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First Euro-Stegosaur Found

A Stegosaurus fossil has been found in Portugal, reported Live Science.  Previously this species with its spiked tail and prominent rows of plates on its back was only known from North America.  A tooth, some leg bones and part of the backbone have been unearthed.  So far, the fossil looks indistinguishable from its North American […]

Dinosaur Fight or Common Fate?

A fossil discovery by amateurs in Montana, reported by the Great Falls Tribune, shows “a meat-eater and a plant-eater – with their tails crossed like swords.”  The fossils show “remarkable detail, right down to tendons and teeth.”  The three amateur discoverers had been scouting on private property in Garfield County.  Finding bone fragments on a […]

Big Dino Found, But How Did it Eat?

A few interesting dinosaur stories came to light this month. I was a Spanish monster:  A new giant sauropod has been found in Spain, reported EurekAlert based on a paper in Science.1  Named Turiasaurus riodevensis by the discoverers, it ranks among the largest of dinosaurs and is the first giant sauropod found in Europe, weighing […]

Dinosaur Skin Found, Possible Soft Tissue

A mostly-complete duck-billed Edmontosaurus dinosaur has been found in Montana, reported the Discovery Channel. A patch of skin from the hip was recovered. The team from North Carolina State University and Museum of Natural Sciences was very careful. They wanted to preserve any possible soft tissue, using techniques developed by Mary Schweitzer that last year […]

Dinosaur Bone Soft Tissue Questioned, Defended

The subject of soft tissue in dinosaur bones came up at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Meeting earlier this month, reported Science.1  Mary Schweitzer was there, defending her spectacular claim that she had discovered both medullary bone (06/03/2006) and soft, pliable blood vessels and cartilage in a T. rex leg bone (03/24/2005).  Doubters, however, brought […]

Dinos Not Killed Off by Meteor, but by Worms

Confident speculations that a big meteor hitting southern Mexico caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs appear to be unraveling.  Gerta Keller [Princeton, 09/25/2003], a doubter of the story that has been a leading contender for years with its smoking-gun crater called Chicxulub in the Yucatan, has been getting a receptive hearing among geologists with […]

Sea Monster Fossils Found in Arctic

The BBC News reported the discovery of over two dozen plesiosaurs, pliosaurs and ichthyosaurs (see 04/20/2005) north of Norway.  Skeletons of the large marine reptiles, completely assembled, were found buried in fine-grained sedimentary layers of black shale.  “Everything we’re finding is articulated,” said Jorn Harald Hurum, co-director of the dig.  “It’s not single bones here […]

Record Dino Trove in Mongolia

67 dinosaurs in a week: that’s what diggers from Montana State University found in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.  The team effort was led by veteran dinosaurologist Jack Horner.  Most skeletons were Psittacosaurs, thought to be predecessors of the horned ceratopsids, like Triceratops.  Seeking to understand the developmental biology of dinosaurs, the team was less […]

Dinosaur Bone Hunting Looks Promising

With probably less than a third of dinosaur types known, prospects are good for a new generation of young people to find one of their own, reports News@Nature.  New finds in Mongolia, South America and China over the last fifteen years indicate the vast majority of dinosaurs are still waiting to be discovered.  The authors […]

Meanwhile, Back on the Dinosaur Ranch

Sid Perkins went on a dinosaur hunt in Montana this past July, and wrote up his experiences for the cover story of the Aug. 26 issue of Science News.  It was more personal diary than science.  Perkins talked about the teamwork, hard work, and the occasional thrill of finding a fragment of bone that the […]

Opal Plesiosaurs, Flashy Pterosaurs and Hot Titanosaurs Inspire Stories

Paleontologists continue to dig up bones of fascinating species of long-lost animals.  When it comes to extinct species, the line between observation and interpretation becomes fuzzy, since there is no way to be absolutely sure how they behaved and what they were doing when they died.  This does not prevent scientists from freely speculating on […]

Mini-Dinos Found in Marine Sediments

Sauropods were not all the lumbering giants we think of; they could be the size of a pet dog (images of Deeno in the Flintstones come to mind).  This came to light from recent discoveries announced in Germany (see BBC News and LiveScience) of adult sauropods smaller than human height, ranging five to 20 feet […]

Dinosaur Boneyard: Dying Together Implies Living Together, Not Much Else

(Guest article)  CNN reported in an article from Associated Press that scientists have uncovered a small cache of dinosaur bones that contains bones from no other animals, and in their excitement have concluded that this means they must have hunted in packs. One expert called the discovery the first substantial evidence of group living by […]

What Use Is Half a Wing?

Ken Dial is at it again, trying to explain bird flight from the ground up with his own version of a Darwinian story (see 01/16/2003).  The title of his paper in BioScience1 harks back to an old criticism of Darwin’s theory: “What use is half a wing?”  Well, half a wing could be a half […]

Sea Monster Found Under Davy Yones’ Locker

The deepest dinosaur bone ever found, a part of a Plateosaurus, has been found by Norwegians 1.4 miles under the North Sea floor. This sets a new depth record for a dinosaur fossil. According to Live Science, “Researchers said it’s quite possible there are many more fossils down there.” More on National Geographic News, News@Nature […]
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