Jurassic Breakfast
April 12, 2013

This morning's snow was like the sugar on a jelly donut.

It's sticky and it gets everywhere and keeps you from noticing that clump of jelly that's about to launch itself from the donut. Jelly does not fall from a jelly donut. It cascades. Like a ball in a pinball machine, it tries to hit as many surfaces as it can on its way down. The jelly reaches out to one surface, gets there, marks it, and then stretches away to some other improbable surface. It'll never make it -- oh -- but it does. Now it heads away to some other far reaching and difficult to clean surface. Amazing.

The elasticity of the jelly in jelly donuts has been formulated to disregard gravity like a rubber ball... a sticky, smearing rubber ball or rubber egg. The jelly is no ordinary jelly.

The oldest jelly-filled donuts have been found in Lufeng in southeast China and jelly-dated back to the lower Jurassic.



Is lower in time more recent... or older?*

Researchers called the jelly donuts, "Lufengosaurus embryos," until some of the jelly started oozing out and getting all over their white lab coats and everything. Now they're a mess.

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Music Associations: 1776 - The Egg & Beatles - Scrambled Eggs
* Standard archaeological-geochronological direction would indicate lower as older due to lower strata generally leading to earlier events.







Dinosaur Late To Class
April 11, 2013

This is an introduction to dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs are... OMG!

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Music Association: Chic - Le Freak (Freak Out!)







Canadians Agree With Australians
Dinosaurs Leave Claw Prints
At The Bottom Of The Pond
April 9, 2013

Yesterday I told you about the Australians who were re-imagining dinosaur tracks to have been made by swimming dinosaurs.

Well now the Canadian researchers at the University of Alberta are saying the same thing.

I just can't see it.

Maybe there was a flash flood (very Australian) and the dinosaurs swam through, scratched the mud bottom while swimming through, and then the whole thing dried up! But the longer the drying time, the less likely any prints would be discernible.

It's not that I'm an expert at dinosaur tracks. It's that I'm an expert at mud.

I know mudslinging, Mud Lakes, gulches, quicksand, clays, and muddy boots. I know Minnesota mud, Wisconsin mud, Michigan mud, Canadian mud, Utah mud, and special flavors and behaviors of mud within and around that geographical area.

There is no way swimming dinosaurs can leave claw prints in a pond bottom and then have the pond drain or evaporate fast enough to leave clear prints.

The researchers should consider a snow-mud surface. That could make the prints they're describing without the print erosion.

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Music Association: Zac Brown Band - Toes in the Water










Dinosaur Free Swim or Dinosaur Stampede!
April 8, 2013

Look at that picture. What do you see?

Other people aren't sure either.

Some scientists believe this to be the only site with fossilized recordings of a dinosaur stampede. Some think it's a dried up dinosaur pond (read about it).

►  Was the surface mud or a pond?
►  How would footprints be preserved at the bottom of a pond?
►  Why are some of the chicken-sized dinosaurs running toward the large dinosaur?
►   Is the large dinosaur a vegetarian? Why would a vegetarian chase small animals?

These are the Dinosaur Trackways at Lark Quarry Conservation Park in Queensland, Australia.

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Music Association: Pink Floyd - Run Like Hell






Science Report
Bronchisaurus
April 5, 2013

Ahem. For my science report today I will tell you about a really recently discovered dinosaur. It is the bronchisaurus.

The bronchisaurus was a dinosaur from the tail end of the Jurassic period.

On the outside it looked like any other dinosaurs. It even looked like the brontosaurus, which everyone knows totally never existed. 

What sets the bronchisaurus apart from other dinosaurs is that it had like the worst chest cold ever.

When it coughed it sounded like two high school marching bands crashing into each other. When it sneezed it covered everything with a thick layer of phlem and mucus.

Using this fan and this bucket of goo, I will reenact the sneeze of the bronchisaurus for the first time in 146 million years.

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Music Association: Ke$ha - Dinosaur
Movie Association: Jurassic Park 3D released today

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