PhysOrg goes *inside* the skull to figure out how – and how quickly – a dinosaur’s brain developed:

Stephan Lautenschlager from Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, together with Tom Hübner from the Niedersächsische Landesmuseum in Hannover, Germany, picked the brains of 150 million year old dinosaurs.

The two palaeontologists studied different fossils of the Jurassic dinosaur Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki: a very [...]

A Devonian fish with a bony head.

That means it was swimming around hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs.

Found on the Scientific Illustration tumblog.

Not individual whales, but whole new species. Science has the details on the big, big discovery in California’s highway system:

“In California, you need a paleontologist and an archaeologist on-site” during such projects, [paleontologist Meredith Rivin, of the John D. Cooper Archaeological and Paleontological Center in Fullerton, California,] says. That was fortuitous: The Laguna Canyon outcrop, excavated between 2000 [...]

Slate examines the mysteries of the mass extinction that killed all the dinosaurs… except the birds:

“Dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid 65 million years ago” is now an indicator of outdated understanding. For one thing, geologists have recalibrated the end of the Cretaceous Period (the final stage of the Mesozoic Era) to 66 million years ago. Granted, from [...]

Nature has a great pictorial guide called How to eat a Triceratops:

Denver Fowler at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, and his colleagues studied numerous Triceratops specimens from Montana’s Hell Creek Formation to identify how many had the characteristic tooth marks of Tyrannosaurus on them. They found 18, most of which were skulls. When they looked closer, [...]

You remember Lake Vostok, yes? The Antarctic lake where scientists pulled up some water from 20 million years ago, just to see what things might have survived? Well, New Scientist says, initial reports are …nothing much, so far:

Isolated from the rest of the planet for 14 million years, Lake Vostok might be the only body of water [...]

A prehistoric non-bird, found via Scientific Illustration.

(Not to be mistaken for the rather unpleasant crusts on the mouths of fever sufferers.)

If there’s something familiar about this composition, it might be because John Sibbick also illustrated Warhammer roleplaying game books, White Dwarf magazine covers and death metal record covers. But they don’t seem to have as much [...]

That’s Homo heidelbergensis stopping for a quick sip of water, as imagined by Zdenek Burian.

Zdenek Burian was possibly Eastern Europe’s (and maybe the world’s) most influential scientific illustrator. A devotee of Charles Knight, he brought ancient scenes to life, starting as an art student in the 1930s in his native Czechoslovakia. He partnered up with [...]

EurekAlert goes back 230 million years to uncover the most ancient arthropods ever found:

The amber droplets, most between 2-6 millimeters long, were buried in outcrops high in the Dolomite Alps of northeastern Italy and excavated by Eugenio Ragazzi and Guido Roghi of the University of Padova. About 70,000 of the miniscule droplets were screened for inclusions —encased animal [...]