Paleontology
Blog Carnival #30: Italian Dinosaurs, Paleoart Controversy, Dino D-Day and More
How is a Saurpod Like a Vacuum Cleaner? Find out at Everything Dinosaur. Renaissance Reptiles: Art Evolved alerts us to the opening of Dinosauri in Carne e Ossa, the first large-scale paleoart exhibition in Italy. The event will be running through May 31 in Piacenza—a city renowned for its histori...
March 29, 2011 |
By Mark Strauss
Racing to Assemble a Dinosaur
Remember the Woodcraft dinosaurs? I loved playing with those skeletal plywood puzzles as a kid, and a giant-sized version of one recently made a guest appearance on the show The Amazing Race. A few of the competing teams were tasked with putting together pl...
March 28, 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
Dinosaur Sighting: Vintage Stegosaurus
Like many fossils fans, I quite enjoy picking apart bad restorations of dinosaurs, but I must admit that I have a soft spot for the 20th century image of drab, slow, stupid dinosaurs. Those were the dinosaurs I first encountered at museums and school libraries—just before the "Dinosaur Renaissance...
March 24, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Creating an Allosaurus Feast
I feel a little sorry that I said Allosaurus had one of the dullest names in paleontology yesterday. It's not the dinosaur's fault that Othniel Charles Marsh gave it the unimaginative title of "different reptile." Had Marsh seen the complete skeleton when he coined the name, perhaps he would have ...
March 23, 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
Always Brontosaurus to Me
During the latter half of the 1980s, when I was just becoming acquainted with dinosaurs, "Brontosaurus" was just on its way out. A few of my books depicted the lumbering dinosaur, and a few museums still had the wrong heads on their skeletons, but the images of slow, stupid Brontosaurus were slowl...
March 17, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
The Dinosaur and the Missing Link
It's easy to take computer-generated dinosaurs for granted. They are everywhere from commercials and documentaries to Hollywood films. But a century ago, filmmakers had to bring dinosaurs to life the old fashioned way. Frame by frame and centimeter by centi...
March 16, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Dinosaur Sighting: A Flying Ankylosaur
Have you ever seen an Ankylosaurus fly? Stout and covered in heavy armor, ankylosaurs were arguably the least aerodynamic of all dinosaurs, but two months ago the Houston Museum of Natural Science treated onlookers to such a sight as they lifted their ankylosaur sculpture out of its old exhibit.The...
March 14, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Restoring Nedoceratops: Gored by a Horned Rival?
What is Nedoceratops? That depends on who you ask. The single known skull could represent a transitional growth stage between Triceratops and Torosaurus head shapes in a single species of dinosaur, or it might be a unique species of horned dinosaur that lived alongside its better-known relatives.T...
March 11, 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 Scat
Tyrannosaurus ate flesh. That much is obvious. The reinforced skull and huge, serrated teeth of the tyrant dinosaur and its kin were not adaptations for cropping grass or cracking coconuts. Both predators and scavengers, the tyrannosaurs must have consumed massive amounts of meat to fuel their lar...
March 09, 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
Blog Carnival #29: PhyloPic Launches, Dino Robots, Prosauropods and Riley the First Grade Paleontologist
Paleo-Profiles: A new site called PhyloPic is a free online archive of silhouhettes featuring organisms both living and extinct. Art Evolved presents this primer on how you can create and contribute silhouettes. Welcome to the Neighborhood: The Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm in Saint Geor...
March 04, 2011 |
By Mark Strauss
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
Debunking the "Dinosaurs" of Kachina Bridge
About 65.5 million years ago, the last of the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out in the fallout from one of the earth's most catastrophic extinction events. They left only bones and traces in the rock behind. Yet there are people who claim that humans actually lived alongside dinosaurs. Young eart...
March 01, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Brontomerus Continues to Thunder Around the Web
Last week, paleontologists Michael Taylor, Mathew Wedel and Richard Cifelli announced an instant dinosaur sensation: Brontomerus mcintoshi, the "thunder-thighed" dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of Utah. All around the web, the sauropod was seen punting a...
February 28, 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
