Apparently Newt Gingrich recently bragged on Twitter about his tyrannosaurus skull:
- via wonkette
Wonkette asks if it’s legal for Gingrich to keep a dinosaur’s skull in his office. This depends on whether it’s a real fossil or a cast, and if it’s real then where the skull originated. (Casts are very common, and even major museums often have only casts of fossils.) Legally it’s probably fine, but as much as I would LOVE to have my own dinosaur skull, I think we’re better served as a society with rare fossils preserved and accessible to everyone. So screw you, Newt. Douchebag.
This reminded me of another douchebag with a dino-skull, Nicolas Cage. In 2007 he out-bid Leonardo DiCaprio, paying $276,000 for a skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, alternately identified as a Tarbosaurus (“alarming lizard”…not as tough as “tyrant lizard”). Either way it was an Asian relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex. And either way screw you too, Cage. Douchebag.
Will somebody in the office please send a memo to all Stranger staffers (ahem, Paul) that Mr. Cage does not spell his name with an h?
@1 Whatever, it’s not our fault he spells it wrong. 🙂 Anyway, fixed it.
I think the skull is from the last Republican Speaker of the House.
Calling it a dinosaur skull is an affront to dinosaurs.
Don’t forget this guy : http://seattle-mansions.blogspot.com/201…
Most of them are casts, the bones are so fragile that most would break if moved. Usually you have to apply a layer of glue or liquid that strengthens the bone/skull, long enough to make a cast.
@5: Typical procedure when working with large fossils is to paint every surface with epoxy resin or similar as soon as it is exposed.
Nicolas cage also buys a shit load of trylobites.
@8 no, I think he just has some amber with grains inside so he can hold it while singing “Amber waves of grain”.
@7 I’m fine with trilobites: they’re common and plentiful. They sell them in gift shops.
pffft!!! to Newts’ implication that t rex thought it was all that;
maybe they did overcompensate a bit for the small forelimbs and put on some airs but c’mon, we all know the real self involved, haughty dinosaur jerks were the brachiosauruses.
I highly doubt the office was big enough to hold a t-rex skull comfortably, if they could manage to get it through the doors in the first place. No, since it’s Newt Gingrich we’re talking about here, it’s much more likely that he’s making the whole thing up.
there’s a guy on mercer island with a fully intact dinosaur skeleton in his living room, too, but i can’t remember what kind. it’s about the size of a horse. apparently he bought it at some kind of auction for an insane amount of money with the intention of donating it to a museum, but then the museum couldn’t fit it or something, so he got stuck with it.
Hey that was totally me that prompted his tweet. This is the whole exchange.
[IMG]http://i55.tinypic.com/28r05fn.png[/IMG]
Museums and libraries are notorious for jealously guarding their collections. Access to artifacts and writings is nowhere near what it should be so don’t assume that individual owners are some kind of selfish scourge on the world of knowledge.