Quarantine entry #98 - June 27

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, however, let us talk about something else again. No, not about ‘Force of Nature’, a new Mel Gibson movie – that we will talk about separately; let us talk about… what?

I admit that I wanted to talk about the king vulture for today – we have discussed the New World vultures in general and the American black vulture in particular in the past, when something else came up: the Thylacosmilus.

In case you forgot, the Thylacosmilus was a prehistoric sabre-toothed mammal, and it was a marsupial, meaning that it was more closely related to the modern koalas and kangaroos than to the big cats, dogs, bears and so on. I also must admit that my perception of the Thylacosmilus is influenced by Mauricio Anton’s ‘Sabretooth’ book, but what else is there? Donald R. Prothero’s ‘Princeton Guide’? Yes, no, I will pass.

Back to the Thylacosmilus for real. People like Mauricio Anton and his sources had depicted the marsupial sabretooth, (aka Thylacosmilus and its’ closest extinct kin), as, well, a marsupial sabretooth, a marsupial counterpart to the placental sabre-toothed carnivores, (and there were quite a lot); right now, it is the word ‘carnivores’ that is key. The recent studies have implied that the Thylacosmilus had a different lifestyle from other sabre-toothed mammals, such as Smilodon, and used its’ sabre-shaped teeth in a different way; already there are theories that it might have been an insectivore instead – but how possible is that?

Let us look at the modern mammals. Recently, we have talked about bears in general, including the sloth bear. While the giant panda is an obligate herbivore, and the polar bear is an obligate carnivore, the sloth bear may be the most specialized bear of them all, as it feeds almost completely on ants, termites, and the like. As a result, on one hand, it got powerful front legs and mighty claws, and on the other, it got a specialized muzzle and reduced teeth, but it can bite, and its’ canine teeth are especially well developed. Pause.

Now, let us look at the Thylacosmilus. Its’ paws and claws were more bear- than cat-like, with claws that were only semi-retractable and not as sharp as those of true cats, and its’ forepaws were powerful, but then again, this is a trait shared by all the sabre-toothed carnivores, including, the mammal-like reptiles, maybe. Its’ muzzle, however, is blunt, not long as that of the sloth bear. So-?

So nothing, let us look at the aardwolf as well. Despite its’ name, it is no relative of the aardvark, but of the hyenas, and in fact it looks like a small striped hyena on the outside. On the inside, however, it is no scavenger or grave robber, but rather feeds on social insects, termites and ants. Not unlike the sloth bear, it too has reduced teeth, but notable canine teeth for self-defence… and nothing else that would imply that it was an insectivore, rather than a carnivore, as the rest of the hyena family is. Thylacosmilus could have been like this as well. Anything else?

Sadly, no, but the carnivorous marsupials are a confusing group, as paleontologists are still unable to properly agree as to what and how they looked like, let alone their paleoecology. What else?

Let us get back to the king vulture, maybe? Well, these birds have appeared on the planet during the mid-Pliocene, when the last marsupial sabretooths were still living there, so the two might have met back then. However, the fossil remains of the king vulture from that period are scarce, so it is hard to say. What is known, however, that this bird is most closely related to the Andean condor out of the entire New World vulture family, and after the two species of condor, it is the biggest of the New World vultures; certainly the most colorful. An imposing bird, the adult king vulture has predominantly white plumage, which has a slight rose-yellow tinge to it. In stark contrast, the wing coverts, flight feathers and tail are dark grey to black, as is the prominent thick neck ruff. The head and neck are devoid of feathers, the skin shades of red and purple on the head, vivid orange on the neck and yellow on the throat. On the head, the skin is wrinkled and folded, and there is a highly noticeable irregular golden crest attached on the cere above its orange and black bill; this caruncle does not fully form until the bird's fourth year. A true king of the vultures, in fact. Anything else?

…For the moment, the king vulture is classified as ‘Least Concern’, as opposed to the Andean condor, which is ‘Near Threatened’ and the California condor, which is ‘Critically Endangered’; hopefully, this trend will continue, and the king vulture will remain flourishing for ages to come, and not vanish from the face of the planet as the various sabre-toothed mammalian carnivores did.

…This is it for now; see you all soon!

Prothero's Princeton Guide to Prehistoric Mammals - Jan 7

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Therefore, I look around for means to escape this, and what do I come across but Donald R. Prothero’s ‘Princeton Guide to Prehistoric Mammals’. Yay?

Mmm, no. As we have discussed back in 2019, I am not the biggest fan of Mr. Prothero these days, and the ‘PGPM’ did not really challenge this opinion, though not for the reasons you think. You see, ‘TPGPM’ is not exactly a field guide; it is more of a reboot, done in a manner not unlike what happened to the SW franchise after it merged with Disney!

…What is the punchline, you may ask? Good question and the answer is located right in the very first chapter of ‘TPGPM’, the ‘How Do We Classify Animals?’ subchapter. It promptly and directly tells the book’s readers, (aka us), that the old classification model of, well, classifying the animal kingdom, (plants and fungi are left beyond the brackets of this book & discussion), is outdated and is going to be rebooted, even if the lay public is not aware of that yet. Moreover, ‘TPGPM’ is an attempt to introduce the lay public to this reboot, one faction of animal kingdom at a time, in this case – it is prehistoric mammals…as well as their modern descendants and/or relatives. The end result is… a picture book for adults, illustrations in ‘TPGPM’ overwhelm the text, though yes, let’s be honest – the chapters are very heterogeneous, and uneven, which is quite reasonable, because the internal factions of the mammal ‘kingdom’ aren’t really equal to each other either. That said, Mr. Prothero may’ve called this book of his a ‘guide’, but it feels more like an encyclopedia, a book that tried to encompass everything that’s mammal-related… and this brings us to another book on prehistoric mammals – Mauricio Anton’s ‘Sabertooth’, which is an encyclopedia on prehistoric mammals and mammal-like reptiles that utilized sabre-teeth as a hunting weapon (& technique). The book approaches this topic from all sorts of angles, but the titular topic is always constant and remains unchanged. Fair enough, since the prehistoric sabre-toothed hunters were a mixed bunch: there were the mammal-like reptiles of the Paleozoic, several creodont species, (more on them down below, maybe), the marsupial Thylacosmilus (and maybe its’ relatives), and the nimravids, the barbourofelids and the true cats slash felids – six major animal groups in total. And?

And nothing, ‘Sabertooth’ is an informative and entertaining book that features not just text, but also illustrations and graphs – Just as ‘TPGPM’ does, though it isn’t mentioned in the list of ‘Further Reading’ in ‘TPGPM’, (though several other books written by Anton and Turner are). Fair enough, though did I mention that I do not like Mr. Prothero lately? Just checking! What next?

‘TPGPM’ seems to follow the approach of ‘Sabertooth’, but because its’ subject is so much broader, the result is a mess. The first chapter is an intro to the book, really; the second cover the mammal-like reptiles, proto-mammals, or stem mammals of Paleozoic, but mostly – the mammals of the Mesozoic; the third – the marsupials of Australia and South America, existing and extinct, (though given the monstrous fires of Australia telling which group is which is trickier than it looks, sadly. Real life sucks). It is only from the fourth chapter onwards to the penultimate seventeenth that we get to see the ‘new’ classification of mammals, and it is as follows: the Xenarthrans – sloths, armadillos and anteaters of the Americas; the Afrotheres; and the Laurasiatheres. Mazel Tov! More precisely, proportionally speaking, we got the Afrotheres – elephants, sea cows, hyraxes, aardvarks, elephant shrews, tenreks, and several other mammal orders, both extinct and still existing. We got the already-mentioned Xenarthrans – and we got all the other placental mammals, aka the Eutheres, which are more closely related to each other than to the Xenarthrans or the Afrotheres. Fair enough, but the result is a great unwieldy mess that doesn’t seem to serve any practical function other than to tickle the egos of various men and women of science – I seriously doubt that anyone else will be particularly impressed by it. Mr. Prothero may state that such outdated terms as ‘Reptilia’ and ‘Amphibia’ (and ‘Mammalia’?) will soon vanish from the professional scientific nomenclature and works, even though the lay public does not know it, but just because they do not know it, does not mean that it will accept it, certainly not easily or graciously.

True science doesn’t need that, science is science, it is its’ own reward? Maybe, but given that Mr. Prothero has released a very thorough and visually impressive picture book for adults, (it includes even images from Wikicommons – really, Mr. Prothero? Really?), trying his best to sell it to people not just literally, but figuratively as well. Considering that the book is a heterogeneous mess, I am not so sure that he had succeeded. True, unlike most Western books, ‘TPGPM’ has both an intro (the first chapter) and an epilogue (the last, eighteenth chapter, which talks about prehistoric mammals and their extinctions, and of course it is the humans’ fault), and it has done its’ best to be professional, entertaining and the like. The problem is that human beings are contrary and unpredictable and you just cannot be sure that they will swallow whatever you try to sell them no matter how pretty the wrapper is or how sweet you consider your product to be. Professional scientists may be retiring the old terms of ‘Reptilia’, ‘Amphibia’ and so on, but odds are that the public will transition to this product will take much longer, and will be much rougher, than how Mr. Prothero and his fellow scientists, expects – real life sucks, remember? (Just look at the Disney/SW mess, for an example!)...

…Well, this is it for now; see you all soon!

Donald R. Prothero & JP franchise - Sep 17

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. It sucks for various reasons, and when you try to escape it, say, by reading Donald R. Prothero’s collection of dinosaur-related essays, named THE STORY OF THE DINOSAURS IN 25 DISCOVERIES, it sucks even more. Why?

Well, to be different, let us look at the ‘final’, twenty-fifth, discovery – ‘Triceratops’. What is it composed of? The first section – a collection of anecdotes regarding Cope & Marsh and Triceratops’ misadventures with them: Cope called it Agathaumas and assumed that it was a hadrosaur; whereas Marsh at first assumed that it was a giant prehistoric bison at first, (even though bison horns and Triceratops horns are very different). Ha-Ha. How humorous. These days, Cope & Marsh seem to be hybrids of paleontology’s founding fathers and Lewis Carroll’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee from his ‘Alice’ duology. Everyone and their dog know something about Cope and Marsh, especially in their homeland of USA, mainly that they were the first paleontologists there ever, that they participated in ‘Bone Wars’ that were half-grand and half-ridiculous… and this is it. There is even a ‘Weird West’ novel where some Native American shamans begin to animate dinosaur bones slash bring dinosaurs back to life, because the dysfunctional duo and their entourage have intruded on a holy site of some sort or another, ho-ho. Groan. The problem is not about the respect/disrespect of those two deceased worthies, but about the fact that everyone in the US and their dog knows that much about them, and is not impressed about it.

…Except maybe for the current POTUS and the rest of the D.C. crowd. There is a political cartoon on the DA site that depicts the two parties as flies that crawl over a chop of meat that is the country of USA. Frankly, it speaks to me.

‘Triceratops’ the chapter’s opening salvo begins with reused and recycled material that is on par of AoS & MCU reusing and recycling Hydra no matter what. They seem to be replacing them with the Kree in Spider-Man II, but then real life happened, apparently, somebody got scared or something, and Hydra is coming back instead, just because. The Disney/Marvel juggernaut does not do explanations; it just does whatever it wants. This attitude has aggravated the SW fans, cough, and so now that faction of the juggernaut is trying to win them back by SW comics, that these days contain various mini-essays about this or that SW character. Sigh. In today’s Western society, what is sauce for the goose-comics may not be sauce for gander-movies; the SW comics themselves aren’t exactly selling like hot cakes; maybe the upcoming ‘Mandalorian’ series, set in the era of the rising First Order, may do a better job – we’ll have to wait and see.

After the Cope & Marsh anecdote of the chapter, Mr. Prothero went into the biography of another prominent paleontologist – Mr. Hatcher, John Bell. And immediately the Triceratops angle of the chapter began to suffer, as the deceased was not just about the old three-horned face, but went all over the place, including Patagonia, to dig for extinct mammal fossils there. Where is the Triceratops?

In the historical anecdotes and vignettes, of course! Marsh was trying to write a monography on Triceratops and died; Hatcher picked up the slack and also died; it was up to Mr. Swann Lull to finish it. How exciting! …If you did not know about any of this thing, of course, but… However, these days the Western society is becoming increasingly stratified, and in case of paleontology, you either have heard it all before and are not impressed because Mr. Prothero is recycling the same old chestnuts, or you have not heard this before because you do not care about this, and therefore are not impressed for that reason instead. You can hit an owl with a stump, you can hit a stump with an owl, the end result is all the same: the stump is unaffected, the owl definitely is. Mr. Prothero? Your actual readers are your owl. Your essay collections are the stump.

…From the biography of Hatcher, where the Triceratops came and went, we go onto the third part of the chapter, which describes the Triceratops in general, from a biological/paleontological P.O.V., and again, it is all generic, it is basically a lite paraphrase of Wikipedia info. When in the 1970s USSR Nikolai Plavilshchikov released his book ‘Homunculus’, which was a collection of biographies of various scientists from the 17^th century to pre-revolutionary (and WWI) Europe and Russia, it was basically the same thing. Just with the emphasis not on dinosaurs, but on life sciences and scientists, and it is a more coherent book because it doesn’t try to combine dinosaurs with life histories of people in a medium of vignettes and anecdotes released as essays – no, it’s just a collection of vignettes and anecdotes, released at a time when Wikipedia and the Internet didn’t exist, (especially in the USSR), and as such ‘Homunculus’ came across, at least initially, as more original, even though the lay-out was the same – minimum text with maximum illustrations. Just no Wikimedia commons unlike the ’25 Discoveries’… because they did not exist of course, but we are not talking about Plavilshchikov here, but about Mr. Prothero. Did he skim on the Wikipedia? Oh yes he did, with ‘skim’ being the key word: as he is talking about Triceratops on the recent media, he talks about such pieces as – Walking with Dinosaurs. The horned dinosaurs in WWD were actually Torosaurus. In ’25 Discoveries’ you get the feeling that Mr. Prothero adheres to the theory that states that Torosaurus and Triceratops are two different dinosaurs, so why the conflation and confusion regarding the horned dinosaurs in WWD? There’s even ‘The Complete Guide…’ made by Impossible Pictures, the same company that made WWD, that succinctly describes Torosaurus and shows several photo stills of this bull lizard.

…Oh wait, there was a single dead Triceratops in WWD, as opposed to all the live Torosaurus. Nice eyes, Legolas, great generalization! What is next?

Mentions of the Jurassic Park franchise in all of its’ incarnations. The problem is that in JP3 there were no horned dinosaurs, especially in main roles, and neither were they in the first JW movie. Why did Mr. Prothero include those two movies? Because he was just skimming through the Wiki looking for Triceratops info and got complacent? Because just as Marsh (in the ‘Triceratops’ chapter) was putting his name onto his assistants’ work, so does Prothero have the ghost writers do all the work for him, and one of them decided ‘to stick it to the man’? Because Mr. Prothero knows that in the modern Western, (especially American and Canadian) society books aren’t really bought and/or read anymore, and his publication of ’25 discoveries’ and other books is just to stoke his own ego and to demonstrate to his friends, enemies, rivals and so on that he can afford to do this on his salary of ‘a paleontology and geology researcher, teacher and author’? Who knows… Which is where ‘Jurassic World Evolution’ comes in. Several weeks ago, it released the Nasutoceratops species profile, and began to look around for information sources beyond the Wikipedia about this dinosaur, and ’25 discoveries’ supposedly had it.

Only they do not. The only mention of the dinosaur in question is the author’s photo of the ‘family tree of ceratopsians at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City’. I have no idea what Mr. Prothero, his publisher, and the rest of the team were sinking, but the photo isn’t just black-and-white, isn’t just ‘meh’ in quality, but also made at such an angle that it is even harder to see and distinguish all of the skulls in the photo, let alone see what number goes with what skull. Did Mr. Prothero even get permission to photograph this ‘family tree’ or did he just photoshoot it once on the sly and got the hell out of there?.. However, we digress. What was the point, again?

…That JW: BBR, at its’ 8 to 9 minutes in length is precisely the dinosaur movie we deserve. Let us break it into acts. Act I – we meet the Motorhouse family. The actors are credited post-movie, aye, but their roles have no names, they are functions rather than people, apparently. They are shown to be your typical American family, racially diverse and woke, and yes, it is a double-edged sword of itself: when the movie is good, such as ‘Spider-Man II’, being woke makes it better; when the movie is bad, as it was in ‘Dark Phoenix 2019’, then wokeness will only make it worse. In BBR, the plot is so brief – the feature film itself is under 10 minutes, remember? – that it doesn’t matter whether or not this family is nuclear, composite, are its’ members WASPs or POCs – all it matters is that they saw a struggle of dinosaurs, then a carnivorous dinosaur attacked them, and they survived. The end. BBR has all the main characters of a JP franchise movie: dinosaurs & humans, and all the main themes of a JP franchise movie: dinosaur attack, human survival of the dinosaur attack, and human family issues. The only theme missing is the human corporate greed, (but then again, the JP3 film lacked it too), and the entire human mad science creating dinosaurs. JP3 film did not have it either, so JW: BBR actually does not stand out there either. What was the main message of the JP novels, especially the initial one? Life finds a way. This is what the novel version of Ian Malcolm, especially in the first novel, was talking about, however long-windedly and roundaboutedly. Everything else was just dressing, and the BBR post-credits scenes show precisely that. …The final scenes of JW: FK do that too, so no ground-breaking new achieves here in BBR either. The JP franchise goes round and round in circles, as does MCU’s AoS, for comparison, only AoS was doing it for longer and more continuously, proportionally speaking, therefore it is more obvious.

…And then we come to the Nasutoceratops. Whereas ‘Big Al’ had been a fan favorite of the American public for a long time, for a while it was second only to the Tyrannosaurus Rex as the best and most known North American carnivorous dinosaur, Nasutoceratops has been introduced to the general populace by the paleontologists only in 2013. Right now, it’s fall 2019, so let assume that people have known about the Nasutoceratops under 7 years. That’s not that long, so the fact that this dinosaur received several minutes of pure film footage is remarkable; yes, it’s a feature film of JP franchise and the Nasutoceratops’ role could’ve been taken over by any of its’ featured cousins, such as the aforementioned Triceratops or Sinoceratops – but it didn’t. JW: BBR and the rest of the JP franchise actually did something new, whereas Mr. Prothero in his ’25 discoveries’ went with the tried, tested, and old – Triceratops and Protoceratops, for example. Yes, Protoceratops fossils were possibly one source of inspiration for the griffin myth, this was acknowledged at least from the 1990s, if not earlier – is Mr. Prothero putting a brand new image for that story? No, not really – the bigger half of the 24^th chapter is about the Protoceratops and its’ discovery, and the rest is about Psittacosaurus, both tried and true dinosaurs, well known to the public. Unlike the JP franchise, Mr. Prothero is not about to talk about the brand new, but about the really old and well known – and in the last part of the 25^th chapter, Einiosaurus supposedly had a thick bony boss instead of a horn, just as Pachyrhinosaurus did.

…Einiosaurus – and this was established for a while – had a nasal horn and it jutting upwards and forwards like a horizontal hook or a sickle, whereas most horned dinosaurs had a horn that jutted either straight upwards, as in case of Monoclonius and Styracosaurus, or at an angle, as in case of Triceratops and Torosaurus. It is Nasutoceratops that actually lacks a nasal horn, and it is an established fact by now, so either Mr. Prothero has confused it and Einiosaurus, or there is some other gaffe. Ouch.

Let me start to wind down my rant. In the introduction to his ’25 discoveries’, Mr. Prothero may wax poetic about us living in the dinosaur renaissance. He is echoing the language used in the intro to Planet Dinosaur mini-series, (aired in 2011), but that is not the point. The point is that he, and the rest of the official paleontological world, are going around in circles, not unlike the rest of the Western/American society, going for old reliable while presenting them as brand new with nary an effort – and what effort there is, echoes directly back to 1970s and 80s, when the ‘dinosaur renaissance’ truly began in the first main mass media – printed books. These days printed media is decreasing in popularity, but officially, it is still going strong, and Mr. Prothero, at least, is trying to get his piece of happiness by publishing all sort of essay collections – but this is not the point. The point is that the entertainment sector of the Western/American mass media is being the pioneer here, with the official science lagging behind. That is just a sad state of affairs, people!

…And this is it for now; see you all soon!