Oh gosh, yes I am… a lil bit of one, yeah! I am mostly an avid watcher of documentaries 😀 Thank you so much for asking! I am NOWHERE near your level – that is incredibly impressive, what an amazing field to enter!!
I have two fave dinos. One is the ridiculously named Muttaburrasaurus, because it was the very first dino skeleton I saw with my own eyes. I was amazed at how BIG THIS HERBIVORE was. It was the dinosaur that got small me into liking dinosaurs!
The other is Kosmoceratops – though Leaellynasaura has the ‘awwww!’ factor, and props to Troodon too, for brains instead of beauty!
(i also really like the titanosaurs, while we’re talking the Mesozoic era… and practically everything to do with ocean fauna)
Megafauna!!!! OH GOSH, this is really where I have difficulty choosing… how can I pick, aaaugh.
Okay, here’s a shout-out to Diprotodon for being a koala/wombat 2m tall. And to Thylacoleo, the marsupial lion, for having the strongest known bite of any mammal that ever lived. I also really like the Terror Birds and the Thunder Birds. And the Hell Pig. Because the names…! And okay sure, Megatherium itself, for being a fucking giant sloth, because Life Goals.
Cripes, paleozoic animals… *shivers* the early paleozoic is messed-up, seriously. Giant scorpions and centipedes and spiders, brrr. Okay. I like the nautiloids, especially the orthocerida! THOSE SHELLS. And Helicoprion – Spiral Saw – and Stethacanthus – the Ironing Board shark. AND DUNKLEOSTEUS.
Ooooh, jeez. I would go back to the Neogene, I guess. And I would look at all the weird and wonderful megafauna, and check out Australopithecus and goggle at our early ancestors and how amazingly they adapted… and finally probably get eaten by a passing Agriotherium.
Good luck and congratulations to you in all your studies! I will be excited to learn all about your amazing discoveries and work in the future!
Back in 2014 we shared news of the awesome discovery of fossils belonging to one of the largest dinosaurs that ever walked the earth and its equally awesome name: the Titanosaur. Last week the American Museum of Natural History unveiled their model of this spectacular specimen, its largest by far measuring 122 feet long and approximately 17 feet tall.
The Titanosaur is so incredibly large that one room isn’t enough to contain it, so the dinosaur’s head stick out more than 10 feet outside the entrance to its home inside the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Orientation Center on the museum’s 4th floor gallery. Were it alive today this dinosaur could lift its head, atop a 39-foot-long neck, to “peek into a five-story building.” It also would’ve weighed about 70 tons, which is about the equivalent of 10 African elephants. What’s even more mind-blowing still is that, based on cross-sections of the animal’s vertebrae, paleontologists think it was only an adolescent when it died, so not fully grown.
“To accompany this massive model, some of the creature’s real fossils, which were first excavated in Argentina in 2014, hang along the wall. While it is nearly impossible to recover all of the bones from any dinosaur, paleontologist Diego Pol and his team have recovered a remarkable 70% (over 200 bones!) of this one over the course of 7 different expeditions in 18 months. For the remaining 30% of the model, scientists have extrapolated from similar species and estimates based on the circumference of the dinosaur’s femur and humerus bones.”
Watch this video to see how the AMNH assembled their colossal new dino:
Aw Yiss 