Birds, dinosaurs, China, Arabic calligraphy musings

Here are snips from the NY Times article about a discovery reported in the journal Nature, of a dinosaur that looks like a huge ostrich. The drawing in the article shows a human would stand approximately up to the "knee caps" of the bird, wow!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/science/14dino.html?hp

snip
Scientists have uncovered a huge surprise in the Inner Mongolia region of northern China: the fossil skeleton of an unusually robust birdlike dinosaur that lived 70 million years ago. The animal appeared to be a young adult 25 feet long and weighing 3,000 pounds and, if it had lived longer, would probably have grown even larger.

snip
The Chinese scientists who made the discovery, being reported today in the journal Nature, said the skeleton belonged to a dinosaur family that included the beaked, birdlike oviraptor. This family was not closely related to the dromaeosaurid dinosaurs generally thought to be ancestors of modern birds. Still, the scientists concluded that the new skeleton “is an exception to some general patterns” during the evolution of related dinosaurs, including the “trend of size decrease” that is associated with the origin of birds. They said it was significant that the large specimen “shows many birdlike features absent” in smaller relatives.
Impressed by the size and puzzling character of their find, the team led by Xing Xu, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, classified the animal as a new genus and species. It was given the name Gigantoraptor erlianensis, the specific name recognizing the Erlian basin of Inner Mongolia, where the skeleton was excavated.
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This news brings together so many of my interests. When I was a teenager my best friend's grandparents had a camp on a lake. Behind it was woods with a waterfall, where we would find innumerable fossils. Nothing spectacular like dinosaurs, but a lot of horn coral, which was easy to pull out even with bare hands. So I always enjoyed dinosaurs and fossils, and those were before the days of Barney that purple cartoon dinosaur. The Chinese have done some fantastic work in excavating fossils these past years, and I congratulate them. I think they were the ones to find the fossils of the earliest flowering plant, Archaefructus sinensis? Anyway, I always read about their finds with great interest.

I've had a lifelong interest in Chinese culture and people. It started when as a teen I bought calligraphy paint brushes, though in my small village in the 1960's there were not many paint resources. It would be as an adult that I learned to write and paint Chinese characters. I was taught how to read and write Chinese characters by a Chinese American guy who worked for me, who had taught Chinese in schools, and spent some lunch hours getting me started, which was great. He taught me to watch for the originating pictures that underlie the development of the character. For example, the character for water evolved from three lines that wriggled like a stream of water. I can still write characters, even pretty complicated ones, in their proper order, though I never got as far as actually speaking Mandarin, though I learned the tonalities.
I had a bamboo calendar at that time, the early 1980's, which remains my favorite. It show a red parrot and the Chinese characters spoken by the parrot, which translates to: "I'm sitting here looking out of the window and learning a new language." It was a parrot, not a 70 foot tall birdlike dinosaur ha, but what an interesting connection as I think about it today. At that time I was also taking shao lin kung fu and tai chi lessons. I'm not a competitive type of person, so I never got into working for various belts and so forth. But I loved how like dance it was. Some time later, after I had to stop with lessons due to long hours at my work job, I taught myself crane style and that remains my favorite. Like a stork (though one with a pot belly ha) I like to stand on one leg in crane stance to relax, sometimes as long as five minutes per leg. When I lived up north I used to stand on a log by a lake and do it. Down south here if I tried that I'd probably be bitten in the rear by an alligator, ha.

Back to the calligraphy. While I still enjoy reading and writing Chinese characters I've become interested also in learning Arabic script. I have a book called "Arabic Script" by Gabriel Mandel Khan, Abbeville Press Publishers, NY, 2001. While it's not a how-to-do book, I can figure out how to draw the script based on my knowledge of calligraphy in general (I also learned mechanical drawing and lettering in high school, and spent several years earning a living drawing maps.) I use as my book mark a print out of a picture and article of a chicken that layed an egg with the script "Allah" inscribed on its shell, in Kazakhstan last year. The mosque confirmed its authenticity for the farmer whose chicken laid the egg. It's beautiful. Anyway, this book has amazing examples of compositions in many different styles. I love the boat shaped compositions in Diwani style, for example. There are many wonderful compositions in the shape of birds, for example, Basmala in the form of a stork. I get a real smile from one page that shows individual letters in the very non-traditional "peacock" style. Letters are peacocks curved and aligned to form each letter. Page 107 if any of you have the book.