Stuck For A Palaeo Gift? Decision-Making Just Got Easier...

Picky Palaeo People

This is shameless self-promotion whereby I suggest you buy my art on t-shirts, mugs, hoodies, and whatever else Redbubble keeps in stock, and as such, I'll not be spamming the Facebook groups (just the Twitter hashtags). If you're one of those people who is lucky enough to count a palaeontologist amongst the inhabitants of your Christmas gift list, then you could do far worse (I think!) than take a look at my Redbubble gallery and peruse the palaeo-themed graphics and doodles which populate its pages.

An ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterosaur, in the style of Pacific Northwest Amerindians, plus Yi qi in the style of the crows from Disney's Dumbo. (Copyright © Gareth Monger.)

Is there an ichthyosaur nerd in your life? Sorted! Do you know of a plesiosaur fancier out there who's still wearing the shoddy transfer t-shirt they made at college in 1990? Upgrade them! Are you sick to death of hearing your neighbours argue because one of them is perpetually frustrated by the lack of Yi qi apparel in the palaeoverse? This might be the fly-remover for their ointment!

(L-R) The Palaeoplushies Queen, Rebecca Groom, wearing the Haida ichthyosaur; 'How Train Your Velociraptor'; a road sign we'd all like to see more of; 'tyrant teen', Tristan Stock, looking buff whilst wearing 'The Membraned Crusader'. 

So pop along to the 'GaffaMondo' gallery at Redbubble and take a peek. There you will find a good chunk of the supporting graphics, doodles and cartoons which I generated over the last twelve months, which is, coincidently, Pteroformer's first year online. With luck, I'll be able to add to this collection over the next twelve months, perhaps producing images to commemorate further new discoveries, as I did for Yi qi. Needless to say, Pteroformer isn't a commercial site (in the sense that I'm not paid to write it) so any money made on the back of it is very gratefully received - plus it means I can keep it ad-free. And don't forget, you'll be supporting original palaeoart, which means that you're joining the good fight against shitty broken-wristed raptors clad in ill-fitting snakeskin pyjamas. Not so good if you have a feather allergy, but it's a small price to pay to get away from 1990s shrink-wrap hell.

Support Original Palaeoart

You'll notice the Support Original Palaeoart graphic - it doesn't mean I'm endorsed, just that I'm one of many supporting the movement, spearheaded by Mark Witton, John Conway and Darren Naish. You can read all about it over at Mark's blog, here.

Late Announcement!

David Orr has just published an article at Love In The Time Of Chasmosaurs, giving a brief run-down of some of the palaeontology-themed artwork, books and other bits you can buy, including work by Ricardo Delgado, Fred Wierum, Levi Hastings, Jon Davies, Juan Carlos Alonso, Matt Martyniuk, Brynn Metheney and Angela Connor. Happily, I got a mention too - as did David's, and his wife Jennie's, great early learner's book, Mammoth Is Mopey. I've got a copy; one day I might let my kids look at it.

Next up: Celebrating 20,000 page views with pterosaur papercraft!

Groovy Swan Beaks

Blogged out

Here's a drive-by blogging, just to get things warmed up after a few quiet weeks. Truth is, the art retail company I work for got wind of my non-day-job blogging and the inevitable happened: yup, I'm now blogging for them, too. Not that that's a problem, you understand; it's all in work's hours and there's no overlap in subject matter, so I'm not repeating myself. Despite having had two or three Pteroformer articles pretty much ready to go for some time, I have felt somewhat 'blogged out'.

TetZoo Time! and Beware! the Zine

That's not to say I've done nothing else. I shot out a brief TetZoo Time! strip to keep things fresh there, whilst Alberta Claw and John Turmelle were between academic years and I also continued work on another blog, Beware! the Zine, which I run with longtime co-conspirator, Andy Brain. Keep an eye out for TetZoo Podcats references (hint: they're here and here). There are also a couple of books in the works, which I'll come back to nearer to the times of their respective completions - if only because I find estimating end dates for such projects rather difficult! On top of all that frantic activity and inactivity, I was happy to notice a couple of my diagrams used in an article at an infamous fringe paleo site (even if it was just to point out how silly they are) but not so pleased to see that attribution seemed too difficult a step.

Got close to swan; arms not broken

Despite the considerable risk to my personal safety, I recently baited a rock with bird seed and photographed Britain's most dangerous extant theropod feeding, up close. Forget cassowaries, even maximum ones. I don't know what kids are taught in the rest of the world, but in '70s and '80s Britain, children found themselves herded into school sports halls so that government-sponsored liaison officers could expound the dangers of getting too close to swans with families. "A fully-grown swan can break a man's arm with its wing!" was what we were all told, without a hint of irony. The girls were safe, seemingly. So too were the boys, at least until they had got puberty out of the way. Swans only target men's arms.

During the '80s and '90s, I attended a local branch of the Scouts, and we would visit the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust in Welney, Cambridgeshire, where thousands of waterbirds would overwinter during the seasonal floods. WWT staff were mostly female in those days, owing to the disproportionate number of men injured in horrifying attacks by mute swans. We can only speculate that they never heard them coming. In fact, archaeological evidence has shown that over half of the adult male skeletons in Romano-British cemeteries for the Fens had healed or healing fractures of their humeri, radii and ulnae, some still with the imprints of swan feathers on their surfaces.

The business end of the swan

Leaving fantasy aside for a moment, one particular photo of a mute swan is worth a share. St. Anne's-on-the-Sea in Lancashire has a biggish ornamental pond situated in Ashton Gardens, its main park. Several species of a wetland bird call it home, including swans, mallards, moorhens and canadian geese. Excepting the moorhens none of them are particularly skittish, which is a shame since it's not too long since an unleashed terrier took the head off one of the swans. On the plus side, it makes getting close to them a bit easier, and they'll readily take food, with younger ducks happy enough to take it from your hands.

A swan. A swan and its pigeon prey. (Copyright © Gareth Monger.)

Now, I've not spent much time staring down the barrel of a swan, basically for the reasons mentioned above. A lot of people are familiar with the 'teeth' of ducks, geese and swans, and a good chunk of those people are aware that they're not true teeth.

Mute swan (Cygnus olor) displaying lamella and corresponding grooves (unless the corresponding grooves are also called lamellae - available diagrams didn't seem to agree). (Copyright © Gareth Monger.)

Mute swans (Cygnus olor), like the one in this photo, are generally herbivorous, and use an array of lamellae in their beaks to gather aquatic plants and separate inedible material from the mix. These rib-like projections in the upper and lowers beaks interlock neatly, though they're not always obvious from the outside. After all, unlike Hollywood's dinosaurs, extant dinosaurs don't spend every waking hour with the mouths hanging open, screaming at stuff.

Highly-detailed and extremely serious scientific diagram, showing a duck's head with lamellae exposed. Note fleshy projections forming a fringe on the lateral margins of the tongue. (Copyright © Gareth Monger.)

So there you are. Swans, geese, ducks, and a bunch of other birds, have weird rib-like features lining their beaks, improving their ability to grip food and separate out the nice bits from sediment and other, less interesting, items. Some birds take it further than others, such as flamingos, which have an arrangement which allows them to filter small invertebrates from the water. A bit of a long blog when all I wanted to do was wave a photo under your noses, but hey, it's been a while. See you soon.

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.

Standing Tall: Stegosaurus

This blog was never conceived with the intention of filling it with speculative palaeoart, but it's as good a place as any to put it. Stegosaurus has had a fair bit of coverage in recent months, with the NHM's mount being used to estimate the animal's mass, and Saitta 2015 looking at apparent differences in individuals' plates to determine the animals' genders. Padian and Carpenter disagreed, and Theropoda looked at the health implications of stegosaurs dragging their tails (such as constipation).

Superb illustrations by John Conway and Mark Witton got me thinking about those plates. Palaeontologists have put forward various ideas regarding their purpose, the most popular of which being thermoregulatory aids, display structures and defensive structures. In nature, structures often have multiple functions, with secondary functions being unrelated to their primary function. Feathers, for example, probably developed initially for insulation, but could have been easly modified for use in display, either through behavioral means or by changes in pigmentation. Structural modification of the feather - and other key anatomical features - then endowed the owner with an aerodynamic advantage.

That's a long-winded way of suggesting that Stegosaurus's plates probably did not perform one single function. Some of that's already been touched on in this earlier post, but I'm keen on the idea that part of Stegosaurus's display is concerned with how tall an individual looks, i.e., how much vertical space it occupies, especially in the eyes of potential mates, conspecific rivals and would-be predators. With fuzziness now known to be present in (some) ornithischians, I'm happy to speculate that some stegosaurs may have used stiff fur or 'fuzz' as it's often called, to extend the margins of the dorsal plates. Many palaeoartists, palaeoillustrators and palaeontographers already restore those dorsal plates with a sizable soft-tissue (see comments) keratinous extension. An additional growth of stiff hairs as a light-weight projection could, in theory, increase the size of the plates' appearance. Compared to a bone-and-flesh plate, the hair component would be less demanding on the animal, given that once the hair as at the surface, it's a dead structure, and no longer requires a blood supply in order to maintain it.  Of course, if it's concerned with sexual display, it may be renewed seasonally, and shed after mating. This would get around the problem of it getting trashed through day-to-day activities, and filling up with dirt, mould and parasites - which nobody wants.

Stegosaurus stenops, displaying some serious fuzz. Not unlike a filthy old coconut husk. (Copyright © 2015 Gareth Monger)

Anyway, it's just a thought. And this post is supposed to be short and sweet, like the Holocene.

Next up: Yi qi (again).

The Fossil Record Throws A Curveball: Yi qi

Those crazy, crazy theropods. If there's one thing palaeontology has showed us about dinosaurs, it's that you shouldn't get used to their popular reconstructions because, sooner or later, something will turn up that'll really screw with your mind. And it's not like these events are necessarily rare; Deinocheirus and Spinosaurus got make-overs in the last couple of years, and they're both pretty high-profile.

Less high-profile are the Scansoriopterygidae, small, feathered, theropodan dinosaurs with the long arms you'd expect of an arboreal, aerial-capable dinosaur, but with an immensely-long third digit. A popular notion is that this digit was an adaptation to an arboreal lifestyle, enabling the creature to wrap its arm around tree trunks and branches, like naturalist David Bellamy, just, y' know, sharing the love.

B-b-but - what's this? A new paper by Xu, Zheng, et al, announces the discovery of a new scansoriopterygid, Yi qi, preserving not only the long fingers and feathers, but also a new, hitherto unseen structure. A long bony, or cartilaginous, rod projects backwards from each wrist, and patches of membrane suggest a set-up not totally unlike that of bats or pterosaurs. Or dragons, but I didn't say that. There's still some debate as to how the proximal margins of the wing chord may articulate, i.e., does it merge with the thoraic region or something else. And what is the true arrangement of the manual elements, in particular, the rear-pointing 'prong', referred to in the paper as the styliform element? They offer up a couple of possible arrangements, such as something superficially bat-like, and a set-up where the styliform elements are directed inwards, towards the body, helping to maintain a narrower chord. If this animal did indeed undertake powered flight, it's not too difficult to imagine it 'scooping' the air with its membranous hands, as bats do. Bats' hands' 'palms' form a sort of concave shape as they fly, which looks like a sort of arial butterfly stroke. Their fingers are fully jointed, enabling them to alter the shapes of their manus as required, resulting in a rather effective wing. The paper offers up three potential arrangements for Yi qi's 'wings', the two more plausible (to me) of which are shown here:

Two of three different arrangements proposed in Xu, Zhen, et al (2015), showing a proximally-pointing styliform element running parallel to the forearm (left), and the same feature, free of the forearm, pointing posteriorly and supporting a much-deeper membrane. (Illustrated by Gareth Monger; modified from Xu, Zhen, et al 2015.)

With regards the styliform element, I wonder if, rather than being curved in a horizontal plane (as restored, left) it instead curved ventrally (right), helping to maintain the aerofoil section - and a bat-like scoop. Some time after death, and prior to fossilisation, it has tipped over, rotating approximately 90 degrees, and settling in an unnatural position (left). Compression of the bones and associated remains during preservation could be masking the true shape of this apparently-unique element, but some lateral compression in life would make structural sense in terms of giving it strength during a downstroke. But that's all speculation.

In the paper, the wing reconstructions (shown in dorsal view) show the hind limbs of the animal trailing behind it. Although the main point of the graphic is to demonstrate the possible extent of the membrane, a trailing position for the hind limbs is unlikely; it pushes the centre of gravity back, and increases turbulence. For a volant theropod, it would seem unlikely that it would extend its legs behind it if they're not supporting part of a flight surface, and it also seems unlikely that a volant animal would rely on a narrow wing as suggested in the left-hand diagram. The right-hand diagram shows a deep chord, within which the (estimated) centre of gravity comfortably sits, when the legs are brought up, underneath the body, and out of the airflow.

Speculative illustration showing possible extent of contour feathers on Yi qi, and a possible centre of gravity. Note that the animal brings its legs in under itself, out of the airflow and therefore reduces turbulence. This also maintains a more-central centre of gravity. (Copyright © 2015 Gareth Monger)

Where the trailing edge of the membrane attaches (e.g., the body, or the hind limb) is not clear. Flying dinosaurs which use feathered wings benefit from legs which are independent of the wings. They can run into the airflow to achieve lift-off, or they can jump into the air, with the wings already committed to the flight strokes and not involved in the jump (compare pterosaur quad-launching). Having a skin membrane attached to the leg might be problematic since the legs (if not held out behind) would need to be elevated in order to maintain a level flight surface, and not one which partially faces into the airflow. However, that brings the leg and the membrane attached to it forward, reducing the tautness of membranous wing. Bearing that in mind, one might expect the membrane to attach on the body, somewhere in front of the hip, and not to the leg. The styliform element could work as a means by which the animal adjusts the tautness of the membrane, in a similar way to how a pterosaur is thought to do so with its apparent ankle attachment. Without that extra strut, the animal might enjoy less control and increased flutter in the membranes.

Yi qi in flight. (Copyright © 2015 Gareth Monger)

One of the key questions raised by this is why would a theropod go the route of developing a membranous flight surface when so much experimentation with flight (and there seems to be a lot of it!) is concerned with forming a continuous flight surface from elongated feathers? A major difference between scansoriopterygids and other, flighted, theropods is their elongated third digit. As suggested earlier on, it could be that this is an adaptation towards an arboreal lifestyle, enabling the animal to climb trees and other steep surfaces more easily. And it could be that selective pressures favoured the extension of the postpatagium instead of the feathers present on the arms. Whatever the case, feathers for flight persisted, and the theropodan flight membrane proved an evolutionary dead-end. Hopefully, additional specimens will come to light, adding to our understanding of this weirdo dinosaur.

Many thanks go to Mike Boyd for enabling me to write this particular article.

Jurassic Park 4: Age of Creative, Integrital and Scientific Extinction

Gawd almighty, what is there to say about Jurassic World which hasn't already been said?  Probably not much, but it never hurts to summarise - especially if you're blogging.  Jurassic World is the subject of much scrutiny, owing mainly to speculation about how the film's designers would render their genetically recovered dinosaurs.  Jurassic Park, in 1993, was perhaps the only occasion the franchise could get away with bald raptors.  Subsequent discoveries set in stone the idea that many, many dinosaurs were feathered. Much was made of the film's reliance on advancements in palaeontlogy. Indeed, they even hired palaeo heavyweight John R. Horner to advise on their appearance (Horner answers some questions about JW here - warning: it's brief). Could dinosaurs receive the Hollywood treatment AND stay true to the ever-shifting science of dinosaurology?  'Would they?' is perhaps a more appropriate question, and one which the JP franchise would answer several times over.

Jurassic Park's Velociraptor: demonic kangaroo lizards.

(Copyright: Universal Pictures)

And so, a few years later, Spielberg served up another monster movie, and aside from throwing in some different dinosaurs and upping the on-screen death toll, nothing really changed.  And that's the snag.  Nothing really changes.  At all.  And not just in Jurassic Park's universe, but in many other films which featured dinosaurs.  Such was Jurassic Park's impact that many other filmmakers simply try to emulate it: "If it's good enough for Jurassic Park, it's good enough for us" or simply, "Well, they must know best". It was as if Jurassic Park's legacy was simply to raise the bar for accurate lighting of scaly hides. With its release, Spielberg, Crichton and Winston were elevated to the heady heights of deities and Industrial Light and Magic became the only name in CGI special effects. A flurry of CGI-heavy films followed, including Jumanji, Twister and Casper. Lots and lots of style over substance. Many, many subsequent television and film dinosaurs were similarly afflicted by this SFX approach.

A fully-feathered Velociraptor mongoliensis, produced for Oxford University Museum in 2003. Still too skinny, though, and the feather arrangement on the 'wings' is inaccurate.
(Copyright: OUMNH/Gareth Monger)

The dominance of the 'JP dinosaur' style was such that it became the preferred look. Even high profile documentaries such as the BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs failed to take that step and feather their theropods, despite coming several years later, and if ever there was an opportunity to do something special, Hobbit-fancying Whovian Peter Jackson missed the mark by about a third of a parsec and delivered an ecosystem crammed with relics hellbent on going extinct by whatever means possible (but mostly just by getting squashed by wobbly sauropods or running off cliffs).  And Jurassic Park's influence here cannot be denied.  C'mon, giant tyrannosaurs and dromaeosaurs? The only thing missing was a giant Jeff Goldblum.  No, wait... the titular character had that covered.

Of course, time's a great healer, and several documentaries did get it right. Although not the first to do so, 2013's Walking With Dinosaurs film certainly put forward some of the best feathered theropods out there. It stopped short of extending this feathery integument to its Gorgosaurus, and it left its ceratopsians similarly in need of insulation. And this may very well be viewed in the future in the same way that Jurassic Park is now, i.e., they could very well have taken that leap, and future discoveries would probably have proven them right. But, unlike Jurassic Park, the Walking With Dinosaurs film did at least move things along from its initial series fifteen years earlier, so much so that its 2013 troodontids bare little resemblance to their 1999 dromaeosaur cousins.

Troodon from Walking With Dinosaurs
(Copyright: 20th Century Fox)

So, bearing that in mind, Jurassic World might appear to be an odd leap backwards. People might be forgiven for thinking that palaeontology is a rather schizophrenic science. Sure, no one expects scientists to agree all the time, but on one hand we've had ten years of increasingly-feathered dinosaur restorations in magazines and on television, and on the other Jack Horner is putting his name to the advisory role of the fourth film in a series which refuses to acknowledge a tsunami of fossil evidence. But if the mob needs someone to hang, they shouldn't turn the pitchforks towards Horner.  I saw him in a lecture, aimed mainly at children, at OUM, back in the late '90s, and he was almost despairing of the film makers' decisions to ignore so much science. He listed palaeontological fact after palaeontological fact, all cast aside in favour of, well, whatever it is that film makers prefer to good, solid palaeontology.  Maybe this was a man, failed by Spielberg and co., trying to limit the damage done by JP's skinny monsters to those kids' understanding of 'dinosaurology'. Unfortunately, come June, it seems that he'll have to do it all over again.

The outmoded image of dinosaurs as 'terrible lizards' may have been knocked over with a fossil feather, but the Jurassic Park monster is standing fast.

Jurassic World will be released in cinemas June 12th, 2015.