Paleontology
Meet Banjo, Matilda and Clancy: Three New Dinosaurs From Australia
Australia has always been a tough place for dinosaur paleontologists to work. Aside from the harsh conditions, dinosaur skeletons found "down under" are often extremely fragmentary. A bit of leg, a claw, a rib, a toe bone; often there is not much more to be found of dinosaurs that once roamed the s...
July 06, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Will There Ever Be a Jurassic Park IV?
The Jurassic Park franchise has been having a rough time of it over the past few years. Jurassic Park III, released eight years ago, performed only modestly at the box office and was generally panned by critics. It is never a good sign when the audience is rooting for the dinosaurs to eat the lead ...
July 02, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
The World's Largest Fossil Wilderness
An Illinois coal mine holds a snapshot of life on earth 300 million years ago, when a massive earthquake "froze" a swamp in time
July 2009 |
By Guy Gugliotta
Blog Carnival #9 -- New Blogs, Pterosaur Gallery, the Barney Rock and more
The Life Aquatic: Let’s offer a warm Dinosaur Tracking welcome to Brain Beatty’s new blog, The Aquatic Amniote, which will “share news and insights about marine mammals, marine reptiles, and generally explore the evolution of aquatic amniotes, with special reference to the transition from terrestri...
June 30, 2009 |
By Mark Strauss
Attack of the Megalosaurus
It is difficult to look at the skeleton of a dinosaur and not imagine what it might have been like when it was alive. What color was it? What sounds did it make? How did it eat? The last question, in particular, is of perpetual interest when it comes to meat-eating dinosaurs, and many writers have ...
June 29, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
A New, Giant Predatory Dinosaur From Spain
Scientists in Spain announced this week the discovery of a large tooth from a predatory dinosaur similar to Allosaurus. Found by local residents in Riodeva, Teruel, the nearly 4-inch-long tooth is the largest predatory dinosaur tooth yet found from the country. Just what dinosaur the tooth belonged...
June 25, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
A Triceratops at the National Zoo
When I visited the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. earlier this year, I was a bit surprised to see a large Triceratops statue next to the giant anteater enclosure. There are a few dinosaurs at the zoo, like the Tyrannosaurus skull sculpture near the big cats exhibit, but the Triceratops seemed out...
June 24, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
"Baby Dinosaur" Appears on Rock
When I took a college course about dinosaurs a few years ago, I took the opportunity to confirm what a family member told me when I was very young. Someone had given me a small lump of irregularly-shaped rock and said it was a dinosaur bone. It certainly looked like some kind of fossil, and in 2003...
June 23, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Dinosaur Finger Points to Bird Evolution
As I have written about many times here on Dinosaur Tracking, paleontologists presently have an overwhelming amount of evidence that birds are living dinosaurs. That doesn't mean that everything about the dinosaur-to-bird transition is well-understood, though. For years scientists have been faced w...
June 19, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Filling in the Dinosaur Family Tree
Dinosaurs are often mentioned in discussions about evolution, yet many people do not know how dinosaurs evolved. That birds are living dinosaurs has been a hot topic during the last decade or so, but what about all those other dinosaurs? How did they emerge and diversify during the ancient past? In...
June 15, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
A New Look For Asia's Ancient "Shark Tooth Dragon"
When we talk about dinosaurs, we often associate some of our favorites with the times in which they lived. Dinosaur enthusiasts know that Tyrannosaurus was a Cretaceous dinosaur, for example, but fewer people know that Tyrannosaurus only lived at the very end of the Cretaceous, about 68 to 65 milli...
June 12, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Trans-Atlantic Dinosaurs?
Did a three-foot-tall predatory dinosaur species make an ancient 2,500-mile migration between what is now Wyoming and the UK's Isle of Skye about 170 million years ago? According to Hunterian Museum paleontologist Neil Clark, quite possibly yes. In the 1980s, a number of theropod footprints were fo...
June 09, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Movie Review: Land of the Lost
When I walked into the theater to see the big-screen adaptation of Land of the Lost, I wasn't expecting high art. Indeed, with a cast starring Will Ferrell and a story featuring dinosaurs, "ape-men," a high-tech device that plays tunes from A Chorus Line, and Matt Lauer, the big-budget summer comed...
June 08, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
The OTHER Land of the Lost
Today the big screen adaptation of The Land of the Lost opens in theaters, and everyone is comparing it to the campy original television series on which it is loosely based. I will be checking it out tomorrow morning (watch for a review next week), but my expectations won't be influenced by the 197...
June 05, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
A Little Paleo-Art Director
Professional paleo-artists often are given the tough task of painting scenes of lost worlds for museums, magazines and books, but what if their work was critiqued by a four-year-old? It sounds like a bad pitch for a TV sitcom but it is not far from what artist Bill Zeman does. On his blog Tiny Art ...
June 03, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
The Sauropod Posture Debate, Part Eleventy
Did the long-necked sauropod dinosaurs hold their necks high in the air or low to the ground? If you think this is a question easily answered, you are sorely mistaken. In many ways sauropods were unlike any living creatures, and scientists have been debating their posture for years. Indeed, last mo...
June 01, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Blog Carnival #8: Stegosaurus, Polish Dinosaurs, Velociraptor Clappers
Stegosaurs of Terror!!!! “Most of us think as Stegosaurus as plodding, dimwitted giants only fit to end up as plates of meat for a hungry predator,” observes the World We Don’t Live In. “And yet, despite all this negative publicity, Stegosaurus has had its shining moments. Various authors have latc...
May 29, 2009 |
By Brian Wolly
Dinosaurs Stalk the Night at the Smithsonian
There appear to be three themes that pop up in many of the major summer blockbusters being released this year: time travel, robots, and dinosaurs. I have already covered two of this summer's bigger dino-flicks, Ice Age 3 and Land of the Lost, but the newly-released Night at the Museum: Battle of th...
May 28, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
On the Trail of an Unknown Dinosaur
Weird new dinosaurs and exquisltely-preserved fossils regularly make headlines, but these discoveries make up only a tiny portion of what paleontologists actually discover and work with. The majority of the fossil record is far more fragmentary, and while little scraps of bone might not cause journ...
May 27, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Don't Bring Back "Denver, the Last Dinosaur"
Sequels and remakes have been the name of the game for Hollywood during the past few years. Every summer sees re-imaginings of television shows or movies I saw as a kid, but there is one that is probably better left alone: Denver, the Last Dinosaur.The basic plot of Denver is pretty standard (and w...
May 26, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
