If  you’re looking for an excuse to visit China, here’s a great one: At the city of Erlian, near the border with Mongolia, there is an enormous statue of two dinosaurs. And they are totally making out. The whole complex was designed to draw attention to the nearby Dinosaur Fairyland park, but that pales in comparison to the site of two long-necked dinos tongue wrestling.

A team of U.S. and British scientists have employed the use of three-dimensional laser scans and computer modeling to weigh five Tyrannosaurus rex specimens, including the largest and most complete T. rex skeleton, “Sue,” owned by the Chicago Field Museum. The team found that Sue would’ve actually weighed 30 percent more than expected, around 9 tons. The smallest, youngest specimen weighed by the team weighed in at less than previously thought, suggesting that during a T. rex’s growth years (10 to 15 years of age), when they were busy listening to music their parents didn’t like and refusing to do math homework, they actually grew more than twice as fast.

Test footage from the ThunderCats CGI movie (Flixist)

Sunday round-up of gamer webcomics (Kotaku)

Somebody leaked a completely playable Crysys 2 online (Destructoid)

Duke Huggem trailers, behind the scenes footage, news to hug your eyes (Mega64)

Pigs, Angry Birds, friendship (Dorkly)

Gallery of Brilliance: Vintage Documentary-SciFi Edition (io9)

This link is about dinosaur sex. (Smithsonian)

(Top pic via Neatorama)

From the Department of Validating Awesome Things From Your Childhood comes a happy bit of news – Tyrannosaurus Rex is officially a predator again. Many of us gleaned form elementary school field trips that the Jurassic Park star and archetype for enormous, terrifying murder-lizards was a bloodthirsty apex predator. This has been called into question in recent years, with T-Rex being more commonly classified as a scavenger.

But something about that always seemed off in our heart of hearts, because, you know, it’s T-Rex. Picking at leftover carcasses for a meal would be most unbecoming for a dinosaur of this stature.

So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,

how amazingly unlikely is your birth,

and pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space,

’cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth.

(via Geeks are Sexy.)

When we realized that the guy who did the spider cow video did a short about “the abridged story of life on earth, as told through the medium of walking fingers,” we were expecting something weird and awesome.  We weren’t expecting finger dinosaurs.

Nobody expects finger dinosaurs.

(via Boingboing.)

A dinosaur skull measuring nearly a foot in length has been discovered embedded in the balustrade support in the Cathedral of St. Ambrose, a 16th-century church in Vigevano, Italy. We don’t yet know what kind of dinosaur it was, however, although 3D modeling may shed light on the answer.

How did the dinosaur skull wind up there?

The calcareous rock in which the dinosaur remains are embedded comes from the rich fossil-bearing site of Mount San Giorgio, which is on the Unesco World Heritage List.

“It is called Broccatello and was mined in Arzo, Switzerland. We know that this type of rock dates geologically to the Lower Jurassic, about 190 million years ago,” [paleontologist Andrea] Tintori said.

(Discovery News via A Blog About History via @pbump. title photograph by Andrea Tintori)

From the talented food artist Vanessa Dualib: Meet the Potatosaurus dulcis, a “totally herbivorous dinosaur and a very ‘sweet’ guy.”

More in Dualib’s Flickr stream.

See also: Hipster Dinosaurs.

(Vanessa Dualib via Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs via @culturingsci)

A number of recent paleontological discoveries have cemented Tyrannosaurus rex as the black sheep of the Tyrannosaurus genus. Seems that the rest of his relatives were much smaller.

Well, except for Tarbosaurus, but we don’t talk to them after what they said about our Bistahieversor at our Kileskus’ wedding the year before last.

Musician Molly Lewis has gone through a bunch of old coloring books and exposed dinosaurs for the tweed-wearing, PBR-sipping hipsters that we always knew they were.