Mesozoic Miscellany #12

It's Christmas. Big deal! No reason we can't celebrate the best of the dinosaur blogosphere for the last week, and besides: I'm sure Kris Kringle and his elves would like something to read as they relax after a night of frenzied labor.

Newsworthiness

The Field Museum's Lindsay Zanno and Peter Makovicky published a new study in PNAS this week looking at the dietary habits across the coelurosauria. Read more at Dinosaur Tracking.

Everything Dinosaur, Chinleana and Palaeoblog all wrote about the gorgeously preserved Luoping biota of China, dating from the Middle Triassic and revealing a marine ecosystem fully recovered after the cataclysmic extinctions at the end of the Permian. Wonderful, frame-worthy fossils.

Clean your dinosaurs! Saurian posted an even-handed rant about the dusty dinosaur skeletons in some museums.

Glendon Mellow celebrated his 500th post at the Flying Trilobite, providing a list of some of his favorite posts, including one on the use of dinosaur bones... as Chinese folk medicine.

At Archosaur Musings, Dave Hone interviewed artist Mick Ellison, who has been associated with the American Museum of Natural History for two decades, and done especially beautiful work on small Chinese theropods. Hone also shared some photos of beautiful Pterodactylus specimens at the Solnhofen Museum. Two posts: first and second.

Speaking of which... pterosaur or pterodactyl? Everything Dinosaur provided a quick distinction between the terms.

At his always illuminating blog Gurney Journey, Dinotopia creator James Gurney provided a look at the creation of a painting using action figures and his own homemade Deinocheirus figurine.

Learning the color of Anchiornis made number one on Ed Yong's list of the "They Did What Now?" science stories of 2010.

Twit Picks
I was extravagantly busy this week, so I didn't do a heck of a lot of tweeting. To my eternal regret, rest assured. But here's a few things I tweeted.

• Paleontologist Dan Chure on Dinosaur National Monument's genesis
• Kentuckians, see paleontologist Jack Horner in Lexington this February.
  Ladies steosaurus sweater. Hot!
• Hmm. I apparently invented a new dinosaur called "steosaurus" in a recent tweet. Closely related to the terrible Malgrafotitan.

Tumblin'

Iamchuckyouarepie shared this T. rex as Santa, by someone named NM.


Paleoart of the Week

This is by Patrick Redman, and it is freakin' awesome.


Outrageously Off-Topic Indulgence

I imagine this is played out, but somehow I just discovered these videos, thanks to my wife accidentally happening across one when searching for crazy yo-yo tricks on Youtube. K-Strass!