Baby Killer: hunting behaviour of theropods

Pterosaur head crests

Everything people ask me about dinosaurs they learned from Jurassic Park

Box heads
Have an ankylosaur skull. Euoplocephalus apparently (I would not claim to know much about ankylosaurs so I’m going with what it said on the sign). You want *more* than this? OK, well ankylosaurs are actually quite interesting but in their own way they rather suffer from the same problem as pterosaurs. That is that their taxonomy is rather problematic since a lot of the characters

Guest Post: your Thanksgiving / Christmas theropod
Today’s post comes courtesy of Tom Holtz. Obviously being British, Thanksgiving passes me by at the best of times and living in China, I usually only register it when suddenly blogs and websites go very quiet for a few days. However we do usually revel in the Christmas turkey this is hardly an inappropriate post on the theropod ancestry of turkeys. Thanksgiving is a great opportunity for a reminder of theropod anatomy. Of course, every roast bird offers this possibility, but since the number of people who are likely to encounter a turkey on Thanksgiving is very high, this time of year makes it easy for a vertebrate

Signs
I’ve been brushing up on a few museum and zoo reviews for posting and it occurs to me that often my biggest complaint with an exhibition is a lack of good signs. I’m not talking here about absolute basics (“This is a Brachiosaurus” – though even some places seem to eschew this minimalist approach) but pretty much anything more detailed than that – be it the age and geographical origin of the organism or a complete display about the phylogeny of the clade and it’s more interesting anatomical features. A great many places of supposed public interest and education seem to rathe

Lost to Science
I have commented on here before about the theft of various fossils (most notably dinosaurs) and their illegal export and sale. However it seems that for once the media has realised that actually selling tyrannosaurs at suction may not be a good thing and that the theft and illegal trade in scientific specimens is bad. I’m very pleased therefore to see this article in The Independent in the UK and I hope that this is not just a one-off and that other outlets pick up the story a

The Whirlpool of Life
So being eight hours out from the UK and 12 from the US east coast it’s perhaps no surprise that I missed (forgot) that yesterday was the anniversary day of the publication of the Origin. While I totally failed to celebrate, Scott Sampson did not and chose this rather auspicious day to launch his new blog – The Whirlpool of Life. Scott will be covering mainstream science education and communication as well as all aspects of nature and biology and not just palaeontology and the dinosaurs on which he usually works. Nip over there and take a look when you have five minutes.