Science & Nature | Dinosaurs | Smithsonian.com

The Most Exciting (and Frustrating) Stories From This Year in Dinosaurs

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 04:59:05 GMT

A restoration of Nyasasaurus in its Middle Triassic habitat, based on the known bones and comparisons to closely related forms. The description of Nyasasaurus was one of the year’s most important dinosaur stories. Art by Mark Witton. There’s always something new to learn about dinosaurs. Whether it’s the description of a previously-unknown species or a twist in what we thought we knew about their lives, our understanding of the evolution, biology, and extinction is shifting on a near-daily basis. Even now, paleontologists are pushing new dinosaurs to publication and debating the natural history of these wonderful animals, but the end of the year is as good a time as a

From Golf Courses to Petting Zoos, Dinosaurs Get in the Way

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 03:17:36 GMT

Dinosaurs are much more than real monsters that fire our imaginations, but, let’s face it, part of their persistent appeal is that many were enormous prehistoric oddities. And it’s just that aspect of dinosaurian nature that is raising ire in a historically-rich California town and on an Australian golf course. San Juan Capistrano, California is famous for the local cliff swallows and the historic Spanish architecture, but the town has recently been in the news because of an unwelcome dinosaur. According to the LA Times, a huge sauropod statue erected in the town’s petting zoo has drawn the ire of those who seek to retain some semblance of southern California’s

Did Early Dinosaurs Burrow?

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 03:17:15 GMT

The “Morphotype 1″ tunnel complex: points marked “a” represent tunnels, and points marked “b” signify vertical shafts. From Colombi et al., 2012. Dinosaurs never cease to surprise. Even though documentaries and paleoart regularly restore these creatures in lifelike poses, the fact is that ongoing investigations into dinosaur lives have revealed behaviors that we never could have expected from bones alone. Among the most recent finds is that dinosaurs were capable of digging into the ground for shelter. Burrows found in Australia and Montana show that some small, herbivorous dinosaurs dug out cozy little resting places in the cool earth. But when did

Beyond the Childhood Dinosaur Phase: Why Dinosaurs Should Matter to Everyone

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 04:14:27 GMT

Dinosaurs are often thought of as kid’s stuff. In America, at least, going through a “dinosaur phase” is just another part of childhood, and somewhere along the way we’re expected to stop acting like walking encyclopedias to Mesozoic life. Yet this narrow view of dinosaurs as nothing more than pre-teen kitsch obscures the essential truths these animals can share with us about evolution, extinction, and survival. As paleontologist Michael Novacek argues in the video above, the history of dinosaurs is also our history–our mammalian ancestors and relatives snuffled and scurried through a dinosaur-dominated world for more than 150 million years. We can’

I is for Irritator

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 05:05:45 GMT

A reconstruction of Irritator. Photo by Kabacchi, image from Wikipedia. Spinosaurs are often called “fish-eating dinosaurs.” Their long, shallow snouts recall the jaws of crocodiles, and, based on gut contents and fossil geochemistry, it seems that these dinosaurs truly were piscivores. Yet spinosaurs weren’t on a strict fish diet. In 2004, Eric Buffetaut and colleagues described a spinosaur tooth embedded in the fossilized neck vertebrae of an Early Cretaceous pterosaur found in Brazil’s roughly 110-million-year-old Santana Formation. The paleontologists couldn’t say whether the dinosaur caught its prey on the wing or scavenged a fresh carcass, but, based

How Did Raptors Use Their Fearsome Toe Claws?

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 07:22:08 GMT

Did Deinonychus and other “raptors” use their foot claws to restrain prey? Art by Emily Willoughby, image from Wikipedia. When paleontologist John Ostrom named Deinonychus in 1969, he provided the spark for our long-running fascination with the “raptors.” Similar dinosaurs had been named before–Velociraptor and Dromaeosaurus were named four decades earlier–but the skeleton of Ostrom’s animal preserved a frightening aspect of the dinosaur that had not yet been seen among the earlier finds. The assembled remains of Deinonychus included the dinosaur’s eponymous “terrible claw”–a wicked, recurved weapon held off the ground o

What Prehistoric Reptile Do These Three-foot Claws Belong To?

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 08:48:36 GMT

The arms of Therizinosaurus–as yet, the rest of the dinosaur is missing. Photo by FunkMonk, image from Wikipedia. The most famous set of arms in the history of dinosaurs belong to Deinocheirus–eight foot long appendages from a huge ornithomimosaur that roamed Mongolia around 70 million years ago. But the immense ostrich-mimic wasn’t the only giant omnivore of its time, nor the only one made famous by its imposing arms. About 20 years before the discovery of Deinocheirus, a joint Soviet-Mongolian expedition found extremely long, tapering claws and a few other bones from a gigantic reptile. The identity of this animal took decades to untangle. Paleontologist Evgeny Mal

Scientists Discover Oldest Known Dinosaur

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 04:56:00 GMT

A restoration of Nyasasaurus in its Middle Triassic habitat, based on the known bones and comparisons to closely related forms. Art by Mark Witton. For the past twenty years, Eoraptor has represented the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs. This controversial little creature–found in the roughly 231-million-year-old rock of Argentina–has often been cited as the earliest known dinosaur. But Eoraptor has either just been stripped of that title, or soon will be. A newly-described fossil found decades ago in Tanzania extends the dawn of the dinosaurs more than 10 million years further back in time. Named Nyasasaurus parringtoni, the roughly 243-million-year-old fossils represent

H is for Hagryphus

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 08:27:13 GMT

The articulated, almost-complete hand of Hagryphus giganteus. From Zanno and Sampson, 2005. When I think of oviraptorosaurs – feathered, beaked, omnivorous theropods–my mind immediately jumps to Mongolia’s famous brooding dinosaurs and other forms extracted from Asia’s Cretaceous rock. But these weird dinosaurs were present in North America, too. Among the latest to come to the attention of paleontologists is Hagryphus giganteus–a large oviraptorosaur known from little more than a hand and pieces of foot. Paleontologists started to report on the oviraptorosaurs of North America’s Late Cretaceous in the 1930s. They just didn’t immediately recog

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Dinosaurian Oddities

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 06:47:28 GMT

A cautious Camptosaurus approaches a resting Allosaurus. Even though the carnivore undoubtedly hunted the herbivore at times, the two weren’t constantly at war with each other. Art by John Conway, from All Yesterdays. The dinosaurs I grew up with were both intensely exciting and incredibly dull. They were creatures unlike anything I had ever seen, but their drab, scaly flesh was always fit snugly to their bones with little embellishment. For decades, this has been the paradox of prehistoric restorations. Reconstructed skeletons are gloriously magnificent and introduce us to strange creatures that we never could imagined if we did not already know they existed. Yet the art of revi

Why Did Plant-Munching Theropods Get So Big?

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 03:18:57 GMT

The arms of the huge ornithomimosaur Deinocheirus. How did such herbivorous theropods get to be so big? Photo by Eduard Solà, image from Wikipedia. When I was first becoming acquainted with dinosaurs in the mid 1980s, “theropod” was synonymous with “carnivorous dinosaur.” Large or small, from Tyrannosaurus to Compsognathus, every theropod I knew of sustained itself on the flesh of other organisms. But it was just about that time that new discoveries and analyses revealed that many theropod dinosaurs were omnivores, or even herbivores. The ostrich-like ornithomimosaurs, beaked oviraptorosaurs and utterly bizarre therizinosaurs, in particular, embodied a switch fr

Feathers Fuel Dinosaur Flight Debate

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 03:00:27 GMT

Archaeopteryx had a wing that was different from that of modern birds, and, as seen here, might have been a glider more than a powered flyer. Art by Carl Buell, courtesy of Nicholas Longrich. How did feathered dinosaurs take to the air? Paleontologists have been investigating and debating this essential aspect of avian evolution for over a century. Indeed, there have been almost as many ideas as they have been experts, envisioning scenarios of dinosaurs gliding through trees, theropods trapping insects with their feathery wings and even aquatic Iguanodon flapping primitive flippers as flight precursors (I didn’t say that all the ideas were good ones). The biomechanical abilities

What is Genyodectes?

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 02:46:29 GMT

An illustration showing the only known bones from Genyodectes. Art in Woodward, 1901, image from Wikipedia. Paleontologists are naming new dinosaurs at an astonishing rate. In fact, they’re only just begun to skim the diversity of dinosaurs preserved in the world’s Mesozoic formations–hundreds of unknown dinosaur species are undoubtedly hiding in stone. But even among dinosaurs that have a formalized identity, there are many that we know relatively little about. Among them is Genyodectes serus, a carnivorous dinosaur known from the tip of its fearsome jaws and little else. Though it’s far from being a household name, Genyodectes holds a significant place in the

G is for Gigantspinosaurus

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 03:04:07 GMT

A restoration of Gigantspinosaurus. Art by Conty, image from Wikipedia. Stegosaurus was a weird dinosaur. We’ve known that for well over a century, but, as Darren Naish has often pointed out, Stegosaurus was strange even compared to its Jurassic relatives. The dinosaur’s arrangement of broad, alternating plates is a departure from the arrangements of smaller plates, back spikes and accessory spines seen on many other stegosaurs, including the perplexingly well-armed Gigantspinosaurus sichuanensis. Ornamented with a double row of short, narrow plates along its back, the roughly 160-million-year-old Gigantspinosaurus generally resembled other stegosaurs from Late Jurassic As

Stegosaurus Plate Debate

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 03:22:31 GMT

Thanks to a row of huge bony plates, Stegosaurus remains one of the strangest dinosaurs ever found. Photo by the author at the Utah Field House of Natural History in Vernal, Utah. Undoubtedly familiar to any dinosaur fan, Stegosaurus remains one of the strangest dinosaurs ever discovered. Even among others of its kind, the iconic Jurassic herbivore looks like an oddball. Many other stegosaur species sported long rows of spikes and short plates, but the flashy Stegosaurus had an alternating row of huge bony plates along its back and a relatively modest set of four tail spikes. How could such a strange arrangement of adornments have evolved? From the arms of tyrannosaurs to the necks of

What Kind of Dinosaur is Coming to Dinner?

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 03:00:36 GMT

Today’s turkeys are living dinosaurs, snoods and all. Photo by Yathin S Krishnappa, image from Wikipedia. Tonight, at dinner tables all around the country, families are going to dine on dinosaur. If you dissect your holiday theropod just right, the ancient nature of the tasty avian is strikingly evident–right down to the wishbone. But what kind of dinosaur is a turkey, anyway? Birds are dinosaurs. That’s a fact. But birds are really just one kind of dinosaur. Indeed, we call Triceratops, Euoplocephalus, Futalognkosaurus, Allosaurus and their ilk non-avian dinosaurs because these lineages fell outside the bird subgroup at greater or lesser distances. Birds are a disti

What’s the Secret of Hadrosaur Skin?

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 02:16:10 GMT

This famous Edmontosaurus skeleton was found with intricate traces of skin over much of its body. Image in Osborn, 1916, from Wikipedia. Last week, I wrote about attempts by paleontologist Phil Bell and colleagues to extract biological secrets from fossilized traces of dinosaur skin. Among the questions the study might help answer is why so many hadrosaurs are found with remnants of their soft tissue intact. Specimens from almost every dinosaur subgroup have been found with some kind of soft tissue preservation, yet, out of all these, the shovel-beaked hadrosaurs of the Late Cretaceous are found with skin impressions and casts most often. Why? Yale University graduate student Matt Dav

Paleontologists Puzzle Over Possible Dinosaur Bones

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 02:36:45 GMT

Partial bone shafts found in Late Triassic rock in England might represent a sauropodomorph, similar to this Plateosaurus, or an entirely different kind of creature. Photo by FunkMonk, image from Wikipedia. Dinosaur giants are among the most famous Mesozoic celebrities. Yet the dinosaur growth spurt didn’t start just as soon as Eoraptor and kin evolved. For most of the Triassic, the first act in their story, dinosaurs were small and gracile creatures, with the first relatively large dinosaurs being the sauropodomorphs of the Late Triassic. Even then, Plateosaurus and kin didn’t come close to the truly enormous sizes of their later relatives–such as Diplodocus and Futa

F is for Futalognkosaurus

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 02:27:01 GMT

The giant sauropod Futalognkosaurus (at left) with some of its Cretaceous neighbors. Art by Maurilio Oliveira. Which was the biggest dinosaur ever? We don’t know. Even though the size-based superlative draws a great deal of attention, paleontologists have uncovered so many scrappy sauropod skeletons that it’s difficult to tell who was truly the most titanic dinosaur of all. But, among the current spread of candidates, Futalognkosaurus dukei is one of the most complete giant dinosaurs yet found. Discovered in 2000, and named in 2007 by Universidad Nacional del Comahue paleontologist Jorge Calvo and colleagues, Futalognkosaurus was one of many dinosaurs found in an exception

Cretaceous Legs Give Away New Dinosaur

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 03:18:53 GMT

Only hindlimb elements of Alnashetri are known so far, but, based on the dinosaur’s relationships, the tiny theropod probably looked something like this Alvarezsaurus. Photo by FunkMonk, image from Wikipedia. Many dinosaurs have gained fame thanks to their gargantuan size. A creature in the form of a dipldodocid or tyrannosaur would be wonderful at any scale, but the fact that Apatosaurus was an 80-foot-long fern-sucker and Tyrannosaurus was a 40-foot carnivore make their skeletal frames all the more spectacular. Even as an adult, long after my first encounter with their bones at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, I still feel tiny when I look up at whatR

Lessons from Einiosaurus

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 02:18:52 GMT

A reconstruction of an Einiosaurus skull in a ceratopsid gallery at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Photo by Maarten Heerlien, image from Wikipedia. Xenoceratops was a gnarly-looking ceratopsid. There’s no doubt about that. Much like its horned kin, the dinosaur sported a distinctive array of head ornaments from the tip of its nose to the back of its frill. But that’s hardly the entire story behind this newly named dinosaur. Contrary to many news reports that focused almost entirely on the dinosaur’s appearance, the real importance of Xenoceratops is in its geological and evolutionary context. The dinosaur is the first identifiable ceratopsid from the rela

Peering Inside Dinosaur Skin

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 03:23:58 GMT

Dinosaur reconstructions often begin and end with bones. Dinosaur muscles and organs usually don’t survive the processes that turn bodies into fossils, with casts of the intestinal tract–called cololites–and other soft tissue clues being rarities. Restoration of those squishy bits relies on comparison with modern animals, muscle scars on bones and other lines of evidence. Yet paleontologists have found a great deal of dinosaur skin impressions, especially from the shovel-beaked hadrosaurs of the Cretaceous. We probably know more about the actual external appearance of hadrosaurs such as Edmontosaurus and Saurolophus than almost any other dinosaurs. Hadrosaurs found w

Tracking Dinosaurs With Ray Stanford

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 03:18:21 GMT

East coast dinosaurs are few and far between. Unlike the exposed formations in the western badlands, much of the dinosaur-bearing strata in the eastern states are hidden beneath forests, lawns and parking lots. But you can still find signs of dinosaurs if you know where to look. Amateur ichnologist Ray Stanford has a knack for finding dinosaur tracks and traces in the Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C. area. Among his recent finds are an impression of a baby ankylosaur–on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History–and a track made by an adult of a similar dinosaur on the grounds of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. As our paleontolog

E is for Eotriceratops

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 03:14:53 GMT

The reconstructed skull of Eotriceratops. The actual specimen is not complete, but, based on the recovered elements and the dinosaur’s relationships, we know the dinosaur would have looked similar to Triceratops. Photo by Roland Tanglao, image from Wikipedia. Triceratops is among the most cherished of dinosaurs. Even that might be a bit of an understatement. Fossil fans threw a conniption when they mistakenly believed that paleontologists were taking the classic “three-horned face” away, after all. But where did the charismatic chasmosaurine come from? Triceratops didn’t simply spring from the earth fully formed–the ceratopsid was the descendant of a long

Paleontologists Welcome Xenoceratops to the Ceratopsian Family Tree

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 02:17:12 GMT

A restoration of Xenoceratops by Danielle Dufault, courtesy David Evans. It’s a good time to be a ceratopsid fan. Since 2010, paleontologists have introduced us to a slew of previously unknown horned dinosaurs, and new discoveries are continuing to trickle out of field sites and museums. Long-forgotten specimens and unopened plaster jackets, especially, have yielded evidence of ceratopsids that researchers overlooked for decades, and this week Royal Ontario Museum paleontologist David Evans and colleagues have debuted yet another horned dinosaur that was hiding in storage. The Late Cretaceous exposures of Alberta, Canada’s Belly River Group are rich with ceratopsid fossils

Piecing Together Eolambia

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 03:07:27 GMT

The reconstructed skull of Eolambia–based on a partial adult skull and scaled juvenile elements–and a restoration by artist Lukas Panzarin. From McDonald et al., 2012. Hadrosaurs were not the most charismatic dinosaurs. Some, such as Parasaurolophus and Lambeosaurus, had ornate, hollow crests jutting through their skulls, but, otherwise, these herbivorous dinosaurs seem rather drab next to their contemporaries. They lacked the garish displays of horns and armor seen among lineages such as the ceratopsians and ankylosaurs, and they cannot compete with the celebrity of the feathery carnivores that preyed upon them. Yet in the habitats where they lived, hadrosaurs were among t

Did Sauropods Have Built-In Swamp Coolers?

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 03:45:55 GMT

Mamenchisaurus, one of the longest-necked dinosaurs of all time, perfectly represents the bizarre nature of sauropods. Art by Steveoc 86, image from Wikimedia Commons. Sauropods were extreme dinosaurs. From the relatively small dwarfed species–still a respectable 12 feet long or so–to giants that stretched over 100 feet long, these small-headed, column-limbed, long-necked dinosaurs were among the strangest creatures ever to walk the earth. Don’t be fooled by the familiarity of species like Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus; the anatomy of sauropods was so strange that paleontologists are still debating basic issues of their biology. How sauropods mated, fed, pumped blood

Finding Duriavenator

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 03:30:55 GMT

The upper and lower jaws of Duriavenator, illustrated when they were thought to belong to Megalosaurus, in A History of British Fossil Reptiles Vol. II. Image from Wikipedia. If you have been following the Dinosaur Alphabet series so far, you may have noticed a pattern among the first four entries. At one time or another, all the dinosaurs I’ve selected so far were thought to be different animals. The horned Agujaceratops was originally named as a species of Chasmosaurus, the distinctive high-spines of Becklespinax gave Richard Owen’s dopey Megalosaurus its hump, the sauropod Cetiosaurus was originally envisioned as a giant crocodile, and the armored Dyoplosaurus was lumped

D is for Dyoplosaurus

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 03:49:15 GMT

The dinosaur William Parks described as Dyoplosaurus, showing where the bones would have fit on the actual animal. From Arbour et al., 2009. If I started this Dinosaur Alphabet series just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have included Dyoplosaurus. Up until 2009, the dinosaur was hiding within another genus of heavily-armored ankylosaur. But after decades of discovery and debate, Dyoplosaurus is back, and the Cretaceous club-tail has its own role to play in wider discussions about the tempo and mode of dinosaur evolution. Canadian paleontologist William Parks named the ankylosaur in 1924. Just a few field seasons earlier, in 1920, a University of Toronto crew found the partial skele

New Dinosaur Discovered – Named After the Demonic Sauron from Lord of the Rings

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 02:05:00 GMT

In this restoration by Emiliano Troco, a Sauroniops feeds on a juvenile Spinosaurus. (And yes, all the dinosaurs in this image are fluffy.) Image courtesy Andrea Cau. Earlier this year, paleontologists Andrea Cau, Fabio Dalla Vecchia and Matteo Fabbri described a strange, 95-million-year-old skull scrap from an unknown dinosaur. Acquired by a commercial collector from Morocco’s Kem Kem beds and later donated to Italy’s Museo Paleontologico di Montevarchi, the bone showed signs that it belonged to a carcharodontosaurid–massive cousins of the familiar Allosaurus. There was something odd about the fossil. The bone was a frontal–situated at the top of the skull jus

Following Dinosaur Falls

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 01:31:20 GMT

Many Allosaurus bones have been found with fractures and other pathologies, but were any of these injuries caused by falls? Photo taken at the Natural History Museum of Utah by the author. If an Allosaurus fell in the Jurassic, would it leave a trace fossil? We know that resting dinosaurs can leave body impressions behind, as shown by a theropod trace found in St. George, Utah, but what if a dinosaur lost its footing and fell over onto a mudflat or sand dune? Such events surely must have happened. The question is whether the embarrassing moments ever became set in stone. A trace fossil would be the obvious mode of preservation for a dinosaur fall. A messy footprint, recording the slip

What Scared Dinosaurs? The Terror Croc

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 04:53:58 GMT

A reconstruction of Deinosuchus at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Photo by the author. From the time of their origin around 230 million years ago, to the extinction of the non-avian forms 66 million years ago, dinosaurs ruled the Earth. That’s how we like to characterize the Mesozoic menagerie, anyway. We take the long success of the dinosaurs as a sign of their long-lived and terrifying domination, but, despite our belief that they were the most vicious creatures of all time, there were creatures that even the dinosaurs had reason to fear. Chief among them was Deinosuchus – North America’s “terrible crocodile.” Between 80 and 73 million years ago, w

Finding Hayden’s Dinosaurs

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 02:01:32 GMT

Fossil teeth, found by Ferdinand Hayden in Montana, which Joseph Leidy attributed to the dinosaur “Trachodon.” From Leidy, 1860, image from Wikipedia. More than 150 years ago, a young naturalist picked up a collection of isolated teeth and bones weathering out of the ground in what is now northern Montana. These weren’t the remains of any living animals but vestiges of Cretaceous life that naturalists had only just begun to recognize and categorize. Even the young explorer who picked them up, Ferdinand Hayden, didn’t know what they were, and so he sent them back east for identification. As the Philadelphia-based polymath Joseph Leidy later determined, some of Ha

C is for Cetiosaurus

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 04:33:02 GMT

A mount of Cetiosaurus at the New Walk Museum in Leicester. While the neck of this sauropod is almost completely known, no skull has ever been described. Photo by Flickr user Paul Stainthorp. Sauropods were magnificent dinosaurs. These long-necked, small-headed titans were unlike anything that has evolved before or since, and they were so strange that paleontologists are still debating the basics of how Apatosaurus and kin actually lived. As iconic as their skeletons are now, though, the first sauropod ever described was initially envisioned as a very different sort of creature. The great Cetiosaurus was originally seen as a gargantuan, plesiosaur-crunching crocodile. In 1841, the Bri

Did Tyrannosaurus Ever Battle Triceratops?

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 04:58:30 GMT

Part of a multi-step sequence by which Tyrannosaurus could have beheaded Triceratops, based on research by Fowler et al. Art by Nate Carroll. For a dinosaur so terrifyingly powerful as Tyrannosaurus, there was no greater rival than Triceratops. Each was the acme of their respective lineage–one a hypercarnivorous bone-crusher, the other an immense three-horned herbivore. No wonder that artists, paleontologists, filmmakers and children on playgrounds have been pitting these dinosaurs against each other for over a century. Yet, despite how much we love to revel in the Cretaceous gore of such scenarios, we don’t really know whether Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops ever fought each

Feathery Ostrich Mimics Enfluffle the Dinosaur Family Tree

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 06:00:10 GMT

Not only was Ornithomimus feathered, but the dinosaur’s fluffy coat changed as it aged. Lovely art by Julius Csotonyi. Another week, another feathery dinosaur. Since the discovery of the fluffy Sinosauropteryx in 1996, paleontologists have discovered direct evidence of fuzz, feather-like bristles and complex plumage on over two dozen dinosaur genera. I love it, and I’m especially excited about a discovery announced today. In the latest issue of Science, University of Calgary paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky adds another enfluffled species to the dinosaurian ranks. Even better, the specimens raise hopes that many more dinosaurs might be preserved with their feathery coats int

Reviving Heterodontosaurus

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 02:44:00 GMT

Heterodontosaurs were freaky. If you don’t believe me, check out the time-lapse reconstruction of this Heterodontosaurus head by artist Tyler Keillor. Released earlier this month in conjunction with a massive monograph on these dinosaurs in ZooKeys, the video beautifully demonstrates how our changing understanding of paleobiology is reviving even classic dinosaurs. Heterodontosaurus was originally described in 1962. This ornithischian was a relatively small dinosaur, only about four feet long, but the creature’s name is a clue to its Jurassic weirdness. Heterodontosaurus, like its close relatives, had a toolkit of different teeth (or a “heterodont dentition) in its m

Dinosaurs Rule at SVP

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 02:40:06 GMT

A reconstruction of Acrocanthosaurus at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina, where this year’s SVP reception was held. Photo by Famille Wielosz-Caron, image from Wikipedia. The annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting is a test of endurance. The science comes fast and furious in presentations, posters, hallway conversations and shouted exchanges over the din of the bar, with no consideration for how dehydrated, weary or hungover you might be. (Paleontologists study hard and party harder.) By the last day, my brain ached with details of flying Microraptor, bounding crocodiles, marsupial bone microstructure and dozens of other topics. W

B is for Becklespinax

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 02:42:55 GMT

The peculiar, high-spined specimen that represents Becklespinax (left), and two possible restorations of the dinosaur by Darren Naish (right). From Naish and Martill, 2007. Poor, neglected Becklespinax. Although this gaudy, sail-backed theropod was an impressive predator at the time it strode across England around 140 million years ago, the fragmentary remains of this dinosaur have a tangled history only recently highlighted by the discovery of a more completely-known relative. In the history of paleontology, Becklespinax the tale is a tragedy. The bones of Becklespinax were among the earliest spate of dinosaur discoveries in England, before anyone really understand just how many dino

Tarbosaurus the Tip of the Black Market Iceberg

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 04:21:01 GMT

The skull of a mounted Tarbosaurus (not the specimen seized by authorities). Photo by Jordi Payà, from Wikipedia. For the past six months, the fate of a million-dollar tyrannosaur has been in limbo. A composite Tarbosaurus skeleton has been awaiting the outcome of an ongoing court trial–will the dinosaur bones go home to Mongolia or wind up in the hands of the private collector who successfully bid for the dinosaur? At every step, the case has become more complex. What was thought to be a single, mostly complete dinosaur turned out to be a jumble of many, and the documents used to import the fossils to the United States hint that these dinosaurs were indeed smuggled out of Mongo

Dinosaur Stampede, the Musical

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 01:29:50 GMT

About 95 million years ago, in Cretaceous Australia, an aggregation of small dinosaurs scurried along an ancient lake margin in what is the world’s only known “dinosaur stampede.” Exactly what caused the dinosaurs to scatter is a mystery. A set of larger tracks, found at the same quarry, have been cast as the footprints of a big predator who was stalking the mixed herd. But, as the rock record shows, this bigger dinosaur passed by at a different time than that of the stampede. And that bigger dinosaur may not have been a carnivore. A recent reassessment of the site raised the possibility that a large herbivore, akin to Muttaburrasaurus, left the tracks. We really don&

Did Dinosaurs Eat Ants?

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 12:29:46 GMT

A reconstruction of Patagonykus, one of South America’s alvarezsaurs. Image from Wikipedia. If there’s one group of dinosaurs that needs better PR, it’s alvarezsaurs. They’re among the strangest dinosaurs to have ever evolved, yet outside of dinosaur die-hards, few people have ever heard of them. They’re not one of those classic forms–the sauropods, tyrannosaurs, stegosaurs, or ceratopsids–that have been cherished for the past century. Paleontologists only recently began to uncover their bones. Alvarezsaurus itself was named in 1991, but it and its close relatives didn’t quite get swept up in the same wave of dinomania as their other Meso

The Saddest Dinosaur Cartoon Ever

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 02:27:04 GMT

For over a century, non-avian dinosaurs have been symbols of extinction. Our awe at their success, and our puzzlement at their ultimate demise, have made them perfect foils for our worries and fears. During World War I, for example, anti-war protestors cast dinosaurs as brutes who drove themselves into extinction by investing too much in their armor and weapons. Later, during the Cold War era, the asteroid strike that closed the Age of Dinosaurs was presented as a Mesozoic precursor to what mutual assured destruction might do to the planet. Not only have we looked to dinosaurs for lessons about what the future might hold, but we’ve also used them as icons of what might happen if

A is for Agujaceratops

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 02:03:18 GMT

A skeletal reconstruction of Agujaceratops, from Sampson et al., 2010. Out of the scores of non-avian dinosaurs discovered, some get all the love. Almost everyone can rattle off a few of the most famous–Triceratops, Stegosaurus and, of course, Tyrannosaurus rex (the only one we ever feel compelled to call by its whole name). But the Age of Dinosaurs was a 160-million-year reign filled with a startling variety of species that we’re only just beginning to become acquainted with. It’s truly a shame that we continually focus on the same handful when there were so many wonderful forms. Among the unsung dinosaurs is Agujaceratops, a horned herbivore that was only recently r

Jurassic Park 4′s Discharged Dinosaur Soldiers

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 02:23:00 GMT

About five years ago, the movie gossip site Ain’t It Cool News pulled back the curtain on a Jurassic Park we’ll never see. A scrapped script for the franchise’s fourth film told a tale of dinosaurs that had not only been brought back from extinction but had also been further modified to make them humanoid soldiers. Sadly, the plot had nothing to do with Axe Cop’s Dinosaur Soldier. Thanks to a little Internet sleuthing, we now know what those dinosaurian troops would have looked like. Earlier this week io9 posted concept art from the discarded version of Jurassic Park 4. It turns out that, for once, Hollywood hype was right. If this movie was actually made, Jura

The Bat-Winged Dinosaur That Never Was

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 02:43:49 GMT

Pennycuick’s hypothetical Archaeopteryx ancestor, with membranes between the fingers and no feathers. From Pennycuick, 1986. How dinosaurs took to the air is one of the longest-running debates in paleontology. Ever since the first skeleton of Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861, researchers have wondered what the archaic bird might tell us about how flight evolved and how the feathery creature connected its reptilian ancestors with modern birds. Even now, when we know that birds are a feathered dinosaur lineage, the origins of flight remain a contentious issue constrained by the available fossil evidence and our ability to reconstruct how prehistoric creatures moved. Before pal

Doing the T. rex Stretch

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 02:50:35 GMT

Few things in paleontology generate as much speculation, and ridicule, as the arms of Tyrannosaurus rex. In a culture where “bigger” is confused with “better,” we can’t seem to get our heads around why such a large predator would have such small forelimbs. Most puzzling of all is that the dinosaur’s arms were not vestigial–they were muscular appendages that must have had some function. But what? Our understanding of tyrannosaur arms is constrained by what we think that dinosaurs were capable of. The trick is parsing the difference between what T. rex could do and what it actually did. Even though it appears that the forelimbs of the tyrant din

How Did Dinosaurs Sleep?

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 02:03:30 GMT

A second specimen of the troodontid Mei, preserved in a bird-like sleeping position. From Gao et al., 2012. Bone by bone and study by study, paleontologists are learning more than ever before about dinosaurs. But there are still many aspects about prehistoric biology that we know little about. In fact, some of the simplest facets of dinosaur lives remain elusive. For one thing, we don’t know much at all about how dinosaurs slept. Did Apatosaurus doze standing up or kneel down to rest? Did tyrannosaurs use their tiny, muscular arms to push themselves off the ground after a nap? And, given the discovery of so many enfluffled dinosaurs, did fuzzy dinosaurs ever cuddle up together t

The Fall of Domino Dinosaurs

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 02:33:26 GMT

The end of the Cretaceous ended in one of the most catastrophic mass extinctions of all time. Among the various forms of life that were toppled were the non-avian dinosaurs. Triceratops and company didn’t exactly fall like dominoes, but, in this short video created by Flippycat.com, domino dinosaurs replay the epic destruction. And stay tuned for the behind-the-scenes video at the end. Just as the last non-avian dinosaurs had an evolutionary backstory stretching back millions and millions of years, it took a long time to set up the toy dinosaurs for their downfall.

Haplocanthosaurus–A Morrison Mystery

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 02:20:17 GMT

A headless Haplocanthosaurus, laid out at the Utah Field House of Natural History. Photo by the author. The Morrison Formation is one of the most wonderful slices of prehistoric time found anywhere in the world. Parts of this Late Jurassic record pop up all over the American west, from Montana to Texas, and the sequence harbors wonderful bonebeds such as those at Dinosaur National Monument, Utah, and Bone Cabin Quarry, Wyoming. Yet, while the upper part of the Morrison has yielded splendid specimens of famous dinosaurs such as Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus and more, the lower part of the formation contains a gaggle of puzzling dinosaurs. Haplocanthosaurus is one of these enigmas

Long Live the King

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 02:51:29 GMT

Thomas the T. rex, a lovely reconstruction at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Photo by the author. Recently I was leading friend and fellow-writer Seth Mnookin through the Natural History Museum of Utah’s prehistoric exhibits when he asked a question that has popped up in my own mind from time to time–why is Tyrannosaurus rex so popular? There were stranger carnivores, and journalists love to delight in the announcements that slightly bigger theropods have dethroned the tyrant king. Yet T. rex remains the quintessential dinosaur. Part of the secret, I think, is cultural inertia. Paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn named Tyrannosaurus rex in 1906, during a time

Dilophosaurus – An Early Jurassic Icon

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 02:23:34 GMT

Dilophosaurus, in a restoration based on an impression found at St. George, Utah. Art by Heather Kyoht Luterman, from Milner et al., 2009. The Early Jurassic is a mysterious time in dinosaur evolution. In North America, at least, paleontologists have uncovered scores of dinosaur tracks from this critical time when dinosaurs had been handed ecological dominance in the wake of a mass extinction, but body fossils are rare. In the orange sandstone that makes up so much of Arches and Canyonlands national parks in Utah, for example, only a handful of skeletons have ever been found. This formation–called the Glen Canyon, Navajo, Nugget or “Nuggaho” depending on who you ask&#

Dinosaur Sighting: Recyclosaurus

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 04:15:49 GMT

Recyclosaurus rex, seen outside the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, Florida. Photo courtesy of reader Wyrmwren. Last month, we asked readers to vote for their favorite entry from all the weird and wonderful Dinosaur Sightings we’ve cataloged over the past few years. Naturally, though, there are even more roadside monsters out there. Readers quickly responded with a significant omission from our list–Tampa, Florida’s Recyclosaurus. Reader Wyrmwren sent in this snapshot, writing “With so much to see and all the traffic, we almost missed him and had to go back for a closer look.” But this dinosaurian monument to recycling isn’t looking as good

Triceratops Wasn’t Toxic

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 02:17:50 GMT

Triceratops at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Photo by the author. Triceratops was an A+ dinosaur. But, awesome as the hulking ceratopsid was, it didn’t have mutant superpowers. Indeed, despite a website’s claim to the contrary, there’s no evidence that this three-horned behemoth defended itself with poisonous quills. Even though it was posted over a year ago, I’ve received a few emails this week asking about a Listverse post by user “TyB” titled “Top 10 Dinosaurs That Aren’t What They Were.” For the most part, the list is a simple summary of how new discoveries and ideas have revitalized images of dinosaurs. W

Where’s My Clone-o-saurus?

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 02:33:56 GMT

Seeing a hadrosaur alive would be a fantastic sight. Or any non-avian dinosaur, for that matter. As lovely as today’s avian dinosaurs are, it’s their distant, extinct cousins that fire my imagination. Sadly, despite the speculations of theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, I don’t think my dinosaur dreams are going to come true. In a Big Think video posted last week, Kaku rhapsodized about the possibility of resurrecting extinct species through genetic techniques. I’m not as optimistic as he is, especially since Kaku glosses over some essential steps in his confused editorial. Kaku spends most of the video talking about Neanderthals and woolly mammoths. These spe

Dino Time Botches Dino Feathers

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 03:12:35 GMT

I’ve spilled a lot of virtual ink about feathered dinosaurs over the past few weeks. Despite assertions to the contrary, bristles, fluff and feathers make dinosaurs more interesting and exciting than they have ever been before. Of course, not every attempt to put plumage on dinosaurs does the animals justice. Case in point–Dino Time 3D. I’ll watch just about anything with dinosaurs in it. This blog is all about tracking dinosaurs through science and pop culture, after all. But I am not going to subject my brain to Dino Time 3D (formerly DinoMom). Anything that “stars” Rob Schneider and two (!) Baldwin brothers is best avoided, especially since th

Technicalities Tangle Tarbosaurus Case

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 02:24:21 GMT

The skull of a mounted Tarbosaurus. Photo by Jordi Payà, from Wikipedia. Since May, Mongolian officials, a fossil dealer, federal agents and paleontologists have been tussling over a million-dollar dinosaur. And the story of this Tarbosaurus keeps getting more complicated. When the tyrant was sold by Heritage Auctions, the dinosaur was advertised as being about 75 percent complete. But, according to a court hearing earlier this month, only about fifty percent of the reconstruction came from a single animal. The rest apparently came from any number of other dinosaurs. Eric Prokopi–the dealer who imported, mounted and tried to sell the dinosaur–has not provided any informati

Did Dinosaurs Swim?

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 02:37:50 GMT

Fossil swim tracks indicate that theropods similar to this Megapnosaurus at least occasionally swam in prehistoric lakes and rivers. Art by Dmitry Bogdanov, image from Wikipedia. Paleontologist R.T. Bird inspected many dinosaur trackways while combing Texas for the perfect set to bring back to the American Museum of Natural History. During several field seasons in the late 1930s, Bird poked around in the Early Cretaceous rock in the vicinity of the Paluxy River for a set of sauropod footprints that would fit nicely behind the museum’s famous “Brontosaurus” mount. Bird eventually got what he was after but not before poring over other intriguing dinosaur traces. One of

What Kind of Dinosaur is Godzilla?

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 02:07:00 GMT

Paleontologist Kenneth Carpenter’s conception of Godzilla, shown alongside a 40-foot Tyrannosaurus. From Carpenter, 1998. Godzilla certainly puts the “fiction” in sci-fi. When you’re dealing with an amphibious dinosaur the size of a mountain that is effectively a biological nuclear reactor, it’s advisable to leave the monster as a symbol of wanton atomic destruction and not worry too much about scientific accuracy. But with the upcoming American reboot of the long-running franchise, I couldn’t help but wonder about the one aspect of Godzilla where paleontology might have something to contribute–just what sort of dinosaur Godzilla is. Everyone

The Awkwardness of Tyrant Teens

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 02:14:38 GMT

A cast of the juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex “Jane” at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Photo by the author. Tyrannosaurus rex is a perfectly-named dinosaur. There is no better title for a forty-foot long, knife-toothed predator that was the biggest carnivore in its ecosystem and, sadly, one of the last non-avian dinosaurs. For over a century, the tyrant has been the quintessential dinosaur, and the fantastic nature of the creature has even ensnared paleontologists. No non-avian dinosaur has been as celebrated or well-studied, and all that attention continues to yield unexpected discoveries about how this dinosaur actually lived. For one thing, T. rex had the most formid

Tussling Over Thecodontosaurus

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 02:38:50 GMT

A reconstruction of an adult and juvenile Thecodontosaurus. From Benton, 2012. When British anatomist Richard Owen coined the term “Dinosauria” in 1842, there were nowhere near as many dinosaurs known as there are today. And even among that paltry lot, most specimens were isolated scraps that required a great deal of interpretation and debate to get right. The most famous of these enigmatic creatures were Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus–a trio of prehistoric monsters that cemented the Dinosauria as a distinct group. But they weren’t the only dinosaurs that paleontologists had found. Almost 20 years before he established the Dinosauria, Owen named what

The Unfortunate Life of Speckles the Tyrannosaur

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 02:22:33 GMT

Speckles the Tarbosaurus just can’t catch a break. For one thing, the menacing tyrannosaur is named “Speckles”–not exactly the most intimidating name for the Late Cretaceous carnivore. But, in the Korean-made film Speckles: The Tarbosaurus 3D released last year, things get far worse for our unfortunately-named hero. If you’re a dinosaur cinema aficionado, you’ve seen Speckles’ tale before. Proving that dinosaur cinema may be the most unoriginal sub-sub-sub genre out there, the story is a mish-mash of elements from Disney’s Dinosaur, the anime treat You are Umasou, the cutesy Pangea, the dinosaur sequence of Fantasia and even Ricardo Dela

The Worst Dinosaur Ever

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 01:14:32 GMT

Ugly tyrannosaurs are a cinema tradition. With the exception of the burly stop-motion version in the 1933 King Kong and the hot-blooded monsters of the Jurassic Park franchise, the majority of tyrant dinosaurs to stomp their way across the screen have been ugly, tottering brutes that only bear the most superficial resemblance to the actual animal. The Land Unknown‘s man-in-suit version looked incapable of threatening a rotting carcass, much less live prey, and I lost all respect for the titular villain of The Last Dinosaur when a boulder caved in the puppet’s noggin, only to roll away and leave the theropod unscathed. (And let’s not talk about Tammy and the T-Rex or T

The Tyrannosaurus Rex’s Dangerous and Deadly Bite

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Tyrannosaurus rex has always been recognized as fearsome—the New York Times labeled it the “prize fighter of antiquity” when the first mounted T. rex bones were displayed in 1906—but thanks to two British researchers, it’s now clear that the giant carnivore bit harder than experts had thought. A lot harder. Karl Bates, a biomechanics expert at the University of Liverpool, and Peter Falkingham, a paleontologist at the Royal Veterinary College, London, and Brown University, acknowledge that measuring the biomechanics of an extinct species “is notoriously difficult and involves numerous assumptions.” But for their assessment of T. rex’s bite, p

Sinking a Sauropod

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 02:28:58 GMT

One of the vertebrae–as seen from the front (a) and back (b)–used to name the dinosaur Arkharavia heterocoelica. Although originally thought to come from a sauropod, it turns out that this bone belonged to a hadrosaur. From Alifanov and Bolotsky, 2010. Dinosaurs come and go. Even though paleontologists are naming new dinosaurs at a fantastic rate–hardly a week seems to go by without the announcement of a previously-unknown species–researchers are also sinking and revising previously-discovered taxa as new finds are compared against what has already been found. The ever-growing ontogeny debate–which threatens the horned dinosaur Torosaurus and the hadrosaur

Outlining Olorotitan

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 03:29:18 GMT

The reconstructed skeleton of Olorotitan, from Godefroit et al., 2012. Olorotitan was one of the most elegant dinosaurs of all time. The 26-foot-long hadrosaur, found in the Late Cretaceous rocks of eastern Russia, had the typical deep tail, beefy legs and slender arms of its kin, but a fan-shaped crest jutting out of the back of the dinosaur’s skull gave it a striking profile. As with its North American cousins Corythosaurus and Lambeosaurus, the hollow head ornament is what makes this dinosaur stand out. Paleontologist Pascal Godefroit of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and colleagues initially described Olorotitan in 2003. Now, in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica

Giddyup, Tricerajeep!

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 02:41:21 GMT

What could be better than seeing a living Triceratops? Riding one, of course. Doctor Who showed us that much. Sadly, old “three horned face” is long gone. I wouldn’t count on the dinosaur to be brought back to us by way of genetic experiments or alien arks filled with dinosaurs. But don’t despair, Triceratops fans. An art group called Wreckage International combined Triceratops with a Jeep to create “Adrianne,” a working autosaurus. You can hear about how Adrianne was created here. No word yet on whether the next model will resemble Torosaurus.

Dryptosaurus Needs a Hand

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 01:55:47 GMT

I have a soft spot for Dryptosaurus. The enigmatic tyrannosauroid was found in my previous home state of New Jersey, and, more than that, played a key role in helping 19th-century paleontologists revise their understanding of just what a dinosaur really was. I even took the theropod’s original name–”Laelaps“, sadly found to be preoccupied by a kind of mite–as my nom de blog. The dinosaur perfectly combines my love of tyrannosaurs and the history of science with a reminder of where I came from. Despite the historic importance of Dryptosaurus, though, the Late Cretaceous predator has since been overshadowed by bigger, badder dinosaurian carnivores. While Dr

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 02:22:39 GMT

I have a confession to make. Before this weekend, I’d never watched even a single episode of Doctor Who. (Shock. Horror.) I’m a bad nerd, I know. But when BBC One announced that the second episode of the show’s seventh season was titled “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”, I knew I had to finally check out the goofy sci-fi staple. I’m not going to say much about the plot of the show itself. When you have dinosaurs, Queen Nefertiti and a pair of insecure sentry robots voiced by David Mitchell and Robert Webb on the same ship–among other things–it’s better to simply let the program speak for itself. All you need to know is that an alien ark i

What’s Sexy to a Dinosaur?

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 03:11:11 GMT

A sculpture of Pentaceratops outside the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. Could sexual selection account for the prominent ornaments of this dinosaur? Photo by the author. Non-avian dinosaurs were weird. That’s one of the reasons we love them so much. There’s nothing quite like a slender-necked Barosaurus, a beautifully-crested Dilophosaurus or lavishly-ornamented Pentaceratops alive today. If such dinosaurs were anything, they were bizarre, but why were they so strange? Each case demands its own explanation, and paleontologists have continuously tussled over whether particular ornaments were weapons, sexual displays or something else. According to an in-p

The Past Keeps Getting Cooler

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 03:26:36 GMT

“Feathers” by Randall Munroe, from http://xkcd.com/ Anyone who regularly reads this blog knows that there’s a very easy way to make me annoyed–all you have to do is start whining about how dinosaurs are less cool since paleontologists discovered that many non-avian species sported tufts and coats of fluff, fuzz, bristles and feathers. My reaction is usually along the lines of “Brian SMASH!” Even though I understand that some people find scaly, monstrous dinosaurs aesthetically appealing, I have no patience for the callow assertion that science has somehow ruined dinosaurs through the addition of plumage. Cartoonist Randall Munroe summed up my feelin

Spider-Man versus Dinosaur Duel Even Weirder Than it Sounds

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 02:45:54 GMT

What do Spider-Man, a dinosaur and a banana have in common? This is not a trick question. In this old animated public service announcement–dredged from the depths of the internet by io9–Spider-Man stops the rampage of an amphibious carnosaur, and all he asks for in return is a simple banana. I can only imagine that the wall-crawler had an unfortunate realization soon after he swung away–”You fool! Think of all the bananas you could have bought with four hundred million dollars!”

The Mysterious Martharaptor

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 03:13:05 GMT

Martharaptor’s affinities are a mystery, but, if the dinosaur was a therizinosauroid, it probably looked like its cousin Falcarius (pictured here at the old Utah Museum of Natural History). Photo by the author. What is Martharaptor? That’s the question raised by paleontologists Phil Senter of Fayetteville State University, Jim Kirkland and Don DeBlieux of the Utah Geological Survey in their description of the previously-unknown dinosaur, published last week in PLoS One. Too little of the creature was preserved to be sure, but the enigmatic theropod may belong to one of the strangest dinosaur lineages of all time. Martharaptor greenriverensis is another Utah dinosaur, named

Stomach Contents Preserve Sinocalliopteryx Snacks

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 02:38:28 GMT

Sinocalliopteryx feeds on the dromaeosaurid Sinornithosaurus (left) and the early bird Confuciusornis (right). Art by Cheung Chungtat, from Xing et al., 2012. Earlier this week, I got into a snit over the blinkered assertion that feathery dinosaurs are lame. I argued the opposite point–as I wrote at the time “Feathered dinosaurs are awesome. Deal with it.” How fortunate that a new paper this week offers proof of fuzzy dinosaur superiority. The evidence comes in the form of gut contents found within predatory dinosaurs that stalked Cretaceous China around 125 million years ago. The carnivores in question are a pair of Sinocalliopteryx. These dinosaurs were close cousi

Catching a Dinosaur by the Tail

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 02:12:37 GMT

Despite being famous for its size, Spinosaurus is mostly known from fragments such as this bit of upper jaw. We don’t really know how large this carnivore was. Photo by FunkMonk, image from Wikipedia. How big was Spinosaurus? The croc-snouted, sail-backed theropod was heralded as being even bigger and more menacing than Tyrannosaurus rex thanks to Jurassic Park III, placing Spinosaurus among the ranks of Giganotosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus as challengers to the vaunted title of the biggest flesh-eater to ever walk the earth. Depending on who you ask, Spinosaurus was about 41 to 59 feet long, making it as large as–if not larger than–old T. rex. Asking “Which

What’s Wrong With Giraffatitan?

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 02:35:46 GMT

Spinosaurus was named for its long neural spines. What would you call it? Photo by Kabacchi, image from Wikipedia. Dinosaur names are important. Each moniker is a title that encompasses the various bones and specimens that paleontologists use to bring dinosaurs to life. When I write Tyrannosaurus rex, for instance, the name instantly conjures up an image of a hulking, deep-skulled bone-crusher that roamed western North America during the last two million years of the Cretaceous. A dinosaur’s name conveys a lot of information. Some names are more mundane than others. Allosaurus is one of my favorite dinosaurs, but her name translates to “different lizard.” Not very in

Who Doesn’t Love Fuzzy Dinosaurs?

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 02:01:46 GMT

I adore feathered dinosaurs. It feels a little strange to say that, but it’s true. Few things make me happier than seeing delicately-rendered restorations of theropods covered in fuzz and ceratopsians with some accessory bristles. The various bits of plumage–from quill-like structures to true feathers–make dinosaurs look even more wonderful and fantastic than the drab, scaly monsters I grew up with. And who wouldn’t love a fluffy like dinosaur like Sciurumimus, perhaps the cutest dinosaur of all time? Of course, not everyone feels the same way. There are some people who want their dinosaurs to be scaly, scaly, scaly, science be damned. They weep, wail and gnash

“Paleo” Isn’t Extinct Yet

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 03:05:11 GMT

The cover of Paleo #2 by Jim Lawson. Image courtesy Jim Lawson and Colin Panetta. When I wanted to review Jim Lawson’s influential dinosaur comic series Paleo last year, I had to track down the paperback anthology of the first six installments and the miscellaneous issues. The books were hard to find and only available as rare, used copies. But, fortunately for pen and ink dinosaur fans, Lawson has now revived his Cretaceous series for free on the web. For those unfamiliar with the comic, Paleo is an anthology of stories about dinosaurs that once roamed Cretaceous North America. Huge tyrannosaurs and sickle-clawed dromaeosaurs are the unquestionable stars of the series, but Laws

Birmingham’s Smoking Dinosaurs

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 02:49:23 GMT

In 1938, dinosaurs roamed the streets of Birmingham, England. Sort of. The three monsters–tottering constructions of plywood and car parts–trundled along in a parade meant to celebrate the transformation of the town from its prehistoric origins to a major industrial center. Best of all, io9 has found some footage of the grotesque dinosaurs in action. The clip is short, but you can see the trio of Egbert, Ogbert and Little Sidney taunt the accompanying guard of a hundred anachronistic cavemen. By the time of the “Stone Age,” the non-avian dinosaurs were long gone–humans never met such creatures. All the same, I have to admire the ingenuity of the people who

Bicentenaria and the Rise of the Coelurosaurs

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 03:15:09 GMT

When paleontologists at the Argentine Museum of Natural Science in Buenos Aires threw the curtain back on the new dinosaur Bicentenaria argentina last month, they showed off a beautiful mount of tussling dinosaurs. But I couldn’t help but wonder about the reconstruction. Just how much of the dinosaur had been found, and was there any direct evidence that these dinosaurs fought each other? Frustratingly, I couldn’t obtain immediate answers. The press event preceded the actual paper describing Bicentenaria. But last night I finally got my claws on the description of this archaic, peculiar dinosaur and its possible behavior. Although Bicentenaria is new to science, the dinos

Tracking Raptors

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 03:25:49 GMT

A reconstruction of Deinonychus showing how this dinosaur walked on two-toed feet. Photo by AStrangerintheAlps, image from Wikipedia. When I think of theropod tracks, the mental image that immediately pops up is of three-toed depressions with conspicuous indentations where the dinosaur’s claws dug into the substrate. After all, theropod means “beast foot,” and many theropod tracks seem to fit the name. But not all theropod dinosaurs balanced on three toes. The deinonychosaurs–the group of sickle-clawed dinosaurs that included the more slender troodontids and the bulky hypercarnivorous dromaeosaurids–ambled through the Mesozoic on two toes, with their curve

Huge Triceratops Uncovered in Alberta

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 03:19:56 GMT

A Triceratops at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Photo by Allie_Caulfield, image from Wikipedia. About a year ago, I briefly joined the Carthage College and Burpee Museum of Natural History field crews as they searched the Hell Creek Formation around Ekalaka, Montana. There were bits of Triceratops strewn across the landscape. Even though I only spent a few days among the rolling grasslands and islands of Late Cretaceous outcrop, there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t see at least a fragment of the great three-horned herbivore–from isolated teeth to skulls that had crumbled apart, Triceratops was a constant companion. Indeed, as Jack Horner and colle

NASA’s Nodosaur Track

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 03:00:41 GMT

The nodosaur Animantarx. While this dinosaur is from Utah, it represents the sort of dinosaur that made the track found at the Maryland NASA campus. Photo by Kabacchia, image from Wikipedia. Last fall, fossil tracker Ray Stanford and paleontologists David Weishampel and Valerie Deleon announced something wonderful–a rare impression of a baby ankylosaur. The delicate specimen, officially named Propanoplosaurus marylandicus and on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, is an Early Cretaceous snapshot from Maryland that gives us a fleeting picture of how these armored dinosaurs started life. And the fossil is even more spectacular given the rarity of dinosaur

How Domed Dinosaurs Grew Up

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 05:49:06 GMT

A pair of Stegoceras on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Alberta, Canada. Photo by Sebastian Bergmann, image from Wikipedia. The history of pachycephalosaurs is mostly a story of domes. Even though some skeletons have been uncovered over the years, the most commonly-found part of these bipedal Cretaceous herbivores is the thickened, decorated skull. As a result, much of what we know about these dinosaurs comes from skull fragments, and this can sometimes seed confusion about which fossils represent new species and which are individuals of already-known dinosaurs. Take the partial pachycephalosaur skull UCMP 130051, for example. In 1990, paleontologist Mark Goodwin described the sk

An In-Depth Look at Ankylosaur Armor

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 02:27:03 GMT

Soft tissue traces of the ankylosaur Tarchia. Black asterisks denote large osteoderms, scale impressions are pointed out by an arrowhead and small ossicles are identified by the arrow. From Arbour et al., 2012. Ankylosaurs can be frustrating dinosaurs. In life, armor covered the bodies of these dinosaurs from snout to tail, but those bony adornments often fell out of place between the death and ultimate burial of the ankylosaurs. Reconstructing an ankylosaur, therefore, requires that paleontologists not only figure out the articulations of the bones but also the arrangement of the armor. Every now and then, though, researchers discover one of these dinosaurs with some armor still in pl

Carnotaurus Had a Hefty Neck

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 05:56:32 GMT

The skulls and necks of Majungasaurus (top) and Carnotaurus (bottom) compared. From Méndez, 2012. Carnotaurus was a weirdo. Not only did this 26-foot predator of Argentina’s Late Cretaceous have prominent horns jutting from its short, deep skull, but, since the time of the dinosaur’s discovery in 1985, paleontologists have been puzzled by the strange arms of the theropod. Despite having absolutely huge shoulder bones, Carnotaurus had wimpy arms that were even stubbier than those on the oft-ridiculed tyrannosaurs. Stubby forelimbs go all the way back to the beginning of the lineage that Carnotaurus belonged to–the abelisaurids–but this ancient South American pred

Banjo Gets a Hand

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:13:49 GMT

Banjo’s reconstructed hand, with the thumb claw on top. From White et al., 2012 Australia isn’t well-known for exceptional dinosaur fossils. Even though the continent contains some spectacular tracksites, such as the “Dinosaur Stampede,” many of the dinosaurs discovered in Australia over the past few years are only known from scraps. Among the exceptions are a trio of dinosaurs first described in 2009 from remains found in Queensland–a pair of sauropods and a theropod nicknamed “Banjo.” These roughly 110-million-year-old dinosaurs were all represented by partial skeletons, and there is even more material from these animals than was originally d

Dinosaurs Better Off Lost

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 02:13:27 GMT

Whether it’s The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield or Paranormal Activity, there’s one thing that unites all “found footage” films–the protagonists are idiots who blindly blunder into danger. More often than not, we meet an unsuspecting group of contented, naive teens or twenty-somethings just before something awful happens, and the addlepated idiots just make things worse. (If they made sensible choices and made it to safety, there wouldn’t be much of a movie.) According to an IGN review, the same can be said of The Dinosaur Project. I mentioned the dinosaur-ridden pseudo-docudrama a few weeks back. The film’s trailer didn’t inspire much

New Wrinkle in Tarbosaurus Kerfuffle

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 02:07:21 GMT

The skull of a mounted Tarbosaurus. Photo by Jordi Payà, from Wikipedia. The road home for an illicit Tarbosaurus is bound to be a long one. Earlier this summer, federal agents seized a skeleton of the tyrannosaur Tarbosaurus that had been put up for auction in New York City. The sale price for the dinosaur topped $1 million, but, as was long suspected and was soon made clear, the dinosaur was illegally smuggled into the United States. Even worse, the skeleton itself was almost certainly illegally excavated from Mongolia and subsequently smuggled out of the country. Mongolian officials, professional paleontologists, lawyers, and United States officials moved quickly to prevent the dino

Artists Bring Dinosaurs Back to Life

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:08:06 GMT

The cover of Dinosaur Art: The World’s Greatest Paleoart. This book is set to debut in September, 2012. Museums are where dinosaurs rest, but art is where dinosaurs live again. No press release about a newly-discovered dinosaur, or some new fact about an already-known dinosaur’s lifestyle, is complete with a beautifully-rendered artist’s restoration. And dinosaur art keeps improving. Since the time of the Dinosaur Renaissance in the late 20th century, artists have taken ever more care in rendering the prehistoric creatures and the habitats they called home. Truly, dinosaurs have never looked better, and the new coffee table book Dinosaur Art: The World’s Greates

Should We Go Back to Jurassic Park?

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 03:22:34 GMT

Almost 20 years after the first film debuted, rumor has it that we’ll soon see a fourth Jurassic Park film. It’s finally happening. After years of rumors, including speculation and consternation about Black Ops raptors, it seems that Jurassic Park 4 is actually going to happen. According to the latest news, writers Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa are working on the script, and producer Frank Marshall has said that he’d like to see the film hit screens by the summer of 2014. That’s awfully soon, so I can only imagine that we’re going to be hearing a lot more about the fourth film in the dinosaur-filled franchise soon. The only thing we know for sure? Despite r

An Australian Jurassic Park?

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 02:44:10 GMT

Among living dinosaurs, the cassowary is one of the most fantastic. Photo by Paul IJsendoorn, from Wikipedia. One of the reasons Jurassic Park was so successful–as a novel and a blockbuster film–is that it presented a plausible way to bring dinosaurs back to life. The idea that viable dinosaur DNA might be retrieved from bloodsucking prehistoric insects seemed like a project that could actually succeed. Even though the actual methodology is hopelessly flawed and would never work, the premise was science-ish enough to let us suspend our disbelief and revel in the return of the dinosaurs. Nevertheless, Jurassic Park brought up the tantalizing possibility that scientists migh

Dinosaur Turnover

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 03:25:41 GMT

The AMNH skeleton of Styracosaurus, one of the dinosaurs from the upper zone of the Dinosaur Park Formation. Image from Brown and Schlaikjer, 1937 via Wikipedia. Dinosaurs didn’t all live at the same time. Not counting the avian species that have thrived during the last 65 million years, dinosaurs proliferated throughout the world during a span of over 160 million years. As I’ve pointed out before, it’s amazing to think that less time separates us from Tyrannosaurus than separated Tyrannosaurus from Stegosaurus. Even within specific geologic formations, not all the dinosaurs found in those layers lived side by side. Dinosaur-bearing strata accumulated over millions a

The Double Dinosaur Brain Myth

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 03:48:06 GMT

Contrary to a popular myth, Stegosaurus did not a have a butt brain. Photo by the author at the Utah Field House of Natural History in Vernal, Utah. There’s no shortage of dinosaur myths. Paleontologist Dave Hone recently compiled a list of eight persistent falsehoods over at the Guardian–from the misapprehension that all dinosaurs were huge to the untenable idea that Tyrannosaurus could only scavenge its meals–but there was one particular misunderstanding that caught my attention. For decades, popular articles and books claimed that the armor-plated Stegosaurus and the biggest of the sauropod dinosaurs had second brains in their rumps. These dinosaurs, it was said, c

Reverse Jurassic Park

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 06:47:29 GMT

Almost 20 years since it first debuted, Jurassic Park is still the quintessential dinosaur movie. But what if the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras were flipped, with intelligent Velociraptor pondering the ferocity of our species? This YouTube parody imagines just that, and a follow-up cartoon depicts that dinosaurs’ amazement at seeing living elephants in “Quaternary Park.” I can only hope that the creators of the spoof eventually get to the famous chase sequence, with a tiger chasing after a jeep full of Velociraptor.

A Brief History of Hidden Dinosaurs

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 06:38:00 GMT

A fragment of the lower jaw of Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur to be scientifically named in 1824. Long before this, though, people puzzled about the nature of dinosaur bones. Image from Wikipedia. We will never know the identity of the first person to discover a fossilized dinosaur. Sure, the British naturalist William Buckland described Megalosaurus in 1824, now regarded to be the first dinosaur to be scientifically named, but people were finding dinosaurs long before Buckland puzzled over his “great lizard.” As Adrienne Mayor and other geohistorians have documented, people all over the world have been recognizing and wondering about dinosaurs and other fossilized creat

Armor for Sauropods

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 02:44:48 GMT

A speculative restoration of the armored sauropod Agustinia. Art by Nobu Tamura, image from Wikipedia. Sauropods are often called “long-necked dinosaurs.” The term is apt – sauropods such as Barosaurus had necks of mind-boggling proportions – but the designation is only the barest sketch of what these dinosaurs were like. After all, long necks were not unique to these herbivores. The recently-discovered stegosaur Miragaia had an extended neck, and the weird feathery theropods called therizinosaurs also had long series of cervical vertebrae. But, more than that, sauropods were a strange, disparate group of animals that were so much more than a long neck on a stou

“Tiny Paleontologist” Loves Dinosaurs

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 02:09:15 GMT

The reconstructed skeleton of a Deinonychus, a dromaeosaur, at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. Photo by the author. From professional paleontologists to kids, there are dinosaur lovers of all ages. But one of the most enthusiastic I’ve ever seen is “the Tiny Paleontologist” – a 4-year-old dinosaur fan who shares his passion through occasional video updates on this blog. In the latest entry, the tiny paleontologists rhapsodizes about dromaeosaurs, or the group of carnivorous dinosaurs with retractable sickle claws on their toes. He’s a little off on some of the particulars, but there can be no doubt that this kid absolutely adores dinosaurs.

The Dinosaur Project Prepares for Launch

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 01:03:27 GMT

All the non-avian dinosaurs are gone. The last of them died out 66 million years ago. All the same, living dinosaurs – birds – aren’t exactly a substitute for Apatosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and Stegosaurus. We miss the truly spectacular, bizarre dinosaurs that lived and died so long ago. At least we can catch brief glimpses of our favorite prehistoric creatures in the ever-increasing list of dinosaur movies, and among the upcoming titles is a film that uses actual legends for its launching point. When I was young, one of the first dinosaur movies I ever saw was Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. Drawing from myths and unsubstantiated rumors, the film imagined what would h

Vandals Smash Irreplaceable Dinosaur

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 01:01:04 GMT

The skull of Edmontosaurus, a Cretaceous hadrosaur from North America. The vandalized dinosaur wasn’t an Edmontosaurus, but belonged to the same evolutionary group. Photo from Ballista, image from Wikipedia. When paleontologists uncover a dinosaur, they have plenty of reason to worry. In some parts of the world, such as Mongolia, black market thieves often steal and smuggle dinosaurs that wind up bringing in hefty sums at auction houses. Sometimes, paleontologists have returned to field sites to find skeletons stolen right out from under their noses. But, even closer to home, vandals regularly damage and destroy dinosaurs. Earlier this month, an “irreplaceable” dinosa

Baby Dinosaur Mystery

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 12:53:00 GMT

The skull of Oviraptor. This fossil was found with fossil eggs, indicating that this parent was brooding over a nest. From Osborn et al., 1924. In 1994, paleontologists made a discovery that turned one dinosaur’s name into an irony. That dinosaur was Oviraptor – the so-called “egg thief” discovered several decades before, but that turned out to be a caring mother. The story starts in 1923. In that year, an expedition from the American Museum of Natural History discovered dinosaur eggs in the Cretaceous rock of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. At the time, the paleontologists thought that the eggs had been laid by Protoceratops – a small horned dinosaur that

How Did Diplodocus Eat?

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 07:30:07 GMT

The head of Diplodocus, on a reconstruction at the Utah Field House of Natural History. Photo by the author. At about 80 feet long, an adult Diplodocus would have required a huge amount of food to fuel its bulk. But how did these huge dinosaurs actually eat? We know from the anatomy of their skulls, and their peg-like teeth, that Diplodocus and other sauropods were not capable of chewing. They did not stand among the Jurassic’s fern-covered floodplains, grinding away. These gargantuan dinosaurs clearly plucked food, then swallowed the mouthfuls whole, but what did Diplodocus dinner habits actually entail? Paleontologist Mark Young and co-authors have just released a new study in

Dino Beatdown is Boring

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 12:03:06 GMT

When I first heard about the game Orion: Dino Beatdown, my reaction was simple. “Jetpacks and dinosaurs? Sound interesting.” After spending a few hours blasting Velociraptor while zipping around the virtual battlefield, though, I can safely say that I was wrong. The game isn’t interesting. As Dino Beatdown frustratingly demonstrates, jetpacks and dinosaurs can’t save a poorly-executed shooter. There’s no story in Dino Beatdown. No introduction. No background. Nothing. Instead, your armor-clad player is dropped into forests and jungles where waves of Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus try to eat you. The game is simply a first person shooter survival mode, and

Round 1 of the Dinosaurs vs Aliens Throwdown

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 05:55:31 GMT

A few months back, I mentioned a comic-movie tie-in that sounds like a shameless cash grab – Dinosaurs vs Aliens. Sadly, the titular extraterrestrials are not the parasitic, acid-spitting ALIENS of horror movie fame – imagine what a Triceratops chestburster would have looked like! – but super-intelligent robo-squid who want to wrest control of the earth from the indigenous dinosaurs. Up until yesterday, I had only seen the promotional hype for this monstrous mash-up. Then Part 1 of the comic arrived at my door. The front matter makes the origin and intent of the story crystal clear. Barry Sonnenfeld, director of the comic-book adaptation Men in Black and its sequels,

Will We Ever Find All the Dinosaurs?

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 03:56:00 GMT

Allosaurus is one of the best-known dinosaurs, but it’s rare to find an extensive record of any single dinosaur genus. And there are some dinosaurs that we may never meet at all. (Photo taken at the Natural History Museum of Utah by the author) During the past two centuries, paleontologists have discovered and named over 600 different non-avian dinosaur genera. At first glance, that might seem like a lot of dinosaur diversity (especially since only a handful of dinosaurs are well-known to the public). But it’s really just the tip of the Mesozoic iceberg. New dinosaurs are being described on a near-weekly basis, and, as estimated by paleontologists Steve Wang and Peter Dods

Angela Milner on Dinosaurs

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 06:54:44 GMT

I grew up during one the best possible times for a dinosaur fan. During the late 80s and early 90s, when our country’s Dinomania was at its apex, dinosaurs were almost always on television in some form or another. There were movies, cartoons, and documentaries, and among the programs I regularly watched was Dinosaurs Dinosaurs Dinosaurs. The show was part of a fun series that covered dinosaurs in science as well as pop culture, and now, almost thirty years after the program first aired, YouTube user DinosaurTheatre has shared part of an original interview with Natural History Museum paleontologist Angela Milner. We’ve featured Milner here before – in a short video ab

On the Trail of a Weird Dinosaur

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 04:00:25 GMT

A restoration of the therizinosaur Nothronychus. Art by Nobu Tamura, altered by ArthurWeasley. Image from Wikipedia. “Therizinosaur” isn’t a household name. This group of feathery dinosaurs hasn’t been around long enough to have the same cultural cachet as the tyrannosaurs, “raptors“, or other famous dinosaur tribes. But the therizinosaurs really do deserve more popularity. Although they were cousins of the carnivorous, sickle-clawed deinonychosaurs, the therizinosaurs were long-necked, pot-bellied omnivores and herbivores, albeit ones that had insanely long claws on their hands. They are some of the strangest dinosaurs ever found, and a track discov

Did All Dinosaurs Have Feathers?

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 05:19:56 GMT

The skeleton of Sciurumimus, seen under UV light. You can see traces of protofeathers alon the dinosaur’s tail. Photo by Helmut Tischlinger. On Monday, the world met yet another fuzzy dinosaur. The little theropod – named Sciurumimus albersdoerferi – is beautifully preserved in a slab of roughly 150 million year old limestone found in Germany. (These deposits have also brought us Archaeopteryx and the also-fluffy Juravenator.) And, with a little evolutionary context, Sciurumimus hints that filament-like protofeathers were more common among dinosaurs than we previously expected. Birds – the only surviving lineage of dinosaurs – are covered in plumage. No s

A Sneak Peek at a New Dinosaur

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 08:07:43 GMT

Last week, paleontologists at the Argentine Museum of Natural Science in Buenos Aires literally unveiled a new dinosaur. Named Bicentenaria argentina to celebrate the museum’s 200th anniversary and just over two centuries of Argentine independence, the dinosaur was presented in a dramatic mount in which two of the predatory dinosaurs face off against each other. As yet, there’s not very much to say about the dinosaur. The paper officially describing Bicentenaria has yet to be published. Based on various news reports, though, Bicentenaria appears to be a 90 million year old coelurosaur. This is the major group of theropod dinosaurs that contains tyrannosaurs, deinonychosaur

Will We Ever Find Dinosaurs Caught in the Act?

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 03:42:28 GMT

Will we ever find mating dinosaurs? No one knows, but the discovery of fossils showing dinosaur behavior—such as this nesting oviraptorosaur—hint that we may someday find dinosaur sex set in stone. Photo by Steve Starer, image from Wikipedia. Earlier this month, I wrote a short article for Nature News about 47-million-year-old turtles that died at a very inopportune moment. Several pairs of prehistoric turtle were fossilized in the act of mating—the tragic consequence of sinking to the toxic depths of a prehistoric lake. An unfortunate fate for the reptiles, but a boon for the paleontologists who found the sexy fossils. The discovery got me thinking about dinosaur sex. I’ve writ

In the Steps of a Hungry Acrocanthosaurus

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 04:43:57 GMT

A reconstructed Acrocanthosaurus at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Photo by the author. Compared to mounted dinosaur skeletons, fossil footprints might seem like mundane objects. They only record one small part of a fantastic creature, and it is harder to envision a whole dinosaur from the ground up than the wrap flesh around a skeletal frame. But we should not forget that dinosaur footprints are fossilized behavior—stone snapshots of an animal’s life. And sometimes, trackways record dramatic moments in dinosaur lives. In 1938, American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Roland T. Bird traveled to Glen Rose, Texas to investigate rumors of huge dinosaur trac

You Say Tyrannosaurus, I Say Tarbosaurus

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 02:30:34 GMT

The skull of a mounted Tarbosaurus. Photo by Jordi Payà, from Wikipedia. Last Friday, the United States government captured a tyrannosaur. The scene was more Law & Order than Jurassic Park. The million-dollar Tarbosaurus skeleton was seized in an ongoing legal dispute about the origins of the dinosaur and how it was imported to the United States. To date, the evidence suggests that the giant Cretaceous predator was illegally collected from Mongolia (a country with strict heritage laws), smuggled to England and then imported to the United States under false pretenses, all before a private buyer bid more than a million dollars for the skeleton at auction. (For full details on the ong

How Hadrosaurs Chewed

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 08:03:09 GMT

Hadrosaurs have often been called “duck-billed dinosaurs.” You don’t have to look at their skulls for very long to see this analogy is wide of the mark. Not only did hadrosaurs such as Edmontosaurus have shovel-shaped, grooved beaks, but their jaws were lined with rows of cropping, crushing teeth. These dinosaurs didn’t dabble in Cretaceous swamps – they grazed the prehistoric plains. And, up until recently, it was thought that these huge herbivores possessed an evolutionary innovation that made them the dinosaurian equivalent to cows. In general, dinosaur jaws and teeth were for cutting, plucking, and tearing. Dinosaurs didn’t chew their fo

Beautiful Dinosaurs Ripped From Time

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 04:54:29 GMT

The reconstructed cast of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus in the NHMLA's centerpiece Dinosaur Hall display. Photo by the author. There has never been a better time for dinosaurs. Skeleton by skeleton, museum by museum, the reconstructed frames of the prehistoric creatures are being updated and repositioned in shiny displays garnished with interactive screens and smartphone tours. The last of the tail-dragging holdouts – leftovers from before the “Dinosaur Renaissance” of the 70s and 80s changed our perspective of how a dinosaur should look – are being disassembled and reconstructed in more active, agile positions. Among the latest museums to revamp their dinosaur e

When Mammals Ate Dinosaurs

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 04:23:00 GMT

A restoration of Repenomamus snacking on a young Psittacosaurus. Image by Nobu Tamura, from Wikipedia. What dinosaurs ate, and how they ate it, is an endless source of fascination. Whether it’s the predatory habits of Tyrannosaurus rex or how sauropods managed to horf down enough food to fuel their bulky bodies, the details of dinosaurs’ paleo diets fuel scientific study and dinosaur restorations alike. If basic cable documentaries have taught me anything, it’s that dinosaurs were all about eating. But dinosaurs were not invulnerable consumers. Even the biggest and fiercest dinosaurs were food sources for other organisms—from giant crocodylians to parasites an

Release the Tarbosaurus!

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 07:23:56 GMT

The auctioned Tarbosaurus skeleton. Image via Heritage Auctions. A million dollar dinosaur may soon be going home. Last month, Heritage Auctions offered a mostly complete, reconstructed skeleton of the tyrannosaur Tarbosaurus for sale. This was despite protests from the Mongolian government and paleontologists that the specimen was illegally collected from Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. The country has very strict regulations involving the collection and curation of dinosaurs, and the very fact that the tyrannosaur was taken from Mongolia and put up for sale was a sure sign that it was an illicit specimen. The auction house went along with the sale anyway—where the top bid was a little

How to Assemble a Giant

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 03:23:16 GMT

A restoration of Futalognkosaurus. Art by Nobu Tamura, image from Wikipedia. On June 23rd, the Royal Ontario Museum is going to open a tribute to some of the largest and strangest dinosaurs ever found, in Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants From Gondwana. The centerpiece of the celebration is a full-size mount of the huge sauropod Futalognkosaurus—a long-necked, 105-foot titan that was described in 2007. And as part of the lead-up to the exhibit’s debut, the Toronto Star is featuring a time-lapse video of how paleontologists put the dinosaur together. After just a few hours, an 87-million-year-old giant stands again.

Disease and the Demise of the Dinosaurs

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 03:59:04 GMT

Disease has often been blamed for the extinction of the last dinosaurs, such as this Edmontosaurus at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Photo by the author. There are more than 100 hypotheses for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Asteroid impact is the most famous, and the effects of volcanic eruptions, sea level change and climate fluctuations remain debated, but other fantastic and weird ideas have been tossed around. Many of the discarded notions, proposed before we knew an extraterrestrial bolide struck the Yucatán Peninsula, cited pathologies as the deciding factor. Cataracts, slipped discs, epidemics, glandular problems and even a loss of sex drive have all been proposed

Shovel-Beaked, Not Duck-Billed

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 06:49:59 GMT

A reconstruction of the Edmontosaurus skull LACM 23502, with a beak based on a natural mold. From Morris, 1970. I’ve never liked the term “duck-billed dinosaur.” I know it’s part of the accepted dinosaur lexicon, just like “raptor” is, but every time I hear the phrase I think of a sluggish, swamp-bound Edmontosaurus dabbling in the water for soft water plants and algae. Paleontologists tossed out this imagery decades ago—hadrosaurs were terrestrial creatures with jaws specially adapted to grinding down tough vegetation. I admit that the skull of Edmontosaurus looks superficially duck-like. Much like a mallard’s, the Late Cretaceous hadrosaur&#

Apatosaurus Was a Deceptive Dinosaur

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 07:00:53 GMT

Apatosaurus means “deceptive lizard.” It’s really the perfect name for the bulky Jurassic sauropod. “Brontosaurus“—a dinosaurian fan favorite whose memory lives on even after being relegated to the taxonomic dustbin—turned out to be a species of Apatosaurus, and for decades, paleontologists assigned the wrong head to Apatosaurus because of a confused view of who the dinosaur was most closely related to. Apatosaurus continues to play tricks. The sauropod tracks placed behind the American Museum of Natural History’s Apatosaurus skeleton were actually made by much different sauropods that lived millions of years later. The cartoon series “I’

The Dinosaurs They are a-Changin’

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 01:51:03 GMT

Even familiar dinosaurs, such as this Allosaurus at Utah's Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, still raise many questions about dinosaur biology. Photo by the author. The dinosaurs I met as a kid aren’t around anymore. I don’t mean to say that all the classic dinosaurs I saw in the late 1980s were sunk, synonymized or otherwise driven into a second extinction. “Brontosaurus” is the only major example of that (although Torosaurus and Anatotitan may soon follow). No, what I mean is that the tail-dragging, drab, stupid dinosaurs I was first introduced to have all been replaced by agile, brightly-colored, complex animals that were amazingly bird-like. Our image of

A Paleo Proposal

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 02:38:00 GMT

Paleontologists Lee Hall and Ashley Fragomeni have just set their engagement in the sweetest, geekiest way I have ever seen. On June 2, Lee took Ashley out to the fictional “Snakewater, Montana” field camp from the beginning of Jurassic Park. Since both are fans of the film, Ashley didn’t suspect that Lee had a grander motive for bringing her out to the movie spot. I won’t spoil Lee’s technique here—watch the video—but to me it looked like the perfect paleo engagement. Congratulations, Lee and Ashley!

In Defense of Raptors

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 02:46:29 GMT

A high-kicking Utahraptor outside the College of Eastern Utah's Prehistoric Museum in Price. Photo by the author. Prior to the summer of 1993, “raptor” was synonymous with “bird of prey.” If you said “raptor,” whoever you were talking to knew you were talking about some kind of hawk, owl, eagle or other sharp-taloned aerial predator. Then Jurassic Park came along. Thanks to some taxonomic muddling and abbreviation, the cunning, sickle-clawed villains of the film’s third act immediately came to be known as “raptors.” Velociraptor, Deinonychus and kin had stolen the term for themselves. Among non-avian dinosaurs, raptor might ref

Dinosaur Sighting: Artsy Apatosaurus

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 03:09:10 GMT

Roger Cutler's wire Apatosaurus. Photo by Sarah Zielinski. Today’s Dinosaur Sighting comes to us from friend of the blog Sarah Zielinski. While visiting the 10th floor of the Artomatic festival in Crystal City, Virginia, where she is an exhibitor, Sarah spotted the wire dinosaur creations of Roger Cutler. Along with an Allosaurus and a tiny Tyrannosaurus, Cutler created an eight-foot-high model of Apatosaurus—a scaled-down outline of the massive Jurassic herbivore. Have you seen a dinosaur or other prehistoric creature in an unusual place? Please send a photo to dinosaursightings@gmail.com.

Brontosaurus Returns

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 03:00:56 GMT

The original AMNH mount of Brontosaurus, reconstructed in 1905. Image from Wikipedia. “Brontosaurus” should have disappeared a long time ago. Paleontologist Elmer Riggs recognized that the famous “thunder lizard” was a synonym of Apatosaurus more than a century ago, and a 1936 monograph by Charles Gilmore strongly reinforced what Riggs had discovered. Brontosaurus was not a real dinosaur. But, thanks to museum displays and pop culture persistence, Brontosaurus hung on. Even now, we feel compelled to invoke Brontosaurus in the same breath as Apatosaurus—it seems that no one can use the name Apatosaurus without explaining to their audience that we used to call the

A Little Lost Tyrannosaur

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 04:40:56 GMT

Life for Tyrannosaurus was undoubtedly tough at the start. Not only were there huge, ornery Triceratops to worry about, but the young tyrants also had to watch out for bigger members of their own kind. (As the fossil record has shown, Tyrannosaurus weren’t above eating their own when the opportunity came up.) But it’s still fun to imagine big-eyed little tyrants running around the Cretaceous world, taking in the sights, sounds and smells of all around them. And while it’s definitely on the sillier side, that’s just what the animation trailer for Pangea – The Neverending World envisions. I haven’t seen Pangea in its entirety. Until this morning, I di

Time for a Dinosaur Attack?

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 02:01:29 GMT

What would life be like if dinosaurs such as this Ceratosaurus (at Ogden, Utah's Eccles Dinosaur Park) suddenly returned? Photo by the author. I was probably too young for my Dinosaurs Attack! cards. When the Topps set popped up at local convenience stores in 1988, I was only five—a touch on the innocent side as I opened the packs of gratuitous dinosaurian carnage. But maybe my naïveté worked to my advantage. Images of Parasaurlophus munching on babies (!) and Stegosaurus thagomizers dashing people’s eyes from their sockets were so over the top that I wasn’t bothered by them. Dinosaurs were supposed to be fearsome and dangerous, right? The gonzo violence looked more or

America's Monumental Dinosaur Site

Thu, 31 May 2012 04:04:17 GMT

As you approach Dinosaur National Monument—America’s most celebrated dinosaur graveyard—you can’t miss all the prehistoric beasts dotting the roadside. To the east, tail-dragging, misshapen dinosaur statues that would make a paleontologist cringe menace the small town of Dinosaur, Colorado. To the west, monsters stalk Highway 40 from downtown Vernal, Utah to the entrance of the park. A miniature “Brontosaurus” stands behind a chain link fence at a Sinclair gas station, and a lumpy Diplodocus with a goofy smile greets visitors turning off the highway. Actual dinosaurs were discovered here a century ago. Starting in 1909, fossil hound Earl Douglass found

Fate of Auctioned Tarbosaurus Yet to be Determined

Thu, 31 May 2012 02:45:34 GMT

The auctioned Tarbosaurus skeleton. Image via Heritage Auctions. What will become of the auctioned Tarbosaurus skeleton? Paleontologists have been wondering about the illicit dinosaur’s fate ever since it was sold for more than a million dollars late last month. Even though the dinosaur was probably illegally collected from Mongolia, Heritage Auctions officials snarled at their critics and decided to go ahead with the auction anyway. And even though a last-minute restraining order halted the dinosaur’s immediate transfer to an unknown buyer, no one knew what was going to happen next. For now, at least, the controversial tyrannosaur specimen isn’t going anywhere. Robe

The Fantastic Gliding Stegosaurus

Wed, 30 May 2012 01:35:07 GMT

A gliding Stegosaurus. From the Ogden Standard-Examiner, 1920. Stegosaurus is undoubtedly one of the most perplexing dinosaurs. What was all that iconic armor for? (And how did amorous stegosaurs get around that complication?) Paleontologists have been investigating and debating the function of Stegosaurus ornamentation for decades, but without much consensus. The dinosaur’s spectacular plates were certainly prominent visual signals, but could they also have been used for regulating body temperature? Or might there be some evolutionary impetus we’re not thinking of? Of course, a few ideas have been tossed in the scientific wastebasket. Despite what 19th and early 20th century

Birds Have Juvenile Dinosaur Skulls

Tue, 29 May 2012 12:49:01 GMT

Archosaur skull changes (juveniles on the left, adults on the right). While there was a significant amount of change between the juvenile and adult skulls of alligators (top) and the non-avian dinosaur Coelophysis (middle), there was little change between the juvenile and adult skulls of early birds such as Archaeopteryx (bottom) and their closest dinosaur relatives. From Bhullar et al., 2012. Birds are dinosaurs. That much is certain. That deep connection, bolstered by fossil finds and theoretical frameworks, has made dinosaurs seem more bird-like than ever expected. From feathers to nesting behavior, many aspects of avian natural history are now known to have originated among non-avi

Social Sauropods?

Fri, 25 May 2012 02:43:09 GMT

The rebbachisaurid Limaysaurus. This sauropod was similar to the ones discovered by Salgado and colleagues in the Patagonian bonebed. Image by FunkMonk, from Wikipedia. Dinosaur skeletons are marvelous things. The reconstructed bones of Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Styracosaurus, Barosaurus and the like are beautiful monuments of natural architecture. But what really makes the skeletons so fantastic is that we know they once cradled viscera and were wrapped in flesh. It’s impossible to look at a dinosaur’s skeleton and not wonder about how the animals looked and acted in life. How social dinosaurs were is one of the most persistent mysteries of their natural history. Rare trac

New Dinosaur Signifies Dawn of Stubby-Armed Predators

Thu, 24 May 2012 01:32:08 GMT

A skeleton reconstruction of Eoabelisaurus, showing the recovered parts of the skeleton. From the LMU press release. Some dinosaur lineages are more famous than others. I can say “tyrannosaur” and most anyone immediately knows what I’m talking about: a big-headed, small-armed predator similar to the notorious Tyrannosaurus rex. The same goes for “stegosaur,” and of course it helps that Stegosaurus itself is the famous emblem of this bizarre group. But public understanding hasn’t kept up with new discoveries. In the past two decades, paleontologists have identified various dinosaur lineages vastly different from the classic types that gained their fam

A Dinosaur Expedition Doomed From the Start

Wed, 23 May 2012 03:14:26 GMT

There aren’t any sauropods in the Congo Basin. There’s not a scrap of evidence that long-necked, swamp-wallowing dinosaurs are hiding somewhere in the jungles of Africa, or anywhere else. And I say that as someone who was enthralled when I saw the puppet brontosaurs of 1985′s Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (see the clip above), arguably the best movie dinosaurs before Jurassic Park stomped along. After seeing that movie, I really, really wanted there to be living sauropods, but the evidence simply doesn’t exist. Rumors that there might be an Apatosaurus-like dinosaur in the Congo Basin have circulated for years. Young earth creationists have been especially en

Tarbosaurus on Trial

Tue, 22 May 2012 02:37:31 GMT

A few weeks ago, Heritage Auctions announced that it had a tyrannosaur to sell. The assembled and articulated Tarbosaurus was expected to fetch nearly a million dollars at the May 20 auction. Paleontologists shook their heads in dismay: Such specimens typically come with very little documentation and often end up in private collections, lost to researchers and the public alike. News services and aggregators made typically inane comments about the dinosaur being the perfect gift for the dinosaur aficionado who has everything. I expected the sale to go on and the dinosaur to disappear into some affluent buyer’s private collection. But this dinosaur has rapidly become a symbol of a

Utahceratops Debut

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:47:52 GMT

A new reconstruction of Utahceratops at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Photo by the author. Cretaceous Utah was a strange place. Today’s arid, sage- and juiper-covered badlands in the southern part of the state preserve the remnants of swampy prehistoric environments that sat along the coast of a vanished seaway. And these wet habitats were inhabited by an array of bizarre dinosaurs that paleontologists are still in the process of describing. Among the recent discoveries is Utahceratops gettyi, a roughly 76-million-year-old horned dinosaur that has just been put on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah. (Full disclosure: I am currently a paleontology volunteer at the

When Dinosaur Parties Go Bad

Fri, 18 May 2012 04:00:11 GMT

As much fun as a dinosaur party sounds, the latest installment of Dinosaur Office shows us the dangers inherent in even a little after-work social. The key take home lesson: Never anger anyone with a thagomizer. CollegeHumor’s Favorite Funny Videos

Fragmentary Clue Reveals Australia’s First Ceratosaur

Thu, 17 May 2012 01:15:23 GMT

A speculative restoration of Australia's Cretaceous ceratosaur. Image by Brian Choo, courtesy Erich Fitzgerald. Deciphering the dinosaurian history of Australia is difficult work. More often than not, down-under dinosaurs are represented by isolated bits and pieces—a tooth, partial hip, damaged vertebra or other unassuming fragment. Despite our incomplete knowledge of many of Australia’s dinosaurs, the various scraps often contain distinctive anatomical clues about which type of dinosaur the bone once belonged to. By looking for these subtle hints, paleontologists have slowly been able to piece together an overview of Australia’s dinosaurs during the Early Cretaceous. T

Dinosaur Sighting: Tyrannosaurus Golf

Wed, 16 May 2012 02:55:23 GMT

A Tyrannosaurus stands over the remains of an abandoned mini-golf course. Photo courtesy Joe Peterson. Dinosaurs and mini-golf: The two complement each other. Granted, dinosaurs probably wouldn’t have been very good at the pastime—imagine how hard it would be for Carnotaurus to use a putter—but they make for excellent fairway decor. And in some places, the dinosaurs remain even after the mini-golf course has closed. Paleontologist Joe Peterson sent in this example: a Tyrannosaurus standing over a closed course in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Maybe it’s just the position of the hands, but the tyrant seems to be begging. “MOAR TASTY TOURISTS, PLZ?” Have you seen a dinosau

Dear Media, Leave My Dinosaurs Alone

Tue, 15 May 2012 02:40:00 GMT

A sculpture of Torosaurus—or, according to some, a mature Triceratops—outside Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. Photo by the author. I wish I could take dinosaurs away from the media for a while. Someone certainly should. Lazy journalists and unscrupulous documentary creators have amply demonstrated that they just can’t play nice with Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and kin. In the past month and a half, we’ve seen aquatic dinosaur nonsense resurface in shoddy news reports, a brief media invasion of hyperintelligent alien dinosaurs and stinky stories about dinosaur farts, not to mention the bizarre creationist/extraterrestrial conspiracy-theory mashup on Ancie

A Miniature Dinosaur Celebrity

Mon, 14 May 2012 01:42:56 GMT

The decaying head of King Kong's Brontosaurus, as seen at The Dinosaur Museum. Photo by the author. The Dinosaur Museum, tucked away a few blocks from Blanding, Utah’s main drag, is an unusual place. Intricately detailed sculptures stand next to casts of fossils, full-size paintings of skeletons and various bits of dinosauriana, mixed together to create rooms full of competing dinosaur images. But I didn’t expect to run into a minor dinosaur celebrity in the galleries. Displayed in a small glass case were the decaying remains of King Kong‘s “Brontosaurus.” I had almost forgotten about the stop-motion dinosaur. In the original, 1933 King Kong, the shar

The Idiocy, Fabrications and Lies of Ancient Aliens

Fri, 11 May 2012 01:31:33 GMT

Despite what basic cable cranks might say, Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops were not driven to extinction by aliens. Photo by the author, taken at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Until now, I have assiduously avoided Ancient Aliens. I had a feeling that if I watched the show—which popularizes far-fetched, evidence-free idiocy about how human history has been molded by extra-terrestrial visitors—my brain would jostle its way out of my skull and stalk the earth in search of a kinder host. Or, at the very least, watching the show would kill about as many brain cells as a weekend bender in Las Vegas. But then I heard the History Channel’s slurry of pseudoscience had taken on

Dinosaur Sighting: Blanding Brontosaurus

Thu, 10 May 2012 04:26:40 GMT

A metallic, skeletal "Brontosaurus" at a Blanding, Utah Sinclair station. Photo by the author. Dinosaurs are a common sight along Utah’s roadways. Sinclair stations still display their iconic “Brontosaurus” on signs, and a rarer few have a little dinosaur sculpture out front. And one aged station in Blanding, Utah created its own version of the dinosaurian mascot. While traveling from Salt Lake City to Albuquerque, New Mexico by way of Blanding’s Dinosaur Museum, I spotted the skeletal dinosaur browsing from a tree on the sidewalk. I had to stop and snap a photo—I always brake for dinosaurs. Have you seen a dinosaur or other prehistoric creature in an

Media Blows Hot Air About Dinosaur Flatulence

Wed, 09 May 2012 05:18:00 GMT

A huge Allosaurus threatens a super-sized Diplodocus. Did such giant dinosaurs fart? We don't know. Photo by the author at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. It sounds like perfect journalist bait: Earlier this week, a new Current Biology paper proposed that the accumulated output of dinosaur farts could have changed the global climate. You could hardly ask for a better story. Dinosaurs are ever-popular media darlings, and the science of sauropod farts is just silly enough to grab the public’s attention. Too bad sources like FOX News, Gawker and the Daily Mail issued some rather noxious stories about the research. The paper itself, written by researchers Davi

The Demise of a Wooden Dinosaur

Tue, 08 May 2012 02:24:45 GMT

The microstructure of Smets' "dinosaur" revealed the fossils to be petrified wood. From Hovelacque, 1890. Naming a new dinosaur is a tricky thing. More often than not, previously unknown dinosaurs first appear as bits and pieces, and more than a few dinosaurs have been established on little more than isolated teeth. Thanks to the uncertainties often inherent in describing new dinosaurs, sometimes what seem to be novel species turn out to be parts of previously known animals. That’s just how science works—ideas are constantly being investigated and tested. But I’m sure that was little consolation to a 19th century scientist who mistakenly named a new dinosaur

Ankylosaur Reef

Mon, 07 May 2012 02:20:44 GMT

A full-size restoration of what Aletopelta might have looked like, at the San Diego Natural History Museum. Photo by the author. Dinosaurs created temporary reefs. At least, the ones whose bodies floated out to sea did. Even though there were no aquatic dinosaurs, dead dinosaurs sometimes washed down rivers to the coast. When their bodies settled on the ocean bottom, scavengers of various sorts and sizes glommed onto the dinosaurs and formed short-lived communities with their own ecological tempo—perhaps similar to what happens to the carcasses of modern whales. The Cretaceous dinosaur bones found in my home state of New Jersey are the result of this kind of transport and marine break

Dinosaur Sighting: Berlin’s Dilapidated Dinosaurs

Fri, 04 May 2012 02:15:17 GMT

That sauropod looks quite frustrated. These dilapidated dinosaurs rest at Berlin's abandoned Spreepark. Photo by Flickr user davidrush. In an abandoned Berlin amusement park, dinosaurs are slowly suffering a second extinction. The creatures, attractions at what was once the German Democratic Republic’s Kulturpark Plänterwald, have toppled over, are decorated with graffiti and are slowly rotting away in a setting perfect for a Scooby-Doo episode or another tedious found-footage horror film (your choice). A felled Stegosaurus at Berlin's Spreepark. Photo by Flickr user extranoise. Kuriositas recently laid out the park’s backstory. When the static dinosaurs were put

Fossil Testifies to Pachycephalosaur Pain

Thu, 03 May 2012 02:31:49 GMT

A pair of Pachycephalosaurus face off at the Museum of Ancient Life in Utah. Photo by the author. Did dome-headed dinosaurs really butt heads? While not one of the most important subjects in paleontology, the question is one of the most fraught. The thick-skulled dinosaurs look as if they were perfectly suited to cracking heads, much like modern bighorn sheep do, but whether or not dinosaurs like Pachycephalosaurus really knocked noggins has depended on who you asked. While some studies have concluded that these dinosaurs were fully capable of bashing skulls, other analyses have disagreed and pointed out that rounded, dome-shaped heads were actually poor weapons in such contests. The

Dinosaur Cinema Explosion

Wed, 02 May 2012 02:22:27 GMT

A promotional image, featuring a baby Pachyrhinosaurus, for Walking With Dinosaurs 3-D. Are we about to experience another burst of Dinomania? Maybe. Dinosaurs already have a ubiquitous cultural presence, but nothing drives interest in the beloved prehistoric creatures like Hollywood films. A stampede of dinosaur flicks is set to debut over the next two years. A few dinosaur features fall somewhere on the educational spectrum. The Werner Herzog-narrated Dinotasia—a re-blended version of the miniseries Dinosaur Revolution—is set to traumatize children who have no idea who Werner Herzog is. And the long-running Walking With Dinosaurs series is scheduled to launch a 3-D sequel sometime n

New Wrinkle to the Story of the Last Dinosaurs

Tue, 01 May 2012 05:01:00 GMT

Small coelurosaurs like this Troodon appear to have maintained stable levels of disparity during the last 12 million years of the Cretaceous. Image courtesy AMNH/J. Brougham. Why did the non-avian dinosaurs become extinct? There’s no shortage of ideas, but no one really knows. And even though paleontologists have narrowed them down to a short list of extinction triggers—including an asteroid strike, massive volcanic outpouring, sea level changes and climate alterations—how these events translated into the extinction of entire clades of organisms remains hotly debated. One of the most contentious questions is whether dinosaurs thrived right until the end of the Creta

The Mysterious Teeth of Ostafrikasaurus

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 04:13:07 GMT

The tooth of Ostrafrikasaurus as seen from the front (A), tongue side (B), back (c) and cheek side (d). From Buffetaut, 2011. There’s a lot we don’t know about spinosaurs. Even though a few of these croc-snouted animals are known from mostly complete skeletons—including Baryonyx and Suchomimus—many spinosaurs are known from only sparse bits and pieces. The large spinosaur Oxalaia from the Cretaceous rock of Brazil is known from two skull fragments, and only a few elements have been found from the newly announced Ichthyovenator. We know even less about another recently proposed spinosaur. Called Ostafrikasaurus, this dinosaur is represented by a pair of teeth. Paleontologis

Why Is It Cool To Hate On Dinosaur Discoveries?

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 05:40:54 GMT

A restoration of Yutyrannus, with the therizinosaurs Beipiaosaurus in the foreground, by Brian Choo. Caption added by the author. When I first heard the news that paleontologists had discovered a giant, fuzzy tyrannosaur, I was giddy with excitement. The dinosaur, dubbed Yutyrannus, was a confirmation of an idea that researchers and artists had been cautiously exploring for years. While most of the feathered dinosaurs discovered so far have been very small and often quite bird-like animals, Yutyrannus was a roughly 30-foot-long bruiser which showed that even huge predators might have sported fluffy plumage. And if an imposing predator like Yutyrannus sported a fuzzy coat, the same migh

Pachysuchus Actually a Hidden Dinosaur

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 05:21:58 GMT

The shape of the "Pachysuchus" fossil (in grey) set into a sauropodomorph dinosaur skull. Image from Barrett and Xu, 2012. Paleontologists are naming new dinosaurs at an extremely rapid pace. This past week alone, we’ve seen the announcement of Philovenator and Ichthyovenator, and the next new dinosaur is undoubtedly only a few days from publication. But we have also lost a few dinosaurs. Some of these, such as Dracorex, Anatotitan and Torosaurus, might get folded into other genera thanks to our changing understanding of how dinosaurs grew up. And as paleontologist Bill Parker pointed out at Chinleana, creatures once thought to be dinosaurs have been recategorized as ve

Tarbosaurus Leftovers Explain Dinosaur Mystery

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 03:59:57 GMT

The skull of Tarbosaurus. Photo by Flickr user Jordi Paya. When I think of Deinocheirus, I think of arms. A few other parts of the dinosaur’s skeleton are known—vertebrae, ribs and most of the hip—but none of those elements are quite as impressive as the immense forelimbs. The arms, tipped with curved claws, measure about eight feet long, and the creature that carried them must have been about as large as the stubby-armed tyrannosaurs that roamed the same habitats in Mongolia around 70 million years ago. The clues from the arms and associated bones hint that Deinocheirus was a gigantic ornithomimid—one of the “ostrich mimic” dinosaurs like Struthiomimus. The trouble i

Ichthyovenator: The Sail-Backed Fish Hunter of Laos

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 02:50:17 GMT

A restoration of Ichthyovenator by Michel Fontaine. From Allain et al., 2012. Spinosaurus was one of my favorite childhood dinosaurs. The carnivore’s enigmatic sail was certainly eye-catching, and that immense billboard set the predator apart from the other huge theropods. But the Spinosaurus I grew up with isn’t around anymore. The creature I knew was based on a partial skeleton discovered by German paleontologist Ernst Stromer in 1912, but was destroyed by an Allied bombing raid during World War II. With only photographs left, paleontologists and artists filled in the missing parts of the spinosaur’s anatomy on the basis of other large, carnivorous dinosaurs. The en

Dinotasia: Werner Herzog’s Gory Dinosaurs

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 04:16:26 GMT

I wanted to like Dinosaur Revolution. Despite a few clunky dinosaurs and some ludicrously over-the-top set pieces, I quite liked the idea of a Mesozoic journey in which the show’s prehistoric creatures were left to play out their stories on their own terms. The show as originally conceived—as a silent epic with a separate, accompanying show about the science behind the drama—sounded like a promising new direction for a documentary subgenre dominated by Walking With Dinosaurs wannabes. That version of Dinosaur Revolution never aired. Late in the show’s production, Dinosaur Revolution was transformed into a more traditional show, sprinkled by annoying narration and talking he

Dinosaurs vs. Aliens

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 02:05:15 GMT

The cover art for Dinosaurs Vs. Aliens. Dinosaurs will fight just about anyone. That’s what movies and comics have taught me, anyway. No surprise, then, that we will soon see a science fiction mash-up that has been due for some time now: Dinosaurs vs. Aliens. The graphic novel’s premise is exactly what it sounds like. Aliens visit the Mesozoic, and the dinosaurs don’t take too kindly to the invasion. To level the playing field, comic creator Grant Morrison made the dinosaurs extra intelligent. A smattering a preview art even shows dinosaurs that apparently decorated themselves with bone weapons and feather headdresses. Mercifully, though, Morrison’s dinosaurs

Will There Ever Be Another Great Dinosaur Movie?

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 02:02:03 GMT

Paleontologists continue to find fascinating dinosaurs, such as this young Teratophoneus on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah. But will we ever see such creatures featured in a great dinosaur movie? Photo by the author. It has been almost 20 years since Jurassic Park came out. That film—a heavy-handed morality fable about leaving Nature well enough alone—remains the best dinosaur film ever made. Even the two sequels didn’t come close to the quality of the increasingly dated first installment. And all this makes me wonder: Will there ever be another great dinosaur movie? Most dinosaur movies are awful. That much is beyond dispute. (If you disagree, watch the Carnosaur

How Eggs Shaped Dinosaur Evolution

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 04:52:35 GMT

Did egg-laying spell doom for non-avian dinosaurs, such as this crispy Troodon at the San Diego Natural History Museum? Photo by the author. How did dinosaurs come to rule the Mesozoic world? No one knows for sure, but the way dinosaurs reproduced probably had something to do with it. Dinosaurs grew fast, started mating before they hit skeletal maturity, and laid clutches of multiple eggs—a life history that may have allowed dinosaurs to rapidly proliferate and diversify. And egg laying itself may have been critical to why many dinosaurs were able to attain gigantic sizes. By laying clutches of small eggs, dinosaurs may have been able to sidestep biological constraints that have limite

Wading With Sauropods

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:29:36 GMT

Camarasaurus, as envisioned by Erwin Christman. From Osborn and Mook, 1921. Sauropods were swamp monsters. At least, that’s what books, movies, and illustrations taught me when I first encountered the huge dinosaurs. If Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus didn’t actually spend most of their time in the water, then the dinosaurs always stayed close to watery refuges where they could escape from Allosaurus and other predators. But starting in the 1960s, a renewed scientific interest in dinosaurs overturned this cherished imagery. Sauropods were wholly terrestrial creatures. These giants did not possess any features related to an aquatic or amphibious lifestyle—Apatosaurus and kin w

Fruitadens and the Dinosaur Diet

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 05:32:13 GMT

A pair of bristly Fruitadens models on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Photo by the author. When asked to account for why dinosaurs are so popular, psychologist Sheldon White delivered the simple answer: “Big, fierce and extinct.” Our perennial favorites—Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus and so on—were all gigantic and wielded a potential for destruction unlike anything alive today. From the time that dinosaurs were first recognized by science, we have brought them back to life in art and museum reconstructions only to eviscerate each other once more. To borrow a few lines from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, we often see dinosaurs as &

When Tyrannosaurus Chomped Sauropods

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 07:07:19 GMT

Tyrannosaurus tears a mouthful out of Alamosaurus. Art by Michael Skrepnick. Tyrannosaurus rex never crunched into Stegosaurus. Despite what Walt Disney’s animators so dramatically depicted in Fantasia, the two dinosaurs were separated by about 83 million years. The same is true for Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Barosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus—all of these 150-million-year-old icons flourished during a time when tyrannosaurs were tiny, fuzzy creatures that could have tackled only much smaller fare. It wasn’t until millions of years later—when the famous Morrison Formation dinosaurs were long gone—that tyrannosaurs became gargantuan apex predators. But this doesn̵

On Dinosaur Time

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 06:31:00 GMT

About 83 million years separated Late Jurassic icons—such as this Torvosaurus—from Cretaceous celebrities like Tyrannosaurus. Photo by the author. You can’t understand dinosaurs without a sense of time. We need to know when a dinosaur lived to comprehend how it fits into what paleontologist William Diller Matthew called “life’s splendid drama.” But we throw around Deep Time estimates, framed in millions of years, so often that it’s easy to become inured to the wider context of life’s history. The Mesozoic Era, which lasted from about 250 million to 66 million years ago, is often called the Age of Dinosaurs. As a kid, this brought to mind o

Dinosaurs From Space!

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 05:13:39 GMT

Somewhere, out in the interstellar void, there may be a planet inhabited by hyper-advanced dinosaurs. At least, that’s what a new paper by Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow says. This morning, friend and fellow science writer David Dobbs forwarded me an American Chemical Society press release titled “Could ‘advanced’ dinosaurs rule other planets?” Since I was still a little bleary-eyed at the early hour, I thought I had read that wrong. But I saw it right the first time. “New scientific research raises the possibility that advanced versions of T. rex and other dinosaurs—monstrous creatures with the intelligence and cunning of humans—may be

Why Brontosaurus Still Matters

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 06:00:11 GMT

The original AMNH mount of Brontosaurus, reconstructed in 1905. Image from Wikipedia. “Brontosaurus” will always be special to me. The shuffling, swamp-dwelling dinosaur never really existed, yet, for my younger self, the Jurassic behemoth was an icon of everything dinosaurs were supposed to be. The skeleton mounted at the American Museum of Natural History is what really hooked me on the sauropod. When I first visited the skeleton in the late 1980s—before the museum’s dinosaur halls were renovated in the late 1990s—I was astonished. I had seen illustrations of Brontosaurus before, but seeing the animal’s actual bones was a transcendent experience for me. I alre

Dinosaur Sighting: Miniature Dinosaurs Run Amok

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 01:35:04 GMT

A miniature Jurassic Park in Nipomo, California. Photo courtesy of reader Matt. In the books and films, Jurassic Park was permanently shut down. But you can still find facsimiles of the overrun theme park here and there. Reader Matt stumbled across a miniature version of the dinosaur zoo at a flea market in Nipomo, California. “Rain and sun had taken a toll on the whole thing,” Matt writes. The little dinosaurs seem to be doing OK, though. They have taken control of the visitors center and are not giving it back. Have you seen a dinosaur or other prehistoric creature in an unusual place? Please send a photo to dinosaursightings@gmail.com.

Dinosaur Egg Hunt

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 05:50:00 GMT

A feathery Troodon on the Museum of Life and Science Dinosaur Trail, in Durham, North Carolina. Photo by Flickr user Cryptonaut. Every kid knows how Easter eggs wind up in their yard. According to the canonical weirdness that is the holiday tradition, the Easter bunny delivers the colorful eggs overnight. But the origin of the eggs themselves is hardly ever mentioned. According to a well-timed press release from the University of Leicester, non-avian dinosaurs are the best candidates for some of the candy eggs hidden away on lawns. There is some real science behind the silliness. In the latest issue of Palaeontology, researchers Nieves López-Martínez and Enric Vicens de

Scientists Discover a Gigantic Feathered Tyrannosaur

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 06:19:00 GMT

The skull of Yutyrannus. Photo by Zang Hailong. Science is awesome. I know this because paleontologists have just announced the discovery of a giant, feather-covered tyrannosaur. The freshly described dinosaur—dubbed Yutyrannus huali by Xu Xing and co-authors—stretched about 30 feet long as an adult. Thanks to the fine preservation of three skeletons that represent this roughly 125-million-year-old carnivore, we know that much of this dinosaur’s body was covered in fine, wispy feathers. These were not flight feathers or down that you might see on a modern bird, but simpler structures best described as dino-fuzz. This makes Yutyrannus the largest creature with observ

Paleontologists Sink Aquatic Dinosaur Nonsense

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 05:46:57 GMT

Were the arms of Tyrannosaurus adapted for catching and inspecting fish? No way. Photo by the author. Earlier this week, the rotting corpse of a discarded dinosaur idea rose from the depths. Brian J. Ford, a television personality and self-styled independent researcher, decided that Apatosaurus, Allosaurus and kin just looked wrong ambling about on land. Unfettered by the accumulation of scientific evidence about how dinosaurs moved and the environments they lived in, Ford decided to set scientists straight by floating an idea that had been sunk decades ago—that all large dinosaurs spent their lives in water. And, like the bad science it is, the idea strained to explain everything abou

Aquatic Dinosaurs? Not So Fast!

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 05:03:49 GMT

Dinosaurs, such as this Apatosaurus at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, were landlubbers, not aquatic creatures. Image from Wikipedia. In 1941, Czech paleo-artist Zdeněk Burian created one of the most iconic dinosaur images ever. I saw it four decades later, in one of my childhood science books, and the illustration amazed me as soon as I saw it. I still love it. Not because it’s correct, but because the painting so beautifully captures an obviously incorrect idea. The painting, in careful detail, shows a trio of Brachiosaurus neck-deep in a prehistoric lake. Two poke their grinning heads above the surface, while a third plucks a gob of soft aquatic plants f

Dinosaur Sighting: Our Lady of Sauropods

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:43:05 GMT

Burning the midnight sauropod. Photo courtesy Cody Burkett. Dinosaurs are excellent April Fool’s prank inspiration. We want to see a living ceratopsian or tyrannosaur so badly that it’s easy to whip up a fake press report about someone finally finding a surviving non-avian dinosaur. But reader Cody Burkett decided to do something a little different. Burkett explains: So as an April Fool’s joke this year, I made a sauropod candle, lit it, and put it under the icons at my church, which also happens to be the seminary in which I attend graduate classes. Everyone seemed to be amused, except for the ecclesiarch, but I suppose that’s to be expected. Have you se

Allosaurus Ink

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 05:12:38 GMT

My Allosaurus ink. Photo by Tracey Switek. I have an Allosaurus on my arm. Heart of Gold Tattoo artist Jon McAffee put it there a few weeks ago. I think the tattoo—designed for me by friend and artist Glendon Mellow—came out beautifully. Contorted into the classic dinosaur death pose, the Jurassic apex predator is an expression of my passions and aspirations. Paleontologists have uncovered scores of fascinating dinosaurs. I would have been proud to carry almost any dinosaur on my sleeve. But I knew my first science ink had to be Allosaurus. The dinosaur is not only the state fossil of Utah—I moved to the beehive state last year to get closer to dinosaurs—but the familiar predator is a

How Tenontosaurus Grew Up

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 04:51:06 GMT

A partial Tenontosaurus skeleton on display at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. Photo by the author. Tenontosaurus is a difficult dinosaur to describe. This beaked herbivore—a distant, roughly 110-million-year-old cousin of the more famous Iguanodon—didn’t have any spectacular spikes, horns, plates, or claws. In short, Tenontosaurus was a vanilla dinosaur, and is probably most famous for being the prey of the “terrible claw” Deinonychus. But there is something very important about the unassuming plant-eater: Paleontologists have collected a lot of them. There are at least 30 complete or partial Tenontosaurus skeletons in museums across the country, inclu

Las Vegas’ Truly Terrible Dinosaurs

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 02:17:13 GMT

The head of Tyrannosaurus at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum. Photo by the author. Las Vegas, Nevada, is not a city I immediately associate with dinosaurs. To judge by the billboards along Interstate 15 approaching town, slot machines, strip clubs and performances by has-been comedians is what the town is all about. But, strange as it may seem, Las Vegas has a natural history museum, and the small building is home to some of the worst dinosaurs I have ever seen. In execution, the Las Vegas Natural History Museum feels less like a true museum and more like a curiosity cabinet cobbled together out of taxidermy mounts and anthropological items. A lion pouncing on a bucking wildebees

Dinosaur Sighting: Ketchupsaurus and Company

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:41:48 GMT

A trio of Pittsburgh dinosaurs - from the left, Philiposaurus, Ketchupsaurus, Mr. Dig. Photo by Traci Suppa. Eight years ago, 100 dinosaurs roamed Pittsburgh. They trod into town as part of the DinoMite Days event. Many have since disappeared, but a few—including a Tyrannosaurus posing as Batman—have recently been spotted. Reader Traci Suppa sent in a snapshot of an additional three decorative dinosaurs. A Stegosaurus (“Philiposaurus”), Torosaurus (“Ketchupsaurus”) and Tyrannosaurus (“Mr. Dig”) still stand outside the Wintergarden building at PPG Place in the middle of the city. I especially like the Ketchupsaurus—if only condiments actually came in

Symphony of Dinosaurs

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 01:22:12 GMT

Have you ever thought about what an auto-tuned Tyrannosaurus would sound like? Wonder no more. “Symphony of Science”—the YouTube series that mashes up science documentary clips to backing music—has just taken on the “awesome, awe-inspiring” dinosaurs. Sharp-eyed dinosaur fans will no doubt recognize clips from the BBC’s “How to Build a Dinosaur“, Jurassic Park, Dinosaurs Alive! and other shows. But there is one major nit to pick. The short film features more than a few pterosaurs—flying archosaurs that were emphatically not dinosaurs. The same footage could be used accurately if the video’s title were changed to “Avemetatarsalia!!&

The Case of the Headless Hadrosaur

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 01:12:24 GMT

A reconstruction of Corythosaurus at the Royal Ontario Museum. Image from Wikipedia. Out of all the parts of a dinosaur’s skeleton, nothing is as prized as the skull. While an entire Tyrannosaurus is a frightening visage, the jaws are what we fear the most. Triceratops is a stout herbivore, but the highly decorated skull is what makes the dinosaur a fan favorite. And the entire character of Apatosaurus, née “Brontosaurus,” changed when paleontologists recognized that they had mounted the wrong head on the dinosaur’s body. No surprise, then, that many paleontologists have been dinosaur head-hunters. Royal Tyrrell Museum paleontologists Darren Tanke and Rhian Rus

Battle Lizard

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 03:12:31 GMT

Are you excited for Battle Lizard? Remember “Dino-Riders”? The super-cheesy cartoon—with oodles of toy tie-ins, of course—about aliens which battled each other on the backs of laser-mounted dinosaurs? The show went off the air long ago, but now a Kickstarter film project has revived the notion of dinosaurs as weapons of futuristic war. The project is called Battle Lizard. Details about the film are scant. According to the short’s Kickstarter page, Battle Lizard is set in “a time-twisted post-apocalypse, where a cavalry soldier (played by Gil Darnell) tries to lure his steed out of hiding so they can confront their fate together. And by ‘steed,’ we mean dinosaur.

The Prehistoric Giants Hall of Fame

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:55:55 GMT

What were the largest species of all time? Does the Tyrannosaurus rex make the list?

How Titanoboa, the 40-Foot-Long Snake, Was Found

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:11:17 GMT

In the lowland tropics of northern Colombia, 60 miles from the Caribbean coast, Cerrejón is an empty, forbidding, seemingly endless horizon of dusty outback, stripped of vegetation and crisscrossed with dirt roads that lead to enormous pits 15 miles in circumference. It is one of the world’s largest coal operations, covering an area larger than Washington, D.C. and employing some 10,000 workers. The multinational corporation that runs the mine, Carbones del Cerrejón Limited, extracted 31.5 million tons of coal last year alone. Cerrejón also happens to be one of the world’s richest, most important fossil deposits, providing scientists with a unique snapsho

Paleontologists Announce Two Tiny Ceratopsians

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 04:15:58 GMT

When I think of ceratopsian dinosaurs, giant and well-ornamented forms such as Triceratops and Styracosaurus immediately spring to mind. These spiky creatures represent the acme of horned dinosaur decoration. But not all ceratopsians were insanely adorned heavyweights. There were small, lightly built ceratopsians running around the Late Cretaceous of Asia and North America, too, and last week paleontologists officially announced a pair of such dinosaurs. Paleontologists first heard about Unescopceratops koppelhusae and Gryphoceratops morrisoni late last year, when a pre-print version of the paper describing the dinosaurs first appeared online. The publication of the official descripti

Life in the Time of Dinosaurs

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 01:43:55 GMT

Dinosaurs are sexy creatures. They are icons of both evolution and extinction, and are our most beloved fossil celebrities. But we can’t learn everything we need to know from studying the bones of dinosaurs themselves. Charismatic as they were, dinosaurs were only part of ancient ecosystems, and reconstructing the world of the dinosaurs requires additional lines of evidence. In the latest of the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s lecture series, paleontologist Annie Quinney turns to fossil soils to restore what life was like for the hadrosaur, ceratopsids, tyrannosaurs and other dinosaurs that roamed Canada’s Horseshoe Canyon Formation around 70 million years ago.

A Baby Brachiosaur?

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 03:08:48 GMT

A reconstruction of a hypothetical adult Brachiosaurus next to a possible juvenile Brachiosaurus, SMA 0009. From Carbadllido et al., 2012. Brachiosaurus used to hold the title of biggest dinosaur ever. I remember when, as a young dinosaur fanatic, books and documentaries told me that this long-necked dinosaur was the ultimate prehistoric titan. Then Supersaurus, Argentinosaurus and other super-sized dinosaurs came along and ruined all the fun. Even worse, paleontologists recently realized that we actually know very little about what Brachiosaurus really looked like. In 1903, paleontologist Elmer Riggs described Brachiosaurus altithorax from fossils discovered in the 150-million-year-o

Dinosaur Sighting: Triceratops Topiary

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 02:10:52 GMT

Trixie the Triceratops. Photo courtesy 'deep. This is a Dinosaur Sighting first: One of the photos we shared on this blog inspired the creation of another public dinosaur. While mulling over what kind of topiary he wanted in his parklet, reader ‘deep saw a photo of a snow Triceratops I posted two years ago. “Boom! Immediate win!!” he thought—the “serious cuteness” of Triceratops made the dinosaur the top pick for the garden sculpture. The process from clay model to finished dinosaur took about three weeks, and while Triceratops were not composed of lots of tiny plants, ‘deep is right that the sculpture is technically a “real, live dinosaur

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Ethereal Dinosaurs

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:23:03 GMT

Dinosaurs have been stomping and roaring across the screen for as long as there have been movies. Stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien made a career out of bringing dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures to life. Most of O’Brien’s early efforts were short films, but he was also behind the first major paleo-film, 1925′s The Lost World, based on a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle. Taking cues from the work of artists like Charles R. Knight, O’Brien made Allosaurus, “Trachodon,” Triceratops, “Agathaumas” and other dinosaurs dance for the camera. I have often heard that audiences were so blown away by the special effects of The Lost World

Excavating the River of Giants

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 03:46:14 GMT

In the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, there is a great fossil mismatch. You can find the deceptive pairing in the Apatosaurus exhibit. Set in the floor behind the enormous dinosaur is a set of trackways—the Apatosaurus is posed as if the skeletal sauropod has just left the tracks behind. But there is no way that Apatosaurus left those tracks. The footprints and the long-necked dinosaur on display were separated by tens of millions of years. Apatosaurus is an iconic Morrison Formation dinosaur. The hefty sauropod trod across prehistoric floodplains of America’s Jurassic West around 150 million years ago. But the footprints on display at

Microraptor Was a Glossy Dinosaur

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 05:26:55 GMT

Microraptor, covered in iridescent plumage. Art courtesy of Jason Brougham/University of Texas. Microraptor was an exquisitely feathered dinosaur. The small, sickle-clawed predator, which lived about 120 million years ago, was covered in well-developed plumage, including long feathers on its arms and legs. But we now know that Microraptor was not only beautiful in an anatomical structure sense. A detailed new study has painted this dinosaur in a glossy black sheen. The range of the dinosaur palette has been one of the most mysterious aspects of dinosaur biology. For most species, we just don’t know—bones and teeth can’t tell us anything about skin color. But feathered dino

Dinosaur Sighting: The Most Dangerous Place for a Wedding

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:23:28 GMT

Newlyweds Scott and Amanda Peters inside the mouth of Cabazon Dino Park's Tyrannosaurus. Photo courtesy Scott Peters. Every now and then, someone comes up with an idea that makes me smack my foreheard and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Getting married inside a dinosaur is one of them. Newlyweds Scott and Amanda Peters selected one of the world’s most recognizable dinosaurs for the site of their wedding: the huge concrete Tyrannosaurus at Cabazon Dino Park in California. Remember the roadside dinosaur that comes to life in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure? That’d be the one. And while getting married anywhere inside the digestive tract of a huge thero

Time for Terra Nova to Evolve or Go Extinct

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 04:34:15 GMT

Terra Nova's dopey Carnotaurus. Despite being sold as a prehistoric extravaganza, the show never really delivered on the promise of fantastic dinosaurs. I heard the news late last night. After just one season, Fox has cancelled the prehistoric family drama Terra Nova. I can’t say I’m especially surprised or saddened by the decision. Terra Nova was the epitome of mediocrity right from the start. The series was heavily hyped—”Spared no expense!” the commercials seemed to shout—but it immediately became bogged down in cloyingly cute family values storylines that dictated that everything turn out okay for the Shannon family at the close of each episode. But thi

A Dinosaur’s Pterosaur Lunch

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 07:35:04 GMT

The chest cavity of Velociraptor MPC-D100/54. The white arrow indicates a broken rib, and the black arrows point to pterosaur bones preserved inside the dinosaur's skeleton. From Hone et al., 2012. Though only about the size of a turkey, Velociraptor still looked like a formidable predator. With snatching hands, a jaw set with recurved teeth and, of course, a retractable claw on each foot, almost every end of this dinosaur was sharp. But what did this well-equipped Cretaceous killer actually eat? One of the prime candidates for a Velociraptor entree has been the small horned dinosaur Protoceratops. A truly spectacular fossil cemented the connection between these dinosaurs. In 1971

The Last Styracosaurus Standing

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 05:44:08 GMT

Styracosaurus at the American Museum of Natural History. From Brown and Schlaikjer, 1937. One of my favorite dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History is the Styracosaurus. The insanely ornamented creature is presented as if swimming through a wave of plaster, a pose meant to depict the way the dinosaur was found in the field. It is a beautiful mount, but the restored and reconstructed skeleton obscures the fact that the actual specimen is not so complete. Veteran fossil hunter Barnum Brown discovered the Styracosaurus in 1915. He found the fossil within what is now Canada’s Dinosaur Provincial Park. Most of the dinosaur’s post-cranial skeleton was intact, but as

The Torosaurus Identity Crisis Continues

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:30:31 GMT

Triceratops (left) and Torosaurus (right). Art by Nicholas Longrich. More than 120 years ago, the Yale paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh described two of the most spectacular horned dinosaurs of all time. The first, named Triceratops in 1889, had three impressive horns jutting out of its face and a solid, curved frill. Two years later, Marsh named Torosaurus, another great, three-horned dinosaur, but with a longer frill perforated by two round holes. Although the two overlapped in space and time, they seemed distinct enough that paleontologists considered them to be separate dinosaur genera. That is, until Museum of the Rockies paleontologists John Scannella and Jack Horner suggeste

Did Triceratops Slouch or Stand Tall?

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:59:35 GMT

Possible postures of Triceratops. Image courtesy John Hutchinson. For decades, paleontologists have been debating how Triceratops stood. Did old “three-horned face” hold its forelimbs straight up and down like other dinosaurs, or did the horned dinosaur waddle along with its elbows out to the side? The dinosaur’s skeleton has not delivered an unambiguous answer. The critical articulation of the upper arm and shoulder can be reconstructed in a range of positions, and so it’s little wonder that different researchers have arrived at disparate conclusions. According to paleontologist John Hutchinson of The Royal Veterinary College in London, reconstructing how dino

Jetpacks and Dinosaurs

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 04:29:22 GMT

Remember Timegate? Of course you don’t. The dinosaur-filled film was never finished. But if it had been, the combination of time travel, Tyrannosaurus, and laser-toting jetpack soldiers would have certainly made the movie a late-night, B-movie staple. Fortunately for those who feel like they might have missed out on something cheesy, crunchy and overall bad for you, Orion: Dino Beatdown picks up the theme of pitting rocket-boosted players against dinosaurs. This forthcoming game is yet another run-and-gun dinosaur shooter, just with a little extra hardware to help gamers jump around the battlefield. You can get a glimpse at the gameplay in the trailer posted above. Sadly

Dinosaur Robots Return with a Vengeance

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 03:07:09 GMT

What’s worse than an invasion of extraterrestrial dinosaurs? Robotic alien dinosaurs. As imagined in their concept album Dinosaur Planet, the band MJ Hibbett & The Validators envisions mechanically augmented dinosaurs returning to Earth to reclaim their home after a 65 million year absence. And as the theme song makes clear, the descendants of Stegosaurus and kin are not very keen on resolving things peacefully. A cyborg Allosaurus isn’t very interested in kissing and making up, and I’m not sure I’d trust one even if it wanted to. Hat-tip to io9 for digging this up.

How to Make Sense of Dinosaur Variation

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 02:52:30 GMT

Anchiceratops ornatus was a pretty successful dinosaur. The single known species of this elaborately horned herbivore survived for about two millions years during the Late Cretaceous—many thousands of years longer than the varieties of horned dinosaur which preceded it in prehistoric Canada. This is a recent realization. As I wrote last September, what were once thought to be two different species of Anchiceratops were actually one, and the idea that paleontologists have found both male and female forms of this dinosaur has also been struck down. These changes stemmed from a better understanding of dinosaur variation. Often, small differences between dinosaur skeletons led paleontolog

England’s Jurassic Tyrant

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 03:31:51 GMT

The known skeleton of Juratyrant (black outline) compared to the dinosaur Guanlong for size. The scale bar is one meter. From Benson, 2008. Despite belonging to one of the most famous dinosaur groups of all time, few people have heard of Stokesosaurus clevelandi. This predator, named in 1974 by paleontologist James Madsen, Jr., was a tyrannosauroid dinosaur that roamed North America tens of millions of years before Tyrannosaurus rex. The bones of Stokesosaurus were initially discovered in the fossil-rich Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur quarry in eastern Utah. Although dominated by the remains of at least 46 Allosaurus, rarer traces of other theropod dinosaurs have come out of the quarry. (Th

Dinosaur Sighting: Polka-Dot Triceratops

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 04:28:14 GMT

A polka-dot Triceratops in Jordan, Montana. Photo by Vladimír Socha. Last week, we met the dinosaurian equivalent of a shar pei. This week, we meet a Triceratops that looks as if a clown exploded all over it. Submitted by reader Vladimír Socha, this clearly bewildered dinosaur resides in Jordan, Montana—a sparsely populated place the dinosaur must have escaped to out of embarrassment. Have you seen a dinosaur or other prehistoric creature in an unusual place? Please send a photo to dinosaursightings@gmail.com.

The Biggest Dinosaur Ever, Or Not

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 02:01:13 GMT

A graphic comparing the largest sauropods. The red giant in the back represents the estimated size of Amphicoelias (the blue speck to the lower left is a human for scale). By DinoGuy2, from Wikipedia. My friend and fellow science writer Ed Yong recently met the biggest mammal of all time. During a trip to Sri Lanka, Ed was able to get quite close to some blue whales—the most massive animals on earth. But are they the largest animals ever? When I tweeted Ed’s story, noting that he met the most immense mammal that has ever lived, Ed picked up that I specified the blue whale as the largest mammal ever, rather than the largest animal. “Are you hedging your bets for a sauropod?&

Whose Tooth is That?

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 03:00:58 GMT

Dinosaurs once roamed in the vicinity of Washington D.C. They did not leave very much behind. No one has found a beautifully articulated skeleton under the city streets—the city’s most famous dinosaur, “Capitalsaurus,” is known from only fragments—but paleontologists can use isolated teeth to take a census of which kinds of dinosaurs were present in the area. In the video posted above, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s dinosaur curator Matthew Carrano explains how paleontologists identify dinosaurs on the basis of teeth alone.

When Beetles Ate Dinosaurs

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 03:16:17 GMT

A silhouette of the dinosaur Nemegtomaia barsboldi, indicating the dinosaur's bones and the nest it was sitting on. Much of the skeleton was lost to beetles. Reconstruction by Marco Auditore, from Fanti, et al. 2012. What dinosaurs ate is a never-ending source of fascination. This is especially true for carnivores—if basic cable documentaries are any indication, we simply can’t get enough of flesh-tearing theropods. But even the largest and most vicious dinosaurs were just one point in complex food webs. The world’s most formidable consumers eventually became food themselves. Among the animals which fed on dinosaurs were beetles. Just as carcasses attract a variety o

Dinosaur Sighting: Wrinkles

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 04:52:19 GMT

A very wrinkly dinosaur outside California's Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center. Photo by Troy Britain. A few weeks ago I posted as list of bad roadside dinosaurs submitted by readers. The photos continue to trickle in. Today’s entry, sent to us by Troy Britain, is a strange wrinklesaurus which stands outside the Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center in Jurupa, California. If you put the dinosaur through the wash, I’m sure those wrinkles will come right out. Have you seen a dinosaur or other prehistoric creature in an unusual place? Please send a photo to dinosaursightings@gmail.com.

The Anatomy of Dinosaur Sex

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:56:56 GMT

A pair of Tyrannosaurus restored in the act at Spain’s Jurassic Museum of Asturias. Photo by Mario Modesto, from Wikipedia. Over the past few days I have written about the dinosaurian Kama Sutra, the idea that sauropods had sexy necks, and how to sex a Tyrannosaurus rex (Answer: very carefully). But there is one topic that I have saved for last: what the Tab A, Slot B reproductive anatomy of dinosaurs actually looked like. Whenever I bring up dinosaur sex in conversation—which is probably far too often—questions about the anatomy of the dinosaurian penis arise almost immediately. I am not sure why this is. Maybe it’s because we expect such impressive, terrifying creatures to hav

Intimate Secrets of Dinosaur Lives

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:24:23 GMT

A restoration of Lambeosaurus magnicristatus, a dinosaur once thought to represent the male form of Lambeosaurus lambei, but now known to be a distinct species. Art by Богданов, via Wikipedia. Figuring out how dinosaurs mated is a frustrating task. There is relatively little that can be gleaned from the fossil record, and much of what paleontologists suspect about behavior and soft tissue anatomy comes from comparisons to birds (specialized, living dinosaurs) and crocodylians (the closest living relatives to the dinosauria). Even worse, exactly how to tell male and female dinosaurs apart from one another has puzzled scientists have decades. If we even can’t sort the females and t

Sex and Dinosaur Necks

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:53:36 GMT

Did sexual selection cause sauropods, such as this Barosaurus at the Natural History Museum of Utah, to evolve ludicrously long necks? Photo by the author. Yesterday I wrote about the possible mating mechanics of immense sauropod dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus and Argentinosaurus. But there’s more to mating than the act itself. It is not as if two Diplodocus nonchalantly walked up to each other, had a quickie, and plodded off to feed on a nearby patch of ferns. There was probably some kind of behavioral lead-up to copulation—a way for one sex to strut its stuff and the other to be choosy about a mating partner. With this in mind, one paleontologist proposed that sex might hold t

How Did the Biggest Dinosaurs Get it On?

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:04:23 GMT

The backside of Diplodocus, photographed at the Utah Field House of Natural History. Photo by the author. In 1991, the American Museum of Natural History unveiled one of the most fantastic fossil displays ever created. Placed at the center of the renovated Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda, an adult Barosaurus rears back to protect its offspring from an oncoming Allosaurus. The defending sauropod’s head is 50 feet up in the air, although whether or not such an immense, long-necked dinosaur could have pulled off such a feat has been a continuing point of contention. Even in a typical posture, Barosaurus must have had a powerful heart to pump blood along its 25-foot neck, and who knows ho

Who Was the First to Discover Dinosaur Eggs?

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:47:34 GMT

A restoration of Hypselosaurus, a sauropod dinosaur which may have laid some of the eggs found in Cretaceous rock of Southern France. Art by Nobu Tamura, from Wikipedia. When Roy Chapman Andrews returned from an American Museum of Natural History expedition to the Gobi Desert in 1923, there was only one thing the press wanted to talk to him about—dinosaur eggs. News had spread quickly that the field team had returned with the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered, and newspapers excitedly tried to outbid each other for an exclusive on the fantastic fossil find. Andrews quickly tired of the popular interest. According to Charles Gallenkamp’s biography of the explorer, Andrews became

Judging a Dinosaur By its Cover

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:42:00 GMT

A restoration of Saurolophus angustirostris based upon skeletal and soft-tissue fossils. Art by L. Xing and Y. Liu, from Bell, 2012. We love to bring dinosaurs back to life. From museum displays and academic papers to big-budget movies, we have an obsession with putting flesh on old bones. How much anatomical conjecture and artistic license is required to do so varies from dinosaur to dinosaur. Some dinosaurs are known from a paltry collection of fragments and require a considerable among of reconstruction and restoration on the basis of better-known specimens of related species. Other dinosaurs are known from complete skeletons and require less osteological wrangling, but they still

Dinosaur Deep Freeze

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:43:51 GMT

There is no shortage of ideas about why the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago. There are so many hypotheses, in fact, that I have seen some museums put up signs warning visitors of various ideas with no evidence (ice age, disease, aliens) rather than list all the other contenders that have been taken seriously. Even now, the mass extinction that wiped out Triceratops and its kin is mysterious. We know an asteroid struck the earth at a critical time, there were massive volcanic eruptions among prehistoric India’s Deccan Traps, sea levels were dropping, and habitats were changing, but exactly how these various factors translated into one of the world’

The Debate Over Dinosaur Sight

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:09:48 GMT

A reconstruction of Velociraptor, complete with a scleral ring in the eye, at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, WY. Photo by the author. What’s scarier than a Velociraptor? A Velociraptor at night. That’s the hook I used last spring when a study published in Science used the fossilized bony rings that once supported dinosaur eyes to discern which species might have run around during the day and which stalked the night. (In truth, you wouldn’t have much to fear from Velociraptor at either time—the feathered dinosaur was about the size of a turkey and probably specialized in prey smaller than themselves.) Since the time that study was published, however, other

Scrambled Eggs and the Demise of the Dinosaurs

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:29:15 GMT

A restoration of the Cretaceous snake Sanajeh about to gulp down a baby sauropod. Model by Tyler Keillor, photographed by Ximena Erickson. In 1925, when Yale University paleontologist George Wieland published a paper titled “Dinosaur Extinction,” no one knew why the great archosaurs had disappeared. The fact that the extinction of the dinosaurs was even worth explaining was a new idea. From the time dinosaurs were initially described in the early 19th century through the beginning of the 20th, their existence and disappearance simply seemed to be part of a grand progression of life that required no special attention or explanation. Even when paleontologists began to puzzle

The “Duck-billed” Dinosaur That Wasn’t

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:38:02 GMT

A restoration of the island hadrosauroid Tethyshadros by Nobu Tamura. Image from Wikipedia. Everyone knows what a “duck-billed” dinosaur was. This bit of shorthand has been permanently grafted onto the hadrosaurs—the widespread group of herbivorous dinosaurs with elongated skulls and what appear to be duck-like beaks. The title made perfect sense during the early 20th century when these dinosaurs, such as Edmontosaurus and Parasaurolophus, were thought to be amphibious creatures that dabbled in the water for soft plants and escaped into Cretaceous lakes when predators came near. If the dinosaurs looked like monstrous ducks, then they must have acted like ducks. But that vi

T. rex Trying…

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:13:43 GMT

A reconstruction of Tyrannosaurus rex on display at the National Museum of Natural History. Photo by the author. I can’t help feel bad for Tyrannosaurus. The dinosaur’s relatively minuscule arms are a near-constant source of ridicule. It doesn’t matter that there were other fearsome predatory dinosaurs with even smaller and apparently useless arms—the short arms of the “tyrant king” are a cruel evolutionary joke. All the same, the tumblr blog T-Rex Trying… is a whimsical line-drawing catalog of all the things Tyrannosaurus couldn’t do with those small arms. Everything from cross-country skiing to simply counting to five would have posed a chal

How an Ankylosaur Went Out to Sea

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 03:24:05 GMT

About 110 million years ago, an ankylosaur settled on the bottom of a Cretaceous sea. This was no place for a dinosaur. No dinosaurs were adapted to a marine lifestyle, and the heavily armored ankylosaurs were probably the least suited to paddling around in the water. Yet, almost a year ago, shovel operator Shawn Funk found an ankylosaur in the marine, Early Cretaceous sediments at a Suncor mine in northern Alberta. How did the dinosaur get there? Donald Henderson, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, explained how this dinosaur died, was preserved and was discovered in a recent lecture for the Royal Tyrrell Museum Speaker Series. Almost everything about the discovery was

Best of the Worst Roadside Dinosaurs

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 05:04:50 GMT

Dinosaur, Colorado's bizarre, long-snouted Triceratops. Photo by author. Last week I asked you submit your favorite atrocious roadside dinosaurs. While the sculptures along the main drag of Dinosaur, Colorado come close to the top of the list, my vote last week went to the ugly, ugly dinosaurs outside Stewart’s Petrified Wood near Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Readers sent in a few additional contenders for the title. Photo by Mark Ryan. Reader Mark Ryan sent in this sad, decaying dinosaur that stands near Interstate 15 in the vicinity of Victorville, California. No wonder the dinosaur needs those metal rods to support itself—its legs look like they’

Stephen Fry Inside the World of Dinosaurs

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:35:36 GMT

There’s no shortage of dinosaur encyclopedias. From technical volumes to children’s picture books, dinosaur catalogs have proliferated in both dead-tree and e-book formats. Among the slew of titles, though, the newly-released Inside the World of Dinosaurs for the iPad looks to be one of the prettiest offerings. The major hook for the new app is a wealth of computer-animated dinosaurs. A total of 60 prehistoric creatures—mostly dinosaurs with a few non-dinosaurian Mesozoic favorites among the lot—are put through their paces in animated walk cycles and re-enacted battles. Aside from common paleo quibbles—the Deinonychus have “bunny hands” and their feathers are n

Paleontologists Uncover Oldest Known Dinosaur Nest Site

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:57:01 GMT

A parent Massospondylus attends to its hatchlings. Art by Julius Csotonyi. Two years ago, paleontologist Robert Reisz and colleagues revealed that the Early Jurassic dinosaur Massospondylus started off life as an awkward little thing. An exceptional set of eggs recovered from South Africa in 1976 contained the well-preserved skeletons of these baby dinosaurs, and the infants did not look very much like their parents. A roughly 20-foot-long adult Massospondylus had an extended neck and a long, low skull and it walked on two legs. But a baby of the same dinosaur had a short neck, a big head for its body, and it walked on all fours. The change between baby and adult was fantastic, and now

Fearsome Dinosaur Had Ridiculously Short Arms

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:25:23 GMT

The reconstructed shoulder and arm of Majungasaurus. From Burch and Carrano, 2012. A few months ago, I wrote about a big, carnivorous dinosaur with what may have been the wimpiest arms of all time. No, not Tyrannosaurus, but a very distantly related predatory dinosaur from Cretaceous South America called Carnotaurus. Despite this dinosaur’s massive, beefy shoulderblade, the arm of Carnotaurus was little more than a nub that would have barely stuck out from the body. And, according to a recent fossil find from Madagascar, Carnotaurus wasn’t alone in having ridiculously tiny forelimbs. Carnotaurus belonged to a group of theropods called abelisaurids. Among them were large pr

Some Dinosaurs Used Natural Heat for Their Nests

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:20:39 GMT

A clutch of sauropod eggs at the geothermal nesting site in Argentina. Eggs are outlined by black dashes. From Fiorelli et al., in press. Imagine a dinosaur as massive as Apatosaurus sitting on a nest. It doesn’t really work, does it? We know without a doubt that these large sauropod dinosaurs laid eggs, but there is no conceivable way that the gargantuan dinosaurs could have sat on their grapefruit-sized eggs without crushing them all. There must have been some other way that the eggs could have been kept safe and warm enough to develop properly. One special site in Argentina suggests that some sauropods had a geological solution to the problem. Two years ago, paleontologists L

What Are the Worst Roadside Dinosaurs?

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 03:33:30 GMT

One of the sad dinosaurs at Stewart's Petrified Wood near Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Photo by David Williams. I have a fondness for roadside dinosaurs. Not because they’re accurate. Quite the contrary. Concrete and plastic dinosaurs beside America’s highways are often sad, malformed creatures that are truly terrible. Nevertheless, they are a reminder of the popularity and cultural importance of Mesozoic life, especially along roads that connect fossil-rich exposures where many authentic dinosaurs were found. My vote for the best worst dinosaurs goes to the monstrosities at Stewart’s Petrified Wood shop near Petrified Forest National Park in Arizon

The Largest Ceratosaurus

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:35:32 GMT

Ceratosaurus nasicornis at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Photo by the author. Eastern Utah’s Cleveland-Lloyd dinosaur quarry is a treasure trove of predatory dinosaurs. In addition to elements from more than 46 individual Allosaurus, this fossil-rich pocket has yielded remains of rarer predators that lived in the region 150 million years ago, including the little-known Marshosaurus and the tyrannosaur Stokesosaurus. The charismatic, well-ornamented predator Ceratosaurus has been uncovered from these deposits, too, but the particular individual found in the Jurassic quarry might belong to a species that was only recently recognized. Since the late 19th centu

Inside Dr. Who’s Dinosaur Invasion

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 04:04:19 GMT

I’ve never been a “Doctor Who” fan, but any show that devotes an episode to dinosaurs is alright in my book. In the above video, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks talk about how the clunky, stiff dinosaurs in the 1970s episode “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” came to life (or, as it were, not).

Dinosaur Division is All in the Hips

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 02:29:26 GMT

The hips of the ornithischian dinosaur Stegosaurus (left) and the saurischian dinosaur Allosaurus (right). Modified from Seeley, 1888. Time has not been very kind to classic dinosaur science. As new discoveries have piled up and different theoretical frameworks have taken hold, dinosaurs as we know them today are vastly different from the creatures envisioned by paleontologists who worked during the 19th and 20th centuries. The idea that some hadrosaurs used their crests as air-supply tanks and the notion that the most spectacular of dinosaurs became so big and spiny that they doomed themselves to extinction are among the ideas that have been tossed. But not all early research has met

Dinosaurs of a Feather

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 07:08:12 GMT

A specimen of the non-avian dinosaur Sinosauropteryx, showing the ruff of simple protofeathers along the back and tail. Image from Wikipedia. Poet Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” To fossil bird expert Alan Feduccia, however, anything with feathers is a bird and emphatically not a feathered dinosaur. For decades Feduccia has been one of the most prominent members of a small and steadfast group of researchers who reject the growing body of evidence that birds are the descendants of one lineage of feather-covered coelurosaurian dinosaurs (the large and varied group which included tyrannosaurs, oviraptorosaurs, deinonychosaurs, therizinosaurs and

The Dinosaurs That Never Were

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:45:13 GMT

Triceratops was one of the last dinosaurs. What would the descendents of this ceratopsid look like if they were alive today? Photo taken at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History by the author. In Slate’s recent poll for 2011′s “Question of the Year,” dinosaurs came in third. “Why are smart people usually ugly?” was the winner. Spoiler: the answer is, “they’re not.” But my favorite Mesozoic archosaurs were respectable runners-up with the question: “Let’s say that a meteor never hits the earth, and dinosaurs continue evolving over all the years human beings have grown into what we are today. What would they be lik

The Way of the Dinosaur

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:18:25 GMT

Tyrannosaurus faces off against Triceratops at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Some early 20th century paleontologists thought the size and weapons of these creatures indicated that dinosaurs were degenerates due for extinction. Photo by the author. I hate the phrase “going the way of the dinosaur.” I cringe almost every time I see it. Political and business journalists are the worst offenders. When a politician begins to lose favor or a company is outmoded, such writers often draw a parallel between their subjects and the classic image of dinosaurs as stupid, swamp-dwelling brutes who ultimately lose life’s race to the quicker, smarter mammals. This metap

Dinosaurian Snorkels, Air Tanks and Tubas

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:34:23 GMT

A Parasaurolophus at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Photo by the author. Of all the crested hadrosaurs, Parasaurolophus is one of my favorites. The long, slightly-curved tube that projects from the back of the dinosaur’s head is a wonderful ornament. But why did this peculiar dinosaur decoration evolve? Parasaurolophus was initially described by paleontologist William Parks in 1922 on the basis of a skeleton found in the vicinity of Alberta’s Red Deer River. This dinosaur was clearly different from other ornamented hadrosaurs–such as Corythosaurus and Saurolophus–that had been found before, and especially perplexing was the makeup of the dinosaur’s

Charles H. Sternberg’s Lost Dinosaurs

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:07:08 GMT

A Corythosaurus with skin impressions--similar to this one on display at the American Museum of Natural History--was lost when a German military vessel sank the SS Mount Temple on December 6, 1916. Image from Brown, 1916, via Wikipedia. Last month, paleontologist Andrew Farke and colleagues described the previously-unknown, multi-horned dinosaur Spinops sternbergorum. The centrosaurine was a gnarly-looking creature and worthy of headlines by itself, but the real hook of the story was that this dinosaur had been hiding in the collections of London’s Natural History Museum for nearly a century. The fossils–collected by veteran dinosaur hunter Charles H. Sternberg and his sons

Charles R. Knight’s Prehistoric Visions

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 06:03:14 GMT

Richard Milner's 'Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time.' There has never been a more influential paleoartist than Charles R. Knight. He wasn’t the first to illustrate prehistoric life, and he certainly was not the last to do so with great skill, but, for a time, he envisioned dinosaurs and other ancient creatures with such loving detail that he seemed to be sending back snapshots from lost eras only he could visit. Science writer Richard Milner recounted Knight’s story in his visual and textual mix-tape of the artist’s work, Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time. The book is not a straight biography. Even though Milner composed

The Littlest Dinosaur Expert

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 06:01:03 GMT

Get this kid a museum job. Stella, a four-year-old dinosaur expert, correctly points out that a so-called Triceratops toy is, in fact, a Styracosaurus. She even hits three of the major differences in skull anatomy—Triceratops had a shorter nasal horn, longer brow horns and smaller, triangular bones around the border of the frill. This has to be the most adorable dinosaur correction I have ever seen. I would love to see Stella give a talk at next year’s Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting.

China’s Dinosaur Folklore

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 04:32:52 GMT

Theropod dinosaur tracks along Potash Road in Moab, Utah. Tracks like these have inspired myths about giant birds at locations all over the world. Photo by the author. Even before we knew what they really were, dinosaurs inspired our imagination. Unidentifiable bones and tracks formed the basis of legend–they were the evidence of great battles, fearsome monsters and times when the world was new and hostile to human existence. Indeed, contrary to what John Noble Wilford wrote in The Riddle of the Dinosaur, fossilized bones were not just ignored or ground up for “dragon-bone medicine” in the centuries prior to the scientific discovery of dinosaurs. People have puzzled o

Creating the Age of Reptiles

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 03:05:30 GMT

The reconstructed skeleton of a Deinonychus, representing the modern image of dinosaurs, in front of Rudolph Zallinger's 'Age of Reptiles' mural in Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. Photo by the author. Of all the dinosaur paintings ever composed, Rudolph Zallinger’s Age of Reptiles is one of the most influential. I can think of no other work of paleo-art that so intricately restores dinosaurs as they were known to us during the mid-20th century, simultaneously representing them within the ongoing march of time. In fact, this 110-foot-long, 16-foot-high illustration was so powerful that it inspired the scientists who would eventually create a more vibrant

The Greatest Dinosaur Hits of 2011

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 03:08:23 GMT

Another year, another fantastic spate of dinosaur discoveries. Even as 2011 draws to a close, the findings keep rolling in—from the way Deinonychus used its killer cutlery to the first record of sauropod dinosaurs from Antarctica and sexual selection among dinosaurs. There has been such a glut of interesting papers that it would be impossible to mention every bit of dinosauriana from this year, but here is a partial listing of some of the stories that caught my eye. Dinosaur Growth Everyone knows that there are lots of unknown dinosaur species left to be discovered. What has become increasingly contentious is the question of how many species can be counted among what has already been

How to Turn a Dinosaur Into a Bird

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 03:13:25 GMT

Since Jack Horner and James Gorman’s book How to Build a Dinosaur debuted almost three years ago, periodic lectures, interviews and articles have piqued the public’s curiosity about reverse-engineering a non-avian dinosaur from an avian one. Perhaps a “chickenosaurus” isn’t as outlandish as it sounds. The possibility of creating a long-tailed chicken with teeth and claws is based on the fact that birds are living dinosaurs. A relatively minimal amount of tinkering could turn a bird into something like its non-avian ancestors. But, during the dinomania of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the idea that birds were derived from dinosaurs was still some

A Mysterious Thumb

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 02:16:10 GMT

An articulated Iguanodon hand on display at London's Natural History Museum. Photo from Flickr user Meffi. There is much we still don’t know about dinosaurs. In fact, some aspects of dinosaurs have puzzled paleontologists for well over a century. Among the most frustrating is why the great herbivore Iguanodon had prominent thumb spikes. Despite all the possibly explanations provided for this appendage, none are especially satisfying. The peculiar false thumb of Iguanodon was originally thought to set into the dinosaur’s nose. When Gideon Mantell first described the animal in 1825, the various bits and pieces of the dinosaur were thought to represent the remains of an e

Deck the Halls With Dinosaurs

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 06:11:35 GMT

When it came time to pick a 2011 Christmas tree ornament, the choice was clear - I needed a dinosaur. Photo by the author. When it came time for my wife and me to pick this year’s Christmas ornament, there was no question what it had to be: We needed a dinosaur. After all, this year we left New Jersey to settle in the fossil-rich state of Utah, and so it was only appropriate to celebrate our successful move with a dinosaurian decoration. We settled on an Allosaurus pendant from Dinosaur National Monument. This Late Jurassic theropod—one of my favorite dinosaurs—is the official state fossil of my new home, and my first visit to the geologically wonderful national park two years ag

Huxley’s Apocryphal Dinosaur Dinner

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 05:41:22 GMT

An early 19th century representation of Megalosaurus at the Crystal Palace gardens. Thomas Henry Huxley's work gave dinosaurs a much more bird-like look. Image by Flickr user Loz Flowers. Winter is the season for dinosaur dinners. Both Thanksgiving and Christmas traditionally feature avian dinosaurs as the main gustatory event, and according to paleontological legend, it was this custom that inspired one 19th century naturalist to realize the connection between roasted birds and Jurassic dinosaurs. Mark Norell, Lowell Dingus and Eugene Gaffney recounted the story in their book Discovering Dinosaurs. “One Christmas Day,” they wrote, “ Huxley was carving a turkey f

Eggs and Enigmatic Dinosaurs

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 07:02:38 GMT

A reconstruction of Patagonykus. The newly-described Bonapartenykus was a close relative of this dinosaur. Image from Wikipedia. Alvarezsaurs are Cretaceous mysteries. These small dinosaurs, a feathered subgroup of coelurosaurs, had long jaws studded with tiny teeth, and their arms were short, stout appendages that some researchers hypothesize were used to tear into anthills or termite mounds. But no one knows for sure. We understand very little about the biology of these dinosaurs, but even as we puzzle over their natural history, more previously unknown genera are being found. The latest is Bonapartenykus ultimus from the Late Cretaceous of Patagonia, and what makes this dinosaur so

Where the Dinosaurs Are

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 06:44:04 GMT

An Allosaurus threatens a Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Photo by the author. Wherever you go in the United States, you’re probably no more than a few hours away from a dinosaur skeleton. The “ruling reptiles” are virtually everywhere. From field sites to museum displays, the country is dotted with dinosaurs, and to coincide with Smithsonian magazine’s new Evotourism feature I have compiled a short “Dinotourism” subset of destinations for the Mesozoic-minded. The Dinosaur Diamond: Utah and Colorado form the heart of dinosaur country. A scenic byway system called the Dinosaur Diamond links some of the top spots along

Hitchcock’s Primeval Birds

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:39:21 GMT

A large stone slab containing mudcracks and many footprints left by small theropod dinosaurs, as illustrated in Hitchcock's "Ichnology of New England." Edward Hitchcock was one of America’s first dedicated dinosaur paleontologists. He just didn’t know it. In fact, during the latter part of his career, he explicitly denied the fact. To Hitchcock, the tracks skittering over red sandstone in the Connecticut Valley were the marks of prehistoric birds from when the Creation was new. Hitchcock could not be dissuaded. As new visions of dinosaurs and the notion of evolution threatened to topple his life’s work, the Amherst natural theologian remained as immutabl

A Smithsonian Paleontologist Suggests His Evotourism Sites

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

To evotourists interested in dinosaurs, Matthew Carrano, a paleontologist with the National Museum of Natural History, recommends Dinosaur State Park, in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, just south of Hartford. The park boasts one of the largest displays of dinosaur tracks in the world. In 1966 a bulldozer operator discovered the first of the footprints in a slab of gray sandstone. The construction project was sidelined and further excavations at the site revealed a swath of 2,000 footprints. About 1,500 of the tracks were reburied so that they might be preserved, while 500 remain visible, protected by a geodesic dome built in 1977. Paleontologists surmise that 200 million years ago, in the early

A Comedy of Dinosaur Errors

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 06:25:05 GMT

A Suarophaganax (left) harries an enormous Diplodocus at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. Photo by Flickr user gwarcita. Tyrannosaurus rex has been the standard for dinosaur ferocity for more than a century. This dinosaur was the “prize fighter of antiquity,” as the New York Times proclaimed in 1906, but there have been a number of heavyweight challengers for the title of prehistory’s deadliest dinosaur. Among the most recent have been Spinosaurus, Giganotosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus—different sorts of predators that may have out-stretched and out-weighed the tyrant king. In 1941, Natural History ran a feature article on an excavation in the La

Nedoceratops: To Be, or Not to Be?

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:35:20 GMT

A comparison of Triceratops (left) and Nedoceratops (right). From Scannella and Horner, 2011. When the “Toroceratops” controversy broke in the summer of last year, I felt sorry for Nedoceratops. Hardly anyone said a word about this unusual horned dinosaur. Fans of Triceratops wept, wailed, and gnashed their teeth at their misapprehension that Museum of the Rockies paleontologists John Scannella and Jack Horner had exterminated the beloved horned dinosaur while paleontologists wondered if this dinosaurian mainstay of the Late Cretaceous could have grown into what had previously been called Torosaurus. But no one shed a tear at the proposition that Nedoceratops, too, might ha

December Dinosaur Digest

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 08:27:34 GMT

http://youtu.be/9_gW2xFp8Wk New discoveries, historical tidbits and paleo-pop are all regular features here at Dinosaur Tracking, but there is far more dinosaur news out there than even this blog can cover. This week, especially, has seen a flurry of new research and dinosaurs in the headlines. I’ll be getting to some of the new papers during the remainder of this week and next, and here’s a rundown of recent dinosaur happenings. Guard dinosaur: Need to leave your car unattended for a while? Why not employ a dinosaur to stand guard. That’s what an owner of a crashed car did in Clothiers Creek, Australia. Granted, the plastic Tyrannosaurus may not have been as frightenin

The Dinosaur Family Foodchain

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:41:54 GMT

You Are Umasou must be one of the most adorable dinosaur films ever made. It’s also one of the strangest. Within the annals of dinosaur cinema, I can’t recall any other film in which a carnivore, raised by an herbivore, takes in and protects another herbivore, all rendered in anthropomorphic anime. Based on Tatsuya Miyanishi picture book, You Are Umasou starts off just like Disney’s Dinosaur—with a lost egg floating downriver. A mother Maiasaura spots the wayward egg and cares for the developing baby back at her own nest. But it’s not a little ornithopod that hatches out. The egg held an infant tyrannosaur. Despite the pressures of her community to aban

Dinosaurs In Space!

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 06:30:51 GMT

Baby Maiasaura and a parent at a mount in the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Baby Maiasaura bones and egg fragments were the first dinosaur fossils in space. Photo by the author. Last year, David Willetts hit a sour note when he unveiled his vision of improving science education in Great Britain. “The two best ways of getting young people into science” the Minister of State for Universities and Science said, “are space and dinosaurs. So that’s what I intend to focus on.” Researchers, writers and science fans quickly jumped on the comment. And rightly so. Space and dinosaurs are popular, but they don’t appeal to everyone. Not every child dreams of becoming

Alamosaurus Gets Pumped Up

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 06:41:38 GMT

Tail vertebrae from a previously known Alamosaurus specimen (A), compared with a newly-discovered Alamosaurus tail vertebra (B) and a tail vertebra from the large titanosaur Futalognkosaurus (C). From Fowler and Sullivan, 2011. Alamosaurus was an unusual sauropod. What makes it so remarkable is not so much its appearance—the dinosaur seems to be a fairly typical member of a group called titanosaurs—but when and where it lived. Even though North America once hosted multiple, coexisting genera of sauropods during the Late Jurassic, that diversity was eventually lost until, about 100 million years ago, there were none left on the continent. By this time the horned dinosaurs and hadrosaurs

Who Wrote the First Dinosaur Novel?

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:50:29 GMT

An embellished "Brontosaurus" menaces the heroes of Frank Mackenzie Savile's "Beyond the Great South Wall." From Savile, 1901. Who wrote the first dinosaur novel? For a long time, I thought the answer was Arthur Conan Doyle. His 1912 adventure yarn The Lost World set the standard for dinosaur-inhabited literature—at least until Jurassic Park came along—and Doyle’s story has lived on in at least six film adaptations that run the gamut from landmark film to cinema trash. But contrary to what I had previously believed, Doyle wasn’t the first author to prominently feature dinosaurs in a novel. Tracking the pathways of dinosaurs through fiction is a dif

Spinops: The Long-Lost Dinosaur

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 06:04:34 GMT

A life restoration of Spinops sternbergorum. Copyright Dmitry Bogdanov, courtesy of Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology Almost a century ago, skilled fossil collectors Charles H. Sternberg and his son Levi excavated a previously unknown horned dinosaur. Paleontologists didn’t realize the importance of the discovery until now. The long-lost dinosaur was sitting right underneath paleontologist’s noses for decades. In 1916, while under commission to find exhibit-quality dinosaurs for what is now London’s Natural History Museum, the Sternbergs discovered and exhumed a dinosaur bonebed in the northwestern part of what is now Dinosaur Provincial Park in Canada. Among th

Dinosaur Sighting: Hardcover Tyrannosaurus

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 04:37:46 GMT

A tyrannosaur bursts from the pages of Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Lost World'. Photo by Chris Scott. A close-up of the Lost World tyrannosaur (notice the human with the gun perched right next to it). Photo by Chris Scott. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World may not have been the first book to feature dinosaurs, but it certainly has been one of the most influential. The book’s legacy even carries on today—there have been at least six different movie and television interpretations of the book, and there will undoubtedly be more. How fitting, then, that someone NPR’s Robert Krulwich has dubbed the “Library Phantom” should take a hardback copy