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Living fossils : Brachiopods or Lamp Shells

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Hi there Charlotte: here's your first challenge from Nanna. So.... we have Brachiopods, or Lamp Shells living in southern NZ, where you live. Cool eh? This is what the red ones look like, and the black ones look the same, but with more ridges on the shell. I haven't been able to find a picture of the black ones. The colour makes them easy to find on the beach, once you start looking. They are about the size of a 50c coin. But why a lamp shell? What kind of lamp was that? In ancient times we used lamps filled with oil that looked pretty much like these shells. I included the bottom picture so you can see how the lamp works. It has a wick of cotton or linen fibre and the fuel is olive oil. The closed in lamp is easy to carry without spilling the oil. Now take a peek at a side view of the brachiopod shell and you will see why it is called the lamp shell. So when you find some Brachiopods, either fossil ones in rocks or shells on the beach please sen
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Dinosaurs

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Some Dinosaurs are big, some are little. Some dinosaurs like to eat meat, some like to eat bugs, some dinosaurs like to eat plants. The meat eating dinosaurs are called carnivores. Tyrranosaurus Rex was a meat eater. Giganotosaurus the biggest carnivore ever The insect eating dinosaurs are called insectivores. A new raptor is named  Linhenykus monodactylus  —  Linhenykus  means "claw from Linhe," the city in Inner Mongolia near where the specimen was found in 2008, and  monodactylus  means "one-fingered." This  mini-predator lived roughly 84 million to 75 million years ago, and would have been just 1 pound in weight and maybe 15 inches long from head to tail.  more about the one fingered dinosaur The plant eating dinosaurs are called herbivores: Pachychephalosaurus was a herbivore. The dinosaurs who eat everything are called omnivores. Below is an Oviraptor incubating it's eggs, something we think many dinosaurs didn't do. Check
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