Dragon Day 2018: Top Ten Prehistoric Animals named after Dragons

Happy Dragon day, the fourth Sunday in October!  

Wait a minute, you ask yourself, why are you talking about mythical animals? Isn’t this blog about real animals? Why haven’t you posted more often? 

First of all, yes, I do need to post more often. Second, I will talk about real animals. And finally, in reverse order, dragons are still awesome and I still feel compelled to talk about mythical animals. Dinosaurs have basically become the dragons to the 20^th century. Watch a dinosaur movie, look at a piece of art-these real animals get their most bizarre and fearsome qualities played up. Dinosaurs fulfill the same narrative device. Authors like Adrienne Mayor, Don Glut, and Allen Debus have all made the parallel. Dinosaur bones were indeitifed with dragons, and dinosaurs have been given dragonish qualities in art and literature from the very beginning. A big scary reptile is going to look like a dragon, period.

So, in honor of dragon day, inspired by Christopher dePiazza’s amazing blog and art, http://prehistoricbeastoftheweek.blogspot.com/2015/04/here-be-dragonsor-dinosaurs.html , I am going to give you my top ten prehistoric animals named after Dragons! 

Top Ten Dinosaur Movies Never Made

As you’ve noticed, dinosaurs have been featured in a lot of terrible movies. From Lost Continent to Jurassic World, from King Dinosaur to Ice Age 3, not to mention any Asylum movie on the Sci Fi Channel, it’s easy to put a dinosaur on screen, but it’s hard to make the experience worthwhile. Sometimes the effects are terrible. Sometimes the dinosaurs are cliched. Sometimes the film is just plain badly written and shot.  So it’s a shame to find out about great movies that were never made. 

In Hollywood, it takes a lot of luck for a project to see work, especially one with an ambitious 

 premise or one demanding expensive special effects. Even filmmakers like Kubrick or Spielberg have had projects die before seeing light.   Fortunately, big ambitious projects are remembered, especially if they’re by people who have made other hit films but somehow were thwarted other times.  In this case, Mark Berry’s excellent Dinosaur Filmography came very much in handy.

These projects all sound like a lot of fun-it’s not often dinosaur movies get made, simply because of the limitations in budget, writing ability, and marketability inherent in the genre. Frankly, if we had these made, they would have turned out far superior than most dinosaur films that actually saw light. These were dream projects, vast in scope and ambition. Some of them were salvaged and recreated into excellent films. Some of them turned out into disasters. But it’s fascinating to learn about them, and dream about what could have been. Who knows? We may see them someday even after their originators have long been dead. Anything can happen in Hollywood, and they love to remake and revisit. Maybe someday these will be made. 

Top Ten (and more!) discoveries since the last time the Cubs won the World Series

As a Chicagoan, you can bet I was quite proud of the Cubs winning the baseball World Series after 108 years. 108 years can be quite significant, especially in the 20^th century’s many, many, events. The 20^th century has seen atrocities, wars, tragedies, and hate, but it’s seen technological and social progress, scientific revolutions, and discoveries about ourselves and our world.

Top 10 Dinosaur fights in fiction

Everyone loves dinosaur fights. All the best dinosaur films have them. What’s better than big, bizarre prehistoric creatures? When they duke it out! They can be violent, they can be bloody, but they’re always exciting.  The very first would be the Ghost of Slumber mountain, where two Triceratops duel and one of them is then killed by a Tyrannosaurus in a fight. The last would be the Pachyrhinosaurus-Gorgosaurus brawl at the climax of Walking With Dinosaurs.  Hopefully this year’s Jurassic World will have the decency of giving us one.  Most of these fights are wildly anachronistic between supersized versions, and some of them involve animals that are not dinosaurs or even real animals, but it gives that element of fantasy that dinosaurs invoke by their very prescence. This list is entirely subjective, so I’ll leave a long list of runners up first-

Top Twelve Worst Name Changes for prehistoric taxa.

Sometimes animals get very evocative names in scientific description. Tyrannosaurus the tyrant, Hyaenodon the Hyena tooth, Stegosaurus the roofed, Styracosaurus the spiked, Megalosaurus and Megatherium, the big animals. Sadly, not all such names survive. The rule of priority is vital here; if we could arbitrarily change the names of taxa, it’d be a mess. Paleontological taxonomy is complicated and deceptive enough that many animals are given different names by different people, or assumed to be a new species when they aren’t. Sadly, this happens all too often, and many classic, evocative names are cast aside for more generic (pardon the pun), dull names.

Top 10 Prehistoric Creatures pictured accidentally

You know, it’s easy to see how we’ve misinterpreted fossils.  It’s difficult for any part of an animal to fossilize, so complete specimens are rare and really special.  So inaccurate palaeoart is inevitable, and really not surprising at all.  Then there are the times when reconstructions accidentally depict a different animal entirely unintentionally. We all know about how Tyrannosaurus was originally reconstructed on Allosaurus and Apatosaurus on Camarosaurus, but they’re not alone. Sometimes it’s because of misidentification, and sometimes it’s simply due to laziness in paleontological reconstructions.  Here are the top 10 Prehistoric Animals people picture when they try to picture a different animal (there has to be a specific word for this phenomenon. I’m sure there’s one in German or something).

Belated Halloween post: Top Ten Scariest Prehistoric Environments

Sorry this took so long!  I was hoping to get this done by Halloween, but it took a week to get this one out. Next time I’ll do monster posts like this one in installments. Today we’re going for another lighthearted one-yes, we’re going to do a top ten list today. This one’s been inspired by the documentary series Sea Monsters, where host Nigel Martin took the audience through the “top 7 deadliest seas”. In the same spirit, I’ve chosen the top 10 Deadliest Terrestrial faunas, based on the number of large predators. If I missed any that deserved to be on this list, please let me know. This isn’t based on any particular grade, but based on the number of large predators present in the fauna.

Here's something I made before I started blogging: Top Ten Megafauna That Made Prehistoric Australia Even Scarier

Ah, Australia. It's a running gag for biologists that it's one of the scariest countries. Sure, the climate doesn't sound that bad, the native peoples didn't have the complex military societies that us Yanks had to deal with during our own hostile takeover, there's never been a civil war, and while there's a lot of ethnic groups (and accompanying oppression), there's not enough guns to make it as dangerous as the average US city. I do plan on going there, and it looks a lot nicer than, say, Israel or India (other places on my list, but I'll get to them later)