Skulduggery Pleasant, four winged dinosaurs and Dare of the Dark Dragon

 http://bit.ly/qNJYCP.  Just a quick Skulduggery Promo. Don't know about Skulduggery Pleasant? (horrified gasp) 
Well at the minute the author, Derek Landly (also known as The Golden God by his devoted minions, the Skuttlebugs) is doing a competition (two competitions, if you are in America) where Skuttlebugs have to go around using the internet to spread the word of Skul-Man. Don't believe me? There's  his blog link at the side.
Right, so for those of you who don't know about the almighty Skul Man, I can tell you right now.
Skulduggery Pleasant has been dead for some time. But thanks to the handiness of magic, he can walk and talk and shoot fireballs at people. In the first book, simply entitled 'Skulduggery Pleasant', a girl called Stephanie Edgly meets him after the tragic death of his uncle. From this encounter, 6 books have spawned, and there's another trilogy to come. The books are about MAGIC, and VAMPIRES WHICH DON'T SPARKLE BUT RIP THEIR SKIN OFF INSTEAD, and SKELETON DETECTIVES and HYPNOTIZING LIBRARIANS and PHSYCIC TATOOISTS and much much more. Just awesomeness on both sides of the page.
So have a read of the funny books.
There's
Skulduggery Pleasant
Playing with Fire
The Faceless Ones
Dark Days
Mortal Coil
Death Bringer
And on World Book Day next year there'll be 'Skulduggery Pleasant and the end of the world', a short story you can get for one pound. One delicious pound.


So, onto the next part of this post; Microraptors. After seeing an episode of 'Planet Dinosaur' which confused me by mixing up the classification order of large therapods I decided to unearth my wonderful Paleontology books. One of them is the beautiful 'Bones Rock' by Peter Larson and Kristin Donnan. Now anyone who really loves dinosaurs would have recognised Peter Larson's name. He's the dude who's dug up more Tyrannosaurus skeletons than anyone alive... Although the classification has changes, so half of all Carnosaurs now appear to by Tyrannosaurs. Lovely and confusing.
Anyhow, he dug up lots of T-Rexs.
And in Bones Rock it tells you everything about being a paleontologist, and in the chapter 'Developing a Theory: a Scientific Guessing Game' it shows how birds might not be birds and dinosaurs might not be dinosaurs. After the discovery of Archeopteyx, and then other feathered bird-dinos the definition became confused. In fact, dinosaurs are birds. Birds have wishbones, so do dinos. Birds have a backwards hallux, so do dinos. Birds have beaks, gallumimus has all the evidence pointing to beak-ness. Feathers? Hell, name one dinosaur we can definetly prove DID NOT have feathers.

But Microraptor was special. No creature alive has both a spine and four wings, but microraptor had flight feathers on its legs as well. To the left is an unfinished Microraptor I'm drawing in Microsoft Paint.
Microraptor was a Dromeaosaur, that's to say that it was not too dissimilar from Velociraptor and Deinonychus. That's to say small dinosaur on hind legs with impressive brains and in the same family of dinosaurs that have sickle-shaped claws on their feet.
Bambiraptor is another feathered dinosaur. It was a lot like velociraptor, only with bigger brains.




And for the final part of the Blog; the dare I have to do for Friday. Oh joy; I have to go up to the guy I fancy and have a conversation with him. Sounds easy doesn't it? I mean, how hard can it be? Well, it's hard when you consider that he's always surrounded by a huge group of people, and I'm not the most social butterfly so it would be as conspicuous as a nude at a funeral if I went up and said "Hello" all bright and smiley. 
But today I'd pepped myself up. I was ready. It was a dare. I'd done dares before, right? I've eaten a bug when dared to, picked up a rotting bird when dared to, rumaged in a bin for somebody's watch when dared to, so this should be easy. I passed him at break and nearly fell over. He was in the snack que. And then I though I'd be able to talk to him outside... But in the end gravitated towards Mcdogface and the dude who WAS going to be a third blogger called Crazy Steve, but never showed up (he and Mcdogface are currently making a web series for all you readers out there). However, Mcdogface randomly moved us to a place in the yard opposite the large group of people that the guy I fancy was in... It was embarrassing the number of times I looked over to him... Standing there.... Being awesome...
Luckily, neither of them noticed. Mcdogface, Crazy Steve, I love the way you can be so unnobservant. I shall do the same and ignore you if you happen to be staring dreamily at a girl.
So, I got a dare to do. I've got to man up (figurativly speaking. She-dragons can't 'man up) and walk over and yell "HELLO NICE WEATHER ISN'T IT?!"


The person who copes badly in coversations;
Dark Dragon