Fictional creatures in Gee & Rey's Field Guide to Dinosaurs

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>]

Greetings,

Finally got my copy of Henry Gee & Luis Rey's excellent Field Guide to
Dinosaurs.  The premise, for those who haven't seen this, is this is a real
honest-to-goodness field guide: that is, it is intended for time travelling
explorers to identify the different critters they find.

I was interested to see a few fictional (or at least
"as-yet-unknown-to-real-paleontology") creatures show up, too!  These
include:
*A larger, wooly, Alaskan species of _Tyrannosaurus_, _T. helcaraxae_ (Gee,
like me, is apparently a big time Tolkien fan...  Readers of the Silmarilion
may recognize the place name Helcaraxe) (Sadly, this critter is not
illustrated...)
*A 30-m crocodilian, _Cthonosuchus lethei_, shown happily gobbling up a
spinosaurid
*A new crested and wattled oviraptorosaur, _Ronaldoraptor_.
*A fluke (_Praefasciola brachiosauri_) and fly (_Luisreyi ginsbergi_) which
have a complicated life cycle connected to sauropods and _Ornitholestes_

I also like the fact that the cries of _Masiakasaurus knopfleri_ sound like
the wailing of an electric guitar :-), and the hypothesized effect of a
lightning strike on _Therizinosaurus_...

Fun stuff!

                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                Vertebrate Paleontologist
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
                College Park, MD  20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/tholtz.htm
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/eltsite
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-405-0796