My First Knitted Dinosaur

In my office this morning I have a new friend– the first knitted dinosaur I made from Jean Greenhowe’s dinosaur knitting patterns. I mostly knitted this dinosaur on Thanksgiving Day, and I just fnished him up last night. I’m quite proud– I’m really a novice knitter, but I think the dinosaur turned out quite well despite a few mistakes here and there. I’m not exactly sure of the dinosaur species. The knitting book calls this dinosaur pattern “The Pink Spotted Dinosaur,” so I suppose my creation could be called the “Purple and Yellow Spotted Dinosaur.” I’m not quite finished yet– I still want to knit this little guy a miniature Christmas scarf. After I finish decking out Purple and Yellow Spotted Dinosaur for the holidays, I’ll move on to the T-Rex or the flying dinosaur. However, I might not have much time for knitting until Christmas… much work to do!

Here’s a few more pictures:

Trekking back the other way across the comforter.

Knitted Dinosaurs

Image taken from Jean Greenhowe Designs: http://www.jeangreenhowe.com/toy.html

For the past few years, I’ve been teaching myself how to knit. I don’t have too much time for knitting in the midst of travel and writing and working on my PhD, but I usually have a knitting project or two that I work on while watching a movie on the weekend. I’m not a very advanced knitter– I pretty much just knit scarves and hats. A few months ago I tried to knit slippers for my husband, but I ended up with three different size slippers. Oops. Recently, though, a friend of mine introduced me to the knitting patterns from Jean Greenhowe Designs. These designs are fantastic– all you have to know how to do is knit, purl, increase, and decrease. There are no complicated stitches or instructions, and there are hundreds of adorable little creatures and other knick-knacks. Since most of the items in the patterns are small, they knit up fairly quickly… unlike that sweater I started once and probably won’t ever finish. Some of the designs are a too cutesy for my taste– for example, the scarecrows and clowns. In fact, I’m sure that I won’t ever knit one of the clowns because clowns used to terrify me as a child. However, I do like many of the patterns, including some of the delightful Christmas ornaments and other decorations. For my first Jean Greenhowe project, I recently made two of the mini Christmas stockings (free pattern available here), and they’ve come out very well. I plan to use the mini stockings to decorate the first Christmas/Newtonmas/Saturnalia tree that my husband and I will have together.

Now that I’ve mastered the simple mini stocking, I plan to move onto more advanced Christmas decorations. Originally, I was going to move on to a Snowman or perhaps a Santa Claus. But then I discovered that Jean Greenhowe has DINOSAUR knitting patterns in her book “Toy Collection.” So, now I plan on knitting mini dinosaurs with Christmas scarves. I just ordered the pattern book, and I can’t wait for it to arrive. I think these knitted dinosaurs will make excellent Christmas decorations and also excellent Christmas gifts for my geologist friends.

I’ll post pictures of my own dinosaurs once I knit them, but for now here are some pictures taken from Jean Greenhowe’s website. I plan to try to knit all of these dinosaurs, scientifically inaccurate Cavemen friends and all! Meanwhile, can any paleontologists (maybe Brian Switek?) help me identify these knitted dinosaurs species? I think there’s a T-Rex and a Pterosaur, but that’s about all I can say.

Sorry, Folks, but Callan was Attacked by a T-Rex

This morning I had the pleasure of meeting up with Callan Bentley of Mountain Beltway. After several months of interacting on the internet, it was great to meet up in real life! I hope to meet some more of my fellow geobloggers over the next year or so.

Unfortunately, shortly after we met up, Callan was attacked by a T-Rex in the University of Wyoming Geology Museum:

A T-Rex attacks Callan.

Fortunately, Callan managed to escape, and we were able to tour the rest of the museum and have a sandwich afterward. Safe travels to Montana, Callan!

Geology Word of the Week: J is for Jurassic

An artist’s vision of Sauropods and Iguanodons during the late Jurassic. Image taken from Wikipedia Commons here.

def. Jurassic:
1. A geologic period spanning from approximately 200 to 145 million years ago.
2. A cool adjective to use in everyday life to describe something or someone ancient and/or gargantuan. For example, “My Jurassic professor doesn’t even know how to use a computer. He does all of his lectures in chalk on the blackboard!” and, “Wow, this is a Jurassic portion of french fries! Please help me eat these.”
3. A time period when the following dinosaurs were NOT alive: T-Rex,Velociraptors, and Triceratops, the dinosaur stars of the movie “Jurassic Park.” Dinosaurs that WERE alive during the Jurassic period include Sauropods such as Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus, Theropods such as Allosaurus and Megalosaurus, and –one of my favorite dinosaurs–Iguanodons.


Jurassic Park movie poster. Image taken from Wikipedia.

The movie “Jurassic Park” came out when I was nine years old. For many years, I would visit my grandmother in South Carolina for two weeks during the summer. My grandmother would spoil me during those two weeks. She would take me horseback riding, buy me toys and junk food, and take me to swim in her neighbor’s pool. She would also sometimes take me to see movies that my parents thought were “too scary” for me. The summer I was nine, my grandmother took me to see “Jurassic Park.” I was so scared that I had trouble sleeping for several nights. In the night I would hear scratching noises (probably my grandmother’s dogs), and I would imagine there were Velociraptors circling my bedroom window. The Velociraptor kitchen scene still spooks me as an adult.

You can watch a video clip of the Velociraptor kitchen scene here.

As a kid the movie “Jurassic Park” scared me to death, but I absolutely loved that movie. I asked for “Jurassic Park” plastic dinosaurs for Christmas, and I used my allowance to buy “Jurassic Park” trading cards. I collected the full set of cards, which are somewhere in my parents’ attic and probably worth a small fortune on ebay. Or maybe not. I imagine dinosaur cards don’t hold quite the same value as baseball cards.

As a young girl interested in science, I was particularly drawn to the female characters in “Jurassic Park”: Dr. Ellie Sattler and young computer whiz Lex. These two females are smart, athletic, and able to keep up with the boys– and more– in the movie. And, of course, they are very pretty in a windswept scientist sort of way. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when Dr. Sattler sticks her hands in a big pile of Triceratops dung. I thought to myself, as a 9 year old, that I wanted to that kind of a scientist when I grew up– the kind that sticks her hands deep in the Triceratops poop.

Although I am not a paleontologist or even a biologist, I hope that I have become the kind of female scientist who “sticks her hands in the Triceratops poop.” That is, a confident female scientist who is not afraid of a little (or a lot) of dirt.

Dr. Ellie Sattler and the sick Triceratops. Image taken from here.

You can watch the Triceratops poop clip here. The giant Triceratops poop pile is towards the end of the clip.

Alas, as I became older I realized that the movie “Jurassic Park” is riddled with scientific mistakes– and not just the whole crazy premise that dinosaurs can be made from ancient mosquitoes preserved in amber. The Michael Crichton book is somewhat more accurate but still has mistakes. I won’t go into all of the mistakes here, but you can read about the movie’s many inaccuracies here and here.

I’ll just go into a few of the “Jurassic Park” inaccuracies here. One of the inaccuracies is, sadly, that the pile of triceratops poop is far too large. Based on coprolites, dinosaur poop was likely smaller than the giant piles portrayed in the movie. So, I guess if I’m ever stuck on a crazy dinosaur theme park island and have to figure out why a dinosaur is sick, I won’t have to stick my hands in quite such a large poop pile. Also, Velociraptors were smaller than portrayed in the movie and were feathered. T-Rex probably could see you, even if you stayed perfectly still. Dilophosaurus (the poisonous spitting dinosaur) was larger and probably did not have a cool frill. There is also no evidence that Dilophosaurus had any sort of poison spit.

The less-scary but more realistic feathered Velociraptor. Image taken from Wikipedia Commons here.

Despite now knowing the inaccuracies of the frill and the poison spit, I still really like the Dilophosaurus toy I had as a child. I used to make him (her?) spit at my younger sister when she tried to enter my room or when she was annoying me. Sorry about that, sis. By the way, this toy makes a delightfully horrible screeching sound when you move the Dilophosaurus’s front arm.

Dilophosaurus toy, like the one I had as a kid. Image taken from here.

Dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park. Image taken from here.

The biggest mistake in the movie and book? The name of the park. Many of the dinosaurs portrayed in the movie were not alive during the Jurassic period at all. T-Rex, Velociraptors and Triceratops, for instance, all lived during the later Cretaceous period. So, the park should probably have been named “Cretaceous Park” not “Jurassic Park.”