SnoQap

May 10

May 10 A Beginner’s Guide to Theropods, Part 4: TYRANNOSAURS!

The tyrannosaurids of the late Late Cretaceous were in a unique position. While earlier theropods had spread freely across the continents, tyrannosaurs lived in a world of fragmented continents and inland seaways. In Asia and western North America, where they were restricted, rising mountains and ebbing seaways formed a huge diversity of habitats, inhabited by a huge diversity of hadrosaurs and ceratopsians. For the first time in theropod history, there were not only no other giant apex predators, but the next biggest carnivorous dinosaurs - dromaeosaurs and troodontids - were over an order of magnitude smaller than they were (Holtz). This meant they were free to not only inherit the role of big-game hunters but, throughout their ontogeny, to maintain their ancestral roles as mid-sized, long-legged pursuers of small, fast animals.

Apr 3

Apr 3 A Beginner’s Guide to Theropods, Part 3: Giant Killers and Lesser Tyrants

Stefan Lungu

Science & Nature

By the beginning of the Late Jurassic, the global supercontinent had begun to break up. Seaways had split off the Northern and Southern landmasses, Asia was an island, and Europe was a Tethys-spanning archipelago. And all of it, from the Chinese Shaximiao to the Tanzanian Tendaguru, was ruled by allosauroids.

Mar 26

Mar 26 A Beginner’s Guide to Theropods, Part 2: Crests, Horns and Sails

Stefan Lungu

Science & Nature

The Early Jurassic World was a very uniform one. After the extremes of heat and drought that characterized the Triassic, a brief period of global cooling had reduced their therapsid and croc-line competitors to a handful of small mammals and lizardlike creatures and allowed the formerly restricted dinosaurs to spread throughout the world (Dunne et al). With the continents joined together, there were no major barriers to their dispersal, and so for the first time in dinosaur history, faunas the world over looked much the same (Holtz). Some faunal elements would have been familiar, if rare, parts of a Late Triassic ecosystem: long-tailed pterosaurs in the air, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs in the sea, bipedal prosauropods and small coelophysids on land. Others were more novel: elephant-sized sauropods, bipedal and armored ornithischians, and hunting them all, the first truly large (6m+), apex-predator theropods.

Mar 19

Mar 19 A Beginner’s Guide to Theropods, Part 1: Setting the Scene

Stefan Lungu

Science & Nature

Theropods (meat-eating dinosaurs) permeate popular culture. Anyone who’s ever had a passing interest in dinosaurs knows T. rex and Velociraptor. They fill books and movies; they’re perpetual objects of childhood fascination for their size, power, and ferocity. They’re windows into a world lost forever, that we can only ever look dimly into. And, in the form of birds, they’re still around today. In this series, we’ll be looking at the Mesozoic through the eyes of theropods, taking a walk up the tree of life and through time to track the ever-changing Mesozoic world and our changing knowledge of it. We’ll see the roles they played in their ecosystems and look at their evolution and diversity, along with a number of historically important discoveries that helped enrich our view of the Age of Reptiles and the predators that stalked through it.