Mesozoic Miscellany 50

I feel like I've been running at waaaaaay too many revolutions per minute for the last week, so what better way to relax a bit than to share some of the excellent work my fellow dinosaur bloggers have been doing? Maybe indulge in a bit of inspiring dinosaur art while we're at it? The fiftieth edition of our occasional roundup series is here, so pour the tea, light the stogies, put on a bit of Kenny G, and slip into your Forever Lazy. It's chill time.

The prize for coolest paleo story since the last coolest paleo story has to go to the discovery of a Massospondylus nesting site in Africa. In a long in the works paper released online prior to publication by PNAS, a team from the Royal Ontario Museum has described discovery. It's a real one-two punch for the sauropodomorphs after Heinrich Mallison's great paper about bipedal Plateosaurus, covered recently here in a terrific post by Marc. Check out a terrific Julius Csotonyi painting from 2010 about the site at his site. Also covered by Dinosaur Tracking, Palaeoblog, and Chinleana.

Dave Hone on big-ass carnivore battles: "Who cares?"

At Green Tea and Velociraptors, Jon Tennant tackles that perpetually thorny issue: What makes a fossil species?

Stephen Fry has returned to the Mesozoic, lending his vocal talents to a new iPad dinosaur Encyclopedia. Switek has the skinny at Dinosaur Tracking.

I love the stuff Raven Amos has been doing, and yesterday she shared a wonderful Pachyrhinosaurus with booty-quills.

For the serious sauropod nerds out there, Mike Taylor has a puzzler for you: Can you identify these sauropod cervical vertabrae?

Terrific Rubeosaurus by Andrey Atuchin. Go look!

Scott Hartman has shared his thoughts on Eoraptor, with a new skeletal diagram to book. Check it out at the Skeletal Drawing blog.

I was unable to join the good folks at ScienceOnline in North Carolina this year, but Andy Farke was, and he's got some cogent thoughts on the whole affair. Check out his summary thoughts at this post at The Open Source Paleontologist, which includes links to his daily reports.

Newt Gingrich, armchair paleontologist. At DinoGoss, Matt Martyniuk shares his perspective on a debate between Jack Horner and Gingrich, on the topic of whether T. rex was a scavenger.

DeviantArt remains an excellent source of dinosaur art, and a prime example of just how freaking lucky we are to live at this moment in time, when access to the science of paleontology is better than ever and the means to share one's artwork is so readily available. My newest discovery on DeviantArt is Julio Lacerda (H/T to Albertonykus for the introduction), whose portrait of a Gorgosaurus pair in the snow I shared on Twitter this week. Once again, superlatives fail me.

Illustration by Julio Lacerda, via DeviantArt.

I'm still overwhelmed by the amount of artists on DeviantArt, and find the interface less than optimal, so please don't hesitate to share your own favorite artists in the comments, so I can add them to my watch list.

Finally, one last bit of shameless self-promotion: I've been adding items to my Cafepress shop this week, as you may have seen in my Wednesday post. Besides the LITC design, I've added a line of "I Left My Heart in (geological period)" t-shirts. Four geological periods are represented, with more to come. If you do happen to buy one of my shirts, send me a photo of yourself wearing it and I'll post it here! It just so happens that I've been cranking out dinosaur themed designs and Jennie and I have been trying to get some traction with our Etsy shop, so you can expect more cool stuff to be shared here in the coming months.