Tea at Trianon: Hoofed Dinosaur Discovered in Wyoming

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, November 6, 2025

Hoofed Dinosaur Discovered in Wyoming

From Live Science:

Two extremely rare dinosaur "mummies" found in the badlands of Wyoming are the first examples of hoofed reptiles, according to a new study. Researchers discovered the pair of 66 million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur (Edmontosaurus annectens) skeletons complete with skin, spikes and hooves, as if the creatures had been naturally mummified.
The fossils aren't true mummies, as their original tissues have been replaced with rock, but they give scientists an unprecedented look at duck-billed dinosaur biology, confirming they had hooves. The researchers reported their findings Oct. 23 in the journal Science.
"It's the first time we’ve had a complete, fleshed-out view of a large dinosaur that we can really feel confident about," study senior author Paul Sereno, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, said in a statement.
Duck-billed dinosaurs used their hooves to stomp through mud at the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). They lived alongside other large dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, just before the age of dinosaurs came to a crashing end when a massive asteroid hit Earth and wiped them all out (except for birds). Dinosaur mummies are exceptionally preserved fossils that contain a clay copy of dinosaur skin and other organic tissues. Several of these fossils were discovered in Wyoming in the early 1900s, which inspired the new research. (Read more.)

From Earth:

Scientists in Argentina have described a new long-necked dinosaur, Chucarosaurus diripienda, that stretched about 100 feet. It lived around 90 million years ago in Patagonia, and its heavy fossil blocks even damaged a road during transport.
The find adds a big piece to the puzzle of South America’s giant plant-eaters. It is not the largest ever found, but it is large enough to sharpen how researchers think about sauropod body design. Lead researcher Fernando E. Novas, of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires and CONICET, led the description. The partial skeleton came from Río Negro province and includes hip and limb elements.
The 2023 study reports Chucarosaurus diripienda‘s femur is about 6.2 feet long and unusually slender limb bones. These appendicular bones, limb bones from shoulders to toes, vary more than expected and carry signals useful for classifying relatives. As a titanosaur, a Cretaceous long-necked plant-eating dinosaur group, Chucarosaurus diripienda would have browsed high vegetation. Its long tail likely served as a deterrent against large predators patrolling the same habitats.
The name fits the field story. Chucaro refers to something hard and indomitable, while diripienda means scrambled, a nod to the scattered bones and the rough trip to the lab. (Read more.)