Those in dinosaur research might well be aware of a joke SVP abstract a few years back that claimed Stegosaurus was a cursorial biped. That however has nothing on this report from 1920 that describes this substantial animal was a glider, using it’s plates for wing. As far as I can tell it’s quite genuine. It’s also awesome. Go read.
My hat is tipped in the direction of John Hutchinson and Jeff Martz for this.
I remember that abstract – it was a joke, but nearly at the same time (IIRC) there was a serious (LOL) paper saying hadrosaurs were aquatic. OUCH!
I have heard from a friend who the actual submitter of the abstract was. However, although I know them quite well (and am even collaborating on a project), I’ve never got round to asking if they really were responsible. Must do that one day…
which one – stego or hadro?
Oh the Stego one. It was submitted as authored by one “R.T. Karbek”. A rather obvious anagram, but obviously there to poke fun at the target, not reveal the real author’s identity.
Interestingly, the COM in stegos is far enough back that bipedal walking was definitely not impossible.
Yes but that’s not *quite* the same as being capable of sprinting like that!
That 1920 article is amazing, not least because it is illustrated by none other than Winsor McCay of _Little Nemo In Slumberland_ fame!
The big illustration is by Winsor McCay, the cartoonist behind the early animation, “Gertie the Dinosaur,” coincidentally.
I wonder if that’s the same W. H. Ballou who wrote articles about the so-called Nevada “shoe print” in Triassic aged stone? http://paleo.cc/paluxy/nevada.htm
This also appears to be serious (http://www.ijser.org/onlineResearchPaperViewer.aspx?The-Large-Scale-Explanation-of-Continental-Drift-and-Plate-Tectonics.pdf)
needless to sat I have no idea quite what to make of it.
The newspaper article is in the comic section so perhaps it isn’t meant to be taken seriously altho’ it’s not obviously a joke. The maths is a little odd, too. The (million year-old) Stegosaurus was apparently 14-28 ft long betw the shoulder and hips with a similar length tail and another 6-10 ft of head & neck, for a total of only 30 ft.
Just don’t let John Ford know about it or we’ll be reading about aquaplaning dinosaurs in all of the parrot press, and he’ll be compared with the likes of Copernicus and Aristotle.
Very interesting. This seems to have come out in 1920, based on the copyright date at the bottom. This means that it predates by ten years the occurrence of a gliding stegosaur in Edgar Rice Burrows’s Tarzan at the Earth’s Core:
(Read more here, if you can bear it.)
So could it possibly be the Burrows thought that Ballou’s report provided a scientific basis for this scene?
Special bonus weirdness: W. H. Ballou (1897) was also responsible for the earliest known life restoration of sauropods: a group of four fully aquatic Amphicoelias individuals, two of them completely submerged and the other two with only their heads above water.
Ballou, W. H. 1897. Strange creatures of the past: gigantic saurians of the reptilian age. The Century, 55(1):15– 23.
I love it! Thanks for sharing the Burroughs description too. Between you tonight I’ve gotten quite a laugh!
Ballou also wrote the New York Herald articles for Cope attacking Marsh in the 1890s, which brought the Bone Wars to the general public.
And here I thought that was an original Burroughs idea….
Wow, there’s even a little naked man next to the flying Stegosaaurus.
Ooooh!!! A pneumatic ornithischian. And identified in 1920!
Brad McFeeters had a similar but even more outlandish idea about Dimetrodon: http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs14/f/2007/109/a/a/__Dimetrodon_volans___by_Brad_ysaurus.jpg
(Yes, this is a joke.)
Hahahaha, I laughed so hard at this picture, my co-workers thought I was crazy.
Haha, thanks! That’s an awesome idea.
Gliding, eh? And here I’d thought it was only flattening after death that obscured the truth that Stegosaurus’ plates were actually helical and itn life it spun the plates on their vertical axes to provide lift like a helicopter.
If there’s anything that would be neater than a gliding Stegosaurus, it’d be a VTOL Stegosaurus.