There are few fact pages dedicated to children for Adasaurus. We have seen fewer than are available today though. There is a pretty easy to read page over at Academic Kids, its only real short coming is how short it is. The About page on Adasaurusis a little more detailed, so we should definitely share that as well. The biggest loser of the day, though, is in the coloring pages area. There really are not any. This gelatinous dinosaur exists and there are a few that might qualify on deviantArt (the first page is kid friendly and only has one non-dinosaur but fully clothed model photo, beyond that I have not checked, so be wary). Those illustrations are not meant as coloring pages though, so so not assume that they can be used as such!
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One For Kiddos
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Gaming Material
Good morning from GSA in Denver, first of all. Secondly, Adasaurus has not made its way into any documentaries that I have found online. That is a little sad in and of itself. However, as we can see here, some intrepid gamer has taken it upon themselves to re-purpose and play with the models of Zoo Tycoon enough to add a modified Adasaurus into the game. I could write a fair amount about the model and how it looks rather plain compared to the feathered appearance of most modern Dromaeosaurid interpretations, but it looks pretty nice all said and done to be honest. I am going to go listen to a talk on archaeology, enjoy your day, and the conference if you are in Denver.
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Inkless
Adasaurus has a short history of being written about. Unfortunately, it is a history that is mostly lacking. In part due to the recentness of the writing and in part due to the fact that the writing was not recent enough that it made its way onto the internet. There have been other articles which mention Adasaurus or allude to it such as this 2000 article about a French Dromaeosaurid. Sadly, that means, there are no scholarly articles to share without finding a paper copy of the original and scanning it. Hopefully someday someone will do that or we will find a copy that the publisher finally decided to put online.
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Adasaurus is A Stocky Animal
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| ©Mike Hanson |
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In Storage
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| Originally posted by Mickey Mortimer |
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Keeper of the Winds
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| ©Karkemish |
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Pointing Forward
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| From Garcia and Salgado 2013 |
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| Picture ©Marco Aurelio Esparz |
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Kids and Dinosaurs
Aeolosaurus is not well known, we can accept that many of the titanosaurs are not well known I think. Cutting out a lot of the speculative and scientific debate of many other articles online, Academic Kids does a good job of just posting the bare minimum of information to introduce kids to the dinosaur. Unfortunately, the bare minimum for a poorly understood dinosaur is a very little amount of information to begin with. For a little more in depth information, after gathering the bare minimum, the outline version of information presented on Bob Strauss' About pages again offer a good place to direct the children eager to read more and talk about this dinosaur more. Sadly today we have no coloring pages to offer up while children read or are read to, but perhaps the kids out there could draw one of these dinosaurs for themselves.
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Motionless Winds
Sadly, for a dinosaur so rooted in winds, by virtue of its name, Aeolosaurus is rather motionless. There are a variety of reasons that this could be, but the sad fact is that there is simply not any documentaries or even wireframe models out there constructed by dinosaur enthusiasts. There are not even modded models in games like Zoo Tycoon. The most important thing about Aeolosaurus that should not be forgotten, despite this lack of wonderful motion and images of a rather unique and interesting sauropod, is that there are many individuals, fragmentary as they are, that are known and therefore the ability to create models in the future becomes greater with every discovery. Since that does not exist, however, please enjoy this wonderful image of Aeolosaurus today:
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Writing Like A Maniac
Aeolosaurus has been written about a lot more than it has starred in documentaries. The mentions of it in scholarly articles are pretty fantastic as well as the number of papers dedicated solely to Aeolosaurus. One of these papers that is of great importance is a 2007 article by Casal, et al. which details the discovery of a new species of Aeolosaurus from Argentina. This species is the second named species, which is why it is an important paper. Additionally, Martinelli, Riff and Lopes wrote a paper discussing when and where fossils of Aeolosaurus have been discovered in South America that makes for a rather fun and interesting read. I encourage everyone to read the first paper if you have to choose between them for any reason!
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Aeolosaurus and Its Tail
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What We Know
We know that Aeolosaurus is not a popular dinosaur, unfortunately. That has been borne out over the week. No one has offered any answers to any of the questions that remain without closure, sadly. However, I do have one more image I can share that is attributed to Aeolosaurus. The image has no attribution as far as I can find in terms of illustrator though.
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A Different Branch of Dinosaur
Tyrannosaurids are always a fun branch of dinosaurs to discuss. After last week's nearly non-existent information on Aeolosaurus I think we ought to cover a nearly equally difficult to fossil carnivore. The love people show to tyrannosaurs ought to somewhat offset the little available fossil material of Alioramusremotus Kurzanov 1976 or Alioramus altai Brusatte 2009. Alioramus is a bit of problem child as fragmentary evidence of the two species has been recovered only from Asia and only as fragments. There is no real problem with being an Asian dinosaur, it is just that the fragments have only been discovered in Asia and that the dinosaur has been noted only as being related to Tarbosaurus bataar which, itself, has debated origins and positioning in the phylogenetic tree. There are some rather interesting similarities between Tarbosaurus and Alioramus that will need to be highlighted to understand where Alioramus belongs on the tyrannosaurid tree, and hopefully we can go over what makes this dinosaur an Asian tyrannosaur during the course of the week!
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| ©Nobu Tamura |
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Two Species and Not A Single Skeleton
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| Constructed by Steveoc86 |
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| Constructed by Conty |
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Kids Play with Alioramus
Alioramus shows up in a few kid related areas, which is always nice. Notable sites that I love to reference include, of course, Dinosaurs for Kids and Academic Kids. For the higher level students there is an entry on the Tree of Life site that discuss Tyrannosaurid systematics a bit more in depth. There is also a nice coloring sheet that really accentuates that Allosaurid snout that has been mentioned.
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Disney Has Fun
A minute into the Dinosaur! ride at Disney's Animal Kingdom an Alioramus rears back and ingests what is supposed to be a Champsosaurus according to the accounts I have read. The only real problem with that is that Champsosaurus is a North American genus that, to my knowledge, has no representative species seen in Asia where Alioramus resided. Regardless, the long snouted Alioramus digging into the ground to pull out the long bodied Champsosaurus kind of meshes well with the statement made Saturday that the long snout allows for extension into cavities, though body cavities not caves and caverns, in search of food. Regardless, digging for food was probably not the primary means of extracting prey items for a dinosaur with a long snout based on its shortened forelimbs. As hypothesized earlier, the snout was probably used as the primary weapon, inflicting quick and sudden bites on prey items during hunting expeditions. The idea that the elongate snout could be used for digging or extracting animals from crevices, while not entirely farcical, would most likely have been a last ditch attempt at procuring food items.
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Looking at Brains and Heads
There are quite a few studies of Alioramus out there to be read. There is a little for everyone in fact. There are studies on osteology of Alioramus specimens out there. The study referenced in this paper even questions the validity of A. altai based on the fact that it appears to represent a younger individual that may in fact only have ontogenetic differences separating it and A. remotus. Additionally, this paper makes note of, and reinforces, the point made here earlier that the jaw, unique amongst Tyrannosaurids, was probably not used in a typical tyrannosaur method of excising large chunks of food for swallowing. An alternative is not mentioned specifically, but instead it is proposed that that mode of feeding may in fact be present in adults of the genus; unfortunately only individuals deemed to be immature have been discovered.
A second paper of interest examines the braincase, via CT scanning, and describes the structure in a highly detailed manner. 21 characters from this structure were used in redefining the tyrannosaur phylogeny recently and all of these characters are addressed and discussed in this paper. It is certainly well worth the read if one has the time. Interest in a somewhat separate area of tyrannosaur phylogeny is represented in this PLOS ONE paper that expounds upon the hypothesis that the rise and fall of tyrannosaur lines can be used to parallel the rise and fall of the Cretaceous oceans. Much of this paper discusses Larimidia (the western half of North America) and the Western Interior Seaway, but there is also mention of the Asian tyrannosaur families as well. Of these North American tyrannosaurs, those from Utah are most highly discussed and the parallels of the ocean habitats of the Cretaceous are drawn from these animals. Despite not being of particular central interest to this paper, Alioramus is a tyrannosaur and, supposedly at least, the same conclusions ought to be able to be drawn by studying Alioramus in a similar fashion.
A second paper of interest examines the braincase, via CT scanning, and describes the structure in a highly detailed manner. 21 characters from this structure were used in redefining the tyrannosaur phylogeny recently and all of these characters are addressed and discussed in this paper. It is certainly well worth the read if one has the time. Interest in a somewhat separate area of tyrannosaur phylogeny is represented in this PLOS ONE paper that expounds upon the hypothesis that the rise and fall of tyrannosaur lines can be used to parallel the rise and fall of the Cretaceous oceans. Much of this paper discusses Larimidia (the western half of North America) and the Western Interior Seaway, but there is also mention of the Asian tyrannosaur families as well. Of these North American tyrannosaurs, those from Utah are most highly discussed and the parallels of the ocean habitats of the Cretaceous are drawn from these animals. Despite not being of particular central interest to this paper, Alioramus is a tyrannosaur and, supposedly at least, the same conclusions ought to be able to be drawn by studying Alioramus in a similar fashion.
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Alioramus is Unique Enough
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Star Tyrannosaur
The story behind the long narrow snout of Alioramus remains quite unsolved and a little bit conjectural. The purpose of such a snout clearly has an embedded purpose and we have certainly entertained many interesting and educated guesses/hypotheses during this week. Alioramus is something of a star also, having had many mentions in many different areas of popular culture. Brian Switek has written about the horned features, that we never covered, in the skull of Alioramus altai. More importantly, in terms of pop culture, the nearly always represented Dinosaur King and Spore video games once again give us pop culture links for our dinosaur of the week. The Spore model is pretty well done actually, even going so far as to include the ridged nasal bones seen in many of the illustrations:
This one dances, so it may be more inaccurate, but... it dances, so really it is also pretty awesome:
This one dances, so it may be more inaccurate, but... it dances, so really it is also pretty awesome:
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The Riches
The world owes a fairly big chunk of its knowledge of Australian dinosaurs to Tom and Patricia Rich (more correctly known as Patricia Vickers-Rich). Using the equipment of a company known as the Atlas Copco Company in 1984 (naming and describing taking place during 1988 and 1989) the duo dug out and named a dinosaur after their tool company! Additionally, the specific epithet honors the state manager of Atlas Copco, and an assistant in the dig, William Loads. Therefore, the name Atlascopcosaurus loadsi, was coined in the description of this dinosaur. A small basal Ornithopod dinosaur, Atlascopcosaurus is known from fragmentary cranial skeletal material and not well known at that. Since the postcranial material is missing, not much is known about the overall shape of these dinosaurs other than that they were basal bipedal Ornithopods, and this is hypothesized from the skull. Difficult weeks are a lot of fun around here!
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