Yes, unfortunately the Velociraptor mongoliensis is more like a very aggressive roadrunner than a man-eating murder machine. But those aren’t the ‘raptors from the movies. The “velociraptors” of Jurassic Park fame are actually Deinonychus, a (slightly) taller, equally roadrunnerish combination of tail and sickle-shaped toe claw. D-nikes (I made that name up) were not huge, but that claw could easily split you open like a bag of spaghetti. There’s no real confirmation that they were “clever girls” or hunted in packs, and the insistence of JP’s directors on not adding feathers to these almost-certainly feathered death-chickens is kind of like a claw-toed slap in the face to paleontology. Just like the great T. rex (which we talked about last week), our image of these dinos changes with new science, and will continue to change. Our fiction needs to change with them. Edit: Several people have noted that Utahraptor is a close match in size to the movie ‘raptors (a death-ostrich, if you will), but that’s a lucky coincidence since it wasn’t discovered until after Jurassic Park was released (or at least close enough that they weren’t willing to change the movie). (Dino images via Colin Douglas Howell on Wikipedia)
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Yes, unfortunately the Velociraptor mongoliensis is more like a very aggressive roadrunner than a man-eating murder machine. But those aren’t the ‘raptors from the movies. The “velociraptors” of Jurassic Park fame are actually Deinonychus, a (slightly) taller, equally roadrunnerish combination of tail and sickle-shaped toe claw. D-nikes (I made that name up) were not huge, but that claw could easily split you open like a bag of spaghetti. There’s no real confirmation that they were “clever girls” or hunted in packs, and the insistence of JP’s directors on not adding feathers to these almost-certainly feathered death-chickens is kind of like a claw-toed slap in the face to paleontology. Just like the great T. rex (which we talked about last week), our image of these dinos changes with new science, and will continue to change. Our fiction needs to change with them. Edit: Several people have noted that Utahraptor is a close match in size to the movie ‘raptors (a death-ostrich, if you will), but that’s a lucky coincidence since it wasn’t discovered until after Jurassic Park was released (or at least close enough that they weren’t willing to change the movie). (Dino images via Colin Douglas Howell on Wikipedia)
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Yes, unfortunately the Velociraptor mongoliensis is more like a very aggressive roadrunner than a man-eating murder machine. But those aren’t the ‘raptors from the movies. The “velociraptors” of Jurassic Park fame are actually Deinonychus, a (slightly) taller, equally roadrunnerish combination of tail and sickle-shaped toe claw. D-nikes (I made that name up) were not huge, but that claw could easily split you open like a bag of spaghetti. There’s no real confirmation that they were “clever girls” or hunted in packs, and the insistence of JP’s directors on not adding feathers to these almost-certainly feathered death-chickens is kind of like a claw-toed slap in the face to paleontology. Just like the great T. rex (which we talked about last week), our image of these dinos changes with new science, and will continue to change. Our fiction needs to change with them. Edit: Several people have noted that Utahraptor is a close match in size to the movie ‘raptors (a death-ostrich, if you will), but that’s a lucky coincidence since it wasn’t discovered until after Jurassic Park was released (or at least close enough that they weren’t willing to change the movie). (Dino images via Colin Douglas Howell on Wikipedia)
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Yes, unfortunately the Velociraptor mongoliensis is more like a very aggressive roadrunner than a man-eating murder machine. But those aren’t the ‘raptors from the movies.

The “velociraptors” of Jurassic Park fame are actually Deinonychus, a (slightly) taller, equally roadrunnerish combination of tail and sickle-shaped toe claw. D-nikes (I made that name up) were not huge, but that claw could easily split you open like a bag of spaghetti.

There’s no real confirmation that they were “clever girls” or hunted in packs, and the insistence of JP’s directors on not adding feathers to these almost-certainly feathered death-chickens is kind of like a claw-toed slap in the face to paleontology.

Just like the great T. rex (which we talked about last week), our image of these dinos changes with new science, and will continue to change. Our fiction needs to change with them.

Edit: Several people have noted that Utahraptor is a close match in size to the movie ‘raptors (a death-ostrich, if you will), but that’s a lucky coincidence since it wasn’t discovered until after Jurassic Park was released (or at least close enough that they weren’t willing to change the movie).

(Dino images via Colin Douglas Howell on Wikipedia)

If you enjoyed the last post about the changing shape of Tyrannosaurus rex and want to dig deeper (see what I did there?) into the awesome world of modern dinosaur science, there’s nobody better than Brian Switek. I just picked up his new book, My Beloved Brontosaurus (which never existed, btw … but that’s kind of the point). Check it out, and I would suggest making his blog a regular stop.
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If you enjoyed the last post about the changing shape of Tyrannosaurus rex and want to dig deeper (see what I did there?) into the awesome world of modern dinosaur science, there’s nobody better than Brian Switek.

I just picked up his new book, My Beloved Brontosaurus (which never existed, btw … but that’s kind of the point). Check it out, and I would suggest making his blog a regular stop.

The Evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex The terrible lizards of your childhood have changed quite a bit, despite having been dead for millions of years. Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in ol’ Sharptooth: T. rex Many folks without strong paleontology backgrounds (which, let’s face it, includes most people … including me) don’t appreciate how little we really know for sure about these prehistoric forms. We go to a museum, we see a fossil reconstruction of an immense dinosaur, and we assume that’s how it came out of the ground. That’s not the case. While the Field Museum’s famous T. rex ”Sue” was 80% complete upon excavation, the first specimen ever constructed was done so with just a suitcase’s worth of bones. See the shaded regions in the upper left drawing? That’s the 108-year-old first reconstruction of T. rex done by W.D. Matthew. And it’s very wrong. Even into the 1940’s, when Rudolph Zallinger painted The Age of Reptiles mural (top right) for Yale’s Peabody Museum, T. rex was still a clumsy, chubby, upright tail-dragger that looked more like a drunk Godzilla than king of the dinosaurs. By the 1970’s it was clear to scientists that T. rex could not have have held its body that way, and instead moved holding its head and tail nearly parallel to the ground. But the tail-dragger myth persisted, and in 1988’s The Land Before Time (which, let’s face it, is where most of us first formed our images of dinosaurs) Sharptooth was frustratingly upright (see middle left). Combine that with the ridiculously impossible, ninja-like aerial assault on Littlefoot’s mom, and we have a real dino science stinker on our hands. Stan Winston’s Jurassic Park finally got the head-down pose right (middle right). Yet children and college students still overwhelmingly draw T. rex as upright. Modern paleoartists (like Raul Martin, lower left) get it consistently right, but the public doesn’t. It shows you just how important it is to deliver good science to kids, because even today I can feel the upright pose of my T. rex dinobot calling me back to wrongville. And as we continue to learn more about Tyrannosaur relatives and the feathery frills they sported, we are beginning to see many artists add them to the great hunter (lower right, by pheaston). Plumage rarely shows up in fossils, and scientists and artists have to be careful not to make errors of incompleteness like we saw 108 years ago. But considering how good Velociraptor looks with that fancy outfit on, I think we’ll see more and more feathery fury on T. rex in the future. At least none of YOU will ever draw it incorrectly again, right? :) For more cool dino illustration, check out Fuck Yeah Dino Art.
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The Evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex The terrible lizards of your childhood have changed quite a bit, despite having been dead for millions of years. Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in ol’ Sharptooth: T. rex Many folks without strong paleontology backgrounds (which, let’s face it, includes most people … including me) don’t appreciate how little we really know for sure about these prehistoric forms. We go to a museum, we see a fossil reconstruction of an immense dinosaur, and we assume that’s how it came out of the ground. That’s not the case. While the Field Museum’s famous T. rex ”Sue” was 80% complete upon excavation, the first specimen ever constructed was done so with just a suitcase’s worth of bones. See the shaded regions in the upper left drawing? That’s the 108-year-old first reconstruction of T. rex done by W.D. Matthew. And it’s very wrong. Even into the 1940’s, when Rudolph Zallinger painted The Age of Reptiles mural (top right) for Yale’s Peabody Museum, T. rex was still a clumsy, chubby, upright tail-dragger that looked more like a drunk Godzilla than king of the dinosaurs. By the 1970’s it was clear to scientists that T. rex could not have have held its body that way, and instead moved holding its head and tail nearly parallel to the ground. But the tail-dragger myth persisted, and in 1988’s The Land Before Time (which, let’s face it, is where most of us first formed our images of dinosaurs) Sharptooth was frustratingly upright (see middle left). Combine that with the ridiculously impossible, ninja-like aerial assault on Littlefoot’s mom, and we have a real dino science stinker on our hands. Stan Winston’s Jurassic Park finally got the head-down pose right (middle right). Yet children and college students still overwhelmingly draw T. rex as upright. Modern paleoartists (like Raul Martin, lower left) get it consistently right, but the public doesn’t. It shows you just how important it is to deliver good science to kids, because even today I can feel the upright pose of my T. rex dinobot calling me back to wrongville. And as we continue to learn more about Tyrannosaur relatives and the feathery frills they sported, we are beginning to see many artists add them to the great hunter (lower right, by pheaston). Plumage rarely shows up in fossils, and scientists and artists have to be careful not to make errors of incompleteness like we saw 108 years ago. But considering how good Velociraptor looks with that fancy outfit on, I think we’ll see more and more feathery fury on T. rex in the future. At least none of YOU will ever draw it incorrectly again, right? :) For more cool dino illustration, check out Fuck Yeah Dino Art.
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The Evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex The terrible lizards of your childhood have changed quite a bit, despite having been dead for millions of years. Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in ol’ Sharptooth: T. rex Many folks without strong paleontology backgrounds (which, let’s face it, includes most people … including me) don’t appreciate how little we really know for sure about these prehistoric forms. We go to a museum, we see a fossil reconstruction of an immense dinosaur, and we assume that’s how it came out of the ground. That’s not the case. While the Field Museum’s famous T. rex ”Sue” was 80% complete upon excavation, the first specimen ever constructed was done so with just a suitcase’s worth of bones. See the shaded regions in the upper left drawing? That’s the 108-year-old first reconstruction of T. rex done by W.D. Matthew. And it’s very wrong. Even into the 1940’s, when Rudolph Zallinger painted The Age of Reptiles mural (top right) for Yale’s Peabody Museum, T. rex was still a clumsy, chubby, upright tail-dragger that looked more like a drunk Godzilla than king of the dinosaurs. By the 1970’s it was clear to scientists that T. rex could not have have held its body that way, and instead moved holding its head and tail nearly parallel to the ground. But the tail-dragger myth persisted, and in 1988’s The Land Before Time (which, let’s face it, is where most of us first formed our images of dinosaurs) Sharptooth was frustratingly upright (see middle left). Combine that with the ridiculously impossible, ninja-like aerial assault on Littlefoot’s mom, and we have a real dino science stinker on our hands. Stan Winston’s Jurassic Park finally got the head-down pose right (middle right). Yet children and college students still overwhelmingly draw T. rex as upright. Modern paleoartists (like Raul Martin, lower left) get it consistently right, but the public doesn’t. It shows you just how important it is to deliver good science to kids, because even today I can feel the upright pose of my T. rex dinobot calling me back to wrongville. And as we continue to learn more about Tyrannosaur relatives and the feathery frills they sported, we are beginning to see many artists add them to the great hunter (lower right, by pheaston). Plumage rarely shows up in fossils, and scientists and artists have to be careful not to make errors of incompleteness like we saw 108 years ago. But considering how good Velociraptor looks with that fancy outfit on, I think we’ll see more and more feathery fury on T. rex in the future. At least none of YOU will ever draw it incorrectly again, right? :) For more cool dino illustration, check out Fuck Yeah Dino Art.
Zoom Info
The Evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex The terrible lizards of your childhood have changed quite a bit, despite having been dead for millions of years. Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in ol’ Sharptooth: T. rex Many folks without strong paleontology backgrounds (which, let’s face it, includes most people … including me) don’t appreciate how little we really know for sure about these prehistoric forms. We go to a museum, we see a fossil reconstruction of an immense dinosaur, and we assume that’s how it came out of the ground. That’s not the case. While the Field Museum’s famous T. rex ”Sue” was 80% complete upon excavation, the first specimen ever constructed was done so with just a suitcase’s worth of bones. See the shaded regions in the upper left drawing? That’s the 108-year-old first reconstruction of T. rex done by W.D. Matthew. And it’s very wrong. Even into the 1940’s, when Rudolph Zallinger painted The Age of Reptiles mural (top right) for Yale’s Peabody Museum, T. rex was still a clumsy, chubby, upright tail-dragger that looked more like a drunk Godzilla than king of the dinosaurs. By the 1970’s it was clear to scientists that T. rex could not have have held its body that way, and instead moved holding its head and tail nearly parallel to the ground. But the tail-dragger myth persisted, and in 1988’s The Land Before Time (which, let’s face it, is where most of us first formed our images of dinosaurs) Sharptooth was frustratingly upright (see middle left). Combine that with the ridiculously impossible, ninja-like aerial assault on Littlefoot’s mom, and we have a real dino science stinker on our hands. Stan Winston’s Jurassic Park finally got the head-down pose right (middle right). Yet children and college students still overwhelmingly draw T. rex as upright. Modern paleoartists (like Raul Martin, lower left) get it consistently right, but the public doesn’t. It shows you just how important it is to deliver good science to kids, because even today I can feel the upright pose of my T. rex dinobot calling me back to wrongville. And as we continue to learn more about Tyrannosaur relatives and the feathery frills they sported, we are beginning to see many artists add them to the great hunter (lower right, by pheaston). Plumage rarely shows up in fossils, and scientists and artists have to be careful not to make errors of incompleteness like we saw 108 years ago. But considering how good Velociraptor looks with that fancy outfit on, I think we’ll see more and more feathery fury on T. rex in the future. At least none of YOU will ever draw it incorrectly again, right? :) For more cool dino illustration, check out Fuck Yeah Dino Art.
Zoom Info

The Evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex

The terrible lizards of your childhood have changed quite a bit, despite having been dead for millions of years. Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in ol’ Sharptooth: T. rex

Many folks without strong paleontology backgrounds (which, let’s face it, includes most people … including me) don’t appreciate how little we really know for sure about these prehistoric forms. We go to a museum, we see a fossil reconstruction of an immense dinosaur, and we assume that’s how it came out of the ground. That’s not the case.

While the Field Museum’s famous T. rex ”Sue” was 80% complete upon excavation, the first specimen ever constructed was done so with just a suitcase’s worth of bones. See the shaded regions in the upper left drawing? That’s the 108-year-old first reconstruction of T. rex done by W.D. Matthew. And it’s very wrong.

Even into the 1940’s, when Rudolph Zallinger painted The Age of Reptiles mural (top right) for Yale’s Peabody Museum, T. rex was still a clumsy, chubby, upright tail-dragger that looked more like a drunk Godzilla than king of the dinosaurs. By the 1970’s it was clear to scientists that T. rex could not have have held its body that way, and instead moved holding its head and tail nearly parallel to the ground.

But the tail-dragger myth persisted, and in 1988’s The Land Before Time (which, let’s face it, is where most of us first formed our images of dinosaurs) Sharptooth was frustratingly upright (see middle left). Combine that with the ridiculously impossible, ninja-like aerial assault on Littlefoot’s mom, and we have a real dino science stinker on our hands. Stan Winston’s Jurassic Park finally got the head-down pose right (middle right). Yet children and college students still overwhelmingly draw T. rex as upright.

Modern paleoartists (like Raul Martin, lower left) get it consistently right, but the public doesn’t. It shows you just how important it is to deliver good science to kids, because even today I can feel the upright pose of my T. rex dinobot calling me back to wrongville.

And as we continue to learn more about Tyrannosaur relatives and the feathery frills they sported, we are beginning to see many artists add them to the great hunter (lower right, by pheaston). Plumage rarely shows up in fossils, and scientists and artists have to be careful not to make errors of incompleteness like we saw 108 years ago. But considering how good Velociraptor looks with that fancy outfit on, I think we’ll see more and more feathery fury on T. rex in the future.

At least none of YOU will ever draw it incorrectly again, right? :)

For more cool dino illustration, check out Fuck Yeah Dino Art.

How did feathers evolve?

Carl Zimmer, an elegant peacock among science writers, delivers this lesson on where bird feathers came from. The shared anatomy between dinosaurs and birds extends beyond the wishbone to their equally functional and extravagant plumage. Recent fossil finds give us hints about the colors and forms that adorned some prehistoric reptiles, from frilly crests to fuzzy proto-wings.

Dinosaurs didn’t take to the air for tens of millions of years after the first feathers showed up, and we don’t yet know exactly how that happened. But we know that the evolution of these delicate, beautiful and functional forms carried some dinosaurs aloft to a higher branch on the tree of life, and from that branch lept the first bird.

(view the full lesson at TED-Ed)

Source: ed.ted.com

How do we know that dinosaurs RAWR-ed? That is far from a silly question! I mean, how DO we really know? That’s the hardest part of studying a long-extinct group of animals like dinosaurs: None of us were around when they were around. When we see dinos in the movies, they always come complete with fearsome roars. From the jerky rubber lizards of the 1940’s to the blood-curdling thunderclap of the T. rex in Jurassic Park, where there’s a saur, there’s a rawr. But those movie roars are created by sound engineers from a mixture of modern sounds. The T. rex shriek in Jurassic Park is actually a mix of the calls from a baby elephant, a tiger and an alligator. The problem is that the anatomy that animals use to make sounds doesn’t fossilize. Soft tissues like vocal chords and resonating throat sacs don’t last the way bones do. So we have to play dino detective, using a combination of structures that do fossilize and studying reptilian relatives that exist today. Crocodilian reptiless and birds, two modern evolutionary cousins of dinosaurs, use soft tissues to make noises. The deep groaning vibrations used by crocodiles and reptiles come from the larynx. Much like in our own vocal chords, air from the lungs vibrates folds of tissue to create rather intimidating vibrations that sound like this. Birds, on the other hand … or wing … use a structure called the syrinx, which is close to a larynx but probably evolved independently. That means that roars and rooster calls could have a different evolutionary origin. One, both or neither of those structures may have existed in various families of dinosaurs. But that’s not the only way dinos made noise. You’ve probably seen this fossil before in a childhood dinosaur book, a hadrosaur: That large crest on top of the duck-billed head is hollow, like our sinuses. Many paleontologists think that hadrosaurs could have used them as resonating sound chambers to communicate over long distances, like a built-in didgeridoo used to warn of danger. These otherwise average herbivorous dinos, called the “cows of the Cretaceous”, roamed in huge herds (numbering into the thousands), and these sound chambers may have helped them communicate when predators were near. Of course, we also know that dinosaurs had ears of some kind. Evolution wouldn’t have kept them if they weren’t useful (it’s not quite that simple, actually, but go with me here), and studying those fossilized skull structures may give clues as to what they heard. While we can be sure that they didn’t sound like they do in the movies, the precise nature of Cretaceous cacophony and Triassic tumult may forever remain a mystery. But I’m confident there would have been plenty to hear in the Age of the Dinosaurs.
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How do we know that dinosaurs RAWR-ed?

That is far from a silly question! I mean, how DO we really know? That’s the hardest part of studying a long-extinct group of animals like dinosaurs: None of us were around when they were around.

When we see dinos in the movies, they always come complete with fearsome roars. From the jerky rubber lizards of the 1940’s to the blood-curdling thunderclap of the T. rex in Jurassic Park, where there’s a saur, there’s a rawr. But those movie roars are created by sound engineers from a mixture of modern sounds. The T. rex shriek in Jurassic Park is actually a mix of the calls from a baby elephant, a tiger and an alligator.

The problem is that the anatomy that animals use to make sounds doesn’t fossilize. Soft tissues like vocal chords and resonating throat sacs don’t last the way bones do. So we have to play dino detective, using a combination of structures that do fossilize and studying reptilian relatives that exist today.

Crocodilian reptiless and birds, two modern evolutionary cousins of dinosaurs, use soft tissues to make noises. The deep groaning vibrations used by crocodiles and reptiles come from the larynx. Much like in our own vocal chords, air from the lungs vibrates folds of tissue to create rather intimidating vibrations that sound like this. Birds, on the other hand … or wing … use a structure called the syrinx, which is close to a larynx but probably evolved independently. That means that roars and rooster calls could have a different evolutionary origin. One, both or neither of those structures may have existed in various families of dinosaurs.

But that’s not the only way dinos made noise. You’ve probably seen this fossil before in a childhood dinosaur book, a hadrosaur:

That large crest on top of the duck-billed head is hollow, like our sinuses. Many paleontologists think that hadrosaurs could have used them as resonating sound chambers to communicate over long distances, like a built-in didgeridoo used to warn of danger. These otherwise average herbivorous dinos, called the “cows of the Cretaceous”, roamed in huge herds (numbering into the thousands), and these sound chambers may have helped them communicate when predators were near.

Of course, we also know that dinosaurs had ears of some kind. Evolution wouldn’t have kept them if they weren’t useful (it’s not quite that simple, actually, but go with me here), and studying those fossilized skull structures may give clues as to what they heard. While we can be sure that they didn’t sound like they do in the movies, the precise nature of Cretaceous cacophony and Triassic tumult may forever remain a mystery. But I’m confident there would have been plenty to hear in the Age of the Dinosaurs.

10 Dinosaur Myths That Need To Go Extinct

Brian Switek, science writer and distant cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex, loves his dinos. But when people perpetuate myths about the great lizards of yesteryear, Brian gets very angry. And like T. rex, you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

Or maybe I’m thinking of The Hulk. You get the point.

Check out his list of 10 dinosaur myths that need to go extinct and learn something today!

 Buzzsaw Jaw If you dug up a fossil that looked like a circular saw blade made of teeth, you’d be forgiven for being a little confused. Was it some sort of toothy nautilus? A relic of a dinosaur’s carpentry shop? When Helicoprion (meaning “spiral saw”) was first discovered in 1899, its whorl of teeth was one of the few things identified. Even though there were few skeletal clues, it was quickly decided that these teeth were from a cartilaginous fish. But where did these “teeth” fit in? On the body? Some freaky mouth appendage? Over a century of confusion followed, but recent work using X-ray analysis of fossil specimens has all but confirmed that this fish used a spiral-fed whorl of teeth, constantly regrowing as today’s sharks do, to catch soft prey like squid, 270 million years ago. It’s actually not a shark at all, but a ratfish, a branch of cartilage-skeletoned fish that branched from sharks in prehistoric times. Check out more great analysis by Brian Switek at Laelaps. He also features even more great art by Ray Troll, a Helicoprion aficionado who did the image at top.
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 Buzzsaw Jaw

If you dug up a fossil that looked like a circular saw blade made of teeth, you’d be forgiven for being a little confused. Was it some sort of toothy nautilus? A relic of a dinosaur’s carpentry shop?

When Helicoprion (meaning “spiral saw”) was first discovered in 1899, its whorl of teeth was one of the few things identified. Even though there were few skeletal clues, it was quickly decided that these teeth were from a cartilaginous fish. But where did these “teeth” fit in? On the body? Some freaky mouth appendage?

Over a century of confusion followed, but recent work using X-ray analysis of fossil specimens has all but confirmed that this fish used a spiral-fed whorl of teeth, constantly regrowing as today’s sharks do, to catch soft prey like squid, 270 million years ago. It’s actually not a shark at all, but a ratfish, a branch of cartilage-skeletoned fish that branched from sharks in prehistoric times.

Check out more great analysis by Brian Switek at Laelaps. He also features even more great art by Ray Troll, a Helicoprion aficionado who did the image at top.

Source: National Geographic

Dinosaurs vs. People Just stumbled upon a fantastic gallery on WIkipedia of illustrated size comparisons between humans and dinosaurs. So many tiny dino-chickens! Check them all out here. Lots of them look like the blue waving guy is about to get chomped Jurassic Park “lawyer in the bathroom” style, but that’s probably pretty accurate. (via Kyle Hill)
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Dinosaurs vs. People Just stumbled upon a fantastic gallery on WIkipedia of illustrated size comparisons between humans and dinosaurs. So many tiny dino-chickens! Check them all out here. Lots of them look like the blue waving guy is about to get chomped Jurassic Park “lawyer in the bathroom” style, but that’s probably pretty accurate. (via Kyle Hill)
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Dinosaurs vs. People Just stumbled upon a fantastic gallery on WIkipedia of illustrated size comparisons between humans and dinosaurs. So many tiny dino-chickens! Check them all out here. Lots of them look like the blue waving guy is about to get chomped Jurassic Park “lawyer in the bathroom” style, but that’s probably pretty accurate. (via Kyle Hill)
Zoom Info

Dinosaurs vs. People

Just stumbled upon a fantastic gallery on WIkipedia of illustrated size comparisons between humans and dinosaurs. So many tiny dino-chickens!

Check them all out here. Lots of them look like the blue waving guy is about to get chomped Jurassic Park “lawyer in the bathroom” style, but that’s probably pretty accurate.

(via Kyle Hill)

Map of the supercontinent Pangaea in the Triassic period, when “first appeared beasties of fur and feather”. The Tethys Ocean looks like it would have had nice beaches to lounge around on, hunting for nautilus shells, sipping Diño Coladas. (by Richard Morden on Redbubble, available as a poster there if you’d like one!)
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Map of the supercontinent Pangaea in the Triassic period, when “first appeared beasties of fur and feather”.

The Tethys Ocean looks like it would have had nice beaches to lounge around on, hunting for nautilus shells, sipping Diño Coladas.

(by Richard Morden on Redbubble, available as a poster there if you’d like one!)

Source: redbubble.com

thekidshouldseethis:

Our Story in 1 Minute:

A tapestry of footage tracing the cosmic and biological origins of our species, set to original music. 

So so, so many related videos to dive further into these quick clips from MelodySheep. From the archives: the Big Bang, the moon, atoms, evolution, dinosaurs, nature, animals, culture, architecture, technology and space.

via @mamagotcha.

If you missed this mind-blowing video over the weekend, do check it out, and check out the related videos above. It grabs you by the brain and the heart at the same time, and just reminds you how awesome the story of us really is.