Borealopelta, Zuul and NG - Aug 3

And so, it came to my attention that there is yet another new dinosaur discovered in RL – Borealopelta, aka ‘northern shield’. It was an armored dinosaur, and a nodosaur, and… it was related… to Zuul, however distantly.

Wait, to whom?

Zuul, the armored dinosaur, described – and depicted – in the June 2017 issue of NG. It was an armored dinosaur, but unlike, say, Ankylosaurus, (featured in JP franchise and etc.), Zuul did not have a tail club, but it had shoulder spikes – as does Borealopelta. Again, this isn’t a problem, nor a surprise – another armored dinosaurs used to have it, as did other reptiles, like Desmatosuchus, a denizen of the Triassic time period, a distant cousin to the dinosaurs, but a closer cousin to the crocodilians, (although Desmatosuchus itself was a plant-eater, to add further incredulity, just as the armored dinosaurs did). Considering that the two dinosaurs were related, (how closely the paleontologists will figure out in due time), it is not very surprising that the two dinosaurs were physically similar; they did occupy similar econiches, after all. What bothers me is how NG handled them – let us discuss.

As I have written back in June 2017, that issue of NG did not give Zuul the same respect as it did to Spinosaurus in a much earlier issue, and I discussed this issue at length. Now, after reading the online NG article about Borealopelta, I see that NG has added insult to injury – the text of the online article is very similar to the text of the printed (and/or electronic) June 2017 magazine’s article on Zuul. And what is more, the depictions of new Borealopelta dinosaur are exactly that of Zuul (the dinosaur, not the first original Ghostbusters’ movie villain) – NG just recycled them from June 2017 time period and that’s that. Given that right now it is just early August 2017, this means that just about two months passed at most, nowhere near enough time for people to forget about NG descriptive article of Zuul, which makes NG’s decision kind of stupid, not just as in ‘foolish’ and ‘unoriginal’, but also as in ‘unimaginative’ and ‘disrespectful’. Seriously, check out ‘The Making of a Most Extraordinary Fossil’ special feature online, (on NG site), and then seek out the June 2017 issue of NG. The two pieces are similar enough in content and depiction that if anyone else did this sort of thing, NG would be full within its’ right to sue them for copyright infringement; yet when they do it to themselves, it’s fine?

End rant, or at least – put it on hold. NG has and will do ‘bloopers’ in the future; the last was probably in July 2017, when that month’s issue had an article – ‘THE MAKING OF A MASSACRE’. It was written together with ProPublica, ‘an independent, non-profit, investigative newsroom’, and it talked about a massacre in Allende, Mexico. Briefly, DEA got the goods on two drug kingpins, the Trevino brothers – and promptly shared this info with the Mexican police, even though their Mexican counterparts could not be trusted. Sure enough, the Trevinos learned immediately after this that they were sold out – and started the titular massacre.

Honestly, I feel sorry for the people of Allende, and am not impressed by the actions of the Mexican police or the DEA; I don’t know, who there was bribed, and who was just too naïve and idealistic for their own good, but this brings us to NG, who published the article both in paper and online – and then did their best to bury it, metaphorically speaking: the article was quickly made hard-to-access online, (even if one does have an online subscription to the magazine), and the magazine itself was quickly removed from many places where it was sold, (convenience stores, DrugMart, etc.). The online version of the article promised some sort of a supplementary video material to be released online in July – it never did. I do not know what went wrong here, but since the U.S. politics were involved, conspiracy theorists are welcome to make their own theories, of course.

However, as for Zuul and Borealopelta… I think that it was an honest blooper, which is still hard to excuse, as NG is usually a solid and respectful magazine and organisation. Was it really hard to figure out which material belongs to which dinosaur species, and just what the magazine was presenting the first time around (June 2017)? Moreover, once it was done, (the figuring out part), once the initial mistake was realized, how hard would it be to depict Borealopelta anew, from scratch, rather than reuse Zuul’s depictions directly? Apparently too hard, since this is what happened here.

That is it for NG (at the moment); as for Borealopelta itself… Ecologically, it was just like Zuul – a medium to large herbivore that used shoulder spikes to protect itself from various carnivorous dinosaurs; in the Early Cretaceous this meant early raptors (such as Deinonychus and Utahraptor) and carnosaurs, (such as Acrocanthosaurus), carnivores that were more similar to Allosaurus than to T-Rex. Neither group was well-suited to handle an armored dinosaur, as I wrote earlier, (in June 2017), so neither Zuul nor Borealopelta needed a tail club – not yet. Later armored dinosaurs, from the Late Cretaceous, will evolve it, because their top predators will be the tyrannosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus Rex itself…

The point that I am trying to make here is about the camouflage – supposedly, Borealopelta had critical countershading in its coloration; its’ back was darker than its’ belly. I let you in on a secret – many animals have it, from all over the tree of life. The most typical example are fish from the open seas, both bony fish and sharks like the mako and the great white, and somehow no one makes a big deal about this. The land animals too have it, just look at the wild horses and donkeys and their African cousins, the zebras. Their backs are darker than their bellies are, so there is no reason to assume that the dinosaurs did not have the same coloration scheme, but rather than they did.

Well, that is it for now; see you all later!

PS: And as for Killjoys? Let us talk about it for some other time…

Zuul the dinosaur

…And so, it is fifth of June already. Yay! In real life, my sister has graduated, and within the summer of 2017, she will have her new job. The two of us do not really get along, and this is all I am going to be talking about her here and now – not in the mood, not at all.

With RL off the table, what else is left there? Okay, there is the new nodosaur dinosaur that was (is?) talked about in May, and now June, of 2017. It is RL, actually, thus-

Thus the thing is that the official NG magazine article (June 2017) is almost downplaying the original excitement about the dinosaur from May. Take a look at the NG magazine archive, and find the October 2014 volume – it deals with Spinosaurus.

…Okay, no. We will actually try to avoid the JP franchise, movie or otherwise – as 2014-present showed, the RL Spinosaurus was a different animal from the one depicted in JP3, which is somewhat ironic, since I talked only last month about it – the RL Spinosaurus – fighting Tyrannosaurus and/or some Cretaceous carnosaur. Right. Here the thing is that back in October 2014 Spinosaurus got front-page coverage, it was the titular article of the volume, and now, in June 2017, this is not the case. The nodosaur is not the focus of the volume, the issue of why people lie is.

Again, so what? In addition, the NG has a point – nodosaurs are not as well-known as the theropod dinosaurs are. The article explains that they are cousins to Ankylosaurus (‘Walking with Dinosaurs’) and the like, but unlike the ankylosaurs in general (think Euoplocephalus, etc.) they had no tail club, but were more often spiked, as Sauropelta from ‘Monsters Resurrected’ was.

…Actually, things are slightly more complex than the lay people believe; apparently, aside from Stegosaurus and its part of the family, the armored dinosaurs consisted of three groups, not two – the ankylosaurs, the nodosaurs, and the polacantines. Polacanthus, from the already mentioned WWD, was a polacantine, not a nodosaur…and this is being disputed, the entire issue of ankylosaurs vs. nodosaurs vs polacantines. So far, scientists still do not know for sure which armored dinosaur belongs in which group, not 100%...

Back to Zuul. Yes, it was the name of one of the monsters in the initial original Ghostbusters movie, and it is the name of the new dinosaur. Only the article avoids this completely for reasons that are not obvious to the readers. Why? No, seriously, why? Has something gone wrong with the dinosaur study and now NG (and co?) are trying to downplay it? Is it something else? Curious minds want to know!

Speaking of minds, ‘River Monsters’ (RM) is over. For good. JW is done with the show and AP. This is seriously depressing. Now AP seems to be left with mainly such shows as ‘My Cat from Hell’ and ‘Tanked’. Such pet shows are not bad, but RM was better, period.

In other news – speaking of AP – I have re-watched the AFO episode ‘Croc vs. Shark’ again, and re-watched the DW episodes ‘Aztec Jaguar vs. Zande Warrior’ and ‘Vlad the Impaler vs. Sun Tzu’. Upon seeing them, I concluded that DW was a more complex show, simply because the human warfare was more complex than anything that animals – especially other vertebrate animals (as opposed to such invertebrates as ants, wasps and/or termites) – can come up with. That said, until the human warfare in question began to involve firearms for real, raw physical strength, dexterity, and endurance (‘toughness’) were even more crucial than how they are now – but that is another story.

Getting back to animals, their physical strength, dexterity and toughness…yes, this brings us back to Spinosaurus and Zuul/not Zuul. Yes, in many ways Spinosaurus was the more impressive dinosaur, but most of these ways were physical; behavior-wise I doubt that Spinosaurus was that more advanced in behaviour than a nodosaur – or a modern crocodile – was (is); Tyrannosaurus, it was implied once, wasn’t as intelligent as a domestic cat, but that’s an unfair comparison; cats are very clever, conniving creatures, and now that my own cat has died, (well, it died a while back, but still), we all miss it…

Back to the dinosaurs. Sorry about rumbling in the last paragraph; the truth is, as a semi-aquatic animal, Spinosaurus was probably one of the more intelligent theropods, relatively speaking. It had to be in order to survive in a complex, 3-D, aquatic lifestyle. By contrast, the armored dinosaurs did not live more complex lives than the modern rhinoceroses or buffalos do – they were strong, large, (relatively so), well-armored, capable of defence and attack, as ‘Jurassic Fight Club’ and ‘Monsters Resurrected’ showed in the past, but these shows, and especially JFC, are somewhat suspect when it comes to facts, but they have a point – Zuul (let’s call it this for now) would’ve had to deal with such carnivores as Acrocanthosaurus, which is a carnosaur, (remember?), meaning that while it was huge and strong, it just wasn’t evolved in the right way to deal with a proportionally small and tough and spiky dinosaur as Zuul or Sauropelta, (when compared to a sauropod like Paluxysaurus/Sauroposeidon, for example). Carnosaurs just did not have the right bite power to tackle ankylosaurs and nodosaurs, unlike the last of the tyrannosaurs – Tyrannosaurus and its’ Asian counterpart, Tarbosaurus – but that was another story.

As for the raptors, Zuul possibly had to deal not just with Deinonychus, but also with the biggest raptor known to scientists (for now) – Utahraptor. They were not as powerful as Acrocanthosaurus or the other carnosaurs, but they were intelligent. In addition, they hunted in packs. This made them dangerous to Zuul and its’ relatives, especially if the armored dinosaurs were young, or old, or sick, or wounded or weakened in some other way – just look at some of the footage from the modern African safaris for comparison…

Well, that’s for Zuul so far. Until next time!