The Dino Hotel Nears Completion! Part 2

As I mentioned IN THE LAST POST, the Best Western Denver Southwest is nearing its completion!  Soon, it will be the most powerful natural history hotel/museum in the entire galaxy!  In this post, we are going to see more of what makes this dinosaur hotel so freaking awesome!  Let's check out some of the skulls and bones that are going to go in the hotel!  First off, an awesome skull of an Acrocanthosaurus!

A bunch of other awesome bones for the hotel were delivered a few months ago to the Morrison Natural History Museum since the lobby at the hotel wasn't finished yet!  Any guesses as to what is inside of the crate?

I hate to say it, but your guesses were probably wrong.  Here is what was inside, with Pyg modeling for scale!  First off, a pair of Brachiosaurus femora!

A Pachycephalosaurus skull!

One day when the Pachycephalosaurus skull was at the museum, Dr. Bob came in one day with a few other pachycephalosaur skulls belonging to Stygimoloch and Dracorex, and had us paint them!  

You can see that all three skulls are approximately the same size: there's NO way that they are all the same animal, as some paleontologists believe!

Another great picture of the Pachycephalosaurus skull!

Here's another dinosaur skull, this one is Edmontosaurus!

And the third and final awesome skull, a Camarasaurus!

The hotel has many other cool specimens, such as this Allosaurus skull, which was in the lobby!

Not only are there some FANTASTIC skulls, the hotel has some casts of fossil skeletons, as well!  Here is the plan for Wadsworth the Stegosaurus, hanging above the front desk!

First, here is Good Sir Wadsworth before being brought inside!

Wadsworth being hung up!

And finally, the lobby, complete in all of its glory!  Notice the Brachiosaurus femora off to the left, and the Edmontosaurus skull in the cabinet around the middle of the picture!

Here are some more great pictures from the lobby!  Here are the curiosity cabinets under construction:

And the final product, with the Allosaurus skull above the fireplace!

If you travel to the dining hall, right off the lobby, you can enjoy lots of fun food, just as an enormous Tylosaurus (now named Sophie) would have done 70 million years ago!  First, some pictures of Sophie!

The flipper of the specimen!

As we mentioned before, this Tylosaurus wasn't hungry when it died!  In the stomach of this beatsie are the remains of a small creature called Dolichorhynchops!  To learn more about both Tylosaurus and Dolichorhynchops, click the link HERE!

Some days, you can also check out a fun-filled and exciting fossil table, crammed full of awesome goodies!  Here are several shots of that!

They also have an awesome donation box for the Morrison Museum!  This mosasaur skull, belonging to another Western Interior Seaway critter called Clidastes, will sit inside of it!

Indeed, this hotel is full of prehistoric from top to bottom!  Actually, literally to the top, as the hotel will have a Pteranodon weathervane!  Here are the plans, and the actual weathervane itself!

Want to hear more about the hotel, but just won't be in the area anytime soon?  Not a problem!  Like their Facebook page by clicking HERE!  Not only do they share lots of awesome pictures and fun facts, they also create lots of fun Dino Memes!  Here is one of my favorites (partly because they included a link to our Xiphactinus: The Inception Fossil post when they uploaded the picture to Facebook!), but partly because it's an awesome meme!

And here is the first in a series of "Fun Fact" memes that I am working on with the Tally's!

Hope to see you all at the hotel!

Top Ten Pokémon Inspired By Real Animals

Many of you are probably familiar with the popular video game and TV series "Pokémon."  While I myself never got into it, a few months ago, I did a post about the axolotl, a fascinating little salamander. While I was researching the post (which you can view by clicking HERE), I found that a Pokémon called Wooper was based off of the axolotl.  I thought this was pretty funny, as I thought that no one had ever really heard of the axolotl, much less based a video game character after it!  The more digging I did, the more I realized that this is a fairly common theme: a great many Pokémon are based off of real animals, both living and dead!  So I thought that for the birthday post of my good friend Masaki Kleinkopf, we could look at the Top Ten Pokémon Inspired By Real Animals!

1.  Farfetch'd - Duck

According to my Pokémon sources (AKA the Internet), the Farfetch'd is supposed to live in and around water, just like a real duck!  It's also supposed to taste pretty good: again, like a real duck!

2.  Lanturn - Anglerfish

Probably one of the freakiest animals in the animal kingdom, the deep-sea loving anglerfish bait other fish closer with the so-called "esca" on its head.  The little fish swim closer, attracted to the bioluminescence emanating from the esca, and then the anglerfish snaps them up.  The name of this Pokémon is clearly an homage to this glowing appendage.

3.  Shieldon - Ceratopsian

The ceratopsians are a large group of dinosaurs containing one of the most famous dinosaurs of all time: Triceratops.  Although most sources state that Shieldon is based off of Triceratops, the Pokémon differs in that it has no horns.  This makes a more likely candidate for the origin of Shieldon another, more primitive ceratopsian called Protoceratops.  If you click on the link to a post HERE and scroll down to the second picture, you can see a picture of the skull of Protoceratops.

4.  Sandslash - Pangolin

The Pokémon called Sandslash is clearly based off of a funny, but quite fascinating, animal called the pangolin.  Sandlash features the dermal armor of the pangolin (a fancy way of saying "armor formed from hardened skin, akin to the armadillo"), as well as the massive claws.  The claws, in both the pangolin and, apparently, Sandslash, can be used to attack potential threats, as well as burrowing.  The pangolin uses its claws to burrow into termite mounds, consuming them by the thousands.  Sandslash can also roll into a ball to defend itself from attack, just like the pangolin: however, I don't think that the pangolin can roll away from its attacker while in "ball mode."  For a song about dermal armor that features, amongst many other things, the pangolin, click HERE!

5.  Relicanth - Coelacanth

Relicanth is based off of a very unassuming, but entirely fascinating, fish called the coelacanth.  For many, many years, conventional wisdom had dictated that the coelacanth went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period, along with the non-avian dinosaurs, the pterosaurs, and the massive marine reptiles. This assumed extinction was backed up by the fact that no fossils had been discovered, at least none that had been positively attributed to the coelacanth.  It wasn't until 1938, when a live coelacanth was pulled up off the coast of Madagascar, that scientists realized that perhaps the coelacanth wasn't quite as dead as they thought it was.  Since then, other sites along the coast of Africa, as well as in Indonesia, have yielded live coelacanths, giving the prehistoric fish a title it very much deserves: a living fossil.  According to the Pokédex in the game (a sort of encyclopedia that talks all about the different Pokémon), the Relicanth was also recently discovered, and is also labeled as a "living fossil."

6.  Tirtouga - Archelon

So apparently, some Pokémon can evolve, which is another cool and clever way of adding science into video games without making the video games dumb and boring.  Apparently, the Pokémon Tirtouga isn't necessarily based off of the massive sea turtle Archelon, but Tirtouga actually evolved into another Pokémon called Carracosta that is based off of Archelon.  Tirtouga appears to be based off of either the extant (still living, opposite of extinct) leatherback sea turtle, or perhaps another extinct sea turtle called Protostega.  Either way, all three sea turtles look pretty much the same!

7.  Archen - Archaeopteryx

It's in the name: clearly, the name Archen is based off of the name Archaeopteryx, a fossil bird that is widely considered to be the missing link (at least the first in a long line of links) between dinosaurs and birds.  First discovered in the 1800s, the feathered fossil of Archaeopteryx helped famed naturalist Charles Darwin and his followers to promote his ideas about evolution and natural selection.  According to the Pokédex, Archen is not able to fly, leading people to speculate that Archen is also based partly off of other, non-flying feathered dinosaurs, such as Velociraptor or Deinonychus.

8.  Lileep - Crinoids

Up until last week, I'd never devoted a whole lot of thought to the evolutionary relationships of a fascinating group of creatures called crinoids.  In my mind, if they look like plants, they're probably plants!  Well, I was wrong: the crinoids are actually echinoderms, just like sea urchins and sea stars, and are actually animals!  I also didn't realize that crinoids were still around today: I knew that there were a ton of them in the past, but I didn't realize that some of them had survived to the present day!  Many people believe that Lileep is based off of these strange animals, and it's not too hard to see the resemblance!

9.  Cranidos - Pachycephalosaurus

Of all of the pachycephalosaurs, Pachycephalosaurus seems like the most likely candidate for the inspiration of the strange Pokémon called Cranidos.  The main means of attack of this Pokémon is by head-butting its opponents, a means of combat long attributed to the pachycephalosaurs.  This head-butting is currently under a lot of scrutiny, with some paleontologists saying that yes, of course pachycephalosaurs head-butted each other, in the same fashion that bighorn sheep do today.  On the other hand, some paleontologists say that there is no way these guys could head-butt each other, as their necks would simply snap after a few impacts.  Other paleontologists believe that they did use their heads for head-butting, but not in the way that the previous two groups were hypothesizing: instead of getting a running start and then cracking heads, bighorn sheep style, they would instead just lock heads without the running start, like many types of deer and elk that spar today.  Still others propose that maybe these dinosaurs were smacking each other in the side or in the flank.  Like many facets of paleontology, we may never know what, exactly, they did with their craniums. 

10.  Anorith - Anomalocaris

This is the Pokémon that really inspired me to do a post like this.  Anomalocaris is one of my favorite animals because it is just so weird looking!  Living in the Cambrian Period, about 500 million years ago (MYA), Anomalocaris is definitely one of those animals that does not get a lot of the limelight.  Often found amongst the various and assorted crazies from the Burgess Shale in Canada, Anomalocaris is definitely something that I never expected to be in a video game!  Nevertheless, here it is!

This was the birthday post of Masaki Kleinkopf! Happy birthday, Masaki! If you have a birthday coming up, just email me the date at cuyvaldar123946@gmail.com with the date and your favorite animals, and I will do my best to get a post in! And if you like what you are reading, please feel free to follow us here or via Facebook!

Top 10 Favorite Dinosaurs by Zack Neher (Part 2)

Part two of my Top Ten Favorite Dinosaurs list.  Enjoy!

6. Pachycephalosaurus

The largest of the pachycephalosaurs, the name Pachycephalosaurus translates to "thick-headed lizard."  A large orbital socket indicates good vision, and, according to my "Prehistoric Life" book, the small teeth in its mouth indicates either herbivory or omnivory.  I have never heard anyone ever say anything about the pachycephalosaurs being omnivorous, so I have doubts about the authenticity of the statement.  Jack Horner suggested that Pachycephalosaurus and the other two pachycephalosaurs that lived in North America at the same time, Dracorex and Stygimoloch, were actually the same dinosaur and just represented different ontogenetic stages in their growth development, but that hypothesis has been almost completely refuted.  Due to the extremely tough-looking and thick skull, many paleontologists also have suggested that the pachycephalosaurs would clash heads much like the extant bighorn sheep, but studies of the necks of these animals indicate that these animals were likely not able to do this without breaking their necks.  Needless to say, this behavior was probably not something that they would attempt to do more than once.  Remains of Pachycephalosaurus have been found in the United States in the states of Wyoming, South Dakota, and Montana.

5. Amargasaurus

A fairly small sauropod, Amargasaurus is certainly quite unusual, as you can see in the pictures below!  On each of its twelve neck, or cervical vertebrae, a pair of spikes project out.  The functions of these spikes are unknown, but many theories have been put forth, from defense, to a sail being attached between each of the spikes to make the animal look bigger, even for heat control.  If a sail was not attached to the spikes, it is likely that they were covered in a layer of horn.  Whatever was on those spikes, it doesn't look like Amargasaurus had a very wide range of vertical mobility in its neck, so it seems likely that the small sauropod would have been mostly a ground-level feeder.  Amargasaurus has been found in Argentina in South America.

4. Utahraptor

While making Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg decided that the real-life Velociraptor wasn't scary enough for his movie.  Not only was Velociraptor actually pretty small (see the size comparison chart below), it was feathered!  But while they were making the movie, remains of the creature that would one day be known as Utahraptor were uncovered, and Spielberg had his monster.  (If you want to read more about this interesting happenstance, check out the introduction to Robert T. Bakker's FANTASTIC novel, Raptor Red, one of my top five favorite books of all time).  Utahraptor remains have been discovered in (can you guess?  I hope you can!) Utah. 

TO BE CONCLUDED IN PART 2

What REALLY Killed the Dinosaurs?

Today, almost all paleontologists believe in one of two scenarios that brought upon the downfall of the dinosaurs; the Silver Bullet Hypothesis, and the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis.  Proponents of the Silver Bullet Hypothesis consider the asteroid that hit Mexico 65.5 MYA to be the cause of the dinosaurs extinction, while fans of the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis believe that the asteroid worked in concert with other factors, like a number of extraordinarily large volcanic impacts and receding sea levels.  Although both of these hypotheses hold great weight, and stand up well to investigation, I find myself more in the Silver Bullet camp.  (If you are unsure, check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gqq2rgOmi8 .  It's a bit long, but you can skip parts of it and still get the gist.  I was simply blown away after watching it, and landed smack-dab in the center of the Silver Bullet camp.)

However, this post is not to talk about the merits of the generally accepted dinosaur-death hypotheses; just like the post regarding the oddly named animals (http://thenaturalworld1.blogspot.com/2012/07/masiakasaurus-knopfleri-and-other.html), Scott Sampson's book Dinosaur Odyssey had another especially interesting tale, a tale about the many different hypotheses (over one hundred in all!) about how the dinosaurs died from over the years.  Here are some of the more interesting ones, quoted from Scott Sampson's book:

1.   Disease
2.   Slipped Vertebral Discs:  Because dinosaurs were so big
3.   Loss of Interest in Sex
4.   Poisonous Plants 1:  The consumption of these plants led to a deadly diarrhea amongst the dinosaurs
5.   Poisonous Plants 2:  The consumption of these plants led to a deadly constipation amongst the dinosaurs
6.   Fungal Invasions
7.   Climatic Change 1:  Global Warming
8.   Climatic Change 2:  Global Cooling
9.   Cosmic Radiation From a Supernova
10.  Egg-Eating Mammals
11.  Sunspots
12.  Nasty Aliens
13.  Not Enough Room on Noah's Ark
14.  The Racial Senility Hypothesis:  Dinosaurs, as a group, were young and restless when they first appeared in the Late Triassic Period.  During the Early Jurassic, the dinosaurs experienced "adolescence," as they expanded "in both form and diversity."  When they reached the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous, the dinosaurs had "reached their evolutionary peak;" they were middle-aged, and had nowhere to go but down.  Thus, in the Late Cretaceous Period, when the dinosaurs like Triceratops, Parasaurolophus, and Pachycephalosaurus grew interesting crests, frills and the like, these were "the result of hormones gone wild and certainly symbolic of a group on its way out."

Obviously, some of these solutions are more interesting than others, but all of them are, at this point in the study of dinosaurs, outdated.  But who knows: perhaps, someday soon, someone will discover proof that it was aliens, and not an asteroid, that ultimately did-in the dinos.