I have a confession to make. I always assumed that Juramaia was tiny. The reconstructions make it look a bit like a rat, and the modern-day comparisons are always to shrews. So she’s basically a prehistoric squirrel-rat-thing right?
I was wrong!
The shark cruised the turquoise water, sunlight rippling through the waves to the soft sand below. A small school of silvery fish stirred up a cloud in the warm, shallow waters by the reef, but the shark turned away from them.
Dr. Pete Diggle checked the mail this morning, and he showed me a letter with a very interesting question…
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Archaeopteryx has been a known fossil for quite some time. Ever since that famous feather discovered in German limestone in 1860, and then the first skeleton in 1861.
The best way to a dino’s heart is through his stomach, as they say… Continue reading
He basked in the warmth of the sun, armored scales like a double row of polished stones. Eyes closed, mouth open with glistening teeth, he listened to the stillness. He could hear the distant calls of flying creatures as they gossiped about their day, the faint rustling of a summer breeze through scraggy conifer branches high above, the scratching chirp of a far away insect. The beating of wings. Continue reading
The little girl clung tightly to the small creature, his wings folded close against his furry body. His legs dangled loosely down by her legs, but he didn’t seem to mind. He gazed up at her pink, rounded face with the wide-eyed curiosity of a bird as she chattered about lizards and the rough bark on the pine trees that bordered the fenced backyard.
He could see her across the field with his keen, yellow eyes. A fence separated him from her as she rested beneath the shade of a tall, prickly cycad palm. Was that a hint of rosy pink wattles? A flash of golden eyes beneath the soft brown of the half-moon crest that crowned her delicate white head? He wasn’t sure, but a gentleman must always look his best in front of a lady, so he arched his long neck and raised his scaly tail.
Sunlight streamed through the tangled layers of conifer branches and cycad fronds to pierce the eternal twilight of the undergrowth. A cloud of tiny, reflective wings coiled like mist in the shaft of light, the thin whine of their hanging flight almost drowned by the whirring, buzzing, drumming, chirping of countless other unseen insects. Alien cries from leather-winged creatures called from above, answered and challenged by a cacophony of voices that clicked, whooped, hollered, whistled…any and every sound fighting to be heard through air so dense with foliage and humidity, constant moisture clung to the leaves and dripped to the black forest floor.
