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Abáloc-- and this and my other worlds...

Drat! Italian Dippy's not in Rome after all...

See what I mean? A little bit goofy... [Wikimedia Commons/Khruner]

I'm in Rome, and happily checking out additional story locations and re-organizing my notes and my research into whatever wild happened in Rome in the mid-to-late first century A.D. I hope to start in the next week or so on the second draft of a YA time-travel novel set here in Rome that I've been working on for a while... but to my distress, Dippy isn't here!

Dippy? Dippy the Diplodocus. My mascot? In the October 19th post? Well, I'd known there was an Italian Dippy, and just assumed he would be in Rome. He's not. He's apparently been in the Museo Geologico Giovanni Capellini in Bologna, up north, ever since he came to Italy. Bad luck for me, because I can't change my schedule here, or go to Glasgow in January to catch British Dippy on tour. I've been in Scotland in January. Too bad there isn't one of him in Los Angeles. Read More 

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My favourite dinosaur... period.

London Dippy -- a nice, goofy face.

Meet Dippy. The Diplodocus. Short for Diplodocus carnegii. I met him when I was about seven. Or eight. And fell in love-- or, to be more precise, "fell in awe." He died in Sheep Creek, Wyoming, but came to live in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. We lived an hour or so down the Ohio River, so I didn't get to visit him very often.

At least, not very often in Pittsburgh. But there are more of him. Andrew Carnegie financed the dig where he was found, and while the Carnegie Museum was still being built, King Edward VII was so impressed with the discovery, he asked Mr. Carnegie for a cast of the bones for London. Dippy Clone #1 met the public at a big formal reception at the Natural History Museum there in 1905. In 1907 Dippy Himself appeared in his new Carnegie Museum home, and it wasn't long before every king or head of state wanted a copy-- so there are now Dippys in the national museums in France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Russia, Spain, Mexico and Argentina. Read More 

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My Favorite Dinosaur (of 2017)

I've said that my blog posts are likely to be all over the map, and here goes: my phone has just now told me that I’m running low on storage, so I’ve been scrolling through my photos in hopes of finding enough duds to delete for me to avoid the chore of downloading the whole backlog to my PC and giving them all useful titles. No such luck, but here is My Probably Favorite Photo of those I’ve taken so far in 2017, the most adorable dinosaur I’ve ever met.

And he breathes! And moves in his sleep! And blinks! He’s animatronic, and I didn’t know it when I took the photo because he was switched off at the time. I discovered it only when I looked the model up online just now and found a  Read More 

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