Fossils
U.S. Officials Send Chinese Dinosaurs Home
Much to the frustration of paleontologists, fossils are big business. Sites all over the world are raided for the petrified treasures, which are then shipped to private collectors. Such practices destroy dig sites, rob countries of their natural history, stifle our scientific understanding of the p...
September 21, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Raptorex: A New, Tiny Tyrant
Tyrannosaurus and its close kin Daspletosaurus, Tarbosaurus, Albertosaurus, and Gorgosaurus were among the largest land-dwelling predators the world has ever known. They had massive heads full of huge, serrated teeth and were the dominant predators in the times and places in which they lived. Surpr...
September 17, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Spinophorosaurus: A New Sauropod With a Wicked Tail Club
The dig site looked like something out of a Hollywood movie. New dinosaurs are often described from partial, fragmentary skeletons, but the bones of Spinophorosaurus nigerensis made a beautiful circle in the pink rock of the Niger desert. This was the kind of preservation paleontologists dream abou...
September 16, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
A New Sauropod With One Heck of a Name: Qiaowanlong kangxii
The long-necked dinosaur Brachiosaurus has always stood out next to its sauropod kin. Its long front legs give it a prouder stature than other sauropods such as Diplodocus, and while newer discoveries have stripped it of the title of "largest dinosaur ever" it is still a giant. Not all brachiosaurs...
September 10, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Paleontology in Action at Dinosaur National Monument
As soon as I arrived at the temporary visitor's center in Utah's Dinosaur National Monument two weeks ago, a ranger asked if I would like to go on a hike to an active fossil dig. "Sure!" I said, to which the ranger replied "Well then you had better get ready. We're leaving in five minutes."I ran ba...
September 01, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
The Burgess Shale: Evolution's Big Bang
A storied trove of fossils from a Canadian paleontological site is yielding new clues to an explosion of life on earth
August 2009 |
By Siobhan Roberts
Tussling over "Tinker" the Tyrannosaurus
Hollywood movies make fossil-collecting looks easy. A prospector or paleontologist finds a fossil, digs it up, and then takes it away for sale or study. Yet this is a far cry from what actually happened when the first remains of a skeleton of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus that would come to be nicknamed...
August 11, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Oops! Dinosaur Find Actually Fossilized Wood!
Naming a new dinosaur can be a tricky thing. Although nearly-complete skeletons often make headlines, more often than not new species are based upon fragmentary material. In these cases further discoveries are often needed to determine whether the species really is new, and every now and then it tu...
August 10, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Did Giant Predatory Dinosaurs Eat Bones?
There is no question that Tyrannosaurus rex was a predatory dinosaur. It was a gargantuan animal with immense jaws lined with railroad spike-size teeth that could be slammed into a prey animal with enough force to puncture bone. At first glance it might seem that the answer to the question "What di...
August 05, 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
Mammals Under the Feet of Dinosaurs?
Scientists at Utah's Dinosaur National Monument have been quite busy this summer. At the beginning of the season they were blasting some sauropod skulls out of the rock for collection, and now the Chicago Tribune reports that they have discovered hundreds of tiny footprints in rock about 190 millio...
July 29, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Hominids’ African Origins, 50 Years Later
Before Mary Leakey’s discovery of hominid fossils in East Africa, many experts thought that human ancestors evolved in Asia
July 23, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
Texas Paleontologists Uncover a Cretaceous Croc
A few months ago I wrote about the rush to study and excavate a Cretaceous fossil site in North Arlington, Texas before developers start construction on the land. University of Texas at Arlington paleontologists and students have been scouring the site to learn what they can, and this week they ann...
July 22, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Burgess Shale's Weird Wonders
The fossils found in the Burgess Shale include the 500-million-year-old ancestors of most modern animals
July 16, 2009 |
By Smithsonian.com
Did Dinosaurs Roar?
I will never forget seeing Jurassic Park for the first time in the summer of 1993. Not only did the dinosaurs look real, but they sounded real, each dinosaur having its own array of chirps, bellows, hoots, and roars. According to paleontologist Phil Senter, however, dinosaurs may not have been able...
July 13, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
"Dakota" the Hadrosaur Makes Her Debut
In the winter of 2007, news agencies were all a-twitter over the news of another "mummy" hadrosaur found in North Dakota. Nicknamed "Dakota", the dinosaur was said to "exceed the jackpot" of what paleontologists could have hoped for, and two books, a documentary and a lecture tour were arranged to ...
July 08, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Meet Banjo, Matilda and Clancy: Three New Dinosaurs From Australia
Australia has always been a tough place for dinosaur paleontologists to work. Aside from the harsh conditions, dinosaur skeletons found "down under" are often extremely fragmentary. A bit of leg, a claw, a rib, a toe bone; often there is not much more to be found of dinosaurs that once roamed the s...
July 06, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
The World's Largest Fossil Wilderness
An Illinois coal mine holds a snapshot of life on earth 300 million years ago, when a massive earthquake "froze" a swamp in time
July 2009 |
By Guy Gugliotta
A New, Giant Predatory Dinosaur From Spain
Scientists in Spain announced this week the discovery of a large tooth from a predatory dinosaur similar to Allosaurus. Found by local residents in Riodeva, Teruel, the nearly 4-inch-long tooth is the largest predatory dinosaur tooth yet found from the country. Just what dinosaur the tooth belonged...
June 25, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
"Baby Dinosaur" Appears on Rock
When I took a college course about dinosaurs a few years ago, I took the opportunity to confirm what a family member told me when I was very young. Someone had given me a small lump of irregularly-shaped rock and said it was a dinosaur bone. It certainly looked like some kind of fossil, and in 2003...
June 23, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
