Toots for llewelly@sauropods.win account

Written by llewelly on 2025-01-20 at 19:41

JK Revell's newest post is about early cavimorph rodents and other Oligocene mammals of South America!

https://synapsida.blogspot.com/2025/01/oligocene-pt-13-first-porcupines.html

[#]mammals

[#]rodents

[#]fossils

[#]porcupines

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-20 at 12:59

@KateShaw

minor technical pedantry: the above podcast has venom and bite of fire ants all mixed together, but the venom is injected by a stinger on the back end of the ant, and the ant's mandibles on the front end don't have any venom. But in practice, the ant uses its mandibles to clamp onto your flesh, and then uses its stinger to sting you repeatedly. So the bite and the venom are separated by a whole ant-length, a distance smaller than the swelling you'll get from the sting. Thus confusion.

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-20 at 12:36

a new episode of strange animals podcast, by @KateShaw is out, and it's about the fire ant and the goliath bird-eater spider, two cool arthropods ... although the fire ant is invasive and a huge problem in many places. : )

https://strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net/2025/01/20/episode-416-the-heaviest-tarantula-and-the-bitey-est-ant/

[#]ants

[#]spiders

[#]animals

[#]biogeography

[#]arthopods

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-19 at 22:03

although I love it, I often forget to post about episodes of the Common Descent podcast. Here's the newest episode on Chimaeras, those strange, strange cartilaginous fish, related to sharks and rays, but outside of Elasmobranchii .

https://commondescentpodcast.com/2025/01/18/episode-209-chimaeras/

[#]fossils

[#]fish

[#]chimaera

[#]deepSea

[#]ratFish

[#]ghostFish

[#]spookFish

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-19 at 19:34

4/4

Yi qi (meaning strange wing) is a tiny, "bat-winged" gliding dinosaur, with membranous wings, probably not capable of powered flight, but probably living in trees. Found in China. The dinosaur genus with the shortest name, and tied with the bat genus Ea for shortest vertebrate genus name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_(dinosaur)

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-19 at 19:31

3/4

Tyrannus is a genus of Tyrant flycatchers, containing over 100 living species spread across North and South America. Most are tiny songbirds which live by catching flying insects. If you're old, you may not know that all birds are a group of theropod dinosaurs, so this one is still a dinosaur!

(not to be confused with a much larger, non-avian theropod dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrant_flycatcher

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-19 at 19:26

2/4

Supersaurus vivianae is a real diplodicid sauropod dinosaur, with a long neck and a long tail, much like Diplodocus, which is in the same family, but much larger. Found at Dry Mesa in eastern Colorado, with a (likely) second specimen found in Wyoming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersaurus

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-19 at 19:23

1/4

Zuul crurivastator is a real ankylosaurine dinosaur, an armored dinosaur with a tail club, named after the monster Zuul in the movie Ghostbusters, because its face looks a little like the movie monster. Among the best-preserved dinosaurs ever found.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuul

But it's not the only one in the list.

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-19 at 19:08

which dinosaurs are genuine dinosaur genera?

[#]dinosaurs

[#]fossils

[#]sauropodSaturday

[#]quiz

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-19 at 10:11

woke up listening to old episode of herphighlights, and they're explaining massive changes a snake's body goes through to digest a huge meal, including:

• Oxygen consumption can increase by as much as 44 times. Similar to the difference between a horse at rest and a horse at full gallop.

• Stomach ph drops from 7 to 1. (Snakes maintain near-neutral stomach ph when not digesting)

In a tangent starting about 27 minutes in.

https://herphighlights.podbean.com/e/039-an-appetite-for-arboreality/

[#]snakes

[#]reptiles

[#]eating

[#]digestion

[#]python

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-18 at 14:43

if anyone could answer two random Chinese history questions for me, I'd be grateful.

When did the cochineal scale insect, from which red dyes have so long been made, get to China?

What did the Chinese do for red dye before cochineal got there?

[#]dye

[#]red

[#]cochineal

[#]insects

[#]china

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-17 at 23:02

Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs has a review of an old book full of 1990s dinosaurs:

https://chasmosaurs.com/2025/01/17/vintage-dinosaur-art-oxford-first-book-of-dinosaurs/

A look back on different things were back then. : )

[#]dinosaurs

[#]FossilFriday

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-17 at 20:06

I'm tooting this link because I feel unresolvable free-floating anger at other computer nerds

https://cathode.church/@cmb/113843326005700439

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-17 at 17:38

hearing loud booms all day, and thinking "no, not UFOs, just someone rented a dumpster and is tearing up their roof and throwing stuff into the dumpster from the roof", and I finally went out and checked, and actually, they're not even throwing stuff off the roof; they're on the ground, and have the back end of a 30 ft (~9 meter) dumpster open, and could easily set stuff down on the dumpster floor, but they're throwing everything with enough force to bounce off the opposite end of the dumpster

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-17 at 17:22

I have some external hard drives I use for backups. None were purchased with an enclosure, but I have a few external hard drive enclosures that I purchased separately.

Is there any reason to purchase a hard drive that comes pre-packaged in an external hard drive enclosure?

If I decided I wanted a different hard drive in an external hard drive enclosure that had been pre-packaged with a hard drive in it, would it be difficult to swap the hard drives?

[#]hardDrive

[#]hardware

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-17 at 14:09

@gay_ornithischians if you haven't seen this already, this article on bird tongues is a great resource for speculative evolution thoughts:

https://toughlittlebirds.com/2014/11/20/lets-talk-about-bird-tongues/

[#]birds

[#]dinosaurs

[#]tongues

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-17 at 12:43

how many rapid unscheduled disassemblies will occur before spacex fanboys admit the firewall popularly hypothesised to protect spacex deciderators from elon's dangerous and foolish notions has burned down?

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-16 at 21:22

sometimes I think the only reason the Sindarin word for "friend" is mellon is so Tolkien could make a "use your melon" joke at the Moria gate.

Edit: the above was unclear; although Gandalf eventually uses the word "mellon" to open the door, the text doesn't contain any direct evidence a pun was intended, that's my speculation.

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-16 at 20:41

there's a mysterious

marine chelicerate

that's got nine eyes

but don't lose any sleep

those nine eyes

can't form images

of you or me or anything

in the deep blue sea

there's a mysterious

marine chelicerate

that's got spikes

on five pairs of thighs

but don't lose any sleep

all those spikes

just break up food

so it can eat

it's not closely related to crabs

it's not closely related to horses

and not even related to shoes

[#]poetry

[#]xiphosuran

[#]horseShoeCrab

[#]arthropods

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Written by llewelly on 2025-01-16 at 20:31

Godzilla fact: Since Godzilla is fusion-powered, his heart is full of sunshine. Isn't that wonderful?

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