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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Dinosaurs / TV / Nerd Today's Dinosaur News

Posted by Mary Traverse on Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 11:35 AM

Deinonychus says Feathers are as cool as bow ties and fezzes!

original image via Wikimedia Commons
Deinonychus says, "Feathers are as cool as bow ties and fezzes!"

Two of my favorite dino-nerds, Brian Switek of Dinosaur Tracking and Marc Vincent of Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs each have posts up discussing the most recent episode of Doctor Who, "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship". (You might remember that Matt Smith said his dream episode would include dinosaurs.)

Says Switek:

A friendly–or, at least, not overly aggressive–Triceratops helps the Doctor and friends out of a few tight spots. Like the ankylosaurs, though, the ceratopsid is a little bit too tubby and doesn’t run quite right. A Triceratops is not a horse.

Vincent points out:

[The creatures] that everyone referred to as 'raptors'... Alas, Doctor Who trotted out the usual silly Jurassic Park-esque bunny-handed monstrosities, virtually devoid of feathers.

Obviously these critiques are meant tongue-in-cheek, although io9 (which quotes Switek's post) notes that the episode "totally wasted its chance to make feathered dinosaurs cool." TOO TRUE.

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I think they had already blown the budget for the episode. Feathers, especially moveable ones, require a lot more processing, if you don't already have the templates and code to handle them.

Luckily, if Apple can expand this nifty time travel app they have for the iPhone 5, so that it skips back more than one day, we might have a solution for that.

Even if the dinosaurs were mostly wiped out by massive oceanic volcanoes going haywire.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on September 12, 2012 at 11:43 AM

@1: Commit sudoku, the evidence still supports the Chicxulub impact as the main cause of the K-T extinction.

Posted by venomlash on September 12, 2012 at 2:43 PM

The coup de grace if you will, @2, but not necessarily the primary stressor.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on September 12, 2012 at 4:13 PM

@3: Are you referring to the Deccan traps? There's evidence that the gases they emitted stressed the global food web, but the single greatest cause seemed to have been the collapse of autotroph populations everywhere as a result of the particulates ejected by the Chicxulub impact.
Look, I'm still in college, but paleontology is what I'm dedicating my career to. I've studied this a bit more than you have.

Posted by venomlash on September 12, 2012 at 5:04 PM