Re: Discovery Channel's "Beasts in Your Back Yard"

["T. Mike Keesey" <tmk@dinosauricon.com>]

I'm in California (specifically, 90025) which has, I think, just one
Mesozoic dinosaur fossil (an indeterminate hadrosaur). For me it came up
with _Nodosaurus_! (Known from Wyoming & Kansas.)

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Ray Stanford wrote:

> BACKGROUND:
>     On http://dsc.discovery.com/cgi-bin/whichdino.cgi under Beasts in Your
> Back Yard, one can type in one's zip code and supposedly receive information
> about dinosaurs roamed in the area associated with the zip code.  So I typed
> in my local College Park, Maryland, zip code, 20741, pressed the "show me"
> button, and I was told that Allosaurus and Tenontosaurus were in our area.
>
>     Well, we have no Jurassic exposures here in Prince George's County.  Not
> unreasonably, no Allosaurus material has been reliably reported.  Tom Lipka
> has found teeth identified by someone whom he says is knowledgeable about
> Acrocanthosaurus teeth (but whose name I do not recall) as being from that
> theropod, an Early Cretaceous allosaurid, but those teeth are certainly not
> from Allosaurus, per se.
>
>     Thus, could it be that someone correctly informed them that an
> allosaurid was (or probably was) here and that it got distorted by someone
> else into "Allosaurus", per se?  List member Dr. Thomas R.Holtz, Jr., works
> in College Park (University of Maryland, College Park Campus), so I wonder
> if he can enlighten us of what may have happened in this instance?
>
>     As to Tenontosaurus, while the age of our outcroppings is in the ball
> park for that animal, the single tooth fragment (USNM 244564) from the
> Potomac Group that is sometimes said to possibly have been from
> Tenontosaurus is far from diagnostic, as is an isolated caudal (tail)
> vertebra (USNM 8508) that has been only very speculatively (IMHO) associated
> with Tenontosaurus.
>
>     It would have been nice if the Discovery Channel had been more accurate
> about Maryland's dinosaurs and hopefully it is more accurate (and I suspect
> it may be) about the dinosaurs of other locations.
>
>     Let's hear from some of you out there about the accuracy of the
> Discovers Channel's "Beasts in Your Back Yard", concerning your own areas.
>
>     Ray Stanford
>
>
>

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T. MICHAEL KEESEY
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