Critter of the Month: Scutellosaurus

Meet Skittles.  She might be all hard and pebbly on the outside, but on the inside she wants nothing more than a nice warm hug.  Scratch just a little in between those rocky scutes, and she’ll roll on her back so you can rub her smooth, soft belly scales.

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The tips of her clawed toes softly scratched stone as she walked. Her head tilted this way and that, like a lizard, large eyes wide as she stared at the straight, dead trees and clean, flat ground. Shiny loops and ledges stuck out from smooth, white walls. Stone? She sniffed the air. Stinging, acidic, not natural, but underneath it was the scent of warm earth.

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Critter of the Month: Dilophosaurus

Meet Picasso.  This quiet softie loves spending time with his special person.  Snuggling under the tree to hear a good story?  That sounds like a lovely way to spend a warm afternoon. 🙂

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Picasso continued his routine patrol of the fence with all the decorum of a peacock. Each step deliberate so that not a single scrubby twig shifted, his fur-like feathers barely brushing against the wire grid too high to jump. Dry ferns and prickly scrub grew through the mesh at the foot of the fence, but ahead there was an emptiness in the dense line of browning vegetation. And the fence…the fence was gone!

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Critter of the Month: Ornitholestes

Meet Opie. He’s a happy little fella who loves to curl up in your lap, so it’s a good thing he’s about the size of a big dog!

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Sunlight streamed through the tangled layers of conifer branches and palm 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.

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Critter of the Month: Gargoyleosaurus

Meet Gertrude! She may be as tough and pokey as a gargoyle, but she loves to cuddle.

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The little ballerina princess shivered as she stared up the sidewalk to Uncle Pete’s house. Tombstones rose up through the dense fog, and bones littered the ground. She nudged a giant rib with her toe, clutched her goodie bag and ribboned wand tightly, and stepped forward.

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Critter of the Month: Juramaia

Meet Maya.  She’s a sweet little fuzzball who loves nothing more than to curl up in your lap.  At least during the day.  When the sun goes down, that’s when the party starts!

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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!

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