Exciting news about Jurassic World and its newfound paleontological accuracy

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been privileged with no less than four fossil finds that came out just in time!  To see the significance, we’ll have to go back 20 years.  You see, in 1993, the film Jurassic Park came out. Michael Crichton’s book featured Velociraptor, and he based his depiction on Deinonychus. Spielberg, wanting something even more intimidating, increased the size of his raptors. The scientific community scoffed at this obvious error, but found themselves dumbfounded when, as the film came out, Utah Paleontologist James Kirkland found a dromaeosaur of that impressive size! Utahraptor brought Hollywood’s Raptor come to life! 

So, it is with great joy that I reveal that similar things have happened this year, coinciding with this summer’s release of Jurassic World!  Yes, once again, life has imitated art! Turns out that the writers of this film were prescient, thanks to their rigorous dedication to scientific accuracy. The papers are not published yet, so I can’t say the discoverers, but I can describe the names and bones found!

April 1

Well, I know all the real blogs are doing elaborate April Fool's gags, but I'm going to save that for next year. Still, I want to entertain, so today we're doing do an MST3k-style commentary track for the Korean dinosaur movie Tarbosaurus aka Speckles The Tarbosaurus.

Here's something I made before I started blogging: Top Ten Megafauna That Made Prehistoric Australia Even Scarier

Ah, Australia. It's a running gag for biologists that it's one of the scariest countries. Sure, the climate doesn't sound that bad, the native peoples didn't have the complex military societies that us Yanks had to deal with during our own hostile takeover, there's never been a civil war, and while there's a lot of ethnic groups (and accompanying oppression), there's not enough guns to make it as dangerous as the average US city. I do plan on going there, and it looks a lot nicer than, say, Israel or India (other places on my list, but I'll get to them later)