9:16pm, 1.6.09

I looked all around for pretty things today and didn't find any that struck my fancy (besides my friend Deva who is 9 months pregnant and about to be a mom any day now-- but I forgot to take a picture of her). So, today, I present you with another ode to dinosaurs: the Utahraptor.


This is a cast of a Utahraptor claw that I got as a souvenir on Saturday when T and I visited the "Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils New Discoveries" exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. As you can see from the very official information card that came with it, Utahraptor lived in the early Cretaceous period and may have even had feathers! Among other things I learned from the exhibit: paleontologists now think that the bones decorating the collars of dinosaurs related to triceratops were just for decoration-- not protection, and the same goes for the fins on a Stegosauraus. In fact, they think these might have even been brightly colored and used for mating-- though they point out that it's hard to know this for sure.