Mow around the dino, please

Holy dinosaur! You have what in your front yard?

Pulling into his driveway last October, Steve Springer noticed a wedding party crossing the street with plans to marry in his front yard.
The couple had come from Illinois to wed outside the retired schoolteacher’s Henderson home with no advance notice. Dressed and ready for the occasion, they just asked if it would be okay.
“When?” Springer asked, to which they responded, “Now.” The wedding commenced, and afterward Springer even allowed them to step into the front yard (though just barely) for a post-nuptial photo shoot.
He likely sent them off with party favors, too. He’s known to hand out tiny plastic dinosaurs, not just to visitors, but to the public at large while out and about. “Wherever I go I have a pocketful of dinosaurs,” he says. “The kids call me the dinosaur man.”
What else would you call someone who’s mounted a costly dinosaur exhibit named Shangri-La Prehistoric Park in his front yard, drawing 15,000 visitors a year? The biggest question is never “Why?” he says, but “Where?” as in, “Where did you get these?” Ours is “What?” as in, “What have you got against garden gnomes?” But that’s neither here nor there when you’re standing before a T. rex statue 20 feet in length and just about as high.

Read all about it here

Why would climate denialists and Tea Partyers like paleontology?

The right’s dinosaur fetish: Why the Koch brothers are obsessed with paleontology

In April of 2014, the National Museum of Natural History in Washington closed the doors of its paleontology hall. Gone were the placoderm fish, the Ice Age mammals, the hollow-boned pterodactyls. Gone especially were the dinosaurs – the Apatosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and other kings of the primordial earth.
But this was no second extinction. It was evolution, a $45 million renovation project that would expand the paleontology halls to 25,000 square feet and give an outdated series of displays a desperately needed update. $35 million of that cost – the largest single gift in the museum’s history — was pledged by one David H. Koch.
Nobody inspires more liberal anger than Charles and David Koch. As owners of the massive Koch Industries, a multinational energy and manufacturing conglomerate, the Koch brothers have spent a fortune bankrolling a profusion of right-wing causes. They have gained a well-deserved reputation as climate change deniers, polluters, union busters and all-round rapacious capitalists. Trace most conservative campaigns back far enough, and you’ll find them at the other end, pumping their libertarian vision into the body politic.
That’s business, however. Everybody needs hobbies, and one of David Koch’s biggest hobbies, beyond his more general philanthropic pursuits, is paleontology. He has toured museums all over the world, visited dig sites in Central Africa, and funded the excavations of Don Johansen, the discoverer of the famous prehuman fossil Lucy. In an interview with the magazine Archeology, Koch excitedly recalled pulling hominid bones from the ground at Johansen’s dig site in Olduvai Gorge. He keeps a frame replica of Lucy’s hand as a trophy on his office wall, and in 2009 he funded the somewhat controversial Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian to the tune of $15 million.


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You can still take the dump at auction

Come for the crap, stay for the fossils. Amazing array of natural history items up for auction on Saturday in Beverly Hills.

I.M. Chait catalog

Yeah, o.k., here's the giant poop

...and a baby woolly

 

...and this spider in amber

...and 357 other amazing things you never knew you wanted—until today.

Here's the scoop on the coprolites (I bet you thought I was going to say "poop")

Origin of the faeces?

World’s longest poo belonging to an unidentified dinosaur measures an 'eye-watering' 40 inches - and it could fetch $10,000 at auction

• Longest dinosaur dung on Earth is going up for auction in Los Angeles 
• It measures 40 inches in length and has a pale brown-yellow colour 
• Auctioneer I.M. Chait expects it to reach $10,000 when under the hammer 
• Fossilised feces of this sort if is known as coprolite and can reveal diet info 
• However researchers aren't sure what dinosaur it originated from

The world’s longest dinosaur dung is set to go up for auction next week.  The fossilised excrement dates back to the Oliogocene and Minocene Epochs, which makes it anywhere from 5.3 to 33.9 million years old.  Found in Lewis County, Washington State the giant dung is expected to reach £4,700 to £5,800 ($8,000 to $10,000) when it goes under the hammer on 22 July

The dung is what is known as coprolite, fossilised feces that can provide information about an animal’s diet rather than just its appearance.

It is described by Beverly Hills auctioneers I.M. Chait as an ‘eye-watering 40 inches [one metre] in length’.

However, research has failed to reveal what dinosaur the excrement originated from.

The above coprolites are a relative bargain at an estimate of about $5000 for the set.

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Colorado-based paleontologists find new dinosaur species

A team of local paleontologists have discovered what's been referred to as the oldest known chasmosaurine ceratopsian in Canada (try saying that three times fast…).The 77 million-year-old Mercuriceratops Gemini was officially named in a German scientific journal, and was discovered by a team of paleontologists based out of the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Research Center.
The new to us (but otherwise very old) species is known from only two species of a unique skull forming a large frill on the back of the dinosaur's skull.
The first of those was found in Montana in 2007. The paleontologist who found it, Kraig Derstler, noticed that there was something different about the cheek-bone region of its skull, and he added question marks to his sketch.

Read full article here

Baby Bone Baggers Busted

Suspects in science museum’s dinosaur heist turn themselves in

A man and woman, both 21, turned themselves over to N.C. State Capitol Police on Thursday in the case of the missing model dinosaur.

Logan Todd Ritchey, 21, of Raleigh, and Alyssa Ann Lavacca, 21, of Holly Springs, are both charged with a felony count of the theft or destruction of the public property of a museum or a library and, additionally, conspiracy to commit felony larceny, county records state.

Ritchey was held Thursday at the Wake County Detention Center on a $2,000 secured bond, while Lavacca was released on an unsecured bond Thursday afternoon, according to police.

Capitol Police report that all of the missing items, including a replica of a baby duck-billed dinosaur, have been recovered.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/07/17/5050408/suspects-in-museums-model-dinosaur.html#.U8mUZqitaYA#storylink=cpy

Full story

Lego Rex

Over 80,000 Legos

More images here