When you’re trying to one-up your neighbor’s holiday decor, an authentic nativity scene on your front lawn is the least of your priorities. You want decorations that will have people driving for miles to see your home. Besides, who’s to say there wasn’t a glowing animated stegosaurus outside the stable that night in Bethlehem?
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Kids will believe anything so why not let them imagine and wonder and dream and believe in magic? We all have to become semi-responsible, half functioning adults some day so let kids be kids, right? Refe Tuma and his wife certainly think so. Every November, Refe and his wife try and convince their kids that their toy dinosaurs come to life at night while they sleep. It’s so fun.
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The most interesting room in the American Museum of Natural History is one you’ll never see. Its inhabitants are millions of years old, its proprietors among the brightest in their field. This is the big bone room, home to what is arguably the largest and most important collection of mammal bones in the world. And we got a first-hand look.
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There’s a reason that towering mammals the likes of King Kong are resigned to fiction. Our aching bones can only take so much weight before they start crumbling under the pressure. But if that’s the case, then why were dinosaurs able to reach such phenomenal heights? According to a new study, the answer isn’t so much about the bones themselves as it is the soft, squishy joints they lay between.
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An exciting thing happened in the world of dinosaur bones this week: News broke that a rare Diplodocus longus skeleton will go to the auction block next month. This must have thrilled everybody’s favorite beat jockey, Diplo, who took his name from the dinosaur.
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A team of scientists just made an exciting and very pop culture-friendly discovery in Montana: The first ever fossilized mosquito with a belly full of blood. This little guy’s been hanging out underground for 46 million years, and it’s a small miracle that it hung in there so long.
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See this cute little space dino, floating like it’s the most natural thing in the world? Well he was made by hand, with love, in orbit. And you can never have him because he belongs to Earth’s luckiest three-year-old boy. Aren’t you green with envy?
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In 2003 when a Cretaceous-era dinosaur adorned with long feathers was discovered in China, it sparked a debate as to if and how such a creature could fly. And to help resolve that debate, researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK put a scale model of the dino in a wind tunnel to see just how bird-like the microraptor really was.
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The giant mammal bones on display at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History are impressive approximations of creatures that once walked the earth (and in some cases, those that still do). But equally if not more amazing? How those displays were actually assembled.
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Fossils are three-dimensional objects, but you aren’t really supposed to touch them, and you can’t see their depth and detail very easily over the internet. But a new database of fossils from the British Geological Survey actually has the necessary files for you to 3D print fossils yourself.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
