My hubby said that dinosaurs don’t cry. I disagreed, and then he asked if birds cried. I didn’t know but wanted to find out.

As with all answers, it is complicated. Birds do have tear ducts, and they make tears to protect their eyes. Some birds that live near saltwater secrete an oily tear for the same reason.

So they could cry if they wanted to, and since birds are dinosaurs, dinosaurs have the ability to cry too. Even Blue.

Thanks to my cats, I finally opened my new box of 152 Crayola crayons. Since then, I’ve been doing a lot of coloring. Yesterday, it was a dinosaur scene. Coloring the sky, sun, trees was easy, but I wondered for a moment what color to make the brontosaurus. I ended up using a nice, safe bronze, and I think he turned out well. But it made me wonder how professional artists know what color to make their dinosaurs.

For the most part, artists rely on modern animals for inspiration. Dinosaurs who lived in forests might have been a similar color to animals that live in forests today. But that still leaves a great deal of variety.  Think of all the different birds (dinosaurs living today) out there. Non-avian dinosaurs might have been just as colorful.

New research has uncovered some answers. Some fossil feathers and skin have melanosomes, and these small organelles carry pigment. Modern birds also have these, so scientists know that these pigments come in black, grey, or red. By comparing the melanosomes on modern birds with those on fossil feathers, some dinosaurs show their true colors.

However, fossil feathers are very rare, and bones do not have melanosomes, so without time travel, we make never know the actual color of most dinosaurs. However, the more fossils we study, the more we will learn. Perhaps someday I’ll know the real color of the brontosaurus I colored. Until then, the bronze I chose looks good.

Compared to your ancestors, you do. Earth’s rotation is slowing down, so a modern day is about 1.7 milliseconds longer than a day a century ago.

I know that doesn’t sound like much, but when dinosaurs lived, a year was about 370 days long.  Give it another hundred million years, and an Earth year may only be 360 days long.

I’m bringing this up because today is leap day. It might seem like we have a handle on counting time. As long as we add an extra day every four years (but not on century years that aren’t divisible by 400), we’ll never be late.

The truth is, our calendar has to be tweaked often to match the seasons and our trip around the sun. There will never be a time when the calendar is set in stone.

Lucky for humans, this constant change happens so slowly that we can’t tell. But for those who work with super-accurate clocks, leap minutes and leap seconds are as important as leap days.

Micropachycephalosaurus is the longest dinosaur name. It means “small, thick-headed lizard.” This dinosaur:

• ate plants
• lived during the Upper Cretaceous (70.6-68.5 mya)
• was found in China
• measured about a meter long

It might have the longest name, but to date, it’s the smallest dinosaur found. Cute!

When I read the heading “Dinosaurs Lived On the Other Side Of the Galaxy,” I assumed it was clickbait nonsense. But then I noticed that it was sent by IFLScience!, so I delved deeper. This heading is both true and misleading, which I suppose is why it works.

Dinosaurs lived on the other side of the galaxy because it takes the Earth 230 million years to orbit our galaxy center. During the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth was on the other side of the galaxy from where it is now.

That is very cool and also very normal. If I go back 115 million years ago from today (when the Earth was opposite where it is now), we end up in the Early Cretaceous, during the age of the dinosaurs. If we go back another 230 million years, another time when the Earth was on the other side of the galaxy, we reach the Carboniferous. We could say that two-foot-long dragonflies lived on the other side of the galaxy.

If we do another rotation, we end up in the Cambrian, when trilobites lived on the other side of the galaxy.

So you see, dinosaurs were not the point of this article, just a sneaky way to get us to learn something. We now know that the Earth (and our entire solar system) rotates the galaxy center in around 230 million years. That’s really cool, but then so are giant dragonflies and trilobites.