solanasaurus.com

My affinity with plastic dinosaurs causes people to send me the most outrageous things by email.

Part 1 – Part 3 – Part 4

These films are produced by a group of filmmakers in Brooklyn. They upload a new film every week. The special effects are tremendous.

One film, The Hauntening, has been viewed more than 2 million times. Gotta love YouTube. But you gotta love the dinosaur/refrigerator magnet reference in this film even more.

Web stats are a really imperfect science. That doesn’t make it any less gratifying to check them. How else would I know who was reading my blog?

My favorite statistical fact relating to this blog, is that the most frequent search term of visitors arriving from search engines is 1) “Dinosaur sex” and 2) “Pet lobster“. If you search for either of these terms in Google my blog appears on the first page of search results. Now that I’ve written this post, it might even appear twice – or higher on the list!

The morale, of course, is that if you want your blog to be famous on the internet, you shouldn’t write about boring things like politics or Al Gore, but stick to what the public really wants to know and isn’t getting information about elsewhere. Like lobster sex. We already know how dinosaurs do it.

Obviously, I myself found both subjects interesting enough to write about in the past (here and here). But if you are one of the curious souls who have searched for information relating to either phenomena and landed on this page, would you please let us know… why?? I await your comments below.

I’d like to let you in on a little game I play in airports. It goes a little something like this: you find the Swarovski store, you enter, and you ask them if they have any crystal dinosaurs. After all, a crystal dinosaur might look quite elegant at the head of the evolution chain of plastic dinosaurs.

Usually the responses have been hillarious, everything from “No, we should get some next month,” to “I think they have them in terminal 4″. Hillarious mainly, because the salesperson is clearly always bluffing or lying, and also because it’s hard to ask with a straight face.

But voila, in Heathrow Airport (snuggled right behind a crystal Little Mermaid) they actually had TWO dinosaurs. One I thought looked like a giraffe and the other suspiciously similar to a dragon. The salesperson said “NO, it’s a dinosaur”, and at £69 she should really know.

What do you think? Is this thing a dino or a dragon? Cast your votes please.

Special effects and flashbacks by JB.

Scientists found a dinosaur in Washington DC and named it Capitalsaurus. They found another one in Arkansas, and called it an Arkansaurus. Scientists in other US states were more creative… Many states now have State Dinosaurs. But according to Wikipedia, Arizona was unable to decide on one. It’s a tough choice.

So how did they do it? “Very carefully,” says one scientist. “In the mud,” says another.

Thanks to family and friends who keep sending me these links. Here’s another one: T-rex goes to Copenhagen city hall.

Experts in Pennsylvania are saying maybe 70% of all dinosaur species have not yet been discovered. Actual fact, or ploy to get more funding? They say they have hundreds of years of digging to do.

Most dinosaur leftovers have been found in North America, China, Mongolia and Argentina. But it seems Denmark (Bornholm) can boast of having been home to at least one Sauropod and an Ankylosaurus about 65 million years ago.

If you’re in the market for plastic dinosaurs, I suggest eBay.

AOL is still suffering the aftermath of a scandal over their disclosure of search terms of their subscribers…

I dare to venture forth and say that my Dreamhost stats tell me what people searched for if they came to this blog via a search engine.

Occassionally, there are some surprises, like this one: “my child is obsessed with dinosaurs“.

Here’s a dino for all you dino-lovers. Don’t let them tell you it’s pathological.