Episode 404: Common Dinosaur Misconceptions. We correct a lot of the common dinosaurs mistakes in movies, TV shows, toys, games, and art.
You can listen to our free podcast, with all our episodes, on Apple Podcasts at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/i-know-dino/id960976813?mt=2
Links we mentioned in this episode:
- The Natural History Museum in London takes on some dinosaur inaccuracies source
- BBC take on why movie dinosaurs are often inaccurate source
- Alex Hasting’s research on dinosaurs in comic books source
- 32 dinosaur movies, documentaries, and TV shows we’ve watched recently (they’re not all winners) source
- The Doodling Dino reimagines a more realistic version of Arlo from The Good Dinosaur source
- An index of paleoartists by Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs source
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The dinosaur of the day: Chirostenotes
- Oviraptorosaur that lived in the Late Cretaceous in what is now Alberta, Canada
- Looked similar to Oviraptor, walked on two legs, had a long neck and tail, and a crest on the head
- Estimated to be around 8.2 to 8.5 ft (2.5 to 2.6 m) long
- Gregory Paul estimated it weighed 220 lb (100 kg)
- Molina-Pérez and Larramendi estimated it weighed 88 lb (40 kg)
- Had a beak
- Probably an omnivore or herbivore
- Had long, powerful legs and slender toes
- Chirostenotes had long arms, slender, relatively straight claws
- May have gone for soft-bodied prey and impaled and hook them with the second claw, which was unusually straight (grub, amphibians, reptiles, mammals)
- But, if Chirostenotes had large feathers on the finger, which has been found in other oviraptorosaurs, it wouldn’t be able to use it to impale
- Type species is Chirostenotes pergracilis
- First fossils found in 1914 by George Sternberg (pair of hands)
- Lawrence Lambe studied the fossils but died before naming them
- Charles Whitney Gilmore named Chirostenotes in 1924 (name came from Lambe’s notes)
- Genus name means “narrow handed”
- Species name means “throughout gracile”
- Another specimen found, that includes a set of jaws with teeth, but later was renamed to Richardoestesia (a dromaeosaur)
- Chirostenotes did not have teeth
- Other fossils found that were later referred to Chirostenotes (includes feet found, that were originally thought to be Macrophalangia, lower jaws thought to be Caenagnathus)
- Edwin Colbert and Dale Russell suggested in 1969 that Chirostenotes and Macrophalangia were synonymous
- Caenagnathus was found to be an oviraptorosaur (originally thought to be a bird), after the oviraptorid Elmisaurus was described by Osmólska in 1981 (found in Mongolia)
- In 1988, Phil Currie and Dale Russell studied a specimen found in storage in 1923, which helped link all the fossils found. They were all considered to be Chirostenotes
- In 1971, Joël Cracraft named a second species of Caenagnathus (still thought it was a bird)
- Russell and Currie suggested this species was a more gracile, smaller species, and named it a second species of Elmisaurus, as Elmisaurus elegans
- Hans-Dieter Sues renamed Elmisaurus elegans to Chirostenotes elegans in 1997, but then it became Leptorhynchos in 2013
- But later studies found Chirostenotes and Caenagnathus to be distinct from each other
- Other dinosaurs that used to be considered to be Chirostenotes include Epichirostenotes and Anzu
- Funston and Currie in 2019 described newly found Chirostenotes fossils, including jaws, vertebrae, and parts of the hindlimb
- Bruce Rothschild and others in 2001 studied stress fractures in theropods and found that out of 17 Chirostenotes foot bones, only one had stress fractures
- Other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include ankylosaurs, ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, theropods
- Other animals that lived around the same time and place include amphibians, crocodilians, lizards, fish, plesiosaurs, mammals
Fun Fact:
After the novel Jurassic Park was released in 1990, a flood of dinosaur movies started that still continues over 30 years later.
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