Dinosaur Valley State Park

As you can see, the Metal Dinosaur had a great time visiting the Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, Texas!  It was very crowded that day, and any photos containing bipeds other than my shadow are not being posted here.  The water was fairly deep despite the dry conditions, so some of the pictures are a little blurry.  But, please enjoy the fossilized Acrocanthosaurus tracks!  Also, a weird fossil rock, which I left in the park.

"Take nothing but pictures.  Leave nothing but footprints.  Kill nothing but time." 

Acrocanthosaurus atokensis

Ack-ro-canth-o-saur-us

Acrocanthosaurus atokensis was one of the coolest dinosaurs alive in the early-to-mid Cretaceous period.  It might actually be my personal favorite.  Acrocanthosaurus means "high-spined lizard."  (It is important to remember that despite the suffix "saur," dinosaurs are not actually lizards.)  It was a large, carnivorous relative of the Allosaurus equipped with three fingers on each hand, one"thumb" and two fingers.  It looks a lot like a very large and heavy Allosaurus, but for its namesake feature; a tall ridge runs along its spine.  The ridge rises from the spinal column starting behind the skull and continuing all along the back to about the middle of the tail.  We're not completely sure what the ridge of neural spines does, whether it was separated or connected by flesh, or even if it had keratinized spikes on top of them.  Keratin is the stuff fingernails, hair, hooves, and skin are made of, so these spikes would be like fingernails, and because of this, they would not be preserved in the fossil record.

We think it could have used the ridge for thermoregulation, or regulating body temperature.  If that's true, it would have flushed the ridge with blood to heat itself up or reduce blood in the ridge to cool off.  It could also have had color-changing spots or been a bright color to attract mates.  The ridge is fairly short compared to Spinosaurus (a dinosaur often confused as a relative of Acrocanthosaurus,) and could have been covered with heavy muscle like a bison.

Acrocanthosaurus may have lived in small family groups (like wolves) or been solitary (like tigers.)  Its skull curves inward from the eye-sockets, giving it binocular vision like most predators today have.  It has a long jaw equipped with sharp, serrated teeth for tearing meat and strong arms, even if they are small.  Its legs are long and powerful, with three clawed toes on each foot.  Acro was likely an active hunter who probably scavenged meat when it couldn't catch anything. 

While we don't know everything about their lives, we do have some cool evidence of an Acrocanthosaurus hunt.  Fossilized footprints in a riverbed in Texas show a large predator chasing a medium-sized Brachiosaur (a long-necked plant eater.)  The possible Acrocanthosaurus's footprints disappear, suggesting that it possibly jumped up onto the Brachiosaur's side.  The riverbed fossils seem to show a fast predator, but one apparently hunting alone.  We do not know how this chase ended.  The Acro could have been thrown to the ground and severely injured, or perhaps it was successful and killed the Brachiosaur.  It's possible that both got out alive.  Others suggest that the two tracks occurred at different times, since the Brachiousaur's footprints don't necessarily react to the Acrocanthosaurus.  You can look up more on the Glenn Rose Formation to see the tracks for yourself and make your own conclusion! 

An Acro skull from the named fossil Fran showed a very cool peculiarity.  The skull, fossilized in toxic iron sulfide, was a beautiful black color and took a long time to excavate, clean, and assemble.  During this two-year long process, another creature's tooth was found embedded in Fran's jaw.  It was a small (only three inches long) crocodilian tooth, buried deep in Fran's mouth, apparently from an active bite.  Acro had bent down to drink, or eat, and the crocodile-like animal had surged out of the water and bit the much larger dinosaur on the mouth, losing its tooth.  The Acro not only survived this encounter, but carried that tooth in its jaw until the day it died.  An infection in the jaw prevented new teeth from growing, but Acro healed and lived on.

So, how do you know if you're looking at an Acrocanthosaurus?  Acro was big, and very heavily built.  It has a fairly straight spine, stiffened by the characteristic tall ridge, and a long tail to counter-balance its long head.  It won't be much longer than 35 feet, and about half of that is tail.  It's about 9 to 13 feet tall at the hips.  If you look at an Acro's skull, you'll see its upper jaw is fairly straight, almost like a frown while T. rex and its relatives tend to have a curved jaw that looks like a smile.

Acro lived in the United States about 120 million years ago and we have found fossils in Texas, Oklahoma and Utah.  As with most dinosaurs, none of these fossils are complete, and our knowledge of the dinosaur comes from combining the incomplete fossils we've found.

If you live in Texas or Oklahoma you can visit Dinosaur State Park, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, or Science Museum Oklahoma for more cool dinosaurs.  If you live in Utah, there's always the Utah Museum of Natural History.

Thanks for reading!

FAQs (in potentia)

I will address some Frequently Asked Questions in this section.  Since I can already guess at a few, I'm going to answer them now and add more as I get them.

Who/What/Where are you?
Not really important.  I was a tour guide and mad scientist for two and a half years, and a "rock expert" for another two.  I have no formal training in paleontology, astronomy, geology, or chemistry, but have been largely self-taught in all of these fields.  I am not an expert and I don't recommend using this site for citation unless you really want to.  As for where I am....I'm sure that means nothing.

So what makes you qualified to talk about dinosaurs like an expert when you just said you weren't?
A paleontologist is someone who studies dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures from fossil and trace evidence.  You do not have to make money doing something to be knowledgeable about it.  Thus, by reading this blog, you too are a paleontologist!

Why do you draw your dinosaurs with feathers?
From the fossil evidence we've recently uncovered, it seems that most, if not all, of the carnivorous dinosaurs were covered in feathers.  There are some exceptions.  Spinosaurus for example, with its massive sail, probably did not have or need feathers to regulate body temperature.  But if you look at the bones of the meat-eating dinosaurs, you see that they are very much like birds.  Even the four-legged dinosaurs have birdlike features such as beaks or similarly shaped hip bones.

What, even T. rex?
T. rex almost certainly had feathers, at least as a baby.  Some paleontoligists say that it lost the feathers as it grew to adult size.  We have discovered T. rex skin impressions that appear to be feather-less, but we just don't have enough information yet.

You know the Earth is only six thousand years old, right?
We do not know for sure how old the Earth is, but we do know it is around 4 to 5 billion years old.

So you're an evolutionist!  How do you know anything about what happened before the Bible was written?  You weren't there!
Neither were you.  There are many religions and many myths about how and when the Earth came to be.  To our best guess, none of these are correct.  The Earth seems to have coalesced out of galactic debris shed from dying stars.  Heavier elements like iron form the molten core of our planet, a super-heated swirling ball of liquid iron powers our world's magnetic field and warms the mantle, allowing the plates on the crust to shift and move.  These plate tectonics caught earthquakes, volcanism, islands, and continental shifts.  They changed the continents from one super landmass called Pangea to the configuration we see today and will continue to change them as time passes.
This does not mean your religion is wrong.  And it does not mean that your particular god or gods are imaginary.  It does mean that religious texts written centuries ago by humans who did not know what we know today made their best guesses, and they were mistaken.  Science has a self-correcting mechanism, and this is why you see changes constantly as our understanding of the world deepens and our knowledge increases.  We will never know everything, but asserting as fact that which cannot be proven is NOT SCIENCE and I will not discuss it further.

So where do we come from?  How did the world "just happen?"  Do the tides "just happen?"
Basically, yes.  The tides are caused by the moon's gravitational pull on the Earth.  As it revolves around us, it pulls on the oceans, and these bulges cause the tides.  The moon seems to have been created when a large astronomical body struck our very young and still-molten planet, breaking off a chunk that, caught in the gravity of the proto-Earth, cooled to become the moon.  Our moon is large enough to stabilize what would otherwise be an erratic wobble that would give us bizarre seasons and possibly prevent life from happening.  We do not yet know how life began on our world, but we are working on it.  It is OK to say "I don't know."  It is OK to not know something.  I know that "I don't know" isn't satisfying, but it is honest.  The truth is what's important.  I don't have all the answers.  Sorry.

A Brief Overview

The Earth has been revolving around our lonely little sun for about 4 billion years.  We say 'about' because, well, we don't know for sure.  And when you're dealing with billions, losing a few million here and there is not a huge deal.  Geologists are scientists who study the earth and its component parts.  Astronomers are scientists who study the stars and the universe.  Astronomers tell us the universe (as it is now) has existed for about 13 billion years.  That looks like 13,000,000,000.  But the Earth hasn't been around that long.  It's only existed for around 4 billion.  (4,000,000,000.)  This blog is about the Mesozoic Era, and will contain information about dinosaurs and the other non-dinosaur animals that lived in this time.  Unless otherwise noted, the creature profiles will be hand-drawn by me.
Who am I?  I'm The Metal Dinosaur.  I worked for a miniature science museum in a mall for a number of years before it was sadly bought out of existence by a clothing store (Forever 21.)  Perhaps I harbor a bit of resentment for that particular store because the decision was made by people who cared more about money than educating and enriching the lives of children and adults in the area.  As much anger as I felt then, and the sadness I feel now, is a response to the senselessness and lack of foresight of changing people's lives because of money in an economic downturn and subsequent recession.  This is my way of continuing the mission of the museum, but hopefully on a larger scale.  I wish to bring dinosaurs to children who can't afford to go to museums, and to interested adults who never quite lose their fascination with the mighty beasts who lived so long before us.

A partial geological map of the world, courtesy of the Smithsonian.

Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian.  These eras in history took place before the dinosaurs evolved to rule the world.  Some of the strangest and coolest animals lived during these times.  Centipedes six feet long.  Underwater scorpions without stingers.  Dragonflies as big as birds, and the completely awesome Dimetrodon lived before the dinosaurs.  In the Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene and Holocene, we see mammals take over the Earth.  Saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, dire wolves, rodents the size of cars, flightless birds that ate miniature horses and ultimately humans all lived well after the dinosaurs died out.
It's not that these animals aren't interesting.  They are!  But the focus will be dinosaurs.  In the future, I may add a separate blog about the creatures who took the dinosaurs' place.
Sit back, relax, and let me take you on a journey back in time, before school buses and horses.  Before dogs and cats and rats.
Let me take you to the time of dinosaurs.