Dinosaurs
- Explore more »
Unexpected Horned Dinosaur Reveals Complex Evolutionary Pattern
In many of the books about dinosaurs I read as a child, the evolution of horned dinosaurs (ceratopsians) looked pretty straightforward. Early, lanky forms such as Psittacosaurus were succeeded by a miniature precursor of later types—Protoceratops—before generating the array of large, spiky ceratops...
November 11, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
A Dinosaur in an Italian Church?
Despite all that we have learned about the fossil record and the evolution of life on earth, some people believe that the world was created, in more or less its present state, about 6,000 years ago. Dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus and Apatosaurus did not live millions and millions of years ago, the...
November 10, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Brontosaurus - Out With the Old Skull, In With the New Skull
The rise and fall of "Brontosaurus" is one of my most favorite stories in all of paleontology. Fossil discoveries, academic arguments, evolutionary scenarios, museum politics and public perception all played into the long-running debate about a dinosaur that only ever existed in our imagination, ye...
November 08, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Paleontologists Take Another Look at a Square-Mouthed Sauropod
Sauropods were exceptionally strange creatures. With tiny heads mounted at the tip of ludicrously long necks anchored on a massive body with tapering tails on the other end, they were truly marvels of evolution. As odd as the basic sauropod body plan was, though, many sauropods had armor, clubs, sa...
November 05, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Cretaceous Croc Bones Were Dinosaur Table Scraps
The traditional, simplified recipe for how to make a fossil goes something like this: take a dead animal, keep it safe from scavengers, cover it up with sediment, add a heaping dollop of time and presto!, you have a petrified skeleton. The second step is often cited as being especially important—a...
November 04, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Southern Raptors Had Weird Teeth
Thanks to plenty of good press from movies, documentaries, books and toys, over the past thirty years, Deinonychus and Velociraptor have become the quintessential dromaeosaurid ("raptor") dinosaurs. They even rival the "Prize Fighter of Antiquity"—Tyrannosaurus rex—in fame these days. But these t...
November 03, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Did Wee Little Sauropods Stand Up to Run?
When the term "sauropod" comes up in discussion, I most often think of the lumbering giants from the Late Jurassic of North America—Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Barosaurus and Brachiosaurus. They were some of the largest terrestrial animals ever to have evolved, yet each individual dinosaur among these...
November 02, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
How Vagaceratops Moved
Did ceratopsid dinosaurs like Triceratops and Styracosaurus walk with their forelimbs held straight beneath their bodies or splayed out to the side? According to 3-D models created by artist Alex Tirabasso for the Canadian Museum of Nature, the truth lies ...
November 01, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Blog Carnival #25: Reading Dino Tracks, Catching a Thief, Wikipedia Whiffs and More..
Walking the Walk: Two paw prints on a beach; both are from the same dog, yet completely different from one another. At Archosaur Musings, David Hone explains how these prints reveal the pitfalls of reading too much into fossilized dinosaur tracks: “Quite simply, tracks will vary and you want a dece...
October 28, 2010 |
By Mark Strauss
Tracking the Emergence of Birds
Since the description of the fuzzy-feathered dinosaur Sinosauropteryx in 1996, paleontologists have been inundated with a still-flowing flood of fossil evidence confirming that birds are living dinosaurs. More than that, many of the characteristics we once thought were unique to birds—from air-sacs...
October 27, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Swimming With Sea Rex
The new IMAX 3-D film Sea Rex starts off with a groaner. Standing in front of a shark tank, a young woman named Julie gazes wistfully into the blue water and imagines a plesiosaur paddling through the open sea. "I just know marine dinosaurs still exist!" she says. At this point anyone with even a m...
October 25, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Remember the Alamosaurus
The Late Jurassic was the heyday of sauropod dinosaurs in prehistoric North America. Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Barosaurus and Brachiosaurus were among the titans found in the 156- to 146-million-year-old Morrison Formation. But after this slice of geologic time, North American sauropods all but disa...
October 22, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Ancient Archosaur Arthritis
When we envision prehistoric life, we often picture long-extinct animals in the most healthy state possible. Each restored individual is the acme of its particular species—be it Allosaurus or a woolly mammoth—but we know that things in the natural world are never so clean and neat. Not only do indi...
October 21, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Tracking a Dinosaur to the NJSM
The New Jersey State Museum (NJSM), where I am a research associate, has a new dinosaur exhibit, and it has been placed outside for all passers-by to see. It's an enormous chunk of rust-red rock recently removed from a quarry in Woodland Park, New Jersey, and on its top is the track of a predatory ...
October 20, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Dino B-Movie Alert: Triassic Attack
Regular readers know that I can't resist cheesy dinosaur movies, and a new SyFy feature set to debut late next month will be the latest stinker to be heaped on the pile of bad dino cinema.Called Triassic Attack, this direct-to-video schlock features the reanimated skeletons of a pterosaur and a Tyr...
October 19, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Tyrannosaurus the Cannibal
For a Tyrannosaurus rex, there was nothing more dangerous than another Tyrannosaurus rex. From a relatively young age these dinosaurs tussled by biting each other on the face—possibly spreading parasitic microorganisms as they did so—and a few fossil scraps have suggested that some tyrannosaurs may...
October 18, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
SVP Dispatch, Part 3: Raptorex—To Be, or Not to Be?
One of the biggest dinosaur stories of 2009 was the discovery of a pint-sized tyrant called Raptorex. Described by a team of paleontologists led by Paul Sereno and dated to about 126 million years ago, the dinosaur showed that many definitive tyrannosaur characteristics—such a puny forearms—evolved...
October 14, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
SVP Dispatch, Part 2: Did Sea Level Influence Dinosaur Diversity?
Paleontologists are constantly reminding themselves of the incompleteness of the fossil record. What has been preserved is only a small fraction of all the organisms and environments that have ever existed. This makes detecting evolutionary patterns a bit of a challenge. In a presentation given at...
October 13, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Dispatch, Part 1
The first day of the 70th annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting was chock-full of dinosaur talks. Fans of ornithischian dinosaurs—the hadrosaurs, ankylosaurs, stegosaurs, pachycehpalosaurs, horned dinosaurs and their kin—had a lot to cheer about. There is a flood of new species, and ne...
October 12, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Sarahsaurus Helps Revise Ideas of Dinosaurian Success
Compared to some of its later, gargantuan cousins, the 190-million-year-old sauropodomorph dinosaur Sarahsaurus aurifontanalis was a rather tiny herbivore. Only 14 feet long, this dinosaur lived in the early days of the Jurassic, and, according to a team of paleontologists led by Jackson School of...
October 08, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
