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Paleontologists Discover 250-Million-Year-Old New Species of Reptile in Brazil
A new fossil reptile that lived 250 million years ago in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, southernmost Brazil has been discovered by an international team of researchers. The species has been identified from a mostly complete and well preserved fossil skull.
September 19,2017
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Utah Paleontologists Turn to Crowdfunding for Raptor Project
Millions of years ago, on a mud flat somewhere in Cretaceous Utah, a group of Utahraptors made a grave mistake: They tried to hunt near quicksand. The pack’s poor fortune has given modern paleontologists an opportunity to decode the giant raptor — its appearance, growth and behavior — but only if they can raise the money.Enter “The Utahraptor Project,” started on GoFundMe last year with a $100,000 goal. It offers backers access to a field worker’s blog, a live “Raptor Cam” and digital models of the find put together through the process of photogrammetry. While it is far from reaching its goal, the team is optimistic.“Once we get this up and running, with all the cameras and gizmos to record the action on a micro and macro level,” said Scott Madsen, a fossil preparator, “I think we can give the public a good show for their money.”Utahraptor, 23 feet long and weighing over a ton, was one of the largest dromaeosaurs, feathered, sickle-clawed dinosaurs closely related to birds. Since its discovery in 1991, it has been the subject of a popular novel, assorted documentaries and tie-in toys from “Jurassic Park.” But for all its fame, the predator has been known primarily from only a few remains. That changed in 2001, when a geology student found a leg bone emerging from a hillside in the Cedar Mountain formation in eastern Utah.Over 12 field seasons, a team of paleontologists with the Utah Geological Survey found an ever-expanding tangle of bones in the 126-million-year-old rock. When the final slab of sandstone was removed in 2014, said Jim Kirkland, Utah state paleontologist, it weighed nine tons and contained the skeletons of a herbivorous dinosaur, a 16-foot adult Utahraptor, four juveniles and a recent hatchling. The block proved too heavy for the lab at the University of Utah, and in 2015 ended up on reinforced floors at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point. Mr. Madsen, then an employee of the Utah Geological Survey with experience preparing …
September 16,2017
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Did Tiny Algae Fell Mighty Dinosaurs?
Seventy million years ago, they all came to drink in the rapidly drying river: long-necked sauropods, fierce theropods, crocodiles, lizards, and raven-sized birds. They never left. The giant and the tiny were entombed together in the riverbed, forming what is now a spectacular series of mass graves in northwestern Madagascar. Last week, researchers proposed a culprit behind this ancient mystery: harmful algal blooms (HABs), in the very water that had lured the animals.The remains of such algal blooms “should be more common in the fossil record,” says vertebrate paleontologist Nicholas Pyenson of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who was not part of the study. But he cautions that they are tough to prove.Bone beds always come with a mystery: Why did so many animals die at once? Floods and volcanoes are sometimes invoked, and for years researchers suspected that drought killed the animals whose fossils accumulated in the Maevarano Formation of Madagascar. Torrential rains punctuating periods of drought might have created turbulent rivers choked with sediment that buried skeletons intact.One chunk of this formation “is the most fossiliferous package of rock I’ve ever seen,” says Raymond Rogers, a geologist at Macalester College in St. Paul, who has been studying the site for 2 decades. He and his colleagues have so far cataloged nearly 1200 specimens from a single bed a third the size of a tennis court.Over time, the team grew skeptical of drought as the only explanation. Large and small animals nestle against each other, suggesting that the bodies were buried where they died and that the killer struck all kinds of animals without discrimination. In addition, whatever killed these animals “was fast-acting,” Rogers says, “dropping birds in their tracks.” And it happened again and again, creating multiple layers of bone beds.Last week, at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology here, Rogers noted the arched-back posture of …
September 15,2017
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Unique Imaging of a Dinosaur's Skull Tells Evolutionary Tale
Researchers using Los Alamos unique neutron-imaging and high-energy X-ray capabilities have exposed the inner structures of the fossil skull of a 74-million-year-old tyrannosauroid dinosaur nicknamed the Bisti Beast in the highest-resolution scan of tyrannosaur skull ever done.
September 14,2017
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New Dinosaur Discovery Suggests New Species Roosted Together Like Modern Birds
The Mongolian Desert has been known for decades for its amazing array of dinosaurs, immaculately preserved in incredible detail and in associations that give exceedingly rare glimpses at behavior in the fossil record.
September 14,2017
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Outrageous Heads Led to Outrageously Large Dinosaurs
Theropod dinosaur species with bony crests, horns and knobs evolved to giant body sizes 20 times faster than those species lacking such embellishments, new research has concluded.
August 05,2017
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New Cretaceous Dinosaur From Queensland
Researchers have announced the naming of Savannasaurus elliottorum, a new genus and species of dinosaur from western Queensland, Australia. The bones come from the Winton Formation, a geological deposit approximately 95 million years old. Savannasaurus was a medium-sized titanosaur, approximately half the length of a basketball court, with a long neck and a relatively short tail.
August 05,2017
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Dinosaurs of a Feather Flock and Die Together?
A new publication on the bird-like dinosaur Avimimus, from the late-Cretaceous suggests they were gregarious, social animals -- evidence that flies in the face of the long-held mysticism surrounding dinosaurs as solo creatures.
August 04,2017
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No Teeth? No Problem: Dinosaur Species Had Teeth as Babies, Lost Them as They Grew
Researchers have discovered that a species of dinosaur, Limusaurus inextricabilis, lost its teeth in adolescence and did not grow another set as adults. The finding is a radical change in anatomy during a lifespan and may help to explain why birds have beaks but no teeth.
August 04,2017
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New Species of Dinosaur Named After Canadian Icon
A new species of troodontid theropod dinosaur, Albertavenator curriei, has been identified. It is named after renowned Canadian palaeontologist Dr. Philip J. Currie. Palaeontologists initially thought that the bones of Albertavenator belonged to its close relative Troodon, which lived around 76 million years ago. This new species of troodontid in the Late Cretaceous of North America indicates that small dinosaur diversity in the latest Cretaceous of North America is likely underestimated due to the difficulty of identifying species from fragmentary fossils.
July 26,2017
