Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

They have found what looks like a direct ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, and it throws doubt on everything they thought they knew about T. rex evolution. The theory had been that something of similar size, but clumsier, had evolved the fierce jaws and small forelimbs.

Raptorex kriegsteini lived about 60 million years before T. rex. And it looks like a miniature T. rex. Same general shape, complete with the tiny forelimbs that were assumed to be a late-evolved characteristic. It has the same jaw and teeth. According to the abstract:

We show that their most conspicuous functional specializations—a proportionately large skull, incisiform premaxillary teeth, expanded jaw-closing musculature, diminutive forelimb, and a hindlimb with cursorial proportions—were present in a new small-bodied, basal tyrannosauroid from Lower Cretaceous rocks in northeastern China. These specializations, scaled up in Late Cretaceous tyrannosaurids with body masses approaching 100 times greater, drove the most dominant radiation of macropredators of the Mesozoic.

cattitude and I just had a very pleasant time showing zorinth around the American Museum of Natural History.

He's in town with papersky, who is here for the Nebulas. We met them, and davidlevine, for a quick slice of pizza, then Papersky and David went back to the hotel, and Cattitude, Zorinth, and I took the train uptown.

We started on the fourth floor, because the original plan had been "take Zorinth to AMNH and show him the dinosaurs." The three of us had fun showing each other stuff--Cattitude and I know the museum, but Zorinth was pointing out details of the fossils to us as well as the other way around. At one point, Cattitude asked to borrow the small flashlight that I keep in my daypack, for a closer look at a fossil; it didn't make a huge difference. After two or three halls, Cattitude decided he wasn't entirely well, and headed home; Z and I kept looking at cool things, including the rest of the dinosaurs.

Having nothing specific in mind after dinosaurs, we went downstairs, which led to the Hall of African Mammals. I led him in there to show off the elephants from above, after which we went around the dioramas on the third floor, then those on the second floor (the level the elephants are actually on), with the fine old dioramas. A discussion while in there about whether giraffes were taller than blue whales had included me saying "We could go look," so we stopped in briefly to see the huge model hanging from the wall of the Hall of Fishes (though we skipped the rest of that hall).

We finished up with the Hall of Rocks and Minerals: Faberge miniatures, specimen gold (the fine leafing and branching some nuggets do), then along to the case of fluorescent minerals, which we watched through three cycles of turning the lights on (so we could see the usual look of them) and off (for the fluorescence). And then casually into the adjacent room, where Zorinth of course walked straight ahead and right up to the Star of India. We had fun looking at star sapphires; Zorinth said he especially liked the red one just below the Star of India. And on around the rest of that room, full of gemstones and a rebuilt gem pocket from a topaz mine. And out again, to look at huge pieces of amethyst and azurite, and a stalagmite, and lots of other things both attractive and educational.

It had been years since I actually went all the way around that hall, instead of just showing off the star sapphires to visitors and then stopping by my favorite huge hunk of amethyst. I should do so more often.

As a bonus, the path in and out of the Hall of Gems and Minerals is through the Hall of Human Origins, which has a model of Turkana Boy that I think is new, and a cast of a Homo floresiensis that I know I hadn't seen before.

That was about as much museum as I had in me, so I took Zorinth back downtown, then came home via the grocery store. (I needed vegetables to make fish stock, having bought fish "frames" (bones and some of the usually-less-desirable flesh) for the purpose at the Greenmarket this morning.)