of anthropomorphism and character identification. At the very least it would have been nice to see some variation in the reproductive behaviors of the theropods.

Regardless, I found that the dinosaurs in this episode in particular were on average the least anthropomorphic out of all the episodes, which was certainly a plus. In this respect (along with the general accuracy), I enjoyed this episode the most. In terms of story, however, I still prefer the second episode or even some of the shorts (notably the Protoceratops story from the third episode). I felt that the story of this episode crammed too much in and then it all had to be cut short to make room for the obligatory K-Pg extinction and its aftermath (and presumably the tacked on talking head segments). A main antagonist is set up before the opening sequence, but then he gets defeated and killed just a bit more than ten minutes into the episode. We see a juvenile Tyrannosaurus be the sole survivor of its brood and even make it past the extinction event... then he just falls off a cliff and dies anyway. We never really get to know any of the dinosaurs as characters that well, as nearly everyone dies halfway through the episode. The ending is very sad though, although its full impact and profundity is tarnished a bit by the suddenly comparatively poor CGI in the very last scenes. Also, I thought this episode suffered the most when it comes to the talking head segments, as a lot of the previews shown during those segments gave away upcoming plot points.

Still a good ending to the series though, and worth a watch. If or when this gets released in its original format, that will probably fix the spoiler and pacing problems somewhat.

I am on TV Tropes!

2011-10-12T06:06:00.000-07:00

I don't mean that I read or edit TV Tropes, of course. You probably all know that already.

I mean that this blog actually has a TV Tropes page now, courtesy of Spinosegnosaurus77! Thanks a bunch!

I'll have to get around to creating some new pages for other works myself when I have more free time. If my not-very-good comic that I've only been drawing for less than two years and fail to update more than 80% of the time can get a page, anyone can, and I can think of many works out there that deserve it more than mine does.

Dinosaur Revolution: Survival Tactics

2011-10-03T01:35:00.000-07:00

Special thanks to Vrahno for locating a download link to the formerly elusive third episode of Dinosaur Revolution. Spoilers ahead.

Like the first episode (and unlike the second and last), "Survival Tactics" is a collection of short stories instead of being one long story. Unlike the first episode, there doesn't appear to be much of a running theme for this one, although they tried to shoehorn one in (namely the very vague and broad theme of "survival tactics"). Which doesn't come across as a surprise, as these these stories were originally intended to be presented chronologically, not thematically. More screwing around by the network I assume.

Compared to the first two episodes, this episode is quite maniraptor (specifically deinonychosaur) heavy. Three (out of six) stories feature maniraptors, and two of those have them in starring roles.

The first of those stories (in fact, the first story in the entire episode) is about the large deinonychosaur Utahraptor. We have two flocks of Utahraptor attacking a juvenile Cedarosaurus but ending up fighting each other. A crocodylomorph also joins in the fun when it tries to drag the juvenile Cedarosaurus into the water, only to get chased off by the Utahraptor. It gets its revenge when a herd of adult Cedarosaurus come back to (literally) kick some theropod butt and one of the Utahraptor is knocked into the water. Okay, so the Utahraptor got the worst out of that deal, but I appreciate the subversion of the "invincible 'raptor' pack" trope. All too often deinonychosaurs are shown killing impossibly huge prey, so seeing Utahraptor of all deinonychosaurs getting beat up was a treat. The fact that they're shown targeting the juvenile is also realistic behavior that deserves to be portrayed in documentaries more. The plumage the Utahraptor have isn't bad, certainly better than most other deinonychosaur depictions that have been on TV. (All the aviremigians in Dinosaur Revolution have remiges, for instance. It's about time!) Some things to keep an eye out for in this segment are references to Raptor Red and the accompanying illustration for the description of Brontomerus. (Speaking of Brontomerus, a quick note about theropod-sauropod encounters in this show. Let's just say that out of the many theropod-sauropod interactions, I can only think of two where the sauropod gets off worse, while I can think of a good number that would probably make SV-POW proud.) Not a bad start to the episode.

The second story also stars a maniraptor, but this time the much smaller unenlagiine Rahonavis. I've been looking forward to this one ever since I saw the storyboards for it (which were released on Youtube prior to the broadcast of the actual show). The lighting in the story is darker and gloomier in the final product than I expected (even though I knew it would be foggy), and the Rahonavis looks a little cuter in the storyboard than in the final product, probably because the final design has a noticeably featherless, scaly face. Incidentally, there is no evidence for scaly faces in any paravians, but otherwise the model for the Rahonavis is excellent. We get to see the Rahonavis performing its day to day activities, flying down from the trees, hitching a ride on a Rapetosaurus, feeding on insects and seeds, and escaping from two young Majungasaurus by using WAIR, all fairly plausible behaviors. One entirely speculative behavior shown for the Rahonavis is mimicking sounds, an ability it later uses to scare away the young Majungasaurus. It's interesting that it is shown to be an omnivore, a subtle Shout Out to the omnivorous ancestry of maniraptors. The portrayal of Seldom Seen Species, the simplistic but interesting and well rounded story, and the plausible behaviors shown in this segment give it a spot among my favorite Dinosaur Revolution stories.

The third maniraptor in the episode is Velociraptor. Unlike Rahonavis, it plays an antagonistic role, and the protagonist of its story is instead the ceratopsian Protoceratops. As it happens, this is the only ornithischian centric storyline in Dinosaur Revolution. (Others were planned, but ~~ornithischians turned out to be too boring~~ by sheer bad luck they were all cut from the final product.) Another special characteristic of this story is that the (tacked on) narrator only says one line of background information at the beginning and doesn't intrude at all for the rest of the segment, giving us a taste of what Dinosaur Revolution was meant to be like. I really liked that. The story itself being engaging and full of heart helped as well. There are things I could nitpick about, but (shock horror) I almost didn't care. Certainly one of the best of the stories in the show (at least out of those that actually ended up being broadcast). As with all the other stories of this episode, the story is short (in fact, I felt that it had slightly been rushed a bit, presumably because little bits of all the stories had been cut out to make room for the last-minute talking head segments), so the Velociraptor don't get to do that much, but for most part I liked what I saw. It is strange though that, immediately after making a kill, they're shown killing an adult Protoceratops and trying to catch a juvenile. Surplus killing? An interesting factoid is that the Velociraptor species shown is not the better known V. mongoliensis, but V. osmolskae, as the story features the Bayan Mandahu Formation.

All in all, the maniraptor segments in this episode were enjoyable. Strangely, I felt that all the stories that didn't feature maniraptors were the goofier stories in the episode. (For the record, the other stories in the episode include a story about two Guanlong, one about a young Shunosaurus, and one about a young Anhanguera.) Some are (intentionally) full blown Looney Tunes shorts but with realistic-looking animals. Your Mileage May Vary on whether that's a good thing.

Incidentally, there's been some (much desired) good news on Dinosaur Revolution. Discovery has postponed the DVD release until a product more worthy of the creative team's efforts can be produced. As mentioned in my review of the first episode, this show has been screwed over really hard by the network, so this sounds like a huge victory for the creative team. Exactly what this will result in is still unknown, but I hope that we'll finally get to see the show in its intended format (or at the very least something closer to its intended format than the broadcast version).

San Diego Zoo Part V: Some Last-minute Exhibits

2011-10-01T05:49:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, not long after going through Elephant Odyssey, I had to cut the trip short. Here are some last-minute photos I got as I walked back towards the exit of the zoo.

Here's a takin, probably a relict of the old Horn and Hoof Mesa.

Some lion-tailed macaques.

A (melanistic) jaguar.

I think this is a Siamese fireback, but my memory is fuzzy.

And my memory is even fuzzier for this one. The fact that there isn't much to look at besides a bundle of feathers doesn't help. Reeve's pheasant?

Another one of the many types of hornbill that are at the zoo (and that I don't remember the exact name of).

A snow leopard. It kept moving around, so this is about the best photo I got (and besides, I was in more of a hurry than usual).

A squirrel monkey. Somewhere between here and the next photo I decided to go pay a visit to the zoo's kiwis. Unlike the other nocturnal animals at the zoo, the kiwis are kept in a nocturnal house. I'd never seen these interesting maniraptors, and the last time I came they were off exhibit.

Except... as it turned out they were off exhibit this time as well! What a let down.

Just outside the kiwi house was this lowland anoa. Another (comparatively) rarely seen creature as far as zoos go. Too bad it's a stinking synapsid.

Babirusa are neat as well. Still, stinking synapsids.

It's only proper to end with a maniraptor, so here's a wompoo fruit dove.

All in all, even with my two trips to this zoo so far combined, I still didn't quite get to visit the entire zoo. But there are only two major exhibition areas (Tiger River and the giant pandas) I haven't been to at least once, so I suppose I haven't done too badly. Might want to give it another go in the distant future. And I need to see some kiwis.

150 Years of Archaeopteryx

2011-10-01T00:21:00.000-07:00

This year marks the 150th anniversary for the description of the iconic "first bird" (or not) Archaeopteryx.

First, a quick diversion. Filled with anachronisms and Misplaced Wildlife, but very catchy. Points for getting the term "Maniraptora" into a children's song!

Naturally, I've prepared a special presentation for this special occasion, this time brought to you by resident Archaeopteryx Savape!

Eh... so I really have to do this, don't I? I would argue that this is the equivalent of grabbing a human passing by on the street on the such and such anniversary of the description of Homo sapiens and asking it to talk all about the research done on its own species. But part of the joy of being a fictional character is that you come with all the knowledge your creator wishes to grant you, so I might as well proceed.

You all know the story. A fossilized feather was unearthed in the Solnhofen Plattenkalk in Germany, described in 1861, and named Archaeopteryx lithographica.

The feather, photographed by H. Raab, from Wikipedia.

A couple of years later an actual skeleton of Archaeopteryx was described. It was preserved with feathers, so it was assumed that this was the type of animal the original feather belonged to, but this is less certain now. First feathered fossil to be discovered! Eat it, Yixian. These days they call this specimen the London Specimen. They really like to keep track of us Archaeopteryx specimens, and all published specimens have been given nicknames like that. These specimens are actually named after the museums they're held at and have nothing to do with where they were discovered. Names like Solnhofen Specimen I and Solnhofen Specimen II just don't stick. (One specimen is called the Solnhofen Specimen, actually. You'll see it later, if nothing has happened to it.)

The London Specimen, photographed by H. Zell, from Wikipedia.

The specimen that gets all the publicity though is the Berlin Specimen. This is the one you see depicted everywhere. Notice in this historical photo that the specimen preserves nice leg feathers and some long body feathers, but those were destroyed during prep. You never see those in modern photos of the specimen, nor in some of the more mediocre Archaeopteryx depictions.

Historical photo of the Berlin Specimen from Vogt, 1880.

As is quite common in paleontology, new names were given to new Archaeopteryx specimens left and right. Names like "Jurapteryx", "Archaeornis", Archaeopteryx "bavarica", Archaeopteryx "macrura", and others that almost no one uses anymore. One that you might still see occasionally is Wellnhoferia, and this is the Solnhofen Specimen mentioned earlier. For most part though, the only Archaeopteryx species still commonly in use is the original Archaeopteryx lithographica.

Wellnhoferia, or the Solnhofen Specimen, photographed by H. Raab, from Wikipedia.

Because Archaeopteryx was the first Mesozoic maniraptor fossil found with feathers, we played a big part in early studies on the evolution of birds. It was noted early on that we had many theropod dinosaur characteristics, and famously in the 1970s Dr. John Ostrom compared the skeletal features of Archaeopteryx and other theropods, providing evidence that birds are theropod dinosaurs.

Comparison between the hands of the dromaeosaurid Deinonychus (right) and Archaeopteryx (left) by John Conway, from Wikipedia. Not to scale.

Due to these significant impacts, Archaeopteryx is often thought of as a "special" fossil, a creature with both "reptile" and "bird" characteristics that shows how modern birds evolved. This concept has led to some awful, awful restorations that depict us as looking something like weird lizard-bird hybrids. But now in 2011, we really aren't that special anymore. It's now known that a lot of other maniraptors (including even things like Velociraptor) had the exact same combination of "reptilian" and "avian" features (feathers, wings, teeth, wing claws, long tail) that we do. As far as Mesozoic paravians go, we're really quite generic, not unusual looking at all. If it had been something like Sinornithosaurus, Microraptor, or Caudipteryx that had been discovered back in the 1800s, they'd have received the same special treatment we do today. But too late for them now.

Modern restoration of Velociraptor by Matt Martyniuk.

Even our traditionally held "first bird" status is no longer ours. Mind you, as far as known maniraptors go, 150 million years ago in the Late Jurassic is still quite old. But other paravians (including some probable avialians), such as scansoriopterygids, Pedopenna, Anchiornis, and Xiaotingia, are now known from even older parts of the Late Jurassic.

As Archaeopteryx was known to have had feathers early on, when no feathered non-bird dinosaur fossils were known, it was assumed that we must have been avialians (i.e.: closer to modern birds than other types of theropods are). Up until recently, this was still widely considered to be true. But several recent analyses have suggested that we may actually be non-eumaniraptor paravians or even deinonychosaurs. It's worth saying that the latter result in particular only has weak statistic support, but suffice it to say that you guys really don't have any good idea what exactly type of basal paravian we are. Me, I'll enjoy observing the chaos in the next few years.

Such confusion is only to be expected. As I hinted earlier, we don't really have that many modern bird traits, at least not much more than definite deinonychosaurs do. Study of one of the latest described Archaeopteryx specimens, the Thermopolis Specimen, even shows that we have a retractable second toe and a barely reversed first toe (contrary to the way many specimens are preserved), similar to definite deinonychosaurs but unlike modern birds. Studies of our forelimb motion and wing feathers suggest that there isn't even any evidence that we were any better at flying than were small definite deinonychosaurs such as Microraptor!

The Thermopolis Specimen, photographed by Stephan Schulz, from Wikipedia.

Other recent research has been done on Archaeopteryx, There have been studies of our brain structure, showing that we have a good sense of balance and spatial perception, which makes sense for small gliding and clambering animals like ourselves. Studies of our growth show that we grew slower than modern birds (similar to most other Mesozoic dinosaurs, including many other Mesozoic birds). There has even been study of the possible size and shape of our eyeballs that reveal we were active during the day (like many modern birds but unlike many deinonychosaurs).

So there you have it. Archaeopteryx is one of the most significant dinosaur discoveries and has a long, rich history and continues to be studied blah blah blah. Not bad for a pigeon-sized protobird if I say so myself.

Last but not least, I must leave a token of my appreciation for the Acme Museum, which has provided me with this wonderful opportunity and put me up to this arduous chore.

San Diego Zoo Part IV: Elephant Odyssey

2011-09-20T06:03:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm writing this post, I've realized that I didn't take as many pictures of Elephant Odyssey as I probably should have. Perhaps that says something about which animals I'm more interested in (i.e.: things like sauropsids, amphibians, and the smaller mammals instead of the large crowd-pleasing mammals). Which also means that, ironically, I didn't take any pictures of the elephants for which the entire exhibition area is named, even though they had these gigantic exhibits that take several minutes to walk past.

By the way, I mentioned earlier that this new area replaces the Horn and Hoof Mesa that ran down the entire "right" side of the zoo, so it's a big, big exhibition area. Fortunately, my stamina appears to increase by a hundred percent when I'm in a zoo, so I could walk all day without being tired out too much. (Once I stepped out of the zoo, on the other hand...) There was also the fact that I was suffering from a bit of jet lag at the time, which turned out to be useful in that I didn't get hungry at the "right" times and so didn't have to make long stops for lunch. (Meanwhile, the "increased stamina effect" staved off the less desirable side effects of jet lag, i.e.: wanting to sleep at the "wrong" times, though that made me extra sleepy once the effect was gone.)

Elephant Odyssey is an interesting exhibit concept. The exhibit area focuses on extinct (Cenozoic) Californian animals and their still-living counterparts (either modern relatives or ecologically similar species). Statues of the extinct species are placed near the exhibits containing these modern counterparts. (I didn't get any photos of the statues, but I probably should have.) The titular elephants represent the many extinct proboscideans known from California. There are also some animals here that are native Californian species that known from close relatives in the recent fossil record and still live today.

A California condor, representing both a native Californian species as well as the extinct giant carnivorous bird Teratornis. An exhibit panel explains that prehistoric California condors probably survived by feeding on the carcasses of marine mammals on coastlines, while Teratornis, more dependent on the bodies of large land mammals, died out.

Another exhibit contained native turtles, lizards, newts, and frogs in an open-air and very large (compared to the occupants) display area, similar to the displays in the Reptile Mesa. I think it's really nice that small "reptiles" and amphibians get such exhibits, not just the large mammals and birds. However, I was not able to find most of the exhibit's occupants that day other than this western fence lizard.

Even native arthropods got some representation at Elephant Odyssey. There are a series of terrariums housing beetles and scorpions. However, the glare on the glass of these exhibits was very strong. I spent a long time trying to photograph some diving beetles, but in the end the only decent picture I have of the arthropods are of these dung beetles.

The two coolest animals at Elephant Odyssey got to share an exhibit. (They're both maniraptors, naturally.) One is this black-billed magpie. Corvids are cool. That goes without saying.

The other is this secretary bird. a long-legged bird of prey that hunts mostly on the ground. Secretary birds, of course, are not from California but from Africa. This one is here to represent the Daggett's eagle, an extinct long-legged hawk that did live in California. Secretary birds feed on many types of small animals, but are best known for hunting snakes, which they kill by stamping into the ground. (Okay, they actually kill most of their prey that way.)

There was also a mixed exhibit showcasing several South American mammals (capybaras, tapirs, and guanacos) to represent the fact that now-extinct capybaras, tapirs, and laminins once lived in North America. Here are some capybaras.

There are a lot of other exhibits at Elephant Odyssey (lions, jaguars, duikers, pronghorn, rattlesnakes, donkeys, camels, etc.), so I really haven't done a thorough job at covering it.

San Diego Zoo Part III: Some Miscellaneous Exhibits

2011-09-17T00:51:00.000-07:00

On my first trip to the San Diego Zoo one of the places I visited was the Horn and Hoof Mesa, a very long trail that ran down the entire right side ("right" as depicted on the zoo map) of the zoo and exhibited mostly (as one can guess) hoofed mammals. This time, I walked into the zoo feeling certain I wouldn't have to walk that long trail this time around.

But when I examined the new zoo map, something was off. The Horn and Hoof Mesa was gone, and in its place was an entirely new exhibition area: Elephant Odyssey.

That was something I didn't foresee.

That wasn't necessarily a bad thing. New exhibits at zoos are usually quite fun. I decided to go and see what this one was all about. However, I certainly hadn't planned on adding an entire area this big to the trip. This would shake things up a lot.

As Elephant Odyssey is situated at the far right of the zoo, I got to check out some of the other exhibits located along the various trails on my way there. As it turns out, this is going to be a maniraptor-heavy post.

A Guam rail.

A female magpie robin.

Some binturongs.

I think this is a fig parrot. I'm certainly going to remember to photograph the signs next time.

Another minor drawback of this zoo is that even the nocturnal animals tend to be housed outdoors (with one exception that I'll get to in a later post). So I didn't have much luck seeing things like lorises and flying squirrels. There's probably a better chance if one visited those around dusk. (The zoo opens to eight at night during summer and winter holidays.) However, I still got to see this southern white-faced scops owl. This species is famous for its defensive responses: it can either fluff its feathers and spread its wings to look more threatening, or press its feathers tightly against its body to resemble a tree limb. Another good use for feathers, and a good example of how feathers can drastically alter the apparent shape and size of a dinosaur.

A laughing kookaburra. One of my favorite living maniraptors.

A banded mongoose. Seeing this guy reminded me that typical mongooses are unusual among small carnivorans in being largely diurnal.

A koala.

This parma wallaby lived in the same exhibit as one of the koalas. It had a shelter underneath the elevated walkway that surrounded the koala exhibits.

A ring-tailed lemur. Unusually, these lemurs were kept with rock hyraxes, perhaps because this is one enclosure the hyraxes can't escape from. (Hyraxes are good climbers, and I hear they're difficult to confine.)

A Visayan warty pig.

Some Cuvier's gazelles.

A bateleur eagle.

A Madagascar buttonquail. This one was part of an exhibit with several other African birds.

For example, there was this white-headed buffalo weaver.

There was also this green woodhoopoe.

In another exhibit was this guineafowl.

The guineafowl lives with this hornbill, though I'm not certain what species this is. (The zoo has a lot of different hornbill species, by the way.)

And here's a white-bellied go-away bird.

I get a mention on TV Tropes!

2011-09-16T02:14:00.000-07:00

While not the first time one of my drawings has gotten a mention on TV Tropes (my deviation on the function of deinonychosaur hands gets linked to on Feather Fingers, so thanks for the recognition there as well), this is probably a first for this blog.

Skull and the Eumaniraptor Trio get brought up at the new trope Raptor Attack and are listed as aversions. Check out Raptor Attack, by the way. It's essentially TV Tropes covers everything wrong about deinonychosaurs in pop culture. ~~You can kind of tell that I wrote a huge chunk of that page.~~

Thanks, fellow tropers!

In similar news, Dr. Thomas Holtz has mentioned on Facebook that he has come across the TV Tropes page for the new dinosaur show Dinosaur Revolution (for which he is a major consultant) and says that he loves it. As I have contributed heavily to that page, I consider that an honor.

San Diego Zoo Part II: Children's Zoo

2011-09-12T00:39:00.000-07:00

In the same general part of the San Diego Zoo (called the Discovery Outpost) as the Reptile House and Reptile Mesa is the Children's Zoo. It's probably called that because it has these easy-to-read signs and hosts various animal encounter programs (and probably others) throughout the day (and it also closes earlier than the other major exhibits at the zoo), but it has a varied collection of interesting animals, and is by no means just for kids.

I'd actually been to the Children's Zoo the first time I came here, but I wanted to check up on one particular individual animal.

One of the first animals I saw in the Children's Zoo, a Goeldi's marmoset.

A fennec fox. One of the few (minor) drawbacks of this zoo is that many of the smaller animals that are kept in outdoor exhibits have these wire mesh cages that... aren't conductive to photography.

This is the animal I wanted to check on. Victor the short-beaked echidna is the oldest resident mammal at the zoo. He's more than fifty years old! He was much the same the last time I saw him: half buried in the sand with his quills protruding. What an interesting species and individual. He really deserves more attention than I saw him get. Or not. He might appreciate an uninterrupted nap.

As would probably be expected, a number of other visitors misidentified Victor as a porcupine. Ironically, just nearby was an exhibit with an actual crested porcupine. It also appeared to enjoy sleeping in its den.

Here is a good demonstration of how even comparatively mundane species can make for interesting displays. This tank houses domesticated albino house mice. The most interesting part of the exhibit is that the mice are living inside a giant loaf of bread. It's an edible home for them.

Maniraptors at last! Here's a kea, an inquisitive omnivorous New Zealand parrot.

Some collared lories.

A naked mole rat.

A river otter.

A thick-billed parrot, one of the few parrots that lived in the United States (but is now only found in the wild in Mexico).

A male Andean cock-of-the-rock.

A scarlet macaw.

A rock hyrax. My first hyrax! As it turns out, I found that there was no shortage of rock hyraxes at the zoo. I saw half a dozen exhibits with them scattered throughout the zoo. They're a little bigger than I expected (probably because we're always talking about how small hyraxes are compared to their closest terrestrial relatives the elephants).

Some meerkats. This is another species that is everywhere in this zoo.

Technically not part of the Children's Zoo, there's an easy-to-miss aviary nearby. Just outside of it were these mountain bamboo partridges.

And across from them is a green aracari. It has its back turned to the camera.

This was one of the many walk-through aviaries at the San Diego Zoo (and one of the smaller ones), and it also happened to be the only one I got to visit this time. Many tropical American birds lived inside, notably several hummingbird species (which I didn't get any photos of). Most conspicuous was this sunbittern.

I know I was trying to photograph something (a tanager, perhaps) here, but the foliage got in the way.

Dinosaur Revolution: Evolution's Winners

2011-09-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

Probably every dinosaur enthusiast has heard of this new show by now. The first two episodes aired in the US last week. Spoilers ahead.

The first episode ("Evolution's Winners") is a mishmash of various short stories, all to do with the reproductive behaviors of dinosaurs (and, in one story, a mosasaur). Just one maniraptor shows up in this episode, and is, in fact a main character. This is the giant oviraptorosaur Gigantoraptor. It gets one of the shorter and simpler stories in the episode: a male Gigantoraptor performs an extravagant courtship dance to attract a mate but collapses a mammal burrow and stumbles, while the family of Zalambdalestes living inside barely avoid being crushed. This is a segment that some may find goofy, and color scheme for the inflatable sac that the male Gigantoraptor uses as a visual display is something of a ripoff of the modern-day tragopans'. Regardless, few (if any) of the behaviors shown in this story I found particularly implausible, and (get this), the Gigantoraptor actually have actual pennaceous primary feathers, which most depictions routinely get wrong. The dances, sexual dimorphism, and inflatable sac are good demonstrations of the fact that behavior and soft tissues rarely fossilize and that they were likely as complex and elaborate in some extinct animals as they are in many modern ones. Also, as we're never shown anything beyond the speculative courtship of the Gigantoraptor, they don't get the less plausible reproductive behaviors postulated for some of the other theropods in the show. I can say I liked this segment more than the terrible mosasaur story (think lizards with extensive parental care and cetacean calls), the Eoraptor story with various strange bits (for example, some glaring cases of What Happened To The Mouse and Bloodless Carnage), and the afore-alluded Cryolophosaurus story (which does have some interesting Shout Outs to classic paleo art pieces). (No, it's not because it's great to see Gigantoraptor on screen... okay, perhaps that's one of the reasons!) Interestingly, my favorite story in the episode, however, was probably that of the basal sauropodomorph Glacialisaurus! Commendably, the show has a good number of rarely-featured or newly-discovered taxa.

I agree with what looks like the majority that the second episode ("The Watering Hole") is excellent and is overall better than the first (story wise, accuracy wise, and animation wise). However, I won't go into much detail here as there are no maniraptors at all in that episode (unless Ornitholestes turns out to be one). Unlike the first episode, this episode tells one long, continuous story about an Allosaurus in the Late Jurassic of Portugal (instead of the stock Morrison Formation).

According to various episode descriptions on the Internet, between the last two episodes (which will air this week; in fact it's reportedly airing in Canada as I type), there will be at least four deinonychosaur taxa featured (most of them in starring roles), so no shortage of maniraptors there. I'll probably have plenty to say about those once I get to watch them. It appears to be widely agreed that the first episode is the lowest point of the show and that the upcoming ones (especially the last) are excellent, so we'll see.

Some good, some bad about this show so far. It's a wonder that we're getting the amount of great stuff we've got, considering the insane levels of being Screwed By The Network that it has received. Had it been allowed to continue with the original plans for it, I have little doubt it could have been one of the best dinosaur shows ever to air. While marketed as a documentary, Dinosaur Revolution is really intended to be more of a story-driven show that uses the latest science. The animals actually feel like characters, not just completely arbitrary individuals. Original plans for the show had no narration and talking heads at all! (There was originally going to be a separate accompanying series that would detail the science and speculation that went into the show.) As it is, however, it ends up as a strange hybrid that it's not meant to be. The talking head segments, while featuring many of the top paleontologists and paleo artists out there, are (as usual for dinosaur shows) too brief for much of the science to be explained in detail. They also (particularly in the second episode) cut into the main storyline too much. The narration also interrupts too frequently, sometimes with useful background, but often stating the obvious. Another point of criticism is that some of the behaviors for the animals shown are a little too anthropomorphic, and in this respect I certainly concur. (One scene in the otherwise great second episode stands out to me in this respect. After a Dinheirosaurus and Allosaurus inadvertently work together to kill a Torvosaurus, they "acknowledge" one another in a rather... cheesy manner. It looks like something out of a Disney movie, instead of something real animals would do.) Nonetheless, I find the show worth watching. Who knows, maybe if it's successful they'll decide to finish up the two episodes that were cut from the show.

Fortunately, there may be some hope yet for the original format of the show actually seeing the light of day. Dun dun dun...

San Diego Zoo Part I: Reptile Mesa

2011-09-11T02:28:00.000-07:00

I got to go on a sort-of vacation this summer, and one of the places I went to was the San Diego Zoo. I wanted to do one big post for this like I did for the Vancouver Aquarium, but I took so many pictures and got so infuriated with Blogger's glitchy unwieldy image upload system that I'll have to do this in parts.

This wasn't the first time I'd gone to the San Diego Zoo, but one of the things about the San Diego Zoo is that it's so large and there are so many little trails with exhibits in the most unexpected of places that even with the extended hours during summer it's probably good as impossible to see everything in just one day (and that's not counting the fact that it's not infrequent for certain animals to be taken off exhibit, often the very animals you're most excited to see, as I was to find out). My main goal on this time around was to visit all the areas that I hadn't gotten to go on my first trip there. That sounded simple enough, but one major thing had happened to the zoo that made this more complicated than I had thought it would be.

Never mind that for now though. On my first trip to this zoo I had gone to its Reptile House (which also happens to be the only major exhibition area at the San Diego Zoo that has an actual roof instead of being either netted or open air), but I had completely overlooked the vast area behind it, the Reptile Mesa. We're used to seeing most "reptiles" in glass terrariums, and while the Reptile House has plenty of those, a number of other "reptiles" (even some of the smaller species) get to enjoy large open-air enclosures at the Reptile Mesa, which was really nice to see.

For example, here's a European glass lizard in one of these larger enclosures.

It shares the exhibit with this European pond turtle.

And in the same exhibit is also this ocellated lizard. I quite like the fact that there are a lot of mixed-species exhibits at this zoo.

Here's a fourth species that was in that exhibit. It's some species of tortoise, but I wasn't able to find a sign for this guy.

The next exhibit was more of a desert habitat. I think these are a type of skink, but I've forgotten their exact identification. Lesson learned: remember to take pictures of the signs of animals you can't identify on sight. Also, don't procrastinate for a month when it comes to putting up photos of trips to zoos.

I can probably remember what species of tortoise this is if I try hard enough. Okay, maybe not. It lives in the same enclosure as those maybe-skinks.

Another one of those tortoises with a red-headed agama.

This one is a desert tortoise that lives in a separate exhibit. At least that's the way I remember it. I'm doing a pretty bad job so far.

Next came a positively huge exhibit filled with little lizards. Here's a sungazer on a rock. It was nice and sunny when I came, so all of the "reptiles" were out basking.

More red-headed agamas, this time even more vibrantly colored. It's worthy to note that they had these flowers growing in their exhibit that was attracting hummingbirds. By chance, I happened to see a wild hummingbird the last time I came to the zoo as well.

These are Galapagos tortoises. The zoo has several different subspecies, living side by side (though in separate exhibits).

An Exuma Island iguana, a critically endangered species.

An Anegada ground iguana, another critically endangered species.

And a Cuban iguana, another endangered island-dwelling iguana species!

One of the animals I really wanted to see was the gharial. I'd never seen one before. It had a huge pond with many different species of turtles living alongside. The exhibit was quite a sight to see, but with one problem. I didn't see any gharials no matter how long and hard I looked. There were no signs suggesting that they were off exhibit, but I assume that's what happened.

An Asian forest tortoise.

An African spurrred tortoise.

In spite of all the open-air exhibits here, the Reptile Mesa is not devoid of traditional glass terrariums for some of the other species, especially the amphibians. Here's a Dominican ameiva.

A Uroplatus species, or leaf-tailed gecko.

A golden frog.

A tomato frog. I always remember this species best for its unique defense mechanism. (It secretes a noxious sticky white liquid that can glue the jaws of a predator shut.)

A White's tree frog.

A chuckwalla, known for wedging itself into rock crevices to avoid predators.

A species of viper.

A king snake.

Uh, stumped again.

A rosy boa.

A rattlesnake ~~in a tree~~ on a piece of wood.

Okay, I'm really not certain what these guys are. For reasons unknown, they didn't come with a sign.

A type of monitor lizard.

A matamata turtle.

Finally, a Komodo dragon. This one is actually part of the Reptile House proper, not the Reptile Mesa, but it's still viewable from outside the House itself, so I was able to check it out as I left the area.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole

2011-07-07T01:31:00.000-07:00

Before this movie came out, I read some people online ridiculing the fact that it had owls as the main characters, as though owls are the least badass creatures one could come up with.

Three things. First, these people clearly haven't read the books based on this movie. We have owls tearing off the faces and slashing open the throats of other owls. We have owls beheading each other and slicing off each others' wings. We have owls getting shoved into fires and and getting their vertebrae severed in two. We have owls getting their hearts torn out of their bodies. Secondly, there's another fictional work (which was also made into an even more infamous movie adaptation) that's probably the epitome of What Do You Mean It's Not For Kids and features rabbits of all things. And these aren't even rabbits that have superpowers or use weapons. Just normal rabbits. Although real rabbits can be quite tough at times, you don't get much more harmless than a rabbit when it comes to public perception.

Lastly:

Mild spoilers ahead.

For the uninitiated, the book series that this movie is based on is essentially about World War II, but with owls. The movie is allegedly based on the first three books, and it deviates from them... quite a lot. However, it does keep the central plot points of each book (being captured and escaping from St. Aegolious, journeying to and settling down at the Great Ga'Hoole Tree, and rescuing Ezylryb, respectively). I was mildly surprised by the fact that I didn't mind the major deviations from the books so much, because I usually do.

One of the strange things about the movie is that the owls are from all over the place, but some of the other wildlife are distinctively Australian. This is not something from the books, which appear to take place in a fantasy land populated not only by owls from all over the world, but also things like bald eagles, polar bears, puffins, flying snakes, and even dire wolves. Somehow, I suspect that the author just threw in whatever species she thought were cool.

On the owls themselves in this film, I thought they were quite well done. They move like real owls, look like real owls, and, although I'm not familiar with bird calls, they reportedly even sound like real owls. Furthermore, no Feather Fingers in this movie at all! The one glaring error I picked up was that the female owls were noticeably smaller than their male counterparts, when it is usually the other way around in real life. (The presence of this inaccuracy is particularly strange, because this is something the books got right.)

Happy Feet

2011-06-30T05:16:00.000-07:00

After my first maniraptor movie review, Babbletrish suggested that I should do one on Happy Feet. I had not seen Happy Feet at the time, but, eventually, I did. Spoilers ahead!

I'm going to agree that seeing otherwise realistic penguins with human-like eyes and dancing like humans is rather... uncanny. I'm not someone who cares that much about graphics or whatever, so that alone might not have put me off this movie. But, truth be told, I felt that the other aspects of the movie were rather "meh". That, and I also thought the ending was slightly rushed and not all that believable. Why would a zoo just suddenly release a new animal celebrity back to the wild? How did the humans figure out that the penguins were trying to communicate with them and what they were trying to say? It's as though someone just put that forth as a random suggestion and everyone else just went, "Hey, let's go with that!" The one mildly interesting thing I found in this movie was how Carnivore Confusion was treated. For a moment you might think the leopard seal is a mindless movie monster, and then it talks. Strangely, the orcas of all things are the only animals (besides actinopterygians and humans, naturally) that don't display an ability to communicate with the rest of the cast.

For all its faults, I must confess that, tap dancing aside, this movie has penguin biology down rather well. Emperor penguins really do sing during courtship, and the males really do huddle together for months while incubating the eggs. (Though just so you know, real emperor penguins sound like this.) Also, penguins really do jostle for position when entering the water as a way of checking for predators. Adélie penguins really are plucky birds, and really do offer stones to potential mates. On the other hand, unlike emperor penguins, Adélie penguins don't breed on the ice, even though they live on it for most of the year. A lone Eudyptes penguin (I do not know exactly which species, if any, it's supposed to represent; I'm guessing one of the rockhopper penguins) also shows up in this movie. Eudyptes penguins are usually found on the subantarctic islands surrounding Antarctica instead of the ice, but given that this is just one individual I assume he's a special case. Some skuas get a few brief scenes (though I am, again, unable to identify their precise species), and from what little we see of them they appear to be portrayed fairly accurately.

Finally, this has nothing to do with maniraptors, but the elephant seals are implied to be herbivores. Really? Unless this was meant as a joke that never gets corrected in the film, it sounds like someone got way too caught up in the similarities between elephant seals and elephants.

Maniraptor Feathers Part VII: Are Feathered Maniraptors, Like, Totally Uncool?

2011-06-24T23:43:00.000-07:00

This will be the last post in this series for now.

I suppose it can be said that many objections to feathered maniraptors, however flawed, have at least some apparent basis to them. But all too often I see arguments that have zero reasoning behind them, arguments that amount to little more than, "I refuse to believe maniraptors had feathers" or "I don't like how feathered maniraptors look."

I don't think I even need to explain how wrong this kind of "argument" is. They're entirely subjective, for starters. My two cents on the issue? These look terrible.

Or, to quote Babbletrish, "Naked maniraptors look stupid."

More importantly, organisms living millions of years ago don't care what a few individuals of one freaking species think. There's nothing wrong with liking naked maniraptors, but how that influences the characteristics of real-life animals is beyond me. I am completely incapable of seeing why this concept is so difficult to grasp.

Maniraptor Feathers Part VI: Lizard-faced Monsters in Gorilla Suits

2011-06-24T05:48:00.000-07:00

It is abundantly clear by now that all evidence points to the fact that non-avian maniraptors had feathers, and most objections to such are little more than attempts to cover up desperate denial that hold little weight if any. A common problem in serious reconstructions of extinct maniraptors these days is not that they lack feathers, but that they aren't feathered correctly.

As Andrea Cau puts it (after being garbled by Google Translate), many depictions of "feathered dinosaurs" don't actually depict "feathered dinosaurs" but "dinosaurs with feathers". They don't really show how these dinosaurs were feathered in life, but take a traditional scaly dinosaur and stick it in a suit of feathers. In other words, they're the equivalent of sticking a human into a gorilla suit and calling it a gorilla. I don't remember where I heard that analogy first, but it sounds apt to me.

This is supposed to be a chicken.

It's not just non-avian maniraptors. Even the de facto "first bird" Archaeopteryx runs into this problem a lot. In reality, we have a decent amount of data on the plumage of these dinosaurs, and they certainly weren't scaly dinosaurs stuck in feathered suits. I briefly described in Part I what we presently know about the plumage of each non-avialian maniraptor for which evidence of feathers has been found. Incidentally, at least one thing I said in Part I is now probably outdated. I talked about how protofeathers, plumaceous feathers, and pennaceous feathers are all known in maniraptors. That is still true, but not in the way I described. A new study has shown that the feathers preserved in the feathered dinosaur specimens are likely more complex than typically thought. A (dead) European siskin was crushed in a printing press to simulate the preservation of the feathered dinosaur specimens, and it turned out that crushed pennaceous body feathers looked like plumaceous feathers or protofeathers. So the "protofeathers" and "plumaceous feathers" found on the bodies of oviraptorosaurs, deinonychosaurs, and basal avialians are likely actually pennaceous feathers, and the protofeathers in more basal maniraptors and other coelurosaurs are probably plumaceous feathers, or at least multiple filaments joined together at the base instead of single filaments. That leaves only the bristle-shaped EBFFs found in Beipiaosaurus (and possibly some undescribed basal coelurosaur taxa) as the only known monofilament feathers in maniraptors. Incidentally, the "ribbon-shaped" wing feathers reported in the juvenile Similicaudipteryx are likely just developing regular pennaceous feathers, while the ribbon-shaped tail feathers in many Mesozoic birds really are ribbon shaped, but the ribbon-shaped part is probably a specialized calamus instead of fused barbs as usually interpreted.

Several common and persistent characteristics of gorilla suit dinosaurs routinely find their way into reconstructions, even those that are otherwise perfectly accurate. Inaccurate wing feathers are one. All modern birds have a fairly uniform wing feather arrangement: tertials attaching to the humerus, secondaries attaching to the ulna, and primaries attaching to the second finger. Non-avian maniraptors and basal avialians don't appear to have had tertials, but aside from that all evidence so far shows that oviraptorosaurs and deinonychosaurs had a similar wing feather arrangement. Other than Caudipteryx zoui and the juveniles of Similicaudipteryx, all oviraptorosaurs and deinonychosaurs with preserved wing feathers have secondaries, and all, so far without exception, have primaries. (More basal maniraptors, such as therizinosaurs, didn't have actual wing feathers, just long protofeathers on the arms.) Possibly by far the most common error in depictions of plumage in oviraptorosaurs and deinonychosaurs is the lack of primary feathers. Although some speculate that certain taxa might have lost the primary feathers, this is typical wishful thinking. There is no evidence that this was the case. Even in flightless birds with short, stubby forelimbs, primary feathers remain, though they aren't easy to see because they "blend in" with the body feathers. Nor is there any reason to suppose that wing feathers would have gotten in the way of catching prey, as the palms and claws of theropods do not point the same way as the feathers do. On a related note, there is no evidence that the fingers of deinonychosaurs were scaly, even though just about everyone reconstructs them that way. As far as we know, even the fingers of deinonychosaurs were fuzzy, although oviraptorosaurs on the other hand appear to have had scales or naked skin on their fingers.

Diagram showing how a deinonychosaur could've used its hands even with large wing feathers from Senter 2006. (A) shows two handed grasping with the wrists flexed. (B) shows obligate supination of the hand as the wrist extends. (C) shows one-handed grasping to the chest. (Wing feathers would have prevented two-handed grasping to the chest.)

Another common error in reconstructions of feathered dinosaurs is stopping the head feathers at the snout, or worse, having scaly, lizard-like heads. Most of these reconstructions are evidently inspired by the fact that in modern birds, feathers stop at the snout. However, modern birds have beaks. In beakless maniraptors (including many Mesozoic birds), the feathers appear to go all the way down the snout, leaving only some naked skin at the tip. Of course, there are variations on this. Beipiaosaurus appears to have had a naked face, and many modern bird clades have evolved naked faces. Even so, there is no reason think that any maniraptor re-evolved scales on previously feathered parts of the body, even if they might have secondarily lost their facial feathers. By the way, although it is common to speculate that carnivorous non-avian maniraptors had bald heads, this appears to be based on vultures, and as I discussed briefly in Part V, bald heads in vultures have more to do with soaring habits than with feeding behavior.

Fossil of Eoenantiornis buhleri showing feathered snout photographed by Laikayiu, from Wikipedia.

Finally, in paleo art, it's common practice to "show all work" and make sure all the skeletal features and proportions of a dinosaur can been seen in reconstructions. However, as Matt Martyniuk, Mickey Mortimer, and Dr. Darren Naish discuss in the comments here, restoring feathered dinosaurs means "obscuring your research". Just look at how much feathers can cover up skeletal features in modern birds! Fossils of non-avian maniraptors also show obscuring of skeletal features by plumage. (Take a look at the fossils of "Dave" or Beipiaosaurus I posted back in Part I.) Even in featherless dinosaurs, the presence of soft tissues would mean that they were far from the shrink-wrapped creatures commonly depicted in art.

Museum mount of Strix nebulosa showing extent of plumage, photographed by FunkMonk, from Wikipedia.

Maniraptor Feathers Part V: What About Big Maniraptors?

2011-06-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

The idea that some extinct maniraptors may have secondarily lost their feathers because "they didn't need them" is one that currently has no evidence for, and in most cases comes from the ignorance of the vast potential functions that feathers have. However, there is one instance where this line of reasoning does at least appear to make sense, and that is when big maniraptors are concerned.

How big is a big maniraptor? Some would say Deinonychus was a "big maniraptor", but truth be told it really... wasn't. Although it was fairly large for a dromaeosaurid, it still wasn't larger than even the largest living maniraptor, the ostrich. A large ostrich can easily weigh more than a hundred kilograms, while Deinonychus has been estimated at around seventy kilograms.

Size comparison between several large aviremigian maniraptors (and a synapsid) by Matt Martyniuk, from Wikipedia. Notice Deinonychus sulking at the back out of embarrassment from being much smaller than the others.

There are several dromaeosaurids that were much larger than Deinonychus, however. Achillobator, Austroraptor, and Utahraptor are the largest dromaeosaurids known. Utahraptor has been estimated at five hundred kilograms and seven meters long, and Achillobator and Austroraptor were probably slightly smaller. Some rumored undescribed specimens of Utahraptor are allegedly even larger, but for the sake of simplicity we can probably ignore those for now.

Size comparison between Utahraptor ostrommaysorum (including an alleged undescribed specimen) and a human by Matt Martyniuk, from Wikipedia.

Large as they were, these large dromaeosaurids were dwarfed by several other maniraptors. The oviraptorosaur Gigantoraptor was more than eight meters long and weighed more than a ton. It was about the same size as the tyrannosaurids Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus. Multiple therizinosaur taxa may have also rivaled or exceeded the biggest dromaeosaurids in mass, including Alxasaurus, Falcarius, Nothronychus, Suzhousaurus, Enigmosaurus, Erlikosaurus, Nanshiungosaurus, and Segnosaurus. The largest known therizinosaur (in fact, the largest known maniraptor) was Therizinosaurus itself. Some estimates put it as being around three meters tall at the hip and weighing as much as six tons. Given the strange, upright build therizinosaurs tended to have, it probably would've been a very imposing animal in life.

Size comparison between Therizinosaurus cheloniformis and a human by Matt Martyniuk, from Wikipedia.

The concept that large maniraptors may have lost their feathers is based on the fact that several large modern tropical land mammal lineages (such as elephants, rhinos, and hippos) have greatly reduced insulating integument, which sounds reasonable. (It's a bit less reasonable when other types of mammals such as humans, naked mole rats, or whales are brought up, given that their reduction of hair involves specialized lifestyles not known in any maniraptor.) These mammals have dispensed with a thick coat of hair because they are large enough to maintain their body temperature without insulation, and probably because they'd overheat with a typical mammalian coat.

On the other hand, there's reason to think that overheating was not quite as much of a problem for theropods as it is for mammals. For one thing, theropods typically have greater surface to volume ratio than mammals do. After all, Velociraptor was roughly the size of a coyote, but was longer than the average man is tall. Even among mammals, surface area to volume ratio appears to make a difference in determining how much insulating integument is reduced. Giraffes and black rhinos are in the same size range, but giraffes haven't greatly reduced their coats of hair, because their surface area to volume ratio is much greater than that of black rhinos. It's worth noting that the builds of elephants, hippos, and rhinos are all terrible for shedding heat, while this was not the case with theropods. Secondly, theropods have an air sac system that mammals do not, and greatly increases their ability to shed excess heat. Indeed, preliminary calculations by Andrea Cau suggest that not even the tyrannosaurid Tyrannosaurus would've been greatly inconvenienced by a feather coat, and Tyrannosaurus was significantly larger than all known maniraptors, barring Therizinosaurus. I suspect the largest coelurosaur with a coat of plumage of a given thickness would've potentially been larger than the largest mammal with an equally thick hair coat.

Besides, there are other reasons why elephants, hippos, and rhinos don't make ideal comparisons to most big maniraptors. Rumors notwithstanding, Utahraptor, Achillobator, and Austroraptor weren't anywhere close to the size of those big mammals. Modern mammals in their size range, even those in tropical environments, don't show a particularly marked reduction in hair. (Funnily, the largest known avian maniraptors were about as large as the largest dromaeosaurids, but rarely does anyone suggest that they lost their feathers. Such baseless differences between the treatment of non-avian and avian maniraptors is quickly becoming an Overly Long Gag.) That leaves only Gigantoraptor, Nothronychus, Suzhousaurus, Segnosaurus, and Therizinosaurus as the only known maniraptors in the size range of large terrestrial mammals with reduced integument covering. Furthermore, the hair loss in hippos (and likely the ancestors of elephants) may well have as much to do with their semi-aquatic habits as it does with size and build, while there's no evidence that any big maniraptors had semi-aquatic ancestors.

Cartoon of hypothetical dromaeosaurids with lifestyles that may lead to significant reduction of insulating integument. Tellingly, none of them are known to have existed.

There's more. Feathers, especially pennaceous feathers (which most maniraptors have) are excellent insulators. They prevent both heat loss from the body and overheating caused by ambient heat. We're biased in our typical view of insulation because we deal with high temperatures by sweating, which isn't too effective with thick clothing covering our skin, but in fact, male turkeys are more likely to overheat from high ambient temperatures than female turkeys are because of their bald heads. Even for us, wearing thin clothing that still allows for evaporation of sweat can actually help lower body temperature. That said, feather loss in some areas of the body in maniraptors can be beneficial under some circumstances. For example, ostriches have naked flanks, legs, and inner wings, and rheas have naked legs and inner wings. These birds can run very fast and probably generate a lot of heat doing so, but live in fairly arid environments and can remain active in hot weather. It turns out that the featherless parts of an ostrich or rhea can all be shaded easily by the bird's wings or the rest of the body, so the heat generated during the day is stored and then can be rapidly shed in one go. The bald heads of certain vultures have also been found to be important in thermoregulation (instead of being an adaptation to cope with messy feeding habits; indeed, the messiest vultures don't have the baldest heads, and most vultures have feathered heads). These vultures usually need to cope with rapidly changing temperatures while soaring, and can quickly facilitate or prevent heat loss by extending or retracting the neck. Even the bald heads of turkeys have a role in shedding metabolic heat.

So it's not improbable for some non-avian maniraptors to have had some naked parts of the body, either for display or thermoregulatory purposes, especially the neck. (Feathers in the neck region are genetically easier to lose than feathers elsewhere on the body, which explains why so many different bird lineages have evolved bald necks for various purposes.) In particular, large cursorial non-avian maniraptors that lived in arid environments may well have had an ostrich-like feather covering. Nevertheless, there is little reason to think that any maniraptor lost its feathers to the same degree elephants, hippos, and rhinos have lost their hair. Even in flightless birds with naked skin patches, the rest of the body still tends to be densely feathered. Indeed, wing feathers in aviremigian maniraptors don't have much to do with insulation and may well have been present in even the largest aviremigians. (They wouldn't have gotten in the way of predation. Might talk about that in a later post.) In fact, ostriches and rheas have even more remiges than flying birds because they no longer need to fly. They have remiges on both sides of the arm, while flying birds only have them on the same side as the ulna. Whether or not any extinct maniraptors had similar feather arrangement is unknown.

Restoration of Achillobator giganticus with plausible ostrich-like feather distribution by Matt Martyniuk. Derived dromaeosaurids weren't cursorial, but fulfilling two out of three requirements is close enough!

Maniraptor Feathers Part IV: What Good are Feathers?

2011-06-19T06:54:00.000-07:00

Another occasional objection that is raised regarding feathered maniraptors is, "Why would taxon A have feathers? It didn't need them!"

Which... isn't really an objection. After all, there is generally no evidence that the taxon concerned "didn't need feathers", even though there may be evidence from phylogenetic inference or even direct fossil evidence that it did have them. Besides, many animals (including many dinosaurs) are known to have some crazy structures for which their function isn't obvious, but that isn't really evidence those animals didn't have them. (Who can actually say, for example, exactly what stegosaur plates or Psittacosaurus bristles were for?) This ends up as more an argument from personal incredulity (i.e.: "I can't think of how taxon A would've used its feathers, so it didn't have any!").

Nevertheless, just as with stegosaur plates and Psittacosaurus bristles, it's still good to try and seek out potential functions for feathers in non-avian maniraptors. Fortunately, the function of feathers is somewhat easier to infer than stegosaur plates or Psittacosaurus bristles, as there are still feathered maniraptors alive today.

All living maniraptors are either flighted or have flighted ancestors, and a primary function of feathers in neornithines is to help them fly. However, no non-avian maniraptor was quite as adapted to flight as modern neornithines, even though some clades have been suggested to have been secondarily flightless and a number of small deinonychosaurs could've had some limited aerial capability. The presence of plumaceous feathers with no aerodynamic qualities in non-maniraptor coelurosaurs with no flight adaptations shows that feathers arose before flight in dinosaurs began to evolve. (That's right, plumaceous feathers were probably present in basal coelurosaurs. Might talk a bit about that later in the series.) As feathers are found in flightless coelurosaurs (including modern ones), they must also be beneficial in other ways. Feathers are exaptations; they were later adapted for flight, but that wasn't their original function.

Another major function of feathers in modern maniraptors (both flighted and flightless) is insulation, and feathers are important in both keeping maniraptors warm in the cold and keeping them cool in the heat. Plumaceous feathers found in basal coelurosaurs (as well as in basal maniraptors such as therizinosaurs and alvarezsauroids) likely had this function.

Many non-avian maniraptors didn't just have plumaceous feathers, however. Oviraptorosaurs and deinonychosaurs are both known have had pennaceous feathers. Pennaceous feathers are also useful for insulation, and asymmetrical pennaceous feathers (which are known in the dromaeosaurid Microraptor) are good for gliding and flying with. In addition, pennaceous feathers are also more useful than plumaceous feathers in visual communication, due to their wider display area and (possibly) greater range of colors that they can show. Some feather structures known in non-avian maniraptors, such as tail fan and the short primary feathers forming little "hand flags" in Caudipteryx zoui and the feather crests in Microraptor and Anchiornis, were likely for display purposes. (In the case of Anchiornis, the feather crest is known to have been orange, in contrast to the dark gray and black of the rest of the animal, which supports its use in visual display. Similarly, the wing feathers of Caudipteryx show a banded color pattern. Furthermore, the development of wing feathers in Similicaudipteryx signify that the wing feathers were more important in older individuals than in younger ones.)

Male Pavo cristatus in display using pennaceous tail feathers photographed by PRA, from Wikipedia.

The greater area of pennaceous feathers likely served another purpose, too. Several oviraptorid and troodont specimens have been preserved brooding on top of their nests with the forelimbs extended over the eggs. The wing feathers that were likely present in these taxa would have helped cover the eggs while the dinosaurs were brooding.

Fossil of Citipati osmolskae brooding on nest photographed by Matt Martyniuk, from Wikipedia.

Some flightless birds have yet another use for their wings. Rheas and ostriches flick their wings out to the sides while running to help them make quick turns. Cursorial flightless non-avian maniraptors may have done the same.

An interesting idea that's been proposed in the last decade is Wing-Assisted Incline Running (WAIR). Many birds, particularly those that are primarily terrestrial or too young to fly, can escape from predators by flapping their wings to help them run up inclined surfaces such as tree trunks. This behavior was first observed in chukar partidges and has been documented among many neornithine groups. It's been suggested that small non-avian maniraptors with well-developed wing feathers may have also used WAIR and that it contributed to the evolution of flight. Other researchers, however, argue that the restricted forelimb movement in non-avian maniraptors wouldn't have allowed them to perform WAIR. (Non-avian maniraptors couldn't lift the wings above their backs. Indeed, not even confuciusornithids could!)

Pokemon Best Wishes: Fossil Revival! Ancient Mysterious Bird Archeos!!

2011-06-17T05:35:00.000-07:00

A quick diversion from the maniraptor feathers series (which will be continued shortly).

As those of you who are Pokemon fans know, in the newest generation of Pokemon (Generation V), there are two Pokemon out there based on basal paravians, Archen and Archeops. (I know that "Pokemon" needs an accent mark in it. But I'm only a pedant when it comes to dinosaurs.)

Art by Ken Sugimori, from Bulbapedia.

I could do without the lizard heads, but they're pretty cool Pokemon. There've been plenty of Pokemon based on modern maniraptors, but the fact that we finally have some deinonychosaurs/archaeopterygids is great.

It so happens that these Pokemon were recently featured in an episode of the Pokemon anime. It can be watched here. Warning: there will be spoilers ahead for episodes that haven't been aired in English.

The episode just starts out of nowhere and we're immediately shown a Plume Fossil.

Fennel is very excited about resurrecting the fossil... I'd probably be pretty excited as well, especially given the fact we don't live in a world where you can just hand a scientist a fragmentary fossil and he or she can revive it for you in a matter of seconds.

They resurrect the fossil by hooking Musharna up to a machine. Okay...

It lives!

It's quite hyper and immediately goes around attacking people and running into stuff.

It also leaves behind some prehistoric seeds that were resurrected alongside it.

What an un-maniraptoran sleeping posture.

It uses Screech!

Which somehow causes the seeds to grow...!?

A few problems though. First, it evidently doesn't like modern Pokemon food.

Second, it's not much of a flier. Which is Truth In Television. (To be perfectly realistic, it probably wouldn't be able to get off the ground at all by flapping. But this is Pokemon.)

It can do WAIR (Wing-Assisted Incline Running) though! Neat.

Ash decides to help it out by sending forth fellow paravian Tranquill.

Watch and learn, inferior maniraptor with only incipient flight adaptations.

Iris also helps by sending out her flying synapsid. (No, really. It can actually fly. This is Pokemon.)

Emolga is more interested in trying out Attract though. Just in case she needs to steal apples from this thing in the future.

It... doesn't work. Looks like Archen is also female.

Fluffy mammal, nom nom.

Emolga is not amused. Volt Switch!

It malfunctions as usual, sending out Cilan's Stunfisk.

Emolga gets to spend the rest of the episode lazing around in a tree. Just the way she likes it.

Beat.

Pancake fish, nom nom.

Too bad it happens to be an electric fish.

With help, Archen is making progress with her flying lessons.

Meanwhile, Archen's screeches throughout the episode have really made an impact on the plant's growth.

It even bears fruit!

These Archen does like to eat.

And when she needs more, she can just give a shout.

All of a sudden... (New evolution animation, w00t!)

Archeops!

It flies!

But then...

Team Rocket! Dun dun dun.

They decide to attack the plant... for reasons, I guess.

Everybody attack! (Funny that Fennel is being more proactive than the main characters who aren't named Ash.)

Team Rocket goes blasting off- Wait, this is the Best Wishes series. Team Rocket is actually competent.

Ash has Roggenrola and Oshawott deal with the ghost... fire... energy... stuff enveloping the building.

Good thing Archeops isn't a pushover. It removes the net with Dragon Breath.

Team Rocket retreats. (They don't blast off anymore.)

Unfortunately, the heroes couldn't save the plant, meaning Archeops's food source is gone.

Fortunately...

Wait a minute, what? Aren't they supposed to be extinct? Didn't you make a big deal out of resurrecting one? Never mind...

So Archeops goes off to join her own kind, who presumably know how to survive in the wild in present day. (To be honest, part of me was hoping that someone would catch Archeops. But considering that Ash in particular is overloaded with Pokemon at the moment to begin with...)

Not bad for a Pokemon episode overall, in spite of some very strange plot devices.

Maniraptor Feathers Part III: The Asian Maniraptors are Not Aberrant

2011-06-15T21:53:00.000-07:00

I've seen it casually suggested on occasion that as, to date, direct evidence of feathers has mostly been found in Asian coelurosaurs, coelurosaurs found elsewhere wouldn't have had feathers.

Which is complete crap, of course.

There is no evidence that Asia was somehow different in some way from other parts of the world that would cause maniraptors to have feathers. There's also no evidence that any maniraptor outside of Asia did not have feathers, even though phylogenetic inference predicts that the default assumption should be that all maniraptors have feathers.

Besides, even among only the maniraptors that are known to preserve direct evidence of feathers, they still represent taxa from multiple different formations (some with vastly different paleoenvironments), multiple maniraptor lineages with greatly varying lifestyles, and a time span of 95 million years. There's no indication that these taxa shared anything specific with each other that aren't shared with other maniraptors. And there's also the fact that fossil dinosaurs which preserve evidence of feathers are known from outside of Asia, such as Rahonavis and Juravenator. (And Archaeopteryx, but no one cares because it's a de facto "bird". We again see the recurring theme of differing treatment between de facto "birds" and other types of maniraptors, even though there is no logical basis behind such behavior.)

The fact that extensive scales are known from other dinosaurs outside of Asia means nothing, because these skin impressions represent those from abelisaurids, titanosaurs, carnosaurs, ceratopsians, thyreophorans, and ornithopods, not maniraptors. It's not as though extensive scaly impressions aren't known from Asian dinosaurs: at least one Psittacosaurus specimen from the Yixian preserves scaly skin over most of its body (albeit along with enigmatic bristles on its tail). Tellingly, it's a ceratopsian instead of a maniraptor, showing that phylogenetics is indeed more important in determining integument than arbitrary political and geographic divisions... as it should be. The only reason the Yixian, Jiufotang, and Tiaojishan maniraptors preserve integument is because they were "lucky" enough to die in an environment conductive to soft tissues. Nothing more. Other Mesozoic dinosaurs must rely on the occasional skin impression or badly preserved integument (as in Shuvuuia), or subtle skeletal features such as quill knobs (which may not be immediately obvious; it took more than eighty years for them to be identified in Velociraptor, after all) if direct evidence of their integument is to be obtained. As far as we can tell, the presence of integument on a given taxon has nothing to do with location.

The notion that only Asian non-avian maniraptors had feathers has so many giant holes in it one could fly a Pelagornis through it. It is evidently just another example of desperate wishful thinking, although clearly not much "thinking" has been put into it.

Maniraptor Feathers Part II: Phylogenetic Inference

2011-06-14T21:41:00.001-07:00

As discussed in the previous post, there is direct evidence of feathers in multiple non-avian maniraptors. But we can also be quite confident in saying that other maniraptors for which we don't have integument also had feathers as well. How do we know?

The same way we know (as in, be quite certain) that extinct mammals without integument preserved very likely had fur: through phylogenetic inference.

We know that closely related organisms tend to be more similar to each other than to more distantly related ones because they share more characteristics with one another. With this in mind, we can often infer whether or not a characteristic is present in a fossil organism if we have enough data on its close relatives, even if we don't have direct evidence of that organism possessing or lacking said characteristic.

For example, we don't have the hands of Tsaagan, so, strictly speaking, we can't directly tell how many fingers it had. However, we do have the hands of its close relatives, and when we reconstruct the relationships between it and its relatives, we can see that both its closest known relative (Linheraptor) and its close-but-not-as-close relatives (such as Velociraptor) are both known to have had three-fingered hands. Therefore, we can infer that Tsaagan likely also had three-fingered hands.

We can do the same thing when trying to figure out what kind of integument maniraptors (or mammals, or lizards, etc.) that haven't preserved any direct evidence of their skin coverings had.

We don't yet have any unequivocal direct evidence of what kind of integument Deinonychus had, for example. However, its phylogenetic position shows that it's nested deep within a clade of known feathered dinosaurs. Some of these feathered dinosaurs are fairly close relatives of Deinonychus (such as Velociraptor or Microraptor). Perhaps more importantly, none of the members of this clade are known to have had any integument other than extensive feathering. (Most do have scales, but only on limited areas of the body such as the feet.) Therefore, it is reasonable to infer that Deinonychus also had feathers.

Simplified cladogram of Maniraptora using the Raptormaniacs cast.

If this conclusion somehow sounds "shaky", it shouldn't be. At least, it shouldn't be any more shaky than the conclusion that Dinofelis likely had fur because it's nested deep within a clade of furry animals, or that Hesperornis had feathers because it's also nested deep within a clade of feathered animals. No one ever questions those because... I honestly don't know. In fact, such inference has already accurately predicted the presence of feathers in at least one case, Velociraptor. Even before quill knobs were discovered on Velociraptor in 2007, phylogenetic inference showed that Velociraptor likely had feathers.

Some "critics" of phylogenetic inference like to use the example of a modern elephant and a mammoth to show how "unreliable" this method is. If modern elephants were extinct and we only knew about the integument of mammoths, so the claim goes, phylogenetic inference would turn out to be completely wrong because it would lead us to think that modern elephants had fur. But, actually, that prediction would turn out to be entirely right!

Close up of an Asian elephant's eye showing integument (including specialized hair) photographed by Alexander Klink, from Wikipedia.

That said, we wouldn't necessarily be able to predict accurately that modern elephants would have had such a sparse covering of hair. But we know from the anatomy of modern animals that even though the arrangement of integument can vary greatly based on environmental factors as well as sexual selection, the presence of integument is not nearly as variable. So we may not be able to tell exactly what the feathers of Deinonychus were like, but we can quite safely say that it did indeed have feathers, as well as infer some more general patterns.

Of course, phylogenetics doesn't always work. For example, the velociraptorine dromaeosaurid Balaur had two fingers instead of three. Had the hands of Balaur not been discovered, we might have thought it had three fingers. However, such examples would clearly be in the minority. For one two-fingered dromaeosaurid taxon there are dozens of three-fingered dromaeosaurid (and other avetheropod) taxa which would have had their finger count predicted accurately by the same method.

Is it technically possible that a maniraptor taxon had scales or fur or pycnofibers or tentacles or cornflakes covering most of their skin instead of feathers? I'll have to confess that, yes, it's technically possible, against all odds. But science doesn't care about what is technically possible. Is there evidence for these possibilities? No. So, until evidence in their favor is found, we can stop kidding ourselves that those possibilities are more likely than (or as likely as) an alternative for which we do have evidence: all maniraptors likely had feathers.

Is that too bold? Really? Any more bold than saying that all extinct mammals likely had fur or that all avian maniraptors likely had feathers?

Back to the basics - Maniraptor Feathers Part I: The Fossil Evidence

2011-06-13T01:18:00.000-07:00

Because drawing comics is getting to be rather time consuming and difficult to do regularly, I'm taking this blog in a more informative direction. I could talk about some really interesting and semi-obscure stuff, but there are other blogs around that discuss maniraptors now and then and do it far better than I'd be able to, and I'd mostly be reciting things that I've learned from those blogs if I did. I will be discussing topics far too basic and petty for more competent bloggers to cover, starting with the ever-present controversy-that-is-not-really-a-controversy-at-all: did non-avian maniraptors have feathers? (Incidentally, I'm not abandoning the comic entirely. I'll probably still slip in a few strips or pages from time to time, or use the characters to illustrate posts.)

The simple answer to this, as every dinosaur enthusiast knows by now, is yes. Non-avian maniraptors did have feathers. There's no question about it. To say that there's more than enough evidence for this is an understatement. The most direct evidence, of course, is fossil evidence, and we have mountains of fossil evidence for feathers in non-avian maniraptors. It's a wonder that we do, given that soft tissues rarely fossilize. However, some formations, such as the Early Cretaceous Yixian Formation and Jiufotang Formation and the Late Jurassic Tiaojishan Formation in China, often do preserve soft tissues, including integumentary structures, in exquisite detail, making them veritable treasure troves for paleontologists. Several maniraptor taxa have been found in such deposits, many of them preserving feathers. In some cases it is also possible to infer the presence of feathers through skeletal features. To date, at least fifteen non-avialian maniraptors have been preserved with direct evidence of feathers. (I'm not including avialians simply because no one ever has any problem with them being feathered for... reasons, I guess. Even though many of them are preserved in the exact same deposits as non-avialian maniraptors. I don't understand it either.)

Avimimus (1987)

That's right, there was direct evidence of feathered non-avialian maniraptors before the 1990s! In 1987, Kuzanov (the original describer of Avimimus) reported the presence of a ridge on the ulna of this oviraptorosaur, indicating the presence of secondary feathers (wing feathers on the ulna). Evidently that wasn't convincing enough at the time and this has since been often overlooked.

Protarchaeopteryx (1997)

Fossil of Protarchaeopteryx robusta, from Qiang et al., 1998.

Though first thought to be an archaeopterygid avialian, this has since turned out to be a basal oviraptorosaur. Though the holotype isn't quite as beautifully preserved as other Yixian fossils, it does preserve large symmetrical pennaceous feathers forming a tail fan on this maniraptor. (There are several main types of feathers. Pennaceous feathers are the vaned feathers we typically see in modern birds. Plumaceous feathers are essentially down. Protofeathers are primitive filaments that can either be single filaments or multiple filaments stemming from the same follicle. All three types are known in non-avian maniraptors.)

Caudipteryx (1998)

Fossil of Caudipteryx zoui photographed by Laikayiu, from Wikipedia.

Unlike Protarchaeopteryx, this basal oviraptorosaur is known from several good specimens. It also preserves a tail fan, as well as protofeathers on the body and primary feathers (wing feathers attaching to the second finger). Interestingly, it appears that Caudipteryx zoui didn't have secondary feathers, while Caudipteryx dongi did.

Rahonavis (1998)

Fossilized quill knobs in Rahonavis ostromi, from Forster et al., 1998.

Rahonavis gets the prize for the first dromaeosaurid found to show evidence of feathers. It's another non-avian maniraptor that was, at first, mistaken for an archaeopterygid avialian. Rahonavis preserved quill knobs on its ulna. Quill knobs anchor the secondary feathers in many modern birds (particularly in strong fliers), and likely served the same purpose in Rahonavis.

Shuvuuia (1999)

One specimen of the alvarezsaurid Shuvuuia came with the remnants of preserved feathers. Unlike other extinct maniraptors for which feathers have been found, it came from the Djadochta Formation in Mongolia, a formation that, although the origin of many excellent fossils, is not known for preservation of soft tissues, and as a consequence only some poorly-preserved protofeathers are present. However, this specimen is still significant in that its feathers have been subject to chemical analysis that show they contain (and lack) the same proteins as modern bird feathers do.

Sinornithosaurus (1999)

Fossil of Sinornithosaurus millenii photographed by Laikayiu, from Wikipedia.

Rahonavis may have gotten the prize for the first dromaeosaurid to show evidence of feathers, but Sinornithosaurus gets the honor for the first dromaeosaurid to actually have its feathers preserved. Specimens of Sinornithosaurus have plumaceous feathers all over the body, but truth be told I'm a little fuzzy on the details of the plumage of Sinornithosaurus proper and someone will have to fill me in, particularly as most descriptions of Sinornithosaurus plumage also include information from from the specimen NGMC 91 "Dave", which was considered a possible juvenile Sinornithosaurus at one point but is probably a distinct taxon.

Beipiaosaurus (1999)

Fossils of Beipiaosaurus inexpectus from Xu et al., 2009.

For those keeping track, at this point we have four major groups of maniraptors with evidence of feathers: avialians (of course), oviraptorosaurs (Avimimus, Protarchaeopteryx, and Caudipteryx), dromaeosaurids (Rahonavis and Sinornithosaurus), and alvarezsaurids (Shuvuuia). With the discovery of Beipiaosaurus, the therizinosaurs join their ranks. The first specimen of Beipiaosaurus found had thick, shaggy protofeathers on its body, but subsequent, better preserved specimens showed something else surprising: long bristle-shaped feathers on at least the neck and tail forming a second coat underneath the protofeathers. These bristle-shaped protofeathers were given the name Elongated Broad Filamentous Feathers (EBFFs). They may be unique to therizinosaurs, but possible EBFFs have been identified in some yet-to-be-described basal coelurosaur taxa.

Microraptor (2000)

Fossil of Microraptor zhaoianus, from Hone et al., 2010.

In 1999 a supposed new feathered dinosaur known as "Archaeoraptor" garnered some media attention, but was soon revealed to be a hoax after it was examined by professionals. "Archaeoraptor" was a chimera comprising the upper half of the Mesozoic bird Yanornis and the lower half of a then-undescribed dromaeosaurid. About a year later, that dromaeosaurid became known as Microraptor. Newer specimens of Microraptor preserve a surprising feature: Microraptor had four wings. It had feathers all over its body, including very long wing feathers on its arms and hands and a tail fan on the tip of its tail. This pattern was not unlike other feathered maniraptors known at this point, but Microraptor also had long pennaceous feathers on its legs going down onto the feet. These large wings suggest that Microraptor was capable of some form of aerial locomotion, but exactly how it flew is still debated. Long leg feathers are now also known in several Mesozoic avialians (including Archaeopteryx) and troodonts, but none of theirs are quite as extensive as those of Microraptor.

Nomingia (2000)

Fossilized pygostyle in Nomingia gobiensis (E), from Barsbold et al., 2000.

Only known from the posterior half of its body, the oviraptorosaur Nomingia had a mass of fused vertebrae on the tip of its tail. This feature, known as a pygostyle, is also known in modern birds (as well as in Beipiaosaurus), and typically supports a fan of feathers. It likely served the same function in Nomingia.

NGMC 91 (2001)

NGMC 91 photographed by Matt Martyniuk, from Wikipedia.

Not yet officially named, this well-preserved dromaeosaurid specimen was described in 2001 and was nicknamed "Dave". Though initially thought to be a juvenile Sinornithosaurus, newer phylogenetic analyses find it a closer relative of Microraptor. It preserves plumaceous feathers all over the body (except for the toes, which have scales, similar to modern birds), and its wing feathers are probably badly preserved pennaceous feathers. It also preserves a tail fan on the tip of the tail.

Yixianosaurus (2003)

Only known from arms and some ribs, Yixianosaurus preserves some feathers, but their exact structure is difficult to tell. It is also hard to say what kind of maniraptor Yixianosaurus was, though its long hands might suggest an affinity with scansoriopterygids, small climbing possible avialians from the Jurassic.

Jinfengopteryx (2005)

Fossil of Jinfengopteryx elegans photographed by Laikayiu, from Wikipedia.

Once thought to be an archaeopterygid (again; this is turning into a sort of running gag, which, considering the similarities between archaeopterygids and deinonychosaurs, shouldn't be surprising), this is really the first troodont to preserve feathers. As the wings are tightly folded against the body, the wing feathers are impossible to decipher, but it does preserve body feathers and retrices (long tail feathers) along the length of its tail (as opposed to a tail fan at the tip as in known dromaeosaurids and oviraptorosaurs).

Velociraptor (2007)

Fossilized quill knobs in Velociraptor mongoliensis, from Turner et al., 2007.

In 2007 the famous Velociraptor also entered the ranks of non-avian maniraptors with direct evidence of feathers, this time due to quill knobs on the ulna (similarly to Rahonavis). This was also evidence that medium-sized flightless dromaeosaurids retained large wings, and some have used it to support the idea that deinonychosaurs were secondarily flightless (as quill knobs are found mostly in strong-flying birds). Those who have examined other Velociraptor specimens personally have confirmed that these quill knobs are not aberrations or artifacts of preservation in one particular specimen, and are present on multiple other Velociraptor specimens.

Similicaudipteryx (2008)

Fossil of Similicaudipteryx yixianensis, from Xu et al., 2010.

When first described in 2008, the presence of a pygostyle in this oviraptorosaur suggested that it had a tail fan. In fact, this was a triumph of sorts for skeletal inference of feathers because when, in 2010, new specimens were found that did indeed preserve actual feathers, lo and behold, they had tail fans (as well as primary and secondary feathers and body feathers). The other interesting thing about these specimens was that they represented different growth stages, and the younger specimen had ribbon-shaped wing feathers (with barbules only at the tips of the feathers) instead of regular pennaceous feathers as in adults. (On the other hand, the "ribbon-shaped feathers" are also similar to the feathers of young birds that are molting, and this might have been the case with the young Similicaudipteryx.) The younger specimen also lacked secondary feathers.

Anchiornis (2009)

Fossil of Anchiornis huxleyi, from Hu et al., 2009.

This is another troodont that was once thought to be an archaeopterygid. (What did I tell you? It's a running gag.) Although the original specimen preserved feathers, new specimens revealed even more information (as usual). Anchiornis was more heavily feathered than even most modern birds! It was completely feathered down to the toes, the only naked region being the very, very tip of the snout (which unfortunately rarely ever gets taken into account in many reconstructions of this taxon). Anchiornis also showed that, like basal dromaeosaurids (such as Microraptor) and many Mesozoic avialians, troodonts started out with long leg feathers. (Jinfengopteryx doesn't preserve long leg feathers, although allegedly there are some undescribed Yixian troodonts that do.) Furthermore, it was also important in that it was a Jurassic non-avialian maniraptor, showing that there were indeed feathered non-avialian dinosaurs before the existence of Archaeopteryx. (Not that it actually mattered before, but it was good to get confirmation.) Finally, Anchiornis also gets the honor of being the first Mesozoic dinosaur for which we can be quite certain how it looked like in life, as it was the first to get the color pigments preserved in its feathers completely analyzed!

In addition to these, several oviraptorids have been preserved brooding on their nests in postures that suggest they had large wing feathers to cover their eggs. A flange on the second finger of Deinonychus (also found in Sinornithosaurus) has also been suggested online to be an anchor for primary feathers.

Note that even the BAND (Birds Are Not Dinosaurs fringe group) do not deny that maniraptors have feathers, in spite of their great skill in ignoring all evidence and the fact that they've tried (and failed) to discredit the presence of feathers in other coelurosaur groups, so anyone who denies all this fossil evidence is essentially out of luck. (They instead proclaim that all maniraptors are "birds and not dinosaurs". Still not correct, but it's something.)

Some people out there desperately write off the growing evidence as being "fake", but this is flat out wrong on so many levels. Nearly all of these fossils have been studied by many different professionals (including BANDits), and many of these taxa (such as Microraptor, Caudipteryx, and Anchiornis) are known from multiple (sometimes hundreds) of specimens that all preserve feathers. Even the "Archaeoraptor" hoax was quickly exposed after actual scientists studied it, and note that the feathers in neither specimen that was used to composite the hoax were faked. The specimen itself was a hoax, but the feathers were not. Funnily enough, no one has the slightest problem with the mammals that preserve fur and avialian dinosaurs that preserve feathers from the same formations. Nice double standard there.

March of the Dinosaurs

2011-05-31T02:50:00.001-07:00

This was a documentary that aired on Discovery Channel some time ago. After some unsuccessful forays on Youtube, I finally came across it online here. Mild spoilers ahead!

The show takes place in the Late Cretaceous (roughly Campanian, with some fairly mild anachronism) of Alaska and Canada and focuses on polar dinosaurs. It follows two main "characters", a young male Edmontosaurus and a young male Troodon. I quite liked the storyline overall; while not without some silliness (most egregiously, a super persistent Albertosaurus that was somehow able to jump vertically straight into the air and was barely inconvenienced by being set on fire or being swept away by a volcanic flash flood), it was quite interesting and enjoyable. Accuracy wise it does reasonably well, certainly far better than some recent dinosaur "documentaries". (Although pterosaur fans are probably going to hate the Quetzalcoatlus. It looks extremely out of place alongside the comparatively well-researched dinosaurs.) There aren't as many overly wild speculations as is typical of such documentaries, though as with most mockumentaries it doesn't go to any lengths to differentiate between evidence-based aspects and completely speculative ones.

The only maniraptors present in the documentary are Troodon, but as mentioned above they get part of the spotlight. Commendably, they have feathers. However, they are also afflicted with what is quickly becoming the new problem with feathered dinosaur portrayals in pop culture: they look like "dinosaurs with feathers" instead of "feathered dinosaurs". They have scaly, lizard-like heads, even though there is no evidence that any maniraptor had a scaly head, including those with bald faces such as Beipiaosaurus or New World vultures. In fact, most of them appear to have had mostly feathered heads. The Troodon on the show also lack primary feathers entirely (even though those are present in all aviremigians for which integument is well documented), and have an awfully thin covering of feathers for being polar animals. (That was somewhat strange considering that even the tyrannosaurids on the show were portrayed with feathers, which was a pleasant surprise.) On the other hand, a good word must be said about the fact that the Troodon (along with all the other theropods) had non-pronated hands. This is one of those things that make you wonder why takes so long to sink into pop culture. It can't be that hard to give dinosaurs non-pronated hands, and, unlike feathered dinosaurs, they don't even change the appearance of the dinos that much. (At the same time, their presence will definitely show dino enthusiasts that you've been doing at least some of your research.)

I have a number of good things to say about the Troodon behavior wise. They don't engage in the laughable and unrealistic practice of killing ridiculously large herbivores that too many deinonychosaurs have been portrayed doing. They are only shown hunting small mammals (and, in the narration, said to feed on baby hadrosaurs). Granted, they also (try to) take advantage of an incapacitated ankylosaur turned on its back, but that looked like reasonable opportunism. (Although it would have been even better had omnivory in troodonts been mentioned, especially taking into account that they have a scene where the ankylosaur and the young Edmontosaurus experiment with feeding on grubs for extra protein.) We also see them using their sense to hearing to hunt prey, which, given the asymmetrical owl-like positioning of the ears in many troodonts, was a behavior they likely engaged in. Male Troodon are shown to be responsible for brooding eggs, which, based on the ratio between clutch and body size, is also likely behavior, though probable polygamy wasn't shown. However, the Troodon get one of the few particularly wild assertions made in the show when they are claimed to have been able to "see in slow motion". Also, there is a scene where a Troodon decides to bite a Gorgosaurus in the leg. Smart move. (I can get that a band of desperate Troodon might attempt to scare off a larger predator from a kill, but physically attacking it?)

This is purely aesthetic, but I'm going to agree with those who have said the dinosaurs in this documentary are a little too brown and drab. There's nothing wrong with being brown and drab, of course, but as none of the animals featured are likely to get their colors analyzed anytime soon (due to not preserving any integument), it would have been at least more visually appealing if some of the dinosaurs had had some (reasonably) bright colors or striking color patterns. Given that many modern reptiles are very visual animals and also use color patterns to communicate, it certainly wouldn't have been far fetched in the least. In fact, the color patterns the mammals had were arguably more striking than most of the dinosaurs', when in all likelihood it would've been the other way around.

Overall, though not focusing enough on the science behind it and not without faults, this is a good step up from much of the crap we've been getting.

Incidentally, I put up a poll on the blog. Haplocheirus appears to be winning, surprisingly, but I know it's only a matter of time before Balaur catches up. Fear not, for I will simply re-name the two choices afterward... I kid, I kid.

Rio

2011-04-17T04:27:00.000-07:00

I decided that I'm going to use this blog to review maniraptor-related films, shows, books, etc. that I stumble upon.

So I watched Rio last week. Here be spoilers. Brief ones without much detail, but I'll put that warning there just in case.

Cue brief plot summary: a pet male blue macaw (named Blu, not Rio) is sent to Brazil so he can mate with a female at a bird shelter, as they happen to be the last of their species. Then they get captured by poachers. Dun dun dun. And there's a side story where Blu's owner tries to find him, but this is Raptormaniacs, not Primatemaniacs. And in all honesty the humans don't make much impact on the final resolution of the plot.

I liked it, I suppose. The visuals are really stunning, especially the flying scenes and the plumage of the birds. The music is quite nice. (It's something of a musical, just so you know. I've never figured out why some people just indiscriminately hate musicals, because I don't mind as long as the songs are good. But I digress.) I did find the plot highly predictable, and I didn't really like the fact that only the main character did anything useful near the climax (though it made for good character development). But I'm not that great a judge of visuals and music and plot. Here comes the more interesting part of my review.

First of all, what maniraptors were there in this movie? The main plot and characters are presumably based on the real life conservation of the Spix's macaw. Although the name Spix's macaw is never said in the movie (the characters instead use the name "blue macaw"), the word "Spix's" is mentioned in passing at one point! (I love Genius Bonuses, don't you?) The Spix's macaw is a species that's likely (though not officially, as its habitat hasn't been fully surveyed) extinct in the wild, and is only hanging on through about eighty-five individuals in captive breeding programs. (I remember first reading about the Spix's macaw in a children's book that said only one was left in the wild. It died in 2000.)

There is a whole suite of Brazilian bird species in this movie, and I approve. South American wildlife totally don't get enough spotlight in pop culture, even in documentaries. Lions, elephants, wildebeest, leopards, cheetahs, buffalo, blah, blah, blah, we've seen all that before. Either way, we have a lot of underrepresented bird species as background characters in Rio, so keep a sharp eye out. In particular, we have supporting characters who are a toco toucan, a red-crested cardinal, and a... canary. Canaries aren't native to South America but to Africa and the Canary Islands, and in any case wild canaries aren't typically bright yellow as the one in the film is. Must be part of a feral population. Finally, there's a sulphur-crested cockatoo on the side of the villains. An Australian bird, not a South American one, but he's not a wild individual so that's probably excusable.

How well were these maniraptors presented? There's quite a lot of good stuff to say here. I was really impressed by how realistic the movements of the macaws were compared with their real life counterparts. I've said before that I'm really bothered by the Feather Fingers trope that always crops up with cartoon neornithines, and although this movie certainly doesn't avert this entirely (especially with the non-parrot birds), we do see the macaws using the feet as hands most of the time as they do in real life. I also liked that we see the macaws and toucans nesting in tree hollows and not generic bird nests, and their clutch sizes are also true to life. (Although I forgot exactly how many offspring the toucan had, it could've either been too many or approaching the maximum.) Last but not least, Blu gives us a decent dose of bird facts throughout the film as he has lived in a bookstore for most of his life. At one point he says that there are around forty flightless bird species when he is ridiculed for being afraid to fly. The ostrich, the emu, three cassowaries, five kiwis, two rheas, three steamer ducks with varying degrees of flightlessness, two island teals, two flightless grebes, the flightless cormorant, the kakapo, (around) twenty penguins, and (around) seventeen flightless rails with varying degrees of flightlessness, totaling fifty-eight species, and there would've been more if many flightless birds hadn't been driven to extinction in the past few centuries. Forty isn't too far off the mark though, given that there are still taxonomic debates and that Your Mileage May Vary on whether some "flightless" birds really count as "flightless".

On the less impressive side of things, we have macaws and toucans with the wrong toe configuration. They have one toe pointing backwards and two pointing forwards. Real macaws and toucans have four toes (as in typical theropods) with zygodactyl feet: digits I and IV pointing backwards, digits II and III pointing forwards. Even stranger is that the toco toucan's mate looks more like a... keel-billed toucan. What. I also found the bright blue plumage of the Spix's macaws to be more similar to that of the hyacinth macaw. Rule of Colorful?

All in all, not a bad film. Go ahead and watch it if you're not picky, if only to see pretty colors and listen to Latin American music. If nothing else, it's a film with dinosaurs in it.

A New Method for Inferring the Integument of Extinct Maniraptors

2011-04-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

A New and Extremely Inaccurate Method for Inferring the Integument of Extinct Maniraptors

By Alberta Claw and I. M. A. Troll

Email: albertonykus@gmail.com, internettroll@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

Since the description of Sinosauropteryx, a non-avian dinosaur preserved with filamentous feathers, in 1996, there has been a tendency in popular culture for professionals and dinosaur enthusiasts alike to insist on adding feathers to reconstructions of coelurosaurian dinosaurs. They have used subsequent findings of feathered dinosaurs since then to support this notion. In this paper we present a new method for inferring the integument of these dinosaurs and coin a name for this method, SRC (Spewing Random Crap). We also use this method to demonstrate that most non-avian maniraptors didn’t actually have feathers.

KEYWORDS

Maniraptors, feathers, scales, Jurassic Park, random crap, trolling

Introduction

The earliest reconstruction of a feathered non-avian dinosaur was that of a “Syntarsus” (now Megapnosaurus) by Sarah Landry, featured in Robert Bakker’s 1975 article The Dinosaur Renaissance, which we will not cite because neither of us has actually read it. Other early feathered dinosaur restorations were painted by Gregory Paul and Luis Rey, while Bakker also illustrated feathered Deinonychus in his book The Dinosaur Heresies, but we’re not going to cite that either because we’re mad that they turned out to be right.

In 1987, the first direct evidence of feathered non-avian dinosaurs was published in the form of a feather attachment surface found on the forelimb of the oviraptorosaur Avimimus, while in 1996 actual fossilized filamentous feathers were described in the description of the compsognathid Sinosauropteryx. Since then, feathers have been found associated with other non-avian coelurosaurs, such as the compsognathids Juravenator and Sinocalliopteryx and the tyrannosauroid Dilong. Among non-avian maniraptors, feathers have been found associated with the therizinosaur Beipiaosaurus, the alvarezsauroid Shuvuuia, the oviraptorosaurs Protarchaeopteryx, Caudipteryx, and Similicaudipteryx, the ~~raptors~~ deinonychosaurs Sinornithosaurus, Microraptor, Jinfengopteryx, and Anchiornis, and the indeterminate maniraptoran Yixianosaurus, while feather attachment surfaces have been found on the arm or tail bones of the deinonychosaurs Rahonavis and Velociraptor and the oviraptorosaur Nomingia. Almost all preserved maniraptor skin or skin impressions show feathers, while scales are have only been found on limited parts of the body such as the toes, the fingers, or the underside of the tail.

Using certain methods, such as phylogenetic bracketing, which we will ignore in this paper because we haven’t actually bothered to find out how they work, others have determined that it is most parsimonious to suppose that all non-avian maniraptors had feathers, and it is now typical for scientific artists to reconstruct them as such (Fig. 1). This is perfectly logical, but because we don’t think logically we will disregard all that evidence in this paper. The new method that we will introduce here is one that has been used by Internet trolls and stuck-up fanboys all over the World Wide Web, but has regretfully been overlooked by most mainstream scientists.

Figure 1. Scientifically accurate reconstruction of the ~~raptor~~ deinonychosaur Microraptor zhaoianus by Matt Martyniuk.

Materials and Methods

In this paper we will coin a new technical term for the new method utilized in this study, Spewing Random Crap (SRC). SRC is best utilized after one ignores all current evidence that contradicts their position, making it a highly ~~biased~~ objective and useful tool for ~~pseudo~~science. This method has been frequently used on the Internet, but, to the best of our knowledge, hasn’t appeared in many major publications until now. SRC consists mostly of committing numerous arbitrary logical and scientific fallacies in attempt to support one’s position and has been proven to be very effective at making the speaker look like a fool. SRC is an extension of the scientific method most commonly used by ~~bad~~ science and high school students, This Is The Conclusion, What Evidence* Can We Find To Support It? (TITCWECWFTSI).

Neither of us has actually studied any maniraptor fossils in person, but we (falsely) believe that we have gleaned enough information from unreliable Internet sources for us to apply SRC to the question of whether extinct maniraptors had feathers. We did so by making a list of arbitrary arguments we thought would not support the notion of feathered maniraptors without considering whether these arguments were accurate, logical, or even relevant. In this paper we shall refer to these arguments as Random Craps (RCs). Afterwards, we compared our results to a reliable source in an attempt to falsify our conclusions.

Specimens Examined

None. Not even photographs.

Results

Contrary to this paper, there’s good evidence that feathers were extensive and widespread among maniraptors (as mentioned in the introduction), and there’s no evidence at all any maniraptor lacked feathers, but, as a prerequisite to the use of SRC, we ignored the obvious conclusion that should have been drawn from that (i.e.: all maniraptors had feathers to some degree). After an hour or so or some other imprecise time interval of desperate thinking, we came up with the following list of RCs.

There is absolutely no evidence that maniraptors had feathers.

This completely contradicts our own introduction, but as the introduction was the only part of this paper for which we actually did any significant research and SRC requires ignorance of all contrary evidence, it was the first RC we were able to come up with.

Non-avian maniraptors with feathers preserved have only been found in Asia, so maniraptors found elsewhere wouldn’t have had feathers.

In reality, this is because soft tissue doesn’t fossilize well anyway and can only be preserved under special conditions that happened to be present in parts of Asia, but we overlooked that. And obviously if we really thought that this was the case we would argue that we shouldn’t reconstruct dinosaurs with eyeballs because eyeballs aren’t usually preserved in the fossil record. Also, by this argument we should also argue that elephant birds (from Madagascar) and terror birds (from the Americas) didn’t have feathers. But we’ll completely ignore that for no reason whatsoever, making this a classic example of an RC.

Maniraptor feathers were useless, so they lost them.

Translation: We couldn’t think of any reason non-avian maniraptors would need feathers, even though if we actually read through the relevant literature we’d know that many plausible functions for feathers have already been proposed.

Feathers are hard to maintain, which would’ve been difficult for non-avian maniraptors to do.

Modern birds can manage just fine, of course, but for no reason at all we assume that other maniraptors couldn’t. Our minds work in bizarre ways.

Saying all maniraptors had feathers is like saying all mammals have lion manes.

Hold on a second. A lion’s mane is a specialized display structure, not a universal characteristic (as the presence of integument usually is). Saying all maniraptors had feathers would be more akin to saying all mammals have hair, which happens to be correct. However, using bad analogies is our specialty. Bad analogies for the win!!!!1!1!1!111eleventy one!**

Maniraptors don’t look scary with feathers.

Duh! Of course, neither of us has actually experienced being nearly disemboweled by a cassowary or chased by a homicidal goose. We find it blindingly obvious that the appearances of living things that lived millions of years ago are directly controlled by personal perceptions of the two of us. Somehow, this counts as a scientific argument, except it doesn’t.

Through these RCs, we predicted that extinct maniraptors didn’t have feathers. We tried to falsify this prediction by watching the movie Jurassic Park about ten times (or maybe eleven times) as a test case. In this movie, the non-avian maniraptor “Velociraptor” (actually Deinonychus, due to the movie using taxonomy proposed by Gregory Paul***) features heavily. In none of these ten (or eleven) viewings did either of us notice any feathered “Velociraptor”. Therefore, we must conclude that our prediction was correct.

Discussion

We suggest that our RCs adequately show that extinct maniraptors didn’t have feathers. This is supported by the “Velociraptor” in Jurassic Park, even though that hardly represents what a living maniraptor looked like, and that movie was made before any non-avian dinosaurs preserved with actual feathers were discovered anyway. We could’ve come up with ten thousand more RCs, each more ridiculous than the last, but we wanted to play video games instead. We also suggest that extinct maniraptors had scales in place of feathers, because things that don’t have feathers obviously always have scales. We highly recommend that, in the future, reconstructions of maniraptors should make them completely scaly as they have always been (Fig. 2).**** We find that the SRC method is a useful method that can be applied to other ~~fringe~~ ~~pseudo~~scientific problems, and in future publications we’ll use SRC to investigate other strongly-debated scientific concepts, except they aren’t strongly debated at all by mainstream scientists and are only “questioned” by Internet trolls (i.e.: the authors of this paper).

Figure 2. ~~Pseudo~~scientific reconstruction of the ~~raptor~~ deinonychosaur Microraptor zhaoianus based on SRC by Albertonykus.

Conclusion

We have no clue what we are talking about, although we are very skilled at spouting pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo. This paper fails.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to two anonymous reviewers who somehow slipped us past peer review, because we definitely couldn’t have made it otherwise. Also thanks to all the random trolls on the Internet for giving us ideas for RCs.

References

We intentionally forgot all our references either because they contradict us or because they’re too unreliable to begin with. If we actually included any references, people could look them up and see that they’ve already been rebutted ten thousand times by others (including in our own paper), so we won’t give them that pleasure.

Note from editor: This paper actually didn’t get past peer review, but we thought it would be instructive to include it.

Last minute note from senior editor: Don’t feed the trolls.

*Except the evidence isn’t really evidence at all. (This is in fact the case for most, if not all, evidence presented through TITCWECWFTSI, but in this paper we officially make a distinction.)

**Sorry, our ~~pseudo~~scientific mask slipped off a bit back there.

***See? We actually can do research!

****We got stuck in time and never got past the 1980s.

Singing "Raptors" Addendum

2011-03-10T04:18:00.000-08:00

OMG OMG OMG Dr. Darren Naish commented on my blog!!1!!!1!!1!1!eleventyone!1!

Fans of vocalizing (non-ornithothoracine) dinosaurs, rejoice! There is still a ray of hope. According to a new comment Dr. Naish has just made on my post about dinosaur vocalization, it turns out that neornithines also use the larynx for vocalization in addition to the syrinx (contrary to older studies), meaning that the common ancestor of crocodilians and neornithines probably had some form of laryngeal vocalization. So non-ornithothoracine dinos may have been able to vocalize after all.

Singing "Raptors"

2011-02-28T04:07:00.000-08:00

Though that doesn't explain why Skull (and everyone else, for that matter) can talk. Not to mention we've seen him sing before. Go figure.

For a while, the answer to "Could dinosaurs vocalize?" was, "Sure, why not?" After all, both living dinosaurs (neornithines) and their closest living relatives (crocodilians) vocalize. But there's a catch. These two groups do not use the same organ for vocalization, meaning they evolved vocalization independently and their latest common ancestor likely couldn't vocalize at all! In crocodilians, vocal sounds are made by the larynx, while birds have an organ called the syrinx. We don't know how when crurotarsans evolved their larynx, because there are no skeletal features that correspond to this organ. However, there is a way to tell if a syrinx is present in extinct archosaurs, and that is the presence of the clavicular air sac that is required for the syrinx to function. As it turns out, although all saurischians have air sacs, only ornithothoracines (enantiornithines, hesperornithines, yanornithiforms, neornithines, and some intermediate taxa) have the clavicular air sac. (The carnosaur Aerosteon had a clavicular air sac, but this was likely evolved independently of the one ornithothoracines have.) That means non-ornithothoracine dinosaurs did not possess a syrinx and were probably not able to make vocal sounds. In fact, this might help explain why so many different dinosaur groups evolved so many different visual display structures.

Fans of roaring tyrannosaurids, screaming deinonychosaurs, and groaning sauropods, your childhood has just been ruined forever. But don't despair, as there are other means for non-ornithothoracine dinosaurs to have communicated acoustically. Mechanical ways of sound making such as foot stomping, wing beating, jaw snapping, hissing, and splashing are certainly not out of the question. And the traditional idea of trumpeting hadrosaurs may still be safe; you don't need vocal chords to blow a musical instrument, fortunately.

Nonetheless, I don't think we'll be seeing non-roaring tyrannosaurids on screen anytime soon. Reality is unrealistic. Thank the coconut effect.

Edit: See comments (and addendum).

Opinions

2011-02-05T02:21:00.000-08:00

My apologies if a non-existent post on Archaeopteryx showed up on anyone's dashboard. It's a post I'm still working on that I accidentally published. You'll see it again somewhere down the road.

A common excuse that people use on the Internet when they're corrected is, "It's just my opinion." But that still doesn't mean their opinion is right. If I believed the earth was flat, would that mean my opinion of whether the earth was flat is as valid as those who think the earth isn't flat? People are free to believe whatever they want to believe, but they should realize that their beliefs may not actually stand up to evidence.

Evidence

2011-01-29T21:43:00.000-08:00

The irony is that Therizinosaurus itself is known only from limb bones.

I must have satirized this before, but it's still a mystery: show anyone an image of a feathered terror bird and no one bats an eye, but show them a feathered deinonychosaur and they whine. Would these people argue that only hadrosaurs known to have scales had them? I doubt it. It's a wonder that they don't advocate we reconstruct Deinonychus as a skeleton or Utahraptor as bone fragments. There's no direct evidence to suggest they had skin or eyeballs or internal organs, after all.

Frankly, there's not a single shred of evidence to suggest that any deinonychosaur (in fact, any maniraptor) had an extensive covering of scales, while at least six taxa to date (Rahonavis, Sinornithosaurus, Microraptor, Jinfengopteryx, Velociraptor, and Anchiornis) show evidence of feathers. When even the MANIACs can't think of any excuses to write off feathered deinonychosaurs, you know you're fighting a losing battle.

Thankfully, such behavior appears to be dwindling on the Internet. A bigger problem with most (serious or semi-serious) reconstructions now is that even though they're feathered, they're not feathered correctly.

A Christmas Caudipteryx Chapter VI

2010-12-24T23:52:00.000-08:00

The conclusion of this storyline!

Yes, there really is an Alan Feduccia Wikipedia page. It's a lot longer than the Wikipedia pages of many, shall we say, more rigorous paleontologists, for shame.

Merry ~~Christmas~~ Saturnalia, everyone! Happy holidays!

A Christmas Caudipteryx Chapter V

2010-12-24T04:11:00.000-08:00

The whole "not reading signs" phenomenon that's present at zoos and other similar institutions really baffles me. If people don't know what they're looking at, why don't they read the sign that's right in front of them (or, in most cases, not too far off at least) instead of guessing arbitrarily and making themselves look like fools? Of course, even when they do read signs they probably still don't know what they're looking at (though chances are that it is explained a few lines down), but at least learn its proper name, please. (I remember reading a post at Tetrapod Zoology about red pandas, and Dr. Naish mentioned that one of the comments he heard while looking at the red pandas in a zoo was, "That's not a panda, pandas are black and white." A painful experience that must have been, indeed.)

As it happens, this phenomenon also appears online. In my experience, explaining why birds are dinosaurs (for example) can be extremely frustrating, mostly because the people you're trying to explain things to keep ignoring your main points and bringing up entirely irrelevant topics. (For an example of one of these discussions I've had, see here. My contributions begin on the second page.) It's particularly weird with people who accept the fact that birds had dinosaurian ancestors but don't grasp the implications. They think that it's somehow possible for something to be descended from another and not belong in the same clade as its ancestors. A living thing can never get out of a clade that its ancestors were in! There are also people who think that birds are just "related" to dinosaurs but not dinosaurs themselves, which is wrong. We are related to dinosaurs, and so are mushrooms and trees and bacteria if you go back far enough. The difference is that birds are nested deeply inside dinosaurs, not a branch that lies outside of Dinosauria. Finally, there are those who think that there's some sort of "debate" about whether birds are dinosaurs when there hasn't been for at least ten, if not twenty years. Only the BAND (who are nuts and don't know what they're talking about) and news media who only like to stir up controversy instead of actually learning about what they're reporting think there's any debate. Don't listen to fringe lunatics and idiot reporters, please.

To be fair, I must say I myself have recently had a "d'oh" moment when I failed to grasp the title of a journal entry. In my defense, I didn't realize that the title was actually the name of a blog.

A Christmas Caudipteryx Chapter IV

2010-12-22T04:38:00.001-08:00

I've been wanting to draw that last panel since forever.

"On vacation" is, of course, an exaggeration. It's tremendously easy to undo unconstructive edits on Wikipedia, so even if someone or another doesn't have any time to read through scientific papers or whip up anatomically accurate restorations they can still help out WikiProject Dinosaurs in other ways as long as they have Internet.

By the way, the "Eldritch Abomination" label at the bottom of this post references the Jurassic Park style dromaeosaurid.

A Christmas Caudipteryx Chapter III

2010-12-20T17:18:00.000-08:00

In spite of recent finds, there are still several coelurosaur ghost lineages. Using phylogenetics, it's possible to predict whether a certain clade existed at a certain point in time. If phylogenetic analyses are correct (and they might not be), we know that clade simply must have been around at that time. However, we may not find any actual fossils of that clade from that time period. When this happens, we end up with a ghost lineage.

For a long time, Archaeopteryx was the oldest known maniraptor, dating from the Late Jurassic. But Archaeopteryx was an avialian, one of the most derived maniraptors. If avialians were around in the Jurassic, where were all the other Jurassic maniraptor groups? The BAND jumped on this fact, calling it the "temporal paradox" and using it as "evidence" that birds couldn't have descended from dinosaur ancestors. But the BAND were wrong (and still are). The real answer to the "paradox" was that we simply hadn't found the other Jurassic maniraptors. Throughout the last ten years or so these ghost lineages have slowly been filled up. We now have Jurassic deinonychosaurs (Anchiornis, as well as some teeth and an undescribed troodont nicknamed "Lori"), alvarezsauroids (Haplocheirus), and even a possible therizinosaur from the Early Jurassic (Eshanosaurus). The odd group out is the oviraptorosaurs. What did Jurassic oviraptorosaurs look like? Only time will tell.

A Christmas Caudipteryx Chapter II

2010-12-20T04:08:00.000-08:00

I was aiming to put up one part of this storyline a day. I failed after the first chapter.

Even stinkin' synapsids include some pretty interesting groups. Proboscideans are one of these. Unfortunately, I can't say anything intelligent about them because first of all this blog is Raptormaniacs and second, I'm not Dr. Naish.

A Christmas Caudipteryx Chapter I

2010-12-17T19:41:00.000-08:00

It's the Raptormaniacs Christmas special! (Even if it has almost nothing to do with Christmas itself.)

I sometimes feel the same way as Remex. I learned a long, long time ago to never, ever read Youtube comments. On the other hand, sometimes it can be a guilty pleasure to read such comments when there are other, vastly more knowledgeable (and probably more sane) people in the vicinity (such as at Tet Zoo) who can take these trolls and turn them inside out, mash them into a pulp, mash their pulp into a pulp, then fling the remains into the far reaches of the universe where they can get devoured by some sort of extraterrestrial life form. Plus, I can feature particularly egregious offenders as Dethroning Moments of Suck on Deviant Art.

Also, I really, really wish that "birds evolving from pterosaurs" remark was just a sarcastic offhand comment, but it's not.

Tough Questions

2010-11-19T19:57:00.000-08:00

What are the answers to these questions, anyway? For the first one, clearly not any single individual deinonychosaur would be able to spontaneously fly if it belongs to a taxon that can't fly to begin with. However, we do know that some small deinonychosaurs could probably fly. Presumably, a newly-hatched deinonychosaur wouldn't be able to fly, but we don't know how long it took for them to fledge.

For the second question, I suppose it also depends on what kind of neornithine we're talking about. Flightless ones will never be able to fly no matter how much they eat, but what about flying ones? Some birds feed their young every fifteen minutes. Assuming it generally takes around twenty days for these birds to fledge, they'd have eaten around two thousand insects by the time they leave the nest!

I don't think we can give a definite answer to the last question. My guess would be "a lot".

Puggles Part III

2010-11-17T00:19:00.000-08:00

It's not uncommon these days to see paleo art depicting Mesozoic maniraptors feeding their young in the manner that many living maniraptors do now. But, in truth, this may not have been the case for most Mesozoic maniraptors.

Mesozoic maniraptors appear to have been most similar in reproductive habits to more basal modern birds such as palaeognaths, the tinamous and their flightless relatives such as ostriches and emus. Like many palaeognaths, male oviraptorosaurs and deinonychosaurs appear to have took multiple mates, who then laid their eggs in one big clutch. The males were probably the ones responsible for brooding the nests.

Also like palaeognaths (as well as basal neognaths such as the gallianseres - the pheasant and duck group), young oviraptorosaurs and deinonychosaurs could run and walk well as soon as they were out of the egg. As a result, they were probably quite capable of feeding themselves. One or both of their parents may have helped shelter them from predators and lead them to food sources, but when it came down to actually procuring the food, the hatchlings were most likely on their own.

So, unlike the blind and helpless young that early mammals probably had, theropods in general likely had very precocial young!

Now, it's still possible that these theropods fed their young on some occasions, as crocodiles (which are also archosaurs that have hatchlings which can hunt for themselves) have been observed feeding their young in captivity. But given the apparent rarity of this behavior, it's still safer to assume that most Mesozoic theropods didn't feed their young most of the time, if they did at all.

Puggles Part II

2010-11-10T23:52:00.000-08:00

The intelligence of Mesozoic maniraptors is frequently exaggerated by pop culture and dinosaur fans, but it's good to point out that Mesozoic mammals probably weren't a whole lot more intelligent when the mammal enthusiasts get too above themselves.

Regarding Zahavi's line, the handicap principle is a hypothesis put forth by biologist Amotz Zahavi to explain why sexual selection often selects for characteristics that hinder their owners. According to this, these characteristics evolved because they hinder their owners. The idea is that, if a male can escape from enough predators and find enough food to survive to maturity in spite of such handicaps, he must be a very fine male indeed. There's a show on Animal Planet called The Most Extreme. Each episode focuses on a certain aspect of zoology (such as "Biters", or "Predators", or "Global Conquerors") and then lists the "top ten" animal contenders for that category. This isn't decided through anything particularly rigorous or scientific, but the show does contain some good information and I find it entertaining when I happen to catch it on TV. (It really messed up badly when one episode claimed that Tyrannosaurus rex was the ancestor of the Komodo dragon, however.) Either way, there was one episode I saw called "Fashion Disasters", which talked about how the physical features of some animals can cause difficulties for them, even eventually killing them. It's no surprise that seven out of ten of the contenders were in thanks to features they gained through sexual selection.

Of course, for the handicap principle to manifest at such a young age as a newly hatched monotreme would be detrimental and so probably wouldn't occur.

Puggles Part I

2010-10-28T01:49:00.000-07:00

A puggle is an occasionally-used term for baby monotreme, by the way. It appears that it was originally used for baby echidnas, and some websites I've read say that since baby echidnas and platypuses don't look alike it's erroneous to use it for platypuses. But since echidnas appear to be essentially terrestrial platypuses, I'll use it either way.

Warm and Fuzzy

2010-10-28T01:43:00.000-07:00

I can never figure out how to get Ostrom's head right.

But the champion of art evolution on this blog has to be Skull! Just compare his first appearance in the "theme song" with the way he looks in the Balaur bondoc song.

Guest: Balaur

2010-10-10T00:56:00.001-07:00

Parody of the P-p-platypus.

Thank goodness for scanners. I no longer have to awkwardly type up the script. I still apologize if my handwriting is in any way hard to read*, but at least the image is quite clear.

*If so, all you have to do is ask!

I chose to adopt the thought-provoking hypothesis that Balaur bondoc was a strange herbivorous dromaeosaurid instead of the conventional double-bladed superpredator image, because it's funnier. And, frankly, more interesting.

Maniraptors in Pink

2010-10-08T01:14:00.000-07:00

Over at ArtEvolved, they're organizing a fundraising event based on paleo art! All through October, you can draw and send in pink dinosaurs. They'll donate one dollar to cancer research for every pink dinosaur drawn. If you're not so comfortable with drawing, no pressure. You can also support the event by donating directly here.

Traditionally, dino artists have always been free to take liberties with dinosaur colors. After all, just about all of our dinosaur books make a point of how it's impossible to tell colors from dinosaur fossils. However, that's beginning to change. Thanks to exciting new developments in the examination of fossils, it is now possible to identify some types of color pigments in fossilized integument. So it is very possible that many of our speculations on dinosaur colors, particularly of those that have their skin and skin coverings preserved with them, will be proven wrong.

But we are still allowed to take liberties with prehistoric beasts that haven't or won't have their colors revealed, right?

Well, not exactly, especially concerning feathered dinosaurs like maniraptors.

There are several ways feathers get their colors. Blue is the result of light being scattered through microscopic structures within integument. The pennaceous feathers* of deinonychosaurs and oviraptorosaurs certainly have the potential to be blue, but we're not so sure about protofeathers. Superficially, protofeathers look a lot like mammalian hair, which cannot be blue. (Which explains why there are mammals with blue skin but not blue fur, even in groups that have fairly good color vision.) And fossilized iridescent feathers usually restrict their iridescence to the barbules, which protofeathers don't have. However, protofeathers, being homologous to pennaceous feathers, had an internal structure more like pennaceous feathers than like hair. So blue protofeathers might still be possible.

*Deinonychosaurs, oviraptorosaurs, and basal birds have pennaceous feathers only on the wings and tail, or (in deinonychosaurs at least) occasionally on the head and parts of the body, the rest of the body being covered in protofeathers. For a more detailed description of feather distribution in the derived maniraptors, see here.

Most other colors are produced through color pigments. Melanins are responsible for different shades of gray and brown, and a lack of melanin will result in white. Combined with structural color, melanins can also produce full-on black. So far, fossilized dinosaur colors have been deduced by examining their preserved melanin pigments.

Another group of pigments is the carotenoids. These are responsible for bright reds, yellows, and oranges in not only feathers but skin, yolk*, and scales. They can also combine with structural color to make green. Dinosaurs can't make carotenoids by themselves. They must eat plants, or fish and invertebrates that eat plants. Because of this, carnivorous dinosaurs don't have much choice in feather colors and generally make do with just structural colors and melanins, unless they feed on herbivorous fish or insects. (Duller reds are okay for carnivores though, as they can be produced by melanins.) There are exceptions to this, like Egyptian vultures which have bright yellow faces, but that's because they feed on herbivore poop.

*Many birds use flavins for yolk instead.

There are also the porphyrins, which probably don't fossilize, but luckily the colors they produce (mostly browns and reds) can probably be deduced through just melanin. Interestingly, they have a role in insulation, so perhaps feathered dinosaurs that were active in colder temperatures had a few extra splashes of reddish brown. There are other types of color pigments out there, and many bird groups have evolved their own unique pigments, but these are the main ones.

For a much more comprehensive and detailed guide, go to DinoGoss!

Now, how did an announcement about a fundraising event turn into this?

Quick Announcement

2010-09-22T00:20:00.000-07:00

Taxonomy is serious bizness.

Savape and the Avian Style Meme

2010-09-12T03:53:00.001-07:00

I actually have five new comics in my sketchbook, I just haven't scanned them yet. On a more productive note, I've started using Blogger's pages function to put up some introductory info about this blog as well as a blogroll.

Those of you who follow me on Deviant ART have probably seen this before. I meant to put it up here as well, but didn't do it until now. The original template is by lizkay.

I originally wanted to use a dromaeosaurid for this, but decided to use Savape: close enough in anatomy, but (probably) lying on the avian* fork in the maniraptor family tree.

Either way, combining the traits of a cartoony basal bird and pop culture caricatures of modern birds was fun to do. I had to cope with Savape's visible wing claws, long tail, retractable toe, and lack of an alula, tertials, or beak, for instance.

Personal - Savape (and nearly all the other characters in Raptormaniacs) was drawn using minimal references. As cartoony as my drawings are, I usually still use references to get the basics done, but with Raptormaniacs being even less serious than usual I just drew my own perception of each character.

Marahute - This one turned out well; a lot better than I anticipated. It was the first one other than the personal style I drew, so I wasn't sure if I was any good at this.

Pokemon - I used Fearow as a base for this one, as its build and general personality are more in line with Savape's.

Jeremy - I found it hard to get good full-body shots of Jeremy, and a lot of his images showed him being comically tied up in string. Appropriate for him, perhaps, but not for the generally more dignified Savape. Fortunately, I discovered a nice picture of him standing guard on a wooden post.

Kehaar - I really like this one. Perhaps it's that Kehaar's aggressive streak fits and so the rest just caught on; I don't really know.

Quest for Camelot - It wasn't too hard to compensate for the differences between Savape and modern birds, a six-limbed partly mammalian gryphon was trouble. So I just did the head. Besides, I couldn't find full-body shots for this one.

Asterix - I don't know anything about this web comic, but I just went with what I had. I used mainly the rooster as a base because the body shape fits better, even though Savape is female.

Family Guy - I also happen not to know anything about this show, either, perhaps surprisingly. I don't watch much television. That weird fight with the chicken I watched on Youtube (to get some inkling of what I was supposed to be drawing) was more random than Freakazoid!, so I wasn't exactly impressed, although I won't judge on the basis of that one clip. Either way, I think I did okay with this one.

For the Birds - Couldn't really do much with this. The Pixar birds are just round things with eyes and beaks, so I responded in kind. Not that it's a bad thing; I love Pixar as much as everyone else.

Iago - Yikes, toothy neornithines and feather fingers really freak me out. I was extremely bothered by feather fingers when I was younger, so I blatantly avoided this trope as much as I could. Whenever I wanted to draw a neornithine holding something I would always have it use its feet or beak. That still holds true today. Luckily, Savape is able to circumvent these pet peeves of mine. As an Archaeopteryx lithographica, she naturally has teeth as well as functional fingers.

The Animals of Farthing Wood - I found a good image of the shrike and used that. Savape is rather predacious. Wouldn't put it past her to impale her victims on thorns or some such.

Griff - No full body shot again, but being a gryphon character that's no handicap. I only needed the head.

*That's Aves, semi-broadly defined. Some authorities use the narrower Aves which includes only modern birds and anything descended from their last common ancestor. Following this usage Archaeopteryx lithographica isn't an avian, although it's still (probably) closer to modern birds than to dromaeosaurids.

Vancouver Aquarium

2010-07-20T20:32:00.001-07:00

A slight deviation from the usual fare, but I'll try to get more comics up soon.

On the second week of July, I went to the Vancouver Aquarium. Here are some photos I took there. Ironically, I couldn't get many good photographs of fish; they tended to move around too much.

My favorite part of this aquarium is probably the Amazon Gallery. To get there you have to go through the Tropic Gallery first, which has many tropical fish from both the sea and freshwater, but I didn't take any pictures. It's quite hot and humid in the Amazon Gallery to emulate the tropics, but you can see some pretty neat animals and exhibits. There are Amazonian fish, of course, and a fruit bat exhibit. The main portion of the gallery is an aviary-type area with a wooden walkway. There are many types of animals in this area and you can have lots of fun trying to find them all. My record was pretty poor this time, but I've gotten close in the past. There are many types of butterflies, river turtles, red-footed tortoises, scarlet ibises, three species of parrots, three species of tanagers, whistling ducks, two-toed sloths, and plumed basilisks, the last of which are probably the hardest to look for. Out of all the times I've been to the Vancouver Aquarium, I've only seen a basilisk twice. I didn't get to see any sloths or ducks or blue-gray tanagers this time, either. In fact, nearly all the animals I saw this time were those that you were bound to see either way and didn't take much searching. Disappointing, I guess, but it's part of the fun.

Other animals from the gallery I really wanted to see but didn't were an emperor tamarin and a pygmy marmoset. The two tiny monkeys are kept in a exhibit separated by netting from the aviary area, and it's really neat to watch their dynamic. Once I saw the two species grooming each other. Interspecies interactions are cool, I guess.

Here's a red-footed tortoise.

Even though this post isn't a comic, there'd better be some maniraptors, right? These hyacinth macaws are very big and striking. However, the one thing I don't like about them is their calls, which are very loud and raucous and very hard on the ears.

A nice picture I got of a scarlet ibis feeding from a feeding basket

Some pictures of a river turtle.

Other than big fish tanks and the aviary area, the gallery also has many terrariums for various reptiles, amphibians, and arthropods. This is an emerald tree boa.

A matamata turtle. It's made of 100% turtle power.

Some Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Not from the Amazon.

A spectacled caiman.

Another part of the aquarium I really like is on their lower floor. (When you enter the aquarium, you're on their upper floor.) There's a huge, impressive-looking tank full of West Coast sea life down there (which you can view from above on the upper floor), but I'm talking about the amphibian exhibits. And it was about at this point where my photography skills became slightly better.

This is a Hong Kong warty newt.

The aquarium also houses caecilians. Which is awesome, to say the least. There's a caecilian among this water weed. Somewhere.

A green tree frog. (No, duh. It's really called that.)

A poison-dart frog. Or dart-poison frog. Or arrow-poison frog. (A frog that by any other name would still be just as lethal.)

Um, these are reed frogs. I think.

Some axolotls. They're cute.

An ornate horned frog, lying in ambush for prey.

Some tree frogs whose name escapes me.

Look at that! It's a golden toad exhibit!

There doesn't appear to be anything inside it. And that's because there isn't. It's "unavailable due to extinction".

A coelacanth. They must have gotten a new one after Traumador the Tyrannosaur rescued the one they had before.

From the lower floor of the aquarium you can reach the underwater viewing area of the dolphin pool. Walk a little further and you're outdoors. This is where most of the marine mammal pools are, but they all have underwater viewing, too. Only the dolphin pool's is actually connected to the main building, however.

This is a seagull I saw near the pools. They hang around here quite a lot, probably to get a share of the food. (As it happens, visitors generally feed here, too.)

A Pacific white-sided dolphin.

A harbor porpoise. The only captive one on the West Coast of North America, I've read, but I may be mistaken. These porpoises sometimes get murdered by bottlenose dolphins in the wild. Either the dolphins are having fun killing stuff or doing practice for murdering baby dolphins. Or both. Really ruins their image, doesn't it?

A sea otter. This is the aquarium that spawned the Youtube video of two sea otters holding hands. One of the otters in the video is dead now, I've heard.

In the belugas' underwater viewing area, there are a few tanks with other Arctic sea life. These are Arctic char. Although I couldn't get good photos of most fish, this one turned out kind of cool. Sadly, I didn't get any beluga pictures.

OMG it's a narwhal! This model makes it quite clear that the narwhal's tusk is a single erupted tooth, so it's off to one side. Sometimes two teeth erupt, resulting in two tusks.

Back inside the main building, I kind of breezed through the BC Coast Gallery.

This is a crime scene! A pile of clams have been murdered. It's the work of a sun star. (You can just barely see part of a sun star on the upper right corner.)

Some hagfish. Slimy critters that tie themselves in knots and burrow into dead bodies. They even defend themselves with slime by suffocating their attackers in it. And then they get rid of the excess slime by slipping themselves through one of their own knots.

I didn't dislike the BC Gallery, but what I was really interested in was the part at its end. I don't know the name of this area, but it's a place with many informative, interactive exhibits. You can listen to the static generated by elephantnose fish, view flashlight fish in a dark tank (and watch what happens when you turn on the lights), observe how barnacles cope with swift currents, look at the world through a four-eyed fish's view, rewind and fast forward a live cam of a tank of sea stars to see how they move, and learn how scientists study the ocean. There is a series of jellyfish exhibits at the front, too, which aren't interactive but very nice to look at nonetheless.

A fried egg jellyfish. Is it edible?

I don't know if the fried egg jelly is edible, but the exhibit sign for these blue jellyfish (they're not all blue, however) say these are. They're very active and kind of cute in a jellyfish way. I've actually eaten jellyfish before, though I don't know if it was one of these.

Subadult moon jellyfish. (They had the juveniles and eggs on display, too, but it's hard to get good photos of them.)

And here are the fully grown ones.

An immature lion's mane jellyfish.

A tentacled snake. Nearby was a video you could play that showed how these snakes and other aquatic predators catch their prey.

A dome filled with mosquitoes. An interesting idea for an exhibit, but I wonder what's the white liquid they fill it with. They played sounds of mosquitos buzzing inside the dome, so it was kind of irritating.

The sanddab exhibit was split into two halves with different-colored substrate. When a sanddab settled in one half, it would change color to match it.

Do u leik mudkipz? I've always thought that mudkip was an aquatic salamander like an axolotl or mudpuppy with fish traits, but it appears it's actually a mudskipper with salamander traits. Go fig.

Just a roadkilled mole I found on the parking lot...

Hard Work

2010-06-04T20:26:00.000-07:00

My conversations with classmates typically fall into four distinct categories.

1) The Pre Test Conversation, for example:
Classmate: Is there a test today?
Me: Yeah.
Classmate: Are you ready?
Me: Yeah.

Or:

Classmate: Is there a test today?
Me: Yeah.
Classmate: Help me!!!

2) The Group Presentation Conversation, for example:
Classmate: Do you think we should put this in?
Me: Yeah, that looks good.

Or:

Me: -Working on Powerpoint-
Classmate: Help me learn how to hypnotize someone! (What???)*

3) The Casual Chat, for example:
Classmate: Do you like sports?
Me: No.

Or:

Classmate: Do you watch TV?
Me: No.

4) Frivolous Nonsense, for example:
Classmate: I was really pissed off today by the people sitting near me!
Me: Did you want to incinerate them?
Classmate: Yes! I'm glad someone understands me!

Or:

Classmate: -Creating something in Drafting and Designs class- This is a spaceship.
Me: It's a hydrogen bomb!
Classmate: IT'S NOT A BOMB!!!

The following is based on one of those Frivolous Nonsense types. (By the way, they generally only occur with one or two classmates. All three of these Frivolous Nonsense examples were conversations with the same person.)

Panel One
Skull: Lots of exhibits want to take over the museum.

Panel Two
Skull: But they don't work as hard as I do.

Panel Three
Skull: Only I try to take over the museum every day!

Panel Four
Ostrom: But...

Panel Five
Ostrom: If you try to take over the museum every day, shouldn't you have succeeded by now?

Panel Six
Skull: Shut up!

*Just for the record, I actually did help him look up tips on hypnosis using Google. He seems to have either forgotten about it or given up now, however.

Death

2010-06-02T18:30:00.000-07:00

This is based on a real conversation I had with a classmate.

Panel One
Ostrom: Hey, Zahavi, are you scared of death?

Panel Two
Zahavi: I used to be. But then I flattened death with a mallet, so I'm not anymore.

Panel Three
Ostrom: Good for you! Death is just a part of life, after all.

Panel Four
Zahavi: Are you scared of anything?

Panel Five
Ostrom: Yes.
Zahavi: What?

Panel Six
Ostrom: Death.

Origin of the Nightmare

2010-05-30T15:40:00.000-07:00

Consider this the epilogue to the Teach the Controversy mini series.

Panel One
Remex: You know why you get nightmares, Skull?

Panel Two
Skull: Sleep is something we still don't quite understand.

Panel Three
Remex: It's because you eat too much meat!

Panel Four
Remex: I always knew dromaeosaurids were real freaks.

Panel Five
Skull: How am I supposed to eat anything?
Remex: Oh, right. No feeding in the museum.

Panel Six
Skull: No, I mean I'm a fossil cast. How would I eat?
Remex: Well, you sleep... and talk...

Teach the Controversy Part III

2010-05-22T17:22:00.000-07:00

The last part in this mini series.

Panel One
Savape: As I see it, there's only one solution to this.

Panel Two
Savape: Euthanize him!

Panel Three
Ostrom: You seem happy.
Savape: 'Tis a gleeful thing.

Panel Four
Ostrom: Is it even possible to euthanize a fossil cast?
Savape: I don't know, but it's worth a try.

Panel Five
Ostrom: That's euthanasia?

Panel Seven
Skull: Thank goodness you woke me up! I was having a terrible nightmare about creationists!
Zahavi: How are you supposed to tell if he's asleep, anyway?

Teach the Controversy Part II

2010-05-15T15:20:00.000-07:00

Panel One
Ostrom: Skull! You've got to snap out of it.

Panel Two
Skull: NOOO!!!

Panel Three
Ostrom: Zahavi, this calls for drastic measures.

Panel Six
Skull: Teach the controversy!!!

To be continued...

Teach the Controversy Part I

2010-05-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

Panel One
Dinky: Something terrible is happening!

Panel Two
Dinky: You all have to come to the museum quick!

Panel Three
Dinky: Skull has gone mad!

Panel Four
Ostrom: He seems okay to me.

Panel Five
Dinky: Just wait for it...

Panel Six
Skull: Teach the controversy!!!

To be continued...

I Love the World

2010-05-01T17:57:00.000-07:00

Savape leads the world's eumaniraptors in a parody of Discovery Channel's I Love the World commercials (2008 version and 2009 version). Guest singers include (in order of appearance) Avisaurus archibaldi, Scansoriopteryx heilmanni, Hesperornis regalis, Pyroraptor olympius, Sinornithosaurus sp., Troodon formosus, Hesperonychus elizabethae, Rahonavis ostromi, Utahraptor ostrommaysorum, Mei long, and Velociraptor mongoliensis.

As usual, I'll provide lyrics.

I love the crashing,
I love the ashy skies,
I love trees falling,
I love when I can't fly,
I love the whole world and all its meteorites,
Boom de ah da,
Boom de ah da,
Boom de ah da,
Boom de ah da.

I love tsunamis,
I love real bloody things,
I love to die fast,
I love the tyrant kings,
I love the whole world and all its extinctions,
Boom de ah da,
Boom de ah da,
Boom de ah da,
Boom de ah da.

I love disaster,
I love ankylosaurs,
I love volcanoes,
I love rogue herbivores,
I love the whole world and all its doom and death,
Boom de ah da,
Boom de ah da,
Boom de ah da,
Boom de ah da...

Eumaniraptors' Return

2010-04-29T18:39:00.000-07:00

Panel One
Ostrom: Hey there!

Panel Two
Remex: What are you doing here? We had a deal!

Panel Three
Ostrom: We only said we'd leave temporarily, not forever

Panel Four
Savape: We decided it was time to return.
Ostrom: People can only handle so many phylogenetic jokes.

Panel Six
Savape: So stay tuned for the awesome return of eumaniraptors!

Oh, No...

2010-04-25T15:13:00.000-07:00

Panel One
Remex: Hey, Ebeff, here's something you might want to see.

Panel Two
Remex: It's a maniraptor cladogram, based on the latest studies.

Panel Three
Ebeff: Nice, but I've been searching around on the Internet and found this...

Panel Four
Remex: Oh, no...

The phylogeny shown in the last panel is a combination of wacky fringe hypotheses and outdated info.

Guests: Haplocheirus and Xixianykus

2010-04-22T21:15:00.000-07:00

Panel One
Remex: It's time for another guest comic.

Panel Two
Remex: Meet new alvarezsauroids Haplocheirus and Xixianykus.

Panel Three
Haplocheirus: 2010 has been very kind to us alvarezsauroids so far.
Xixianykus: If you ask me we need more recognition.

Panel Four
Remex: Come to think of it, there's something similar going on with oviraptorosaurs. With Banji and Luoyanggia...
Xixianykus: Technically, Luoyanggia is from 2009...

Panel Six
Remex: What was that for?
Ebeff: Alvarezsauroids are eumaniraptors, right?

"Oviraptoriforms"

2010-04-17T21:16:00.001-07:00

Panel One
Remex: Thanks for the help last time, Ebeff.

Panel Two
Ebeff: No problem, Remex. We oviraptoriforms need to stick together.

Panel Three
Remex: Um, did I ever tell you that Oviraptoriformes is polyphyletic?

Panel Four
Ebeff: Is that so?

Panel Five
Ebeff: That's okay.

Panel Six
At least we're still enigmosaurs!

Remex and Ebeff comics tend to be more of phylogenetic in jokes rather than more traditional humor. At one point oviraptorosaurs and therizinosaurs were thought to be each others' closest relatives, but later studies showed this was wrong. At the time, the Oviraptorosauria + Therizinosauria group was known as either Oviraptoriformes or Enigmosauria.

By the way, if anyone's still confused about who's who in Raptormaniacs, I drew a (helpful?) dramatis personae.