AFP – In a world first, scientists in Australia announced on Wednesday they had extracted DNA from the fossilised eggshells of extinct birds, including iconic giants such as the moa and elephant bird.

The skull of a juvenile sauropod dinosaur, rediscovered in museum collections, illustrates that some sauropod species went through drastic changes in skull shape during normal growth.

Researchers have discovered a new dinosaur that was one of the smallest known and also one of the best adapted for running. The fossil skeleton of the tiny animal, named Xixianykus zhangi, is incomplete but would probably have measured around half a meter in length. The specimen comes from Xixia County in Henan province, China.

Scientists have found the first ever evidence that tyrannosaur dinosaurs existed in the southern continents. They identified a hip bone found at Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, Australia, as belonging to an ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex.

The study of Mesozoic birds and the dinosaur-bird transition is one of the most exciting and vigorous fields in vertebrate paleontology today. A newly described bird from the Jehol Biota of northeast China suggests that scientists have only tapped a small proportion of the birds and dinosaurs that were living at that time, and that the rocks still have many secrets to reveal.

Utah’s red rocks — world-famous attractions at numerous national parks, monuments and state parks — have yielded a rare skeleton of a new species of plant-eating dinosaur that lived 185 million years ago and may have been buried alive by a collapsing sand dune.

How did dinosaurs become rulers of Earth more than 200 million years ago? Widespread volcanism and a spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide wiped out half of all plant species, and extinguished early crocodile relatives that had competed with the earliest dinosaurs, according to experts.

Ancient bite marks and fossilized feces discovered in Georgia are providing new details about a giant crocodile that roamed the Southeast United States about 79 million years ago.

A new species of dinosaur, a relative of the famous Velociraptor, has been discovered in Inner Mongolia by two Ph.D. students. The exceptionally well preserved dinosaur, named Linheraptor exquisitus, is the first near complete skeleton of its kind to be found in the Gobi desert since 1972, and will help scientists work out the appearance of other closely related dinosaur species.

Like a zombie clawing its way out of the grave, a new dinosaur species was discovered when scientists spotted a hand bone protruding from a cliff in the Gobi desert of Inner Mongolia, palaeontologists have announced