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Page 18 of 43
Yesterday's post kicked off my look back at dinosaurs that stomped, roared and chomped their way through comics with Jim Lawson's Paleo. Rather than placing dinosaurs in the modern era or sending people back to the Cretaceous, Lawson's stories stood out because he considered dinosaurs in their own ...
April 05, 2011
| By Brian Switek
The dinosaurs of the 1990s were a strange breed. Even though visions of the dinosaurs as highly active, dynamic animals had become the norm, some still dragged their tails and behaved like dim-witted monsters. Old interpretations hung on even as new discoveries changed our perspective, and one way ...
April 04, 2011
| By Brian Switek
"While 2010 was celebrated as the year of ceratopsians by many," paleontologist Dave Hone wrote at Archosaur Musings yesterday, "it should not be overlooked the huge number of tyrannosaurs that have cropped up in the last year or so." He's right. For a long time Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Daspleto...
April 01, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Pliosaurs are not technically dinosaurs, but they were fellow travelers. Both clades lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, went extinct about 65 million years ago and were gigantic, toothy and bizarre.Former Food & Think blogger Amanda Bensen (now Fiegl) left Smithsonian a few months ag...
March 31, 2011
| By Laura Helmuth
Stegosaurus had a formidable tail. Studded with four long spikes, this dinosaur's business end would have given Allosaurus and other Jurassic predators plenty of incentive to keep moving. But do we have any evidence that Stegosaurus really used its tail this way?Among paleontologists, the four-spi...
March 30, 2011
| By Brian Switek
How is a Saurpod Like a Vacuum Cleaner? Find out at Everything Dinosaur. Renaissance Reptiles: Art Evolved alerts us to the opening of Dinosauri in Carne e Ossa, the first large-scale paleoart exhibition in Italy. The event will be running through May 31 in Piacenza—a city renowned for its histori...
March 29, 2011
| By Mark Strauss
Remember the Woodcraft dinosaurs? I loved playing with those skeletal plywood puzzles as a kid, and a giant-sized version of one recently made a guest appearance on the show The Amazing Race. A few of the competing teams were tasked with putting together pl...
March 28, 2011
| By Brian Switek
When I was in elementary school, I was told that mammals and reptiles could easily be told apart by their teeth. Mammals had a full, enamel-covered toolkit in their mouths—incisors, canines, premolars, and molars suited to different tasks—while reptiles had only one kind of tooth. The dental differ...
March 25, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Like many fossils fans, I quite enjoy picking apart bad restorations of dinosaurs, but I must admit that I have a soft spot for the 20th century image of drab, slow, stupid dinosaurs. Those were the dinosaurs I first encountered at museums and school libraries—just before the "Dinosaur Renaissance...
March 24, 2011
| By Brian Switek
I feel a little sorry that I said Allosaurus had one of the dullest names in paleontology yesterday. It's not the dinosaur's fault that Othniel Charles Marsh gave it the unimaginative title of "different reptile." Had Marsh seen the complete skeleton when he coined the name, perhaps he would have ...
March 23, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Allosaurus has one of the dullest names in all of paleontology. The famous dinosaur's moniker simply means "different reptile"—a bit of a letdown for one of the top predators of Jurassic North America. Early on, the name fit well—Allosaurus was a very unusual dinosaur compared to other large, pred...
March 22, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Paleontologists have not found much of Oxalaia quilombensis. A fragment of the snout and a portion of the upper jaw are all that is known of this dinosaur. Even so, those two parts are enough to know that Oxalaia was one of the peculiar predatory dinosaurs known as spinosaurs, and a giant one at t...
March 21, 2011
| By Brian Switek
The prehistoric world was intensely violent. So I believed when I was a kid, anyway. Almost every book I read or movie I saw about now-fossilized creatures showed them as ferocious monsters that were constantly biting and clawing at each other. I spent hours with plastic toys and mud puddles reenac...
March 18, 2011
| By Brian Switek
During the latter half of the 1980s, when I was just becoming acquainted with dinosaurs, "Brontosaurus" was just on its way out. A few of my books depicted the lumbering dinosaur, and a few museums still had the wrong heads on their skeletons, but the images of slow, stupid Brontosaurus were slowl...
March 17, 2011
| By Brian Switek
It's easy to take computer-generated dinosaurs for granted. They are everywhere from commercials and documentaries to Hollywood films. But a century ago, filmmakers had to bring dinosaurs to life the old fashioned way. Frame by frame and centimeter by centi...
March 16, 2011
| By Brian Switek
About two weeks ago I visited the American Museum of Natural History for a preview of their upcoming dinosaur exhibit. The chance to visit the dinosaur halls—and the collections!—after dark was an opportunity I did not want to miss, especially since my first visit to the museum, in the late 1980s, ...
March 15, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Have you ever seen an Ankylosaurus fly? Stout and covered in heavy armor, ankylosaurs were arguably the least aerodynamic of all dinosaurs, but two months ago the Houston Museum of Natural Science treated onlookers to such a sight as they lifted their ankylosaur sculpture out of its old exhibit.The...
March 14, 2011
| By Brian Switek
What is Nedoceratops? That depends on who you ask. The single known skull could represent a transitional growth stage between Triceratops and Torosaurus head shapes in a single species of dinosaur, or it might be a unique species of horned dinosaur that lived alongside its better-known relatives.T...
March 11, 2011
| By Brian Switek
In one short section of his book Parasite Rex, science writer Carl Zimmer asked a simple question: "Did tapeworms live in dinosaurs?" There is no reason to think they didn't. Both the living descendants of dinosaurs (birds) and their crocodylian cousins harbor tapeworms, Zimmer pointed out, and so ...
March 10, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Tyrannosaurus ate flesh. That much is obvious. The reinforced skull and huge, serrated teeth of the tyrant dinosaur and its kin were not adaptations for cropping grass or cracking coconuts. Both predators and scavengers, the tyrannosaurs must have consumed massive amounts of meat to fuel their lar...
March 09, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Many years ago, before the major renovation of the dinosaur halls, my parents took me to see the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). I will never forget that visit. Standing below the skeleton of the immense "Brontosaurus," I imagined what the animal would have looked like w...
March 08, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Of all the organisms scientists have found in the fossil record, Tyrannosaurus rex is the most prominent ambassador for paleontology. No dinosaur hall is complete without at least some fragment of the tyrant dinosaur, and almost anything about the dinosaur is sure to get press coverage. We simply...
March 07, 2011
| By Brian Switek
Paleo-Profiles: A new site called PhyloPic is a free online archive of silhouhettes featuring organisms both living and extinct. Art Evolved presents this primer on how you can create and contribute silhouettes. Welcome to the Neighborhood: The Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm in Saint Geor...
March 04, 2011
| By Mark Strauss
Slowly but surely, museums across the United States are updating their dinosaur exhibits. The state of dinosaur science is changing so rapidly that even exhibits renovated in the 1990s are at least partially outdated, and I am thrilled to see so many institutions incorporating the latest science i...
March 03, 2011
| By Brian Switek
In 1991, the cable channel A&E ran a four-part prehistoric extravaganza hosted by Walter Cronkite and simply called Dinosaur! I was only eight when it aired, and I remember begging my parents to stay up to watch the episodes. Irrepressible little dinosaur...
March 02, 2011
| By Brian Switek
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