dinosaur comics.

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=779

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1543

PSITTACOSAURUS (parrot reptile)

i had never heard of this dinosaur before today.
my good friend, LaurenP, gave me a huge book about dinos 2 weeks ago whilst i was home sick, unable to get off the couch.
i have read about a different dinosaur every couple of days since then and today i got to page 35:

~had a parrot-like beak.

~had no teeth.

~distant relative of the triceratops.

~ate stones to help themselves digest food.

~herbivore

~could walk on 2 or 4 legs

~stood approximately 4 ft tall

thanks to LaurenP for the hot truth!

prehistoric shark

5.3 feet long
16.5 lbs

it's real.
this photo was taken at the Awashima Marine Park
in Japan back in 2007. Some fishermen brought her in the marine park
and, although it only lived for a couple of hours, they got some pictures and a crazy video of it.
this creature dates back 50 million years.

dinosaur, colorado

in 1909, a palaeontologist named earl douglass found dinosaur bone beds in what is now know as dinosaur national monument.

as you can see from this photo, amazing discoveries such as whole vertebrae were found at this location.
dinosaur, colorado was originally called artesia, but the name of the town was changed in 1966 because of its' proximity to dinosaur national monument.



this is just another reason for people to go see the four corners.

self-explanitory

a magical liopleurodon

first things first.... if you haven't witnessed the pure epic-ocity of the charlie the unicorn series, here's the link to the first one:

http://www.filmcow.com/flash-charlietheunicorn.html

thank you, filmcow.

in this amazing animated short, we learn that the liopleurodon is a land based creature with huge flippers who's will "guide our way to candy mountain".
I'm here today to let you in on an unspoken truth...... this is not factual.

to begin with, liopleurodon was a marine reptile in the middle jurassic period.

as far as scientific classification goes, it's in the order of plesiosauria and the class of reptilia.

This is an outline of it's awesome skull.
click on the image to go to the plesiosaur directory.


something i like to think about is this: no one knows how big these guys got. estimations are between 7 and 11 metres... or 23 - 38 feet!!

so, what i'm trying to say is that the ogopogo is probably real.

Hesperonychus

my friend land recently sent me some intriguing information about a newly discovered carnivorous dino.
it's name was hesperonychus and it was the size of a domestic cat.
actually, it is, to date, the smallest known dinosaur from north america!
it was fierce, vicious and roamed alberta (of all places).

for the whole article, go here:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/090316/science/science_tiny_dinosaur_1

the stamp issue

in the year 1989, the united states postal service decided to make 60 million dinosaur stamps. good idea, right?

the four "dinosaurs" chosen for the stamp collection were: tyrannosaurus, stegosaurus, pteradon, and brontosaurus. ok, there are clearly 2 inaccuracies here; pteranodon is misspelled (and is actually a pterosaur, not a dinosaur) and, of course, the brontosaurus.

so, 2 of the 4 weren't even dinosaurs.

well, the scientific community was irate! the postal service was repeatedly accused of "fostering scientific illiteracy" and all hell broke loose.

if anyone out there has their dirty mitts on one of these bad boys, hook me up.

it's time for people to know the truth

here's the concise version, as most of my friends have a short attention span:

in the year 1877, a paleontologist by the name of Othniel Charles Marsh published the name apatasaurus. in 1879, the very same man published the name brontosaurus. in 1903, a man named Elmer Riggs came along and noted that the two were so similar, they were actually in the same genus! the older of the two names holds priority (as per the {ICZM} International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature).
Mike Taylor, a paleobiologist from the UK, states that "the world continued and continues to use "Brontosaurus''; but Apatosaurus should be used in all serious writing."

the proof is in the pudding! but if you're lactose intolerant, go here:

http://www.iczn.org/Palaeontology.htm