Fossil Friday

[purplecat]

Image stolen shamelessly from The Great Dinosaur Discoveries by Darren Nash.


Dracorex is a Pachycephalosaur from the late Cretaceous. The spectacular skull was first described 2006.

Comments

[spiralsheep]

What a handsome baby! If you've got to be a herbivore then run fast and headbutt effectively imo.

Did you know that deer antlers, the fastest growing animal tissue on earth, evolved from a form of bone cancer (osteosarcoma)?

Also, because I can:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetoceras

[purplecat]

Oh dear! That horn on its nose does not look very practical - but then that's probably not the point!

[spiralsheep]

Evolution, being the result of gloriously random mutations, doesn't care about practicality... until there's a resource bottleneck and then everything* tends towards crabs, lol.

* to certain values of "everything" that mostly only includes crustaceans

[purplecat]

Marmalade Sparrow brought a load of animal biscuits back from Germany (Knabber Tiere). On helping myself to some last night I found only crabs were left - and was struck by the truth of this.

[spiralsheep]

Lol, your biscuits have undergone carcinisation.

[bunn]

THAT'S A DRAGON.

Well, I guess not really, but honestly if someone dug up one of those and came to the conclusion 'that's a dragon' without other information to work on, you could hardly blame them.

[purplecat]

It's full name is Dracorex hogwartsia (Dragon King of Hogwarts)