This month has seen the identification of not one but two new species of dinosaurs. Life finds a way, indeed.
The first skeleton discovery was made by a team of Chilean geologists and paleontologists who unearthed remains in the 1990s and carried out their research throughout the 2000s until finally making their findings public last week in the journal Cretaceous Research. Unearthed in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest in the world, the scientists identified the skeletal remains to belong to a massive, plant-eating titanosaur. Per the BBC, “The creature was a sauropod, or a long-necked, long-tailed, plant-eating dinosaur. It was found in beds dating from the Late Cretaceous, the last epoch before dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago.”
The second dinosaur discovery revealed rather a more unusual prehistoric creature. Gizmodo reported that an international team of scientists centered in China and Japan unearthed a new species of dinosaur from examining a fossilized, crushed skeleton found in a rock in the Hebei province of China. The Sinomacrops bondei, as it has been named, is a new type of pterosaur, often generally referred to as “flying dinosaurs.” But unlike its prehistoric cousin, the pterodactyl, the Sinomacrops looks more cuddly than ferocious.
Using specialized X-ray imaging, the scientists created a picture of what the new pterosaur may have looked like, and the result is something akin to crossing a bat with a hamster. Big-eyed with bat-like wings, the creature was roughly the size of a small bird, with two hind legs, a round, seemingly furry mouth, and a rat-like tail. Think the porg in the terrible new Star Wars movies.
We remember British naturalist William Buckland as the first recorded man to discover a fossilized dinosaur, the Megalosaurus in 1824. Yet, a humble eye to history should tell us that this was probably not the case. Stories of gigantic, larger-than-life creatures and their remains litter the myths and folklore of most civilizations throughout the ages. We know the Native Americans painted depictions and petroglyphs of creatures resembling modern renderings of dinosaurs. Why can’t the Cyclops also have been some form of a dinosaur?
This is the precise type of question explored by Adrienne Mayor in her fascinating book, The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. As the Stanford University folklorist and historian of ancient science describes, many fossilized dinosaur remains have been uncovered in the lands that were known to the Greeks and Romans. It is entirely plausible that these societies’ epic myths represent antiquity’s way of attempting to make sense of such remains. According to Mayor, stories of griffins, Titans, the shoulder of Pelops, dragons, and even the Cyclopes could have all been born of this instinct to interpret physical uncoverings they could not understand in a normal framework.
For my part, I prefer Homer’s interpretation, but the porg-like thing does seem weirdly cute.
