Zuul crurivastator (Zuul, destroyer of shins), wikipedia.Zuul, the Gatekeeper of Gozer, photo from collider.com.
Yes, Zuul from Ghostbusters. Zuulwho inhabits Sigourney Weaver’s body in order to search for the Keymaster, schlubby Rick Moranis, so that their coupling will release the demon Gozer into the world. A nerdy fantasy written by nerds for nerds.
I was never a fan of the movie, but yesterday, when I was running down the list of which “Z” dinosaur would get the honor to front my very last post, and I said Zuul, my spouse immediately said Oh! The Gatekeeper of Gozer. Paleontologists, I suppose, are as nerdy as romance writers, medieval historians, and Hollywood directors, so, yes….
The Big One! Asteroid impact site in Chicxulub, Yucatan. Graphic from Atlantic.
BOOM! or maybe it was boom…boom…fshhhh..whap booma-booma…boom..bubble boom glub glub Boom…
Which was it? Luis Alvarez had one story, and he was laughed out of the paleontologist’s room. Until he wasn’t. Gerta Keller, who disagreed with him, has been laughed out of the same rooms. She’s won prizes for her research. Can they both be right?
There are multiple stories here. First, there is a story of a scientist who had a crazy idea and some data, which took decades for scientists to confirm. Then, there’s a second story, of a scientist still fighting for her own version, one which would upend those decades. Plus, there’s the underlying story, of what killed off all the dinosaurs. Between story one and story two, there’s still uncertainty about story three.
It’s been called “The Nastiest Feud in Science.” It’s still ongoing, even though now they do know where the asteroid hit. The crater is in the Yucatan.
Pteranodon longiceps, at the NY Museum of Natural History
The flying dinosaur is a tricky concept. If you search “flying dinosaur,” you get a hundred sites that refer to pterosaurs as flying dinosaurs. But they’re not dinosaurs; they’re not on the dinosaur clade (family tree). They don’t have the right kind of hips or the hole in their head (see Letter “A”). Maybe 10% of those internet sites put “flying dinosaur” in quotes to show they at least know something, although most don’t bother (including MSN, Youtube, LiveScience and so on). Just to be clear, pterosaurs were flying reptiles, but not dinosaurs. Now that we have that out of the way, they were also cool. Just look at the bones, the arms, the wings!!!!
Meanwhile, scientists talk about non-avian and avian dinosaurs. What’s that about? Some reputable sites say the non-avians meant cold-blooded, the big giant sauropods. Others label all dinosaurs non-avian except for the one line, Avialea, that produced the modern birds. To recap, flying reptilian pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. Birds are avian dinosaurs. I would argue that makes all other dinosaurs non-avian. And one specific type of non-avian dinosaur was so close to birds that it may be considered a missing link between the two bird and dinosaur branches.
Whether dinosaurs or avian or not, their flight is also the subject of the day. How did they fly–compared with modern fliers? And what was so unusual about archaeopteryx, the fossil with a feather? I want to acknowledge right up front that I was inspired in this post by the paleontologist guru professor of the Rediscovering the Age of Dinosaurs Great Course, Kristi Curry Rogers. She specifically compared pterosaurs–those wonderful flying giant reptiles–to birds and bats, so I am going to borrow and share several of her ideas here.
