Kakuru Kujani

Hello comrades! Today's post is about Kakuru.
        I picked up my big book of the Dinosauria today and opened it to a completely random page, I then looked down this page to the very bottom of the left hand corner and saw at the very edge of an enormous chart the name  Kakuru Kujani. I then decided it would be today's dinosaur. It turns out very little is known about Kakuru, so the research was kind of difficult, but what I did find was pretty interesting. Kakuru Kujani was an Early Cretaceous theropod from what is today Australia.The name means "Rainbow Serpent of the Kujani," the Kujani being an aboriginal Australian group. There were no approximate measurements of the animal I could find, probably since the only known bone from it is a tibia, the lower half of the leg bone. However, because I know about comparative anatomy, and because I'm the most swagalicious scientist ever, I decided to use the tibia measurements to try and figure out the size of the rest of the animal. I found that the femur would be 42.96 centimeters long, making the total leg length 75.96 centimeters. Using the length of the leg I calculated the total body length to be somewhere in the large neighborhood of 317.5 cm, or 3.175 meters. I got these numbers by comparing the lengths with those of Kakuru's close relative, Ornitholestes. Ornitholestes did have a disproportionately long tail, so I had to kind of try to work that into the measurements.
        Another interesting fact about Kakuru is that it is one of the only dinosaur fossils ever found to be "opalized," that is, instead of normal rock, the bones are comprised of opal. This gives the bones a striking blue appearance.

Seriously though, das HOT

        Being a theropod, Kakuru was most likely a carnivore. Many scientists agree that it would probably have had long slender arms to match its elegant legs. At the end of these arms would've been wicked claws, ideal for dragging away small corpses. The only picture I could find of the actual animal was this one, where it kind of looks like, to me at least, a serial killer.

I did, admittedly, add the knife, but still that face. Gives me shivers.

         Well that's Kakuru. Sorry if this entry was kind of lame, finding stuff was hard, and I just wanted to get something out since there weren't many in september. Anyway that's it. Next time will be one of my favorite dinosaurs, Troodon.

        -Athos

Weishampel, David B., Peter Dodson, and Halszka Osmólska. The Dinosauria. Berkeley: University of California, 1990. Print.

Dinosaur Relationships

        Hello comrades! Today's post is on dinosaur relationships (my OTP is Troodon and Velociraptor) and nomenclature.


        The Dinosauria is an enormous clade of organisms, encompassing 1500 known species and still thousands more undiscovered. The system of species division of the Dinosauria was created by a paleontologist by the name of Harry G. Seeley, whom you may remember from Agrosaurus. Seeley decided that Dinosauria should be split into two main orders, ornithischia, meaning bird hipped, and saurichia, meaning lizard hipped. These names turned out to be rather confusing later on when it was discovered that in reality, saurichians were the ancestors of today's birds. The saurichian group was incredibly diverse, including everything from Tyrannosaurus, to Apatosaurus, to Velociraptor. On the ornithischian side, all animals were herbivores, and dinosaurs like Torosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Parasaurolophus were in this group. Both of these groups then split into families, the most well known on the Saurichian side being the sauropods and theropods, and on the best known on the Ornithaschian side being the ceratopsians, ornithopods, and thyreophorans. The sauropods included pretty much everything with a long neck, like Brachiosaurus. The theropods included the well-known Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus, and many other bird-like dinosaurs such as Aurornis. The ceratopsians included animals like Triceratops, the ornithopod group was very diverse and included animals like Parasaurolophus and Iguanodon. The thyreophoran group was home to the armored dinosaurs, like Ankylosaurus, and Stegosuaurus. I made up this kind of lame game thing to help explain how all these groups are related, so check it out.

        Anyway that wraps up today's post. Sorry this took a while to get up, I've been busy with life, or lack thereof. Have a nice day!

-Athos

Palmer, Douglas. Dinosaurs. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Print