Sky Monsters (DVD Review)

No, they weren’t dinosaurs. True, model sets of extinct animals often include saber-tooth cats, sail-backs (which were mammal-like reptiles and more closely related to us than to dinosaurs) and extinct marine reptiles as well as pterosaurs, but none of these are actually dinosaurs. Pterosaurs did, however, live alongside dinosaurs and are of great interest as the largest animals ever to fly on their own.

This DVD, another of the National Geographic series, looks at the mystery of pterosaur flight. As usual, the animation is not very exciting, but the scientific work and the attempt to build a mechanical pterosaur more than makes up for that.

The big questions are, how large did pterosaurs grow and how did they fly?

One of the threads of the program is the rather controversial discoveries of trackways and fossils suggesting even larger pterosaurs than Quetzalcoatlus, which itself had a wingspan of 10 meters (33 feet.) That’s three times larger than an albatross, the largest flying bird alive today. Forget the giants; how did even the ones we’re reasonably sure of fly?

The meat of the DVD, as far as I was concerned, was an attempt to build a robotic pterosaur, controlled like a model airplane. The result was not wholly successful, but a great deal was demonstrated about pterosaurs in the process.

First, pterosaur wings were a good deal more complicated than the sailcloth that was first tried. They had oriented stiffening fibers, muscles within the wing membrane, a good blood supply to the wings, a furry covering that (like the dimples on a golf ball) helped aerodynamically, and some kind of built-in sunscreen. (Bats are nocturnal in part because their wings would sunburn too badly in daylight.)

Control was incredibly sophisticated, certainly more so than could be mimicked by a model airplane controller. Much of the maneuvering of a real pterosaur was probably as automatic as keeping your balance is to you – possibly more so, if the speculation that baby pterosaurs were born knowing how to fly is correct. Changing the shape of the wings and the tilt of the head would have been automatic for a real pterosaur. Not so for the model, and it is hardly surprising that it was not fully successful, even aside from the problems of finding components and power sources of sufficiently light weight. Pterosaurs, like birds, had very light bone structures.

As entertainment this DVD falls short. But as documentation of a fascinating experiment, it is worth watching.

Dinosaurs Unearthed: DVD Review

This is the first of a number of reviews of National Geographic’s DVDs on prehistoric animals, so I will start out by saying something that applies to all. They are very good in interviews with actual paleontologists. The computer graphics of the extinct animals are of moderate quality, and there are only a few clips repeated over and over again. These videos are excellent for budding paleontologists or those actually interested in the science of how we know about extinct animals, and are better than series like “Walking With Dinosaurs” in that they allow scientific arguments to be heard. They are not in the same league when it comes to the re-creation of the extinct animals.

This DVD contains two programs originally shown on the National Geographic channel: Dino Autopsy and Dino Death Trap. The first is about a rare fossilized mummy of a hadrosaur, nicknamed “Dakota,” found in the badlands of North Dakota. The fossil was found in 1999 by a teenaged paleontologist, and has supplied information on skin texture and musculature of hadrosaurs. The science is fascinating. The quality of the animation is somewhat less so.

The second program involves the excavation of a site in China. This site produced a number of near-complete skeletons from a period, the Late Jurassic, very poorly represented until now. Most of the attention is given to Guanlong, a very early form of tyrannosaurid. The skeletons are in three dimensions rather than flattened, which has been interpreted as evidence that they were trapped in soft sediments, and lie above each other in a vertical column.

There is speculation about how they died included in the video. Was a volcanic eruption to blame? Was the mud in which they were trapped due to volcanic ash falling into a marsh? Also, while these animals are the early forms of species known from the Cretaceous, the Cretaceous forms were giants, and these animals are relatively small. Guanlong’s back would about reach the waist on a standing human, yet it is an early relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex. What caused the increase in size? Did guanlong really have feathers as part of its crest? They are in the computer animation, and a relative, Dilong, is known to have had primitive feathers. The crest does appear to be a display organ (relatively thin and brittle) and feathers would have made it more conspicuous.

Overall the DVD is worth watching if you are really interested in dinosaurs. If you are looking primarily for entertainment, others are better.

Index of Science Posts

Here are links to all of the posts I would count as science, including those that explain how I use science in my science fiction. This list will be updated as new science posts are added. (Note that some posts listed under “Health” or “Technology” may also be of interest.)

The Science Behind Homecoming 4/2/10
Why do we have Weather? 4/24/10
Precession – Astronomy and Milankovitch 5/6/15
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 6/12/10
Why Planets Have Seasons 6/24/10
Full of Sound and Fury (Fireworks) 7/3/10
Tricycles are not Bicycles 8/8/10
Planet Building 8/15/10 – 10/24/10
Racemization 9/2/10
Equinoxes and Daylight Savings 9/23/10
Horse Color Genetics 10/31/10 – 5/8/11
R’il’nai, Humans and Crossbreds: Life Span 12/11/10
Conservation Laws of Energy and Teleportation 12/20/10
Winter Solstice 12/22/10
Mass into Energy 12/24/11
Momentum and Teleportation 1/1/11
Snowflakes 1/7/11
Ice Fog: Ground Level Contrails 1/25/11
The Planets of Tourist Trap: Eversummer 3/6/11
Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes 3/13/11
Why 12-Hour Days Already? 3/19/11
Ice Sculpture: Ice and Sun 3/26/11
More on Ice Melting 3/27/11
Why Temperatures Remembered Don’t Match the Record 4/5/11
When It’s Springtime in Alaska 4/8/11
Twilight 4/12/11
How High the Moon? 4/15/11
Breakup 4/16/11
The Cambrian Explosion 4/22/11
How Did We Learn to Walk? 4/29/11
Back to the Water 5/6/11
Where did the First Plants Come from? 5/13/11
The Geophysical Institute 5/15/11
Alaskan Mosquitoes 5/19/11
Colored-Leaf Geraniums 5/20/11
Early History of the Geophysical Institute 5/22/11
The Fairbanks Flood of 1967 5/29/11
Before Computers 6/5/11
Ice Ages and Alaska 6/17/11
Cumulus Clouds and Cloud Streets 6/24/11
Plate Tectonics Part I 7/1/11
Plate Tectonics Part II 7/8/11
Plate Tectonics Part III 8/5/11
Frost Hollows 8/19/11
Be Careful What You Ask For 8/27/11
Autumn Colors 9/10/11
Thermometers in Fairbanks 9/17/11
Junk Mail and Plants 9/20/11
The Chimney Sweep 9/22/11
Lights, Batteries, Temperatures? 9/24/11
How Dry I Am 10/15/11
Keeping Windows Dry 10/22/11
Snowflakes 10/29/11
The Alaskan Mesozoic 11/1/11
Mesozoic Alaska Part 2 8/11/11
Alaskan Mesozoic 3 11/15/11
Death of Blue Babe 11/17/11
Nightlength Sensitivity in Houseplants 12/10/11
Our Sense of Smell 12/17/11
What Time of Day is Warmest? 12/31/11
Alaska Winter Weather: Cordova and Nome 1/14/12
Inversions and Smokestacks 1/28/12
January Wasn’t Warm in Alaska 2/4/12
Fog, Fog, Fog 2/11/12
Oceanography DVD Review 2/14/12
Snow Festoons 2/18/12
Disturbance Hardening of Snow 3/24/12
Cold-Packed Snow and White Ice 3/31/12
Tornadoes and Climate Change 4/7/12
Breakup Season 4/14/12
Ice Jam Floods 4/21/12
Calories and Weight 5/5/12
Battery Woes 5/12/12
IRT Plastic: Using the Sun 6/2/12
A Love Affair with Begonias 6/7/12
The Transit of Venus 6/9/12
How does Rain Form? 6/16/12
If Earth were on its Side 6/22/12
Day and Year Lengths of the Planets 6/23/12
Chickweed and Mosquitoes 6/28/12
Flowers and Sex 6/30/12
Salpiglossis (Painted Tongue) 7/5/12
How Long is your Night? 7/7/12
Colorado Storm 8/2/12
Could Jarn have Made Glass? 8/11/12
Seeing the Jet Stream 8/18/12
A Bird in the Hand 8/23/12
Radiation Frosts 9/1/12
Alaska Sky 9/25/12
Sky Photo 9/27/12
Flower Photos 10/9/12
Start of the Seasonal Snowpack 10/18/12
Sunrise and Sunset in Fairbanks (video) 12/27/12
Video from Barrow, Alaska the first day of Sunrise 1/24/13
We Have Puddles! 4/20/13
DNA: We All Have it 6/1/13
My Maternal DNA 6/8/13
Winter Solstice in Fairbanks 12/21/13
Glaciation 4/8/14
Mints, Part 1 6/2/14
Mints, Part 2 6/5/14
Rosemarys 6/12/14
Thymes 6/17/14
Basils 6/19/14
The Summer Solstice 6/21/14
Other Culinary Herbs 6/24/14
Lavenders 6/26/14
Annual flowers in Alaska 6/28/14
First Daylily of 2014 7/1/14

Why an Index?

With 550 posts as of today, I’ve started to have problems remembering what I’ve already put on here. This is particularly a problem with posting existing content such as poems, short pieces from the Summer Arts Festival, or science explanations originally written for the Alaska Science Forum. I can’t remember which books or DVDs I’ve posted reviews on. It also is starting to be a problem when I want to link to a previous post and can’t remember when it was put up or what the title was. And there are posts on this blog that have permanent information, like the series on planet building and the one on horse color genetics, or the book and DVD reviews. I want to make it easier for my readers as well as myself to find things.

I made a start some time ago by adding an index page, which can be accessed from the menu at the top of any page. Right now, the only links are to index pages on my author site. This takes you out of the site and sometimes back in, which is rather clumsy. The index list is also incomplete.

I’m going to start posting an occasional entry which is strictly an index of past posts on a particular topic. These posts will be linked from the index page, and will link forward to the individual blog posts. As it takes a while to find all the posts that belong together, this will be a slow process—probably extending over the next few months. The first in this series, on DVD reviews, is already queued for January 3. Others will follow, most on Thursdays.

I probably won’t be indexing every post. Some, like those early posts which were simply glossary entries for my books, are on the author site and really belong there. Others, like the regular Monday updates on North Pole weather starting in November 2010, can be found easily enough just by using the calendar on the site. But I hope that by the time I have finished this, older posts of interest will be easier to find.