Jesse Willms – Gigantosaurus!

It’s Jesse again. I just found out that Daily Kos now does a Dinosaur of the week.

This week it’s gigantosaurus!

Jesse Willms

Jesse Willms – 190 Million Year Old Dinosaur Tracks Found!

Hi. It’s Jesse Willms again.

How awesome is this?

Dino tracks nearly 200 million years old found.

“Far up a remote canyon in Dinosaur National Monument, paleontologists have discovered a remarkable deposit of footprints made by ancient mammals as they crossed the sand dunes of an ancient desert.

One long ago night, 190 million years ago, small primitive animals left their burrows and scurried up the fronts of great sand dunes to forage for food.

As they walked up the dune slopes, they left footprints with raised up back edges, where their feet had pushed against the sand to gain purchase. Later that night, the surface of the dunes were slightly moistened, perhaps by dew.

That gave the sand a slight crust and strengthened the tracks just enough that they were not blown away the next day. Instead, they were buried under more sand and preserved.”

Jesse Willms

Jesse Willms – New Dinosaur Found!

Holy shit!

Scientists discovered a new dinosaur!

NORTH FLORIDA — A team of paleontologists has discovered a new species of dinosaur belonging to an extremely rare group known as therizinosaurs (sickle-clawed reptiles) in Southern Utah.

Barry Albright, a paleontologist and professor in the Department of Physics at the University of North Florida, along with a multi-institutional team of scientists, worked together on the discovery.

They call this new dinosaur, nothronychus graffami (no-thrown-EYE-kus GRA-fam-eye). They say it represents the most complete specimen of a large-bodied therizinosaur yet discovered worldwide and is one of only three species of this rare type of dinosaur found to date in North America.

The species is named for Merle Graffam, a resident of Southern Utah who discovered the skeleton and who also helped the Museum of Northern Arizona’s excavation team.

How awesome is that?

Jesse Willms

Jesse Willms Dinosaurs In Ohio

Hi. Jesse Willms again.

There’s a cool new dinosaur exhibition in Cincinnati.

If you are near there it’s probably worth checking out.

Jesse Willms

Jesse Willms On Ice Age 3

OMG!

Ice Age 3 is awesome.

Just check out what Rober Ebert has to say about it.

“Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” is the best of the three films about our friends in the inter-species herd of plucky prehistoric heroes. And it involves some of the best use of 3-D I’ve seen in an animated feature.”

I could not agree more! I don’t want to give out any spoilers but this is one heck of a dinosaur movie.

You should go see it!

Jesse Willms

Ever Wonder Why Dinosaurs Could Grow So Big?

This article explains exactly how!

Jesse Willms

Heading To The Movies With Jesse

Hey,

Jesse Willms and I are going to head out and see the new cool 3d movie about dinosaurs.

Jesse Willms will post his own review of the movie soon!

New Dinosaur Post By Jesse Willms

This is Jess Willms again.

Check it out three new species of dinosaurs have been discovered!

If you like dinosaurs you need to read this story!

Jesse Willms

Jesse Willms Himself

Hi. This is Jesse Willms and I wanted to say thanks to Jack for setting up this blog.

Anyway, did you see this?

It’s dinosaurs on the boardwalk!

Check it out!

Jesse Willms

Jesse Willms – Dinosaur Man

The first thing I noticed when I was introduced to Jesse Willms online was the fact that all of his instant message conversations are punctuated by a picture of Barney, the purple dinosaur my kid brother used to idolize.

“Jesse,” I said. “I have to ask you about the Barney icon. Is that some kind of dedication to your children or something?”

“No,” Willms replied. “I’m just into dinosaurs. I’ve loved them since I was a child, and as a grown up I’m still fascinated by them.”

This is not the way I envisioned my first conversation with this legendary entrepreneur panning out. After all, Jesse Willms is known for many things – but I’d never suspected that under his cool façade, he still carried with him a childhood obsession with extinct reptiles.

But, I guess that’s all part of the duality of man. The most hard edge and serious businessmen – like Willms – all have their human side, too. After all, none of us can be all business all of the time.

And that’s how my first interview with Jesse Willms went. I’d intended to talk to him about cutting edge advertising practices and the latest trends in Internet marketing. Instead, I got to see the man behind the business legend.

Willms went on to tell me how he can remember first learning about dinosaurs in grade school and being immediately obsessed.

“For a while I wanted to be a paleontologist,” Willms said. “I pictured myself as ‘Jesse Willms -Dinosaur Hunter’. I remember watching Land of the Lost over and over again, and wishing I could find that island and see the dinosaurs for real.”

“What about the Jurassic Park movies?” I had to ask Jesse.

“The first one was wonderful,” Willms said. “It made sense based on the way science in evolving. You could imagine that habitat developing and leading to this entire micro-world where dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures could live. But, by the second or third movies the logic started to break down. Dinosaurs simply wouldn’t behave that way in the real world.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing,” Willms said. “The tyrannosaurus rex would never have acted like that. They didn’t attack other dinosaurs, so why would they attack people? Despite what you may have seen in the movies the T-rex was a scavenger. It walked around eating dead carcasses. The only point to its sharp teeth was to keep other scavengers away from its prey.”

“What about the velociraptors?” I had to ask. “Were they scavengers too?”

“No,” Willms said. “They were fast hunters. Where the movies make mistakes is having them hunt in packs like a bunch of wild dogs or wolves. In the real world they would have been very independent creatures. They also had a very small brain stem. So, if they didn’t catch their prey right away they wouldn’t have remembered to keep chasing them. They would have moved on to new prey. Spielberg seems to have given these creatures many more human personality traits than make any kind of scientific sense.”

Or course, this led me to ask Jesse if in the business world he sees himself more as a tyrannosaurus or a velociraptor.

“Ha!” was Willms immediate reply. “I’m certainly not a scavenger. I think I’m more of a hunter, who is always looking for a new business opportunity. But, I’m much more social than a velociraptor. I believe that you find the largest profit potential when you work with other people. The free flowing exchange of perspectives often leads to the most dynamic and game changing ideas.”

Jesse says he keeps up on the newest trends and theories in paleontology by reading scientific journals and keeping up on news reports about the latest discoveries.

“I never get tired of this stuff,” Willms said. “It’s amazing to think that these giant beasts – whatever they were – once ruled the world and then simply vanished or transformed.”

At this point I become confused. After all, I thought we knew what they were and that they were wiped out by a meteor, an ice age, or both.

“That may not be true,” Willms said. “Many scientists now think that dinosaurs were actually the earliest versions of birds on the planet. Dinosaurs and modern birds share a lot of bone structure. Instead of getting wiped out by a natural event, they may simply have evolved into the blue jays and hawks we see today.”

“But shouldn’t evolution favor the bigger and stronger beasts?” I asked. “It doesn’t seem to make sense that the giant T-rex would eventually become a sparrow chased by house cats.”

“Actually,” Willms said. “It makes a lot of sense. There was only so much food available on the planet at the time. As dinosaurs became more fruitful and multiplied, their food supplies would have dwindled. To escape starvation they would have had to evolve into smaller and smaller creatures that needed fewer calories to survive. All in all, it makes you wonder how dinosaurs would have really behaved. Who knows; maybe most of them moved in flocks like birds do today. Unfortunately unless a Jurassic Park scenario really comes to pass we will never know.”

Jesse said that one of his lifelong goals is to eventually get enough time off from work to be able to go on a dig with paleontologists and see how they work in the real world.

“Can you imagine how amazing it would be,” Willms said, “to be digging in the desert and find a bone that you knew was hundreds of millions of years old? It would be the most amazing feeling in the world.”