dinosaurs

National Geographic should have a 3-D animation up soon The pursuit of accurate dinosaur colours just turned into a race, and a heated one at that. Just last week, I wrote about a group of scientists who claimed to have accurately identified the colours of some feathered dinosaurs by microscopically analysing three fossils. According to that study, Sinosauropteryx had a tail covered in ginger stripes. Now, another group have revealed the palette of an entire dinosaur, Anchiornis. This tiny predator had a dark grey body and the limbs bore long, white feathers tipped with black spangles. Its…
tags: science, iPhone Apps, technology, education, dinosaurs, American Museum of Natural History, AMNH, streaming video Introducing the first official iPhone app from the American Museum of Natural History, DINOSAURS: American Museum of Natural History Collections. This app lets paleontologists of all ages explore the Museum's famous fossil halls in depth. DINOSAURS: American Museum of Natural History Collections contains more than 800 images from the Museum's archive, woven together to create a striking image of the world's most famous dinosaur, the Tyrannosaurus rex. Double-tap or pinch to…
tags: evolutionary biology, convergent evolution, paleontology, taxonomy, zoology, basal birds, theropods, dinosaurs, ornithology, birds, Alvarezsauroidea, Haplocheirus sollers, Maniraptora, Archaeopteryx, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper A Newly Discovered Basal Alvarezsauroid Theropod from the Early Late Jurassic. Artwork: Portia Sloan [larger view] DOI: 10.1126/science.1182143 A long-standing scientific debate focuses on the origins of birds: did they evolve from reptiles or dinosaurs? Currently, most scientists think that birds are modern dinosaurs, but…
Hits of the week: Savage Minds (with a spiffy website redesign) asks Why is there no Anthropology Journalism? Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss punches back. (NB: 1. I was founding editor of Mind Matters, but no longer edit it, did not edit the Andrews/Thomson piece, and don't know any of these people. 2. While my recent Atlantic article presented an argument for how a gene associated with depression (the so-called SERT gene) might be…
tags: evolutionary biology, fossils, feathers, plumage color, color, dinosaurs, theropods, Sinosauropteryx, Sinornithosaurus, birds, Confuciusornis, melanosomes, phaeomelanosomes, eumelanosomes, keratinocytes, SEM, scanning electron microscopy, 10.1038/nature08740, researchblogging.org, peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper Reconstruction of two Sinosauropteryx, sporting their orange and white striped tails. Artwork by Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing [larger view] DOI: 10.1038/nature08740 While looking at museum dioramas that feature dinosaurs, I often overhear people asking "How do they…
Dinosaur books have become more colourful affairs of late, with the dull greens, browns and greys of yesteryear replaced by vivid hues, stripes and patterns. This has largely been a question of artistic licence. While fossils may constrain an artist's hand in terms of size and shape, they haven't provided any information about colour. But that is starting to change. The fossils of some small meat-eating dinosaurs were covered in filaments that are widely thought to be the precursors of feathers. And among these filaments, a team of Chinese and British scientists have found the distinctive…
It's a dinosaur tooth, and clearly one that belonged to a predator - sharp and backwards-pointing. But this particularly tooth, belonging to a small raptor called Sinornithosaurus, has a special feature that's courting a lot controversy. It has a thin groove running down its length, from the root to the very tip. According to a new paper from Enpu Gong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it was a channel for venom. Thanks to a certain film that shall remain nameless, a lot of people probably think that we already know that some dinosaurs are venomous. But the idea that Dilophosaurus was…
The question of whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded is one of the most enduring in palaeontology. Did they generate their own body heat like today's mammals; was their temperature more influenced by their environment like today's reptiles; or did they use a mixture of both strategies? Scientists have put forward a slew of arguments for all of these alternatives, but Herman Pontzer from Washington University has a new take on things which suggests that many dinosaurs were indeed warm-blooded. Based on our knowledge of living animals, Pontzer worked out the energy that 14…
A new investigation of the sedimentology and ichnology of the Early Jurassic Moyeni tracksite in Lesotho, southern Africa has yielded new insights into the behavior and locomotor dynamics of early dinosaurs. The tracksite is a pont bar in an old river that had a lot of variation in slope and the nature of the sediment on which one would walk. There are trackways of numerous different kinds of dinosaurs that walked across this surface over a very short period of time (of several days or a bit longer). The different dinosaurs responded to the different surfaces differently. That is not a…
A ridiculously cool dinosaur encounter on a German TV show. Part animatronics, part puppet show, and part Sprockets. Some great Halloween costume ideas.
At 13 metres in length, Tyrannosaurus rex had little to fear from other predators. But it was occasionally attacked by an enemy far smaller than itself. In a wonderful piece of forensic palaeontology, Ewan Wolff from the University of Wisconsin has shown that the tyrant lizard king was often infected by a microscopic parasite, whose relatives still infect the birds of today. Potentially transmitted through bites from other tyrannosaurs, the parasite could have starved the infected animals to death. Many of the large meat-eating dinosaurs have wounds on their heads that were clearly inflicted…
tags: science, Science is Real, They might be Giants, music video, streaming video Here's a fun music video; "Science is Real" by the creative group, They Might be Giants. This is one of many wonderful songs on their new album "Here Comes Science." You can order They Might be Giants' new album [CD/DVD], "Here Comes Science" from Amazon.
Meet Raptorex, the "king of thieves". It's a new species of dinosaur that looks, for all intents and purposes¸ like the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, complete with large, powerful skull and tiny, comical forearms. But there's one very important difference - it's 100 times smaller. Unlike the ever-shrinking world of music players and phones, it seems that evolution crafted tyrannosaur technology with much smaller specifications before enlarging the design into the giant predators of the late Cretaceous. Raptorex is a new species of meat-eating dinosaur, discovered in northwest China by Paul…
Just reported in PLoS ONE is a new dinosaur. Spinophorosaurus nigerensis Here are the salient facts: Species name: Spinophorosaurus nigerensis Who found it: Scientists with the State Museum of Natural History Braunschweig, Germany, and the Paldes Project (led by the Paleontological Museum of Elche, Spain) Kind of dinosaur: Basal sauropod Time period: Early and Middle Jurassic (about 200 to 170 million years ago) What the finders say about it: "There are very few complete skeletons of basal sauropods," Remes explains. However, complete finds are crucial for the scientists in order to…
tags: paleontology, fossils, dinosaurs, evolution, I am a Paleontologist, they might be giants, music video, streaming video I have been remiss lately regarding music videos because I was in Finland for awhile, and then was otherwise preoccupied. But I just had to share this song with you; "I am a Paleontologist" is by the group, They Might be Giants and is one of many wonderful songs on their new album "Here Comes Science." If I was teaching biology or evolution this semester, I would use it in class. You can order They Might be Giants' new album [CD/DVD], "Here Comes Science" from Amazon.
previously reviewed Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic is a children's book for kids in third to fifth grade or, in my opinion, a little younger. Certainly this is an excellent choice, because of the cool illustrations, of a book to read aloud to the pre-literate little ones. Author Gregory Wenzel does a good job in few words explaining life in the Jurassic, how bones get to become fossils, and something about how they are found. Most of the riveting several hundred words in this 32 page book are about the real stars of the show, the dinosaurs themselves. Not every single dinosaur in this book…
There is a reason why there are no dinosaur geneticists - their careers would quickly become as extinct as the 'terrible lizards' themselves. Bones may fossilise, but soft tissues and molecules like DNA do not. Outside of the fictional world of Jurassic Park, dinosaurs have left no genetic traces for eager scientists to study. Nonetheless, that is exactly what Chris Organ and Scott Edwards from Harvard University have managed to do. And it all started with a simple riddle: which came first, the chicken or the genome? Like almost all birds, a chicken's genome - its full complement of DNA…
Many years ago, a sudden event occurred that changed everything. Or at least, that is what we think now. But in truth, the event took longer than many today believe, and many of the specific details, the exact order of events, the actual meaning of each detail, are not fully understood. Indeed, in the process of describing this event today, we find considerable disagreement, or at least, it is clear that one person's version is different than another's. I'd be happy to give you my version of it. What qualifies me to do that? Well, for one thing, I was there when it happened... I refer,…
Keller has been one of the leading voices opposing the impact KT boundary extinction hypothesis. According to a press release from her university, she has more on this matter. Press Release: Gerta Keller, whose studies of rock formations at many sites in the United States, Mexico and India have led her to conclude that volcanoes, not a vast meteorite, were the more likely culprits in the demise of the Earth's giant reptiles, is producing new data supporting her claim. Keller, a Princeton professor of geosciences, and several co-authors lay out the case in a paper published April 27 in the…
These cells look like fairly typical bone cells. They appear to be connected to each other by thin branch-like projections and are embedded in a white matrix of fibres. At their centres are dark red spots that are probably their nuclei. But it's not their appearance that singles out these extraordinary cells - it's their source. You're looking at the bone cells of a dinosaur. They come from an animal called Brachylophosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur that lived over 80 million years ago. By looking at one of its thigh bones, Mary Schweitzer from North Carolina State University has managed to…