Singing "Raptors"

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

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

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

The conclusion of this storyline!

Yes, there really is an Alan Feduccia Wikipedia page.

Merry Christmas Saturnalia, everyone! Happy holidays!

A Christmas Caudipteryx Chapter V

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

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

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.