Review: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, 2025 edition

July 29, 2025

Let’s start with the information you need most: Dougal Dixon’s speculative evolution classic The New Dinosaurs, which imagines the biota of today if the K-Pg extinction event had never happened, is being reprinted in a handsomely-produced new edition from Breakdown Press. Here’s the website, open for pre-orders (link); the book ships on August 11. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy of this absolute banger.

CHRONONAUT

Dougal Dixon’s books After Man (1981) and The New Dinosaurs (1988) both cast very long shadows over my intellectual development. I was maybe 7 or 8 years old when I first saw a thumbnail advertisement for After Man in a bookstore flyer. With nothing more than the cover art and a 2-3 sentence description to go on, my mind fizzed. To say that the mere idea of the book fired my imagination is an understatement so gross as to be a lie; more accurately it detonated an atomic bomb under my imagination, Project-Orion-style, and sent it rocketing into the stratosphere. When I finally found a copy at the local public library a couple of years later, I was not disappointed. The Gigantelopes, Raboons, and Porpins were awesomely strange and wonderful and inspiring. At about the same time in my life that The Dinosaurs by William Stout and William Service was making me a chrononaut in the Mesozoic, After Man was giving me a similarly vertiginous sensation of the distant future.

My 1988 first edition of The New Dinosaurs and my 2022 40th anniversary edition of After Man.

I have a very vivid memory of the first time I saw The New Dinosaurs on the shelf in my local Waldenbooks, a week before my 14th birthday. The book was on a display rack, cover facing out, and the image of the cutlasstooth made my stomach drop. The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution, by Dougal Dixon. “OMG it’s the After Man guy he did a dinosaur book OMG OMG OMG!!” crashed through my mind like a railgun projectile. The New Dinosaurs bent my brain no less than After Man, with its flightless pterosaurs, aquatic hypsilophodonts, and tiny, eusocial pachycephalosaurs. I cared for my first edition hardcover like it was a holy relic; even though I reread it countless times as a teenager and have revisited it many times as an adult, it still looks essentially brand new.

Fast forward to the 2020s. When Breakdown Press published the 40th anniversary edition of After Man in 2022, I bought a copy quick-quick. It’s sitting proudly on display across the living room from me as I type this. When the folks at Breakdown asked me if I’d be interested in reviewing the new edition of The New Dinosaurs, I felt like a kid who’d gotten the golden ticket. I’m excited to get to review the book, but even happier to live in a world where the book is in print again, from a publisher who cares about getting it right. I haven’t yet seen the reprinted book in the flesh — this review is based on digital files supplied by Breakdown — but based on the 40th anniversary edition of After Man my confidence is high. The new After Man has a thick, high-gloss cover, pages sewn in signatures, and excellent color reproduction, and I have every reason to expect the same from the 2025 edition of The New Dinosaurs.

This book taught me the fundamentals of biogeography. Palaearctic Realm opening spread, pp. 42-43 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.

CONCEPT

I’m not sure how well-known it is that the conceptual engine of The New Dinosaurs is not merely “Hey whoa weird critters”, but using the idea of imaginary saurians to explain biogeography. In an interview with Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology (link), Dougal Dixon said regarding the success of After Man:

“It made me think… there’s a future in this. That is, in popular-level books that use fictitious examples of factual processes, there’s definitely room for a few more. And that’s why I came up with the idea for The New Dinosaurs. Again, I wanted to do the same sort of thing but, this time, I was aiming to create a popular-level book on zoogeography, using fictitious examples to show what the dinosaurs might perhaps be like if they hadn’t become extinct.”

In the same interview Dixon wonders to what extent the book achieved that aim, rather than being just a gee-whiz spec evo book. It worked for me! When I learned about biogeography in college, the concepts of “Nearctic” North America, “Palearctic” Eurasia, and so on were already familiar to me from The New Dinosaurs. Similarly, I’m pretty sure that I first learned the concept of biomes from After Man.

As a lover of both turtles and sauropods, I was pre-adapted to be a Turtosaur stan. Pp. 42-43 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.

WHAT ABOUT THOSE NEW DINOSAURS?

I’m not the first to point out that The New Dinosaurs was eerily prescient in many ways — Darren has touched on this at Tetrapod Zoology, and Riley Black wrote a nice piece on the topic of 2022, which seems only be available via Wayback Machine now (link; I heap vile curses on Scientific American for being the digital graveyard of so much good science writing). Some things for which we had little to no evidence for the 80s but which are now either well-established or at least up for discussion include:

  • fuzz
  • small arboreal dinosaurs, esp. with skin-wings (e.g., the Flurrit)
  • semi-aquatic dinosaurs
  • arctic dinosaurs
  • dwarf island dinosaurs
  • insect-eating dinosaurs
  • at least the specter of flightless terrestrial pterosaurs

To that list I’d add morphologically conservative sauropods. The awesome, glyptodont-analogue Turtosaur is an osteoderm-bedecked titanosaur taken to its logical conclusion, and there’s a little sidebar about a short-lived group of sprinting sauropods, but the sauropods in the book are all large-bodied, long-necked, long-tailed, mostly graviportal herbivores. Revisiting The New Dinosaurs for this review after a hiatus of some years, I was pleased to see that among the many radical evolutionary transformations postulated in other clades, the sauropods were all still recognizable sauropods, which nicely fits my ideas about the constraints on their bauplan.

Now, it’s both unrealistic and unreasonable to expect a book written in the mid-1980s to be scientifically up-to-date in 2025, and indeed there are many discoveries and developments in the past four decades that the book did not anticipate. Whole clades of dinosaurs that were known very imperfectly (therizinosaurs, rebbachisaurs) or not at all (alvarezsaurs, scansoriopterygids) when the book was created are now much better known both scientifically and popularly. To this we can add a vast ecological diversity of Mesozoic crocs, birds, squamates, and mammals. The sole mammal featured in the book is the semiaquatic Zwim, a small insectivorous placental, explicitly described as an outlier among the morphologically and ecologically conservative mammals. In the universe of The New Dinosaurs, arboreal, gliding, and digging mammals didn’t evolve in either the Mesozoic or the Cenozoic; in our own timeline, mammals were doing all of those things by the Late Jurassic at least. (Aside: I can’t remember if I’ve said this out loud anywhere, but the ecological diversity of Mesozoic mammals shouldn’t surprise anyone given that our surviving monotremes include an electrosensory swimmer and a spiny digger. The mere existence of platypuses and echidnas implies a whole zoo of ecological experimentation among early mammals.)

Similarly, we know a lot more about the biology of dinosaurs now. One thing that may jar modern dinosaur enthusiasts encountering the book for the first time is so many dinosaurs shown with very mammalian rear ends and skinny tails (depicted in the coelurosaurian arbrosaurs, in multiple hypsilophodonts and hadrosaurs, and even to some extent in the cover-adorning cutlasstooth), as opposed to the thick caudofemoralis-housing tails now known to be present in almost all non-avian dinosaurs. When I first encountered The New Dinosaurs at age 13, the furry dinosaurs blew my mind, and none moreso than the desert-adapted Taranter (see below). I suspect that the only integumentary surprise for readers now opening the book for the first time will be the absence of pennaceous feathers on any of the non-avian dinosaurs.

These observations are not intended as — and, I hope, could not be reasonably interpreted as — criticisms of the book. It is an artifact of the post-Deinonychus but pre-Sinosauropteryx Dinosaur Renaissance, not a forward projection of dinosaurs as we know them today but of dinosaurs as they were known back then. So here in 2025 the book rather mind-bendingly embodies the future (now) of the past (the 1980s) of the future (the Cenozoic) of the past (non-avian dinosaurs).

Probably my favorite paintings in the book. Pp. 86-87 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.

I can’t do a review without mentioning the art. My opinion there hasn’t changed much since I was 13. Like After Man, the ideas in The New Dinosaurs sometimes outrun their visual execution. Most of the art is serviceable, some of the pieces really shine — the painterly work on the Paraso in particular has always impressed me — and a few are so flat and indifferently rendered that my eyes tend to slide past them. My initial impression, unchanged almost four decades later, was that the artists either only had experience painting mammals and birds, or the publisher gave them the brief to render the alternative dinosaurs in the guise of mammals and birds. Weirdly, I find most of the black-and-white pencil sketches much more consistently well-executed than the full-color paintings; it’s hard for me to tell how much of that is real and how much is just my strong bent towards pencil sketches (about which see more here and here). Given that Dougal Dixon is himself a very gifted artist (see examples of Dixon’s work at his personal website and in various TetZoo posts: one, two, three), I’d love to see a version of the book someday that included his original sketches. Perhaps if there’s sufficient interest, such material could be included in a 40th anniversary edition of The New Dinosaurs, as Dixon and Breakdown Press did for After Man. One can hope. For now, let’s just say that the book runs on the strength of its ideas and the art mostly gets the job done.

I’ll close on a couple of high notes. First, I love the layout of the book, which is unchanged in the new edition. I find it interesting, drawing my eyes omnivorously around each spread, but uncluttered, with just the right amount of negative space to let each image and text block breathe. Also, and very fittingly for a book about zoogeography, the maps at the beginning of each section are fantastic, and would sit comfortably in a top-of-the-line science book today.

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

The reprinted book does have some nods to the passage of human time and the accumulation of scientific knowledge since 1988. There’s a new Author’s Introduction credited to Dougal Dixon, 2024, and on the following page this note:

This is a facsimile reproduction of the 1988 first edition
of The New Dinosaurs by Dougal Dixon.
Some of the text has been changed at the request
of the author to reflect scientific discoveries
made in the intervening years.
The changes have been made in a slightly
different typeface to make their presence clear.

I really like having the updates in a different typeface; it’s the publishing equivalent of making sure that the cast and sculpted bits can be distinguished from real bone in a mounted dinosaur skeleton. Along the same lines, a minor but pleasing thing for anyone comparing both versions of the book is that the pagination hasn’t changed; the ever-contentious Lank is still on page 34, and so on.

How do I know when I got the first edition of The New Dinosaurs? Because, bless my geeky little heart, I inscribed each of my dinosaur books with my name and the date of acquisition.

So what’s updated? Mostly the front matter, with a few tweaks elsewhere in the book. The section on “The Great Extinction” (pp. 6-9) has been heavily revised to present the evidence for the impact hypothesis. In the “What is a Dinosaur” section (pp. 10-11), the left-hand page has been overhauled and now features a phylogenetic tree of dinosaurs and their outgroups rather than the hub-and-spokes “bubblegram” of the original book, in which saurischians, ornithischians, pterosaurs, and crocs all arose independently from thecodonts. The following right-hand page hasn’t been edited at all as far as I can tell. This creates a minor disjunct; the passage, “It is possible that warm-blooded dinosaurs may have had fur or down” appears unchanged on page 11, but on the revised page 10 the evolution of feathers in theropods has already been established as observed fact.

The following section, “The New Tree of Life” (pp. 12-15), is really, really new. Not only does it follow the fate of various vertebrate groups into a hypothetical mass-extinction-free Cenozoic, as in the original book, but the underlying relationship diagram has been substantially overhauled to somewhat better reflect current thinking on dinosaur evolution. I say “somewhat” because there are some peculiarities: tyrannosaurs and ornithomimids are on a common branch, separated from all other theropods; oviraptorosaurs are allied with a big swath of coelurosaurs that are in turn separate from therizinosaurs, maniraptorans, alvarezsaurs, and birds.

Not only is the phylogenetic arrangement a little odd, the fates of several clades and their surviving representatives (in the alternative Cenozoic) have changed from the original book. The Gourmand was originally a specialized scavenging tyrannosaur, but predatory tyrannosaurs apparently survived as well (according to the bubblegram; none were featured in the original book). In the new edition, all tyrannosaurs died out in the mid-Cenozoic and were replaced by abelisaurs that spread north from Gondwana. The Gourmand art is unchanged, but it is now described as an abelisaur, which is fine. With its long, low body, short hind limbs, and absent forelimbs, the Gourmand arguably reads better as an abelisaur than a tyrannosaur anyway, even if its scavenge-then-snooze biology is pulled from Lawrence Lambe’s sleepy post-prandial Gorgosaurus of the early 20th century.

There are a few other such phylogenetic reassignments, and they don’t all completely cohere. In the original book, Madagascar is a dinosaurian Australia, home to a relictual fauna of titanosaurian sauropods and Megalosaurus (not some generalized megalosaurid or megalosauroid, but good old William-Buckland-approved Megalosaurus, albeit as the new species M. modernus). This is now Megalodontosaurus, a carcharodontosaur; according to the revised text, abelisaurs and carcharodontosaurs both made it to Madagascar, but only the carcharodontosaurs survived. To fictionally wipe out the theropod clade that actually diversified in Madagascar (abelisaurs) and replace it with a clade with zero known Malagasy representatives (carcharodontosaurs) is, to say the least, an odd choice for a book founded in zoogeography.

The Mountain Leaper in the 1988 original (left) and the new 2025 edition (right). Note that the hands have been edited out of both the color art and the black and white sketches. I’m pretty sure the two standing Mountain Leapers have had raised feet removed as well. Differences in color and so on are down to my imperfect photography and photo-editing. P. 61 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.

In the original book, the Northclaw and the Mountain Leaper were generalized coelurosaurs, but now they are a therizinosaur and an alvarezsaur, respectively. According to the revised text, some therizinosaurs reverted to carnivory and those are the only ones that have survived. The Mountain Leaper is now described as an alvarezsaur, and its art is changed — the original art showed multi-fingered hands, which wouldn’t do for an alvarezsaurid, so the hands (and I think at least one raised foot) are painted over in the color art and simply erased from the accompanying pencil diagram. As far as I could tell, this is the only animal in the book to have its art revised. The fish-eating Dip, a small theropod (p. 76), is now described as being descended from ornithomimids rather than the Mountain Leaper, its first-edition forebear. But in the Dip’s description the parenthetical reference to page 61 is still to the Mountain Leaper, which is now an alvarezsaur and not an ornithomimosaur (some phylogenies find alvarezsaurs allied with ornithomimosaurs, but in the revised book the two clades are quite separate).

Am I picking nits? Most assuredly, and not because I don’t like the book but precisely because I do. For me the updates to the text fall between two stools; the new edition of the book is not a perfect time capsule reproduction of the first edition, but neither have the minor edits been integrated thoroughly enough to make a cohesive whole. Given that the book was never going to be completely up-to-date without a clean-sheet redesign, I think it would have been more elegant to leave it untouched, in all of its mid-80s glory. But I’m an old, pedantic curmudgeon, and in all honesty the edits are few and minor and unlikely to corrode anyone’s enjoyment of the book. In the interest of doing my due diligence as a reviewer, I may have already given them more attention than anyone else ever will.

In any case, Dougal Dixon himself is quite well-acquainted with the problem of always-advancing science inevitably outrunning any fixed publication. In the Afterword, subtitled “The Survival of Dinosaurs in Literature”, a paragraph has been added about Jurassic Park. It concludes with these lines (p. 111):

“Unfortunately for both the book and the films, dinosaur science moves on so quickly that many of the details have become very dated. The book has hypsilophodonts climbing trees (no longer believed) and the film has Velociraptor without the feathers we now know it to have possessed. Unfortunately, that is the fate faced by all writers who stray into the genre.”

The woolly Taranter so surprised me as an adolescent that I still have feelings about it today. Pp. 52-53 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.

VERDICT

So should you get the book? Of course! Certainly if you were curious enough to slog through this whole post. The New Dinosaurs is a stone classic, one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution, and almost four decades on it still has the power to delight, astonish, and provoke. I look at some of the new dinosaurs and think, “That’s too conservative” or “That’s too far out”, but then I remember that elephants’ closest living relatives are sirenians and they share their zoogeographic province with big flightless sprint-birds and bone-crushing feliforms and barely-endothermic eusocial rodents and flat tortoises that can inflate their shells to wedge themselves into cracks in the rocks, and I decide that my handle on “too conservative” or “too far out” is extremely poorly calibrated. As Ursula K. Le Guin observed, science fiction is not about the future, it is about the present, viewed “at certain odd times of day in certain weathers”.

Ultimately, The New Dinosaurs has given me things to think about for 36 years. I was born in the 1970s but grew up during what now seems like a golden age of semi-technical dinosaur books in the 1980s. I still have all of those books, and on occasion I dip into one or another for nostalgia. The New Dinosaurs is one of the very few I’ve revisited as a working scientist, to hold up against our ever-evolving understanding of the past and see how well my dinosaurometer is calibrated. The new edition costs £29.99 (about $40 as of this writing), but having this particular time machine on my bookshelf is nearly priceless. Here’s that link again — go do the right thing.

CODA: OTHER TIMES AND PLACES

It seems to be speculative evolution season. C.M. Kosemen’s All Tomorrows is being published in an expanded English-language print edition on August 25 (link), and Gert van Dijk’s Wildlife on the Planet Furaha will likely be available later this year (author’s announcement, publisher’s page). If I missed any other developments in this area, sing out in the comments.

Parting shot: you do have a 40th anniversary edition of After Man, right? If not, kindly sort yourself out (link).

 

doi:10.59350/svpow.23955

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in books, Cenozoic dinosaurs, Dougal Dixon, reviews by SV-POW!sketeers, Speculation, timely
5 Comments »

Things: The Surprising Power of Stuff That Exists

July 27, 2025

In the past decade or two, I’ve seen a LOT of popular science books of this form:

[NOUN]

Learn how this amazing [whatsit] allowed the rise of civilization, informs every aspect of our daily lives, and may hold the key to our future.

where the noun in question might be salt or wood or math or clouds or daydreaming or whatever. It’s not enough to write an engaging book on Topic X without somehow, by tortuously overreaching, making it the underpinning of life itself.

If we ever do an SV-POW! book, I’ll be sorely tempted to put on the back cover: “Could understanding diapophyseal laminae improve the health of your spleen? Open this book to find out!”

This cast of a juvenile apatosaur femur really does hold the key to your future: get your eyes back on the dang road!

 

doi:10.59350/svpow.23942

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Apatosaurus, diplodocids, femur, juvenile, rants, Science communication, stinkin' appendicular elements
4 Comments »

Did journal articles survive the last ten years?

July 19, 2025

Ten years ago, almost to the day, Matt and I were having a conversation vie Google chat. We got onto the evergreen topic of scholarly publishing. Let’s ignore the somewhat dated references to Twitter and Skype, and listen in on those two starry-eyed youngsters …

Matt: People will continue to publish papers (as currently understood) beyond the natural lifespan of the medium, because papers are easy to count. But the very word ‘paper’ betrays the weakness of the form: it was dictated by a few centuries of reliance on physically publishing science on dead trees. It does not need to be now. And people are veeerrrrry gradually waking up to that fact.

Mike: “Paper” is funny, sure, but no more so than “file” or “folder”. It’s really just an old word repurposed. I don’t think the fact that it’s a homonym of an obsolete storage medium really betrays a Think Fail, just some history. I think papers will always exist. Even if we start to call them something else, like articles. Because a single, coherent, crafted narrative about a hunk of research is an inherently useful thing.

Matt: Papers may always exist, but other forms that are less constrained in space and time will spring up around them.

Mike: I don’t want to read four years of someone’s Open Notebooks about the new aquatic titanosaur, I want to read the paper.

Matt: Those other forms will be harder to measure with current metrics.

Mike: And harder to use. If a researcher doesn’t do the work of writing an actual paper (or something strongly analogous) he’s not getting his job done.

Matt: We-e-ell, would you read someone’s blog about the new aquatic titanosaur?

Mike: Sure. But that’s not at all the same thing. I wouldn’t want or expect the same kind of rigour. There are going to be half a dozen blog posts about the titanosaur, just like there are about the Archbishop, all wildly incomplete and somewhat contradictory.

Matt: Someone from a century hence will say, “If a researcher doesn’t publish her data as early and openly as possible, then follow up in a few months with analysis and discussion, then field questions and suggestions on the same platform for the rest of her career, she’s not getting her job done.”

Mike: I won’t disagree with that. Those things are also part of the job. But in the end, someone is going to want the Here’s What We Learned rigorous summary. That’s the paper.

Matt: Or the abstract. Or the talk. Right now we see these as qualitatively different things. But they may be just points on a more continuous research stream, that is accessed and evaluated as such, in the future.

Mike: Dude. Srsly. You do not want to have to come to grips with someone’s entire research program. You want them to do the work of giving you what you need to know in a discrete package.

Matt: Oh, I agree. For most people, anyway. For you, Pat O’Connor, and one or two others, I want the whole stream. We already have a spectrum of packaging, of which the paper is by far the premiere entity. But it may not always be so.

Mike: Right. I might read the Whole Stream behind Wilson and Allain’s rebbachisaur work, but not for the other 100 papers I’ve been interested in this year.

Matt: For example: right now when people include video along with their papers, it’s video-as-data. But there’s no reason why it couldn’t be video-as-abstract or video-as-discussion-section.
You won’t have to, because there will be other levels of packaging for those other research streams. At least as many levels as there are now, and probably more (but maybe different in kind). What if the discussion section of the paper was not one person writing about what they thought about it, but a captured Skype conference or Twitter stream between that person and their colleagues, lightly edited.

Mike: Sounds awfu’ complicated.

Matt: Doesn’t everything from the future sound complicated when you first hear about it?

Mike: Bottom line, I read 100 times as many papers as I write, which means the people doing the research I’m reading about have a duty to make it as easy as possible for me to digest what they’ve done, including all relevant background material and discussion. Whatever tech we come up with for doing that, it’s going to be analogous to a paper.

Matt: See, there are huge swaths of most papers that I would happily jettison. I hardly ever read introductions – it’s pretty damn obvious what the paper is about already, and either the background is very familiar to me or so far afield that I’m unlikely to be reading the paper anyway. And I don’t really care about M&M unless there’s a new method that I need to either learn for myself, or understand to decide if the results are actually valid. Until very recently, all of these boxcars had to be delivered as part of a single train. But I should be able to go online and download a ‘paper’ that is just abstract-figures-discussion-references. And someone else should be able to click different boxes. Chemists probably really care about Materials & Methods.

Mike: Interesting,.

Matt: The paper doesn’t go away — it will always be possible for users to click the same pattern of boxes that are the default contents now — but they can also get less, or more (open data, video discussion, Skype conference with author offered from within the paper-access outlet, etc.). In fact — and I hate to admit this — Science & Nature are maybe ahead of the curve here since they’ve been relegating most of the intro, M&M, and all but the most cursory results to SI for a while now. I’m not arguing that papers of the future should evolve to match the tabloids. Just that access may be much more a la carte for users.

Mike: That is total BS. Excuse my sudden apparent hostility.

Matt: Say on

Mike: It’s one thing to unbundle the traditional parts of a paper.
What S&N are doing is relegating crucial parts.

Matt: Yes. I didn’t say they were doing it right. I said they were doing something similar.

Mike: They are the ones saying “Oh, you guys don’t need this”.

Matt: I shouldn’t have said they were ahead of the curve. But I won’t be surprised when in 20 years they claim to have invented the new form of papers back when.

Mike: Anyway I’m not sure how your a la carte vision is practically different from just not reading the intro.

Matt: Because you are talking about what constitutes a paper as a necessary thing, that will continue to be called forth because users find it most convenient.

Mike: The specific sections are not important. The thing that’s important is the process where the author sits down and writes “OK, this is what we did and what it means”. All the supporting data in the world is great, but it’s not that, and that is almost always what you need — at least, it’s your route in.

Matt: And I’m talking about what constitutes a paper being a historical accident that we’ve all gotten used to, which will not disappear so much as spread out into multiple sections (possibly at multiple depths — I can imagine a one-paragraph summary for each classic paper section) so that in a few decades, it will be impossible to say where the online data and post-hoc discussions end and the paper begins.

Matt: Here’s a slippery-slope way it might happen. PeerJ already lets you navigate to each section of each paper by the hyperlinked section headings. It would be super-easy to add a DOI to each section, with instructions on how to cite it. Then what is the paper? Everything that is linked on that page? That’s a pretty arbitrary definition.

Mike: Maybe you should encourage PeerJ to assign those DOIs, and see what happens?

Well, I guess history will show which of us is right. Want to reconvene this conversation in ten years?

Matt: If you’re betting that the future will look like the past with a minor digital facelift, I’ll take that bet. :-) And yes, we should reconvene in 10 years. Because I’m certain that the future will be surprising on some axis that is orthogonal to everything we’ve discussed. Some young genius will come up with a platform that will be to scientific publication what Twitter is to chat.

Mike: OK, I am putting this in my Google calendar.

Matt: Awesome.

And here we are, ten years later. (Well: ten years and three days, in fact, as it took me a while to find the time to write this up.)

Who was right?

Well, me more than Matt. But I think we’d probably both says we’re surprised — and disappointed — at how little things have moved on in those ten years. Not only are we still publishing all our work as papers in journals, we are still desperate to get into one or two special anointed journals that we believe (rightly or wrongly) are necessary for career progression. Articles remain very static objects. PDF is still the preferred format — because HTML versions don’t use any of the affordances of the Web to let us do interesting things, but merely stuff the margins with adverts and menus. (Also: still no aquatic titanosaurs.)

I still think that something analogous to a paper or article is fundamentally desirable: something that provides a complete through-line of thought, rather than just inviting you to dip your hand into a lucky dip of research articles. But there are surely better ways to present it.

The only things that have really changed are (A) that very nearly every journal has its content online, and (B) open access is increasingly ubiquitous. Yay for both of those. But …

What changes do we still want to see? Plenty, I reckon.

But rather than give you my list, let’s hear from y’all in the comments.

 

doi:10.59350/svpow.23922

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in Dull analogue past, Shiny digital future, stinkin' publishers
1 Comment »

This Saturday is Aquilops Day!

July 17, 2025

This Saturday, July 19, the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is hosting Aquilops Day.

Before Jurassic World Rebirth was released, I was interviewed by the folks at the SNOMNH about Aquilops. Andy Farke and I got quoted a few places (here, here, and here). I was really happy to see Scott Madsen get some attention (here) — if he hadn’t found and prepped the fossil, Aquilops wouldn’t be a thing, and we’d know a lot less about the earliest ceratopsians in North America.

It was nice to see that one quote of mine get around, but the rest of the interview was just sitting in email, so I got permission from the SNOMNH folks to post it here.

When the specimen was first discovered in the field what did the team think it was initially? Were they looking for anything specific in the area?

I wasn’t on the expedition in the summer of 1997 when Scott Madsen discovered the Aquilops type specimen — everything I know about this I learned from Scott and from Dr. Cifelli later. I did go out to the Cloverly Formation with the OMNH crew in the summer of 1998. To answer those questions in reverse order: even in 1998 we were looking for anything and everything. I did a lot of prospecting that summer with Scott and the rest of the crew, just walking outcrops for hours in hopes of finding either fossil skeletons or a promising microsite, someplace that preserved a lot of tiny bones and especially teeth that we could retrieve by screenwashing the sediment. Dr. Cifelli had been very successful getting tiny teeth of early mammals, lizards, snakes, and more from microsites in the Cedar Mountain Formation in Utah and, to a lesser extent, from the Antlers Formation in southeast Oklahoma, and we were hoping to replicate that success in the Cloverly. But we also were not going to turn down larger fossils like skulls and skeletons.

According to Scott’s account of the discovery (link), everyone initially assumed it was a Zephyrosaurus, a small plant-eating dinosaur distantly related to duckbills. It was only during the process of preparing the skull out of the surrounding rock that Scott found the beak and realized that it was an early horned dinosaur — the earliest anywhere in the world outside of Asia.

Table centerpiece at my birthday party last month.

It’s more rare or unusual to find a dinosaur’s skull relatively intact isn’t it? Do we know or can we guess what circumstances caused this specimen’s skull to be preserved without the rest of its body?

It does often seem like feast or famine with dinosaur skulls. There are numerous dinosaurs for which we have most of the skeleton but no skull, and some others for which we have a skull but nothing else. For relatively large-headed animals like Aquilops, the skull and the body are basically two big masses connected by a weaker linkage — the neck. It’s common for the head to become separated from the body after death, as the carcass is moved around by scavengers or simply by flowing water. The same thing happens to human bodies in forensic situations.

My better half, Jenny Adams, with a plush Aquilops.

What adaptations did Aquilops and other early ceratopsians have that made it so successful? What environmental pressures caused such a small, unassuming dinosaur to eventually evolve into some of the largest land animals that ever lived?

Ceratopsians had nifty teeth that could efficiently cut up plants, like walking around with paired sets of garden shears in their mouths. And to power those shears, they had enlarged attachments for jaw muscles at the backs of their skulls, which were the first beginnings of the frills that things like Triceratops and Pentaceratops would take to such flamboyant lengths later on. But even the little cat- and pig-sized ceratopsians were pretty successful, based on the high diversity of early ceratopsians in China and Mongolia — the ancestors and cousins of Aquilops.

The combination of big jaw muscles, shearing teeth, sharp beak, and pointy skull bits worked well across a wide range of body sizes, from little tiny things like Aquilops to the later rhino- and elephant-sized horned dinosaurs. I think it’s particularly interesting that even in the Late Cretaceous, generally Aquilops-like small ceratopsians such as Leptoceratops were still thriving alongside giants like Triceratops. So it’s not the case that big ceratopsians replaced small ceratopsians, rather that the range of successful body plans expanded to include big multi-horned four-leggers. But the little ones were still doing fine, more than 40 million years after Aquilops existed.

My Aquilops t-shirt was a birthday present from Andy Farke. I didn’t even know the other one existed until Jenny got it delivered.

How accurate do you think Aquilops’ representation will be on the big screen? What would be the biggest challenge in realistically portraying Aquilops in film — locomotion, coloration or something else?

We have a lot of advantages when it comes to reconstructing the little early ceratopsians. From Asia we have multiple complete skeletons of close relatives of Aquilops, like Psittacosaurus, and some of those have fossilized impressions of the skin, including scales, color patterns, even protofeathers or “dinofuzz”. So we can reconstruct those animals with a lot more certainty than we can most of larger and more famous dinosaurs like Spinosaurus or Dilophosaurus. There isn’t a single Dilophosaurus in the world in which the tippy-top of the skull is intact, so we still don’t know the full shape and extent of the head crest (more on that here).

From the footage I’ve seen in the trailers, I think the moviemakers did a pretty darned good job with Aquilops. The body proportions look good, the colors and movements are plausible, nothing set off any red flags for me. I do wonder about disposition. A lot of small plant-eaters today are pretty skittish, and they can fight aggressively when cornered — think about the attitude of a bantam rooster, or an angry goose. My guess is that a live Aquilops would be so good at hiding that humans moving through its environment would never even see it. But for the sake of getting to see “my” dinosaur on the big screen, I’m glad the moviemakers went another way.

If this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

One more question for fun… if you were consulted about creating this dinosaur’s on-screen persona, what kind of personality do you think it would or should have had? Nervous? Intelligent? Are there any modern animals that might have a similar personality?

When Dr. Farke, who was the lead author on the Aquilops project, and I were coordinating with Brian Engh, who did all of the art for the paper and the press release, we wanted to show a person holding an Aquilops to give a sense of scale. One of the things we talked about is that living animals with beaks or sharp teeth have a tendency to bite when they feel threatened. The core ceratopsian superpower was having very powerful jaw muscles pushing scissor-like teeth and a wickedly sharp beak. One of Brian’s preliminary sketches showed an Aquilops jumping out of a person’s arms and nipping their fingers on the way. As much as I love the idea of an adorable, friendly “cat-ceratops”, I think a real-life Aquilops would have no problem kicking, scratching, and especially biting if it got cornered by a human. Imagine a raccoon with the head of a snapping turtle — would you want that in your backpack?

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

One thing occurred to me after the interview, and after I saw the movie: the filmmakers may have gotten Dolores’s personality more correct than I thought. In the movie, the island had been uninhabited by people for 17years, and presumably Dolores is younger than that. She’d have no reason to fear people, and given the wiiiide variation in animal personalities, it wouldn’t surprise me if some Aquilops were more inquisitive than skittish. I still don’t think I’d want a cat-sized biting machine in my backpack; as Xavier says in the movie, “That may or may not be a terrible idea.”

So anyway, if you’re in or near central Oklahoma this weekend, you could do a lot worse than swinging by the Sam Noble Museum to enjoy Aquilops Day. I myself am planning on giving a short virtual presentation there — watch this space for more. EDIT: my talk, “Bringing Aquilops to Life”, will run from 1:00-1:15 PM, Central Daylight Time.

And since I’ve linked to more than one YouTube video already in this post, go watch Gabriel Santos’s awesome short on Aquilops — it’s good for you.

 

doi:10.59350/svpow.23847

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Aquilops, big tough sauropodologists throwing away their dignity, movies, museums, navel blogging, OMNH, People we like, stinkin' mammals, stinkin' ornithischians, stinkin' SV-POW!sketeers, timely, toys
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I say, I say, I say! How many palaeontologists does it take to write a paper? Twenty-four (if it’s in Nature)!

July 16, 2025

Today sees the publication of what is, OK, an interesting paper on how the serrated trailing edge of the flippers of the ichthyosaur Temnodontosaurus may have enabled it to generate less turbulence, enhancing its abilities as a stealth predator:

  • Lindgren, Johan, Dean R. Lomax, Robert-Zoltán Szász, Miguel Marx, Johan Revstedt, Georg Göltz, Sven Sachs, Randolph G. De La Garza, Miriam Heingård, Martin Jarenmark, Kristina Ydström, Peter Sjövall, Frank Osbæck, Stephen A. Hall, Michiel Op de Beeck, Mats E. Eriksson, Carl Alwmark, Federica Marone, Alexander Liptak, Robert Atwood, Genoveva Burca, Per Uvdal, Per Persson and Dan-Eric Nilsson. 2025. Adaptations for stealth in the wing-like flippers of a large ichthyosaur. Nature, published online 16 July 2025. doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09271-w

Lindgren et al. 2025: figure 1. a–c, Photographs of the part section of SSN8DOR11 under polarized (a) and ultraviolet (longpass cut-off 455 nm) (b) light, respectively, together with a diagrammatic representation of the forelimb in planform view (c). Note that the individual blocks have been re-assembled in their original position (the stippled line delineates the end of sediment that has been digitally removed to show underlying bones). Arrow indicates anterior. Extended Data Figs. 1 and 2 depict the counterpart section.

Now this is good interdisciplinary work which would have legitimately required the involvement of several scientists with different specialisms, including morphology, exotic photography techniques, biomechanics and maybe fluid dynamics. I can easily see how it would have four authors, or five or even maybe six.

But, cards on the table, I find it very hard to believe that twenty-four people all made substantial contributions to this paper — substantial enough to be listed as authors.

So what are they all doing there? I can only surmise that the four or five legitimate authors all invited their friends along for the ride, on the basis that “he needs a Nature paper for his postdoc applications”.

And the tragedy of it is, they’re not wrong.

Many universities — most? Maybe even all? — do indeed recruit people to postdocs and permanent positions in part on whether they have a paper in Nature or Science. Even if their role is as seventeenth or eighteenth of twenty-four, and they actually did little or nothing towards the science. I have been told flatly by people in positions of influence that candidates without the Nature or Science stamp are likely to be filtered out of the recruitment process at Step Zero, and never even have their papers read, let alone make it to interview.

And for as long as that is true, it would be negligent of lab leaders not to slip their own grad-students, and any other students they know and like, into the authorship of such a paper if it happens to come their way.

What does this mean for the aspiring palaeontologist? It means that his or her most rational strategy for landing a job is to socially cultivate as many lab leaders as possible, especially those who work in strata likely to turn up preserved soft tissue, and hope to get in on a Nature or Science paper — so that their job applications get through to the stage where their actual work might get some scrutiny.

Can we all agree that this is idiotic?

 

doi:10.59350/svpow.23857

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in credit where it's due, Did I just say that out loud?, how the sausage is made, Just Plain Wrong, manus, paleontologists behaving badly, rants, stinkin' marine reptiles, timely, What counts?
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Nuchal sesamoids in shrews

July 5, 2025

Lateral (a, b) and postero-dorsal (c) views of the head and neck region in alcohol-preserved, intact specimens of Congosorex verheyeni (a, SMNS 50411), Surdisorex norae (b, FMNH 190260) and Congosorex phillipsorum (c, FMNH 177721). Posterodorsal view (c) is of the same semi-transverse section, osteology in red, with (left) and without (right) reconstructed soft-tissues evident in CT scan. rce = rhomboideus cervicis, s = nuchal sesamoid, sc = scapula, sp = splenius, tc = tracheal cartilages, T2 = second thoracic vertebra, T6 = sixth thoracic vertebra. Note greater opacity in nuchal sesamoids compared to tracheal cartilages. Oblique streaks in (c, left) and through the hyoid, angular process of dentary, ectotympanics and posterior skull in (b) are CT artefacts. Scale bars = 5 mm. Yuan et al. (2024: fig. 3).

I missed this paper (Yuan et al. 2024) when it came out last year, but my friend and colleague Jeremiah Scott brought it to my attention. The bit on nuchal sesamoids in shrews is so good and so weird that I’m just going to copy and paste it in its entirety. I loathe numbered references and supplementary info, so I’ve converted the numbered refs to standard author-year refs and inserted the relevant supplementary figure. If you’re not up on insectivore taxonomy (I wasn’t), Soricidae are shrews, Erinaceidae are hedgehogs and moonrats, and Talpidae are true moles. Yuan et al. (2024) is open access and linked here and at the bottom of the post.

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Among the most surprising results of our analysis is the discovery of a robust sesamoid in Myosoricini (see taxonomy in the electronic supplementary material, appendix S6), denser than nearby tracheal cartilages, similar in opacity to adjacent vertebral bone, and extending dorso-cranially from the second thoracic neural arch (figure 3; electronic supplementary material, table S4) towards the nuchal region. In Myosorex and Congosorex (electronic supplementary material, appendix S7), the nuchal sesamoid is elongate and comparable in proximo-distal length to these species’ humeri. It is shorter in the fossorial Surdisorex but still robust (figure 3b). Lin et al. (2013) noticed a structurally similar but smaller sesamoid in species of Crocidura, Suncus and Scutisorex, observations which we confirm in our sample (electronic supplementary material, figure S3, table S4). Lin et al. (2013) noted the element’s role in anchoring the splenius muscle and discussed how it may increase neck mobility. Our anatomical observations are consistent with their interpretation, although we cannot rule out additional functions, such as sensation or defence, particularly given the extraordinary length of the sesamoid in Congosorex and Myosorex. In Congosorex phillipsorum, the three most conspicuous muscles attaching to the nuchal sesamoid are splenius, rhomboideus capitis and rhomboideus cervicis (figure 3c), as shown in our animated CT volume (electronic supplementary material, appendix S7). Splenius originates along the proximal half of the sesamoid and inserts on the lateral surface of the anterior petromastoid (or ‘tabular’ of Sharma 1958). Both rhomboid muscles insert on the posterior end of the vertebral border of the scapula; rhomboideus capitis originates from the middle region of the sesamoid and rhomboideus cervicis originates from its cranial region (electronic supplementary material, appendix S7).

Lateral views of the neck region in alcohol-preserved, intact specimens of an erinaceid (A, Hylomus suillus, AMNH 278568) talpid (B, Uropsilus soricipes, AMNH 232373), and two soricids: Crocidura russula (C, UMMZ 157845), and Blarina brevicauda (D, UMMZ 154698). Note small nuchal sesamoids in A-C, lack thereof in D. Abbreviations are s = nuchal sesamoid, T2 = second thoracid vertebra, tc = tracheal cartilages. Scalebars = 5mm. Yuan et al. (2024: fig. S3).

We do not yet know the function of the robust nuchal sesamoid in Myosoricini. In specimens of Myosorex for which we have sex identifications (electronic supplementary material, table S4), the sesamoid : humerus length ratio is approximately 0.9 and broadly overlaps among males and females, suggesting that it is not the result of sexual selection. The sesamoid is embedded within soft tissues (electronic supplementary material, appendix S7) and, despite its needle-like appearance (figure 3), does not appear to protrude beyond the skin. There is no obvious lumen or groove along which glandular secretions could have been transported. Again, this is consistent with, but not exclusive to, a function related to mobility (Lin et al. 2013).

The nuchal sesamoid would be unlikely to survive skeletonization techniques typically applied in most museums, and is evident only among intact, alcohol-preserved or cleared-and-stained specimens. This is probably why it has remained undocumented in the published literature until now. For example, Sharma (1958) correctly noted in Suncus murinus that ‘the spinous process of the second thoracic vertebra’ (to which the sesamoid attaches) ‘is well developed’, but mentioned sesamoids only in reference to the manus and pes. Crocidura russula (electronic supplementary material, figure S3) and all other species of Crocidurinei observed to date (electronic supplementary material, table S4) nonetheless show a smaller version of the element seen in Myosoricini, as does the erinaceid Hylomys suillus (electronic supplementary material, figure S3a). Several talpids exhibit an elongate, midline element dorsal to cervical vertebrae and caudal to the skull. This approaches T2 in some specimens of Uropsilus (electronic supplementary material, figure S3b), but the sesamoid in talpids lacks a clear bony connection to their more gracile T2 neural arch.

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Stay tuned. Like the Dread Olecranon of Kentrosaurus, this post is building toward a future one.

References

 

doi:10.59350/svpow.23812

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in neural spine, shrew, stinkin' mammals, stinkin' sesamoids, what is this I can't even
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The Dread Olecranon of Kentrosaurus

July 4, 2025

(This was buried in Part 5 of my 2011 review of the Sideshow Apatosaurus maquette, but it’s long deserved to be a post of its own, and now it is. I’m not adding anything new here, just extracting and reposting the relevant bits, for reasons that will become clear in a future post. — MJW)

The Dread Olecranon of Kentrosaurus is something Heinrich Mallison pointed out in the second of his excellent Plateosaurus papers (Mallison 2010: fig. 3).

Heinrich’s thoughts on articular cartilage in dinosaurs are well worth reading, so once again I’m going to quote extensively (Mallison 2010: p. 439):

Cartilaginous tissues are rarely preserved on fossils, so the thickness of cartilage caps in dinosaurs is unclear. Often, it is claimed that even large dinosaurs had only thin layers of articular cartilage, as seen in extant large mammals, because layers proportional to extant birds would have been too thick to be effectively supplied with nutrients from the synovial fluid. This argument is fallacious, because it assumes that a thick cartilage cap on a dinosaur long bone would have the same internal composition as the thin cap on a mammalian long bone. Mammals have a thin layer of hyaline cartilage only, but in birds the structure is more complex, with the hyaline cartilage underlain by thicker fibrous cartilage pervaded by numerous blood vessels (Graf et al. 1993: 114, fig. 2), so that nutrient transport is effected through blood vessels, not diffusion. This tissue can be scaled up to a thickness of several centimeters without problems.

An impressive example for the size of cartilaginous structures in dinosaurs is the olecranon process in the stegosaur Kentrosaurus aethiopicus Hennig, 1915. In the original description a left ulna (MB.R.4800.33, field number St 461) is figured (Hennig 1915: fig. 5) that shows a large proximal process. However, other ulnae of the same species lack this process, and are thus far less distinct from other dinosaurian ulnae (Fig. 3B, C). The process on MB.R.4800.33 and other parts of its surface have a surface texture that can also be found on other bones of the same individual, and may indicate some form of hyperostosis or another condition that leads to ossification of cartilaginous tissues. Fig. 3B–D compares MB.R.4800.33 and two other ulnae of K. aethiopicus from the IFGT skeletal mount. It is immediately obvious that the normally not fossilized cartilaginous process has a significant influence on the ability to hyperextend the elbow, because it forms a stop to extension. Similarly large cartilaginous structures may have been present on a plethora of bones in any number of dinosaur taxa, so that range of motion analyses like the one presented here are at best cautious approximations.

One of the crucial points to take away from all of this is that thick cartilage caps did not only expand or only limit the ranges of motions of different joints. The mistake is to think that soft tissues always do one or the other. The big olecranon in Kentrosaurus probably limited the ROM of the elbow, by banging into the humerus in extension. In contrast, thick articular cartilage at the wrists [of sauropods] probably expanded the ROM and may have allowed the strong wrist flexion that some artists have restored for sauropods. I’m not arguing that it must have done so, just that I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that it may have.

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To see that chunk in context and read more about cartilage in dinosaurs, see the original post — here’s that link again. Throwing in the references to Bonnan et al. (2010) and Holliday et al. (2010) because they’re still relevant, foundational studies.

References

 

doi:10.59350/svpow.23800

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in cartilage, stinkin' appendicular elements, stinkin' ornithischians, ulna
5 Comments »

Semi-spoileriffic first thoughts on Jurassic World Rebirth

July 3, 2025

This thing arrived in the mail yesterday. Just in time…

I say “semi-spoileriffic” because I’m not going to go out of my way to give away any plot points or creature details you couldn’t get from watching the trailers and TV spots, but if you want to keep yourself pure as the driven snow, you might want to save this post for later.

I don’t know that I’ve ever done a movie review on this blog. It’s not really our thing here. Plus, no previous Jurassic World movie has interested me very much. I mean, of course I saw them all, because dinosaurs. In the introduction to his story collection “Dinosaur Tales”, Ray Bradbury describes going with his friend Ray Harryhausen and their spouses to see a production of the opera Siegfried, for no better reason than to catch a glimpse of the dragon Fafnir. I can relate.

Jurassic World Rebirth has interested me, in part because Aquilops is in it, but also because I’ve been holding out hope that it might be decent. Stephen King once wrote in an essay that he knew that almost all horror movies were going to be poorly-written, clumsily-executed cliche-fests, but he kept going because one in a hundred bottled the lightning and made him genuinely feel something. That was approximately my hope here. David Koepp coming back to write the screenplay was a big point in the movie’s favor, as was Gareth Edwards in the director’s chair. Hence my cautious optimism.

So how’d it work out?

I did not in a million years think that I’d have my choice of two interactive Aquilops toys to take with me when I went to see Aquilops on the big screen.

I liked it! It’s not perfect, but I think it does a lot of things better than any other Jurassic World movie, and in my opinion it’s easily the best Jurassic Park/World movie since the original. I’ll do my best to tease out the bits that I think are objectively good from the bits where the movie was pushing my specific buttons.

Things I think are objectively good about the movie:

Sense of wonder — there are some scenes that read as very explicit homages to thematically similar scenes in the original Jurassic Park, that emphasize the sheer amazingness of dinosaurs as living animals, and as metaphors for the grandeur of nature. Of course, every Jurassic franchise film has Dinosaurs Getting Out And That Being a Problem, but the last three movies made the dinosaurs a little too contained, a little too controlled, a little too commodified. Which leads me to:

Basic scenario — I’m on the fence about whether this point is an objective or a subjective one. Personally, if I’m going to see what is basically a monster movie about big wild animals, a small team on the ground in the unknown surrounded by monsters is much more interesting and compelling than putting the monsters in a human environment. It’s why Kong: Skull Island is my favorite Monsterverse movie (Godzilla: King of the Monsters is second, mostly because it gives us so many interesting environments that aren’t cities). But I think the scenario of putting people into a wild environment just makes more sense for dinosaurs. None of these movies exist in a vacuum, and if we’re going to put monsters in a human environment, we might as well go the whole distance and have Godzilla or Pacific Rim. As soon as the humans were stranded on the island, outnumbered, outgunned, clearly the underdogs, I was like, “Hell yeah, let’s roll.”

Moral compass — I’m not going to lean on this one too heavily, because it’s not a huge part of the movie, but Jurassic World Rebirth is About Something in a way that most of the other movies after the original have not been. I mean, they’re all sorta about Greed is Bad and Kills People, but mostly not in a very interesting or inspiring way. There are at least a couple of moments in this movie where OA advocates might do a fist-pump, and Elsevier execs might squirm in their seats, and I’ll take it. It was also nice to see science presented as an altruistic endeavor. Obviously scientists are human and science is a human endeavor, with all the imperfections that implies, but the motivation to learn and to share is the beating heart of science, and it’s nice to see some love for the better angels.

Characters — Others may disagree, and that’s fine, but I thought for a movie that had to cover a lot of ground, literally and metaphorically, and put the dinosaurs front and center, Jurassic World Rebirth did a decent job of sketching its main characters and giving them each a motivation and a chance to learn or grow at least a little. I got more out of it than any of the previous sequels, anyway.

The Aquilops shoulder pal won out, because it let me go hands-free, and it has an off switch.

Some things I wasn’t so wild about:

Unconvincing rationale — Look, I get it, there’s going to be some hand-wavy not-quite-science because it’s a sci-fi movie and not a documentary. And to be fair, the movie at least takes a stab at justifying the collection of living tissue. But if the company that inherited the InGen IP had all the critters’ genomes and the ability to translate them into embryos, it’s not obvious why they couldn’t just culture some titanosaur heart muscle in vitro and call it a day. Maybe this is just a Tolkien’s eagles thing, but it feels like something that Jim Cameron would have sewn up a little tighter (say what you will about his movies, but their information hygiene is usually hermetic).

Mutant dinosaurs — Oh boy, do I have Thoughts about this. Starting with Indominus rex in Jurassic World, these movies have pushed the line that the public would get bored of regular dinosaurs, so InGen (or whoever) had to keep making up new dinosaurs. But there’s an elision here between the fiction and the metafiction. There is 100% a company that keeps making up new dinosaurs because their execs think regular dinosaurs are too vanilla to keep the public’s interest, but it isn’t InGen, it’s Universal. That really irritates me, because it says to me that the folks in charge don’t believe in the mission. So what if they just…didn’t? I think the previous Jurassic World movies would have done just fine without mutant dinosaurs, and I think that in part because their mutant dinosaurs were so boring. Indominus rex is morphologically just a big allosauroid, to the extent that some people were using their I. rex figures as Saurophaganax stand-ins in their head canon (I discovered while working on the Allosaurus anax project). Indoraptor is just a slightly bigger, slightly smarter, still feather-less dromaeosaur. Big whoop. I’ll say this for Jurassic World Rebirth: the mutadons and D. rex are at least actually weird enough to be believable as mutants. Even if plot-wise you could swap them for ‘vanilla’ raptors and tyrannosaurs and everything would still work.

Bad nomenclature — Okay, this is an inside-baseball thing to grump about, but hey, the name of the blog is a clue to the background geekiness level around here. Titanosaurus hasn’t been a valid genus for a minute. Why not call the super-gigantic titanosaurs in the movie Argentinosaurus or Patagotitan or Sauroposeidon (he suggested modestly)? Also, we don’t have to guess what the head of Quetzalcoatlus looked like, we know pretty much the whole thing from Q. langstoni Q. lawsoni. If the moviemakers wanted to have their big pterosaur look like not-Quetz, that’s cool, but then why call it Quetz? Call it Hatzegopteryx or Arambourgiana or one of the other big azhdarchids for which complete skulls are not yet known, they’re all equally unpronounceable to civilians. Or just make it look like actual Quetz, it will still be sufficiently terrifying with the crest in the right place.

Reasonably predictable — You’ll figure out right away who’s going to live, who’s going to die, who’s going to have a heel turn, and who will be redeemed, based solely on the prominence and likeability of the actors playing them. Part of me would have loved to see the movie go a little harder — it’s directed by Gareth “I nuked the Rogue One cast from orbit” Edwards, after all. But even my shriveled little heart smiled at the happy ending, so there’s that.

On the upside, they look like giant titanosaurs, not just generic long-necks.

And finally, so I can end on a positive note, here are some things that really worked for me, but which might not work for everyone.

The movie had a lot of bits that were unexpectedly resonant for me. I’ve seen a blue whale up close on a whale-watching trip, and it was one of those moments, like my first time peering down into the Grand Canyon, where my brain just couldn’t fully process what I was seeing. I saw the blue whale, but I had a hard time believing it, even after living for decades with the intellectual knowledge of how big they are, and even after seeing grays and humpbacks on previous trips. One shot in the mosasaur chase brought that blue whale encounter roaring back into my mind. Another example: there’s a point fairly early on when the team has its first real success, and for a minute or two everyone is happy is that they’ve pulled off something logistically challenging. I thought, “Yeah, that’s exactly what it feels like when we get a big jacket out of the field in one piece”. Everyone’s happy, everyone’s relieved, fingers and toes (and hooves) are all accounted for, and the specimen we came for is safe.

Like this.

The paleontologist in the movie, Dr. Henry Loomis, played by Jonathan Bailey, is a very believable combination of basically competent, starry-eyed, and thoroughly geeky. At one point Mahershala Ali’s character laughs out loud and says, “You’re so weird!” in response to something Loomis just said. That made me laugh out loud, because what Loomis said is something that I have heard my paleontologist friends say more than once. I think most paleontologists would like to see themselves as Alan Grant or Ellie Sattler, but in truth most of us have a stripe of Ross Geller a mile wide. Bailey hits that balance with uncanny precision. Of all of the depictions of paleontologists in pop culture, Henry Loomis is the one that made me nod and smile in recognition the most. Not just, “I’d go to the field with that guy”, but “I’ve been to the field with that guy”.

Speaking of, I also laughed out loud at several other points in the movie, which is for me a big deal. A movie like this doesn’t need to be a wall-to-wall quip-fest, and this one is not, but a few well-earned chuckles make the whole thing a lot more enjoyable.

Squeee!!

Finally, even after watching a million trailers and promo videos, I got misty-eyed when Dolores the Aquilops first appeared. That was surprisingly moving for me, to see ‘my’ little dinosaur up there on the big screen. I shed a happy tear at one other point in the movie, which will be completely obvious to anyone who’s seen it, so I won’t belabor it here. It’s a big moment for one of the characters, and it made me think, “Yeah, that’s my dream, too.”

Given that, you’d better take this whole post with an evaporated ocean of salt, because my objectivity has been compromised.

So anyway, I liked it, a lot, and I’m gonna see it again. You?

 

doi:10.59350/svpow.23779

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Aquilops, big tough sauropodologists throwing away their dignity, brachiosaurids, Brachiosaurus, reviews by SV-POW!sketeers, stinkin' mammals, stinkin' ornithischians, stinkin' SV-POW!sketeers, titanosaur, toys
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Baffled by diplodocoids? Need a comprehensive introduction? You’re in luck!

July 1, 2025

It crept out quietly under cover of darkness, but I’m pleased to say that today saw the publication of a new paper:

As you can see, there are nine authors, and this is one of those papers where each one of them earned his or her place by contributing substantially. It’s a paper with many sections: the introduction, an overview of the history of diplodocoid research, a sketch of diplodocoid phylogeny, sections on each major group (Rebbachisauridae, Dicraeosauridae, Apatosaurinae, Diplodocinae, and “other”), a morphological survey, a review of ecology and ontogeny, a biogeographical survey, thoughts on life appearance, and a terrifyingly exhaustive bibliography.

Van der Linden et al. 2025: Figure 5. Transformation of the cranial bones in diplodocids with noted trends from Whitlock et al. (2010) and Woodruff et al. (2018). Skulls are modified after Woodruff et al. (2018).

(Figure 5, shown above, is interesting to me. The diplodocid skull shapes shown in the middle and on the right are both hugely familiar to me — wired straight into my hindbrain — but it had simply not occurred to me that they might be growth stages.)

I’m pleased that this paper is at Palaeontologia Electronica — the original open-access palaeontology journal. Despite my annoyance at their low-resolution illustrations (but see the unofficial supplementary information for the full-resolution versions), it’s an important journal not just in our scholarly field but in the history of open access. I’m glad to finally have this notch on my bedpost, after at least one failed attempt.

My main contribution was the historical background section — which will come as no surprise to anyone who’s familiar with my 2010 paper, or the recent works on the Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (Taylor et al. 2023) and the Carnegie Diplodocus (Taylor et al. 2025). I also wrote the overview of apatosaurines, and the bit in the morphology section about cervical vertebrae, and contributed Figures 2 and 3.

This paper is the first chapter in an in-progress special volume about diplodocoids, in which each chapter appears in Palaeontologia Electronica as it’s ready, rather than waiting for all of them to be ready before any are published. I say “first” in the sense that it would appear first in a printed volume because it’s the introduction. But at least one other paper in the collection has already been published: A new diplodocine sauropod from the Morrison Formation, Wyoming, USA (Van der Linden et al. 2024), and a couple more are in review already. (Matt and I had hoped at one point to get our Giant Barosaurus paper into this volume, but we weren’t able to hit the deadline.)

Anyway, this paper is a pretty comprehensive introduction to a very important clade of the most awesome dinosaurs, and I hope much of it is fairly readable to laymen. Enjoy!

References

 

doi:10.59350/svpow.23759

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in diplodocids, papers by SV-POW!sketeers
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