Saturday, June 11, 2011

New Dinosaur Species Found

It's amazing what you can find on the internet if you look hard enough. Look at it as a metaphor for looking for things in real life. Sometimes you find something amazing without even looking!

New dinosaur species have been unearthed in and around California. Discovering a whole trove of discoveries rocked my consciousness with wonder! How had this not shook the rest of the world and if so, why hadn't I heard about it?? Everyone knows that they've found new pyramids but really this? After 65,000,000,000 years?! For anyone who grew up making plasticine dinosaurs, who perfected sculpting every known species of dinosaur into figurines and who now has a whole new challenge ahead of them, this is simply amazing.

How it happened was that I was sitting at my computer not doing too much when I wondered whether Tyrannosaurus Rex's were particularly fast runners or not. Random question, infinite access to the internet. One would assume that they are a predator ergo they would have to be, but I was just doing some cautious fact-checking when I came across this not-so-secret archive of paleontology finds and boy was I excited! I was so excited I didn't even care how fast Tyrannosaurus Rexes could run, my thoughts were racing even faster!

Perhaps I have just been in an archeoillogical bubble, going to my 9-5 job listening to democracynow.org and the good old CBC rather than digging my heels into underground paleontology -the grit of the distant past, but let me ask you, have you heard of a cocketetielosaurus? You have heard of a cocketielosaurus! What does it look like? WRONG!

In fact the cocketetielosaurus is covered in feathers. There are a lot of theories that dinosaurs weren't naked lizards as they are commonly portrayed to us by our mainstream paleontologists but actually fully clothed. This is the proposed theory of renegade paleontologist "Jillian". The cocketetielosaurus very name means "nice bird". But every "nice" smiley face has a hidden frown, the cockotielosaurus is definitely one bird, or sorry, excuse me, one dinosaur(?), not to mess with. If you want to gloat about your trip to Paris, don't do it to the cocketeilosaurus. It's been there done that. It had been all over the world and survived in every climate. "It flew everywhere." Not like the stripeosaurus who despite having a pretty cool stripey coat, went nowhere. There's some joy (albeit vicarious bordering on envious) knowing that the cocketetielosaurus was probably a very light-hearted species. "It played a lot."

There are other dinosaurs whom evolution did not treat them so kindly. Take the cheeasaurus for example. "It was mad because a long neck ran into him." I would be too! Wouldn't you? Funny thing those long necks. They never seem to be attached to a brain! Always running around everywhere without even looking where they're going! Thank goodness Brandon discovered him so that he could share his troubled history with us so that we can gain a better appreciation of the hardship he had to endured to surv...er, get extinct by.

Whichever story you choose to believe, whether humans and dinosaurs co-existed, whether knights of the stone henge were commissioned by dinosaur kings to build them impenetrable armour or that throwing virgins into volcanoes was in fact the causal beginning of the ice age, this is a goldmine of discovery by extremely ambitious young paleontologists who deserve recognition! It tells us a very different story about dinosaurs that we don't often get to see. Perhaps by learning about a vast array of species it can help us better understand our own.

Some of these dinosaurs may still be surviving according to students in the field. The pinkosaurus is one such species. It can be tough to spot because it hides under Brentwood Bus seats but that doesn't make it any less plausible that it could still be unphased out of existence. It's related to, but quite different in appearance than the blueasaurus. Like it's name suggests, it's blue. It's discovery has caused many critics in various fields to quit their jobs immediately.

Probably the most exciting and frightening of these discoveries are the species of killosaurus. Its pictured here with its characteristic "mean" look, smeared in the blood of its prey, its friends and its mate. Paleontologist Justin summed it up best with these three points when he said:

It looked mean.

It liked to eat meat.

It killed other dinosaurs very well.

Thanks to the teachers at Brentwood for supplying shovels.


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