News broke this week that paleontologists have determined that a set of bones found in Big Bend back in the 1980s is actually a hitherto unknown type of duck-billed dinosaur. Whenever I hear of a new species, I can’t help but wonder how long that new species identification will last.
Regular readers know that I’ve been looking for a copy of Roland T. Bird’s 1944 essay, “Did Brontosaurus ever walk on land?” since 2011, when I had to rely on J.A. Wilson’s second-hand account of it while researching the answer to the pressing question: “Could sauropods swim?” A few weeks ago, I discovered that I could acquire Roland T. Bird’s memoir, Bones for Barnum Brown: Adventures of a Dinosaur Hunter, through the Northern California Interlibrary Loan Service. So of course I did.
In the spring, a curiosity blogger’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of dinosaurs. Specifically, the sauropod tracks in Glen Rose, Texas, and whether this will be the summer I get to see them.
Yesterday, the Field Museum launched its Máximo the titanosaur chatbot. I’m sure that you won’t be at all surprised to learn that I have spent hours interviewing him. For science. Here’s what I learned.
Public art is everywhere, and this is the season for getting out and viewing it. I’ve spent the past few days reading a book set in South Dakota, which made me pretty curious to see what public art in South Dakota looks like. With that, let’s pay a visit to Dinosaur Park in Rapid City.
Summer is in full force here at Caterpickles Central, and someone’s reading list this week reflects it. See if you can figure out The Eleven-Year-Old’s summer…
This week, The Ten-Year-Old spent several happy hours with The Magic Thief by @SPrineas and trying to draw dinosaurs like the ones in John Malam’s Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Creatures.
Scenes from The Ten-Year-Old’s recent trip to Jurassic World at the Field Museum, Chicago.
Every Sunday afternoon (at least, every Sunday that we can manage it), our family clusters on the couch with a bowl of fresh-popped popcorn and proceeds to haggle over our Sunday Afternoon Movie. This week, Daddyo put together a montage of 1940s Superman cartoons. Watching the original Superman cartoons with The Six-Year-Old was much more fun than even my husband expected. My daughter comments freely on what she sees, and with Superman, what she saw was a lot of stuff people got wrong about dinosaurs.
This week, The Nine-Year-Old continues to plow through Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, and Mommyo takes a firm stand against the 9YO’s plan to build a coop on the back deck to house her future pet Chickensoraus.
