airigami (headed by larry moss) has completed a 20-foot long acrocanthosaurus--a dinosaur from the early cretaceous period. this is not the first time the team has built one of the mammoth creatures from their signature medium of balloons, but it is the first occasion in which they have produced and displayed one alongside a cast of an actual skeleton of a prehistoric reptile. finished over the course of four days, the massive inflated beast is installed within the virgina museum of natural history (for as long as it will last).

the core team of marsh gallagher, TJ michael, phil cosmos and dee cosmos who realized the larger than life blow-up sculpture were assisted by many helpers including elementary school students and museum staff.

20-foot dinosaur made from balloons by airigami [Designboom] ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/27/20-foot-dinosaur-made-from-bal.html/feed 26 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/26/download-a-dinosaur-or-17.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/26/download-a-dinosaur-or-17.html#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:34:39 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=226889 download 17 digital versions of dinosaur bodies created by scientists at the UK's The Royal Veterinary College, Hatfield, and other institutions. The bodies were made for a study of the biomechanics of dinosaurs — essentially, an attempt to reverse engineer some knowledge of how dinosaurs moved and how body shape and movement changed as dinosaurs got closer to becoming birds. I don't really know exactly what you might do with these files, but they're free and available to anyone. And, I figure, if somebody is going to come up with a fantastic use for digitized dinosaurs, it's you guys. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/26/download-a-dinosaur-or-17.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/26/perfect-score-on-a-4th-grade-s.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/26/perfect-score-on-a-4th-grade-s.html#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:59:18 +0000 Mark Frauenfelder http://boingboing.net/?p=226847 I can't vouch for the provenance of this alleged school test about dinosaurs. I just like to imagine cute dinosaurs the size of sheep. They must've been fabulous pets! (Via CN)

Tired of turkey? Bored with beef? Maybe it's time to consider a more exotic roast this holiday season. At Popular Science, Erin Berger has taken the time to figure out what dinosaur would hypothetically make the best dinner for people (as opposed to the other way around). The analysis turns out to be surprisingly fascinating — Dinosaurs probably tasted more like beef than chicken! Armored tails are the other other white meat! — and it turns out that what you really want is a nice chunk of sauropod neck.

Imagine an apatosaurus with a long, elephant-like snout. Plenty of people have. That's because the nostril placement on sauropod dinosaurs is, in some ways, remarkably similar to that of trunked animals that live today. In both cases, the nostrils are large, and they're located up around what we'd call the forehead, kind of smack between the eyes.

On the one hand, this is one of those things that it's really hard to ever know for certain. We don't have preserved soft tissue, so when we make models of what dinosaurs might have looked like we're really going on clues from the bones and comparisons to living animals with similar bone structure. Because of that, it is somewhat reasonable to suggest that hey, maybe, sauropods really did look like grumpy diplodocus in the image above. It's fun to speculate.

But not all speculations are created equal. In a fascinating post at the Tetrapod Zoology blog, Darren Naish explains why a superficial similarity to trunked animals isn't enough to counteract the much-more prevalent evidence against sauropod trunks. One of the more interesting lines of evidence he points out is the fact that dinosaurs apparently lacked the facial which form the trunk in living animals. We know this partly because muscles leave their signature on bone, and Naish says there's no evidence sauropods had the right facial muscles. It's further bolstered by the fact that the animals most closely related to sauropods don't have those facial muscles, either.

Naish's piece reminds me of the last time we talked about sauropod biology here. That, too, dealt with the fact that superficial similarities aren't enough to infer that two animals must have identical biology. Only, in that case, we were talking about the differences between the long necks of giraffes and the long necks of sauropods.

I think Johnson just sold me a copy of his book, but I also wanted to look up this phenomenon right now. I'd honestly never heard of dinosaur cancer, but it turns out that there are several examples of this, including a fossilized brain tumor discovered in 2003. That said, there does seem to be some debate on the subject. While that brain tumor was found in the skull of a relative of the T. Rex, another study published the same year found that only duck-billed dinosaurs seemed to have had much of a risk of cancer. In that study, scientists x-rayed 10,000 specimens. They only found cancer in the duck-billed hadrosaurs.

Now, on the one hand, this might not be totally representative of all cancer risk. After all, what you're seeing in fossils are cancers of the bone, or cancers that have metastasized to the bone. On the other hand, if this is an accurate reflection of the nature of cancer in dinosaurs, it's a pretty interesting finding, which suggests that genetics played a huge role in determining which dinosaurs got cancer and which didn't. Either that, or duck-billed dinosaurs were exposed to some kind of environmental risk factor that didn't affect other species. (Which isn't a totally crazy idea. For instance, we know that hadrosaurs grazed heavily on conifers. And, according to the 2003 paper, they may have been the only dinosaurs who preferred that diet.)

There's lots of good stuff to read on this:
• Read the full 2003 study on the epidemiology of cancer in dinosaurs
• In 1999, the same researchers published a short report on bone cancer in dinosaurs. You can read that online, too
• A 2007 paper compared rates of bone cancer in dinosaurs with those in modern vertebrates. According to this research, the rate of bone cancer hasn't changed.
• A 2010 paper looked at modern cancer treatments in the context of what we know about cancer in ancient times — both in dinosaurs and in human mummies

Edit: Yesterday, I said David Quammen was the author writing a book about cancer. That was incorrect. It is fixed now.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/27/dinosaurs-had-cancer-too.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/27/long-dinosaur-is-long.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/27/long-dinosaur-is-long.html#comments Sat, 27 Oct 2012 12:14:08 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=190370 Check out this LiveScience piece by Kim Ann Zimmermann for more fun Diplodocus facts. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/27/long-dinosaur-is-long.html/feed 20 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/26/how-to-eat-a-triceratops.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/26/how-to-eat-a-triceratops.html#comments Fri, 26 Oct 2012 19:43:05 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=190234

With their big, bitey teeth and teeny, ineffectual arms, it can be difficult to picture how Tyrannosaurus Rex actually managed to eat anything. After all, all of our personal experience with eating involves an awful lot of gripping with the forearms. Some new research, takes a stab at understanding T. Rex table manners. The results are pretty neat — and they highlight the similarities between dinosaurs and birds — but I want to make a bit of a bigger deal out of the methodology.

Several times on this blog, we've talked about the importance of the vast archives of archaeological and paleontological specimens that are sitting around in storage at museums and universities. Some of these things have never even been removed from the matrix of burlap and plaster used to secure them for shipping. Some have sat there for decades, enjoying only a cursory glance from researchers. But when scientists finally start sifting through these unseen specimens, they often find fascinating things.

In this case, scientists turned to the fossil archives to get a broad view of how T. Rexes ate Triceratopses. That involved examining Triceratops skulls from Montana's Hell Creek Formation, looking for characteristic signs of T. Rex teeth marks. Ultimately, they found 18 skulls that were probably once ancient entrées. And these are not the kind of skulls you'd find browsing through a museum. In fact, in many cases, those skulls represented only partial skeletons. So, while, in the past, we've pointed out the need to look more closely at these archives, this is a great example of what you can find when you do. Buried in the back room, there were specimens that have taught us something about how dinosaurs might have lived.

As Fowler and his colleagues examined the various types of bite mark on the skulls, they were intrigued by the extensive puncture and pull marks on the neck frills on some of the specimens. At first, this seemed to make no sense. “The frill would have been mostly bone and keratin,” says Fowler. “Not much to eat there.” The pulling action and the presence of deep parallel grooves led the team to realise that these marks were probably not indicative of actual eating, but repositioning of the prey. The scientists suggest that the frills were in the way of Tyrannosaurus as it was trying to get at the nutrient-rich neck muscles.

“It's gruesome, but the easiest way to do this was to pull the head off,” explains Fowler with a grin. The researchers found further evidence to support this idea when they examined the Triceratops occipital condyles — the ball-socket head–neck joint — and found tooth marks there too. Such marks could only have been made if the animal had been decapitated.

Read the rest of the story at Nature News

Image courtesy Nathan Carroll

At The Dinosaur Tracking blog, Brian Switek is starting a cool, new series meant to highlight the lesser-known dinosaurs that the public as long ignored. Sure, it's a bit easier to pronounce Tyrannosaurus, but Agujaceratops and Zalmoxes still deserve their 15 minutes of fame.

The alphabetical series kicks off today with the aforementioned Agujaceratops. Found in Texas, Agujaceratops is distinctly different, in several ways, from its cousins that have been found in the northern part of North America. In fact, writes Switek, Agujaceratops is so different, that it's making paleontologists reconsider ancient North American geography.

At the species and genus levels, the southern dinosaurs are different. The big question is, why? Paleontologists know that a shallow, vanished seaway separated dinosaurs on eastern and western subcontinents for millions of years, but on that western subcontinent called Laramidia, there was apparently some other kind of barrier that isolated northern and southern dinosaur populations.

The hypothesis relies on basic evolutionary theory. Isolate populations of an ancestor species in different regions, and through factors such as natural selection and genetic drift, those populations will evolve in different ways. The fact that Agujaceratops, Kosmoceratops and Utahceratops are so different from Chasmosaurus and other northern cousins are a sign that such a barrier was in place. No one has found it yet, though, and a great deal of work remains to be done on whether all these dinosaurs were really contemporaries or reveal a much more complex evolutionary pattern. As these investigations continue, though, Agujaceratops will continue to play an important role as a symbol of isolation and evolution.

Follow along with the Dinosaur Alphabet at the Dinosaur Tracking blog

Yesterday, I posted about Pegomastax africanus, a parrot-like dinosaur whose fossil was discovered not in a remote waste in some far corner of the world, but in a rock that had sat in storage at Harvard University for 50 years.

In the post, I tried to explain why something like that could happen. The simple fact of the matter: A successful archaeological or paleontological dig will produce far more material than the original scientists have time (or money) to sort through, process, and examine. So lots of stuff ends up sitting in storage.

That led BoingBoing reader Matt Fedorko to some interesting speculation:

"...This seems like a perfect opportunity to exploit 3D scanning technology to put the shapes of fossils, at least, into some kind of digital storage area where other researchers could look at a dig's haul and start to work with them spatially, or beside any of the other data that is collected in the field or logged during the cataloging procedure."

Now, Charles Q. Choi, a journalist who wrote about the discovery of Pegomastax africanus, says that Matt's idea isn't all that far-fetched. In fact, scientists already do something like this with the fossils that do get closely examined.

Laser scanning of fossils to create 3-D models of them is becoming increasingly common. These models are key to computer simulations exploring how dinosaurs might have moved, and serve as the blueprints for replicas created using 3-D printers. Such 3-D printed fossils open up the possibility of 3-D printed dinosaur robots, a massive geek conjunction of lasers, dinosaurs and robots all in one package. More prosaically, the ability to hold a fossil in your hands can help paleontologists better imagine how bones of unknown species might fit together into skeletons.

When we talk about a backload of unexamined fossils sitting in storage, we aren't talking about piles of T-Rex femurs stacked up behind the Ark of the Covenant in some warehouse. Instead, these fossils are still stuck in slabs of rock and not always in a nice, clean way where you can see an entire fossil skeleton splayed out on a rock surface. Meanwhile, the rock slabs, in turn, are encased in layers of burlap and plaster — a coating that researchers use to protect the fossils in the field and during shipment from the dig site back to the lab.

Choi suspects that 3-D imaging might be a tool that could help scientists more quickly sort through all those white lumps to see which ones deserve attention.

Instead of removing fossils from their matrices and then laser scanning them, why not try creating 3-D scans of them while they are still trapped within the rock? Imagine 3-D models of all these vast libraries of fossils placed online where students in schools all around the world might take a look at them either on their computers or as 3-D replicas.

This idea is part of Choi's ongoing series "A Modest Proposal". You can read the full post at his Assignment Impossible blog.

Image: Alex Harrison, Appalachian State University

This is an artists' rendition of Pegomastax africanus, a 200-million-year-old dinosaur that is the subject of a new peer-reviewed research paper out this week in the journal ZooKeys.

It's a great face, and a fascinating species. Couple of things here that I think are worth highlighting:

First, despite the fang-y teeth Pegomastax africanus is sporting, the scientists who wrote the paper think this animal was actually a vegetarian. Or, at least, mostly a vegetarian. At LiveScience.com, the researchers told journalist Charles Q. Choi that the dinosaur had a parrot-like beak, its fangs weren't positioned well for cutting through meat, and its back teeth look like the kind of chompers plant-eaters use to slice through leaves and roughage. All of which suggest Pegomastax africanus ate more seeds, nuts, and fruit than flank steak.

The other cool thing has to do with when Pegomastax africanus was found. While the paper describing the fossil was published online today, the fossil itself was pulled out of the ground in the 1960s. In fact, the paper's main author — paleontologist Paul C. Sereno — first noticed the neglected fossil in 1983, and only recently got around to examining it more closely. Think of it this way, a successful dig might come out with lots of potentially cool rocks and fossils. The fact is that there are often more artifacts than there is time for one team to closely work with all the artifacts. The researchers who did the digging will focus on the ones that are most interesting to them. The rest get catalogued. Maybe the original researchers come back to them; maybe they don't. Maybe somebody else picks up the catalogued fossils; maybe it takes 50 years for that happen. But what this reminds us is that there are cool things waiting to be discovered in storage ... not just in the ground.

Read the full paper, which puts Pegomastax africanus into context as a member of a family of dinosaurs called heterodontosaurids.

FlippyCat's animated 3D domino depiction of the comet-strike extinction of the dinosaurs is both poignant and exciting, and the setup/blooper-reel that follows the main action is a real nail-biter.

Also known as domino-saurs

This took 38.5 hours of setup time, over about 2 weeks.

This project contains several smaller projects that I have wanted to do for a long time...the earth being hit and spreading out (since I did this with flags), the eggs revealing something behind them, a fossil/skeleton and a domino-saur!

The Fall of the Dinosaurs (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/02/3d-domino-fall-illustrates-the.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/29/dinosaur.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/29/dinosaur.html#comments Sat, 29 Sep 2012 22:30:38 +0000 Rob Beschizza http://boingboing.net/?p=184285 The correct answer is, of course, Ankylosaurus.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/29/dinosaur.html/feed 68 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/why-dont-giraffes-have-necks.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/why-dont-giraffes-have-necks.html#comments Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:49:48 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=184058

We think of giraffes as long-necked creatures, but compared to ancient sauropod dinosaurs (a family that includes the brachiosaurus and apatosaurus) even the longest-necked giraffe may as well be nicknamed "Stumpy". In a paper published online at arXiv site, two paleontologists analyzed the biology of sauropods in an attempt to figure out which features allowed the dinosaurs to grow necks six times longer than giraffes.

Turns out, there are some distinct differences — especially in the anatomical architecture of the vertebra closest to both animals' skulls — that really stand out. As this helpful slide shows, a sauropod with the vertebra of a giraffe would be in very bad shape, indeed.

This paper, by the authors' own account, began life "as a late-night discussion over a couple of beers", which means it's basically the paleontology equivalent of "Who would win in a fight: Darth Vader or Superman?" Which is awesome. Better yet, the paper is quite easy to read and the information is organized in a way that will probably make more sense to you than the typical scientific research paper. So dig in! It's worth it! Here's one short excerpt taken from a part discussing some of those differences in the cervical vertebra (the aforementioned vertebra closest to the skull):

Many groups of animals seem to be constrained as to the number of cervical vertebrae they can evolve. With the exceptions of sloths and sirenians, mammals are all limited to exactly seven cervicals; azdarchids are variously reported as having seven to nine cervical vertebrae, but never more; non-avian theropods do not seem to have exceeded the 13 or perhaps 14 cervicals of Neimongosaurus, with eleven or fewer being more typical.

By contrast, sauropods repeatedly increased the number of their cervical vertebrae, attaining as many as 19 in Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis. Modern swans have up to 25 cervical vertebrae, and as noted above the marine reptile Albertonectes had 76 cervical vertebrae. Multiplication of cervical vertebrae obviously contributes to neck elongation.

Read the full study at arXiv

Read a blog post about the study by one of the authors

Dinosaur Art is a collection -- and celebration -- of some the finest purveyors of paleoart. My primary reason in assembling this host of talent was to give them a voice. Generally their work is seen in books running the gamete from children’s to the most serious academic volume; from National Geographic’s website to illustrating a report on a BBC News feature. However, I couldn’t help but notice they rarely got to talk about themselves and their art. I hoped to rectify that and in doing so bring together a collection of amazing art that you don’t need to be a dinosaur enthusiast to enjoy -- although that helps!

Here’s a selection of some of my favorite images, from the book. -- Steve White, editor of Dinosaur Art

ASTEROID

Douglas Henderson

I love the lighting on this. What filmmakers call ‘the Magic Hour’ – beautiful twilight colours. It is also preludes the event that heralded the demise of the dinosaurs (and untold other species) – the impact of a massive object, in this case illustrated as an asteroid but possibly a comet or meteor, that slammed into the area of what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, unleashing a global catastrophe.

GALLIMIMUS & TARBOSAURUS

John Conway

Tarbosaurus is a very close relative to T-rex. In this beautiful shot by John, it’s chasing down the ostrich-mimicking Gallimimus, best known for its star turn in Jurassic Park, but here illustrated in a shaggy down. We don’t know for sure that Gallimimus was clad as such but here John is making use of the paleoartist’s best friend: the educated guess.

SINUSONASUS FIGHTING

Luis Rey

Luis uses the newest tool in the paleoartist’s tookbox, the computer, and produces a great piece of photo-manipulation. Using grey herons as a starting point, he illustrates a very important maxim in Life Sciences: that small, predatory dinosaurs like Sinusonasus weren’t a million miles away from birds. Chances are they were in fact just around the corner.

THE LEVIATHAN

Robert Nicholls

Bob does a brilliant job here in bringing to life the sheer terrifying mass of one of the truly giant marine reptiles, Liopleurodon. I also really love the light on this one; the rays of sun falling through the water and adding real depth to the picture.

STYRACOSAURUS

Raul Martin

Another picture that makes wonderful use of sunlight. Raul is an amazing artist who uses computer software as effectively as he uses a pencil. This is digital painting par excellence, but it’s Raul’s use of light and shade that really sold this one to me.

AEROSTEON

Todd Marshall

I love this illustration. It’s more like a medical drawing than a piece of paleoart. Todd uses the cutaway of the carnivorous dinosaur, Aerosteon, to highlight its inner workings while at the same time maintaining an air of dynamism – this really is an x-ray on the run!

TYRANNOSAURUS SEAFOOD

Julius Csotonyi

Another fine example of mixed media – the marriage of traditional and digital artwork. This looks more like someone’s snapshot from a time machine window than a piece of artwork, and the T-rex just looks plain awesome!

WOODSTONE AMMONITE GRAVEYARD

John Sibbick has an eye for detail. You may have gathered that from trying to count the number of ammonite shells he painted. But it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality: the texture of the sand and the rocks, the spines on the seed cones in the foreground, it’s all stunning complete. Little wonder John wears glasses.

Dinosaur Art: The World’s Greatest Paleoart

Retinal neuroscientist and photographer Bryan Jones sends in this gorgeous shot of an archaeopteryx fossil displayed in the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany.

"As a biologist, seeing this fossil represents something of a pilgrimage," says Bryan, "[Visiting this museum is] a journey that all biologists would benefit from making."

Snip from his blog post:

This particular sample was found in the Solnhofen limestone formation in Bavaria and is the basis for the link between the dinosaurs and the feathered birds. Archaeopteryx itself is a feathered theropod, but is though of as the oldest documented bird dating back approximately 150 million years ago.

The fossil was found in 1874 by Jakob Niemeyer who traded it to Johann Dorr for a cow. Johann then sold the fossil to Ernst Haberlein for 2,000 German Marks. This sale was then turned around to the founder of Siemens, Werner von Siemens for 20,000 German Marks for the University of Berlin which has provided this specimen to scientists around the world as the best preserved specimen found with elegant feathers and an exquisitely preserved skull.

Zombie T-Rex Tattoo Shoulder Tattoo (via Geekologie) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/07/zombie-t-rex-tattoo.html/feed 56 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/02/the-descent-of-petey.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/02/the-descent-of-petey.html#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2012 17:44:38 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=168677

Bird and Moon comics offers this helpful illustration of how evolution screwed over the parakeet.

See the full comic, "Evolution Sucks"

Made of cupronickel, the coin has a face value of 25 cents but is much larger than a regular Canuck quarter.

It shows an artist's rendering of Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, a 4-ton, 26-foot dinosaur discovered in Alberta in 1972. It's the first in a four-coin series of photo-luminescent prehistoric creatures.

The mint says the skeleton can best be seen after the coin is exposed to sunlight, or to fluorescent or incandescent light for 30-60 seconds, adding that the luminescence won't fade with time.

Canada's newest coin glows in the dark (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/12/commemorative-canadian-quarter.html/feed 36 http://boingboing.net/2012/04/12/the-threat-of-intelligent-spac.html http://boingboing.net/2012/04/12/the-threat-of-intelligent-spac.html#comments Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:52:38 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=154324

Chirality is an interesting concept. The best way to explain it quickly is an analogy to being left-handed or right-handed. Molecules don't have hands, but they do have an inherent orientation that can be compared to having a dominant hand that you do most of your work with. Sugars are mostly right-handed. Amino acids: Left-handed.

But here's where things get weird: It doesn't have to be that way. In fact, given the randomness and chance through which evolution works, it would make more sense for there to be a lot more diversity in orientation.

All of this backstory is important so that I can tell you about the most hilarious non sequitur I've encountered in 2012.

Chemist Ronald Breslow has a new paper out in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, where he talks about why chirality might be the way it is. For the most part, his ideas are not unreasonable ones. Breslow thinks that life on Earth—and we're talking about life in its simplest forms, like molecules, not actual creatures—could have been "seeded" by material that fell to the planet on an asteroid. The idea is that, if the building blocks of life came from one place—a meteor fall—rather than arising and adapting here, it could explain why there's not the diversity of molecular "handedness" that we might otherwise expect to see.

In fact, in related news, there's another paper out suggesting that Earth could have paid that gift of life forward, with potentially microbe-and-molecule-laden rocks from here traveling far into interstellar space.

What makes Breslow's paper unique is the odd, brief, speculative tangent he gets into at the very end, a tangent which lead to me receiving a press release titled, "Could Advanced Dinosaurs Rule Other Planets?"

An
implication 
from
 this 
work 
is 
that
 elsewhere 
in
 the
 universe
 there
could be 
life
 forms
 based 
on 
D 
amino 
acids
 and 
L 
sugars,
 depending 
on 
the 
chirality
 of
circular
 polarized
 light
 in 
that 
sector
 of 
the 
universe
 or
 whatever 
other 
process 
operated 
to
 favor
 the
 L 
α‐methyl 
amino
 acids
 in 
the
 meteorites 
that 
have 
landed 
on
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. 
We
 would 
be
 better 
off 
not 
meeting 
them.

I suppose it's rather hard to argue with the basic thesis that we'd be better off not meeting a hyper-intelligent T. Rex. But at Dinosaur Tracking, Brian Switek attempts to explain why it's maybe not a great idea for chemists to randomly start pontificating on paleontology. In particular, the "rule" of the dinosaurs was not inevitable and was not dependent on the outcome of a single asteroid collision.

Prior to 250 million years ago, the synapsids—our ancestors and relatives—were the dominant creatures on land. But the apocalyptic extinction at the end of the Permian Period eliminated most synapsid lineages, in addition to many other forms of life. This clearing of the ecological slate is what allowed a different group of creatures to proliferate. Early archosaurs, or “ruling reptiles,” included the archaic forerunners of crocodiles, pterosaurs and dinosaurs, in addition to various groups now extinct, and these creatures dominated the Triassic.

Despite what has been traditionally told, though, the dinosaurian branch of the greater archosaur family tree didn’t immediately out-compete its neighbors. Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus were not the Triassic terrors they were cast as during the mid-1990s. For the most part, Triassic dinosaurs were small, rare, marginal parts of the ecosystems they inhabited. It was only after another mass extinction at the end of the Triassic, around 200 million years ago, that the competitors of early dinosaurs were removed and the reign of the dinosaurs truly began.

“A spiffing way to go to war I decided as we powered through the veldt. Mr. Roberson’s patented Triterrortops steam powered terrible lizard replica was performing above the expectations it has been set by His Majesties Royal Calvalry Corp. My report to the Generals will be that the vehicle has proved more then adequate to combat the clone-vat monstrosities of the Zimbab bio-shamens.(sic)

Also: it really walks!

Steam-Dinos-Rule (via Super Punch) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/08/steampunk-lego-dino-with-a-ba.html/feed 10