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Page 24 of 43

Thanks to their prominent appearances in museum displays and the Jurassic Park film franchise, many people are very familiar with what dromaeosaurid dinosaurs looked like. Relatively small and lightly-built, these predators had long, grasping hands and a hyperextendable second toe on each foot tip...
August 31, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Last March a team of paleontologists led by Roger Benson described what appeared to be a partial hip of a tyrannosauroid dinosaur from Australia—the first-ever trace of this group of dinosaurs on the southern continent. Now, in a comment and reply printed in last week's Science, Matthew Herne, Jay ...
August 30, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Every year scores of paleontologists head out to the field in search of dinosaur fossils, but sometimes the remains of the charismatic creatures are hiding right underfoot. As reported in various news outlets earlier this week, sewer construction workers Aaron Krywiak and Ryley Paul discovered din...
August 27, 2010 | By Brian Switek

When I think of dinosaur bones, the rocky and shrub-flecked expanses of western North America immediately come to mind, but it should not be forgotten that some of the first dinosaurs recognized by science were discovered across the Atlantic in England. Paleontologists have been searching for dino...
August 26, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Ah, The Crater Lake Monster, a film that repeatedly made me wonder, "why the heck am I still watching this movie?"Like the last Dinosaur Drive-In film featured here, Crater Lake Monster contains no actual dinosaurs (no matter how many times the scientists in the film call it one). Instead our mons...
August 25, 2010 | By Brian Switek

No matter how much we learn about the lives of dinosaurs, much of the public's attention is focused on issues of attack and defense. How powerful was a Tyrannosaurus bite? How did Deinonychus hunt? Why did ankylosaurs have such impressive armor? Did Triceratops form herds to defend themselves? Agai...
August 24, 2010 | By Brian Switek

A few weeks ago, someone decapitated the dinosaur standing outside Norman, Oklahoma's only Sinclair station. The sculpture—put in place five years ago and named "Dino"—was a beloved local landmark, and fortunately the head was eventually recovered. This wasn't the first time a dinosaur's head has ...
August 23, 2010 | By Brian Switek

One of the many reasons I love paleontology is that every now and then I stumble across a paper on some aspect of ancient life I had never considered before. There is much more to the science than descriptions of new species, and one of the studies that most recently caught my eye carried the title...
August 20, 2010 | By Brian Switek

On my way back from Montana, I had a layover in Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, and it was there that I spotted this impressive mount of Brachiosaurus altithorax. Another skeletal restoration of the immense dinosaur stands outside the city's famed Field Museum. I have to say that seeing thi...
August 19, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Whenever I pass construction sites, I sometimes imagine that some of the heavy, earth-moving machines are mechanical dinosaurs. Big, loud, and powerful, they fit the caricature of dinosaurs as bellowing monsters from my childhood, but the late sculptor Jim Gary actually went a step beyond seeing ve...
August 18, 2010 | By Brian Switek

In 1991, paleontologist David Gillette announced that he had found the largest of the enormous sauropod dinosaurs. He called it Seismosaurus halli, and based on the parts of the skeleton that had been prepared at the time, Gillette believed Seismosaurus to be between 127 and 170 feet long! Even gia...
August 17, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Growing up, I often heard that there might still be dinosaurs living in some distant, tropical jungle. In television documentaries and some of the less-reputable "science" books carried by my elementary school library, rumors of long-lost prehistoric creatures abounded, and I could not help but hop...
August 16, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Many visitors to natural history museums—especially children—come to see just one thing: dinosaurs. No major institution can be without a hall of enormous Jurassic and Cretaceous animals (with the smaller, lesser-known Triassic dinosaurs taking their places along the margins), but the American occu...
August 13, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Twenty years ago today, fossil hunter Sue Hendrickson discovered the dinosaur that now bears her name—the immense, 80 percent complete Tyrannosaurus rex called Sue. Arguably the most famous representative of the superstar of the dinosaur world, Sue is one of the most fantastic fossil discoveries ev...
August 12, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Sent to us by Karen James of London's Natural History Museum, this badly-mannered dinosaur was spotted in Santa Monica, California. I don't suppose anyone told this theropod that it is rude to spit in public. Have you stumbled across a dinosaur in an unexpected place? If you have, and hav...
August 11, 2010 | By Brian Switek

At about 40 feet long, Tyrannosaurus rex was one of the largest predatory animals that ever lived. But even the skeleton of a fully grown T. rex would be dwarfed by its animatronic likeness now standing outside the Children's Museum of South Dakota. Measuring 60 feet long from nose to tail, the su...
August 10, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Back in 1991, paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City created one of the most ambitious and controversial dinosaur exhibits ever seen. An homage to the (at the time) new vision of dinosaurs as active, dynamic animals, the skeletal scene depicted an Allosaurus mena...
August 09, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Modern crocodylians—from alligators to gharials—can't chew their food. Their jaws are adapted for snapping shut quickly and powerfully on prey, but once these archosaurs have captured their meal, they must either swallow it whole or tear off a smaller piece and bolt it down. Given that these extant...
August 06, 2010 | By Brian Switek

During the past week, people all over the Internet have driven themselves into a tizzy over the new study by John Scanella and Jack Horner in which the paleontologists hypothesized that the dinosaur known as Torosaurus was really the adult stage of the more familiar Triceratops. "Triceratops Never...
August 05, 2010 | By Brian Switek

While on her way to the Festival d'été de Québec in Canada, my old friend Ashley Rosenfeld happened upon a row of shoddy-looking dinosaur sculptures. With missing arms or with necks snapped backwards, many of these dinosaurs have seen better days—the theropod in this photo was one of the few that...
August 04, 2010 | By Brian Switek

When you get right down to it, most dinosaur movies are missing something. "Good special effects" might be one answer, and "a plot" is an even better one, but if "a trippy jazz-disco musical score" was your reply, then 1977's Japanese monster flick Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds may be just ...
August 03, 2010 | By Brian Switek

As stated in many popular-audience books and documentaries, the fossilization of a skeleton involves the gradual transformation of bone into stone, often by way of mineral-rich groundwater percolating through bones over a long period of time. Yet things are not that simple. Thanks to recent discove...
August 02, 2010 | By Brian Switek

An Evolving Blog: Please welcome the latest blog to emerge from the primordial ooze of the Internet. Pick & Scalpel is the official blog of the WitmerLab. Their mission statement: “We’re a collection of scientists at Ohio University using 21st century approaches to ‘flesh out’ the past. Our mis...
July 30, 2010 | By Mark Strauss

I knew it was probably going to be bad, but when I saw that the prehistoric critter documentary series Monsters Resurrected was on Netflix, I couldn't help but hit the "play" button. As I soon found out, the series represents everything I love and hate about modern dinosaur documentaries.First broa...
July 29, 2010 | By Brian Switek

I love visiting the fossil halls of natural history museums, but I have to admit that I sometimes yearn to see new specimens on display. Tyrannosaurus, Apatosaurus, Triceratops, Allosaurus, Edmontosaurus—their skeletons remains as impressive as ever, but given all the new dinosaur species discovere...
July 28, 2010 | By Brian Switek

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