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S is for Skin

Dinosaurs had a lot of skin in the game, even though it’s rather hard to find it 200 million years later. They did have a lot of skin in general. That process of fossilization I described back in letter “F” replaces bone with minerals, though. Skin has to be preserved in a completely different way. It must be mummified, i.e., geologically captured in a unique set of circumstances that don’t allow it be replaced with anything. Skin is tricky to discover.

But there are a few examples, and they can tell us plenty about what the reptile rulers were like.

The preserved Borealopelta, photo on Reddit.

Dino-Mummies

It’s difficult for dinosaur skin to be found intact, but miners in Canada managed to find an exquisitely preserved–it can hardly be called anything else–nearly full skin, complete with horn edges and the face of a type of ankylosaur. This was a nodosaur that they called Borealopelta, meaning “northern shield,” in reference to its discovery origin and covering.

The circumstances of preservation were unusual. Our Borealopelta fell into water when it died, then flipped upside-down. That wasn’t particularly odd as corpses do float after death, typically filling with gases. Perhaps because its thick top layer was so much heavier than the dead, soft underside, the dead animal turned belly-side up, then sank into the mud. It was held fast and did not decay, the sands inside the water acting in this case as a mummifying agent rather than as a conduit to replace living tissue with rock.

When the Canadian paleontologist pulled it out they saw a beautiful set of scales, clearly defining the horns that had long been known as stubborn resistance to predators. Yet they also found something else in the skin. There were remnants of skin-marking melanosomes, the organic things that create coloration and pigmentation.

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R is for Renaissance

Variations of Dinosaur Renaissance images abound. From Creative Mechanics at tumblr.

Didn’t I just write about the history of the Renaissance? Wait, that was 2022, the human renaissance. Today, I’m talking about the Dinosaur Renaissance.

The Dino Renaissance is a well-established phenomenon, one which has spawned books and video series and is now “aging.” It’s captured the popular imagination so much that there are games and apps which advertise “Dinosaur Shakespeare!” and dating complete, with humanoid-dinosaur Romeo, Juliet, and Friar Lawrence. Now, that’s just silly. We don’t need to put a triceratops head on a biped in a dress to understand what the dinosaur renaissance was about. We just need to know about the relatively recent history of paleontology.

Cue the Go-Go music because this story starts in the 1960s.

Deinonychus was the key to the renaissance. Drawn by renaissance-man himself, Robert Bakker.
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Q is for Quetzalcoatlus

Dragon dinosaur. Like Turu the Terrible (that was another Q…more on that in a sec).

Quetzalcoatlus was the largest flying animal ever discovered. Fifty foot wingspan, like a small aircraft. In fact, the first paleontologist named it Q. northropi after–you might guess it– a Northrop aircraft. Massive jaws. As a tall as a giraffe. 500 pounds.

Not, technically, a dinosaur. No anorbital fenestra, wrong kind of hips. Q. northropi belonged under the group called pterosaurs, flying reptiles that had branched off the reptile line before the dinosaurs were completely upright.

But who cares? Look at the size of the wings!

Plus, the perfect candidate for a “Q.”

The First “Q” I Thought Of

“Turu the Terrible” from “Jonny Quest,” 1964, Hanna-Barbera.

When I was laying out my A to Z grid, I original thought of the TV show “Jonny Quest,” because it was a favorite when I was a kid, and it had that super creepy pterodactyl on it. “Turu the Terrible,” he was named. He was carrying off some generic natives, i.e. indigenous people in South America. The adventure-science foursome traced him back to his handler, another old creepy guy in a wheelchair.

What was remarkable about the 1960s Quest was that it was relatively accurate, for its time. Not accurate so much–it was a cartoon and generally used the “monster of the week” formula. But it did try to be a little scientific, and while pterodactyls don’t still exist, Turu was about the right size. He walked awkwardly on his hands and feet, like a chimpanzee, but the way such creatures walked.

And that bizarre throat warbling cry. Still creeps me out. If you’ve never seen any “Jonny Quest” episodes, I do recommend them. Consider the context. At the time, so much information about dinosaurs was outdated and had still had them lumbering and dragging their tails. “Turu” was pretty innovative for its time.

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