Happy to be back! Lots to chat about!

I took a very long hiatus during the craziness of the holidays and some crazy stuff happening in my personal life, but I’m happy to say I can come back to posting about dinosaur things again!

Since I’ve been gone for a while, this post is going to be rather long, and really more of a catch-all post instead of it having a clear point or theme. Since the last time I was able to post, there has been some cool news announced, I found some more cool art, learned about new books and a graphic novel, found some videos….all KINDS of good stuff!

MERRY DINO XMAS I GUESS.

Other than the ramblings of my brain, here’s a link to the Top Dinosaur Discoveries of 2015! Now you can’t say I never gave you anything. ;D

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• I found Reddit

I’m extremely tardy to the party on this, but I’ve discovered the wonderful world of Reddit. Well, more like Alex (my hubby) got me into it. He made me an account and loaded my subreddits (pages to follow) with topics that he thought I would like.

Naturally, he loaded r/Dinosaurs as one of them. I lav him. :3

It’s only been about two weeks since I started chronically diving into these threads, and so far I have learned about so many cool things. The newest discoveries are posted almost immediately, which is amazing, but the community there is really friendly and helpful. Stumbling through understanding this new fangled Reddit machine, I learned about “profile flare” which varies between subreddits. In r/Dinosaurs, our flare is “picking teams”, which honestly was one of the hardest decisions OF MY LIFE.

How the hell am I supposed to pick TEAMS when it comes to fucking dinosaurs? It’d be like asking which dog I like better.  I LOVE THEM ALL, WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?

I ended up picking triceratops, after a good hour of soul searching. Ceratopsians were my favorites as a kid, so I finally had to commit. I’m still in turmoil over it.

• More toys, please

The threads have been fantastic, because I feel like most of the people there are nerds and not actually experts. I think there are a few peppered in, but for the most part, it’s just us dinosaur enthusiasts gushing over something we love. By far my favorite threads have been about the more fun/hobby side of dinosaur lovers, like people’s art, asking for book recommendations, and learning about really awesome dinosaur figures and toys.

Dimetrodon eating a cake pop. :3

Papo Toys and Schleich Toys have been a new obsession since finding this subreddit. I didn’t realize that these guys  really existed, even though my Dimetrodon is a Papo toy. I’m completely in love with both lines, and am going to have to start collecting them. I even found a video the upcoming Papo line coming out in 2016, and holy shit that raptor!!

The detail comes at a steep price though, because I remember looking at some of these bad boys at Toys R Us and paling at the price tag. They are easily $30+ for one of these guys, so this may have to be a birthday/xmas kind of thing, or pulling in some overtime at work.

I was informed early this morning that there is a line of toys at Target called Terra by Battat which features some pretty decent figures at a really good price. My good friend Steven shot me a picture of them today, and one of the first things I noticed was that the dinosaurs featured weren't the normal fan favorites, i.e. t-rex, triceratops, etc.
Not that I'm against these awesome guys, but I like seeing a toy line take the plunge and put out some of the lesser known members of the dinosaur family. In the picture sent to me, the dinosaurs displayed were Ceratosaurus, Carnotaurus, and Pachyrhinosaurus. Steven also mentioned there was a Dilophosaurus there hanging out as well.
Talk about the cool, badass cousins of the famous dinosaurs, right?? While Carnotaurus is one of the coolest therapods out there, I'm really stoked about the pahcyrhino myself. It's such a cool ceratopisan, and I've been reliving how much I adore them recently.
If I'm able to go grab one today, I'll let you guys know what I think of them once I get them in my grubby paws. With them only being about $13, it's hard to turn down!

• Dinosaur Graphic novel??

Along with some cool articles posted this week about Nicolas Cage returning a stolen fossil, someone had posted about a graphic novel I had never heard of. It’s called Age of Reptiles by Ricardo Delgago. Apparently this series has been out of a couple of years, and I had no earthly idea.

I was extremely delighted and very excited to see it, thinking the art and concept was thrilling. There’s even an omnibus available that has a collection of everything out so far….but it’s completely sold out.

Shit.

Hunting down a used copy further upset me, as the ones I found are upwards into the $50 range. New it’s about $25. Damn. It. I’m going keep hunting for this, and hopefully I have find a copy new, or have it ordered from B&N or Wild West Comics. I really want it.

It looks like there is another graphic novel coming out later in January called Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians, which looks SUPER COOL. I’ll definitely snag that when it comes out and do a full book review! :D

• Re-imagining of "The Good Dinosaur"

The last thing I'll share with you from my latest reddit scan today was a really cool video from Josh Cotton, a really awesome paleo artist, who re-imagined the main character from The Good Dinosaur. Now, I had wrote about my feelings on the movie earlier in the month, and so far nothing has swayed me from my pretty strongly apathetic feelings towards the film. Josh was disheartened by the lack of scientific knowledge that went into the movie, stating that the creators basically missed out on a great opportunity to do something wonderful by simply knowing about the dinosaurs they had in the movie. 

Josh took Arlo, an Apatosaurus, who would not have been alive during the Cretaceous period, and re-drew him as an Alamosaurs. It's impressive and amazing to watch, and his commentary is fantastic.

Go check out his video.

• 12 Days of Evolution and my hype for Darwin Day!

In case you have never heard of Darwin Day, it’s a holiday (to me) celebrated every year on Charles Darwin’s birthday, February 12th. It’s a day to celebrate triumphs in scientific discoveries, evolution, understanding our place in the tree of life, and the life of Darwin himself.

Over the past couple years, this day has ramped up in popularity, which more places (usually museums and universities) holding celebrations and lectures. Since I live in north Texas, there hasn’t been a lot in the ways of cool ways to celebrate, so I usually do something with friends.

Last year was going to be hard to top! My awesome partner in science-themed greatness, Nym, set up a projector in her backyard so we could watch a vast evolution video playlist I put together with amazing YouTube videos on the topic. We sat huddled under together in the February cold, drinking a fantastic concoction called “primordial booze”, and watching videos all night.

It was nothing short of fucking fantastic.

This year, I have no idea how I’m going to make this event better. I may do something very similar, because it was such a good time. We had food and drinks and science. Perfect.

One of the channels I follow, which I ended up using a lot of videos for Darwin Day from, was It’s Okay To Be Smart. I adore their short, very easy to understand, fun science videos that cover a wide range of topics. Their latest series was put out during the holidays called 12 Days of Evolution, which is absolutely going on the playlist this year.

They released one episode at a time over the span of 12 days (duh), and cover the most common questions and basic understanding of evolution. The host is apparently from/lives in I think north Texas, which means at some point I’m going to have to give him an epic high-five.

• My current obsession with Ceratopsians

Going back to my earlier discussion of the soul crushing decision I had to make about picking which dinosaur team I allied to on Reddit, this sparked me to get a weird bug to avidly consume information about ceratopsians. It’s been a while since I honed in on one species in particular, as I usually to a well-rounded, little bit of everything, type of internet crawl when it comes to dinos. But lately I’ve been pecking and picking a bits of info about ceratopsians, trying to absorb as much as I can.

One of them in particular I’ve totally fallen for, the impressive Regalceratops, which I think I’m going to do a full post about later. He was actually one of the amazing dinosaur finds of 2015, which I linked to at the very tippy-top of the post. :D

I found out that one of the best resources to study about specific species is found in the Dinosauria, a ri-goddamn-diculously giant book….which I own. I’m going to read through this massive tome and make a more detailed post later about what I find out.

Regaliceratops by Julius T. Csotonyi

• Lastly, here's some cool art I found

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I’m glad to be back to posting about this stuff again. It really is a great sense of joy and relaxation for me to have my own little corner to gush and fangirl out about one of the topics I love so much.

I hope you guys have fun reading it as much as I have fun writing it.

And if not, that’s ok too. Because I’m just having a ball.

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