al-mofhariz

I wanted to alert everyone to an article that appears in the journal Nature today, which has been causing quite a stir.  (It was even written up in the NY Times!)  The article announces the discovery of a new feathered dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous in Liaoning Province, China.  Above is an artist's rendering that gives you a sense of how scientists imagine these creatures looked in the flesh.
There are a few things worth noting here.  First, this creature is a fairly close (but older) relative of T. rex.  Second, as the article points out, it is by far the largest feathered dinosaur that has been found so far.  (The next largest was only about 1/40th its size.) 
Since the discovery of Archaeopteryx in the Victorian period, paleontologists have posited a link between extinct dinosaurs and modern birds.  (Indeed, extinct dinosaurs are now usually referred to as non-avian dinosaurs.)  But in the past several decades, scientists have been pushing the evolution of feathers further a…

HANK's posts (here and here) on research methods have got me thinking about the craft aspect of what we do. But I'd like to take the discussion in a slightly different direction and ask what happens if we stop assuming that we historians ought to be primarily in the business or writing texts.
In my research, I think a lot about the different effects that various media have on us as consumers of culture. For example, I have found that fully articulated, free-standing displays of mounted dinosaurs in the late 19th and early 20th century are best thought of as mixed media installations. In addition to fossilized bones, lots of other materials were required to mount a dinosaur, including shellac, gum acacia, paint, plater of Paris, and iron or steel. Moreover, mounted dinosaurs were almost always paired with other ways of representing prehistory, including three dimensional models and paintings of these animals in the flesh.





There are a number of ways we can go about making sense o…