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Page 17 of 43
Everybody knows that Stegosaurus had four tail spikes. The formidable weapons this odd dinosaur sported were some of its most prominent features. Yet, when Stegosaurus was new to science, it seemed as if this dinosaur bristled with even more spikes. In 1891, the first full skeletal drawing of Stegosaurus ungulatus was created under the direction [...]
May 09, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Dinosaurs are ambassadors of paleontology. Much to the frustration of scientists who study plants, invertebrates, and even fossil mammals, the word "paleontologist" is closely associated with the image of scruffy researchers digging around for dinosaur bones. Despite the popularity of dinosaurs, th...
May 06, 2011
| By Brian Switek
I thought that I had seen just about every major dinosaur documentary from the 1980s, but I just found out that I missed at least one: the Smithsonian Video Collection's Dinosaurs. It was one of many programs—like A&E's miniseries Dinosaur!—that were inspired by deep changes to what we thought ...
May 05, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Non-avian dinosaurs have been extinct for about 65 million years, but that has not stopped them from showing up on Twitter. Several dinosaurs have been making the most of the social media platform. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History doesn't have one yet—I would personally love to he...
May 04, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Everybody knows that Tyrannosaurus had small arms tipped in only two fingers. The relatively small arms of the Late Cretaceous predator are part of its charm. When paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn described Tyrannosaurus in 1905, however, the fingers and forearm of the dinosaur were missing. E...
May 03, 2011
| By Brian Switek
A Gorgosaurus tries to scare a group of Troodon away from a hapless ankylosaur in this promotional image for March of the Dinosaurs.
The Discovery Channel's "March of the Dinosaurs" is the kind of dinosaur documentary that could not have been made until this point in time. When I was fi...
May 02, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Sauropods were humongous creatures, but how they got so large is a mystery that paleontologists are still trying to unravel
April 29, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Thirty Earths: ArtEvolved points us to this remarkable set of images depicting the changing physical appearance of the Earth over the last 750 million years. The thirty visual reconstructions were recently released by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo...
April 29, 2011
| By Mark Strauss
TMP 2003.45.64 is not exactly a headline-making fossil. The left lower jaw of an Albertosaurus, most of the teeth have fallen out and the bone is only one part of a well-known species represented by many other skeletons. But, for those who know what they are looking for, this specimen bears the tr...
April 28, 2011
| By Brian Switek
If you spot a tiny tyrannosaur peeking out from the back of a jeep in the vicinity of Fort Campbell on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, you aren't seeing things. The dinosaur and the custom-painted Jurassic Park jeep are the creations of Daniel Peterson, the director of the U.S. Army Museum at the mi...
April 27, 2011
| By Brian Switek
The Museum of Modern Art needs dinosaurs. That was the conclusion of one young visitor named Annabelle after she failed to find any dinosaurs at the MoMA. "ou call your self a museum!" she chided on a comment cards, and her brief critique has been popping up all over the web this week.Not everyone ...
April 26, 2011
| By Brian Switek
I spent Sunday morning among the dinosaurs of Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The skeletons of the prehistoric creatures stood nearly shoulder to shoulder—the Tyrannosaurus appeared to snarl at a nearby Triceratops, and an Allosaurus stood dangerously close to the business-end of...
April 25, 2011
| By Brian Switek
When the American Museum of Natural History's paleontologist William Diller Matthew published his book Dinosaurs in 1915, no one understood how the famous Mesozoic creatures originated or went extinct. Both the beginning and end of the "Age of Dinosaurs" were mysterious. Yet, tucked away in a foot...
April 22, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Just in time for Halloween 2008, several gruesome spider photographs popped up in the news. The shots recorded two incidents—both of which took place in Queensland, Australia—of huge golden orb weaver spiders eating birds that had flown into the webs of the arachnids. Birds aren't exactly a staple...
April 21, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Most of the dinosaur sightings readers have sent in are of big creatures, but this week we have dinosaurs on a smaller scale.Following up her last submission of a giant pliosaur—which wasn't a dinosaur, but a fearsome Mesozoic marine reptile—former Food & Think blogger Amanda Bensen (now Fiegl)...
April 20, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Randall Munroe, the creator of the webcomic XKCD, isn't going to like this one bit. Fear of attack by Velociraptor is a running theme in the science-themed series—lazy computer programmers should be especially wary—and two separate discoveries announced last week gave those with a phobia of raptor...
April 19, 2011
| By Brian Switek
The way I look at dinosaurs now isn't the same way I looked at them when I was five or 10. Like the above video from a Sydney school shows, kids still feel that mix of joy and fright when they get up-close-and-personal with dinosaurs. That kind of interaction can be u...
April 18, 2011
| By Brian Switek
When I opened my email inbox this morning, I was met with a pleasant surprise. Phil Tippett's exquisite short film Prehistoric Beast has finally been released in its entirety.I had only seen bits and pieces of Tippett's stop-motion story as a kid. The short's dinosaurs - a Monoclonius and a tyranno...
April 15, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Feathers, air sacs, nesting behavior—the earliest birds owed a lot to their dinosaurian ancestors. The first birds also inherited a strong sense of smell.Modern birds have not been thought of as excellent scent-detectors, save for some super-smellers such as turkey vultures, which detect the scent ...
April 14, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Evolution is not a constant march of onward-and-upward progress. Any organism is a mosaic of the ancient and the modern—old features can be modified and put to new uses over time—and the mechanism of natural selection accounts for both an apparent lack of change and dramatic evolutionary transforma...
April 13, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Hunting dinosaurs is a dangerous business. Scores of fictional, time-traveling hunters have learned this lesson the hard way, but arguably the most unfortunate was the protagonist of Brian Aldiss' short story "Poor Little Warrior." All Claude Ford wanted to do was get away from his disappointing li...
April 12, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Oryctodromeus isn't exactly a household name. A small, herbivorous ornithopod found in the Late Cretaceous rock of western North America, it was the sort of dinosaur most often depicted as being prey for charismatic carnivores. But there was at least one aspect of Oryctodromeus that made it particu...
April 11, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Old bones have many tales to tell. The fossilized skeleton of any prehistoric creature contains clues about that animal's evolution, as well as the world around it and—if we're lucky—what caused its death. One such skeleton is at the center of the National Geographic Channel program Death of a Sea ...
April 08, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Paleo, Age of Reptiles, Tyrant—this week I've been looking back at comics that tell the stories of dinosaurs in Mesozoic settings (no humans allowed). How dinosaurs have appeared in comics can tell us something about the way images of these creatures have changed and how science trickles into popul...
April 07, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Comic books about the day-to-day lives of dinosaurs pop up only every once in a while. More often than not, pen and ink dinosaurs threaten to stomp and chomp unlucky humans who cross their paths, and occasionally a dinosaur will make a cameo appearance in one of the more famous comic franchises. By...
April 06, 2011
| By Brian Switek
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