Presenting the Wooly Pachyrhinosaurus

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Tom Hopp

Pachyrhinosaurus In WinterScientific theories change with time. New fossils are found, new ideas arise. What you’re looking at here is the latest in dinosaur fashions: fur! Now, I’m sure I’ll be in for some criticism for this image, which I created in Photoshop for the cover of my latest short story, “Saving Pachyrhinosaurus,” but I’ve been on the sidelines too long. Scientific discoveries have been building an increasingly complex view of this great horned dinosaur, but no one has gone so far as to suggest what I’m suggesting. Maybe these beasts were covered in fur like the wooly rhinoceros of the much more recent Ice Ages.

Take a good look by clicking the image to get a larger view. The snow-blanketed wool on a dinosaur is just not something you see every day — or ever, until now. Most people think of dinosaurs as having lived in a time when the world was covered all over with tropical swamps and steaming jungles. Scientists have known for quite some time that that view is not exactly correct. There was always snow somewhere on earth, either at the poles or on high mountain slopes. To be sure, the world was a warmer place in the day of the dinosaur, but not all that much warmer than now. Furthermore, fossils of this very dinosaur, pachyrhinosaurus, have recently been uncovered on the North Slope of Alaska. Based on a complete lack of co-fossilized turtles and crocodiles the discoverers concluded that the pachyrhinosaurs they are unearthing lived in an environment that froze quite solid in wintertime. Crocs and turtles can’t survive in such places.

So I got to thinking, if scaly cold blooded reptiles couldn’t hack the North Slope in the waning days of the Cretaceous Era, then why would your typical scaly ceratopsian dino do any better? Cold is cold and I for one wouldn’t want to hang out on the North Slope for any length of time without a coat of some kind to wear. So how about fur?

Supporting this notion is the recent discovery in China of an ancestor of pachyrhinosaurus, tianyulong, that was preserved in fine enough detail to show it had fur-like fine strands of something on much of its body. Having this new information in hand, it’s not too great a stretch to figure out that a polar species of dinosaur might adapt to the chill by growing thick fur all over its body. That’s exactly analogous to what the cave paintings of our ancestors tell us about the wooly rhinoceros.

Think about it. If you look at African rhinos, you could make an assertion that all rhinoceroses are naked-skinned — and you’d be wrong. When one species migrated up far to the north, the little tufts of fur that can be found here and there on African rhinos transformed into a think blanket of wool. Just right for warming those long winter nights.

Close up and woolySo, I just applied the same logic to pachyrhinosaurus, and voila! the wooly beast you see at right. No one has dug up a wool-covered pachyrhinosaurus fossil yet, but the logic is compelling. Just as an African rhinoceros would shiver to death in an Arctic snowstorm, so too would the pachyrhinosaurs, unless they had insulating jackets of fur to keep them warm.

By the way, I’ve posted a full-sized image of Pachyrhinosaurus In Winter on my artwork distribution website. For very little cash, you can have an even more detailed art print of this image sent to you straight from the source, which you can frame and hang on your wall, or use to amaze your friends — or both!

Note added June 12, 2015: The short story version of “Saving Pachyrhinosaurus” has been incorporated into the new full length book, Dinosaur Tales.

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Saving Pachyrhinosaurus Published!

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Tom Hopp

A wooly what?Observing wildlife in Yellowstone Park can be dangerous, especially when the animals you’re observing are dinosaurs brought back to earth after 65 million years! When Kit Daniels and her mentor Dr. David Ogilvey set out to study a herd of pachyrhinosaurs living on the snowy landscape of Yellowstone in winter, trouble stalks their path. The elephant sized horned dinosaurs may be plant eaters, but they are as temperamental as bull elephants. Kit and Dr. O soon find themselves in a life-threatening predicament with danger on all sides. This time, even Kit’s bravery and wits may not be enough to save them.

That’s the basic plot behind my new short story, “Saving Pachyrhinosaurus” just released last week in the usual assortment of ebook formats. I’m particularly fond of this one because not only does it offer an action packed adventure for its human heroes, but it brings into perspective an incredible creature from the earth’s distant past.

You see, the scientific view of dinosaurs has been evolving with each new fossil discovery and in the case of “pachy,” as Kit and Dr. O call this creature, our scientific understanding seems to evolve on an almost daily basis. Click the image to take a good look at the book cover. Notice anything unexpected about that dinosaur? Yep, that’s right, it’s covered in wooly fur.

Now, scientific opinions may vary quite a bit from mine but I couldn’t help myself. I had to present the animal in something other than the usual boring reptilian scaly covering that so often clothes dinosaurs in what is becoming a cliche of skin coverings. Scales on dinosaurs, in my opinion, are going the way of the dinosaur.

I’m sure that many dinosaurologists would beg to differ with me, but one of my major purposes in writing my “Dinosaur Tales,” of which this is one, is to present very advanced views of these amazing creatures based on the most recent fossil evidence. In this case I told a story and made a painting that present pachyrhinosaurus as an animal every bit as prepared for the cold of winter as an American bison or wooly rhinoceros ever thought of being. In fact, the painting was created by taking a photo of a Yellowstone Park buffalo in winter and altering its shape and size until a stupendously huge, equally foul-tempered, dinosaurian equivalent of the buffalo was achieved. Then I plunked in a picture of the relatively diminutive heroine, Kit Daniels, in rather precarious proximity and voila! a snapshot of one of the great moments of the story.

If you’d like to find out how it all turns out for Kit, grab a copy of “Saving Pachyrhinosaurus” at your favorite ebook sellers’ store. You can find Kindle and Nook and Sony and Kobo and iTunes and Diesel versions, or go directly to my publisher Smashwords for even more choices. Happy reading. I guarantee you’ll never look upon dinosaurs as big sluggish stomping lizards again!

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The Jihad Virus Revisited

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Tom Hopp

I’ve just begun to revamp my third novel The Jihad Virus for re-issue as an ebook. As with some of my other titles, I’m going to run through the entire story and tweak up the prose to give it even more sizzle than the original version. The reviews of the original were generally raves, although lack of good distribution by my former publisher kept it off the bestseller lists. This time around, maybe things will be different.

If you’ve read one or another of my Peyton McKean mystery stories, you’ll be interested to know that The Jihad Virus is actually the original story in the series, where we first meet the super intelligent Dr. Peyton McKean and his sidekick and storyteller, Phineus “Fin” Morton. The story also introduces McKean’s faithful and hardworking laboratory technician, Janet Emerson, and his contact at the Seattle Public Health Hospital, Dr. Kay Erwin. Together they confront a plot by international terrorists to unleash a genetically altered, new and deadly form of the smallpox virus with the intention of devastating the population of the United States.

The action intensifies when Morton and McKean confront a terrorist cell spearheaded by the evil Sheik Abdul Ghazi, who uses his wealth and power to bring an apocalyptical plague to the shores of America.

The bad news for readers is, in order to re-issue the story as an ebook, I’ve had to cancel my contract with the original publisher and they have stopped printing the book. Therefor there is going to be a period of time while I rewrite, that The Jihad Virus will be unavailable. At present, there are still copies to be had in some bookstores or at the usual online booksellers. If you can’t wait to find out whether Abdul Ghazi’s schemes will come to fruition, you’d best grab one of the remaining copies, or check out the online book resellers to get a used copy.

I’ll do my best to get the revisions finished and issue the new ebook within just a few months.

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Candle smoke is bad for you

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Tom Hopp

Take a deep inhaleThere. I went right ahead and said it. Those romantic, glimmering lights in restaurants, pubs, and people’s homes are evil. And they’re proliferating like tiny little nuclear weapons intent on sending you to an early grave. Do I have your attention yet?

On this blog I don’t like to harp on negative subjects, but occasionally I get my hackles up over something that’s wrong that ought to be fixed. And the problem of candles, candles, everywhere is one of those issues. Now, those who know me may say, “Oh, you’re just griping because you’re allergic to candle smoke.” And it’s true, I begin to sniffle within seconds of entering a room with candles burning. Later, I get a headache that lasts for days and occasionally break out in a rash. So, sure, I’m allergic to ’em. But I consider myself lucky compared to all you who are not. You see, I’ve got my own internal alarm that goes off the instant I get exposed to the deadly chemicals in candle smoke. What’s your warning buzzer? Don’t have one? Well read on about what you get for not paying attention to candle smoke. Or maybe I should say, what gets you.

Oil company sludgeFirst of all, most candles today are made from the sludge at the bottom of a barrel of oil. Add a little toxic hydrogen gas to bleach it white and viola! you’ve got paraffin. Stick a wick in it and put it in one of those ridiculous little tealight tins and you’ve got a way to dispose of your unwanted chemical sludge, if you’re a major oil company. You can get gullible consumers to light them up in rooms where they live and breathe while you escape the tyranny of the EPA, which no longer allows you to dump your sludge in the local swamplands. Nice capitalist trick!

The only drawback here is that the consumer is poisoning him/herself and any kids, customers or small animals that share the same room with those candles. Scientific studies have shown that candle flames emit almost exactly the same exhaust gasses and soot as the tailpipes of diesel powered automobiles. The list of deadly components is long, including benzene, a potent inducer of leukemia and other cancers, benzopyrene, one of the strongest carcinogens known, and formaldehyde, which was banned from household insulation materials a few years ago because of the wide variety of deadly effects it had on the human body.

So, I suppose you might ask, “Are you saying, ‘Light up a candle and die’?” Short answer: Yes.

Even though there have not been a lot of scientific studies done, a few government workplace safety studies have reported that diesel exhaust in the work environment is harmful. However, the same oil industry that sells candles in every possible outlet from shopping malls to drugstores, lobbied against enforcement of the findings by OSHA, the government workplace safety watchdog. What was their rationale? They argued successfully that studies clearly showing increased diesel-caused cancer in white rats were not valid for predicting human consequences. Incredible. This is exactly the tack taken but the cigarette industry to delay the ban on smoking in the workplace that brought us fresh air in taverns and restaurants. Different industry, same trick. Same motive: profit, and who cares about people’s health. And, by the way, the air in public places is getting more toxic daily, thanks to the cheap availability of great big plastic bags of those demonic little candles.

I once was sniffling over dinner in a fine Seattle restaurant. The owner of the place came out himself to ask us how our meal tasted. Great, we all agreed, but I kept looking at his face with a question half formed. Did you get that rash all over your face from the candles you are burning on every table and in every wall niche? I held my tongue so as not to spoil the moment, but I probably did him a disservice.

Mark my words. Someday, when enough statistics can be gathered in the post-cigarette era, a link between working in restaurants and pubs, and asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, and skin cancer will unveil itself. Right now, the legacy of early death still relates to the old fact that cigarette smoke used to fill the air of public houses. But when the last generation of waiters and waitresses from the pack-a-day times die off and yet the trend of restaurateurs dying younger continues, then the link to candle toxins will be plain to see.

We all should take it upon ourselves to complain to those who foist candles on us everywhere like cigarettes once were: WE WON’T INHALE YOUR POISON ANY MORE!

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A Girl, Her Pony — And T-Rex!

Posted on February 11, 2012 by Tom Hopp

Most girls have a fantasy at one time or another of owning their very own horsey. Kit Daniels is one of those lucky girls who made the fantasy a reality. She named her quarter horse mare “Lucky” but as you can see, Lucky may not be so lucky after all unless she can put some distance between her and that hungry Tyrannosaurus. Such is life in the Yellowstone High Country now that dinosaurs have made it their home again. Click the image for a closer — and scarier — look.

The image is an outtake from the cover art for the first book in my Dinosaur Wars series. I’m rather proud of the fact that the rex is bristling with hackle feathers. You see, at the time I painted the image back in 2004, scientists were doubtful that T rex had anything but scales all over him. Nowadays they’ve found fossils that prove there were feathers in the dinosaurian line that rex belonged to, and so were likely on rex as well. I guess I was a bit ahead of my time on that one. I’ve uploaded a high resolution version to the major art website, DeviantArt, so go there if you’d like to frame a nice “girl on horseback” print for your wall.

Another item: in order to make it easier to get a copy of Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall while the ebook version is still available for free, I’ve established a “Landing Page” as they say in the online book trade. That’s a place where anyone searching for my story can find it and then just click once to get the book on their favorite ebook-seller’s web site. If you haven’t got a copy yet, you might just want to click on through to the Landing Page right now to download your own freebie while supplies last.

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Hail to the Hero!

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Tom Hopp

Bound for the South PacificSixty-nine years ago today my Uncle Herbert Hopp’s torpedo bomber went down in flames on New Georgia Island in the South Pacific. I thought I’d note the passing of this day, drink a toast to Herb, and try to imagine what he went through in defense of his home and country. His is a tale of heroic suffering, but also of triumph in a way, and a tremendous tale of survival.

I’ve been researching old war records and family mementoes and I’ve found much, but clearly there’s much more to be uncovered.

Herb was one of those young men who volunteered the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. He went to the Navy recruiters and requested training to become a fighter pilot, no doubt with dreams of shooting down those who had attacked our fleet. He’d built his own pylon racing plane and had a pilot’s license, so despite his lack of a high school diploma they let him into the program. However, because he wasn’t a college boy he was ineligible to train as a pilot and was offered the position of turret gunner, which he accepted, excelling in every aspect of his training in flight operations, physical combat, and gunnery. He was soon put to the test.

Stationed aboard one of the fleet’s smallest aircraft carriers, the USS Copahee, he shipped out for Pearl Harbor, where the picture was taken, and then quickly on to the South Pacific. There, he separated from his home squadron VGS-12 and joined one of the legendary Marine squadrons of Guadalcanal, probably the immediate predecessor squadron to the Black Sheep Squadron of TV fame.

Within days he was in the thick of the fighting, attacking Japanese warships as they approached Guadalcanal for what was to prove the final and decisive battle for its control. The US won that contest, and most of the war in the Pacific after that was a long withdrawal of Japanese forces, starting with the defeat Herb had helped to dish out.

TBF attack!But it wasn’t all glory. My research has turned up incredible facts about Herb’s personal trial by fire, and I’ve mentioned some of them in previous posts on this blog. One thing that has dawned on me recently is that, on this day sixty nine years ago, Herb’s flight of three torpedo bombers went up against not only a hail of fire from the anti-aircraft guns of twenty destroyers, but what may well have been the densest air cover of Japanese Zero fighters that any US squadron ever faced — thirty Zeros, according to the pilots of Herb’s own fighter cover.

On that fateful February 4, 1943, the three torpedo bombers attacked the destroyers and none of them made it home. All three were shot down either by fire from the Zeros or from the destroyers. Our fighters were either unable or unwilling to dive down into that maelstrom with the brave torpedomen. Herb’s plane crashed on New Georgia Island, an enemy-occupied jungle hell, where Herb pulled the pilot from the burning plane but found his radioman dead, having been thrown from the plane when it smashed into the giant banyan trees of the jungle.

The rest of his saga is too lengthy to tell here, including the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that Herb brought home with him, so I’ll leave off the telling for now. There will be a novel made out of this someday, once I’ve finished the prodigious digging necessary to gather all the facts. Meanwhile, check out the preliminary write-up I’ve published in my short piece, “Herbert Hopp’s Story.” It’s available in Kindle, Nook, Sony, iTunes, Kobo, Diesel, and a bunch of other formats at Smashwords.

In closing just let me say this, sixty nine years later: Hail to the hero, Herbert Albert Hopp! You are not forgotten.

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Blood Tide

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Tom Hopp

McKean spies a skiffWhen my short story “Blood Tide” was chosen as the lead story in the anthology Seattle Noir, I was delighted. It seems I had hit the nail on the head in responding to Akashic Books’ call for a dark and disturbing noir category mystery story either about Seattle or by a Seattle author (I gave ’em both) on subject matter dealing with the downtrodden, the left-out, or minorities (I gave ’em all three). Come to think of it, now I see exactly why they put my story right up front and center.

“Blood Tide” is one of my Peyton McKean mysteries and one I’m very proud of. It gives plenty of play to the ingenious brain workings of Dr. Peyton McKean, the Seattle biotechnology researcher and super sleuth whom I like to bill as “The greatest mind since Sherlock Holmes,” and his friend, sidekick, chronicler and sometimes white-knuckle chauffeur, Phineus “Fin” Morton. They make quite a team in this story, with Peyton providing the intellectual insights and Fin putting the hot foot to the gas pedal when the chase is on.

This is by no means a “Sherlockiana” story recapitulating Holmes in our times but parallels do exist, from the super-smart lead character to the sidekick chronicler to the gloomy streets in common between London town and rainy Seattle. On the other hand, Seattle lends a unique backdrop with its bleak history of environmental degradation in a former paradise and its often despicable relationship with its Native American inhabitants. The natives have their say in this story and to a certain extent, that was one of my purposes in crafting this tale. I wanted to give these normally soft-spoken people a louder voice. Their trials and grievances come through loud and clear.

The ebook has already showed up in the book lists of Amazon Kindle and it should appear shortly on Nook, iTunes, Sony Reader, Kobo and other formats. One more thing. The story is now a bit longer and more detailed than in its original telling in Seattle Noir. As often happens, it needed quite a bit of trimming to meet the publisher’s page requirements, something that is most acute in anthologies published on paper. Fortunately this stand-alone ebook version has no such limits, so scenes that had been slashed to the bone could be fleshed out. I think the whole story now reads a little more smoothly and offers substantially more depth of character compared to the necessarily brief telling in the anthology. See what you think. Grab a copy for 99 cents. That’s a good old pulp fiction noir story price.

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And the reviews are in!

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Tom Hopp

Watch out for that T rex, Kit!My first novel, Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall, has been out as an ebook for a bit more than a year now, and the reviews keep coming in. Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble have chalked up quite a few and they’re running extremely positive. B&N takes the prize, with 280 customer reviews posted and an average of four stars out of five. Of these, there are literally dozens of five-star testimonials and a bunch of four stars. Of course there are pans too but not too many. Amazon started slowly but has been gaining momentum with 25 reviews so far and a four-and-a-half star overall rating.

It seems somebody out there likes Dinosaur Wars. The reader/reviewers who ‘get’ Dinosaur Wars the best are those who understand it was intended to be a fun read and not something deeper, darker or horribly twisted. It’s an adventure story and lovers of adventures are chiming in that it suits their tastes just fine.

All this justifies my long-standing faith that my science fiction stories will build up a solid readership over time. As Dinosaur Wars:Earthfall takes off, I can’t help but feel a bit of satisfaction that I chose not to use a conventional publisher or an agent. I had spent quite a bit of time consulting with potential publishers and agents, and came away from that experience feeling that they were more interested in having me change my story to fit their preconceived notions of what readers would want, rather than my interest, which was to put my stories in front of readers and let them decide for themselves.

Well, the results are in. I didn’t need to change Dinosaur Wars in order to find readers who would like it. And I can sell it on my own without the intervention of money people from the publishing world. It’s just between me and the reader. I write what I hope readers will like, and readers either agree or they don’t. You can see both types of reactions in the reviews but happily for me and for Dinosaur Wars, the main reaction is delight.

I’m honored and grateful. Blush blush. Next, how about a movie deal?

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McKean Helps Holmes with his Homework

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Tom Hopp

Holmes' HomeworkIn his first case, “A Study In Scarlet,” Sherlock Holmes invented a chemical test for detecting bloodstains, hence the title. The hero of my mysteries, Dr. Peyton McKean, is likewise an inventor of forensic tests. In fact, he is so accomplished at the task that he has invented dozens of commonly used blood tests, DNA tests, and you-name-it tests. Being such an expert, he’s most often summoned to murder scenes not so much to perform DNA tests, but to act as an expert examiner when DNA tests go wrong.

Peyton McKean is the top expert in his field, just as Sherlock Holmes was before him. And just as Holmes could be relied upon to bring the utmost brain-power to any problem, nowadays that lot usually falls to Peyton McKean. That’s why, in my first mystery in the Peyton McKean series, The Jihad Virus, I billed McKean as “The Greatest Mind Since Sherlock Holmes.”

The scene above, with apologies to Sydney Paget, portrays the moment when the eminent English sleuth asks the equally eminent American sleuth, “What do you make of this?” while he shows McKean a page of odd DNA test results he’s admittedly baffled by. If McKean’s intellectual trend runs true, he’ll quickly surmise a weakness in technique or an ambiguity in the sample that was tested, and come up with a new hypothesis for Holmes to factor into his prodigious process of deduction. It was McKean’s formidable skill in biotechnology that enabled him to succeed where others had failed to solve the mysteries I recorded in The Ghost Trees, A Dangerous Breed, and Blood Tide, the last of which was originally published in the anthology, Seattle Noir, and will soon appear as a stand-alone short story.

Ah, if only Peyton McKean had existed in Holmes’ times. What a team they would have made!

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Those Crazy Crested Kra

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Tom Hopp

Gar close upPeople can distinguish themselves by wearing a hat. Think of Indiana Jones, Lady Gaga, the Pope. Dinosaurs were no slouches when it came to headgear. They sported eye-catching topknots in a dazzling array of styles and fashions. This trend was not lost on me when I created the leading lizard of my Dinosaur Wars stories, Gar the Kra.

As you can see, he’s got a fairly flashy crest on top of his cranium that would make a Pharaoh want to trade in his Crown of the Upper and Lower Nile. Handy thing that dinosaurs carried their crowns with them everywhere they went.

Recently, some paleontologists stopped their dinosaur digging long enough to publish an article about dinosaur headwear, under the evocative title, “Does mutual sexual selection explain the evolution of head crests in pterosaurs and dinosaurs?” Their hypothesis says that girl dinosaurs and boy dinosaurs used to be irresistibly attracted to members of the opposite sex who displayed the greatest fashion sense in cranial accessories.

Dino HeadgearThe dino-diggers even published a Who’s Who of saurian fashion in their news report, which I present here in slightly modified form. I’ve added color so you can see the many holes that penetrated dinosaur heads (hinting perhaps at a reason for their ultimate extinction) in blue, as well as the darker holes that contained the eyes with which they ogled their dinosaur paramours. Think of Bogey and one of his leading ladies, both in hats. He raises his drink and says, “Here’s looking at you, Monolophosaurus!”

I hate to brag, but I think I was just a bit ahead of the curve in this area of science. In my Dinosaur Wars science fiction stories, I’ve written my own take on such matters. In one scene, Gar is captivated by his mate’s reptilian beauty:

“Gana raised her head atop her gloriously long neck and uttered her greeting call, “Ah-keeah!” She blinked her ochre eyes with such coy provocation that Gar felt instinctually compelled to start the mating dance. His legs, without so much as a conscious thought, began a stiff strut across the floor. He reflexively raised his own head high, turning his crest right and left in the mating ritual.”

Guess what happens next. Uh huh. Uh uh. Maybe. Read the book.

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