How true-to-life are Hollywood movie dinosaurs?

Don't hike in the woods wearing sandals.

That's the central message in "Joyce Carol Oates’ foot photo is freaking everyone out."

“So important to wear proper hiking shoes,” the National Book Award winner tweeted, sharing a graphic close-up of her foot. “Never/ever walk in the woods in sandals. the instep of my left foot this morning--poison ivy? poison oak? must’ve stepped in something...”

Bonus JCO tweet at that link:

So barbaric that this should still be allowed... No conservation laws in effect wherever this is? https://t.co/hgavm9IBaM

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) June 9, 2015

I will read one and only one of articles on the "Popular in Slate" list, which I think stands on it's own as something worth reading.

I'll update soon with something about the one I want to read.

ADDED: The article I chose — could you guess? — was "It’s Time for the Heroic Male Paleontologist Trope to Go Extinct" by Riley Black (subheadline: "The New Yorker’s story on the day the dinosaurs died brings up more questions than it answers, but it does make the staleness of this genre clear").

Under the sweltering desert sun, a man painstakingly scrapes away at ancient stone. A weathered fedora offers what passes for shade in these harsh conditions. With each carefully controlled scratch, a lost world comes into view—a time of monsters never before seen, the strata seeming to glow with potential.

This isn’t a scene from the next Indiana Jones film; it’s the kind of breathless prose novelist Douglas Preston employs in his latest New Yorker feature hyping a controversial fossil site that slammed onto social media last week like the asteroid that closed the Cretaceous. It also happens to be exactly the kind of scruffy, macho, lone-scientist stereotype legend that needs to go extinct....

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with a little Indiana Jones cosplay... It’d be one thing if the rogue-heroic-scientist-makes-amazing-discovery storyline was one of many types of tales of how we make progress in this field. But it’s the only one we ever seem to get with paleontology, and in this case, the hype just doesn’t match the published results. The claims that made the New Yorker story so popular and shareable are not all included in the paper out this week....

This shouldn’t be how science, or science journalism, works.... 

IN THE COMMENTS: William said:

I think the writer is conflating archeologists with paleontologists. An easy mistake for the uninformed to make, but nonetheless a mistake. You will remember from Bringing Up Baby how Cary Grant wore glasses and was quite reserved and proper in his behavior. Likewise with Ross in Friends. Typical paleontologists. There's very little toxic masculinity among paleontologists.....

That's right! The 2 most well-known paleontologists in American popular media are Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby" and Ross in "Friends." Both are nerdy and inhibited.

"It is difficult not to get choked up and passionate about this topic. We look at moment-by-moment records of one of the most notable impact events in Earth’s history."

"No other site has a record quite like that. And this particular event is tied directly to all of us — to every mammal on Earth, in fact. Because this is essentially where we inherited the planet. Nothing was the same after the impact. It became a planet of mammals instead of a planet of dinosaurs."

Said University of Kansas doctoral student Robert A. DePalma, quoted in "KU student’s major find: Scene of devastation from dinosaur-killing asteroid" (Kansas City Star).

"The last Jurassic World film grossed a massive $1.67 billion worldwide but was critically panned..."

"... with much of the conversation revolving around why Howard’s heroine spent the entire film running from dinosaurs in heels (in a hilariously petty 'fuck you' to critics, our first shot of Howard in Fallen Kingdom delivers a close-up of her heels and, when she arrives on the island, a close-up of her wearing appropriate boots)."

From "‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ Proves the Dinosaur Franchise Should Go Extinct" by Ira Madison (in The Daily Beast).

That passage reminds me of how the Trump administration is doing so well, though the media critics have panned it, and — when Melania Trump went to Texas after the floods of Tropical Storm Harvey, — how much of the conversation revolved around the stilettos she wore, and how— in this week's sequel trip to Texas — in a hilariously petty "fuck you" to critics, our first shot of Melania delivers a close-up of the back of her jacket that reads "I REALLY DON'T CARE..."

My more detailed and serious reaction to Melania's talkative jacket is here. All I mean to say in this new post is that there are some things that launch high over the heads of the critics, and the cries of disgust from the critics only energize the love that is felt by the people who love that stuff.

And here's Trump's reaction:

“I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” written on the back of Melania’s jacket, refers to the Fake News Media. Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2018

ADDED: "A Psychological Explanation for Kids’ Love of Dinosaurs" (NY Magazine):

Researchers don’t know exactly what sparks them — the majority of parents can’t pinpoint the moment or event that kicked off their kids’ interest — but almost a third of all children have [an "intense interest"] at some point, typically between the ages of 2 and 6... And while studies have shown that the most common intense interest is vehicles — planes, trains, and cars — the next most popular, by a wide margin, is dinosaurs....

“Maybe at home the interest was being reinforced, and the positive feedback loop was, ‘Johnny knows that’s a pterodactyl, Johnny’s a genius!’ When you’re getting praise over and over again for having information about a subject, you’re on a runaway train to Dinosaurland,” [therapist Elizabeth] Chatel says. “But then school begins and the positive feedback loops shift to, ‘Johnny played so well with others, Johnny shared his toys and made a friend.’”

There's just no stopping the Tyrannosaurus rex... once he starts going up in flames.

Via "Giant animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex goes up in dramatic flames in Colorado" (WaPo).

The 24-foot-tall reptile replica at the Royal Gorge Dinosaur Experience was set ablaze by an electrical malfunction in the early afternoon, the park’s owners said in a Facebook post. After smoldering for about 10 minutes, huge flames engulfed the creature, whose motorized head and jaws sway as parkgoers pass by....

When it finally extinguished, the T. rex’s metal skeleton was still standing silhouetted in the afternoon light, its poorly-evolved, disproportionately-small arms bent plaintively toward the sky.

Oh, come on, that's just mean, calling attention to the poor guy's tiny arms in his time of greatest anguish.

"We don’t just have a skeleton. We have a dinosaur as it would have been."

"I’ve been calling this one the Rosetta Stone for armor."/"It’s basically a dinosaur mummy ― it really is exceptional."

Sounds delightfully intact, but here they are breaking it in 2011:

"It was the delicate, feathered tail of a tiny dinosaur."

Preserved in amber.

"One reason it took paleontologists so long to classify Wade as a new species had to do with where it was found."

"Most of Wade’s remains were trapped in a boulder. Even with the help of hundreds of volunteer fossil enthusiasts, about a decade passed before Wade was finally extracted."

The new species is: Titanosaur.

Nicolas Cage outbid Leonardo DiCaprio for a 32-inch-long, 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar skull.

He paid $276,000, but turns out it was stolen, and now Cage must send the skull back where it belongs: Mongolia.

“Cultural artifacts such as this Bataar Skull represent a part of Mongolian national cultural heritage,” Glenn Sorge, a special agent with [the United States attorney in Manhattan], said in a statement. “It belongs to the people of Mongolia. These priceless antiquities are not souvenirs to be sold to private collectors or hobbyists.”

ADDED: How is the skull of an animal that died tens of millions of years before there was a Mongolia part of the "Mongolian national cultural heritage"? Mongolia may have a superior claim to the valuable object, and the claim may be based on lofty values of some sort, but it's not a claim based on Mongolian national cultural heritage. Talk about cultural appropriation!

"It's like: you and the Tyrannosaurus rex."

What I said when Meade read item #4 on "10 things not to buy in 2016": "Selfie sticks." I was all: "Yeah, if your arm's not long enough...."

"Wearing a toilet seat on his head, David Hu accepts the Ig Nobel Physics Prize for his research on the principle that mammals empty their bladders of urine in about 21 seconds."

His work was "Duration of Urination Does Not Change With Body Size."

I also liked:

ECONOMICS PRIZE — The Bangkok Metropolitan Police for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes.
REFERENCE: Numerous news reports....

BIOLOGY PRIZE — Bruno Grossi, Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. Vásquez, José Iriarte-Díaz, for observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.
REFERENCE: “Walking Like Dinosaurs: Chickens with Artificial Tails Provide Clues about Non-Avian Theropod Locomotion,” Bruno Grossi, José Iriarte-Díaz, Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. Vásquez, PLoS ONE, 2014.

More of that sort of thing at the link.

"Microbiologist Takes Handprint of Her Son After Playing Outside and Incubates the Results."

Amazing and beautiful.

And for some reason it reminded me that I wanted to blog "I rediscovered my Jurassic Park dossier when cleaning out a cupboard... "

What if Joyce Carol Oates told a joke...

... and nobody got it ... even though you had to go to this obvious joke even to see what she was talking about....

This guy thinks it's cool to kill defenceless animals then take a selfie. Jerk. pic.twitter.com/WbgMklrd9u

— Chris Tilly (@TillyTweets) June 9, 2015

"Over the years, belief in the brontosaurus became a badge of melancholy quixotism."

"'We brontophiles have been defeated,' Stephen Jay Gould wrote mournfully, in 1991. 'They have won."

But the tables have turned:

Researchers from Portugal and the United Kingdom have evaluated eighty-one diplodocid fossils—including specimens of Apatosaurus ajax (the first described apatosaurus) and Apatosaurus excelsus (the dinosaur formerly known as brontosaurus)—for a total of four hundred and seventy-seven morphological characteristics. “The differences we found between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were at least as numerous as the ones between other closely related genera, and much more than what you normally find between species,” Roger Benson, a professor of paleobiology at Oxford University, said....

"Dreadnoughtus (meaning 'fearing nothing'...) is a genus of giant titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur..."

"It is one of the largest of all known terrestrial vertebrates, possessing the greatest mass of any land animal that can be calculated with reasonable certainty, using limb bone measurements."

Are you excited about the Dreadnought dinosaur? "Dreadnought" has a big "disambiguation" page at Wikipedia, with lots of ships, of course, and also trains and books and movies. The word goes back to the 1500s, used for ships. From the OED (which is unlinkable, even as a dreadnought might be unsinkable):

1587   F. Drake Despatch 27 Apr. in R. Hakluyt Princ. Navigations (1904) VI. p. xiv,   A greate leake sprange uppon the Dreadenoughte.

There's also "A type of thick woollen cloth with a long pile; a coat or other outer garment made of this cloth, typically worn in stormy weather."

1834   R. Southey Doctor II. 197   One of those dreadnoughts the utility of which sets fashion at defiance.

"Dreadnought" can be an adjective, meaning "fearless" (or, alternatively, made out of that heavy cloth used to make those above-mentioned coats). It was used to mean "fearless" here:

1978   N.Y. Mag. 18 Dec. 18/3   What is the point of this dreadnought approach to a basically frivolous genre?

That quote comes from a short trashing of the film "Death on the Nile." The preceding sentence is "Bette Davis and Maggie Smith are fun together, but no one else in the huge cast distinguishes himself."



Loving the dinosaurs!

Maya Angelou, the poet who puzzlingly punctuated Bill Clinton's first auguration with references to dried dinosaur and mastodon shit...

... has passed. She was 86.

Here's the full text of the poem, "On the Pulse of Morning,"" which begins: "A Rock, A River, A Tree/Hosts to species long since departed/Marked the mastodon/The dinosaur, who left dried tokens/Of their sojourn here/On our planet floor...." What that meant about Bill Clinton, we are left to interpret.

ADDED: I loved "I Know Why the Caged Bird Laughs."

AND: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

"Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth."

"Its length, from its head to the tip of its tail, was 40m. Standing with its neck up, it was about 20m high - equal to a seven-storey building."

And may I add that the photo of the paleontologist lying on the ground posing with the half-excavated bone is very cute?

Nasutoceratops titusi... big-nose, horn-face...

A new dinosaur.

"The horns are by far the absolute largest of any member of its group of dinosaurs - they curve sideways and forwards... In addition it has the biggest nose of its group too."

"How to eat a Triceratops."

"Step one: get a good grip on the neck frill."