Latest Mesozoic Stories
Chinasaurs Exhibit and Sea Rex IMAX® Film Open May 26 for short summer run at Museum of Nature & Science DALLAS, May 26, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Museum of Nature & Science is launching a double dinosaur deal that offers a comprehensive look at the Mesozoic Era, through the opening of a new dinosaur exhibit, Chinasaurs, and accompanying IMAX® film, Sea Rex: Journey to a Prehistoric World. Both open May 26 at the Museum's Fair Park location and will run until...
Researchers have discovered that an evolutionary change from 65 million years ago may have set the pace for the rapid growth rate of present-day flowering plants.Taylor Feild, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in collaboration with a group of other researchers from around the world, have determined the precise dates that angiosperms, or flowering plants, experienced two surges in growth during the Cretaceous period.Their...
Persistence paid off for a University of Alberta paleontology researcher, who after months of pondering the origins of a fossilized jaw bone, finally identified it as a new species of pterosaur, a flying reptile that lived 70 million years ago.Victoria Arbour says she was stumped when the small piece of jaw bone was first pulled out of of a fossil storage cabinet in the U of A's paleontology department."It could have been from a dinosaur, a fish or a marine reptile," said Arbour....
Tyrannosaurs are more than large carnivores at the top of the food chainWe've all heard this story: the Late Cretaceous of Asia and North America"”about 65 million years ago"”was dominated by several large-headed, bipedal predatory dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex and Tarbosaurus that had tiny arms. But a decade of new fossil discoveries that have more than doubled the number of known tyrannosaur species has changed this tale. Older and smaller tyrannosaurs have made the evolutionary tree...
The amount of available living space--not competition, as Darwin believed--may have been the catalyst of evolution, according to a new study published in the August 23 edition of Biology Letters.As part of the study, researchers at the University of Bristol analyzed the fossils of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians dating as far back as 400 million years ago. According to BBC News science reporter Howard Falcon-Lang, "the scientists showed that the amount of biodiversity closely...
The Gondwana supercontinent underwent a 60-degree rotation across Earth's surface during the Early Cambrian period, according to new evidence uncovered by a team of Yale University geologists. Gondwana made up the southern half of Pangaea, the giant supercontinent that constituted the Earth's landmass before it broke up into the separate continents we see today. The study, which appears in the August issue of the journal Geology, has implications for the environmental conditions that...
One hundred million years ago the earth looked very different from how it does today. Continents were joining and breaking apart, dinosaurs were roaming the earth, and flowering plants were becoming more widespread.The southern hemisphere supercontinent known as Gondwana formed around 180-200 mya during the breakup of Pangaea and then began to split apart about 167 mya. As scientists reconstruct the history of these land masses and life during this period, many questions arise. For example,...
Named dinosaurs may actually be juvenile or subadults of already known taxaPaleontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Museum of the Rockies have wiped out two species of dome-headed dinosaur, one of them named three years ago "“ with great fanfare "“ after Hogwarts, the school attended by Harry Potter.Their demise comes after a three-horned dinosaur, Torosaurus, was assigned to the dustbin of history last month at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in...
Carnivorous but smaller T. rex relative shared environment with larger cousinsNow, just a few weeks after tiny, early Raptorex kriegsteini was unveiled, a new wrench has been thrown into the family tree of the tyrannosaurs. The new Alioramus altai"”a horned, long-snouted, gracile cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex"”shared the same environment with larger, predatory relatives. A paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes this exceptionally...
Scientists in Australia have reported the discovery of three new species, including one agile predator that lived 98 million years ago.Writing in the peer-reviewed journal, PLoS ONE, Scott Hocknull and colleagues at the Queensland Museum and the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History noted the discovery of two large herbivorous sauropods and one carnivorous theropod in the Winton Formation in eastern Australia.Australia doesn't have a noteworthy fossil record, and many...
Latest Mesozoic Reference Libraries
Styracosaurus, meaning “spiked lizard” from the Ancient Greek styrax “spike at the butt-end of a spear-shaft” and sauros “lizard” was a genus of herbivorous ceratopsian dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period, about 76.5 to 75 million years ago. It had four to six long horns, stretching from its neck frill, a smaller horn on each cheek, and a single horn jutting out from its nose, which may have been up to 2 feet long and 6 inches wide. The function/functions of these horns and frills...
Thescelosaurus, meaning “godlike”, “wondrous”, or “marvelous” and “lizard” was a genus of small ornithopod dinosaur that appeared at the very end of the Late Cretaceous period in North America. It was a member of the last dinosaurian fauna before the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event around 65.5 million years ago. The completeness and preservation of many of its specimens illustrate that it might have preferred to live near streams. This bipedal ornithopod is known from...
Daspletosaurus, meaning “frightful lizard” is a genus of tyrannosaurid theropod dinosaur that resided in western North America between 77 and 74 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period. Fossils of the only named species were found in Alberta, although other possible species from Alberta and Montana wait for description. Daspletosaurus is closely related to the much larger and more current Tyrannosaurus. Like most of the known tyrannosaurids, it was a multi-ton bipedal...
Megalaosaurus, meaning “Great Lizard”, from Greek megalo, meaning ‘big’ or ‘tall’ and sauros, meaning “lizard”, is a genus of large and meat-eating theropod dinosaurs of the Middle Jurassic period of Europe. It’s significant as the first genus of dinosaur, outside of birds, to be described and named. Megalosaurus might have been the first dinosaur to be described in scientific literature. Part of a bone was recovered from a limestone quarry at Cornwell by Chipping Norton,...
Velociraptor, meaning “swift seizer” is a genus of dromaeosaurid theropod dinosaur that lived about 75 to 71 million years ago during the later part of the Cretaceous Period. There are two species that are presently recognized. The type species is V. mongoliensis; fossils of this particular species have been uncovered in Mongolia. A second species, V. osmolskae, it was named in 2008 for some skull material from Inner Mongolia, China. They are smaller than other dromaeosaurids such as...
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