We’ve hit two hundred episodes! To celebrate we’re taking your questions. Designer, photographer, and all-around superhero Sarah Giffrow joined Joe to answer talk about how to think about history, the state of podcasting, and dinosaurs.
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This week’s episode is an interview with artist and cartoonist Kory Bing about dinosaurs and other extinct megafauna. We talked about drawing dinosaurs, what dinosaurs are, and how dinosaurs and other extinct animals are portrayed in popular culture. Kory writes and draws the webcomic Skin Deep and regularly illustrates dinosaurs, pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and other extinct megafauna. Find her work here.
Theme music: Cowboy Surfer by the Vivisectors
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The most complete tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the world, nicknamed “Sue,” in honor of the paleontologist who discovered her, stands over adoring crowds at Chicago’s Field Museum. However, Sue’s journey the field museum was not an easy one, though. Prior to finally being put on display in 2000, there was a battle for Sue’s bones. A fossil hunter, the ranch owner, the federal government, and a Native American tribe all vied for ownership of the dinosaur, in a fight that involved the FBI seizing a warehouse of dinosaur bones, and a man going to prison.
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Related Links:
“Bones of Contention” from the Chicago Tribune, 2003
“A Dinosaur Named Sue Divides Fossil Hunters” from the New York Times, 1992
Sue is the subject of Dinosaur 13, a documentary sympathetic to Peter Larson that has drawn some criticism.
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Scientists are motivated by curiosity, by the desire to help their fellow humans, by compulsion and, sometimes, by irrational personal vendettas. Edward Drinker Cope and Othneil Charles Marsh were two leading paleontologists during the late 1800s, and discovered approximately 130 species between them, and were instrumental in confirming the then-new theory of evolution by natural selection. They also hated each other, and each tried to cut the other down to size with methods and tactics that simply would not fly in the scientific world today.
The 1897 painting below by Charles Knight is not at all a historically accurate depiction of dinosaurs, but it is amazing. It’s also apt. The art is called Leaping Laelaps, and uses Cope’s name for the dinosaur. The species was later renamed dryptosaurus, a name that Marsh gave it.
Related links:
Cope’s backward elasmosaurus, with the head on the end of the tail.
A profile of Uintatherium, the prehistoric mammal discovered by Joseph Leidy, but claimed by both Marsh and Cope.
The World of Charles R. Knight is a website dedicated to the artist that briefly worked with Cope.
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