I've said that my blog posts are likely to be all over the map, and here goes: my phone has just now told me that I’m running low on storage, so I’ve been scrolling through my photos in hopes of finding enough duds to delete for me to avoid the chore of downloading the whole backlog to my PC and giving them all useful titles. No such luck, but here is My Probably Favorite Photo of those I’ve taken so far in 2017, the most adorable dinosaur I’ve ever met.
And he breathes! And moves in his sleep! And blinks! He’s animatronic, and I didn’t know it when I took the photo because he was switched off at the time. I discovered it only when I looked the model up online just now and found a YouTube video. (Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqEoQC0lKA4).
His name is Psittacosaurus (Parrot Lizard), he will grow to a bit over six feet long, and he’s presumably been asleep for 100 to 130 million years. I can’t, alas, claim him for the deep prehistory of Abáloc, since his kind come from China and Mongolia. Present home: the Natural History Museum in London, where he was new to me. (I’m addicted to the Natural History Museum, and visit it on average once or twice every other year. I usually have a “research” excuse, though it’s really just to traipse from room to room in a state of wonder. This last time I supposedly went to photograph several of the animals—their skeletons or models, that is—which do appear in The Wolves of Aam [Book 7 of Abáloc]. But more of that another time…)