Latest Dinosaurs Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of paleontologists, including Dr. Luis Chiappe, Director of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles Country's Dinosaur Institute has discovered a definitive way to determine the sex of an avian dinosaur species. The 125-million-year-old Mesozoic bird, Confuciusornis sanctus, had remarkable differences in plumage between specimens. Some had almost body length ornamental tail feathers, while others had none....

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online This week University of Alberta researchers examining the fossilized remains of dinosaur tail bones made what appears to be a startling discovery. Our modern day birds like the turkey and the peacock, which often use their dazzling plumage to attract a mate, may be channeling their long-departed ancestors: the feathered dinosaurs. This discovery was not made in a single find, however. Scott Persons, a paleontologist at the...

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A trip to the Galapagos islands will bring you face to face with 14 closely related species of finch that Charles Darwin discovered on his adventure abroad in the 1830s. The finches he noted, still referenced in essentially every biology textbook, had beak sizes of varying lengths and sizes. This was true of both the ground- and tree-dwelling birds, and Darwin postulated that differing diets might have required the birds’ unique...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE states dinosaurs may have been bigger than we thought, in terms of ratio. Scientists have always understood dinosaurs were the largest animals to roam the Earth, but now they find they also had a greater number of larger species compared to all other back-boned animals. For the study, Queen Mary, University of London researchers compared the size of the femur bone of 329 different...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A pair of U.K. biologists has revived an older and heavily debated theory that suggests sauropod dinosaurs reached their massive sizes due to the plants they ate. About ten years ago, plant ecologists from South Africa originally formulated this theory; however their ideas have fallen out of favor with many dinosaur researchers. According to a paper from David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) and Graeme Ruxton...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Some of the earliest known dinosaurs to have walked the planet were considered to be small dinosaurs like the swift-footed Eoraptor. But researchers have discovered a new dinosaur-like fossil that may be even older. Called Nyasasaurus parringtoni, the specimen is thought to have existed 10 to 15 million years earlier than dinosaur fossils have previously shown, originating in the Middle rather than the Late Triassic Period. Study...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online When scientists first discovered fossils of the Eocene bird Diatryma in the mid 19th century, they portrayed the 7-foot avian as a fierce predator, which caught on with science writers and popular culture. However, a recent discovery has suggested that this flightless giant was a gentle herbivore and not a flesh-eating terror as previously suggested. According to a report in the journal Paleontology, a set of 50...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online More evidence has emerged, published in the journal Current Biology, claiming birds are the descendants of dinosaurs. The prehistoric Archaeopteryx and bird-like dinosaurs before them had a more primitive version of a wing, according to the recent findings. Scientists are piecing together how the wing evolved, lending to evidence that gliding dinosaurs spent much of their days in the trees. "Before, it seemed that we had more...

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online There’s a popular cartoon geared towards adults which tells the story of a hapless young man who accidentally stumbles into a cryogenic capsule just moments before the turn of the century. The capsule just so happens to be set for 1,000 years, long enough for a couple of alien and robot uprisings and for the entire world our character knew to be virtually wiped away. The rest of the show is centered on how this 20th century guy...

FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology Faced with the same threat, city and country birds do not react in the same way despite being from the same species. According to a new study, urban birds have changed their anti-predator behavior in new environments. When a bird is faced with a predator, its only objective is to escape. However, city birds do not react in the same way as their countryside counterparts, despite being from the same species. Urbanization plays an...