Geology in Art - The Far Side

Gary Larson is most well-known as the comic artist who created The Far Side, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995. The Far Side was a series of one-off single panel comics that basically poked fun at nearly every aspect of everyday life. He has since returned to producing The Far Side comics in 2020, which can be found currently on his website: thefarside.com.

 

Back in 1982, an issue of The Far Side ran that featured what can essentially be called a presentation (a scientific presentation?) where one caveman is lecturing a group of cave people about the tail of a Stegosaurus. At which point he says 

"Now, this end is called the thagomizer ... after the late Thag Simmons."

It is from here that we don't have geology influencing art, but art influencing geology, or more specifically, paleontology. 

Stegosaurus from the Field Museum, Chicago, IL

Prior to this, the tail spikes of a Stegosaurus did not have a scientific name associated with them. However, paleontologists often do have a sense of humor and after awhile they started to incorporate the name into scientific presentations and literature. It started in 1993 when Ken Carpenter, a paleontologist then with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, used the term while describing a new species of Stegosaurus during a presentation for the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting. 

Following that, the term spread and was included in actual scientific publications including 1997's The Complete Dinosaur. From 2000 on, the usage of "thagomizer" exploded both in the scientific literature and outside of it. And while there are some holdouts that this term is not scientifically valid, continued consistent usage in the scientific literature is a requisite for scientific validity and this seems to have satisfied that requisite. 

Usage of the term "thagomizer" through time. Courtesy of Google NGram. 

References

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/07/thagomizer-why-stegosaurus-spiky-tail.html

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=thagomizer&year_start=1980&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=true#

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Complete_Dinosaur/FOViD-lDPy0C?hl=en&gbpv=1

Dinos in Pop Culture - LEGO Dinosaurs

 When LEGO decided to release the Dinosaur Fossils set it became a "must have" for me. These are far from the only dinosaurs LEGO has ever produced as well but besides being specifically the skeletons of the dinosaurs (and Pteranodon, which is not a dinosaur) they are set up as if they were museum displays. This makes the paleontologist heart in me happy. 

The line of LEGOs comes from their LEGO Ideas sets, which are LEGO sets that had been submitted by  users as potential builds. These ideas/suggestions are then reworked by LEGO professional builders to make them work in a mass market possibilities. This set was originally designed by Jonathan Brunn, who is a French graphic designer and reworked by the LEGO Designer Niels Milan Pedersen. 

The set itself comes with the three main fossil skeletons, Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops horridus, and Pteranodon longiceps. On top of that it comes with a little paleontologist, box of paleontological tools and books, as well as a "LEGO sapiens" model (i.e. the bones of a LEGO figure).  

The models are set up as skeletons in a 1:32 scale with the skeletons on a display pad complete with identification plaque. Most of each figure is adjustable as well, so that you can get the models in the pose that you really want. 

Even though they are obviously LEGO figures, the models themselves are actually quite awesome. They are not a 1-to-1 recreation of a real life skeleton, but they are as close to what would happen if a real life skeleton got put through a LEGOification machine. 

And I love the variety that you get. You have the two stalwarts of dinosaur popularity representing the carnivores (T. rex) and herbivores (Triceratops), and you also have the non-dinosaurian flying Pteranodon complete with a stand so you can place it in "flying mode". 

Your crate of goodies also comes with some bones, a magnifying glass, an egg, a cup, a rock hammer, a book about fossils, and some unidentifiable tools.  

Overall, this set earns an A+ from me.

Paleo in Pop Culture - Hollywood Studios' Galaxy's Edge

 

Although not dinosaur related, there is another strong paleontological connection in Hollywood Studios and that involves the entire backdrop of the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge land within the park. 

The entire park of Galaxy's Edge takes place within the canon of Star Wars on a planet named Batuu. This settlement on Batuu is known as Black Spire Outpost, named after the spires located throughout the backdrop and within the park itself, specifically one spire in particular that is blacker than the other spires. Here is the blurb from starwars.com:

"Widely known for the petrified remains of its once towering ancient trees, the spires now stand guard across the river valleys and plains and have long captured the imagination of travelers to this planet."

In canon, these spires are petrified trees that were petrified in place, where the tops of the trees were not preserved (either they eroded away over time or only the bottoms were petrified and the tops decayed before preservation). Petrification is a specific type of fossilization that refers to trees. This process involves the replacement of each living/biological molecule with mineral molecules. 

The replacement process, or permineralization, occurs when minerals dissolved in water, frequently silica in the instance of petrification, flow through the water and do a (typically) 1-to-1 replacement of the molecules leaving behind a nearly perfect replica of the tree. These petrified trees no longer contain living (or dead) tissue but are essentially tree shaped rocks. For this process to occur though, the trees need to be buried, or at least submerged, in silica rich waters. It is also helpful if there is a lack of oxygen, because without oxygen the trees can't decay. For this to have occurred with all of these trees still standing upright, the entire region would need to have been buried or flooded with anoxic (lack of oxygen) waters or sediment (mud). 

The inspiration for these petrified trees came from a National Park within northeast Arizona, Petrified Forest National Park, where one can actually go see real life petrified trees. The difference here is that although the trees in Petrified Forest are huge, they are nowhere near as big as the ones in Black Spire Outpost, and also most, if not all, of the trees in Petrified Forest are preserved after they had fallen over.

Here are some of the lovely petrified trees from Petrified Forest National Park. I had done a post about the geology of Petrified Forest a little while ago and contains some more pictures and information after the fossilization process.

A close up of an actual petrified log from Petrified Forest National Park.

Back to Black Spire Outpost.

Here is a close up shot of one of the petrified stumps that really looks a lot like a petrified log. The artisans at the park spent a lot of time crafting each spire individually so that they not only looked like trees, but petrified trees, and each unique so they don't look cookie cutter. 

Here are some more spires off in the distance. These petrified tree spires also share a relative in Disney's California Adventure with the petrified Millennium Tree on the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail.

You can find all of my Dinos of Disney compiled on my website at Dinojim.com.

Geology and Paleontology in Pop Culture - The Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium

 Back in August of 2019, I was able to go visit my mother in Florida without the threat of doom and on the trip we visited the local Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota. The Mote is broken up into several buildings over a nice campus with some great animal displays within it. But, as always, my focus tends to be drawn to geology and paleontology of the place. 

Geology

The Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium sits on the Lido Key, off the western coast of Florida within the Gulf of Mexico. The most notable geological thing that I found was the building stone that was surrounding one of the larger shark tanks. 

Here is a little bit of a zoomed out shot of the building stone. A closer look below will reveal what type of building stone we are looking at.

As we can see by the clearly coral fossils in this part of the rock, this is a limestone. Brain coral in particular here. There are many types of limestones based on what they are made up of. The term limestone just means that the rock is primarily composed of the calcium carbonate, typically in the form of the mineral calcite. Calcite can form in a few different ways, but the most common way is through the processes of marine organisms like the making of clam shells or coral skeletons. 

The different building blocks within the shark tank enclosure have some variety with what types of fossils are visible. Within this block we can see some shells, which are mostly up of some gastropods (snail) and bivales (like clams). 

A close up of some more coral.

And more coral. This piece is interesting because the upper left piece of coral and the lower right piece of coral are the same type of coral, just cut at different angles.

When identifying limestones, there a couple of different classifications that are used. Since this is clearly a reef rock, based on the presence of so much corals, that is what we want to focus on. 

Limestone classification of reef rocks. Image courtesy of SEPM.

My knowledge of limestone classifications is definitely limited, however based on the structure of the corals within the rock, they appear to be "autochthonous", which means that they had not been transported before they were turned into a rock. All of the above limestone pictures also probably don't fit into the same category, however I would say the majority of the blocks likely fall into the Framestone or Bafflestone category of limestone. 

On the coastal islands, there isn't much, if any, building stone localities so these must have been trucked in from somewhere, however I can't find any mention of specifically where they came from. They did likely originate locally due to the large abundance of coral reef limestones within the state of Florida. 

Paleontology

There are a few paleontological themed areas of the aquarium as well. This includes the "Fossil Creek" area, where people can get bags of sand filled with fossilized shark teeth. This area is highlighted by one of the most famous fossil sharks, the Otodus megalodon, more commonly just called the Megalodon.

A full sized rendering of what the Megalodon jaw would have looked like. However, only teeth of the Megalodon have ever been found so the entire jaw reconstruction is just that, a theorized reconstruction.

I love that in this version of the reconstruction they didn't even bother to hide the painterly strokes along the cartilage jaw.

Next to the Megalodon jaw there is also a couple of display cases with other fossil shark teeth including tiger, hammerhead, great white, mako, and of course the Megalodon. 

There are also some fossilized vertebrae, as well as other animal bits scattered throughout the cases.

I didn't take a picture of the identification sign, however I don't know if there even was one. But what interests me here, is that mixed among the mostly marine fossils are the teeth of a mammoth. Although there have been some mammoth discoveries in Florida (they aren't unheard of), just unexpected in a marine museum. 

These teeth, and other bones, may actually belong to a discovery of a nearby mammoth from Salt Creek, near Warm Mineral Springs, Florida back in 1987. 

Newspaper image of a pair of mammoth teeth found in 1987 from Salt Creek, Florida. Image courtesy of Warm Mineral Springs.

The newspaper listing of the find state an unknown age at the time of discovery, but that the fossils will likely be stored at the Mote Aquarium. 

And the last fossil I saw at the Mote is a vertebrae of whale tail found in southwestern Florida. 

Of course they also have modern skeletons on display. Here is the skeleton of a manatee.

And the skeleton of a giant sea turtle. 

Underside view of the sea turtle.

Dinosaurs!: From Cultural to Pop Culture - 1987: Robocop

DINOSAURS! From Cultural to Pop Culture

Modern Times

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1987: Robocop

Located within 1987's Robocop by Paul Verhoeven, is a classic example of dinosaurs within pop culture, especially renditions of dinosaurs that didn't keep up with their scientific equivalents. 

The movie Robocop is broken up by several fake, in-universe movies, including this one for the 6000 SUX, a gas guzzling vehicle that gets 8.2 mpg. The dinosaur "commercial", located at the 1:15:59 minute mark, uses a classic stop-motion dinosaur effect, similar to those seen in 1933's King Kong, as well as many movies afterwards through the 1950's and 1960's. 

Dinosaur from Robocop (1987)

The dinosaur in the commercial is a questionable species, not really resembling anything known to have existed. It is a clearly a theropod, similar to a T. rex, however with three digits on its hands like an Allosaurus with relatively long arms. It is also looking to be about 5 stories tall, or ~75 feet tall, based on the building in the background. This is far taller, even with the antiquated upright stance in the commercial, of any known theropod. At this height, this dinosaur is reaching the height levels of the tallest dinosaurs to ever have lived, like the Sauroposeidon proteles. 

Up front close up of Robocop's (1987) dinosaur.

The commercial dinosaur also has a series of horns/spikes above its eyes, like Carnotaurus. However, Carnotaurus only had one spike over each eye, and also had significantly reduced forelimbs, similar to T. rex. 

Carnotaurus reconstruction from Dinosaur Wiki.

   

Dinos in Pop Culture - Star Trek: Voyager - Entry 3

 And the last of my Star Trek entries into the Geology and Dinos in Pop Culture is perhaps the greatest dinosaurian related episode of Star Trek to date. The episode is from Star Trek: Voyager, Season 3, Episode 23, entitled "Distant Origin".

This clip above is just a small portion of the episode, in which I highly recommend watching the whole thing if possible. In the episode, the crew of the Voyager are faced with the Voth. A species that, after some genetic determination, evolved from hadrosaursians and somehow ended up across the galaxy into the Delta Quadrant. Their supposition was that this hadrosaurian species survived the extinction of the dinosaurs and were isolated on an island, where eventually they evolved space-faring technology to somehow eventually leave Earth and end up across the cosmos. The best part is when they start researching the history of the Voth, leading them to Eryops, "from the Devonian era". 

Eryops from the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Distant Origin"

Their reconstruction of Eryops though, does not actually resemble the current reconstructions (pictured below). Nor is it from the Devonian, having been found in Permian deposits over 100 million years later. However, this reconstruction looks amazingly like a pelycosaur, like Dimetrodon, just without the sail.

Eryops reconstruction from Britannica. 

Eryops was an amphibian, and was supposed to stand in on Voyager as the "last common ancestor of cold-blooded and warm-blooded organisms." My assumption is that they were looking for the split between mammals and reptiles. However, that is not entirely an accurate thing, since mammals evolved much later. What we need to search for is the split between Synapsids (the group that evolved into and includes mammals) and Diapsids (the group that includes crocodilians, dinosaurs, and birds). Both of these groups fall under the classification of amniotes. 

The branch between these groups is thought to have taken place in the Lower Permian, approximately 300 million years ago and would have involved early synapsids, such as the pelycosaurs (kind of pictured in the show) . And although pelycosaurs are considered basal synapsids, not the ancestors to both dinosaurs and mammals, it's not out of the realm of possibility that the actual ancestor would have several similar characteristics. 

Dimetrodon skeleton. Image courtesy of ScienceSourceImages.

So although their name dropping of Eryops was 100% incorrect, perhaps their model was a bit closer to reality. 

The show also asks what was the "most highly evolved cold-blooded organism to develop from the Eryops" and the show pictures a Hadrosaur. Specifically, a Parasaurolophus. 

The "most highly evolved" dinosaur according to Star Trek: Voyager.

Evolutionarily speaking, all reptiles, and this includes all dinosaurs/birds, would have evolved from the basal diapsids. So by saying the "most highly evolved", you are making assumptions that one organism is more evolved than another one, which is not how evolution works. There is no organism that is "more highly evolved" than another. Each organism is adapted to their own environment. I am assuming by "more highly evolved" they mean more intelligent, which is another matter entirely. And even then, it is assumed that the theropod branch of dinosaurs, the one that evolves into birds, would be much more intelligent than the sauropods, which were larger and lumbering herbivorous dinosaurs. Heck, the birds even survived the end Cretaceous extinction, which none of the Sauropods did. (well except this one branch that went off into space.

Evolution of the Voth from their Parasaurolophus ancestors

My last point about the episode is where they show where the Parasaurolophus evolved into a "more advanced" race, the Voth in this instance. This evolutionary idea that should the dinosaurs have survived the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous (minus birds of course), they had the potential to evolve into a humanoid species. This is not a new concept to Star Trek. Back in 1982, (Russell and Séguin) proposed a similar idea while studying the troodontid Stenonychosaurus. 

Reconstructions of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosaurid (Russell and Séguin, 1982)

While being a bit tongue in cheek, it has prompted discussion about the possibilities of future evolution of the non-avian dinosaurs ever since. 

So, however you see it, this episode was a dinosaur wonderland. 

References

https://www.britannica.com/animal/Eryops

https://www.sciencesource.com/archive/Image/Dimetrodon-Skeleton-SS2506221.html#/SearchResult&ITEMID=SS2506221

Russell, D. A., and Séguin, R., 1982, Reconstructions of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosaurid: Syllogeus, v. 37, p. 1-43

Dinos in Pop Culture - Star Trek: Enterprise - Entry 3

 And the last of the Star Trek: Enterprise entries is a paleontological mention. 

From Season 4, episode 19 "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II", the crew is in the Mirror Universe and is being attacked by the infamous Gorn from the Original Series. While they are trying to figure out what did it they comment that they had "traces of reptilian saliva in the ... wounds" and the bite radius indicates a reptile that is more than 2 meters in length. When asked if this was a pet, the response was "Unless one of them owned a velociraptor, I find it extremely unlikely."

Gorn from Star Trek: The Original Series. Image courtesy of Memory-Alpha.

Gorn from Star Trek: Enterprise. Image courtesy of Memory-Alpha.

Paleo in Pop Culture - Star Trek: Voyager - Entry 1

 Star Trek has had numerous geological and paleontological references over the years. Here is just one of them.

From Star Trek: Voyager, Season 6 Episode 8 "One Small Step" during which Chakotay waxes that "Paleontology was always my first love" and "I knew I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was 6."

Paleo in Pop Culture - Star Wars Paleontology Xcavations

Back in 2018, Uncle Milton came out with a line of "educational" Star Wars toys that blurred the lines between paleontology and Star Wars. These toys called Xcavations Creature Crates were short-lived toys that I only saw once in the aisle of my local Walmart. Searching for any Uncle Milton Star Wars toys now seems to be a game of hide-and-seek, where they must have lost the Star Wars license since I see nothing current up on their own website. 

I had wanted to wait and do a post once I could find more of the toys, but then time slowly slipped away and several years has now passed without me personally seeing any of these anymore, so we will make a post about them now. For anyone interested in finding these toys, they are available on eBay though, and for not too bad a price (~$10 a piece for new, in crate ones). 

The way that the toys work was that they had one skull, broken into a few pieces, from a variety of Star Wars characters/species located within a crate. The person opening the crate would dump the entire block of sand and skull pieces out onto the table and "excavate" the skull pieces out of the sand from which they skulls were embedded. The sand was essentially Kinetic play sand, that was fairly easy to excavate and didn't make a terrible mess once it was out. My gripe would be that they were too easy to excavate, reducing the level of fun (but that's just my opinion). 

After the pieces had been excavated, reconstructing the skull is fairly straightforward with each skull being made up of only a few pieces (3-4 or so). The fun is then discovering what skull you had unearthed, because each package was blind-boxed, meaning you didn't know what you were getting. The two that I got are below...

Here is a Gamorrean skull, pictured on the top left of the packaging in the first picture.

Here is the Hutt skull that I got. This one is also picture in the display case that all of these boxes came out of. Each skull came with a different colored sand, so I am curious what the range of sand colors were. But the different colored sand gave the impression that these skulls were fossilized within different environments, hence the different sediment properties. 

One of the best parts about Uncle Milton toys was that they tried to make everything they did not only fun, but also educational. With these skulls they came with a paleontology pamphlet that not only described paleontology but also included comparisons of the Star Wars skulls to those found on Earth.

From the pamphlet above:

Paleontology

Paleontology is the study of life from the past. These scientists, or paleontologists, search for and study fossils here on earth. By simply examining the fossils, they can discover clues that teach them about different creatures, plants and other living things from the past and how they lived on earth.

Fossils

There are numerous types of fossils that a paleontologist might discover all over the world. Most can be grouped into two main categories - traces fossils and body fossils. Trace fossils are tracks, trails and other marking that have been preserved in rocks, shells and other things that show evidence of past life. Body fossils are the actual remains of past living things such as skeletal bones.  

On the back of the pamphlet you can see that they compare the Star Wars skulls as a combination of real life skulls. Such as the Gamorrean skull being a combination of a Gorilla and a Wild Boar skull.

Close up of the Gamorrean skull

A replica of a gorilla skull from Skulls Unlimited. 

A replica of a wild boar skull from Skulls Unlimited. 

Since the skulls are essentially sculpted, they don't have the level of detail that I would expect from one that is based on a real life animal. They are also a bit thicker than I would expect, I assume for durability. But they do have some pretty cool features. One of my favorites is the brain case area of the skull. In vertebrate animals, the brain is not typically (if ever) preserved in fossils. However, the skull that protects the brain, is left with impressions of the brain where they came into contact. They recreated these skull impressions within the fossils as well, of which you can open up the skull casing to see the brain cavity.

Brain case of the Hutt skull

Brain case of the Gamorrean skull

Are these skulls works of art? No, definitely not. The level of detail, while admirable, is still rather low. However, they do provide a gateway drug for kids to start asking questions. "What is that impression within the skull? Is it really a brain impression? Is that found in real life skulls?" I'm tempted to pick up a few more of these just to see what I can find. 

I love it. As a friend said to me "It seems like they made these just for you."