A friend’s daughter owned a pet corn snake, and a hamster. About a month ago, the former got into the latter’s cage — and in a reversal of the usual course of such events, sustained some nasty injuries. As snakes often do, it struggled to recover, and the wound seems to have necrotised.

Well, I see that our ‘roadside dinos‘ category is in a sad state. Not from lack of posts, but because most of the so-called roadside dinos found therein are entirely too polished. Real roadside dinos are assembled by non-paleontologists armed only with scrap metal, welding equipment, The Giant Golden Book of Dinosaurs (again, the real one), and a dream.

This is so unspeakably cool. Today in PLoS Biology (yay, free reprints for everybody!), Wilson et al. (2010) describe a new snake, Sanajeh indicus , based on multiple specimens from multiple sauropod nests where they were apparently eating baby sauropods! This is sweet for loads of reasons. There aren’t that many well-documented cases of predation in the fossil record in the first place.