The Description Alone
Sciurumimus was sensationalized prior to any description being published that detailed the anatomy or even what the fossil may have looked like. Nearly a year later the description of the fossil was...
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The Furry Tails
© Román García MoraFeathered dinosaurs are nothing new. In 2012 they were not really all that new, though the number of theropod, non-avian, dinosaurs that we knew had feathers was on the rise and the...
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The Angry Squirrel Dinosaur
©Robinson KunzThe vast majority of illustrations of Sciurumimus that we have looked at this week have portrayed this small coelurosaur as a very fuzzy and, honestly, a cuddly looking ball of adorable...
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Chinese Dragons
By Ghedoghedo - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35328110Possessing a name that is actually based on Chinese and Latin roots, Guidraco venator sounds as though it...
View ArticleIt Flies, but it Doesn't Film
Guidraco is a very interesting animal with a scary set of teeth but it has garnered less attention than an animal this scary looking probably should be more involved in films, short and long. The only...
View ArticleDescribing a Dragon
The description of Guidraco written by Wang, et al. in 2012 is available online with 15 different websites hosting the article or links to the article. The phylogenetic relationships of Guidraco and...
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Mouth of the Dragon
Attributed to Feng LanGuidraco possessed approximately 82 teeth in its 38 cm (14.9 in) long skull. Both the mandible and upper jaw (consisting of maxillae, premaxillae, and nasals) were of equal length...
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On the Nest
©Maurilio OliveiraGuidracovenator is unique among pterosaurs in a variety of ways. The teeth are actually somewhat common in earlier pterosaurs like Dimorphodon, but the size of Guidraco is more rare...
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News Then Therapsids
In the somewhat recent past I found myself thinking that perhaps we could use a name change here at Dinosaur of the Week. The fact of the matter is that we have covered a lot of dinosaurs and fossil...
View ArticleUgly Animals Get All the Love
Whenever a fossil animal is bizarre enough to be a little scary or to be called ugly outright it appears to gather an awful lot of attention in the media and within the general population....
View ArticleWorking Hard to Find Papers
Finding papers that are about, reference, or even vaguely mention Estemmenosuchus is actually a lot more difficult than I had initially thought it would be. The majority of the papers that make mention...
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Sprawling Horned Faces
From Chudinov 1965Estemmenosuchus has a crown of horns. The crown of horns has been hypothesized to have been used for intraspecific signalling and display short of combat; combat with the horns was...
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Portrait of an Ugly Therapsid
One of the best things about very odd animals is that they tend to inspire a lot of interpretations and illustrations because they tend to spark the imagination. Estemmenosuchus certainly inspires...
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An Old Ugly Dinosaur
©Nobu TamuraOne thing that creeps into horror movies and the Halloween season every year is the act of cannibalism. There are cannibalistic animals throughout the animal world but it is a taboo in most...
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Cannibalism on Display
How do we know an animal that is now a fossil was a cannibal? As with much evidence of cannibalism, even in extant animals, we must look at the teeth, the wounds, and how these two pieces of evidence...
View ArticleCannibalism Imagined
Due to the highly publicized knowledge of cannibalism in Majungasaurus there have been multiple iterations of animated and illustrated versions of Majungasaurus engaging in cannibalism. As stated...
View ArticlePapers Everywhere
Being an ugly cannibal dinosaur has its perks. In the scientific community it has perks at least. The number of papers written about Majungasaurus (including its synonymous genus Majungatholus) is very...
View ArticleMajungasaurus Everywhere
Majungasaurus has been seen in many different forms of media for the past 60 years. Originally described by the French paleontologist Rene Lavocat in 1955, Majungasaurus was named as the dinosaur of...
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Iconic Representation
Deviant Paleoart via Creative CommonsAs I have mentioned a few times this week, there are many illustrations of Majungasaurus out on the internet for people to view and be entertained by. There are...
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Fearsome Sharks
©Nobu Tamura, 2016; most recent accepted iteration of whorl locationFew animals are as frightening to humans, as primates, as large oceanic predators. The diversity of sharks is such that we could...
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