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A 1980s Look at Smithsonian Dinosaurs
I thought that I had seen just about every major dinosaur documentary from the 1980s, but I just found out that I missed at least one: the Smithsonian Video Collection's Dinosaurs. It was one of many programs—like A&E's miniseries Dinosaur!—that were inspired by deep changes to what we thought ...
May 05, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
How Tyrannosaurus Lost a Finger
Everybody knows that Tyrannosaurus had small arms tipped in only two fingers. The relatively small arms of the Late Cretaceous predator are part of its charm. When paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn described Tyrannosaurus in 1905, however, the fingers and forearm of the dinosaur were missing. E...
May 03, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
When Dinosaurs Were New
I spent Sunday morning among the dinosaurs of Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The skeletons of the prehistoric creatures stood nearly shoulder to shoulder—the Tyrannosaurus appeared to snarl at a nearby Triceratops, and an Allosaurus stood dangerously close to the business-end of...
April 25, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Will the Dinosaurs Return?
When the American Museum of Natural History's paleontologist William Diller Matthew published his book Dinosaurs in 1915, no one understood how the famous Mesozoic creatures originated or went extinct. Both the beginning and end of the "Age of Dinosaurs" were mysterious. Yet, tucked away in a foot...
April 22, 2011 |
By Brian Switek
Is There A "Homer Simpson Effect" Among Scientists?
Despite decades of progress for women in science (and some arguments that no more is needed), the playing field still isn't level. But do all the advantages men get result in them thinking more highly of their expertise than female scientists do? Three researchers, including D. Carolina Useche at t...
April 13, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
50 Facts for the 50th Anniversary of the First Man in Space
1 ) Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into space in Vostok 1 on the morning of April 12, 1961, 50 years ago today.2 ) He was a 27-year-old military pilot.3 ) He and his family were thrown out of their house by the Germans during World War II.4 ) They had to live in a dugout in the garden.5 ) Gaga...
April 12, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Five Reasons Anti-Evolution Measures are a Bad Idea
In 1925, John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, was put on trial in Tennessee for having the audacity to teach evolution to his students. In the 21st century, teachers don't have to worry about being arrested for teaching this fundamental topic in science, and the Supreme Court declared teachi...
April 04, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Piltdown Man, Paleoanthropology's April Fool's
This is the story of a missing link that never was
April 01, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Great Depression Had Little Effect on Death Rates
There's this somewhat counter-intuitive idea that economic downturns are good for your health. You might expect the privation and malnutrition inherent in such times would take a toll. But during the Great Depression, mortality rates fell. And since that time, the idea that recessions are a net-pos...
March 28, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Lost Naturalist: A 163-Year-Old Australian Mystery
When I was preparing to visit friends in Australia a few years ago, I read a book about all the ways the continent would kill you. The entry on scorpions, I remember, stood out because it said not to worry about them---their stings only hurt.I was reminded of this while reading a story from Austral...
March 24, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
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
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
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
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
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
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
Marine Archaeologists Find Shipwreck Linked to Moby Dick
George Pollard Jr. was not a very lucky sea captain. In 1819, he became captain of the whaling ship Essex, out of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and headed for the Pacific Ocean. Just four days out, though, a storm struck and damaged the ship. Still, Pollard pressed on, rounding Cape Horn in January 182...
February 15, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Robot That Tells Jokes
The robot takeover steadily approaches: They're now figuring out humor. Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. student Heather Knight, who calls herself a "social roboticist," has created Data, an adorable robot who not only tells jokes but learns from the audience response and then adjusts its comedy routine. Data...
February 02, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
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
