The Dino Hotel Nears Completion! Part 1

You've probably heard me mention the Best Western Denver Southwest several times here on the blog: they are the folks who are changing their hotel into a dinosaur themed natural history museum/hotel extravaganza!  Well, the lobby is now complete, as is much of the rest of the dinosaur themed paraphernalia around the grounds!  Just a few more things are awaiting completion, but the hotel looks fantastic!  I thought I'd share some pictures of the hotel for you guys here!  For your information, the credit for all of the photos in this post goes to the Best Western Denver Southwest, unless it is otherwise noted or there is a stuffed Triceratops named Pyg in the picture!  But first, you should meet the stars of the hotel: the Tally family!

First, let's start on the outside of the hotel!  Here are the initial plans for the outside of the hotel:

And here is who greets you now when you walk inside: Stanley, the Stegosaurus!

Now, the lobby only just recently finished construction.  Until recently, the lobby entrance looked like this:

The lobby just finished construction and looks GREAT now, but first let's look at a few more construction pictures, just so you can get a feel for how far along everything has come!  First let's take a look at the pool!  In the far future, the room should be partially enclosed from the outdoors!

At the beginning of construction, this place looked like it does in the picture below with Meredith!

A few months later, we have their two children, Caroline and Joe Tally, talking about the future plans for the pool with a camera crew from the BBC!

Finally, here are some pictures of the pool from very recently, it is now finished!

At least, the pool itself is finished.  Sometime starting next year, the Tally's will be hiring someone to create a tile mosaic of some creatures that inhabited the Western Interior Seaway (which you can read more about HERE).  Oh....and did I forget to mention that the pool is in the shape of the seaway?  Pretty frickin' awesome if you ask me!

Now, a few pictures back, I mentioned that Joe and Caroline were talking to a BBC camera crew.  What was that all about?  Well, as you can imagine, this whole dinosaur hotel idea has been pretty popular to a whole lot of folks, and has made an appearance across a very wide range of media, one of which was a BBC story about it!  Check out the link HERE!  I also have several pictures of the filming!  First off, we have several pictures of the camera on Greg!

As you might have noticed in the video, the film crew also stopped at the Morrison Natural History Museum, my place of work!  There they interviewed the director and curator Matt Mossbrucker, and you can see a few of those pictures below!

Here the film crew watches as Matt excavates part of an Apatosaurus skull named Kevin upstairs in the lab!

Another big break for the hotel came from The Oatmeal!  We have a lot to cover here in this post so I won't take the time to delve into it myself, but you absolutely HAVE to check it out by clicking HERE: it is fantastic, I guarantee it!  These three screenshots below are credited to The Oatmeal!

It doesn't stop there, though!  The Tallys have also been featured in Entrepreneur magazine!  Here is a picture of the article, and you can read it yourself by clicking the link HERE!

And on the lighter side of things: have you ever heard of the popular YouTube series My Drunk Kitchen?  If not, make sure to check it out because it is hysterical: but especially make sure to check out the episode with the hotel and the museum in it!  Suffice it to say, the Tallys have definitely found their way down many different avenues of pop culture!

I don't really find it that surprising: what they're doing is freaking awesome!  Check out these murals that they are having painted on the back of the building!  The first one is a sort of walk through time, featuring all sorts of fun animals!  The close up below is of a prehistoric mammal called Uintatherium!

Here's another mural for you to check out:

As if that isn't enough awesome paleo art for you, hanging in the rooms will be copies of some of the watercolors made by an awesome paleontologist named Arthur Lakes who excavated a lot of cool things from the area, including some of the bones that we have in the museum!

There are also some awesome banners hanging on the poles outside the hotel!

These aren't the only reasons why the hotel is super cool, though: not by a long shot!  Usually every week, they have a Bird of Prey show and a Jungle Lady show!

First some pictures from the bird of prey shows!  First, a few pictures of Anne Price holding a barn owl!

Next, we have a picture of her holding a turkey vulture!

Next, we have Anne holding a Harris hawk, while Peter Reshetniak holds a great-horned owl!

 Here, Peter still holds the great-horned owl!

 Peter takes a turn with the Harris hawk!

Next, we have a picture of Peter holding a screech owl!

Finally, two kids are enthralled by the red-tailed hawk!

The Jungle Lady is really cool too, here are some pictures of the animals that she brings, too!  Here's Meredith with the albino Burmese python!

 And an albino hedgehog!

Here's a picture of a veiled chameleon named Prince Charming!

This post is really long: I am splitting it up into two parts!  Check back next time to learn about what REALLY makes the dinosaur hotel a DINOSAUR hotel!

Dinosaur Provincial Park

As we talked about IN A PREVIOUS POST, dinosaurs are pretty big in Canada.  A large number of dinosaur species have been discovered up there, and one of the best places to find dinosaurs is a place near Calgary in Alberta called Dinosaur Provincial Park.  As a matter of fact, Dinosaur Provincial Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, along with 981 other properties "which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value."  Other famous sites include the Great Barrier Reef in Australia; the Galápagos Islands; Stonehenge; the Grand Canyon; and "Memphis and its Necropolis," the site of the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza!  Just to name a few.  Do you get the idea, though?  Dinosaur Provincial Park is kind of a big deal!

But why?  What makes a bunch of badlands with some dinosaur bones in them so important to Canada, much less a committee dedicated to protecting such international treasures as the Great Barrier Reef and the Great Pyramids?  What makes Dinosaur Provincial Park so GREAT?  (Get it?  Nevermind, it wasn't that funny anyways.)  Here's what the UNESCO website has to say about the park:

The property is unmatched in terms of the number and variety of high quality specimens, over 60 of which represent more than 45 genera and 14 families of dinosaurs, which date back 75-77 million years. The park contains exceptional riparian habitat features as well as "badlands" of outstanding aesthetic value.
The committee also included two main criterion that show why the park is so important:

Criterion (vii): Dinosaur Provincial Park is an outstanding example of major geological processes and fluvial erosion patterns in semi-arid steppes. These "badlands" stretch along 24 kilometers of high quality and virtually undisturbed riparian habitat, presenting a landscape of stark, but exceptional natural beauty.


Criterion (viii): The property is outstanding in the number and variety of high quality specimens representing every known group of Cretaceous dinosaurs. The diversity affords excellent opportunities for paleontology that is both comparative and chronological. Over 300 specimens from the Oldman Formation in the park including more than 150 complete skeletons now reside in more than 30 major museums.

Wow. Well that's a pretty big deal!  According to the website, between 1979 and 1991, a grand total of around 23,347 fossils were collected, including an amazing 300 dinosaur skeletons!  As mentioned above, the dinosaur skeletons represent every known group of Cretaceous dinosaurs.  (I assume that they mean every group that is known to live in North America at the time.)  Not only does the sheer amount of fossils allow for a more complete view of an extinct ecosystem, new dinosaurs and other animals have been discovered there, as well as potential behavior that can be inferred from the fossils! 

During the Late Cretaceous North America was divided by the Western Interior Seaway, a shallow, continental sea.  (To learn more about the seaway, check out a recent post I did on it by clicking HERE).  In Dinosaur Provincial Park, you can find the remains of both ocean going animals and land dwellers, as well!  The park is, of course, famous for its dinosaurs (as you could probably tell from its name).  But many of the marine creatures entombed in the rocks there and in the surrounding area are pretty awesome, as well!  For example, Hybodus, an interesting shark!  

Before we get to the dinosaurs, let's check out a few other cool creatures found in the park!  One of these is a creature we mentioned in a previous post: the post entitled "There Be Dragons," all about the monitor lizards!  In the post, I had a picture of a prehistoric monitor lizard named Palaeosaniwa attacking a flock of Ornithomimus.  Well, both of these creatures have been found in the park!  Below is the picture, created by talented paleo-artist James Field!  You can check out his website HERE!

Many animals have been discovered in the park, including turtles, crocodilians, and a ton of plants, but the only other non-dinosaur we are going to look at for now is a small little primitive marsupial mammal called Eodelphis!  Eodelphis, whose name means "early opossum," is thought to have weighed a little over a pound which, astonishingly, means that it was one of the largest mammals of its time!  It is thought to be related to Didelphodon, another Mesozoic marsupial mammal, who we shall meet in an upcoming post!

Now for the dinosaurs!  I'm going to start with an animal called Centrosaurus.  A ceratopsian dinosaur (just like Triceratops), thousands of individuals specimens of Centrosaurus have been discovered in a massive bonebed that extends for hundreds of meters!  While paleontologists disagree as to exactly what killed all of these animals, and in such immense numbers, the prevailing theory is that this was a herd of animals that drowned while trying to cross a river.  The individuals that make up the herd vary widely in age, which is one of the lines of evidence which supports the herd idea.  This is important evidence for paleontologists, as it indicates that these animals lived in groups!  

Another dinosaur that is found in the park is the small pachycephalosaur called Stegoceras, who is not to be confused with the similarly named and much more famous Stegosaurus!

Here is another fun dinosaur, called Chirostenotes!  This oviraptorosaur was first found in the park, and is definitely quite funky looking!

Dromaeosaurus, a distant cousin of Chirostenotes and a closer relative of the famous Velociraptor, was also first discovered in the park!

Just as Dromaeosaurus has been pushed from the limelight by Velociraptor, so too has Daspletosaurus been pushed by Tyrannosaurus!  Daspletosaurus is a tyrannosaur as well, and was first discovered in (surprise surprise) Dinosaur Provincial Park!  Two more Dinosaur Provinicial Park natives (and firsts) are Euoplocephalus, one of the tank-like ankylosaurs, and Parasaurolophus, a hadrosaur or duck-billed dinosaur!

I can't WAIT to visit the park one day!  In the meantime, HERE is a link to the park's website so you, too can plan your visit!

Calgary on Dwellable

Introduction to Latin and Greek Roots and the Number One!

When it comes to giving an organism a scientific name, many languages can be used to construct the two part name (consisting of the genus name and the species name), but it must be in the Latin grammatical form.  For example: a long time ago, last July, I wrote a post about some fun scientific names: click HERE to check it out!  One of the animals that we talked about is an interesting theropod dinosaur from Madagascar.  Named Masiakasaurus knopfleri, this dinosaurs name roughly translates to "vicious lizard of Knopfler."  In this case, the "Knopfler" part of the name is the surname of famous musician Mark Knopfler, and the "Masiakasaurus" part of the name is the origin of the "vicious lizard" half.  So the words in the binomial name don't have to be Latin: however, they are Latinized.  Oftentimes, Greek roots are used.

Oftentimes, you can tell a bit about an animal just from its scientific name.  I like doing this, and thought it might make for a few good posts.  We'll start easy today: let's look at the number one, in both its cardinal (i.e. one, two, three, etc.) form, as well as its multiple form (i.e. once, twice, thrice, etc.).  Many of these roots will be familiar to you, both the Latin roots and the Greek roots.  For example, the root "du" in Latin means the English equivalent of two.  Meanwhile, the Greek root is "di."  For multiples (i.e. the English equivalent of the word "twice"), you would use the Latin root "bi" or the Greek root "dis."  There are often multiple roots that mean the same thing in any given language.  For example, when using the Greek root "di" to mean two, you could instead use "dy" or "duo."  Sometimes, especially for the multiple versions of the roots, there are just not really any animals whose scientific names use them: at least, not that I could easily find.  If you want to search those animals out, by all means be my guest!

Keep in mind, however, that just because a scientific name has the letters of the root in it, doesn't necessarily that the person who originally came up with that name meant that root to be inside.  For example, the dugong, Dugong dugon, appears to have the Latin root "du" in it.  However, the true etymology stems from the Malay name for the animal, "duyung," meaning "lady of the sea."  Another example is the massive extinct penguin Pachydyptes simpsoni.  A quick look at the species name, "simpsoni," might indicate that the Latin root "sim," meaning "once" in English, is in the name: however, this penguin was actually named for the famous paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson!

Much as Pachydyptes simpsoni would have dove into the oceans off the coast of Australia, let us in turn dive into the number one!  We will start with the cardinal roots for the two languages.  First, in Latin, the root word would be "uni."  You might be thinking of "unicycle" (one wheel), or "unicorn" (one horn).  Here is an example of a biological organism with the root "uni" in its binomial name: meet Monotropa uniflora, the ghost plant!  The name genus name, Monotropa, originates from the Greek roots "mono" and "trop," meaning "once" and "turning" respectively.  Meanwhile, the species name, uniflora, means "one" and "flowered" from the roots "uni" and "flora."  We'll talk about this flower again in a few minutes.

Next, we have the Greek root for "one," which is the root word "hen."  For this root, we will look at another fascinating creature we have about!  Remember the turtle-like placodonts that we talked about in a post a few months back?  (No?  Well you better familiarize yourself with it HERE because otherwise your friends will ostracize you.)  Of these placodonts, one of them received the binomial name "turtle-faced single tooth.)  Called Henodus chelyops, the genus name, Henodus, can be broken down into the Greek roots of "hen" and "odus."  As we already talked about, "hen" means "one," and the root "odus" is the Greek root for "tooth."  (We will probably have an entire blog post just about that one root!)

Wait a second, though let's back up to the ghost plant real fast, Monotropa uniflora.  In this binomial name, the root "uni" was only used once in the binomial name, and yet the English words "once" and "one" were both contained within!  Well, this is because the root "mono" is the multiple Greek root for one!  (Remember, multiple would be like once, twice, thrice, etc.)  Here are some other examples of the root word "mono" used in a biological context:

• One of the three main groups of mammals, the monotremes, get their name from the roots "mono" and "trema," which roughly translates to "single hole."  This refers to the cloaca, a single orifice in many animals that is the only opening for the reproductive, intestinal, and urinary tracts!
• The dubious taxa of ceratopsian dinosaur called Monoclonius, whose name means "single sprout," and refers to the single horn coming out of the snout of the animal!  The remains of Monoclonius are very fragmentary, however, and some paleontologists believe that Monoclonius is simply a bunch of juvenile ceratopsian dinosaurs clumped together, such as Centrosaurus.  

• The scientific name of the narwhal is Monodon monoceros, which is double ones!  The name means one-tooth (mono-don) one-horn (mono-ceros).  The root word "ceros" might sound familiar: remember the ceratopsians?  "Ceratopsian" translates to "horned faces" (cerat=horned, tops=face).  
• This is Monolophosaurus, a Chinese theropod from the Middle Jurassic   It's name, meaning "single-crested lizard," originates from the fact that the animals head plays host to a single large crest running much of the length of the skull!

• Now this little dinosaur is QUITE the interesting fellow: little Mononykus, one of the few dinosaurs whose arms are even stranger than those of Tyrannosaurus rex!  Literally meaning "one claw," Mononykus had a single claw on its arm, and was quite interesting looking!  This three foot long dinosaur was originally named Mononychus, but the name was changed after it was discovered that name was already taken by a beetle, the iris weevil!

We ain't done yet, though!  Remember before when I mentioned that multiple roots can have the same meaning?  Well, there are two multiple Greek roots that mean one, with "mono" being one and "haplo" being the other!  Here are a pair of examples:

• The sauropod called Mongolosaurus haplodon, whose genus name refers to Mongolia and whose species name, "haplodon," translates to "single tooth."  Mongolosaurus, like Monoclonius, is a dubious taxa.

• Here's another sauropod: Haplocanthosaurus, discovered in the Morrison Formation, along with the stegosaur Hesperosaurus, the theropod Allosaurus, and another sauropod called Eobrontosaurus!  However, "Haplocanthosaurus" roughly translates to "simple spined lizard."  This is another example of a root word that has two different meanings: "haplo" can either mean "single," or "simple," making binomial nomenclature anything but.

This is a lot to process for a single post, so I think we will save the twos for next time!

Drive to Dinosaur: Dinosaur Road Trip With Grace Part 1

Last Sunday, my girlfriend Grace Albers and I drove down for a few nights to Dinosaur National Monument in north western Colorado and north eastern Utah!  We saw a TON of awesome things, and I am going to share it all with you over the course of numerous posts!  First off, here are some pictures from our drive down there!

First off, we nabbed a few pics of my cat, Chimney, and dog, Daisy, before we left!

Pyg stops for a rest break at Lake Dillon near Frisco and Silverthorne!

Some pretty scenery on the road again!

A nice lunch of home made pasta salad, thank you mother!

Around Rifle I believe, Grace spotted a bald eagle!  We were moving pretty fast (but not over the speed limit, of course), so we didn't get any good pictures, but it's still enough to tell that it's a bald eagle!

A bit after the bald eagle, we saw some pronghorn, one of my most favorite animals of all time!  We will be talking about the evolution of the pronghorns speed sometime within the next few weeks!

After the pronghorn stopped to look at us in the picture above, the pair took off, and we got some great action shots!

We kept driving, and got some more awesome shots of the surrounding landscape!

It wasn't too long before we saw our second group of pronghorn, this one much larger!  Pyg tried to spot them, but you really need a zoomed in picture to see them.  Actual eyes and a brain don't hurt, either.

Here are some closer pictures of the pronghorn!  Below is a picture of a female.

Next, we have several shots of several pronghorn, with the male being the individual on the far right (or the only individual in the shot).  While female pronghorn have horns just like the males, they are much smaller, and are rarely pronged.

This looks like a female and a calf grazing!

Several shots of the sagebrush shrublands: Grace really enjoyed the landscape, as did I!

Finally, we were getting close to Dinosaur National Monument!  We first reached the Canyon Visitor Center, which is situated right next to the beginning of the Harper's Corner scenic drive, which we will most definitely talk about later on!  While we were at the visitor center, Pyg desperately wanted her picture taken next to this pre-rennaisance, old school Allosaurus model!

Utah, at last!  More state signs need to have dinosaurs on them, in my opinion.

Some more landscape shots!

We reached the small town of Jensen, and then turned north on the final leg of our journey!  Right after the right turn however, we spotted some funky looking deer, and went back a little ways to check it out!  On someones private property was a group of several fallow deer, a species of deer that, although it has its origins in Europe and Asia, has been introduced on every continent except for Antarctica!  There were several small and cute fawns in the mix, as well!  Notice that all of the deer, regardless of age, are spotted.  Unlike the mule and white-tailed deer fawns that live here in Colorado, the adults do not grow out of their white spots, and instead keep them their entire lives!  We actually saw several of these critters at the drive through animal park near my Gramma Roo's house in Texas, click HERE to check out that post, too!

At last, we reached the national park!

We stopped just inside the park to consult the map, and to check out the Green River!  While our side of the river was National Park, the boundary of the park traced the rivers course for aways, as you can see in the picture of the map below.  Right on the other side of the river was actually cultivated farmland, whose green pastures was a stark contrast to the arid sagebrush shrubland and desert right on the other side of the river.  I wonder just how much water they use to keep all those plants green?  We will actually talk more about water related issues in future posts of this series, including a fascinating fact that I learned about a dam!  But that comes later....

There were several Canada geese on one of the sandbars.  It was weird for me to see them out here in the middle of nowhere: usually when I see them, they are pooping all over the green grasses of the schools near my house!

The scenery in the park is pretty spectacular, and here are just a few shots of some of the rocky outcrops that we saw right away!

We finally got to our campground, the Green River Campground (consult the map above), which, as you might have already guessed, is a campground right along the banks of the Green River.  (If you didn't get that one, don't worry about it, it was supposed to be a tough one, most people don't get it the first time, either.)  Here is a shot of some more gorgeous outcrops between the trunks of two cottonwood trees at our campsite, followed by a picture of our tent!

Immediately upon arrival, we were plagued by several golden mantled ground squirrels who were positively itching for food scraps from us humans.

After we'd settled in, we decided to walk down to the river for a few minutes.  It was really gorgeous there, and we saw a ton of what I think are frog eggs in the water!

It was getting late in the day, but before the sun set, we wanted to go exploring.  Grace is super into Archaeology (Grace:Archaeology::Zack:Paleontology), so we decided to go check out: some petroglyphs.

Join us for our next installment, coming shortly: In Which We Check Out Some Petroglyphs!