GC3NVTV Dinosaurs #1: Zanabazar junior (Traditional Cache) in Florida, United States created by Miwa Satoshi

This cache has been archived.

BoJaB: Hello

I am archiving this listing, if you get this one fixed within the next 30 days, send me an email. I will unarchive it for you provided that it still meets the guidelines.

BoJaB --- Volunteer reviewer for Florida

GC3NVTV ▼

A cache by Miwa Satoshi Message this owner

Hidden : 6/19/2012

Difficulty:

Terrain:

Size: Size: micro (micro)

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Geocache Description:

A pretty easy hide placed near my favorite burger joint in Orlando. This area fills up with hungry muggles from mid-evening through the early morning hours, so use your best ninja stealth techniques if you want to try during that time frame! Difficulty is slightly bumped up due to stealth requirements (as well as a fantastic rehide job by VThunderHammer, you rock, man!).

We know a lot more about dinosaurs now than when I started getting into them as a kid. For example, there are hundreds more species known to science than there were just twenty years ago. But one of the bigger differences is illustrated below:

Zanabazar junior

Yup, those are feathers all right. We now know that birds are not just closely related to dinosaurs, but may in fact most likely be descended from a branch of theropod dinosaurs that evolved feathers and wings in order to better chase prey.

Zanabazar junior wasn't an ancestor to the birds, but rather, an offshoot that traded flight for size, somewhat like a modern-day ostrich or an emu. It may be hard to tell from the drawing, but this guy's head was ten inches long, making it all told somewhere between six and eight feet long full-grown. Unlike modern birds, its snout was armed with razor-sharp teeth, and its feet have a version of the sickle claws made famous by the "raptors" in Jurassic Park. Zanabazar was not a member of that group, though, belonging instead to the not-as-well-known but closely-related troodontid family.

Zanabazar was a latecomer to the party, living in the Late Cretaceous (70 million years ago), about five million years before the event that would wipe all all non-avian dinosaurs. It was native to Mongolia, which was at that time partially forested and very unlike the windswept deserts that exist there now, and loaded with a rich dinosaurian fauna, including other bird-like dinosaurs like Avimimus and Mononykus, giant tyrannosaurs such as Alioramus and Tarbosaurus, the ankylosaurid walking fortress Tarchia, the towering sauropods Nemegtosaurus and Opisthocoelicaudia, duckbills Barsboldia and Saurolophus, boneheaded pachycephalosaurs Homalocephale and Prenocephale, as well as an assortment of smaller fauna, including small mammals called multituberculates, which Zanabazar probably hunted.

Oddly enough, Zanabazar was actually discovered in 1974, but misclassified for years as belonging to another genus called Saurornithoides. When scientists realized this didn't belong there, they formed a new genus in 2009, opting to name it after a man named Undur Geghen Zanabazar, the first spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia. His name was a Mongolian rendition of the Sanskrit phrase jnana-vajra meaning "thunderbolt of wisdom" : a cool name with a cool meaning, and clearly too awesome to just tack in front of -saurus like they would have in the old days.

I guess this makes the man Zanabazar Senior?

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I've classified this as a micro because there's really no room for small items or travel bugs in the cache container, but it's definitely bigger than a 35mm film canister; it's almost but not quite a small. BYOP!

Cache container is repurposed from the archived Winter Park cache What's Up Doc?. A big thanks to Itchyfeet2wander for letting me rehab and release this guy back into the wild!