It feels we hardly ever talk about dinosaurs on here. My 5-year old self would be unhappy I’m not vigorously pursuing more knowledge about them.
Anyway, this bit of news caught my eye today.
This carnivore was 16 feet long and looks like it was quite the predator.
And this 23 foot bad boy was found in Uzbekistan recently. A 6+ ton meat eater!
That site was crashing my iPad, but I found a version of the Uzbecki fossil on Smithsonian, and it’s fascinating. That’s a big jawbone!
Hey, I have a dinosaur story!
A month or two ago, my wife, our 15 year old and I visited the Cranbrook Institute of Science. They have an entire T. Rex skeleton right near the entrance. The signage at the T. Rex display asked the question “predator or scavenger?”. According to the display info, some paleontologists think that T. Rex was just a scavenger, due to its small arms, its sheer size making it questionable how fast it could run, and the size devoted to its olfactory cavity making it clear it had a powerful sense of smell, possibly for smelling rotting carrion at a distance. Which is of course a very disappointing idea to our inner 5 year old.
In another part of the museum a young college student paleontologist was set up at a table display with some dinosaur bones, including a duck-billed dino skull and some T. Rex teeth. We spoke with him for awhile, asking I think some good questions, and he seemed to enjoy being engaged and being able to share his knowledge. So I asked the question “T. Rex: predator or scavenger?” And he said “ah!” (I think he actually raised a finger) and he said that in the early 90s (I think), an herbivorous dino skeleton was found with a T. Rex tooth embedded in one of its bones, and it had healed over. So proof positive that a T. Rex hunted live prey that got away! I should have informed Cranbrook they need to update their signage 
Interesting!
Well, to be fair, Prehistoric Creature’s Day doesn’t come around all that often.
So it was Prehistoric Creatures Day on the day I was born!
I used to try posting interesting paleontology news here, but jer-- um, people complained to the moderators that I was posting links to articles without providing a sufficiently long essay on why the story is important enough for them to read and getting my posts locked. Your post has a similar amount of descripitve material to mine, so you might have similar problems from the hall monitors who want to keep the number of threads here to a bare minimum. (You may also get complaints that your title isn’t good enough.)
The mods can change the title if they want, but I reckon it’s descriptive enough for MPSIMS. I figure this thread could be a repository for dino news, facts and thoughts without people having to create constant new threads that might get minimal interaction.
As an adult, I find I have little appetite for learning more about dinosaurs. I had certain conceptions of dinosaurs from childhood, and now I keep hearing new information that conflicts with that.
Many dinosaurs had feathers. T. rex was a slow scavenger (or a fast predator again). The Brontosaurus is actually an Apatosaurus, or did that change again? Triceratops and Torosaurus are the same thing, with the Torosaurus being adults, and I’m not sure which genus name we should be using. Or did that idea get ditched?
I’ll just acknowledge that much of what I learned about dinosaurs in childhood is likely wrong, and leave it as a kind of fantasy.
I posted this link in another thread some time ago. Fascinating if controversial account of a discovery that purports to shed much more light on the KT impact (Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction) that wiped out the dinosaurs and, among other things, eventually allowed humans to evolve. It’s mind-boggling to realize that dinosaurs successfully thrived on this earth for some 165 million years, while homo sapiens and our immediate ancestors have been around for barely a few hundred thousand years. Dinosaurs were not just impressively huge, they were destined to be the true inheritors of this planet, but for an extraordinary freak cosmic accident.
Yes, that possibility is fascinating, I agree. But there are also hypothesis that the dinosaurs were annihilated by the asteroid because they were in a long term decline, others say terminal decline, because of vulcanism, climatic change, or even mosquitos! I think it is fascinating that we still don’t know for sure and I find it inspiring that so many paleontologes keep on investigating.
Apart from the dinosaurs there are also the pterosaurs, which are a different group, who I find particularly awe inspiring. They were on a strange path when the asteroid struck: there were fewer and fewer species (or we have not yet found them, as their bones were extremely light and fossilize badly), but those species were bigger and bigger. Meet the azhdarchidae! If those don’t freak you out I don’t know what will.
Ah, yes: and the nyctosaurus.
Dinosaurs were big and impressive, but there were other far more interesting things back then. Like trilobites. Some day, sit down and read Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness while keeping the original earth terra-formers in mind. Some of the predators look like they live in nightmares. This Boedaspis is amazing.
When I come across inexpensive but easily identifiable fossils I like to buy some to give to children. It never fails to impress and won’t really matter if/when the small object gets lost or traded away.
Don’t you know that dinosaurs are blasphemous?
It’s only mind-boggling if you compare an entire superclass to a single genus. Dinosaurs vs. synapsids isn’t nearly as great a disparity.
Oh, and you know that there are still living dinosaurs around, right? Sure, most of them died in the K-T event, but then, most of everything died in that event.
But no pterosaurs! 
And no trilobites or ammonites (and, and, and…) either.
Could I interest you in a nice horseshoe crab?
The ones with the weird blood they use for medicines? Sure! Gimme links!
Yes, but they’re all pathetic wusses! 
With the possible exception of the cassowary.
OK, I’ll grant the Casuarius at least a modicum of respect. The largest can be taller than a human, and they sport a dagger-like claw on each foot that can be up to five inches long – very much like the claw that scared the bejeesus out of a group of kids when Sam Neill waved it around in Jurassic Park. And they have a hollow thing on top of their heads called a “casque” that is very reminiscent of dinosaurs. Respect! But as for the rest of modern-day “dinosaurs” – meh. Just ask a cat how much he fears them.
From the article:
“We’re fed up with everybody acting like the people of Tucson are imbeciles and we want to help,” a spokesperson for the group said. “Having a big dinosaur outside a cultural hub like McDonald’s makes Tucsonians look like they’re mentally deficient and that isn’t right.”
Fair enough. It’s obvious that if dinosaurs ever really existed, they would have to have co-existed with humans, as proven by the screenshot below from a renowned documentary on the subject. Stop trying to make the people of Tucson out to be imbeciles!
