stuff you need to read

just a not-quite-random selection – in fact, not random at all, just without any pretence to be anything like complete: blog posts of the last few weeks that I found to be especially important, interesting, or informative.

First of all Christopher DiPiazza reminds us that the Age of Dinosaurs went on for an enormously long time – to me, the baffling thing is how little large theropods change morphologically throughout that time. Seems that the active terrestrial top predator niche has fairly narrow biomechanical constraints, so they all end up looking very similar to each other.

Then, there is Mark Wildman’s take on Yutyrannus and Sciurumimus, and what their feathers may mean for dinosaur behaviour. And he takes on social sauropods as well. See also Brian Switek’s post on Sciurumimus and dino feathers.

Matt Bonnan also has a post on this topic, but I’d rather point you to his article on the very important “LAGs in mammal bones” paper in Nature.

Michael Habib sinks two myths about galliform birds – well done! Also see this post for an absolutely stunning and mind-blowing picture of a ray – airborne!

At Extinct Monsters, you can find a nice post on the history of the Smithsonian. It’s part of a series, so stay tuned for more!

Also, you should definitively head over to Palaeontology [online] and check all their content. Oh, and do think about contributing!

David Orr, meanwhile, addresses the Nessie-disproves-evilution topic again.

From SV-POW I’ll only pick this one; Mike Taylor has been quite vocal on Open Access over there and you really should read all.

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and – did you think I wouldn’t mention it? – the epic takedown of ReptileEvolution.com by Darren Naish of TetZoo. “Must read” is too weak a term for this!
But then, who am I to send people over to the Monster-that-is-TetZoo?