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Page 36 of 43

Dinosaurs are often mentioned in discussions about evolution, yet many people do not know how dinosaurs evolved. That birds are living dinosaurs has been a hot topic during the last decade or so, but what about all those other dinosaurs? How did they emerge and diversify during the ancient past? In...
June 15, 2009 | By Brian Switek

When we talk about dinosaurs, we often associate some of our favorites with the times in which they lived. Dinosaur enthusiasts know that Tyrannosaurus was a Cretaceous dinosaur, for example, but fewer people know that Tyrannosaurus only lived at the very end of the Cretaceous, about 68 to 65 milli...
June 12, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Earlier this year a chain of dino-themed restaurants, called T-REX, started to open in the United States, but a restaurant in Taiwan has been serving up meals in the shadow of dinosaurs for much longer. The three-story Jurassic Restaurant in Taipei opened in 1988, five years before Jurassic Park sp...
June 11, 2009 | By Brian Switek

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, home of the Dinosphere, is welcoming some new additions this week. As reported by local TV station WISH, the museum just added a mother and baby Brachiosaurus sculpture to the outside of the building.
June 10, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Did a three-foot-tall predatory dinosaur species make an ancient 2,500-mile migration between what is now Wyoming and the UK's Isle of Skye about 170 million years ago? According to Hunterian Museum paleontologist Neil Clark, quite possibly yes. In the 1980s, a number of theropod footprints were fo...
June 09, 2009 | By Brian Switek

When I walked into the theater to see the big-screen adaptation of Land of the Lost, I wasn't expecting high art. Indeed, with a cast starring Will Ferrell and a story featuring dinosaurs, "ape-men," a high-tech device that plays tunes from A Chorus Line, and Matt Lauer, the big-budget summer comed...
June 08, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Today the big screen adaptation of The Land of the Lost opens in theaters, and everyone is comparing it to the campy original television series on which it is loosely based. I will be checking it out tomorrow morning (watch for a review next week), but my expectations won't be influenced by the 197...
June 05, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Sometime over this past weekend the "Brontosaurus" at Durham, North Carolina's Museum of Life and Science lost its head. The statue stood for more than three decades in what had been called the Pre-History Trail, and everyone was shocked to see that had been vandalized. The crime was made even more...
June 04, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Professional paleo-artists often are given the tough task of painting scenes of lost worlds for museums, magazines and books, but what if their work was critiqued by a four-year-old? It sounds like a bad pitch for a TV sitcom but it is not far from what artist Bill Zeman does. On his blog Tiny Art ...
June 03, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Before my passion for paleontology was reinvigorated, I had dreams of being a rock star. I was constantly playing my guitar and writing songs, but if I had only rediscovered dinosaurs during this time maybe I could have written a hit! That's what happened for Frankie Orrico, a seven-year-old songwr...
June 02, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Did the long-necked sauropod dinosaurs hold their necks high in the air or low to the ground? If you think this is a question easily answered, you are sorely mistaken. In many ways sauropods were unlike any living creatures, and scientists have been debating their posture for years. Indeed, last mo...
June 01, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Stegosaurs of Terror!!!! “Most of us think as Stegosaurus as plodding, dimwitted giants only fit to end up as plates of meat for a hungry predator,” observes the World We Don’t Live In. “And yet, despite all this negative publicity, Stegosaurus has had its shining moments. Various authors have latc...
May 29, 2009 | By Brian Wolly

There appear to be three themes that pop up in many of the major summer blockbusters being released this year: time travel, robots, and dinosaurs. I have already covered two of this summer's bigger dino-flicks, Ice Age 3 and Land of the Lost, but the newly-released Night at the Museum: Battle of th...
May 28, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Weird new dinosaurs and exquisltely-preserved fossils regularly make headlines, but these discoveries make up only a tiny portion of what paleontologists actually discover and work with. The majority of the fossil record is far more fragmentary, and while little scraps of bone might not cause journ...
May 27, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Sequels and remakes have been the name of the game for Hollywood during the past few years. Every summer sees re-imaginings of television shows or movies I saw as a kid, but there is one that is probably better left alone: Denver, the Last Dinosaur.The basic plot of Denver is pretty standard (and w...
May 26, 2009 | By Brian Switek

If you are a dinophile in the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland, you may want to clear your plans for this weekend. Tomorrow, the Maryland Science Center in the city's Inner Harbor will raise the curtain on the traveling exhibit "Chinasaurs-Dinosaur Dynasty." The webpage promoting the exhibit promise...
May 22, 2009 | By Brian Switek

This week news services were all a-twitter about a 47-million-year-old fossil primate from the famous Messel deposits of Germany. Named Darwinius masillae and described in the journal PLoS One, the lemur-like primate was heralded as being a transitional form between a group of extinct primates call...
May 21, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Outside of Hollywood films, dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops never coexisted with humans, and no case can be made that The Flintstones is an accurate depiction of prehistory. That has not stopped young-earth creationists from maintaining otherwise, though, and this has led to some rathe...
May 20, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Studying dinosaur fossils can be hard work, but imagine building a dinosaur from scratch. That was the task given to St. Louis Community College art student Nicki Conaway, who created a 12-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus skeleton (nicknamed "Lola") for a production of the play Pterodactyls at her school. T...
May 19, 2009 | By Brian Switek

If late night B-movies have taught me anything, it is that radiation makes things grow very big really, really fast. This is not true, of course, but it is a standard convention of cheesy science fiction, and it is a theme carried on by Leigh Clark's novel Carnivore.The story unfolds at a remote An...
May 18, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Dinosaurs and trains might not seem to have much in common, but the television network PBS will soon be mashing them together in a new children's show called "Dinosaur Train." Right now details are scant, but it looks like the show will be set in a computer animated world where characters will teac...
May 15, 2009 | By Brian Switek

It can be a long road from the quarry to the exhibition site for some fossils. Most of what is collected is put in storage rather than placed on display, but even exceptional specimens can take a long time to prepare for their public debut. Such was the case with a series of dinosaur tracks found i...
May 14, 2009 | By Brian Switek

You never know when you might stumble across a prehistoric creature. Earlier this month Australian news services picked up the story of a "grey nomad," as retirees who travel the country extensively are known, who found fossils of an ichthyosaur when he stopped to use the toilet in northwest Queens...
May 13, 2009 | By Brian Switek

Financial times may be tough, but the push to reinvigorate the economy has provided an unexpected boon for Dinosaur National Monument. The national park, which straddles the Colorado/Utah border, will receive more than $13,000,000 in stimulus money for the construction of a new visitors center. The...
May 12, 2009 | By Brian Switek

A few months ago my colleague Mark Strauss mentioned the controversy surrounding the state dinosaur of Texas. Previously the state's patron dinosaur was the sauropod Pleurocoelus, but this has turned out to be a mistake. Pleurocoelus was initially named for bones found in Maryland and the same name...
May 08, 2009 | By Brian Switek

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