Drawing a Dilophosaurus while paleontologists fight in the background
Sketch & Coffee, Live! is streamed daily at 5:30am, Texas Time, at the YouTubes
This morning, I drew a Dilophosaurus, one of the actual Jurassic dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Most of the dinosaurs in that movie weren’t Jurassic at all. They were Cretaceous. This little guy’s about 193 million years old (the real one, not the toy), while the rest of them were more like 65 million. But they still called the movie Jurassic Park.
Dilophosaurus had those crests on its head, and we don’t really know what they were for. We can only speculate. Were they broadcasters? Did they make sounds and flash color like the little Martian dudes in Star Trek: The Menagerie? Did they flex them to communicate? We don’t know. There’s no color preserved, no melanocytes, no DNA. We don’t even know how many of them there were – we don’t have very many specimens. We can’t say how successful they were, or whether they hunted in packs or alone.
But I guarantee you, there are paleontologists pounding the table, arguing about it. “This means they did this,” “That feature proves that.” Paleontologists fight. They don’t like not knowing, and they hate having to admit it.
And I love that. I love the fact that we don’t know. It opens the door to speculation.
The very first thing people say when they see those crests? “Must be for sex.” Like a cassowary, just a flashy piece on top of the head to help with mating. But males and females both had them, and they weren’t sexually dimorphic. So that tells me it probably wasn’t just for attraction.
They did some X-rays of the skull and found cavities in the crest that lead back to the sinuses. So it’s more likely, at least from my perspective, that these were used for sonic resonance. We like to pretend dinosaurs roared because the movies from the 1930s had them roaring, but they probably didn’t really have that kind of vocalization, they more likely honked or squawked. The crests would make it so that when they honked, like a goose, they could attract mates or give warning calls.
Being discovered in 1942, they weren’t well known enough to have used in the early dinosaur movies, like Journey to the Center of the Earth, where they had people being attacked by stop motion dinosaurs. That kept them out of the American phsyche so they haven’t appeared in many movies besides Jurassic park. And THEY took a few liberties with them for Hollywood effect. In the movie, it’s a frilled, venom spitting, overgrown turkey. In life, they were frill-less, 20 feet long and weighed 1000 lbs. That’s 30 bananas and a 1/3 of a giraffe! #anythingbutmetric
Click here to watch the Dilophosaur episode of Sketch & Coffee, Live!
The link below is for a 20-30 minute lesson plan that doesn’t require the video to use. This is free to my teacher friends:
Leave a Reply