Great trumpeting wildebeests!
Science Daily introduces us to a new… or, well, very, very old beast – a prehistoric gnu that trumpeted like a duck-billed dinosaur: By poring […]
paleontology
Dinosaurs walked in Scotland
National Geographic marvels at a huge number of very large footprints on the Scottish coast: The footprints form the largest dinosaur site ever found in […]
Apatosaurus could have cracked its tail like a giant whip.
Scientific American explores a strange anatomical detail for a very large dinosaur indeed – a whip-like tail that could actually have cracked like a whip: […]
Science Art: Giant Animals: Modern and Extinct (detail), by Mary McLain
Click to embiggen These are prehistoric animals compared to their modern relatives and, for scale, a human. A human who’s interested in what they’re like… […]
Four-legged snake fossil rewrites reptile evolution.
Nature has more on the Brazilian “hugging” snake with legs… that’s changing the way we look at reptile origins: Although it has four legs, Tetrapodophis […]
World’s oldest sperm found inside fossilized worm.
It’s the sperm of perspective, is what it is. Nature is showing off the very seed of history – the oldest animal sperm ever discovered: […]
Science Art: Comparison between Deinonychus and Velociraptor’s feet, by Danny Cicchetti.
Click to embiggen File this, I guess, under “the problem with Jurassic Park.” The little claw at the bottom belonged to the fearsome Velociraptor, a […]
Hellboy, king of the Triceratops clan.
Science Daily describes the regal bearing and frilly crown of Regaliceratops peterhewsi, the dinosaur they’re calling “Hellboy”: “The specimen comes from a geographic region of […]
Snakes had ankles a long, long time ago.
Science Daily paints a picture of the very first snakes… before they lost their feet: The study, led by Yale University, USA, analyzed fossils, genes, […]
Science Art: Os Maxillaires Fossiles, by Pieter Camper.
Click to embiggen Jaws! Pieter Camper was a fossil collector, and in 1786, he drew this jaw he’d acquired. He thought it belonged to a […]
A plant-eating T. rex… with a long neck.
Science Daily tries to describe a “platypus dinosaur” that combines the oddest bits of Brontosaurus and T. rex: Chilesaurus diegosuarezi is named after the country […]
Dinosaur eggs in the big city.
Sometimes, as South China Morning Post demonstrates, you just can’t dig a hole in some parts of China without making some kind of remarkable dinosaur […]
The age of the elephant rats.
Live Science describes a new sort of prehistoric monster – a bull-sized rodent with elephant-like tusks: An amateur paleontologist first unearthed the skull of an […]
The mighty (tiny, but mighty) primate ancestor… waaay bigger than expected.
New Scientist tries to keep some perspective about our great-great-etc. grandfather, Ursolestes, a prehistoric primate who might seem to us, a squirrel monkey. To dinosaurs, […]
Science Art: Fig 2: Lateral views of the skull and lower jaw… (etc.)
Click to embiggen My son and I just spent the afternoon watching the charming Your Inner Fish series (his idea, not mine), and learned all […]