The prevailing wisdom is that the demise of the dinosaurs on Earth was brought about by a massive asteroid strike, which disrupted the global climate enough to make the planet inhospitable to the giant creatures - and paved the way for the rise of furry little mammals. (Meanwhile, the various insects just continued on unperturbed..) That's the theme of today's puzzle - scattered through the grid are dinosaurs, all split across adjacent clues and missing their tails. To wit - LEBRON ("'King James'") is next to TOE ("Word before nail or after steel"), and there, hidden within, is BRONTO, split in two and missing its SAURUS tail. There are three other similarly hidden/truncated dinosaurs to be found. Now, to be terribly pedantic, if the suggestion is that the ASTEROID (one of the revealers at 4D) broke the dinosaurs in half and vaporized their tails, I don't think it worked quite that way.. :) The missing tails are amusingly revealed toward the bottom of the puzzle, as "Writer's reference...or what the shaded letters are missing?", which of course is THESAURUS. Nice one!
As an extra cataclysmic reference, "Something possibly triggered during a mass extension event" is SEISM, which an asteroid strike would undoubtedly have caused, resulting in huge tidal waves o'er the land. Also - in a nod to the creatures whose names don't lend themselves to the theme - "Features of many ceratopsians" is HORNS of course.
.jpg "LAIKA THE SPACE DOG")
Outside of this apocalyptic theme, lots of nice cluing is to be found. It *is* still the Yuletide season, so ADESTE Fidelis fit right in. I remember doing the encryption thing as a kid, where you wrap a strip of paper around a pencil and write your message on it, but I never knew it was called SCYTALE. Never heard of the PRITZKER architecture award - you don't see that in a crossword every day. But of course the real treat for me was seeing my own name - PHIL - the father on Modern Family! I shall cherish this moment. (IKID of course)
I shall leave you with that. I hope wherever you are is more Christmassy than the view outside our window here in Toronto right now, which is: pelting, angry rain... >sigh<
-philbo
An architectural photographer in a past life, I dropped in PRITZKER prize, but yeah, SCYTALE? Not so much.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed this dino-themed puzzle. Heh. And yeah, the revealer was cute.
Just finished up this puzzle! While Jeremy is better at the normals clues, I pick up on the themes pretty well so we make an efficient team while solving these. Let me tell you, we both audibly gasped when we figured out the theme. So clever!
ReplyDeleteWe learned what a scytale was (so cool) and I thought the ruler’s dimension clue (realm) was pretty clever.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this puzzle and as Jeremy and I are getting back into solving the NYT crossword, this blog has become part of our daily ritual :)