Extinction
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
The Skeletons of Shanidar Cave
A rare cache of hominid fossils from the Kurdistan area of northern Iraq offers a window on Neanderthal culture
March 2010 |
By Owen Edwards
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
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
Did Caterpillars Starve Dinosaurs to Death?
I love discarded hypotheses for the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Some ideas, such as a global pandemic, sound at least somewhat reasonable, but others seem to have come out of left field. One particular paper, published in the Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera in 1962 by entomologist...
December 08, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Ten Notable Apocalypses That (Obviously) Didn’t Happen
Apocalyptic predictions are nothing new—they have been around for millennia
November 12, 2009 |
By Mark Strauss
Blog Carnival Unlucky #13: Julia Child, Bad Dino Reporting, Quizzes, Auctions and more...
Croutons Not Recommended: Paleochick points us to this blast from the past: Julia Child turns her kitchen into a biolab and cooks up a batch of primordial soup. (The video played in the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's now-closed “Life in the Universe” gallery.)Worst. Article. Ever. Th...
October 29, 2009 |
By Mark Strauss
Return of the Sandpiper
Thanks to the Delaware Bay's horseshoe crabs, the tide may be turning for an imperiled shorebird
October 2009 |
By Abigail Tucker
Were the Dinosaurs too Spiny to Survive?
The extinction of the dinosaurs has long been a mystery. Generation after generation of paleontologists have proposed different mechanisms that could have sent the dinosaurs into oblivion. Today much of the debate over their extinction centers around the damage done by a large hunk of rock from out...
August 12, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Georgia Elementary School Trades One Dinosaur for Another
If the principal of Thomson Elementary School in Thomson, Georgia, thinks she has rid her school of dinosaurs, the joke's on her. According to the McDuffie Mirror, principal Anita Cummings recently decided to paint over a dinosaur mural and remove dinosaur tracks from the school because:
The dinosa...
August 04, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
