Anchiornis Takes Flight
The majority of sources and literature concerning Anchiornis mention that the animal was a dinosaur. Very few, and there are still some holdouts in popular outlets, not as much in the literature, still...
View ArticleWhere Are Your Bird Parts?
Anchiornis lacks a lot of parts of birds that are diagnostically avian. The most telling lack is in the chest. A requirement for powered flight is to develop muscles that can manage to power one's...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Coloring Your Feathers
The preservation of soft tissue structures, including pigmentation, blood, and some other rare and hard to spot tissues, is becoming almost commonplace in paleontology. There are two reasons for this....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Anchiornis the Popular
Anchiornis is popular in many ways. We have detailed many of those ways in the past week. There are a few that have not been represented well here by image or description. These are the prime reasons...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lizard of Qingdao
Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus is named for the place from which its fossils were unearthed and recovered initially and its most peculiar characteristic at the time of discovery. Tsintaosaurus is a large...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Anti-Unicorn Illustration
Albert Prieto-Márquez, Jonathan R. WagnerProcesses on the premaxilla and prefrontals of Tsintaosaurus were missing or at least degraded in the fossilization process on the type specie cranium. The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Unicorn Facts
Slightly less colorful than facts about the mythical unicorns of fantasy tales, these unicorn facts are all concerned with a dinosaur initially described as possessing a unique and special crest. We...
View ArticleFlorida Transport
There are a few short clips featuring Tsintaosaurus circulating on the internet. These range from an animatronic dinosaur park in Florida to museum exhibits. Fleshing out of the dinosaur in the...
View ArticleTaking Down A Unicorn
In mythological situations the destruction of a unicorn is often considered a terrible and disgusting act. In the case of Tsintaosaurus the reversal of unicorn status to a fully crested hadrosaur was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hadrosaur Sized
Hadrosaurs were large ornithischian dinosaurs in their most common forms and in their most derived forms. Early hadrosaurs were small, compared to later hadrosaurs, but even these genera and species...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Retaining Fame
How does a dinosaur once famous for anomalous anatomy retain its wonder and fame with the populace when they are told that the anatomy was false? In the case of Tsintaosaurus the anatomical description...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Serendipitous
As an ode to the calendar, or maybe just because I think it is interesting to make the last week of every month "calendar week", we are going to discuss the dinosaurs that are featured in space on the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Illustrations with No Basis
The fact that an ulna is the holotype and the only anatomical remains that exist for Serendipaceratops means that we have no real idea what the dinosaur would have looked like. Inferred depictions of...
View ArticleSmall Consolations
There are a number of fact pages online, though none are comprehensive and a number of them conclude with the argument that this dinosaur does not exist. Some of these end this way because they are old...
View ArticleA Scholarly Serendipaceratops
I skipped yesterday's post ignominiously. I was not pleased with the idea that I was about to post something that had no content; there are no movies or documentaries that discuss Serendipaceratops...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Throwing Elbows
The ulna forms the pointy bit of our elbow as the olecranon process rotates about the trochlea. The olecranon of Serendipaceratops is broken and completely absent from the solitary ulna that was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Famous in Error
Serendipaceratops is not necessarily a tragic tale of errors and mistakes, but it could be said to be a cautionary tale on both sides of the debate about the validity of the taxon. There are far better...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Thieving Dakota
Emily WilloughbyRecently, as recent as 2015, a new dromaeosaur was described by DePalma, et al. after its discovery and retrieval from South Dakota in 2005. Estimated sizes range from 5 to 6 meters for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Being Raptorial
(C) Emily WilloughbyThere are a number of papers in publicationon the hunting methods employed by extant raptorial species. Falcons are neck biters; that is to say they tend to known their prey out of...
View ArticleSuper Facts
The Super Bowl is underway in the United States. I stopped watching it because I simply was not that entertained. It looks like it is an okay game anyhow though.Dakotaraptor is new enough to science...
View Article