Re: Duckbill necks

["Peter Von Sholly" <vonrex@gte.net>]

Matt Celesky wrote
>Can you give any examples of recent disenchantment-confusion with
> dinosaur paleontology due to overly speculative restoration?

Well, you get things like "Spitters" from the media- and then when you talk
to "non dinosaur-intensive" people, you find they are completely surprised
to learn that Dilophosaurus didn't have a frilled-lizard neck flap and spit
black gooey poison.  And you get feathers on Dilophosaurus sculptures and
people see that and assume it's true.  
People used to say to me "hey, did you hear they just discovered that
stegosaurs only had one row of plates right down the middle of their
backs"?  (And suddenly all stegosaurs also walk around with their tails
parallel to the ground like they're about to defecate at all times. 
Where'd that come from and why is it suddenly the norm?) 
Or "So these Velociraptors (referring to man-sized Deinonychi) were pack
hunters, right?"  
And I see artwork that mixes animals from different times and places willy
nilly.... anybody casually looking at these things would assume many things
that are not true.  Amargasaurus battling Carnotaurus, sure.  Hey, they're
both from Argentina, why not?

Part of my sense of disenchantment and confusion is of course, my own.  I
worked on a dinosaur movie where certain people didn't know or care squat
about dinosaurs, yet were in charge of people who passionately did care. 
Guess who called the shots?  
I feel that we do need to explore the "viable" possibilities... and I love
colorful imaginative images as much as anybody.  But I feel we need to be
intelligent and cautious with these images.  It makes it damn hard to know
what's "true".

> 
> >How about the new "weird sauropod" from Argentina?  Augustia, was it?
> >Anybody out there making paintings and model kits of that yet?  Go
ahead,
> >"you are very much free to choose and be as creative as viable
possibilites
> >may allow you".  And nobody can prove you're wrong anyway.
> 
> What would be the minimum material required to make an acceptable
> reconstruction/restoration? 

Well, I would think one needs a lot more than the following:

> *"The collected material includes a sequence of 19 incomplete neural
arches, 9
> dermal ossifications located on the neural spines, a right tibia and
fibula
> with an incomplete astragalus, and 5 metatarsals from the left side." 

Will that stop somebody with a little bit of knowledge (sometimes called a
dangerous thing!) from picking up brush and sculpey?
We'll see.  Thanks, Matt

> Matt.
> mceleskey@cabq.gov
> http://www.io.com/~mwalk/hmnh/hmnhmain.html