#its just really funny so many people have joined DMM rising stars with absolutely none of this backstory known to them

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Noticed that none of the widely known Dino’s aren’t in the competetion…..which is honestly good cause the trex would have absolutely swept

So actually this is our 6th dinosaur march madness! (5th, technically, anyway). We've been doing this for ages, ever since I got inspired by a similar thing on twitter (mammals, not dinosaurs)!

Year one was way back in 2016 - we used to use google polls to run the competition! We had people narrow down their fave dinosaurs by general group (ie ones closely related to each other) and then duked it out. Believe it or not, T. rex didn't make it into the first year! That'll remain wild for me, but Yutyrannus was the tyrannosaur. Ultimately, the Common Raven won, which makes a significant amount of sense for tumblr

Year two (2017) we only allowed in contestants that hadn't made the bracket the year before - this was a weird year, because Maiasaura won, and I s2g, I don't think it should have, I think people just voted for it because it's my (Meig, the main ADAD guy) favorite dinosaur. What can ya do...

Year three (2018) we only allowed in things that hadn't been in EITHER bracket EITHER year - this allowed for a lot of weirdos to show up, and the ultimate winner was Halszkaraptor, the first known goose-raptor-thing (like Natovenator this year)!

Year four (2019) - DMM Allstars! It was a bunch of competitors that had made it into the bracket the other three years, but didn't win outright. Amargasaurus won that year! It's a close cousin of Bajadasaurus in this year's bracket

Year five (2020 - note all the prep happens BEFORE March...) we switched it up and did Triassic March Madness - not technically dinosaurs, just a bunch of really weird critters from one of the weirdest times in Earth's history - Postosuchus won though, even though its not that weird, because the art made it look like a puppy. What can ya do.

Then we took a break because I was starting grad school again, moving across the country, bunch of the rest of the team also doing literally the same two things to whatever extent it applied to them, and also that whole pandemic thing

And now we have DMM: Rising Stars, where we take the opportunity to highlight dinosaurs that had come out since the last competition new ones would have showed up in (2018) - hence its a bunch of dinosaurs y'all haven't heard of! What a great opportunity to share new science and make DMM even more interesting!

Plus it gave me and @albertonykus more opportunities to brag about the birds (Anachronornis and Asteriornis respectively) we've named during that same time period XD

We want to do Permian Madness eventually like we did Triassic, because the Permian is also super weird. Another year we might do Fossil Birds, because often the birds that got voted in those first four years were living species and a lot of fossil birds haven't had their time in the spotlight in my very biased fossil-bird-researcher opinion. We have a lot of ideas, and frankly the excitement that is not having to use a third party (google) with the addition of tumblr polls means prehistory-march-madness will continue for a while!