Mesozoic Miscellany #1

One reason I don't drop enough linkbombs on y'all is that I've lacked a pithy name for the posts. This is the best I could come up with. Better ideas welcome in the comments.

It's October. That's Breast Cancer Awareness month, and as you probably know by now, ART Evolved is holding a fundraiser. Draw a pink dinosaur, for crying out loud! Even I managed to squeeze one in to my modern, high-stress, wall-to-wall-business life.

At Archosaur Musings, Dave Hone has been featuring interviews with paleoartists for the last several months. They're required reading. Especially illuminating is today's interview with Jeff Martz of Paleoerrata. His artwork doesn't get a lot of attention, but it sure as heck deserves it. The influence of Gregory Paul and Robert Bakker are apparent, but Martz has his own style happening, and I dig it. Also read the Honeman's chats with John Conway, Luis Rey, Bob Nicholls, Brett Booth, and Julia Molnar.

Natural Selections, the excellent bite-size natural history podcast by North Country Radio in upstate New York, has done some bits on the avian branch of the dinosaur family recently. Direct links to MP3s:

• Northern Flicker
• Hermit Thrush
• Bird Vocabulary
• Passenger Pigeons

Dialing the geological clock back a few hundred million years to the Silurian Period, the seas teemed with those charismatic arthropods known as the trilobites. Mike of the blog Louisville Fossils and Beyond has been chronicling his progress in prepping what will surely be a beautiful example of the trilobite Calymene, beginning here.

Twit Picks
Stuff I've tweeted in the last week or so:

• Parasaurolophus Hilton's new perfume.
• If you liked the RC pterosaur videos I posted the other day, check out this Pterosaur Database post on earlier attempts
• "I love the black-crowned night heron partly because it looks like a nineteenth-century school master..."
• After debunking bird claims of Cornet fossil assemblage, Naish turns his eye to the pterosaurs at Tetrapod Zoology
• Of his many wonderful pieces, this may be my favorite by John Conway: Dead Velociraptor mongoliensis
• Pharyngula on "It Gets Better" video project by Dan Savage. Hope for gay teens having a rough time. Spread the word.

Outrageously Off-topic Indulgence
People, country music doesn't get much better than Gram Parsons. He's a bit of a divisive figure, but that's to be expected when a population consists of both reasonable folks and total knuckleheads. Throw a dart at his body of work and you'll probably hit a transcendent piece of songwriting, a stunning performance, or at the very least something damned charming.

So, that's the way these will go. Once a week, methinks. Later, gators.