blacksundae

Gizmodo:

When it comes to Dubai and attracting wealthy tourists, the word “restraint” is seldom used. Perhaps that is why it is not surprising that the locals are building a $1 billion theme park that will feature over 100 animatronic dinosaurs of 40 different species. Dubbed “Restless Planet,” the park will attempt to provide an educational experience amid all of the Vegas-style spectacle. This will be done using history themed rides and robots/habitats that represent an accurate portrayal (based on current knowledge) of what life was like millions of years ago.

Hmm… Two Michael Crichton stories in one! What could possibly go wrong?

Science News:

Paleontologists have unearthed an ancient, sediment-filled burrow that holds remains of the creatures that dug it. The find is the first indisputable evidence that some dinosaurs maintained an underground lifestyle for at least part of their lives.

Read on. [via Boing Boing]

Either this trading card series is a tad inaccurate, or there were some very confused herbivores during the Mesozoic. Who cares about accuracy, though, when something is this goddamned perfect? [via MetaFilter]

Discovery Channel:

“It’s unquestionably the metacarpal,” Quinlan told Discovery News. No previous T. rex remains have ever been found with a third metacarpal, despite the fact that the other bones suggested its presence. “There is a notch in the side of the second metacarpal that was just begging to have something fit into it.”

The revised anatomy of the hand suggests there was a very strong tendon that attached to second metacarpal, giving the hand a pretty decent grip, she said. Still, the puny limbs were almost certainly not used by T. rex to grapple with prey or kill.

[edit]

That said, the new finger bone is not going to cause much change to reconstructions of T. rex, says Hartman. Throughout the evolution of meat-eating dinosaurs there was a trend towards fewer fingers, with the earliest having five fingers and the T. rex having two. This newfound nubbin of a third finger was already on its way out, and did not stick out much, he said.

“In another 10 million years they would have lost (the third finger) completely,” said Hartman. Unfortunately for them, however, the age of dinosaurs ended before that could happen.

Read on.

“I just happened to feel these couple of bumps along the backside. And it was like, ‘Oh, that’s very interesting,’” he recalled. “And then I kind of let it pass. And then I was thinking about it more later on, and that’s when I took it to the high powered microscopes and realized it has all these other features that you would expect to see if it was a quill knob.”

The quill knobs found on Velociraptor are regularly spaced bumps along the ulna where flight or wing feathers would have been attached.

“And when you compare them to the ulna of a bird, you see that they correspond quite closely to these quill knobs,” he added. “These wouldn’t have been flight feathers in the Velociraptor, because it’s an animal that’s much too big to have flown. But it still shows that feathers were attached to the bone there.”

Read on.

This is awesome.

(This is from Dino-Riders. I had a Kentrosaurus Dino-Rider toy as a kid. According to Wikipedia, the Kentrosaurs were Rulons — bad guys. I guess that explains why the action figure it came with had a cobra head.)

William Sellers at the University of Manchester, UK, argues that this type of comparison can be misleading. “Such calculations can accurately predict the top speed of a six-tonne chicken, but dinosaurs are not built like chickens, nor do they run like them,” he says.

Instead, Sellers and colleague Phillip Manning used an approach they dub “evolutionary robotics” to generate new estimates of the top speed of several two-legged dinosaurs. They built computer models featuring the leg bones, muscles, and skeletal structures of five groups of dinosaur: Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Allosaurus (which looks like a miniature Tyrannosaurus [albiet more gracile and sporting the typical three digits on the front limb, as opposed to rex's two. - Shannon]), the slightly smaller Dilophosaurus, and the chicken-sized Compsognathus.

To begin with, each model could move in a huge variety of different ways, too many to analysis properly. To narrow the problem down, Sellers and Manning generated a virtual population for each group, containing lots of models with slightly different gaits. They then raced these models against each other. Those that fell after only a few steps were culled while the fastest went on to spawn another generation of slightly modified gaits.

After hundreds of generations, this simulated evolution arrived at an efficient, workable gait for each dinosaur. The same method has previously been used to model the gait of extinct hominids, but “we are the only people to have tried this on dinosaurs,” Sellers says.

Read on.

Zeppelin v Pterodactyls! Since Hammer is staging to make a comeback, maybe they can resurrect this project and use this as an animatic.

There’s nothing a World War II buff likes better than seeing American soldiers fight dinosaurs. Or at least, that seems to be the thinking behind “The War that Time Forgot”, which regularly, over a period of years, featured exactly that. It was one of the oddest concepts DC Comics ever made a series of — and for the company that did Prez (a teenage U.S. president), Super Chief (an Indian superhero in the old West), Space Cabby (an interplanetary taxi driver) and so much more, that says a lot.

In the 1950s and early ’60s, there was a strong tendency for low-grade sci-fi to creep into the most unlikely DC comics. Batman, that mysterious creature of the night, repeatedly encountered aliens and monsters — in broad daylight, no less. Tomahawk, who fought in the American War for Independence, did the same. Even Mr. District Attorney, based on a radio show about an inner-city law enforcer, ran across the occasional Martian. It took until the April-May, 1960 issue of Star Spangled War Stories (#90), but eventually that trend reached the company’s war titles.

Robert Kanigher, editor of DC’s war line, wrote the cover-featured story, and it was illustrated by penciller Ross Andru and inker Mike Esposito — the same team that was editing, writing and drawing Wonder Woman at the time and, a couple of years later, did Metal Men, both of which were among the quirkier of the ’60s superheroes. Apparently, the World War II buffs among DC’s readership were indeed looking for that sort of thing, because the dinosaurs were back on both cover and inside two issues later, and two issues after that, then became every-issue regulars. This series replaced French resistance fighter Mlle. Marie, who had been running less than a year.

These stories, published under the common rubric “The War that Time Forgot”, took place on a remote, uncharted Pacific island where the big guys had, for unexplained reasons, avoided going extinct. A very large remote, uncharted island, apparently, considering the number of extremely bulky carnivores it managed to support. There were no regular characters — most issues featured new G.I.’s stumbling across the unofficial nature preserve and being surprised by what they found. Since some, at least, managed to survive and return to the land of humans, it seems odd that word failed to get around.

This went on until the 137th issue (Feb-March, 1968). In #138, Enemy Ace, a World War I German pilot, took over the covers and the lead spot in the magazine, and the dinosaurs were seen no more. Most “War that Time Forgot” stories featured the same creative team as the first: Kanigher, Andru and Esposito.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that an explanation, of sorts, was offered for the characteristic fauna of Dinosaur Island (as the locale has become known). There seems to have been a connection, through hundreds of miles of solid rock, between it and Skartaris, the setting of DC’s Warlord series, an inner-Earth land loosely based on the “Pellucidar” books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Dinosaurs are, of course, common in such inner-Earth lands, as everyone familiar with the clichés of fantasy fiction knows.

I have now found meaning in my life. I was brought into this world to make this movie.

[Found on Toonopedia]

D&TB:

The teeth of each dinosaur is clearly adcapted for thier unique diet. The teeth of specific genera are so well adapted that even if they decided to eat anything other than their associated biscuit they would be unable to cope. It would be like feeding a giraffe a toffee apple or gravel to a monkey.

[via MetaFilter (imagine that!)]