Fossils
Tiny Tarbosaurus Shows How Tyrants Grew Up
The new Tarbosaurus juvenile is a truly remarkable specimen
May 16, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Kelmayisaurus Gets a Family
What was Kelmayisaurus? Discovered in 1973, the lower jaw and partial upper jaw of this large, predatory dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of China have been frustratingly difficult to interpret. Maybe Kelmayisaurus belonged to some obscure lineage of archaic theropod dinosaurs, or perhaps the fos...
May 10, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
The Myth of the Eight-Spiked Stegosaurus
Everybody knows that Stegosaurus had four tail spikes. The formidable weapons this odd dinosaur sported were some of its most prominent features. Yet, when Stegosaurus was new to science, it seemed as if this dinosaur bristled with even more spikes. In 1891, the first full skeletal drawing of Stegosaurus ungulatus was created under the direction [...]
May 09, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
What Tales Do Albertosaurus Injuries Tell?
TMP 2003.45.64 is not exactly a headline-making fossil. The left lower jaw of an Albertosaurus, most of the teeth have fallen out and the bone is only one part of a well-known species represented by many other skeletons. But, for those who know what they are looking for, this specimen bears the tr...
April 28, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Come Into My Parlor, Said the Spider to the Dinosaur
Just in time for Halloween 2008, several gruesome spider photographs popped up in the news. The shots recorded two incidents—both of which took place in Queensland, Australia—of huge golden orb weaver spiders eating birds that had flown into the webs of the arachnids. Birds aren't exactly a staple...
April 21, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Just When You Thought Velociraptor Couldn't Get Scarier
Randall Munroe, the creator of the webcomic XKCD, isn't going to like this one bit. Fear of attack by Velociraptor is a running theme in the science-themed series—lazy computer programmers should be especially wary—and two separate discoveries announced last week gave those with a phobia of raptor...
April 19, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Birds Inherited Strong Sense of Smell From Dinosaurs
Feathers, air sacs, nesting behavior—the earliest birds owed a lot to their dinosaurian ancestors. The first birds also inherited a strong sense of smell.Modern birds have not been thought of as excellent scent-detectors, save for some super-smellers such as turkey vultures, which detect the scent ...
April 14, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Daemonosaurus Shakes Up the Early History of Dinosaurs
Evolution is not a constant march of onward-and-upward progress. Any organism is a mosaic of the ancient and the modern—old features can be modified and put to new uses over time—and the mechanism of natural selection accounts for both an apparent lack of change and dramatic evolutionary transforma...
April 13, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
The Deep History of Dinosaur Lice
Hunting dinosaurs is a dangerous business. Scores of fictional, time-traveling hunters have learned this lesson the hard way, but arguably the most unfortunate was the protagonist of Brian Aldiss' short story "Poor Little Warrior." All Claude Ford wanted to do was get away from his disappointing li...
April 12, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
A New Giant Tyrant, Zhuchengtyrannus
"While 2010 was celebrated as the year of ceratopsians by many," paleontologist Dave Hone wrote at Archosaur Musings yesterday, "it should not be overlooked the huge number of tyrannosaurs that have cropped up in the last year or so." He's right. For a long time Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Daspleto...
April 01, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Watch Out For That Thagomizer!
Stegosaurus had a formidable tail. Studded with four long spikes, this dinosaur's business end would have given Allosaurus and other Jurassic predators plenty of incentive to keep moving. But do we have any evidence that Stegosaurus really used its tail this way?Among paleontologists, the four-spi...
March 30, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
The Tyrannosaur Tooth Toolkit
When I was in elementary school, I was told that mammals and reptiles could easily be told apart by their teeth. Mammals had a full, enamel-covered toolkit in their mouths—incisors, canines, premolars, and molars suited to different tasks—while reptiles had only one kind of tooth. The dental differ...
March 25, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Finding the Family of Acrocanthosaurus
Allosaurus has one of the dullest names in all of paleontology. The famous dinosaur's moniker simply means "different reptile"—a bit of a letdown for one of the top predators of Jurassic North America. Early on, the name fit well—Allosaurus was a very unusual dinosaur compared to other large, pred...
March 22, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Oxalaia: Brazil's New, Giant Spinosaur
Paleontologists have not found much of Oxalaia quilombensis. A fragment of the snout and a portion of the upper jaw are all that is known of this dinosaur. Even so, those two parts are enough to know that Oxalaia was one of the peculiar predatory dinosaurs known as spinosaurs, and a giant one at t...
March 21, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Bite Marks Tell of Tussling Ichthyosaurs
The prehistoric world was intensely violent. So I believed when I was a kid, anyway. Almost every book I read or movie I saw about now-fossilized creatures showed them as ferocious monsters that were constantly biting and clawing at each other. I spent hours with plastic toys and mud puddles reenac...
March 18, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Tapeworms, Trematodes and Other Dinosaur Pests
In one short section of his book Parasite Rex, science writer Carl Zimmer asked a simple question: "Did tapeworms live in dinosaurs?" There is no reason to think they didn't. Both the living descendants of dinosaurs (birds) and their crocodylian cousins harbor tapeworms, Zimmer pointed out, and so ...
March 10, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Tyrannosaurus: Hyena of the Cretaceous
Of all the organisms scientists have found in the fossil record, Tyrannosaurus rex is the most prominent ambassador for paleontology. No dinosaur hall is complete without at least some fragment of the tyrant dinosaur, and almost anything about the dinosaur is sure to get press coverage. We simply...
March 07, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Looking Back at A&E's "Dinosaur!"
In 1991, the cable channel A&E ran a four-part prehistoric extravaganza hosted by Walter Cronkite and simply called Dinosaur! I was only eight when it aired, and I remember begging my parents to stay up to watch the episodes. Irrepressible little dinosaur...
March 02, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Flowers, Pine Cones and Dinosaurs
When we think about the Mesozoic world, dinosaurs often dominate our attention. They are the stars of countless museum displays and restorations, and everything else about their world just seems like window dressing. When visitors to Yale's Peabody Museum look at Rudolph Zallinger's beautiful (if o...
February 25, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Hadrosaurus Was Real, After All
Described in 1858, the partial skeleton of Hadrosaurus foulkii was one of the most important dinosaur discoveries ever made. At that time, the few known dinosaurs were represented by a collection of scraps—paltry fragments that allowed paleontologists to reconstruct them first as giant lizards, an...
February 24, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
