Lately, a nagging question has been keeping me up nights: why do so few operas feature dinosaurs? (Real dinosaurs, I mean, not skeletal-looking divas and plump Neapolitans who should've taken their last curtain calls 20 years ago.) Well, according to the Calgary Herald, I can now sleep in peace: librettist Val Brandt and composer Allan Gilliland recently collaborated on an opera called Hannaraptor, about a young girl who works through her family issues whilst digging up the bones of a mysterious dinosaur on her family's farm.

As an opera buff myself, I can only applaud this trend. If there are any aspiring Puccinis out there who'd like to make their mark, I suggest a one-act opera based on the epic battle of Protoceratops and Velociraptor (needless to say, both dinosaurs die at the end, so the operatic treatment would work quite nicely).

A while back, I posted a popular list of the 10 Weirdest Dinosaur Names, which included such strange beasts as Yamaceratops and Gasosaurus. But it turns out that some of the weirdest names are veiled behind innocent-sounding Greek or Chinese words, as evidenced by the list below:

Anatotitan (Greek for "giant duck")
Colepiocephale (Greek for "knucklehead")
Dracorex hogwartsia (Greek for "dragon king of Hogwarts")
Micropachycephalosaurus (Greek for "tiny thick-headed lizard")
Nanotyrannus (Greek for "tiny tyrant")
Olorotitan (Greek for "giant swan")
Rapetosaurus (Greek for "mischievous lizard")
Saichania (Chinese for "beautiful"--it wasn't)
Tarchia (Chinese for "brainy"--it wasn't)
Titanophoneus (Greek for "giant murderer"--it wasn't)

I'm proud to say that--as of 5:35 eastern time on Saturday, May 10, 2008--I've posted exactly 200 profiles of individual dinosaurs on this site, which you can find by clicking on the "Dinosaurs A to Z" link on the home page. (Well, technically they're not all dinosaurs--some of them are avian and aquatic reptiles, or reptiles that preceded the dinosaurs--but you get the general idea.) Each profile includes basic information--size and weight, habitat and diet, what the name means, etc.--and I've appended at least one (and sometimes two or three) paragraphs of explanation and subtext.

Am I done? Not by a long shot! There's probably two hundred or more dinosaurs and reptiles to go, and countless other creatures that preceded, followed, or were contemporaneous with dinosaurs. So keep on checking the list--I'll keep adding profiles as long as paleontologists keep digging up and naming fossils.

Over the years, researchers have spun off numerous twists of the K/T Extinction Event, the meteor/comet impact 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. Now, we can add yet another novel variant to the list: a New Zealand scientist theorizes that the massive impact vaporized a huge underground deposit of oil, which subsequently rained down on the planet with disastrous results. (Contrary to the common folk belief, oil doesn't come from dinosaurs, but from microscopic organisms that covered the earth hundreds of millions of years before the development of terrestrial life).

It's too soon to tell if this theory has any legs, but the image of an Anatotitan asphyxiating under a sticky coat of oil resonates down to the present day, when even a small oil slick can kill thousands of innocent animals.

Researchers at New York Medical College may have discovered a key genetic reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs. It turns out that modern birds (which are directly descended from dinos) lack a gene for manufacturing adipose tissue--the "brown fat" that bears use to hibernate during the winter, and that helps keep baby mammals (including humans) warm.

How would this have affected your average dinosaur? Well, during the Cretaceous period, the climate was comfortably warm and muggy. But after the K/T asteroid slammed into earth 65 million years ago, the resulting global cooling would have made the average T. Rex keenly miss his heat-generating adipose tissue--and dinosaurs would have died out faster than mammals.

They predated the dinosaurs by hundreds of millions of years, and they've survived--albeit in vastly diminished numbers--down to the present day. Now, biologists are worried that the world's amphibians may be imperiled by something called the chytrid fungus, which quickly kills frogs, toads and salamanders. (Bear in mind that there are only 6,000 or so species of amphibians on earth today, so they're not exactly in abundant supply.)

In the past few years, according to British biologists, over 100 species of frog have been wiped out, and any further extinctions could resonate higher up the food chain (for example, many species of birds and snakes subsist on frogs and toads). Although the odds of the chytrid fungus wiping out all amphibians are small, this would be the biggest mass extinction of a single type of animal since the demise of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.

There's a funny Monty Python sketch in a which a deranged-looking looney sits down on a park bench next to a proper English gentleman and says, apropos of nothing, "Did you know the whale is an insect?" I was reminded of that gag when researchers announced, a few days ago, that T. Rex's closest living relative is the modern chicken.

Amazingly, these scientists managed to get hold of a chunk of actual, 68-million-year old T. Rex protein (proteins, unlike more delicate molecules like DNA, can occasionally be preserved over tens of millions of years under the right conditions). They found that sequence of amino acids in the protein most closely matches that of contemporary birds, which may not be much of a surprise to professionals in the field--who have speculated for decades about the descent of birds from dinosaurs--but probably struck the average layperson like a pillow stuffed with feathers.

You don't have to look all the way back to the dinosaurs to learn a valuable lesson about the fine line between global extinction and survival. A recent study of mitochondrial DNA has shown that the total human population on earth could once, fairly recently, have fit comfortably into your average-sized Broadway theater.

Because of a series of droughts in Africa a little over 70,000 years ago, the study shows, only about 2,000 or so human beings survived, clustered together in small groups. This may be the closest the human race has ever come to extinction; fortunately, the huddled survivors were able to repopulate the species to the extent that human beings soon began migrating out of Africa to other continents.

Giant crabs with oversized right claws are the poster crustaceans for sexual selection: the reason male crabs have such huge claws is to attract female crabs. Now, a paleontologist has discovered the fossil of an especially large giant-clawed crab of the aptly named Megaxantho family, which lived in the late Cretaceous period alongside the last of the dinosaurs.

What's interesting about this crab--besides its size--is the prominent tooth-shaped structure on its giant claw, which presumably was used to pry snails out of their shells. Also, this species of Megaxantho lived 20 million years earlier than paleontologists had previously believed, which may cause some rapid rewriting of the "crustaceans" section of biology textbooks.

Yesterday, I was out innocently surfing the Web when I happened across a site that downloaded a Trojan Horse onto my computer (for those of you not in the know, Trojans are illicit programs that redirect browsers, pop up distasteful web sites, and wreak all sorts of havoc with the inner workings of your PC). The result was that I was rendered unable (and still am unable, as of this writing) to make any changes to my Dinosaurs site from my home computer.

In an attempt to fix the damage, I ran a virus scan on my PC—a longer process than I expected, since it turns out that there are over 60,000 separate files on my hard drive. This got me to thinking, since 60,000 is roughly equivalent (give or take a few tens of thousands) to the number of genes in your average dinosaur, or any macroscopic life form, for that matter. The vast majority of these files (genes), if deleted or tampered with, have no evident effect on the functioning of the computer (organism), but mess with the wrong one and Bam!—either the entire system collapses, or subtle, negative changes accumulate and render the computer/dinosaur completely unfit for its environment.

What about those random changes that produce an improvement in the system? I’m no computer expert, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one out of every million code-tweakings perpetrated by hostile viruses actually resulted in improved function—the same way (very) rare genetic mutations created new, improved dinosaurs.