Rawrr.

It’s part of being human to occasionally wonder, “What’s been going on with monsters lately?” Well, dear reader, Questionist is here to answer that for you – this time. You need to stay on your toes, or else something’s going to eat you. Anyway, let’s check the headlines!

A Big Month for Mosasaurs

Last week, scientists in Mexico announced the discovery of a new species of mosasaur, Yaguarasaurus regiomontanus. It was a 17-foot sea creature (rendered in the featured image, from Northeast Mexico’s Museo del Desierto) that lived about 90 million years ago. The team discovered the skeleton in Nuevo Leon, and published its findings in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences.

The discovery follows on early November’s announcement that a specimen found at the tippy-top of North Dakota in 2015 is itself from a previously unidentified line of mosasaurs. This one – the Nordically-named Jormungandr walhallaensis – measured 18 to 24 feet long, and lived about 80 million years ago. Its discovery was published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. 

Though Nuevo Leon and northern North Dakota are some 1,900 miles apart, in the Cretaceous Period they were both covered by the same shallow sea. Reggie and Wally, as we’re officially calling them at Questionist, were practically neighbors! We hope they shared lawn mowers and stuff.

C is for Completely Inedible

This week, The New York Times spilled the beans cookies on something that we’ve weirdly never really wondered before: How do the Sesame Street people make those preternaturally crumbly cookies that Cookie Monster is always ritually destroying? “The recipe, roughly: Pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts and instant coffee, with water in the mixture. The chocolate chips are made using hot glue sticks — essentially colored gobs of glue.” For some reason we imagine Adam Sandler as not having an especially refined palate, but even he gave them a thumbs-down after shrugging off a producer’s warning not to eat them.

SKREEONGK!

Godzilla Minus One has edged the original 1954 Godzilla to claim the franchise’s highest Metacritic score ever. Set once again in postwar Japan, the ground-up reboot “delivers just about everything fans could want from a sequel,” according to the Daily Beast. Film Threat goes even further: “Cast Marvel aside and get ready for the Toho Godzilla Cinematic Universe.”

(Okay, maybe that’s not as high praise as it would have been a few years ago, with even Time ganging up on Marvel now, but it still sounds pretty good. GODZILLA SMASH!)