dinosaurs

We are starting to get so much more information now: Andrew had a short narrow snout, whereas his parents had wide, square snouts. His snout was suited to forests, but his parents would be grazing the ground in open areas. But if adults fed their babies, why would they need to have different teeth and snouts? The researchers believe that the babies fended for themselves and were separated from the adults. The babies most likely lived in forests in age-segregated herds, which could protect them both from predators and from being trampled by their own gigantic parents. “I’ve been thinking of these roving bands of young Diplodocus in the forests akin to Peter Pan’s Lost Boys,” Woodruff said. “These age-segregated herds Read More ›

Turns out we didn’t need Jurassic Park: The lungs and feathers of a bird that lived 120 million years ago had some of the same characteristics found in today’s birds, researchers reported yesterday (October 18) in PNAS… They examined a sample with scanning electron microscopy and found an extremely subdivided structure much like that enabling modern birds to take in enough oxygen to fuel flight. They also identified similarities between the specimen’s preserved feathers and its modern counterparts.Shawna Williams, “A fossil from the Cretaceous Period shows similarities to modern avian species.” at The Scientist Significance: Archaeorhynchus spathula is a basal member of the Ornithuromorpha, the lineage that includes neornithines. Although this is the fifth reported specimen, unlike the others it Read More ›

Paleontologist Gerta Keller attributes the extinction 66 million years ago of three-quarters of Earth’s species, including all dinosaurs, not to an asteroid hit but to a series of volcanic eruptions. A writer goes with her on a field trip: The prestige of science is solidly behind the asteroid: The impact theory provided an elegant solution to a prehistoric puzzle, and its steady march from hypothesis to fact offered a heartwarming story about the integrity of the scientific method. “This is nearly as close to a certainty as one can get in science,” a planetary-science professor told Time magazine in an article on the crater’s discovery. In the years since, impacters say they have come even closer to total certainty. “I Read More ›

For one thing, advanced dinosaurs existed much earlier than thought. From ScienceDaily: “We were surprised to find a close relative of Diplodocus in East Asia 174 million years ago. It’s commonly thought that sauropods did not disperse there until 200 million years ago and many of their giant descendants, reached this region much later, if at all,” explained study co-author Professor Paul Upchurch (UCL Earth Sciences). “Our discovery of Lingwulong demonstrates that several different types of advanced sauropod must have existed at least 15 million years earlier and spread across the world while the supercontinent Pangaea was still a coherent landmass. This forces a complete re-evaluation of the origins and evolution of these animals.” The new evidence also reinforces the Read More ›

Sometimes. From Helen Gordon at Wired: Long thought an impossible dream, the emerging field of palaeocolour is revolutionising our view of the prehistoric world, turning it from black-and-white into glorious technicolour. So far only a handful of dinosaurs, insects and reptiles have been studied but, as Johan Lindgren, a scientist from the University of Lund, says, “We’re only just scratching on the surface.” Finding evidence of colour in the fossil record will do much more than simply tell us what hue to paint a T-Rex. Bones can fossilise. but behaviour does not. “When we look at the animals and plants we see in the world around us we see striking colours and colour patterns,” says Maria McNamara from the University Read More ›