Tag Archives: jurassic park

Dinosaurs in three dimensions: See Jurassic Park 3D on Houston’s biggest screen — complete with a Jurassic Paleo Hall tour

Published by on in Giant Screen Theatre
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It’s the cult classic that launched a thousand fascinations with fossils. Influenced a generation of dinosaur devotees. Made you forever fear wilderness toilets, whether stranded on a prehistoric amusement park/island or just camping in Pedernales.

jurassicpark3dNow Jurassic Park is back in 3D, and this, well, this you’ve got to see. And where else than at HMNS’ Giant Screen Theatre, also known as the single largest screen in town?

So perhaps you already know we have an expansive screen. But need we mention our new, not-even-a-year-old, monstrous Morian Hall of Paleontology? Yeah. It’s only what the Huffington Post called one of the top dinosaur exhibits in the entire country. No big deal.

But to add to our Jurassic fierceness, our docents are guiding special <i>Jurassic</i> tours of that new Paleo Hall — spotlighting the real specimens featured in the film and separating scientific fact from fiction. Oh, yeaaaaah, we did.

For more information on our guided tours, call the Box Office at 713-639-4629 or click here to reserve your Jurassic Park 3D tickets!

Wyrex’s fancy footwork and tender hands: Get to know this tyrannosaur’s softer side

Published by on in Paleontology
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As we all know, Tyrannosaurus rex is the world’s No. 1 favorite dinosaur, so we at the Houston Museum of Natural Science are as pleased as punch over our specimen Wyrex, a truly splendid fossil that will help fill out the Cretaceous zone of the new Hall of Paleontology.

Wyrex will join our casts of Stan, an adult rex, and Bucky, a teenage Tyrannosaurus, in the new hall next week.

Bakker Wyrex Blog
Here’s our Wyrex sniffing at the trail of our duck-billed dinosaurs

Our Wyrex gets its name for Montana rancher Don Wyrick, who spotted bones eroding out of river sediments that were deposited about 66 million years ago during the Lancian Age — the last slice of dinosaur history before the great die-off.

Of course, T. rexes are famous for their bone-crushing bite and the old question of whether they were cowardly scavengers or fearless predators. But equally fascinating is the century-old puzzle of tyrannosaur digits. (Fingers, not phone numbers).

And that’s precisely why our Wyrex is a scientific groundbreaker. He has the best-preserved hands and feet of any T. rex ever uncovered, and he has something to say about three tyrannosaurian problems:

Theory No. 1: Some scientists say: T. rex was a waddling stumblebum, so slow that you could easily escape it at an amble.

Let’s look at the hard (fossilized) data.  Our database includes all the maxi-fauna today —  land creatures who grow to a ton or more. We find that slow walkers, like elephants, have short shins and very short ankles compared to their thigh length.  A charging African elephant, for example, hits 22 miles per hour. Faster large animals, such as rhinos (who get almost as heavy as elephants) are equipped with more length in shin and ankle. An angry white rhino easily surpasses 30 miles per hour.

Wyrex, in contrast, seems elegantly leggy — his shin and ankle are way, way longer compared to his thigh than the ratios we see in an elephant. Wyrex confirms what a dozen other T. rex skeletons have already told us: These giant dinos were built for speed. (Whether they were built for comfort, I’d guess no one was brave enough to find out.)

Bakker Wyrex Blog
A rhino, a fast big critter, next to a T. rex. Notice how long the shin and ankle are in the rex.

Here’s another way to test the slow-rex theory. Fast animals today — small, medium and large — have compact ankles. The long ankle bones, called “metapodials,” are tightly bound to each other so they make one strong unit. Slow walkers like elephants have loosely constructed metapodials that let the entire ankle spread out.  Check out our Wyrex’s ankle. Tight or loose?

TIGHT! There are three long ankle bones, and the inner and outer bones hug the middle bone so tightly that the whole ankle works as one bony unit. That is not an elephant-style spreading foot.

Our three rexes, Stan, Bucky and Wyrex, tell us most emphatically that their species were not slowpokes.

Theory No. 2:  Some scientists say that T. rex fingers were powerful meat hooks.

Wyrex’s hand is worth pondering. In the new hall you’ll be able to stand very close to the bones, so you can compare your arm and fingers to his. At first glance, the rex mitt does seem as strong as a grizzly bear’s. But wait … in nature, what matters is how strong your hand is compared to the rest of your body. Wyrex was 10 times as heavy as the average grizzly bear. That means the Wyrex arm is 10 times weaker relative to his body weight than the bear’s.

When we diagram a grizzly bear with the the proportions of Wyrex, the poor bear seems to have a ridiculously wussy arm:

Bakker Wyrex Blog
Check out the measly arms on this Grizzly bear proportioned like our Wyrex.

Now analyze the Wyrex claws. Are they as big and hooked as hand claws from earlier meat-eating dinos? Nope. Our Acro (Acrocanthosaurus) is a bit smaller in body weight than Wyrex but has much heavier, sharper and more hooked claws.  T. rex evolved from an ancestor shaped like Acrocanthosaurus, who evolved from something like the Jurassic megalosaurs. If claw strength really was important, why did evolution make the rex claws weaker?

Then there’s the famous two-fingered salute. Most dino carnivores had three strong fingers — thumb, index finger and middle finger. Allosaurs from the Jurassic are built that way, and so are the acrocanthosaurs from the Early Cretaceous. So are all the raptors. One example? Our cast of Deinonychus, the raptor who inspired Jurassic Park.

Wyrex has a near-perfect hand. But how many fingers does he have? Two — thumb and index. And the finger bones are far skinnier than what you see in an allosaur or an acro. All T. rexes and their close cousins, the gorgosaurs, were weakly two-fingered.

Bakker Wyrex Blog
A rex arm next to a Jurassic meat-eating megalosaur.

How and why did evolution clip off that third finger? Wyrex shows us. Stare at the outer side of the hand. You’ll see an ultra-thin bone crowded against the index finger. That’s a remnant of the third digit. It was retained because some major muscles attach to the base of the third finger, muscles that are needed to rotate the whole hand sideways.  Other rex specimens probably also had that remnant of the third finger, but lost the bone after death when scavengers nibbled away the muscles.

third finger
The thin remnant of Wyrex’s third finger

The muscle-attachment on the finger remnant tells us that some sideways movement was still important in Wyrex, but it was a delicate movement — not the brute action of a meat-hook.

Theory No. 3: In 1905 one famous scientist theorized that rex fingers were for gentle…tickling!?

It sounds weird at first. However, that scientist was none other than Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, the New York paleontologist who found the first T. rex and gave the species its name. Osborn had great insights into extinct animals. He had museum-smarts AND zoo-smarts.  He was on the board of the Bronx Zoo, and he observed live animals. He knew that a giant predator needed more than powerful jaws for killing prey and long limbs for chasing it; predators needed a way to attract desirable mates so they could make healthy, desirable offspring.

The problem: If you are a 10,000-pound rex who can bite another dinosaur in half in one chomp, how do you express tender, romantic feelings?

The answer: Tickling. Many animals today use a small finger or toe to stroke their loved ones. Critters with fur or feathers spend much time grooming their friends and mates with delicate strokes of claw-tips. Grooming renews the bond between male and female, between parent and youngster, and between pack-mates in a hunting group.

It is a fun fantasy. Think of it: a young mated couple of rexes relaxing after a meal of duck-bill meat, stroking each other’s necks and muzzles, then petting their newly hatched chicks.

The fantasy becomes more believable if rexes had fur or feathers. Feathers have been found with many small and medium-sized meat-eating dinos, but up until 2012 no one had excavated a big tyrannosaur with feathery pelage.

But in the spring of that year, our Chinese colleagues announced an Early Cretaceous tyrannosaur fossilized with big sections of skin.  In the skin were tightly packed feathers — thin, kiwi-like feathers — up to a foot and a half long. The Chinese species was very similar to what the direct ancestor of later tyrannosaurs must have looked like.  The conclusion, then, is that Wyrex, too, probably had feathers.

So recent discoveries back up what Professor Osborn said over a century ago: T. rexes had a softer side — literally!

An aside — Osborn was not only a superb research scientist, but also a brilliant designer of public exhibits. He was the first to mix skeletons with beautiful murals and sculptures of the extinct beasts in their natural habitat. And he envisioned a fossil exhibition as a series of safaris back into deep time.

In other words, Osborn would have loved our new HMNS Hall of Paleontology — and you will, too.

Raptors – Group Hunters or Cannibals?

Published by on in Paleontology
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The question to answer is did dino-raptors live and hunt and feed in packs, like wolves?

I’m biased. I worked on the movie “Jurassic Park,” consulting with the special effects artists. And the book “Jurassic Park” has references to my research.

And…my first dig was excavating raptors near Bridger, Montana, in 1964. I was a freshman. Grant Meyer was the Field Boss – a fine fellow with delicacy of touch that was surprising in such a hulking physique.

Grant is the guy who really started “Jurassic Park.”

It was Grant Meyer who found the raptor Deinonychus, four of them, their bones intermingled in a thin layer of dark gray clay-stone. He directed us kids in extracting the bones. Back at Yale, another undergrad, Peter Parks, cleaned the rock off the bones. Professor John Ostrom named the beast “Terrible Claw” – Deinonychus.

I prepared the first restoration and the temporary exhibit.

Model of a Dromaeosaurus raptor claw

Raptor Kick-Boxer of the Cretaceous
Deinonychus became a dino celebrity.  It was fast, smart, maneuverable – we imagined it as a Kick-boxer of the Cretaceous. It would leap up and slash its victims with the huge, curved hind-claw, shaped like a box-cutter.

We wondered whether the four Deinonychus were a social unit in real life. Maybe the hunted together. Since Deinonychus was close kin to Velociraptor, dug in the 1920’s in Mongolia, we started calling all the similar critters “raptors.”

Michael Crichton read about the Yale raptors and he got thinking: “hmmmmm…wouldn’t it be cool to use genetic engineering to bring back to life…a pack of Dino-Raptors…”  His best-seller “Jurassic Park” was the result. In his book, he called Deinoncyhus a species of Velociraptor (they are close).

CSI of Multiple Victims.
But how can we be sure that the four raptors lived and hunted together? Perhaps these four raptors lived separately, died separately, and then their bodies got washed in together. How can we be certain that the way fossils are buried truthfully preserves the way they lived?

We can’t.

Here’s a Fundamental Rule of paleontology: all species tend to leave their dead bodies in clumps. Whether or not they hunted together, extinct animals get buried together.

Example of Non-Pack Mass Burial

Dimetrodon
Creative Commons License photo credit: kaurjmeb

We’re digging in north Texas now, excavating the first specialized top predator that ever evolved – the Finback Dimetrodon. It’s 170 million years before Deinonychus. Dimetrodons had very small brains, slow legs, and certainly were not  nearly as quick witted or quick legged as a Komodo Dragon Lizard of today.

Lizards don’t make wolf-packs. We wouldn’t expect Dimetrodon to make well organized social units.

But we find them buried in clumps. In one quarry there are fossils from at least 500 Dimetrodons. Maybe 5000…we find hundreds of bones from scores of Dimetrodons all mixed together at dozens of spots within the quarry that is about 200 yards long.

There are babies, adolescents, young adults, and old Dimetrodons all piled on top of each other – in fifteen separate layers.

And…..DIMETRODONS WERE CANNIBALS!!!!!!

Here’s the proof:

What we look for is ballistic evidence. First, we search for clues that victims were dismembered and gnawed – we want to find marks on bones left by carnivore teeth.

Second, we want fossil bullets. Bullets are the tooth crowns shed by meat-eaters as they fed. Like crocs and sharks today, dinosaurs and primitive reptiles like  Dimetrodon shed old tooth crowns as they fed. New crowns would grow in to replace the old. So…when we find many shed teeth mixed with chewed bones that’s excellent CSI evidence about who ate whom.

Do our Dimetrodon bones have tooth marks? Yes!  And do we find shed teeth from  the perpetrators? Yes again.  Who’s the perp? 98% of the shed teeth at our big Dimetrodon quarry are from……

….Dimetrodon!!

Dimetrodon cannibalism surprised us at first, but it shouldn’t have. It’s Standard Operating Procedure today. Meat is hard to come by and most carnivore species won’t turn up their noses at a meal of their own kind.  Lions eat lions. Wolves eat wolves. Hyenas will eat everybody.

Our mega-Dimetrodon quarry was different from the Four Raptor Site. The Dimetrodons included babies, adolescents and adults. And a dozen other species were buried with the Dimetrodons, including big and small herbivores, insect-eaters, fresh-water sharks, and bottom-living aquatic amphibians shaped like salamanders.

We don’t know yet what killed our Dimetrodons. We don’t know why so many carnivores came to one spot – maybe they were attracted to amphibians who were trapped in a pond that was drying up. But it’s perfectly natural that the Dimetrodon survivors would gobble up the Dimetrodon victims. Cannibalism is just common sense.

Back to the Four Raptors……
Did dinosaur predators feed together?

X-ray of an allosaur upper jaw showing the
new tooth crowns growing inside
the tooth sockets

I’ve dug several Jurassic spots with shed teeth from carnivorous allosaurs. These Jurassic sites show that the allosaurs were cannibals but still may have been good parents. We dug a spot with heaps of giant, multi-ton prey.  Herbivore bones were tooth-marked and chewed. There were shed teeth only from one species – an allosaur. Both baby shed teeth and adult shed teeth were mixed with the giant bones.

So here it looked like parents and babies did eat together – and the parents may have brought food to the young.

Five of the victims chewed by adult and baby allosaurs were….adult allosaurs. Perfectly natural – cannibalism is nature’s way.

Did Deinonychus eat its own dead?
They’d be foolish if they didn’t. At the Four Raptor Site there are some tooth marks on some bones and a few shed teeth. We just dug another Montana site where someone had chewed on a Deinonychus hip and left some shed teeth. The chewer was…..another Deinonychus.

Ok – no surprise to find chewed & clumped raptors. Cannibalism is Ubiquitous.  But we’re not through with our Dino-CSI.  We need to analyze why the four raptors died and were buried so close together.

The Three D’s of Death:
There are three big mass killers in Nature, the three big D’s:

Disease. Drought. Drowning.
A long-lasting drought can kill thousands, both herbivores and carnivores. A sudden flood can drown thousands of all species. Epidemics wipe out multitudes of plant-eaters and meat-eaters.

The D’s work together: A drought can kill and dry up many victims. Then, a flood can wash the desiccated carcasses into a sandbar. After disease kills many, the bodies may dry up, then get washed in together.

Did a flood drown the raptors and wash them into one spot?
No evidence for that. The water that carried in the mud was moving very slowly – it wasn’t a killer flood.

And…this is important…there weren’t other victims bunched up with the raptors. A major flood would wash in turtles and crocs, fish and dino-herbivores. The four raptors were alone in their burial – no other species.

There are flood sites with dinosaurs – huge river sand bar deposits with hundreds of skeletons. Usually there are many species – plant-eaters and meat-eaters. Bone Cabin Quarryin Wyoming was such a sandbar and had stegosaurs, apatosaurs, Diplodocus, camarasaurs, camptosaurs – all herbivores, adults and youngsters. And there were allosaurs and Ornitholestes, both predators.

The Four-Deinonychus quarry wasn’t like that.

Did Drought Kill the Four Raptors?
No evidence here either – the habitat seemed peaceful and normal. Drought should concentrate water-loving critters – we should see crocs and turtles huddled together in the last ponds and lakes. That’s not our Four Raptor site.

What Could Clump Raptors in Life?
The four raptors were all adults, one a bit older than the others. No babies. In many Jurassic and Cretaceous digs, we get adolescent predators – one of my Como digs had a half dozen young allosaurs. But not at the Deinonychus site dug by Grant Meyer.

What would concentrate four adults of one raptor species and no one else? Why didn’t the young die and get buried?

Did Disease Kill the Raptors?
Disease today hits social predators hard. Since they live together, all the predators in a pack can come down with a virus or bacterial ailment together.

Age Segregation and Adult-Only Death

Model of a Dromaeosaurus - 
from the same family as the Deinonychus

Plus – social predators do separate the young from the adults during hunting. Group hunting is common among mammals, birds and some advanced reptiles. Crocs are the most social reptiles alive today. Nile Crocodiles do some adult-group hunting when wildebeest herds cross rivers. Several big crocs (probably brothers) gang up on the wildebeest.

Hunting groups - wolves, hyenas, lions, crocs - usually contain only adults, babies and adolescents are well advised to stay away so they won’t get hurt. Therefore, social hunting is one way adults clump together and may die together.

Working Hypothesis:

Therefore….at this stage in our investigation…when we look at all the clues from the mud, current velocity, lack of babies, lack of other species…

…group hunting by adult Deinonychus Raptors is a viable hypothesis.

It’s not the ONLY hypothesis but still, I think, the strongest one.


Book List: This month, dig into archaeology

Published by on in Science
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From Jurassic Park to A Brief History of Time, some of the best and most influential books ever written are science-based. Long before students get to Steven Hawking, however, books about science teach them to explore the world around them and inspire a curiosity that lasts a lifetime.
 
To encourage this spirit of discovery, HMNS provides monthly book lists on various science topics, from “Leonardo da Vinci” to “Lizards and Snakes” and everything in between on our web site. Nonfiction and science-based fiction options are provided at three levels: 2nd grade and below; 3rd – 6th grade; and 7th grade and higher.

Susan Buck, the museum’s Director of Youth Education Sales and a former librabrian, puts these lists together each month. Starting with December’s list, she’ll share her inspirations for each month’s topic here.

The museum’s December book list features books on archaeology.  When you think of archaeology you generally think of nonfiction, but one of my favorite books on this topic, Kokopelli’s Flute by Will Hobbs is a fantasy book.

In my “former life” I was a middle school librarian, and one of the great joys of that job was the opportunity to meet incredible authors who became friends.  I am proud to list Will Hobbs and his wife Jean among them. 

Several teachers at my school were using Will’s novels in their classrooms, so I invited him to speak to the students.  A former language arts teacher, Will was right at home, and the middle schoolers were immediately drawn to his easy-going style…and they loved his books.

When Kokopelli’s Flute was published, I was fascinated because Will generally writes about outdoor adventures, many of which he had shared with nieces and nephews. 

 My dog Nanny on the right

The cover of the first edition of Kokopelli’s Flute featured a picture of Tepary Jones, the main character, playing a flute.  However, Tep’s golden retriever, Dusty, did not appear on the cover – even through Dusty had a significant role in the book. 

At that time, our family had the most wonderful golden retriever, Nanny, so Nanny “wrote” a book review that I sent to Will.  The gist of the review was that Nanny loved the book, but felt slighted that Dusty, who plays such a significant role in the book, was not featured on the cover.  The next time Will visited my school I took him to my house to be photographed with Nanny.  Ironically, when I began research for this article I discovered that the cover of the paperback edition features both Tep and Dusty.  Authors tell me that they have no input into the covers of their books, but seeing the picture brought back special memories!

The cover of Kokopelli’s Flute,
reproduced here with permission.

In Kokopelli’s Flute, Tepary Jones and his golden retriever Dusty are camping out at the Picture House, an ancient Anasazi cliff dwelling not far from his father’s seed farm in northern New Mexico, to view a total eclipse of the moon when they encounter pothunters. After scaring them away, Tep cannot resist taking the small eagle bone flute the thieves left behind.  Playing the ancient flute is the beginning of a fascinating story, for Tep triggers his gift as a changeling, and each night after dark, he becomes a pack rat.

Tep’s parents are scientists who have taught their son the joys of nature and an appreciation of the history that surrounds them.  It is very easy to like this family who are so devoted to each other.
As readers become involved in the story they suspend disbelief, so the fantasy works—especially when a mysterious stranger arrives at the farm.  Kokopelli’s Flute has a strong environmental message and readers will remember Tep’s and Dusty’s special relationship long after the book is closed.

Will Hobbs is the author of seventeen novels for upper elementary, middle school and young adult readers, as well as two picture book stories. Seven of his novels, Bearstone, Downriver, The Big Wander, Beardance, Far North, The Maze, and Jason’s Gold, were named Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association. ALA also named Far North and Downriver to their list of the 100 Best Young Adult Books of the Twentieth Century. Ghost Canoe received the Edgar Allan Poe Award in l998 for Best Young Adult Mystery. Will’s books have won many other awards, including the California Young Reader Medal, the Western Writers of America Spur Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the Colorado Book Award, and nominations to state award lists in over thirty states.

Other books by Will Hobbs:  Changes in Latitudes (1988), Bearstone (l989), Downriver (l991), The Big Wander (l992), Beardance (l993), Far North (l996), Ghost Canoe (l997), River Thunder (l997), The Maze (l998), Jason’s Gold (l999), Down the Yukon (2001), Wild Man Island (2002), Jackie’s Wild Seattle (2003), Leaving Protection (2004), Crossing the Wire (2006), Go Big or Go Home (2008), and picture books Beardream (l997), Howling Hill (l998) .

You can get to know Will Hobbs better by reading the questions and answers posted on his Web site.