That experiment lasted only a couple hours. I couldn’t standing looking at it, so I switched to these handsome autumnal tones for now while I come up with something more clever.

Cartilage may not have significantly increased the height of theropod dinosaurs, like Tyrannosaurus, because they moved about in a hunched position, said Casey Holliday, a paleontologist at the University of Missouri and the study’s lead author.

But ornithischian and sauropod dinosaurs, like Triceratops and Brachiosaurus had a more upright posture and may have been taller than previously estimated. Brachiosaurus, thought to be about 42 feet tall, may have been at least a foot taller, the study found.

– Sindya N. Bhanoo, N.Y. Times.

More waffling from the dinosaur scientists; no surprise here. Now it turns out dinosaurs might have been a foot taller than previously thought due to all the soft cartilage between their bones, which somehow no one ever before realized might have been larger than the cartilage of other animals even though they’re F@#$ING DINOSAURS.

Is it me or are all the new changes to dinosaurs, especially since the Great Triceratops Caper, making them slightly more sensational? 13 horns? Ridiculously supersized head? A foot taller? This sounds to me like an industry wide make-good project to revitalize interest in dinosaurs after breaking our collective hearts with the news that triceratops never even existed.

You know how this ends, right? Jurassic Park. It’s really the only way we’ll ever know for sure what dinosaurs were like, and I, for one, welcome the idea. I mean, I read somewhere that dinosaurs might have had feathers. Like, all dinosaurs. They were the ancestors of birds, after all. How tremendously silly-looking would that be? And then how terrifying would it be when the power grid went down and those gigantic feathered beasts tore Newman apart?

Seriously, though: Regardless of how it played out in that book and movie, I’d totally be down for Jurassic Park. I discussed this with my buddy Jake not long ago, and we came to the conclusion that if it turned out that cloning dinosaurs and bringing them out of extinction meant the ultimate demise of humanity, well, so be it. We agreed that we’d gladly bow down to our new dinosaur overlords if it turned out theirs was the dominant species.

Are you on board?

[poll id=10]

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the amazing response to yesterday’s post. Thanks to all the tweeting and retweeting, linking, emailing and sharing, I’ve now blown past my fundraising goal of $2,000 and am closing in on $3,000. I appreciate it.

If this site is a bit slow today, it’s because I’m sending out thank-you emails to everyone that donated, and donations keep coming in.

Well, that and because I’m sick of speculating about the Mets’ forthcoming front-office turnover, and I have stuff to say about Pedro Feliciano and the Jets but they both pertain to videos that are rolling out in the early afternoon, so I’m holding out for now.

For no reason at all, I decided to sort through the list of recent Google search terms that led people to TedQuarters. The popular ones are predictable: Tedquarters, braylon edwards beard, ted berg, mark sanchez, melvin mora, mark sanchez taco bell hat.

Once you get down to the list of searches that only sent one visitor, though, you get some extremely random and particularly hilarious returns. They include:

“i hate bono so much”
75 great auk eggs
bathroom urinate hibernation
chester a arthur embarrassing fact
cole hamels nsfw
do they have bears in westchester
hot trucker stuff
llamas turn your back
marshmallow suspension bridge
penultimate lobster
porno tuba

Carry on.

Mark Twain was so struck when he first saw that “long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it” that he called it “a living, breathing allegory of Want.” And Twain’s description itself was so vivid, it inspired the animator Chuck Jones to create that perennial failure known to cartoon-loving children everywhere, Wile E. Coyote of Road Runner-hating fame….

There are even hints that the traveling coyotes may have been up to more than just dawdling with a wolf or two. Dr. Kays’s team also found one coyote carrying something similar to domestic dog DNA, suggesting that the question of what exactly an Eastern coyote is may become even more complicated as scientists learn more.

One major complication is that all the species in the genus Canis, to which the coyote belongs, can successfully interbreed. In other words, coyotes (or Canis latrans, meaning “barking dog”) and domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and every kind of wolf, from the red wolf to the Eastern wolf to the gray wolf (Canis lupus), can mate and produce perfectly healthy pups. No wonder, then, that interactions among these species have led to a genetic mess that researchers sometimes refer to as “Canis soupus.”

– Carol Kaesuk Yoon, N.Y. Times.

Smart money says this is the most interesting thing you’ll read today, all about the mysterious and ominous coyote. First of all, I had no idea that Mark Twain inspired the creation of Wile E. Coyote. Who knew?

Plus, it turns out the coyotes we have in these parts are actually part-wolf and part-dog, whereas the coyotes like the one that jumped out in front of my buddy’s car in Utah are pure coyote.

The big revelation here, to me at least, is that all members of the genus Canis can successfully breed.

Now I have a new life goal: I must somehow mate a wolf and a dachshund. Because what the hell would that look like? Hey! It’s a wiener wolf!