Fossils of a new genus and species of an ankylosaurid dinosaur—Akainacephalus johnsoni-- have been unearthed in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, U.S.A., and are revealing new details about the diversity and evolution of this group of armored dinosaurs.
This stamp, featuring the 1993 movie Jurassic Park’s iconic Tyrannosaurus rex, was released by the U.S. Postal Service in 2000 as part of a souvenir sheet “Celebrate The Century: 1990s.” Legendary movie-poster artist Drew Struzan illustrated the stamp. He is known for his more than 150 movie posters, including all the films in the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and Star Wars film series.
Dinosaur-age fossilised remains of tiny organisms normally found in the sea have been discovered in inland, arid Australia – suggesting the area was, for a short time at least, inundated by sea water 40 million years before Australia’s large inland sea existed.
An international team of scientists has concluded the asteroid that smashed into Earth 66 million years ago not only wiped out the dinosaurs, but erased the world’s forests and the species that lived in trees. The researchers say only small ground-dwelling birds survived the mass extinction, profoundly changing the course of bird evolution.
Comparing how the chromosomes of modern-day birds and turtles are structured can help scientists figure out how dinosaur genomes might have looked. An Iowa State University scientist contributed to an international research team that recently published its findings reaching back through 260 million years of genomics.
Every 405,000 years, gravitational tugs from Jupiter and Venus slightly elongate Earth’s orbit, an amazingly consistent pattern that has influenced our planet’s climate for at least 215 million years and allows scientists to more precisely date geological events like the spread of dinosaurs, according to a Rutgers-led study. The findings are published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Silvisaurus condrayi has made a return to the KU Natural History Museum in a new, more complete form, accompanied by an interactive display that includes stunning depictions of the dinosaur and its environs.
A project spanning countries, years and institutions has attempted to reconstruct what the southern end of the world looked like during the Triassic period, 252 to 199 million years ago.
Fossils of six new species of pterosaurs, giant flying reptiles that flew over the heads of the dinosaurs, have been discovered by a team of researchers.
While the giant birds that once dominated New Zealand are all extinct, a study of their preserved dung (coprolites) has revealed many aspects of their ancient ecosystem, with important insights for ongoing conservation efforts.
In a study covering 300 million years of evolutionary history, researchers from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences found four necessary components to tail weapon development: size, armor, herbivory and thoracic stiffness.
The partial skeleton of a new species of turkey-sized herbivorous dinosaur has been discovered in 113 million year old rocks in southeastern Australia. The fossilized tail and foot bones give new insight into the diversity of the small, bipedal herbivorous dinosaurs called ornithopods.
Scans of fossilized dinosaur prints show how some dinosaur feet moved not just on top of but through the earth. The results of this study will be presented at the annual conference of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in San Francisco, CA on January 4, 2018
Using modern research tools on a 155-million-year-old reptile fossil, scientists at Johns Hopkins and the American Museum of Natural History report they have filled in some important clues to the evolution of animals that once roamed land and transitioned to life in the water.
Plesiosaurs, who thrived during the early to middle Jurassic Period, used four paddlelike flippers of nearly equal size and musculature to swim. Despite the seemingly subpar engineering, the fossil record reveals that plesiosaurs were widespread and prolific. This inspired a team in the U.K. to explore how swimming with four flippers might be advantageous compared to two. They’ll present their work during the 70th meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics, Nov. 19-21, 2017.
The stinging cells of jellyfish, called nematocytes, have evolved to be one of the world’s most efficient predation tools. The nematocysts consist of a capsule and folded tubule, and use high pressure and acceleration for defense and locomotion and, more importantly, to capture prey. Inconsistencies in a previous conceptual explanation of the stinging cell mechanism were identified using a microfluidic system and mathematical models. Researchers will share their mathematical model of nemotocytes at the 70th meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics, Nov. 19-21, 2017. The model demonstrates how environmental modifications can reduce the impact of jellyfish stinging capacity.
Prehistoric polar forests were built for survival, but were not hardy enough to live in ultra-high concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. A UWM geologist is studying the tree fossil record in Antarctica from a mass extinction 250 million years ago, looking for clues to how greenhouse gases affected plants -- then and now.
Rural counties continue to rank lowest among counties across the U.S., in terms of health outcomes. A group of national organizations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National 4-H Council are leading the way to close the rural health gap.
The two teeth are from small, rat-like creatures that lived 145 million years ago in the shadow of the dinosaurs. They are the earliest undisputed fossils of mammals belonging to the line that led to human beings.
Cancer cells can be targeted and destroyed with the metal from the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, according to new research by an international collaboration between the University of Warwick and Sun Yat-Sen University in China.
A team of scientists and students at the University of Rhode Island is inching closer to revealing how a group of animals from the Late Triassic went extinct
According to NAU researcher Chris Doughty, these large animals are important not for the quantity of dung they produce, but for their ability to move long distances across landscapes, effectively mixing the nutrients.
Human activities could change the pace of evolution, similar to what occurred 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving modern birds as their only descendants. That's one conclusion drawn by the authors of a new study published in Systematic Biology.
Some big plant-eating dinosaurs roaming present-day Utah some 75 million years ago were slurping up crustaceans on the side, a behavior that may have been tied to reproductive activities, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.
Scientists say that a large, now extinct, frog called Beelzebufo that lived about 68 million years ago in Madagascar would have been capable of eating small dinosaurs.
The fossilized plesiosaur Sankar Chatterjee found in 1984 is giving scientists a new understanding of convergent evolution between reptiles and mammals.
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.
Two 160 million-year-old mammal fossils discovered in China show that the forerunners of mammals in the Jurassic Period evolved to glide and live in trees. With long limbs, long hand and foot fingers, and wing-like membranes for tree-to-tree gliding, Maiopatagium furculiferum and Vilevolodon diplomylos are the oldest known gliders in the long history of early mammals.
Little is known about the origin and early evolution of the Notosuchia, hitherto unknown in the Jurassic period. New research on fossils from Madagascar, published in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ by Italian and French paleontologists, begin to fill the gap in a million-year-long ghost lineage.
Dinosaurs' faces might have been much more sensitive than previously thought, and crucial to tasks from precision eating and testing nest temperature to combat and mating rituals, according to a University of Southampton study.
Pioneering technology has shed fresh light on the world’s first scientifically-described dinosaur fossil – over 200 years after it was first discovered - thanks to research by WMG at the University of Warwick and the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History.
The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry is the densest collection of Jurassic dinosaur fossils. Since its discovery in the 1920s, numerous hypotheses have been proposed to explain the origin of the quarry. Were the dinosaurs poisoned? Did they die due to drought? Were they trapped in quick sand? A new study suggests that the quarry represents numerous mortality events which brought the dinosaurs to the site over time, rather than a single fatal event.
Observations from the age of the dinosaurs to today shows that chemical weathering of rocks changes less with global temperatures than believed. The results upend the accepted idea for how rocks regulate a planet's temperature over millions of years.
Leading hospital “superbugs,” known as the enterococci, arose from an ancestor that dates back 450 million years — about the time when animals were first crawling onto land (and well before the age of dinosaurs), according to a new study.
Researchers recently confirmed it is possible to extract proteins from 80-million-year-old dinosaur bones. The discovery sparks hopes for new insights about evolution and environmental change and could even offer useful clues for drug discovery or the search for extraterrestrial life.
A new species of ancient reptile has been described by scientists at the University of Birmingham, filling a critical gap in the fossil record of dinosaur cousins and suggesting that some features thought to characterise dinosaurs evolved much earlier than previously thought.
Researchers from the University of Missouri School Of Medicine recently discovered that although alligators, birds and dinosaurs have a similar skull-joint shape, this does not guarantee that their movements are the same.
Utilizing the most rigorous testing methods to date, researchers from North Carolina State University have isolated additional collagen peptides from an 80-million-year-old Brachylophosaurus.
Climate scientists now reconstructed how tiny droplets of sulfuric acid formed high up in the air after the well-known impact of a large asteroid and blocking the sunlight for several years, had a profound influence on life on Earth.
New research on the teeth of fossilized dinosaur embryos indicates that the eggs of non-avian dinosaurs took a long time to hatch--between about three and six months.
New research on the teeth of fossilized dinosaur embryos indicates that the eggs of non-avian dinosaurs took a long time to hatch--between about three and six months.
How long did it take for dinosaur eggs to incubate? Groundbreaking research led by Florida State University establishes a timeline of three to six months.
The study is the first to draw a link between RBC size and microscopic traces of blood vessels and bone cells inside bones. They found that extinct mammal and bird relatives had smaller RBCs and were likely better athletes than earlier terrestrial vertebrates. The timing of RBC-size reduction coincided with Earth's greatest mass extinction 252 mya.