Paleontology
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
Paleontologists Announce "Thunder Thighs"
"Brontosaurus" was a great dinosaur name. The great "thunder reptile" of the Jurassic, there was no better moniker for the stoutly-built sauropod. Unfortunately, the name had to be tossed out in favor of Apatosaurus, but a different dinosaur just described by Michael Taylor, Mathew Wedel and Richa...
February 23, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
What Do We Really Know About Utahraptor?
When it was released in 1993, Jurassic Park turned Velociraptor into a household name. Agile and cunning, it was a type of predatory dinosaur theater audiences hadn't seen before. But paleontologists knew the movie's raptors were drawn with a bit of artistic license. For one thing, the dinosaurs h...
February 22, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Did Dinosaurs Die Out Because Males Couldn't Find a Date?
What caused the end-Cretaceous mass extinction is one of the greatest mysteries of all time. Paleontologists have racked up a long list of victims---including the non-avian dinosaurs---and geologists have confirmed that a massive asteroid that struck the earth near the modern-day Yucatan peninsula ...
February 18, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Drawing a Dinosaur Death Trap
About 90 million years ago, a flock of teenage Sinornithomimus got stuck in the mud. They didn't make it out alive. At least 13 of the poor young dinosaurs perished and became preserved in this single bonebed, and a new painting by artist James Gurney offers a look into some of the last moments of ...
February 17, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
150 Years of Archaeopteryx
Over the past fifteen years, paleontologists have described more than twenty species of feathered dinosaurs. Even dinosaurs once thought to have dry, scaly skin, such as Velociraptor, have turned out to have feathers. But paleontologists have actually known of at least one feathered dinosaur since ...
February 16, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Walking With Raptors
A little more than a year ago, paleontologists working in Niger announced the discovery of Spinophorosaurus, a sauropod dinosaur with a wicked tail club. Its bones were not the only traces of dinosaurs to be found in the desert area. About three hundred feet from the exceptionally well preserved s...
February 15, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
How Parasaurolophus Set the Mood
It's Valentine's Day, and that means that millions of people will be riffling through their record and CD collections to find the right music to set the proper mood with their special someone. Seventy five million years ago, though, there was no Barry White, and so some deep-voiced dinosaurs made ...
February 14, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Scientists Uncover One of the Smallest Dinosaurs Ever
Another month, another alvarezsaur. In January, paleontologists announced the discovery of a small, one-fingered dinosaur from Inner Mongolia named Linhenykus, and another team of paleontologists has just published the description of a related, slightly older creature in the latest Journal of Vert...
February 11, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Everything You Wanted to Know About Dinosaur Sex
By studying dinosaurs' closest living relatives, we are able to uncover their secret mating habits and rituals
February 10, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Tapuiasaurus Gets a Head
Sauropod skulls are rare. As big as impressive as these long-necked giants were, they often lost their heads after death. There were decades of confusion over what the skull of Apatosaurus looked like. This makes the discovery of any complete sauropod skull cause for celebration, and I was delighte...
February 09, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Dinosaur Sighting: Hokkaido's Ice Dinosaurs
Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus and kin never made it to the ice age, but in 2004 one of the artists at Japan's annual Sapporo Snow Festival chiseled out these frozen dinosaurs. Such an impressive ice sculpture might seem too good to be true, but as the crew over at SV-POW! confirmed in a post of their ...
February 08, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Masiakasaurus Gets a Few Touch-Ups
Masiakasaurus was a weird-looking dinosaur. The paper that first described it was titled "A bizarre predatory dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar." What made it so strange were its teeth. At the front of its lower jaw, this six-foot theropod had forward-tilted teeth much different fro...
February 07, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Willo the Dinosaur Loses Heart
At first glance, Willo was not an especially impressive dinosaur. A well-preserved Thescelosaurus, this herbivorous dinosaur was one of the mid-sized ornithischians that lived about 66 million years ago. What made Willo special was its heart. Preserved inside a concretion cradled within the dinosau...
February 03, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Footsteps of a Dinosaur Deity
In 1999, construction workers creating a highway from Tibet's Bangda Airport to Changdu County uncovered a set of enormous tracks. They had been left more than 160 million years ago by a large sauropod dinosaur, but the local Tibetan people had other interpretations. Some believed that the tracks h...
February 01, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
The Great Triceratops Debate Continues
What is Nedoceratops hatcheri? That depends on whom you ask.For over 120 years the problematic skull of this horned dinosaur has been bounced around the literature under different names and attributions. While it was originally described as a distinct genus, Diceratops, some paleontologists later ...
January 31, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Teratophoneus: Utah's Monstrous, Murderous New Tyrannosaur
It missed the 2010 Utah dinosaur rush by nearly a month, but a new tyrannosaur from the southern part of the beehive state makes up for its tardiness by helping to fill a gap in the famous group's evolutionary history.Almost one year ago, paleontologists Thomas Carr and Thomas Williamson described...
January 28, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Blog Carnival # 28: Eating Han Solo, Extinction Cakes, Art and Science and More
Interpretive Dance: Everything Dinosaur recounts an unusual class project that is curiously reminiscent of many off-off-Broadway productions: “The children…(aged 5-6) put on a dancing display as they interpreted how they tho...
January 27, 2011 |
By Mark Strauss
For T. rex, Scavenging Was a Tough Gig
Was Tyrannosaurus rex a fearsome hunter or a scavenger? The answer is "both."In the early 1990s, the paleontologist Jack Horner popularized the idea that Tyrannosaurus fed entirely on carrion. The idea that this dinosaur—the "prize fighter of antiquity"—could not catch or kill other dinosaurs was s...
January 26, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Linhenykus: A weird, one-fingered dinosaur
When it was first described in 1993, Mononykus was one of the strangest dinosaurs known. It had the slender, light build of some of the "ostrich mimic" dinosaurs, yet it possessed two stubby, one-clawed hands and a few other subtle characteristics that placed it in a new group called the alvarezsa...
January 25, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
