Prehistoric times

Writers in This Mike Fredericks Tracy Ford 

w ww   .  pr ehist or ict  i

Randy Knol

mes.com

Allen Debus Robert Telleria Tony Campagna Mike Howgate

Artists in this issue:

Dan Liebman Mike Kelley Jan Harrison Pat Schaefer 

Phil Hore

Mike Fredericks

Fred Wierum

Russell J Hawley

James Kuether 

Tracy Ford 

Robert Telleria

Chris DiPiazza

Daniel Luckeydoo

John Sibbick 

Trish Burnett

Elijah Hampton

Ricky Lim

Sean Cooper 

John Goodier  Meg Bernstein

Joschua Knuppe

Damir G Martin

Andrew Ebbett

Zubin Erik Dutta

Caroline Dreese

Meggy Vodusek 

Chris Srnka

 Nathan E Rogers

Dean Schaefer 

Mike Landry

Kurt Miller 

Keith Berdak 

Bill Unzen

Roman Morales Gabriel Lio

Martin Garratt

Betty Reid Martin

Mark Hallett William Stout Julius Csotonyi

John F Davies

David Kinney

Kevin Hedgpeth

Jason Ward 

Jorge Blanco

John K Patterson

Paul Passano

Fabio Pastori

Jim Martinez

Chris Kastner 

Subscribe Today! Visit our web site and use your credit card (through Paypal only) to

www.prehistorictimes.com Join the Prehistoric Times group for free on Facebook  All payments in U.S. funds. Credit card payment through our site only Or mail your check/MO/cash to our address. Subscription Information below: subscribe, resubscribe or buy back issues

Prehistoric Times • 145 Bayline Circle • Folsom, CA • 95630-8077 $30 U.S. Only (one year, 4 issues)  third class postage. $35 U. S. first class postage and Canada $45 South of the border & across the Atlantic $50 Across the Pacific

The PT Interview: Sean Cooper. . . . . . . . . . . Liebman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Jurassic World - The Film & the Collectibles Fredericks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Brontosaurus Part 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 How to Draw Dinosaurs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Publisher/Editor: Mike Fredericks 145 Bayline Circle, Folsom, Ca 95630-8077 (916) 985-7986 between 8-5 PST M-F  business hours only ple ase.

FAX (916) 985-2481  [email protected]

www.prehistorictimes.com Don’t forget PT is also available as an app for your phone or computer

Collectors Corner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fredericks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Dinosaur Collector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Knol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Wisbech Museum Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Howgate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Interview Matt Mossbrucker T. rex Autopsy . Campagna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 What’s New in Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fredericks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Aurochs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Advertising: Full page - $150 b&w - $400 color; 1/2 pg - $100 b&w - $300 color;

Evolution & Ghost Slumber Mtn . . . . . . . . . Debus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

1/4 pg - $75 b&w - $200 color 

World of T. rex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kelley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Reader Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Paleonews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 PT logo by William Stout Redone above by Thomas Miller Front cover graphic design by Juan Carlos Alonso

Mesozoic Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fredericks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Marx Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schaefer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 America’s State Fossils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Telleria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

FROM THE EDITOR 

How’s it going? It’s your ole’ friend Magic Mike XXL here and I have an amazing

Sean Cooper’s

Concavenator

model

MOVING?? PLEASE let us know your new address the second you plan to move. The magazine is  NOT forwarded and it costs us to resend the magazine later to your new “digs.” Also if you subscribed to PT  by sending your payment anywhere except directly to us, please know that we only received a paltry percentage of that payment. The people you sent the payment to got the lion’s

Summer issue of PT for you. painted ny Martin Garratt As usual Juan Carlos Alonso put together our front cover utilizing a beautiful model of the Spanish, Early Cretaceous dinosaur Concavenator corcovatus sculpted   by Sean Cooper and painted by Martin Garratt. To the right i s a photo of another  copy of that model with a different paint scheme, also accomplished by Martin. Some exciting news is that Juan Carlos Alonso has a new dinosaur book coming out in the fall illustrated by him and written by Gregory S Paul. Check out his site: www.alonsopaleo.com. It is titled “Ancient Earth Journal - The Early Cretaceous” Coming in September 2015. Here is a well done video about the book -http://youtu.be/jBtnqACZdyA But anyway, as I was saying, sculptor Sean Cooper is featured in this issue with an interview by Dan Liebman of dansdinosaurs.com. Check out Dan’s internet site as he has just about every dinosaur figure and model for sale including some exclusives. And of course I thank Sean for taking the time from his busy schedule to answer  Dan’s questions. I hope you all enjoy it. Long time PT readers will remember the name Tony Campagna, who used to handle so many of our interviews in the mag. He is  back! And he has interviewed paleontologist Matthew Mossbrucker, who was recently on the National Geographic TV special, the “T. rex Autopsy.” Thanks Tony, nice to have you  back. Thanks too to Matt for agreeing to be a part of this issue. An interesting, recent set of dinosaur postage Of course wacky Phil Hore is here to announce the happy news that stamps from Spain. Two of the stamps are 3D  Brontosaurus is back and also to tell when you wear 3D glasses and the Ankylosaurus us the amazing history of Aurochs. has texture to the touch on its back. The very talented Robert Telleria educates us about all of the U.S. state official fossils and creates a model of  each, standing on its state. I thank Mike share. When you (hopefully) renew your subscription, PLEASE do Howgate for showing what just might be it by sending your payment directly to us. We are a small business the first prehistoric models ever made. and could really use your support. Thanks so much to many of you Pat Schaefer is back with a new article who have started renewing directly with us. Would the rest of you about Marx toy dinosaurs. Read this arti please stop your automati c renewal with an internet subscription cle and then you tell me whether this man service? I have been begging some of you for years. Do you want to is a genius or completely crazy. I think it see PT flourish or fade away? might actually be the former because ARTISTS! PT does not pay for submissions but many artists who else would think to WEIGH toy whose work is seen in Prehistoric Times get paying work from PT readers have become very familiar with the fantastic art of paledinosaurs to determine when they other sources. Please send jpg files of your artwork scanned at oartist Julius Csotonyi. Julius was kind enough to autograph several 300 DPI resolution. Send as an approx 4” jpg with your name were manufactured. Dinosaur modeler  different sheets of a beautiful new set of Canadian stamps that he Jan Harrison shows us how to make a in the title of the image --example--Triceratops by John  beauti ful dioram a util izing Dave Smith.jpg to our e-mail address or send good copies (that you  painted and send them here to PT. Silva’s  Acroc anthosaur us and  don’t need returned and that aren’t larger than our 9 x 12 scanSauropelta resin kits. Author Mike Kelley has provided us with a very well written ner bed) to our mailing address in California. We need your art and info. For #115 story about T. rex. Of course our regulars Allen Debus, Tracy Ford and Randy Knol Pachycephalosaurus & Deinotherium (Deadline Sep 10, 2015) For #116 supplied us with interesting articles. Tracy’s Kentrosaurus & Argentenavis (Deadline Dec 10, 2015) Thank you! new book is a collection of some of his earliArtist Kevin est articles in PT and is reviewed in this issue. Hedgpeth’s Aurochs, our  I don’t suppose any of you saw a little featured extinct mammal Summer film by the name of  “Jurassic World,” did you? Oh, you did? I thought I saw you all there. Among my usual dinosaur  figure and book  reviews inside I A also give my lit d   d  tle review of the  e   s  i    g recently released  n  b  film “Jurassic  y M World” and tell i    c  h  you all about the related collectibles I have discovered. I  a  e  l   hope you enjoy it all and I see you again with issue #115  S   t    e   v in the Fall, when it is much cooler and more comfortable here  e  n  s  in California. Dinotopia artist James Gurney recently finished a couple of beautiful paintings of tyrannosaurs that appear in the May issue of Scientific American magazine. Here's a 5-minute YouTube video about the story behind the art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jRmyRoLQWU In this issue I review his latest DVD for sale on how he illustrated  the tyrannosaurs for the magazine.

T. rex Autopsy

 r  u m m e  S  t  c  e r f e  T h e P  W ea r ! !

MESOZOIC

Apatosaurus herd © John Sibbick -- www.johnsibbick.com

MAIL

 Nice little Tarbosaurus metallic sculpture by Andrey Atuchin. PT thanks Paul McFarland for  sending this photo.

Hi Mike, I was reading Steyer's book, "The Earth Before The Dinosaurs," and it struck me! How come, with all the spectacular reptiles and  amphibians living during the Permian, the only recent reptile produced as a toy is the Dimetrodon? What about Diplocaulus, Eryops, Bunostegos, Scutosaurus, Gorgonops or Dicynodon. You see how well Papo did their  Dimetrodon, imagine what they could do with Edaphosaurus. The reason that I am writing to you is that I was wondering if you would ask  this question of your readers in your next issue. I am sure that I am not the only one crying out for something different and unique. I am really interested to hear what they have to say. Your  Loyal Subscriber, Aldon Spencer 

 painted. Dinosauriana is full of examples. I also want to clarify/remind that Invicta figures (and even ROMs) were never "hard to get" as stated in the article. Among the sup pliers in the 70-80s were various Invicta distributors from Toys R Us, Lionel Playworld, Circus World, and various mom and pop toy shops. In the 80s, Barnes & Noble did a nationwide mail order campaign (at the highest prices anywhere), while education outlets including Discovery Toys, Edmund Scientific

Well you know I am always up for any new prehistoric animals made into well done figures and especially ones that you don’t see very often (or ever). There have actually been a number of  figures of  Diplocau lus, Eryops,  Edaphosauru s and others over the years but we can never get too many. I will print your letter here and hope that someone sculpting figures will agree with you/us - editor

I want to point out that hand painted  dinosaur toys were not introduced to the world by Safari's Carnegies as implied in

John Sibbick sent us this  Jaggermeryx that he illustrated. It was a weird, hoofed, swamp dwelling prehistoric animal from Africa-19mya [Miocene] based upon jaw fragments which indicated a large snout and lower lip giving it its name after Mick Jagger, the famously large lipped singer of The Rolling Stones.

By Tony Campagna

the article in #113. There were painted  Tsukudas, S t a r l u x , Bullyland  minis, Inpros, Orsenigos, T i m p o s , Millers and a multitude of  miniature Asian made  plastic f igures  befor e Safar i entered the field, plus figural and toy dinos all the way back in the 1920s were hand 

and Carolina Biological also Artist Jorge Blanco sent us this photo of  offered them (at the lowest prices his "Euenantiornithes", the oldest record of a anywhere). Dozens of Dinosaurs,  bird of South America. He made the reconThe Dinosaur Store, Dinosaur  struction under the direction of Dr Fernando Catalog, Prehistoric Products,  Novas from Argenti na (MACN) and  and National Wildlife Professor Ismar Carvalho from Brazil (UFRJ). The fossil is about 2 inches long and  Federation/Ranger Rick also sold  has two long feather impressions - tail feaththem. All the big city museums ers about 2 inches with pigment cells which carried Invictas right into the late gives a total length of 4 inches. 1990s. To be sure, they were ubiquitous. Another supplier of Invictas? Safari Ltd. - even when they offered their  own Carnegies! (source: 1980s catalogs) The business model was clearly already proven by Invicta. They showed the market was there - that's why they are still plentiful today on the secondary market. One issue with Invicta was their mixed message - first they were not toys, then distributors marketed them as toys, then they were not toys again, etc. Safari Ltd. knew from the outset they were in the toy business. They wanted colorful figures in fairly active gestures rather than just passive portraits like Invicta's. The biggest concern with Carnegie was the total abandonment of the standard 1/40 scale a few years into the range, something not lost on con-

from catalogs a few years back. To date, no company has produced a range of model dinosaurs (toys?) that are consistently scale that are fully satisfactory to the world's leading  paleon tologis ts. Not even Battat - as you will see in an upcoming article. Robert Telleria, New York 

Kretaceous Kinders Daniel Luckeydoo Age 8

We can’t get enough of readers like Daniel Luckeydoo from Saginaw, TX, shown with Dear Mike, Yours is a great his science project on Anomalocaris (which he said he learned about in PT) and enjoying magazine and I hope it continhis latest PT and also sending us his artwork. ues on. I especially enjoy that of early humans. I’m going to you not only cover dinosaurs but also the Paleozoic and Cenozoic eras. guess that it was probably There were many creatures then as strange and as interesting as the dinosaurs such as the Ice Age Elasmotherium. After reading how the legend  short-tempered like the extant of the grypho n started with Sycthian tribes’ interpretation of Protoceratops ones, too. It’s just an idea, but fossils have contributed to the skeletons, I started thinking that  Elasmotherium may have planted the idea of the unicorn. The concept of the unicorn as a f ierce beast bearing a single mythological bestiary, so why horn is an ancient one, going back as far as Pliny. But I wonder if the con- not this one? I wanted to say I cept goes back even further. Elasmotherium carried its nose on its forehead, also enjoy the model build-up articles and the reader art, as I rather than on the nose like rhinos, and importantly, it was a contemporary

Caroline Dreese Age 5

More Artwork © Damir G Martin. See “Super  Predator, The World of T. rex” on pages 48 and 49 Caroline Dreese Age 5

 build dinosaur kits and the articles help out. Those articles came in handy when I  built Alchemy Work’s Auror a What- If  wooly rhinoceros, as this was my first resin kit. Keep up the good work, you and your  staff! Sincerely, Suzanne Grant, Rohnert Park, Ca. I, too, find it interesting to wonder which legendary animals were based upon the discovery of fossilized bones. Most obvious would be dragons. They could be based upon any number of dinosaurs and/or prehistoric mammals. I like the idea of the cyclops coming from ancient people seeing an elephant skull as they look like they only have one eye in the center of their face. Thanks for the kind words, Suzanne - editor Cretaceous War Zone, Hydra Wars, and  Prehistoric Times Magazine at Super  Science Saturday in the Museum in Trenton, New Jer sey.

“Dinosaur Island” is a new, complete Official Dreamwish Playset!! A set that Marx didn’t make but we wished they had - featuring a NEW Line of realistic, plastic dinosaurs! Includes illustrated box, one-of-a-kind terrain base and much more. $299.00 postage paid. Ron Lizorty 6117 Fee Fee Rd. Hazelwood, Mo. 63042 (314) 731-0584

The PT DinoStore Vintage dinosaur collectibles for sale from PT magazine 18. hollow dinos

1. Collectibles 1. “Dinosaur Collectibles” price guide co-written and signed by PT editor $49  book  2. Linde 1950s Coffee Premium plastic dinosaur figs 7 from Austria. $12ea. 3. Rare 8th Linde figure to complete above set: Rare Rhamphorhynchus $45 4. Marx orig. sm/med 50s/ 60s dinosaur toy figs (green, brown, gray) $5 5. Marx orig. Krono, T-rex (pot-belly or slender) $39, Brontosaurus $34 6. Marx original second series dinos/mammals $12 each, set of 8 - $79 7. Marx 45mm cavemen (6 diff) $7 ea Marx 6” cavemen (6 diff) $15 ea. 8. Multiple (MPC) dinosaur plastic figures many colors $5-10 each (inquire) 10. Sinclair banks 9. JH Miller waxy plastic 50s Tricer, Mammoth/Mastodon or Stego $65 19. SRG JH Miller Bronto (complete) $79, Rare Pterodactyl (broken feet) $99. 16. Sinclair bagged set JH Miller Rare small Dimetrodon (one broken foot) Stands fine $59 10. Sinclair 1960s green plastic 10” brontosaur bank $24 30. Palmer  11. Sinclair 1934 Dinosaur book $25 & Sinclair1964 Worlds Fair booklet $15 2&3. Linde 12. Sinclair 60s colorful Hardback “The Exciting World of Dinosaurs” $44 13. Sinclair hollow dinosaurs 64 NY World’ World’ss Fair dinos in several colors @$35 14. Sinclair rare hollow NY Worlds Fair Brontosaurus looking backward $66 15. Sinclair album and complete stamps set1935 $35 or 1959 $20 16. Sinclair 60s solid Worlds Fair dinos (6 diff. various prices) (bagged set $89) 9. Miller  17. Sinclair Oil 1960s dino chrome metal tray $69 Pterodactyl 18. Hollow, dimestore plastic dinos, 60s/70s six different $8 each (see photo) 19. SRG Small metal dinosaurs T. rex, Tricer, Tricer, Tracho, Bronto or Stego $39 ea. 30. Palmer  11. 1934 Book  SRG sm. Caveman, Dimetrodon or Plesiosaur $59 ea. SRG Large metal Stegosaurus or T. rex $69 each 13. Sinclair hollow dinosaurs 20. 60’s 60’s Japan Porcelain Dimetrodon, Stego, Bronto, T-rex T-rex or Protoce ratops 5” @$24 21. Nabisco silver prehistoric mammal cereal premiums early 1960s $10 ea. All 8 $75 22. Nabisco/Fritos dinosaur premiums, gray (60s) $5 each, 1950s green & red $10 ea. 23. ROM (Royal Ontario Museum)plastic dinosaur figures. $15 ea, Pteranodon $25 24. View Master Prehistoric Animals 1960s comp. 3 reels/booklet nm $24 25. 1960s La Brea Wm Otto bronze 3” Saber-toothed cat (short tail) $79 21. Nabisco cereal prehistoric 26. Ultra Rare Chialu Italian 1950s resin Ankylosaurus figure in great shape $199. mammals 27. Teach Teach Me About Prehistoric Animals Flash cards 1960s $49 26. 28. Brooke Bonde 60s dinosaur trading album w/ set of cards attached $59 Chialu 29. Pyro white box MIB dinosaur model kits, Proto, Stego, @$39 Ankylosaur  8. MPC 30. Palmer 1960s Mastodon skeleton or Brontosaurus skeleton $39 each MIB Multiple dinos 31. Marx Linemar 1960s one inch metal dinos. T. rex or Brontosaurus $24 ea. 32. Golden Funtime 1960s Dinosaur punch out (unpunched in book) $99 33. Abbeon 1960s Japan bone china orange Stegosaurus or Dimetrodon 5” - $39 34. Timpo (England) 50/60s plastic 4” Dimetrodon (black or red brown) or Triceratops $45 PT back issues 31, 33, 41, 42, 52, 66, 74-76, 78, 85, 92-110 $8 each or $12 each foreign. 19. JH Miller  (PT issue prices include shipping) small Dimetrodon Please add $6 shipping in U.S. • Call or e-mail me about condition. 31. Marx 17. Sinclair chrome

Mike Fredericks Prehistoric Times 32. 1960s Golden 145 Bayline Cir. Dinosaur funtime Folsom, California 95630 punch out in book  8077 (916) 985-7986 [email protected] 13. Sinclair  1960s hard back 

Linemar tiny metal T. rex

tray 1960s

25. Wm Otto Sabertooth 27. Flash cards

28. Brooke Bond  22. Nabisco dinos

33. Abbeon Dimetro & Stego

24. 60’s Viewmaster  25. ROM plastic dinos

20. 1960s Japan

7. 6 inch Marx large cavemen 34. Timpo Dimetrodon or 

16. Sinclair 1959 Oil

THE PT INTERVIEW:

Sculptor Sean Cooper by Dan Liebman of Dansdinosaurs.com All models built/painted by Martin Garratt

Machairodus and 3-toed  Horse

aft” came “Paleocr aft” Dan Liebman: Tell us a little about how your business “Paleocr  to be. dericks for this hank you and Mike Fre Fredericks to thank Sean Cooper Cooper: First Dan, I want to t informative.. in teresting and informative  portunity. ortunity. I hope all the the PT readers find this int op p thee business later  become "Paleocraft" th The ground work  work   for what would later timee I was making fan the mid 90's. At that tim ago in the goes ba back about 20 years ago in es, mainly because it was just sculptu r es, tasy, sci-fi, and preh pre historic themed sculptur  than an for any com I was  was interested in and  enjoyed doing, rather th something I something hat through that internet ternet had just recently recently exploded and through t mercial intentions. The in  to Super Sculpey any sc sculpting I had  ed  Super   Super Sculpey. Prior  to I had discover ed  attem pted had always  been with either   plasPredation Scene ys or waxes. ticine cla c lays Super Sculpey was a game chang chan ger, being ablee to make something abl that could be easily ed   was fascinatsolidified  solidifi ing to me. Also throu through he   internet, I  browsing the ar ned ned there were entire lear  le nes, and  websites, magazi magazines, tr ies ies devoted to industr  indus this. Among those, those, our  very own "Prehistoric Times" Ti mes" Magazine, wher e the earliest of my prehistoric themed sculpts can eader's  be seen in the "R eader's on. And it was Art” secti section. through PT that I  became acqu acquaainted with ke   Evans at Alchemy Mike Mi

netallowed lowed me to turn a ho b by into a b usiwork with the the right people is what al ss.. ness ne kills I was casting skills mold making and casting s Before utilizing utilizin g Mike's professional mo Without The Alchemy Works ting ng to do it myself with with mixed results. Without attempti attemp umble use although I could  f umble n't be a Paleocraft beca because there probably would  would n't iently. ntly. Mike and I ever able to do it effic ie was never through the the casting process, I was n  the years and continue continue to over  the avee developed a good wo working relationship over  hav to produce  produce models. work together to some amazing Mesozoic models, but it seems you are DL: You have som y mammals. How predominantly known own for other prehisto prehistoric fauna, predominantl uniquely kn did this come about? usu SC: Well it's true I'm usuSC: ally associated  with the toric ric mammals and   prehisto  prehis that's okay. As I menre they're not tioned befo before my sole point of interest interest,, ey're 're  but to me, th they just as esting and I believed  inter esting under represented  in the ic  model genre.  prehistor ic  ng At the time I was getti get ting started with wit h Paleocraft re were  were already several there the rs proreally good sculpto sculptors inosaur models. ducing d inosaur The mammals were so s omed to focus on thing I decide decided r tly tly to distinguish distinguis h  par   pa tly to just myself and par tly add som somee variety to the amindustry. Producing m Producing mammal models models   was risky at

first because I wasn’t sure just how in demand they'd be. Some are more successful than others but most have done well and  I don't regret focusing on them. It’s probably safe to say that you’ve mastered the hairiest and scariest of beasts. Do you have any general tips for sculpting fur, and do these abilities translate well when developing feathered theropods? DL:

Baryonyx

also be a struggle. Sometimes I find  myself backtracking to change the pose in later stages of the sculpt, having to redo work is no fun but if that's what it takes to make it look good then that's what I do. Any tiny, highly detailed features can be a challenge, like rows of tiny teeth or a hand or paw full of tiny claws. My eye sight isn't what it used to be so I have to wear optivisors to help see when sculpting, especially when sculpting the fine details. I think pterosaur wings, or bat type wings can also be difficult. Making the thin wing membrane look smooth and uniform over  a large span isn't easy. Sculpting any features of modern animals can also be challenging. There's usually lots of reference material to work  from but at the same time everyone is familiar with how, let's say, an African Elephant looks so it's easier to be more critical of how accurate the sculpture is. Prehistoric mammals can be the same way since many of them have extant relatives we're all familiar with. With dinosaurs there's no actual images to go by so its just a matter of what’s a more believable or plausible reconstruction.

That's very kind of you to say; I don't know if I'd say "mastered" though, I have made some breakthroughs over the years that lend themselves to creating a successful sculpture, at least in regards to fur texturing. Sculpting fur is one of those things thats hard to make convincing at small scales. I mean its impossible to sculpt every single hair so at best you have to just try and create the illusion of fur. There's lots of different types of fur, low shag, high shag, course, fine, etc. to name a few. few. I just r ecently sculpted a musk ox, which is probably one of the hairiest creatures to have ever existed. They seem to have every type of fur texture there is on some point of their body and are a real challenge to sculpt. For anyone looking to hone their hair sculpting abilities the musk ox would  DL: Do you have any favorite resources or ar tistic influences, perhaps even  be a good one to practice on. When making the d ifferent textures, I used a tool made from a bent stick pin. If I had to give any general tips, I'd say use specific art that you feel strongly about? the tool to make tiny impressions rather than dragging or raking it. Ultimately it just takes practice and a lot of trial and error to get the look  SC:  Not specif ically ically,, I tend to appreciate most art on some level. I'm not and technique down. usually critical of other's work and find value in not just the successes but In regards to feathered theropods, I do think that being able to sculpt fur  also in stuff that falls short. And in regards to influences, I think I'm infludoes often translate to sculpting feathers; at least at small scales, especially enced in one way or another by everything I see and I try to learn through  proto-feathers or the type of feathers you see on ratites like emus and  the endeavors of others, even if its just what not to do. ostriches. Of course, flight feathers and tail feathers are different all togethIn regards to resources, I'm a long time subscriber of periodicals like er.  National Geographic, National Wildlife, Amazing Figure Modeler, and of  course Prehistoric Times magazine. I find taxidermy catalogs to be very DL: Your models show a great deal of attention to the musculature of the useful. All of the images of eyes, ears, noses, etc. are great to reference. I'm animal. How do you develop the body of an animal that is quite different also an avid browser of the internet and like to look up the latest paleontofrom extant species, such as a ceratopsid? logical discoveries and theories. I find search engines very useful. Being able to quickly find specific images to reference when sculpting is invaluable. I used to spend hours scouring books and magazine to find just the SC: Well a lot of it is just educated guess work. I think its impor tant to pay close attention to the actual skeleton when creating the armature and make right image, like the foot of a rhinoceros for example or the horns of a musk  note of where muscles would attach. Fortunately, Fortunately, Ceratopsian skeletons are ox, a task achievable in a matter of seconds through the internet. widely represented in the fossil record. However, since we know some extinct animals from only a few bones, maybe a skull if we're lucky, I find  DL: I sometimes hear from collectors who are exclusively interested interested in your  it important to reference related species that we have more fossilized eviwork. Aside from your obvious high standards, why do you believe you have dence of. And it's also important to reference and understand the musculaso many devout followers? ture of modern animals. Then at the end of the day, since there's no phoSC: I've been very for tunate over the years to have gained support from sevtographs or actual living specimens to go by, the best I can hope for is a  plausible, believable believable reconstruction. eral collectors, I try to be as loyal to them as they have been to me. If given the choice between doing commissions, I'm probably more apt to choose a DL: Are there any animals or features that you find especially interesting  project for one of my my collectors. They've come to know what what to expect from or challenging to work on? me and that they can trust I'm not going to send them something I'm not happy with. It's Martin Garratt created a beautiful glaze on Sean’s Dunkleosteus SC: I guess that would depend on the day good to work with that kind of familiarity. familiarity. It's and just how interested I am in the subject a lot less stressful once you've already estabmatter. There's good sculpting days where lished that kind of trust. I also have some I'm focused in and everything sort of goes the commercial clients who have been great supway I want and I make great progress and   porters of my work and alwa always ys try to give then there are other days where I can't seem them equal time. to get anything to work and look right. DL: The market of garage-kit hobbyists and  Symmetry is always a challenge when sculpting, trying to make the left side match the artists is sometimes tricky to navigate, yet right can be daunting. Getting a unique and  you’ve become known known as a beacon of profesinteresting pose in the armature stages can sionalism and reliability reliability.. What advice would  SC:

character laughs at the name when he first hears it.) When Chris finds out, he thinks this is a bad idea and of course, he could not be more right. We soon get to see an impressively oversized mosasaur  eat a great white shark and are teased with a T. rex eating a goat off camera. We also see a dinosaur pet ting zoo in which young children and young herbivorous dinosaurs frolick together. There is a great scene where the boys in their gyro-car are surrounded by harmless “veggie-saurs” - Triceratops, sauropods, Stegosaurus and   Parasaurolophus.

The Film and the Collectibles

Well of course the Indominus rex escapes its pen and begins terrorizing the Park including the boys in their gyro vehicle. We learn and see that it can camouflage itself like its surroundings thanks to cuttlefish DNA that the scientists supplied (remember this chameleon-like ability was explored in the third   Jurassic Park movie too.)

By now, you are likely aware that the  Jurassic World  film broke all ticket sales records bringing in over $224 million dollars in its opening Baking weekend. For its second weekend it grossed the second highest amount of  &  all time. By the third weekend it was still number one and had grossed  Party  $500 million. I am so glad that people still enjoy dinosaurs so much. (I just figures wish one of those millions would trickle into Prehistoric Times magazine A dome-shaped aviary of pterosaurs including subscriptions.) For the two or three of you who have yet to see this movie,  Pteranodons and  Dimorphodons is breeched allowing I warn you that there are many spoilers in this artithe flying creatures to terrorize the park visitors for  cle. a while. Chris and  Hasbro makes the action figs. Although I already Opie’s daughter resmentioned in the last cue the two boys but PT that I was not are soon confronted  happy with the idea  by the Indominus in that Chris Pratt’s charthe middle of the acter “has a relation park. The ship” with the Velociraptors come and  to the rescue but Velociraptors therefore has “some” aren’t enough to control over them, my  bring the big girl overall review of the down so they also movie is this - “plenty enlist the help of the Park’s T. rex. As the T. rex charges the of dinosaurs and plenIndominus, there is great symbolism when it crashes through a Spinosaurus skeleton. I’m sure you recall the T. rex in the third  ty of action; what more could you ask for from Jurassic Park film was killed by a Spinosaurus and this seems to a Jurassic Park film?”  be its revenge for T. That’s it! I’ve watched  rexes everywhere, it several times in some 14 years later. very crowded theaters and each time the audience rose up and clapped at the end. The movie starts out with the two nephews of Ron Howard’s daughter  coming to visit Jurassic World, a park  stocked with living prehistoric animals; thanks to genetic science. Their aunt is too busy to meet them in person and  sends her British super model assistant to greet them and get them set up in their hotel. (Notice she is reading Dr. Malcolm’s (Jeff Goldblum) book (Chaos Theory?) while on the people mover. I won’t make any joke about super models not understanding his book; or  maybe I just did. We also see the book later in the control room.) We soon learn that Chris Pratt’s character works at the park a s the “raptor t rainer.” We also f ind out that the scientists at the park have genetically engineered a totally new meat-eating dinosaur that

The younger  of the nephews had said that they needed “more teeth” to defeat the Indominus rex. T. rex was “holding its own” in the fight but couldn’t quite bring down its adversary. As the fight moves close to the water, the enormous (oversized) mosasaur (Tylosaurus?) noses its way out of the water, grabs the Indominus with his huge jaws and pulls it under the water to its doom. The end. Never mind that we saw something similar in “Walking with Dinosaurs” when the  Liople urod on did the same thing to the  Eustreptospondylus. Oh, and my apologies to

cans for the film. Dairy Queen was offering special desserts in JW cups. Mike and Ike was changed to a Jurassic World  candy. There were also Jurassic Pizza box (left) plus 4 card set (above) World fruit snacks that I showed  in the last issue of PT. Bryce Dallas Howard (yes, I know her name). I couldn’t resist kidding around with her some here. She does a good job in the film and all while wearing high heels. Did you like the film? I thought it was a pretty good re-telling of the  Jurassic Park tale; this time with customers in the  park. The movie has taken a lot of flak for not being more scientifically accurate with the appearance of its dinosaurs (no feathers on the theropods, some dinosaurs too big and  some too small, tails much closer to the ground than in  previous films and more.) But Michael Chrichton wrote in his books, and it was discussed in the first three movies, and it was certainly talked about in this film that these are not real dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are gone forever. These are the closest that the scientists could get utilizing partial DNA from fossilized dinosaur   blood found inside insects trapped  inside fossilized  Metallic mini amber plus adding everything from frog DNA Spino to cuttlefish DNA. The dinosaurs were made to look the way the “Average Joe” would expect them to look. He might not have paid good money to see giant chickens. Yes, I too would like for them to be as realistic as possible, but this is a plausi ble explanation for why they were not. I wish they could have worked in a few dinosaurs never  seen in a Jurassic Park  movie before however. Indominus doesn’t count! For instance, how about our cover dinosaur  Concavenator to pop up in the park at one point? I think it could be a crowd   pleaser. And that, of course, is just one of hundreds of po ssibilities.

plush figures

Walmart stores offer many exclusive toys based upon the film. There are more than a dozen diecast toy vehicle sets from Matchbox that only Walmart sells. Another Walmart exclusive are the tiny little plastic dinosaur figures they offer in bags. (There were similar dinosaur figures  based upon the “Walking with Dinosaurs 3D” movie last year.) You can buy  bags that hold just one figure and take your chances trying to complete a set or you can buy the 15 figure bag that gives you the complete set including the exclusive Indominus rex. There are color variations however for the completist collector. These f igures also come three per tube where you can see exactly what you are getting. Look for  the rare metallic colored dinos. I have Spinosaurus and Stegosaurus in metallic paint. Super Walmarts (with grocer y stores inside) also have pizzas in Jurassic World packaging. There are four different pizzas to buy to get the complete four card set of Jurassic World trading cards that came inside each box. Hasbro again has the action figure license. The Hasbro Jurassic World  Indominus rex vs. Ankylosaurus set with gyroshere is a Target Exclusive as is the Hasbro Jurassic World  Velociraptor set with Echo, Delta, Charlie, and Blue Target Exclusive Figures. (No one else offers a Blue figure.) The Hasbro Jurassic World  Indominus rex Hero Mashers is only sold at Target. The Jurassic World  Brawlasaurs Dino 5 Pack is an exclusive figure set from Toys R Us.

Hasbro Velociraptor  chomping head

video games, JW children’s  book s, backp acks, T-shir ts, Well, a cornucopia (I like that word) of Jurassic World related collectibles Playskool Heroes JW dinos and  have come out this summer. Of course movie theaters have some nice also a Jurassic World   posters and dinosaur drinking cups and popcor n buckets. Barbasol shaving Monopoly game. Of course I’ll cream offers some specially decorated   be first in line for the Jur assic World BluRay DVD in a few months. I’m sure there is much more out there. Please let us know what good collectibles you find and what you thought of the movie. Will you get in line for Jurassic World 2 some-

There are a number of Jurassic World Lego sets. Toys R Us had a day in June for kids to come into the store and receive a free Lego Jurassic World exclusive front gate to build. It was not sold in stores. That should be a nice collectible. There are remote control Jurassic World vehicles and Jurassic World 

Exclusive Toys R Us Lego JW gate given free to customers.

by Phil Hore [email protected]

© Fred Wierum

 Allosaurus on a Brontosaurus we highlighted in part one, and as great as the stories were, it was the art that really made this book special. Born in Siberia, Rudolph Franz Zallinger attended Yale’s School of Fine © Nathan E. Rogers

© Kurt Miller 

 Normally we would have a story here, so please indulge me a little as I recount my encounter with one of the most important storytellers in paleontology. Let me begin by explaining how I got into trouble when I visited  Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History in Connecticut. The dinosaur  hall there is top notch (if a little dated), and the prehistoric mammal display is nice, but the real reason you visit the Peabody is for its mural—its spectacular, world-renowned mural. As a child I was the proud possessor (and still am) of a Golden Circle  book called Dinosaurs and Their Prehistoric Relatives. Unlike most of the dinosaur books today, which are full of technical explanations and scientif ic  photographs of dinosaur skeletons, this boo k contained tales of day-to-day life told by skilled storytellers. By far my favorite was the attack of an

Arts during the Great Depression. Here he studied not only art, but also anatomy and paleontology. This final course was to help him complete a job Yale had asked him to do: paint the 110-foot bare wall above the museum’s dinosaur hall. Although many of us believe The Age of Reptiles mural is his most famous work, Zallinger also created during this time what is arguably one of the most important scientific illustrations in the world, the image depicting human evolution from the monkeys, called The March of Progress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Progress#/media/File:The_March_  of_Progress.jpg I was photographing The Age of Reptiles mural when I got in trouble for  taking too many pictures and perhaps rightfully so (I will ag ree now though I was more than a little miffed at the time) because the museum is very protective of its magnificent mural, which adorns T-shirts, posters, and coffee © Bill Unzen

© Paul Passano

mugs in its gift shop. The museum depends on a percentage from these products because it is a private-, not a government-funded institution and fights hard  to make sure the painting do esn’t appear on knockoff   products.

Dinotopia Market Place © James Gurney www.dinotopia.com

Taking nearly three years and completed in 1947, the mural was painted in the Renaissance fresco secco technique. This required the pigments to be applied to wet plaster, making them durable and creating depth. The painting was also carefully plotted  as a “panorama of time” to tell a story, with the oldest environments and animals at the far left of the mural merging into the younger ones on the far right. Far from just a painting, there is layer upon layer  of information within the composition of the image. First, it is separated into individual times, with the size of each era cor responding to the length of wall the images cover. Each of these eras is divided by a large tree in the foreground, creating biological  panels if you will, while the animals themselves depict life the way it was  believed to have been at the time. This means the dinosaurs are sluggish and  reptilian looking, with © Ricky Lim  Brontosa urus sitting in a swamp to support its enormous bulk. Today we understand most dinosaurs were quick, bird-like creatures, whereas the sauropods lived  a lifestyle more like that of  an elephant.

© John K. Patterson

There are other Zallinger  ly got me excited was a display on how the Age of Reptiles mural was cre pieces throughout the muse- ated. There were original sketches and photos of Zallinger painting the picum as well. Almost as ture, and my seeing these put an even bigger smile on my face. As a kid  impressive growing up in Australia I never  as the main http://csotonyi.com  believed there’d be any chance © Julius Csotonyi mural is the of seeing these things in perAge of  son, and so I encourage you all Mammals, to visit if you get the chance. I which picks guarantee you’ll be grinning up the story  just like I did. from the end  And if you ever get to visit, of the there is a little trick to getting Cretaceous and marches all the way up to the Ice Age. There an unusual view of both the are also individual pieces, some even from my childhood  dinosaur hall and the Zallinger   book. mural. On the second floor you It was a great pleasure to see these artworks, but what realwill find the hands-on education center for students, and at Chris Kastner sculpture the far end of this room is a  backyardterrors.com small portal looking out from the roof of the hall, giving you a bird’s eye view of the entire room.

© Chris Dipiazza

To Be or Not to Be

© Betty Reid Martin

As PT issue 112 headed to the printers, something remarkable occurred. For  years, nay, for  decades there has been a push in paleontology to teach the general public that, despite what they learned in The Flintstones, © Jason Ward  © Chris Srnka

© Jorge Blanco

there was no such dinosaur as  B r o n t o s a u r u s . The species name was actually  Apatosaurus. Well, it would appear we were wrong.

Horizon model kit  built/painted by Bruce Horton

O.C. Marsh sure got it right in 1877 when he named 

two sauropods that had come out of  Wyoming ‘Deceptive Lizard’ because they had indeed proved to be a tricky  bunch. What we regarded was one species may actually be two, or possi bly even three.

© John F Davies

 Apatosaurus was described from an incomplete juvenile, and the “deceptive” part came from the fact that Marsh recognized that the small  bones under the tail (called chevrons) were different “from those of most known Dinosaurs in having the superior articular ends of the rami not united, but separated from each other, as in the Mosasauria…” (“Notice of 

© Mike Landry

© William Stout www.williamstout.com

more  Diplodocus like. The exciting thing was that this skull proved to be not exactly the same as CM 11162 either, indicating there were actually two subspecies. This was not exactly news to paleontologists like Dr. Robert Bakker,

© Elijah Hampton

© Trish Burnett

Jurassic Formation,” American Journal of Science, Series 3, Vol. 14: 514516, December 1877). Two years later Marsh received 25 crates of bones from the Morrison Formation at Como Bluff, Wyoming. After it was unpacked, he now had an almost complete skeleton of an adult sauropod, and because of the robust size of the animal, especially when compared to the juvenile Apatosaurus and the far more gracile  Diplodocus, he gave his specimen the new name  Brontosaurus excelsus, the ‘lofty thunder lizard’. Due to the differences in size and the incompleteness of the juvenile, Marsh had missed that both were actually the same species, and they remained separated until 1903, when Elmer Riggs published an article claiming that “the two genera may be regarded as synonymous. As the term ‘ Apatosaurus’ has priority, ‘ Brontosaurus’ will be regarded as a synonym.” Any confusion over the combining of the two was not helped when a few years later the American Museum of Natural History crowned their own specimen with a “largely conjectural” reconstructed skull. Based on Camarasaurus, it is important to note that this was not actually a Camarasaurus skull but a created one. It also didn’t help that the AMNH continued to call their specimen  Brontosaurus until 1912 and that a skull (numbered CM 11162) found in 1909 near a new Apatosaurus skeleton at the National Dinosaur Monument in Utah had been rejected outright  because it was too similar to the smaller  Diplodocus. Almost everyone  believed the beefy Brontosaurus needed an equally beefy head.

© John Goodier 

who for years had been trying to save the name Brontosaurus, because they recognized there were enough differences between all the remains to separate them. Bakker’s unpopular and  unsupported idea would become very  popu lar and highly supp orte d in 2015 when Emanuel Tschopp, Octavio Mateus, and Roger Benson released a new report. They had  inspected all the known Apatosaurus fossils and found there were enough differences to not only resurrect the original  Brontosaurus species, but also add two subspecies and keep  Apatosaurus.

One person who did believe the skull was correct was the Carnegie Museum’s director William H. Holland. When the museum’s new skeleton went on display, Holland mysteriously left it headless, as though he was From two we went to one and now have five, all sitting inside a single ashamed of the discovery, yet refused to conform with subfamily, the Apatosaurinae. This is split everyone else’s opinion. When the director died in 1934, the © John Sibbick  into two species,  Apatosaurus (with A. ajax museum finally relented and put a skull on their specimen, and A. louisae) and Brontosaurus ( B. excelwww.johnsibbick.com  but instead of placing their own, cor rect skull in place, the  sus, B. yahnahpin [Lakota ‘necklace’], and  Carnegie used a cast of a Camarasaurus skull. This may  B. parvus). Furthermore all are Diplodocids, have been a reaction to Yale, which had recently mounted  meaning they are also closely related to Marsh’s original Brontosaurus skeleton with a partly com Diplodocus,  Barosaurus, and Supersaurus,  posite, partly carved skull of their own, one that differed  explaining the similarity of the skulls. from everyone else’s but was still far more beefy than those What isn’t often reported though—and  found on Diplodocus. something I found surprising in my Today we know all these skulls were far too robust than research—was that Marsh did not originally the correct skull though it would not be until 1979 that the name two sauropods in the 1870s; he named  decision was finally made to start replacing all the three. Although we remember  Apatosaurus Camarasaurus and carved skulls with copies of the correct and Brontosaurus, the first sauropod Marsh CM 11162 skull. Finally these displays were correct, and  described was Titanosaurus montanus, a almost everyone agreed there was only one species of the name that would be short lived when it was robust sauropod, Apatosaurus, but that was last century, and   pointed out there was already a sauropod  things have changed. called Titanosaurus, and so Marsh renamed  In 2011 an articulated  Apatosaurus skull and neck was the specimen Atlantosaurus.

size” (Popular Science, February 1889).

© Zubin Erik Dutta

In 1877 an English teacher living in Denver wrote to both Marsh and  E.D. Cope about some gigantic  bones he had  unearthed and was looking to sell. Marsh responded  immediately by sending one of his collectors, Prof. B.F. Mudge, to inspect and buy the fossils. This purchase would  include those bones Lakes had already sent to Cope, so you can imagine how that went over  with Marsh’s opponent.

© Mark Hallett www.hallettpaleoart.com

Marsh would name a second species  A. immanis, and from the few remains he estimated it was a whopping 115 feet long. This was later scaled back to 80 feet, and though he apparently did little work on these sauropods after naming them, they seemed to have left a lasting impression since Marsh named the fossil-rich Jurassic formation they came out of the © David Kinney  Atlantosa urus  beds. For decade after decade and book after book paleontologists dug around and wrote about the amazing fossils they found in the Atlantosaurus beds, yet for such a famous site, where is it? And who today has heard of it? Well, the answer is a simple one  because the beds were later renamed the Morrison Formation, arguably the most fertile source of Jurassic dinosaur fossils in the world. Today Atlantosaurus hangs on by a thread though most who have seen the few fossils believe they likely belonged to Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus. Why is this important? Well, on the same page Marsh had described   Atlantosaurus he had also named Apatosaurus, but Atlantosaurus was first, and since the species has still not been entirely discarded, it creates an interesting possibility. After a century-long debate over which name has priority, there is a tiny chance any new discovery of the original specimen could  require us, at the very least, to dump one of these new subspecies and  rename it Atlantosaurus. To be or not to be! It’s great to have Brontosaurus back, but for how long? Well, that may well be the question!

Later that year Marsh announced “his” discovery: “THE gigantic Dinosaur,  Atlantosa urus montanus , described by the writer in the July number of this Journal,  proves to belong to a lower horizon than at f irst supposed and  is really from the upper Jurassic. Additional remains of the type specimen, moreover, throw considerable light on the structure of this largest of land animals and indicate that it is the representative of a distinct family, which may be called  Atlantosauridae. . . . The size of the original specimen of  A. montanus may be estimated from the femur, which was about seven feet in length. If the animal had the proportions of a Crocodile, it was at least eighty feet long.” Although this species is all but forgotten today, twenty years after its initial description it was still appearing in books and  articles across the globe. “Belonged to an animal the length of which has been estimated at from eighty to a hundred feet. It has been called   Atlantosaurus, on account of its size. This Atlantosaurus must have been a beast able to sweep down an elephant with a stroke of its tail as a crocodile would a dog. Of all the known land-animals, living or fossil ones, it is the largest, and it is probable that Nature reached a limit in producing land-animals of this

© Russell J Hawley

Dinosaur Playsets An Illustrated Guide to the Prehistoric Playsets of Marx and MPC Coming Soon! Finally! The definitive reference work on the dinosaur playsets from these two iconic companies! Perhaps the most endearing of dinosaur collectibles to many people are the lines of figures and playsets  produced by the Louis Marx Toy Company. The figures have attained a near iconic status among collectors of  dinosaur toys and memorabilia. Frequently considered something of a “baby sister” to the Marx dinosaur line is the series of prehistoric figures and playsets put out by the Multiple Products Corporation (MPC) at roughly the same time period. Often confused with one another, the dinosaur output of these two companies has shaped the  perception of what these prehistoric beasts were like in the minds of generations of children and adults. Unfortunately, up to this point there has not been an abundance of detailed information available concerning these popular lines of prehistoric toys, and much of what is out there can be wildly inaccurate, frustrating, and  confusing to the beginner and serious collector alike. Author Jeff Pfeiffer has compiled this fully illustrated 8 ½ x 11-inch volume to help playset enthusiasts navigate the prehistoric output of these two legendary toy companies. Written with both the novice and seasoned collector in mind, this book starts at the basics, with  brief histories of each company, discussions of the various dinosaur figures and accessories found in these  playsets, and (most significantly) over 175 full color photographs, encompassing most of the boxed dinosaur   playsets, carded sets, and bagged assortments of both Marx and MPC. This represents the most comprehensive work on the prehistoric playsets of these two companies to date. Information is also presented concerning the various reissue and knock-off sets that were produced by other companies, such as Toy Street, Spaulding, and  Winneco, as well as additional items and games that were directly based on the Marx and/or MPC prehistoric output. Also included is a handy guide to each playset discussed, with a listing of its contents, year of  production, and model number. This is the book that Marx and MPC dinosaur collectors have been waiting for! Author Jeff Pfeiffer has been an avid collector of Marx and MPC prehistoric playsets for well over a decade. Over the course of that time he has amassed an extensive collection of playsets from both companies. His passion for dinosaurs began in childhood, when he was given his first set of MPC dinosaur figures as a birthday present, and continues to the present day. Jeff presents Dinosaur Playsets to devotees of the dinosaurs of Marx and MPC as an indispensable tool in their own collecting passions!

By Tracy Lee Ford

[email protected]

discovered in different localities. He found two different types or morphs of   plates (figure 1). Either there were two different species based on the plates, or there were both males and females at the sites. Skeletally, the two morphs don’t vary that much. Histologically, both mor phs occur in fully-grown individuals. The plates are known from the whole animal, not just individual  plates. One morph had rounded plates; the other had more pointed plates. Saitta suggests the rounded plates were from males and the females had  more pointed plates (figure 2).

There are at least three valid  species of Stegosaurus, depending on who you believe. Stegosaurus Figure 1. Plates of  Hesperosaurus mjosi, A) after Carpenter, et Sexing Stegosaurs armatus is the type species of  al., 2001; B) after Saitta, 2015. Stegosaurus, and is from the highest Morrison Formation. It has not been Determining the sex of dinosaurs well described because the type spechas been a daunting task. It had been imen is incased in rock hard cement speculated that it was possible to matrix and is very difficult to predetermine sex in hadrosaurs and some  pare. When the materia l of  ceratopians based on the shape of  Stegosaurus ungulatus, was found, their horns/crests; however that possiMarsh decided to focus on that  bility has come under scrutiny and has species because the matrix was much  been challenged. One of the dinosaurs easier to prepare. Then S. stenops that had their sex determined was was discovered, which became the  Proto cerato ps. This determination iconic image for Stegosaurus. There was based on the size of the skull, its are a few other species that have been shape, and the width of the frill; hownamed but they are fragmentary. One small genus is  Diracodon laticeps and it comes from Albany County, Figure 2. Hesperosaurus mjosi sexual dimorphism; A) male, and  Wyoming. It is only known from 2 different dentaries and the end of the tail B) female, after Saitta. of a juvenile. It might be a valid genus or a juvenile Stegosaurus stenops. If  it is, then the name of Stegosaurus stenops would be Diracodon (Greek: ‘neck-point tooth’). Out of all the Stegosaurus species, stenops is the most abundant. It has distinct plates. At the locality where the f irst road kill S. stenops was discovered, there is a tail of a larger specimen, but the plates are smaller. Could  this also be a male and female? The largest plates on Stegosaurus are over  and just behind the pelvis (figure 4). The plate tips of S. ungulates has more a point than stenops does. At Dinosaur National Monument there is stegosaur material that ranges from  babies to full adults. What is interesting is that the plates have more a point, more than those found in S. ungulatus, and Bakker and I believe they represent a new species (figure 3 and 4).

ever, this theory has been recently challenged. Maiorino, et al., 2015 determined that many of the skulls that were identified as a female, were actually young males that had not matured yet. There are only a few ways to determine if a specimen was actually a female; medullary bone (the medullary bone is found in the center of the bone in female birds and assist in egg  production), an egg, or an embryo in the body cavity. Males and females show different morphologies; horns, color, body size, and so forth. In some animal clades the males are larger  than the females, whereas in other clades it is the other way around. A new paper published in PLoS determined that with at least one Stegosaurus species its sexual dimorphism is recognizable. Saitta 2015 studied several specimens of Stegosaurus mjosi. This species was first described as  Hesperosaurus mjosi, Carpenter, et al., 2001, and was made a junior synonym of Stegosaurus by Maidment, et al. 2008. Personally, I believe they are separate genera, but I’m not totally against its being a Stegosaurus species, as should be evident at the end of this article. For the rest of the ar ticle I’ll be using Hesperosaurus. Saitta studied several  Hesperosaurus specimens that were

Figure 3. Plates of Stegosaurus: A) single plate of S. armatus, after Carpenter & Galton, 2001); B) Stegosaurus stenops, after Ostrom & Mcintosh, 1999, Gilmore, 1914, C) Stegosaurus ungulatus, after Ostrom & Mcintosh, 1999, Gilmore, 1914, and D) Stegosaurus nova? from Dinosaur National Monument.

Stegosaurus longispinus is known from fragmentary material and has extremely long tail spikes. It may be either a genus of   Kentrurosaurus or a new genus. It is not a Stegosaurus.

Figure 4.  Stegosaurus specimens; A-B) Stegosaurus stenops; A) USNM 4934, B) USNM 4714, showing the different sized animals and plates, modified from Gilmore, 1914; C) Stegosaurus ungulatus, and D) Stegosaurus nova? from Dinosaur National Monument.

More research is needed to either confirm or  deny the sexual dimorphisms in Stegosaurus, and for that matter, ankylosaurs, and the Saitta  paper is a good start. The plates of the female  Hesperosaurus are thin, tall and pointed and do resemble those of  other Stegosaurus species, but the more rounded male’s don’t. It is the female plates that look  more like Stegosaurus than the males do. With such dynamically different looking plates,  placing those specimens into a genus is difficult. To complicate things even further, at the Howe Quarry in Shell, Wyoming there appears to be a different stegosaur. Recently the British Museum of Natural History bought a nearly complete Stegosaur from the Howe Quarry and  the Sauriermuseum. The stegosaur was named  “Sarah”. And its plates are different from  Hesperosaurus (figure 5). However, there is a controversy with the study. The specimens were discovered on private land, and the material is held in private collections. There are some North American  paleontologists who have a problem with this, and have complained about the specimens being held in private collections. Figure 5.   Stegosaurus specimens from the Howe Quarry; A Unlike European paleontologists, who (“Lilly”)-B (“Victoria”)  Hesperosa urus mjosi, and C) Stegosaur  don’t have a problem with privately “Sarah” (modified from Siber & Mockli, 2007). held specimens, and have a better  working relationship with private collectors, some American paleontologists don’t think any fossil should be held in private collection. Dr. Padian also has a problem with the interpretation of the h istology used, and I’ll have to bow to his expertise and his conclusions since he is one of the foremost  paleon tologis ts in the study of  dinosaur histology. There is also another new paper on Stegosaurs based on swimming traces. The tracks are of geologically older  specimens. There are good pes tracks and scratches of the manus. I find it interesting imagining a swimming stegosaur. My book, How to Draw Dinosaurs, volume 1 is now available on Amazon. It is my first 25 articles from  Prehistoric Times magazine and one from Dinosaur world . Watch this space, I will have another announcement in the next issue of   Prehistoric Times.

Don’t forget to visit my two websites; my original Dinohunter (http://www.dinohunter.info) and Paleofile (http://www.paleofile.com). Paleofile has several areas and an easy index (just click on the name, and  it will take you to the systematic list), or  you can go directly to the systematic list (eggs and ichnology included). Click on the name in the list, and it will take you to a more compressive listing: genus, species, etymology, holotype (lecto-,  para-, etc.), locality, horizon (formation), biostratigraphy (faunal zone if  known), age, material, and referred  material. There will be two faunal lists, one in which you can check your area or  any area in the world to see what animals were found there and the other will  be ages. If you’re intere sted in Biostratigraphy, you can see which animals lived with which at that time from around the world. There are also smaller sections: paleopathology, histology, extinction, taphonomy, skin, coprolites, etc. Eventually it will be fully illustrated. The site is now a free site; no subscription. I do have a donate button for  those who would like to give money to help keep the site going.

Dinosauriana, The Compendium With over 2000 full color photos and a wealth of information on dinosaur and prehistoric animal collectibles from the 20th century  by expert Joe DeMarco and a half dozen other experts, this disc allows you to also become the expert with just a touch of  your computer mouse. Pick up your copy of this computer disc direct from the author. Please note it is a PDF format so you must have Adobe Reader. The disc sells for $22 including shipping. Contact Joe at [email protected]. Joe accepts Paypal.

Godzilla Fans! Subscribe Today! www.g-fan.com

,

Rare prehistoric birds salt & pepper shakers made in Japan probably in the 1960s. Collection of Ron Vasquez. LEFT :

LEFT : The Sinclair  dinosaur (DINO) coin bank manufactured by Hull Pottery of  Crooksville, OH exclusively for the Sinclair Oil Corporation. This rare and expensive 7” tall collectible is desireable not only to dinosaur collectors, but also collectors of  Sinclair Oil Memorabilia, Hull Pottery, Coin Banks, and Advertising. It therefore commands very high prices if you can find one.

The J. H. Miller hollow waxy plastic Protoceratops is very tough to find in its normal tan color but I had never heard of one in black until I saw one in the collection of Ron Vasquez (left). Then collector Jean Marie Leonard of  France showed me a photo of  his (above.) Interestingly, his has the dinosaur name on the tail where Ron’s figure does not. Very strange. ABOVE & LEFT:

BELOW:

ABOVE : The complete boxed set of British Timpo Collection plastic, 5” prehistoric animal figures from the 1960s/70s. This is the second release with the figures in different colored plastic from the originals. The origiABOVE : In the 1950s/60s, British Shreddies cereal boxes contained one nal release was slightly painted. flat, hard plastic prehistoric animal figure. This photo shows a few of  those figures. It also includes the back of the cardboard cereal box that a kid had cut out and started crossing off the figures he had, leaving only two left. I wonder if he ever got that “Fish Lizard” and that “Fin Devil.”

Here is a recent reproduction of  the Waterhouse Hawkins Megalosaurus. It is a plaster  cast made by British sculptor  Russell Batten and is 20 cm. long from nose to tail. Russell devised and ran a ‘Dinosaur  Museum’ in Gloucester Docks for several years in the 1980’s to 1990’s. From the collection of Mike Howgate, London, UK

Remember Mattel’s Creepy Crawlers? You poured plasti-goop into metal molds, heated it BELOW: In 1993 Trendmasters issued up in the “Thingmaker” and rubbery creepy creathis trio of battery-operated toys with tures came out. Well, with expansion kits, you roaring sounds and eyes that light up red. could buy all kinds of molds including prehistoric They were packaged on blister cards animals. Here are two molds of prehistoric mamwith art that traced John Gurche's mals and two of marine reptiles. Daspletosaurus. The figures themselves were larger, unlicensed versions of the ever-popular scale dinosaurs produced by Invicta. Collection of Robert Telleria BELOW :

Canadian Doug Watson’s vintage certificate he received when he completed his Brooke Bond Dinosaur card album.

ABOVE:

a pterosaur from the Early Cretaceous Liaoning, a popular  source for the best toy figures. Guidraco is interesting  because of the teeth and the by Randy Knol moveable jaw allows you to [email protected] check them out closely. There are long and very narrow front teeth, 8 on top and 9 on the botwww.dinosaurcollectorsitea.com tom, that are intermeshing when the jaw closes. These are followed by a series of four  medium-length forwardWild Safari: In Liaoning, northeastern China curved teeth that CollectA’s Deluxe Guid raco 125 million years ago Yutyrannus was are progressively the Lord of the Yixian. The Yixian was smaller. The remaining teeth are a long row of small pegs g radthe home of the best documented feathually diminishing in size. The skull supports a large multi-colered dinosaurs. Safari Ltd gave us the ored crest with a rounded top pointing forward. It has a fourFeathered Dinosaur Toob that includes footed posture like the old Marx  Pteranodon, a near relative. Yixian small theropods  Dilong , The back feet are webbed; natural for a fish eater. The covering  Beipiaosaur us, Sinornitho saurus, and  of pterosaur fuzz is done in a shorebird's black and white. The Claudiopteryx all contemporary with figure is detailed, plausible and the articulated jaw lets you Yutyrannus. This year we get count the teeth. A unique figure you can only get from Yutyrannus, a medium sized tyran- Safar i Ltd Yutyr annus & Feathered Dinosaur  CollectA. nosauroid that is the largest known feathToob figs. Deluxe euryapsids: the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs from ered dinosaur. This game-changing disCollectA have a wide selection. Temnodontosaurus was a large, Early covery raises the possibility that the later tyrannosaurids of North America, Jurassic ichthyosaur perhaps getting as big as the Late Triassic shonisaurs. like T. rex, would have been feathered. The 2015 Wild Safari is the most It was the top predator of the sea feeding on other marine reptiles. The dark   photogenic release of the year. The figure is covered in gray dino fuzz. The gray body is long, robust and slender. The narrow forefins and hind f ins are use of a dark base under the gray is what gives the feathers their 3D look  roughly the same lengths. It has big eyes and a long that stands out in photographs. This is a very slender snout lined with teeth. From fossils we know effective painting technique to display the sculpichthyosaurs gave live birth with the young birthing tail ture’s level of detailing. The legs have feathered  first. This is skillfully included for another CollectA “trousers” and the robust forearms have feathfirst. ered “sleeves.” The scaled skull has a red mid Pliosaurus is an homage to the BBC Predator X and  line crest and two small horns over the front of  the Invicta pliosaur. The top predator of the Late the eyes. The forearms are held palms in with Jurassic seas, it was the largest of the pliosaurs at over  three strong claws contrasting with the later  40 feet long. The figure appears to be modeled on  puny ar ms and two f ingers of the larger North  Pliosaurus kevani, there are several recognized species. American tyrannosaurids. The tail is held high The open jaws lined with teeth have a crocodile feel and straight and the model is well balanced on with a hitch in the upper jaw. The smooth dark green Wild Safar i  Ar chaeopt ery x  (in foregr ound) two feet. You will want to add this to your collecfigures e ryx  skin on top turns white at the belly. The skin is p opulatcompared to other  Archaeopt  tion with the Feathered Dinosaur Toob as attenbehind. ed with parasites resembling a hagfish. This is a big f igdants. ure recalling the old Schleich  Kronosaurus but with a  Archaeopteryx the Urvogel lived on the arid shores and islands of  more convincing design and character. The euryapsids had a single temporal Germany's Late Jurassic Solnhofen lagoons. Although known since 1861 it fenestra, an opening behind the was not a popular subject for replicas. Artist Zdenek Burian's blue feathered  eye orbit. This model has a depreslizard headed version was imitated by Kaiyodo and Bullyland when they sion behind the eye that provides a created their  Archaeopteryx figures. The French toy company Papo proway to introduce the distinctive duced a fantasy version of  Archaeopteryx in 2014. The figure is colored  signature of the group.  brown, with blue, red, and white like an exotic pheasant with some bizarrely CollectA Popular series gives us impractical looking wing tip feathers. The head is naked like a moder n vultwo horned dinosaurs a chasture. For 2015, we have the Wild Safari  Archaeopteryx incorporating the mosaurine and a centrosaurine most recent scientific advances, including colors for the first time. In 2011, CollectA  Pliosaurus and with the trademark CollectA fringe melanosomes were identified on the fo ssil feathers that enable the coloring T emnodontosaur us over the hips.  Medusaceratops is to be identified. The Wild Safari reconstruction has black tips on the ends of the flight feathers with black and white over the rest of the wing. The from the asymmetric shape of the flight feathers is clearly visible. The wings are Judith River  rounded at the ends and of middle width reminding me of a quail's formation in wingspan. The tail is long with broad feathers. The skull is feathered to the Montana and  snout and the jaw is populated with small teeth. The feet have a hyper  is the oldest extendable second toe like raptors and a hind toe is reversed to support known chas perching. This is an excellent educational tool and with many teachable mosaurine. moments built into it. It is the most accurate reproduction I have seen. CollectA  Medusacer atops and  N asutoceratop s The formation CollectA’s Deluxe Guidraco is the new release in their extra-large figures supported one line. While other companies are rushing to release mini figures, CollectA of the most diverse dinosaur faunas, but fossils are pretty scrappy. Good   just works on getting better at being bigger. I had been just nonchalant to the skeletons from the formation have yet to be found, so  Medusaceratops is

reconstructed based on relatives. I like this model. The frill has six scallops with two outward curving parietals, the brow horns are angled out in a curve. The nose horn is a boss. The parrot-like beak is open with the head  raised as if bellowing. The skull is a combination of brown, black and white. The bovine torso is brown with dark stripes. The legs are slender with five toes on the manus and four on the pes. The color scheme engages the imagination without being garish.  Nasuto ceratop s lived in Utah in the Campanian. The American southwest seems to have developed a fauna different from the dinosaurs living in Montana and Canada and the fossils are more recent. Centrosaurines typically have short frills, prominent node horns, and no brow horns. Nasutoceratops has a medium frill, long curved   brow horns like a Texas longhorn or bison and has a boss in place of a nose horn. The skull is short with a strong beak. The frill is edged with rounded  osteoderms. The skin is scaled, the tail is short and the legs are slender with five toes in the back and four in front like  Medusaceratops. CollectA’s designer Anthony Beeson has created another original reconstruction. GeoWorld: Daspletosaurus was a Late Cretaceous North American tyrannosaurid. While many of its relatives are known to have had feathers, all of the fossilized skin known for North American tyrannosaurids shows a bare, scaly skin. It is becoming clear that in the Campanian, tyrannosaurids were  s  Daspleto sauru GeoWorld  very diverse.  Daspletosaurus had  a robust body, with a large head and long arms for a tyrannosaurid. The GeoWorld company captures the long ar ms. Compared with the GeoWorld   Albertosaurus it is more robustly built with a larger head. The skin has a crocodile appearance with a segmented cuirass descending from the head  along the back. The blue base color is suitable for a child's toy and the fir m vinyl seems to be a good medium to hold paint for those who prefer a custom look. A distinctive GeoWorld touch is a crest of filaments along the  back of the skull suggesting a d isplay of protofeathers. Like all GeoWorld  figures, it comes with educational support in the form of unmatched documentation in the packaging. The Universal Pictures film  Jurassic World  has arrived and many companies are betting they can ride the coattails. There SceneArama canned dior ama has been a surge in small figure sets. Safari Ltd. has dominated the high end of the 2 inch and under  market niche. Papo released  Schleich mini figures an uninspired set last year  (and then a second set) and  Schleich has 8 new mini figures for 2015, I just obtained  the Prehistoric Life Scene Setters from SceneArama and  Walmart has been selling a set of exclusive  Jurassic World   blind bag figures from Hasbro's Amblin. The Schleich figures are in the company style. The figures are chubby in the preferred preschool style. When I f irst saw them I thought there were intended  to be baby versions of the large set. There are no names on the figures, but they are easy to identify. The  Pentaceratops is interesting and rare in this size. The raptor is missing the toe claw for a  Jurassic World  feel but has feathers on the arms. The Schleich Saichania is much better looking than the Amblin ankylosaur that is a splayed belly dragger. There are 12 d ifferent  Jurassic World figures sold in 15 figure packets. There are at least 3 color  variations. I think we are supposed to buy the blind bags until we get all the variants. Amblin is a production company found by Spielberg and does some of the Jurassic Park  franchise tie-in products. The figures are in the

style of the original Hasbro figures so they are best appreciated by suspending your disbelief. There are some new figures. The mosasaur has a scalloped tail, the  Dimorp hodo n is the right size to be an accessory to some of the serious larger  scale series, the new allosaur  is interesting, but then there is the problematic mutant Walmart’s Jurassic World Indominus rex. The brief on tiny figures  Juras sic World  describes Indominus as a chimera made from the recovered  genes of Giganotosaurus,  Rugops,  Majungasaurus and Carnotaurus  plus  bird filler and more. So there are feathers on the arms and spine and the feet are webbed, so it must have been a duck for the bird genes. The arms are long with long claws. It is ¾ abelisaur and they had 4 fingers bu t short arms. I guess I could pass it off as an early theropod. I prefer the Amblin figures to the Hasbro articulated versions. SceneArama sells canned diorama sets for use at grade school science fairs. They sell a package of figures  Dimetrodon, Saltasaurus, Pteranodon, Triceratops, and Tyrannosaurus for  use with their display kits. They are not g reat figures but original and I like that they keep the sizes relative, as  Dimetrodon is the smaller and  Tyrannosaurus is bigger. I Hope Jurassic World’s success creates a tide that floats all boats.

THE

WISBECH

MUSEUM

WATERHOUSE

HAWKINS PREHISTORIC MODELS WERE THESE THE FIRST EVER PREHISTORIC MODELS?

By Mike Howgate

In December  1868 two fully laden wagons trundled north from Park Lane in London to the town of Wisbech in rural  N o r t h Cambridgeshire, in what must have been a  journey of more than a week. Their destination was the Wisbech Museum, which had been  built in 1846 making it one of the earliest purpose  built museu ms in England*. Their load, consisting of 51 packages, weighed 15 tons and was  part of the bequest of the Reverend Chauncy Hare Townshend esquire. Although born in Godalming in Surrey, Townshend owned land in the Wisbech area and  developed such an attachment for the town that it  became the principal beneficiary of his will after  the South Kensington Museum in London (kn own today as the Victoria and  Albert Museum). It is worth quoting at length the part of his will we are interested in: “… I give and bequeath all the rest of my pictures and water colour drawings and  engravings. And my coins and all my books and my original sketches and  my fossils, autographs, rings set with jewels intended to illustrate my geological collections and my collection of dried plants and all other effects under the denomination of ‘Curiosities’, objects of antiquity or vertu, to the Trustees or Directors for the time being of ‘The Wisbech Museum’ established at Wisbech aforesaid, on condition that the same several articles be never sold or exchanged but deposited and kept in the same museum for  ever under proper regulation and exhibited to the p ublic for the advantage of  the town and n eighbourhood.”** And that is how it is to this day. The Wisbech Museum, for the small local museum that it is, is a gem of a museum. It is preserved in aspic from the early Victorian period and puts the majority of modern county museums to shame for the range of material it has on display. No modern gimmicky dis play technique here, just a multitude of specimens. One display case, however, will be of particular interest to readers of  ‘Prehistoric Times’ and would reward a detour on any visit to the U.K. being  just twenty miles north of the fabulous Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge. In a corner cabinet at the end of the geology gallery on the upper floor is a collection of geological curiosities that are unique in the history of palaeontology - a collection of small scale models of the Crystal Palace ‘Geological Illustrations’. The life-sized models erected in Sydenham, South London of  dinosaurs, marine reptiles, Permo-Triassic amphibians, mammal-like reptiles and Tertiary and Quaternary mammals are world famous and feature in

 just about every ‘Dinosaur  Book’ ever produced. They were, as every P.T. reader  should know, designed and  sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under  the direction of Professor  Richard Owen between 1852 and 1854. Waterhouse Hawkins also produced some spinoffs of his ‘Geological Illustrations’. These included a series of six lithographic dioramas intended  for use as teaching aids, two of which are displayed in the Huntarian Museum of  the University of Glasgow, and a series of 1 inch to 1 foot plaster models which were available for purchase  by museums and collectors  both in the U.K. and the U.S.A. These were very detailed and well executed  models obviously produced   by Waterhouse Hawkins to his exacting standards. Two, the  Iguan odon and   Megalosaurus are on dis play in the Dinos aur  Gallery of the Natural History Museum in London. Others that were produced are a Pterodactyl , a  Labyrinthodon a diorama featuring an  Ichthyosaurus and two Plesiosaurs ( Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus and P. microcephalus). The models were sold   by James Tennant at his shop in the Strand in London and were available in the USA through Professor Henry Ward from whom the full set could be had for a mere thirty dollars.*** Compared to these models the Wisbech Museum examples look like crude knock-offs. It is like comparing pristine Marx original toy dinosaur  figures with the ubiquitous Hong Kong repros! The Wisbech models also come in different materials; some are in cast iron, both hollow and solid, while others are in plaster. The quality of the sculpting varies from more or  less accurate to the frankly comical.  Nearly all of the Crystal Palace models were produced, only the  Pterod actyls , the  Mosasa urus, the  Anopl otheri um group and the  Megatherium are missing. But to make up for these there are two extra models, one that Waterhouse Hawkins planned but never produced; a Mammoth and what the museum list describes as a giant turtle which is most likely a representation of the living Galapagos giant tortoise. The Mammoth has the tusks curved upwards at the same level as the head rather than the downwards sweep to ankle height we know is correct today, but this is how Waterhouse Hawkins planned  to produce the life-sized model. A report in the daily newspaper The Observer for January 7th. 1855 notes “We cannot pass over the gigantic mammoth without a word. This is the last of Mr. Hawkins creations and will probably be the largest. The solid foundations of brick and cement which are to receive him are laid  and his model on a scale of an inch to a foot constructed.” *** How he planned to engineer the tusks in this position is anybody’s guess. But he did manage the giant-sized antlers of the male Megaloceras, the Irish Elk, which must have posed a similar problem.

The Wisbech models could not have been reproductions of the maquettes made by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins for the full-sized  models he produced in 1852-4. Several of these were produced for  James Tennant who sold these accurate one inch to one foot scale models in both the U.K. and the U.S.A. where his agent was Professor  Henry Ward. Hawkins was a consummate artist who illustrated Charles Darwin’s ‘The Zoology of The Voyage of HMS Beagle’ and exhibited his group study ‘Model of the Aurochs’ at the Royal Society. It seems highly unlikely that he would have allowed such crude casts to  be made for sale. It is more likely that they were-one off models made by him in order to plan out how the models would fit into the landscape of  the ‘islands’ they were to adorn. These crude models could be moved  around a model of the proposed landscape to find the most desirable fit. They may also have provided the basis for the ‘Baxter’ print of early 1854 which shows some of the models in an imagined ‘Crystal Palace’ landscape and was produced before the Grounds were opened and some of the models even constructed. The print also shows the models in a different arrangement to that in which they were eventually erected .**** * While it cannot be proved that these models came from the Townshend bequest as there is no documentation to prove it, it does seem to be the most likely source. ** Quotation from ‘A1 Among Country Museums’ published by The Friends of Wisbech and Fenland Museum in 1985 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the opening of the museum. *** Information from ‘ The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, the story of the World’s First Prehistoric Sculptures’ by Steve McCarthy and Mike Gilbert published by ‘ The Crystal Palace Foundation’ in 1994. **** To see the print and a discussion of it by Professor Joe Cain go to the website of the ‘Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs’ at cpdinosaurs.org. Below is a full list of the 25 Wisbech models, both those on display in the cabinet and those held in storage in three boxes labelled  ‘Victorian Replicas’. CRYSTAL PALACE PREHISTORIC ANIMAL MODELS

 body and upturned tusks. WISFM: 1999. 3.8.  Dicynodon. Cast Iron 140 mm. long with long tusks and tortoise like shell on  back. Models in store – Geology shelf 19 (WISFM = Wisbech & Fenland Museum) Victorian Replicas Box 1: WISFM : 1999.3.9  Dicynodon. Cast iron, hollow, 140 mm long. WISFM : 1999.3 5 Giant Tortoise? Plaster cast 130 mm long. Limbs damaged. Rt. Limb repaired, others missing. WISFM : 1999. 3.1  Palaeotherium. Cast iron 75 mm long. In museum list described as a Tapier. Victorian Replicas Box 2: WISFM : 1999. 3.25  Labyrinth odon salamandroides. Plaster cast 140 mm long. With smooth frog-like skin. WISFM : 1999. 3.13  Plesiosaurus. Cast iron (solid) 152 mm long. WISFM :1999.3.11 Teleosaurus. Cast iron (solid)340 mm long. WISFM : 1999. 3. 12 Teleosaurus. Cast iron (solid) 340 mm long. With broken left forelimb. Victorian Replica Box 3: WISFM : 1999. 3. 21 Iguanodon. Large Plaster cast. with ‘ Hylaeosaurus’ (wrongly) scratched on the underside. WISFM: 1999. 3.7 Irish Elk. Cast iron 100 mm long. Antlers inserted into holes in the head. Left antler twisted  out of alignment and with forward pointing prong not cast. WISFM:1999. 3.24 Labyrinthodon pachygnathus. Plaster  cast 100 mm long. With ‘warty toad-like skin’. WISFM: 1999.3.3 Female Irish Elk. Cast iron 115 mm long. Described on the museum list as “horse”.

IN THE WISBECH AND FENLAND MUSEUM

Models on display in the corner cabinet of the first floor gallery. (WISFM = Wisbech & Fenland Museum) WISFM: 1999.3.18  Ichthyosaurus tenuirostris. Cast iron hollow model 280 mm long. WISFM: 1999. 3.16 Ichthyosaurus communis. Cast iron hollow model 420 mm long, with two right fins and the tail broken and repaired. WISFM: 1999. 3.15  Ichthyosaurus platyodon. Cast iron hollow model 240 mm long, repaired right fore-fin. WISFM: 1999. 3.19  Iguanodon. Plaster cast 320 mm long, one fore-foot raised and with the distinctive double nasal horn. WISFM: 1999.3.20  Megalosaurus. Plaster cast on a base 420 mm long, WISFM: 1999. 3.22 Hylaeosaurus. Plaster cast 330 mm long with triangular spines along the back cut from sheet metal. Label on the side says Iguanodon, presumably because of the nasal horn, but it has the dorsal spines and distinct knobbly-ness above the eyes of   Hylaeosaurus. WISFM: 1999. 3.17 Plesiosaurus. Cast iron (solid) 135 mm long. WISFM: 1999. 3.14  Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus. Cast iron (solid) 210 mm long. WISFM: 1999. 3.2  Palaeotherium. Cast iron (solid) 75 mm long. On museum list described as a Tapier. WISFM: 1999. 3.23  Labyrinthodon pachygnathus. Plaster cast 100mm. long. The skin is warty and toad-like. WISFM: 1999. 3.4 Female Irish Elk. Cast Iron 115 mm long. Described  on the museum list as ‘Horse’. WISFM: 1999. 3.6 Male Irish Elk. Cast Iron 100 mm. long. The antlers are inserted into holes drilled into the head. WISFM: 1999. 3.10 Woolly Mammoth. Plaster cast 380 mm long. Hollow

ILLUSTRATIONS:

DSCF 4234: The classical entrance of the Wisbech Museum built in 1846. DSCF 4236: The ‘Victorian’ main gallery of the Wisbech Museum. DSCF 4239 and 4281 The ‘Crystal Palace’ models on display in the Geology gallery. DSCF 4243  Iguanod on  plaster model WISFM 1999.3.21 in storage which has  Hylaeosaurus wrongly scratched on the underside. DSCF 4291  Hylaeo sauru s  plaste r model WISFM 1999.3.22 in display case, with sheet metal cut out spines along its back wrongly identified as ‘ Iguanodon’ DSCF 4292 Iguanodon plaster model WISFM 1999.3.19 in display case and wrongly identified as ‘ Hylaeosaurus’. DSCF 4293  Megalosaurus  plaster model WISFM 1999.3.20 with cast iron  Ichthyosaurus communis WISFM 1999.3. 16 below. DSCF 4265 Cast iron Teleosaurus 1999.3.11 in storage. DSCF 4290 Woolly Mammoth plaster model WISFM 1999 3.10 in display case. DSCF 4283 Male Irish Elk WISFM 1999. 3. 6 in display case. DSCF 4282 Female Irish Elk WISFM 1999. 3. 4 in display case identified  as Eohippus and on museum list as Horse. DSCF 4278 cast iron  Palaeotherium WISFM 1999.3.1 in storage and  described on the museum list as a Tapier.

Interview with Paleontologist Matthew Mossbrucker of National Geographic Channel’s T. rex Autopsy  by Tony Campagna When Matthew T. Mossbrucker isn’t busy dissecting dinosaurs for The  National Geographic Channel he’s directing the public Morrison Natural   History Museum in Morrison, Colorado, home of the type section of the  famous Morrison Formation. www.mnhm.org He also curates the museum's collections, which are partially a state repository for Colorado fossils. The  flora and fauna of the Morrison remains his particular passion, along with communicating science to museum-goers. His work make him something of  a paleontological generalist, studying everything from stegosaurs to lung fish. With his crew, he's lead the re-excavation at historic Jurassic fossil  quarries in Morrison and prepares new material from these sites. We first  talked about the National Geographic channel’s T. rex Autopsy and then continued with a discussion about this issue’s featured dinosaurs How did you end up pulling out the first T.rex entrails on national television? How does a young man working the Mor rison end-up dissecting the king of carnivores from the Cretaceous? TC:

MB: This “Jurassic life” is an unusual one sometimes; like eviscerating a rubber meat puppet on global TV. It happened very quickly. British production company Impossible Factual contacted me in the early spring to film "T.rex Autopsy" for the National Geographic Channel. Once I vetted them that they weren't in fact making another Mermaids or Megalodon fakumentary, I quickly signed on. I felt that folks would be attracted to the gore and  campy nature of the concept, but stick around for real science. I talk to thousands of folks every year, and it's always bothered me that some view dinosaurs as monsters. "T. rex Autopsy" allowed us to showcase the dinosaur's animalhood in an entertaining way.

 Not entirely sure how Impossible Factual found me. Previous to “TA”, most of my on camera time revolved around museum outreach to the Internet geek community (who happen to be massive dino geeks. There's a lot of overlap). I've worked with Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen, The Happy Hobbits, several Comic Cons, and The One Ring.net, the leading J. R. R. Tolkien fan club. One of these streaming videos must have caught the eye of somebody at Impossible Factual. Perhaps it was my rhythmless  breakdancing instructional video? Dunno. TC: Who made the call to have the "paleo-brat pack" do the show? Why not all the old familiar faces? Any ideas?

MB: I don't know, Tony. That's above my pay grade. From the looks of it, everyone else was busy with documentaries of their own. Point of fact, the

narrator says Matthew something like Mossbrucker next to "..greatest team his T. rex Autopsy of experts..." in the "T. rex Autopsy" intro, and I keep adding "... were busy, so they called these people." But it's inaccurate to say none of the old hands appeared during Nat Geo's "Dino Week." I watched  those specials, and a large swathe of paleo professionals appeared in the other three documentaries airing concurrently. And I'm not sure some of the seasoned pros would have wanted to wade around in the buckets of gore that we did. When it came to the cast of our little show, I'm the junior member, in terms of television experience. Luke Gamble had a on e season reality show revolving around his veterinary practice. Paleontologist Steve Brusatte did   both camera work and consulting for the "Walking With Dinosaurs" franchise on the BBC. And Paleobiologist Tori Herridge appeared in a show called "Mammoth Autopsy." While I have filmed a sizzle reel that was shopped to about twenty networks, and interviewed with a variety of news  programs, I've never been in a show b efore. I think there's a desire at least at the network level for some young whippersnappers in front of the camera. Everybody else was busy, so I jumped into the rubber carcass with both  boots. TC:

Had you worked with any of the other team members previous to this

event? MB: Never! I met Luke and Steve the day before we started shooting, and  Tori the day of shooting. The project was borderline anarchy, no turning  back and no reshooting many scenes due to the syrupy, gor y nature of the T.rex. It was exhausting, but great fun. Given the absurdity of the situation, all we could do is have a great time and laugh and joke at our lot. I still expect all of us to get matching tattoos at some point.

Did you have to keep it all a secret from everyone? When did you wrap up shooting? TC:

MB: We weren't under any kind

of embargo or non disclosure agreement. It was a gentleman's agreement. But to make sure there weren't any inadvertent leaks, I left my cell phone back in my hotel room. Shooting wrapped in mid April. It was a whirlwind production schedule. Signed on in mid March;

As I watched the show each time, I had to wonder how many times you all must have slipped and or fell in all of that "blood"? TC:

MB: It was slick. It was treacherous. We were ankle deep in fake corn syrup blood  inside the body cavity of the rex. A scalpel was lost in there that we never recovered. (From l to r) Paleobiologist Tori Herr id ge

TC: Funny stories? Interesting behind the scenes stories?

Any opinion on how social media  plays into the sciences? There are so many armchair paleontologists – some are good, some are TROLLS, and some are professionals who use FB and Twitter and such to share and "debate" the sciences, Is it a good thing or not? The openness of it all now? TC:

MB: Social media amplifies voices -- the good, the bad and the ugly. We live in an Information Age, but not an Enlightenment Age. It remains vital that scientists engage the general populace through TV and social media. Sometimes, we are our own worst enemies, in terms of outreach and  PR.

Paleontologist Steve Brusatte, Paleontologist Matthew Moss brucker, Veterinarian Luke Gamble

MB: The TV crew pumped sugar blood all over the T.rex and set by the gallon. It was so sticky, Tori got stuck while reaching into the rex's cloaca. I had to pull her out by the ankles. We wore the cheapest medical scrubs and  TC: A little bird (Greg Tally!) told me to ask - What's with the nickname white wellies chosen more for their look than comfort. We all had contact Dr.Sugarbeard?  bruises from our scrubs fusing to our skin. Peeling them off after four teen  plus hours of shooting was a particular agony. The production team also MB: It's a nickname bestowed upon me by my colleagues at the Morrison made a maquette, a small scale model of the T.rex. There was no place to put it at the end of a long day's shoot, so it ended up spending the night with me  Natural History Museum. I was in illfitting scrubs and by the end of each in my hotel room. Insert the salacious joke of your choice here. day of shooting, my facial hair was caked and knotted with yet more sugar   blood. So my friends came up with a teasing nickname of "Dr. Sugarbeard." She's called Becky, by the way. I like it. It makes me feel like a Bond villain. TC: What has become of the beast and its  parts now? I think if Nat Geo were smart about it they'd put it on a traveling exhibit as it is a TV star itself.

TC: Please tell us about the awesome viewing party your friends and such threw for the premiere please!

My wife Colleen as well as Meredith and Greg Tally (owners of a dinosaur-themed Best Western near my museum) - were rushing and planning a nearly impromptu gathering to view "T. rex TC: I've read that there was no script. Autopsy." Colleen ordered a cake from our  Matthew’s Trex Autopsy viewing party cake True? You appeared to have very little dialocal Target in Littleton, Colorado and the logue.  baker must have searched the web for "T. rex Autopsy" because they really outdid themselves. We ended up with a gory little cake that was perfect for my museum crew, friends and family. My MB: Still waters run deep, my friend. They fed us lines, and there was friends and family gathered at the Dino Hotel's restaurant bar called Paleo cursory rehearsal. Mostly, we were improvising and sharing our knowledge Joe's to watch together. Perfect setting. on the fly. Given that most scenes were one take, I was still finding my footing on camera. TC: As a Jurassic guy – tell me, How do I identify which of my Bronto/Apatosaurus toys/models are which? I am so confused! TC: As a scientist, how did you/the team/the show make calls about not  being accurate? Example - lots CSI fans, crime show junkies, IZOMBIE MB: From what I've seen they're all a hot mess, my friend. I have yet to viewers, and junior high school biology students, know that you don't dissect and animal with such reckless abandon. Why was that the acting  be satisfied with popular models of either dinosaur. I'm still holding out for  choice? How did you all balance making it "real" and "we're not saying this the posable action f igures of the "T.rex Autopsy" team, replete with a blood  is really real"? soaked rex with removable organs. I heard they sold it to a casino in Monte Carlo. No doubt, they now have a major problem with ants. I warned them... MB:

As my mentor Dr. Bakker says about a lot of paleo art, "Accuracy schmack-uracy; schlock sells." This was a campy exercise in popular science education, not an accurate portrayal of a dissection or necropsy. In terms of aesthetics, it has more in common with a slasher film than a "how to" for veterinary procedure. What we were really doing as a team was a little subversive; disguising teaching, science and critical thinking for the average viewer inside the milieu of a monster movie. We hid the broccoli inside  buttery mashed p otatoes so that the kids would eat their vegetables. If you  buy into this joke, it is a great deal of fun. It was "Saw" meets "Jurassic Park" with a healthy dollop of "Sharknado." MB:

MB:

*This is where the T. rex Autopsy interview ended but as this issue of PT  is about Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus I went on to ask a few questions about them from Matt; someone in the know. TC: Matt, this issue focuses on the animal(s)  Apatosaurus and/or   Brontosaurus. I thought the last big news about its reconstruction was  putting the right head on the animal, but you made an interesting find  (when?) dealing with the face of Apatosaurus. What was it and what is its significance?

 What’s New  in review  By Mike Fredericks Sideshow collectibles’  Apatosaurus repaint/variant statue arrived here for review and is well timed for  this issue. This new version differs mainly in its  prominent banded paint on the neck and tail. It has a great “water-pattern” striped camouflage paint scheme. Artists Steve Riojas and Anthony Mestas again did a “bang up job” (that’s a compliment, by the way) of painting this 43” long sauropod statue. Sculptor Jorge Blanco really created a masterpiece with his sculpting on this beast. All of the skin texture details, wrinkles and protruding bone structure

from their acclaimed  Dinosauria collection. was a power Mosasaurus ful swimmer, the predatory marine reptile of the Late Cretaceous period. It rises from the depths of a seabed  teeming with colorful marine life. Perhaps in cel-

Sideshow’s re-paint - Amber colored  Mosasaurus

Sideshow’s Apatosaurus re-paint.

is evident and amazingly defined. I like how the groundwork base has many different footprints on it, both from this Apatosaurus and from other passers  by. With these repaints, an extra piece of ground work is attached (l ike with the Styraco repaint I reviewed last issue) that gives the statue a little more height. The  Apatosaurus is another  high-quality polystone, impressive museum quality piece and is guaranteed to thrill dinosaur enthusiasts. Please go to this site: http://bit.ly/GetApato. Sideshow Collectibles is gauging the Two views of Anchiceratops interest in their  resin model kit  prehistoric animal line by how many  people visit this site. Thank you. Price is $359.99 We also received a second  review statue from S i d e s h o w Collectibles. This is a new re-paint of their recently r e l e a s e d  

ebration of the “Jurassic World” movie released this summer the  Mosasaurus is painted in an amber-colored paint and reptilian brown spotted skin. ( Mosasaurus was a star of the film.) The entire paint job on this new version is completely different from the first gray-colored mosasaur. Both have their merits and I like them both. Again Jorge Blanco did an amazing job of creating a realistic looking and scientifically accurate prehistoric animal here and again Steve Riojas did a wonderful job of painting it. Jorge told me the sealife around the Mosasaur is based  upon real fossils of creatures known to have lived then too. It is great that Sideshow is re-releasing much of their Dinosauria line in new paint schemes. This gives people who missed the first run of the statues a second  chance without hurting the collectibility of the first statues which were done in completely different paints. The first Mosasaurus was a run of 1000 editions where this Amber version is only 400. Price is $299.00. Please go to this site: http://bit.ly/GetMosasaurAmber. Sideshow Collectibles is gauging the interest in their prehistoric animal line by how many people visit this site. Thank you.  Anchiceratops was a chasmosaurine ceratopsid dinosaur that lived during the latter part of the Cretaceous Period in what is now Alberta, Canada.  Anchiceratops is also a beautiful 1/10th scale resin model kit sculpted by Darren McDonald. Darren has devised a new method for dinosaur skin that is a mazing. He also, of course, really researches his subject matter so that all aspects of his models are scientifically accurate. I think the photos to the left speak for themselves. This is a resin model kit that requires assembly with super glue and painting. The length is about 22" long with no base included. Casting is by Russ Mueller, who really knows what he is doing so the model will be “clean as a whistle.”

There is a *Prehistoric Times" special Pr ehistorix Dimetrodon base with  price good until Sept. 1st. swamp check/money order/PayPal $160 SHIPPED within 48 States --$170 SHIPPED within 48 States after that. International shipping is $45. Immediate shipping is available (Josh has castings on hand and ready to go). Send payments to: Josh Burch 3625 Wilmington Ave St Louis, Mo 63116  [email protected]

Prehistorix Mesozoic I want to introduce you to Hunting Ground  Prehistorix. We received the Mesozoic Hunting Ground  Add On Base from Prehistorix for the Aurora Prehistoric Scenes Kits. It includes; base, small dinosaur carcass with detachable leg (for the Aurora Allosaurus to munch on. NOW we know why he’s Prehistorix Baby  been drooling the past 40 years!), Mammoth Peril! carrion eating lizard, small tree fern and a broken plant, all in a Collectors Box with instructions. This is a fun resin model kit that requires assembly and painting. It looks to be in the style and spirit of the old Prehistoric Scenes models by Aurora, just as Prehistorix designed it to look. This is a limitPa po young ed edition kit of only 20 and they have sold most of  Apatosaurus those already so hurry. Prehistorix is a busy company with much new coming on the horizon.

Prehistorix also supply recasts of missing rare Aurora P/S Bases and Flickering Products (one of  their best sellers) to bring your models to life. They have collaborated with Wild Safari AroarA for the Sauropelta Leaping/Impaled  Saber Tooth Tiger.

1:15 Nasutoceratops of them, especially the Wild Safari figmodel ures. PT readers have voted his figures as the best two years in a row now. He gets scientific help from experts to make them as realistic as possible. He recently told me that paleontologist Ken Carpenter helped him on the Both are exclusive Sauropelta and paleontologist Eric to dansdinosaurs.com Lund of Utah helped him on the  Nasutoceratops. His Yutyrannus is quite well done too. This is a newly found feathered relation of  1:20 Tyrannosaurus from China. All Yutyrannus three of these Wild Safari figures are model by super detailed and as accurate as Shane Foulkes they could be made. I highly recommend them. PT was also sent The Wild Safari Archaeopteryx who’s feathers are black and white, just as paleontologists have discovered that melanosome shape and density in fossilized  feathers can infer color. A black and white mix was found. The Archaeopteryx also has minute detail. We were also sent the Wild Safari  Brachiosaurus. This is also very nice looking and colored in brilliant earth-tones of green and brown with a light g reenish-yellow under belly. These are all “musts” for you collection.

PT has yet to find a contact at the French company Papo  but have been CollectA receiving review Daeodon Papo samples from Dean Tupuxuara Walker’s dinosaur figure selling company They offer a found at  base to give the D e J a n k i n s . c o m . Dimetrodon a CollectA Wild Safari DeJankins has everyswampy home. Xiongguanlong  Nasutocerato ps thing in the toy prehisThis base will toric animal world and  finally take at the best prices. The care of that latest from Papo is a small pool of  young  Apato sauru s. water on the Of course depending Dimetrodon Base by extending it CollectA on the scale, this could also be an adult into a real swamp… “The Wild Safari Guidraco Carboniferous Swamp.” Also,  Apatosaurus (or even a  Brontosaurus now Yutyrannus they have products for the that it is back!) This is another beautiful Papo P y r o / L i n d b e r g / L i f e - L i k e  prehistoric animal with its long, soft whipDinosaur fan with more to come  ping tail and its mouth open; it appears to be and a universal base for your  in peril. It is almost a foot and a half long. Airfix Dinos to play on. This will Also new is the pterosaur Tupuxuara which is a large crested flyer from Brazil. This is a f ine include a Collectors Box with a figure shown walking on the ground on all  backdrop. fours. Its mouth is wide open with its tongue Another new release is Baby Mammoth Peril! This resin kit will include sticking forward, undoubtedly calling out a Baby Woolly Mammoth, a 2 part base that connects to the P/S Mammoth loudly. Get these f igures and much more at CollectA Base, A small rock cliff and an Altered Saber Tooth Tiger in crouching posi- DeJankins.com. Daxiatitan tion, ready to spring on our hapless Baby. Also includes a nameplate.(This A fine producer of many new figures is is a AroarA/Prehistorix collaboration ) CollectA. They are turning out beautiful, And finally they will be coming out with a kit that will be a crossover to innovative, prehistoric animals like crazy, the Monster Scenes Series titled " The Woman Eating Plant!" Please go to many of which have never been created  their website prehistorix.wix.com/prehistorix  before. We received a big box from them. I hope no one will mind that I use my illustrations for some of the figures First I have to talk about the huge 1/4 scale I review this time. After all, Randy Knol and/or I have shown photos of all Guidraco pterosaur with movable jaw. (Gui of them in previous issues of PT anyway. Thanks for your understanding and  means "malicious ghost" + Lat. draco I hope you like my little drawings. "dragon") is a genus of large-toothed pteroSafari Ltd. sent us samples of their latest prehistoric animal f igures. They dactyloid pterosaur known from the Early are genuinely beautiful figures. Canadian sculptor Doug Watson does many Cretaceous of Liaoning Province, northeast

China. In fact, the teeth on this creature are amazing. Guidraco has a colorful crest and is posed crawling on all four limbs. It stands over ten inches tall. Like Wild  Safari, CollectA has also come out with a fine little  Nasutoceratops figure. This Late Cretaceous ceratopian dinosaur had a rack of horns more similar to a steer  or bull than any other known to science.  Acrocanthosaurus is a favorite dinosaur of many peo ple. CollectA’s Deluxe 1:40 scale Acro has a moveable  jaw and a line-type camouflage pattern. Also in this Deluxe 1:40 scale series is their new  Pliosaurus.  Pliosaurus cruised using just two fore-flippers, using the back pair for extra speed when pursuing and capturing prey. It is interesting that this f igure has sucking  parasites attached to it too. CollectA’s 1:20 scale line has two new prehistoric mammals in it,  Moropus and   Daeodon. The Late Oligocene Daeodon ( Meaning: Dreadful teeth) had long and slender limbs. This wild   boar-like animal was the largest and last of the entelodonts. Moropus has long been known to science. It was Herbivorous and lived during the Miocene. Moropus (Meaning: Sloth foot) is related to the modern horse, the rhino and the tapir. Also new from CollectA is  Daxiatitan. This enormous, long necked, Lower Cretaceous titanosaur  dinosaur may have been protected by a scattering of bony armored plates. This is another of the figures that only CollectA offers. Medusaceratops is a newly discovered ceratopian dinosaur that CollectA offers in brown with a striped motif on its back. CollectA has come out with a fantastic looking Smilodon figure - the famous saber-toothed cat. It has well done, spotted  leopard-type fur. The marine reptile Temnodontosaurus platyodon is portrayed giving live birth which is a clever idea. And finally, a tiny little  Xiong guan long  was included in the box. This carnivorous, Lower  Cretaceous bipedal long-snouted ancestor of the tyrannosaurs had a nar row elongated muzzle reminiscent of the later  Alioramus. It is attached to a

small stand. Whew, well that is the lot. My congratulations to another banner group of figures designed by Anthony Beeson and produced by the Leungs. Rebor is a Chinese company offering many new readyfor-display finished dinosaur statues. I received the Rebor  “King T -rex” which is a very nice sculpt in traditional  brown.The design is very similar to Papo’s T. rex design which, of course, is very similar to the T. rex from Jurassic  Park which Crash McCreery and Mike Trcic designed over  twenty years ago for the film. And as is the trend these days with dinosaur figures, the mouth opens and closes. The figure is designed to have one foot balanced on a rock  about the same size as the foot (no other base is included.) This is a very precarious stance to say the least and whoRebor  ever at Rebor designed this needs to be slowly killed. I’m Utahraptor  sorry; that was harsh. I will amend that to he should be quickly killed. The resin rex will balance there with a little finesse from your f ingers but I’m afraid to even breathe on it after that. And if it falls over, it will probably break and  ruin the statue. Rebor released this statue of Tyrannosaurus rex in 2014. As stated, the articulated jaw can be adjusted for display, and the nice, detailed  textured skin work and well done paint job can be admired from all angles. This solidly build model is packed within its own collector's box with sleek  graphic design, information booklet, and fitted foam to protect the model. 1:35 Scale. Dimensions: 13" L x 7" H. I have the T. rex but there are many others to get now and even more coming soon. Rebor also offers Ceratosaurus Dentisculcatus Savage, Utahraptor Ostrommaysorum Wind  Hunter, Yutyrannus Huali Y-Rex and Hatchling Triceratops Jolly. And coming soon are  Acrocanthosaurus Atokensis Hercules, Velociraptor Triplets Statue, Fallen Queen Triceratops, Sauropod Nest Diorama (non-scale), Theropod Nest Diorama (non-scale),  Dimorphodon 1:6 Scale. Get yours from dansdinosaurs.com

Continuing from Pg 31 I identified the missing muzzle of Apatosaurus ajax. It's locked in granite-hard sandstone and I'm still  preparing the fossils. The process is like cleaning concrete off of a Faberge Egg. MB:

The four  scientists get down and dirty at the Trex Autopsy

(TC - The following was sent by email.) MB: Here's the abstract that Adam Marsh, Bob Bakker and I published (along with a poster) at the 2014 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America held in Denver, Colorado. Here's our published abstract. Feel free to quote from it. "In 1877, the first giant Jurassic dinosaurs were discovered in Morrison, Colorado by Arthur Lakes. Although North America did not produce the first sauropodomorph dinosaur, Apatosaurus ajax was the first sauropod  that provided insight into the form of the most iconic family of long-necked  dinosaurs. Crowning the neck with the correct skull proved challenging,  particularly for the type sample of Apatosaurus, as only the rear of the skull had been identified -- until now. From Lakes' Quarry 5, the most productive Morrison Formation sandstone quarry, we have recovered a virtually uncrushed, disarticulated but associated diplodocid maxilla and premaxillae. We assign these specimens to  Apatosaurus ajax  because the general proportions are most like  Apatosaurus as described by Berman and McIntosh and differ from those of other diplodocids. A. ajax appears to be the only  Apatosaurus species documented from the sample area. The new Quarry 5 maxilla - premaxilla is broader across the muzzle than in Diplodocus, and agrees with that of Apatosaurus louisae. The undistorted new maxilla suggests a deeper eye/cheek region than previously reconstructed for A. louisae. Another feature linking the new maxilla to that of  A. louisae is the proportionately large antorbital fenestra with an anterior end  far deeper and blunter than that of  Diplodocus. The proportions of the Quarry 5 specimen are unique in the extreme depth of the anterior end of the antorbital fenestra, indicating that  A. ajax was more derived in this feature than  Apatosaurus louisae and to a lesser  extent,  Apatosaurus excelsus. Seven dentary teeth sans dentary from Quarry 5 was assigned to Diplodocus lacustris in 1884 by Marsh; however  the specimen was excavated in the same sandstone and within 10 m of the new apatosaur muzzle and shares identical dental morphology to the new material, hence we refer Diplodocus lacustris to cf.  Apatosaurus ajax. With this new partial snout, combined with the paired quadrates and   braincase from the 1877 excavation at Morrison’s Quarry 10, we can more accurately reconstruct the skull of the first known species of  Apatosaurus. With further preparation, these specimens from Quarry 5 help to illuminate the distinction between Apatosaurus ajax and other diplodocids." TC: What are your thoughts on the validity of there being two different creatures with these names?

When we find one of these giant dinos, we don't find more than a couple in the same layer - suggesting the animals are contemporaneous and from the same breeding population. If we want to quantify the differences from one individual to another or between sexes, we need more than just a carcass or two. Uncertainty arises when you move above or below that layer because you're time traveling. Move across a valley or into another basin as you could be mushing together different populations from other points in dino history. The blankets stone that make up the Morrison Formation capture several million years of time. When skeletons are pulled from the Morrison that does not necessarily mean that they all lived at the same time. When we look at the skeleton of Brontosaurus and the skeleton of Apatosaurus, we see that they are clearly related. However, we don't find them together and  the differences in their bodies make me want to cleave the genera in order  to best express the diversity between the two species. If we can't prove with the rock record that a population of fossil beasts were alive at the same time, why should we assume that they are same species or genus when we the skeletons don't look the same? I think the fundamental question is why is the recognition of fossil species important? I think that charting the diversification of living things throughout time is the only way for us to understand the tempo of evolution within time's song. I find a greater danger in lumping physically different critters across the boundaries of rock layers because we understand how ecosystems evolved and fell apart, and recognizing the diversity of organisms is the foundation of our understanding of extinction. The concept of a fossil species matters. Is there anything about Apato/Bronto that you share with visitors to the museum that you see is news to them? What don't we armchair paleontologists know about this icon of all things dinosaur? TC:

MB: If you were to stand an Apato and Bronto side-by-side, you'd immediately be struck by how much larger Apatosaurus ajax was compared to  Brontosaurus excelsus, by almost a third. The neck of each animal is different - Bronto's neck is nearly as wide as it was deep in cross-section, while the Apato neck was almost twice as wide as it was deep. There's some other  differences, but I've yet to publish on them. Stay tuned...

MB: They are different. Historically, paleontologists always regarded  them as such. The argument is how different were these animals?

When O. C. Marsh named  Apatosaurus from the first fossils (consequently, they're from a hole across the highway from our museum) and a couple years later Brontosaurus, he noted that Apato had three fused verte brae in the sacrum, while Bronto had f ive. About a century later, John Berman and Jack McIntosh argued that paleontology had the wrong noggin on the neck of the family apatosaur - they reminded the world that Elmer Riggs has joined  Brontosaurus with  Apatosaurus in 1903. Riggs correctly pointed out that the differences in the rumps and shoulders were slight between Professor Marsh's  Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus, and could be attributed to changes during growth. But Riggs didn't look at the necks, let alone the skulls, which had either been misidentified in museum collections or were languishing in the ground.

TC:

Thank you for sharing your work and experiences with us.

MB: Let me say thank you to Prehistoric Times. Their review of the best toys is like a hot sheet we use for our museum gift shop. Also, I have been reading PT since I was a kid. I have read your work Tony and I consider it an honor to be interviewed by you and join the ranks in Prehistoric Times.

Crawley Creatures put the Rex together. http://www.crawleycreatures.com/  Nat Geo Channel has some featurettes on the 'T. rex Autopsy' website: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/t-rex-autopsy/.

by Phil Hore [email protected]

 blight, almost the entire nation’s yield of   potatoes failed, and people started dying. All over the globe we have cultures relying on fewer and fewer crop and farm species, and there is strong evidence these are vulnerable and likely to fail if they were ever to encounter an aggressive  pathogen.” Many of the hands poised above the crowd had dropped because their questions were answered, and so rather than call on someone else and get pulled off  topic, Ryan continued on.

© Joschua Knuppe

With the park now operating at full capacity it had been decided to use the power of this technology to blunt some of  the attacks by those who opposed what the park had been doing. Live dinosaurs were great and paid the bills, but many  people had begun asking, perhaps correctly, why the company had not brought back other recently extinct species. Well it was time to answer that question. The company had begun by using DNA collected from the hide of an extinct, zebra-like African creature called a quagga. Extinct since the 1880s because of overhunting, a cloned herd  with the company’s logo stamped inside their ears was now running wild in a South African nature park. The success of  this program had brought a flood of orders to repopulate the wilds of many of the hidden corners of the planet with lost animals, and today the company was about to reveal its latest  product. Oliver Ryan, head of the Taurus Genome Project, stood   behind the gathered crowd of reporters and scientists, along with the European politicians whose funding had helped  finance the project, as the large door at the far end of the coliseum opened. Camera flashes and gasps of pleasure broke over the crowd as f ive enormous animals trotted into view.

“Records and numerous studies have revealed over the last 25 years that we have lost 190 breeds of farm animals, with thousands more on the verge of  extinction as markets call for standardized   prod ucts. Cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, and pigs—  we have lost many of the older breeds because they  produce less meat, milk, and eggs, meaning if the few remaining species almost all of humanity relies on ever suffer the same fate as the Irish lumper potato, we are in serious trouble. There is hope, however. All over the world, forwardthinking nations have long established seed banks; little deposits of botanical treasures that are helping to ensure the survival of our  most important crops against natural disasters.

Well, with the technology here we have shown that the world’s zoos and natural All were quadrupeds with enormous, forward-pointing history museums can horns that curved back in toward their face. The largest indi become a similar genetic vidual was a male, as tall as an adult human at its enormously  bank for our lost species. muscled shoulder, which bulged and flexed as it shook its These animals before you © Trish Brunette enormous horned head about and snorted. The beast’s coat was were partly cloned from a dark brown, almost black, with a small, light stripe of hair  century-old specimens sitrunning down its neck shaped somewhat like an eel. ting in museum cupboards across Europe. Exactly how we did this is of  “Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the aurochs.” course a trade secret, but I can tell you it is built on the same technology that Ryan, standing at the podium situated in front of the enclosure, asked  helped us create the dinosaurs currently roaming the park outside this room those gathered: “Any questions before we move on?” He then pointed, sin- and is a large step to ensure that should we ever face a biological disaster in the future the world has a chance to recover and survive. If we have learned  gling out one person from a sea of desperately raised hands. anything by growing our own dinosaurs, extinction is forever unless we do “Why?” something about it, and n ow we can do something about it.” Ryan looked long and hard at the reporter, before responding. “The glib Finished, Ryan looked at the gathered crowd. “So, any questions?” answer would be ‘why not?’ The pot-boiler answer would be ‘that we can!’ Only a single hand was still raised. “Could you tell us exactly why these I’d rather point out that the power to reproduce extinct species is more animals were the ones you brought back first?” important than ever before. “The aurochs is the basis of almost all our domestic cattle species. They Our modern world has decimated the natural one to such an extent that are large and hardy and records show they rarely have any trouble calving. too many species have become so genetically bottlenecked that there is a They are also capable of breeding with every single cow species we have real danger of inbreeding. Most people are aware of the trouble the cheetahs today, giving us the potential to enter new genetic material into these species have had thanks to this issue. Well, you may not be aware that the Irish potato famine occurred when farmers began relying on a single, hardy, high- and reverse any genetic bottleneck. For these reasons the aurochs was the obvious choice, plus the nations who helped fund this program, Russia, yield strain of potato. Tragically, when that strain proved vulnerable to

national heart and are proud ly waiting for the herds we have produced for  them to help rewild their parks and  forests. That’s the reason we have chosen these animals to begin our   program.”

This aurochs horn was once the treasure of a Polish Prince.

The Aurochs

There is an . . . [animal] which are called uri. These are a little below the elephant in size and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their  strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied. These the Germans take with much pains in pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this exercise and practice themselves in this kind of hunting, and those who have slain the greatest number of them, having produced  the horns in public to serve as evidence, receive great praise. But not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed. The size, shape, and appearance of their horns differ much from the horns of our  oxen. These they anxiously seek after and bind at the tips with silver and use  between these two, along with a sprinkling of other bovines, such as yaks as cups at their most sumptuous entertainments. Julius Caesar. and bison. This description from the future Roman emperor can be found in his sixth At the same time Jurassic World is in cinemas and the somewhat fictionvolume on the war he waged against the Gauls and their leader Ambiorix. al science behind the story is coming under scrutiny, there are numerous Though Caesar won the war, his description of the aurochs suggests that he experiments moving forward whose goal is to rebuild prehistoric landscapes never really encountered one (or had never really seen an elephant) and was and repopulate them with rare and possibly even extinct species. either just recalling a distant view or someone else’s description. I point this Called “rewilding,” one such program is Russia’s Pleistocene Park, a out as a little strange because the powerful, aggressive aurochs was a comnature reserve along the Kolyma River where scientists are attempting to mon beast fighting in Roman circuses. rebuild such an accurate Ice Age The aurochs was a wild species of  ecosystem that a mammoth could call cattle that once roamed across Europe, it home. After a modest start reintroAsia, and large parts of the Middle ducing the Yakutian horse to the East right up until the seventeenth cenregion in 1988, the park today contury, though to be fair they had been tains reindeer, moose, wild horses, rare for centuries before their extincmusk-oxen, wisents (European bison), tion. wolves, brown bears, wolverines, and  Rather than “a little below the elefoxes, with future plans to bring in  phant in size,” the largest male specitigers, elks, Saiga antelopes, camels, mens were around 6 feet tall at the and, if they are ever reproduced, mamshoulder, though there seems to have moths.  been geogr aphic variati ons, with The park would also be interested in southern European species a little the aurochs, which had survived the shorter and lighter and those in the Ice Age and endured until 1627 when north taller and heavier, possibly to © Mike Landry the last known individual, a female, help them retain heat during the freezdied in Jaktorów forest, Poland. The ing winters there. This makes the remains of this specimen were stolen during the Swedish invasion of Poland  aurochs equal in size to the largest modern cattle species, India’s gaur. There and are held today in a museum located within Sweden’s Royal Palace. were also cases of island dwarfism, with those on Mediterranean islands The idea of the species being revived to help rewild parts of the Northern like Sicily around 20% smaller than those on the mainland. Hemisphere is not so crazy as it sounds. The TaurOs Project is an internaThe aurochs likely evolved from a Pleistocene species called  Bos acutional effort (though mostly a Dutch program) to collect those primitive cattifrons around 1.5 mya and then moved up from India into the wide grassy tle breeds that most resemble their aurochs ancestors and try to reproduce European plains that appeared during the cold climate of the Pliocene. the species. Of course any offspring will only physically resemble the These regions would become the very places humans and their agricultureaurochs, but then because these animals are descendants of the aurochs anyloving ways would infest, forcing the bovines into more r emote regions such way, what will that really matter? This was all given a boost in 2013 with the as swamps and marshes. It wasn’t all bad news for the aurochs, however, Uruz Project, which plans to not only use the same back-breeding idea of   because these intruders also saw value in the hardy animals and began to looking for the most primitive domestic species with the most aurochs-like domesticate them. It is also thanks to these early humans that we have a features “to breed back an animal that resembles the Aurochs in every good idea what these cattle looked like since there are prehistoric images of  aspect: appearance, behavior and even genetically. Uruz is the old Germanic them scattered across Europe. word for Aurochs and seems fit for a project that has the goal to recreate the Genetics, fossils, and local lore tells us this domestication process mighty wild cattle that roamed throughout Eurasia until four centuries ago occurred twice, with the larger Eurasian subspecies ( Bos primigenius prim- (www.truenaturefoundation.org).” [Note: Old High German uruz is proigenius) being domesticated into taurine cattle during the Copper Age nounced /OO-roots/.] (around 8000 years ago). The Indian aurochs ( Bos primigenius namadicus) Bizarrely this effort was not the first time someone had tried to bring the separated from their Eurasian cousins around 2 mya and were likely domesaurochs back either. In 1996 a German-based grou p had tried to back-breed  ticated at the start of the Neolithic (around 11,000 years ago) into the zebu, cattle with aurochs-like features, and the results today are called Taurus cat-

tle, herds of which have been released into controlled parks in several European nations. The Taurus is a tall, long-legged, far sleeker animal than most farm cows, showing the  project is, at least physically, on the right track because modern farming requires animals to be less mobile and far bulkier to increase their controllability and meat production—  features not only unnecessary, but dangerous in a wild animal that needs to roam long distances and  deal with predators. All these pro jects were built on the back of one of  the strangest moments in paleontology and zoology, and it occurred in a Polish forest called Białowie a (/byah-wo-VYEH-zhah/ ‘whitetower’).

meanwhile Germany invaded Poland  with the help of their ally Russia and  then turned around and invaded  Russia, leaving Göring master of the annexed nation’s forests. This leads us to a very suspicious photo taken in 1933 of Göring and the Hecks working on a map of the Białowie a forest.

In the 1930s a dark cloud rolled  over central Europe, with Adolf Hitler and his cronies taking control of  Germany and immediately setting their eyes outward. At the same time the second most powerful Nazi, Herman Göring, became Reich Master of the Hunt and Master of  the German Forests. A prolific hunter, Göring took these positions seriously and introduced many lasting changes, such as protecting and  expanding the few national German  parks. These would become havens for the few remaining wild lynx, European bison, and wolves, and  Göring added to the forests by restocking them with other, once  plenti ful creatu res such as elk, moose, and bears. Many of these were imported from North America, along with any zoo in the countries Germany invaded during the war. It was in this roll that the vice-chancellor also met with a pair  of brothers interested in bringing  back a creature that the Aryan-loving Nazis were fascinated in. Lutz and Heinz Heck were zoologists in charge of zoos in Berlin and  Munich and had been at the forefront of saving the European bison, a species that had been decimated during WWI. Also surviving the Ice Age, the wisent had been reduced to a few hundred animals, and the Hecks collected these to breed. They ensured there would be no inbreeding by creating the first ever studbook of a wild animal species to keep track of each animal’s pedigree. This effort was successful because today there are nearly 5000 animals, though any congratulation should be tempered with the fact that the Hecks took Nazi dignitaries through Poland’s zoos, and any animals they felt were “not necessary” they shot for fun. This work with the bison triggered an idea in the Hecks to look at some of the oldest domestic lines of  horses and cattle to see if they could breed their  ancient ancestors back. With the help of Göring, the  brothers searched far and wide for animals with the  physical features they required to bring back the aurochs and the ancestor of the domesticated horse, the recently extinct tarpan ( Equus ferus ferus), the Eurasian wild horse.

The Nazis considered themselves the children of the Aryan race—and  here is the important part—would   prove themselves by hunting the most powerful creature in their  world, the aurochs. It would seem to hunt this cow was to be Aryan! So does anyone find it suspicious that six years before Germany invaded  Poland and triggered the Second  World War, Göring and the Hecks were planning the largest nature reserve in Europe in the last bit of prehistoric forest in the north of the country?

Beautiful Aurochs sculpture by Jim Martinez

The timing of this is bizarre and  requires a far deeper investigation than we can get into here. We do know that Göring had been invited   by the Polish government to hunt the forest years earlier, and so he obviously had first-hand knowledge of  the region and had likely begun  planning his park the moment Hitler  set his eyes on their national neigh bor. We also know that there were many people living in and around  the forest at the start of the war, and  many of these people were Jewish. Between the occupying Soviet and  then the German forces, Białowie a experienced the first of many exterminations, often committed by one of the most notorious Nazi units in Poland, Police Battalion 322.

After 15 years of breeding and with the forest cleared, the Hecks began the last stage of their experiment. Lutz had created a herd of cattle that looked a lot like an aurochs, and although smaller than the prehistoric species, the cows were hardy, tough, and highly aggressive, attacking anyone who approached them. He had part of his herd transported to Poland, along with some bison and some of the tarpan-like horses his brother Heinz had bred. All were released into Białowie a forest, and for the first time in centuries a herd of admittedly pseudo-aurochs were roaming free in Europe. Although these Nazi-bred animals (called Heck cattle and Heck horses) were later exterminated by the Soviets, who understandably wanted few reminders of their former opponents running about attacking people, today there are still a few Heck  cattle herds about. These cattle are the ones that have been used in the modern programs intent on  bringing the mighty aurochs back to life; so, who knows, shortly we may have news of aurochs being reintroduced once more into Białowie a forest, this time for the right reasons.

Herman Göring, (right) Reich Master of the Hunt and Master of the German Forests

tures, 1919’s Ghost of Slumber Mountain, and  The Lost World (1925). Perhaps for today’s audiences and film historians,  Evolution is most notable due to its incorporation of several stopmotion scenes swiped from Ghost of Slumber   Mountain.  Evolution’s fundamental question is, how did  we come to be upon the Earth? Also, was man always man, or formerly a lower animal? To answer such queries, viewers are treated to quite a variety of visuals. In an extended opening segment, Fleischer outlines familiar geological  processes, as well as techniques & the tool kit utilized by scientists to infer what we’ve learned  about prehistory. We see fossils (trilobites & ammonites), and are mesmerized by the results of  fossil vertebrate restoration (spying Charles Knight’s swamp-dwelling Apatosaurus American To many, “evolution” simply means life through Museum painting, and his horned “Agathaumas” geological time, although by the turn of the 20th censculpture). Prehistoric cave paintings (Lascaux), tury, these were terms that one usually only encounand examples of ancient architecture (Aztecs, tered in museums and books (both popular and textEgyptian, Stonehenge and Roman ruins) are also  books). Of course, today, we’re accustomed to shown. While interesting, this introductory, Advertising for Ghost of Slumber Mountain,  being bombarded not only in televised nature & showing the large flightless bird, Diatryma as an “instructive” (or table setting) portion of the science documentaries about how life developed  film is un even in meaning and best rather vague attraction. But where is O’Brien’s name? and changed throughout the Phanerozoic Era, but conceptu ally. Next, we delve into Earth’s murky we’re also exposed to this theme even in popular  origins, quickly progressing to modern times, a movies and television series. Just think of the words in that theme song visualized life through time sequence which is the main focus of the film. composed by the ‘Bare Naked Ladies’ for CBS’ popular comedy, The Big  Life’s development on Earth is outlined, but only after visuals illustrate  Bang Theory, for example. Quite unexpectedly, the 2014 film Noah actually how the solar system originated from the near-collision of stellar bodies (a includes a cgi-animated evolutionary sequence. The Americanized version  popular astronomical theory then), followed by formation of the Earth and  of the Japanese giant d ino-monster movie, Gigantis the Fire Monster (1959)  planetary system from swirling stardust. As a prerequisite to life’s origin, contains a recreated life- through- time element, incorporating several lifewe see examples of molten masses, steaming lakes, and then, as the surface through-time stop-motion animated shots. Yes - and there are numerous cools, formation of oceans. The Moon finally becomes visible through other examples abounding! vaporous clouds, volcanoes erupt and mountain ranges buckle. These Whether or not we fully comprehend or accept it, by the early 21st centu- effects are achieved with minimal use of model-making, live footage and  ry, life-through-time explanation of prehistory has truly & irr evocably gone  props, yet they effectively convey ideas as read by “popular.” This is perhaps, especially, because proaudiences on inter-title cards. Chemical reactions ducers can incorporate knowledge and restorations give rise to aqueous, microscopic life, which rapidof fossils, dinosaurs and other p rehistoric & extinct ly proliferates from single-celled “shapeless protoanimals into the traditionalized tale, as related in  plasms” into multicellular jellyfish and other inverfilm. It seems, however, that by the 1920s, the then tebrates. Here, Fleischer spliced in footage of mod(new) stop-motion animation technique offered  ern echinoderms, an octopus and then the first verfresh and startling opportunities for portraying tebrates - f ish, all representing nature’s struggle for  creatures as genuinely fascinating as dino-monexistence in which, it is claimed, instinctual fear  sters!  became instilled during primeval times. The next important marker is the arrival of lungfish sprawlSo when did representations of life-throughing onto shallow beachheads (gills making way for  time first appear for wider audiences, not simply in lungs), amidst the carpet o f awaiting terrestrial veg books, but on film? Possibly in 1923, in a silent etation. These biological “milestones” are achieved  41-minute documentary titled Evolution, directed  without indicating how much intervening geologi by Max Fleischer, with scientific supervision procal time has passed (which wasn’t accurately known vided by Edward J. Foyles (American Museum of  then). We also sense the old “ladder” concept of   Natural History). Footage in this rather simple evolutionary development in play here, leading (needless to say - black & white) silent film may somewhere – inevitably – to that fully anticipated, seem far removed from the more sophisticated, familiar biological destination. analogously themed fare one views today (for  example, contrasting the visually absorbing 2014 re-make, Cosmos: A Space-time Odyssey hosted by  Neil deGrasse Tyson). But Evolution scored then in attempting to present the essence of the evolutionary, life through time idea, without becoming overly technical. Charles Darwin probably would  Willis O’Brien’s Tyrannosaurus ‘puppet’ have enjoyed viewing it, had he been alive then, (sometimes referred to as an “allosaur”) for  without being overly critical of the effort. Ghost of Slumber Mountain, excerpted from  Evolution also straddles the period in between Jeff Rovin’s “From the Land Beyond Beyond” release of two early significant silent dinosaur pic-

Of course, after life spreads onto land, reptiles dutifully evolve. Fleischer shows us several modern examples, and then more dramatically - restorations of prehistoric reptiles – dinosaurs! The dinosaurs’ age as featured in this documentary comes from two main sources. Several of Josef  Pallenberg’s life-sized dinosaur statues displayed in Hamburg’s Zoo Tiergarten, as well as footage from The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (not a documentary, but an early sci-f i/fantasy film released in June

1919) represent the Mesozoic Era. First we see Pallenberg’s  Igua nodo n (misidentified as Tyrannosaurus), followed by Allosaurus b iting Stegosaurus’ flank, and a Triceratops ‘family.’ (See Prehistoric Times magazine # 106 for  more on sculptor Josef Pallenberg.)

films, two animals are shown fighting … twice as much effort as a film showing but one monster in action. Yet this sculptor did not stop with two in the same picture; he  put in three and four, and the diff iculty … was quadru pled.”

Even worse, Dawley cut several stop-motion scenes from Ghost ; the outtakes, again O’Brien’s work, would  Then several sequences from Ghost  later appear in another unfairly credited production, Along  are spliced into the sequence; brief  the Moonbeam Trail  (1920). A recently “rediscovered” scenes showing Willis O’Brien’s stopfilm (i.e. as of late 2009),  Moonbeam Trail  relied on motion animated “Brontosaurus,” feedfootage of a duckbilled “Trachodon,” a tyrannosaur, and a ing and jousting Triceratops, and a Stegosaurus menacing people in a cave. The f ilm involved  tyrannosaur “Tyrant Lizard King” vs. youngsters whisked off to the Moon where they see these Triceratops battle. Mark F. Berr y notes creatures. (The film is retained within the collection of the Advertising for Ghost of Slumber Mountain in his  Dinos aur Filmog raphy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.) A (1919) (McFarland, 2002), that 9 of the o riginal “Trachodon” puppet sculpt (most likely O’Brien’s) is 17 stop-motion cuts in Ghost  are represented in  Evolution. Berry also  plainly visible on a table near the window in Mad Dick’s hut, as shown in claims the 15-minute silent “The Ghost of Slumber Mountain is notable as Ghost of Slumber Mountain. more than just a stepping stone on (O’Brien’s) progressive journey to King  Well, naturally O’Brien had had enough of this odious treatment and left,  Kong ; it is in fact the first movie to really begin to exploit the cinematic thus beginning his fruitful association with Watterson R. Rothacker who  potential of dinosaurs.” (pp.116, 99) There were two additional prehistoria was appalled by Dawley’s selfish tactics. This led both to 1925’s The Lost  animated by O’Brien for Ghost , however, Fleischer chose to feature (i.e. World  and a lawsuit brought by Dawley against Rothacker and Arthur   borrow) only the most dramatic scenes. Conan Doyle (author of The Lost World serialized in 1912). The case was O’Brien had a falling out with Ghost of Slumber Mountain’s producer, readily overturned. Herbert M. Dawley, following its release resulting f rom their very one-sided  Compared to the version of Ghost of Slumber Mountain featured in a collaboration on stop-motion animation. Dawley had experimented with a recent DVD, (appended as a special feature to Retromedia’s 20th annivercumbersome & time consuming stop-motion technique, involving the sary edition release of  Planet of Dinosaurs), the visual clarity of the sculpting of life-sized prehistoric animals that presumably were sufficiently dinosaur scenes borrowed from Ghost & spliced into  Evolution is clearer  flexible through armatures or some other mechanism. As the sculptures (and less ‘ghost-like’). Ghost is O’Brien’s only surviving f ilm made prior to were moved incrementally, photos could be taken of the models “moving.” The Lost World in which stop-motion animation is combined with live However, according to Jeff Rovin in The Land Beyond Beyond , Dawley action. According to Steve Archer, the great special effects artist also (sup“hadn’t “… actually shot any film of these creations. He had simply taken  posedly) appears in Ghost as “Mad Dick,” the hermit who invites the prostill photographs and pasted them into a book. When the pages were flipped, tagonist to peer through a telescope to witness “live” prehistoric animals. the animals appeared to move.” So Dawley hired the more experienced  Archer also explains that surviving prints of Ghost were derived from one O’Brien, whose demonstrated use of camera footage, with miniature “pup-  poorly preserved 16 mm negative, claiming, “This is a big problem with  pets” each having moveable armatures was far more refined and practical. viewing films from the silent period. Films were not expected to make any The f ilm was ultimately successful, owing mainly to the special effects (not money after their initial release, so they were stored – not so future generaso much the story itself). And Dawley was jealous, afterward striving to tions could see them, but to be forgotten and to disintegrate slowly to erase O’Brien’s credit for his contributions and special effects mastery. unviewable dust. … According to some sources, the original running time Although during the premier O’Brien was duly credited for the production, of The Ghost of Slumber Mountain was considerably longer than it is today.” now Dawley coveted all the praise for himself, expunging O’Brien’s good  (Archer, Willis O’Brien: Special Effects Genius , pp.5-6). name from released film prints. Fleischer, who went on later to create Betty Boop, Popeye and was credFor instance, in the August 1919 issue of  Motion Picture Magazine, a ited with an early classic Superman cartoon series, was evidently highly writer describes the exacting process Dawley allegedly went through to proinspired by Willis O’Brien’s animation of The Ghost of Slumber Mountain duce the startling effects, claiming: dinosaurs. However, (as Neil Pettigrew suggests in his The Stop-Motion “Mr. Dawley wanted to film prehistoric mammoths in action, and he b uilt  Filmography), he may have thought such avenue of trick photography too huge models – of cloth, wire, and steel – of the dinosaurs and other monintricate (& costly) to perfor m routinely, thus moving toward the two-dimenstrosities of the pre-stone ages. Placing these in front of the camera and  sional cartoon medium. slowly filming their movements – that is, by moving their head a bit and  Fleischer’s evolutionary sequence continues in Evolution, with footage of   photographing, moving it again a bit more and again photographing – he modern birds and a new warm-blooded type – mammals! Curiously, no preattained the effect of prehistoric animals in action. Mr. Dawley was able to historic paleomammals are indicated or shown in the film. Or even fossil take something like twenty feet of film a day – that is, on days he worked   birds. Where is  Archaeopteryx in a documentary concerning evolution?! hard and consistently. But the result! Astonishing, even to the fight to the And Fleischer missed an opportunity to borrow the Diatryma flightless bird  death between huge creatures of the dim past.” also animated by O’Brien for Ghost . Interestingly, in Ghost of Slumber  Ridiculous! And in ensuing months, Dawley proved unrelenting. For in the  November 1919 issue of  Illustrated World , another writer states, “Maj. Dawley … laid in a supply of lumber, cloth, paint, clay and other materials … He first prepared a rugged wooden skeleton … with a covering of clay to express the muscles, tendons and bones … and over this placed a skinlike covering of cloth painted a dark brown color. After building several animals – one of them was 17 feet high – he was ready to make them act for  the camera … In addition to placing the legs in the proper posture each time an exposure was made, he had to change the position of the neck, the tr unk  and the tail each time a new step was taken…. In one of Maj. Dawley’s

 Mountain, the  Diatryma bends to scratch its ear with its right leg, analogously to how Marcel Delgado’s Tyrannosaurus in 1933’s King Kong also scratches its ear upon making its startling appearance. This was a signature characterization inaugurated by O’Brien in his earlier film,  Prehistoric  Poultry (1917). Climate change next ensues in Fleischer’s  Evolution and a pervading glacial period results in widespread extinctions. In the wake of the great continental glaciers, after the ice sheets melt, we witness modern faunal assemblages, emphasizing organismal adaptations for sur vival. There is also an evolutionary trend noticeable, with successive shots of creatures supposedly on that “‘inevitable” branch leading to man. So we see not only lemurs

and various primates, but also J. Howard  from the fossil record.  Evolution is overly ambiMcGregor’s head restorations of prehistoric tious yet superficial. In his  Prehistoric Humans in humans, including Java Man, Piltdown Man,  Film a nd Television, Michael Klossner claims the  Neanderthal Man and Cro-Magnon. (Relics then subtitles in  Evolution are “overwrought.” Berry attributed to Piltdown Man, of course, planted in a adds “… despite its drawbacks, this creaky but rock stratum for unwary discoverers to find in 1915, thankfully straightforward relic is actually more fooled many. The Piltdown hoax wasn’t proven watchable – the dinosaur sequences notwithstanduntil the 1950s.) From there, various races spread  ing – than Irwin Allen’s similar but painfully smug worldwide leading to modern civilization, and we 1956 entr y, The Animal World ” (which incorporatread of the voice of nature calling for “everlasting ed Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion dinosaur  H. M. Dawley’s patented concept of how change.” The film ends cautiously on a theological scenes). tone, not unlike the early 1960s Americanized ver- stop-motion might, or could conceivably work  With that said, however, the life-through-time sion of Karel Zeman’s Journey to the Beginning of  using life-sized armature models ran counter to theme of portraying prehistoric times has also O’Brien’s more practical approach involving Time, also another life-through-time extravaganza taken a back seat to more forward probing, staterelying heavily on stop-motion animation, except  puppet miniatures. It was O’Brien, not Dawley, of-the-art, variegated “dinosaur renaissance” sciwho animated dino-monsters for “Ghost of  with a fantasy plot moving backward into the geoentific matters. True – despite its former heraldry Slumber Mountain”, although Dawley tried to logical past, from the present instead of forward  during Victorian times (usually illustrated & outsteal credit for O’Brien’s successes. from the beginning. lined in an array of popular books), by the late 20th Certainly by today’s standards, as a documentary concerning Life’s history,  Evolution isn’t visually captivating. Modern youthful audiences wouldn’t appreciate it. And yet, even for its time, it would appear to be antiquated. It missed great opportunities for embellishment or to capitalize on other significant matters known to science then

century, the “life through time” theme had become  prosaic, if not mundane. And Ghost of Slumber Mountain, rarely witnessed  today, with its dramatic, pre-Lost World dino-monster stop-motion footage once central to a lawsuit has quietly settled into the d ust of yesteryear, pro jecting mere phantasms from a simpler, forgotten time.

© Andrew Ebbett

Smilodon populator  © Fabio Pastori Brachio © Meggy Vodusek 

T. rex © Nathan E Rogers

Juvenile T. rex © Dean Schaefer 

Apato © Mark Hallett www.hallettpaleoart.com

T. rex © Roman Morales

 Free to subscribers but must be updated each issue Wanted: Paying TOP dollar for SRG dinosaurs I need. Offering $800 for SRG Dinichthys. Offering $500 for Large SRG Cavewoman. Also, will pay $250 for the following SRG collectibles: large caveman, large mammoth, large Mosasaurus, and large Plesiosaurus. Contact me at [email protected] Large Fossil Collection for sale. Selling as one lot. Many unique and hard to f ind..Serious inquiries only please. Call after  8:00 PM EST and leave message..I would be more than happy to email pics upon request. Call Mark (704-763-8401) FOR SALE: Complete collection of Prehistoric Times #1 113 plus the next eight issues. Collection of Indian Artifact Magazines 1982 - 2012; all in binders. Complete collection of  Dinosaurs The Encyclopedia Vol. 1 plus all seven supplements (Don Glut). Complete set of Dinosaurs (Atlas Addition) All 103 volumes in original binders plus 3-d glasses. Many books on dinosaurs, fossil and other dinosaur magazines. 80 volumes of National Geographic magazines that cover dinosaurs and origins of man. Complete collection of CollectA dinosaurs 2006 2014. All standard and deluxe models plus plants, all new. Please contact Bobby Goodman at 727-424-7881 or email me at [email protected] if you are interested in anything. LIFE SIZE DINOSAURS FOR SALE - Four different Creatures. All hand sculpted by a professional artist. Made from 100% recycled materials. Light weight and mounted on wood bases with caster wheels for ease of movement. Highly detailed and accurate. Very lifelike with vivid color. 1. Adult Aletopelta - $1500.00 2. Adult Deinonychus - $1500.00 3. Adult Leptoceratops - $750.00 4. Juvenile Nanotyrannus $1500.00 Prefer to sell as group but will sell separately. Reasonable offers considered. For information contact Wayne at 785-250-2460 or email [email protected] For Sale as complete Collection: 273 books on dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Over 90% are hardbacks in excellent condition with perfect dust jackets. Many are rare and  highly collectible. The Earth for Sam (1930 1st ed.) Prehistoric Life (1939 3rd Ed.) The Dinosaur Book (Colbert 1945 2nd ed.) Evolution in the Past (Knipe 1945 1st ed.) Prehistoric Animals (Augusta & Burian 1957 1st ed.) The World We Live In (Life Mag Zallinger 3 vol set 1962 1st ed) Dinosaurs (Brooke Bond  Album (Zallinger 1963 1st ed.) and many more from the 1940s to the present that are extremely rare or impossible to find. The collection is a showcase of prehistoric art from Hawkins thru Woodward & Bucknall, to Parkjer’s beautiful B&Ws, to Burian’s classic studies to the fantastic art of Knight & Zallinger leading to Kish, Sibbick, Stout, Gurche, Forsey, Hallett, Henderson, Slovak, Walters, Delgado, Martin & Rey and also artistic authors like Bakker & Paul. The collection is a wealth of art & info for students, libraries, colleges or museums. This is my personal collection dating from 1955 and  would be impossible to duplicate today. A 20 page annotated  listing of the 273 items is avail. for $10 postage included and  applicable to the purchase price. To view the collection w/ pics, go to Ebay and enter “Lifetime Accumulation of Prehistoric Books.” Asking 4,999.00 or best offer. Local pickup. Robert Campbell, [email protected] Prehistoric Planet Store. “The Museum Where You Can Purchase Every Exhibit”. We have over 1000 dinosaur skulls, skeletons, models, fossil, rock and mineral items at PrehistoricStore.com. Like our Facebook Page and post on our  wall why you like dinosaurs.....We’ll enter you in our monthly drawing for a f ree replica dinosaur claw. https://www.facebook.com/prehistoricplanetstore.com. WANTED: Aurora Prehistoric Scenes model kit pink  instructions from Canada (litho in Canada): Neanderthal man (729), Cave (732), Tar Pit (735), Cave Bear (738), Jungle Swamp (740), Three-Horned Dinosaur (741), Wooly Mammoth (743). Please send infos to: [email protected] 1000+ MODEL DINOSAURS shown in The Visual Guide to Scale Model Dinosaurs, 2012, softcover, 300 pages. Contact: eonepoch@aol .com FOR SALE: Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs Book (Currie, Padian) in new condition, $120 Stratford, Ct 203-375-8560 Wanted: Back issue of Prehistoric Times Magazine #90. Contact David McBride at [email protected].

World of Prehistoric Monsters playset, any MPC dinosaurs, Marx Prehistoric Times #3988 playset, Marx Prehistoric Mountain playset, Marx Prehistoric playset #3398 w/ waxy figures, Marx World of Dinosaurs Storage Box set, Marx #2650 Prehistoric playset (The holy grail) and Ajax dinosaurs. James J. Berger, 3515 Howard St., Park City, Il 60085 1-847-625-1807 French collector (prehistoric animal figures, fossils and minerals), Phd in Geology, inhabitant of Grenoble, seeks U.S. and  other collectors outside the European Union to help me to com bine and reship my purchases on Ebay made in their countries. In exchange, I offer the same services for your   purchases made in France and the European Union to reduce shipping costs, VAT and customs duties. I can also help with your purchases in France, for  example, to complete your Starlux collection (Prehistoric animals and other figures of this French brand) or your minerals collection with good quality crystals from the French Alps. Contact : Jean-Marie LEONARD [email protected]  For Sale: Horizon 1/19 scale vinyl Jurassic Park Brachiosaur  kit. Original box and parts still in poly bag. $105 plus ship ping. Dave Colton – [email protected] Attention Museums and collectors – Five original lamps designed by and made for Zdenek Burian's art studio for sale, contact me, Jiri Hochman for photograph, details and prices. Zdenek Burian post cards, posters, coffee cups and copyrights of Burian images for sale. Also looking for a producer/sponsor  for: a Zdenek Burian exhibition in the USA/Canada etc ZB Great Monograph for sale in the USA/Canada etc production of  copies of ZB original paintings for sale a completely new book  (the best of) Zdenek Burian – Action Illustration - website: www.zdenekburi an.com or contact j.hochman @volny.cz For Sale: My book, Lens to the Natural World: Reflections on Dinosaurs, Galaxies, and God by Ken Olson (Foreword by Jack Horner, endorsed by Kevin Padian of the National Center  for Science Education). Celebrating the wonders of nature, this is a work of “science & religion & philosophy & literature,” and  navigates a middle way between the vocal extremists on the issue of evolution. I have been a Research Associate in Paleontology at The Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, MT for  24 years. List price is $26; add just $2 to ship in the lower 48 states. Send check or USPS money order to: Ken Olson, 1009 W. Blvd, Lewistown, MT 59457. Wanted: I am interested in any playvisions animal figures but especially the African Forest Buffalo, Chital (Axis Deer) and  Dhole. I am also looking for Jeols Bushpig, Safari Vanishing Wild Gemsbok (adult and calf), and ELC Kob. I would be interested in almost any mammal figures, prehistoric and modern. Please email me at [email protected], you can call at 801 597 8875 or write to Keith Brown, 3032 S 5990 W, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84128 For Sale : Complete set of Battat dinosaurs for sale, as a set. I also have one of the few JP full size raptor promotional pieces. This piece is unreal. I 'm also downsizing a very large collection of various pieces amassed over 20 years of collecting. I have many unique and extremely hard to find dinosaurs and mammals that are no longer in production. Most of these are sets, all are in mint condition and never used other than for display. Call and or e-mail for more information on what's available. [email protected] 513-737-6695 For Sale or trade: I offer all the large J H Miller prehistoric animals/dinosaurs, caveman, cavewoman and cave. I have many SRG, both large and small, including the caveman, a complete set of Linde dinos, complete set of Battat (Boston Museum) dinos, Castagna dinos, Alva Bronto, Marx, Chialu, Starlux and  more. Call Jim Van Dyke 616-669-3897 [email protected] WANTED: Max Salas 1/35 Entelodon and Andrewsarchus. Contact Ron at r [email protected]. WANTED: RAY HARRYHAUSEN & STOP-MOTION RELATED 'ZINES Colossa #1 (1993) / Hollywood Horror  Classics #4 (1996) Cinemagram #1 (1964) / Cinefantastique #2 (Mimeo - Apr 1967) Mystification #6 (1965) / Animals Magazine (Aug 1969) - British Wonder #2 (Summer 1989) / Box Office Vol. 90 #16 (Feb 6 1967) Spectre #18 (Mar/Apr  1968) / Photon #1, 7, 13 (1963, 1965, 1967) Vampire's Crypt #8 (Dec 1963) / Amazing Screen Horrors #6 (1966) Just Imagine #4 (1977) - British / Cosmos Aventuras #9 (May 1964) Ray Harryhausen Journal (1973) / Animation Journal #4 (May 1965) Stop-Motion Monsters of Filmland #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9 Japanese (1990’s) King Kong: Unauthorized Jewish Fractals in Philopatry (1996) Contact: Scott McRae ([email protected]) Wanted: PT issues 1-22 & later back issues no longer available through PT, Marx dinos in metallic green and gold, Pom Poms candy boxes w/ Aurora Prehistoric Scenes art on them, SRG metal Dinychthys fish, Chialu dinos (Italian composition),

horse plus T. rex, Smithsonian metal prehistoric animals, Messmore & Damon 1933 Chicago World’s Fair metal figs! For Trade/Sale: vintage dinosaurs of most manufacturers. I ’ve got a ton of old dinosaur figures for sale. I’m always buying  pre-1970s dino collectibles --Please contact Mike Fredericks 145 Bayline Cir, Folsom, Ca 95630-8077, (916) 985-7986 [email protected] WANTED: Prehistoric Times issues 79, 81, 83, and 84. Also looking for any books, magazines, and/or DVDs on whale evolution/extinct whales/dolphins, ancient marine reptiles, ele phant evolution/ext inct elephan ts, and shark  evolution/ext inct sharks. Will pay by money order only. Also looking for any information on fossils in Alabama, Mississippi, and the rest of the southeastern US. Please call 205-269-7054. For Sale: 3/4'” cloisonne lapel pin that states: REUNITE GONDWANALAND and depicts Pangea and  Laurasia united in one huge continent. Only a limited number  are available. $8 includes the pin and postage. Contact Lynne Dickman, (406) 728-5221, [email protected] Wanted: Hobby Trading Post (Nu-Card) DINOSAURS cards (B&W, post-card size) #'s 7, 13, 15, 28. I will gladly purchase these but I also have many duplicate cards available for trade. I would prefer "nice" condition cards (e.g., VG+ to Mint) without major creasing or other significant defects. Please contact me (Mike Riley) at: [email protected] or at 303-566-1267 (weekdays, 7:00 am to 4:00 pm, MDT). MODELERS: PT build up writer, Sean Kotz, now has a national hobby column on line at the Examiner. I am committed  to bringing paleo models, sculptors and kits to the forefront on a regular basis, as well as all other forms of modeling from plastic kits to rocket ships. Go to www.examiner.com and search for  "Model Building Examiner" or my name and bookmark or subscribe. You can also search out the Facebook Fan page Playset Magazine Plastic heaven, America's best info on vintage playsets by Marx and others from the Atomic Era and  Beyond. Battleground, Zorro, news, classifieds to buy, color  glossy. Complete website listings too! www.playsetmagazine.com, email [email protected], or call (719) 634-7430 J H Miller repaired - your broken and incomplete vintage J H Miller plastic figures -expertly repaired. Ask for Nick  Lamanec (484) 274-0315 FOR SALE: Looking for awesome paleontology-themed Tshirts? Visit www.cafepress.com/dannysdinosaurs! Featuring clever dinosaurian designs on everything from shirts to coffee mugs to bumper stickers, www.cafepress.com/dannysdinosaurs is a great place for all your dinosaur apparel needs. TOP DOLLAR PAID for prehistoric animal postcards including diorama scenes, statues, fossils, museum displays, etc. I also would like to purchase prehistoric animal museum or  excavation site brochures and posters. If you have vintage dinosaur or prehistoric animal books or photographs from the 1900's up to 1980 please let me know since I also collect these. I have lots of paper ephemera such as this for trade if that is  preferable. Please contact Stephen Hubbell (253) 851-7036 or  email me at [email protected]. PALEODIRECT.COM Your direct source for the finest and rarest fossil specimens along with tools and weapons of   primitive man. With several thousand pages of fossils and primitive man artifacts displayed online, PaleoDirect.com is truly one of the largest online paleontological suppliers across the globe. Categories include a BROAD DIVERSITY of both INVERTEBRATE and VERTEBRATE fossils. We also specialize in genuine TOOLS and WEAPONS of PRIMITIVE HUMANS from the Lower PALEOLITHIC through the  NEOLITHIC Periods up to and including the Iron Age. PALEO DIRECT, Inc. is a full-time, professional supplier and a mem ber of the American Associa tion of Paleontolog ical Suppliers.We acquire specimens direct from the source regions of the world through exclusive affiliations with the diggers and  their management as well as conduct several of our own international collecting expeditions each year. Furthermore, many of  our rare specimens are prepared in-house by our own conservation facilities and staff. This explains our consistently better  quality fossils than is usually found in the marketplace. In addition to what is shown on the site, an even greater inventory of  specimens are either yet to be listed or in various states of   preparation. New material from around the world is constantly  being added. If you wish to be added to our email list for when new specimens are updated to the website, please email or call us and let us know. PALEO DIRECT, INC. P. O. Box 160305 Altamonte Springs, FL 32716-0305 (407) 774-1063 www.PaleoDirect.com [email protected] Supplying museums, educational facilities and collectors around the world.

Super Predator, The World of Tyrannosaurus rex by Mike Kelley [email protected]

Location : Newcastle, Wyoming, USA. Time Zone : Late Cretaceous, Maastrichtian 66.331231 Ma The sun now low in the sky, dips behind the treetops of the forest, instantly darkening the countryside to the East, across the low coastal floodplain. A Tyrannosaurus rex also watches, poised, tense and motionless from the cover at the edge of the forest tree line, bordering a glade. She knows instinctively that her mate is away to her right some fifty meters or so, deeper in the forest and moving stealthily towards the open landscape ahead, following the infrasound transmitted through the ground by the movement of mega herbivores migrating through their territory. The search for prey is never ending and she has perfected the vital skill required for the perfect ambush  patience. Her mate occasionally makes a low frequency call a nd she in turn answers the infrasound grunt so as to co-ordinate their movements. The ambush predator  watches the group of ten or more chasmosaurine, ceratopsids from downwind of the herd; Triceratops horridus is feeding in the clearing. With eyes the size of softballs, large retinae make T. rex vision in the low light of dawn and dusk more keen than other animals and provides this deadly predator with a hunting edge at these ti mes of  the day. Above each eye she has a gnarled, ruggose boss that performs the same function as the ridge above the eye of a raptorial bird, physically protecting her eyes from wind, dust, and debris and shielding them from excessive glare. A circle of bony  plates, known as the sclerotic ring, surrounds each of her eyes, holding them rigid and  stabilized in the skull. In an improvement over the reptilian eye, her avian eye design  pushes the lens further forward, increasing the siz e of the image on the retina. She compensates by moving her head rather than her eyes. This advanced gaze stabilization allows her to keep track of prey even at high speeds. Her eyelids never blink. This is done by the nict itating membrane, a transparent third eyelid which moves horizontally and allows for continuous vision even in a high speed c hase through thick jungle.

as the Triceratops mature. In the past this had lead Paleontologists to assign sixteen different species of Triceratops based on all the different skull variations found. Now we know there are only two confirmed species, namely, T. horridus and T. prorsus. In the small infants the frill is short with a scalloped edge, and the horns mere bumps that stick straight up. In the juveniles the brow horns curve upward and backward, and  small triangular bones form a spiky edge to the neck frill. In the older animals, the  brow horns have transitioned to facing forward and the triangular bones have become completely fused to the edge of the growing frill. The forward-facing brow horns reached a meter long at maturity, while the frill edges become nearly smooth as the  bones along the edge are completely absorbed into the frill. It would appear that these huge skull features serve for both sexual display and competition with rivals and that the changing horns and frill features signal the level of maturity to other Triceratops. The female T. rex is full grown, not the biggest (very few are), but a prime specimen, nonetheless, at around twelve metres in length, four meters high and just over  six tons in weight. Her eyes are fixed upon a young, five ton, alpha male Triceratops, that has strayed from the protection of the rest of the herd to within thirty meters of  her hiding place. This Triceratops has broken the first rule of the coastal flood plain; never stray from the herd. For this relatively inexperienced Triceratops it is potentially a very dangerous mistake. He is ti red from locking horns earlier with another a lpha male and not as alert as usual. The female T. rex has sensed this, intuitively calculating his vulnerability, looking beyond the outer wall of his horny armaments. Infact whilst the distant infrasound of the herd was the first signal that she locked onto it was the faint scent of blood that provided the homing signal to bring her to this location. The Triceratops’s injuries a re only slight grazes to the neck frill , barely drawing  blood, gouges from its opponent’s brow horns. Just as a modern day shark can detect a single drop of blood in a million drops of sea water so too Tyrannosaurus can smell the slightest trace of blood in a similar volume of air. From over one and a half miles away she has refined her hunting of the herd down to the stalking of one single individual. The final approach is critical. She inches forward on the flat of her feet which is very unusual for tyrannosaurs and a mode of walking reserved for stalking. She has selected her target and brought him into the cross hairs of her acute bifocal vision. Her concentration is intense and absolute. She must wait for the perfect moment. The outcome depends upon strategy and the skill to survive. She is totally focused on her  objective but the result is far from certain. Many factors will influence the next few minutes as she takes on the most dangerous of prey, not least of all her experience, honed over twenty five years. Whilst a perfect ambush will end in slaughter any errors may result in a long drawn out death match. A Thescelosaurus, a heavily built, bipedal, herbivorous animal of three meters in length, with small broad five fingered hands and a long pointed snout, the most common small herbivore in this region rustles the undergrowth some fifteen meters distant, browsing and feeding selectively from the low lying vegetation, the first meter or so from the ground up. The animal’s cheeks bulge with food held in the cheeks as it chews, oblivious to the presence of the huge predator nearby. The elaborate alarm call of the Thescelosaurus to warn conspecifics of approaching predators is also recognized for what it is by many other animals. The Triceratops could be alerted to the presence of the concealed ambush predator. The female T. rex remains calm and motionless, watching both the intruder with her wide peripheral vision and  her intended prey with her sharp binocular vision.

The herd is much larger than the small group of animals that we can see, with hundreds more scattered through the woodlands. One can clearly see that  Triceratops is a large, powerful and sophisticated plant eating dinosaur. Old ‘three horned face’ has a huge head (only the modern whale is known to have a larger skull), up to seven feet long and fully one third of the total length of the animal. Triceratops has three horns on its head: two long ones over each brow and one smaller horn on the snout. Unlike the horn of the modern Rhino which is composed entirely of keratin, (the same substance that hair and nails are formed from), the horns of Triceratops are formed  from a core of solid bone, part of the skull itself, covered by a thin sheath of keratin. Along the back of the head the luxuriantly colorful, bony frill resembles a shield and   protects the neck. The largest of the ceratopsians, this ornithischian dinosaur (birdhipped) has a solid four legged, rhinoceros like body; an animal to be reckoned with. Of the adult Triceratops some stand nearly ten feet high at the hip and must be of the order of 7 tons. Triceratops is an ill-tempered animal, temperamental and excitable, showing outright aggression to any animals coming close enough to disturb it. Cows with calves are especially dangerous and wil l charge under almost any circumstances when threatened. These herbivores have a projecting parrot like beak and they chomp on the vegetation indiscriminately, using the beaklike mouth and powerful jaws lined  with rows of sharp cheek teeth to shred and grind cycads, ferns, angiosperms (flowering plants) and other low-lying vegetation.

The Triceratops moves towards an isolated cycad bush in the direction of the waiting killer. As with modern predator attacks on the Savannah grasslands of Africa only about fifty percent are successful; every inch nearer tilts the odds in her favour. Prey are always alert and defensive, the balance of advantage between these animals incredibly fine. She probably won’t be seen if she doesn’t move. The mistake is to  pounce too soon. Failure is a large par t of any predator’s life but attacks on this particular animal can often prove fatal for the attacker. There is rarely an easy contest but she is well rehearsed. Her thighs begin to twitch. When she makes her move it must  be clinical and precise. Her striking range is a measured radial arc of thirty meters or  so across which the Triceratops now moves. Before the herbivore can settle to feed  the T. rex breaks cover from the dense group of sequoia trees and dashes towards its intended victim. As she erupts forth muscles snap into action, fuelled by glycogen, a chemical that releases a concentrated burst of energy when required. T. rex is a sprinter not a long distance runner. Energy stored in taut, stretched t endons explodes forth. She accelerates very quickly, launching forwards on her outstretched, arctometatarsalian tip toes, the epitome of raw power. Her muscles ripple under the skin. Her strides lengthen.

The forelimb posture and locomotion of ceratopsians, particularly the ceratopsids, has long been controversial. Ceratopsid dinosaurs traditionally have been restored with sprawling forelimbs and were considered unable to run at high speeds. Here we see the ceratopsids as rhinoceros-like in stance with neither the proposed  sprawling forelimb nor a columnar like elephantine stance. The forelimb posture is similar to that of large, extant mammals, albeit with slightly more averted elbows. They are clearly capable of speeds in excess of those of modern elephants, more in keeping with a charging rhinoceros.

T. rex has an avian breathing system, the same as in modern day birds. This highly efficient air sac system evolved to enable the Saurischian dinosaurs to survive when oxygen levels at the Earth's surface were about half of today's 21%, the same level that modern birds breathe at altitude. Oxygen levels at the surface in the late Cretaceous have already risen to todays 21% levels giving T. rex a massive oxygen  boost. Unlike the two-way mammalian lung system (a bellows type, tidal flow system of interrupted breathing), the avian system is unidirectional, continually oxidizing the  blood with fresh air and allowing T. rex to extract up to 160% more oxygen from the

Artwork © Damir G Martin

The predator’s stereoscopic vision is critical in determining when her prey is within reach. The temperature of her brain will reach dangerously high levels towards the end of the measured dash. Tyrannosaurus rex is much faster than that predicted  for an animal of its size due to the huge continuous oxygen intake and the mass of the caudofemoralis muscle, the primary hind limb retractor, which takes up over half the total mass of its tail. Rich in tendons and septa the tail muscles are an enormous store of elastic energy. The caudofemoralis muscle is relatively larger in Tyrannosaurus rex than in any other known animal and has evolved in compensation for the animal’s immense size, greatly improving locomotive efficiency. Propelled forwards by the huge thigh and tail muscles the female T. rex acceleration is explosive. A flock of birds take to the air screeching. The screech of the Thescelosaurus  pierces the air. Seeing the dark shape of the approaching predator too late the Triceratops is slow to turn the large, frilled head and horns, as the rest of the herd, some fifty to a hundred meters distant, begin to bellow their warning signals. Split seconds decide whether a predator will feed or go hungry, whether the fighting bull will survive. The ceratopsid bony neck frill flushes with blood, an intimidating ‘threat display,’ as the T. rex slams into the side of the all but motionless Triceratops. Didactyl claws grab onto the flat of the herbivore’s back, hooking into the flesh, anchoring her to her prey. The predator’s highly sophisticated inner ear, balance and  equilibrium system transmits almost instant, motor control body-stance adjustments, milliseconds where life hangs in the balance. Any slight miscalculation and the predator itself may be badly injured. The shocked herbivore shrieks loudly as the full weight of his assailant hits broadside on. The air in its body, within the rudimentary, ornithischian respiratory system, is forced out, leaving the Triceratops winded. Had  the Triceratops managed to swing the colorful, frilled head and long, brow horns to  point at the T. rex, his attacker would have aborted the ambush. Heading for cover  once more, she would have let out a deep, low growl to alert her mate that the attack  was unsuccessful and that he should now make his own attack run. Perhaps she would  have attempted to bite one of the horns to immobilize her prey whilst the male attacked the undefended flanks. Instead the ‘land shark’-like ambush is successful. The short arms of the T. rex punch into the Triceratops high on its back above the pelvis, squirting blood into the air. Tyrannosaurus rex  puny looking arms are adapted for this particular hunting strategy, pushing the prey with its chest while grip ping with its arms reduces the chance of the prey slipping away while being pushed. The arms, being short yet strong, reduced the chance of joint injury during this struggle. Built relatively low to the ground, endowing it with a stubborn center of gravity, Triceratops is a difficult dinosaur to dislodge but pushing forward with the chest area, a heavily reinforced pectoral girdle, the attacker has its prey off balance. The furcula, the ‘wish-bone’, acts as a spring-like shock absorber. As the T. rex takes another step the horned beast topples over, legs flying out from underneath the huge bulk and hits the ground with a loud thump and a spray of dust. The at tacking T. rex stamps on the  body with one foot as it climbs over, raking the razor sharp claws of the other foot  backwards across the thick hide and ripping a yard long gash open in the belly of the Triceratops. As the T. rex steps over the struggling animal the pes claws gouge deep into the open wound and a fountain of blood sprays into the air and is caught on the wind. The Triceratops squirms on its back, tr ying helplessly to roll over onto its side, legs tucked underneath the body. Once the victim is grounded it is all over. The neck  frill digs into the soft earth hampering the animal’s attempts to right its self. As the T. rex turns, leaving bloody footprints in the soil, the gaping maw opens impossibly wide and plunges downwards toward the Triceratops’ exposed ribcage. As the huge  jaws come together, six inch teeth puncture the scaly skin and dark blood gushes

forth. The powerful teeth pulverize bone as they shear past each other. Rib bones snap loudly as the jaws close. The T. rex jerks back its violently shaking head, taking with it flesh, guts and bones, leaving a deep, four foot long, scarlet hole in the dying Triceratops. Ragged shreds of red meat and splinters of shiny, white bone are thrown sideways from the thrashing head. The background noise of bellowing Triceratops grows louder as the rest of the herd look on, the victim’s distress calls enraging the herd. They will not rally to their fallen comrade’s aide as the battle is too close to the edge of where the darkened forest is thickest and of which they are instinctively nervous. Where there is one T. rex there is sure to be more. Snorting loudly, the triumphant monster shakes its head one last time, gulping successively on huge chunks of meat and hide. Sharp pes claws provide traction and the arctometarsalian foot design absorbs the shock and spreads the l oading. The animal’s deft turn is now com plete and the teeth, armor piercing spikes, bear down for a second, death delivering  bite to t he ribcage, cutting short the Triceratops’ blood curdling scream; again the loud cracking of bone. This is not for the squeamish. A dark stain spreads across the ground in the low light of dusk and the Triceratops herd falls silent. With its prey successfully downed the female T. rex roars into the sky aloft and spreads its comically short arms out to the sides. It is a clean kill. The male T. rex, slightly smaller than the female, trots into the clearing with two juveniles in tow, one half the size of the adults and the other half the size again of its sibling. The male has a bright red snout and brightly coloured, primitive feathers sweeping back from use his arms. He is a pursuit predator. It is the female of  the species that has adapted to an ambush strategy and become the specialized, large  prey hunter, not the male. Were we able to see the world through the eyes of a T. rex and see in the ultraviolet light spectrum, the male would appear even more brightly colored as it does to the female of the species. The female T. rex has locked her jaws firmly on the neck frill and is wrenching the enormous head from the Triceratops body. There isn’t much flesh on the keratin covered frill of Triceratops, she is trying to get at the succulent neck muscles. As she violently shakes and twists her jaws, providing the torsion to tear the head from the  body, the rest of the family group j oin her. A feeding frenzy commences with the  predators thrusting their heads deep into the carcass and raising them again, snouts soaked in blood, to gulp down huge lumps of flesh and bone. Now we see why the necks of these animals are bare of feathers or ‘dino fuzz’ in all ontogenetic growth stages. These carnivores waste no time chewing. At times the blood crazed tyrannosaurs rip out lumps of flesh that are tossed into the air, recaught and then gulped  down. With the carcass split open the juveniles f ight for the softer internal organs, the adults crunch down on the rib cage. In less than an hour only the f ive foot head of the Triceratops, untouched, save for a ‘U’- shaped bite mark in the neck frill, remains at the edge of a large oval patch of blood stained and flattened undergrowth. The herd of Triceratops continues slowly on their way feeding as they go, seemingly unperturbed now that the killers are satiated…….

With the artist Damir G Martin, Mike Kelley is working on the book, Super Predator, The World of Tyrannosaurus rex, along with Sergey Krasovsky, Luis V Rey and Jaime Headdon.

 bank where it was entombed for 68 million years, but the diabolic task proved gratifying. Bat-Winged Dinosaur Discovery Poses Flight Puzzle

Yi Qi

A newly found fossil of a small, feathered  dinosaur that probably sported bat-like wing membranes might have been able to glide or  fly short distances. The fossilized remains of  the creature, unearthed in eastern China, have a 13-centimeter-long, rod-like bone that extends from each wrist, which might have helped to support or position wing membranes; small patches of membranous tissue also cling around the bones. It is the first time such a bone structure has been seen in dinosaurs. It is difficult to ascertain how much area the dinosaur’s wing membranes covered, says Xing Xu, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and  Paleoanthropology in Beijing and lead author of the paper. The newly discovered species, which lived approximately 160 million years ago, has been dubbed Yi qi, which in Mandarin means “strange wing”. Xu and his colleagues estimate that the creature had a 60-centimeter wingspan and  weighed about 380 grams—roughly the size of a magpie but slightly heftier. “This is one of the strangest animals that I’ve seen in the fossil record in years,” says Thomas Holtz Jr, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. “It’s raising a lot more puzzles than it’s solving.” Xu says that it is not clear whether the rod-like  bone extending from Yi qi’s wrist remained in one  position or could somehow be moved to control the membrane. And on the basis of the one specimen his team has unearthed, he notes that it is difficult to tell whether the creature glided, flapped its wings or alternated between the two, as do some modern-day bats and many birds, including swifts, woodpeckers and finches.

The scientists on Thursday described one of the most unique horned dinosaurs ever discovered, a beast boasting an exotic set of facial horns and spines around the edge of the  bony frill at the back its skull. "This new animal is definitely one of the weirdest horned  dinosaurs," said paleontologist Caleb Brown of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta. "How weird it is really only becomes fully apparent when you compare it to its close relatives, in which case it stands out like a sore thumb. They officially named it  Regaliceratops peterhewsi, meaning "royal horned face" and honoring geologist Peter  Hews, who found it. But they nicknamed it "Hellboy"  because its stubby horns above the eyes resembled the comic-book character of the same name and because of the hellish time they had in painstakingly extricating it from incredibly hard rock. "We did have an earlier, politically incorrect name for it,  but with great effort we managed to stop ourselves using it after a few months," Royal Tyrrell Museum paleontologist Donald Henderson said.  Regaliceratops, similar in size to today's largest rhinos, was estimated at 16 feet (5 meters) long, 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall at the hips, weighing about 1.5 tons. "Think of it like a big SUV," Brown said. The fossil was found in 2005 along the Oldman River in southwestern Alberta, with the tip of the snout sticking out of the cliff. Rather than being squashed flat like many fossils, the skull was in remarkable three-dimensional preservation Horned dinosaurs were a formidable group of  Cretaceous Period plant-eaters.  Regalicerato ps lived near the end of the age of dinosaurs. It possessed a large conical horn over its nose and a pair  of small, forward-curving horns over its eyes that were puny compared to its bigger close relative, Triceratops. Seven bony spines in triangular and   pentagonal shapes formed a halo around the edge of its large shield-like frill

If Yi qi did take to the air, it may have spent most "The complete frill looks like a crown formed  of its time gliding, not flapping its wings, the team An artist’s reconstruction of the new horned  around the face of the animal," Brown said. suggests. The bone in the wing membrane might dinosaur Regaliceratops peterhewsi. Illustration: Julius  Nearly the entire skull, but none of the rest of  T. Csotonyi/Royal Tyrrell Museum, Drumheller, have rendered flapping unwieldy, and features on the skeleton, was found. Alberta. the forelimb bones suggest that the dinosaur's flight muscles may have been relatively small and weak. (The creature’s feathers would not have helped it to fly: they are more like T. rex cousin found and it’s a vegetarian stiff, frayed bristles than the aerodynamic str uctures that today’s birds have). Tyrannosaurus rex, one of history ’s most dreaded carnivores, had an oddIf its wing membranes were used for flight, the dinosaur’s aerial abilities looking vegetarian cousin with a tiny head, long neck and stubby fingers, would have evolved separately from those of pterosaurs, a group of ancient scientists said Monday, admitting its anatomy had them puzzled. flying reptiles that sported wing membranes rather than feathers, says Holtz. Chilesaurus diegosuarezi had a bird-like beak with leaf-shaped teeth, eviHe adds that the dinosaur's membranes might instead have been display devices, used during courtship rituals or to help distinguish themselves from dence that it feasted on plants, but with hind leg features similar to theropod  dinosaurs, the group into which it was slotted with notorious killers like T. other species. “The temptation to associate these membranes with flight  Rex, Velociraptor and the horned Carnotaurus. may be misleading,” he says. “Chilesaurus constitutes one of the most bizarre dinosaurs ever found,” After all, evolution might have played a similar trick before: many paleFernando Novas of Argentina’s Natural History Museum in Buenos Aires ontologists have proposed that feathers first evolved so that dinosaurs could  said of a study published in the journal Nature which he co-authored.  better retain body heat or communicate with potential mates, and that only later were feathers co-opted for the purposes of flight. New Ceratopian dinosaur dubbed “Hellboy.”

Scientists had a heck of a time getting the remarkable fossil of a dinosaur 

“At the beginning, I was convinced that we had collected three different dinosaurs, but when the most complete skeleton was prepared, it (became) evident that all the elements pertained to a single dinosaur species.” The bizarre creature was named after the South American country where its fossilized remains were fou nd, and the seven-year old boy, Diego Suarez,

who discovered the first bones in 2004 while exploring the Andes mountains with his geologist parents. About a dozen Chilesaurus specimens have since been dug up.

researcher of geology and geophysics at Yale University. Hsiang and colleagues created an enormous snake family tree by identifying each species' similarities and differences. Their findings focused on the ancestor of all snakes and snakelike animals, as well as the legendary great granddaddy of  only snakes.

Theropods like T. rex tended to have relatively short necks, big heads and  strong, muscled hind legs much bigger than their arms, vicious claws and   jaws brimming with razor-sharp Chilesaurus © Gabriel Lio teeth. But Chilesaurus cuts an altogether less threatening figure. “The proportionally small skull of Chilesaurus, with the presence of a horn beak at the tip of the snout and… leaf-shaped teeth, reveal that Chilesaurus was a strict  plant eater,” Novas said, “Its forearms were robust, but the hands were provided with just two blunt fingers.” Most skeletons discovered so far  were the size of a turkey, but isolated bones have revealed that Chilesaurus could grow to about three metres (10 feet) in length.  Novas and his team have taken to comparing Chilesaurus to a platy pus, which with its duck-like bill,  beaver-like tail and otter-like feet, has features of many different animals. “We are puzzled by the weird anatomy of Chilesaurus, which recalls different dinosaurian groups,” said Novas. Its pelvis is reminiscent of ornithischian dinosaurs with beaks, like Stegosaurus, and its wide, four-toed hind feet are similar to those of the massive, “lizard-footed” sauropods like Brontosaurus. Yet the research team  believed Chilesaurus to represent a new type of theropod — “an evolutionary jigsaw puzzle that will generate debate among paleontologists,” according to Novas. Until now, herbivorous theropods were known only in close dinosaur relatives of modern-day birds, the team said. Yet the discovery of  Chilesaurus showed that a meat-free diet was acquired much earlier than thought. Chilesaurus lived at the end of the Jurassic period, some 145 million years ago — long before T. rex which ruled at the end of the Cretaceous era some 70-65 million years ago. The Common Ancestor of all snakes is found

Millions of years ago, the common ancestor of all living snakes, a long creature with tiny hind limbs as well as ankles and toes, could be found  slithering over the damp soil of forests in search of soft-bodied prey, a new study finds. In the first comprehensive reconstruction of ancestral snakes, the researchers analyzed the fossils, DNA and anatomy of 73 species of snake and lizard. Their findings suggest that the most recent common ancestor of  snakes was likely nocturnal, evolved on land and lived in the warm, damp forests of the Southern Hemisphere about 128 million years ago. The finding sheds light on the evolutionary history of snakes. Even though more than 3,400 snake species currently live on Earth in all sorts of habitats, little is known about where and when they developed, and how their original ancestor  looked and behaved. In addition to using genetic and anatomic data, the researchers "were able to take available data and backtrack through time to reconstruct what was the most likely  behavior exhibited by the fossil snakes, given that the living snakes are behaving in this way," said Allison Hsiang, the study's

Both ancestors likely hunted at night and ate "soft-bodied  vertebrate and invertebrate prey" that was about the size of their  heads, the researchers wrote in the study. Although their prey were relatively large compared to prey eaten by lizards at the time, it does not appear that these ancient creatures could constrict and manipulate prey larger than themselves, as the modern boa constrictor can, the researchers said. And unlike constrictors, these snake ancestors likely used needlelike teeth to snag prey before swallowing them whole. The ancestors also likely lived on land in "warm, well-watered and well-vegetated  environments," they added. However, the ancestor of all snakelike animals, which includes some lizards, likely developed during the middle of the Early Cretaceous period, about 128.5 million years ago, on Laurasia, a continent that included what is n ow North America, Europe and Asia, the researchers said. The ancestor of all snakes followed about 20 million years later on the supercontinent Gondwana, which includes what is now South America, Africa, Antarctica and Australia, they said.

The team also found that snakes used to be night owls. Although many ancestral reptiles were active during the daytime, the ancestral snake was nocturnal for about 45 million to 50 million years, they said. This nocturnal behavior likely stopped when Colubroidae, a family of snakes that makes up more than 85 percent of living snake species, stopped going out at night as temperatures dropped. It did well  because it could adapt to daytime activities, the researchers said. Moreover, snakes may be successful at occupying different types of habitat because they can travel far and wide. Snakes can journey in ranges of about 42,500 square miles, which is about 4 .5 times larger than the range of lizards. They can also live in both land and water, which has impeded the dispersal of  other terrestrial animals, the researchers said.

 birthplace in Africa, Neanderthals were already thriving in Europe; descendants of a much earlier migration of the African genus Homo. But when modern humans eventually made their  way to Europe 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals suddenly vanished. Ever since the first Neanderthal bones were identified in 1856, scientists have been wondering why modern humans survive while their evolutionary cousins went extinct? “The Invaders” collects good evidence to show that the major factor  in the Neanderthals’ demise was direct competition with newly arriving humans. Pat Shipman traces the devastating impact of  a growing new human population, the reduction of the Neanderthals’ geographic range, their isolation into small groups and thereby loss of genetic diversity.

Prehistoric Predators  by Brian Switek, illustrated by Julius Csotonyi, Ages 6 and up, Hardcover: 104 pages, Applesauce Press, ISBN-10:1604335521, ISBN-13:978-16043 35521. With this new book, youngsters can discover the most dangerous prehistoric carnivores that ever roamed the Earth (featuring a unique cover that feels like dinosaur-skin) The carnivores come alive in “Prehistoric Predators.” From But interestingly, modern humans were not the only invaders who comfavorites like T. rex and Spinosaurus, to the ferocious  peted with Neanderthals for big game. Shipman reveals fasciGiganotosaurus and terrifying Megalodon giant shark, the nating confirmation of humans’ partnership with the first amazing full-color illustrations from renowned paleoartist domesticated wolf-dogs soon after Neanderthals began to Julius Csotonyi make these dangerous creatures spring to life disappear. This alliance between two predator species, she on each page. Bursting with many new facts written by hypothesizes, made possible an great degree of success in  National Geographic contributor Brian Switek, this is actually hunting large Ice Age mammals, a distinct and ultimately the perfect book for dinosaur lovers of every age! Brian decisive advantage for humans over Neanderthals. Utilizing Switek is the author of Written in Stone and  My Beloved  new evidence, Pat Shipman of Pennsylvania State University  Brontosaurus, and regularly covers the latest prehistoric disshows how our coevolution with wolves contributed to the coveries on his National He lives in Utah. Julius Csotonyi is extinction of Neanderthals and further transformed us one of the world's most high profile and talented contempothrough the process of domesticating our dogs that we so rary paleoartists and is well known to PT readers. Julius has enjoy today. considerable academic expertise that contributes to his Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians Paperback by dynamic art. He has created life-sized dinosaur murals for the Ricardo Delgado (Author, Illustrator) One of the most Royal Ontario Museum and for the Dinosaur Hall at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and most of the artwork for the  beloved and respected comic book series returns as Ricardo Delgado's Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians series continues with his great wordless stonew Hall of Paleontology at the HMNS. He lives in Canada. rytelling. Ricardo sets his new bo ok in the swamps of Cretaceous Africa that How to Draw Dinosaurs volume 1 by Tracy Ford, Paperback, 176 pages, are packed with prehistoric life and primordial danger in a tale filled with Our own Tracy Ford has collected his “How to Draw Dinosaurs” articles villains, victims, and one of the most dangerous and unpredictable protago previously shown in Prehistoric Times magazine issues from 1996 to early nists ever created. Our anti-hero is the huge Spinosaurus aegyp2001 and presented them in one handy volume (most of these ticus as he faces a swamp full of dangerous dinosaurs and  issues are no longer available.) Tracy even shows the PT front other prehistoric animals that Ricardo fills with the feel of the cover that each article originally appeared in. Of course his classic spaghetti western and the noble samurai tale. Using the dinosaur art articles have been a regular feature in Prehistoric most up-to-date science regarding Spinosaurus, Ricardo shows Times magazine for close to twenty years. They include black  us a day or two in the life of this ancient water-bound animal. and white, detailed, line drawings of different dinosaur’s anatoRicardo’s illustrations may seem simplistic at f irst viewing but my or whatever is needed to suppor t what Tracy is teaching us in then you see all of the detail and multiple stories happening in that issue’s writing. They provide paleontological information each frame. Add all of the beautiful color and you can apprethat is near impossible to find elsewhere. The goal of Tracy’s ciate his vast artistic talent that bring his storytelling to life. articles are to be a resource to help artists stay scientifically Three more issues are forthcoming in this series. See ad in this accurate in representing each dinosaur by keeping current on the issue. latest available information. Tracy’s book is an unbelievably Digging for Triceratops: Digging for Tyrannosaurus helpful source for artists who want to portray the appearance of  rex: Digging for Stegosaurus: Digging for Brachiosaurus:  prehistoric animals to the best that the latest scientific knowledge can make them. Tracy has done the home work for you and consequently all A Discovery Timeline (Dinosaur Discovery Timelines)  by Thomas R. Holtz Jr. Age Range: 8 - 12 years, 32 pages, Capstone Press ISBN-10:  paleoartists really need this book. Available at Amazon.com 149142124X, ISBN-13: 978-1491421246 Four different books make up this A Field Guide to the Dinosaurs of North America: and Prehistoric series in which we discovery most all there is to know about T. rex, Megafauna Paperback by Bob Strauss Paperback: 224 pages, Falcon Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Triceratops. Through this new and interGuides, ISBN-10: 1493009257, ISBN-13: 978-1493009251 A field guide esting timeline format, we retrace the steps including the scito 60 dinosaurs and prehistoric animals that once lived in what is entists, digs, and fossils from around the world that brought now North America. Featuring beautifully done illustrations of  each of these prehistoric creatures into modern times. We each animal by world-famous artist Sergey Krosovskiy and  learn things like the first time scientists unearthed a  based on the latest paleontological research, this book provides Triceratops fossil, they initially thought they might be dealinformation about the where and when the animals lived, what ing with a really big bison. The books go year by year with they ate, and more. highlights regarding discoveries of the titled dinosaur includThe Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove ing related dinosaurs. Piecing some of these dinosaurs Neanderthals to Extinction  by Pat Shipman, Hardcover: 288 together was a worldwide puzzle that took years to be solved.  pages, Belknap Press, ISBN-10: 0674736761, ISBN-13: 978Each book is very colorful with many paintings and pho0674736764 With their large brains, sturdy physique, sophistitographs on every page. Take a great journey through this cated tools, and hunting skills, Neanderthals are the closest discovery timeline series of books to reveal the mysteries and  known relatives to humans. Approximately 200,000 years ago, as revelations of how four of the most iconic dinosaurs were modern humans began to move north out from their evolutionary discovered. Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. is a vertebrate paleontolo-

gist with the University of Maryland  Department of Geology who has written many books and has been seen on several dinosaur TV documentaries.

good enough to pull that off on their own. But anyway, for fans, this 4-disc set contains all 13 episodes including the double length pilot plus special features like behindthe-scenes content, a gag reel, deleted scenes and more.

The Last Dinosaur DVD starring Richard Boone and  A Walk Through Dinosaurland Joan Van Ark. This is a movie from 1977 that stars  by Jim Lawson. Lawson’s new Richard Boone who is probably best known for playing  paperback, comic art style book is a Palladin on the 1960s TV western show “Have Gun-Will lot of fun to read. Jim got it successTravel.” Boone’s character in “The Last Dinosaur” is a fully published by using the internet  billionaire who enjoys hunting big game. He has built a site Kickstarter to acquire investors.  boring machine, (that’s “boring” as in digging a hole) It tells the tale of John who is a large enough to hold a “man” who takes Matthew (a young group of humans, that he Previously reviewed  plans to use to cut into the  boy) on a tour of evolution through  prehistoric times. All types of prehis- in PT. Now in paperback  earth to a cavity where pretoric animals are shown and  historic life still lives John informs Matt (and us) about each one in a way that is funny including a tyrannosaur. yet accurate for all ages to enjoy. Just for added fun, Jim gives He acts like he plans to the book a plausible ending and then a more crazy second pos study the rex but everyone sible ending. Jim sent us an autographed copy by mail. I don’t in the audience (and no one see the book available on amazon.com but maybe through in the film) knows he realKickstarter, you can still find copies. ly plans to hunt it and kill it. He and his team arrive Tyrannosaurs: Behind the Art DVD by James Gurney. Jim’s in the prehistoric undernew video tutorial gives you front row seats at the creation of  ground with Joan Van two Tyrannosaur paintings for Scientific American magazine, Ark’s character in tow. including one for the cover. Super talented Illustrator James They see  Pteranodons and an enormous UintatheriumGurney fully explains his process as he reconstructs two recently like creature (that the ‘expert’ calls a ceratopsian) and  discovered relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex, as if you were sitting eventually the T. rex. We also see the T. rex battle and kill right there with him. Working closely with scientist Stephen a Triceratops (that must be the ceratopsian he meant.) Brusatte, who discovered one of them, he shows his process including First off, I will say that “Have Gun-Will Travel” was a respected 1960s TV thumbnails and color comprehensives. He shows how he uses photos and  show in its day. I was a little young then to remember it now but I know my models, as well as outdoor studies, as he moves ahead to the final oil illusdad really enjoyed it. So, I have to ask, what happened to Boone’s acting tration. He explains both his methods and his thinking with an emphasis on abilities in the 1970s when he made this movie? And Joan Van Ark and the the techniques for portraying feather and foliage textures, thereby creating others in this film aren’t much better. Wow, is this ever a bad movie! Yes, a believable reconstruction of a scene that is imagthat’s my opinion but I challenge any of you to ined based on scientific evidence. Jim Gurney sit and watch this entire movie, like I had to shows how he chooses his colors, what brushes he do, and tell me I’m mistaken. uses at each stage, and how he pr epares his board 

for painting. The production is packed with information that will fascinate dinosaur artists as well as all other artists. I promise you will be most impressed. PT readers have seen a lot of Jim’s art in this magazine as well as Steve Brusatte’s articles on new paleontological discoveries. Please support both of their work by picking up a copy of  this DVD. Check out jamesgurney.com or amazon.com to order your DVD. Terra Nova, Complete Series , 4 DVDs. I was certainly among the PT faithful who were really looking forward to this heavily hyped Steven Spielberg TV series before it arrived. The SciFi  plot sounded good. It is the year 2149. Mankind is o n the brink of extinction. “Lucky” people of a future earth use a time machine to start all over  again and make their utopia in prehistoric times - packed with lots of dinosaurs. Well, it turned  out that the show wasn’t bad but certainly it lacked a very important element - where were the dinosaurs? Not just for PT readers but also the rest of the viewers expected a new “Jurassic Park” from this TV show. Afterall, it was Spielberg making it. And I think that was one of  its greatest problems and caused its eventual downfall. We saw a few prehistoric animals in early episodes and occasionally more in later  ones but mostly, it was just about the interaction  between the human actors - and they just weren’t

The story is so unoriginal and the acting is  just sad. The dinosaurs are of the man-in-asuit variety. The T. rex even makes the same sound that Godzilla does in all of his films. Like the dinosaur suits, the miniature models (like the bore machine, for instance) are obviously made in Japan. There are even several Japanese actors in the film and all of the cavepeople that our intrepid team meet in prehistoric land are also Japanese. So, this was obviously a Japanese collaborative effort, even though the movie was done by Rankin/Bass, probably best known for  “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and other holiday animated cartoons. It says on the DVD that this is the complete original theatrical version. I have been told  that on the Japanese version of this DVD, a further half an hour of footage is included. I’m not complaining that I only have the American version however as it is merciful of  this version to have cut out a half an hour of  this film. Thank you. (Also this DVD includes nothing extra: no deleted scenes, no director’s commentary, no special features.) And finally, does anyone remember an episode of “Have Gun - Will Travel” in which Palladin is searching for a giant cyclops? That is a vague childhood memory of mine.

Marx Set Science Weighs In By Pat Schaefer In PT #91, we crossed a great divide in order to continue our discussion about Marx dinosaur playsets sold at Sears. In that article, we mostly talked about the playsets, and did not dwell so much on the meaning of the g reat divide. What was this great divide? First of all, it was the time that  passed between the Marx dinosaur playset, offered in the 1963 Marx catalog and the next Marx dinosaur playset, seen 8 years later in 1971. Second, it was the jump from commercial rules and regulations circa 1960, to the more modern age of product warnings and labels. The final part of the great divide, we encapsulated as “seventies style, same molds, new materials” and, further focused the topic to a single word, “Plastics”. We now want to review and expand that topic, and  so we say “Plastics, old and new”. In our earlier investigations, we learned that instead of “new”, some say “waxy”, “shiny” or use the code word “heritage” and think enough has  been said. As for me, sometimes I see waxy and sometimes I am not sure. So, now is the time for set science to weight in, and propose a new way of determining the old plastic f igures from the new. Previously, we investigated various means of plastic determination but found nothing better than “waxy”. Today, we are going to compare old figures vs new figures, looking for  something to complement our waxy discriminator. As luck  would have it, we got a scale for Christmas. No, NOT that kind, I did put on a pound or two, thank you very much, but, a small scale, accurate to .1 gram, and two calibration weights to monitor its accuracy. So, we selected two sets of  figures, one old, the other new, and started weighing. The great divide was all about same mold, new material. What we found is that the old material weighs more than the new material. How much more? Do you know how much a nickel weighs? Well not as much as that, b ut, for 2 different molds, 6 different figures, the old f igures all weighed more than the new. Figures, old and new. Which figures did we choose? For the most part we chose large, relatively heavy figures. From the large mold group, we chose pot bellied T-Rex, Brontosaurus , and Kronosaurus. From the revised  mold group, we chose slim T-Rex, revised  Brontosaurus , and revised  Stegosaurus . We chose the relatively light weight Stegosaurus figure  because in PT #107, we distinguished two different kinds of revised  Stegosaurus figures, and fur ther, suggested that one would be in the time of  old plastic, the other in the time of new plastic. Once the f igures were chosen, where to get samples? The trick, of course, is to be sure that the “old” figures are old, and the “new” figures are new. We selected figures from 14 examples of these 8 old sets: 3389, 3390, 33 88, 3394, square box set with no number, 3398, 0645, and marx card P-1078 ; and 15 examples of these 9 new sets: 3398, 4130, 3421, 4208, Superior  5500, Sears/Toy Street 49-5631 2, Toy Street 4700, Marx of Miami, Jurassic Island, and Marx of Miami 4673, Flintstones Collector Set. How did we choose each particular set for measurement? We chose the sets carefully. We are more confident in our judgement, now that, in earlier  PT articles, we have collected and reviewed the Sears and Wards catalogs. We expect the sets to look how they did in the catalogs. We like figures that

come with a box, but just being found IN A BOX is not enough; we expect the figures to be FROM THE BOX because they match our catalog expectations. We do not always have the luxury of having a box. If there is no  box, we want to see a set of f igures that match our catalog models and are near complete. How did we weigh the figures? Well, in the name of brevity, let’s just say we weighed them carefully, repeatedly, and, as nearly as possible, in the same way, each and every time. PLEASE! not more numbers. OK, I hear you, and you get your wish. This time we are going to flex our ar tistic muscles, just drawing and painting and, ok, there will be a wee bit of counting. Yes, I know this is set science and  all, but I am going to release my inner artist. So, let me show you a couple drawings of the results. Those of you in the know may think they see influence by the great moder n artist Mondrian, but, trust me, the inspiration is more “Tukey.” Let me tell you how these pictures were created. We start with the weighing of the figures. Then, there are just four easy steps. First, we paint the value on the grid. Second, we paint a median bar. We count the number of observations. If there is an odd number of samples, we find the 1 value which splits the readings in half, and paint a black bar  next to that reading. If there are an even number of readings, we find the 2 values which again splits the readings in half. So for 14 samples, we f ind the seventh and eighth sample and we paint a  black bar on both. This separates readings 1 through 6 (6 samples) from 9 through 14 (6 samples). Third, we add a gray box around  the black bars, enclosing at least 50% of the readings. The results again break along the lines of even or odd. If there is an even num ber of samples, exactly 50 % of the samples are enclosed. If the number is odd, then we include a little more than 50%, up to a maximum of 57%. For example, with a sample size of 7, we enclose 4 of 7 samples (57%), not 3 of 7 samples (43%) and, we do not try to find the elusive sample number three and  one half. We put observations into the gray  box, two at a time, one from above the black   bar, then one from below, until we have enclosed 50% of the samples, or, we need to  place only one more sample. That last sam ple is the one closest to the black bar, either above or below. Fourth, we count the number of steps between the two gray  boxes and place a bright red dividing line midway between the two. With that, our masterpiece is finished. Consider first, the portrait “Slim T-Rex, in hot pink and  corn flower”. The old plastic is hot pink, the new is in a kind  of corn flower blue color. We have 14 samples total, 6 old   plastic, 8 new plastic. What do we see? Old plastic median: 38.1-38.6. New  plastic median: 35.9- 36.1. Old different than new?: Yes. Difference: 2.85 grams. Samples Overlap?: No. Gap  between Gray boxes: 1.7 grams. Dividing line between gray  boxes: 37.3 grams. Divide Clean?: Yes. What does it mean? To me, it means there is a difference in what the old figures and what the new figures weigh, with the old f igures being slightly heavier. Samples lying outside of the old figure’s gray box do not overlap those lying outside of the new figure’s gray box; there is a clear break   between outliers of the old and new. The dividing line  between the gray boxes clearly separates old from new. Based on this limited sample, I would suggest that slim T Rex figures that weigh more than 37.3 grams are old, and  those that weigh less than that are new. As always, more sam-

How are we going to use this information? Consider this set of figures that I acquired some time ago, Mystery Contestant #1. The appeal was the two brown slim T-Rex figures. Everything else seemed a mishmash, without rhyme or reason.  Now, let’s plot them up against known brown figures. From the 60s, there is the brown slim  T-Rex figure as found on a Marx blister card. You can see one on the f ar right. From the 70s, there is the brown slim T-Rex figure that I know as one of the “revised red brown” figures which were sprinkled into the 3398 sets, to liven up the light gray and green color scheme. He is pictured on the left; the mystery contestants have been placed in between. So now, from the 70s, we have Mr. 35.0, a light brown slim T-Rex figure. Is it a very pale, “revised red brown” figure, or a recast figure from SDC we have not seen before, or, maybe, a figure from a Canadian set? Didn’t the 3398 MO have 2 brown colors in it (see PT #103). And on the other hand, from the 60s, we have Mr. 37.8, a dark brown slim figure. Is it a lighter colored Marx card figure now freed from the  blister card and, seemingly, bereft of his revised mold   buddies, or, maybe, a dump figure, a fugitive from Marx quality control? (see also The DUMP!! in Mike Fredericks and Joe DeMarco’s monograph at http://www.dinosaur-toys-collectorsguide.com/marx-playset-monograph.html). The figure has to be from Marx, no recasts in the 60s. T-Rex

All clear now, right? Ok, maybe not so much. But I believe we have placed them on the correct side of  the great divide.

gray boxes: 46.2. Divide Clean?: No. Number of measurements over  divide?: 1. Comment: All the lightest old measurements belong to figures which have a metallic (M) color. Also, it should be noted that none of the new figures are Marx, as Marx stopped producing figures from the large mold in the 60s. What does it mean? To me, it means, there is a difference in what the old  figures and what the new figures weigh, with the old figures being slightly heavier. Samples lying outside of the old gray figure’s box do not overlap those lying outside of the new gray figure’s box, there is a small but clear   break between outliers of the old and new ( .2 grams). The divide between the 50% boxes separates all but 1 old f igure from new. Based on this limited  sample, I would suggest that pot bellied T-Rex figures that weigh more than 46.2 grams are old, and less than that are new. Figures with weights near the divide should be checked for having a metallic style color which would indicate old plastic. As always, more samples may move, substantiate or repudiate this demarcation. How are we going to use this information? Consider this set of figures that I saw recently, Mystery Contestant #2. A large mold group in dark red brown would be a new one on me, even if, they turned out to be recast figures. I was excited, boy howdy! But not every fairy tale has a Disney ending, some endings are more Grimm.  Now, let’s plot them up against known brown figures. I o nly know of one brown pot bellied T Rex figure from the 60s. It is a milk chocolate  beauty, a special bonus figure included in certain sets of 3389/3390, 3391/3392 vintage. He has  been placed on the far right. The only brown pot  bellied T-Rex figure from the 70s that I know, was found in a Marx of Miami, Jurassic Village set. He is pictured on the left, the two mystery contestants have been placed in between.

Mystery Contestant #2 Color aside: Siri, what color are my figures? This is an entirely gnarly topic and there will be no possible last word, but, I would like to share with you what my computer  thinks. As part of our investigation, we made a “color track” of  Yes, that’s right, we have TWO, not one, mysthe four figures, scanning the tery contestants, because two large mold  standing figures to give a view of  groups finally came with the set; one in metalfour sets of feet (see PT #102). lic We scanned all figures at the silsame time, so the lighting should  ver and one in a light red   be near identical. We made a happy discovery that allows us to locate an identical spot on each figure. We made our   brown. No time to say why. color comparisons starting from this spot. The slim T-Rex What I was expecting was a large mold group whose color  has a very, very small dimple on the bottom of the middle was something like the sample toe, right foot. The dimple was most pronounced on the unused, just-off-the-Marx-card figure, and was present but square in the upper right corner  not as clear on all the other figures. In addition, this kind  of the picture of Mystery Contestant #2. of spot comparison, might be utilized to judge the “wear” on a figure, the clearer the dimple the fresher the figure. That is not what I received. Once the figures were actually We centered our digital color meter o n that spot, locked  in hand, the color match with the position and then, opened the sampling aperture, one the Jurassic Village figure step at a time. By the time we reached the fifth step, RGB values stopped changing with increasing sample area. For  clearly identified it as 70s not what it is worth, based on this analysis, my computer  60s. The 45.1 gram weight just thinks these four figures are these RGB colors : (140, 104, cements the case. This time the 94), (141, 134, 120), (139, 122, 108), (127, 99, 89). Leave color gave it away, but IF the set was really a dark red brown art to the artist, right? color, set science would have  Now consider, the portrait “Pot Belly T-Rex, in corn you looking for his buddies on flower and hot pink”. The old plastic is hot pink, the new the correct side of the great is in a kind of corn flower blue color. We used 21 samples, divide. 14 old plastic (12 sets, 2 sets had multiple samples) and 7 Where did the dark red  new plastic (6 sets, 1 set h ad multiple samples).  brown figures go? That’s a What do we see? Old plastic median: 47.8 - 48.0. New story for another time. Keep  plastic median: 45.1. Old different than new?: Yes. your eyes open, who knows Difference: 2.8 grams. Samples Overlap? No. Gap what treasures we may find.  between Gray boxes: 1.3 grams. Dividing line between

T. rex - certainly not the nation’s kindest, gentlest state fossil - mostly because it never had to be one. The  flag didn’t stand a chance – mostly because the colors didn’t run.

by Robert Telleria dinosauriana.com paleoartistry.webs.com

Continuing my “what if ” series where I create models that never  existed, I realized no artist or  company has ever issued a series of figurines specifically commemorating any or all of our  nation’s official state fossil representatives. As we celebrate America’s inde pendence this Fourth of July, I focused  Bronzes by mainly on the dinosaurs and select fish William Otto and mammals that form the cast of seemingly haphazardly selected state fossils of the U.S. The figures sculpted by William Otto, still lovely after 50-odd years, inspired  my set of state fossils. The color was inspired by William Otto’s beautiful cop per and chocolate toned pot metal Page Museum La Brea Tar Pit Los Angeles Page Museum paleofauna souvenirs sold  in the late 1950s-1960s. The scale varies but each miniature figure, usually 5” to 7” is placed on 3” bases shaped as their native states. Of course I didn’t sculpt all fifty states. Nine states do not have an official state fossil while others like Alabama and Mississippi, or Washington and Alaska, share the same state fossil. In these cases I picked the first state to claim it. Utah and  Oklahoma share fossils that may actually be the same genus, so I only chose the better known one in these cases. Plants and invertebrates do not personally satisfy me to create so I also skipped these. In some of these instances, in the spirit of independence and true “what if ” fashion, I have replaced  them with what I consider more spectacular choices for that state representative. Alabama (1984)/ Mississippi (1981) –   Basilosaurus cetoides Since the Yellowhammer  and Magnolia states both yield the same Eocene whale I decided to just make the base shaped like Alabama rather than Mississippi which technically elected it first only  because Alabama has done a better job of displaying the skeleton in their  natural history museum. Alaska –  Mammuthus primigenius (Woolly Mammoth), 1986. Considered the Last Frontier, Alaska has pachyrhinosaurs, albertosaurs and  ankylosaurids in the North Slope, but these were barely known when the state elected the mammoth as state fossil. With part of the state glacial the Ice Age giant is a f itting and evocative choice. Arizona - Araucarioxylon arizonicum (Petrified Wood), 1988. The state fossil is a Triassic conifer because of the Petrified Forest National Park, of  course, yet there are many excellent animal prospects for the Grand Canyon State Fossils from dicynodont Placerias, phytosaur Rutiodon, to early (but  poorly known) dinosaur Chindesaurus, to camels, horses and mastodons in the Pleistocene. I would nominate the Jurassic theropod  Dilophosaurus

although two states already may have the same creature represented by Eubrontes tracks. To change things up, I would hope rauisuchid   Postosuchus would win any future honors. Arkansas - None. For the Natural State I would suggest a mosasaur or   plesiosaur, both unclaimed by any state so far. California – Smilodon fatalis, 1973. When one thinks of Golden State  paleontology they think of the “black gold” found in La Brea Tar Pits where the majority of saber cat fossils have been unearthed. Other fossil treasures from California span all ages of the prehistoric past from pterosaurs, dinosaurs (Labocania anyone?), mosasaurs and plesiosaurs (like  Muraenosaurus) to the aforementioned Pleistocene fauna. I originally envisioned Smilodon laying down on its side taking up the length of the state but it would mean the size of the state would have to be dramatically larger than the rest. Colorado – Stegosaurus armatus, 1982. If its fossil record was a factor, the Centennial State could have more accurately been called the Megamultimillenial State. How does one choose from all the possible excellent candidates? The archetypal armored dinosaur Stegosaurus is emblematic and a true American icon. Colorado can be real proud as the genus with its large triangular plates, has yet to turn up anywhere else in the world as big as they are in the U.S. Connecticut (1991)/Massachusetts (1980) –   Eubrontes giganteus tracks. The Constitution State and  the Bay State both share what is believed to have been tracks left by a dilophosaur. The sculpt is based on the lifesized model at Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, which was sculpted by Richard Rush Studio in turn based on specs provided by Gregory Paul. Delaware - Belemnitella americana, 1996. Maybe it is fitting that the First State has such a primitive animal (a Cretaceous belemnite) for its state fossil but Delaware’s where some decent late Cretaceous deposits are found, so theropod  Dryptosaurus may have roamed the area. Footprints called  Grallator  may have been a Triassic predator like or the same as Coelophysis. Either would be good choices for state dinosaurs. District of Columbia – “Capitalsaurus.” Can’t do any better than the informal name: although it may well be Acrocanthosaurus. Florida - None. With a Cretaceous age sea tur tle as its oldest known fossil vertebrate, the Sunshine State was underwater during the Mesozoic Era leaving megafauna contenders like glyptodonts, scimitar cats, short-faced   bears (Tremarctus floridanus), and bear dogs. With Jefferson’s Ground  Sloth already claimed by West Virginia, maybe Florida can forego  Mammuthus floridanus, saber cat  Xenosmilus, or the predictable marine themes (i.e. fossil sharks, whales or sirenians) and champion a terror bird, Titanis or giant condor Teratornis. Georgia - unidentified Miocene shark tooth, 1976. The Peach State should have waited for a better, more certain state fossil to be unearthed. Eocene whale Georgiacetus would have been a nicer pick. Hawaii – No ne. It was only 5 million years ago that this state said Aloha to the world, so it only has sea fossils and remains of fossil birds to offer. Idaho - Equus simplicidens (Hagerman horse), 1988 . The American zebra is the first tr ue horse, dating back to the Pliocene. A good candidate for state dinosaur would be its most abundant genus, the burrowing ornithopod  named Oryctodromeus. If it couldn’t be the Fossil State, then the Gem State’s not a bad monicker. Illinois - Tullimonstrum gregarium, 1989. The Paleozoic era deposits are excellent for trilobites and brachiopods. The Pennsylvanian deposits are in the Mazon Creek fossil beds from which the enigmatic carnivore nicknamed “Tully Monster” used to swim these seas of what is now the Prairie State. Though they may have been present, no remains of dinosaurs have  been found in Illinois, as it too had a gap between the Mesozoic and Ice Age.

Indiana – None. So, Hoosier State Fossil? (Get it? Who’s yer state fossil?) Jokes aside, while they may have existed in the state, dinosaurs are out of  the running as the state’s Mesozoic age sediments were not deposited. Ditto for Permian age creatures. The likely vertebrate contenders would be any number of mammals though the candidate may be nothing more than some  plant life from the Carboniferous Period. Iowa – None. It would take hawk eyes indeed to find any interesting candidates in the fossil record of the Hawkeye State. Devonian marine life, plesiosaur, mosasaur and pterosaur remains have been recovered as well as hadrosaur and ankylosaurid  dinosaurs. Kansas - None. Many may think  of marine reptiles when they think  of the prehistoric Sunflower State  but I vote for  Pteran odon as  pterosaurs are not represented by any states currently. Cretaceous fish Xiphactinus would be a runner  up. Government Fundies may be in the way of getting a state fossil process never mind a state rock, gemstone or mineral. Kentucky - Brachiopod, 1986. Most of the coal deposits in the Bluegrass State stem from the Carboniferous age rocks. The fossil record is extremely  poor for the Permian Period and Mesozoic Era; not even Devonian deposits yield any fish. The Quaternary age fauna is well-represented however, so why not short-faced bear Arctodus or bear-sized beaver Castoroides? Louisiana -  Palmoxylon (petrified wood), 1976. The Pelican State is mainly buried marine life going back to the Devonian. Like its Southern neighbors Alabama and Mississippi, you will find Basilosaurus fossils from the Eocene. There are also abundant Miocene fossil mammals like Synthetoceras, Hipparion and Teleoceros and Pleistocene Glyptotherium. A single dinosaur tooth belonging to an unidentified dromaeosaurid has been reported. Maine - Pertica (plant), 1985. A Devonian plant. What else would you expect from the Pine Tree State? The rest of its fossil record is mainly Silurian or Ordovician marine life. If you came looking for megafauna you came to the wrong place as back then it could have been called the Glacier  State… Maryland – Ecphora gardnerae (snail), 1994. I know what you are thinking. A snail? How dull! However, if a dinosaur was selected for the Old Line State, it would have been old hat since  Astrodon (Pleurocoelus), a Cretaceous sauropod which is already claimed (as Paluxysaurus) by Texas. Massachusetts - See Connecticut. Michigan -  Mammut americanum (American Mastodon), 2002. The American Mastodon is a great choice for the Great Lakes State. It could  have selected yet another mammoth from its Pleistocene deposits or less spectacularly a Devonian fish, brachiopod, bryzoan, trilobite, gastropod, or  cephalopod. The Carboniferous material is typically not well-preserved and  the Mesozoic rocks did not survive. Minnesota – None. In the North Star state, they have yet to find a star to  be their state fossil. The only dinosaurs, recovered from Cretaceous Period  deposits, belong to unidentified species of hadrosaurs. No Permian or even Carboniferous age fossils have been found. Hopefully when one is selected  it will not be another mammoth. Mississippi - See Alabama. Missouri - Delocrinus (sea lily), 1989;  Hypsibema missouriensis, 2004. Show Me State should show me better state fossils. A sea lily is frankly lame, and the state dinosaur is an extremely poorly known hadrosaur. Ice Age mastodons or sloths (like Mylodon) would have made better candidates for state fossils. Montana – Maiasaura peeblesorum, 1985. There’s a lot of paleontological treasure in the Treasure State of Montana: Triceratops,  Deinonychus, Tyrannosaurus, for  starters. But mostly it’s duckbill territory all over so Maiasaura, the

headline-making dinosaur that showed the world how motherly dinosaur   parents could be, is a perfect representative.  Nebraska –  Mammuthus primigenius, M. columbi, M. imperator  (Mammoths – Woolly, Columbian and Imperial), 1967. First to lay claim to the mammoth, which represents the Cornhusker State well but the bear dog  Amphicyon and any number of fossil rhinos from Ashfall Fossil Beds would  have avoided the clash when Alaska, South Carolina and Washington also elected mammoths decades earlier. I assigned Nebraska the Columbian Mammoth which is now considered synonymous with Imperial Mammoth. I also assigned Teleoceras, actually the most common fossil at Ashfall, to Louisiana.  Nevada – Shonisaurus popularis, 1977. Here’s a state that got it right  by default. The fifty foot ichthyosaur Shonisaurus is the only real choice for  the Silver State.  New Hampshire – None. Paleozoic life - brachiopods, bryozoans, corals, crinoids, and trilobites - seem to be the only fossils from the p erfectly nicknamed Granite State.  New Jersey - Hadrosaurus foulkii, 1991. With its ample late Cretaceous deposits, who knows what other dinosaurs lie beneath the Garden State waiting to be discovered?  Hadrosaurus is the first significant dinosaur  found in America, and deserving of the status of New Jersey State Fossil. I didn’t sculpt this because another artist already d id a miniature commemorative bronze that was good enough.  New Mexico - Coelophysis bauri, 1981. When Edwin Colbert discovered  the Ghost Ranch site was full of Coelophysis skeletons he undoubtedly agreed with the state’s nickname as the Land of Enchantment, and f or paleontologists it still rings true. Some thirty four years later the Triassic dinosaur became the state fossil. A few years after that, supersized  diplodocid Seismosaurus was found. Additionally there’s been allosaurids and tyrannosaurids, large chasmosaurines, Stegosaurus, therizinosaurs like  Nothronynchus, crested duckbills like Parasaurolophus and many others.  New York - Eurypterus remipes (sea scorpion), 1984. The geologic rise and fall of The Empire State is inconsistently recorded by the rocks, particularly in the Adirondacks, dating back to the Precambrian. Carboniferous and Permian rocks were eroded, and late Mesozoic age sediments are limited to the Coastal Plain area of Long Island. This leaves the best fossils from the Silurian and Devonian periods. One of the largest specimens is the mansized Eurypterus, the largest arthropo d ever.  North Carolina – Carcharodon megalodon, 2013. Good for the Tar Heel State: selecting the giant white shark relative first when Maryland or Florida could have easily claimed the same genus. If you are familiar with the exhibit at North Carolina’s Museum of Natural Sciences hopefully you know that there’s no solid proof Acrocanthosaurus roamed the state as it did Texas, Oklahoma and Maryland.  North Dakota - Teredo (petrified wood), 1967. There’s petrified wood in the Peace Garden State but as far as animal candidates, there’s many of the same superstars from neighboring state South Dakota including Cretaceous dinosaurs Triceratops, Edmontosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus as well as mosasaurs. I suggest they claim Tyrannosaurus before someone else does. Ohio –  Isotelus maximus (Trilobite), 1985. A bit shortsighted, the Buckeye State’s choices of vertebrate fossils need to be reconsidered. Too  bad the more spectacular Dunkleosteus, housed at the Cleveland Museum of   Natural History, was not elected state fossil. Oklahoma – Saurophaganax maximus, 2000. It could have been decided  sooner than 2000 which fossil would represent the Sooner State, and while I am glad it is a dinosaur, Saurophaganax could very well be a large specimen of the better known Allosaurus, already claimed by Utah. It is too bad  the more unique Acrocanthosaurus didn’t get the vote instead; Washington D.C.’s “Capitalsaurus” may be more or less the same animal but is still fragmentary. Oregon – Metasequoia (Dawn redwood), 1988. As awesome as the Dawn redwoods are, they are actually not extinct but alive and f airly well in China.

With an animal friendly nickname like the Beaver State, they should really choose an actual fossil vertebrate. When and if they do it will likely be one of those found in John Day Fossil Beds, such as an oreodont, a brontothere or a hyaeodont. I vote for the creodont Patriofelis; it sounds almost patriotic. Pennsylvania – Phacops rana (trilobite), 1988. Some of the same verte brates in Arizona and Connecticut occur in the Keystone State so I would   prefer to see Devonian fish or better still, Carboniferous amphibians as state fossil vertebrates. Rhode Island – None. A prehistoric arthropod, such as Carboniferous arachnid Anthracomartus, may be a candidate as might a marine inverte brate for the appropriately named Ocean State. Due to eroded deposits for  their respective periods, dinosaurs and mammals are out of the running. South Carolina – Mammuthus columbi (Columbian Mammoth), 2014. A controversial victory for the evolutionists of the Palmetto State, one of the most religious and conservative states in the union. A symbol of the war  against Fundies in the backwards South, it is still too bad that mammoths are already overrepresented and that the dinosaurs and Cretaceous reptiles that have been detected are still too poorly known. South Dakota - Triceratops horridus, 1988. Triceratops is a true North American icon, the largest and most famous horned dinosaur, found on no other continent. Had Black Hills Institute of Geological Research unearthed  “Sue” or even “Stan” sooner than the early 1990s, perhaps the Rushmore State would have rushed to elect Tyrannosaurus rex. South Dakota perhaps deserves two state fossils – that’s how rich it is in prehistoric life. Tennessee - Pterotrigonia (bivalve), 1998. I previously recommended it for Ohio, but failing that I’d volunteer  Dunkleosteus to represent the Volunteer State, fertile ground for Devonian marine organisms, should a separate vertebrate state fossil nomination occur. Just the same mosasaurs and sea turtles, or Cenozoic megafauna like Camelops and Harlan’s Ground  Sloth ( Mylodon) are possible too. Texas -  Paluxysa urus =  Pleurocoe lus nanus , 2009. Whether it’s superpterosaur Quetzalcoatlus, supercroc  Deino suchu s, pelycosaur   Dimetr odon , dirk  tooth cat  Megantereon, or a marine monster like  Bra ch a uch eniu s , Texas had some of  the best fossils you could dream of. So you see, there are many possible stars in the The Lone Star State. The width of the state allowed this artist plenty of room to mount the sauropod formerly known as  Astrodon (named after the Houston Astros…just kidding) and that beat Maryland’s very similar remains to the state fossil punch. Utah -  Allosaurus fragilis, 1988. The Beehive State is very much the Dinosaur State, harboring fossils spanning the entire Mesozoic Era. While Utahraptor was five years away from being discovered when Utah elected  their state fossil,  Allosaurus, was far more common, better understood and  likely more successful, in evolutionary and iconic terms. Vermont – Delphinapterus leucas, 1993. Vermont translates from French literally to its nickname “Green Mountain”, the name shared by the mountain range in the state giving no hint of its somewhat uneventful geologic  past. The state fossil is a Pleistocene beluga whale because the earlier rocks contain no fossils and there are zero deposits from the Jurassic on backwards to the Devonian, when the state was covered in a shallow sea. Virginia - Chesapecten jeffersonius (scallop), 1993. The Old Dominion State paints a broad picture of prehistory, with brachiopods, gastropods and  trilobites being far cooler choices than the state fossil scallop. Virginia even had evidence of dinosaurs, but like Maryland, whale and shark traces are abundant in the state’s Coastal Plain. Washington – Mammuthus columbi (Columbian Mammoth), 1998. With not much to choose from and no dinosaurs, the Evergreen State unremarkably chose a mammoth, just like Nebraska did 30 years before. The remains of prehistoric cetaceans resembling modern river dolphins are plentiful around the Olympic Peninsula; they would have made more interesting state fossils. Washington D.C. - See District o f Columbia.

West Virginia -  Megalonyx jeffersonii, 2008. Cave deposits in the Mountain State yield the usual Quaternary mastodons and mammoths, so good on WV for selecting a different state fossil – Jefferson’s Ground Sloth.  No Mesozoic age rocks mean there are no dinosaurs to be found. Wisconsin - Calymene celebra (trilobite), 1986. I won’t badger anybody to change its state fossil, as it is slim pickins in the Badger State when it comes to decent candidates. Paleozoic fossils are well represented with the state’s Mesozoic deposits yielding not a single vertebrate fossil. Wyoming - Knightia (fish), 1987. The Equality State is home to all sorts of dinosaurs and reptiles and a lousy sardine-like fish got selected only  because Kemmerer is the “Fossil Fish Capital of the World”. Why not Eocene rhino Uintatherium? Early bat  Icaronycteris? Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis? Not all prehistoric animals are evolved equal! Canada’s Provincial (and Territorial) Fossils. Since the Great White North  began the process in 2002, only one province has adopted a fossil in the same spirit America has with state fossils by an Act of House of Assembly:  Nova Scotia’s  Hylonomus lyelli, the world’s oldest known reptile known from the Carboniferous period. If Canada does not get around to at least a few of these suggestions sometime during the 2 010s, this process could take decades. Alberta – Alberta’s Cretaceous sediments are legendary. You may think   Albertosaurus may get the nod, but the abundant ceratopsid genus Centrosaurus will probably win the title. British Columbia -- Five years since the campaign started for BC’s  provincial fossil, an arthropod from the Burgess Shale, the hard to classify  but abundant  Marrella, is getting the most support beating out even the great Elasmosaurus and Cretaceous ammonite Canadoceras. Manitoba – The biggies would be Cretaceous marine life such as mosasaur Hainosaurus, squid Tusoteuthis, and bony fish Xiphactinus, but invertebrates from Ordovician rocks from Lake Winnipeg may be victorious.  New Brunswick—Sharing a geologic record akin to Nova Scotia, you could select a mastodon, Carboniferous insects, trilobite  Paradoxides, and  going back further to the Precambrian, the first stromatolite fossil  Archaeozoon.  Newfoundland & Labrador—Home to Edicarans (enigmatic complex life forms from around 655 million years ago). The spindle shaped variety is most common thus would likely get the n od.  Northwest Territories –Paleontology from this region requires more sam pling but it is represented by Precambrian Ediacaran fossils and marine life through the Devonian.  Nunevut—The usual mollusks, trilobites and brachiopods should take a  backseat to Tiktaalik roseae, the Devonian lobe finned fish that made global headlines in 2006. Neil Shubin called it a “fishapod”, a creature somewhere  between fish and amphibian, and a perfect transitional fossil. Ontario—Ordovician fossils dominate Canada’s most populous province, including trilobites, brachiopods, graptolites, mollusks and crinoids. Prince Edward Island—The majority of rocks here date to the Permian Period. Tracks named Ichniotherium appear to have been left by diadectids. Quebec – Devonian lobefin fish Eusthenopteron foordi (from Miguasha Park) is probably the best known fossil from Quebec but the region is known for older marine fossils spanning the Paleozoic back to the Precambrian. Saskatchewan—Alberta may be more famous for dinosaur fossils than its neighboring province to the right which yields much of the same Cretaceous taxa, but it may be able to claim the most famous dinosaur of all, Tyrannosaurus, which will surely overshadow the variety of Tertiary mammals of the province. Yukon—Ice Age or Pleistocene mammals are present here, many discovered in permafrost. I nominate  Arctodus simus yukonensis though giant camels which received some press for the area, evolved from North American ancestors. Cretaceous dinosaur tracks are known from the Ross River as well as fossil marine reptiles but the material is non-diagnostic.  Note: Models and photos in this article are copyright Epoch Scale Models, 2015.

Making a Diorama for Creative Beast Studio’s Acrocanthosaurus & Sauropelta Kits By Jan Harrison

rocks and shaped pieces of Styrofoam to give interest and contour to the scene (Fig. 2). I mixed up some paper mache and applied it to the base. This is the “ground”, so I shaped and contoured it to blend the resin bases together with the wooden base (Fig. 3). PAINTING THE BASE

Generally speaking, a lot of planning goes into a dinosaur diorama pro ject befo re any const ructi on begins . In plann ing the  Acrocantho saurus/Sa uropelta diorama, the amazing David Silva of  Creative Beast did almost all of the work for me. Both of these models display real dynamic energy, with coiled bodies, lashing tails and expressive faces. They are designed with bases that fit together and when this is done the story is told. A mother Sauropelta is des perately trying to protect her baby and fend off a determined attack by an extremely vicious Acrocanthosaurus. In diorama storytelling, it doesn’t get much better than this! The kits are cleanly cast in resin with beautiful detail and fit throughout.

I use acrylic (water based) hobby  paints for the base colors and the dry  brushed highlights and then artist oils for the washes when I paint a diorama  base. The process of washes and dry  brushing really make the details “pop” and adds a lot to the final look of the  piece. I chose as base colors, a nice earthy brown for the ground, a light tan for the rocks, a mustard yellow for  the tree trunk and a medium green for the palm fronds and plants. APPLYING THE FOLIAGE

I often like to add some additional foliage to my dioramas. There are various products available, some made of paper (Green Line from Germany) and others are photo etched metal (Scale Link from the UK). I prefer photo etch plants as they are more durable and take paint better. STEPS FOR ADDING FOLIAGE

The plant is cut from the fret and glued to a piece of thin diameter wire (.026 flower wire works great) a couple of inches long. The key here is that the glue is flexible, so that when the stem is bent the plant won’t break off. I used a flexible, household glue called “GOOP”. TIP: For ease of painting, I lay out strips of modeling PART 1: ASSEMBLING THE DINOSAURS clay and stick the glued  As always, the parts must be washed in soapy water to remove any mold   plants into them. (Fig. 4) release material. I removed any casting seams or pour stubs, and glued the Once again, I used a sys parts together with Super Glue. TIP: When a dinosaur has its lower jaw cast tem of an acrylic base paint separately, I f ind that it is easier to paint the inside of the mouth now, before (forest green in this case), attaching the jaw. (I’ll get into painting a little later.) washes and dry brushing to Regardless of how well a model is cast, the seams must be dealt with so  bring out the detail. that they are invisible under the paint. I use Aves I placed the foliage on the Fixit Sculpt to fill the seams. It is a two part putty diorama where it looks right. that is water soluble while curing, so that it can be I drilled a small hole for the smoothed and blended with a wet fingertip. I wire and cut the wire so that replaced the skin detail with RepliScale. when placed in the hole and bent, it was the correct length for the plant to Once the dinos were assembled and the putty “look right”. was completely cured, I drilled a hole and inserted  When all of this was done, I glued some crumbled bits of ground debris a “mounting rod” into the foot/leg that contacts the made from bits of dried lichen  base. This served to both anchor the dinosaur to and moss (available at craft the base and provide a rod that will fit into the stores) to tie it all together, and  handles and jigs that I use to hold the model durVOILA! A home for the ing the painting process (Fig. 1). With the big dinosaurs (Fig. 5).  Acrocanthosaurus I used a ¼” diameter rod, with the Sauropelta, only 1/8” diameter. TIP: Make the rod long enough and drill PART 3: PAINTING THE deep enough to go through the resin base and into the wood as far as posDINOSAURS sible without going through the bottom of the wood. This provides a very When painting dinosaurs, I use solid anchor for the dinos. a combination of acrylic hobby PART 2: BUILDING THE DIORAMA BASE  paint, artist oil paints and ComArt transparent paints. I like artist I prefer to mount my dioramas on a wooden base with felt glued to the oils because of how well they  bottom. Determining the dimensions of the base depends on many factors. The size of the dino(s), their placement on the base, available display shelf   blend, their long working time (because of their slow drying) and the amazing variations in color that can be achieved with them. Layering the transarea, etc. In the case of this diorama, Mr. Silva has done most of the work. When the resin bases are placed together the layout is pretty much deter-  parent paints with the airbrush also provides amazing variations in color. TIP: I f ind that it’s best not to handle the dinosaurs while painting. With big mined. Mr. Silva has even provided a palm tree with separate fronds! But, not content to leave well enough alone, I decided to add some more ground  and heavy dinosaurs, like the  Acrocanthosaurus, I clamp the rod into an articulated clamp which is attached to a heavy piece of wood (Fig. 2). When work to tie everything together.  placed in a “lazy Susan” turntable, painting is much easier. For smaller and  STEPS FOR ADDING GROUNDWORK: lighter dinosaurs, like the Sauropelta, the rod is clamped in a large pin vise