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Page 32 of 43

November 24, 2009 will mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and scientists have already started the celebrations. Last week, for example, the University of Chicago hosted a series of talks by some of the top evolutionary scientists working toda...
November 05, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Humans youngsters often use their hands and arms to push and shove, but young Tyrannosaurus were obviously a bit different than us. It would take a lot of effort for two of the fighting dinosaurs to get close enough to scrabble at each other with their small arms, and so they employed a different t...
November 04, 2009 | By Brian Switek

When I was about six years old, a traveling exhibit of animatronic dinosaurs came to a nearby town. I knew that dinosaurs were extinct—my parents had taken me to see what was left of them at the American Museum of Natural History in New York—but the metal-and-plastic robots were the closest I would...
November 03, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Earlier this year Texas updated the name of its official state dinosaur, a sauropod dinosaur previously called Pleurocoelus but recently renamed Paluxysaurus. To celebrate the name change, a team of scientists is creating a full restoration of the dinosaur's skeleton for the Fort Worth Museum of Sc...
November 02, 2009 | By Brian Switek

When Brian Switek polled readers about the Dinosaur Capital of the World, he included "Bedrock" as a gag answer. It did pretty well—beating out "Other" but losing, as did Liaoning and Glen Rose, to Drumheller. An astute reader pointed out that there is a way to visit Bedrock aside from being a cart...
October 30, 2009 | By Laura Helmuth

Croutons Not Recommended: Paleochick points us to this blast from the past: Julia Child turns her kitchen into a biolab and cooks up a batch of primordial soup. (The video played in the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's now-closed “Life in the Universe” gallery.)Worst. Article. Ever. Th...
October 29, 2009 | By Mark Strauss

If you knew nothing at all about dogs, but you were presented with a lineup of the skeletons of a variety of breeds from chihuahua to bulldog to German shepherd to mastiff, you could be excused for thinking they were different species. Their skeletons seem to be so different, yet we know they are a...
October 28, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Documentaries often show scientists digging for dinosaurs in places like the Badlands of the American West or the hot sands of the Gobi Desert, but people in the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area are a lot closer to a dinosaur bone-bed than they may know.This week the state of Maryland is establishing...
October 27, 2009 | By Brian Switek

From movies to museums, the most famous dinosaurs are among the largest. We like superlatives, and want to know what the biggest, fastest, and fiercest dinosaurs are. Yet, just like living animals, dinosaurs came in a variety of shapes and sizes, and a team of paleontologists has just announced, in...
October 26, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Today's Dinosaur Sighting comes to us from reader Cameron, who snapped this photo of a Tyrannosaurus popping out of an IGA grocery store wall in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. The dinosaur may look mean, but I'm sure he's just enthusiastic about helping shoppers take bags to their cars. Too bad he's ...
October 23, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Given the number of books that are published about dinosaurs, there is bound to be some overlap among them. Most titles fall into a handful of categories: the "menagerie" approach, where a collection of various dinosaurs is prefaced by a few short summaries of paleontology; the "life in the field" ...
October 22, 2009 | By Brian Switek

It is often assumed that dinosaur paleontologists are interested only in getting the fossils they discover out of the ground as quickly as possible. This is not true. Paleontologists generally take great care to document and catalogue every fossil removed from a dig site, because the position and s...
October 21, 2009 | By Brian Switek

I have always felt a bit sorry for Allosaurus. It was one of the top predators in what would become North America during the Jurassic, but the fearsome tyrannosaurs of the late Cretaceous are much more popular. In fact, the popularity of Tyrannosaurus and its kin has created the impression that the...
October 20, 2009 | By Brian Switek

About 199 million years ago, on a small patch of land that is now preserved in the present-day African nation of Lesotho, there was an inclined slope next to a riverbed. Within hours, days, or even weeks of each other, several different dinosaurs climbed up and down the slope, leaving their footpri...
October 19, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Our latest Dinosaur Sighting comes to us from our very own Sarah Zielinski, who writes for the Surprising Science blog here at Smithsonian. During a recent visit to Paris, Sarah spotted this Stegosaurus outside the Museum National D'Histoire Naturelle, and while she did not see anyone on it while s...
October 16, 2009 | By Brian Switek

The discovery of new kinds of feathered dinosaurs regularly makes the news these days, but it is important to remember that modern vertebrate paleontology encompasses much more than the search for the origin of birds. Indeed, this week scientists described an equally-spectacular fossil that fills i...
October 15, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Modern birds grow amazingly fast. After hatching, many species grow to adult size in a matter of days to weeks. But a new study published in the journal PLoS One suggests that birds did not always exhibit the same rapid rate of growth. By looking at chips of bone taken from the legs of some of the ...
October 14, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Even though some of the largest dinosaurs get the most attention, dinosaurs actually came in a variety of sizes. This past week paleontologists announced two discoveries that emphasize just how large, and how small, some dinosaurs were.From Plagne, France came the announcement of the largest dinosa...
October 13, 2009 | By Brian Switek

When I want to watch a movie but am not sure what I'm in the mood for, I usually pop in one of the Jurassic Park DVDs. I am not going to argue that they are classic cinema, but it is pretty fun to see dinosaurs "brought back to life" through puppetry and CGI, even if the series became increasingly ...
October 09, 2009 | By Brian Switek

In 1996, researchers in Canada's Dinosaur Provincial Park recovered the partial left jawbone of a large tyrannosaur. Numerous remains of tyrannosaurs had been found from the location before, but this one was special. Embedded in the bone was the tooth of a second tyrannosaur.This specimen sat in a ...
October 08, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Earlier this week I wrote about a spectacular discovery made in Tamil Nadu, India: dozens of dinosaur eggs preserved in what may have been an ancient nesting ground. Word quickly spread about the discovery, but now it looks like scientists may never get to fully study the site. Since the time the d...
October 07, 2009 | By Brian Switek

It has been a good month for tyrannosaur research. We have been introduced to the comparatively tiny tyrannosauroid Raptorex, have learned that Tyrannosaurus probably suffered from a parasitic infestation similar to one seen in living birds, and now a team of paleontologists led by Stephen Brusatte...
October 06, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Last week the BBC reported that a team of geologists from Periyar University stumbled upon dozens of fossilized dinosaur eggs in the state of Tamil Nadu, India.The geologists had been excavating a riverbed when they discovered layer upon layer of dinosaur eggs measuring 5 to 9 inches in diameter. T...
October 05, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Wherever you find dinosaurs, chances are that Dimetrodon is close by. The sail-backed creature is a staple of museum displays, boxes of sugar-saurus cookies, and sets of plastic dinosaurs, and I have to admit that it certainly does look dinosaur-like. Yet appearances can be deceiving. Not only was ...
October 02, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Apocalypto: Can the extinction of the dinosaurs shed light on the disappearance of the Mayans? Some scientists believe that the 110-mile diameter Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan Peninsula is a remnant of the asteroid that smacked into Earth 65 million years ago and precipitated the downfall of th...
October 01, 2009 | By Mark Strauss

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