Zapping zombies: how the US military uses the entertainment industries as a recruitment tool

We hear a lot about gamification these days. As video games edge closer to simulating the real world, while Hollywood blockbusters seem to more and more resemble video games, it's little wonder that businesses are using the gaming concept as a learning tool. If anyone has noticed an eerie similarity between the plethora of military sci-fi movies, combat video games and the technology used by United States' armed forces, then you might be interested to learn that this is no coincidence.

Developed at MIT in 1962, Spacewar! is frequently cited as the earliest combat video game. Of course, it was developed for mainframe computers and so it took a long time before high enough quality visuals - with sound effects - could be installed in gaming arcades, followed in the early 1980s by games written for the first generation of ready-assembled home microcomputers.

Hollywood capitalised on the rapidly burgeoning video game market - both at home and in arcades - via movies such as 1984's The Last Starfighter, in which an expert arcade player finds himself recruited into an alien war. In other words, the game he excels at is really a simulator designed to discover and hone players who can then use their gaming skills in genuine space combat.

So how does this fiction compare to the real world? Specialist aviation publications have been full of articles with titles such as 'Do Gamers Make Better Drone Operators Than Pilots?' - the answer being that in addition to the obvious skills such as good hand-eye coordination, gamers are used to not being at personal risk from playing video games (except possibly RSI) and so remain calm under pressure. The conclusion is that they may give them an edge for controlling drones, although not it has to be said, larger, manually piloted aircraft.

The big question is how deep is the military involvement in the development, promotion and assessment of video games that contain combat skills? The relationship certainly appears to go back many decades, considering that the MIT graduate students who developed Space War! were funded by the Pentagon. With the development of much more lifelike virtual worlds, the US military has taken a front seat in both producing games that hone useful skills and creating realistic simulators for training its warfighters. 

There is complex feedback loop between these two spheres and in 1999 the Department of Defense set up the Institute for Creative Technologies to work across them. Games such as Full Spectrum Warrior (2003) and its non-commercial officer training stablemate Full Spectrum Command attempted to portray realistic combat scenarios, facing enemies who frequently resemble their real-life counterparts. 

America's Army (2002) was the first of a series of (initially free) video games that began as propaganda and recruitment tools and then became a widespread commercial franchise. Marines and Special Forces soldiers were amongst those combat veterans involved in the development of these games. In addition, the developers were allowed to scan weapons (in order to build realistic digital simulations) and even shoot them on a firing range so as to experience the physical attributes at first hand. Needless to say, the potential for glorification of violence led to opposition from various quarters.

It isn't just the software that has crossed over between the military and civilian life: weaponry and control systems also feedback between the real world and combat simulations, easing the move from game playing to the genuine article. Of course, skills such as leadership and team cooperation are also being honed by these games. The idea is that they reduce the cost of recruitment and training, leading to the realisation that the free version of America's Army, having had 1.5 million downloads in its first month (and a whopping 40 million downloads over the following six years), proved how effective they could be. 

Going in the other direction, US armed forces personnel have taken part in campaigns such as Operation Phantom Fury, which let's face it, has more than a touch of the Xbox or PlayStation about it. I assume this is also part of the process to ensure a smooth transition between young combat game players and activities in the real-world military. The channel is unlikely to diminish any time soon, seeing as China is now following America's lead; their Glorious Mission online video game, aimed at potential recruits as well as enlisted service personnel, already has over 300 million players.

The US military gaming sector has also started to diversify. To minimise complaints - already prevalent in the gaming sector, due to the implacable enemy often being a group of Muslim fundamentalists - there needed to be a new target that wouldn't raise the ire of any particular nation or ethnic group. To this end, the Call of Duty series of games has introduced reanimated dead soldiers, AKA zombies, as opponents. Bearing in mind that in the past ten years there have been over fifty video games featuring zombie antagonists, its clear that this theme is just as popular as invading aliens and terrorist zealots. Perhaps it's not surprising that doomsday preppers and survivalist groups are often said to be getting ready for the zombie apocalypse!

Recently released - although heavily-redacted - files suggest that as well as developing and promoting video games centred on combat simulation, the Department of Defense has also secretly collected players' data in order to understand their demographics. This is presumably in order to tailor recruitment and training programmes for recruits with a gaming background. The same information also hints that Hollywood too is being used by the military-industrial complex to promote its own agenda. It sounds a bit far-fetched, but the facts speak for themselves. 

The US military have long taken an interest in how Hollywood portrays them. Ronald Reagan's Whitehouse had screenings of Red Dawn (1984) and WarGames (1983) with the former gaining the Pentagon's approval while the latter was not well received (hardly surprising, if you know the plot). Gung-ho space marine movies started back in the mid-1980s with likes of Predator and Aliens, but really took off in mid-1990s with blockbusters such as Independence Day, Stargate and Starship Troopers. 

Hollywood hasn't looked back since, and as well as the US military fighting off hordes of alien invaders, there are plenty of zombie movies - over 170 worldwide over the past decade - along with numerous zombie-themed tv series. Of course, this genre usually features civilians fighting against the living dead, but nonetheless the firearm-laden format resembles its military counterparts. Critics have been keen to note that just as the alien invasion films of 1950s and 1960s were thinly-disguised Cold War allegories, so zombie movies contain subtext of the unpredictable nature of global terrorism - and imply readiness to engage the perceived enemy is a patriotic duty.

So what is the underlying connection between these genres and the Pentagon? Even a minimum of research will reveal that a fair number of the Department of Defense's advanced weaponry projects, from the F22 Raptor tactical fighter to the Global Hawk surveillance UAV (that's an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to you and me) have been truncated, in both these cases with only about half the number of units being built compared to the original proposals. The funding for those cancelled vehicles is being redirected elsewhere and Hollywood is the most likely recipient, the money being used for both movies and tv shows that follow the DoD agenda.

And how does the Pentagon know it's getting value for money? As more people book cinema tickets online and via their smartphones, the DoD is able to build frighteningly detailed profiles of those adolescents with the aptitude and skills they are looking for. Thanks to tv subscription services, it is also much easier to see exactly who is watching how much of what.

By immersing America's youth in popular entertainment across a variety of channels that both gives a homely familiarity to the military and allows niche targeting for potential recruits, the Pentagon is saving money on blanket advertising while promoting its own values as a mainstream cultural element. Thanks to a business culture that embeds military-derived phrases ('locked and loaded', 'SWAT team', 'strategic planning', etc) the distance between the armed forces and civilian life has been much reduced since the anti-war ethos of the 1970s. So if you're a teenager who plays certain types of video games and/or watches these sorts of movies and tv shows, don't be surprised if you start receiving recruitment adverts tailored closely to your personality profile. To paraphrase the Village People: they want you as a new recruit!

Where's my Thunderbird? Or how Gerry Anderson helped fool the Soviet Union

The death of Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson on Boxing Day last year marked the end of an era, at least as far as I'm concerned. Still my all-time favourite children's television programme, Thunderbirds marked the apogee of Anderson's career, a livelihood spent converting technological prognostication into high drama. Following the recent announcement that a new version of the series will be produced here in New Zealand it seemed a good time to examine a bizarre aspect of the show - along with some of its sister series - that only recently came to light. A combination of freshly declassified documents by the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence (M.O.D.) and the publication of highlights from a bundle of letters by Anderson's once-business partner Reg Hill have caused something of a minor sensation amongst the techno-SF cognoscenti.

A cursory look at even a small number of the craft that appear in the various TV shows reveals something extremely curious: most of the designs look far more Warsaw Pact than NATO. To elaborate, let's start with a survey of a few of the vehicles that helped to inspire such enormous affection in Anderson's television shows. For example:

1. If you examine Thunderbird 3 or the Sun Probe from the same series there is an eerie similarity to various Soviet space rockets of the late 1960s, including the Soyuz and Proton series. Whilst there were some details of these vehicles available in the West at the time, the USSR's ill-fated N1 manned moon rocket remained a secret until spy reconnaissance in 1968. Yet several of Anderson's rockets of the period have rather more than a passing resemblance to the giant failure.
   
   
2. The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-105 Spiral space plane, which only went as far as atmospheric flight tests, bears a remarkable likeness to the Dove shuttle seen in the Anderson scripted and produced 1969 film Journey to the far side of the Sun. Yet again, the project was unknown in the West (at least outside of security bureaus) until after its cancellation in 1978.
   
3. The Spectrum Cloudbase in the series Captain Scarlet is echoed by the experimental aerial missile platform the Yakovlev VVP-6, although it seems doubtful if the latter ever got off the drawing board.
   
4. There are various jetcopters and helijets making guest appearances in Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, with several similar in design to the Bartini Beriev VVA-14 which first flew in 1972.
   

One resemblance could be put down to chance, but this random selection shows just how uncanny Anderson's teams' designs were in matching real-life Eastern Bloc ventures. The question is how could the Soviet projects have served as the blueprint when no-one in the West knew about them? Remember: these television series were made during the 1960s, when Cold War paranoia severely restricted knowledge in both directions, especially of advanced hardware (always excepting the material that made it to the opposing side via diplomatic baggage). In addition, the Anderson shows often preceded the equivalent Russian design by several years.

Bearing this in mind, the only explanation I can find is what if the reverse was true? Could the Soviet Union have based the development of some of their aircraft, rockets and spacecraft on the fictional designs seen in Gerry Anderson programmes? As absurd as this sounds, the idea begins to make sense when considering some of the more unusual excerpts from Reg Hill's letters.

Hill, who served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, was both a producer and designer on most of Anderson's classic output. His years in the RAF gave Hill a certain amount of first-hand knowledge in aircraft construction and piloting, which proved extremely handy when it came to creating vehicles for the shows (along with the better known crew members Derek Meddings, Brian Johnson and Mike Trim).  Reg Hill's letters cover the period 1959 to 1976 and would seemingly be of little interest to all except the most diehard Fanderson. However, a small number refer to Hill's meetings with mysterious representatives of the British security services, to whom Hill gave the James Bond (or if you prefer, Men in Black) appellations of Messrs A through H. Although the writing is guarded, Reg Hill gives the impression that as of 1964 he was asked to supply these enigmatic men with - of all things - detailed blueprints for some of the production company's fictional craft. As to what purpose Hill thought these requests were intended, he makes no mention. No doubt as an ex-serviceman he understood the need for national security and thus placed patriotism ahead of curiosity.

As someone who's not a fan of conspiracy theories I had difficulty understanding what the references pertained to. After all, the letters could be forgeries or the results of a strange sense of humour. But then a series of M.O.D. documents dating from the same period were made available to journalists in late 2012 under the UK's Freedom of Information Act, subject to all the usual blanked-out details that encumber such material. Luckily, the missing content mostly related to names, places and times, leaving the gist of the events intact. The upshot of reading the documents is that they confirm the narrative supplied in Hill's letters: the British Government paid (token amounts, it has to be said) for copies of blueprints to vehicles that were designed to appear in children's television series. As this point I said to myself, move over X-Files!

When I found out that Reg Hill and Gerry Anderson had formed a short-lived production company in the late 1950s called Pentagon Films I wondered if the outfit's name had given the British Secret Intelligence Service the idea of deliberately leaking aero- and astronautical disinformation to the Eastern Bloc. Or alternatively, MI5/MI6 may have been aware of similarities between the ramp-launching technique of Fireball XL5 (from the 1962 series of the same name) and a never-implemented Soviet scheme for deploying ICBMs. If accepted as genuine, Hill's drawings could have served several purposes, from tying up Soviet design bureaus in analysis of fictional machines to the wasting of countless rubles in technological dead-ends.

It might seem ridiculous that the deception would work, not just once but repeatedly, only it should be remembered that senior scientists and engineers in the Soviet Union frequently attained their status from acute political rather than scientific skills. The best known example of this is Trofim Lysenko, the untrained researcher and Stalinist crony whose pseudo-scientific theories were used in crop production for decades instead of Mendelian genetics. In the field of astronautics, when the rocket and spacecraft 'Chief Designer' Sergei Korolev suddenly died in 1966 the Soviet manned lunar landing programme stalled and never recovered. Ironically, the USSR was its own worst enemy in this field, since many other capable rocket scientists had been killed in Stalinist purges.

In addition, projects were frequently rushed for political purposes: Sputnik 2, which carried the dog Laika on a pioneering if one-way trip into orbit, was designed in less than a month! It is well known that the latest Western technology often found a surreptitious route to Moscow, with Warsaw Pact design bureaus deconstructing the material in order to produce their own versions at rapid speed. A good instance of this was the Tupolev Tu-144, a poor quality reworking of the Concorde supersonic airliner that beat the latter into the air by two months but was then two years behind its Anglo-French rival in entering commercial service. Indeed, there are rumours that the Concorde manufacturers deliberately leaked inaccurate schematics in order to mislead the Tupolev team!

Bearing all this in mind, is it possible the Soviets would repeatedly fall for such seemingly obvious ploys as British (and possibly American) security services' reworked plans of vehicles designed for children's TV shows? Perhaps the speed with which the Russian teams had to work prevented them from realising they had been duped. In general, their aviation technology remained markedly inferior to the West's until the 1980s, as was shown by the shocking revelation in 1976 (thanks to a defecting pilot) that their most advanced - and record-breaking - interceptor largely relied on vacuum tube avionics. By the early 1970s Hill stopped receiving visits from the shadowy intelligence figures, so perhaps the Soviets had at last caught on to the ruse - but of course failed to advertise this in order to avoid embarrassment.

As bizarre as all this sounds, other disinformation strategies employed  in the West were if anything even more elaborate, from creating fake infra-red 'shadows' for advanced spy planes to leaking wildly inaccurate yet plausible designs for stealth aircraft that even made it as far as plastic model kits. By comparison, reworking the Anderson craft and passing them off as new NATO projects seems a relatively easy - and inexpensive - method.

It's often stated that truth is stranger than fiction. So if you consider the foregoing a plausible hypothesis you might want to ponder the real meaning behind the Thunderbirds' famous call-sign F.A.B. or its Captain Scarlet equivalent S.I.G. Personally, my money's on "Fooled All Bolsheviks" and "Soviets Is Gullible".  Or is that just plain daft?

Moonage daydreams: lunacy, conspiracy and the Apollo moon landings

It's astonishing to think that in less than two weeks' time it will be half a century since Yuri Gargarin slipped the surly bonds of Earth in Vostock 1. Although a generation has grown up since the end of the Cold War, any study of early astronautics cannot exclude a major dollop of politics. This is particularly true of the Apollo moon landing programme and President Kennedy's commitment to achieve this goal by 1970. Now as much a part of history as a fading memory, a small but significant number of theorists doubt the veracity of the missions. But are they just the same crackpots/misguided types (delete as required) who claim to have been abducted by aliens, or is there anything more concrete to go on?

A wide range of conspiracy stories has been circulating since rocket engine company employee the (now late) Bill Kaysing self-published his 1974 opus We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Of course conspiracy was very much in the American psyche during that period: the Watergate affair had occurred 6 months prior to the final moon landing mission in December 1972 whilst President Nixon's resignation followed the release of the crucial audio tape evidence in August 1974. In a sense, the world was ready for Kaysing's theories, but can an impartial assessment show how accurate they are? Much of his thesis can be dismissed with a little application of the scientific method: the alleged problems on photographs and movie footage such as disappearing cross-hairs or incorrect shadows and lighting are easy to resolve. In another vein, the waving of the US flag on the lunar surface, attributed to wind in an Earth-based moon simulator, is just foolish. Why would such amateur mistakes occur if an elaborate cover-up were true?

However, new evidence recently made public from former Soviet archives hints that the conspiracy theorists may be on to something after all. Telemetry tapes from the USSR's land- and ship-based deep space network suggest that there was an additional signal hidden, via frequency division multiplexing, underneath transmissions to the Apollo craft. This implies that what actually went to the moon were pairs of empty spacecraft: a robot version of the lander (or LM); and a command module (CSM) with an automated radio system. This latter set-up would isolate the hidden transmissions received from Earthbound astronauts and beam them back to fool the world into thinking the spacecraft was manned. The crew themselves would divide their time between Apollo mock-ups built inside a weightless training aircraft or 'vomit comet' (ironically also the technique used in the 1995 film Apollo 13) and a recreation of the lunar surface in the infamous Area 51 complex in Nevada. Of course the associated activities of sending robot sample-return missions to bring back massive quantities of moon rock (the same method used by the Soviet Luna missions from 1970 onwards) would presumably have eaten so deeply into NASA's budget as to be responsible for the cancellation of the last three moon-landing missions (or fake missions, as perhaps we should refer to them).

The obvious question is why go to all this length when the programme's fantastic achievements – the rockets, spacecraft, and their entire cutting-edge infrastructure - had already been built? Again, the USSR can add something to the picture. Fully six months before the Apollo 11 flight, the Soviet Union officially announced it was pulling out of the moon race and would not even attempt a manned flight to the moon. Then the month after Apollo 11's splashdown, the Soviets launched Zond 7, an unmanned variant of their Soyuz craft (a design still in use today to ferry crew to the International Space Station), on a circumlunar trajectory. What is interesting is that the craft carried 'special radiation protection'. Had they found a fundamental obstruction to a manned lunar landing mission? Less than one month prior to Apollo 11, when you would have thought NASA would have been completely focussed on that mission (and bearing in mind the massive amount of unpaid overtime required to maintain schedules), the US launched a pigtail monkey called Bonny into orbit aboard Biosat 3. This almost unknown mission was terminated more than twenty days early, with Bonny dying 8 hours after landing. What was so urgent it needed testing at this crucial time? In a word: radiation.

The Van Allen Belt consists of two tori (basically, doughnuts) of high-energy charged particles trapped by the Earth's magnetic field. After its existence was confirmed by the USA's first satellite, Explorer 1, continuous observation proved that the radiation intensity varies over time as well as space. Unfortunately, 1969-1970 was a peak period in the cycle, in addition to which it was accidentally augmented by artificially-induced radiation. In 1962 the USA detonated a 1.4 megaton atomic weapon at an altitude of 400 kilometres. Although by no means the largest bomb used during four years of high-altitude testing, Operation Starfish Prime generated far more radiation than any similar US or USSR experiment, quickly crippling a number of satellites, including some belonging to the Soviets.

The theory holds that this additional radiation belt would have had a profound effect on manned spacecraft travelling beyond low Earth orbit. An additional whammy would be the danger of deep-space radiation once away from the protection of the geomagnetic field. The BBC's 2004 docudrama series Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets showed this quite nicely when the interplanetary Pegasus mission lost its doctor to cosmic radiation. There is also speculation that the impact of cosmic rays on the lunar surface generates a spray of secondary particles that would prove hazardous to astronauts. Although it's not clear if the Russians were sending animals into space during the late 1960s as per the Biosat series, Bill Kaysing claimed he had been given access to a Soviet study that recommended blanketing lunar surface astronauts in over a metre of lead!

The Apollo missions of course utilised what was then cutting edge technology, but even so the payload capacity of the Saturn V rocket did not allow for spacecraft with anything but the lightest of construction techniques. Indeed, the Apollo lunar module had outer coverings of Mylar-aluminium alloy – a substance that appears to be a high-tech version of baking foil. In this instance it seems rather apt, in the sense that it may well have lead to self-basting astronauts, had they actually been on board. In all seriousness, the heaviest of the fuelled-up CSM-LM configurations was around 40 tonnes (for Apollo 17), only five tonnes short of the maximum lunar transfer trajectory capacity. Since it took an 111-metre tall Saturn V to launch these craft, it is clear that lead shielding wasn't really an option.

Some conspiracy theorists have argued that Stanley Kubrick, coming directly from four years of making 2001: A Space Odyssey, was involved in the hoax filming, but this seems rather ridiculous (although another irony is that 2010: Odyssey Two director Peter Hyams had earlier made the Mars mission conspiracy film Capricorn One, the film's hardware consisting of Apollo craft...) A far more plausible candidate to my mind is Gene Roddenberry, the originator of Star Trek. The Apollo 8 circumlunar flight over Christmas 1968 (including a reading from Genesis, no less), the 'happy' (from a ratings point of view) accident of Apollo 13, even the use of America's first rocket-launched astronaut Alan Shepard as commander of Apollo 14, hint back to the homely yet patriotic heroics of Kirk and co. As for the photographic effects crew, my money would be on one 2001's effects supervisors, namely the engineering genius Douglas Trumbull. Today even amateurs like myself can attempt to replicate their brilliant work: here's my take of Armstrong and Aldrin, done many moons ago, courtesy of Messer Airfix and Photoshop (shame you can't see the cross-hairs at this size):


As for how all those involved have managed to maintain silence over the decades, Neil Armstrong's publicity shyness is about the only example I can think of that bolsters the argument. Except there is also the curious case of Britain's own "pretty far out" David Bowie, who somehow seems to have been in the know. It sounds bizarre, but if you examine his oeuvre from Space Oddity onwards ("your circuits dead, there's something wrong") to the film The Man Who Fell to Earth (complete with a cameo from Apollo 13 commander James Lovell as himself) you begin to find a subliminal thematic thread. For me, these culminate in the 1971 song Moonage Daydream, with the deeply conspiratorial lyrics "Keep your mouth shut, you're squawking like a pink monkey bird...Don't fake it baby, lay the real thing on me..."

Couldn't have put it any better myself!

Blown away: some weird and wonderful animal defence mechanisms

At a time when environmentalists are calling for farmers to swap cattle for non-ruminant species such as kangaroos in an effort to stem bovine methane emission, a recent report by a leading Argentinean palaeontologist reminds me of Karl Marx's popular axiom "History repeats itself first as tragedy, second as farce".

The report's theme concerns animal defensive mechanisms, a classic example of truth being infinitely stranger than fiction. Consider for instance the bombardier beetle, an innocuous enough looking insect that when endangered can squirt a boiling liquid from its rear abdomen. Okay, that's only mildly weird. Well what about the several species of frogs and newts that when threatened extrude internal claws or spines by puncturing their own skin? Or the Asian carpenter ants whose soldiers literally self-destruct in the defence of their colony, in the process spraying a sticky poison over their attackers? Surely if anyone needed a good argument against Creationism then this panoply of the bizarre would suit admirably, since it postulates an equally bizarre, not to say warped, sense of humour on behalf of a Creator.

But the news from Argentina may well outshine (if that is the right word) all of the above, not least from the sheer scale of the animals involved. The main players are those undisputed giants of the dinosaur world, the South American titanosauria sauropods of the mid- to late-Cretaceous. Partial remains found over the past twenty years imply species such as Argentinosaurus may have reached lengths of 40 metres, thereby exceeding their better-known Jurassic relatives such as Diplodocus by around 20 per cent.

In 2002 Fernando Calvo, Professor of Natural Sciences at La Salta University in Argentina, became intrigued by sauropod growth patterns and nutrition. Although coprolites (fossilised poo) have not been found for any species of Argentinean titanosaur, the study of microscopic phytoliths, silicified plant fragments, suggest these animals enjoyed a broad plant diet. The notion that Mesozoic vegetation consisted primarily of conifers, cycads, horsetails and ferns has been overturned by recent discoveries of palms and even tall, primitive grasses. Since modern grazers such as cattle can survive solely on such unpromising material, how about titanosaurs?

Calvo and his team began a study to go where no scientists had gone before and assess the potential digestive systems of Argentinosaurus and its relatives. One of the luxuries of an enormous bulk is being able to subsist on nutritionally-poor foodstuffs, a case of sheer quantity over quality. The La Salta group hypothesised that their native sauropods were amongst the most efficient of digesters just because of their size: by the time plant material had worked its way through such a large digestive tract most of the nutrients would be absorbed, no doubt aided by gastroliths, literally stomach stones deliberately swallowed to help churn the material.

The preliminary report was published in March last year and quickly became notorious in palaeontological circles. For there was no delicate way of describing the findings: the titanosaurs would easily top the Guinness Book of Records' list of “World's Greatest Farters”. Whilst sauropods did not have the multiple stomach arrangements of modern ruminants the hypothesis was clear: titanosaur herds would have been surrounded by an omnipresent cloud of methane.

For Calvo, the next step came several months later when a tip-off from a farmer in Chubut led to an astonishing series of finds. The site, whose exact location remains secret, revealed the semi-articulated fragments from a tight-knit group of three predatory Giganotosaurus and approximately 15 per cent of the skeleton of a single, adult Argentinosaurus. Team member Jose Chiappe led the extraction work on the latter colossus and postulated that it had died slowly, perhaps due to blood loss following an attack.

What were far more intriguing were the positions of the attackers: all three had a slumped, head-down attitude, implying sudden collapse and virtually instantaneous death. Calvo found himself asking the obvious: how could they have died? Whereas a Diplodocus tail was well-formed for use as a whip, it was a much more gracile animal than its Cretaceous counterparts. The larger bulk of Argentinosaurus didn't bode well for a fast reaction: by the time a titanosaur had noticed the approach of a Giganotosaurus it would have had precious few seconds to position its tail for a whiplash response. Then Chiappe remembered an Early Cretaceous site in Liaoning Province, China, where animals had died of suffocation due to volcanic gases.

The resemblance in the post-mortem postures of the Giganotosaurus led to an incredible but as yet unpublished hypothesis: if correctly positioned, a frightened titanosaur could have defended itself by the simple expedient of raising its tail and expelling gaseous waste directly into the conveniently-placed head of an oncoming predator. An initial calculation based on scaling up from modern animals suggested an adult titanosaur could have produced about one tonne of methane per week. Computer simulations suggest a sustained five-second burst at close range would have K-O'd an eight-ton Giganotosaurus, and with a brain barely half that of Tyrannosaurus, it's unlikely the predators had the wherewithal to avoid their fate. If only the late Michael Crichton had known this, perhaps he would have written a scene involving an ignominious demise at the rear end of a sauropod for some of the characters in Jurassic Park (Jurassic Fart, anyone?) Or since this occurred in the Cretaceous, in the name of scientific accuracy perhaps that should that be Gone with the Wind?

Technorati Tags: dinosaurs, jurassic, palaeontology