The Questioning Librarian

Anyone who knows me for more than ten minutes knows of my deep and abiding fondness for dinosaurs. It's a holdover from that phase most children go through, re-ignited during a summer class on the extinct beasts during college. Yet the drawback of being an adult who loves dinosaurs is readily apparent when you visit the shelves of your local library or bookstore. Most dinosaur books published are aimed at a far younger audience than myself, and the books for adults are often more technical works. Imagine my delight in seeing the newest book by John Pickrell waiting to be cataloged at my library! I placed a request for the book as quickly as I could pull out my smart phone, and I was not disappointed! Weird Dinosaurs: The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew , is an excellent overview of many of the fascinating and bizarre new discoveries, and rediscoveries, of the past decade. A journalist and editor by trade, Pickrell is passionate about dinosaurs, ...

It occasionally surprises me that interest in dinosaurs is considered something for children. This isn't true of everyone, to be fair, but it is all too common that when I express my absolute fascination with dinosaurs I get looks of puzzlement, even mild sympathy from other adults. It is as though I'm Peter Pan and refuse to grow up. Our culture certainly reflects this; the overwhelming majority of books on dinosaurs are aimed at children; the older one gets, the harder it is for the non-specialist to find a book on them that isn't filled with rhymes and cartoon depictions of these venerable beasts. They may consider me with surprise, but I consider them with sympathy as well as my own bewilderment. To think that dinosaurs are for children only! As though dinosaurs, like Legos and Lincoln Logs, are to be put away as we grow in exchange for more "adult" interests! Certainly many children find themselves fascinated with dinosaurs, as I was, knowing the names o...

Camarasaurus - very definitely a dinosaur Last time, I wrote about bad science in terrible creature features. One of the things I noted was the tendency of the actors and writers to refer to anything old and extinct as a dinosaur. Of course, this is a problem in that it displays a poor understanding of what a dinosaur actually is, but this misunderstanding isn't limited to bad science fiction films. It instead reflects a larger societal misunderstanding of what constitutes a dinosaur--any big, dead reptile gets lumped into the category of "dinosaur." But in reality, paleontologists have a very specific definition of what a dinosaur is. In the first place, dinosaurs are diapsids, animals that have two openings in their skull behind the eyes (fenestra). Other diapsids include birds, lizards, and crocodiles, but this characteristic alone separates them from the synapsids (one opening behind the eye), a group that includes mammals, and from the anapsids (no openi...

Over at Answers in Genesis, Buddy Davis has an idea. Well, it isn't necessarily his idea, but his article encapsulates creationist thinking on the topic; how can we  use dinosaurs to spread creationism ? He rightly points out that dinosaurs are used to teach evolution and millions of years...because they are a prime example of evolution in the fossil record and existed for millions of year. No humans, by the way, which I suppose is sadly necessary to mention. No humans until almost sixty million years after the dinosaurs died out. Never mind that many Christians are not creationists, Davis wants to speak for all of them. Because of course, we all know that the Christians who accept evolution are really just a bunch of liberal compromisers destined for hell, naturally. He asserts that Christians can use dinosaurs to explain the origin of death. Oh, that's right, creationists assert that there is no death before the Fall of Adam and Eve, so they have to explain away the fossil ...

It seems likely now that at least some dinosaurs were able to hunt at night. Several paleontologists have developed a model based on a number of factors, including the scleral ring, a bone that reinforces the eye in a number of birds and reptiles. Taking into account evolutionary relationships, this model was tested on living animals species and was demonstrated to be accurate; given that knowledge it was then applied to extinct animals, whose habits are, rather understandably, harder to figure out. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/14/dinosaurs-around-the-clock-or-how-we-know-velociraptor-hunted-by-night/ It seems that, like modern animals, the predators largely hunted at night. This new information, exciting and fascinating new information, is a demonstration that, while we know so much more than we once did about the dinosaurs, there always remains work to be done. While many seem to think that the great age of learning about dinosaurs belonged to Marsh ...