Fossils
Dinosaur Finger Points to Bird Evolution
As I have written about many times here on Dinosaur Tracking, paleontologists presently have an overwhelming amount of evidence that birds are living dinosaurs. That doesn't mean that everything about the dinosaur-to-bird transition is well-understood, though. For years scientists have been faced w...
June 19, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Filling in the Dinosaur Family Tree
Dinosaurs are often mentioned in discussions about evolution, yet many people do not know how dinosaurs evolved. That birds are living dinosaurs has been a hot topic during the last decade or so, but what about all those other dinosaurs? How did they emerge and diversify during the ancient past? In...
June 15, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
A New Look For Asia's Ancient "Shark Tooth Dragon"
When we talk about dinosaurs, we often associate some of our favorites with the times in which they lived. Dinosaur enthusiasts know that Tyrannosaurus was a Cretaceous dinosaur, for example, but fewer people know that Tyrannosaurus only lived at the very end of the Cretaceous, about 68 to 65 milli...
June 12, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
The Sauropod Posture Debate, Part Eleventy
Did the long-necked sauropod dinosaurs hold their necks high in the air or low to the ground? If you think this is a question easily answered, you are sorely mistaken. In many ways sauropods were unlike any living creatures, and scientists have been debating their posture for years. Indeed, last mo...
June 01, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
On the Trail of an Unknown Dinosaur
Weird new dinosaurs and exquisltely-preserved fossils regularly make headlines, but these discoveries make up only a tiny portion of what paleontologists actually discover and work with. The majority of the fossil record is far more fragmentary, and while little scraps of bone might not cause journ...
May 27, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Walking With Primates
This week news services were all a-twitter about a 47-million-year-old fossil primate from the famous Messel deposits of Germany. Named Darwinius masillae and described in the journal PLoS One, the lemur-like primate was heralded as being a transitional form between a group of extinct primates call...
May 21, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
An Ichthyosaur Found at a Rest Stop
You never know when you might stumble across a prehistoric creature. Earlier this month Australian news services picked up the story of a "grey nomad," as retirees who travel the country extensively are known, who found fossils of an ichthyosaur when he stopped to use the toilet in northwest Queens...
May 13, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Texas Gets a New State Dinosaur
A few months ago my colleague Mark Strauss mentioned the controversy surrounding the state dinosaur of Texas. Previously the state's patron dinosaur was the sauropod Pleurocoelus, but this has turned out to be a mistake. Pleurocoelus was initially named for bones found in Maryland and the same name...
May 08, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Swimming Proto-Birds?
During the past decade, numerous discoveries have been made that have confirmed the hypothesis that birds evolved from dinosaurs. These fossils have given paleontologists important insight into how adaptations like feathers evolved, but one of the most hotly debated topics in paleobiology is how bi...
May 07, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
What's New About Hadrosaur Goo
One of the first things I learned about dinosaur fossils was that soft tissues are never preserved. Impressions of skin, hair, and even internal organs can leave their mark in the fossil record, but no one is ever going to find an intact, non-fossilized Tyrannosaurus heart. Like many of the things ...
May 06, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Much Ado About Chicxulub
Mass extinction is an extremely difficult subject to study. It is one thing to identify a mass extinction in the fossil record, but it is quite another to be able to fully explain its cause. It is not surprising, then, that the triggers for the great mass extinctions in earth's history are hotly de...
April 29, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Xiongguanlong: A New, Long-nosed Tyrannosaurid
Even though Tyrannosaurus has been a dinosaur celebrity for a century, we have only recently begun to understand how it evolved. For many years it seemed to be a larger and deadlier version of earlier carnivorous dinosaurs like Allosaurus, but recent discoveries have placed Tyrannosaurus and its re...
April 27, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
No Time for Protohadros
Time is running out for paleontologists studying a Cretaceous fossil site in North Arlington, Texas. As reported by CBS 11, paleontologists from the University of Texas only have about five months to finish their work before they will have to make way for a huge development project. This is unfortu...
April 23, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Discovering the Titanoboa
As part of a multi-organizational team, Smithsonian scientist Carlos Jaramillo uncovered the fossils of a gigantic snake
April 20, 2009 |
By Bruce Hathaway
Did Sauropods Hold their Heads High?
In museums all over the world, skeletons of sauropod dinosaurs are reconstructed with their heads held high. It seems like the most natural position for these animals, but a short letter recently published in Science has questioned whether it is correct. According to biologist Roger Seymour, saurop...
April 14, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Did Juvenile Triceratops Hang Out in Gangs?
Many years ago I recall seeing an arresting illustration by paleo-artist Mark Hallett in a magazine. It was of a group of Triceratops forming a protective circle to ward off a pair of Tyrannosaurus, but I would later learn there was a substantial problem with this picture. Even though Triceratops i...
April 10, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
The Dinosaur Fossil Wars
Across the American West, legal battles over dinosaur fossils are on the rise as amateur prospectors make major finds
April 2009 |
By Donovan Webster
Commercial Collectors and the Plight of Paleontology
In paleontology, "amateur" can be a dirty word. Even though the term is meant to describe someone with a great affinity for a topic or activity, it all too often is used to signify a lack of knowledge, standards, or other values considered to mark professionals. This is not necessarily true, and th...
March 24, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Tyrannosaurus vs. Alamosaurus
For years, one of the cardinal sins of paleontology illustration was showing a Tyrannosaurus attacking a sauropod dinosaur. Most of the long-necked earthshakers had disappeared from North America by the time the most famous of carnivorous dinosaurs came along, and so any scene depicting them togeth...
March 23, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Tianyulong: An Unexpectedly Fuzzy Dinosaur
Over the past decade so many feathered dinosaurs have been discovered that it almost comes as no surprise when a new one is announced. What paleontologists did not expect, however, was to find "feathers" on a dinosaur that should not have had them. In a paper published this week in Nature paleontol...
March 20, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
