Dinosaur in Biological News

Down Under dinosaur burrow discovery provides climate change clues

On the heels of his discovery in Montana of the first trace fossil of a dinosaur burrow, Emory University paleontologist Anthony Martin has found evidence of more dinosaur burrows this time on the other side of the world, in Victoria, Australia. The find, to be published this month in Cretaceous...

Beaked, bird-like dinosaur tells story of finger evolution

Scientists have discovered a unique beaked, plant-eating dinosaur in China. The finding, they say, demonstrates that theropod, or bird-footed, dinosaurs were more ecologically diverse in the Jurassic period than previously thought, and offers important evidence about how the three-fingered hand of...

New dinosaur species possible in Northwestern Alberta

EdmontonThe discovery of a gruesome feeding frenzy that played out 73 million years ago in northwestern Alberta may also lead to the discovery of new dinosaur species in northwestern Alberta. University of Alberta student Tetsuto Miyashita and Frederico Fanti, a paleontology graduate student fr...

Study of polar dinosaur migration questions whether dinosaurs were truly the first great migrators

EdmontonContrary to popular belief, polar dinosaurs may not have traveled nearly as far as originally thought when making their bi-annual migration. University of Alberta researchers Phil Bell and Eric Snively have suggested that while some dinosaurs may have migrated during the winter season, ...

'A dinosaur dance floor'

SALT LAKE CITY University of Utah geologists identified an amazing concentration of dinosaur footprints that they call "a dinosaur dance floor," located in a wilderness on the Arizona-Utah border where there was a sandy desert oasis 190 million years ago. The three-quarter-acre site which i...

Key to function of dinosaur crests found in brain structure

Paleontologists have long debated the function of the strange, bony crests on the heads of the duck-billed dinosaurs known as lambeosaurs. The structures contain incredibly long, convoluted nasal passages that loop up over the tops of their skulls. Scientists at the University of Toronto, Ohio ...

Brain structure provides key to unraveling function of bizarre dinosaur crests

ATHENS, Ohio (Oct. 16, 2008) Paleontologists have long debated the function of the strange, bony crests on the heads of the duck-billed dinosaurs known as lambeosaurs. The structures contain incredibly long, convoluted nasal passages that loop up over the tops of their skulls. Scientists at t...

A new dinosaur species, Pachyrhinosaur lakustai, unveiled from Pipestone Creek, Alberta, Canada

The fossils revealed a herd of dinosaurs that perished in a catastrophic event 72.5 million years ago. The animals are characterized by a bony frill on the back of the skull ornamented with smaller horns. They also had large bony structures above their nose and eyes which lends them their name: Pa...

New meat-eating dinosaur from Argentina had bird-like breathing system

MENDOZA, ArgentinaThe remains of a new 10-meter-long predatory dinosaur discovered along the banks of Argentina's Rio Colorado is helping to unravel how birds evolved their unusual breathing system. Paleontologists led by the University of Chicago's Paul Sereno, a National Geographic Explorer-i...

Meat-eating dinosaur from Argentina had bird-like breathing system

ANN ARBOR, Mich.--The remains of a 30-foot-long predatory dinosaur discovered along the banks of Argentina's Rio Colorado is helping to unravel how birds evolved their unusual breathing system. University of Michigan paleontologist Jeffrey Wilson was part of the team that made the discovery, to ...

America's smallest dinosaur uncovered

An unusual breed of dinosaur that was the size of a chicken, ran on two legs and scoured the ancient forest floor for termites is the smallest dinosaur species found in North America, according to a University of Calgary researcher who analyzed bones found during the excavation of an ancient bone ...

Medical College researchers find dinosaur clues in fat

VALHALLA, April 23, 2008A team of researchers at New York Medical College has discovered why birds, unlike mammals, lack a tissue that is specialized to generate heat. A paper published April 21, 2008 in the online peer-reviewed journal BMC Biology contains the surprising implication that the same...

Quantum weirdness, parallel worlds, dinosaur poop, and the ultimate fate of the universe...

College Park, MD, February 11, 2008 -- The American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced the winners of its 2007 Science Writing Awards today. The winners -- a scientist, a journalist, a children's book author, and three radio broadcasters -- will receive a prize of $3,000, an engraved Windsor cha...

New dinosaur from Mexico offers insights into ancient life on West America

SALT LAKE CITY A new species of dinosaur unearthed in Mexico is giving scientists fresh insights into the ancient history of western North America, according to an international research team led by scientists from the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah. To date, the di...

Unusual fish-eating dinosaur had crocodile-like skull

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. Dr Emily Rayfield at the University of Bristol, UK, used computer...

Massive dinosaur discovered in Antarctica sheds light on life, distribution of sauropodomorphs

CHICAGOA new genus and species of dinosaur from the Early Jurassic has been discovered in Antarctica. The massive plant-eating primitive sauropodomorph is called Glacialisaurus hammeri and lived about 190 million years ago. The recently published description of the new dinosaur is based on part...

Emory paleontologist reports discovery of carnivorous dinosaur tracks in Australia

The first fossil tracks belonging to large, carnivorous dinosaurs have been discovered in Victoria, Australia, by paleontologists from Emory University, Monash University and the Museum of Victoria (both in Melbourne). The tracks are especially significant for showing that large dinosaurs were liv...

New dinosaur species found in Montana

A dinosaur skeleton found 24 years ago in Montana has finally been identified as a new species that links North American dinosaurs with Asian dinosaurs. The dinosaur would have weighed 30 to 40 pounds, walked on two feet and stood about three feet tall. The fossil came from sediment that's about ...

Sands of Gobi Desert yield new species of nut-cracking dinosaur

Plants or meat: That's about all that fossils ever tell paleontologists about a dinosaur's diet. But the skull characteristics of a new species of parrot-beaked dinosaur and its associated gizzard stones indicate that the animal fed on nuts and/or seeds. These characteristics present the first sol...

How to look at dinosaur tracks

A new study appearing in the May issue of The Journal of Geology provides fascinating insight into the factors geologists must account for when examining dinosaur tracks. The authors studied a range of larger tracks from the family of dinosaurs that includes the T. Rex and the tridactyl, and provid...

Diminishing dinosaur steps saved by laser and laptop

The Fumanya site, in the Bergueda region of central Catalonia, is so delicate that experts cannot get physically close enough to the tracks to examine them. In the years since the tracks were discovered they have been exposed to the elements, and as a result are severely weathered and eroding at ...

Old dinosaur research leads to new honor

A lifelong obsession with fossils led to Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grantee Robert Reisz discovering the oldest known dinosaur embryos and the oldest known reptile that stands on two legs. Now, he is being honoured for more than 35 years of research excellence by joining ...

Good times ahead for dinosaur hunters, according to U of Penn scientist's dinosaur census

The golden age of dinosaur discovery is yet upon us, according to Peter Dodson at the University of Pennsylvania. In a forthcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dodson revises his groundbreaking 1990 census on the diversity of discoverable dinosaurs upward by 50%, o...

Insect predation sheds light on food web recovery after the dinosaur extinction

The recovery of biodiversity after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction was much more chaotic than previously thought, according to paleontologists. New fossil evidence shows that at certain times and places, plant and insect diversity were severely out of balance, not linked as they are today. The e...

FSU biologist says new dinosaur is oldest cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex

Florida State University paleobiologist Gregory M. Erickson sliced up some ancient dinosaur bones uncovered in China to help an international team of scientists identify a new genus and species. Despite striking skeletal differences and only subtle similarities, the FSU researcher determined that t...

The world's deepest dinosaur finding - 2256 metres below the seabed

While most nations excavate their skeletons using a toothbrush, the Norwegians found one using a drill. The somewhat rough uncovering of Norway's first dinosaur happened in the North Sea, at an entire 2256 metres below the seabed. It had been there for nearly 200 million years, ever since the time ...

Next good dinosaur news likely to come from small packages

Dinosaurs seem bigger than life ?big bones, big mysteries. So it's a delicious irony that the next big answers about dinosaurs may come from small ?very small ?remains. "Molecules are fossils, too," said Michigan State University zoologist Peggy Ostrom. "We've shown that proteins survive in very...

Newly discovered birdlike dinosaur is oldest raptor ever found in South America

Relative of Velociraptor rewrites evolutionary charts The recent discovery of a 90-million-year-old dinosaur in Patagonia demonstrates that dromaeosaurs, a group of carnivorous theropods that includes Velociraptor and is closely related to birds, originated much earlier than previously thought. ...

U. of Colorado researcher identifies tracks of swimming dinosaur in Wyoming

Editor : Visit this webpage for pictures and videos! With their long stalks and feathery arms, marine animals known as sea lilies look a lot like their garden-variety namesakes. Perhaps because of that resemblance, scientists had always assumed that sea lilies stayed rooted instead of moving...

Skull study sheds light on dinosaur diversity

With their long necks and tails, sauropod dinosaurs---famous as the Sinclair gasoline logo and Fred Flintstone's gravel pit tractor---are easy to recognize, in part because they all seem to look alike. The largest animals known to have walked the earth, sauropods were common in North America dur...

Revueltosaurus skeleton unearthed at Petrified Forest upsets dinosaur tale

The fossilized skeleton of a small crocodile relative excavated last year at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona throws a wrench into theories of how and where the dinosaurs arose more than 210 million years ago at the end of the Triassic Period. The animal, one of many creatures from the ...

Definitive evidence found of a swimming dinosaur

An extraordinary underwater trackway with 12 consecutive prints provides the most compelling evidence to-date that some dinosaurs were swimmers. The 15-meter-long trackway, located in La Virgen del Campo track site in Spain's Cameros Basin, contains the first long and continuous record of swimming...

Carbon nanoparticles toxic to adult fruit flies but benign to young

...ded them. The nanoparticles "glom onto the flies," Rand noted while watching a video of flies in the test tubes. "They just can't move. It's like a dinosaur falling into a tar pit." (Note to journalists: Video is available on request.) Rand and Robert Hurt, director of Brown's Institute for Molecular an...

New research shows dinosaurs may have been smaller than we thought

...covered a problem with the statistical model used by some scientists in the dinosaur community to estimate the mass of dinosaurs. "The original equation used... these animals. The researchers developed a new equation for calculating dinosaur mass based on bone dimensions. This equation doesn't require the transforma...

Dino-not-so-soaring

...d today in the Zoological Society of London's Journal of Zoology . Scientists have discovered that the original statistical model used to calculate dinosaur mass is flawed, suggesting dinosaurs have been oversized. Widely cited estimates for the mass of Apatosaurus louisae , one of the largest of the di...

When palm trees gave way to spruce trees

...go in the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene. Profound changes were underway. Globally, carbon dioxide levels were falling and the hothouse warmth of the dinosaur age and Eocene Period was waning. In Antarctica, ice sheets had formed and covered much of the southern polar continent. But what exactly was happe...

Discovery raises new doubts about dinosaur-bird links

... OSU professor of zoology. "This discovery probably means that birds evolved on a parallel path alongside dinosaurs, starting that process before most dinosaur species even existed." These studies were just published in The Journal of Morphology , and were funded by the National Science Foundation. It'...

Fossil bone bed helps reconstruct life along California's ancient coastline

...hough a small portion of it was added to the National Natural Landmark registry in 1976. "This deposit, if properly developed, would look just like dinosaur National Monument," said Lipps, referring to a popular park in Colorado and Utah. "(Sharktooth Hill) is actually much more extensive, and the top of t...

Princeton geoscientist offers new evidence that meteorite did not wipe out dinosaurs

...ce as sufficiently convincing and compelling to allow her to move on and investigate further the evidence for Deccan volcanism as being at the root of dinosaur extinction. But she does not expect her teams' present work will stop the raging debate at the heart of this controversy. "The decades-old controve...

Geoscientists meet to discuss Rocky Mountain geology

...yon, and Wasatch Mountain State Park; Brigham Young University's Museum of Paleontology, housing one of the largest and finest collections of Jurassic dinosaur bones; and various locations providing an in-depth look at the tectonics and stratigraphy of the Western Colorado Plateau. MEETING, REGISTRATION AN...