The popularity of dinosaurs - for better, for worse

This article is being cross-posted at the website of the London-based 2016 Popularizing Palaeontology workshop as part of a series of blog posts focusing on the discussions and themes of that event. Over the course of this two day workshop curators, artists, historians and palaeontologists presented talks and led round-table discussions about the history and current state of palaeontological outreach. I presented a talk at this workshop - entitled 'The importance and impact of palaeoart in palaeontological outreach', which you can see here. The following is not based on this talk, but rather a theme that seemed - to me - to be consistent across many presentations and discussions, including my own.

Whether it's a giant armoured thyreophoran like Panoplosaurus mirus (thanks to the Empress of Ankylosauria, Victoria Arbour, for advice on this restoration) or a svelte theropod like Chirostenotes pergracilis, everyone likes dinosaurs and we - palaeontologists - like using them in our outreach. But are dinosaurs really universally popular and appropriate for the wide range of outreach we use them in?

The Popularizing Palaeontology workshops held in August 2016 presented fascinating insights into the history and current state of palaeontological outreach. Our many talks and roundtable discussions touched varied topics but several central themes emerged, of which one was the prevalence of dinosaurs in virtually all palaeontological PR exercises. Whatever we discussed - the history of museums, the palaeoart industry, public interest in research or palaeontological influences on cinema - dinosaurs were almost always involved. Even if they weren’t a main focus, their influence there - catalysing certain events, influencing decisions, eclipsing other outreach topics. It would be wrong to say popularising palaeontology is totally synonymous with popularising dinosaurs, but for better and worse, these animals have a major role and influence over public outreach of palaeontological science.

The success of dinosaurs in outreach

Exactly why dinosaurs occupy such an important and influential space in popular culture remains largely mysterious. On paper, dinosaurs are a group of extinct reptiles which are not - superficially at least - so different from other long-dead sauropsids, and yet they have somehow gained global fame and many dedicated followers. My suspicion is that dinosaurs uniquely combine obviously amazing, ‘high impact’ anatomy - large size, fantastic skeletal structures such as horns, huge teeth and so on - with bauplans that are easily understood by the general public, without being so familiar that they’re pedestrian. For instance, everyone can appreciate Allosaurus as an active, large bodied predator even if just looking at its skeleton in a museum, but - as bird-like as it is in detail - the overall form is somewhat alien and intriguing. Other fossil groups, such as ancient carnivorans or whales, are impressive enough but perhaps also too familiar to inspire our imaginations in the same way. At the other end of the spectrum are extinct creatures which are just too unusual for widespread appreciation. Perhaps their anatomy is too strange or their life histories are too obscure and difficult to relate to familiar biology. This applies to many extinct invertebrates, as well as several types of weirder vertebrates. Dinosaur biology is thus near perfect for outreach material: they’re visually impressive, anatomically and biologically accessible, but different enough to warrant interest. Whether this is the actual basis for dinosaurian appeal or not, museum staff, educators and merchandisers have realised for over 150 years that dinosaurs are an excellent way to interest the public and make money, and given them prominent roles in outreach. Aiding any intuitive draw we have to dinosaurs is a lot of social inertia, and part of the enduring appeal of dinosaurs is a long history of ingraining them into popular culture.

The success of dinosaurs in the public eye almost certainly reflects many varied influences, but their unique anatomical qualities may play an important role. Does any other fossil group combine interesting, ‘high impact’ biology, in a format that the public can easily grasp, in the way that dinosaurs do?

For those of us interested in science education, dinosaurs are one of the most important and potent tools at our disposal. We see them as not only fascinating subjects in their own right but as a way to introduce ‘bigger picture’, perhaps fundamentally more important, scientific concepts to lay audiences. Dinosaurs are gateways to discussions of evolution, adaptation, anatomy, biological diversity, extinction, geological time and the changing nature of the planet. They provide, as charismatic and fantastic creatures, perfect characters to maintain interest in discussions of these sometimes complex concepts, and well-known Mesozoic dramas - the breakup of Pangea, formation of the Deccan Trapps, the Chicxulub Impact - offer rich backgrounds to stage our conversations. Dinosaurs are more than just awesome animals: they’re public ambassadors for science, facts and intelligent thinking.

We cannot ignore the economic value of dinosaurs, too - and not just to Hollywood movie makers and toy manufacturers. Dinosaurs provide academia and its satellite industries with vital income because of their easy marketability and merchandising potential. Public interest in dinosaur news, books and artwork keeps authors and palaeoartists in work, while the pull of dinosaur exhibitions in natural history museums not only keeps turnstiles spinning but brings essential revenue - in the form of gift shop purchases, entry fees and cafe visits - to these underfunded venues. I don’t know that anyone has ever attempted to work out the net worth of dinosaurs to education, but, globally, their appeal must bring millions of pounds into venues that perform outreach every year.

Too much of a good thing?

So hurrah for dinosaurs, then, and their role as not only fascinating subjects for research and art, but as bankable, relatable and demanded elements of modern culture. But the popularity of dinosaurs does have an impact on other aspects of palaeontological PR, and in some conversations at our workshop ‘dinosaur’ almost became a bit of dirty word. No-one will deny the positive aspects of dinosaur popularity, but their dominance in popularised palaeontology influences outreach strategies, merchandising and public expectation, and not always in a positive way.

Some of the problems caused by dinosaurs were outlined in detail during talks at our workshop. We heard that a large portion of natural history museum visitors are exclusively concerned with seeing dinosaur exhibits, challenging natural history museums to use the rest of their collections in a meaningful, impactful manner. This is despite many museum goers being unable to distinguish dinosaur remains from those of other animals without the aid of helpful signage. It seems that, for some museum visitors, dinosaurs act like a brand label, or justification for interest, rather than an excuse to visit a museum for a rounded educational experience.

We also heard that bringing attention to non-dinosaur groups can be extremely difficult, and the less dinosaur-like they are, the harder it is. Groups like pre-Cenozoic synapsids, extinct invertebrates, fossil fish and so on struggle for attention and require highly creative outreach tactics to receive any interest. One of the commonest strategies - used frequently for semi-technical books on fossil animals (below) - is to make sure dinosaurs remain prominently mentioned even in those events or products which are focused on completely unrelated groups of animals. We just don’t trust most non-dinosaur clades to draw crowds or revenue on their own and have to spin them as being relevant to dinosaurs in some way. Tellingly, the only groups to escape frequent dinosaur namechecking are those which are already somewhat ‘dinosaur-like’. Giant fossil mammals, pterosaurs and Mesozoic marine reptiles share aspects of size and gross appearance with Mesozoic dinosaurs and might be seen as ‘honorary dinosaurs’ by the public, and perhaps mistakenly interpreted as the genuine article by many. Both dinosaur-targeted museum visits and our resistance to promote palaeontological topics without a dinosaurian safety net questions whether dinosaurs are a genuine ‘gateway’ to wider scientific education, and perhaps suggests a rather narrower interest in prehistoric life among the public.

Just some of the non-dinosaurian textbooks coming your way in 2017. Probably.

Our group also raised the association between dinosaur outreach and very young demographics, and the challenge this presented to educators. The problem isn’t that many children are naturally interested in dinosaurs - if anything, this is something to celebrate and encourage - but the impact this association has on older audiences. Many adults assume that anything to do with dinosaurs, and by extension any prehistoric animal, is automatically related to children, and often very young children. This becomes an issue for to those attempting to perform outreach or market palaeontologically-informed products to older audiences, and particularly outside of online venues. Experience shows that ‘real world’ dinosaur events - regardless of venue, event type or advertising theme - will be primarily stocked by children and parents expecting child-friendly media. I’ve experienced this many times in my outreach career, such as bowing to pressure for colouring-in stations at a palaeoart gallery, being asked whether a public lecture (entitled Palaeoart: the Never Ending Quest for Accuracy) was suitable for toddlers, and being invited to run art stalls and events for older audiences at dinosaur-themed events to find few interested people over 10 years of age.

The general expectation that dinosaur-related events or products skew towards children presents a complex set of challenges. Firstly, it can lead to older audiences deciding a priori that they cannot take anything away from dinosaur outreach because the event - whatever it is - is ‘just for kids’. I’m sure many of us have seen how ‘switched off’ parents of young dinosaur fanatics are when visiting outreach events, even though the people their children are speaking to may be expert scientists, experienced fossil hunters or world-renowned palaeoartists. Secondly, mismatched expectations of outreach events can be frustrating for both outreachers and audiences: attendees may wonder why a dinosaur event is pitched above the level of their children, while outreachers may feel over-prepared or over-invested in their activity programme when confronted with only young audiences. Perhaps the most concerning issue is that many outreachers and merchandisers use young demographics as an excuse for low scientific standards and sensationalism, promoting outdated, erroneous and sometimes idiosyncratic views of palaeontology because their audience is too young and insufficiently educated to know otherwise, or ignoring scientific data where it might curb child appeal. I am sure most readers can think of numerous examples of products - many labelled as ‘educational’ - which show evidence of this, and it’s easy to see how this attitude may play a major role in perpetuating outdated and erroneous ideas about the past.

One of our final discussion touched on perhaps another issue faced by dinosaur outreach: the schism between public and palaeontological appreciation of what dinosaurs are. For palaeontologists, dinosaurs are a constantly - and sometimes rapidly - evolving set of hypotheses and ideas, and this is what we generally try to present to the world in our outreach. But certain dinosaur concepts outgrew palaeontologist-steered media long ago and now occupy their own place in popular culture, one almost entirely divorced from developments of dinosaur science and instead orbiting their portrayals in film, TV and popular literature. Most of these products - even those produced in the last few years - stick to now long-outdated 20th century interpretations of dinosaur biology and, divorced from guiding hands of scientists, solely emphasise marketable aspects such as their size, perceived ferociousness, and unusual anatomy. The result is a public largely familiar with dinosaurs in a scientifically-distanced, simplified and monstrous form rather than the animals reconstructed through biological and geological sciences, and with little appreciation for their evolutionary context, the scientific techniques used to understand them, or their relationship to wider, ‘core themes’ of scientific outreach. Recent studies partly vindicate this view in showing that the public are generally unaware of even the most basic aspects of dinosaur science, such as the near 50-year old revision from the classic ‘tail-dragging’ posture to an elevated tail and horizontal body attitude (Ross et al. 2013). This is despite museums, artwork, documentaries and some of the most successful blockbuster movies of all time showing the latter since at least the 1990s. This being the case (and with an added caveat that the study in question was relatively small), perhaps our issue with dinosaur education is more severe than we thought: are people really engaging with dinosaur media at all, or are our subjects of research, artwork, and hallowed gateways to other sciences little more than time-fillers and distractions?

Despite the best efforts of many scientists, the public at large seem to associate dinosaurs with considerably outdated interpretations and monstrous creatures. Reviewing recent successful entries into one of the most widely-accessed sources of popular dinosaur culture - Hollywood movies - is this surprising? Perhaps the most visually progressive rendering in this set are the sparsely feathered dromaeosaurs from Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (bottom right). However, the state of their integument still recalls dinosaur palaeoart from the mid-1990s, and not the extensive feather body covering shown by fossil evidence and now commonly restored over certain dinosaur species. Image sources, from top row down; King Kong (2005); Godzilla (2014); Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014); Toy Story (1996 - onwards); Jurassic World (2015); The Good Dinosaur (2015).

So, are dinosaurs as useful as we think for outreach purposes?

The points raise a simple but significant question: how effective is dinosaur-based outreach, really? As noted above, many decisions about outreach are shaped around dinosaur science and resources are poured into promoting dinosaur science itself. But are we right to regard dinosaur outreach as highly as we do?

Trying to balance the positive and negative points raised above, my take is yes, dinosaurs are an effective means to bringing science to people… but probably only certain people. Specifically, they seem to work very well among those who are already tuned into palaeontology, natural history and general science, an audience composed mostly of adult enthusiasts and children. Beyond this, their effect seems to tail off quickly and they may actually be a barrier to effective outreach. Audiences with preconceived expectations of dinosaur-themed content may ignore anything dinosaur related, which is a concern with us giving dinosaurs such privileged consideration in educational material. Are we limiting our promotion of other topics that could engage these uninterested people? And is one of our challenges of popularising palaeontology making dinosaurs and related topics universally attractive, and not just subjects with appeal to specialist audiences or younger people?

Of course, your opinion on this matter may differ. But even so, I think most of us would agree that our wider education about dinosaurs and related matters could be more effective, or at least more nuanced and reflective of more topics, than it currently is. I am optimistic that a groundswell of suitable movements towards this goal may already be underway. Many modern curators, scientists and artists are attuned to matters of science communication and interested in identifying outreach issues, sharing best practise, evolving public engagement methods and reaching new audiences with new topics. The fact that this article is being written as output from a workshop dedicated to popularised palaeontology is evidence of these practises actually occurring, and it feels like the right questions are being discussed. How can we, and when should we, shift focus from dinosaurs? How do we make other forms of life/parts of museum collections of wider interest? How do we more effectively impart new science to publishers, movie makers and other non-educational bodies making palaeontologically-themed media? It’s also pleasing to see more discussions about the once largely backgrounded industry practises of palaeoartistry in both scientific and popular media. Realising the important role that palaeoart has for communicating science, many involved in its production are vocally distancing themselves from the ‘popularised’ image of dinosaurs to more nuanced, scientifically-validated and interesting portrayals of dinosaurs, as well as other forms of prehistoric life. We are still on the uphill part of this journey to revising our outreach approach, but it’s reassuring to know that a body of professionals are looking critically at dinosaur outreach and its wider impact.

Minor victories in recent palaeontological outreach involve effectively communicating to certain, interested audiences that Deep Time was not a dinosaur theme park, and that fossil creatures did not spend all their time battling and roaring at one another. Evidence that this message has hit home with at least some audiences is reflected in the broadening depth and nuance of palaeoart being posted across the internet. Shown here: my take on Jurassic stem-mammals, a gorgonopsian, gliding drepanosaurs, a goniopholidid crocodyliform, Cretaceous albanerpetontid, erythrosuchids, and... Longisquama, whatever the heck that is. Not shown here: dinosaurs in premier view, or roaring. The challenge is getting scenes like this, and subjects like this, to wider audiences.

Most of the discussions and innovation in dinosaur/palaeontolgical outreach are taking place online, and transferring these to ‘real-world’ outreach, where the necessity of resource investment makes change risky, may be our greatest upcoming challenge. Again, however, there are signs of this sort of thing happening, such as the famous (or infamous?) decision to replace the Natural History Museum’s famous Diplodocus cast with a blue whale skeleton. This logic of moving this famous attraction has been questioned by some, but I admire the museum for putting a very relevant and symbolically significant specimen in their most prominent location. In doing so, they’re making a clear statement about what they consider to be important, and what they want the public to engage with. Whether you agree with the controversial reorganisation of the natural history museum or not, the idea of outreachers taking initiative with their educational agenda is something I feel we should echo when popularising prehistoric animals. If our outreach is primarily reaching pre-interested audiences anyway, then why not have faith in their interest and tell them what we - as researchers, artists and curators - think is fascinating and exciting about our field, whether it’s related to dinosaurs or not? It would seem a diverse array of outreach topics is more likely to spread out from palaeo-primed audiences and into broader public interest than one largely revolving around a single, perhaps somewhat over-familiar topic. Perhaps cutting palaeontological outreach’s umbilical chord with dinosaurs would benefit us outreachers too, allowing us to freshen and rethink our approach to popularising neglected groups and focus on their own selling points, instead of using them to greater contextualise dinosaurs.

The risk of failure is what prevents many of us, and our employers, from straying too far from tried and tested means of outreach. And yes, if we’re talking paleontology with the public, dinosaurs are an obvious safety net. But we should take advantage of the fact that we’re more enabled than any previous generation of educators to cooperate, create and promote the subjects we feel are important with only a little inventive thinking and technological knowhow. Individuals can now develop significant outreach resources without the need for expensive designers and developers; online promotion can be essentially free; and the increasing accessibility of printing - both 2D and 3D materials - is lowering the financial risks tied into ‘real world’ outreach events. Any public enterprise involves a level of investment and risk, but resourceful thinking and shouldering the brunt of development ourselves can minimise these.

In closing, I want to stress that I’m not wailing on dinosaurs. As may be evident from my own output, I think they’re fantastically interesting animals with an important role to play in outreach. But for dinosaur outreach to be successful and support, not restrict, other outreach efforts we have to realise their limitations, as well as their strengths, as public ambassadors.

This piece of outreach was supported by Patreon

The paintings and words featured here are sponsored by folks who are certainly very popular in my house, my Patreon backers. Supporting my blog from $1 a month helps me produce researched and detailed articles with paintings to accompany them, and in return you get access to bonus blog content: additional commentary, in-progress sneak-previews of paintings, high-resolution artwork, and even free prints. For this post we'll be looking at my new angry nodosaur painting, discussing ankylosaurs in palaeoart and why they're so darned challenging to render well. Sign up to Patreon to be part of the discussion!

Reference

• Ross, R., Duggan-Haas, D. and Allmon, W. (2013). The posture of Tyrannosaurus rex: Why do student views lag behind the science? Journal of Geoscience Education, 61, 145-160

Godzilla and MUTOs vs. birds and newts: reasons why the creatures in Godzilla (2014) are (sort of) plausible

Inside every 29 year and 11 month year-old man is a 5 year old who only watches monster movies so he can produce little doodles of them afterwards.

After much hype, Godzilla (2014) has finally stomped into cinemas around the world. It seems to have been a divisive monster movie, with some taking its slow pacing and focus on human characters as a breath of fresh air in a stale genre, and others wishing it had the wham-bam-thank-you-mam approach of Pacific Rim. Personally, I'm in the former camp, and am especially glad the new Godzilla franchise has not started with two hours of giant monster wrestling. While Godzilla (2014) is not flawless, it takes a lot of risks and feels like a modernised 'classic' monster movie, and not the focus-grouped, merchandise-led fanboy service it could have been. I should add that I'm not especially keen on the last 59 years of Godzilla movies, much preferring the genuine drama and symbolism of the original 1954 movie to the decades of monster fights which followed. Because Godzilla (2014) is tonally closer to the original than the later escapades, I'm not surprised that people just wanting two hours of skyscraper-sized wrestling are feeling a bit disappointed. Anyway, there's a lot we could say about this, but that's not quite what I want to write about  here.

A big part of updating Godzilla has been the overhaul of Big G himself, as well as bringing new creatures to this franchise. These are exciting times for monster film fans because, for only the second time in its 60 year history, one of the most famous movie monsters of all is in for a complete redesign (we all know what happened the first time) and, of course, is now free of the constraint of 'suitmation' effects - the fancy term applied to the 'guy-in-latex-suit' approach Godzilla movies are (in?)famous for. A fun fact about the original 1954 Godzilla is that the now-inconic chap-in-suit technology was a compromise, the studio initially desiring stop-motion effects like those of American-made films King Kong or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Toho, the studio which created Godzilla, had neither the money or expertise to execute stop motion effectively, so opted for using costumes instead. Despite using their second choice, the Japanese trailer for Godzilla triumphantly declares their special effects superior to anything the American movie machine was making at the time! And it certainly worked out for Toho: after a difficult teething process, the 'suitmation' approach worked well for the franchise and wasn't tinkered with outside of the much maligned 1998 Tristar Godzilla.

For 2014, Godzilla is a fully digital and, as we all know, relatively faithful to the original designs. It has, however, been altered in ways which would be difficult to execute if we were still watching a man in a suit. A lot of these changes, as well as the design of Godzilla's adversaries, were pretty neat because they tie into what we know about animal biology, scaling and functionality, and I get the impression that the guys behind this latest Godzilla - Legendary Pictures - put a lot of effort into making half-sensible creatures which biologists, biomechanicists and functional anatomists can be relatively happy with. And yes, yes yes: there's a buttload of stuff which is clearly nonsense: there's no way these animals could be the size they are, or firing beams of nuclear fire from their throats and so forth. But that's just par for the course for a Godzilla movie, and I'm not going to jump on boring old bandwagon of highlighting how impossible the whole lot is. What's far more interesting, and what I want to focus on here, is how Legendary built their animals around standard movie monster tenets to produce creatures which are not only intriguing and cool-looking, but also chime with real animal biology and functionality.

Twinkle toes

Godzilla's stubby, new-look foot, as seen from an airport terminal. Image from the Godzilla movie forum.

One of the most striking aspects of Godzilla’s redesign is its short, stubby feet instead of the long, plantigrade feet we’re familiar with from the suitmation costumes (above). This is easily one of the best changes to make in the entire redesign. Not only does it move away from Godzilla looking like he’s wearing a pair of comedy slippers, but it makes a lot of sense from a functional perspective. Long, plantigrade feet of bipedal animals (like our own, as well as those of chaps in Godzilla suits) lift our entire body weight with every step, our metatarsals and ankles both supporting and propelling us forward. This works fine for lightweight animals like ourselves, but comparable foot anatomy in a skyscraper-sized animal would need to be immense to avoid buckling under thousands of tonnes of bending force. The superficially sauropod-, tortoise- or elephant-like foot of the new Godzilla negates this risk however, creating a more columnar distal limb structure which is not employed in lift and propulsion but instead ideal for supporting terrific weight. This has several effects on limb structure and locomotion. The foot musculature (anchored to the shin) is reduced, keeping the weight of the limb down overall, thus making movement more efficient. However, it also decreases the foot mobility, limits stride length and overall gracility. Some of these effects are countered, however, by the elongate thigh region common to all Godzilla designs, which can swing the shortened distal-leg over great distances with every step. This increased length of the proximal limb region and shortening of distal is a trend we commonly associate with larger animals, even in species which are quite active and sprightly, and descended from cursorial ancestors (e.g. rhinos). Godzilla’s enormous thighs also fit with observations that proximal hindlimb musculature becomes relatively huge in larger bipeds - see the pelves of large bipedal dinosaurs for examples - providing the powerhouses necessary to move its huge bulk around. The result is a limb which isn’t going to win Godzilla any prizes for sprinting but, more importantly, is much more suited to the animal itself than the older designs. And let’s face it, when you can take strides measured in hundreds of metres, moving relatively quickly isn’t a problem.

Godgilla

Gills ahoy, on the lower portion of Godzilla's neck. Image from Detroit News.

A clear departure from all other Godzilla movies is that new version can breathe underwater. They’re easy to miss, but look closely and you can spot a series of fish-like gills on the side of its neck. At certain points in the movie, you can see them opening and closing as the big chap respires. Apparently, these were added not only because Big G spends a lot of its time swimming from location to location in the movie, but also to explain how an animal as large as Godzilla could keep a relatively low profile for so long. Air breathing animals of such size would surely be better known to the world at large if they were routinely surfacing to take breaths. These are all that's left of fish-inspired designs for the new Godzilla, which also featured fins instead of rows of bony plates; fish-like scales instead of reptilian skin and so forth.

Gills on a big, adult tetrapod sound a bit crazy, and I will admit - the fish-like (bony?) gills of the new Godzilla are difficult to rationalise entirely among real animals. If we’re willing to stretch belief a bit (I assume we are, what with a fictitious 100 m tall reptile being the subject of discussion here), we can find saving grace from early tetrapods and their descendants, modern amphibians. The latter have internal and external gills in at least their larval stages with most species losing them as they become adults. These gills are supported by a series of bones behind the skull which lead to openings in the body wall which allow swallowed water to escape - these are known known as gill clefts. Some amphibians - specifically select caudatans (salamanders, axylotyls, newts etc. - see below) - famously retain gill structures into adulthood, including their elaborate external gills. We know from exquisitely preserved fossils that such gills were present in the ancestors of all modern tetrapods, some of which also retained these gills in adulthood, and others which at least maintained their gill clefts (Schoch 2009). It seems likely, then, that the possession of gills, and possibly retention of gill structures into adult life* is the ancestral condition for all early tetrapods - including, presumably - Godzilla. Amniotes, which also presumably includes Godzilla, have obviously abandoned these structures and co-opted the gill apparatus for other purposes.

An axolotl with its external gills. © Kevin Schafer / www.photoshot.com, linked from ARKive.

Could Godzilla or other creatures ever get their gills back? Well, maybe. For a long time it was thought that evolution was irreversible ('Dollo's Law of Irreversibility') and, under this concept, loss of gills would be a one way street: Godzilla would have to evolve an entirely new set of gills, which is entirely possible. However, it's now appreciated that Dollo's Law is not really a law at all, and that organisms frequently do reverse their evolution, including backtracking on complex aspects of their anatomy and life history: digits, dentitions, wings, larval stages, reproductive strategies are all examples of things which have been lost and then recovered in animals. What once seemed like a law is likely more statistical improbability: a lineage can evolve in many ways at any point in time, and the likelihood that it will directly reverse along a familiar path is relatively low. However, in theory, there's no real reason why this shouldn't happen, so long as the selection pressures are correct. It would take some hefty tinkering with genes and mountains of heterochrony, and it's difficult to think of conditions which would promote the development of early-stage gill anatomy, but I guess it's not impossible for an amphibious creature to regain its ancestral gill condition under the right circumstances. My guess is that they would look more like the gills of caudatans than they would the scale-like fishy apparatus of Newzilla, but, let's face it, big feathery gills would look incredibly silly on a city-smashing monster.

See? Less "Godzilla, King of the Monsters", more "Preszilla, Queen of the Desert". Both are scary, but in very different ways.

Has Godzilla put on weight? No, it's just in it's head

One of the key comments made about the new Godzilla design is that it’s a bit of a heffer compared to other versions. This is debatable (they’ve always been pretty chunky if you ask me), but Legendary’s Godzilla design probably appears fatter than the rest because of its proportionally small head. There are good design reasons for this move: the smaller head gives a natural taper towards the top of the animal, distorting its perceived perspective and size, and it helps avoid the comically oversized, googly-eyed heads of previous versions. It's also in keeping with the natural world. Animals show a disproportionate reduction in skull length with respect to body mass - that is to say, larger animals generally have proportionally smaller heads than smaller ones. Note that this applies to carnivores as well as herbivores (Van Valkenburgh 1990; Christansen 1999). Godzilla represents a real extreme of animal gigantism, so it makes sense that its skull and head is going to carry this allometric trend to an unprecedented limit. What’s more, whatever Godzilla actually is (the new movie, thankfully, doesn’t really concern itself with this), it’s clearly on the reptile branch of the animal tree. Reptile cranial musculature is generally less developed than that of mammals, so their skulls and heads are relatively smaller at a given body mass than equivalently sized mammals (Christansen 1999). Again, this fits neatly with the small cranium of our new-look Godzilla. Of course, making the head look even smaller are the big legs and counterbalancing tail but, as mentioned above, this is also to be expected. Bottom line: far from being fat, 2014's Godzilla is just showing the extremes of proportion that we would expect if an animal ever grew to the ridiculous sizes we see on screen, and my feeling is that we're looking at a far more 'realistically' proportioned version that we've seen before.

"I'm not fat, I just have a head of predictably small proportion based on typical animal scaling allometries which distorts your overall perception of my size!" Whatever, buddy. Image from Godzilla Movies. 

MUTO: Finally, a convincing giant, flying movie creature

Moving away from the main attraction: Godzilla vies for attention in the 2014 movie with another species of giant critter, termed ‘MUTO’ (below). The design for the MUTO(s) is very cool: gigantic, eight limbed, insect-ungulate-pterosaur beasts which defy easy classification. We’re shown pronounced dimorphism in adult MUTOs, the females being larger and more robust than the males, and devoting all limb sets to either terrestrial locomotion or gripping. The males, however, allocate one set of limbs to flight, bearing a spectacular pair of enormous membranous wings which recall monowing plane designs of the early 20th century (this isn't a coincidence: male MUTO wings are actually based on stealth bombers). These wings are largely unfoldable and situated on the dorsal surface of the torso so, when grounded, they extend behind the MUTO like a huge cape. Despite being the smallest creature in the film, male MUTO is still huge, so there’s little risk of it clipping its flowing wings on any structures when locomoting terrestrially.

MUTO in flight, from the Godzilla trailer.

There’s a lot to like about the male MUTO’s wing anatomy and flight mechanics. Firstly, the wings of this animal are simply enormous, as they should be for a creature of its size. Not only do they dwarf the body of the animal, but we could measure their span in metric villages. All too often, flying movie creatures are equipped with wings far too small for their body size, but - running off intuition here - these look ‘right’ for its size. As demonstrated by the birds below, wings increase in length and area disproportionately with body size because of standard rules of scaling: any linear size increases equates to a cubed increase in mass, which gives more for gravity to pull against and greater wing area requirements to achieve lift. If we are ever to expect a several-hundred tonne flying creature to become become and stay airborne, it would need significant wingage: MUTO delivers on this front.

A rule of thumb for designing flying animals: as mass increases, wing length increases faster. Demonstrated here by various bird planforms from Rayner (1988).

But it’s not just wing size that’s cool about the male MUTO: it’s flapping, or lack thereof, was also neat. Flapping amplitude - the degree of movement of a full wing stoke - decreases with wingspan in all flying creatures. The larger an animal is, the less movement is required in its wings to produce an effective flap cycle. A familiar example of this is the wing motions of flapping geese compared to pigeons: both flap their wings nearly constantly while flying, but the former move their wings around the horizontal, while pigeons swing them in great arcs. All too often, giant flying movie creatures (including several giant pterosaurs) show whopping huge flapping amplitudes well beyond necessity for flight and, probably, aerial stability. Godzilla’s male MUTO moves his wings just a little, however: he definitely flaps, but his wings move just a few degrees around the horizontal, not in huge arcs (watch the clip, below, for an example. Skip to 0:24 if you're a particularly impatient type). He also largely soars, as would be expected for any uber-large flier: flapping those wings would take a lot of effort, so soaring is the way to go. It would be loads of fun to get some basic wing size and mass data for this guy to work out some basic flight parameters - cruising speed, travelling distance etc. Given that giant pterosaurs seem capable of cruising at 100kph (Witton and Habib 2010), and yet are mere pipsqueeks at 10 m wingspans compared to the male MUTO, I reckon we’re looking at cruising speeds of several hundred kph. And that’s if he’s not in a hurry.

Finally, we get to see the MUTO launch a couple of times in the film, and each time we see something reminiscent of quad-launching. Pterosaur fans will know this trick as the best hypothesis on the table for explaining how flying reptiles became airborne, and a core factor explaining their attainment of gigantic proportions (Habib 2008). The kimeatics of MUTOs takeoff aren't quite the same - which is to be expected seeing as the limbs of pterosaurs are quite different to those of MUTOs - but it's neat to see the same basic components - a standing start, the rocking back crouch, forward thrust, upward push and leaping phase - incorporated into MUTOs takeoff. These actions are all performed with the four walking limbs rather than the wings themselves, as in pterosaurs and bats, but this also chimes well: MUTOs would need all the power they could to become airborne, so using every available limb is logical. Note that insects are an unlikely model for MUTO takeoff because, while seemingly comparable with MUTO because of their similar limb and wing configuration, at least some insects only use one pair of limbs (the mesothoracic) to launch (Trimarchi and Schneiderman 1995). This is probably because insects enjoy much better power/weight ratios than large vertebrates/skycraper-sized-monsters. 2-4 mm long fruit flies can jump up to 15x their own body lengths - about 30 mm - using their middle limbs only (Zumstein et al. 2004). This sets them apart from bats and pterosaurs, which use all their limbs in launching, and makes these the best candidates for MUTO launch models. It would be neat to know how much attention the animators and designers have been paying to bat and pterosaur research or if they came up with this launch strategy on their own. My experience of explaining quad-launch is that a lot of folks find it counter-intuitive at first, probably because we don't see many animals routinely taking off in this way, so I do wonder if the similarity between these takeoff strategies reflects research into animal takeoff.

And that's it for now. If you want to know more about how the animals of Godzilla (2014) were constructed, you should check out the concept art book which accompanies the film: Godzilla: the Art of Destruction (Cotta Vaz 2014). Closer to home, more fun with famous fictitious monsters can be found here, and for more on movie creatures - specifically those of special effects legend Ray Harryhausen, check out this.

References

• Christiansen, P. (1999). On the head size of sauropodomorph dinosaurs: implications for ecology and physiology. Historical Biology, 13(4), 269-297.
• Cotta Vaz, M. (2014). Godzilla: the Art of Destruction. Titan Books.
• Habib, M. B. (2008). Comparative evidence for quadrupedal launch in pterosaurs. Zitteliana, 159-166.
• Rayner, J. M. (1988). Form and function in avian flight. In Current ornithology (pp. 1-66). Springer US.
• Schoch, R. R. (2009). Evolution of life cycles in early amphibians. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 37, 135-162.
• Trimarchi, J. R., & Schneiderman, A. M. (1995). Initiation of flight in the unrestrained fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Journal of Zoology, 235(2), 211-222.
• Van Valkenburgh, B. (1990). Skeletal and dental predictors of body mass in carnivores. In: Damuth, J. and MacFadden, B. (eds). Body size in mammalian paleobiology: estimation and biological implications, 18, 1-205.
• Witton, M. P., & Habib, M. B. (2010). On the size and flight diversity of giant pterosaurs, the use of birds as pterosaur analogues and comments on pterosaur flightlessness. PLoS One, 5(11), e13982.
• Zumstein, N., Forman, O., Nongthomba, U., Sparrow, J. C., & Elliott, C. J. (2004). Distance and force production during jumping in wild-type and mutant Drosophila melanogaster. Journal of experimental biology, 207(20), 3515-3522.

Ray Harryhausen, 1920-2013

A prehistoric animal being lassoed by cowboys alongside ruined temples in a barren landscape? Sounds like a Harryhausen movie. Oh wait: it kinda was.

There aren't many people in the public eye who I admire, but the pioneering stop-motion artist Ray Harryhausen was one of them. Harryhausen didn't kick start my interest in palaeontology in the first place, but his animated dinosaur sequences were certainly one of the highlights of my dinosaur obsessed childhood. I still watch his films today, both dinosaur-themed and otherwise. In fact, I watched two of them just this weekend. Turns out this was strangely timely: as we all know by now, it was announced that Harryhausen passed away yesterday (7/5/2013) at the age of 92.

I'm not alone among palaeontologists in revering Harryhausen's work. Few other special effects artists in the 20th century could make dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals come alive quite like Harryhausen, and it was perhaps only the sophisticated animatronics and CG effects in 1993's Jurassic Park which clearly superseded his work. Indeed, to appreciate Harryhausen's work fully you had to live in pre-JP times, where movie dinosaurs were generally pretty poorly executed. Before Jurassic Park, most movies dinosaurs were modern lizards and crocs dressed up with horns and sails, shonky animatronics and puppets, or else men in oversize reptile costumes. None of these approaches were terribly convincing. Harryhausen's stop motion models, by contrast, looked and acted like the real thing, battling with people and other creatures as if they were present on set. With very few exceptions, there was simply nothing closer to seeing actual dinosaurs than Harryhausen's animations until 1993. It's hard to chose a favourite scene from his dinosaur works, but in terms of overall execution, I think his Allosaurus attack in the 1966 film One Million Years BC may be among his best (below, borrowed from Apollomovieguy). As with all Harryhausen's creations, the animal in this scene is full of character thanks to subtle movements of its head and body. At times the allosaur comes across as a genuine actor in the production, and one who thinks that the movie is below him. Some of his lazier snaps and turns suggest it's just walking the part rather than playing the ferocious animal it could be. You can almost see it thinking 'well, at least I'll be able to pay the rent this month' as it snaps, idly, at the cavefolk. It's only when it's allowed to run across the set and savage people that it really seems to surrender to the role. I don't mean these a criticisms: Harryhausen's careful animation that gives the animal these little flourishes of character that make his films a joy to watch. There are numerous other examples we could cite of this sort of thing: Talos staggering a little when climbing from his plinth, and is preferentially uses his right hand, in Clash of the Titans (1981); Gwangi tugging at the lasso ropes around his neck with his little arms in Valley of Gwangi (1969) and so forth.



Although we may automatically think of dinosaurs when Harryhausen is mentioned, he actually only made three movies which contain 'proper' Mesozoic dinosaurs: The Best from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), One Million Years BC (1966) and Valley of Gwangi. Indeed, we're only including Beast on a technicality. The plot suggests that the 'Rhedosaurus' creature is a dinosaur, but it looks more like a giant lizard than a theropod. I get the impression that Harryhausen would have liked to have worked with dinosaurs more,  apparently trying to drum up interest for further other dinosaur movies or crowbar them into other productions (Sinbad was meant to meet a ceratopsian in a fourth film in that series). He certainly seems to frequently mention dinosaurs in a favourable light in interviews, and some of his first stop-motion models - made when he was a young teenager, were of famous dinosaur species. He did, of course, animate a short sequence of dinosaurs for the 1956 documentary Animal World, which was his only attempt to show dinosaurs in a natural time and setting*. A few other Harryhausen movies - Mysterious Island (1961) and Clash of the Titans - featured avian dinosaurs, but, in all, he actually made relatively few productions featuring the 'classic' dinosaurs. Much of his filmography is comprised of other fantasy or science fiction fare, so his dinosaur movies are, in fact, a minority of his work. Clearly, his dinosaur scenes were well executed enough to remain prominent in our memories even if, when put together, they only comprise a few minutes of footage.

*Unlike his other dinosaur scenes, the models for Animal World were made from injection foam, a cheaper but inferior material to his preferred medium of layered latex, and the sequence features closeups of awkward looking robotic miniatures. For this and other reasons, Harryhausen was never really happy with his work on Animal World and, although the stop-motion still stands up, it's easy to see why he did not consider it as highly as his other projects.

I find it interesting that palaeontologists are so fond of Harryhausen's work considering his sometimes flippant regard for scientific accuracy. Palaeontologists can be real sticklers for such issues, and Harryhausen had a pretty loose concept of what dinosaurs were like (which may explain his 'dinosaur' in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms). He frequently over-scaled his animals to make them more formidable, or hybridised different species for dramatic effect. The theropod Gwangi is well known as being a hybrid of Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus, and he added bat-like wings and owl talons to pterosaurs (see his Pteranodon model, below, borrowed from my Pterosaur.Net post on this very topic). Harryhausen played loose with myths as well. His harpies, featured in the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, have bat-like wings instead of the feathered wings described in folklore, and his Medusa, from Clash of the Titans, sports a rattlesnake abdomen not mentioned in any literature on this creature.

Despite his loose interpretation of source material, Harryhausen rarely invented completely novel anatomies for his creatures, even when working with entirely novel concepts. His anatomies always had a source in the real world, and it was his combination of animal components which resulted in different models. It's for this reason that Harryhausen's creations share the same appearance, as some of his anatomical 'building blocks' have a signature style. The Kraken from Clash of the Titan, for instance, has the body resembling his JatA Talos model (down to the navel and nipples, which are curious features on a titan), the head is rather like Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) and the arms are clearly borrowed from the octopus in It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955). These characters all represent very different types of beast - mythological titans, aliens, and giant animals - but they all share Harryhausen's artistic DNA.

For all of his recycling of designs and body parts though, Harryhausen never tweaked his creations so far from their source material that they were unrecognisable. They were enhanced, sure, but never distorted. Palaeontologists watching his dinosaur flicks could feel satisfied that his animals more-or-less looked matched concepts of these animals fashionable in the 50s and 60s. Besides, his animations are too unapologetically focussed on entertainment to warrant harsh scrutiny. You can nitpick Gwangi's anatomy all you like, but you'll be missing the coolest dinosaur round up scene ever committed to film if you do. The plots of Harryhausen's films, which he was often a key producer of, are all about pulpy entertainment and nothing more. They appeal to the little boys and girls in all of us, and aren't asking for detailed critiques of their stories, scientific plausibility or even scripts and acting. Can anyone in touch with their inner child honestly say that they're not interested in watching cowboys round up a tyrannosaur, or a dinosaur destroying a lighthouse? Harryhausen's ideas are simply so charismatic that they're practically immune to scientific criticism.

Harryhausen's legacy is not just one a charismatic storyteller and skilled special effects artist, however. It's well known that Harryhausen was one of the signature stop-motion artists of the 20th century, but the fact that he saved stop-motion as an artform in the 1940s and 50s isn't common knowledge. Early stop-motion techniques pioneered in films like The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933) by Harryhausen's mentor, Willis O'Brian, were wonderfully executed but extremely time consuming and expensive, even by standards of stop-motion photography. O'Brian's techniques employed setting several painted landscapes on glass between his animated models and the camera, thus creating the impression that the creatures were set in middle distance. The process of painting these landscapes and compositing these shots, in addition to animating the models and other technical work, was so intensive that most studios were unwilling to invest the necessary time and money into stop motion work. Harryhausen's childhood interest in stop-motion animation, fired by multiple viewings of King Kong and some very supportive parents, allowed him to develop matting techniques which negated the need for painted glass landscapes, in which components of the filmed footage could be re-photographed on top of the animated scene. This cut the time and material costs of stop-motion processes drammatically, and he pioneered this technique, which he would eventually call 'dynamation', before he landed his first solo job on a motion picture. Dynamation was first put to the test on the low budget Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and Harryhausen delivered his work for a fraction of the cost of traditional stop motion. Without this revolution in stop-motion, the artform as we know it may never have happened. That may not seem like a big deal to us now in a time of CG effects, but bear in mind that Jurassic Park was greenlit with a sophisticated form of stop-motion in mind.



In his career, Harryhausen more-or-less single handedly lent his dynamation craft, and other special effects wizardry, to something like 16 motion pictures (see compilation, above, by Vidar Solaas). If the testimonies of the numerous fans and film makers are accurate, the movie world would be a very different place without them. There's so much more we could say about Harryhausen: his abilities as an artist and sculptor, the vast numbers of films he designed that were never made (War of the Worlds with Harryhausen tripods!), the many, many stories he has shared about making his films, but there's simply not enough time to relate even a fraction of them here. If you want to know this sort of stuff, though, I thoroughly recommend you track down either his richly illustrated autobiography and collected artworks, or the recent critically acclaimed documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan.

On that note, it's time to get on with other things. Thanks then for everything, Ray, you will be missed.

The Joy of Rex

There is enough text, imagery and pop culture references to Tyrannosaurus rex that, if laid end to end, they would give the Martian rover Curiosity a bridge back home. (Image above: my painting of Tyrannosaurus, which extends that bridge far enough to give Curiosity something to wipe its feet on when it gets back). Tyrannosaurus has invaded the consciousness of palaeontologists and the public like no other extinct species. Far older than the dodo, more spectacular than mammoths and more frightening than the gigantic sauropods, Tyrannosaurus is the ultimate symbol of prehistoric life. Its rise to fame was helped by being discovered in plenty of time for dinosaur movie makers to become acquainted with its size and awesomeness, by being the largest predatory dinosaur for the best part of a century, and having a PR-perfect name. You don't have to be a scholar of ancient languages to know that something called Tyrannosaurus rex is going to be a whole heap of badassery, and unlike many Greek names, it's pronounceable on your first try. The truncated binomial, T. rex, is a piece of cake to remember and sounds cool, like the name of a sports car, a swish computer processer, or an assassinatobot from the Terminator franchise. The latter is entirely fitting for an animal of gigantic size, bone crushing bite and ability to swallow eight year old children-sized prey whole.

Like most child dinofanciers, I drew buttloads of Tyrannosaurus when I was growing up, a hobby spurned on by the 1993 release of Jurassic Park. Looking back on that movie, Tyrannosaurus was clearly its star and the creature that most effectively demonstrated the transition from the lumbering, lizard-like dinosaurs of Hollywood's Golden Age to the fast, cunning monsters we recognise them as today. The brachiosaur may have evoked awe, but it didn't behave in a dissimilar fashion to other movie sauropods. Velociraptor revealed an unfamiliar and sinister side to the dinosaur cannon, but mot people had no concept of Velociraptor or other dromaeosaurs before then. Tyrannosaurus, though, was already familiar through its out-of-shape, tail-dragging variants being featured in the 1925 The Lost World, the 1933 King Kong and 1964 Valley of Gwangi*. When the toned, fast and ferocious Jurassic Park version started overturning cars, smashing a small building to matchwood, and almost outrunning a jeep, it was clear that the perception of dinosaurs had received a complete makeover, and that their interpretation as lizard-like creatures had been banished.

*Yes, yes: I know. Gwangi wasn't a straight Tyrannosaurus, but he was half. Harryhausen made Gwangi, as he did his other prehistoric creatures, by compositing his favourite bits of different animals into one model. Gwangi was a mix of Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus, which Harryhausen termed 'Allo-rex'.

Since 2005, I've drawn considerably fewer Tyrannosaurus, and certainly never painted one. In coming back to Tyrannosaurus after all this time, I made a wholehearted effort to do it justice. All too often, Tyrannosaurus is rendered as a generic theropod with short, two-fingered arms, a large head and massive teeth, but such portrayals miss a lot of remarkable anatomy (above, lateral view of the restored skull and mandible of FMNH PR2081, better known as the Tyrannosaurus called 'Sue', showing the characteristic shapes common to Tyrannosaurus skulls. Image by me, 2008). Tyrannosaurus is the acme of tyrant dinosaur evolution, knocking 'standard' tyrannosaurid anatomy up to 11 to become on the most 'extreme' dinosaurs known. Anatomical quirks include the very wide temporal region of the skull, the abrupt, vertical termination to the muzzle, and the cool shades over the eyes. Their necks probably heavily muscled, judging by the space for neck muscle attachment on the Tyrannosaurus skull, cervical vertebrae and anterior trunk skeleton. The torso shape is unusual too, with their gently arcing ribs forming a thoroughly barrel-chested torso, which would partially obscure the big thigh muscles when viewed from anterior aspect. As with depiction of a coelurosaur nowadays, a decision had to be made about whether to apply a covering of feathers, as is increasingly plausible for theropods of all sizes. I followed the data offered by several scrappy Tyrannosaurus skin impressions showing pebbly scales for much of the body, but also figured that a few large, thickened scales across the face, neck and back wouldn't look out of place. These were animals that habitually tried to bite each others faces off after all, so few bits of toughened hide would not have gone amiss. Oh, and a few feathers can be seen at the end of the tail, because even tough animals have their sensitive sides.

Some time was spent pondering what to have my Tyrannosaurus doing, too. Tyrannosaurus is a seriously busy animal in palaeoartistic renditions. It's always doing something, be it roaring, chasing a hadrosaur, eating a dead Triceratops, roaring, running for no obvious reason, roaring, stalking unseen animals, roaring, making or nurturing babies, roaring, battling other theropods or perhaps roaring (if our depictions of Tyrannosaurus are accurate, the Maastrichtian fauna of North America must've been deafened by the incessant screaming of the local tyrannosaurs, because they always seem to be making noise in our pictures of them!). To avoid these clichés, the Tyrannosaurus here is doing, well, not very much, really. He's just standing around, looking like he's trying to remember why he walked over to that point in the first place, or perhaps wondering where he left his car keys. Point is, it's doing nothing in particular, which seems to be a relative rarity among tyrannosaur palaeoart, but perhaps allows for a little more appreciation of its shape and form. Plus, this is clearly a Tyrannosaurus from the northern extreme of its range, where forests of conifer and deciduous trees were common. I think I may have spent more time on the plants in this image than any other I've drawn, which requires a hat tip towards palaeoart man of the moment John Conway. John's attention to vegetation in his palaeoart has shown up other palaeoartists for all too often using plants as a generic, green backdrop to their work, which I'm entirely guilty of, and need to stop. There does seem to have been a bit of a push against purely green, tropical worlds in Mesozoic palaeoart recently , which joins the 'anti-shrink wrap' palaeoart movement mentioned in the previous post in marking a new age in our depictions of ancient worlds.

Anyway, I've gone on enough for the time being. I think the above painting is one of the more successful bits of artwork I've done, which may be why I'm still going on about it. Still, so much for a word-light approach to blogging.