Dino And Aliens

[Niobe Hennigan]

The show offers a few other awful gems. Our narrator goes on at length about how carbon-14 dating is unreliable for telling the age of dinosaurs, but paleontologists do not use carbon-14 to estimate the age of non-avian dinosaurs. Radiocarbon dating only works for carbon-bearing materials up to about 60,000 years old. Instead, paleontologists use different radiometric dating techniques to constrain the history of non-avian dinosaurs. In uranium-lead dating, for example, geologists investigate the relative abundance of uranium and lead, the element uranium decays into, to determine the age of the rock the materials were sampled from.

The Dino Aliens discovered the LEGO Planet in 2010 and assessed it to be a relatively primitive world due to the Dino Attack. They decided it would be an easy conquest, and further identified the major species as the Mutant Dino, ignoring the Minifigs as a lesser race. This may have been due to bias as the Dino Aliens are partly reptilian themselves, but also because most of Minifig civilization was annihilated due to the Dino Attack. The Dino Attack Team hadn't been fully formed at this time, and most major cities were in ruins.

So, the Dino Aliens captured several specimens of Mutant Dinos and brought them back to their homeworld for analysis. They considered various methods of invasion, from a virus to a good-old "send in the shock troops", but settled on using artificial versions of the Mutant Dinos. These Robotic Mutant Dinos would blend in with the native populations, and when the time was right, they would strike, clearing the way for an occupation force.

While the Dino Aliens began preparing for the invasion, another scout ship was sent back to the LEGO Planet with several Robotic Mutant Dinos onboard- two Robotic Mutant Raptors and four Robotic Mutant Lizards. Their goal was to make sure all facts about the planet were known and to test whether or not the robotic copies would pass as Mutant Dinos.

The scouts landed in Space City in a cloaked ship and began gathering information. Tests confirmed that the robots would pass unnoticed. But the scouts discovered that the Minifigs were more important than they thought. This was the time where the Dino Attack Team was becoming a major force on the planet. So the scouts sent a signal back that the invasion plans would need to be changed, and began working on a different solution.

However, things ended there. Elite Agent Reptile, disgraced after hunting down what appeared to be a useless device, was assigned to Space City on patrol. He immediately noticed weird power fluctuations in the area. He guessed there was some kind of invisible object in the city and used his Iron Predator to bombard it with weapons fire until it became visible. The Dino Aliens, surprised, ordered the Robotic Dinos to attack Reptile. He defeated them, and reported the matter to Alpha Team- as he recognized than alien invaders were outside of his jurisdiction.

Reptile was unsure of what their real name was and so logged them in the database as "Dino Aliens" (because they were using the Mutant Dinos in their invasion). He didn't know at the time the Dinos were robotic, but the name struck, as no one has been able to find out their true name since.

Alpha Team has not been able to gather much information from the aliens- or, if they have, they haven't released it. And No additional appearances of the Dino Aliens has been seen since Reptile defeated their scout ship. It's possible there are invisible scout ships and robotic dinos active on the LEGO Planet even now, but it is more likely they are devising a new strategy.

The Dino Aliens are minifiguroid, but have reptilian features. They are unlike some other species, which appear to be exactly the same as minifigs (called "Near-Minifigs" by skeptics). Like minifigs, they have a creation spark.

Aliens appear many times in the Dino Run game. There is an Alien Egg that only appears in level 5, an alien head as well as a UFO in Beyond Apocalypse. The aliens went to Earth in a UFO to save the dinosaurs from extinction and to bring them to their planet, Planet D. It has lower gravity and balloons floating everywhere. Strangely, there are no aliens seen on Planet D.

A flying saucer lands in Dino's garden where he grows all his fruit, and unleashes a horde of aliens. They knock down the trees, trample the grass, shoot their pistols and laugh meanly. Even more, they set up lasers and plant explosives to blow everything up and build their own city on the ruins. Dino has been lenient, but this is the last straw - the garden needs some sweeping.

Dino and Aliens is a 3D puzzle game with maze-like levels. The player controls Dino through short levels where the goal is to find and activate a portal to continue to a next section. Dino can push items, kick enemies, and use regular or radio-controlled bombs to clear the way or defeat multiple enemies at once. Other items include a battery to charge a laser, often used in mirror reflection puzzles, a magic hat to become invisible, and a watch to slow down time. Health can be restored with apples and pineapples.

Support the Dinosaur Toy Forum by making dino-purchases through these links to Ebay and Amazon. Disclaimer: these links are affiliate links, so when you make purchases through them we may make a commission.

The Dino from Dino vs Aliens is a Dinosaur that lives in his peaceful island. The dino uses weapons to defeat the aliens based on his aliens and tries to destroy the island. One of his magic powers are used to re-claim the care-free world in the invasion game.

A paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society examines the prospect of alien dinosaur life -- a concept that will be explored less scientifically in Liquid Comics' interactive digital app, eBook and graphic novel "Dinosaurs Vs. Aliens," due out this summer. (Liquid Comics)

In new research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the rather outlandish prospect of alien -- not terrestrial -- dinosaur life is explored by Ronald Breslow. And these dino-aliens ("Dinolians"?) didn't have the misfortune of being smacked by an asteroid and/or get snuffed out by a volcanic eruption.

But before we get too carried away with thoughts of pirate Velociraptors flying space shuttles, attacking interplanetary supply ships (too late!), there is actually some scientific reasoning behind this work -- even though the "alien dinosaur" conclusion is a bit "iffy."

All sugars, amino acids, DNA and RNA exist in one of two possible orientations, left-handed or right-handed. This handedness is known as "chirality." The theory is that for life to be possible, proteins must contain only one chiral form of amino acids, left or right, for example. Apart from a few bacteria, the chirality of amino acids of all life on Earth is left-handed.

One theory of how life was spawned on Earth is through a mechanism known as "panspermia" -- basically, life has the ability to "hop" from one planet to the next encased in the protective shell of meteoroids. If life on Earth was indeed started via a cosmic "seed," then perhaps life evolved elsewhere in a similar manner as it did on our planet. Perhaps life even evolved with a different chirality than Earth.

"Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth," Breslow speculates. "We would be better off not meeting them."

"Our planet's fossil record has intricately detailed the fact that evolution is not a linear march of progress from one predestined waypoint to another," says Switek. "Dinosaurs were never destined to be. The history of life on earth has been greatly influenced by chance and contingency, and dinosaurs are a perfect example of this fact."

In other words, there's no reason to think dinosaurs are an inevitable consequence of the evolution of life. It just so happened that life on Earth produced dinosaurs, but they aren't the only examples of life and life doesn't have to go through a "dinosaur phase" before it can move onto the next evolutionary step.

So, although there may well be alien equivalents of T. rex's elsewhere in the galaxy struggling to steer spaceships with their tiny arms (an evolutionary attribute that may have snuffed-out that particular dinosaur species anyway), this is just as fanciful as any other science fiction alien.

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Triceratons are an alien species. These aliens resemble anthropomorphic Triceratops that have hi-tech weaponry with them who have a rivalry with The Kraang. Triceratons debuts in Dinosaur Seen in Sewers!.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish.ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: And I'm Robert Siegel with a 78 million-year-old mystery that appears to have been solved. Fragments of fossilized bone discovered back in the 1950s in Southern Alberta, Canada, have been pieced together to form part of a skull - the skull of a new genus and species of dinosaur. It has been named Xenoceratops foremostensis, which means alien horned face from Foremost, Alberta. And we're joined now by one of the paleontologists who identified it and named it. Dr. Michael Ryan, welcome and congratulations.DR. MICHAEL RYAN: Thanks very much.SIEGEL: So tell us what this dinosaur would have looked like and what makes it different enough to be classified as a new one.RYAN: Well, your listeners are probably familiar with the large-horned dinosaur triceratops. It showed up in all the old movies, and it's just about in every museum around the world. So it's a large, four-footed, four-legged herbivorous dinosaur, body about the size of an oversized rhinoceros. On its face, it's got, typically, a horn over the nose and then two large horns coming off either brow over the eye. And uniquely coming off the back of the skull, there's a large shield or frill, as we call it. And depending on which type of horned dinosaur you're talking about, it's got ornamentation sticking off spikes or hooks off the back of that frill. So on Xenoceratops, it would look something like that. It's got two big spikes at either corner of that frill. It's got a beak at the front of its mouth and, surprisingly, was actually herbivorous dinosaur, ate plants.SIEGEL: So what's so different between it and the triceratops? Is it just the diceratops?(LAUGHTER)RYAN: Well, there actually is another animal called diceratops that some of my colleagues would argue about whether it exists or not. So horned dinosaurs, I tell my students, come in two flavors. There's two subfamilies. There's the Chasmosaurinae, which includes things like triceratops. And then there's the other group, which includes our new Xenoceratops, which is called the Centrosaurinae. And our Xenoceratops is actually at the very bottom of the branch where those two branches would come off.And like triceratops, our Xenoceratops has large brow horns, which it's not supposed to have, at least it's not supposed to have if it belonged to that group. And it's got these large spikes. So the combination of those unique features, certainly the back of the frill tells us that it's not triceratops definitely, and it's like nothing else we've seen before.SIEGEL: Now, all that you have to go on in making this determination is bones, I assume.RYAN: That's correct. Unfortunately, all the soft tissue is long gone.SIEGEL: And how much of the skull do you actually have? What percent, let's say, of the skull do you actually have in hand and built?RYAN: I always hate it when people ask me what the percent is because it's always a very small number. But it's - I would probably say in terms of the actual three original specimens that we based our description on, we've got about 40 percent of the skull. We also found an additional skull of the same type, same genes and species about a year later in our digs out there, but it was totally broken apart, totally weathered. And it would take forever to reassemble it, but that's probably about 100 percent complete, although it's just a bag of kibble bits.SIEGEL: Well, as you've said, the fossils that you've been working with were dug up a while ago, more than half a century ago in Southern Alberta.RYAN: That's right.SIEGEL: Is it normal that there are just piles of dinosaur remains around that are waiting to be pieced together artfully?RYAN: You mean in collections and museums?SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.RYAN: Yes, indeed. If you have a museum that's old enough, something like the American Museum of Natural History in New York or the Canadian Museum of Nature here in Ottawa, Canada, where Xenoceratops was discovered, those museums have long histories both of collection and just being open to the public. So the museum in Ottawa has almost 100-year history of collecting dinosaurs. And unfortunately, we don't have enough scientists or technicians to actually prepare all the specimens that come back out of the field.When we find something in the field, we wrap it up in a large plaster-burlap jacket so the fossils won't fall apart. And those field jackets, as we call them, will sit on the shelves sometimes for dozens of years. As it turns out, part of the field jackets - some of the field jackets with this specimen set there from 1958 when Juan Langston(ph) originally collected them till we opened them up a couple of years ago.SIEGEL: Which do you think is closer to the truth, that we've found remains of most of the dinosaurs that were around in what is now North America and now and again we'll find another one, or there were zillions of different species of dinosaur and we just happen to be lucky enough to have found the bones of a small number of them?RYAN: I'll crib a statement from Carl Sagan and say that there were billions and billions of them out there and we've only found a small, tiny fraction of them. When we find dinosaur fossils, we're typically finding them in what we call terrestrial sediments. They're sands and muds that are laid down by ancient river systems. And the bodies...SIEGEL: We're finding the unluckiest dinosaurs there were.RYAN: Well, the ones that died - well, actually, they're lucky for us because they died and became fossils. But they were ones that were living around bodies of water or river systems. So the dinosaurs that were living in upland mountain environments or deep forest don't have that opportunity to become fossils, at least very rarely become fossils. So there's a whole large percentage of the Earth that just didn't have the opportunity to preserve dinosaurs when they were alive. So we're going to be missing all those different animals that were living in all those different environments.SIEGEL: And to - I'm trying to recall some of that enormous amount of high school biology I took - because Xenoceratops foremostensis is a new genus and species, it could only have bred with other whatever the plural of that creature is?(LAUGHTER)RYAN: In theory that's right. In fact, that's one of the reasons we think that these horned dinosaurs had those unique ornamentations off the back of their frills. Xenoceratops has these two short spikes at the - either corner. Things like styracosaurus has spikes all the way around the margin. And we think those were probably signaling devices so that females could recognize males. And very much like some modern birds, like the bird-of-paradise with those giant tail feathers, females would preferentially prefer and mate with the dinosaurs that have the most robust horns on their frills.SIEGEL: Are you one of those, by the way, who regards dinosaurs as not extinct? They're the little things flying around in the sky all over the Earth now?RYAN: Yes, indeed. Every living bird is a dinosaur. Although not all dinosaurs that were alive were birds. It's pretty unequivocal. We have Thanksgiving coming up in a few days time...SIEGEL: We all have a big dinosaur to eat you're saying.RYAN: ...you'll all have a big dinosaur to eat. In fact, if you actually take - if you're lucky enough to have a nice, big turkey and you totally consume it, as most families would do, so you've got a table full of bones, if you pick up one of the leg bones or one of the ribs or one of the vertebra and you hold it in your hand, it's about the same size and shape as something like velociraptor, those little carnivorous dinosaurs you see in the movies all the time. And I would bet that if you took your upper leg bone, the femur from a turkey and held it beside a velociraptor femur that's been fossilized for 70-plus million years, you'd have a hard time telling which one is which if you didn't know which one was fossil.SIEGEL: It's both fascinating and appetizing at the same time.RYAN: Hmm, yummy.SIEGEL: Well, Dr. Ryan, congratulations on this, and thanks for talking with us about it.RYAN: Oh, thanks very much for having me in. I appreciate it.SIEGEL: Dr. Michael Ryan is curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and he is a discoverer of the new dinosaur Xenoceratops foremostensis.

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