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 its 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.
Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings 
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.
Thread is a little old, but I’m slow. However, it is still worth adding: Robert T. Karbek submitted a number of abstracts to SVP, but only one was ever published. One of the best postulated a new hypothesis for the function of archosaur fenestra, namely that they were lined with membranes that picked up soundwaves of different frequencies. The large one in the antorbital area picked up the low frequency thump-thump-thumping of the footfalls of sauropod dinosaurs, the mid-sized infratemporal fenestra picked up the midrange sounds of its conspecifics, and the tiny supratemporal fenestra picked up the high-pitched tweets of the “ubiquitous haramyid” multituberculates.
Karbek did, in fact, present a poster on the bipedal stegosaur. Here is the description from an eye-witness:
“Yes, including a graph with two (real) data points on stegosaur limb proportions, with the caption “Line shows clear trend.” There was also a digital photo of a traffic pylon (captioned “Digital photo of traffic pylon”) with flagging tape wrapped around it, illustrating a clever and potentially useful
method determining center of mass of simple objects. Another figure
showed migration of cerebral glial cells to form grey matter in the
second brain, by way of a hand-drawn red arrow along the spinal cord.
Matt Carrano was apparently laughing his brains out. That was nice, but
we were rather disturbed that other people took the analysis seriously
and agreed with K. The author must have snuck in early to take it down,
since it disappeared the next day.”
I happen to know who was behind the Karbek poster, though despite having been with one of the guilty parties not too long ago, and them claiming to have a copy somewhere, I’ve still not seen it. Anyone got a photo? It was pre-digital, but someone must have taken a posterity snap.