Zoologist Mike Dickison throws his hat into the dinosaur comedy ring (yes, dinosaur):
[Hat tip to the brother in Jersey]
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Nifty Fifty
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June 30th, 2010 at 9:13 am
Brilliant!!
June 30th, 2010 at 9:38 am
It’s not a ratite? Damn!
June 30th, 2010 at 9:38 am
When I was little and watching Sesame Street I told my mom that Big Bird was cross between an ostrich and a Pelican.
The ostrich is understandable, the Pelican I can only attribute to the fact that we had one that hung around our boat and I had named it Big Bird.
I don’t remember telling her this. But its a famous family story.
June 30th, 2010 at 9:52 am
Wonderful!!!
June 30th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
OMG AWESOME! That was probably one of the best talks I’ve seen this year.
Now the follow up talk should be on the mysterious large mammal that has a relationship with this large flightless crane and whether or not it is a long tailed proboscidean or a trunked xenarthrian!
June 30th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Damn! And I thought it might turn out to be a feathered non-avian dinosaur…
June 30th, 2010 at 8:15 pm
I can but agree with some luminaries here: Great fun.
June 30th, 2010 at 8:44 pm
I’m out of time to watch the video (sorry), but a moa surely?
(I’m biased: moas, like me, are from New Zealand. Or rather were. I don’t think I’ve gone extinct.)
July 1st, 2010 at 1:56 am
He had me at “tibiotarsus”
July 1st, 2010 at 9:40 am
Grant: moas have highly HIGHLY reduced forelimbs. Grandicrocavis, on the other hand (so to speak) does not.
July 1st, 2010 at 11:46 am
I would have thought it was a highly modified therizinosaur. Smaller claws, more feathers (possibly), and reduced dentitition. Then the fingers, neck, gut and posture would match and all you would need to do is make the tail extremely vestigial.
Big “Bird”, obviously, is a modern colloquial taxonomic identification.
July 3rd, 2010 at 1:15 am
The number of people who have tried to convince me that Grandicrocavis is non-avian… Last I looked, it wasn’t the Mesozoic any more, guys. What’s more plausible: last surviving non-avian dinosaur, OR, it’s a bird? See, this is why we need DNA.
And Snuffleupagus is surely a dwarf island mammoth. But I’ll leave that debate to the mammalogists.
July 7th, 2010 at 10:25 am
[...] Comedy video of the month. [...]
July 14th, 2010 at 1:20 am
Pretty good post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I
have really enjoyed reading your blog posts.
funny pictures
July 16th, 2010 at 10:23 am
Awesome!!!! Love all your comments as well! Thanks to Anisa for the link to that site, it’s hilarious!!!
September 2nd, 2010 at 5:42 pm
[...] If you have a few minutes and would like to listen to a thoughtful yet somewhat irreverent discussion on the nature and discovery of a certain flightless bird, you could do worse than zoologist Mike Dickison. Check it out here. [...]
November 23rd, 2011 at 7:50 am
Sorry, but he admits he did not have an actual skeleton, and he only hypothesized the skeletal morphology. Looking at the actual observations he in fact gave, we can see that the much reduced tarsometatarsus is more consistent in what we see in Therizinosaurs, than what we see in the family Gruidae with their greatly increased tarsometatarsal region. Also, the extremely large gut is more in line with a more herbivorous animal that utilizes a large bacterial fermenting for cellulose breakdown. Again, this is more consistent with Therizinosaurs.