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Stop Continental Drift NOW!
Feb. 24th, 2013 06:03 pmWe finally went to the ROM's current dinosaur show. The lure here is that it's fossils from the Southern hemisphere -- Gondwandaland -- and significantly different from the ones we usually see. The exhibit texts took the opportunity, having lured us in with dinos, to sneak in lessons about continental drift, though I don't know how closely the visitors were looking at that part of the show. The "interactive" screens *were* a lot more informative than they usually are in family-friendly museum exhibits -- I liked that they specified which bones in the skeletons on display were cast from actual found bones, and which ones were guesswork.
Spinosaurus was, as TVTropes puts it, "the dinosaur even more Badass than T. rex." Majungasaurus and Carnotaurus, OTOH, pretty much existed to make T. Rex's arms look good. (I wonder if the vestigial forelimbs still served some purpose, like maybe hanging on during mating.)
Apparently, even back in the distant past when the continents were in different locations, Madagascar was already weird, As in, crocodiles there had diversified to fill ecological niches you would expect to find crocodiles in. For example, this pug-nosed herbivore. I mean, look at that. It's a wombat-croc. It's kind of adorable.
Spinosaurus was, as TVTropes puts it, "the dinosaur even more Badass than T. rex." Majungasaurus and Carnotaurus, OTOH, pretty much existed to make T. Rex's arms look good. (I wonder if the vestigial forelimbs still served some purpose, like maybe hanging on during mating.)
Apparently, even back in the distant past when the continents were in different locations, Madagascar was already weird, As in, crocodiles there had diversified to fill ecological niches you would expect to find crocodiles in. For example, this pug-nosed herbivore. I mean, look at that. It's a wombat-croc. It's kind of adorable.
