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Page 25 of 43

What do Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and dinosaurs have in common? According to Hollywood scuttlebutt, the answer is a soon-to-be-released film called The Tree of Life, but it doesn't sound like it's going to be your usual prehistoric-monsters-run-amok film.Details of what the movie is actually going to be...
July 27, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Over the past few years, most of what I have learned about dinosaurs has come from books and papers. I am constantly trying to keep up with the literature—both from my own edification and to bring you news of the coolest new discoveries—but there is only so much libraries can do for you. Sooner or ...
July 26, 2010 | By Brian Switek

The first thing you need to know about the 1977 B movie The Last Dinosaur is that the name of the film's chief protagonist is Maston Thrust. I'm not kidding. Played by Richard Boone of Have Gun—Will Travel fame, he's an ornery old cuss with a face like a catcher's mitt and a penchant for wearing sc...
July 23, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Late last year paleontologists Jack Horner and Mark Goodwin made waves by proposing that what had previously been thought to be two distinct genera of "bone-headed" dinosaurs—Stygimoloch and Dracorex—were really just growth stages of Pachycephalosaurus. Together the three body types illustrated ho...
July 22, 2010 | By Brian Switek

One month ago I wrote about the efforts of paleontologist Darren Tanke and crew to launch a dinosaur-hunting expedition along Alberta's Red Deer River using the same techniques employed by famous fossil collectors Barnum Brown and Charles H. Sternberg. That journey has now come to a premature end.A...
July 21, 2010 | By Brian Switek

The Walking With Dinosaurs live show has raised the bar for dinosaur puppetry, and numerous museums and theme parks have begun to feature their own resident dinosaurs to enthrall their guests. On the inventively educational side of the spectrum are shows like the Utah Museum of Natural History's "L...
July 20, 2010 | By Brian Switek

As the great 20th century paleontologist William Diller Matthew once wrote, "The story of life on Earth is a splendid drama, as interesting as we watch its action and study the interplay of causes and motives that lie behind its movement as any great historic play." Within this great play, the Tria...
July 19, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Dinosaurs overshadowed mammals for most of the Mesozoic, but evidence of actual dinosaur-mammal interactions are very rare. On the mammalian score, a specimen of the relatively large Cretaceous mammal Repenomamus robustus described in 2005 was found with the bones of baby dinosaurs in its stomach—i...
July 16, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Back in the 1990s, paleontologist Jack Horner proposed that Tyrannosaurus rex—popularly cast as the most fearsome predator of all time—was really a giant-sized scavenger. With its small arms, a large part of its brain devoted to analyzing smells, and a mouth full of rail-spike-sized teeth, the tyra...
July 15, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Today's Dinosaur Sighting comes to us from reader Mark Ryan.While traveling along Route 97 just outside of Port Jervis, New York, Mark spotted this rusty spinosaur on a business rooftop. Looks to me like this dinosaur could use a touch of Rust-Oleum.Have you stumbled across a dinosaur in an unexpec...
July 14, 2010 | By Brian Switek

There can be a fine line between "art" and "eyesore"—especially when it comes to roadside dinosaurs. Which side the 122-foot-long "Vermontasaurus" falls on is a matter of taste.As reported by the Associated Press, last month the 61-year-old Vermont resident Brian Boland decided to create a dinosaur...
July 12, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Every now and then, I come across a study that makes me hope my first doubtful impression is wrong and that the authors have better evidence to back up their claims. One such case was the hypothesis that the feathered dinosaur Sinornithosaurus had a venomous bite, as was proposed by scientists Enpu...
July 09, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Fossil dinosaur tracks don't often get the same popular attention that skeletons do. The impressions within the rock seem to pale in comparison to the beautiful organic architecture of the bones, but, while they might not be as aesthetically interesting to some, tracks are bits of behavior preserve...
July 08, 2010 | By Brian Switek

The coast of Maine, like any good vacation destination, is full of fudge shops. They all tend to have the same selection of candies, the same line of sunburned kids and the same sticky sweet smell. But only one (that I know of) has a shocking pink triceratops Styracosaurus (sharp readers: thanks fo...
July 07, 2010 | By Laura Helmuth

It was one of the most memorable scenes in Jurassic Park—a hungry Tyrannosaurus rex chasing after Ian Malcolm, Ellie Sattler and Robert Muldoon as they make their escape in a Jeep. It was also among the moments that probably made paleontologists in the audience facepalm. Tyrannosaurus was fearsome,...
July 06, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Paleontologists have long been fascinated by bizarre structures on prehistoric animals. The horns of Styracosaurus, the sail of Dimetrodon, the crest of Tupuxuara and more—these odd ornaments raise the questions, "what were those structures used for, and how did they evolve?" In a recent review of ...
July 02, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Spun Around: Ediacaran displays a fossil of Redlichia takooensis (a large trilobite, around 12 to 14 centimeters in length) suffering from a curious malady: its head is on backwards. The reason? Not demonic possession, but a tragic molting accident.Top Paleo-Chef: Mike Taylor at SV-POW! demonstrate...
July 01, 2010 | By Mark Strauss

Even though they grew to be some of the largest animals ever to walk the earth, sauropod dinosaurs started off small. From numerous nesting sites found all over the world it appears that gravid female sauropods, rather than putting all their effort into laying a few enormous eggs, created large nes...
June 30, 2010 | By Brian Switek

When I was growing up, almost every documentary I saw or dinosaur book I read showed images of the great wall of Jurassic dinosaurs laid out at the Dinosaur National Monument visitor center. The wall, which is the enduring legacy of paleontologist Earl Douglass, who discovered the rich assemblage o...
June 29, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Most dinosaur-themed video games seem to fall into one of two categories—the ones that give players a ridiculous arsenal of weapons to gun down dinosaurs and those that allow players to be the dinosaurs. To be honest, I have always found the latter type of game to be a bit dull—one can only bite, s...
June 28, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Mammals have long been characterized as the underdogs of the Mesozoic world. They diversified in habitats ecologically dominated by dinosaurs, but, even though most were small, they did not simply cower in their burrows until the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. In fact, Mes...
June 25, 2010 | By Brian Switek

As much as I love spotting dinosaurs along the road and in "prehistoric parks," I have to admit that most of them look terrible. Not only are they often misshapen and woefully out of date, but many have been in a state of disrepair for years. It seems that many roadside dinosaurs are the products o...
June 24, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Even though some roadside dinosaur parks may be going extinct, there are still plenty of funky dinosaur sculptures standing on the side of highways and in front of gift shops. These two, photographed by Smithsonian staffer Erik Washam, stand outside of the Crystal Forest Museum Gift Shop in Holbroo...
June 23, 2010 | By Brian Switek

As a group, dinosaurs were certainly well-ornamented animals. Horns, spikes, crests, plates, sails, clubs and other strange structures marked the bodies of many dinosaurs, but figuring out why these dinosaurs had these structures in the first place has often been difficult to figure out. Numerous h...
June 22, 2010 | By Brian Switek

Between 1910 and 1916, during the second great dinosaur "bone rush" in North America, the famous fossil hunters Barnum Brown and Charles Sternberg engaged in a bit of friendly competition along the Red Deer River in Alberta, Canada. The areas along the banks, often inaccessible by land, were rich i...
June 21, 2010 | By Brian Switek

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