Welcome to another edition of the NatSCA Digital Digest! This episode has been brought to you today by the phrase “birdy num num”. Extra credit if you know where that phrase comes from.

Let’s start off with the news everyone’s been waiting for: Fenscore is back! It was showcased at Refloating the Ark last week and it has a new home right here at NatSCA. We are going to have a full story on this later with many more details from a mystery guest blogger, so we’re looking forward to that. For those of you still struggling to complete your NatSCA Bingo cards, reading this counts.

Another reminder for anyone wishing to submit a poster for the Bone Collections day in Cambridge, Vicky Purewal and Natalie Jones want to hear from you. Get your submissions in or scrawny chick judges you.

For those of you that weren’t in the UCL grounds on Monday night, you missed a great night out (including free and student price drinks)  with some of the NatSCA irregulars. The night started with a talk about the Victorian attitudes to fossil discovery by Professor Joe Cain and proceeded to an evening viewing of the Grant Museum‘s temporary exhibition. Joe highlighted the Crystal Palace dinosaurs as a great place to go and see that enthusiasm for lost worlds. He also highlighted the repair work needed and the important work being done by the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs.

Which brings us to our news from interesting recent papers: weird Romanian theropod Balaur bondoc, with its distinctive pair of sickle claws per foot has been shifted from the dromaeosaur to the basal bird clade, thanks to the work of Cau, et al. It isn’t all that big a jump but it does mean Balaur won’t be getting picked on by its clademates for being different quite so much. For more on this, check out co-author Darren Naish’s write-up at Scientific American.

That’s all for now. Tune in next week when we (hopefully) will be able to advertise a really tempting job vacancy!