Monday, April 2, 2012

Hashtagopteryx twitterensis

pteranodon
#PterosaurMyths: Pteranodon had the most frequent occurence of tooth decay in all of the pterosauria; in fact, sometimes individuals are found with no teeth at all! This restoration correctly depicts the animal with a full compliment of teeth. Photo by Arborwin, via Flickr.

The other day, I tweeted a link to my post about the Royal Tyrrell video of Dr. Michael Habib's pterosaur lecture. It's a great talk, and could bring the general public up to speed quickly on current pterosaur research, so I mentioned that it dispels some lingering myths about pterosaurs. Desert blogger Chris Clarke decided to make this joke.



Which led to this inspired bit of hashtaggery.



It slowly grew, with Chris and I trading tweets back and forth, then more of his followers joining in... and then the dark overlord himself, PZ Myers, joined in, bringing even more folks over. It's petered out a bit, but I have a feeling it's not quite dead, so hop on over to twitter and share your own ptweets. You should also check out Darren Naish's takedown of pterosaur tropes at Pterosaur.net. And if you aren't already, do follow Chris Clarke at @canislatrans as well as Coyote Crossing and Desert Biodiversity, where he cuts through a lot of BS and writes incisively about the state of desert ecosystems.

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