Lego: The Building Blocks Of Simulated Life

An introduction to Lego might seem totally unnecessary, but in the event that this blog outlives the famous brick system, here's a tweet's worth of description for future readers:

@Lego is a line of plastic construction #toys consisting of colourful interlocking plastic bricks, gears, figurines and various other parts.

There you go. A description so concise, even a world leader couldn't fail to stick with it to the end. But Lego is more than that. Lego is manufactured by real Vikings and for a good few years it barely sported any English on its packaging. Even so, it's taken a surprisingly strong hold in English-speaking countries, eventually shedding the remnants of its continental look, and making every third set a Disney-controlled-Hollywood-movie tie-in (and then there's all the DC stuff). Old duffers like me yearn for a time when there were fewer unique pieces, but you can't fight evolution, and Lego doesn't fight market changes.

Luckily, Lego whizz, Warren Elsmore, was on hand to remind us that Lego can still be more than just Star Wars and lazy, gender-specific faux pas.

Dinosaurs: The Universal Language For Cool

Before a chance visit to Preston's Harris Museum & Art Gallery last week, I'd not heard of Warren Elsmore (he tweets here). Everything I now know has been gleaned from the web, and it's clear that he's not built (BUILT!) his Lego career just so he can fill the world with dinosaurs. And that's okay. Dinosaurs aren't everybody's cup of stuff, and making a living out of them is hard work. Warren has turned his engineery talents to several disparate areas, which are all incredible and covered in detail at his site, but what got my palaeosenses tingling is his current touring exhibition, 'Brick Dinos'.

The Dinosaurs Take Preston

Now, it's almost a given that something with dinosaur in the title, and intended for general consumption, will actually feature a fairly broad array of dinosaur and non-dinosaur palaeontological critters. Practically nothing else rolls off the tongue, and as any marketing consultant will tell you, buzz words work (even if they make experts twitch).

Ammonite. A good fossil is worth its weight in Lego. (Copyright © Warren Elsmore; photo: Gareth Monger)

Warren's 'palaeoLego' displays themselves were placed within a couple of decent-sized galleries, and could be divided, broadly, into two types. A dozen or more glass cases held dioramas and replica specimens, such as plant and ammonite fossils. The dioramas resembled regular kits in terms of scale. I could almost have imagined that these were off-the-shelf Lego kits - and that's not to suggest that there was anything run-of-the-mill about them, simply that were very-well conceived and honestly looked as if Lego's designers had signed them off. And that should come as no surprise, since Lego bricks is what Warren's famous for.

A pair of seagoing "pterosaurs" - presumably Pteranodon. Honestly, those two kids' smiles were totally genuine! (Copyright © Warren Elsmore; photo: Gareth Monger)

Naturally, there's a resolution issue here. There's a bottom end to the scale, and the only real way to introduce palaeontologist-pleasing detail is to go big. You don't really get to include integumentary structures such as feathers when you're working in Lego. That doesn't mean Warren doesn't try. His ornithomimid - I think it was Struthiomimus - certainly had some attractive downy fluff cascading down its sides.

Struthio-/Galli- + mimus. (Copyright © Warren Elsmore; photo: Gareth Monger)

As this was a flying visit and I didn't know the exhibition was happening, I didn't take many notes, so I honestly don't recall whether this was Struthiomimus or Gallimimus. And that illustrates the resolution issue. The level of detail attainable at this size is limited, so this could be any ornithomimid. On the other hand, this isn't an exercise in scientific accuracy, so who cares? And it is nice to see a non-avian theropod, as part of a pop culture exhibit, adorned with feathers.

(Speaking of feathers, there was also an Archaeopteryx, but it wasn't very convincing, even bearing in mind it was made in Lego - so I didn't bother to photograph it. Again, it's a resolution issue. Bricks are just too, well, bricky to convincingly depict an animal famous for its avian-esque qualities. Also, it seemed to have a short tail.)

Tyrannosaurus. (Copyright © Warren Elsmore; photo: Gareth Monger)

It would be weird if there wasn't a hulking great Tyrannosaurus in this display, so it was no great surprise to find one skulking around in the Lego scrubland of one of the glass cases. This one raised smiles with its bloodied kill's remains strewn across the ground. Oh, and look those manus! No bunny hands here! Hats off to them for getting that right.

Ankylosaurus grazes next to a seasonally-dry riverbed. (Oops - it's not dry.) (Copyright © Warren Elsmore; photo: Gareth Monger)

It's worth drawing attention to the landscapes in Warren's sets. There's no Cretaceous hothouse tropiness going on. No baked deserts with an obligatory backdrop of lava-spewing volcanoes. The leaflet boasts that Warren worked closely with a palaeontologist, and that's evident. These are Lego renderings of living animals and it shows. These are not '60s caricatures of cold-blooded, tail-dragging lizards, smashing their heads into rocks and fighting each other because they don't know how to do anything else. I walked in vaguely curious, but ultimately not expecting much, and I came out wanting to blog about it.

Sauropods (Diplodocus?) drink at, perhaps, the edge of a lake. (Copyright © Warren Elsmore; photo: Gareth Monger)

The Big Stuff

The second type of display, after the dioramas, is the full-scale sculpture. Understandably, there weren't as many of these, and how do you decide which dinosaur to tackle? And, importantly, where do you draw the line when it comes to size? Cleverly, a large diorama into which one places a medium-sized dinosaur is still an imposing sculpture! Masiakasaurus is an interesting theropod from Madagascar with weird, sticky-outy teeth which suggest that it may have gone after fish and other small animals.

Not everybody wants to get to know Masiakasaurus. (Copyright © Warren Elsmore; photo: Gareth Monger.)

Most palaeo workers agree that too small a selection of palaeontological animals get too big a share of the attention. That most of those animals are dinosaurs is also a massive bugbear for palaeo workers. Dinosaurs are the 1%. If you asked a hundred different palaeontologists to nominate an extinct animal to feature in this diorama, you'd receive a thousand different nominations - and you might get a dinosaur among the mammal teeth. But this isn't SVPCA, it's the Harris in Preston, and its target audience includes an enormous number of kids, all desperate to rattle off every dinosaur name they know in front of proud parents.

Despite this, it's still fun to see something a little more 'out there' than the usual 'T-REX', or mis-scaled Velociraptor, even if it is another theropod. Masiakasaurus isn't your usual theropod, at least not at the sharp end, and it's nice to see that extra effort went into avoiding a dinosaurian cliche.

Given that this was the only full-size Lego model of a theropod in the display, I would have loved to have seen an attempt to add some sort of feathery coat, perhaps not fully-veined feathers given its position on the theropod family tree relative to those more closely related to birds, but some hint. Or maybe, given that Warren clearly isn't adverse to the idea of feathered dinosaurs, his consultant nudged him away from that headache.

Another "pterosaur", presumably a female Pteranodon. Seriously, why don't the pterosaurs get to use their generic names? That happened in the WWD movie, too. (Copyright © Warren Elsmore; photo: Gareth Monger.)

Again, I feel like I'm nitpicking. An important aspect to displaying dinosaurs is conveying their size - especially the larger examples - and this is something you don't necessarily get from their skeletons, since they are reduced to hollow, lightweight frameworks, with museum lighting reaching through a complex of negative space. A solid, fleshed reconstruction takes us that bit further, and we can appreciate the mass of an animal, even if it is demonstrated in Lego, minus a bit of fluff.

During my short visit, I saw children awed, and occasionally scared, by Warren's incredible models. Interactive displays and activities enabled visitors to fully engage, and an art competition will extend the enjoyment that bit longer for one lucky visitor. If you're in the Northwest, you've got 'til September 17th (2017) to see this exhibition, after which it goes extinct, though perhaps not forever. For more information, go here or here.

After tweaking the papercraft Aquilops americanus skull, made available at SV-POW!, I figured I'd throw together a desktop 'ornament'. A. americanus is fast becoming the unwitting poster boy for open access palaeontology, so it's an apt choice of dinosaur. In keeping with the intentions of the paper's authors, it's freely available. Download the image from here or, if you want the PDF of the Ai file so that you can edit it, email me at microraptor_at_hotmail.com.

Quadrupedal pose perhaps overstated. Don't like it? Change it!

This model is designed to work without glue BUT! glue will make it look better, giving closer, neater joins. It's up to you. Make it better!

Papercraft Aquilops americanus (by Gareth Monger)

It works best printed at the intended size of A3 (420x297mm) but A4 (297x210mm) will work at a push. Print onto thicker stock if possible, say, 250gsm. If you carefully trim the barbed tabs, they should 'click' into the receiver tabs without the need for glue. Score folds for a neater finish. A good craft-knife (or, better still, a scalpel) and a steel rule/straightedge give best results.

Edit it, share it, distribute it. Keep it fun and keep it free.

See SV-POW! for more Aquilops stuff.

To the untrained eye it would easy to think of Stegosaurus as one of those dinosaurs which the palaeo crowd thinks it's got right.  What is there to get wrong?  It's an obligate quadruped with a tiny head. Its brain - the front one, obviously (duh!) - was the inspiration for the humble walnut. It was a design so successful that even modern domestic mammals stole it: "Stegosaurus's brain was the same size as that of a kitten." And what of its array of fancy dorsal plates? Two rows of huge, bony diamonds, which chipped Allosaurus's teeth, and warmed the animal on those slow-go mornings. Slow and stupid and lumbering, with an entrance for plants at one end and Gary Larson's greatest achievement at the other. This dated and stagnant image of Stegosaurus is one that it's struggled to shake off.

It's nineteen eighty-something, and this particular less-than-ten-year-old is moping around the house, cursing the extinction event that robbed him of the full-scale versions of the plastic figures he plays with every day.  Feathered (non-avian) dinosaurs aren't being harvested by Chinese farmers yet and speculation about a dinosaurian origin for birds is hardly ever mentioned in the books available to children. (To make matters worse, most of my books are hand-me-downs from well-meaning family and friends and are even more out-of-date than the brand-new ones that my parents occasionally get for me.) The local font of historical knowledge and artifacts, Wisbech Museum, holds a few scrappy dinosaur remains (though some much better marine reptile fossils), but its most important collection, for me, was a tray of Inpro dinosaur toys.

Hideous green blob, driving forwards with its head in the mud. Not sure of the manufacturer. (Photograph: Gareth Monger)

Stegosaurus by Inpro. Smile, for gawdsake - there are children watching! (Photograph: Gareth Monger

It's fair to say that my earliest exposure to three-dimensional dinosaurs was through Inpro's toys. Anatomically they're what you'd expect of a small, inexpensive museum souvenir. Indeed, I've only ever seen the range available in museum gift shops. The range is a strange mix of static-posed, goofy-looking creatures, and slightly-more-dynamic animals, as if Inpro employed two sculptors - one who already liked dinosaurs and one who didn't know what they were until he clocked in or work that morning. Inpro's Stegosaurus sits neatly in the latter camp. Early film appearances, such as in 1933's King Kong, helped cement the animal's image in the public psyche; why would Inpro not meet the expectations of its customers?

Stegosaurus meets Westerners for the first time, quickly assumes the horizontal position. A scene from the ground-breaking King Kong, 1933. (Photograph: © Warner Bros.)

Stegosaurus does get better coverage in the popular palaeontology literature, but this rarely seems to have filtered back into pre-'90s toys or kids' books, or else we'd have seen more of those toys with alternative plate arrangements or speculative bipedality. It might ultimately have been proven wrong, but it would have at least shown less of a reliance on popular cultural examples which are themselves not necessarily the product of up-to-date scientific process. That's not to say it never happens, but examples are hard to find. (Suggested examples will be added!)

More-recent high profile media appearances include the original Walking With Dinosaurs series and Primeval but, oddly, film fans had to wait until the second installment of the Jurassic Park franchise before they were treated to an ILM Stegosaurus. I find that unusual if only because, when one asks just about anyone to list some dinosaurs, there are a handful of dinosaurian poster boys which nearly always get mentioned - and Stegosaurus is one of them. A minor deviation from the novel gave Triceratops some screen time instead. Inevitably, The Lost Word did show Stegosaurus doing the only thing it knew how to do, other than eating - attempting to thagomize another creature out of existence. To be fair, King Kong, Fantasia and Walking With Dinosaurs all featured angry stegs, too. Angry, angry stegs. 'Death Stegs'.

Left: A Stegosaurus takes on a generic Hollywood theropod, in this case an allosaur seemingly modeled on a tyrannosaur, in Fantasia (© Disney); Right: An Allosaurus interrupts a Stegosaurus in Walking With Dinosaurs, which subsequently murders a young Diplodocus (© BBC)

As far as dinosaurs go, Stegosaurus is pretty well known, from numerous remains representing several species from multiple localities. Despite this, many aspects of Stegosaurus's behaviour and biology remain poorly understood. When one considers how extant organisms possess structures which exhibit multifunctionality, it's easy to see why the dorsal plates and thagomizer may be hard to nail down to a single use. For example, feathers are insulatory, aerodynamic and display structures though one of more of those functions were probably secondary. Common suggestions for Stegosaurus's bizarre array of kite and spike-shaped osteoderms include armour, sexual displays, as warnings to would-be predators and deceptive displays where the individual appears much larger. Palaeontologists are yet to suggest that the plates make Stegosaurus harder for an Allosaurus to swallow.

Hard to swallow: The dangers of not growing massive, inflexible plating. (Image: © Gareth Monger. NB: This is shoestring palaeoart. At eight quid an illustration, Mike Taylor was outside my budget.)

This week it was announced that a well-preserved Stegosaurus, nicknamed 'Sophie', was going to be the subject of an intensive study in order to improve palaeontology's understanding of the strange, platey beast. Prof. Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum is leading a team which, having scanned the 80%-complete skeleton, will examine it digitally in order reveal some important aspects of the animal in life, such as its posture, feeding, nutritional demands, locomotion and how it may have used those crazy osteoderms. With luck, the new data will filter quickly into the palaeoart community and new, improved restorations will be seen in books and in the form of children's toys. If any dinosaur deserves that, surely it's Stegosaurus.