Dinosaurs
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How Parasaurolophus Set the Mood
It's Valentine's Day, and that means that millions of people will be riffling through their record and CD collections to find the right music to set the proper mood with their special someone. Seventy five million years ago, though, there was no Barry White, and so some deep-voiced dinosaurs made ...
February 14, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Scientists Uncover One of the Smallest Dinosaurs Ever
Another month, another alvarezsaur. In January, paleontologists announced the discovery of a small, one-fingered dinosaur from Inner Mongolia named Linhenykus, and another team of paleontologists has just published the description of a related, slightly older creature in the latest Journal of Vert...
February 11, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Everything You Wanted to Know About Dinosaur Sex
By studying dinosaurs' closest living relatives, we are able to uncover their secret mating habits and rituals
February 10, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Tapuiasaurus Gets a Head
Sauropod skulls are rare. As big as impressive as these long-necked giants were, they often lost their heads after death. There were decades of confusion over what the skull of Apatosaurus looked like. This makes the discovery of any complete sauropod skull cause for celebration, and I was delighte...
February 09, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Dinosaur Sighting: Hokkaido's Ice Dinosaurs
Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus and kin never made it to the ice age, but in 2004 one of the artists at Japan's annual Sapporo Snow Festival chiseled out these frozen dinosaurs. Such an impressive ice sculpture might seem too good to be true, but as the crew over at SV-POW! confirmed in a post of their ...
February 08, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Masiakasaurus Gets a Few Touch-Ups
Masiakasaurus was a weird-looking dinosaur. The paper that first described it was titled "A bizarre predatory dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar." What made it so strange were its teeth. At the front of its lower jaw, this six-foot theropod had forward-tilted teeth much different fro...
February 07, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Willo the Dinosaur Loses Heart
At first glance, Willo was not an especially impressive dinosaur. A well-preserved Thescelosaurus, this herbivorous dinosaur was one of the mid-sized ornithischians that lived about 66 million years ago. What made Willo special was its heart. Preserved inside a concretion cradled within the dinosau...
February 03, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Footsteps of a Dinosaur Deity
In 1999, construction workers creating a highway from Tibet's Bangda Airport to Changdu County uncovered a set of enormous tracks. They had been left more than 160 million years ago by a large sauropod dinosaur, but the local Tibetan people had other interpretations. Some believed that the tracks h...
February 01, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
The Great Triceratops Debate Continues
What is Nedoceratops hatcheri? That depends on whom you ask.For over 120 years the problematic skull of this horned dinosaur has been bounced around the literature under different names and attributions. While it was originally described as a distinct genus, Diceratops, some paleontologists later ...
January 31, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Teratophoneus: Utah's Monstrous, Murderous New Tyrannosaur
It missed the 2010 Utah dinosaur rush by nearly a month, but a new tyrannosaur from the southern part of the beehive state makes up for its tardiness by helping to fill a gap in the famous group's evolutionary history.Almost one year ago, paleontologists Thomas Carr and Thomas Williamson described...
January 28, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Blog Carnival # 28: Eating Han Solo, Extinction Cakes, Art and Science and More
Interpretive Dance: Everything Dinosaur recounts an unusual class project that is curiously reminiscent of many off-off-Broadway productions: “The children…(aged 5-6) put on a dancing display as they interpreted how they tho...
January 27, 2011 |
By Mark Strauss
For T. rex, Scavenging Was a Tough Gig
Was Tyrannosaurus rex a fearsome hunter or a scavenger? The answer is "both."In the early 1990s, the paleontologist Jack Horner popularized the idea that Tyrannosaurus fed entirely on carrion. The idea that this dinosaur—the "prize fighter of antiquity"—could not catch or kill other dinosaurs was s...
January 26, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Linhenykus: A weird, one-fingered dinosaur
When it was first described in 1993, Mononykus was one of the strangest dinosaurs known. It had the slender, light build of some of the "ostrich mimic" dinosaurs, yet it possessed two stubby, one-clawed hands and a few other subtle characteristics that placed it in a new group called the alvarezsa...
January 25, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Dinos Coming to Big and Small Screens
What is going on with the Jurassic Park franchise? For the past decade rumors have circulated about a fourth installment of the dinosaurs-gone-wild series, and for every report that a sequel is in the works there is another denying such plans. The latest episode involved a daily shooting schedule ...
January 24, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Pterosaurs Were Born to Fly
Just a few hours after yesterday's post on dinosaur embryos went up, another major egg-based discovery was announced, in the journal Science.In October of 2009, paleontologists first described the flying reptile Darwinopterus, a pterosaur that lived in what is now China over 160 million years ago....
January 21, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Exceptional Eggs Preserve Tiny Dinosaurs
Baby dinosaurs are hard to find. While the bones of large, adult dinosaurs were often sturdy enough to survive the processes involved in fossilization, the bones of young dinosaurs were small and delicate and have rarely made it into the fossil record. In many cases we just don't know what baby di...
January 20, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Dinosaur Sighting: Dino Brew
University of Alberta scientist Phil Currie is one of the most famous paleontologists in the field today, but what many people don't know is that he's also a brewer of his own brand of beer. Sent to us by reader Casey Tucker, the above label came from a homebrew Currie made in the 1990s, and the a...
January 19, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Tyrannosaurus Wrecks
There are many ways to make a dinosaur cake. You could bake one in the shape of a dinosaur, you should create an icing dinosaur on the cake, or otherwise give your delicious creation a prehistoric theme. Unfortunately, this means that there are just as many ways to screw up making a dinosaur cake, ...
January 18, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Eodromaeus Adds Context to Dinosaur Origins
Tracking the origin of the dinosaurs has been one of the most difficult tasks paleontologists have faced, but since the 1990s, multiple discoveries in South America have provided scientists with a look at what some of the earliest dinosaurs were like. Eoraptor, Herrerasaurus and the recently-descr...
January 14, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
The Tangled History of Connecticut's Anchisaurus
East Coast dinosaurs are relatively rare finds, often because the geological formations in which they rest have been built over. Dinosaurs surely remain to be found under parking lots, housing developments and city streets, and one of the now-lost dinosaur quarries is located in Manchester, Connec...
January 13, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
