Latest Mesozoic Stories
University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno says Psittacosaurus gobiensis is the first dinosaur species that ate mainly nuts. Sereno, who discovered fossils of the 3-foot-long dinosaur in Inner Mongolia in 2001, said the skull features of the dinosaur that lived 110 million years ago are reminiscent of a parrot, the Chicago Sun-Times said Thursday. The parallels in the skull to that in parrots, the descendants of dinosaurs most famous for their nut-cracking habits, is remarkable, said...
A Triceratops skull auctioned in New York sold for $242,000, nearly double its expected sale price, while an Alioramus remotus skull sold for $206,000.Bonhams auction house, which did not reveal the names of the winning bidders, said the three-horned dinosaur skull was expected to sell for only $125,000 while the skull of the Alioramus remotus, a cousin of the Tyrannosaurus, was expected to sell for a maximum $140,000, the New York Post reported Tuesday.The Triceratops skull, which measures...
Early dinosaurs were likely to have used their feathers for looks rather than for flight or staying warm, researchers reported on Monday. Researchers formed their hypothesis after studying two 125-million-year-old dinosaur fossils discovered in China.The Beipiaosaurus fossils depicted individual feathers as represented by a single broad filament, Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and colleagues wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy...
U.S. scientists using computerized tomography scanning have found dinosaurs had much larger air cavities in their heads than had been thought. Ohio University Professor Lawrence Witmer and research associate Ryan Ridgely examined skulls from two predators, Tyrannosaurus rex and Majungasaurus, as well as two ankylosaurian dinosaurs, Panoplosaurus and Euoplocephalus. For comparison, the scientists said they also studied scans of crocodiles and ostriches, which are modern day relatives of...
New study on hadrosaur bones shows fast growth, reproduction ratesWith long limbs and a soft body, the duck-billed hadrosaur had few defenses against predators such as tyrannosaurs. But new research on the bones of this plant-eating dinosaur suggests that it had at least one advantage: It grew to adulthood much faster than its predators, giving it superiority in size.In a study published online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, scientists compared...
Colorado Springs has a dinosaur to call its own, a beast that's never been found anywhere else in the world. Scientists planned to announce Saturday at Garden of the Gods that century-old assumptions about a dinosaur skull found in the park in the late 1800s are wrong. The fossils don't belong to the type of dinosaur -- the camptosaurus -- that early bone hunters thought it did. It seems the skull fragments belong to a dino that's new to science, a conclusion that sent ripples through the...
In a paper published in this month's "˜Geophysical Journal International', Dr Graeme Eagles from the Earth Sciences Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, reveals how one of the largest continents ever to exist met its demise.Gondwana was a "˜supercontinent' that existed between 500 and 180 million years ago. For the past four decades, geologists have debated how Gondwana eventually broke up, developing a multitude of scenarios which can be loosely grouped into two schools of...
By Lipkin, Christine Sereno, Paul C; Horner, John R INTRODUCTION OSSIFIED CLAVICLES, either as paired elements or as a median furcula, have been recorded in all major clades of dinosaurs, including ornithischians, sauropodomorphs, and theropods (Bryant and Russell, 1993). Nearly all but the most basal theropods, Eoraptor lunensis and Herrerasaurus ischigualastensis, have an ossified furcula including coelophysids (Downs, 2000; Tykoski et al., 2002; Carrano et al., 2005), allosauroids (Chure...
An 80-million-year-old dinosaur fossil unearthed in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia demonstrates that miniaturization, long thought to be a hallmark of bird origins and a necessary precursor of flight, occurred progressively in primitive dinosaurs.The find, described in the September 7 issue of the journal Science, is made up of the fossilized bones of a new dinosaur the researchers have named Mahakala, and includes portions of its skull, forelimb and hindlimb, as well as much of the vertebral...
BERKELEYÂ -- The peculiar pose of many fossilized dinosaurs, with wide-open mouth, head thrown back and recurved tail, likely resulted from the agonized death throes typical of brain damage and asphyxiation, according to two paleontologists.A classic example of the posture, which has puzzled paleontologists for ages, is the 150 million-year-old Archaeopteryx, the first-known example of a feathered dinosaur and the proposed link between dinosaurs and present-day birds. "Virtually all...
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...
![\"Awakening of Hunger\"](/media/gallery/national-science-foundation-gallery/thumbs/thumbs_hallett_scn_h.jpg "\\"Awakening of Hunger\\"")
