The report (HT John Wilson) begins: “The first ever example of a plant-eating dinosaur with feathers and scales has been discovered in Russia. Previously only flesh-eating dinosaurs were known to have had feathers so this new find indicates that all dinosaurs could have been feathered.” The big thing here is the “all” I have been …
Tag: Dinosaurs
We Need More Feathered Dinos
John McLoughlin was writing about them in the late SEVENTIES. Isn’t it time yet to acknowlege, preferably before the next Jurassic Park, that dinos resemble eagles and turkeys and Roadrunners more than, oh, fence lizards? Especially with all the good artists around… These last would be so good if they weren’t lizard- naked! This guy …
New Toy
Supposedly Archaeopteryx— but except for the lack of the inner “killer claw” more of a typical feathered Theropod like Deinonychus. Also see A Field Guide to Mesozoic Birds.
Feathered Tyrants
Are we finally having the sense to use feathers as the default condition on at least Theropod Dinos? New and new- ish examples of these smaller relatives of T rex would seem to argue “yes”. Add caption Brian Switek muses on the state of the arthere. See also the website of John Conway, the most …
Mahakala(s): Mongolian Free Association
I took a bunch of Mongolian artifacts to the Magdalena Library Saturday as visual aids to a talk by my friend Ian Jenness. He and his wife had taken the Trans- Siberian to Lake Baikal and Irkutsk, then dropped down to Ulan Bataar, spent a week or so in Mongolia in ger camps, then continued …
Feathered Tyrants
It is almost 30 years since Robert Bakker referred to Tyrannosaurus rex as the “roadrunner from Hell”. Some of us, like John McLaughlin, got the message right away. After all the intervening years, as the lines between “bird” and “dinosaur” have become blurrier and blurrier, the Zeitgeist is finally catching up. The first big “bird”, …
Paleo Art comes of age…
Which doesn’t mean gets dull and predictable. On the contrary, the abundance of “new” fossils has given birth to a generation of artistic and scientific iconoclasts whose bold new vision is far more rooted in the past than any older generation’s was. The inimitable polymath and prodigiously productive blogger Darren Naish, a serious anatomist, was …
Dino- birds
A good XKCD on one of our favorite subjects from Peculiar:
Tattoos, Griffins, Dinosaurs, and Indiana Jones
Our friend Sari in Finland sends this link to some tattooed mummies in the Siberian Altai. Here are a couple more from that tradition, from (I think) a bit further south. These are mythical “Griffins”, but are probably based on fossils like the Protoceratops, found in Mongolia in the 1920’s by Roy Chapman Andrews, the …
Eevil Killer Dino- Birds
(With apologies to Darren). Walter Hingley sends word of new theories coming out the Museum of the Rockies about the ever- closer similarities becoming apparent between raptorial dinos and modern raptors. The illo is lurid but wonderful: Of course some of us have always thought so, notably John McLoughlin. “Washington and Moscow…” UPDATE: Quote is …