Out of stasis once more

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Weyland-Yutani stasis pod concept art.
Weyland-Yutani stasis pod concept art.

Visitors to the site may have noticed that it has been stuck in archive mode for the past however many months. This only recently came to my attention when I had noticed a lack of update nags from WordPress. Further investigation revealed that comments were no longer going through, nor were new posts. Given the global lockdown of the site I suspected that I was either hacked (again!) or that there was a database issue. A quick scan from Sucuri eliminated the first option (or at least made it less likely), which led me to check the database.

 

Lo and behold I found that the Reptipage database is currently holding at  approximately 150 MB. Unfortunately,  my current webhost (1and1.com) had a hard limit of 100 MB for databases at my current hosting level. I say “had” because they have since bumped database sizes up to 1GB. The problem was that any old databases currently in use were still subjected to this hard limit. I was 50MB over the hard limit so the MYSQL database was locked down. Hence the lack of updates, comments, posts, etc. I would have caught this sooner, but the demands of my current job have caused the site to get backburnered.

The site is now on a new database that has more legroom to it and I’m now aware of this looming problem (the DB isn’t 1GB now, but it will be in the future). I’m looking into spreading the Reptipage across a few databases using the hyperDB plugin. We’ll see where it goes.

 

Also, there has been a bit of a lull in my current workflow that has freed up some time that I intend to devote to writing again. Between T. rex autopsy and Jurassic World (both coming out in a few weeks) there is no shortage of excitement, controversy and overall butthurt on the internet that I can talk about. There has also been a bevy of cool new things regarding extant reptiles which I intend to get back to covering.

So that is the current status of things. I have some posts in the hopper that should be coming out shortly. I apologize for having the site in archive mode for so long.

Time to get back to business.

~ Jura

 

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4 Responses to Out of stasis once more

  1. Avatar Ruger
    Ruger says:

    Hi there! I am a fairly avid dinophile, and I just discovered this here webpage over the weekend, and have readily burned through most of the posts. I am fascinated with what might be called a more “herpocentric” look at dinosaurs, as well as with the breadth of reptile diversity that you’ve covered. I just wanted to say keep up the good work, and I look forward to more posts. I think that your somewhat heretical position (I’m tempted to say it is Bakker-esque in nature) is good for discussion and merits plenty of research. Thank you for the quality articles!

    • Thanks for the support. I think one of the unintended results of the Dinosaur Renaissance was forgetting about the reptilian relationships of dinosaurs in favour of a more bird and mammal-centric perspective. In many ways it was that underappreciation that inspired this site in the first place. Even if people don’t agree with my interpretations at least there is an alternative point of view out there that””as you pointed out””can lead to good discussions and maybe even better interpretations of what these animals were actually like in life.

  2. Hey Jura,

    I recently had a dream about dinosaurs with glowing patches of bioluminescence on their hides. I know a dream is a poor foundation for scientific speculation, but what are the odds that dinosaurs or any other prehistoric reptiles could have evolved bioluminescence? I’ve been notified of a sea turtle species with biofluorescence, but that’s apparently not quite the same thing as bioluminescence. My guess is that we’ll never know since the fossil record probably wouldn’t preserve such information (or if it did, we don’t have the technological means to detect it yet), but it sounds like a cool idea to me.

  3. This reminds me of Brian Engh’s image of cave-dwelling sauropods (wrongly attributed to the All Yesterday’s movement, according to Engh).

    Bioluminescence would be a pretty cool thing to see in a tetrapod. I think the terrestrial lifestyle of most dinosaurs probably would have prohibited much in the way of bioluminescence, but I wouldn’t entirely rule it out for a semi-aquatic dinosaur like (probably) Spinosaurus. It’s interesting to note that bioluminescence is largely restricted to marine life (arthropods appear to be the only exception to this). Whether that is because the bacteria responsible for bioluminescence are restricted to marine ecosystems, or because it’s just blind luck, is hard to say.

    All that said, I could certainly see a Spinosaurus or even Sarcosuchus in a particularly swampy area, getting their dorsum covered in algae, as we see in extant alligators. If either animal spent time in the ocean too, then it could be possible that it could be covered in bioluminescent algae, or barnacles that house bioluminescent bacteria. Either way, it would probably be pure chance that the animal was lighting up (i.e., it wasn’t really using it for anything), but it would still be cool.