A T. rex sighting in South Dakota. Photo by Laura Helmuth

Wall Drug in South Dakota is the ultimate roadside attraction. It’s advertised on goofy billboards all along Interstate 90, features a camel-size jackalope, sells all kinds of trinkets, has a gold-panning operation for kids and is decorated in full high-country kitsch. If you make it past the animatronic cowboy singers and the ice cream parlor and the teepee and the Western wear shop, be sure to stop and admire the T. rex looming out of a patch of palm fronds. Every ten minutes or so, the T. rex comes to life: It shakes its head, snaps its jaws menacingly and roars (or, as commenter Belle put it best, RAWRs) as dry-ice steam spews from the display.

Have you seen a dinosaur or other prehistoric creature in an unusual place? Please send your photo to dinosaursightings@gmail.com.

Credit: Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory; Gregory Stewart, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Just a quick note that Science magazine’s website is running a live chat this afternoon at 3:00 about new techniques to reveal color in fossils. Phil Manning and Roy Wogelius will take your questions about “the latest insights into what ancient birds, mammals and dinosaurs really looked like—and how their appearance may have affected their behavior and evolution.”

A blow-up pliosaur at National Geographic headquarters, courtesy of Amanda Bensen Fiegl

Pliosaurs are not technically dinosaurs, but they were fellow travelers. Both clades lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, went extinct about 65 million years ago and were gigantic, toothy and bizarre.

Former Food & Think blogger Amanda Bensen (now Fiegl) left Smithsonian a few months ago to take a job with our arch-nemesis, National Geographic. She snapped this photo of a blow-up 45-foot pliosaur in front of her new office building; it’s there to promote a program called “Death of a Sea Monster.”

Note the lovely cherry blossoms—it’s springtime in Washington.

Have you seen a dinosaur (or other ancient beast) in an unusual place? Please send us your sighting via dinosaursightings@gmail.com!

You can track previous dinosaur sightings here.

Courtesy of Laura Helmuth

The coast of Maine, like any good vacation destination, is full of fudge shops. They all tend to have the same selection of candies, the same line of sunburned kids and the same sticky sweet smell. But only one (that I know of) has a shocking pink triceratops Styracosaurus (sharp readers: thanks for the catch!) out front. The color doesn’t come through well in this rainy-day photo, but the dino is as pink as pink can be. It’s in front of Perry’s Nut House (you can see more pictures at the website of the shop next door, Bennett’s Gems and Jewelry) in Belfast, Maine, just off of coastal Highway 1. Perry’s is no South of the Border when it comes to tourist traps, but the triceratops Styracosaurus probably does lure in a lot of vacationers taking the scenic route to Acadia National Park.

Have you stumbled across a dinosaur in an unexpected place? If you have, and have a photo of the encounter, send it to us via dinosaursightings@gmail.com!

Not quite the Dinosaur Capital of the World

When Brian Switek polled readers about the Dinosaur Capital of the World, he included “Bedrock” as a gag answer. It did pretty well—beating out “Other” but losing, as did Liaoning and Glen Rose, to Drumheller. An astute reader pointed out that there is a way to visit Bedrock aside from being a cartoon character—it’s a campground just south of the Grand Canyon.

It was sort of surreal to go from one of the most spectacular geologic sites in the world (where I saw fossil sponges and Paleozoic trackways last week) to a kitschy roadside attraction. The cartoon-land colors are faded in the desert sun, and Fred’s wooden-wheeled car looks a bit lopsided. But sure enough, there is a dinosaur statue in the parking lot. And some sort of yellow pterosaur behind the wall, perched on a volcano.

Have you seen a dinosaur in an unusual place? Snap a photo and send it to dinosaursightings@gmail.com and you may see it here!

A Cake Wreck Cake Rex

A goofy-fun blog called Cake Wrecks finds humor in “unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate” professionally decorated cakes. (Here’s the cake that started it all.) Blogger Jen has been searching this odd artform for a decent dinosaur cake worthy of the title Cake Rex. No winner so far, but a few absurd runners-up are worth a look.

Do you have any photos of candidate Cake Rexes? Or are you inspired to bake a better dinosaur cake for some poor soul’s next birthday? Please send Cake Wrecks (and us) your photos.

Oh, this will make you smile. Do you remember a fossil called Tiktaalik roseae that was discovered a few years ago? It’s an important transition between aquatic and terrestrial animals; it probably lived in shallow water but had shoulders and wrists that allowed it to walk on land. Now a band called The Indoorfins (Ed. note — groan) has written a very catchy song about it, called “Tiktaalik (Your Inner Fish),” and filmed a clever video of Tiktaalik wandering around Philadelphia. It’s close, but I think this video is even better than the one for Captain Beefheart’s “Smithsonian Institute [sic!] Blues.” (Tiktaalik lived about 300 million years before dinosaurs, but let’s overlook that for a moment for art’s sake.)

We interviewed Neil Shubin for Smithsonian magazine a few years ago, but I have to say that this video tells the story about as well as we did. Neil has since written a delightful book called Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. The University of Pennsylvania had its incoming freshman class read the book and commissioned The Indoorfins to write a song based on the book.

Shubin and his colleagues are still studying their rock star fossil. They recently analyzed its neck, a feature that is useful if you’re on stuck on land and not swimming around in the sea.

One warning: the song’s “tik tik tik tik tik-talik” chorus is likely to curse you with an earworm.

Surprising Science is written by Sarah Zielinski, a biology-major-turned-journalist and an assistant editor at Smithsonian. She is interested in most types of science (“whatever is in front of me,” she says) but will focus on the subjects we tend to cover in the magazine: geology, archaeology, astronomy, animals (living or dead) and stories that have art or history or travel tie-ins. But above all, stories that are weird or quirky or unexpected or amusing. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

We’re looking for the Best Costume Ever, Dinosaur Division. Please email us at smithsonianmagazine@si.edu to submit your photos from this year or years past.

For inspiration, here are some last-minute costume ideas for your kids or even your pets.

And even though crocodilians and dinosaurs diverged hundreds of millions of years ago, you’ve got to see this.

The one consolation of fall’s creeping cold and darkness is that you might see very weird birds this time of year. Birds you wouldn’t normally see because they nest far to the north and spend the winter far to the south.

And birds, of course, are just latter-day dinosaurs.

Strangely enough, some dinosaurs might have migrated as well—also to escape cold and darkness, in this case, three to six months of total darkness. Mitch Leslie wrote about this idea in Smithsonian magazine in “The Strange Lives of Polar Dinosaurs”

Dinosaur fossils have been found in Alaska, the South Pole, and parts of Australia that were functionally the South Pole back in the dinosaurs’ day. The world was warmer then, but the seasons were still extreme. The question is: how did dinosaurs at these latitudes survive the long winters? Did they hibernate, hunt in the dark, flee? Here’s the relevant section:

Other dinosaurs might have migrated south for the winter (or north, if they lived in the Southern Hemisphere). [Tom] Rich [a paleontologist at Museum Victoria in Melbourne] says his dinosaurs would have made unlikely travelers. They were small, and an inland sea would have blocked their path to warmer climes. But Edmontosaurus, from Alaska’s North Slope, is a better candidate for seasonal migration. Adults were about the size of elephants, so they would not have been able to crawl under rocks when temperatures fell. Rough calculations suggest that by ambling at about 1 mile per hour—”browsing speed” for animals of that size—herds of Edmontosaurus could have journeyed more than 1,000 miles south in three months, says paleobotanist Bob Spicer of the Open University in Milton Keynes, Britain. Such a migration would have taken them out of the “zone of darkness” and into areas where plants might have still been growing.

Sounds like a lot of trouble, but today’s dominant herbivores also make difficult and sort of absurd migrations. Sorry for the shameless shilling, but to get a feel for what a dinosaur migration might have looked like, check out our stories about wildebeest on the Serengeti or pronghorn antelope migrating—or trying to—through Wyoming.

And if you don’t happen to be in Maasai Mara or the Grand Tetons to see these beasts, best of luck looking for strange birds this season. And stay warm.

Photo Credit: Peter Trusler

The prize is Earth Science’s answer to the Nobel, the Vetlesen Prize.

The asteroid impact set off “a giant tsunami, continent-scale wildfires, darkness, and cold, followed by sweltering greenhouse heat. When conditions returned to normal, half the genera of plants and animals on Earth had perished,” Alvarez writes on his Website.

The impact also left two major clues: a layer of iridium, which is an element found in comets and asteroids but is rare on Earth, and a 110-mile-wide crater near what is now the Yucatan Peninsula. Alvarez dated both to 65 million years ago, a.k.a. End Times for the dinosaurs.

Several scientific fields that are snubbed by the Nobels have established their own “me too!” prizes. Math has the Fields Medal, for instance, and high tech has the Millennium Prize. (It’s administered by Finland, which might reflect a certain amount of rivalry with those other Scandinavian countries that are so prize-happy.) And purists know that the Nobel for Economics isn’t really a Nobel—it’s administered by Sweden’s central bank in honor of Alfred Nobel. But I know I’m forgetting some. Anybody? Help me out here—what other fields have their own versions of the Nobel?