SCIENCE

Blog Carnival #29: PhyloPic Launches, Dino Robots, Prosauropods and Riley the First Grade Paleontologist

March 4, 2011

Paleo-Profiles: A new site called PhyloPic is a free online archive of silhouhettes featuring organisms both living and extinct. Art Evolved presents this primer on how you can create and contribute silhouettes.

Welcome to the Neighborhood: The Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm in Saint George, Utah recently unveiled its newest exhibit— the first Scelidosaurus ever displayed in the Western Hemisphere. Dinochik interviews paleontologist Jerry Harris about how he designed the installation.

It Walks! Sure, this past month we commemorated the 150th anniversary of Archaeopteryx, but Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs reminds us that it is also the 10th anniversary of Troody, a bipedal robot based on Troodon formosus and developed by Peter Dilworth at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. “Dilworth was concerned with solving the problems of bipedal locomotion in robots, and in a canny move to draw attention to his work and get youth interested in robotics, he chose to work on the theropod body plan.”

Growth Spurt: Dracovenator has begun his countdown of the ten largest prosauropods—herbivorous dinosaurs that lived during the Triassic and early Jurassic—and were among the biggest of the early dinosaurs.

Bringing a Shrimp Down to Size: Recent research suggests that one of Earth’s earliest predators—the carnivorous shrimp Anomalocaris, which lived in oceans three billion years ago—wasn’t all that fearsome. New 3D modeling of the critter’s mouth reveals that it likely couldn’t have even penetrated the exoskeleton of trilobites. Needless to say, this was welcome news for the denizens of Walcott’s Quarry.

Jurassic Food Pyramid: Illustrator Eduardo San Gil, a self-described “28.78-year-old boy,” presents this handy infographic of the “T-Rex Diet.”

Are You Smarter Than a First-Grader? At Superoceras, David Tana introduces us to Riley, “the first grade paleontologist,” who stars in his very own YouTube series (Episode 1: Carnivores). “In all seriousness, if this kid keeps it up, he's going to go places,” Tana writes, “he's already starting to throw his weight around and question the established view of things.”