Tag: #Dinosaurs

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P is for Parasaurolophus

It is my favorite dinosaur, that parasaurolophus. Ain’t he cute? Partly because I just love how that word rolls off the tongue. You’ll get it…

para–like parachute
saur–like “sore”
olo–like “ah-lla”. The big accent is on the “ah” part
phus–“fuss”

para + saura + olophus
“beyond” + “lizard” + “crest”
As in, that dinosaur dude has one heavy-duty crest. It’s beyond, man!

Despite the parasaurolophus being my favorite dinosaur, I was this old when I actually wondered what it meant. I only connected the Greek root dots this morning. Now, you and I both know. You’re welcome.

Dig that Crazy Crest!

It’s a trombone. Seriously, the weird and wacky long head tube was the subject of a lot of speculation. The first parasaurolophus skeleton was discovered in 1921 up in Alberta. They spent decades wondering exactly what the crest was for. Mating calls? Fighting? There were even bizarre hypotheses, categorized under the “discarded hypothesis” section of wikipedia. Several thought it might be a breathing tube, like a snorkel. Let them wade into the copious waters of the mid-Jurassic, maybe to hide from predators. On the other hand, there were a lot of giant marine reptile predators, so not sure how that was going to help them.

Parasaurolophus skull in New Mexico, photo by kajmeister.
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O is for Origin

Darwin’s diary, speculating about species development. Wikipedia.

I hope this doesn’t burst anyone’s bubble, but Charles Darwin did not entirely invent the theory of evolution. Many biologists–or naturalists as they called them then–had an idea that life had changed over time. Darwin added his own special sauce, in his argument On the Origin of Species, but it was part of a chain of scientific proposals. Some of these proposals preceded or ignored the fossil findings. Others tried to fit them within grander narratives, despite evidence that said differently.

The origin of the dinosaurs can be considered from two frameworks. One is about the history of those who found fossils, a topic that has been brushed lightly before. The other is about the first dinosaur itself, a truth that is at the mercy of the fossils themselves. Then, there is the question of what came after, what animal origins emerged once the ruling dinosaurs were forced to bow before E.T. and his Merry Asteroid. Different kinds of origin stories.

Cuvier drawing of elephant parts, wikpedia.

The Origin of Evolution

Evolution and the resistance to evolution was not just about monkeys. The radical notion about change in general was that there had been change to live creatures, and it had lasted millions of years. The Bible had dictated different terms. Seven days. All the creatures, flora and fauna, created in just a part of that time span. As naturalists started digging up things, the idea that million of years had past didn’t fit the religious narrative.

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N is for North Pole

Cryolophosaurus hanging out in the Transantarctic. Photo on Reddit.

Yes, you read that correctly. Dinosaurs in the snow.

There were dinosaurs in the Arctic and in the Antarctic. There have been fossil finds in the north, across Siberia and most recently in Alaska, which have changed the conventional notions about where dinosaurs might have lived. If you’ve seen some of those National Geographic or David Attenborough shows about life on earth, you know that today, life exists everywhere–deepest ocean, darkest and coldest parts of land. Dinosaurs were spread across the globe 90 million years ago, so why wouldn’t they also have adapted to the deepest, darkest, coldest?

Mostly seas in 94 MA. Photo from Global Geology.

Where in the World is the World?

To be fair, the Arctic and Antarctic today were not that way 150 million years ago. First of all, the continents were not the same at all. When the dinosaurs first emerged and adapted to range far and wide, most of the land mass was still connected together, vestiges of a super-mass called Pangaea, which gradually started to drift apart.

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