Mastodawn

MirrorMirror Feb 28

Fossil Pokemon vs. Paleontologist! Could Aurorus be real?

https://peertube.gravitywell.xyz/w/scQ6dx3M55C92z3Dc5oUyi

Fossil Pokemon vs. Paleontologist! Could Aurorus be real?

PeerTube

Benjamin Carr, Ph.D. 👨🏻‍💻🧬Dec 29

This bright orange life-form could point to new #dino discoveries
The reflected infrared light of bone-loving #lichen can be detected by #drones
“Rather than finding new sites serendipitously, this approach can help paleontologists to locate new areas that are likely to have #fossils at the surface and then go there to investigate,” says #paleontologist Brian Pickles at the University of Reading in England.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lichen-dinosaur-fossils
https://archive.ph/n32xa
#Dinosaurs

This bright orange life-form could point to new dino discoveries

Colorful lichen living on dinosaur bones reflect infrared light that can be detected by drones, which might lead to finds in remote areas.

Science News

Steve Dustcircle 🌹Dec 6

Tiny #Humans Are Hiding in #Indonesia, a #Paleontologist Claims. That Could Rewrite the #History of Our #Species.

Tiny Humans Are Hiding in Indonesia, a Paleontologist Claims. That Could Rewrite the History of Our Species.

Finding a supposedly extinct form of human living today would be “extraordinary,” and would change our family tree. This is the truth about Homo floresiensis.

Popular Mechanics

knizer Sep 5, 2025

#paleontology fedi: I’m putting together a playlist of Dino-adjacent songs suitable for adults, featuring lyrics relevant to the field. There’s some obvious choices (tmbg, walk the dinosaur, Jonathan Richman), but I’m looking for gems like the #Dinosaur Holiday album- where some #museum staff or grad student went all in and recorded a song you’d choose to listen to (and not, say, less than inspired efforts marketed to children). Did someone in your department defend their #paleobotany thesis in musical form? Did your parasocial pal post to SoundCloud their diss track about the Jurassic Park franchise, and you put it on mixes? I wanna hear it, especially if it is danceable/funky. No AI slop, please. https://museummusic.com/dinosaurholiday.aspx #dinosaurs #paleontologist #prehistory #jurassic #jurassicpark #dino #mezozoic #science #nature

DINOSAUR HOLIDAY!

Museum Music Website

Daniel Dvorkin Sep 5, 2025

This subject comes up fairly often, so I'm putting my mini-essay here as an easy reference. Feel free to share, or copy and paste with attribution, as you see fit. Comments, suggestions, and corrections are welcome. 🦖 🧪 🚀 ✍️

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Michael Crichton's main reference when writing #JurassicPark was Gregory Paul's Predatory #Dinosaurs of the World. That's how we ended up with human size "velociraptors," later retconned to the considerably larger #Utahraptor. Although the poor creatures still have broken wrists and a severe case of mange.

Paul is a notorious #lumper, who likes shoving distantly related organisms into the same #taxonomic category. (The opposite of lumpers are #splitters, who try to put every specimen into as distinct a category as possible.) But even he never claimed they were the same species. Rather, he put them into the same genus, making #Deinonychus into another species of #Velociraptor, i.e. V. antirrhopus instead of D. antirrhopus.

This isn't entirely a crazy idea. Lots of modern genera have species with similar body plans but enormous size differences. Consider #Panthera, the big cats, which contains species from P. uncia, the #snowleopard, to P. tigris, the #tiger—even though tigers are generally about five times the mass of snow leopards, similar to the ratio between D. antirrhopus and V. mongoliensis.

However, there are enough other differences between Deinonychus and Velociraptor that even Paul has long since admitted this was a mistake. No #paleontologist now doubts they each belong in their own genus. Unfortunately, since Jurassic Park has so thoroughly cemented the idea of the big V, I doubt it will ever go away.