Fossils
New Study Probes the Details of Dinosaur Bites
On a very superficial level, the skulls of the carnivorous theropod dinosaurs might look very much the same from species to species—big jaws filled with lots of pointy teeth. If they are examined in even a little bit of detail, however, it is quickly apparent that meat-eating dinosaurs were diverse...
June 14, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Leonardo da Vinci - Paleontology Pioneer
Although he’s been dead for nearly 500 years, Leonardo da Vinci is still remembered as the quintessential Renaissance man, a polymath whose curiosity and creativity ranged widely among the arts and sciences. One of his interests was the study of fossils. In a new paper in the journal Palaios, Andre...
June 11, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
New Study Suggests That Some Sauropods Reached High for Leaves
How high did the sauropod dinosaurs hold their heads? It is a simple question, but for years it has been part of an ongoing controversy about the evolution and habits of these long-necked, large-bodied vegetarians. Depending on whom you ask, sauropods either kept their heads down to vacuum up low-l...
June 08, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Island-Hopping Ceratopsians Made it to Europe
Ceratopsians, or the "horned dinosaurs" such as Triceratops and Centrosaurus, were among the most distinctive members of dinosaur communities in North America and eastern Asia during the Cretaceous. Even so, bits and pieces of fossil bone collected by paleontologists over the years have hinted that...
June 02, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Articulated Skeletons Give a New Look at "Armadillodiles"
Early dinosaurs and other Triassic creatures have been in the news quite a bit lately. From a new review of the origin of dinosaurs to the recognition of a mistaken dinosaur and the discovery of the skeleton of a fearsome predator closely related to crocodiles, some of the most interesting recent p...
May 27, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
How Did Sauropods Get So Big?
Without a doubt, the sauropod dinosaurs were the largest animals to have ever walked the earth. Even the largest land mammal, the prehistoric rhino-relative Paraceratherium, would have been dwarfed by the biggest sauropods such as Diplodocus, Sauroposeidon, and others. How did these giants get to b...
May 24, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Azendohsaurus, the Dinosaur That Wasn't
Parsing the origins and early history of dinosaurs is a challenging task. A number of prehistoric creatures were a lot like some of the earliest dinosaurs, and sometimes evolutionary cousins of early dinosaurs have been mistaken for dinosaurs on the basis of fragmentary material. As a study publish...
May 21, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
A Closer Look at Ankylosaur Armor
Many dinosaurs were adorned with spikes, horns and plates, but it was the ankylosaurs that took armor to the extreme. These dinosaurs were covered in bony armor from snout to tail-tip, yet, as a new study suggests, there may have been more to some of these structures than just attack and defense.As...
May 20, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Diabloceratops Gets Ready for its Debut
At the end of last summer, on my way out of Salt Lake City, Utah, I encountered a dinosaur I had never seen before in the halls of the Utah Museum of Natural History. Lying on its side was an impressive skull bristling with horns, and the placard identified it as an as-yet-unpublished creature info...
May 19, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Exceptional New Fossil Find Reveals Fearsome Triassic Predator
It's not a dinosaur, but it may have eaten some of their ancestors.Last week paleontologists from Lutheran University discovered the nearly complete skeleton of the 238-million-year-old predator Prestosuchus chiniquensis in the Late Triassic rock near the Brazilian town of Dona Francisca. The excep...
May 18, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
X-Rays Give a New Look at Archaeopteryx
Scientists have known about the feathered dinosaur Archaeopteryx for over a century and a half, but scientists are using new techniques to get a better look at this creature and its close relatives. Within the past few months alone, paleontologists have described how they have used laboratory techn...
May 12, 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 Dwarf Dinosaurs of Haţeg Island
For hundreds of years, people have been finding the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in Romania's Haţeg basin. The Cretaceous-age deposits are remnants of prehistoric islands that sported their own unique faunas, but in the days before fossils were recognized as being the remain...
May 07, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Exceptional Fossils Record Dinosaur Feather Changes
Over the past decade and a half paleontologists have found the remains of numerous feathered dinosaurs, but, as announced in this week's edition of Nature, a new pair of specimens may show how the feathers of some of these dinosaurs changed as they grew up.Among birds, feather growth is relatively ...
April 29, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Tracks of Giants Created Dino Death Traps
Around 160 million years ago, an enormous sauropod dinosaur trudged across an ancient marsh in what is now Xinjiang, China. It was not easy going. The eruption of a nearby volcano coated the area in a layer of ash which formed a thin surface over a morass of mud and volcanic debris, and as it walke...
April 22, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
A New "Bonehead" Dinosaur From Texas
In the entire history of life on earth, there was nothing quite like the pachycephalosaurs, or the "bonehead" dinosaurs. These herbivorous, bipedal dinosaurs were most recognizable by the array of bumps, knobs, and spikes on their reinforced skulls, and a newly discovered species of this kind of di...
April 20, 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
Marsh's "Megalosaurus" From Utah
In 1988, a little more than a century after O.C. Marsh first described it, Allosaurus was declared to be the state fossil of Utah. What fewer people know, however, is that seven years before Marsh named the famous theropod dinosaur, he had discovered the signs of another predatory dinosaur.Accordin...
April 15, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Rare Juvenile Diplodocus Skull Tells of Changing Dino Diets
From movies to museum displays, the dinosaurs we most often see are fully mature animals. There are a few good reasons for this. The first is that the skeletons of adult dinosaurs are among the most impressive specimens in the whole of the fossil record, but it is also true that the bones of juveni...
April 09, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Fossil Fragments are Table Scraps of an Enormous Alligator
I love B-grade monster movies, and one of my all time favorites is the 1980 creature feature Alligator. As its title suggests, the film's protagonist is a 40-foot-long alligator, literally pumped up on steroids from consuming the bodies of medical research lab animals which had been dumped in the s...
April 06, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
