Monday, September 08, 2003

Where are these skulls coming from?

For some reason, the Dinosauricon seems to pocess intimate details of the shapes of skulls of those theropods so newly discovered that they haven't even made it into english speaking scientific literature. I'm not saying that they definately don't have a wide variety of chinese and argentinian artists who happen to receive obscure scientific journals from their home countries, submitting reconstrucitons of the skulls, but the chances of that seem pretty slim. Furthermore, some of the features that are attributed to some of these new varieties seem completely fanciful. Once again, this is not to say that these creatures definately didn't posess these characters, but there hasn't been much publically anounced evidence to suggest that they did either. People still reconstruct ornitholestes with a big horn on its nose for some reason. There has never been a nose horn discovered. Infact, the nasal is mostly missing in ornitholestes.

There is a slightly convex angle to the nasal, but this is not proof of a large, laterally compressed horn, which totally skrews up calculations of lateral skull area. Zupaysaurus rougieri is another good example of an addition to a skull sticking around because each artist copies the work of the artist before him. Or, if only a crest or something like that is found, the artist merely adds this feature onto the skull of another dinosaur closesly related to it. Many artists have even just put the head of one dinosaour in the place of a missing one in their reconstruction. this is exactly the sort of mistake that brought us Brontosaurus. Because the artist has a basic understanding of the bones in the skull of a theropod, he can make a convincing reconstruction. Until I actually see a reconstruciton of the skull in a peer reviewed journal including a depiciton of which bones are actually represtented in the fossil, I won't be happy.
I challenge popular magazines and rapid review journals (Science and Nature i'm looking both your ways) to start publishing actually usable diagrams of the material that was found, not just crumby thumbnails. The faster these depictions are out there, the faster science progresses, and the faster we can unravel the mystery of these dinosaur.

No comments: