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Page 21 of 43

2010 has been a bumper crop year for Utah's dinosaurs. No fewer than eight new species have been named, including the iguanodonts Hippodraco and Iguanacolossus; the ceratopsids Utahceratops, Kosmoceratops and Diabloceratops; the sauropodomorph Seitaad and the sauropod Abydosaurus. (A few other Uta...
December 16, 2010 | By Brian Switek

How do you ship a dinosaur? If this photo taken by reader Sheryl Todd outside a Victoria, British Columbia museum is any indication, a traditional wooden box works fine. True, a steel cage would probably be safer, but what is the fun in transporting a dinosaur if there isn't at least the possibilit...
December 15, 2010 | By Brian Switek

When I was a kid, Spinosaurus was one of my favorite dinosaurs. There was something so wonderfully odd about a massive predator with a sail on its back, but the trouble was that no one had a good idea what this animal looked like.Spinosaurs have been known to paleontologists since 1820. The troubl...
December 14, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Situated in the English county of Wiltshire, Stonehenge is one of the most famous archaeological monuments in the world. It is also one of the most mysterious. The culture that made it left no written records behind, so, as Nigel Tufnel has said, "No one kn...
December 13, 2010 | By Brian Switek

From place to place and year to year, it is a fact of paleontology that some of the best discoveries are made at the very end of the field season. This is not so common that it is some kind of natural law, but it happens quite often, and there is more to it than just luck...
December 10, 2010 | By Brian Switek

I have never been particularly good at sending out Christmas cards. By the time I get into the holiday spirit and remember, it is usually December 24th. This year, however, the Etsy member FrankNBones has given me a good excuse to do things right with a unique set of dinosaur holiday cards!Featurin...
December 09, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Dinosaurs versus the Army. I spent many childhood hours pitting my green plastic army figures against the reptilian horde of my dinosaur toy collection. It didn't matter which side won—it was good fun either way.Comic books and B movies depicted similar bat...
December 08, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Evolution never got much time in my elementary school science classes. When the topic came up, inevitably near the end of the term, the standard, pre-packaged historical overview came along with it. Charles Darwin was the first person to come up with the idea of evolution, and, despite the ravings ...
December 07, 2010 | By Brian Switek

We typically think of dinosaurs as warm-weather creatures, but, as seen in this photo taken outside Bozeman, Montana's Museum of the Rockies by University of Utah graduate student Carrie Levitt, sometimes dinosaurs like to play in the snow, too.True, the Montana of Cretaceous times was a bit differ...
December 06, 2010 | By Brian Switek

The most telling moment in SyFy's latest installment of Saturday night schlock - Triassic Attack - comes fairly early on in the film. Dismayed and angered by the expansion of a nearby college, a Native American protester named Dakota (played by Raoul Trujil...
December 03, 2010 | By Brian Switek

As mighty as Tyrannosaurus rex was, its tiny forelimbs have also made it one of the most mocked dinosaurs of all time. The stubby arms of this predator once seemed mismatched to its enormous frame, and some of the hypotheses put forward to explain their function just made the "tyrant king" seem sil...
December 02, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Fossilized dinosaur tracks can be exceptionally informative traces of prehistoric life, but figuring out what dinosaur made a particular set of footprints can be tricky. Unless an animal literally dies in its tracks, the best we can do is to match the skeletal anatomy of dinosaur feet with the anat...
December 01, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Among the many recurring themes on this blog, the evolution of birds from feathered maniraptoran dinosaurs is probably the most prevalent. Hardly a month goes by without a new study relevant to this major evolutionary transition, and as paleontologists discover more they continue to find that many ...
November 30, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Publish or Perish: At SV-POW!, Mike Taylor presents a tutorial on “How to become a palaeontologist.” His central message: write papers. “I know a whole bunch of people who should be published palaeontologists, but aren’t. Some of them know far, far more about extinct animals than I do, and I am fra...
November 29, 2010 | By Mark Strauss

Tomorrow families all over the United States will be taking part in the ritualized, yearly tradition of dinosaur dissection. Granted, "Thanksgiving" is a much better name than "Annual Dinosaur Dissection Day", but the fact of the matter is that the turkey on the table has a lot in common with its ...
November 24, 2010 | By Brian Switek

The parade of new dinosaur species continues this week with the description of two new iguanodont dinosaurs from Utah: Hippodraco and Iguanacolossus.Iguanodont dinosaurs were among the first to be discovered by scientists. The genus Iguanodon itself was described by the English naturalist Gideon M...
November 23, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Hot on the heels of a team of researchers who described Zhuchengceratops from the Cretaceous of China, paleontologists Yuong-Nam Lee, Michael J. Ryan and Yoshitsugu Kobayashi have just announced the discovery of another ceratopsian dinosaur—Koreaceratops hwaseongensis—from the 103-million-year-old...
November 22, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Last Friday I wrote about a new study by paleontologist Phil Senter that revised the arrangement of bones in the front feet of Stegosaurus. Despite being only a distant relative of the sauropod dinosaurs, Stegosaurus had convergently evolved a semi-circular pattern of bones which would have given ...
November 19, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Earlier this week paleontologists Mark Witton and Michael Habib published a new study in PLoS One on how pterosaurs—particularly large forms such as Quetzalcoatlus—took to the air. Rather than pushing off the ground with their legs, pterosaurs used their arms in a pole-vault type of motion to launc...
November 18, 2010 | By Brian Switek

China's spectacular feathered fossils have finally answered the century-old question about the ancestors of today's birds
December 2010 | By Richard Stone

Regular readers know that I was underwhelmed by IDW's efforts to take on the Jurassic Park franchise—I'll have a wrap-up review coming soon—but fortunately for dinosaur comic fans, several forthcoming releases should provide a higher-quality dino fix.Next February, Image Comics will release a one-s...
November 17, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Almost everyone has a pretty good idea of what Tyrannosaurus rex looked like. The massive head, scrawny arms, and the bird-like posture are all iconic parts of prehistory's most famous dinosaur, but its tail would probably be tacked on as an afterthought.You can't have a good Tyrannosaurus without ...
November 16, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Paleontologists are discovering dinosaur species at a dizzying pace. These days it seems that a new species is announced almost every other week. Many of these new dinosaurs are being found in China, and two different teams of scientists have recently described a pair of unique species from two lo...
November 15, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Paleontologists certainly have their hands full finding and describing new dinosaurs, but there is still much to learn about the already familiar species. The configuration of different parts of dinosaur anatomy, for one thing, is an area of research in which scientists are constantly re-examining...
November 12, 2010 | By Brian Switek

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