Although they’re each in fragmentary forms, this doesn’t prevent them from becoming the most complete dinosaur fossils ever found in Australia. Say hello to Australovenator (Banjo), Wintonotitan (Clancy), and Diamantinasaurus (Matilda).

Illustrated by T. Tischler.

These 3 new Aussies lived during the Mid-Cretaceous Period about 98 million years ago. Wintonotitan has a slimmer body built like a giraffe while Diamantinasaurus has a body built like a hippo. Australovenator was built like a cheetah, according to Paleontologist Scott Hocknull, running as fast and agile like the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park and were much bigger than these movie raptors. This discovery of the “dwarf Allosaur”  solves a 28 year old mystery of what kind of dinosaur owns an ankle bone unearthed in Victoria in 1981. The conclusion of the ankle bone belong to a dwarf Allosaur was pretty controversial until Australovenator was discovered. Now it is known that the ankle bone belongs to Australovenator’s direct ancestor featured in the Walking with Dinosaurs segment “Spirits of the Ice Forest.”

The 3 dinosaurs were unearthed from where it was once a 98 million year old billabong (a small oxbow lake). All 3 dinosaurs are named in honor of a folk artist named Banjo Patterson who wrote a well known Australian folk song Waltzing Matilda in 1885. While the thief dove into the billabong to escape authorities, Banjo and Matilda was either killed in a fight or got stuck in the mud with Matilda getting stuck and sank into the mud first before Banjo came along a short time later and started eating the carcass before becoming stuck and sank into the soft mud himself. And just like the thief and his stolen sheep (or jumbuck) pack in his Matilda bag in the song, both Banjo and Matilda met their end at the bottom of the billabong.

Hocknull, S., White, M., Tischler, T., Cook, A., Calleja, N., Sloan, T., & Elliott, D. (2009). New Mid-Cretaceous (Latest Albian) Dinosaurs from Winton, Queensland, Australia PLoS ONE, 4 (7) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006190

Tomorrow, the Geological Museum at the University of Wyoming will close its doors to the public. It’s very sad to see great museums featuring famous dinosaur displays with “Big Al” who made appearance in Allosaurus: A Walking with Dinosaurs Special, having no other choice but to close its doors due to lack of funds. Like Rebecca, I, too was hoping that someone with a rich background will give a private donation to keep the museum open. I just hope and pray that God will stir up someone to come over and donate money to reopen the museum to the public so that people everywhere can come in and enjoy the dinosaur displays again.

From Dino Chick Blogs — Today is a very sad day!! At the end of the business day the University of Wyoming Geological Museum will be closing its doors to the public and the two employees of the museum will loose their jobs. This amazing image pretty much sums up the last nearly 30 years of paleontology at the museum – a history which the University no longer finds important. A very very sad day for everyone.

A great article where we finally have a chance to hear how museum director Brent Breithaupt is taking all of this can be read here (a very emotional read). There is also a poor set of excuses and bad attempt to save face from the powers that be at UW here, and a word from the Governor of Wyoming supporting the cuts here. You might not like my description of these articles, but I am mad that this is happening and aggravated at the short-sightedness that the university administration obviously has. How can this museum not fulfill the universities core mission of teaching, research and outreach. It does ALL of these!

Please visit the “Keep Laramie Dinos” page for more information on what you can do to save this wonderful museum. An account has been set up to try and build an endowment to reopen the museum, hopefully in the very near future, as the S.H. Knight Geological Museum. Stay tuned for further developments as they occur.

Sorry. As of right now, my Bulletproof Harpist fanfics will not be seen on this blog any more due to being relocated to my new blog. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bulletproof Vess – Forever Harpist, a blog that celebrates everything harp. Check it out.

I bought 2 more domains for my blog. If you punch up stupiddinosaurlies.com or stupiddinosaurlies.net, you can find yourself on the exact same site you go to when you punch up stupiddinosaurlies.org.  Maybe someday I can set up a forum on one of these addresses where people can come and discuss what I wrote as long as they’re not spammers or creationist trolls.

Reposted and revised as of June 26– There’s a 2-floor section that’s been opened at Ken Ham’s Creation Museum (preferably and rightfully be called “Crackhouse”) since July 4th of 2007 to accompany the Jurassic Park Dinosaur knock-offs that litter many parts of the crackhouse. Known as Dino Den, this section, just like the junkstore next to it, the outside area of the crackhouse, and the walkthrough entrance way in the main lobby, is littered with several dinosaur and pterosaur models that are wrongly inaccurate and unrealistically made. Example: no hair and tiny teeth on a pteranodon, another Pteranodon in the lobby area with hair, yet no pelican pouch and hardly any short tail at all, dromaeosaurs with unbird-like appearance bearing no coating of feathers on their bodies, Allosaurus-like dinosaur wrongly shown to walk on 4 legs instead of two, incorrect scale patterns on an Iguanodon, Baryonyx grossly portrayed erroneously as a 4 legged wingless dragon with dog ears, additional horns on its head, spikes jutting all over its back, and a tail ending with an arrow tip, a knock-off version of Diplodocus made for Walking with Dinosaurs with 4 elephantine legs and crooked horse-like front legs unlike real Diplodocus that has 4 elephant-type legs with a C-shaped almost toeless forefeet and two elephantine hindfeet, another WWD Diplodocus knock-off in another outdoor section also with crooked horse-like front legs, a male Protoceratops with a frill too small, Ceratosaurus with very small, yet wrongly arranged fingers with three big fingers and a tiny fourth finger, Polacanthus with no double row of huge spikes at the top of its back and scores of small to tiny spikes on the  sides of its face and all over its back, flanks, and on the hip plate, Stegosaurus with no pebbly throat pouch and a cheekless mouth, one Tyrannosaur in the outside forested area shown in a classic yet now-incorrect upright, tail-dragging pose– proof that old popular dinosaur concepts die hard— and another tyrannosaur in the Dino Den section shown to have wrinkle skin and a wrong-shaped head, Edaphosaurus shown to have a wrong shaped head, Thescelosaurus with thick T.rex-type legs and feet while the real Thescelosaurus actually has slender legs and four toes with hoof-like nails, Ornithomimosaur with a narrow body shape, thighs too short, and “slapper arms“, Archaeopteryx looking more of a modern bird than a theropod related to Compsognathus, Heterodontsaurus with “paw” like hands with fingers almost the same size unlike the real Heterodontosaurus that has human-like hands with 3 very long I-III fingers and two small IV-V fingers, Ornitholestes with a long, narrow, less than squarish head and a crested nose unlike the real Ornitholestes that has a square head and no crest, and Baby Oviraptors with scaly skin and fully developed crests unlike the real baby Oviraptors that don’t have crests when hatched; their crests will develop throughout their juvenile years until they become fully developed by the time the Oviraptors reach adulthood. These are made as if they’re 3D versions of amateur dinosaur drawings made for a small children’s book, including a model of a baby Triceratops with a blanket and a saddle on its back you could’ve sworn these is all the result of Buddy Davis, one of Ham’s cronies who’s made these models, getting this find of “inspiration” from James Gurney’s fantasy series Dinotopia- hard core evidence of where creationists ever got their ideas and “inspirations” for their pseudo-bible histories from, science fiction and fantasy books. Science fiction beget science fiction and Science fiction beget religious cults including Scientology and young earthism.

Read more…

Today I’ve heard from PZ Myers that he’s planning on visiting Ken Ham’s Crackhouse in August soon. He’s celebrating the fact that he won an iPod from the son of Jailbird Hovind who had a contest to see who will win the iPod and PZ and a few other athiests won! It’ll probebly be a cheap version of an actual iPod worth more than $200. If so, then you’ll know just how creationists can swindle people into partaking their crappy contests. We’ll just have to wait and see. Lately Ham has been whining over PZ and I’s slamming of his crackhouse and all the lies within, defending every lie and hypocrisy with lies and hypocrisy of his own from saying he has only one dinosaur with a saddle on its back (never mind the over 15 anatomically incorrect dinosaur models with a few mingling with humans) to claiming this is “God’s museum” when PZ calls it “Ken Ham’s ‘museum’”. Not it’s not, this is really the Devil’s museum, a museum fill of lies, paranoia, hatred, slander, propaganda, hypocrisy, and all else that gives Christianity a bad name. One has to wonder how can Ham get away from saying this when he knows deep down inside that what he advocate in his crackhouse is completely everything God does not condone.