Trending Topics

  1. American History
  2. Animals
  3. Biology
  4. Fossils
  5. Scientific Innovation
  6. American Civil War

Editors' Picks

Before and After: America’s Environmental History

For the EPA's State of the Environment Photography Project, people are returning to sites photographed in the 1970s. They are snapping the scenes yet again—to document any changes in the landscape

PHOTOS: The Mind-Blowing, Floating, Unmanned Scientific Laboratory

Wave Gliders are about to make scientific exploration a lot cheaper and safer

Merely a Taste of Beer Can Trigger a Rush of Chemical Pleasure in the Brain

New research shows just a sip can cause the potent neurotransmitter dopamine to flood the brain

Beats

Games

WordSmith

Test your knowledge on Smithsonian.com's crossword puzzle

Daily Sudoku

Play the addictive number placement puzzle

Page 20 of 43

When it was first described in 1993, Mononykus was one of the strangest dinosaurs known. It had the slender, light build of some of the "ostrich mimic" dinosaurs, yet it possessed two stubby, one-clawed hands and a few other subtle characteristics that placed it in a new group called the alvarezsa...
January 25, 2011 | By Brian Switek

What is going on with the Jurassic Park franchise? For the past decade rumors have circulated about a fourth installment of the dinosaurs-gone-wild series, and for every report that a sequel is in the works there is another denying such plans. The latest episode involved a daily shooting schedule ...
January 24, 2011 | By Brian Switek

Just a few hours after yesterday's post on dinosaur embryos went up, another major egg-based discovery was announced, in the journal Science.In October of 2009, paleontologists first described the flying reptile Darwinopterus, a pterosaur that lived in what is now China over 160 million years ago....
January 21, 2011 | By Brian Switek

Baby dinosaurs are hard to find. While the bones of large, adult dinosaurs were often sturdy enough to survive the processes involved in fossilization, the bones of young dinosaurs were small and delicate and have rarely made it into the fossil record. In many cases we just don't know what baby di...
January 20, 2011 | By Brian Switek

University of Alberta scientist Phil Currie is one of the most famous paleontologists in the field today, but what many people don't know is that he's also a brewer of his own brand of beer. Sent to us by reader Casey Tucker, the above label came from a homebrew Currie made in the 1990s, and the a...
January 19, 2011 | By Brian Switek

There are many ways to make a dinosaur cake. You could bake one in the shape of a dinosaur, you should create an icing dinosaur on the cake, or otherwise give your delicious creation a prehistoric theme. Unfortunately, this means that there are just as many ways to screw up making a dinosaur cake, ...
January 18, 2011 | By Brian Switek

Tracking the origin of the dinosaurs has been one of the most difficult tasks paleontologists have faced, but since the 1990s, multiple discoveries in South America have provided scientists with a look at what some of the earliest dinosaurs were like. Eoraptor, Herrerasaurus and the recently-descr...
January 14, 2011 | By Brian Switek

East Coast dinosaurs are relatively rare finds, often because the geological formations in which they rest have been built over. Dinosaurs surely remain to be found under parking lots, housing developments and city streets, and one of the now-lost dinosaur quarries is located in Manchester, Connec...
January 13, 2011 | By Brian Switek

Frequent dino-spotter Mark Ryan has sent us another sighting from the Twin Cities area, this time at the Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. Named Minne, the prehistoric creature in this photo has popped up in several lakes over the past few years, although it is difficult to say exactly what Minne i...
January 12, 2011 | By Brian Switek

March of the Mammoths: How do you draw a woolly mammoth? Peter Bond walks us through his step-by-step process, and the final version stomped its way over to the ART Evolved elephant gallery. Woolly mammoths dominate the assemblage, but I was glad to see some of my shovel-tusked favorites, like Ame...
January 11, 2011 | By Brian Switek

What did Velociraptor eat? Despite what the Jurassic Park franchise might suggest, the answer is not "tourists and hapless scientists." Those were in rather short supply during the Mesozoic. Instead, as reported in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology last year, recently found fossils ...
January 10, 2011 | By Brian Switek

I love AMC's gritty TV-adaptation of The Walking Dead, and the only way it could be better would be if they added zombie dinosaurs. That isn't going to happen, but, fortunately for those of us who would like to see undead theropods stomping around the place, young artist Martin Kevil has been worki...
January 07, 2011 | By Brian Switek

For the past century, paleontologists have been trying to figure out one of the most puzzling disappearing acts in the fossil record.In both Europe and North America, the Jurassic was the heyday of the sauropod dinosaurs. After the beginning of the Cretaceous period 145 million years ago, however, ...
January 06, 2011 | By Brian Switek

Today's sighting comes to us from reader Teresa, who passed along this photo of "Safety Steve" from when the Dinosaurs Unearthed exhibit was being loaded up after a run at the Calgary Zoo. Every such operation requires someone to oversee safety, and I know I would pay attention to a Baryonyx on th...
January 05, 2011 | By Brian Switek

Many unknown dinosaurs await discovery in rock formations all over the world, but some new species are hiding in plain sight. One such animal, described in an in-press Cretaceous Research paper, had one of the largest heads of any dinosaur.As recounted in the study by Yale paleontologist Nicholas L...
January 04, 2011 | By Brian Switek

With the start of 2011, the holiday season is now behind us, but while visiting the American Museum of Natural History, I spotted a lovely group of yuletide dinosaurs. Arranged around a Christmas tree were origami versions of many creatures, living and extinct, including numerous dinosaurs. Stegosa...
January 03, 2011 | By Brian Switek

2010 has been a good year for dinosaurs. Numerous new species have been named, long-awaited conference proceedings have been published, new techniques for studying the past have been devised, and scientists finally allowed us to answer one of the most confounding questions in dinosaur science. The...
December 30, 2010 | By Brian Switek

The Cretaceous dinosaur tracks scattered along Morrison, Colorado's Dinosaur Ridge have persisted in the fossil record for 1o0 million years, but they are now in danger of being lost forever. Exposed on the surface, the tracks are being eroded away bit by bit, and a local controversy over the aesth...
December 29, 2010 | By Brian Switek

When I think of North American dinosaurs, my mind immediately jumps to the impressive giants like Diplodocus and Tyrannosaurus scattered in rock formations around the West. But there were East Coast dinosaurs, too. One of them, an enigmatic creature discovered at the close of the 19th century, even...
December 28, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Another year, another spate of dinosaur books. The following is a brief review of the major dinosaur and dinosaur-related books I reported on during the past year (plus one extra that I have not yet reviewed but that no "best of 2010 dinosaur books" list could be without):Barnum Brown: The Man Who ...
December 27, 2010 | By Brian Switek

In northern Alaska, along the banks of the Colville River, a series of fossil bonebeds preserve remnants of the Late Cretaceous world. These ancient environments were quite different from those found farther south.Even though the climate of Cretaceous Alaska was warmer than that of today, areas nea...
December 23, 2010 | By Brian Switek

There has been virtually no snowfall where I live this year, dashing my hopes of making a snow dinosaur. One of our readers, Wim, has had better luck. In a comment on our last Dinosaur Sighting, Wim included the above picture and wrote:I spotted a “Snowceratops belgicae” in my garden last week.Unf...
December 22, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Coelurosaurs were one of the strangest groups of dinosaurs. In addition to the famous predators Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor, the coelurosaurs included the small, fuzzy Sinosauropteryx; "ostrich-mimics" such as Struthiomimus; the long-necked, sickle-clawed giant Therizinosaurus; the tiny, ant-ea...
December 21, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Ninety-five million years ago, in what is now southeastern Morocco, giant predators ruled the land. The reddish Cretaceous rock of these arid localities—called the Kem Kem Beds—has yielded the remains of the theropods Deltadromeus, Carcharodontosaurus (seen in Mark Hallett's exquisite painting "Thu...
December 20, 2010 | By Brian Switek

In 1861, as debates about evolution were brewing among naturalists, two important skeletons were discovered from the Late Jurassic limestone quarries of Germany. Both would be relevant to ideas about how birds evolved. Although not recognized as such until the late 20th century, Archaeopteryx was t...
December 17, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Advertisement

Follow Us

Marketplace






First Name
Last Name
Address 1
Address 2
City
State   Zip
Email


Smithsonian Journeys