Paleontology
Chronicles of Paleo Adventures in China
Last month a group of nine students from Montana State University, Dawson Community College and Rocky Mountain College left for China to study dinosaur eggs, and they have been chronicling their experiences on the new blog MSU China Paleontology Expedition. About two weeks into their six-week stay...
June 03, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Island-Hopping Ceratopsians Made it to Europe
Ceratopsians, or the "horned dinosaurs" such as Triceratops and Centrosaurus, were among the most distinctive members of dinosaur communities in North America and eastern Asia during the Cretaceous. Even so, bits and pieces of fossil bone collected by paleontologists over the years have hinted that...
June 02, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Blog Carnival #20: Lost Films, Q and A FAIL, Abandoned Dinosaur Parks and More
The Film Before Time: Palaeoblog commemorates the May 19, 1915 premiere of the movie The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy, which you can watch in two parts on YouTube, thanks to the Library of Congress. (One of the characters is named—I kid you not—Miss Araminta Rockface.) It f...
May 28, 2010 |
By Mark Strauss
Articulated Skeletons Give a New Look at "Armadillodiles"
Early dinosaurs and other Triassic creatures have been in the news quite a bit lately. From a new review of the origin of dinosaurs to the recognition of a mistaken dinosaur and the discovery of the skeleton of a fearsome predator closely related to crocodiles, some of the most interesting recent p...
May 27, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Dinosaur Sighting: Never Forget
This ironic graffiti tag on the Carrboro, North Carolina was photographed by reader Jason Adams. The impact of an asteroid in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula was a bit of a bad day for them, but we are probably much better off without having to worry about tyrannosaurs wandering the suburbs or sa...
May 26, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
How Did Sauropods Get So Big?
Without a doubt, the sauropod dinosaurs were the largest animals to have ever walked the earth. Even the largest land mammal, the prehistoric rhino-relative Paraceratherium, would have been dwarfed by the biggest sauropods such as Diplodocus, Sauroposeidon, and others. How did these giants get to b...
May 24, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Azendohsaurus, the Dinosaur That Wasn't
Parsing the origins and early history of dinosaurs is a challenging task. A number of prehistoric creatures were a lot like some of the earliest dinosaurs, and sometimes evolutionary cousins of early dinosaurs have been mistaken for dinosaurs on the basis of fragmentary material. As a study publish...
May 21, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
A Closer Look at Ankylosaur Armor
Many dinosaurs were adorned with spikes, horns and plates, but it was the ankylosaurs that took armor to the extreme. These dinosaurs were covered in bony armor from snout to tail-tip, yet, as a new study suggests, there may have been more to some of these structures than just attack and defense.As...
May 20, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Diabloceratops Gets Ready for its Debut
At the end of last summer, on my way out of Salt Lake City, Utah, I encountered a dinosaur I had never seen before in the halls of the Utah Museum of Natural History. Lying on its side was an impressive skull bristling with horns, and the placard identified it as an as-yet-unpublished creature info...
May 19, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Exceptional New Fossil Find Reveals Fearsome Triassic Predator
It's not a dinosaur, but it may have eaten some of their ancestors.Last week paleontologists from Lutheran University discovered the nearly complete skeleton of the 238-million-year-old predator Prestosuchus chiniquensis in the Late Triassic rock near the Brazilian town of Dona Francisca. The excep...
May 18, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Fossil Skeleton Preserves Signs of Shark Buffet
According to a short communication recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, an ancient marine reptile provided a feast for hungry sharks.In 2006 paleontologists Tamaki Sato, Yoshikazu Hasegawa and Makoto Manabe described the remains of a previously-unknown kind of elasmosaurid,...
May 14, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
X-Rays Give a New Look at Archaeopteryx
Scientists have known about the feathered dinosaur Archaeopteryx for over a century and a half, but scientists are using new techniques to get a better look at this creature and its close relatives. Within the past few months alone, paleontologists have described how they have used laboratory techn...
May 12, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex
There are at least two stories behind every dinosaur skeleton you see at a museum. There is the story of the animal itself, its life and evolution, but there is also the story of its discovery, and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City many of the fossils on display attest to t...
May 11, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Tracking the Origin of Dinosaurs
Almost everyone is familiar with the ongoing debate surrounding the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but the discussion over where dinosaurs came from in the first place is often overlooked. Hypotheses of dinosaur origins have been just as controversial as those of trigge...
May 10, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
The Dwarf Dinosaurs of Haţeg Island
For hundreds of years, people have been finding the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in Romania's Haţeg basin. The Cretaceous-age deposits are remnants of prehistoric islands that sported their own unique faunas, but in the days before fossils were recognized as being the remain...
May 07, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Dinosaur Sighting: Granger's Dinosaurs
Past editions of Dinosaur Sightings have mentioned the numerous dinosaur sculptures that can be found in the state of Oregon, but the state's neighbor to the north can also boast a few dinosaurs. As pointed out by reader Marc Shecter, in 1993 the town of Granger, Washington decided to build a numbe...
May 05, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Bone-Hunter Biographies
Finding, excavating, preparing, studying and mounting dinosaur skeletons is hard work. We marvel at the articulated bones of these creatures in museums, and while each skeleton tells the story of the creature it once belonged to, there is also the story of its discovery. These stories are often jus...
May 04, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Blog Carnival #19: New Blogs, Ichythyosaurs, Bacteria, Comic Strips and More...
New Blog on the Block: A hearty paleosphere welcome to Crurotarsi: The Forgotten Archosaurs, a blog devoted to the critters that ruled the Triassic alongside the dinosaurs: “Crurotarsans are some pretty amazing animals, having occupied almost every major ecological niche during the Triassic Period,...
May 03, 2010 |
By Mark Strauss
What Are the Best Dinosaur Movies Ever Made?
As sorry as I am to admit it, most movies with dinosaurs in them are not very good. It is far easier for me to think of bad dinosaur movies (I still have nightmares from Theodore Rex, and that was meant to be a comedy) than good ones, but there are a few shining examples of what dino-cinema can be ...
April 30, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Exceptional Fossils Record Dinosaur Feather Changes
Over the past decade and a half paleontologists have found the remains of numerous feathered dinosaurs, but, as announced in this week's edition of Nature, a new pair of specimens may show how the feathers of some of these dinosaurs changed as they grew up.Among birds, feather growth is relatively ...
April 29, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
