LiveScience.com – A turtle that toddled alongside the dinosaurs died just days before laying a clutch of eggs. Now, about 75 million years later, paleontologists are announcing their find of the fossilized mother-to-be and the eggs tucked inside her body.
Paleontologists have found a previously unknown amphibious predator that probably made the Antarctica of 240 million years ago something less than a hospitable place.
Researchers have challenged the general consensus among scientists that there must have been something special about dinosaurs that helped them rise to prominence. Good luck, not general ‘superiority,’ was the primary factor in the rise of the dinosaurs according to new research.
A 75-million-year-old fossil of a pregnant turtle and a nest of fossilized eggs that were discovered in the badlands of southeastern Alberta are yielding new ideas on the evolution of egg-laying and reproduction in turtles and tortoises.
With long limbs and a soft body, the duck-billed hadrosaur had few defenses against predators such as tyrannosaurs. But new research on the bones of this plant-eating dinosaur suggests that it had at least one advantage: It grew to adulthood much faster than its predators, giving it superiority in size.
Paleontologists in 2005 hailed research apparently showing that soft tissues had been recovered from dissolved dinosaur bones, but new research suggests the supposed recovered tissue is really just biofilm — or slime.
It has long been debated whether dinosaurs were part of the ‘Terrestrial Revolution’ that occurred some 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous when birds, mammals, flowering plants, insects and reptiles all underwent a rapid expansion. During their last 50 million years of existence, dinosaurs were not expanding as actively as had been previously thought and that the apparent explosion of dinosaur diversity may be largely explained by sampling bias.
Australia’s links to South America have just gotten a bit closer, but not due to economic forces, rather fossil forces. Palaeontologists working in Australia identified a fossil that had previously only been found in South America.
A partial dinosaur skeleton unearthed in 1971 from a remote British Columbia site is the first ever found in Canadian mountains and may represent a new species.
The first dinosaur tracks on the Arabian Peninsula have just been discovered. Scientists found evidence of a large ornithopod dinosaur, as well as a herd of 11 sauropods walking along a Mesozoic coastal mudflat in what is now the Republic of Yemen.
