Showing posts with label london. Show all posts
Showing posts with label london. Show all posts

Thursday, 15 January 2015

Allosaurus - Natural History Museum

This is Big Al, who can be found at the Natural History Museum, London.  I think everyone think's he's a T Rex, but he's not, so there!

Bit of waffle from Wikipedia here - FYI they lived 155-150 million years ago, roughly about the length of time it takes to buy an overseas product from ebay (my son is currently waiting for a Slytherin tie!):-

Allosaurus was a large bipedal predator. Its skull was large and equipped with dozens of large, sharp teeth. It averaged 8.5 m (28 ft) in length, though fragmentary remains suggest it could have reached over 12 m (39 ft). Relative to the large and powerful hindlimbs, its three-fingered forelimbs were small, and the body was balanced by a long and heavily muscled tail. It is classified as an allosaurid, a type of carnosaurian theropod dinosaur. The genus has a complicated taxonomy, and includes an uncertain number of validspecies, the best known of which is A. fragilis. The bulk of Allosaurus remains have come from North America's Morrison Formation, with material also known from Portugal and possibly Tanzania. It was known for over half of the 20th century as Antrodemus, but study of the copious remains from the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry brought the name "Allosaurus" back to prominence, and established it as one of the best-known dinosaurs.

As the most abundant large predator in the Morrison Formation, Allosaurus was at the top of the food chain, probably preying on contemporaneous large herbivorous dinosaurs and perhaps even other predators. Potential prey included ornithopodsstegosaurids, and sauropods. Some paleontologists interpret Allosaurus as having had cooperative social behavior, and hunting in packs, while others believe individuals may have been aggressive toward each other, and that congregations of this genus are the result of lone individuals feeding on the same carcasses. It may have attacked large prey by ambush, using its upper jaw like a hatchet.


Wednesday, 14 January 2015

Triceratops - Natural History Museum

This is my image of a triceratops as seen in the Natural History Museum.  It's got a slightly creepy cast to it as it was lit from underneath with tungsten lights.

There was a massive queue to get in here when I was at the museum over Christmas 2014 and this is the almost the first sight as you file through.  It was very tricky to draw as it's held in a glass case that has reflections all over the place.

Triceratops is a genus of herbivorous ceratopsid dinosaur that first appeared during the late Maastrichtian stage of the lateCretaceous period, about 68 million years ago (Mya) in what is now North America. It is one of the last known non-avian dinosaur genera, and became extinct in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago.[1] The term Triceratops, which literally means "three-horned face", is derived from the Greek τρί- (tri-) meaning "three", κέρας (kéras) meaning "horn", and ὤψ (ops) meaning "face".[2][3]


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