Belated Creature Feature: Interview with the Esteemed Herr Doktor

You may know LGM commenter herr doktor bimler as the the quick-witted smarty-pants who makes you look at weird stuff, but I know herr doktor bimler as a quick-witted smarty-pants who makes me look at weird stuff and also is a fancy-schmancy school doctor. I’ll let him take it from here:

I am a lowly Ph.D. Massey University pays me a pittance as a Research
Affiliate, i.e. to publish enough papers to burnish their reputation. The
Teutonic styling is so that if anyone in a comment thread complains about
my pompous pedantry, I can point to the “Herr Doktor” and tell them “What
the fuck do you expect??”

Lately most of those papers have been about perceptual psychology and
colour vision, but my research area is anything I want it to be. I am
happy to pretend to be knowledgeable about multiple topics.

Long story short, he is super-smart and knows a lot of stuff about a lot of things. So I decided to ask him about dinosaur things.

But first he demurs a bit…

 Bear in mind, [I] only [have] a layman’s knowledge of dinos. I read Tetrapod
Zoology and remember stuff (I never could work out why people *forget*
stuff; it only means that you have to learn it again in the future).

Now let’s get to the fun stuff.

Here’s a chart for you:

(from Paleoking). The existing bones of Dreadnoughtus are *smaller* than
other known dinosaurs (including Agentinosaurus), but the individuals
weren’t fully grown, so the size of a full-grown Dreadnoughtus remains
fair game for speculation.Our Dark Lord (Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology) has not weighed in yet so
I dare not venture an opinion, for fear of the scorpion pits if I guess
wrong.

> 2.) Paleontologist Jack Horner thinks that Dracorex, Stygimoloc and
> Pachycephalosaurus may have been the same dinosaur during different stages
> of its life. There have been similar theories regarding Triceratops and
> Torosaurus. Do you think there’s any validity to either theory?

 

At Riddled we rate for Jack Horner because he wants to devolve chickens
back into basal dinosaurs.… but Longrich & Field’s demolition of the Triceratops / Torosaurus
theory was pretty persuasive.

> 3.) What is your favorite dinosaur and why?

 

I’m going to say the Azhdarchidae, (a) because think how many points that
would score in a Scrabble game, and (b) so you can complain that
pterosaurs aren’t dinosaurs.

> 4.) Do you think that Therizinosaurus used it claws to root out insects to
> eat? If he did, would he still be considered a plant-eater?

 Clearly Therizinosaurus used its scary reaver claws for doing jazz-hands.

Don’t you want to see a whole troupe of Therizinosauri in a dance revue?

One more thing: herr doktor would like me to point you to my last post, where I claimed that the Pentaceratops on display at the Sam Noble museum had the biggest skull ever found. It turns that, though it is labeled “Pentaceratops”, it is, in fact, a Titanoceratops.