Because that's the first thing you think about besides toilet paper....

Dinosaurs to twanging bras to bright spots on Ceres.

How dinosaurs became birds.

There shouldn't be any public schools because they teach liberal stuff.

Olive oil kills cancer cells.

Slut-shamers and anti-abortionists share the same fear of women being able to control their own bodies.  And what happened after a boy twanged her bra several times.

What are poopers?  Ok, I laughed at the misspelling but the blog post is hilarious.

Supermassive black holes that shouldn't exist but do.

Portland harnesses the power of the sewers to create electricity.

Jeb Bush.

Mysterious bright spots on Ceres.  And a weird orbit of 3753 Cruithne around the Earth.

Terrorism will not destroy America.  Our hysteria about it might.

The better to hug you with, my dear....

Mystery of dinosaur with giant arms solved

Logic has nothing to do with it.

Um this makes no sense...North Carolina Law Bans Police From Destroying The Guns They Seize

STOP THAT WITH YOUR NAUGHTY BITS!  And weird conspiracy theories held by some fundamentalists.

Beautiful and thoughtful response by an Australian politician to a pastor's question.  Why can't we get intelligent politicians like him?

Why we live longer today.

Harvesting the plastic out of the ocean.  Can it be done?

Climate change's effect on animals who change to winter coats.

The world's largest cave.

Dinosaurs to the death!

Heavy metal Vivaldi.

Trying to push the conservative viewpoint via student textbooks.

Aging in 5 minutes.

Exercise in absurdity.

The best birth control is for men.

History is one damn thing after another....

And if you're not paying attention you ca... arrrghhhh



Antarctic ice shelf has shrunk by 85 % since 1995.  So stop exhaling!  It's all that carbon dioxide!

One kid saved by Obamacare.

So what is your opinion of protecting pedophiles then?

Yum yum... arsenic in chicken!

Vikings being maligned in movies.  Vikings having fun.

Dinosaurs were fluffy.  We've been looking at them nude all these years....

Morals, censorship, stupidity.

Explaining Wall Street ethics, cheating, intuition. Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code.

Censored Doonesbury about Palin not reading. And then there is the party of stupid. And Republicanism as religion. (Last one is scary.)

Surprise! (And thank god.) There are still intelligent people out there:

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked enforcement of a first-in-the-nation law that restricted what Florida physicians can say about guns to their patients, ruling the law violates the U.S. Constitution’s free speech guarantees and does not trample gun rights.

Some reasons why we actually need a government. You know... the kind Republicans deny exists. A government that works for the people. Or as the Republicans would have it... only some of the people.

Oops. FBI Raids Home Of CBS Correspondent By Mistake

Wars over water are just over the horizon.

Just imagine all those plastic dinosaurs we played with were really just terribly bald. Dinosaurs had colorful feathers.

Just a reminder:

Pat Robertson wants you to know if you get Alzheimer's.... your spouse can dump you.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Lion Tries To Eat Baby, Parents Oddly Okay With It

This fossil find makes me want to watch Jurassic Park again...

How ... odd. Forecast predicts biggest Gulf dead zone ever. I wonder if the oil companies and corn growers want to make the entire Gulf of Mexico dead so they can drill for oil and ignore fertilizer run off in peace....

Tell American Public Media: Report the facts, not anti-organic propaganda paid for by Monsanto

Sunspots are disappearing! Does that mean a little ice age is coming? On top of global warming? I'm so confused....

Do they mean our gas guzzling cars?

World's Largest Dinosaur Graveyard Linked to Mass Death.

Not yet. But soon.

Headlines

Twittering into history: 5 Famous Last Status Updates

The Ten Most Influential Internet Moments of the Decade

Slate's: The Going Rogue Index, TPM's Sarah, Plain And Lying

Strange Crocs of the Sahara has some fantastic dinosaur era animation. Also: Dung helps reveal why mammoths died out

Pirates!: Increased Violence on the High Seas

And this: College Students Arrested For Refusing To Pay Tip

We really did have monsters

Long ago:

The 7.8ft (2.4m) skull of the predator, which lived 150 million years ago, could belong to one of the largest pliosaurs ever found, and could measure up to 52.48ft (16m).

[snip]

Pliosaurs are a short-necked form of plesiosaur, a group of giant aquatic reptiles that dominated the oceans during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. They had immensely powerful jaws and a huge set of razor-sharp teeth.

Richard Forrest, a palaeontologist and plesiosaur expert said that the T-Rex was a "kitten" compared to the pliosaur.

"One of the things that is very clear from looking at this specimen is just how powerful this animal was," he said.

"If we look at the lower jaw this is the point at which the muscles attach and then you've got the great beam coming forward – that bone is roughly the strength of steel, so think of the strength of a steel girder that size.

"So it was an enormously powerful biting machine. These things were big enough and powerful enough to bite a small car in half.

"It would take a human in one gulp. It would take T-Rex in one gulp. Compared to this beast T-Rex was a kitten."

You realize how difficult it's going to be

To glue tiny feathers to all those plastic T-Rexs?

One plaster cast convinces Palin that Adam walked with dinosaurs?

Even if the cast is so badly done that people laugh when they see it?

Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and running mate of John McCain, believes that the world is only 6000 years old.

Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct -- the teacher said.
...
Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said "she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks..."

Gee... if she believes that, then it would take very little to convince her that Bush and Cheney were right, that the surge worked; that leaving Iraq means defeat but victory cannot be defined; that the fundamentals of the economy are strong; that the vice president's office needs to be expanded; that habeas corpus was unnecessary; that John McCain is right no matter how many times he lies and flipflops....

um....

But she sure did well in the debates, don'cha know! You betcha!

Update: I had to include this fantastic pic posted by PZ Myers at Pharyngula!



Read the rest, it's hilarious!

Noah had to use duct tape to get this one on the ark

I suppose this one ate coconuts as well?

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Fossils from two newly discovered meat-eating dinosaurs that lived in the Sahara Desert 110 million years ago paint a fearsome picture of life in Africa's Cretaceous period, which appears to have been teeming with unusual carnivores.

University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno unearthed Kryptops palaios, a short-snouted, hyena-like beast, and Eocarcharia dinops, a shark-toothed, bony-browed killer in a 2000 expedition.

Both were about 25 feet in length -- and on the prowl for meat.

"These are two of three that we dug up. To have three large predators in this area is really extraordinary," said Sereno, who describes the dinosaurs in the scientific journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

[snip]

Sereno said the animals lived in the southern landmass that was known as Gondwana, where distinctive meat-eaters arose, many of which bear no likeness to the better-known North American predator of the time, Tyrannosaurus rex.

[snip]

Kryptops was a scavenger and had a uniform series of relatively pointy teeth and a short snout. "The idea was that the animal was sticking its head into carcasses," he said.

Eocarcharia, or "dawn shark," is known for its blade shaped teeth and bony brow.

"The teeth are very narrow side-to-side. They are blade-shaped for cutting. This animal specialized in capturing live prey and severing limbs. It was definitely a sabotage attacker, waiting for an opportunity to jump at something," Sereno said.

Eocarcharia and members of the group carcharodontosaurids gave rise to the biggest predators on southern continents, matching or exceeding Tyrannosaurus in size.

Sereno said the fossils epitomize the split world of dinosaurs during the Cretaceous period, which occurred because the continents began to drift apart.

"There is nothing quite like it in North America Cretaceous because after a few fits and starts, the tyrannosaur came into being and they are often alone as the large predatory dinosaur."

I am very grateful to be living in the Holocene Epoch, thank you very much.

Adam used this one to pull his trailer?

It had a huge neck, see...

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Brazilian and Argentine paleontologists have discovered the largely complete fossil of a new species of giant dinosaur that roamed what is now northern Patagonia about 80 million years ago.

The herbivorous Futalognkosaurus dukei measured an estimated 105 feet to 112 feet from head to tail and was as high as a four-storey building. It is one of the three biggest dinosaurs yet found in the world.

"It's a new species, it's a new group," Argentine paleontologist Juan Porfiri told a news conference in Rio de Janeiro on Monday.

The find pointed to a new lineage of titanosaurs, with particularly bulky necks, he said.

"Its neck was very big in diameter, strong and huge."

At least China's indifference to humanity isn't just to the rest of the world

They pick on their own people too...

A large explosion has levelled a karaoke nightclub in northeast China killing 25 people and leaving another 33 injured.

State media did not give a cause for the blast on Wednesday night in the town of Tianshifu in Liaoning province.

[snip]

China has recently seen a spate of explosions, fires and accidents in shopping malls, cinemas and other public places despite repeated government promises to improve safety standards.

And forget about drinking water:

Beijing - Contamination of a river in east China by chemical plants upstream has left 200,000 people without water for two days, local media reported Wednesday. Water supplies were cut Monday afternoon in Shuyang county of Jiangsu Province after ammonia and azote polluted the Xinyi River, which originates in Shandong Province, according to Xinhua news agency.

The pollutants detected were about three times the upper limit for drinkable water. The exact cause of the poisoning was still unclear, however waste water from chemical plants upstream were suspected.

Which might explain why some Chinese do this:

Beijing, China (AHN) - In an attempt to gain healing powers, villagers in central China boiled a ton of dinosaur bones into soup or ground them to a powder for traditional medicine. They believe that the bones belong to flying dragons had special powers.

According to AP reports, these fossils were being sold in the Henan province as "dragon bones" at about 4 yuan (50 cents) per kilogram (2.2 pounds). Villagers also feed the calcium-rich bones, boiled with other ingredients to children as a treatment for dizziness and leg cramps.

The practice of grounding the bones to make a paste to apply directly to fractures and other injuries had been going on for at least two decades. In Henan's Ruyang County, scientists have recently excavated a 60-foot-long plant-eating dinosaur, which lived 85 million to 100 million years ago.

Why questions about teeth chew a hole in creationism

And explain why T-Rex wasn't crunching coconuts.

Christopher O'Brien of Northstate Science discusses what Ken Ham’s Creation 'Museum' is doing. The 'museum ' tries to cause doubt in science by pointing out bears have sharp teeth and eat vegetation therefore dinosaurs could have been herbivores: (my bold)

Certainly the responses to these observations are important, but that is not what prompted me to write this post. What really intrigued me was the process I engaged in while obtaining the information. It is the process of discovery that, as much as the answers, serves to radically distinguish science from creationism in all its forms. As I said, my reader raised several issues that, on face value, would be sufficient for most people to stop and wonder if Ham and AIG weren’t at least raising a legitimate issue. For Ham, AIG, and on a different level, the intelligent design advocates, inquiry would completely cease at this point. See, O’Brien is wrong: polar bear teeth are hardly different from other bear teeth and they exclusively eat meat…hence it is possible that tyrannosaurs ate vegetation at one time. Here, the entire goal is accomplished: raise reasonable doubt with the general populace at large.

But science follows a completely different process. Upon reading the phrase “polar bear teeth are hardly different from other bears” the first thing I did was ask myself, “is that true?” and reach for a book on mammalian anatomy; and I did it so sub-consciously and automatically that the significance of the act did not become apparent until a few hours later. Scientists constantly question whether their data (and others') are correct…it’s ingrained as part of the process. The same cannot be said for creationists.

The deliberate misuse of the word 'theory' is another attempt to muddy the waters, trying to get people to have reasonable doubt over a rigourous process such as science. Remember, gravity is a theory, so it's a theory that holds us onto an orbiting ball as it hurtles through space.

I'd rather have science than faith explain to me why I don't fall off.

I knew we couldn't have been the only ones!

Of course the Greeks and the Romans, the people of the Dark Ages and the Renaissance would have found dinosaur bones! They mined, they had flagstones made of sandstone, they dug in chalk, made clay pots.... of course they would have found bones and teeth of mighty dinosaurs.

Explains where dragons in fables came from, doesn't it? How on earth would you explain bones made out of rock except by magic?

Neatorama has a picture of a fossil skull on a Greek vase and this quote:

For example, Schliemann found a fossil in his Troy excavations. The fossil was in a layer dating to around the 13th century B.C. and has since been located (due to Mayor’s work) at the British Museum. Other examples are the large distal femur fragment found at the temple of Hera on Samos and the Nichoria distal femur fragment found in the acropolis of an ancient town in Messenia.

I posted this about the fossils in China.

Maybe this explains why the Chinese

Have dragons in their folklore and art:

BEIJING: Fossil findings of an ancient arboreal lizard in northeastern China's Liaoning province indicate that the reptile could glide through air using a membrane it could stretch across its elongated ribs.

[snip]

The scientists found that reptile's gliding membrane, which is called “patagium,” is stretched across eight elongated dorsal ribs. When it is fully expanded, it would have spanned about 4.5 inches. The reptile had curved claws helping it to stay on treetops and then launch itself into the air. The scientists believe it could probably glide a longer distance than the modern-day flying lizards.

Proof that Adam rode dinosaurs to work

These had horns for the traffic jams:

Cleveland, OH (AHN) - A new dinosaur species has been found that could suggest a link between older dinosaurs and smaller ones that evolved much later. The dinosaur was a plant-eater and had horns over his eyebrows that are about a yard long.

News of the discovery was published in this month's Journal of Paleontology.

The fossil was dug up six years ago in southern Alberta, Canada.

The dinosaur measured about 20 feet long and lived an estimated 78 million years ago. Paleontologists say the find establishes a link between older species of dinosaurs that have horns with smaller-horned dinosaurs that evolved much later.

Picture of the creationist museum referred to in this post with a link to Tengrain's Mock Paper Scissors.

Evolving from biplanes to monoplane dinosaurs

The dinosaur had two sets of feathered wings, on its forelimbs and hind legs and is believed to have "flown" like a flying squirrel - gliding, but incapable of true flight.

The Chinese scientists who found the Microraptor fossil proposed that when it glided between trees, it spread out its legs and kept its wings one behind the other in a tandem pattern similar to a dragonfly.

But using computer models and anatomical analysis, Sankar Chatterjee, a paleontologist at Texas Tech University, and Jack Templin, an aeronautical engineer, decided that such an arrangement could not have worked.

Chatterjee proposed that Microraptor positioned its hind legs below its body, adopting a "biplane" arrangement.

He said: "We knew that there was something wrong anatomically. There is just one choice. It has to have this biplane wing design."

A computer flight simulation of Microraptor employing this wing arrangement demonstrated it would undulate up and down, necessary for gliding among trees, and may have been able to glide over a distance of 40 metres.