From The Dinosaur Heresies. Part 1.

I don’t have time to write about this properly, but a few people have asked me about the new Sellers et al. (2012) paper on measuring the masses of extinct animals — in particular, the Berlin Giraffatitan — by having a CAD program generate minimal complex hulls around various body regions.

You may remember that when I wrote about Amphicoelias diplobrontobarowassea the other day, I rather ungraciously complained that “I don’t want to talk about that.

That clanking sound you just heard was pretty much the entire field of paleontology evolutionary biology wired humanity dropping a solid gold brick: Tianyulong , a basal ornithischian from (where else?) China, has been found with dino-fuzz (Zheng et al. 2009). Not exactly protofeathers, but pretty darn similar. And if they’re in theropods and ornithischians, they were probably primitive for Dinosauria (at least;