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Dinosaur news

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Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Velociraptor Dinosaur's cousin discovered

Scientists have found out a new species of Dinosaur that was closely related to the Velociraptor.

The 1.8m-long predator was a dromaeosaurid - a family of theropod dinosaurs from which modern birds come down.

The researchers found out its exquisitely well preserved skeleton in sediments dating from the Upper Cretaceous period in Inner Mongolia.

The Fossilised skeleton was in almost perfect condition - with entire claws and teeth - despite being between 145 and 65 million years old.

Its examination was directed by Xing Xu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

He and his colleagues described several distinguishing features, particularly of its jaw and feet, that enabled them to recognize it as a dromaeosaurid - a name that means "running lizard".

It had, for example, what the researchers explained as "raptorial claws" on its feet.

The highly evolved predator, which has been named Linheraptor exquisitus, represents an entirely latest genus within that family.

"Linheraptor is alike Velociraptor in many features," wrote the scientists.
They positioned out, however, that it was not Velociraptor's closest relative within the dromaeosaurid family.

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Thursday, March 25, 2010

Fossil illustrates dinosaur caught in collapsing sand dune

Researchers have found out a nearly complete Dinosaur Fossil which appears to have been caught in a collapsing sand dune.

The Seitaad ruessi fossil, illustrated in the journal PLoS One, is a relative of the long-necked sauropods that were once Earth's biggest animals.

S. ruessi, discovered in what is now Utah, could have walked on all four legs, or risen up to walk on just two.

It is from the Early Jurassic period, between 175 and 200 million years before.

At that time, all of Earth's continents were still joined in the super-continent Pangaea, and sauropodomorphs like S. ruessi have been originate in South America and Africa.

Unlike the sauropods to which they are associated, S. ruessi was relatively small, about a metre tall and 3.5-4m long with its lengthy neck and tail, weighing in at between 70 and 90kg.

Much of the fossil, first found out by a local artist in 2004, was perfectly preserved in sandstone. Still, it is missing its head, neck and tail.

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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Dinosaur skeleton to auction for $6-8m

A 66 million year-aged collectible will be going under the hammer at the Las Vegas Strip on Saturday.

Auctioneer Bonhams & Butterfields is giving natural history buffs the chance to possess "Samson", a fossilised female Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Samson's 170 bones were found out 17 years before in South Dakota, US, and make-up more than half the skeleton of the 40-feet-long, 7.5 ton Dinosaur.

Bids are hoped to apex $6m when it is sold at the Venetian hotel-casino in Las Vegas, on October 3.

The sale will contain hundreds of Dinosaur bone fragments in plastic bags - these separate bones could be added to Samson if experts are willing to invest the necessary thousands of hours.

The T. Rex is being vend among 41 other lots of museum-ready pieces, including a 28-foot duck-billed Dinosaur skeleton and a Seven-foot Fossil shark.

The collection will be on public preview for two weeks prior to the auction.

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Friday, March 19, 2010

China exposes Thousands of Dinosaur Footprints

More than 3,000 Dinosaur Footprints, all facing the same way, have been found out by researchers after a three-month excavation in the eastern Shandong province of China. Possibly representing a migration or panicked stampede, both the quantity and size of the prints distinguish this wonderful discovery.

Estimated to be more than 100 million years aged and dating back to the mid Cretaceous period, Dinosaur remains have been discovered more than thirty sites in the Zhucheng area. Therefore, the moniker, “dinosaur city.”

The prints range in size from 4 to 32 inches long and are thought to belong to at least six different dinosaur kinds including: Tyrannosaurs, Coelurosaurs and Hadrosaurs.

The area is said to be the world’s major grouping of fossilized dinosaur bones. Since 1964, there have been two major digs in this region and experts consider the large numbers of dinosaurs found could give vital clues about their extinction so many millions of years before.

It is possible that even more Dinosaur footprints may be uncovered as the excavation continues. At this time, plans are being made to set up a Dinosaur Fossil park in the area.

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Monday, March 15, 2010

Famous dinosaur fossil hunters

Movies like Jurassic Park make our fascination with dinosaurs seem risky and exciting. Dinosaur hunting can be both hazardous and exciting, but not in the way that the movies portray.

Dinosaur hunting is intellectually exciting, but things do not normally occur as quickly or as flashily as in the movies. Much of it is more tedious, sweaty job. Long trips to isolated places, shovels and picks. Viewing at pieces of rocks and bones, comparing bits of evidence.

There have been lots of people over the years interested in the past. Some have been interested in the distant past of prehistoric times. Bones have been found out for thousands of years. It was not until the 19th century, though, that some of those bones became known belonging to a different sort of animal. Large. Reptilian. Dinosaur!

The premature study of what became known as dinosaurs began in Europe, with many of the leaders in the field being British.

One of the premature dinosaur hunters was Gideon Mantell (1790-1852), who was a doctor from East Sussex, England. In 1822 he explained a tooth that his wife is said to have found along the road while traveling in West Sussex. The story of Gideon Mantell is accessible on a National Geographic DVD titled The Dinosaur Hunters.

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Monday, March 1, 2010

Skulls of new dinosaur species found in Utah

Scientists have made a rare discover: four skulls of a new species of giant plant-eating dinosaur, one of them completely intact.

Skulls of plant-eating Dinosaurs were so light and fragile that they have hardly been preserved to be discovered by paleontologists. Reaction to the discover, made in Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah, was "probably not printable in a newspaper," said Dan Chure, a paleontologist with the monument.

Chure said that everyone was actually dumbfounded and can go your complete career without seeing one of these. .To find multiple heads was just phenomenal.

Abydosaurus, which lived about 100 million years before, is a type of sauropod, the largest kind of dinosaur to walk on land. Like its relative Brachiosaurus, the long-necked Abydosaurus had a massive body with 3-trunk legs but a relatively tiny head, about one-two-hundredth the size of its body mass. The smallest sauropods might weigh as little as 10 tons; the largest as much as 50 or 60 tons.

The skulls that were found out were those of juvenile dinosaurs, which were probably about 25 feet long when they died, Chure said.

The dearth of skulls among Dinosaur Fossils has posed a hurdle in discovering about the creatures' biology and evolution, researchers said.

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Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Scientists decipher dinosaur colouration

Scientists have lastly answered the question that has befuddled the mind of nearly every inquisitive dinosaur enthusiast who's wondered, what colour were they?
While Hollywood has frequently provided its artistic interpretation for what the primitive creatures may have looked like in films like Jurassic Park, scientists now believe that they have enough evidence to definitively describe the colour patterns of convinced dinosaurs.
The discoveries, lately published in the academic journal Science and featured in National Geographic, were credited to a team led by Li Quanguo of the Beijing Museum of usual History and Jakob Vinther of Yale University.
The scientists were capable to extrapolate information about the density of melanosomes within fossilized dinosaurs with protofeathers and compare them to alike structures in modern birds to produce lifelike images of Anchiornis huxleyi. This little dinosaur much more closely resembles modern birds than it does stereotypical dinosaurs, but the impact of these findings remain innovative nonetheless.
Many researchers have been racing to rebuild the accurate image of dinosaurs; a similar study was lately published in a January issue of Nature. That article featured artwork by Lida Xing, a master's student studying paleontology at the University of Alberta. Xing contributed a picture of sinosaurepteryx, a carnivorous turkey-sized dinosaur, that he had constructed based on the findings.
Usually speaking, I would study the fossil cautiously, and communicated with the paper author regularly to understand the major features of the dinosaur. For example, sinosauropteryx with orange- and white-striped tails might be used for exhibit. This is the hint I'd got, he said.
When asked what inspired both his artistic originality and his scientific passion, Xing recalled a jiffy from his childhood.
My mother interpret to me Chinese Dinosaur, a book written by Dr. Dong Zhiming. It was then that the idea of becoming a paleontologist got determinedly planted in my head he recalled.
Many years afterward Xing was capable to join Zhiming on dinosaur excavations in Yunan and Henan provinces of China. afterward he worked at the Institute of Vertabrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences where he began work on artistic reproductions of dinosaurs, counting a cover illustration for Nature in 2006.

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Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Fossil find in China boosts dinosaur-bird link

A Dinosaur fossil discovered in northwestern China has gave fresh evidence that although its tribe resembled birds millions of years ago, it must have evolved separately - helping confirm that modern birds are indeed living dinosaurs.

It lived a full 160 million years before in the Jurassic period, long before the feathered Archaeopteryx, the first true flying bird, emerged in the fossil record, scientists said.

The newfound Dinosaur is a member of a group that some scientists had thought evolved into modern-day birds. However, because this fossil is so old, it gives weight to the dominant sight that modern birds, not the newly discovered birdlike creatures in China, were the ones that evolved from dinosaurs.

Like a bird, the dinosaur had 3 toes on each leg, a birdlike keel-shaped chest and a long beak. The ten-foot-long dinosaur, named Haplocheirus sollers or "simple, skillful hand," had short forearms with massive claws.

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Monday, February 1, 2010

Dinosaur Skin Color Revealed


Paleontologists Say Early Dinosaurs had Red "Mohawk" with Red and White Striped Tail

As much as paleontologists have sorted out about the Dinosaurs, one of the chief aspects of their appearance-what color they were-has remained mysterious. But in a new Nature study, a team of British and Chinese scientists report that they establish a way to unlock the color patterns of one of the earliest feathery dinosaurs-it had a red mohawk, they say, with a red and white striped tail.

The dino in question is called Sinosauropteryx, which existed about 125 million years ago. Looking at Fossils originate in China, the team led by Mike Benton found what they think are the remains of feathers. And they found a bit inside the feathers that matches modern birds: melanosomes.

These structures offer the melanin pigment in bird feathers (and human hair), and what color they are depends on the shape. “A ginger-haired person would have more spherical melanosomes, and a black-haired or grey-haired person might have more of the sausage-shaped structures,” said Professor Benton.

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Thursday, January 28, 2010

Dinosaur had ginger feathers


A team of scientists from China and the UK has currently revealed that the bristles of this 125 million-year-old Dinosaur were in fact ginger-coloured feathers.

The researchers say that the very small carnivore had a Mohican of feathers running along its head and back. It also had a stripy tail.

The team revealed details of the Dinosaur's colored feathers in an article published on Nature's website.

The team began by studying the fossilised ruins of a bird, Confuciusornis, which also lived during the premature cretaceous period.

Confuciusornis' featherswere preserved in very complete Fossils that were lately discovered in northern China.

Using a powerful electron microscope to look in the interior feathers, researchers were capable to see microscopic structures called melanosomes, which, in life, include the pigment melanin.



Melanin is what gives color to human hair and animal pelt, said Professor Mike Benton from the University of Bristol, UK, who led this study. They are also the most general way that colors are [produced] in feathers.

Professor Benton explained that differently shaped melanosomes produced dissimilar colors, with blacks or greys produced by sausage-shaped melanosomes, and reddish or russet shades found in globular ones.


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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Blast from the past


DANVILLE — Local dentist Dr. John Jack Hankla is delighted as schoolchildren file into the grand hall of the Community Arts Center and marvel at the hefty collection of replica dinosaur skeletons.

I just enjoy seeing the children 'ooh' and aah, Hankla said. When they first come in through the door and they see the splendor of these specimens, and they say Wow! I understand that we have done our job.

That Wow! factor, as Hankla calls it, fueled the curiosity that he and his son, John, shared to obtain the collection over the last 20 years.

The collection which includes a 40-foot Tyrannosaurus rex does not include innovative fossils. Rather, the specimens in the display are cast replicas of the bones. The ground floor has completely assembled skeletons, while an upstairs room has skulls and feet.

The inventive fossils were found in China, Brazil, Germany, North Africa and elsewhere around the world. The skull of a duck-billed dinosaur was found on a site close to Lusk, Wyo., where the Hanklas one time owned the fossil rights for digging specimens.

It was at that site that Jack and John Hankla first got eager about dinosaurs when John was about 8 years old. Hundreds of duck-billed dinosaurs had drowned there in a few sort of water hazard.

They were all washed into one smooth lagoon, Jack Hankla said. The carnivores then came and feasted on all these carcasses, and it was nicknamed the T. rex Café, because we discover all these broken teeth of carnivores like T. rex and raptors and lesser dromeosaurs, where they had been there munching.

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Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Teeth Suggest Dinosaur Was Venomous

Well-preserved fossils of a feathered dinosaur that exist about 124 million years ago — along with certain aspects of its teeth and skull — imply that the turkey-sized creature was venomous.

Sinornithosaurus was unearthed in China and first described by scientists about 10 years ago, but the telling details of the creature’s cranial anatomy are just now being described, says David Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

The majority of the teeth in each side of the creature’s upper jaw have grooves that run from the base of each tooth to the tip, a characteristic seen in some of today’s venomous reptiles. A huge triangular depression on the creature’s upper jawbone — a feature not previously reported in other dinosaurs or their relatives — probably held venom-producing glands, Burnham and his colleagues report online December 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Venom curving from those glands probably pooled in reservoirs at the base of each grooved tooth until the dino bit its prey, Burnham says.

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Friday, December 11, 2009

Dinosaur fossil fills gaps in evolutionary knowledge

Scientists have unearthed the fossilised bones of a meat-eating dinosaur the size of a large dog which they believed could fill in the gaps about the early evolution and global migration of a group of animals that take over the land for 170 million years.

The dinosaur, called Tawa hallae, lived about 230 million years ago and was originate in a quarry in northern New Mexico. It hold anatomical features that link it with other dinosaurs living much further south in what is now South America. Researchers said that Tawa bear the idea that the dinosaur lineage evolved in the southern part of the supercontinent Pangea. Successive waves of migration from that region resulted in a diverse variety of dinosaurs spreading to other parts of the giant continent, which later on split into several separate continents.

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Saturday, October 10, 2009

Dinosaur-killing impact set Earth to broil, not burn

The asteroid impact that ruined the age of dinosaurs 65 million years ago didn't incinerate life on our planet's surface – it presently broiled it, a new study suggests. The work resolves nagging questions about a theory that the affect triggered deadly wildfires around the world, but it also bring up new questions about just what led to the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period.

The impact of a 10-km asteroid is liable for the extinction of the dinosaurs and most other species on the planet. Early computer models demonstrate that more than half of the debris blasted into space by the impact would fall into the atmosphere within eight hours.

The models predicted the rain of shock-heated debris would radiate heat as intensely as an oven set to "broil" (260 °C) for at least 20 minutes, and maybe a couple of hours. Intense heating for that extend would heat wood to its ignition temperature, causing global wildfires.

Yet some species survived, and the global layer of impact debris doesn't contain as much soot as would be expected from burning the world's forests, raising questions about the scope of post-impact wildfires

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