· · Music video by Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up. History. Segoe was designed by Steve Matteson during his employment at Agfa Monotype. Licensed to Microsoft for use as a branding typeface and user interface font, it. Nightmarish Crocodile Relative Terrorized Dinosaurs in Prehistoric Madagascar. Roughly 1. 65 million years ago during the mid- Jurassic, Madagascar is an alien place. The famously large island has yet to fully cleave itself tectonically from India and Africa, still crammed together with the rest of the southern supercontinent of Gondwana. Primates have yet to evolve, and flowers aren’t even a thing yet. This Madagascar is instead alive with a spectacular diversity of dinosaurs and reptiles, racing along the dirt and soaring above the forests. But everything that slinks, bounds, and lumbers across this sun- baked, proto- Madagascan theater is united in unshakeable wariness over the region’s most feared apex predator: Razanandrongobe sakalavae, an enormous, land- striding relative of crocodiles with a nightmare where its face ought to go. The fragmented fossilized remains of the horror- croc (nicknamed ‘Razana’, as in ‘Razana, Eater of Worlds’) have been described in a new paper in the journal Peer. J by a team of Italian and French paleontologists. The species was first documented in the literature more than a decade ago, but due to limitations of the fossils, its specific classification was unknown. Up until now, it wasn’t clear if Razana was a massive, meat- eating theropod dinosaur, or some other kind of reptile. New fossils of the jaws and teeth, collected from the same region of northwestern Madagascar where the first fossils were found, reveal that Razanandrongobe sakalavae—the “giant lizard ancestor from Sakalava region”—was actually a relative of today’s crocodiles and alligators. Considering Razana had a grill so full of flesh- rending terror it’d make a T. Rex blush, it’s perhaps a little surprising the mean mug presented by the fossils didn’t belong to a predatory dinosaur. But Razana comes from a time when the crocodile family line was crowded, and full of creatures that weren’t content to wait poolside for the delivery of their prey. Razana was a ‘notosuchian’, a group of crocodilians that differed from their close, still- living cousins in a few very important ways. For one, Razana and other notosuchians were specialized for terrestrial life. . Their legs were positioned straight and erect under their bodies, allowing them to gallop and sprint after prey in a decidedly athletic, uncrocodile- like manner.Notosuchians like Razana also had elevated skulls, making them look more Velociraptor and less pancake- headed swamp monster.Notosuchians were fierce predators that ranged all over Gondwana during the last half of the Mesozoic Era, but the new findings demonstrate that none of these souped- up crocs were quite as formidable as the monster from Madagascar.
Razanandrongobe was huge, perhaps larger than any other known notosuchian. While it is hard to determine the exact size of an animal based on incomplete remains, the recovered portions of Razana’s head paint a picture of a carnivore that must have been a horrifying addition to ancient Madagascar’s fauna, an assemblage that included top predators like lithe, knotty- headed abelisaurs and razor- toothed ceratosaurs the size of pickup trucks. Razanandrongobe had a head as big as a washing machine, which evolution had outfitted with a battery of serrated, banana- sized teeth. These chompers were resilient and rugged enough, the researchers contend, that ol’ Razana might have been able to pulverize and gobble down bone and tendon along with its prey’s fleshy bits. This fearsome machinery, once attached to the standard, track- and- field star chassis of a notosuchian, likely made Razana the biggest and baddest predator of its ecosystem.“‘Razana’ could outcompete even theropod dinosaurs, at the top of the food chain”, said Cristiano Dal Sasso, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Milan and first author on the new paper, in a press release. A non- dinosaur hunting and eating dinosaurs doesn’t fit well into the traditional idea that dinos reigned over the entirety of Earth’s terrestrial ecology for 1. But, as science is rapidly finding out, the reality of the relationships between animal groups during this time period was a bit more complicated than one- party rule. While dinosaurs were especially prominent and diverse in the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, there was still plenty of mobility within the food web for the second string players. Razanandrongobe is a single, jarring example of the rejection of a dinosaurian regime, one that has company in scores of other ancient crocodilians and kin that gave dinos a run for their money. Sebecosuchians (close relatives of notosuchians) like Baurusuchuspreyed upon smaller dinos in the late Cretaceous of Brazil, patrolling the landscape like armored dire wolves. These terrestrial crocodilian cousins did so well for themselves that some survived in South America millions of years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. The “Super. Croc” of Africa, Sarcosuchus, was the size of a school bus and killed and ate dinosaurs. Even mammals, the supposed underdogs of the Mesozoic, occasionally had their day in the sun: Repenomamus, something of a 1. Beelzebufo, the largest known frog species ever, lived in Madagascar some time after Razana did; it was as big as a beachball, carnivorous, and almost certainly ate baby dinosaurs. Razana” fits perfectly into an emerging view of the Age of Dinosaurs where the food chain wasn’t so one- sided. Jake Buehler is a science writer based in the Seattle area with a fanatical obsession with biology’s weirdest and under- acknowledged stories. RIP, Microsoft Paint. MS Paint, the first app you used for editing images, will probably be killed off in future updates of Windows 1. Paint 3. D. Microsoft lists the 3. Windows 1. 0’s next autumn update, a little X marking the end of an era. The app is certainly a relic, from a time when the casual computer user couldn’t crack open Photoshop or Skitch or Pixelmator or thousands of web apps. MS Paint can’t save image components as layers or vectors; it’s for making flat static images only. It doesn’t smooth lines or guess at your best intentions. It does what you tell it and nothing more, faithfully representing the herky- jerky motion of drawing freehand with a computer mouse. It’s from a time before touch, a time before trackpads. As more sophisticated options appeared, Paint’s janky aesthetic became a conscious choice. Paint” became the metonym for that aesthetic, even if an image was actually created in another app. TV Tropes lists major limitations that came to define a certain look: the wobbly freehand lines, awkward color handling, and inappropriate export settings that give Paint its distinctive look. In 2. 01. 4, Gawker’s Sam Biddle noted Paint’s influence on conspiracy theory images, calling the form “Chart Brut.” In amateur detectives’ attempts at identifying the Boston Marathon bombers, the simplicity and jaggedness of Paint evokes the “crazy wall” aesthetic of red string and scribbled notes, apparently without irony. The same year, internet historian Patrick Davison explored Paint’s influence on the last decade of meme culture, particularly Rage Comics. The outsider- art aesthetic feels appropriate to the relatable everyday content, and makes the art form unthreatening. Of course, Paint offered a few features to smooth things out, like the circle and line tools and the “fill” tool, all used in the stoner comics of the early 1. Crucially, those circles still had jagged curves. The bright colors of stoner comics are flat, as MS Paint didn’t support gradients (without an elaborate hack). Contrast those pixellated lines with the slick, stylish face from this art tutorial: This slickness is built into Paint’s successor, Paint 3. D. From the moment you start sketching, Paint 3. D smooths out your art. It also supports automatic selection tools and content- aware fill to rival Photoshop’s.)By automatically improving art, Paint 3. D hides the process behind the image. Paint’s sloppiness is probably why rage comics got so popular. Looking at a rage comic, you can tell exactly how it was drawn, and how you might draw one yourself. By delivering exactly what the artist draws, MS Paint forms an image that the viewer can mentally reverse- engineer and imitate. Unless you go absolutely nuts with it. Reddit user Toweringhorizon painstakingly assembled the drawing “To a Little Radio” using MS Paint tools like the oil brush, stretching the medium while maintaining a pixelated look. It’s one of the top submissions to MS Paint subreddit, a beautiful collaborative art gallery. Scrolling through this art feels like flipping through the sketchbook of the most artistic kid in high school. There’s an accepted roughness, a desired minimalism. For example, the exquisite raindrops in the work above are reflected in a flat, featureless tabletop. Like a transistor radio, Paint might be showing its age, but this tenacious little gadget should not be underestimated.“To a Little Radio” doesn’t even come close to testing Paint’s limits. As we say goodbye to the app that shaped an era, let us watch this bizarrely soundtracked time lapse of drawing Santa Claus in MS Paint on Windows 7 over the course of 5. We can only believe this is real because faking it would be even harder.
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