"No. Unless You Count Birds." - Let's Finish Reading _If Dinosaurs Were Alive Today_!

Ay-yi-yi, we're almost done!



Here's that other strange-looking Triceratops I promised way back in the beginning.

The whole final section of the book may actually be the most brain-hurting.  It purpotes to be a "Question and Answer" section that intends to show some genuine non-speculative science in this otherwise very silly book. Well...



First off, that's a metaphysical question I never thought I'd see. Secondly, "Mammals are only here because there are no dinosaurs.  In the Age of Dinosaurs mammals were small... new meat-eating animals evolved -- first into giant flightless birds, and then carnivorous mammals."

So much wrong in one little rectangle of text, it boggles the mind.  And here is another unsuspecting human who looks like he was blissfully unaware of what they were going to use his photo for.



But then the answer is "Yes" isn't it? Anyway, at least Dixon is nice enough to elaborate on this. Kinda:



Yeah.



That's downright philosophical.  And what do people have against chickens anyway?



"I've always wanted to ride a Chocobo!"



Yeah, so who else has ever heard of this "Vivaporous Pachycephalosaurs" theory? I've only ever heard of live-birthing sauropods and that was long enough ago to feel like a childhood fever dream. Elsewhere, Dixon notes that since their eggs are always in pairs, a female Troodon must have had a pair of "egg tubes" in her body where modern birds only have one, which, if true, is news to me.

And then, there's this:



I feel Dixon stopped just short of screaming, "'Jurassic Park 3' is stupid, stop even acknowledging it!"  This is part of a brief listing of science fiction involving dinosaurs in modern times that mentions "Jurassic Park", of course, and The Lost World and Journey to the Center of the Earth and Pellucidar...  but NOT The New Dinosaurs.  Huh.

Anyway, it's time to touch base with an old friend:



Syntarsus sans Mohawk! Man, he looks strange without it.

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Sketch of the Day!

"Save the Ichthyosaurs!" - Let's Keep On Reading _If Dinosaurs Were Alive Today"!

Clearly this book is a goldmine.

Today, we're going to explore how Mesozoic creatures of the air and sea would deal with modern times.  As we've seen, most Mesozoic animals, when suddenly transported somehow to modern times, make a big conspicuous show of themselves.  These guys won't be any different:



Dear Quetzalcoatli, please don't mess with airplanes. Just don't. I've seen you do this before and let me tell you, it will only end in tears. (By the way, obligate scavenger Quetzalcoatlus.)



... ... ... What?



DIVER 1: "Shonisaurus! Oh, how majestic!"

DIVER 2: "It's only a painting."

DIVER 1: "Shut up, you."

To be fair, the painted animals look awesome especially since the CGI animals look so goofy. The Photoshopping is still so very awkward. To wit:



This otter looks so happy to have caught a badly-Photoshopped-in painting of an Ammonite!

And this reminds me of another odd aspect of this book.  It happily ignores the fact that there were such things as fish, birds, small mammals, and such in the Mesozoic.  Scenes like this or the sight of a small pterosaur competing with small birds for food aren't quite as bizarre as the book makes them out to be.



Coming at this from a different direction, the book also ignores the fact that large predatory animals, giant sea creatures, enormous herbivores, and -duh- birds exist in modern times.  It's not so bizarre to see birds roosting in and flocking around the Statue of Liberty -- except they aren't as conspicuous about it. And dig the early interpretation of Microraptor. "We can be sure that it was brightly colored like the tropical birds of today," says Dixon, even though the Microraptors in the illustration are more subdued. Yeah.

And now, the second most-ridiculous image in the book.  Gaze upon it in despair:



There is absolutely nothing I could add to this. At all. Moving on...



"Birds is Birds!" Yes, but Microraptor is classified as a Deinonychosaur, so...? And then there's the strange assurance that if you're a bird you aren't a dinosaur anymore.  I cannot emphasize this enough: that is like insisting that whales are no longer mammals.

And finally, the most ridiculous, and my absolute favorite, image in the book:



I wonder if this person knew what they were taking her picture for?

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Sketch of the Day!

Yeah, what if dinosaurs were alive today?  Hmmm...   HMMMMM...

"No, What Are You DOING?!?" - Let's Continue Reading _If Dinosaurs Were Alive Today_

When last we left off in the big barrel of insanity that was Dougal Dixon's If Dinosaurs Were Alive Today, we saw a monstrously huge and very 90's Tyrannosaurus attacking a herd of longhorn cattle. This brings us into the chapter about how Theropods would have to deal with modern times.

We're going to ignore for the moment that, uh, there are theropods dealing with modern times, but we'll have to wait a while to get to them. For now, enjoy the above implication that if there were nonavian theropods around, we'd all be reenacting "Reign of Fire". Reason being that big theropods ate everything, including animals that hadn't even appeared in the fossil record yet:



Even the Hartbeeste is like, "I don't even know..."



Note: not an image from that one Animorphs book with all the dinosaurs.

This is as good a time to note that obviously Dixon isn't attacking the "what if dinosaurs were still around" premise from the same angle he did in the New Dinosaurs. New Dinosaurs is the "Primer" of alternate universe nonavian dinosaur survival fiction compared to this. With this book it almost looks like they started out with the basic idea, "Let's compare dinosaurs to modern animals" and then things went south.



I like how they just drop in the "warm-blooded" issue with no elaboration at all. Also, what?  No!  WHAT?!?



These "Gorilla suit" Troodons are all like, "We got your low metabolism dinosaurs right here!" More importantly, these guys are the first feathered theropods we see in the book. Brace yourself for a bunch of brain farts, including this strange looking "adult Troodon":



Sticking with the maniraptors for a bit, here's a small flock of badly rendered crab-eating Oviraptors:



This is a particularly strange Oviraptor behavioral theory that I've seen exactly twice; the other instance was illustrated by no less than Wayne D. Barlowe. I hate to be a spoilsport but wouldn't Oviraptor habitat be lacking in seashores and crabs?

And then we see this:



Alright, let's ignore the hilarious sight of a flock of Struthiomimids joining a horse race (like so many wild animals who like to run do today). "Struthiomimus resembled today's large, flightless birds... and were the ancestors of all modern birds."

What? WHAT? No. But... WHAT?!?

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Sketch of the Day!

"What in the...?" Let's read _If Dinosaurs Were Alive Today_!

Full confession: our dear friends at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs already covered this book, but I happened to order my copy around the same time Marc did and since there is WAY more than enough WTF-ery in the book to go around, he said it was okay.  (I will try to come up with different funny things to say about the illustrations we both picked to show.)

The book we shall be exploring this week is If Dinosaurs Were Alive Today, written by our old buddy Dougal Dixon with consulting from Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol.  Illustrations by Simon Mendes, Andrew Kerr, Roger Harris, Leonello Calvetti, Franco Tempesta, Peter Scott, Frank DeNota, and... Luis Rey?!?  Why do I feel as though this may be an old shame for him?  Even though -and this is the strangest thing- it isn't all that old; the book was first published in America in 2007 by Running Press Book Publishers.  That's... surprising, given what we're going to see.

So.  This book.  To borrow a phrase, it sure is a book.  It has pages that are stitched together, and those pages have words and pictures on them.

Okay, seriously.  This is a book about how well animals from the Mesozoic era would be able to deal with modern times... hypothetically.  See, there are moments where the goofy-as-hell premise is taken seriously and there are many MANY more moments when it isn't.  This creates its fair share of mood whiplash.  There are also some deeply bizarre moments that have nothing to do with the premise.  Basically, every two-page spread in this book has at least one thing about it that will make you say, "Wait, what?!?" I wouldn't dare spoil the fun by posting every single illustration here, since the book is available for dirt-cheap on Amazon. It's worth it to have a copy of your own to gawk incredulously at.

The fun begins right on the Table of Contents:



So far this is the most recent book I have seen that associates Archaeopteryx with pterosaurs instead of other dinosaurs.  (I didn't mention it at the time, but Dinosaurs Discovered does the same thing.  It was slightly more excusable since that book is quite old.)  The weird thing is, now Microraptor is brought into the -ugh- "Flying Reptile" fold too.  Don't worry, there will be more brain-farts involving winged theropods later on.



For now, enjoy this herd of elephants chilling with a Sauroposeidon who suffers from a severe case of Shrinkwrap Face.  Behold!



"Dear sweet Littlefoot... Do you know the way to the Uncanny Valley?"

Now, to be fair, it's neat to see the scale of certain prehistoric animals next to modern animals.  And this image is appropriately epic.  If you ignore the eye-bleedingly awful CGI and Photoshoppery.



This might just be the nadir of "Pachycephalosaurs were just the dinosaur equivalent of bighorn sheep" paleoart meme.



After we get to see a Styracosaurus facing down a White Rhino, we get to see the first of two very odd-looking Triceratops. We'll get to the other one in a little bit.



Now this illustration is our first focus on the probably unintentional underlying theme of the book: modern day mammals are just better at everything. We're told that poor Plateosaurus (whose neck looks painful) wouldn't stand a chance against a tiger. Well, no kidding! It'd be no more fair to drop a tiger in the middle of the late Triassic would it? I'm giving the stupid premise of this book way too much thought, aren't I?



Oh God oh GOD, bad "Dinosaur" flashbacks!!!

At some point we're told that herbivorous dinosaurs would have a hard time of it in modern times since the foods they are used to are relatively rare and take many years to mature.  Even so, humans would domesticate them and not cows and pigs and whatnot.  This is a book that exists outside the land of logic.



Man, another sauropod suffering from the unspeakable heartbreak of Shrinkwrap Face.



Said Diplodocus (Seismosaurus in the book) is part of a herd that has wandered into a busy commercial airport runway, like you do when you are a very big animal. "They would not be disturbed by the movement of taxing aircraft," Dixon assures us, "as to them they would be just like other big sauropods to which they are accustomed." Yes, because airplanes are what sauropods look like.



I have nothing to add to this. Anyway, time for one of the most ridiculous pictures in the book before we pause for now:



90's as f***!!!

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Sketch of the Day

Let's Continue to Read _Peterson First Guide: Dinosaurs_!

Continuing our journey through Peterson First Guide: Dinosaurs, written by John C. Kricher and illustrated by Gordon Morrison, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1990. As I mentioned previously, this slim volume is a treasure trove of paleoart memes from the era, most of which look very strange today and which are handily pointed out by Peterson's trademark "look for this in the field" arrows.

The little drawing on this page point out the distinctive "Field Marks" of large sauropods, circa 1990: one big claw on the elephantine forefoot, high nostrils, and an overall shrink-wrapped face. Ayuh. Far, far more interesting, however, is the big main illustration. It's basically the AMNH Barosaurus with a few dramatic additions to make it more awesome.

By the way, I cannot for the life of me find any information as to when the AMNH Barosaurus display was unveiled and it's not for lack of trying. I'd have loved to find an article recounting some of the uproar over it's unveiling; it's the "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" of dinosaur mounts.

We'll see another illustration based off an exhibit that caused an uproar later...


Ah, Saltasaurus. At the time, this guy was the weirdest sauropod we knew about, so he got showcased in dinosaur books an awful lot. His "niche" has essentially been overtaken by the admittedly more fun for artists to play with Amargasaurus.



More of the dinosaurs drinking from streams mini-meme! I repeat: Tianyulong would have blown peoples' minds back then.



The Iguanodon is known for having a hilariously wrong initial reconstruction that hosted what was undoubtedly an amazing party and for having permanent Hitch-hiker Thumb. That's it.



Man-in-suit Edmontosaurus (and the almost prescient use of Edmontosaurus to represent every large crestless hadrosaur save one lucky lady we'll see very soon) notwithstanding, I love the illustration of Saurolophus' Amazing Inflatable Face, here stated like it's an indisputable given. Have I ever shared my favorite-ever take on this paleoart meme?



Skipping ahead a little, today's kids will probably remember when Anantotitan and company were replaced in all dinosaur books with Edmontosaurus, just like I remember when Ankylosaurus was phased out in favor of Euplocephalus. Except Ankylosaurus was never merged into another genus so...? (I bet it's because Euplocephalus is easier to draw.)


So the only thing differentiating Maiasaura from other hadrosaurs is that she will always always always be shown attending her nest. Note her weird "sad moose" face and that bumpy crest thing between her eyes.



Maiasaura and Protoceratops. Stuck-At-Nest Buddies. And note the weird, almost beakless Psittacosaurus.

Time for my favorite-ever illustration in the book:



Chasmosaurus is chillin' like a villain, maxin' like Michael Jackson, livin' like Thanskgivin', and gellin' like a felon. He's like MA-gellin, he's so gellin'.



There's no real acknowledgement that birds are dinosaurs here. So these Terror Birds are kind of stuck in as an afterthought. Their illustrations are *tiny* (easily covered with an American Quarter) and I don't even know what Phorusrhacos is supposed to be doing.



Heading to a different group of Avemetatarsalians. The illustrator here seems to have been given a small note card describing these three pterosaurs. I love that Mohawk-thing on Quetzalcoatlus. I also seriously like how Pterodaustro here acts more like a Skimmer than a Flamingo, as usually depicted.



Illustrations of Mososaurs were stuck in a kind of time warp for so many years. Most of them looked less like a big ocean-dwelling lizard than a weird dragon-thing with a snazzy back-fin. And speaking of dragony things...



Swan-necked plesiosaurs! It's truly amazing how long this meme has stuck around, isn't it?



I include this illustration of Tuatara for two reasons. First, he is included in the book as a "Living Fossil". (Aren't we technically *all* Living Fossils? And if your physical form hasn't changed in many many millions of years, shouldn't that mean you WIN at natural selection?) Second, I wish I could find it again, but more than one of my childhood books touted this poor unsuspecting creature as "A real living dinosaur!"

Oh, the playground grief that caused me.
 
Bully: "Why do you care about dinosaurs anyway? They're all DEAD! Who gives a crap?"

Trish as a Lass: "But they're NAAAAWWWWT!!! There's this one little cute thing that nobody's ever heard of that lives in New Zealand and and and..."

Lucky kids today, all you have to do is point up.

And while we are on the subject of Things That Make Me Drink, here's the very last page of the book. Brace yourselves.



So... another otherwise serious and straightforward dinosaur field guide (see also this) has a nice long entry on the 80's equivalent of the Artistic Triassic Kraken (especially in that it's initial unveiling caused an uproar, the media went nuts with it, and many paleontologists had to emphasize that this kind of thing is not what most of them do with their time). What a note to end on, right? 

My reaction when seeing this page in the guide for the first time was essentially,

"What?

"No, really, What?
 
"WHY?!?

"But if...?

"Then...

"No.

"No, just no."

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Art of the Day!

My struggle to capture the colors of autumn on canvas.