paleontology

Mother and child, deep in conversation. Models of newly described miniature sauropod, Europasaurus holgeri, adult with juvenile (Europasaurus; "reptile from Europe", after "Europe" and the Greek, sauros for "lizard";holgeri after Holger Ludtke, who discovered the first bones).Image courtesy of Freilichtmuseum Munchehagen (Munchehagen Dinosaur Museum). At first, it was not especially remarkable when self-taught paleontologist, Holger Luedtke, found some small sauropod bones in a German quarry in 1998. However, scientists realized quite recently that the group of at least 10 diminutive…
Gastonia burgei, an "armored tank" dinosaur, so named in 1995 for Don Burge, the founding director of the CEU Prehistoric Museum, and for amateur rock hound, Robert Gaston, who co-discovered the species. This species appears to be a close relative to the newly discovered dinosaur featured in this story, which has yet to be named.Image: CEU Prehistoric Museum. (image resized). The biggest armored dinosaur to be discovered so far was recently found in southern Utah, in a rugged badland just south of Green River. "It's built like a tank," stated Reese Barrick of the new dinosaur. Barrick is…
tags: dinosaur, fossil, Children's Museum of Indianapolis, pachycephalosaur, Dracorex hogwartsia, Harry Potter . Dracorex hogwartsia, a newly discovered member of the pachycephalosaur family of dinosaurs. Image: Drawing by paleontologist Robert Bakker, provided by the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. It was only a few years ago when JK Rowling was just another single mother who was on the dole, sitting in a coffee shop, scribbling stories on napkins and spare pieces of paper, and now, she is the richest woman in the UK and has a dinosaur named in honor of her imaginary world. Heyyy,…
One of three newly-discovered specimens of the 383 million-year-oldTiktaalik roseae. These specimens fill a gap in the fossil record between aquatic and terrestrial animals. Image: Ted Daeschler. Making that transition from aquatic life to living on land was very important for vertebrates. However, there has been a gap in the fossil record at precisely that transitional point -- up until now, that is. Today, a group of scientists report that they found a group of three fossils from "crocodile-like" animals that neatly fit into the evolutionary progression as animals moved from water to land…
Fossilized mosasaur skull (source linked from image). Mosasaurs are marine reptiles, not dinosaurs. But the reason I show this fossil here will (hopefully) become more obvious after you read the story. A 2 kilometer-long treasure trove of fossilized bones, teeth and claws from dinosaurs and ancient reptiles was recently unearthed on the Chatham Islands, approximately 850 kilometers (530 miles) east of New Zealand (see map, below), proving that dinosaurs also inhabited South Pacific islands. Jeffrey Stilwell, a US-born fellow in palaeontology at Melbourne's Monash University, said he…
When Pittsburgh paleontologist Matt Lamanna jokingly promised his fellow scientists that he would eat a duck foot if they unearthed a rare bird fossil, he never expected that they would discover a large group of them in northwest China. This discovery, the most significant in the past 25 years, was made in the Changma Basin, a desert located more than 1,000 miles away from the famed Liaoning fossil quarries. "The dinosaur-bird transition is the hottest topic in dinosaur paleontology," says Lamanna. Some evolutionary biologists think that birds and dinosaurs are too different to be directly…