The Big Dinosaur Podcast

In our 183rd episode we got to speak with Dr. Elizabeth Rega, a professor of Anatomy and associate vice provost for academic development and academic affairs at Western University of Health Sciences. She’s also a consultant for the animation and gaming industries, and has worked on projects including Disney’s Dinosaur. She specializes in human and nonhuman primate anatomy. Here is her paper on dimetrodon, and a link to “The Complete Dinosaur” that we briefly discussed with her.

Episode 183 is also about Proceratosaurus an early tyrannosauroid whose name can be seen on an embryo cooler in Jurassic Park

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In this episode, we discuss:

News:

• Researchers put Nile crocodiles into an MRI to test how they see and hear
• A Diplodocus hip was found with “signs of possibly being purulent” (puss-filled)
• Germany is making plans to help encourage and train new paleontologists in Tanzania
• The Theo Murphy International Scientific Meeting Sexual Selection: Patterns in the History of Life meeting was held in Buckinghamshire, UK
• Jack Horner is developing 3D dinosaur holograms with Base Hologram
• The Museum at Prairiefire in Overland Park has been struggling financially, but is turning things around
• A “T-Rexplorers” event was held at the Charles B. Philips Library in Newark, IL on May 31
• In Cincinnati, OH, the Rhinegeist Brewery has a dinosaur specimen on display, of Galeamopus
• LifeHacker posted a list of family friendly dinosaur digs (all in the U.S.)
• Riverside, CA has a shop called Sweetosaur that serves dinosaur themed desserts
• Dinosaur Fingerlings are for sale in the U.S.
• Fandango, which sells movie tickets, has added a new “Prop Shop” including Jurassic Park & Jurassic World merchandise
• Claire Dearing from Jurassic World had a video encouraging people to “adopt a dino” to save them
• College Humor created a clip of Owen Grady and Claire Dearing trying to check Blue into a flight as a service animal

The dinosaur of the day Proceratosaurus

• Proceratosaurus
• Name is seen on an embryo cooler in Jurassic Park
• Theropod that lived in the Jurassic in what is now England
• Found in 1910 in Minchinhampton during an excavation for a reservoir
• Found a partial, fragmentary skull of a subadult
• Name means “Before Ceratosaurus”
• Species name in honor of F. Lewis Bradley, who found the specimen
• Arthur Smith Woodward first described the skull as Megalosaurus bradleyi (part of the wastebasket taxon)
• At the time Woodward described the skull, it was the most complete theropod skull known from Europe (that wasn’t crushed and hard to study, like some Compsognathus and Archaeopteryx skulls)
• Woodward thought it was an ancestor of Ceratosaurus, and then Friedrich von Huene agreed in the 1930s with this interpretation (though he thought both were Coelurosauria)
• Friedrich von Huene renamed Megalosaurus bradleyi to Proceratosaurus bradleyi because of its nasal horn, which was similar to Ceratosaurus
• Huene originally used the name Proceratosaurus in an illustrated phylogenetic scheme in 1923
• Named in 1926 (officially) by Friedrich von Huene
• Type species is Proceratosaurus bradleyi
• Thought to be an ancestor to Ceratosaurus, because they had a similar small crest of their snouts. But now it’s considered to be a coelurosaur, and one of the earliest Tyrannosauroidea (basal relatives of tyrannosaurs)
• Scientists re-exmained this in the late 1980s. Gregory Paul thought it was a close relative of Ornitholeses (because of the crest on the nose, though it was later found Ornitholestes did not have a nasal crest). He also thought Proceratosaurus and Ornitholestes were primitive allosauroids, and that the theropod Piveteausaurus was a junior synonym of Proceratosaurus. But it was later found the two are disntinct genera
• Phylogenetic analysis in the early 2000s found Proceratosaurus to be a coelurosaur
• In 2010 Oliver Rauhut and others published a re-evaluation of Proceratosaurus and concluded it was a coelurosaur, and a tyrannosauroid, and most closely related to Guanlong, a tyrannosauroid from China
• Small, about 9.8 ft (3 m) long
• Carnivorous, with serrated teeth
• Had small premaxillary teeth (front) and large lateral teeth (side)
• Had enlarged nostrils and a head crest
• Highly pneumatic skull (lots of holes)
• Like other theropods, probably was bipedal and had a long tail
• Type specimen is in the London Museum of Natural History

Fun Fact:

As pointed out by Brian Switek and Darren Naish, “duck-billed dinosaurs” did not have duck bills.

This episode was brought to you by:

TRX Dinosaurs, which makes beautiful and realistic dinosaur sculptures, puppets, and exhibits. You can see some amazing examples and works in progress on Instagram @trxdinosaurs.

Enter to win a TRX Dinosaurs-made 1:1 scale Velociraptor sculpture. It’s open to anyone in the US or Canada (except Quebec) ages 18 and older to win. Complete rules are at https://iknowdino.com/velociraptor-sculpture-sweepstakes-official-rules

This week’s link to enter is http://bit.ly/Giveaway183