Tango
The Holiday Season is Here
The weather is getting cooler, seasonal jingles are playing in every major retail store, and the smell of cinnamon is everywhere…it’s Time for the Christmas Countdown!
Continue readingCritter of the Month: Yi Qi
The dragon of the Jurassic! A mysterious creature that many portray as a monstrous frankenstein of bat and bird features…may actually not look so strange afterall.
This handsome little fellow was only about the size of a pigeon or perhaps a crow. The one and only fossil preserves beautiful details about its feathers, the skin membrane between a few fingers, and even the structures that hint at color. But fossils like these can often lead to even more questions than one started with! Let’s take a moment to unpack what I mean…
Continue readingCritter of the Month: Archaeopteryx
Meet Tango. This bird likes to party, and loves being the center of attention even more!
Last year I wrote a little story about Tango and Twig, but it was posted in two halves. Tango and Twig would be much happier if I posted the whole story in one place, so enjoy this silly little tale about Tango the Archaeopteryx and Twig the Compsognathus.
Continue readingCritter of the Month: Compsognathus
Meet Twig. He’s a lot more travel-sized, if you’re looking for a dinosaur that’s not a bird. He makes up for his size by being extra friendly and huggable.
Last month Tango found a good place to sing, but just in case you didn’t meet him last month, I will start this little adventure from the beginning…
Continue readingCritter of the Month: Archaeopteryx
Meet Tango. This bird likes to party, and loves being the center of attention even more!
We’ve been working on my big boy’s reading skills, and he’s been struggling to focus on some of the stories in his workbook. To be perfectly frank, they’re not really stories so much as exposition on a particular topic. What’s exposition, you ask? In a word…boring! So I thought I’d write a few silly stories of my own for him to read!
Here’s the first little section. I’ll have it finished and post the complete story with the next critter of the month. Keep in mind this is for a beginning reader, so some sight words and words that he can sound out lol 😀
Continue readingCritter 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. 🙂
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!
Critter of the Month: Archaeopteryx
Meet Tango. This bird likes to party, and loves being the center of attention even more!
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.
Critter of the Month?
Oops! Looks like our featured critter has flown the coop! I’m terribly sorry for the delay, but Pete’s on it and will bring him back as soon as possible. 🙂
While you wait, I found a few lovely old drawings and paintings of our feathered friend. And by old, I mean a part of history. In 1941 Manfred Reichel, a Swiss paleontologist, published an article on Archaeopteryx. I love how natural and lifelike his drawings are, unlike the chimeric feathered-lizard monstrosities most people have drawn for ages.
Manfred Reichel took some inspiration from reading The Origin of Birds, written by Gerhard Hellmann and published in 1926. Below is one of Hellmann’s beautiful paintings.
Come back soon! Hopefully it won’t take more than a day or two to catch our feisty dancer. 😀
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