Dinosaurs
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New Commentary Stirs Dino-Bird Brouhaha
The chicken on the table, the pigeon on the street, the parrot in the zoo: all of them are living descendants of dinosaurs. Over the past ten years a flood of fossil evidence, from evidence of bird-like breathing apparatus to remnants of pigments in preserved feathers, has confirmed beyond a reason...
February 16, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Swimming Spinosaurs
In 1986, paleontologists described a dinosaur unlike any that had been seen before. Named Baryonyx walkeri, it was a theropod with a long, crocodile-like snout and arms tipped in huge claws. Some preserved stomach contents confirmed that it was a fish-eater. It showed some similarities to another d...
February 12, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
When Tyrannosaurs Roamed New Mexico
For years paleontologists have been finding teeth and isolated scraps of tyrannosaurs in the southwestern United States, but figuring out which specific dinosaurs they belonged to has been another matter. Many of the best-known tyrannosaurs, including the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, lived farther to ...
February 10, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
"Primal Carnage" Sets Players on the Hunt for Dinosaurs
So you have played through Turok and Jurassic: The Hunted several times already; what are you going to do to get your dinosaur-hunting fix?While it probably will not be released until the end of this year, Primal Carnage will be the next entry into the ever-popular humans-gunning-down-dinosaurs su...
February 09, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Why Did Mammals Survive When Dinosaurs Perished?
Had the non-avian dinosaurs not been wiped out 65 million years ago, our species would probably never existed. The mass extinction that struck at the end of the Cretaceous was one of the major events in earth's history that greatly affected evolution by pruning back the tree of life, and it was in ...
February 08, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Dinosaurs, Now in Living Color
For the first time ever, paleontologists can look at dinosaurs in color.In last week's issue of the journal Nature, scientists described the discovery of melanosomes, biological structures that give feathers their color, in the wispy "dinofuzz" of the small theropod Sinosauropteryx. Not only did ...
February 05, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Bone vs. Stone: How to Tell the Difference
When I was a child, one of my uncles gave me what he said was a real dinosaur bone. The little black object certainly looked like some sort of bone, and I kept it in my little collection of shark teeth and other fossils in my closest. After a while I almost completely forgot about it, but when I to...
February 03, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Setting Up a Paleozoic Park in New Mexico
In the spring of 2009, the United States government added a 280-million-year-old fossil site to its list of national monuments: a 5,280-acre parcel of land in southern New Mexico that will be called Paleozoic Trackways National Monument. The national park, which has been studied by scientists and q...
February 02, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
New, Bird-Like Dinosaur Solves Evolutionary Puzzle
About a year and a half ago, as my first post on Dinosaur Tracking, I wrote about the discovery of a tiny, termite-eating dinosaur called Albertonykus. It belonged to one of the strangest groups of dinosaurs recognized to date. Called the Alvarezsaurids, these dinosaurs were covered in feathers, ha...
February 01, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Blog Carnival #16: Draw a Dinosaur Day, Reporter Guidelines, Jurassic Parka and More...
Calling All Artists: ART Evolved spreads the word about “Draw a Dinosaur Day,” which will be celebrated tomorrow on January 30th. See the entries at the official website.News You Can Use: Fed up with constant errors in the media, David Hone at Archosaur Musings has written “A Guide for Journalists ...
January 29, 2010 |
By Brian Wolly
Fossil Feathers May Preserve Dinosaur Colors
At one point or another, almost every general book about dinosaurs I have ever seen has said the same thing: we cannot know what color dinosaurs were. Scientists have found the skin impressions of some specimens, but as far as we know these traces contain nothing that might tell us what color those...
January 28, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Dinosaur Sighting: South of the Border Dinosaur
Anyone who has driven I-95 over the North Carolina/South Carolina state line is familiar with the tourist trap South of the Border (the numerous billboards advertising it make it hard to miss), but unless you look carefully you might miss the dinosaur there. That is what our own Brian Wolly found w...
January 27, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
The Best Dinosaur Books for Kids
I read too many dinosaur books when I was a kid. It was so bad that the school librarian even called in my parents to express concern over my reading habits. If there was a book about dinosaurs in the library, I'd read it and then read it again.That was a long time ago, though, back when many of th...
January 26, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Controversial Raptor to Go Up for Sale
It is not every day that authorities hold a dinosaur as evidence of a crime.In 2002 a team of paleontologists organized by amateur fossil hunter Nate Murphy discovered the bones of a small, nearly complete raptor dinosaur on a ranch in Montana. Murphy could tell immediately that it was something ne...
January 25, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Why We Need Another Paleontology Book
Now that it is 2010 and the "Darwin Year" is over, we can expect the tide of evolution-themed documentaries and books to ebb. A notable exception, however (if I do say so myself), is my forthcoming book about evolution and the fossil record called Written in Stone. After years of hard work it will ...
January 22, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Another Look at Asia's "Shark-Toothed Dragon"
Several months ago paleontologists Stephen Brusatte, Roger Benson, Dan Chure, Xu Xing, Corwin Sullivan, and David Hone described the dinosaur Shaochilong, the first representative of the group of large predatory dinosaurs called carcharodontosaurids to be definitively identified from Asia. Now memb...
January 21, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
New Study Suggests Alligators Breathe Like Birds
On the surface, a pigeon and an alligator could hardly seem more different. While the pigeon is a flying, feather-covered creature that pecks its food with a toothless beak, an alligator is an amphibious, armored predator that crushes its prey in jaws studded with conical teeth. Despite the dispara...
January 20, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Paleo Poetry by Charles H. Sternberg
A Story of the Past, or A Romance of Science is a very unusual book. In it readers will find frequent references to Jesus, the American West, fossil mammals, and extinct marine reptiles, often all in the same poem. Who else but one of the greatest fossil hunters who ever lived, Charles H. Sternberg...
January 15, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Dinosaur Sighting: a Superior Dinosaur
Of all the places I would expect to find a dinosaur sculpture, the north shore of Lake Superior just outside of Duluth, Minnesota would be one of the last on the list. As shown by this photo sent in by reader Mark Ryan, though, there are definitely dinosaurs there. Among the group of stylized metal...
January 13, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Face-to-Face With Dinosaurs in the "Morning of Time"
Even though there has never been any evidence that humans and non-avian dinosaurs lived alongside one another (the first hominids, after all, did not evolve until about 6 million years ago), there have been many fictional stories that pit "cavemen" against dinosaurs. Indeed, it is difficult to look...
January 12, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
