Results of Ruminations

I have been talking about dinosaurs here for a while . And since  some rumors  about the new Jurassic World franchise have been floating, I thought I'd revisit what I wrote about Jurassic World  and point out where I would go in completely different directions. For starters, I would skip the horrible concept of "weaponizing dinosaurs", despite it being a large theme in the film. After all, Crichton originally imagined Jurassic Park  because he felt only entertainment would front the money needed to refine the tech and allow the cloning to happen. It's a sad commentary on our world, I think, that twenty years later, we figure the only people who want dinosaurs are those who are looking to exploit them for war. Now, chucking off one of the themes is in and itself problematic. After all, it was clearly an important part to the filmmakers' vision of Jurassic World.  But if you think about it, there' s already precedence for dropping inconvenient plot poi...

Flicking through Twitter, I saw this thread from a paleontologist I follow named Brian Switek. I met him a year and a half ago whilst teaching a Winterim class about dinosaurs. He guided us through the National History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City and even took us through the special collections that's normally not shown to the public. At his offering, one of the students licked a coprolite  in order to verify that it was, indeed, a fossil.* Anyway, Switek's a cool guy and a good author (his My Beloved Brontosaurus  is a great, lay-person friendly read. I have two copies), plus he's a dinosaur fanatic (obviously), so there's a lot of common ground there. His short tweetstorm reminded me about my own first exposure to Jurassic Park, inspiring me to write this essay. Summer of 1993 Like most boys, I grew up fascinated by dinosaurs. I have dim, dim  memories of going downstairs to a library--probably in Provo, Utah--to pick out a book. I couldn't read at the...

Amid the perpetual noise of the internet and the jockeying for additional outrage over the latest political scandal--an almost daily occurrence these days--there's been a lot of clicks baited through headlines (which I'm quoting, not linking to, because I don't want to give them the satisfaction of having another visitor to their websites) such as "A 130-Year-Old Fact About Dinosaurs Might Be Wrong" and "Astonishing Discovery About Dinosaurs Shocks Scientists"* and my personal favorite, "A new theory could overturn one of the most central 'facts' about dinosaurs". Curious about this, I followed the link provided by one of the many paleontologists I follow on Twitter, which pointed me to a blog post by Dr. Paul Barrett. In his post " Shaking the tree ...", he explains the basic thesis of what he's conceived of, though the full article is behind a paywall from Nature  magazine**. It's not particularly technical, and...

A video hit my timeline a little while ago. It comes from earlier in the year. The main idea is summed up in this little Vine: In typical lack-of-nuance reporting, a lot of people took this to mean that all  dinosaurs were incapable of vocalization, and instead relied on syrinx to create sounds more like modern day birds do. Instead, if you read the conclusion of the report (or watch this video about it), you'll see that we're not talking about dinosaurs qua dinosaurs, but instead the branch of dinosaurs that filled a different evolutionary niche that survived the K-T extinction (and all the history of dinosaurs that came before it). Science on a straight line. Clear as can be. Found here . I like to think of it as working on an address, but backwards. The address of my house would be the far right of that diagram above ("Living birds")--very specific, easily observable. Then we have the road on which my house resides, which is connected to a larger thoroug...

I watched Jurassic World last night. Short version: I liked it quite a bit. Long version: I have a love/love relationship with the Jurassic Park series, a love that blossomed when the first film came out in 1993. The novel Jurassic Park was the first 'adult book' (so called in my brain because 1) my dad read it, and 2) it was found in airport bookstores, which never carried any of the Dragonriders of Pern or Spider-Man novels that comprised most of my reading diet at the time) I read. I knocked the whole thing out over a weekend while in 6th grade. I still remember hauling the battered paperback in the inside pocket of my coat, thrilled that it fit. Memories of the summer of '93 are still fresh in my mind: Seeing the 7-Eleven cups with scenes from the movie and having no context why a guy was hugging a triceratops; the giddy thrill of seeing the cup of water oscillate; laughing at some of the few jokes I understood; identifying with little Timmy as a young, m...

I'm confident many (read: three or four) people will want me to weigh in on today's exciting news  about the maybe-reinstatement of Brontosaurus  as a "real" dinosaur. I'm not terribly thrilled. "What?" I can hear you say. "But you love dinosaurs!" Yes. Yes, I do. But I really love what's real  about dinosaurs, and what's real is what's understood through a very meticulous process of the scientific method, analyses, and debates. One paper does not an improper classification change. See, the Internet's deep love for Pluto and Brontosaurus (I've decided not to put it into quotation marks the way Brian Switek does throughout his incredible book, My Beloved Brontosaurus   because that's a stylistic choice that I'm not super fond of) has given a disproportionate sense of science having 'robbed' childhoods and assumptions due to best guesses made off of insufficient data. This sense of victimhood--of depriv...

In the summer of 1993--at the crisp age of ten--a movie came out that I loved: Last Action Hero . Being enamored of action movies and Arnold Schwarzenegger, I enjoyed Last Action Hero immensely. I watched it again a couple of years ago and found that it's an even better movie than I had thought. Subversive, self-aware, satirical, it has all the earmarks of a great work under-appreciated in its time.* The reason few people remember Last Action Hero is because of one major monster movie that came out one week before it: Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs were eating up the box office reviews, ticket sales, and summer blockbuster buzz. Even Arnold can't walk away from going toe-to-toe against a tyrannosaurus rex. Perhaps ten is when my memory truly began to coalesce. I have manifold and distinct images in my mind of that time--and most of it comes from Jurassic Park. I can vividly recall how confused (and excited) I was to see the McDonald's cups that depicted moments fro...