EXTINCT FOR SIXTY-FIVE MILLION YEARS AND STILL GOING STRONG
NEW STUFF! APRIL 2005!
I have put up new images of most of the teeth in my collection. They are much larger, higher resolution pictures and include information about the size of the specimen.
I have recently found a number of model skulls, originally made by Ants, on Ebay. Most of them are unfinished and I will be preparing them to look the way I think a fossil should look. I'll probably put most of them on the Art and Artifice page along with the teeth.
The Deinonychus skull in the title above is a plaque that I carved from an oak bookshelf. I did this several years ago, before there were abundant and readily affordable skulls that are now available from a variety of sources. (see the links page)
A COMMON THEME
As you page through my website, you will find a series of essays. I certainly won't even try to present anything like a comprehensive review of Dinosaurs. I will discuss a variety of subjects related to Dinosaurs that happen to interest me.
Popular media often presents the question, "Why the modern fascination
with Dinosaurs?" Obviously they appeal to a lot of people for a variety
of different reasons. The most common reason I see is that they are
the closest thing to real dragons that have ever lived. It seems
incredible that any creatures so large and powerful could have walked the
same Earth that we occupy today. For most of recorded history humans
have viewed our world as having been placed here for our benefit and use.
We are finally beginning to understand that this planet has been home to
millions of other species over hundreds of millions of years. Each
of them evolved to take the maximum possible advantage of the ecological
niche available to it. Dinosaurs dominated this terrestrial frame
more successfully and longer than any other group of animals since the
first vertebrates crawled onto the land. How did they do it?
The basic theme that runs through all of my writing is that they were not
dragons or other fantastical monsters. They had to accomplish their
domination under the same rules of physiology and evolution common to all
organisms. A lot of what passes for Dinosaur Science in the
popular press today ignores this basic truth, which seems to occur out
of enthusiasm for such an exciting subject rather than any deliberate attempt
to mislead. In my education in both Zoology and Medicine I
have learned a lot about anatomy and physiology as they apply to a functional
organism. Personally, I find it exciting to figure out how
Dinosaurs became such amazing animals and how they solved the problems
of survival with what is basically the same protoplasm that Life on Earth
has used for more than a billion years and is still using today.
This is really a lot more interesting than just thinking of them as figments
of our imagination. If you want fantasy, go dream about dragons.
For more on Tyrannosaurs, see
T-rex:
A Call For Arms .
I have something to say about raptors, my favorite wild bunch, at
Raptor
Revisionism
For an Apatasaurus skeleton, some ruminations on sauropod physiology,
and shots of some kits in my collection,
see Mesozoic Meandering
.
To view my collection of Dinosaur teeth and some opinions about current
trends in scientifically accurate
dinosaur portrayal, see Art
and Artifice .
I discuss my ultimate May-December love affair and list some links
at My Dinosaur Tale
.
I may also have something to say about the way we torture paleo-political
correctness to call birds dinosaurs. There was a recent series of
lectures on dinosaur-bird evolution at the San Diego Natural History Museum and
I am actually working on incorporating what I learned into this long-planned but
never written rant.
October 12,1998
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