Extinction
Dinosaur Deep Freeze
An animated short suggests dinosaurs died out for want of winter coats
February 06, 2012 |
By Brian Switek
Scrambled Eggs and the Demise of the Dinosaurs
Did egg-eating lizards and snakes contribute to the dinosaurs' extinction?
February 02, 2012 |
By Brian Switek
The Dinosaurs That Never Were
If the non-avian dinosaurs hadn't died out 65 million years ago, what would they look like today?
January 12, 2012 |
By Brian Switek
The Way of the Dinosaur
"Going the way of the dinosaur" is a popular phrase, but one drawn from bizarre 20th century ideas that dinosaurs were due for an extinction
January 11, 2012 |
By Brian Switek
Living Sauropods? No Way
Dinosaurs have long been rumored to still survive in the Congo Basin, but is there any truth to the tall tales?
October 28, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Pixar Rewrites Dinosaur History
What if the cataclysmic asteroid that forever changed life on Earth actually missed the planet and giant dinosaurs never went extinct?
August 25, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Will the Dinosaurs Return?
When the American Museum of Natural History's paleontologist William Diller Matthew published his book Dinosaurs in 1915, no one understood how the famous Mesozoic creatures originated or went extinct. Both the beginning and end of the "Age of Dinosaurs" were mysterious. Yet, tucked away in a foot...
April 22, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Did Dinosaurs Die Out Because Males Couldn't Find a Date?
What caused the end-Cretaceous mass extinction is one of the greatest mysteries of all time. Paleontologists have racked up a long list of victims---including the non-avian dinosaurs---and geologists have confirmed that a massive asteroid that struck the earth near the modern-day Yucatan peninsula ...
February 18, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
What Killed Alaska's Dinosaurs?
In northern Alaska, along the banks of the Colville River, a series of fossil bonebeds preserve remnants of the Late Cretaceous world. These ancient environments were quite different from those found farther south.Even though the climate of Cretaceous Alaska was warmer than that of today, areas nea...
December 23, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Fate of the Cave Bear
The lumbering beasts coexisted with the first humans for tens of thousands of years and then died off. Why?
December 2010 |
By Andrew Curry
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
Earth’s Worst Extinction May Have Been Key to Dinosaur Origins
From the emergence of the first of their kind about 228 million years ago to the modern abundance of birds (their living descendants), dinosaurs have been one of the most successful groups of organisms on the planet. Why they originated in the first place, however, has been a much trickier subject ...
October 06, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Get Fuzzy on the Extinction of the Dinosaurs
What killed off the non-avian dinosaurs? Over the years climate change, mammals with a taste for dinosaur eggs, the laziness of dinosaurs, and even hungry, hungry caterpillars have been blamed, with the current favored culprit being an asteroid that struck in the vicinity of today's Yucatan peninsu...
September 27, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
The Dinosaurs of Industry
Since the time of their discovery in the early 19th century, dinosaurs have been pop-culture superstars. Beyond their scientific identities, they have a celebrity that has remained strong from decade to decade, and given their notoriety it is no wonder that they have been so often used as metaphors...
September 09, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Five Species Likely to Become Extinct in the Next 40 Years
Experts estimate that one-eighth of all bird species, one-fifth of mammal species and one-third of amphibian species are at risk
August 2010 |
By Erica R. Hendry
The Dinosaurs Never Saw it Coming
Since the time dinosaurs were first recognized by science in the early 19th century, naturalists have puzzled over why they disappeared. Everything from hungry, hungry caterpillars to asteroid strike (the present favored hypothesis) have been proposed as extinction triggers, but an ad for a new ani...
June 15, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Tracking the Origin of Dinosaurs
Almost everyone is familiar with the ongoing debate surrounding the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but the discussion over where dinosaurs came from in the first place is often overlooked. Hypotheses of dinosaur origins have been just as controversial as those of trigge...
May 10, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
The History of Air
Paleontologists are looking to the fossil record to decipher what the earth's atmosphere was like hundreds of millions of years ago
April 19, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Mammoths and Mastodons: All American Monsters
A mammoth discovery in 1705 sparked a fossil craze and gave the young United States a symbol of national might
April 2010 |
By Richard Conniff
Asteroid Strike Confirmed as Dinosaur Killer
Sixty-five million years ago, life on Earth suffered one of the worst mass extinctions of all time. It was an event that killed creatures across the spectrum of life's diversity, from tiny marine invertebrates to the largest dinosaurs, but what could have caused it?A number of hypotheses have been ...
March 10, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
