A Two Fingered Therizinosaur
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This episode is brought to you by Colorado Northwestern Community College. Join them for two weeks digging up dinosaur bones from the Jurassic period in northwest Colorado this summer. For details, go to cncc.edu slash dino dig.

Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 535th episode, we're talking all about a new Therizinosaur that only had two fingers, but still had very large claws, as well as some new dinosaur movies. We're also going to announce our Dino Duels winner and prize.

And we have dinosaur of the day, Sinovenator, or Sinovenator, the troodontid with large claws on its feet. Lots of claws in this episode. There you go. Hand claws, foot claws. I guess those are the only, you could have wing claws, I guess, but those are kind of hand claws too.

And then we've got our fun fact, which relates to the dinosaur movie news, is that Don Bluth, who directed and co-produced The Land Before Time, started as a Disney animator. Makes sense. It does.

Before we get into all that amazing stuff, of course, we have to thank 10 of our new patrons because they are the ones keeping our podcast going. And this week, we'd like to thank Caboose, Richard, Tathan, Zik, GootAllo, JumperGamer122, Manny B, Joseph, MongolWarrior, and Destiny. Yay, thank you so much for being a dino at all.

We hope you're enjoying all the perks that come with it. And before we get into the news, we want to sort of announce our Dino Duels winner.

We didn't hear if they want to be recognized by any name specifically. So we'll just say they got 31 out of the 32 possible points. Impressive. Meaning they only got one of the first round answers wrong. But then that one didn't matter because immediately the other one won and then they won everything else all the way to the end. Nice. Well done. Yes. And that means I did not have the highest score.

Of everybody. I think I was in third because there was somebody else that I think had 29 and I had 27. Oh, that's pretty good. Yeah. And then I was way behind. And for that 29 point bracket, they only missed two, but one of them was in the second round. Wow. That's why they were three points away from perfect. Well done, people.

Yeah, there's also a 26 point answer in the mix. So a lot of very good bracket guesses. All of those obviously had Giraffatitan winning the last one since that's worth eight points. But

In total, they were the only people who guessed Giraffatitan would win the last one. They also had a lot of earlier points too. So figuring out that Giraffatitan would be the overall winner was really the key to winning the bracket. I should have just gone for the sauropod. Yeah. Well, there was another sauropod too. So you would have had to choose between, what was it, Nigerosaurus, I think? Mm-hmm.

And Giraffatitan. Giraffatitan is definitely cooler. Although Nigerosaurus has a more interesting face. That's what you're looking for. If you liked the Dino Duels competition, then let us know by filling out our listener survey. We're looking for feedback on what can make the show better and what is working best right now. Yep. For the Dino Duels championship, as well as other things on the show. Anything. Anything and everything.

And that's at bit.ly slash ikdsurvey25.

I think as of this recording, we only have four responses. I can count on one hand. It's only been a day or two since the last episode came out, so I expect that number to go up. But if you don't want just four people to decide the future of the show, you should get your voice heard too by going to bit.ly slash ikdsurvey25. 25 is in the current year, the last two digits of it at least. And there you can answer such questions as...

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Jumping into the news, as Garrett mentioned, we've got a new Therizinosaur. I love Therizinosaurus because they're so weird. I think after looking through our book and all the different spreads in it,

My favorite is Therizinosaurus. I think also the arc of it starting out as being seen as a big turtley thing with big flippers and using what we now think of as claws, but they thought they were like webbed into flippers. And now we know they're giant claws. And then it went through a phase of, oh, they're giant claws. This thing must have been ferocious. And then now even later, there have been the studies that

Yeah.

Which is just fascinating. It is. It doesn't mean it wasn't a deterrent, though. I keep thinking, like, if you saw an animal with three-foot-long claws that were razor sharp... You would think twice before messing with it. I guess we don't know if they were razor sharp. But yeah, you would see those and you would go away. You wouldn't say, like, well, I don't know how hard it could stab me before it hurt its finger. Yeah. The claws could be used for other things. Like, in this paper, they talk about maybe courtship or play.

I like the idea of claws in play. I don't know how that would work. I was thinking like High Lie, you know, that game where you're holding that scoop and you're flinging a ball against the wall like 100 miles an hour. I don't know what else you could, how else you play with claws. The play would get very painful quickly, I feel like. Well, maybe.

That deserves its own study. Yeah. And it also would be very hard because that's a dinosaur behavior that's hard to fossilize. And doesn't have any modern analogs because there's nothing walking around with three foot long claws to compare to. But I like the idea. But yeah, like you were saying, Garrett, so Therizinosaurus...

as a group. They're known for having large bellies, long necks, small heads. They're covered in feathers. They walked on two legs. And of course they have these large claws on their hands. They were herbivorous slash omnivorous. They lived in what's now Asia and North America. And they're known for having three fingers on each hand until now. Hmm. Twist. Yes. Well, we,

We sort of announced that at the beginning of this episode. But yeah, the new Therizinosaur dinosaur with the two fingers on each hand and large claws is Duonychus sagbatari. Duonychus, it's a good name. Yes, it means two claw. And then the species name is in honor of Kishiyav sagbatari.

Hopefully I did an okay job with that name. And the paper says, quote, a paleontologist and former director of the Institute of Paleontology Mongolian Academy of Sciences in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Yeah, it's definitely a Mongolian name. Mm-hmm.

This paper was published by Yoshitsugu Kobayashi and others in iScience, and it's open access if you want to read, dig in to the details. Well, this Deunicus wasn't really digging, but you know. That's true. Well, maybe with his feet, not with a hand cloth, but it could have been some kicking around of the dirt, like a sauropod. Maybe. Yeah.

It sounds like that's a Japanese name. So this is probably one of those joint Mongolian-Japanese expeditions. I know there were at least a couple of those over the years. Oh, yeah, could be. In this case, the fossils were found during construction of a water pipeline. And this Therizinosaur lived in the Cretaceous around 95 to 90 million years ago in what's now the Gobi Desert in Mongolia in the Bayan Shiri Formation.

And it's a medium-sized therizinosaur. It's estimated to be about 10 feet or 3 meters long and weigh about 575 pounds or 260 kilograms. Although, the skeleton that they found was not fully grown. So, maybe it got bigger. For comparison, just because I need to do it, therizinosaurus proper.

the OG Therizinosaur, was about 70 million years ago. So that makes it about 20 million years more recent than this dinosaur. And as was the case with many dinosaur lineages, they did generally trend towards a larger size over time. So it's not too surprising that this one is smaller. But

Therizinosaurus, what did you say this one was, 400 pounds? 575 pounds. So Therizinosaurus was about 20 times as big because it was more on the order of 10,000 pounds. Yeah. Therizinosaurus also had bigger claws. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Because you said the body is estimated to be three meters long. Its claw alone was one meter long, Therizinosaurus, so it's like...

Those three claws add up to the full length of the length of this animal. Well, so this animal, the holotype, the skeleton that they found and which now, since it's the holotype, more fossils that are considered to be Deonichus will have to be compared to this one.

It's a partial skeleton. It includes six neck bones, parts of the hips, a tailbone, parts of the ribs, parts of the shoulder, and both hands and arms. Ooh. We know a lot about its hands and arms. Yeah, that's the money part. Yes. It's nice to have a skull too. That would have been good to have, but. But for a Therizinosaur. Yeah. You want to see those claws. Yeah. And so we know this one has the two fingers on each hand with the large curved claws, whereas Arachnid,

All other therizinosauras so far have been found with three fingers on their hands. Yeah, that's really great too because if you have an animal that is missing a finger, you don't know is that a congenital issue that it had? Did it lose it while it was alive? There's any number of reasons it could have less fingers. But if you have both hands and you have the same number and they look similar on both, there's a very good reason to believe that that's just a feature of the species. Yeah.

And so they not only found the hands with the claws, but also a keratinous sheath on one of the fingers. That's that protective coating over the claw. Nice. And no keratinous claws have been found with other therizinosaurus. Nice. So this keratin sheath would have made the claw...

40% longer than the bone shows. Oh, that's so great. Because I've always been saying that about Therizinosaurus. I love pointing that out about any dinosaur you see in a museum, that you see their claws, but that's just the inner part of the claw. When it was alive, it had keratin covering it that would have potentially made it much longer. And having that number of 40%, that is a lot bigger. We don't know for sure if Therizinosaurus would be the same, but a Therizinosaurus...

inside part of claw, the bone part, was about a meter long. If it was 40% longer, you're getting up to like the height of a human almost. Just the claw, yeah. Just the claw, just one claw. Well, I mean, without the keratin sheath, it is the height of a small human child. That's true. Yeah, it goes from like toddler to like middle schooler in terms of height. Yeah.

Well, what's really cool about having the hands and the arms and everything and knowing that Deonicus had just two fingers is that this shows there's yet another theropod lineage that independently evolved to have just two fingers. There's at least five. We've got Allosauroidea, Tyrannosauridae, Alvarosauridae, Oviraptorosauria, and now Therizinosauridae. I didn't realize Oviraptorosaurs...

only had two fingers. I didn't either. I guess some of them did, not all of them. Yeah. Just like there are obviously some allosauroids that had more than two fingers. Well, just like with therizinosaurus, there's just this one with the two fingers. Yeah. So far. Yeah. So maybe in this case with the therizinosaur, the two fingers were helpful with foraging and

Based on the large claw and how it's curved, it's 120 degrees with the sheath. Wow. And its joint flexibility, it seems likely that it grasped its food. It could also potentially use the claws to climb or grapple, the author said, but grasping just seems the most likely based on its body size, the fact that it's a therizinosaur too, so it was either an herbivore or omnivore.

just makes sense. That's very interesting. It reminds me of a three-toed sloth, right? They have very long claws that are very curved and they use those for climbing and hanging. If there was a therizinosaur that hung from trees in the canopy like a three-toed sloth, that might be my new favorite even ahead of regular therizinosaurus. That would be so fantastic. Oh, can you imagine if they put that in Jurassic World? Oh, man, that would be good. I hope that...

There's follow-up research to this to determine how exactly those claws were used. It's a bummer now in more bums that we don't have the skull because you can tell things about the general orientation of the body when you have the skull. So I don't know for sure, but maybe in a three-toed sloth, there might be some analog where you could tell this animal spends a lot of time upside down.

Yeah. Or a bat or something. That would be interesting. Yeah. They can tell based on the shape of the hand and the size of the claw, though, that it could have grasped branches or vegetation up to almost four inches or 10 centimeters in diameter. That really seems three-toed slothy. This isn't that much bigger than a three-toed sloth either.

Okay, I take it back. It is a lot bigger. Three-toed sloths weigh about 10 pounds. That is a lot bigger. I always imagined them being so much bigger than that, but I guess they're the size of a small dog or large cat is the description on Wikipedia. Maybe you'd remember when we go to museums and we see the giant sloths. It could be. Yeah, those are clearly much bigger. And I don't think they spend a lot of time in trees. It's right in the name. Yeah.

Well, Deuonychus, like we said, it's not as big as Therizinosaurus. So maybe it was more of a selective or pickier eater. It's often the case for smaller animals. Yeah.

This Therizinosaur, Deunicus, lived in a semi-arid environment with river channels, and some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include ankylosaurs, ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, and so many different types of theropods, including...

doing, I guess, because therizinosaur are theropods. True. Yep. They're like the weird vegetarian cousin. Well, I'm not saying that it's weird to be vegetarian, but it's different because most theropods are carnivorous. The odd ones out, I should say. So one of the reasons we were talking about therizinosaur is because there's a trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth that came out and...

Therizinosaurus was kind of the breakout star of Jurassic World Dominion. Yeah. Yeah, I think that was my favorite dinosaur in the movie. The way they made it blind and sort of echolocating and stuff too. Made it very menacing, especially for an herbivore in a Jurassic Park movie. Yeah.

So Jurassic World Rebirth is coming out July 2nd of this year, which seems really fast, but I guess that's what happens when you take time off for a baby. Yes. I mean, that's soon. It's less than three months away now. It is. It is. And the trailer came out sort of recently. Recent for us, I guess. Mm-hmm.

And I know some of our listeners are trying to avoid news of this movie, so maybe you want to skip ahead a little bit. If you don't want spoilers. We can't avoid them because we have all sorts of alerts for everything dinosaur related. Yes. We're always getting the news about every detail that comes out. Yes.

So I read that this movie, Jurassic World Rebirth, is meant to be more like a horror film than some of the more recent films in the franchise. I hope so. We've heard that before and it hasn't been horror enough for me. No, not even... The second half of Fallen Kingdom was kind of horror-ish and I enjoyed that, but like none of the other ones were. Yeah.

There were moments in Camp Cretaceous too, the TV show and the chaos theory one that came out later. Yeah. It also had some horror-ish moments in it that were pretty good. Well, speaking of the next part of chaos theories out, we should probably watch that at some point. It's like twice a year they come out with a season of that show, I feel like. Yeah. I really enjoy them. It's nice. It bridges the gap in between the movies. There's a bunch of other Jurassic Park stuff that comes out.

Well, so Rebirth takes place five years after Jurassic World Dominion. It's a bit of a bummer because it turns out Earth is mostly inhospitable to the dinosaurs. So the dinosaurs that remain are in isolated areas around the equator.

Living in climates similar to the ones where they used to live. So we're not getting the all over the world rampaging everywhere movie we were all hoping for. Maybe they'll bring that back. That would be there's so many cool ways to explore that. But I think the statistic is a large fraction of the human population lives within not that many miles of the equator. Yeah.

And then as you get closer to the poles, there's way less people. So depending on how close to the equator you have to be, like if you just make it the tropics, it's still a huge amount of people. You have like Southeast Asia, all this stuff. Well, from what I read, it's isolated areas around the equator. Oh, so it's going to be like islands and stuff. I think so. Yeah.

Unless we get like Hawaii. It doesn't seem like that based on the trailer. I want humans, regular humans interacting with the dinosaurs. I don't know why I want that so bad. I don't know, but I don't think you're going to get that with this movie. Okay. Because in Rebirth, it's a group of people are traveling to get the DNA from three of the biggest dinosaurs because those dinosaurs are going to be able to help with some kind of drug, some life-saving drug that can help humans. And the group of people end up stranded on an island.

Okay. And it just turns out that the dinosaurs on that island were too dangerous for the original Jurassic Park. Mm-hmm. Now, in terms of the dinosaurs I saw in the trailer, I saw Dilophosaurus with the frills, of course. Okay. And T-Rex and Spinosaurus. There's also Titanosaurus.

And on the non-dino side, we've got Mosasaurus and Quetzalcoatlus. I wonder if Mosasaurus and Quetzalcoatlus are going to be two of the three quote-unquote largest dinosaurs that they need to collect from. I don't know. Because the Mosasaurus has been a main feature in recent movies. They've got the Spinos and the Mosasaurus working together to hunt in one of the scenes. Interesting. Yeah.

And what I think is going to happen is at least one of the dinosaurs is hybrid because there's one terrifying hybrid dinosaur, but we don't know too much about it yet. Yeah. I mean, I guess only 200 new dinosaurs were discovered since the last movie came out, so they had to come up with their own. They couldn't have picked one of those. Snark. Yeah.

It might not quite be 200. Maybe it's only like the low hundreds. Well, I'm still excited to see where this goes. Yeah. If it's a horror movie, I'm all for it. The first Jurassic Park, I think, is so good because it is so scary. And the second one is also it has some really good scary scenes in it. Like I think almost everyone remembers that scene where they're walking through the grass and you see the dinosaurs sort of converging on them. Yeah. It's great. There's so many great moments like that in the early movies.

And they've sort of diverged more towards action movies lately, which are still fun. But then it's more just like people shooting them and then they're sort of bulletproof and

It's not as interesting as, you know, that intensity you get when it's like, where's the dinosaur? How's it going to get me? I think you're going to get intensity based on what I saw in the trailer. It's good. I'll enjoy it no matter what. I always enjoy the movies because anytime you have huge budgets making new dinosaur animations, it's really enjoyable.

And I like the idea of the spinos and the mosasaurs working together. Mm-hmm. That's a cool idea. It is. Sounds like they're going to make a pretty aquatic spinosaurus. Unless, I guess, the spinosaurus could be chasing things to the water or something. They're swimming. Nice. I wonder if that'll fuel the debate. I don't know if any researchers are going to cite Jurassic Park. Maybe not.

Well, on the other end of the dinosaur show spectrum, BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs revival is coming out later this year. Ooh, was that season three? I'm not sure. Oh, wait. I was thinking Prehistoric Planet, the other BBC dinosaur thing. This is a recreation of Walking with Dinosaurs, the old puppet inclusive show from what, like the very early 2000s or maybe late 90s? I think it was late 90s.

They released the first look images. So it's going to have six episodes. Each one will tell the story of one dinosaur. And the dinosaurs include Albertosaurus, which will have fuzz. Pachyrhinosaurus is another one. That's the ceratopsid with large bosses over the nose and eyes, which makes them look like they have thick eyebrows in the pictures. Mm-hmm.

So that's pretty cool. And I would say the opposite end of Jurassic World because it's not meant to necessarily be horror action. It's meant to be very scientifically accurate. Yes. It'll be narrated, not acted out, presumably. And it'll also be focused on seeing them in well-lit areas. None of the what's lurking in the shadows sort of. Well, unless there's some hunt going on, maybe. Oh, yeah, they could. That's true. Yeah.

Like prehistoric beast, Phil Tippett's one that predated Jurassic Park by a little bit. That's really cool. People have been calling for a revival of Walking with Dinosaurs for decades. Yeah, I'm excited to see it. The first one is fantastic. It's still really good, really enjoyable. It holds up well. Yeah.

But then going back to the more entertainment side of things. Yo-yoing. There's a new dinosaur horror comedy called The Invisible Raptor that's coming out this December. And a secret facility accidentally creates an invisible killer raptor. Hmm.

Interesting. Yes. The description says, quote, After a top-secret experiment goes wrong, a hyper-intelligent, invisible raptor escapes the lab and begins wreaking havoc in the surrounding neighborhood. When the creature's identity is uncovered, it soon becomes clear that a disgraced paleontologist, alongside his ex-girlfriend, an unhinged amusement park security guard, and a local celebrity chicken farmer, is the town's only hope for surviving the raptor's ravenous rampage. When you were describing those characters, I thought it was going to be that they were the ones that

created the invisible raptor no they're gonna save everyone it's meant to be cheesy like the trailer mentions it's the deadliest predator you've never seen i think the raptor being invisible probably helped a little bit with the visual effects it does sound like if i was making a movie and i wanted there to be dinosaurs in it and then i realized oh i don't have a budget to have dinosaurs in this oh we'll make them invisible and then we can finish the movie

It could be. It looks very enjoyable, though. Nice. I think we'll end up watching it, although it won't be until December. Switching gears a little bit, I want to give a quick mention. Thank you to our patron, ToonRex, for sharing this with us.

There's a couple of dinosaur petitions going around right now. There's one to save Tyra, the world's largest dinosaur in Drumheller. I didn't realize that dinosaur had a name. I didn't either. So it's Tyra the Tyrannosaurus. Oh, maybe it's Tyra then? I think it's Tyra. Tyra. I was overthinking. Yeah. Tyra the Tyrannosaurus. Tyrannosaurus. Yeah.

That makes sense. And then there's another petition to make T-Rex the U.S. national fossil, which we talk about state fossils so much, I never thought about a national one. Yeah, that was started by our patron, Toon Rex. That is their own personal petition. And it does make sense because T-Rex is mostly an American dinosaur. There have been some found in Canada. Yeah.

Yeah, well, there's the famous one in Canada, Scotty the T-Rex. Oh, yeah, that's right. Sometimes I forget if they were actually found where they're displayed, but you're right, that one is an official Canadian dinosaur. So Canada could have a claim for a T-Rex as a national fossil too. So maybe we need to get on it before Canada beats us to the punch. Or...

It becomes the national fossil of two countries because you have that with state fossils too. That's true. Yeah. Not T-Rex, but other dinosaurs. Yeah. T-Rex is interesting because it's not the state fossil of any state, despite it being widely, you know, acclaimed from places like Montana and Wyoming and the Dakotas even.

But nobody has claimed it as their state fossil yet. So making it a national fossil would sort of solve that problem. So we'll have those links if you want to add your name to the petition. Oh, yeah. And with the Tyra petition, I wanted to mention it's interesting because they basically like city council or somebody who's in charge of funding for things like this basically said it's expensive to

And maybe we don't need it anymore. So we're just going to stop funding it in a few years. But they didn't really give a price or anything. They didn't say, oh, it's going to cost $5 million. And that's not in our budget. They were just like,

Well, we don't want to keep it going. So we're just going to get rid of it in a few years, which just seems like a shame. At least decide how much it costs and let the people in the area decide if they want to come up with that money or try to raise it somehow. But it almost seems like they just want to get rid of it. It's weird. Well, hopefully it sticks around. It was pretty fun to be able to walk up it when we visited Drumheller. Yeah. Yeah, it is cool because you walk up like its body and then you're inside its mouth.

I'm not sure if it's still the world's largest dinosaur. That's still what they call it, but there are some pretty big dinosaur mounts in Asia and things, so I'm not 100% on that one. Although this one is very cartoonish. It's not, obviously, to the proportions of a real T-Rex. Right. So it has that going for it for largest dinosaur. It's very scaled up. Yeah, so I'll have the links.

And one last kind of news item. Well, this is more like a, I would say a separate section. We've done this a few times where one of our listeners will send us a review of a museum that they've recently been to. And we love reading those because we're not going to be able to go to all the museums. So we like to hear about them. Yeah. Unfortunately, we can't make it to everyone. Yes. Although I hope to make it to this one. Seems like we should be able to someday. This is the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum in Mantua, New Jersey.

So thank you to our patron, Brosis Girl, for sending us this fantastic review. I'm going to read it so that other people can hear more about this museum, which sounds like a lot of fun. All right. So the review is, quote, the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum in Mantua, New Jersey is beyond fantastic. Oh, that must be where I got that word. Yep. My husband...

My husband Wayne and I were there for opening day and we just loved it. Not only are the full-scale dinos absolutely gorgeous, but they are presented quite dramatically as well. The minute attention to detail in all of the displays was truly impressive. You'll be able to see some of that in my photos. Sabrina, one of the first things you see as you enter the Cretaceous World Gallery is a life-size astrodon stomping on an acrocanthosaurus. Yes! Hooray for sauropods! And for Garrett, there's a really cute priconodon.

Also a display of scutes you can touch. In the same gallery, there's a dryptosaurus, New Jersey's answer to T-Rex, and willing to pounce on you, and a hadrosaurus mama vigilantly watching over her youngster and a clutch of eggs, one of which is hatching. Hadrosaurus foci was discovered only 11 miles away from the museum. There's an entire section on the ancient marine world, the monstrous seas gallery, because this area was 70 feet underwater during the Cretaceous.

A massive recreation of a mosasaur floats along the ceiling. A nearly complete skeleton was discovered in the adjacent quarry. Very intimidating. Also many other representations of life in the seas at this time. The signage is abundant. We couldn't begin to read it all. A good excuse to come back. They really went out of their way to make it informative, fascinating, and fun.

The museum makes no bones, forgive the pun, about its very strong environmental message. There's an entire gallery devoted to the fifth extinction as well as the extreme climate crisis we're facing now. They don't hold back, but they also lay out practical things we can all do to help, and the overall message, though cautious, is one of hope. The building itself, which is beautiful, was designed with sustainability as its overarching criterion. It's the largest carbon-neutral building in the state.

Although there's so much to see, the museum is not massive and can easily be done in several hours, but you couldn't prove it by me. I like to take my time.

Dr. Kenneth Lacovara, a discoverer of the mighty Dreadnoughtus, is the executive director and guiding spirit behind the museum. He told me that he now has his office there. How cool is that? He took questions from dino enthusiasts in the museum's theater, which he'll be doing on a regular basis. He was absolutely brimming with enthusiasm and delight. There's a lovely little cafe with a large patio area nearby where you can dine alfresco if you wish. It was a very warm day, so we did. The museum also has a wonderful gift shop with a reproduction of Charles Darwin's study tucked into it.

They certainly did not neglect the little ones. There are plenty of interactive exhibits, a tunnel young explorers can crawl through that allows them to poke their heads up amid the hadrosaurs, and whimsical little dioramas scattered about right at kids' eye level. There will eventually be some live animal exhibits. A monitor lizard is coming. There's also a large outdoor playground with a giant pterosaur kids can climb on. I think that will be very popular.

And if all that weren't enough, you can actually dig for fossils yourself from May through October in the giant quarry. We were so impressed. They really thought of everything. There were many staff members on hand and they were all friendly and helpful. Everything seemed to run very smoothly. I'm happy to report that the opening weekend was sold out. Oh yes, parking is free and the address of the museum is 66 million Moses or way. It doesn't get any better than that. So thank you, Brose's girl, for sending us this wonderful review and for sending us pictures to look at, which again,

For those of you listening, we'll be sharing a way for you to see those pictures in the coming weeks. That does sound like a really cool museum. Yes, we're going to have to make a trip to the East Coast. Yeah, when we lived in New Jersey, we made a trip down to Trenton one time. And I think it was just before they put that big mount on display of the lay laps leaping onto the other at the New Jersey State Museum. Either that or it was just closed so we couldn't get in.

But this isn't too far from there. It's still on the New Jersey side of sort of the Philadelphia metropolitan area, southern New Jersey. And it is really cool that it's so close to the original Haddonfield area.

discovery of Hadrosaurus Fulci. Yeah. The first ever mounted dinosaur. Good old Hattie. Yep. I also like how much New Jersey is leaning into the laylapse thing in general because laylapse, I had to double check the years on this, but it was named in 1866 by Cope. And then later it was discovered that it was a mite because so many things are predetermined.

existing genera and it was so much harder to know before the internet and then marsh renamed it to driptosaurus so really laylaps is driptosaurus if you're familiar yep it's the eutyrannosaur do you prefer laylaps i feel like i see laylaps more just because isn't that like riley black's

handle in a few places. It is, but I think I see Dryptosaurus more. I just see their handle around. So I think of lay laps periodically, plus leaping lay laps. I really like the alliteration there. And it's such a cool drawing of one Tyrannosaur leaping onto the other one from the 1800s, showing them as such active hunters. It's so cool. And then once they mounted

a couple skeletons like that at the New Jersey State Museum. I just, yeah, I think I like laylaps a little bit better because of that history. But it's the same as dryptosaurus. So I'm fine either way. Laylaps also just rolls off the tongue so much easier than dryptosaurus. I like how Brose's girl put it, New Jersey's answer to T-Rex. Yeah. Yeah, because it is a tyrannosaurus. So it's cool.

smaller, obviously, but it lived at the same time. So watch out. Yeah. Yeah. We'll definitely have to check out that museum from the pictures. It looks really cool, but you never quite get the full sense of a museum from pictures, even virtual reality. You don't quite fully get it the way you do when you're actually there next to the bones of an animal or a full scale replica of an animal. It's always a little more intimidating and more fun.

We'll get into our dinosaur of the day in just a moment, but first we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Colorado Northwestern Community College. There is nothing like discovering a new dinosaur in the field. So I've heard, so I can imagine.

Getting the fossils out of the ground, it's exciting and it's a challenging endeavor. And you can do that with CNCC. But getting the fossils out of the ground is just the very first step in paleontology. Arguably more important is all the work that gets done in a laboratory afterwards. Separating a fossil from the surrounding rock is an extremely important skill. Yeah, that's how we learn about the dinosaurs. It is, and sometimes it takes thousands.

thousands of hours and can reveal things like feathers, keratin, all sorts of things that a good preparator can make all the difference with. If you want to become an amazing preparator, you can learn those skills by joining the experts at CNCC. You even get to try your hand at the last step of a fossil's journey, creating a museum exhibit. Nice. We love seeing the museum exhibits.

If you want, you can do the dig program and the lab program back to back for a full four week paleontology extravaganza this summer. Go through the whole cycle. Yeah, from in ground to museum display, maybe on different fossils, but the whole process. So go to cncc.edu slash dino dig to get all the details and make sure you register online by May 31st. Again, that's cncc.edu slash dino dig.

And now for our dinosaur of the day, Sinovenidor, which was a request from PaleoMike716 via our Patreon and Discord, so thanks! It was a troodontid that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now Liaoning, China, in the Yixian Formation. It's older than 128 million years. It looked like other troodontids. It walked on two legs, it had a long tail, sickle claws on the feet, a long head full of sharp teeth, and raptor-like hands.

The troodontids were small and bird-like, and they had a lot of teeth, closely spaced teeth in their lower jaws. And of course, they had those sickle claws on the toes. Two specimens, or individuals, of Sinovenidor were originally found. The holotype was less than 3.3 feet, or one meter long. It was about the size of a chicken. That holotype, though, was a sub-adult. Since that one was found, some more individuals have been found that are twice that long.

and the holotypes estimated to weigh 5.5 pounds, or 2.5 kilograms. Sinovenator probably had feathers. The fossils were found in rocks deposited by a river, so no feathers have been found. It had bird-like hips and a triangular skull with a shallow snout. The type and only species is Sinovenator changiai,

It was described in 2002 by Xu Xing, Mark Norrell, and others. That genus name, Sinovenator, means Chinese hunter, and the species name is in honor of Miman Cheng, who has done a lot studying the Jehol fauna. This discovery of Sinovenator helped further show that birds evolved from dinosaurs, and it's really cool. The fossils are preserved in 3D. A partial skull and disarticulated skeleton were found, along with a second individual that was incomplete but articulated, which means you can see where the bones fit together.

Then a wrist was found later of another individual. And then also later, another fragmentary skeleton was referred to Sinovenator. That includes a partial skull, lower jaws, and six neck bones. What's interesting is a 2006 survey found that there's hundreds of undescribed specimens. So I imagine we'll learn a lot more about this dinosaur at some point. There's one nearly complete skeleton, including the skull, that was found preserved in a sleeping posture, similar to Meilong.

and a study of the brain case, the endocast, found that Sinovenator was similar to Archaeopteryx. Sinovenator may have had a better sense of smell compared to other troodontids. It had a long olfactory tract and bulbs. In 2015, a man from Colorado in the U.S. was sentenced for trying to smuggle dinosaur fossils from China to the U.S., and one of those fossils was Sinovenator, which was valued at $70,000 U.S. All of the fossils that the man had were returned.

Sinovenator lived in an area with wet and dry seasons, with cold winters. Other animals that lived around the same time and place include the Ceratopsian satacosaurus, the Ornithischian jeholosaurus, and the mammal, Repenomamus. And for our fun fact, we're keeping with our dinosaur movie theme, Don Bluth, who directed and co-produced The Land Before Time, started as a Disney animator. I can't believe I didn't know that before.

I don't know much about Don Bluth other than the fact that he directed Land Before Time. He worked on a lot of movies that I watched growing up, both Disney and Don Bluth Studio. Yeah. So according to CBR, Bluth left Disney on his 42nd birthday in 1979 because he was frustrated and he started his studio to be a competitor to Disney.

While at Disney, he worked on Sleeping Beauty in 1955, The Rescuers, and Pete's Dragon. Wow, he was young when he was working on Sleeping Beauty then. Yeah. And then some other Disney animators followed him. Apparently, they were called the Disney Defectors. And the first film that they made was The Secret of NIMH.

which is about a widowed mouse who has to save her family. And it's this serious and darker type of film. Interesting. I remember watching that movie as a kid and it was beautiful. I don't think I've ever seen that. It's a great movie. It was intense from what I remember, but it's very artistic. And that artistry apparently drew Steven Spielberg in who hired the studio to work on Land Before Time. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, Land Before Time is fantastic.

We've got a full size movie poster, like outdoor size movie poster. I don't even remember the scale of that thing is crazy. It's like three feet by five feet or something, but I still haven't found a frame for it. Love that little foot. Yeah. I feel like my favorite watching the movie might've been Petrie.

Petrie was entertaining. I like Spike too when I was eating. Yeah. Sorry, Sarah. Yeah, nobody really likes Sarah. She was sort of the villain or the frenemy. Oh, but Ducky was also pretty great. Ducky is also fantastic, yes. Yep, yep, yep.

Well, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you so much for listening. Stay tuned. Next week, we'll have more exciting dinosaur discussions. And if you could, please take our listener survey. That's at bit.ly slash ikdsurvey25. Thanks again, and until next time.

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