Random Palaeo-Work ideas of the Day #19

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. June is here, and I'm kicking it off with two ideas related to how June is been labelled both Jurassic June and Pride Month, both of which are quite to my interests, hence why all June posts this months will have at least more then one Jurassic taxa and be dubbed Junerassic.

Jurassic Giants

Art by Nils Hoff (2011)

Yet another documentary idea of mine, this one about one of the underrepresented Late Jurassic locales known: the Tendaguru Formation of Tanzania. It's not as well known as other contemporary formations (China's, Europe's, or North America's), but what sets it apart is that it preserves both terrestrial and marine fossils due to representing a coastal plain of lagoons and deltas. This documentary would thus be about the giants of both the land and the sea, and how the ecosystems of both influence one another. For example, washed out dung from dinosaurs on land brings nitrogen to the sea. And yes, there would be scenes with sauropods wading (not swimming, mind you - sauropods couldn't do that) in the ocean and where a sauropod and a plesiosaur meet, craning their necks forward to look at one another*.

* Not like a swan mind. I'm well aware plesiosaurs couldn't hold their necks like it.

Major creatures I intend to appear in the work are:

• Giraffatitan brancai - Can't have a Tendaguru work without the most famous dinosaur from it, the giant macronarian sauropod once thought of as Brachiosaurus. We would specifically follow a female.
• Plesiosaur - Not really a specific genus in mind beyond, as none are known from the formation, but still, I wanted to choose a creature that would serve well for the lead of a marine segment, and modelled after the contempopary Cryptocleidus. Plus, while obviously very different, the long necks connect it to the sauropods of the land. The main one the doc would focus on would be a young male in a pod.
• Ichthyosaurs and Pliosaur - The other marine reptiles of the tendaguru's coast. Two species in the former would appear, just one of the latter would appear, modelled after Simolestes, known from a location close enough to east Africa at the time, southern Asia.
• Kentrosaurus aethiopicus - The stegosaur that's just behind Giraffa in notoriety.
• Veterupristisaurus milneri - A large theropod and top terrestrial predator, one of the first of the giant carcharodontosaurs.
• Tendaguria tanzaniensis, Janenschia robusta, and Wamweracaudia keranjei - Other sauropods that would appear in Jurassic Giants.
• Elaphrosaurus bambergi - A human-sized ceratosauroid theropod.
• Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki - An ornithopod of a similar size to Elaphrosaurus.
• Tendaguripterus recki - A pterosaur.
• Ostafrikasaurus crassiserratus - A smaller theropod. The taxonomy is rather nebulous and is currently believed to be a ceratosaur as opposed to a spinosaur as it once was, but I would restore it here as a kind of megalosaur (the clade they both belong to) in transition, gaining the derived traits needed for piscivory and swimming.
• Machimosaurus - A marine crocodilian relative, appearring because fossils of it or a similar creature are known from both Ethiopia and Madagascar.
• Lepidotes - A fish.
• Hybodus - A shark.
• Haploceras - Ammonites.

Art by Mark Witton, to give you one last idea of what the work and feel would be like 

The Pride of Prehistory

To celebrate Pride Month (and to anyone who thinks queer people are horrid and disgusting, please kindly piss off), here's a whole work about LGBTQ+ lives of prehistoric life, consisting of various vignettes. Just two segments I have in mind, however crude at the moment, are:

• A same sex couple of a large theropod tending their chicks together.
• A natural FTM small troodont with a damaged ovary (think TrollMan's piece Insert Jurassic Park Quote Here).

I know it's not much, but it's a start.

At the moment I picture TPoP as either an illustrated book or graphic novel, or a documentary.

Hoped you like this pair of prehistory ideas! Please share, and let me know what else can be added or improved to it!

Sources

• The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants. By Mark Hallett and Mathew J. Wedel. Baltimore (Maryland): Johns Hopkins University Press. $39.95. xvi + 320 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-1-4214-2028-8 (hc); 978-4214-2029-5 (eb). 2016.
• Heinrich, W.D., Bussert, R., and Aberhan, M. 2011. "A blast from the past: the lost world of dinosaurs at Tendaguru, East Africa". Geology Today 27 (3): 101–106
• M. T. Young, S. Hua, and L. Steel, D. Foffa, S. L. Brusatte, S. Thuring, O. Mateus, J. I. Ruiz-Omenaca, P. Havlik, Y. Lepage, M. B. de Andrade. 2014. "Revision of the Late Jurassic teleosaurid genus Machimosaurus (Crocodylomorpha, Thalattosuchia)". Royal Society Open Science. 1:140222