Matthew Rossi

Trust me, we’ll come back to this.

I don’t know why but I am amused by the established fact that Allosaurus specimens have a marked tendency to display paleopathologies that indicate that even among Theropods, they were willing to take risks. We find broken ribs, punctured tail vertebra, and a variety of wounds from Stegosaurus thagomizers. Including a thagomizer blow to the public bone of a particularly… let’s just say reckless… Allosaurus.

I like to imagine Allosaurus as a genus of Johnny Knoxvilles. Daring each other to attack a Brontosaurus or a Stegosaurus and getting their faces smashed so hard they spend the rest of their lives with crooked jaws, bone spurs, stubbed tails and yes, spike punctures to their pubic bones. The Tazmanian Devils of the Jurassic.

Thank you for the idea, Jalamenos.

Behold, Dimetrodon! Not a direct ancestor of us mammals, they are still a beloved relative of us all and more closely related to you (yes, even you, Kalcheus) than they are to the Dinosaurs people often mistake them for.

The genus Dimetrodon has a variety of species, from the extremely small Dimetrodon teutonis which was 60 centimeters and 14 kilograms, to the nearly 5 meter long Dimetrodon angelensis.

And I know nobody asked but I don’t care, I love Dimetrodon like a drunk uncle that approves of us mammals in a distant, confused way.

Why?

• They make it easier to organize my thoughts
• Often I sit down and use a bulleted list to group together related ideas
  • For example, using a subsidiary bullet to list an idea complimentary to a previous full bullet point
  • Like you could have a bullet saying Theropods and then several sub-bullets like Extinct Theropods with all the various groups like:
    • Carcharadontosaurs
    • Ceratosaurs
    • Megalosaurs
    • Coelurosaurs
      • Extinct Coelurosaurs
      • Extant Coelurosaurs aka birds

Now, let’s Queue this.

My spouse and I are going to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day this weekend, a date night and the first movie I’ll see in a theatre since 2020. I won’t pretend I’m not nervous — COVID left marks on my soul that have never really faded and the realization that many people living around me would be perfectly happy to let me and other people with risk factors die instead of doing simple, harmless things like wearing masks or getting vaccinated.

Still, I want to see Spider-Man do Spider-Man things. And at least I know he’d wear a mask to keep me safe, if he were real.

I like Devil Dinosaur. I’d like to see him on Sanctuary.

Before you get worried, I do not have fatal insomnia — I do sleep for between two to four hours a night. Most nights closer to two, admittedly. It means I spend a lot of time in the middle of the night playing video games, and I have been for a long time now. I played the original Diablo on PlayStation, Xenogears, several of the Silent Hill games, the various Doom games. Even the Dino Crisis games. In a real way, if I could sleep normal hours, the past 20 years of my life wouldn’t have looked anything like it has.

I still wish I could sleep more than I do.

Here are some things to keep in mind about whether or not we have to start having memorials to Suchomimus, the Spinosaurid that has recently been in the Dinosaur loving news because a recent paper indicated that Cristatusaurus and Suchomimus may in fact have been the same animal. Why does that matter? Because if they are, then Suchomimus — the animal with more complete fossils — would become Cristatusaurus because it was named first and in taxonomy the first described specimen has naming priority.

 

With the Lord of Hatred expansion, I think it's fair to say that Diablo 4 finally has a story that feels complete.