National Geographic's Antidote To Terminal Monster Saturation

The palaeontology community's members are all in therapy, thanks to Jurassic World's insistence on filling a(n ENORMOUS) fictional theme park with some of the worst reconstructions of Mesozoic reptiles known to man. The TetZoo guys didn't even make it to the end of their own review*, with Darren Naish weeping uncontrollably after only fifteen minutes, and transmission being cut seconds after what can only be described as a muffled thud. Listeners were left to make up their own minds as to what had transpired, with many speculating that they'd just heard Naish's mercy killing at the hands of John Conway. The Love In The Time Of Chasmosaurs blog clearly comprises a masochistic crew, who offered up not one but two reviews on JW. (And they just added a third about an hour ago.)

The point is, you don't have to look too far to find a palaeo community review for this year's main Summer blockbuster. Jurassic World has attracted much attention since people began speculating as to how they might depict some of the film's key creatures. It's nearly two decades since John Hammond demonstrated how you should NEVER EVER run a zoo and, in that time, dinosaur reconstruction has evolved at an unimaginable rate. Would Jurassic World reflect this? Would we get feathered 'raptors'? Would they possess the correct wrists described by Dr Alan Grant RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FIRST MOVIE? And, most importantly, would their T. rex still move around the park, one earthquake-causing footstep at a time, taken every thirty seconds? ("T. rex doesn't want to be fed, it wants to hunt!" Not gonna happen. Not when everything within a couple of miles knows you're coming.)

Chris Pratt's character taunts Jurassic World's Velociraptors by demonstrating the range of motion they should be able to achieve with their arms. (Copyright © 2015 Universal Pictures.)

By now you already know the answers. You've either seen the film or read the reviews, so in the interest of avoiding repetition, I'll spare you a long and damning run-through of how bad they got it. Jurassic World was, for me, an enjoyable monster romp - a worthy sequel to Jurassic Park. I got giddy sat at home, waiting to leave for the cinema. I got chills hearing the music. And I nearly wet myself during the tag-team end battle. But it's not a film about dinosaurs. It is, however, a love letter to the first film, as demonstrated by numerous references and nods to Jurassic Park. It also flicks the Vs at the less-well-loved Jurassic Park III, if only by having the first film's T. rex smash through a mounted Spinosaurus skeleton during the final reel. And remember how the JP3 promo art made use of a triple claw-gash to form the III? The only reason I could see for Improbable Indominus rex having four manual digits was so that Universal could use the same trick for this fourth instalment. Pfft.  Yes, it's daft, overblown, and it makes scientists cry. But it's fun and noisy and holds children's attention for the duration.

These are the take-home points of the Jurassic Park series:

• Revived Mesozoic animals will, upon their release, always, ALWAYS go bat-shit crazy and attack every human in sight, irrespective of their general temperament when confined, or whether they're piscivorous, carnivorous or veggie-saurus, Lex, veggie-saurus!
• Large theropods will announce their approach with impact-tremor footsteps. They will then stand and roar, I guess because they're sporting types, and think it fair to offer their intended prey a chance of escape.
• A hunting dinosaur has no concern for its own wellbeing. It will happily smash through buildings, walls, perimeter fences and steel doors in order to catch prey. It will go to any and all lengths to catch a person, inconvenience be damned. It has no concept of 'too much effort'. (Extinction hypothesis?)
• Indominus rex was originally engineered as a means to retrieve broken-down gyrospheres, hence its enormous gape. Probably.
• Jurassic Park films would all end after only ten minutes if ANYBODY had conducted a decent risk assessment analysis. Ergo, in the JP universe, people are really, really stupid.

So will the Summer of 2015 go down in history as the moment when film & television decided that palaeontology ≠ sexy? Not quite.

Before they took a blood shower: Dr. Luke Gamble at front and, left to right, Matthew T. Mossbrucker, Dr. Steve Brusatte and Dr. Tori Herridge. (Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Channel.)

Thank the flips for National Geographic's 'T. rex Autopsy'. If you've not seen it, the premise is a straight-forward one: make a fully-furnished Tyrannosaurus rex corpse, hire a team of palaeontologists and vets, and set them to work dissecting it. Obviously turning that into a reality was anything but simple, as palaeontologist and adviser-to-the-show Dave Hone explains (here). And they do a brilliant job. The dissection team does not behave as if its members are crawling over a special effect. They do their level best to convince the viewers - and themselves - that the animal is real. For the most part they pull it off, too. Excepting the odd, faked, reflexive cough at smells we know aren't there, their reactions at having been presented with a 'real' non-avian dinosaur are a joy to watch. My seventeen-year-old daughter arrived home partway through the programme; gawping confusedly at the television screen, she enquired as to where on earth the makers got hold of a fully-fleshed dinosaur. That's how good it is. Of course, if you're looking for the tells which betray the animal's synthetic construction, they're there, well hidden. But who cares? Disbelief is easily - and wilfully - suspended.  Hats are tipped at those who conceived, designed, and executed this remarkable piece of television. It more than makes up for those well-documented missed opportunities of Jurassic World.

A few weeks ago LITC announced the Jurassic World challenge. In order to try to increase awareness of real palaentology, and perhaps direct some funds back towards it, LITC suggested that if you go to see the film you could spend at least the equivalent amount on something which will benefit palaeontologists, research institutions, palaeoartists and museums. You could buy a book, or a piece of palaeoart, or donate to a museum or crowd-fund someone. There's loads to choose from if you look around.

Since I have bills like everyone else, it would help me enormously if people bought a t-shirt from my Redbubble page. You can show off your pop-culture-savviness with a hyper-daft Guardians-Jurassic-World-How-To-Train-Your-Dragon mash-up, or keep reminding everyone that T. rex Autopsy was the best thing on telly since sliced tyrannosaur.

Juraasic World and T. rex Autopsy fan art t-shirts, available at my Redbubble page, here.

It's good to get that JW stuff off my chest. Normal service will resume soon. There's a stack of stuff sat there in draft, including more wandering sauropod ecosystems, more Yi qi, and more pterosaur quad-launching. Laters!

*Of course TetZoo did the whole interview. Listen to it - its very entertaining.

Speculative Palaeoart: Pterosaur Embryos

This micro-project was born out of one of those Facebook art challenges which I tried (and failed) to ignore, and for which I was nominated by Bob Art Models's Bob Follen (remember him from this post?) and Palaeoplushies's Rebecca Groom. The 'rules' of this particular Facebook challenge were pretty simple: produce three pieces of art for five days. That was it. It didn't specify whether they were to be new pieces, or whether they had to be posted over five consecutive days.

It started well enough as I paved the way to its inevitable non-completion with the usual good intentions. In fact, it's not abandoned, just hard to complete, what with everything else I've got going on. Given that I've got a fairly sizeable pterosaur project in the works, I figured it would make sense to stay close to this subject, and I was inspired to try my hand at portraying pterosaur embryos as close as possible to how extant animal embryos are.

It started with a quick mooch around Google, looking at photos of embryos of familiar animals, to get an idea of general bauplans. Most people are used to the proportions of young animals, with their disproportionately large eyes and heads, and comparatively short bodies and small limbs, but embryonic animals, depending upon their stage of development, can look altogether different to how they will appear at the time of their birth. Indeed, in the early stages, many disparate lineages' embryos may look broadly similar to one another. The diagram below shows representatives of the major vertebrate groups.

A selection of early-stage embryos, representing the major vertebrate groups. (Copyright © 2015 Gareth Monger)

You'll no doubt have seen versions of this line-up. I've opted to cut out most of the internal detailing so common to this style of diagram since I'm only dealing with external features in the pterosaur embryos I'm illustrating. It's easy to appreciate the broad similarities in this selection. The embryos, although perhaps not quite the same age, are at a very similar developmental stage, which shows how vertebrates follow a similar pattern of development in their earliest stages before they begin to specialise. As you can probably appreciate, there's not much point in producing a speculative, days-old pterosaur embryo to add into the above line-up as it won't look significantly different enough to add anything to the subject. The extant maniraptor in that diagram doesn't exactly scream 'DINOSAUR!', or at least not to this non-embryologist.

Today, the only flying vertebrates are birds and bats, and since only bats and pterosaurs share a membranous wing, I chose to look at bat embryos. Of course, bats and pterosaurs are not particularly closely related, having both developed flight apparatus independently, separated by an enormous chunk of time. (View this illustrated lineage at Phylopic to see just how distantly-related they are.) The framework on which they support their wing membranes is different, too, with pterosaurs using an enormously-elongated fourth finger and an internal network of aktinofibrils to stiffen the wing, while bats support a comparatively loose membrane on an enormous, five-fingered hand. Presumably this is the trade-off: pterosaurs have a skeletal scaffold reduced to a single spar, but there's more going on in the membrane and the skeletal mechanism by which they fold the wing away may not be as effective as that of at least some bats.

Embryos of the black mastiff bat (Molossus rufus), showing various stages of forelimb development. Compare 1's short manual digits with those of 2 and 3. (Copyright: Dorit Hockman. Used with permission)

This photo of three black mastiff bat embryos, courtesy of award-winning Dorit Hockman, a junior research fellow at Oxford, shows clearly the embryo pups' 'hands' and dactylopatagia (interdigital wing membranes) which are relatively small compared to those of newborn pups. Roll back several days in these animals' development, and at some point the animals' limbs will appear somewhat unspecialised, without any suggestion of the flighted animal to come. It was this intermediacy which I wanted to explore in my pterosaur embryo illustrations.

There's probably not too much that bat embryology tells us about pterosaurs; after all, bats are altricial and, although relatively well-developed at birth, are unable to fly until they are several weeks old, so there is a period of development and growth during this period. Some exceptionally well-preserved pterosaur fossils suggest that they are precocial, to the point that they can probably even fly within a very short time of hatching. It's reasonable to expect this to be reflected in the anatomy of their embryos and that their embryos go through a stage of rapid development before hatching, at which point they are essentially miniature adults. Unfortunately, early-stage embryo skeletons comprise a lot of cartilage which doesn't often fossilise well anyway, hence the speculative nature of illustrating pterosaur embryos.

A relatively-quick digital 'sketch' of a pterodactyloid embryo, with large head, closed eyes and stubby wings. 10a scalpel blade for scale. (Copyright © 2015 Gareth Monger)

It's difficult to make any scientific claims as to the accuracy of these illustrations, given the lack of direct evidence, which is why I tend towards filing these under 'speculative palaeoillustration'. That's also why I don't feel comfortable tying these down to too specific a taxon, leaving it as loose as 'pterodactyloid'. Other than full-term pterosaur foetuses illustrated to support fossil finds, there doesn't appear to be much in the way of palaeoart for prenatal pterosaurs. It's probable that, owing to the lack of any physical evidence, and the fact that the embryonic/foetal stage is comparatively brief, it's simply not important enough to necessitate producing illustrations of an animal at a point in its development where nothing would see it anyway, particularly when the adult reconstructions are being reviewed and refreshed as frequently as they are.

Another generalised pterodactyloid pterosaur embryo, with wing-digit and brachiopatagium beginning to develop. (Copyright © 2015 Gareth Monger)

So, in short, I don't think this is necessarily a critical aspect of palaeoart, but as science and scientific art, including photography, creeps further and further into our lives, whether that be online or through television or in print, the previously-hidden lives of vertebrates become more familiar to us. It makes some sense for palaeoartists to let themselves be influenced by this.

Biggest of thanks go to Dorit Hockman for letting me use her photograph of the bat embryos, which greatly influenced the final look of my pterosaur embryos. View her professional profile here.