Paleontologists have long been perplexed by dinosaur fossils with missing pieces — sets of teeth without a jaw bone, bones that are pitted and grooved, even bones that are half gone. Now a Brigham Young University study identifies a culprit: ancient insects that munched on dinosaur bones.
Putting more meat on the theory that dinosaurs’ closest living relatives are modern-day birds, molecular analysis of a shred of 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex protein — along with that of 21 modern species — confirms that dinosaurs share common ancestry with chickens, ostriches, and to a lesser extent, alligators.
Archaeologists have discovered of one of the largest dinosaur-era marine reptiles ever found — an enormous sea predator known as a pliosaur estimated to be almost 15 meters (50 feet) feet long. The 150 million year-old Jurassic fossil was discovered on the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, at 78 degrees north latitude, approximately 1300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole. “Although we didn’t get the entire skeleton, we found many of the most important parts, including portions of the skull, teeth, much of the neck and back, the shoulder girdle, and a nearly complete forelimb (paddle)” said one of the researchers, “Amazingly, the paddle alone is nearly 10 feet long.”
Two new 110 million-year-old dinosaurs unearthed in the Sahara Desert highlight the unusual meat-eaters that prowled southern continents during the Cretaceous Period. Named Kryptops and Eocarcharia the new fossils provide a glimpse of an earlier stage in the evolution of the bizarre meat-eaters of Gondwana, the southern landmass.
A new species of dinosaur unearthed in Mexico is giving scientists fresh insights into the ancient history of western North America. The new creature — aptly dubbed Velafrons coahuilensis — was a massive plant-eater belonging to a group of duck-billed dinosaurs, or hadrosaurs. In addition to isolated skeletons, the researchers found large bonebeds of jumbled duck-bill and horned dinosaur skeletons.
Scientists are researching which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago. They want to find out how the dinosaurs were able to become as large as they did. In actual fact such gigantic animals should not have existed. There is a law to which most animals living today conform: The larger an animal, the smaller the density of the population, i.e. the fewer animals of the same species there are per square mile. The larger an animal is, the larger the amount of food it has to have in order to survive. Therefore a specific area can only feed a certain maximum number of animals.
The celebrated Bristol Dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus, has now been shown to live on subtropical islands around Bristol, instead of in a desert on the mainland as previously thought. This new research could explain the dinosaur’s small size (2 m) in relation to its giant (10 m) mainland equivalent, Plateosaurus. Like many species trapped on small islands, such as the ‘hobbit’ Homo floresiensis of Flores and pygmy elephants on Malta, the Bristol Dinosaur may have been subjected to island dwarfing.
Dinosaurs had pregnancies as early as age 8, far before they reached their maximum adult size, a new study finds. Scientists have identified the fossil bones of three female dinosaurs, each a different species, and it has become clear that dinosaurs exhibited rapid growth and early maturity, probably because they had a high early mortality rate.
An unusual dinosaur has been shown to have a skull that functioned like a fish-eating crocodile, despite looking like a dinosaur. It also possessed two huge hand claws, perhaps used as grappling hooks to lift fish from the water.
Asteroid impacts or massive volcanic flows might have occurred around the time dinosaurs became extinct, but a new argument is that the mightiest creatures the world has ever known may have been brought down by a tiny, much less dramatic force — biting, disease-carrying insects.
