This Sh%$ Is Nightmare Fuel

A skull that resembles Rex from Toy Story has been found in North Central Texas. The nearly complete skull of an over 280 million-year-old amphibian will eventually be displayed at the Texas Through Time Fossil Museum.

For more info: https://t.co/YNfEV0f3jw pic.twitter.com/UQlUpJTR85

— IGN (@IGN) June 24, 2025

Not Rex from Toy Story


This Guy

So there I am surfing the web, and I come across the following hed, "Paleontologists Find Skeleton That Weirdly Looks Exactly Like Barney the Purple Dinosaur."

I had to share this.

I will not suffer alone:

Deep in the heart of Texas, a goofy-looking dinosaur skeleton has been unearthed — and it's got a funny head that makes it look like a dead ringer for Barney, the purple lizard of 90s television fame with the annoyingly cheery voice.

As the Houston Chronicle reports, the dinosaur in question — called Eryops megacephalus — has a wide, grinning smile on a large flat skull that sits on four squat legs. Paleontologist Andre LuJan told the newspaper that he found the skeleton of the semiaquatic ancient amphibian recently in Archer County, in a quarry that dates back to the Permian era, about over 280 million years ago.

"This is an exciting discovery," LuJan told Chron. "It's a well-known animal and not considered rare, but this discovery is significant because even though it's damaged, it is nearly complete, and that is far more uncommon or even rare than finding fragments."

 The horror.....................

This is So Cool

They found a kitten in Siberia.

A 35,000 year old sabertooth  tiger kitten that was so well preserved that it still had its teeth and claws.

Not great for the aforementioned kitten, but great for paleontologists everywhere:

While searching for mammoth tusks in eastern Siberia, scavengers found a rare ice mummy along the banks of the Badyarikha River. One of the many treasures to be unearthed in Siberia, the finding turned out to be a three-week-old saber-toothed kitten preserved in the permafrost.

The study, published on Thursday in Scientific Reports, describes the frozen kitten’s 35,000-year-old body. The mummy contains the head and front parts of the animal, including fur and muzzle, making it possible for scientists to study these for the first time.

………

Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers found that the cub lived somewhere between 35,500 to 37,000 years ago. It also belonged to the species Homotherium latidens, and lived in the Late Pleistocene. Judging by its incisors, scientists estimate it was about three weeks old.

Amid all of the crappy news these days, this is good news.

The "Too Much Free Time" Event Horizon Has Been Crossed

Seriously:

Link.

This Sounds Like Throwing Shade

Normally, when someone discovers a creates a creature, and names it after someone, it is an expression of admiration, see the chewing lice specific to owls, Strigiphilus garylarsoni, named after the creator of The Far Side.

That being said, when paleontologists discovered a fossilized ancestor of the Vampire Squid, and decided to name it after Joe Biden, it feels like a subtle, or not so subtle, dis:

Paleontologists have identified the earliest known ancestor of the octopus and vampire squid — and named the newly discovered species after President Biden.

The more than 300-million-year-old fossilized Syllipsimopodi bideni, a vampyropod, was unearthed from the Bear Gulch Limestone in Montana and donated in 1988 to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. There, it sat relatively unstudied until paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History slid it under a microscope.

They noticed that the fossil resembled an octopus and vampire squid, but with 10 arms instead of eight, two rows of tiny suckers and what appears to be an ink sac — the organ that produces the ink that octopuses and squid spray in self-defense when escaping from predators. The findings were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Paleontologists have identified the earliest known ancestor of the octopus and vampire squid — and named the newly discovered species after President Biden.

The more than 300-million-year-old fossilized Syllipsimopodi bideni, a vampyropod, was unearthed from the Bear Gulch Limestone in Montana and donated in 1988 to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. There, it sat relatively unstudied until paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History slid it under a microscope.

They noticed that the fossil resembled an octopus and vampire squid, but with 10 arms instead of eight, two rows of tiny suckers and what appears to be an ink sac — the organ that produces the ink that octopuses and squid spray in self-defense when escaping from predators. The findings were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

 ………

Whalen said in an interview with The Washington Post that he and a colleague were studying the fossil around the time Biden was elected president, so they named it Syllipsimopodi bideni, after Biden, to commemorate the start of his presidency and raise awareness for his climate change policies.

I'd be happy if someone named a chewing lice after me, or a round worm, but a fossilized vampire squid?  That makes me paranoid.

How Does the World’s Foremost Author of Gay Dinosaur Pr0n Not Have a Blue Check Mark?

dang. surprised nobody who works for greg abbott remembered to buy https://t.co/GXnZnfLtRt pic.twitter.com/AheMQvidXA

— Chuck Tingle (@ChuckTingle) February 24, 2022

This is an epic own of Greg Abbott and his Evil Minions^™.

Tekeli li! Tekeli li!

Some children in New Zealand have discovered the fossils of a heretofore unknown prehistoric penguin.

Let's see:  Distant southern land, giant penguins ……… If those kids hear something that sounds like a subway train, run like hell:

What's black and white and the size of a 10-year-old child? A giant, extinct penguin that lived between 27 million and 35 million years ago in what is now New Zealand.

The enormous diving bird stood about 4.5 feet (1.4 meters) tall and had unusually long legs and beak for a penguin, according to scientists who recently described it as a newfound species. It was discovered in 2006 by fossil-hunting students with the Hamilton Junior Naturalist Club (JUNATS), a natural history club in Hamilton, New Zealand, for children ages 10 to 18. 

A group of club members, led by JUNATS fossil expert Chris Templer, found the extinct giant's bones on a small peninsula in Kawhia Harbor during a field trip. The fossil is the most complete giant penguin skeleton ever discovered, and the length of its hind limbs inspired researchers to name it Kairuku waewaeroa: "waewae" means "legs" and "roa" means "long" in the Māori language, scientists wrote in a new study about the giant bird.

H/t Blade at the Stellar Parthenon BBS

Headline of the Day

Joe Biden Owes Neanderthals an Apology After Comments on Texas Mask Mandate Lift

—Charlie Pierce

Yes, the Texas governor has decided to lift all Covid restrictions, because  ……… TEXAS, and the governor of Mississippi has decided to lift all Covid restrictions, because  ……… they can't abide TEXAS out-stupiding them.

Biden described this as, "Neanderthal Thinking," which is, as the eminently quotable Mr. Pierce notes, unfair to Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis, who by all indications were just as capable and intelligent as our own Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

I think that we should give Texas back to Mexico, if they will take it.

As to Mississippi,could someone please take them?  Anyone?

Arizona, It's the New Florida, Man!

In Tucson, Arizona, a "Christian" group has organized protests at a McDonalds against a statue of a dinosaur, because ……… Ummmm ……… It's not in Genesis, I guess?

This is not The Onion:

A Tucson landmark won't be going extinct anytime soon. Attempts to remove a fiberglass dinosaur statue outside of a McDonald's have been thwarted.

A group called Christians Against Dinosaurs denounced the T. rex statue on its Facebook page and called for its followers to rally in an effort to remove the statue.

"Please help! This McDonald's has this dinosaur and refuse to remove it!" according to the Arizona Daily Star. "This is in Tucson, Arizona. Call the manager and demand the removal of this blasphemy!"

………

When reached via Facebook, Christians Against Dinosaurs told Patch that the group's mission is no joke.

"We're fed up with everybody acting like the people of Tucson are imbeciles and we want to help," a spokesperson for the group said. "Having a big dinosaur outside a cultural hub like McDonald's makes Tucsonians look like they're mentally deficient and that isn't right."

No, YOU are making, "Tucsonians look like they're mentally deficient."

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

Scientists have reconstructed an antediluvian creature from fossil, and it looks a lot like something from the mind of HP Lovecraft:

A creature with more than a passing resemblance to HP Lovecraft’s terrifying Chthulu once actually existed, palaeontologists have revealed – although at just three centimetres wide, it was hardly a danger to shipping or buildings.

Not, of course, that there were any human-made structures around when Sollasina cthulhu prowled across the ocean floor some 430 million years ago.

The creature, a very distant ancestor of sea cucumbers and sea slugs, is revealed in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

It was found in fossilised form in the UK county of Hereford. A team of researchers led by Imran Rahman from the University of Oxford then spent months painstakingly grinding it away, taking photographs at every stage, resulting in an accurate 3D computer reconstruction.

It has a face only a mother could love:

No, That Was Margaret Thatcher, It's a Common Mistake

OK, the headline on the BBC was, "Major shake-up suggests dinosaurs may have 'UK origin'," but I still think that it was Margaret Thatcher:

The first dinosaurs may have originated in the Northern Hemisphere, possibly in an area that is now Britain.

This is one of the conclusions of the first detailed re-evaluation of the relationships between dinosaurs for 130 years.

It shows that the current theory of how dinosaurs evolved and where they came from may well be wrong.

This major shake-up of dinosaur theory is published in this weeks's edition of the journal Nature.

The reassessment shows that the meat eating beasts, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor, have been wrongly classified in the dinosaur family tree.

One of the implications is that dinosaurs first emerged 15 million years earlier than previously believed.

And the fossil evidence suggests that this origin may have occurred further north than current thinking suggests - possibly in an area that is now the UK, according to the new study's lead author, Matthew Baron of Cambridge University.

Well, that was my first thought when I read the headline.

Your Awesome Fact of the Day

In a development that should surprise no one, this is a fact about the Gary Larson Cartoon The Far Side:

Stegosaurus is world-famous for its lime-sized brain and the quartet of nasty-looking spikes on its tail. A 1982 "Far Side" strip decided to have a little fun with the latter attribute. In that cartoon, we find an early human anachronistically lecturing his fellow cavemen about dinosaur-related hazards. Pointing at the rear end of a Stegosaurus diagram, he says “Now this end is called the thagomizer … after the late Thag Simmons.” Without meaning to, Larson’s strip plugged a gap in the scientific lexicon. Previously, nobody had ever given a name to the unique arrangement of tail spikes found on Stegosaurus and its relatives. But today, many paleontologists use the word “thagomizer” when describing this apparatus, even in scientific journals.

This is so full of awesome that there is a risk of injury.

Headline of the Day

To Be Clear, Velociraptors Would Make Terrible Weapons

Hell, this might be the headline of the year.

I am Unreasonably Stoked About This

I don't know why, but the taxonomic resurrection of the species Brontosaurus has me pleased to a completely unreasonably degree:

The brontosaurus, loved by kids the world over but cruelly snubbed by paleontologists for more than a century, is back. British and Portuguese fossil boffins have concluded the dinosaur existed as a separate genus after all.

It was back in 1879 that paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh named a collection of bones a brontosaurus, or Thunder Lizard, and described a massive herbivore with a long neck and tail that wandered across the plains of what is now America.

But within a couple of decades the existence of the Thunder Lizard was called into question, and the scientific community decided that the stumbled-upon brontosaurus was just an adolescent apatosaurus. There then followed a 100-year campaign to expunge the word brontosaurus from textbooks, but the name proved just too popular.

Now a study looking at the largest range of fossils of the genus has shown that the brontosaurus was a distinct genus. While the dino does have strong similarities to the apatosaurus, there are enough differences to separate the two, the study's authors concluded.

Our research would not have been possible at this level of detail 15 or more years ago", explains Emanuel Tschopp, a Swiss national who led the research from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal, "in fact, until very recently, the claim that Brontosaurus was the same as Apatosaurus was completely reasonable, based on the knowledge we had."

The initial argument for the non-existence of the brontosaurus was down to its sacrum bones, which link the tail to the base of the spine. The first Thunder Lizard found had five of these, compared to the apatosaurus' three, but it was assumed that the brontosaurus bones were young and would have merged together to form these three bones.

But as more and more specimens were found, this theory started to look a little off. That was reinforced by other fossil evidence, so the new study turned to statistics to find out what was going on.

"The differences we found between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were at least as numerous as the ones between other closely related genera, and much more than what you normally find between species," explained Roger Benson, a co-author from the University of Oxford.

I have no clue why I am so giddy over this news, but I am incredibly happy about this.

I Honestly Do Not Know if this is Cute or Terrifying

But a 2 m tall penguin weighing 115 kg could play outside linebacker in the NFL:

A penguin species that lived millions of years ago would have dwarfed today’s biggest living penguins and stood as tall as most humans, according to analysis of fossils by a team of researchers from the La Plata Museum in Argentina.

Palaeeudyptes klekowskii has already been dubbed the “colossus penguin”, and is the most complete fossil ever uncovered from the Antarctic. The unearthed bones are 37m years old and include the longest recorded fused ankle-foot bone as well as parts of a wing bone.

From those bones, researchers estimated the species would have stood 2m tall from toe to beak tip, and weighed as much as 115kg. Standing normally, beak down, the penguin would have be around 1.6m tall, the team reported in the journal Geobios.

By comparison, the tallest and heaviest living species, the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), stands 1.1m high and weighs just under 50kg.

This is like Ted "The Mad Stork" Hendricks in a tuxedo.

Unreal.