That's incredible. Here's the perfect 215 million-year-old footprint found by a 4-year-old girl on the seashore between Barry and Sully, for those who don't want to click through to the wretched hive of clickbait and villainy that is Wales Online.
Yes, if I'd seen that (and it's only a couple of miles away from where I am), I genuinely think I'd have dismissed it as just the results of an artist or someone cocking around. It looks absolutely too pristine to be real.
Pleased to see, incidentally, that linked BBC article includes a video of Dippy's visit from the Natural History Museum to the National Museum of Wales last year, where I went to see him/her twice for the first time in years.
Do you mean the Dracoraptor there, PT? Yes, if so – it had its own little exhibition display just next to where they were displaying Dippy in the main entrance hall, which I looked at with interest when I was there last year.
(Do I mean last year? If so it must be nearly a full year ago now, as I haven't been into Cardiff since early March at the latest.)
Edit: Yes, just found the photos: it was a year ago this week, in fact!
I was sure it couldn't be 2019 as I recall wearing a woolly hat in the museum that I only got given that Christmas – but it still feels odd and a bit unreal in retrospect that in late January I was still merrily popping into the city centre to mix with hundreds of other people.
Yes, that's the one. Next to the gift shop. I didn't get to see Dippy. I missed the Chinese Dinosaurs exhibition a few years back as well. I love the National Museum whenever I go in there and then suffer a kind of blank when exhibitions come along.
When I was a kid, I lived quite close to Howlett's zoo park near Canterbury. Owner John Aspinall had a couple of cassowaries that were indeed big and surly pieces of work: one once stuck its head through a fence and made one of my school friends wet himself. (I wasn't there to witness this, but suffice to say that the tale 'did the rounds' back in class.)
Unfortunately, this was pre- the 'dinosaurs-are-birds' school of thinking, so I didn't really make that connection. When at primary school, I was happy to toe the line that they were still very much terrifying scaly reptiles as depicted in all my books - and indeed VA's posts upthread.
We have an "Australian Birds" calender (sent to me by my cousin in NSW) and April's bird is a cassowary complete with the normal cassowary expression of red-eyed indignant malevolence.
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