genetic linkage sept 06 - big dinosaurs

September 06, 2026
Welcome to Genetic Linkage, a series where I share updates and interesting links for the week.

Bloggers, I'm pretty tired after Blaugust. It's been harder to sit down and write this week, so I mostly wanted to take a break from posting all week. I still managed to find several cool things to talk about though.

Links:

Katamari Damacy Object Library

Someone made a library of all the objects you can roll up in Katamari Damacy, a video game series where you roll a ball around Japan and pick up things that stick to it, growing the ball larger and larger. I loved this series on the PS2, spent many, many hours rolling. I think my favorite level was one that was just a free for all with a really long time limit, so that you get the katamari so big you end up picking up chunks of land and clouds.

I think some of my favorites are the dogs with fleas, the soy sauce pack, and this beetle fight (picture above).

Gene errors are widespread in the scientific literature

This one might be unavailable to most people so contact me if you want to read the full thing. It's a paper from 10 years ago describing how Microsoft Excel auto correcting entires messes up a bunch of gene names.

"gene symbols such as SEPT2 (Septin 2) and MARCH1 [Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, (...)] are converted by default to ‘2-Sep’ and ‘1-Mar’, respectively"

They found that 1/3 of publications had these kinds of errors, holy shit! I would suspect with the advent of AI, new and worse problems of the same kind are being introduced.

Science's list of Fall Books for 2026:

An intro and review of some new fiction and nonfiction books about and concerning varying science topics. One that was mentioned of interest to me was Tyrant Lizard Queen by Taylor Winkleman, written from the perspective of a female Tyrannosaurus rex. The article compares it to other xenofiction like White Fang, but I'm surprised that the book Raptor Red wasn't mentioned. Raptor Red is an excellent fiction book written from the perspective of a large raptor species.

Skeleton Drawing - Prehistoric animal size comparison

Choose five species of prehistoric animals, including many dinosaurs, to compare their sizes among each other. Spinosaurus is insanely big, easily rivaling and adult T. rex. It even has the option for including the humble Gallus gallus (the domestic chicken). If you really want to marvel at size, include the sauropod Dreadnaughtus.

Also includes some neat non-dinosaurs like Smilodon (a sabre-toothed cat) and Dimetrodon. Iguanodon is bigger than I realized, about 33 feet long.

Horned lizards' skin channels for water collection used in engineering

An interesting paper I came across that uses the horned lizard, well-known for having skin microchannels to direct rainfall into its mouth for drinking, as inspiration for designing a water pump. We didn't exactly how the lizards were so efficient at harvesting water before, but this study breaks down the mechanics of it.

A similar looking but unrelated lizard, the thorny devil from Australia, also does this.

Here is the link to the official paper, from the journal PNAS: here.

Blaugust results

Blaugust has officially ended! The final count of participants was 170+, which is fantastic and I'm glad to be a part of that. Krikket kindly posted an impressive breakdown of the 'awards' for how many posts people made. I am proud that I made it to the Rainbow Diamond Award of posting 31 times during Blaugust! Lots of other people made the same goal.

If you participated, don't forget to fill out this survey from ContainsModeratePeril about your thoughts.

Again, thanks a ton to the organizers, I enjoyed this event and lot and am happy with my blog award!

-jakalopes