“[His] mind began to shut down in an effort to preserve his sanity” – Garm Braddock in Kronos Rising: Kraken (vol. 1)

Hawthorne’s mahoosive Kronosaurus imperator is back and this time she’s brought her buddies along for the ride. This sequel to Kronos Rising (which I reviewed here) is set decades after the events of the first book, in a world where pliosaurs now run amok. Oceanic ecosystems are in turmoil and it’s time to get military on these bastard reptiles! Beefcake brothers Garm and Dirk are at the heart of proceedings as they take steps to emerge victorious from the raging ‘Saurian War’. Little do they know the titular Kraken is waiting to arrive on the scene to cause even more havoc…

I won’t comment in detail on the story, style, tone, characters, and so on. I have opinions, of course, but who am I, as a lowly palaeontologist, to judge? All I’ll say is that it wasn’t to my taste. What I can focus on, as I did in my previous review, is the science. The aspects of the book that only a pedant like me will get his undies in a bind over. So, that’s what I’ll do – it’s panty twisting time.

One of my criticisms of the original novel was the dubious status of the species Kronosaurus imperator. This is the sort of nit-pick that only the most hard-nosed academic would rest any importance on, but I noticed the issue is still not resolved in Kronos Rising: Kraken. It means the species is technically invalid – a nomen nudum. This strikes me as somewhat appropriate given Hawthorne’s proclivity for exposing his characters’ most intimate fleshy parts.

Generally the anatomical descriptions are very good (n.b. I’m talking about the reptiles now!) and Hawthorne has done research to ensure the scientist characters use the correct language and terminology. However, he’s also not afraid to take liberties. For example, in the book, pliosaurs lay spherical eggs in nests, whereas we know sauropterygians gave birth to live young. The pliosaur’s teeth are described as sharply ridged with razor-sharp ends, whereas the course ridges on pliosaur teeth aren’t sharp, and pliosaur teeth really taper to a blunt bone-crushing apex. The fictional monsters skin consists of a “thick hide covered with rock hard scales”, yet it “absorbs 30% of the oxygen they need from the water”. In reality, there would have to be a compromise – skin has to be thin to absorb oxygen. In my Kronos Rising review I compiled a long list of the pliosaur’s superpowers. We can now also add camouflage onto said list. Don’t get me wrong, these are not complaints per se, I’m just saying. The key word to remember here – fiction. Let it go, let it go!

As with the previous novel, there’s a worrying infatuation with large size, be it the size of the creatures, the vessels, the machinery, the architecture, Dirk’s penis, Garm’s penis. “What can I say? Size matters!” chuckles one of the characters in the book. If you, too, believe size matters, then this is the book for you!

While Kronos Rising: Kraken (vol. 1) didn’t float my boat, aficionados of maritime monster fiction should probably pick up a copy and judge for themselves. Can thousands of Hawthorne’s fanatic ‘Legions of Kronos’ be wrong? Kronos Rising: Kraken (vol. 1), is available from Amazon.com here and Amazon.co.uk here. The official Kronos Rising website is located at http://www.kronosrising.com and you can also visit and like the Kronos Rising Facebook Page here, where Hawthorne makes a special effort to engage with readers, and sometimes puts forward his own interesting pet paleontological hypotheses. Lastly, thanks go to Max for the review copy – I hope you don’t regret the kind gesture!

A quick additional note. The original Kronos Rising novel now has a swanky new front cover, featuring amazing artwork. Check it out!

It is hard to believe that the last time I wrote about plesiosaur toys here was in March 2011, over six years ago (http://plesiosauria.com/news/index.php/new-plesiosaur-replicas-for-2011/). Since then, many more new plesiosaur figures have hit the shelves, well, online stores – you’ll do well to find any of these toys in actual brick and mortar stores. The least I can do at this stage is summarise some of the latest additions to my ever-growing collection of plesiosaur models over the past several years.

Safari Ltd

Safari Ltd have added two plesiosaurs to their Wild Safari line since they released their Liopleurodon in 2010: an Elasmosaurus (2013) and a Kronosaurus (2017). I was grateful for the opportunity to work closely again with the Safari Ltd sculptors as a consultant on these.

CollectA

In 2011 I praised CollectA as a “blossoming company” and the CollectA flower has continued to blossom in subsequent years. They have produced four plesiosaurs, including familiar and obscure taxa, Dolichorhynchops (2012), Pliosaurus (2015), Thalassomedon (2016), and Kronosaurus (2017). The company has a reputation for selecting species other than the usual suspects, and for that I’m glad, we have more than enough Elasmosaurus and Liopleurodon already.

Both Safari Ltd and CollectA released a large Kronosaurus in 2017. This presented picky collectors with a difficult choice since both models are very good. CollectA have also released miniature versions of the ‘Deluxe’ size Pliosaurus and their older standard size Liopleurodon as part of their growing series of tube collections.

Geoworld

2014/2015 saw the release of three plesiosaurians by Geoworld in their Sea Reptiles Collection: Kronosaurus, Liopleurodon and Elasmosaurus. They’re nothing special and pretty bad when it comes to accuracy but still irresistible to completists like me. I unboxed the entire Sea Reptiles Collection on the Dinotoyblog Youtube channel if anyone is interested.

Bullyland presented a single plesiosaurian offering in the last half decade: a Liopleurodon with an articulated jaw in 2016. Good to see the German company still in the picture, at least.

Lastly, to round up the group, De Agostini is a newcomer to the world of plesiosaur toys. The Italian company created some particularly cute plesiosaurians as part of their ‘Dinosaurs and Friends’ children’s book series. A family of Plesiosaurus (mummy, daddy and baby) and a father and son pair of Kronosaurus.

That’s not an exhaustive list but it is more than enough to keep collectors on their toes!

In 2012 I co-presented a poster at the SVP annual meeting on a new plesiosaur from Lyme Regis, UK (see my article about it here). The long awaited follow up paper was finally published this summer in the latest volume of Palaeontographica A (Smith and Araújo, 2017) and the beast now has a name, Thaumatodracon wiedenrothi, meaning ‘Wiedenroth’s Wonder Dragon’.

The Lower Saxony State Museum commissioned artist Luzia Soares to create a stylistic impression of Thaumatodracon. Copyright L. Soares 2017

Thaumatodracon was a top-predator that cruised around the shallow Tethys Ocean that covered Europe about 195 million years ago. It had a 60 cm long skull with dozens of sharp teeth, an estimated total body length of 6.5 m, and may have weighed around 2 tonnes. The specimen was collected from Lyme Regis in 1969 by Kurt Wiedenroth, an amateur German palaeontologist to whom we dedicated the new species name. The Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover (Lower Saxony State Museum) acquired the specimen later that year where it was subsequently prepared by Elijah Widmann during the 1990s.

Kurt Wiedenroth hunting for ammonites in Lower Cretaceous deposits near Hanover, Germany. Kurt discovered Thaumatodracon wiedenrothi in Lyme Regis in 1969. Photo courtesy of Sönke Simonsen.

The nearly complete skull and neck of this plesiosaur are exquisitely preserved, and Ricardo Araújo and I visited the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover in 2011, where we identified it as a new species that fills a gap in the fossil record of rhomaleosaurids. Diagnostic ones, anyway. The holotype of ‘Plesiosaurus’ macrocephalus, also from Lyme Regis, could well be a rhomaleosaurid, but since it is a juvenile it is difficult to diagnose. Our findings in Hanover were too late to include in my PhD thesis dedicated to rhomaleosaurids, but better late than never.

The preserved parts of the skeleton – the head and neck – are highlighted in dark grey

The holotype specimen, laid out in dorsal view.

Details and interpretation of the skull

In addition to a thorough comparative description, we conducted morphometric analyses to compare Thaumatodracon to all other rhomaleosaurid plesiosaurs. We found that the new taxon possesses transitional characteristics that are consistent with its intermediate position in the plesiosaur family tree. This is also more or less what we would predict to find because it is from the Sinemurian, which makes it stratigraphically intermediate between the older Hettangian rhomaleosaurid fauna (Atychodracon) and younger Toarcian rhomaleosaurid fauna (Rhomaleosaurus, Meyerasaurus).

The new genus is a nod to ‘Thaumatosaurus’, a powerful name that was once used interchangeably with Rhomaleosaurus. It was also widely applied to the holotype specimen of Meyerasaurus victor before I came along and made ‘Thaumatosaurus’ a nomen dubium (see my article about that here). So, I chose the name Thaumatodracon as atonement, but also because plesiosaurs were true wonders of the prehistoric world and Ricardo and I wanted to give this new species a name to reflects that.

Rhomaleosaurids have traditionally been regarded as pliosaurs. Although we called Thaumatodracon a pliosaur in our original poster presentation, the position of Rhomaleosauridae within Plesiosauria has since become disputed. Several studies now suggest that the rhomaleosaurid family diverged from other plesiosaurs before the pliosaur/plesiosauroid dichotomy, which is why we avoid calling Thaumatodracon a pliosaur in our paper.

The journal has requested that I do not share the PDF publicly, but I’m free to email it, so drop me an email if you’re interested: plesiosauria@gmail.com

Reference
Smith, A.S. and Araújo, R. 2017. Thaumatodracon wiedenrothi, a morphometrically and stratigraphically intermediate new rhomaleosaurid plesiosaurian from the Lower Jurassic (Sinemurian) of Lyme Regis. Palaeontographica Abteilung A, 308 (4-6), 89-125. doi:10.1127/pala/308/2017/89