Dinosaurs includes the largest animals to walk the Earth NOVEMBER6 Paleobiology of Dinosaurs Learn in this unit What is a dinosaur Why the fascination Where we find them how we study them and what we know about their world As children we get stymied by realization that this is not real eg dragons bunny santa Paleontologist someone who studies any aspect of ancient organisms This course is specifically about paleobiology the study of the lives of ancient organisms physiology behavior ecology functional anatomy The history of dinosaur paleobiology It is hard to miss dinosaur bones Clearly people knew about them before their scientific recognition in 1842 China dinosaur giants Dragon Bones from long dead serpents were unearthed for centuries for medicinal purposes IN 1676 Giant Human Thighbone found in England Later reinterpreted as the Giant s private parts The specimen was named Scrotum humanum technically the first proper scientific name given to a Now known to be the end of a dinosaurs s thigh bone American Indians referred to Dinosaur remains as the Father of the Buffalo or as a scared former race of Lewis and Clark found dinosaur bones in Montana and wrote them off as remains of a giant fish At that time most people did not think that extinction could occur Thomas Jefferson a fossil fanatic thus told them to be on the look out for mastodons furry elephants 1770 a 40 foot long sea monster named Mosasaurus was found in Holland In 1824 William Buckland described a reptile jaw with pointed serrated teeth from England He called it Megalosaurus big lizard since he thought it was just a giant relative of today s lizards About the same time surgeon Gideon Mantell of England found giant teeth and bones Thought it was just a big lizard too Named it Iguanaodon Iguana tooth Giant herbivorous reptiles were unheard of got a lot of press Notes reptiles like lizards and crocodiles have scaly skin Richard Owen took stock of all the crazy giants being found in Europe and noted they were different than the reptiles living today giant having upright posture Famous dinner was held named them Dinosauria Fearfully Giant Reptiles QUESTION ON TEST Own worked with artist Waterhouse to depict them in full size as part of a huge display of British Science Owen made several mistakes all dinosaurs were quadrapedal and he also put spikes on them Dino mania began and hundreds of thousands came to view the Dinosaurs We now have a better idea of what features characterize them who they are related to and why So what makes a dinosaur a dinosaur Dinosaurs had teeth in sockets like crocodiles pterosaurs flying reptiles and dinomorphs dinosaur like reptiles thus these are their closest relatives dinosauromorphs have erect posture like dinosaurs Unique dinosaur feature 1 Three or more sacral vertebrae fused backbones in hip region feature 2 Hands with 3 main fingers Perforate acetabulae i e the hole where the thighbone attached goes all the way through the feature 3 hip Yankee Dinosaurs The first documented remains were tracks found in 1800 Wrote them off as giant birds 1858 Joseph Leidy given nearly complete skeleton of a duck billed dinosaur Became immediately apparent that British were wrong dinosaurs were actually bipedal He envisioned it like a kangaroo New York officials wanted to show up Brits and planned their own exposition in Central Park showing the proper way to mount dinosaurs Thugs broke in and destroyed them the dinosaurs are still buried there today By late 1800s there was enough evidence to show there are two different types of dinosaurs The fossil feud led to the discovery of some of the most famous dinosaurs from the North American west marsh and Cope found most of the famous dinosaurs seen in museums today Early 1900s US Museums take over as American Dinomania dinosaurs were only to get the public to come through the gates so scientists could pay for the After WWII most dinosaur hunting slowed down science was considered kid stuff most dinosaurs were thought to have been found important work on mammals Dinosaur Renaissance Ostrom discovered Deinonyclaus need to know this name Here was an athletic animal Ostrom took a student Robert Bakker and said that all dinosaurs were athletic and more like living birds Outcome everyone started studying dinosaurs and jobs were created more money is spent on Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez and Walter Alvarez in 1980 argued that an asteroid hit the earth and killed and mammals dinosaurs than every before dinosaurs Cladistics A method to organize physical characteristics of dinosaurs and discern relationships So all in all dinosaur paleobiology is alive and well and growing we are learning more and more about these animals everyday NOV8 The Age of the Dinosaurs When did dinosaurs live 238 million years until 65 5 million years ago Three divisions to age of dinosaurs How do we know these ages look at radioactive isotopes in volcanic rocks Compare original amount to final amount to assess age there were a lot of volcanoes during the age of the dinosaurs For dinosaur age uranium 235 is best World was warmer It was arid in equatorial regions like FL in middle regions Plate Tectonics Continents move driven by volcanic seafloor spreading It is pure when volcano rocks cool Carbon dating is too short to be of our use for dinos We know from the kinds of plants and animals and temp sensitive rocks that In the Triassic continents were adjoined called Pangea By the end of the Cretaceous they were close to their present positions One of the ways we know continents move is by finding species of dinos in different parts of the world With a warmer Earth there was no ice at the poles The meant oceans were higher and covered much of the continents and ironically dinos had less land to live on than there is today Seaways crossed the continents and influenced where dinos could travel this explains why some species are only found in certain regions Mountain Systems The world was fairly flat during the age of the dinos Most of today s mountain ranges had yet to develop to a major extent The flora during the age of the dinos differed from that of today and the types of plants changed several times the types of plants available for forage had a strong influence on what dinos could eat Triassic and Jurassic Plants There was less ground to cover back then since there was no grass Trees had great height and chemical defenses and poor ability to regenerate By the middle of the Cretaceous
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