terrible hands

This month's National Geographic is about dinosaurs. Specifically, dinosaurs that had weird appendages and body parts that people aren't sure the purpose of, i.e. spines on shoulders, weird headbones, or gigantic arms. It is this last that is the point of this blog.

Have you heard of Deinocheirus? It's been my favorite dinosaur ever since I saw it at the Natural History Museum. And I was a kind of dino-freak growing up. And in college. (I would have gotten my degree in paleontology had my school offered it.) But in my favorite section of my favorite museum ever, there are 2 giant fossilized arms. That's it.

Backstory:
Some guy found these bones, which he decided were giant arms (of course that's up for debate, are they even arms?). Oh and there were a coupla vertebrae or ribs or something. But the scientific community decided that these arm bones, which had been found only once and never again, constituted a completely new species of dinosaur. A new species of dinosaur based on arm bones that have never been found any other time. And that's it.

That still cracks me up, for so many reasons.

And now you know a little bit more about me.