T-Rex post

This is just another T-Rex photo post. The resolution is much better.

T-Rex Madness

This is a photo of a T-Rex from a cool dinosaur website. For other dinosaur photos check out the website here.

Noah saves the earth! 

Koala Concerns

It was 8:15 a.m., breakfast time for Noah Wallace Hessinger on a school day recently, and our little ecologist found himself worrying about the Koala bears. Noah was munching on Organic Koala Crisp, an EnviroKidz Cereal from Nature’s Path Foods Inc., the British Columbia and Washington state based firm specializing in organic cereal, bread, granola bars and other healthy and earth friendly snacks. The back of the cereal box told about the Australian Koala Foundation. According to the group’s website, financial contributions to the organization can help plant trees reclaiming lost habitat for these adorable out back marsupials. The discussion at the breakfast table also touched on concerns about plans to drill for oil in the National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. But when I tried to find a website later on this, Noah was too busy shooting at T-Rex’s from a camouflaged helicopter in his newly downloaded Jurassic Park Operation Genesis game from the Universal Jurassic Park website. So much for ecology. When it comes to conservation, Noah’s views are pretty utilitarian.

“If all the animals were to disappear, where would we get our eggs and chicken and where would we get our meat and milk? Where will we get any meat or things that they give?” Noah said.

I’m not exactly sure how you’d milk a Koala or get eggs from an Alaskan polar bear, but here’s a website on the Alaskan oil drilling issue from the Natural Resources Defense Council and another point of view from the editorial page of the Washington Times.

Gallimimus No. 1 by Noah Wallace Hessinger 

Gallimimus No. 2 by Noah Wallace Hessinger 

Gallimimus No. 3 by Noah Wallace Hessinger 

Gallimimus No. 4 by Noah Wallace Hessinger 

Take that Steven Spielberg!

Remember the scene in Jurassic Park when the characters run from a heard of stampeding Gallimimus? At one point one of the characters asks if this reptile is a “meatasaurus”—a carnivore—but Dr. Grant, played by actor Sam Neill, never really answers his young companion’s query. To my seven-year-old paleontologist in training Noah Wallace Hessinger, this implied that Gallimimus might have been a herbivore, a point he was quick to dispute. Announcing that he wished to discuss the food chain with me recently, Noah said “some people” seem under the impression this 13 to 20 foot dinosaur from the Cretaceous period ate only plants. Instead, Noah insisted the creature is an omnivore, an animal whose diet consists of both plants and animals. A quick consultation of ZoomDinosaurs.com, a great little dinosaur encyclopedia site, showed he was quite right. The site reveals that Gallimimus probably fed on small animals like insects and lizards, eggs and some plants. When I asked Noah to draw a picture of the creature for our blog, his first rendering (1) more closely resembled Ceratosaurus, the horned Jurassic predator. However, Noah insisted that unlike Ceratosaurus, his creation had one horn on its snout not two or three. Noah also insisted that paleontologists might have simply failed to find the horn. He’s been obsessed with the possibility of mistakes being made by scientists in estimating what a dinosaur may have looked like in life since hearing the story of how Iguanodon’s thumb was mistaken for a horn on its nose at first. But after studying a painting by paleo-artist Josef Moravec and some fossil remains at the Paleontological Museum at the University of Oslo, Norway, he had a few more tries. His mother and I most appreciated a version (2) which gave the creature a yellow spine formation. Another (3), Noah informed me, was to depict the similarities between Gallimimus and Velociraptor, another birdlike contemporary. One of Noah’s most interesting renderings is a version of the creature with a single feather on its head (4). He’s become fascinated with the theoretical link between dinosaurs and birds, particularly the raptors that are depicted as feathered in some renderings.

Noah Wallace Hessinger holds an inflatable version of the space shuttle. 

A website for young Einstein

From questions about red giant stars to the feeding habits of velociraptor, the probing inquiries of our seven year old often send my wife and I reeling. An investigative journalist by profession accustomed to Internet research, I find myself surfing cyberspace for answers, often with Noah Wallace Hessinger on my lap posing new questions with every new discovery. This blog started as an attempt to chronicle our quest for knowledge and an excuse for trying all the nifty science experiments in a book we just bought him at a school science fair. We’ll post photos as we go. Noah, who recently announced he wants to be an inventor, paleontologist, computer expert and veterinarian when he grows up, also enjoys visits to the Academy of Natural Sciences and Franklin Institute in Philly. We’ll take you along on those jaunts as well when feasible. If you have a question or comment—or a really neat science experiment to suggest—post it in the comments section. And now fasten your seat belts. A universe of discovery awaits…