Preparing for the New CollectA Models – Metriacanthosaurus et al

Team members at Everything Dinosaur are busy preparing for the arrival of the next set of new CollectA prehistoric animal models.  The new for 2016 replicas are due to arrive at the end of March, or possibly the first week of April.  We are expecting a number of new models, including the splendid Metriacanthosaurus (M. parkeri) model.

Everything Dinosaur (CollectA Metriacanthosaurus)

“Parker’s moderately spined lizard”

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

New CollectA Models

Metriacanthosaurus, pronounced met-tree-ah-can-tho-sore-us, is known from a single, fragmentary skeleton excavated from a site approximately one and a half miles north of the Dorset town of Weymouth (Jurassic Coast of southern England).  The holotype material is currently stored in the Oxford Museum of Natural History and team members at Everything Dinosaur have been researching and writing a fact sheet on this English prehistoric animal.  The exact locality of the fossil remains is debated, however, most palaeontologists assert that the fossils, which include two thigh bones, come from the clays located at Jordan Cliffs.

What is not debated, is the age of the material as one of the dorsal vertebrae associated with the specimen had the fossilised remains of an oyster attached to it (Gryphaea).  The species is diagnostic of the uppermost layer of the Oxford Clay Formation (Early Oxfordian faunal stage of the Jurassic).  The Gryphaea species associated with the fossilised remains of Metriacanthosaurus is Gryphaea dilatata.

Everything Dinosaur’s Scale Drawing Ready for the Fact Sheet

A scale drawing of the theropod dinosaur Metriacanthosaurus.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

To view the CollectA prehistoric animal range available from Everything Dinosaur: CollectA Prehistoric Animal Models.

As far as we at Everything Dinosaur are aware, Metriacanthosaurus is the only theropod currently recognised from the upper Oxford Clay Formation.  The name translates as “Parker’s moderately-spined lizard”, as the dorsal vertebrae possess relatively tall neural spines.  The species name honours the English 19th century anatomist and zoologist William Kitchen Parker who has been credited with the original fossil discovery.  Its classification within the Theropoda remains uncertain.

Megalosaurus parkeri

When originally named by the German palaeontologist Friedrich von Huene in 1923, it was called Megalosaurus parkeri.  However, in the late 1920s and early 1930s many German scientists were being heavily influenced by the work on North African dinosaurs by Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach.  The tall neural spines were reminiscent of the much more prominent spines found on the dorsal vertebrae of Spinosaurus (S. aegyptiacus), a dinosaur named by Stromer in 1915, whose fossils were being continuously studied.

No other member of the Megalosauridae had such large neural spines and so the genus assignment was questioned.  It was suggested that this English dinosaur should be associated with the spinosaurids.  In 1932, von Huene concluded that it should be placed within the genus Altispinax, which was known from Germany.  The problem was the fossil material from Weymouth represented an animal that lived at least 25 million  years before Altispinax.

It was not until the 1960s that a separate genus – Metriacanthosaurus was erected (Alick Walker, 1964), more recent studies have attempted to place this dinosaur more accurately within the phylogeny of the Theropoda.  Metriacanthosaurus has been placed within the sinraptorid clade.

If Metriacanthosaurus was a member of the Sinraptoridae family, then it would the first European member of this mostly Asian family of meat-eating dinosaurs to have been described.  The lack of cranial material makes positive identification at the taxonomic level difficult, the fossil material ascribed to this dinosaur consists of elements of the pelvis (a partial right ilium), vertebrae and elements of the hind limbs but the bones are severely cracked and distorted.

Win a Super Megaloceros Soft Toy.  Go pink with Everything Dinosaur!

WIN! WIN! WIN! with Everything Dinosaur! Please note this competition has now closed.

Everything Dinosaur has another super, soft toy giveaway.  We have a big, bright and very cuddly soft toy which needs a home.  It is a reindeer and very sweet it is too, but our palaeontologists have been pretending that it is a baby Megaloceros – can you give it a new home?

Win a Very Pink Soft Toy Member of the Cervidae (Deer Family)

Deer little thing!

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

The deer family (Cervidae) go back a long way in the fossil record.  Whether it is a Megaloceros or a baby Reindeer, it certainly is very cute and one lucky person is going to win it, just give this bright pink little chap a name.

Win a Super Soft Toy in our Competition

All you have to do is “Like” Everything Dinosaur’s FACEBOOK page, then comment on the pink deer picture including a suggestion for the name for this super and very sparkly soft toy.  It is certainly a “deer little thing”  but he/she needs a name!

Everything Dinosaur on FACEBOOK: “LIKE” our Facebook page and enter the competition!

We will draw the lucky winner at random and the name caption competition closes on Friday 12th February.  Good luck, we “deerly” hope you win!

To view Everything Dinosaur’s range of super prehistoric animal soft toys: Prehistoric Animal Soft Toys.

Terms and Conditions of Soft Toy Name Caption Competition

Automated entries are not permitted and will be excluded from the draw

Only one entry per person

The prize is non-transferable and no cash alternative will be offered

The Everything Dinosaur name a soft toy competition runs until Friday 12th February 2016.

Winner will be notified by private message on Facebook.

Prize includes postage and packing

For full terms and conditions contact: Contact Everything Dinosaur.

Please note this competition has now closed.

A Review of Everything Dinosaur’s Social Media Targets for 2015

Time for a quick update on Everything Dinosaur’s performance on social media over the last twelve months or so.  First, a big thank you to all our Twitter feed followers, Facebook fans, Pinterest pinners, Youtube channel subscribers we appreciate you all.

A Big Iguanodon “Thumbs Up” to All Everything Dinosaur’s Social Media Fans

Praise from a dinosaur!

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

She who must be obeyed “Tyrannosaurus Sue” set targets for “likes” on Facebook, followers on Twitter, pins on Pinterest and such like for 2015.  Let’s take a look to see how we did.

Social Media Targets

•  Everything Dinosaur’s School Website (Dinosaurs for Schools) – blog posts and the number of free downloads available

Since this website went live in August 2014, we have been able to help many hundreds of teachers and thousands of school children.  This website provides free downloads, teaching resources, school lesson plans, activity ideas and so much more.  In 2014, we posted up sixty-seven articles on the teaching blog, featuring new dinosaur discoveries and about how to teach about fossils and prehistoric animals in school.

In 2015, we added a further ninety-three articles, not a bad effort considering it was a record year for dinosaur workshops and school visits.  However, our target was to add an extra 125 articles (total by the year end to be 192 school blog posts).

To learn about Everything Dinosaur’s website and our help with teaching work and support for home educators: Contact Everything Dinosaur.

1. In terms of blog articles posted up we achieved 74% of our intended target (93 articles posted against a target of 125)
2. We set out to add a further 10 free downloads for teachers in 2015, we got 9 put up so that’s a 90% of target achieved as far as we are concerned.

Progress on Facebook

•  Facebook and Everything Dinosaur

Team members enjoy seeing all the dinosaur themed Facebook posts and we have had a busy year with our own Facebook exploits.  At the end of 2014 we had 1,581 Facebook likes and we set a target of 2,000 for 2015.

The Facebook “likes” target has been well and truly beaten with 1,000 new “likes” added to our page over the last twelve months.  A huge thank you to everyone who supported Everything Dinosaur on Facebook last year – we are genuinely humbled.   In 2014 we had about 175 friends on Facebook, at the end of 2015 we had 479 friends, that’s a very big increase.  We believe that Facebook “likes” have to be earned and not purchased, we shall continue to work hard to earn every appreciative “like” and every “friend” that we receive.

Reviewing our Targets

Targets:

1. Increase “likes” to “2,000” by the end of 2015 – achieved we have over 2,580 “likes” in total
2. Increase the number of friends we have on Facebook to 400 by the end of the year – achieved we have 479 friends
3. Run at least three competitions and free giveaways to show our gratitude to our Facebook fans (just like we did last year) – achieved we gave away lots of super dinosaur themed prizes too.

Target for 2015 was 2,000 earned “likes”.

Feel free to “like” our page by clicking on the Facebook logo – that would be brilliant!!

Twitter and Youtube

• Twitter

By the end of 2015 Everything Dinosaur had “tweeted” some 3,440 times, the “tweet target” for 2015 was 3,200 so we have exceeded this target and in terms of the number of people following us we wanted to get over 500 followers, by December 31st we had 676 followers.  We are not following quite as many other Twitter feeds as we thought we would, but in this instance it is probably a case of quality not quantity.

• Youtube

As we end this year our Youtube channel: Everything Dinosaur on Youtube has 105 videos posted up, this is a few less than we anticipated after we did not get all the videos made that we wanted to.   However, we are still really impressed with the number of channel views which now stands at over a million (thanks to everyone).

Subscribers

Subscriber numbers stand at 1,532, up from 1,200 in the previous year which is also very impressive for us, although we did have a 2015 target of 1,750 subscribers.  We are confident that if we post up more videos we will get more subscribers, especially if we maintain our focus on prehistoric animal model and replica reviews.

Visit Everything Dinosaur’s Youtube Channel

Click on the banner to visit Everything Dinosaur’s Youtube channel.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

What About Pinterest?

• Pinterest

Everything Dinosaur has “smart pins” and our entire product range is slowly and surely being added to our pinterest presence, along with new boards such as “Jurassic World” and Crystal Palace dinosaurs.  Here is how we fared against our 2015 targets.

1. Target for 2015 8,500 pins – actual pins 10,200
2. Target for 2015 1,050 followers – actual followers 1,300
3. Target 600 following – actual number for the end of the year is 486 (like Twitter we suspect it is a question of quality not quantity).

To visit our Pinterest pages, simply click on the Pin It logo below:

Click to visit Everything Dinosaur’s Pinterest pages.

That’s about all for social media targets, Everything Dinosaur team members are confident that “she who must be obeyed”, Tyrannosaurus Sue will be setting some targets for 2016, but one other point to note is that our website: Everything Dinosaur had 1,398 customer reviews posted up on it by the end of last year (indeed, we have now reached 1,400).  A really big thank you to all our reviewers and everyone who has posted a comment up on our website.

The Everything Dinosaur Blog (This Site)

Since we began this blog back in May 2007, we have tried to post up an article every single day, aiming for a total of at least 365 articles and stories per year.  On May 23rd 2015 we posted up our 3,000th article, that’s quite a milestone!

In May Everything Dinosaur Celebrated the 3,000th Blog Article

Celebrating our 3,000th blog post.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

We had calculated that by December 31st 2015 we would have 3,221 articles posted up, in fact, we ended the year on 3,225.  We are a long way off our 4,000th article, that should come some time in the first few months of 2018, however, we should comfortably pass the 3,500 landmark this year.

A Very Big Thank You from Everything Dinosaur

Thank you from Everything Dinosaur.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

Visit Everything Dinosaur’s website: Everything Dinosaur.

Looking Back on our Palaeontology Predictions for 2015

Lots of people are looking ahead and making New Year resolutions in early January, but for team members at Everything Dinosaur who are discussing the list of predictions for what we think is going to happen in palaeontology and related fields over the next twelve months, time to look back and re-visit our list of predictions for 2015.  Each year, just for a bit of fun, we try to second guess what news stories we will cover on this blog, can we predict dinosaur discoveries, new fossil finds, trends in model collecting and so forth?  Some years we can be quite successful, other years we end up way off the mark.

2015 Palaeontology Predictions

Here is the list of our 2015 palaeontology predictions with notes as to how well (or how badly) we did:

The 2015 Palaeontology Predictions

1. It’s a “Jurassic World” – a big year for dinosaur movies
2. Metallome Research Provides Fresh Fossil Insights – identifying elements in fossils
3. Stegosaurus into the Limelight – lots of research on the Stegosaurus genus
4. “Good Day” to Aussie Dinosaurs – more Australian dinosaur fossil discoveries
5. More Insights into Human Evolution – genetics leads the way when it comes to understanding our origins
6. A New Chinese pterosaur – new flying reptile discovery from China
7. Everything Dinosaur social media – targets and more targets on our social media platforms
8. Malaysia Firmly on the Dinosaur Map – further dinosaur discoveries from Malaysia in 2015
9. New species of Horned North American dinosaur Announced – further additions to the ceratopsids predicted
10. Fossil Finding is Child’s Play – child in the UK will make an important fossil discovery

How Did We Do?

It is quite an eclectic list, one year on let’s see how we did…

“Jurassic World” – we confidently predicted that this film from Universal Studios – a re-boot of the “Jurassic Park” franchise would do really well and surprise, surprise we were not wrong.  The film which had its premier in June put dinosaurs very much on the map once again and introduced prehistoric animals to a whole new generation of dinosaur fans.  Such was the impact of the movie that the “bad girl” of the film – Indominus rex ended up at number three in our annual compilation of the top ten prehistoric animals of the year.  The “Good Dinosaur” was not included in our palaeontology predictions list, not all dinosaur themed movies are a guarantee of cinema success it seems.

“Jurassic World” was officially the top grossing film in 2015 with box office sales in excess of $652 million dollars, although we expect to see the new Star Wars film overtake it in next two days or so.

Stegosaurus

Metallome and Stegosaurus – not too bad with these two either, back in June we reported on work from Manchester University that is helping scientists to understand the biological processes of long extinct creatures thanks to research undertaken in the field of biometal preservation.  Stegosaurus did step into the limelight, this time thanks to London Natural History museum which published the first of a succession of studies, on their fantastic Stegosaurus stenops exhibit.  Other articles on Stegosaurus written by our team members this year focused on those iconic plates.

To read more about biometals: Dinosaur Chemical Ghosts.

Stegosaurus steps into the spotlight: Sophie Weighs in at 1.6 tonnes.

How to tell the boys from the girls when it comes to Stegosaurs: Did Boy Stegosaurs Have Bigger Plates than the Girls?

 Australian Dinosaurs and Human Evolution – we had to wait until December for a new dinosaur genus, but the wait was worth it as sheep-sized Kunbarrasaurus ieversi was erected following an in-depth analysis of skull material formerly assigned to Minmi paravertebra.

Australia’s Newest Dinosaur – Kunbarrasaurus

Kunbarrasaurus ieversi of the Cretaceous (Australia).

Picture credit: University of Queensland/Australian Geographic

Predictions Related to Human Evolution

As for our prediction related to human evolution, specifically the unravelling of the oldest genome known to date from the likes of the Max Planck Institute, we were a little off target with this one, plaudits in 2015 to the brilliant work behind Homo naledi, another hominin from South Africa.

To read about H. naledi:  South Africa’s Latest Hominin Discovery.

A New Chinese Pterosaur and our Social Media Targets – again, a bit of a mixed bag this one, we reported on dinosaur discoveries from China, notably a new leptoceratopsid and an oviraptorid, but we did not feature any new Chinese pterosaur discoveries on this blog in 2015.  We were as accurate with this prediction as all those model making companies which insist in putting teeth into their Pteranodon replicas.  As for our social media targets, they deserve a separate blog article all of their own but in summary:

• School Blog Articles – target missed (boo)
• School Blog Downloads – just about hit target (hooray)
• Facebook “Likes” – so proud of smashing this target (a big thank you to all our Facebook fans) – (huge hooray)
• Twitter – more tweets, followers target reached, but we are not following as many other feeds as we predicted (would you believe half a hooray)?
• Youtube Videos – let’s just say this needs more of a focus in 2016 (down with the “Good Dinosaur” when it comes to this one…)
• Pinterest – we have had a very busy year with our pins! (hooray)

Dinosaurs in Malaysia

Malaysia Firmly on the Dinosaur Map and New Species of North American Horned Dinosaur – after reporting on Malaysia’s first dinosaur back in 2014, we confidently predicted that more dinosaur fossils from that country would be reported on this blog in 2015.  Sadly, we did not receive any press releases, or papers related to Malaysian dinosaurs.  This is one prediction we got wrong.  Time to cheer ourselves up with the good news that unsurprisingly, there were a number of Late Cretaceous horned dinosaurs announced in 2015, two immediately spring to mind, for further information:

Regaliceratops: A Right Royal Rumble.

Wendy Sloboda is honoured with new horned dinosaur: Wendiceratops pinhornensis from Canada.

A Cast of Wendiceratops on Display in 2015

A reconstruction of the dinosaur’s skeleton.

Picture credit: Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, Canada)

Fossil Discoveries

Fossil Finding is Child’s Play – oh dear, despite meeting lots of young dinosaur fans last year, we did not report on any new notable fossil discoveries made by a young person in the UK.  No marks here, but honourable mentions to undergraduate Student Sam Davies who found more pieces of the new Welsh theropod dinosaur: “Lucky” Welsh Find! and to Everything Dinosaur team members who helped out at a school’s science conference and invited children to go on an indoor fossil hunt: Celebrating Science with Blackpool Schools.

To read the article in which we set out our 2015 palaeontology predictions: Palaeontology and Fossil Predictions for 2015.

We will publish our list of palaeontology predictions for 2016 shortly.

Visit Everything Dinosaur’s website: Everything Dinosaur’s Website.