Fossils
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
Book Review: How to Build a Dinosaur
When the film adaptation of the science fiction novel Jurassic Park premiered in the summer of 1993, scientists and the public alike wondered if it was possible to bring dinosaurs back from the dead. It was a tantalizing prospect, but the general consensus was that even if dinosaur DNA could be rec...
March 19, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Hesperonychus: A Tiny Killer
If you visited what is now Alberta, Canada 75 million years ago, you would have to beware of some formidable predators. The large tyrannosaurids Daspletosaurus and Gorgosaurus prowled the landscape while the smaller sickle-clawed killers Dromaeosaurus and Saurornitholestes stalked their prey in the...
March 17, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
The Sauropod “Kid’s Table”
Fossil trackways have shown paleontologists that some sauropod dinosaurs moved together in herds. But how were their herds organized? Were they made up only of particular age groups or were individuals of different ages all mixed together? In a new paper in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palae...
March 13, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Getting a Handle on Theropod Arms
Earlier this week a new paper in the journal PLoS One reported a set of fossilized impressions that showed how theropod dinosaurs held their hands. Scientists were able to confirm that theropods' palms faced each other. But paleo-artist Michael Skrepnick reminded me of another trackway that confir...
March 06, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
An Early Theropod Leaves an Impression on Scientists
If there is one top complaint paleontologists have about restorations of dinosaurs in movies, it is that the filmmakers never get the hands right. Theropods, be they Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor, are always shown with their "palms" facing downwards—even though this would have been anatomically imp...
March 04, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
The Dinosaur Name Game
Everybody is familiar with the dinosaur Tryannosaurus rex, but did you know that it was a tyrannosaurine tyrannosaurid tyrannosauroid? It's true, and you really did read that last line correctly. Understanding how this makes any sense, though, requires a bit more explanation.Most of us are familiar...
March 03, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Tracking Dinosaurs in New Jersey
You can find dinosaurs in New Jersey, but you have to know where to look. Even though my home state is known for suburban sprawl and peculiar odors today, a little over 65 million years ago much of it was covered by the ocean. Marine crocodiles, plesiosaurs, and gigantic mosasaurs prowled the near-...
March 02, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Miragaia, the Long-Necked Stegosaur
With small heads, thick limbs, spiked tails, and backs decked with plates, stegosaurs were among the most bizarre creatures ever to have evolved. A new discovery, however, shows that some were even stranger than the weird genera already known. Yesterday a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Socie...
February 26, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Which Dinosaur Would You Clone?
When the film adaptation of Jurassic Park came out in 1993 the idea that scientists may one day be able to clone dinosaurs had everybody talking. It is still more science fiction than science fact (check out The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World), but suppose for a moment that there was s...
February 25, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Book Review: Feathered Dinosaurs
When paleo-artist Gregory S. Paul published Predatory Dinosaurs of the World in 1989, the idea that many theropod dinosaurs might have been covered in feathers was still controversial. The hypothesis that birds evolved from small, predatory dinosaurs was still being hotly debated, and it would be a...
February 23, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Building a Better Dinosaur
We all know dinosaurs were big, but how massive were they, exactly? A complete skeleton can give scientists a good idea of the height, length, and general size of a dinosaur, but figuring out the mass carried by those skeletal frames has been a difficult question to answer. A study just published i...
February 19, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
A New Early Dinosaur, Panphagia protos
The long-necked sauropod dinosaurs were among the most massive creatures to have ever evolved (their immensity only surpassed by the blue whale), but like all dinosaurs their early relatives were quite small. A newly announced early sauropodomorph dinosaur, Panphagia protos, is one of these early r...
February 18, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Darwin and the Dinosaurs
Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, whose book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection forever changed our understanding of the natural world. Although his father wanted him to become a surgeon or a clergyman, as a young man Darwin was more intent on col...
February 12, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Triceratops v. Triceratops
Every dinosaur enthusiast can immediately recognize Triceratops by its bony frill and three horns, but what did it actually use those horns for? The horns might have been used for defense against predators, for display, in combat between rival Triceratops, or even all three, but it has been difficu...
February 05, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Mysterious Origins for Important Skull
Last month I wrote about a potentially new ankylosaur, Minotaurasaurus, that had been described in the journal Current Science. Unfortunately, paleontologists were unable to precisely determine how old the fossil is or where it exactly came from. The scientists who reported on it did not dig it out...
February 03, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Battle of the Giant Theropods
Who was the biggest predator of them all? For as long as I can remember, Tyrannosaurus rex has been the heavyweight champion of the meat-eating dinosaurs. But its reign would not go unchallenged. Starting in the mid-1990s, excavations in South America and Africa revealed creatures like Giganotosaur...
January 28, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
A Tiny Fossilized Treasure
On July 23, 2005, amateur paleontologist Tony Morris was looking for fossils with friends in a part of Oklahoma where a mining operation had uncovered a wealth of fossil fragments. He found a piece of rock with a jaw sticking out of it. Could there be more of the skull of this creature inside the r...
January 26, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
If You Found a Fossil on the Ground, What Would You Do?
The recent case of amateur paleontologist Nathan Murphy illustrates how complicated fossil-collecting can be. Murphy ran a for-profit organization called the Judith River Dinosaur Institute, which took paying customers to dig at fossil sites. According to a New York Times report, Murphy had an arra...
January 23, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
