Feathered Fossils Prove Birds Evolved From Dinosaurs, Say Chinese Scientists

Discovery: An illustration of a feathered dinosaur, Anchiornis huxleyi,
the fossils of which have been found in China

From The Daily Mail:

A new species of feathered dinosaurs provides hard evidence the prehistoric creatures evolved into birds, a group of Chinese scientists has claimed.

The fossils represent five different species from two different rock sequences in north-eastern China and all have feathers or feather-like structures.

The new finds are 'indisputably' older than archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, which scientists claim provides exceptional evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

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Sharks Swarmed on Ancient Sea Monster

Voracious Predator. Cretalamna appendiculata, was an early relative of today's great white shark, shown here. Getty Images

From Discovery Channel:

Sept. 17, 2009 -- Remains of a shark-bitten, 85-million-year-old plesiosaur reveal that around seven sharks likely consumed the enormous dinosaur-era marine reptile in a feeding frenzy, leaving some of their shark teeth stuck in the plesiosaur's bones, according to a new study.

The findings, which will be presented at next week's 69th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, are the first direct evidence of the diet and feeding behavior of Cretalamna appendiculata, a now-extinct early relative of today's great white sharks.

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Fossil Find Challenges Theories on T. Rex

The bones of Raptorex were discovered in northern China. Mike Hettwer

From The New York Times:

Paleontologists said Thursday that they had discovered what amounted to a miniature prototype of Tyrannosaurus rex, complete with the oversize head, powerful jaws, long legs — and, as every schoolchild knows, puny arms — that were hallmarks of the king of the dinosaurs.

But this scaled-down version, which was about nine feet long and weighed only 150 pounds, lived 125 million years ago, about 35 million years before giant Tyrannosaurs roamed the earth. So the discovery calls into question theories about the evolution of T. rex, which was about five times longer and almost 100 times heavier.

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US Scientists Set To Reveal The True Colour Of Dinosaurs

From Independent:

A new technique that identifies the hue of ancient birds may help a Yale team with bigger beasts.

It is a question that has baffled the greatest scientific minds – and those of the average seven-year-old: what colour were dinosaurs?

Now a dramatic breakthrough in fossil examination has sparked a race to discover an answer that may satisfy the scientific community as well as anxious crayon-wielders. A research team at Yale University believes it has established a technique that can identify the colour of fossilised feathers and fur. Preliminary results suggest that the true colours of dinosaurs may soon be revealed.

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End Of Civil War Opens Up Angolan 'Jurassic Park'

Fossils are seen in the Bentiaba desert, southern province of Namibe in Angola. Much of Angola's fossil richness results from dramatic continental shifts tens of millions of years ago, which saw the land transform from desert to tropics. (AFP/HO/File/Anne Schulp)

From Yahoo News.AFP:

LUANDA (AFP) – Angola is best known for oil and diamonds, but dinosaur hunters say the country holds a "museum in the ground" of rare fossils -- some actually jutting from the earth -- waiting to be discovered.

"Angola is the final frontier for palaeontology," explained Louis Jacobs, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, part of the PaleoAngola project which is hunting for dinosaur fossils.

"Due to the war, there's been little research carried out so far, but now we're getting in finally and there's so much to find.

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Prehistoric 'Runway' Used by Flying Reptile

A photo and depiction of the pterosaur tracks that suggest an ancient landing strip.
Credit: JM Mazin et al.

From Live Science:

A prehistoric runway for flying pterosaurs has been discovered for the first time.

Scientists uncovered the first known landing tracks of one of these extinct flying reptiles at a site dubbed "Pterosaur Beach," in the fine-grained limestone deposits of an ancient lagoon in southwestern France dating back some 140 million years ago to the Late Jurassic.

The footprints suggest the pterosaur — a "pterodactyloid" with a wingspan roughly three feet wide (one meter) — flapped to stall its flight during landing, and then planted both its two-inch-long feet (five cm) simultaneously at a high angle.

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Chicken-hearted Tyrants: Predatory Dinosaurs As Baby Killers

Fossil evidence suggests that the large carnivores hunted mainly juvenile dinosaurs instead of giant herbivorous adults. (Credit: iStockphoto/David Coder)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 7, 2009) — Two titans fighting a bloody battle – one that often turns fatal for both of them. This is how big predatory dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus are often depicted while hunting down their supposed prey, even larger herbivorous dinosaurs. The fossils, though, do not account for that kind of hunting behavior but indicate that theropods, the large predatory dinosaurs, were hunting much smaller prey.

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Dino Tooth Sheds New Light On Ancient Riddle: Major Group Of Dinosaurs Had Unique Way Of Eating

These are teeth from the lower jaw of a hadrosaur, Edmontosaurus, showing its multiple rows of leaf-shaped teeth. The worn, chewing surface of the teeth is towards the top. (Credit: Vince Williams, University of Leicester)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 30, 2009) — Microscopic analysis of scratches on dinosaur teeth has helped scientists unravel an ancient riddle of what a major group of dinosaurs ate -- and exactly how they did it!

Now for the first time, a study led by the University of Leicester, has found evidence that the duck-billed dinosaurs -- the Hadrosaurs -- in fact had a unique way of eating, unlike any living creature today.

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Evidence Found For Ancient Supersized Sperm

Researchers used a type of holotomography to capture 3-D images of this 100 million-year-old fossil ostracod called Harbinia micropapillosa. The left arrow shows the preserved inner part of the esophagus, while the right arrow points to the two seminal receptacles, where this female stored the giant sperm cells after mating. Credit: Renate Matzke-Karasz

From Live Science:

The fossilized remains of a tiny 100 million-year-old crustacean reveal evidence of what to her at least would have been giant sperm, measuring perhaps as long as her body.

While the sperm itself was not preserved, 3-D images of the female's specialized receptacles indicate she had just finished having sex and that they were filled with sperm that has since degraded. (The oldest direct evidence of sperm comes from a springtail living some 40 million years ago, according to the researchers.)

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Bang Goes That Theory: Dinosaur Extinction Due To Volcano NOT Asteroid

Image: A giant asteroid hit the Earth around 65million years ago, but experts dispute the impact it had

From The Daily Mail:

The dinosaurs were wiped out by volcanoes that erupted in India about sixty five million years ago, according to new research.

For the last thirty years scientists have believed a giant meteorite that struck Chicxulub in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula was responsible for the mass extinction of species, including T Rex and its cousins.

But now Professor Gerta Keller says fossilized traces of plants and animals dug out of low lying hills at El Penon in northeastern Mexico show this event happened 300,000 years after the dinosaurs disappeared.

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Bang Goes That Theory: Dinosaur Extinction 'Occurred 300,000 Years AFTER Asteroid Impact '

Photo: A giant asteroid hit the Earth around 65million years ago, but experts dispute the impact it had

From The Daily Mail:

The popular theory that dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid 65million years ago has been challenged.

It was believed the Chicxulub crater in Mexico was the 'smoking gun' of the mass extinction event.

Molten droplets from the ancient asteroid impact were found just below the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary - a geological layer of sediment linked with the extinction.

But soil samples from the 112-mile wide crater show the impact predates the disappearance of the dinosaurs by about 300,000 years.

The latest research has been published in the Journal of the Geological Society.

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T. Rex Relative Fills Evolutionary Gap

Reconstructed body silhouettes of three tyrannosaurs, showing where Xiongguanlong falls in the spectrum of body sizes in this lineage. Dilong on the left is 125 million years old and the smallest known tyrannosaur. Xiongguanlong, shown in grey, is much larger, but is still dwarfed by T. rex, shown on the right. Credit: M. Donnelly/The Field Museum

From Live Science:

A Tyrannosaurus rex ancestor and an ostrich-mimic have emerged as two new dinosaur species found among a treasure trove of skeletons in China's Gobi Desert.

The T. rex relative had a mouthful of 70 teeth, and stood 5 feet tall at the hip while weighing almost a third of a ton. Scientists say that its discovery helps fill in a "missing link" in the giant carnivore's evolution.

However, the earlier dinosaur "was still a fly weight predator compared to its heavy-weight relatives," said Peter Makovicky, curator of dinosaurs at the Field Museum in Chicago. The Field Museum houses the largest known T. rex specimen, named Sue, which stood at nearly 14 feet tall at the hips and weighed between 6 and 7 tons.

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Why Certain Fishes Went Extinct 65 Million Years Ago

Fossil herrings from the Eocene Green River Formation of the western United States where Colorado, Utah and Nevada meet. Herrings are one of the small-bodied groups of bony fishes that survived the end-Cretaceous extinction and persist to this day in marine environments. (Credit: Photo by Matt Friedman)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2009) — Large size and a fast bite spelled doom for bony fishes during the last mass extinction 65 million years ago, according to a new study.

Today, those same features characterize large predatory bony fishes, such as tuna and billfishes, that are currently in decline and at risk of extinction themselves, said Matt Friedman, author of the study and a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago.

"The same thing is happening today to ecologically similar fishes," he said. "The hardest hit species are consistently big predators."

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Young Dinosaurs Roamed Together, Died Together

While approaching the edge of a lake in what is today the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia, a herd of young Sinornithomimus dinosaurs suddenly finds itself hopelessly trapped in mud some 90 million years ago. (Credit: Art by Todd Marshall, courtesy of Project Exploration)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2009) — A herd of young birdlike dinosaurs met their death on the muddy margins of a lake some 90 million years ago, according to a team of Chinese and American paleontologists that excavated the site in the Gobi Desert in western Inner Mongolia.

The Sudden sudden death of the herd in a mud trap provides a rare snapshot of social behavior. Composed entirely of juveniles of a single species of ornithomimid dinosaur (Sinornithomimus dongi), the herd suggests that immature individuals were left to fend for themselves when adults were preoccupied with nesting or brooding.

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Fossil Hunters Find Sea Monster ... And A Dinosaur The Size Of A Skinny Chicken

Artist's impression of a 45-tonne Pliosaur attacking a Plesiosaur.
Photograph: Atlantic Productions

From The Guardian:

The giant meat-eating reptile, known as a pliosaur, had a bite four times as powerful as T. rex. The second creature, on the other hand, may be the least scary dinosaur ever discovered.

The remains of a giant meat-eating sea monster that patrolled the oceans during the reign of the dinosaurs have been unearthed on an island in the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

Norwegian fossil hunters recovered the rear half of the formidable reptile's skull in south-west Spitsbergen in what has been described as one of the most significant Jurassic discoveries ever made.

The predator has been identified as a new species of pliosaur, a group of extinct aquatic reptiles that had huge skulls, short necks and four flippers to power them through the water.

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Dino Extinction May Have Been Caused By ‘Magnetic Chaos’

From Zeenews.com:

Washington, Dec 13: A new theory has suggested that the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs 250 million years ago, was caused by the Earth’s magnetic field going into complete disarray, exposing the planet to a shower of cosmic radiation.

According to a report in Discovery News, the theory has been put forward by Yukio Isozaki of the University of Tokyo.

The Permian-Triassic mass extinction event happened 250 million years ago, snuffing out 90 percent of life on the planet.

Now, the new theory by Isozaki suggests that the catastrophe was set in motion 15 million years earlier, deep in the Earth.

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Polar Dinosaurs Endured Cold Dark Winters

The skull of a polar dinosaur, Saurolophus osborni, displayed on Dec. 3, 2008, by Phil Bell (left) and Eric Snively (right) of the University of Alberta. Some Saurolophus specimens have been found in polar regions. Credit: Jamie Hanlon, University of Alberta

From Live Science:

Polar dinosaurs such as the 3.3-ton duckbill Edmontosaurus are thought by some paleontologists to have been champion migrators to avoid the cold, dark season. But a study now claims that most of these beasts preferred to stick closer to home despite potentially deadly winter weather.

While some polar dinosaurs may have migrated, their treks were much shorter than previously thought, University of Alberta researchers Phil Bell and Eric Snively conclude from a recent review of past research on the animals and their habitat. Polar dinosaurs include hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, tyrannosaurs, troodontids, hypsilophodontids, ankylosaurs, prosauropods, sauropods, ornithomimids and oviraptorosaurs.

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