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ooookie dokie I have done it New place same URL as the old one! @raptor-rage I'll reblog it to the new one as well, and I'll be working on the layout and stuff probably for the next few days!

Heads Up!

There is a very very good chance that I will be relocating to a new blog very soon, maybe even today! I will announce it here for anyone who still wants to, so you can go and follow me over there and whatnot. I just need to relocate some of my stuff and just sort of start anew for a few different reasons aha Just letting everyone know ahead of time!

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Heads Up!

There is a very very good chance that I will be relocating to a new blog very soon, maybe even today! I will announce it here for anyone who still wants to, so you can go and follow me over there and whatnot. I just need to relocate some of my stuff and just sort of start anew for a few different reasons aha Just letting everyone know ahead of time!

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This Day a Year Ago...

Source: thewoodparable, the wonderful artist behind much of Prosauropod Hell 2015!

KULINDADROMEUS WAS FOUND! 

Why is Kulindadromeus so important and exciting? Well, as long-time followers of this blog know, Kulindadromeus was a small little ornithischian from the middle to late Jurassic. It was relatively unremarkable, I mean, it was a bipedal runner about 1.5 meters long, with a short had, short forelimbs, long hindlimbs (the better for running,) and a long tail. So why do I - and so many paleontologists - care about this little guy? 

It was covered. 

In SO many. 

(proto)Feathers. 

Source: artisticthingem! Look at this little fluffy bastard. 

That’s right, protofeathers. And this little guy wasn’t a theropod. It wasn’t a member of the group of dinosaurs that includes birds. In fact, if you look at my handy little family tree here: 

Source: fezraptor, who is much better at constructing these things than I am.

Kulindadromeus and other feathered dinosaurs are really only related in that they are all dinosaurs; they are as far apart on the family tree as you can possibly be! 

So what does this mean for feathers and their origin? Well, when it comes to evolutionary biology (a subject I am something of an expert in, thanks,) when you’re mapping the evolution of a trait in a family group, it is always best to apply the simplest explanation for that evolution. 

Let’s apply that idea to Kulindadromeus. Which is a simpler explanation: protofeathers evolved twice, once in the Ornithischians and then again the theropods… or protofeathers were ancestral to all of Dinosauria? 

That’s right, you guessed it… the second one. 

Source: lovelyerror! She drew this EXCEPTIONALLY fast and I am extremely impressed! She draws a LOT of truly beautiful paleoart, from feathery and accurate raptors to scaly gorgeous herbivores. I definitely recommend checking out her blog!

Now, there are still some questions, of course - we do know that some dinosaurs were scaly, so which dinosaurs exactly were scaly, and which ones were fluffy? Was it dependent on size at all? On cladistic position? Are the pycnofibres of the closely related pterosaurs the same sort of structure? 

Now, a paper came out last year trying to prove that it was likely that this sort of structure evolved twice, and protofeathers weren’t ancestral to Dinosauria. However, it had pretty terrible methodology - it had strange underlying assumptions that skewed the results. If you took away the assumption that skewed the result, you actually got the finding that it was likely that dinosaurs were ancestrally feathered. For a better explanation, read my friend’s post here. 

Source: dirntbag, who has now drawn two excellent artworks for me :D Check out her Massospondylus, and what I wrote about her on that post!

So, this clearly has some exciting implications for how we think about dinosaurs - and how we think about the evolution of integument (something that I’m particularly interested in, research-wise-speaking.) Hopefully, more fossils will come to light that shed some more information on how feathers evolved and were distributed among Dinosauria. Until then, let’s celebrate our little friend Kulindadromeus, for revolutionizing our perception of this fascinating and diverse group of reptiles. 

Source: eight-legged-possum-thing, who has an art blog at iguanodont! She does an amazing amount of art of animals, both real and fantastical, and even did an illustration of Yi qi which I may or may not use (and cite, of course) for Yi’s factfiel! Definitely look at her blogs. 

If you want to read more about Kulindadromeus, read the posts I did last year: 

Official Factfile

The post in which the news broke

A really professional celebration by me at the time

Let us all celebrate a year of floof together! 

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Someone asked me what my top three non-avian dinosaurs were and I got a little carried away!!

I like Microraptor gui because it was cute, I like Spinosaurus aegypticus because it was Badass and also quite special, and I like Kulindadromeus because it suggests feathers are a basal trait of all dinosaurs and that makes me VERY EXCITED (note: this doesn’t mean all dinosaurs had feathers, but it does mean there is a possibility they had a wide variety of integuments we have yet to discover!!)

And Carnotaurus sastrei gets an honorable mention because I think its angry eyebrow horns are cool and I love its chubby little nub arms.

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Dude, dude, what if you doodled the MOST FLOOFIEST DINOSAUR YOU CAN THINK OF? If you want to, of course.

Here you go chere anon

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have you seen new spinosaurus? feelings?

LOOK AT THIS ASSHOLE WITH HIS TINY LEGS.

Part of me is skeptical of the whole possibility of them being (semi?) quadrupedal on land. Otherwise it makes me interested in seeing what other aquatic/semi aquatic dinosaurs there were, as well as the extent of how Spinosaurids lived

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I won't be able to probably do anything digital today so have this tiny little Breme ✨

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Archaeopteryx lithographica. Upper Jurassic. Germany

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Dsungaripterus. Cretaceous. China

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Smilodon fatalis. La Brea Tar Pits. Los Angeles

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A guide to color in fossil dinosaurs, now updated with a new enantiornithine specimen and new data on Psittacosaurus.

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some bird/dino doodles from today!

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raise your hand if you started playing this game for cool dinosaurs and left overly attached to the characters

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Reposting is fucking evil.

I saw this while browsing tags and I liked it; I checked on it later to reblog and saw that it was tagged “not mine”

So I went to find the original. Turns out that it belongs to mydreammagic on deviantART.

If you look at the repost, it has 331 notes. Wanna see how much the original got? 

5 favorites. The one comment is me telling the artist that someone stole their work. 

Oh, and the reposter? They have a tipjar, as if they worked for this. 

Reposting hurts artists. Reposting takes exposure and attention away from artists. Reposting is theft.

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Reblog if you want a shitty summary of your blog in your inbox.

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please reblog or like this if its cool to make friends with you

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This Facebook sticker set is called Downer Dinos and I’m convinced whoever thought this up consulted 15-year-old me.