Darius Nau

Very excited to present the first ornithomimosaurs from Early Cretaceous of Germany. Artwork by @joschuaknuppe.bsky.social and the paper is OA:

www.app.pan.pl/article/item...

Enjoy! More is to be described from this place

With great pleasure I would like to introduce you to the first ornithomimosaur from Germany!
The fossils of this charming bugger are from Balve, a locality that preserves early Cretaceous fossils in a Devonian reef that had karstified already back then, giving us: cave dinosaurs

There are definitely modern print editions of Brehm’s Tierleben, I grew up with one in my household. To what extent any are true to the original scope or whether all are just condensed versions I am unsure though.

So even though they are more stem-ward than coelurosaur groups where we see prominent reductions of the tail, their body proportions forced them to adopt a more horizontal femur posture, and therefore evolve thicker femora and larger iliac blades.

The evolution of femoral osteology and soft tissues on the line to extant birds (Neornithes) Abstract. Femoral osteology and soft tissues evolved in a stepwise pattern in archosauromorph reptiles on the line to crown group birds. Crocodylia retains

…while more crow-ward groups (esp. coelurosaurs, most notably Eumaniraptorans) increasingly reduce the caudofemoralis, and rely mostly on knee flexion.

In the case of tyrannosaurids, the more anterior COM is a direct consequence of the very heavy skull and broad anterior chest area.

This falls on a general trend of more knee-driven locomotion on the lineage towards modern birds, where more stem-ward theropods tend to have smaller iliac blades, smaller gluteal complexes and a greater reliance on femoral retraction powered by the caudofemoralis muscles…

Incidentally this same mechanism (more "bird-like", crouched posture with a less vertical femur) may also be why the gluteal complex of tyrannosaurids is larger. While widely ascribed to an adaptation for superior mobility, it probably has to do with a more knee-driven style of locomotion.

A brown fuzzy animal that may at first glance appear to be a hare-like lagomorph, but is in fact a small bipedal stubby-tailed ornithischian with large display feathers resembling ears on its head. It's holding an egg with a blue-green shell that it presumably just laid previously. It may in fact be in the process of laying more eggs. Why, who know if it has already hidden several of its eggs in the nearest garden or park.

Happy easter, watch out for lagomorph-mimicking ornithopods. When in doubt, remember that eutherians don't lay eggs.

Anyone surprised this was going to happen?

Google search results says: National Institute of Justice (•gov) https://nij.ojp.gov › topics › articles › undocumented-im.. immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens. No information is available for this page. Learn why

THREAD: The Trump administration's DOJ has removed a study from the NIJ website that found that immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants, commit crimes at significantly lower rates than U.S. citizens.

The study is at odds with the Trump regime's propaganda about immigrants & crime. (1)

Is that so crazy? I mean sure, bald eagles are mostly piscivores, but their predatory tools are not really so massively different from those of Golden eagles, which take carnivorans this size or larger on more than just anecdotal occasions.

Ali-U-Net: A Convolutional Transformer Neural Net for Multiple Sequence Alignment of DNA Sequences. A proof of concept We report a convolutional transformer neural network that is capable of aligning multiple nucleotide sequences. The neural network is based on the U-Net commonly used in image segmentation which we em...

The preprint of my first paper has finally been published this Monday.

Ali-U-Net: A Convolutional Transformer Neural Net for Multiple Sequence Alignment of DNA Sequences. A proof of concept www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Pass it on.
#StandWithUkraine

Surely what was possible in 1999 should be possible in 2025. Sadly it appears that recent years have seen a step back, rather than progress, in terms of the diversity of settings and fauna shown in paleomedia.

If you want to argue that you had to include Maastrichtian North America because "they wouldn’t fund a paleo doc without T. rex!", at least do us the courtesy of not ALSO insisting to include TWO more that are also set in Late Cretaceous North America while entirely ignoring the Triassic.

What I do understand is that realities of big-budget productions involve compromises, but if those mean that every documentary has to feature T. rex and Triceratops, i.e. the most overused setting of all, that’s still no excuse to follow that up with two more eps. in the third-most overused setting.

I don’t get why the current iteration would strive for a LESS, rather than more, diverse set of geographical and stratigraphical settings, especially now that we already have decades of overrepresentation of certain stratigraphies and localities.

Across identical runtimes, WWD1990 gave us: 4 different continents, all three periods of the mesozoic, 3/6 episodes set in the Cretaceous, 1/6 Late Cretaceous

WWD2025 is giving us: 3 continents, 5/6 episodes set in the Cretaceous, 4/6 Cretaceous North America, 3/6 Late Cretaceous North America

That is for a documentary series that is literally walking in the footsteps of the original 1999 Walking with Dinosaurs, which set a benchmark for not just visuals and entertainment, but also the wider evolutionary narrative and the diversity of paleobiota shown.

Do not get me wrong, I am hyped for WWD2025 all the same, and I’m sure a lot of amazing work went into it. But I am also a bit disappointed by what I’ve seen so far, in that it will include 5 Cretaceous episodes, a single Jurassic one, and no Triassic at all.

Bar chart showing the frequency distribution of different geological epochs shown across paleontology-themed documentaries in animated form. Note extreme overrepresentation of the Late Cretaceous (and, to a lesser degree, the Pleistocene).

In my opinion, we should consider a moratorium on more Late Cretaceous North America representation in animated paleontology documentaries, until other important settings like the Santa Maria or Elliot formations have received their deserved attention. The bias is becoming ridiculous. #WWD2025

Yes!