Paleontology
is an art as much as it is a science. When the animals you study mostly died
out around 65 million years ago it can often be tricky to understand the most basic
things about them. For that reason, paleontologists can be prone to some of the
most imaginative theories in all of science. That is to say, sometimes they
just make stuff up. Not that you can blame them. Dinosaurs especially are just
one of those things that people are really excited to learn about. In the world
of science, when you’ve got everyone’s attention, it is tempting to come up
with a good story to tell, even if it isn’t always supported by the facts.
A few
famous and notable mistakes made since the study of dinosaurs
began include the Iguanadon’s spiked thumb being placed on its nose as a horn;
the discovery and unfortunate naming of the BasiloSAURUS, which is actually an ancestor of whales and
not even close to a dinosaur; and the idea that Brachiosauruses spent most of
their time underwater with their heads poking out of the surface to breath.
To be fair
to modern paleontologists, most of the really big goofs happened in the early
years of bone hunting and things are a little more reserved and a little more
open to debate these days… Most of the time, anyway. One exception is the
dinosaur known, inconveniently, as Deinocheirus
mirificus (we will stick with DM for short). The problem with old DM is
that when it was discovered in the 1960’s all that scientists could find were
its two front limbs, but oh what front limbs they were. Muscular and measuring
2.4 meters (8 feet) long, ending in three mean looking claws they were unlike
anything ever before seen on a dinosaur. Since the arms were all they had to go
on, DM’s name literally means “unusual, horrible hands.”
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Since it
was unearthed, paleontologists have been theorizing what DM could have possibly looked like. Some
of the more fun ideas include A) a T-rex-like predator with freakishly long arms
to grab fleeing prey and B) something like a reptilian sloth that used its strong
arms to hang from tree branches. The ideas were so imaginative and so varied that
it was clear to even the casual observer that the people involved really had no
idea what they were talking about, which is why DM has spent the last half
century in the dusty storage closet paleontology reserves for its cold cases.
And in that
closet DM stayed until August of this year when researchers published a paper reporting that, at long last, they
had discovered a complete DM skeleton. Finally, crazy notions could be set
aside and DM could be marveled at and respected for the impressive,
chiseled work of nature it was. Unfortunately for DM, when asked to describe
the discovery, lead researcher Yuong-Name Lee said “It turned out to be one of
the weirdest dinosaurs. It’s weird beyond our imagination.” Other researchers
have commented that “… it’s just so freaking weird – we never would have
expected this animal to look so bizarre.” Maybe it’s time to change the name to
Rodney Dangersourus.
It turns
out that DM was huge. Something like 11 meters (36 feet) long and weighed as
much as 6 tonnes. It had a hump on its back, a beak, and hooved feet.
Scientists now believe DM lived in wetlands and the contents of its stomach
suggest it ate mostly plants and fish. And the arms? It is now thought that
they were used to dig through the prehistoric muck in search of good
plant-matter to munch on. So much for snagging fleeing prey at high speeds.
So what is
the lesson in all of this? Something we thought might have been the baddest
predator of it’s time turned out to be a muddy swamp-monster. Yeah, that might
be one way to look at it. The other, much cooler lesson is that dinosaurs still
have the ability to surprise the best minds in the business. When you can shock a profession as imaginative and outlandish as paleontology (did I mention they
used to think stegosaurus had a second brain in its butt?) you are certainly from
a ilk worthy of our attention. In the end, it goes back to a great quote from
geneticist J.B.S. Haldane: “My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only
queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Or, if you prefer, another quote from the fictional
scientist Dr. Ian Malcolm: Just when you think that nature can’t get any
more screwy, “life finds a way.”
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