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Page 35 of 43

One of the first dinosaur movies I ever saw was The Land That Time Forgot. Based upon the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel of the same name, the film followed a mixed group of British and German World War I sailors stranded in a dinosaur-infested lost world. I did not care very much about the human chara...
July 21, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Everybody knows that dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor were meat eaters, but what might come as a shock is that some of their close relatives often ate plants.When I was a kid things were simple. Theropod dinosaurs were meat-eaters and all the rest were plant-eaters. Since the 1980s, th...
July 20, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Last month I asked readers of this blog to vote for which location deserved the title of "Dinosaur Capital of the World." Glen Rose, Texas quickly jumped into the lead, but many commenters voiced their preference for Drumheller, Alberta. Glen Rose might have the tracks, they say, but it is hard to ...
July 17, 2009 | By Brian Switek

In 1996, damage caused by Hurricane Fran forced North Carolina's Museum of Life and Science to close down their beloved Pre-History Trail. The path, opened in 1967, was meant to take visitors on a journey through 300 million years, but in the wake of the storm it seemed like a good time to pause. N...
July 16, 2009 | By Brian Switek

One of the things I love about natural history museums is that you sometimes get to see real dinosaur bones. There is no substitute for seeing the fossilized remains of creatures that lived millions of years ago. If you want to see dinosaurs running around you will have to look to the movies, but a...
July 15, 2009 | By Brian Switek

The Cincinnati Museum has a bit of a problem. Not long ago the exhibit "Dinosaurs Unearthed" opened there, but what museum officials didn't know was that one of the Velociraptor brought to the museum was brooding a clutch of eggs! The babies hatched and escaped into the city, and the museum is call...
July 14, 2009 | By Brian Switek

I will never forget seeing Jurassic Park for the first time in the summer of 1993. Not only did the dinosaurs look real, but they sounded real, each dinosaur having its own array of chirps, bellows, hoots, and roars. According to paleontologist Phil Senter, however, dinosaurs may not have been able...
July 13, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Few animals are as intimidating as Tyrannosaurus, and that little fact might be keeping the property of Rick Pariser of Galena, Illinois a little safer. According to the Telegraph Herald, Pariser recently purchased a 10-foot-long metal sculpture of the famous dinosaur to round out his collection of...
July 10, 2009 | By Brian Switek

In 1918 the paleontologists at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History were pretty busy. Rather than go out into the field to collect more specimens, they chipped away at specimens that had already been collected so that they could be put on display. When the famous fossil collector Char...
July 09, 2009 | By Brian Switek

In the winter of 2007, news agencies were all a-twitter over the news of another "mummy" hadrosaur found in North Dakota. Nicknamed "Dakota", the dinosaur was said to "exceed the jackpot" of what paleontologists could have hoped for, and two books, a documentary and a lecture tour were arranged to ...
July 08, 2009 | By Brian Switek

If you want to enjoy Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, you are going to have to suspend your belief for a bit. There is no use nitpicking over a children's movie featuring talking extinct species of mammals from different places and time periods (to say nothing of saber-toothed squirrels). The late...
July 07, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Australia has always been a tough place for dinosaur paleontologists to work. Aside from the harsh conditions, dinosaur skeletons found "down under" are often extremely fragmentary. A bit of leg, a claw, a rib, a toe bone; often there is not much more to be found of dinosaurs that once roamed the s...
July 06, 2009 | By Brian Switek

The Jurassic Park franchise has been having a rough time of it over the past few years. Jurassic Park III, released eight years ago, performed only modestly at the box office and was generally panned by critics. It is never a good sign when the audience is rooting for the dinosaurs to eat the lead ...
July 02, 2009 | By Brian Switek

At 5 PM on June 30th the lights went out in the halls of the University of Wyoming Geological Museum for the last time. Earlier in the month, state budget cuts forced the university to cut funding to the institution, which houses the spectacular Allosaurus "Big Al" and an Apatosaurus skeleton. Plea...
July 01, 2009 | By Brian Switek

The Life Aquatic: Let’s offer a warm Dinosaur Tracking welcome to Brain Beatty’s new blog, The Aquatic Amniote, which will “share news and insights about marine mammals, marine reptiles, and generally explore the evolution of aquatic amniotes, with special reference to the transition from terrestri...
June 30, 2009 | By Mark Strauss

It is difficult to look at the skeleton of a dinosaur and not imagine what it might have been like when it was alive. What color was it? What sounds did it make? How did it eat? The last question, in particular, is of perpetual interest when it comes to meat-eating dinosaurs, and many writers have ...
June 29, 2009 | By Brian Switek

For the past seven years, a seven-foot-tall origami Tyrannosaurus has served as the mascot for the TEA ReX Teahouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. As The Charlotte Observer recently reported, however, the company is switching to a new online format, and the giant paper dinosaur would need a new home...
June 26, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Scientists in Spain announced this week the discovery of a large tooth from a predatory dinosaur similar to Allosaurus. Found by local residents in Riodeva, Teruel, the nearly 4-inch-long tooth is the largest predatory dinosaur tooth yet found from the country. Just what dinosaur the tooth belonged...
June 25, 2009 | By Brian Switek

When I visited the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. earlier this year, I was a bit surprised to see a large Triceratops statue next to the giant anteater enclosure. There are a few dinosaurs at the zoo, like the Tyrannosaurus skull sculpture near the big cats exhibit, but the Triceratops seemed out...
June 24, 2009 | By Brian Switek

When I took a college course about dinosaurs a few years ago, I took the opportunity to confirm what a family member told me when I was very young. Someone had given me a small lump of irregularly-shaped rock and said it was a dinosaur bone. It certainly looked like some kind of fossil, and in 2003...
June 23, 2009 | By Brian Switek

The wonderful exhibit "Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries" will soon be coming to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and to promote it the museum has commissioned a special TV ad that can only be described as "Apatosaurus on Ice."Unfortunately, though, some people might think this ...
June 22, 2009 | By Brian Switek

As I have written about many times here on Dinosaur Tracking, paleontologists presently have an overwhelming amount of evidence that birds are living dinosaurs. That doesn't mean that everything about the dinosaur-to-bird transition is well-understood, though. For years scientists have been faced w...
June 19, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Parents of young dino fans know it has to happen eventually. When birthday time rolls around, their future paleontologist wants a cake in the shape of, or at least adorned with, dinosaurs. There's plenty of ways to do this. For those short on time there's always the option of running to the superma...
June 18, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Every day, President Barack Obama takes on tough political questions, but what does he think about space dinosaurs? That is what Steven, an 11-year-old from St. Louis, Missouri, would most like to know. In a new book containing children's letters to the president, Kids' Letters to President Obama, ...
June 17, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Earlier this week the Burpee Museum of Natural History and the Discovery Center Museum, both in Rockford, Illinois, held a ground-breaking ceremony on a $10 million expansion for the museums.  The construction will give both institutions more exhibition space, and if the comments of Burpee Museum o...
June 16, 2009 | By Brian Switek

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