Fossils
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
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
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
A Dinosaur Graveyard in the Smithsonian's Backyard
At a new dinosaur park in Maryland, children and paleontologists alike have found fossils for a new Smithsonian exhibit
February 2010 |
By Abby Callard
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
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
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
Poor, Dumb, Infected Dinosaurs
Every bone tells a story. It is easy to think of a bone as a static thing, a part of an animal's body that does not change, but in truth bones are constantly being remodeled throughout the life of an organism. This was true of dinosaurs just as much as any vertebrate living today, and the fossil bo...
January 08, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Top Dino Discoveries of 2009
It has been a good year for dinosaurs. Every month multiple new, interesting discoveries have been announced that either introduce us to new dinosaurs or tell us something new about those already familiar to us. I have been able to cover only a small fraction of all these stories here on Dinosaur T...
December 31, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
A Plesiosaur That Ate Ichthyosaurs for Lunch
Finding an articulated fossil skeleton is always a delight for paleontologists. Not only do such specimens illustrate how all those bones went together, but sometimes there are little associated bonuses that could not be seen if the skeleton had been scattered. In the case of a 161- to 155-million-...
December 28, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Were Feathered Dinosaurs Venomous?
Though its dinosaurs looked pretty good, Jurassic Park was not particularly accurate as far as science was concerned. One of the real howlers that sent paleontologists reeling was the decision to make Dilophosaurus, one of the largest of the early predatory dinosaurs, the dinosaur equivalent of a s...
December 22, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Tawa hallae and the Making of Meat-Eating Dinosaurs
Part of what so fascinates us about dinosaurs is that they came in such a wide array of forms. Stegosaurus, Velociraptor, Brachiosaurus, Triceratops, Spinosaurus and more; they were all very different creatures. Yet we also know that dinosaurs share a common ancestry. If we had the bones of every d...
December 17, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Were Dinosaurs Meant to Fly?
One of the most important insights Charles Darwin had was that evolution does not follow a pre-ordained path. There is no evolutionary endpoint that organisms are striving toward. The "endless forms most beautiful" we observe in nature are both shaped by adaption to local conditions and constrained...
December 16, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Doing the Hadrosaur Hop
I always feel a bit sorry for hadrosaurs. They are sometimes referred to as the "cows of the Cretaceous," herbivorous dinosaurs that lacked the impressive armor, spikes, and horns of their relatives the ankylosaurs and ceratopsians. This does not mean that hadrosaurs were entirely defenseless again...
December 15, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
New Dinosaur Helps Fill Out the Early History of "Raptors"
When the big-screen adaptation of Jurassic Park premeired in 1993, "raptors" instantly became some of the most popular dinosaurs. For scientists, though, they posed a troublesome problem. There were only a few types of raptor, technically called dromaeosaurs, known at the time, and paleontologists...
December 09, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Is Your Dinosaur Ready For Thanksgiving?
Ah, Thanksgiving, the day when families across the United States sit down for a delicious feast of dinosaur with all the trimmings.You read that correctly. Scientists have recognized that birds and dinosaurs are closely related for over a century, and within the last thirty years a tidal wave of di...
November 25, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
