Let's Blow Up a Whale!

Calm down my PETA friends! It is not what it seems. A plastic whale now looms before you. (OK, now I've offended some of my friends protecting the enviroment from the scourges of plastic!) This posting is dedicated to the tale (or tail) of a whale.

Oh, what good memories! I was a member of the West Virginia CATS project team (Coordinated and Thematic Science) along with the Project WILD and Project WET programs sponsored by the WV Department of Natural Resources. It was an exciting time because we were developing hands-on activities in science for WV public school students. What great science teachers we have in our state!

One of the special exhibits involved the construction of a full scale blue whale (our was really black due to necessity) using plastic trash bags. The photo above is similar to our whale. The whale was inflated by a fan that allowed the students to enter the "belly" of the model.

I was checking out the news and came across this recent video posted of an origami whale that was constructed at a special dinosaur exhibit in Tokyo. Twas an origami Spinosaurus!

Spinosaurus (meaning "spine lizard") is a genus of theropod dinosaur which lived in what is now North Africa, sometime during the Albian and Cenomanian stages of the Cretaceous period, about 112 to 93.5 million years ago. This genus was first known from Egyptian remains discovered in the 1910s and described by German paleontologist Ernst Stromer. These original remains were destroyed in World War II, but additional skull material has come to light in recent years.

Our friend Tranosaurus is the beast below outlined in blue. The Spinosaurus is the largest outline shaded in red.

Click below on the video to make the paper Spinosaurus come to life!