Did I see trafficjamosaurus there somewhere? Designer Andy Council of Bristol, England, created a series of urban dinosaurs in which he imagined prehistoric creatures arising from the urban landscape of skyscrapers and highways.

Link | Andy's blog and Flickr page, where you can find many more neat stuff - via My Modern Met

Ridiculous? Yes. Eye-catching? Certainly! This ad is for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. -via the Presurfer

Ah, T. Rex: Fierce ... ferocious ... fat?

Paleontologist John R. Hutchinson and colleagues led the study that suggested that the king of dinosaur was way plumper than previously thought:

“We knew she was big but the 30 percent increase in her weight was unexpected,” said Makovicky, who works at the museum where Sue has been a major draw since 2000. He added that this figure represents the leanest model, so the famous dinosaur might have been even more corpulent. “Nine tons is the minimum estimate we arrived at using a very skinny body form,” he explained.

The new mass estimates indicate that Tyrannosaurus rex grew twice as quickly as previously thought, packing on up to 3,950 pounds per year during the teenage phase. This staggering rate, coupled with its gargantuan adult proportions, probably meant that Tyrannosaurus rex moved more slowly as it aged, according to the researchers. Large individuals could still have achieved speeds between 10 and 25 miles per hour while running after prey, using their giant tail and hip muscles for propulsion, they said. Not bad for a hulking beast once thought to have weighed as much as a school bus or full-grown elephant—but may actually have verged on a bus with an elephant inside.

Link (Image: Julia Molnar) - via The Week

• Physically and temperamentally sound babies, regardless of species
• Proven show-quality specimens
• Fully-licensed and registered documentation of champion bloodlines
• All-inclusive obedience training and care lessons provided on-site

It looks almost serious, until you see the photo gallery and read the customer testimonials. Link -via the Presurfer

Are you looking for a fun way to beat the heat? You need the Dino Pops Popsicle Mold from the NeatoShop.  This great set includes 4 sculpted dinosaur shapes 3 sculpted dinosaur shapes and 1 flying reptile shape: Brontosaurus,  Stegosaurus, T-Rex, and Pterodactyl Pterosaur. This is the perfect gift for any budding paleontologist.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Mealtime fun!

Link

Dino D-Day wants to show you what the hype is all about by letting you play for free until July 31st on Steam. The indie game has received lots of buzz over the last few months, not only because of its humorous subject matter (Nazi controlled dinosaurs), but also because the gameplay is fast paced and fun, and the graphics are quite good for such a low budget game. Now you have a chance to check it out for yourself and see if slaying Nazi dinosaurs satisfies your craving for virtual blood.

Link

Tea Rex Tea Infuser – $9.95

Does work have you feeling about 65 million years old?  Maybe it’s time to take a break and make yourself a nice cup of tea with the Tea Rex Tea Infuser from the NeatoShop.  Remember, every ferocious beast needs to take a rest now and again.  You will be back to your  kingly, bone crushing self in no time.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fierce Kitchen Stuff!

Link

]]> http://www.neatorama.com/2011/07/12/tea-rex-tea-infuser/feed/ 0 http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/14/a-dinosaur-at-school/ http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/14/a-dinosaur-at-school/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:07:17 +0000 Miss Cellania http://www.neatorama.com/?p=44633
(YouTube link)

One of the dinosaurs from the show “Walking with Dinosaurs” (previously at Neatorama) visited a school in Bondi, near Sydney, Australia. The kids were, shall we say, excited. Don’t miss the foot race! -via reddit

This is fantastic: artist Polly M. Law illustrated 100 odd and obscure words with her unique bricolage style in The Word Project. My favorite is this one above, in which she magnificently illustrated the word "dinomania": (n) irresistible urge to dance. (Yes, the word also also means obsession with dinosaurs).

See more at Brain Pickings: Link

Don’t let my three-year-old see this, or we’ll never get out of the house today. Jessica of Running With Scissors created these awesome Dino Tails and was kind enough to provide a tutorial on how to make your own – via Craft

The photo above shows a drawing of a specimen retrieved from a quarry near Oxford in 1676.  It is the end of the femur, and was named by British naturalist Richard Brookes after what he thought it looked like.

It was given the name Scrotum humanum in 1763 but it didn’t catch on; it was renamed Megalosaurus by Reverand Buckland in 1824. The word dinosaur wasn’t coined until sixteen years later.

Found in the “Nutty Nomenclature” subsection of the link at Null Hypothesis, which also includes a small brown moth whose official scientific name is “Eubetia bigaulae.”

It’s pronounced “you betcha, by golly.”  Honest.

Link.

The Ropen or ‘demon flyer’ is a monstrous animal that is said to have terrified the natives of Papua New Guinea for thousands of years. Another smaller animal, known as the Duah, is possibly related to the Ropen, a cryptid creature said to haunts some of the far-flung outlying islands.

The flying animals described are said to “glow” in the dark, as reported both by locals and researchers. It has been hypothesized that the bio-luminescent glow assists the animals’ effort to hunt and catch food in the deep darkness of the tropical night. One of the researchers, David Woetzel, has said that he recorded images of the animals while studying them.

Link

(Image credit: Wikipedia user DinoGuy2)

Great Vocab Didn't Save the Thesaurus Mug - $9.95 | T-shirt version

Here's the perfect mug for your beloved logophile (lover of words, that is), exclusively available from the NeatoShop: Great Vocab Didn't Save the Thesaurus Mug

More fun items for academics, school-age kids, and overall smartypants:

Great Women Rulers of Science	Butt Station	Lamborghini Murcielago Wireless Mouse
App Magnets	Yummy Pocket Cookie - More Yummy Pockets	Etch A Sketch iPad Case

Link

What do you get when you combine a bird with a giraffe? The largest flying creatures that have ever existed on Earth:

With wingspans of 40 to 50 ft, the Azhdarchids were pterosaurs as big as some modern aircraft, with incredibly lop-sided bodies. Hugely long legs, beaks and necks adorned unusually small torsos with wings that were, surprisingly, proportionately short. It is thought that they were not able to hunt in flight, but needed to land and scrabble awkwardly for anything that they could swallow whole. Since one of these terrifying monsters stood as much as 20ft tall, it is easy to imagine that man might well have been a prey animal for them, had they lived alongside each other.

Environmental Graffiti has a feature of more less well known, but equally savage prehistoric predators: Link

We’ve featured the crazy cool creations of Jim’s Pancakes before on Neatorama, but this one takes the cake (or perhaps pancake): the 3D Dinosaur Bones Pancake. As usual, Jim’s daughter Allie approves: Link – via Great White Snark

Still using regular ice cubes? Don’t let your sense of party style go extinct! Add fun to your drinks and make ‘em the toast of the party with dinosaur fossil ice cubes.

The Fossiliced Ice Trays from the NeatoShop are a set of 2 ice trays (Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus Rex). They add the perfect prehistoric touch to modern day drinks: Link | More Fun Ice Trays | More Fun Party Supplies | More Fun Kitchen Stuff

Afraid of the dark? That’s no longer a problem with these awesome porcelain night lights over at the NeatoShop. I’m particularly drawn to the dinosaur night lights, but the entire selection is actually very neat: Link

Does your kid have messy hair? Make that a thing of the past with this fun Bonehead dinosaur folding comb and brush from the NeatoShop. There’s no better way to teach your young Neanderthals that unkempt hair deserves to be extinct: Link | More Fun Bath & Body Stuff

Residents of the quiet English seaside town of Southsea were startled when they discovered they had a new resident.  Towering over them at fifty feet and over seventy in length the reproduction of an Ultrasaurus (which was thought once to have existed but sadly was an archaeological blunder) promises to turn heads all summer.

She is the creation of artists Ivan and Heather Morrison and part of their current exhibition called An Unreachable Country: A Long Way To Go. But what kind of dinosaur is Luna Park? The answer is, she isn’t based on any in the fossil record.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

The oldest dinosaur fossil ever found dates back around 230 million years. But the fossils of around a dozen specimens of a new animal called Asilisaurus kongwe, or silesaur, found in Tanzania lead researchers to believe dinosaurs diverged from another evolutionary line around 243 million years ago.

“Back then it was a very large river system, maybe something like the Mississippi today,” said lead author and University of Texas at Austin paleontologist Sterling Nesbitt. During that time, Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India were all one giant continent called Gondwana.

Though silesaurs are very closely related to dinosaurs, they lack the open hip-sockets that are universal in dinosaurs. The Asilisaurus was a small, four-legged creatures with a long tail. Their beak-like jaws and leaf-shaped teeth helped the animals eat the soft, fibrous leaves of the primordial palms, ferns and conifers that were prevalent during the Triassic period. That suggests that, while the animal may not have been exclusively vegetarian, a good portion of its diet came from plants, he said.

The silesaur changes the conventional wisdom that the dinosaur’s closest relatives were predators. Link

When University of Michigan professor Jeffrey Wilson stumbled upon fossilized dinosaur eggs, he discovered something quite remarkable – a death scene best described as "Anaconda" meets "Jurassic Park":

"It was amazing," Wilson recalls, "because we realized that not only do we have an egg, not only do we have a chain of vertebrae, but they are arranged in a coil, and on top of the coil was a skull."

The snake was coiled around the broken eggshell. "Next to that coil, eggshell, skull, was a solid egg, and another solid egg, and then some larger bones," says Wilson.

Those bones belonged to a baby sauropod. Full-grown sauropods were the vegetarian 100-ton giants of the dinosaur world. But the baby was only about a foot-and-a-half long. It had apparently just hatched from that broken egg. The snake, about 11 feet long, had been waiting for the baby to hatch in order to eat it.

Link

This clever "Disappearing Civil Liberties" mug features the complete text of the Bill of Rights that disappear (thanks to the Patriot Act) as you add hot beverage. From the Neatorama Shop: Link

More disappearing mugs:

Global Warming Mug	Disappearing Dino Mug	DisappEARing Van Gogh

If you think that dinosaurs looked like giant lizards, you’d be forgiven as that has been the depiction in stories, movies, and even in school textbooks. Scientists, however, have recently reached a different conclusion: dinos actually looked like giant chickens!

The subject of the new study—the 155-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi—turns out to have looked something like a woodpecker the size of a chicken, with black-and-white spangled wings and a rusty red crown [...]

The color patterns on Anchiornis’s limbs are "quite similar to the silver-spangled Hamburg chicken, a domestic breed of ornamental chicken," said ornithologist Richard Prum of Yale University.

Link

Combine the imagination of a five-year-old with the talent of a professional comic artist and you get Axe Cop. Malachai Nicolle comes up with the stories and his 29-year-old brother Ethan Nicolle {wiki} draws them. The result is wonderful! Anyone who’s ever had, or ever been, a five-year-old storyteller will get a real kick out of this. Link

Ross Butter has a fine grasp of an odd idea. His explanation: “I got in touch with my inner child. He made me do this.” -via Buzzfeed

The Murphy Family home in Jupiter, Florida features a child’s bed shaped like a dinosaur mouth. Bonnie Murphy, a muralist, did the painting and her husband did the carpentry. Can you imagine anything more soothing?

Link via Geekologie | Photo: 3 Murphys

“These were big dinosaur versions of a Sherman tank,” Bill Parsons said. “They were armored and they withstood whatever came at them, and they just kept going.” T. cooneyorum was about 15 to 20 feet (4.5 to 6 meters) in length.

And this dinosaur had its share of protection, with two sets of stubby horns, one on the cheeks and the other around its eyes, two thick domes at the back of the skull and thickened areas around the nasal region.

Bill Parsons suspects T. cooneyorum was covered with hundreds or even thousands of bony plates equipped with spikes and a tail tipped with a club, similar to other ankylosaurs. Such protection, along with a swinging clubbed tail, would have kept at bay any of the small dinosaurs around at the time, Parsons said.

T. cooneyorum dates from around 112 million years ago. Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: Bill Parsons)

Fossils of flying reptiles come in two versions: the older long-tailed pterosaurs and the more recent short-tailed versions. The fossil gap between the two was a mystery until 20 skeletons of a new species were discovered early in 2009 in northeast China. The new pterosaur was named Darwinopterus in honor of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.

“Darwinopterus came as quite a shock to us,” explained David Unwin part of the research team and based at the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies. “We had always expected a gap-filler with typically intermediate features such as a moderately elongate tail – neither long nor short – but the strange thing about Darwinopterus is that it has a head and neck just like that of advanced pterosaurs, while the rest of the skeleton, including a very long tail, is identical to that of primitive forms”.

The discovery lends credence to the theory that evolution is not an even process, but contains periods of rapid evolution. Link -via Digg

(image credit: Mark Witton, University of Portsmouth)

The world’s oldest known dinosaur burrow, recently discovered on the southeast coast of Australia, suggests that some dinos went underground to escape extreme weather.

110 million years ago, when this burrow was dug, the southeastern coast of Australia was adjacent to Antarctica.

The burrow is strikingly similar to another one found in Montana in  2005, which held the remains of a 96-million-year-old dinosaur family.

Illustration by James Hays, Fernbank Museum, via National Geographic News

“Right now burrowing dinosaurs might look like an exception to the rule,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if more species [dug burrows]. Ten years from now it might be considered commonplace.”
–Emory University paleontologist Anthony Martin

Link – via news

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

Its skeleton, described in the current issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B, represents the most complete remains ever excavated of a therizinosaur, meaning “reaper lizard.” It is one of only three such dinosaurs ever found in North America.

Lead author Lindsay Zanno told Discovery News that therizinosaurs, including the new Utah species, “are unusual in that they have small heads with a keratinous beak at the front of the mouth — the same material as the beak of modern birds — and small leaf-shaped teeth.”

“Their bellies are proportionally enormous, supporting large guts,” added Zanno, who is a researcher in the Department of Geology at The Field Museum. “They have greatly enlarged claws on their hands, short legs and tails, and four-toed feet.”

The dinosaur’s anatomy suggests it ate both plants and animals. Link

(image credit: Victor Leshyk)

The meat-eating Banjo has been dubbed Australia’s answer to the feared Velociraptor.

“The cheetah of his time, Banjo was light and agile,” said Queensland Museum paleantologist Scott Hocknull, who is among the scientists being credited with the discoveries.

“He could run down most prey with ease over open ground. His most distinguishing feature was three large slashing claws on each hand. Unlike some theropods that have small arms (think T. rex), Banjo was different; his arms were a primary weapon.

“He’s Australia’s answer to velociraptor, but many times bigger and more terrifying.”

The bones will eventually go on display to the public. Link -via Fark

A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.

… Schweitzer took a look at the pristine leg bone of a plant-eating hadrosaur that had been encased in sandstone for 80 million years. She and colleagues exhaustively tested the sample, sequencing the proteins they found with a new and better mass spectrometer and sending samples to two other labs for verification.

Now they report recovering not just collagen – which conveys little evolutionary information because it is the same in almost all animals – but also haemoglobin, elastin and laminin, as well as cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells. The proteins should reveal more about dinosaur evolution because they vary much more between species.

This can’t possibly end well: Link

Link via OhGizmo

In 1976, Patricia Renick created this awesome sculpture of the dinosaur Triceratop out of real helicopter parts:

Completed in 1976 as the Vietnam war wound down, it serves largely as a plea for the extinction of military technology. 30 feet long, the fearsome sculpture combines life sized helicopter and Triceratops parts, featuring genuine blades and weapons. [...]

Triceracopter could be placed in multiple traditions. It is a form of social commentary on killing machines and an expression of hope for the end of warfare. There are many artists who are working with the idea of bio-mechanical forms, juxtapositions and transformations.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by JJA.

Alan Taylor of the Big Picture Blog over at Boston Globe has a(nother) neat post – this time of fantastic photos of Mike Hettwer of a dinosaur fossil excavation in the Sahara Desert:

About 9,000 years ago, a very wet climate prevailed in parts of the Sahara Desert called the Neolithic Subpluvial period. Lasting several thousand years, this Green Sahara was home to many grassland and woodland animals as well as humans. While on an expedition for dinosaur fossils with paleontologist Paul Sereno in Niger in 2000, Hettwer discovered a burial area containing hundreds of skeletons from two distinct cultures, each thousands of years old – the Kiffian and Tenerian. Also found in the dry and desolate site were hunting tools, pottery, and bones of large land animals and fish.

Link | Many more excellent photos at Mike’s website: Link