Maddening Machinations Made Manageable

[cryptonature]

Somewhere, there are orcas. I’m in my little gray house in Ohio surrounded by the stale, staticky air of winter indoors, but somewhere there are orcas. It’s an easy fact to forget. It’s easy to shrink your world to what you can see. But thankfully, somewhere, there are orcas.

[stefani-germanotta]

Jonathan Van Ness in Queer Eye seasons 1 & 2

[madeline-kahn]

Music in Film:

Little Shop of Horrors (1986) dir. Frank Oz

- music and lyrics by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman

[tonymuyo]

Angelenos Building Community: Celebrating Madin Lopez, ProjectQ

Using Hair as a Form of Social Justice

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles has a great interview with @madinlopez about their experience in LA, reaching out to homeless LGBTQIA+, and their salon and community center ProjectQ. It’s really amazing stuff, highlighting the amazing community that is found in LA.

Also check out their website and consider donating to support programs and safe spaces for the homeless LGBTQIA+ youth of LA: https://www.projectq.me/home

ALSO also donate to the Pride Membership Drive! Times are tough, and they need help providing to the community during these hard times, inclduing food and hygiene boxes: https://www.projectq.me/

[poguesgold]

HOW TO DONATE TO BLM WHEN YOU HAVE NO MONEY

a black woman named zoe amira posted a video on youtube. this video is an hour long and filled with art and music from black creators. it has a ton of ads, and in result will rack up a ton of revenue. 100% of the ad revenue from the video will be dispersed between various blm organizations, including bail-out funds for protesters. it will be split between the following, dependent on necessity

brooklyn bail fund

minnesota freedom fund

atlanta action network

columbus freedom fund

louisville community bail fund

chicago bond

black visions collective

richmond community bail fund

the bail project inc

nw com bail fund

philadelphia bail fund

the korchhinski-parquet family gofundme

george floyd’s family gofundme

blacklivesmatter.com

reclaim the block

aclu

turn off your adblocker and do not skip ads. between each time watch 3-5 other videos (mix it up) before restarting. this will ensure you aren’t marked as spam by youtube. mute the tab if you need to focus elsewhere but don’t mute the video itself. and let. it. play.

youtube will donate to blm for you.

please, please reblog. for people who don’t have money to spare, this is incredibly important information to have.

[aseaofquotes]

Albert Camus, The Misunderstanding

Submitted by Joanne Noelle.

[weirdlandtv]

Extinct animals by Remie Bakker (Manimal Works).

[middlenamemothman]

👣some cryptid banners i made for my room! they're just felt and hot glue. rbs are appreciated, so please don't re-post! 👣

✨live, laugh, lurk!✨

[skunkbear]

Here’s the orbital period of our solar system’s 8 major planets (how long it takes each to travel around the sun). Their size is to scale and their speed is accurate relative to Earth’s. The repetition of each GIF is proportional to their orbital period. Mercury takes less than 3 months to zoom around Sol, Neptune takes nearly 165 years.  

[bi-spectral]

fuck this gifset do you know how long i sat here waiting for fucking neptune to drag its lazy ass into the frame

[ghostquartets]

here’s to happiness freedom and life!

[doodlize]

Gonna do an art spam lol, haven’t been here in a while and I worked on a lot, here’s a stegosaurus dinosaur artwork based on Girl with the pearl earring

[mabeltanaka]

[weirdlandtv]

Anatomy of the creature from THE SHAPE OF WATER.

[visual-infinity]

Ocean Ramsey and her team encountered this 20 ft Great White Shark near the island of Oahu, Hawaii. It is believed to be the biggest ever recorded

[usik-paleo-illust]

SPINOSAURIDAE

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

hi! i just recently got into dinosaurs and i’ve been fascinated by velociraptors for longer. that said, can you give me sum random interesting fact(s) about velociraptors? thank you🤍✨

Sure thing! I’m not sure how much knowledge you’re starting with but it’s important to know the basic background info that Velociraptor is Small:

and Velociraptor is Fluffy:

And we have evidence for the fluffiness too, in the form of quill bumps on its forearms that would have been used as anchor points for large wing feathers!

(images by Matt Martyniuk and Fred Wierum)

Random Interesting Fact no. 1

Velociraptor… actually wasn’t all that fast. It wasn’t slow either but its legs were not really built for fast sprinting as it’s often portrayed as doing. 

Like, compare the ankles (red) of Velociraptor on the left and Sinovenator on the right, an animal much more adapted for fast running. Sinovenator’s ankles take up a much larger amount of its leg length, and it has smaller feet too, which is another running adaptation.

(skeletals by Scott Hartman)

Rather than being a speed demon, Velociraptor may have been more of an ambush predator, jumping out at prey and tackling them down. And speaking of tackling…

Random Interesting Fact no. 2

Raptor Prey Restraint! Shortened as RPR, this is one of the coolest developments in dromaeosaur palaeontology in the last few years. Ok so Velociraptor had those big feet and giant claws for a reason, and that reason according to a 2011 paper by Fowler et al was, scientifically speaking, “grabbing things and pinning them to the floor so they could go ham with the teeth”. Turns out dromaeosaur feet are very good at gripping and holding, using its giant claws as hooks much like birds of prey do today.

Here’s a rather terrifying diagram from the paper showing the possible grip that the foot of Deinonychus could have had! The study basically overturned the old “slashing claws” idea by showing that they weren’t actually that good at slicing. The paper is open-access so I’d highly recommend giving it a read!

There’s a lot of art out there showing RPR behaviour, but here’s a few top picks!

(by Mark Witton)

(by Delirio88 on deviantart)

(by Emily Willoughby)

And, googling ‘raptor prey restraint’ to find pictures for this, I stumbled across one of my own drawings from my early days on Tumblr! It’s aged quite a lot in the couple of years it’s been since I drew it, so maybe a redraw might be in order?

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed some Fun Velociraptor Facts, and congrats on getting into dinosaurs! If you’re in need of resources, I can highly recommend checking out Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved by Darren Naish and Paul Barrett, it’s a good all-round up to date guide to dinosaur science!

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

Yep, that is true! Dromaeosaur claws really weren’t shaped well for slashing, like most claws really. A slashing claw would need a much sharper inner edge to actually cut, which dromaeosaurs just didn’t have. The only sharp part is the tip of the claw, which supports the idea that they were piercing, puncturing weapons rather than for cutting and slashing.

As for the neck thing specifically, we don’t really have any idea but it’s possible at least. The data seems to suggest that their claws were used more for grappling than causing blood loss or puncturing throats though, more like hooks than daggers if that makes sense.

[hildeeveraert]