Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Portsmouth, UK) who mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs. He also studies such things as the 
I'm somewhat pushed for time at the moment (massive, massive understatement), so nothing new here, sorry. Too busy with book jobs, SVP preparation, demolition work, baby care and other stuff. So here's some nonsense: if you've been with me from the start you'll remember this captivating image from January 2006. To the rest of you it might be new. Believe it or don't it's Fig. 2 in the Tet Zoo book (currently nearing completion, after a hiatus of more than a year).
In other news: the thing everyone's talking about today is the launch of the Open Dinosaur Project. This ambitious project aims, by way of 'crowd sourced' data, to gather a vast pool of, err, data on ornithischian limb measurements in order to test hypotheses. Visit the site to learn more and (should you wish) to get involved. Exciting stuff!
Comments
Geez, you have a mind!
When hearing of Open Dinosaur Project, I immediately thought of a community project to sequence and clone a dinosaur.
And a sort of sci-fi story when cloned dinosaurs and monsters of all sizes and shapes roam the world and fight each other. Sort of new Godzilla crossed with Dinotopia. THAT film would sell a lots of toys (apparently the most important reason why big budget sci-fi films today get approved for production).
Posted by: Jerzy | September 8, 2009 5:38 PM
Jerzy: and you say I have a mind?? :)
Posted by: Darren Naish | September 8, 2009 5:46 PM
Jerzy, there's Cthulhu vs Godzilla fanfiction somewhere out there on teh intarwebz. You'll probably like it.
Posted by: David Marjanović | September 8, 2009 5:50 PM
Cthulhu would just drive Godzilla insane. Case closed!
Posted by: Tor Bertin | September 8, 2009 7:55 PM
Oh yeah, I do remember this one...
I also remember your little sketches posted on your Flickr account. I'm particularly fond of this one.
Posted by: Hai~Ren | September 8, 2009 9:03 PM
Cthulhu can be (temporarily) damaged by a steam yacht running him down... I think Godzilla's breath is more damaging than that (especially since it has heat and radiation to kill the cells, and doesn't just rip the flesh apart; Cthulhu is amorphous enough that he could survive a steamship hit.)
Said Godzilla-vs.-Cthulhu story is at this link.
Posted by: William Miller | September 9, 2009 1:06 AM
In response to Comment #5:
Oh yeah baby, gotta love that one!
Posted by: M. O. Erickson | September 9, 2009 1:29 AM
That picture (linked to in comment 5) inspired a creationist comic strip - does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Posted by: Darren Naish | September 9, 2009 4:01 AM
He tried.
No. It's a bizarre drawing, though.
Posted by: David Marjanović | September 9, 2009 5:32 AM
> Cthulhu can be (temporarily) damaged by a steam yacht
> running him down...
Don't underestimate Ctulhu because of this.
The term steam yacht is misleading because nowadays "yacht" is associated with modern recreational vessels, wich tend to be rather small. An Edwardian steam yacht or aviso was a much more substantial vessel, somewhere between a destroyer and a light cruiser in size, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Steam_yacht_Rambler.jpg
A hit by such a ship, making 20 knots or so under full steam, might be comparable to the impact of a MOAB or a small nuke.
Posted by: johannes | September 9, 2009 12:19 PM
@johannes: The original story "Call of Cthulhu" makes it clear that we're not talking about a 30-40 foot pleasure boat. But still, a ship of 1000 tons making 10 meters/second (~20 knots) has a kinetic energy (from 1/2 mass x velocity squared) of 1/2 x 1000000 kg x 100 m/s squared = 50 million joules, which is really not that impressive (the smallest nukes ever, for the "Davy Crockett", were around 10 tons TNT = ~42 [i]billion[/i] joules; one ton TNT = 4.184 gigajoules).
But I think we're a little far off the topic of tetrapods (although there was a post on Godzilla here a while back, I'm pretty sure Cthulhu isn't a tetrapod, since he's extraterrestrial).
Posted by: William Miller | September 9, 2009 9:44 PM