the ark left without the dinosaurs

earth's history on a football field

tuba city, az dinosaur tracks

How Jurassic World Should Have Ended

Scientists Discover One Of The Oldest Horned Dinosaurs: Wendiceratops

Scientists have found a "new" horned dinosaur that lived about 79 million years ago — and they say the discovery helps them understand the early evolution of the family that includes Triceratops.

The new dinosaur, which was named Wendiceratops pinhornensis after a famous fossil hunter who discovered the bone bed in Canada where these fossils were buried, is one of the oldest known horned dinosaurs.

Its distinctive feature is a highly decorated frill around its neck, says paleontologist David Evans from the Royal Ontario Museum.

"The frill is sort of ornamented by a pretty spectacular wave of gnarly hooks that project forward," Evans says.

He adds that it probably had big horns above its eyes and had a big one over its nose — the earliest occurrence of a prominent nose horn in this dinosaur family.

"It's a significant discovery in that it tells us a lot of new information about the early evolution of skull ornamentation, the hooks and horns, that characterize this iconic group of dinosaurs," Evans says.

A few decades ago, scientists knew of only 25 to 30 horned dinosaurs. Now, there are more than 60 and new ones keep turning up all the time.

Michael Ryan, a paleontologist with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, says that Triceratops may have used its horns to fend off Tyrannosaurus rex in the late Cretaceous. But all these weird skull decorations in other dinosaurs likely had more to do with impressing the ladies.

"The horned dinosaur with the biggest horns may have been able to out-compete its rivals to control the biggest harem for breeding purposes," Ryan says.

He and Evans describe their new dinosaur in the journal PLOS ONE.

Despite this — and all the other new discoveries — Triceratops will likely continue to reign as the quintessential horned dinosaur, even though it is "actually a relatively boring horned dinosaur in many ways," Evans says.

But it was discovered over a century ago and has had time to get firmly lodged in the public's imagination. What's more, the fact that it lived in the time of T. rex means that children can play out epic battles between them.

"When I was a kid, Triceratops certainly loomed large in our household," says Evans, who recalls that it was his sister's favorite, while he preferred T. rex. "So, we kind of had the classic argument about which one was better when I was maybe 5 years old."

And he isn't the only one with such vivid Triceratops memories. Ryan recalls that his kindergarten teacher once read a children's book called The Enormous Egg.

"Because it was all about Triceratops and horned dinosaurs," Ryan says, "that probably set me on my path to where I am today." npr

dinosaur sand drawing

A tyrannosaur on Shanklin sands. Completed in about five minutes byNiroot Puttapipat. More pictures at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs.

zookeepers recreating Jurassic World dinosaur training

After literally the biggest opening weekend ever, Jurassic World fever has taken over, well, the world. Everyone wishes they could hop on a motorcycle and hang out with some dinosaurs, right? Sadly, we can’t grab a frosty beverage and enjoy watching pterodactyls flapping around an atrium quite yet. I know, we’re sad about it too. But, we have uncovered some real life Chris Pratts working hard and joining in on the Jurassic World hype.

Keepers and trainers at aquariums and zoos all over are announcing their membership in Pratt’s raptor squad. Starting on Twitter, keepers have been posting photos recreating the famous shot of Pratt’s character Owen Grady taming the velociraptors. I love a good meme, and these photos are amazing. What better way to spread the word about zoos and aquariums?

Jurassic World: What do the paleontologists think?

Explaining the concept of this review is like explaining a dream. "I went to go see 'Jurassic World' before the film was in theaters, but instead of my friends, I brought two top paleontologists."

Based on a small sample size, the "Jurassic Park" film franchise has a special place in the heart of paleontologists. This is probably why I was able to convince the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History Director Kirk Johnson and Curator of Dinosauria Matthew Carrano, both paleontologists, to come to a screening of "Jurassic World."

The tl;dr of their reaction? "Jurassic World" is super entertaining — but it could have used more herbivores.

Here is the paleontologists' review, in the form of a condensed and edited conversation. There are, as you would imagine, mild — but not devastating — spoilers.

KJ: I did enjoy the addition of the Pterosaurs and the Mesosaur.

MC: Right, a few non-dinosaurs. That's true, having more than just peripheral role.

KJ: They definitely supercharged the Mesosaur and made the Pterosaurs way stronger than they would have been in real life.

MC: Yeah. Pterosours could do you damage, but it's hard to believe a Pterosaur could lift a person. They're not that strong. Their bones are like paper. It's hard to imagine not being able to get away from a Pterosaur. You could crush one, probably.

KJ: And their claws aren't like that.

MC: They're not eagles. That's the other thing, too. They're not actually animals that run around and grab things with their claws the way raptors do today. They're mouth predators. If they can't pick you up with their mouth, they're not going to eatyou. And a lot of Pterosaurs, their neck bones are not thick. They probably can't pick up a person. Their feet are not — I wouldn't imagine it to be the equivalent of an eagle. They basically are flat footed.

KJ: They're fishing.

MC: Bug eating. The average Pterosaur is much smaller. It's the same thing as the Velociraptor. And the Mesosaur is substantially larger than most Mesosaurs.

KJ: Twice-ish.

MC: Nice to see some marine things. Although I'd love to know how you get [a Mesosaur] out of a mosquito. How do you get the blood out of a sea creature out of a mosquito?

What's changed in dinosaur science between "Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic World"?

KJ: The number of dinosaurs we know has just, like, skyrocketed.

MC: Every six or seven weeks, you get a new dinosaur. And that pace has been going up for 20 years.

KJ: If you drive a direct connection between places putting value in dinosaurs and hiring dinosaur scientists, and then dinosaur science finding new dinosaurs, there's almost something like a direct cause and effect between something like "Jurassic Park" and this incredible number of new dinosaurs.

The new Jurassic World dinosaur is 'a little shy', apparently

Of all those newly discovered dinosaurs since the last installment of the series, which one should have been in "Jurassic World"?

KJ: Deinocheirus. A gigantic clawed duck thing. A lot of the cool weird ones are herbivores.

MC: Every single kind of carnivore is in there, right? With the herbivores, it's "we've got our horns one, we have our armor one, we have our longneck one, and we don't really care how many."

We've probably discovered about 4 percent of all the dinosaurs that ever existed. They should be just making these dinosaurs like "holy cow, what's that?" And they would all be dinosaurs you've never heard of. They could say, "Well it's kind of like a stegosaurus, but it's got all this other junk on it. I guess it's a ... " And they could just start naming new dinosaurs.

On the Indominus Rex, the made-up hybrid villain "dinosaur."

KJ: It basically looks like a supercharged Allosaurus. But it had bird raptor claws. Did you notice that? Those are eagle claws, they weren't dinosaur claws.

MC: And then it had sort of like a Bellusaur head with all these knobs on it.

KJ: It looks like a dinosaur, basically. It looked like you could easily find that.

MC: In the technical details no, but there are giant long-armed predatory dinosaurs. So you don't even need to get that weird about it. Interestingly, the color changing, that was in the book, the first book. There's a dinosaur in the first book called Carnotaurus. Which of course we don't know what color it was. But in the first "Jurassic Park" book, it was a color-changing dinosaur, which they only found out after they made it. It just turned out to be a camouflaged dinosaur. They got rid of it in the first movie originally, but they brought the concept back now.

On the film's choice to explain away the accuracy of "Jurassic World's" dinosaurs by saying that none of the park's creatures are "natural."

MC: I loved that, right? It was the "scientist, shut up" moment. B.D. Wong's character says something like: "You always wanted more teeth and more this, if we did it the way they were supposed to be they would look completely different." So the idea is, they don't have feathers on purpose. At least he provides an answer, right?

On the portrayal of scientists in the film.

KJ: This was the first one with no paleontologists in it?

MC: Yeah.

KJ: In the first (movie), there's the famous line, "I need the opinion of a paleobotanist." Which is the first and only time the word "paleobotany" has ever been uttered in a movie. As a paleobotanist I was —

MC: It was a high-water mark.

KJ: This one, there was, like, the tough guy who was the dinosaur trainer.

MC: But he was like an ex-Navy dude.

KJ: So that might be the big thing, is that they've matured past needing us.

What about the Jurassic plants?

KJ : My big pet peeve is of course, everybody short-shrifts the vegetation in the landscape. Everybody puts dinosaurs in modern landscapes. It's even worse if you call it "Jurassic World." All the implications are that you're going to build this entire world. But really it's not; it's Hawaii with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs didn't really live in the rain forest, because there weren't really rain forests to live in when dinosaurs were around.

MC: And actually if you had an island like that, if you assume that the dinosaurs could have adjusted to eating these things they've never eaten before, etc. It would have take no time at all for those dinosaurs to totally have remade that landscape, like elephants today. Elephants hate trees; they just start pulling them down. Elephants are engineering the landscape, and the big dinosaurs certainly would have done that. It wouldn't have been a dense rain forest for very long. They would have trashed the place.

What did you think about Chris Pratt's trained Velociraptors?

MC: Deeply unlikely, for a whole bunch of reasons. A lot of dinosaurs live in groups, it seems like. I'm sure there are ways of communicating, crocodiles do that today. But the raptors are engaging in wolf-like behavior. Even in mammals that stuff shows up late. It's a pretty new thing.

We want our predators to be as dramatic as possible, right? That whole notion actually came out of science, that they were pack hunters. That's not a movie invention. And it's based on the fact that the very first examples of these raptors that were found, there were several of them that were found together, and a plant eater that was much bigger. The idea was that it was a pack scenario. But that has not really held up in later years for a variety of reasons. But it's been a very catchy thing. The more likely thing is that they were running around eating lizards.

Copyright: Washington Post 

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/jurassic-world-what-do-the-paleontologists-think-10316292.html

Fossil shows Prehistoric Reptile Gave Birth in Open Ocean

A case of mistaken identity turned out to be the key for proving that a prehistoric aquatic reptile did not lay eggs, but rather gave birth to live young in the warm seas of the Mesozoic.

Former Smithsonian pre-doctoral fellow and prehistoric bird expert Daniel Field, now a researcher at Yale University, was combing through the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History’s collections of fossilized toothed birds. Coming to a box containing an unknown bird species, Field immediately recognized the bones had been misfiled.

Field saw the tiny jawbone pieces in the box—complete with teeth—and realized they very clearly belonged to a baby-sized version of a swimming reptile known as a mosasaur. Field had worked with adult mosasaur specimens during a paleontological dig earlier in his career.

What’s more, these specimens were collected from deposits from the prehistoric Bear Paw Sea, which once stretched from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico. That  gives strong credence to two previous proposals: that mosasaurs lived in the open ocean, not lurking exclusively near coastlines, as previously believed; and that they gave birth to live young.

“It really speaks to the value of the fossil record, that only the fossil record can provide direct evidence of the history of life,” Field says. “It helps us understand what these long-extinct animals would have been like as living, breathing creatures.”

Field added that the marine lizard’s reproductive strategy raises the question of whether mosasaurs and their like were truly cold-blooded in the classic sense. Giving birth to ready-to-swim young in the ocean doesn’t translate to being slow and sluggish like modern reptiles, Field notes.

Collected in Kansas in the late 1800s from the famous Niobrara Formation, the baby mosasaur bones strongly resemble the jaws of unrelated toothed birds in size and shape, and were found in an area where other fossilized birds had been collected. They’d probably been mistaken as bird bones simply due to their size.

Field’s expertise with birds and prior experience with mosasaurs enabled him to identify a distinguishing bulge on the jawbone samples, a structure absent in prehistoric toothed birds. The jawbones belong to a species of mosasaur called Clidastes. Adult specimens have been found 9 feet in length, but these jawbones came from babies no more than 12 inches long. 

Fossils of baby mosasaurs have been found before, but all were etched and pitted as if by acid, indicating they’d been transported to their final resting places in the belly of a predator. The Yale bones showed no such evidence, meaning they’d died of other causes. Field’s discovery fills a puzzling gap in the fossil record.

“Direct evidence of baby mosasaurs in an open marine setting had not yet been found, which is surprising because they had turned up for other groups of marine reptiles,” Field says.

Because of their body structure, researchers had suspected that mosasaurs did not haul themselves out onto a beach to lay eggs, similar to how sea turtles reproduce. Fossilized remains of other prehistoric swimmers, the ichthyosaurs, have been found in the process of giving birth. Some modern relatives of mosasaurs, including monitor lizards and some species of snakes, also skip the eggs.

Why are baby mosasaur fossils rare? Fields points to a variety of likely reasons, including collection bias. Turn-of-the-century fossil hunters were more interested in large, fearsome skeletons for their museums’ collections. They possibly disregarded smaller bones as uninteresting. Also, small-bodied organisms often aren’t preserved as well in the fossil record, due to factors including predation, scavenging, or the bones being smashed and scattered before they can fossilize.

“These fossils have basically waited in the bowels of the Yale Peabody museum for their time to shine,” Field laughed. “People talk about the second round of fossil hunting—everybody knows that paleontologists go into field to dig stuff up, but fossil hunting in museum collections can lead to new insights, too.”  smithsonianscience.si.edu

Field reported his findings in a recent issue of the journal Palaeontology.

size and weight comparisons for dreadnoughtus schrani

Four-winged dinosaur is 'biggest ever'

A new four-winged dinosaur has been discovered, with exceptionally long feathers on its tail and "hindwings".

Changyuraptor yangi was a gliding predator which lived in the Cretaceous period in what is now Liaoning, China.

Its remarkable tail feathers - measuring up to 30cm - are the longest in any non-avian dinosaur.

This unusual plumage helped the creature to slow down during flight and land safely, say scientists writing in Nature Communications.

C. yangi is a new species of microraptorine, a group related to early avians.

These ancient creatures offer clues to the origin of flight - and the transition from feathered dinosaurs to birds.

Palaeontologists once thought that four-winged gliders were a stepping stone in the path to two-winged flight.

But recent fossil discoveries suggest that microraptorines were an evolutionary side-branch.

Flight probably evolved many times in different feathered species - not only the lineage which ultimately became birds.

The skeleton of C. yangi was discovered by a team from Bohai University, China, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, US.

Measuring 132cm from its snout to the tip of its tail feathers, it is the largest four-winged dinosaur ever discovered - longer than an eagle or an albatross today. bbc

Microraptor gui - another ancient four-winged species

christmasaurus rex

work computer background

Happy holidays, dino lovers! Our theme has had a winter wonderland makeover! It’s a combination of an idea I got from this amazing holiday sweatshirt on etsy, clip art found here, some snowflake brushes, and way too much time on my hands! We hope you enjoy it. If you’d like to use it as your background, click here for the seamless version and be sure to throw us some credit.

bird family thanksgiving

stegosaurus menora

The smallest intact ceratopsid skeleton was recently unearthed in Alberta

The smallest intact ceratopsid skeleton was recently unearthed in Alberta
Credit: Philip J. Currie, Robert Holmes, Michael Ryan Clive Coy, Eva B. Koppelhus

The toddler was just 3 years old and 5 feet (1.5 meters) long when it wandered into a river near Alberta, Canada, and drowned about 70 million years ago. The beast was so well-preserved that some of its skin left impressions in the nearby rock.

Meet the Gigantic Carnivore That Kept T. Rex Down

by Stephanie Pappas

An enormous carnivorous dinosaur that once roamed North America kept Tyrannosaurus rex from achieving its potential for millions of years, a new discovery suggests.

The new dinosaur, dubbed Siats meekerorum, is part of a group of giant predators known as carcharodontosaurs, and it’s only the second of this group to be discovered in North America. North Carolina State University paleontologist Lindsay Zanno discovered the Siats bones eroding out of a hillside in Utah in 2008.

"It’s easily the most exciting thing that I’ve found so far," Zanno, who heads the paleontology lab at the North Carolina Museum of NaturalScience, told LiveScience…

(read more: Live Science)

real plastic dinosaurs

no...

catyranosaurus

Quetzalcoatlus northropi

What was as tall as a giraffe, weighed a scant 550 pounds, and could fly? This is not a trick question. Around 68 million years ago, such creatures tromped and flew over what is now Texas. Paleontologists know this animal as Quetzalcoatlus northropi – a fantastically huge pterosaur that belonged to a group called azhdarchids. The biggest members of this leathery-winged lineage were the largest creatures ever to fly over our planet, and the increasing amount of information paleontologists have gleaned from their bones has repeatedly underscored a persistent riddle. How did these unusual flyers get to be so enormous?

Superlative size sparks our imagination and demands explanation. We’re constantly drawn to mysteries such as why there aren’t anygargantuan bony fish filtering krill from the seas as there had been in the Jurassic, and, of course, why the most massive land mammal of all time wasn’t even close to the prodigious size of dinosaurian titans…

(read more: Laelaps blog - National Geo)