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Minecraft fashion lineup

(I drew this before the copper update and had to go back and shove copper in there-)

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looking at cape canaveral on wplace makes me so happy

yay!! so many others love astronauts too

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1200 megapixel

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Remembering Jim Lovell, NASA astronaut and commander of Apollo 13, who died August 7, 2025, at the age of 97. May his memory be a blessing 💙

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i think if you have a crush on someone that isnt into you the same way you should be able to throw up horrible black goo for about 10 minutes to make the crush go away

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understanding taxonomy is so funny to me, cause now i see this and go

ah yes, two reptiles

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I'm longisquama

I'm drepanosaurus

I'm Mirasaura

And we are

(source)

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Back in 1939, fossil collector Louis Grauvogel discovered a couple of reptile fossils in Middle Triassic-aged deposits (~247 million years old) in eastern France. A large preserved structure was noted above the animal's back, but for many years it was interpreted as an unrelated fish fin, insect wing, or plant frond.

It was only when the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart acquired the specimens in 2019 that they were recognized as representing something very special: a long-sought-after relative of the bizarre and enigmatic Longisquama!

Mirasaura grauvogeli grew to around 30cm long (~1') and was, if anything, even stranger than its relative. It had humped shoulders, grasping limbs, and a bird-like head with large forward-facing eyes and a long pointed snout that was toothless at the front, probably used to probe for small invertebrates in cracks and crevices.

But most strikingly it had up to 20 tall structures overlapping along its back to form a sail-like crest. Although they were superficially feather-like in shape with preserved melanosomes that resemble those of birds, structurally they weren't feathers at all – but they also weren't modified scales. Instead these appear to have been an entirely novel type of skin appendage, made up of continuous sheets with a midline shaft and a corrugated texture.

The crest was probably used for visual display, and 80 additional fossils of isolated crest structures suggest they were regularly shed and regrown.

Along with Longisquama, Mirasaura appears to have been an early member of the drepanosaur lineage – a group of wonderfully weird tamandua-like reptiles whose evolutionary relationships are still disputed, with different studies currently recovering them as either a unique early offshoot of the diapsids or as archosauromorphs.

(Interestingly, a specimen of Drepanosaurus reportedly preserves some soft tissue on its back that may also be one of these strange new crest structures. Drepanosaurs just keep on getting weirder and weirder and I love them.)

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References:

Renesto, Silvo, et al. The taxonomy and paleobiology of the Late Triassic (Carnian-Norian: Adamanian-Apachean) drepnosaurs (Diapsida: Archosauromorpha: Drepanosauromorpha): Bulletin 46. Vol. 46. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, 2010. https://nmdigital.unm.edu/digital/collection/bulletins/id/1261/

Spiekman, Stephan NF, et al. "Triassic diapsid shows early diversification of skin appendages in reptiles." Nature (2025): 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09167-9

Wikipedia contributors. “Mirasaura” Wikipedia, 27 Jul. 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirasaura

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I open my wallet and out cascades a comically long accordion of pictures of my OCs

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Breaking news drepanosaurs are fucked up

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talking to people online is always like "i should watch that" "i should read that" "i should play that" there are so many things in the world. this is why i am never going to die

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im joining the war on gross disgusting pornographic content on the side of gross disgusting pornographic content