Cartoon dino looks like the real thing

Did you catch this news the other day?

At the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, a gathering of highly regarded, perfectly intelligent scientists were taken aback by a model of 30-foot-long dinosaur unlike anything they'd ever seen.

Nigersaurus taqueti, whose bones were discovered in the Sahara Desert in 1997, was apparently a gentle, greenish critter with a mouth like a vacuum cleaner and a fondness for ferns - kind of a cross between a cow and a lawn mower, they said.

"What we are seeing is something that we just didn't know about before," said Matthew Carrano, the curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian Institution.

"We'll never know for sure whether Nigersaurus fell victim to its own outlandishness," said evolutionary biologist David Jablonski, "But while it lasted this fern-eating giant was a bizarre and beautiful success.''

Are they kidding?

These guys apparently did not spend enough time in front of the television set when they were growing up. Otherwise, they'd recognize the creature immediately as Cecil, the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent - co-star from 1962 to 1967 of the Saturday morning classic, Beany and Cecil (aired locally on ABC).

Beany, who was able to fly by means of a propeller on his head, and his pal Cecil, had some pretty swell adventures, often discovering ancient civilizations and artifacts.

Before they appeared in cartoon form, the pair starred on a 1949 puppet show called Time for Beany.

For decades, adults believed that Beany and Cecil were fictional creations of the writer Bob Clampett. But we kids always knew better.

Don't laugh. Someday they'll find fossilized evidence proving the existence of Bertie the Bunyip.