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.

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."

Star Wars meets Paleontology - Halloween edition

So coming across this the other day I felt I needed to repost this here. It is for the ILM Halloween party where they turned familiar Star Wars characters into skeletons. The point that I am making as a paleo post is if you look at a few of them, they look a lot like something out of our paleontology text books.

The two in particular that I feel I should point out are the AT-AT-Mammoth mix and the X-Wing-Pterodactyl mix (enlarged below).

Dino Pic of the Week

Although this was just mentioned in the Geo-Paleo blog section I thought it pertinent to install it here as well.



I found a website called "Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week" and they did a blog specifically on Star Wars. In particular the Krayt Dragon seen above. The skeleton was seen in the background of A New Hope when C-3PO landed on Tatooine.