Open Thread: Jurassic Porg

Choire's new job and a flying chicken nugget from the past

April 16th, 2021

Choire Sicha is leaving the boring old NYT Styles Desk for the white-hot center of media action: newsletters. He’ll “help expand our newsletter portfolio alongside Sam Dolnick and Adam Pasick,” says the triple-bylined press release from Dean Baquet, Joe Kahn and Sam Sifton. All of this is in accordance with journalism’s famous Rule of Three: “it takes three New York Times editors to do anything.” Good luck, and hey: 📞☎️📱 know what I mean?

But it’s open thread day and we’re not here for media business news, we’re here for cute flying dinosaurs! Gizmodo’s Jake Buehler brings us a PeerJ paper about “a newly described species of pterosaur named Sinomacrops bondei, apparently evolution’s answer to the question, ’what if frog, but also bat, but also dragon?’”

Many later pterosaurs were terrifying, otherworldly, dinosaur-gobbling storks the size of giraffes, but anurognathids like Sinomacrops had the bearing and physique of a chicken nugget.

Scheduling Note: Tabs is off next week. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to take next week off as well, so you can tell your boss I said so. We can both return on Monday, April 26th, when we’re Dogecoin millionaires.

Happy Friday! What’s the best dinosaur? What should the Times newsletter strategy be? What are you doing this weekend? Subscribe if you don’t and let us all know in the 💬 zone.

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