Tiny Terror of the Cretaceous!

Scientists, those scamps, have turned up the smallest known predatory dinosaur in Canada.

Aww, aren't they cute li'l flesh-rending terrors?

Meet Hesperonychus elizabethae. At around two and a half pounds they’re half the size of your cat. Wait, that can’t be right, although I read it on some news service. A quarter-cat, say. Or less if it’s a fatass like Squeak. It’s supposed to be North America’s smallest dino of any kind.

“It’s basically a predator of small things,” said the University of Calgary’s Curator of the Obvious.

Don’t you love the way they colored their feathers to be foxlike? Cute.  Of course, they were found in 1982. Nobody got around to popping a squint at them until Nick Longrich ran across ‘em in 2007.

On other fronts, water has finally returned to Bear’s Ditch, which is what I call the ditch that runs along the east side of the RGNC fields. Who cares what anybody else calls it? Anyway, that might not mean much to you, but it means a lot to me. And more to a certain Emma Dog.

For me it’s a sign of the changing seasons (as is, a little more poignantly, the draining of most of the ditches in Fall.) For Emma, it’s a chance to drink and wade to her heart’s content. Which she certainly did today.

The real thing about it is that it makes it easier for us to walk. Emma, who you might have gathered tends to be a bit particular, doesn’t like to drink out of a bottle or even a bowl her Daddy has thoughtfully lugged along. So it can get uncomfortable on walks. Especially in warmer weather.

It’s not as if she hasn’t gotten to splash around in a ditch all winter:  the clear ditch by the Nature Center proper flows year-round. But she hasn’t got to do it in Bear’s Ditch. And it was warmer today than it’s been.

Otherwise: another damned glorious and perfect Spring day in Albuquerque’s North Valley! It was warm, you might’ve gathered; a cool breeze blowing sporadically along the ditch proper was welcome. The sky was clear but for a few wispy or puffy clouds near the horizons.

The branches of the trees have started getting furred with green. You can smell growing things. A big gaudy cock pheasant was working the fields down by the cul-de-sac past Glenwood. A wonderful day.

A white purse-model terrier or poodle barked most ferociously at us from the far side of the ditch as we passed. I bet it could’ve taken that damn Hesperonychus.