Newly Discovered Spiked Dinosaurs From South America Look Like Creatures From 'No Man's Sky' Six Of The Most Bizarre Dinosaurs. The Most Bizarre Dinosaurs: Pliosaurs The pliosaur was a marine reptile that haunted the oceans throughout the late Jurassic period. The bizarre beast had a short neck, huge jaw and a massive skeleton – 8 feet of which accounted for just its head – and is considered one of the most powerful killing machines of its age. Mamenchisaurus The mamenchisaurus may look like the cousin of the brontosaurus, but there is one bizarre and significant difference. The Most Bizarre Dinosaurs: Nigersaurus taqueti Over 100 million years ago, the nigersauras was an elephant-sized animal that lived in what is now West Africa.
The Prehistoric Giants Hall of Fame. Of all the dinosaur superlatives, “biggest dinosaur ever” is one of the most prized. The trouble is that we don’t really know who deserves the title. Sauropods like Apatosaurus (once known as “Brontosaurus”) and Diplodocus, both at roughly 70 feet long, seemed to be the champions during the 19th century, but since then a variety of even bigger sauropods has been found. The trouble is that the top contenders have been found only in fragments, so their absolute lengths are a matter of estimation.
At the moment, the largest known dinosaur seems to be Argentinosaurus, a long-necked sauropod that lived 94 million years ago in Argentina. This massive creature is estimated to have stretched 100 feet long and weighed more than 73 tons. Other contenders in the roughly 100-foot range are Supersaurus, Sauroposeidon and Futalognkosaurus. But one dinosaur may have been much, much bigger. Life in the Time of Dinosaurs | Dinosaur Tracking. Celebrating Charles R. Knight, the artist who first brought dinosaurs and megafauna to life. Giant Prehistoric Penguins Stood Nearly 5 Feet Tall | Wired Science. By Katie Scott, Wired UK Paleontologists have constructed a model of a prehistoric penguin that stood almost 4 feet 6 inches tall when it lived in what is now New Zealand, approximately 25 million years ago.
[partner id="wireduk"]Named Kairuku, a Maori word that means “diver who returns with food,” the penguin was reconstructed from fossilised bones that were collected in 1977 by Dr Ewan Fordyce, a paleontologist from the University of Otago. The bones drew the attention of Dan Ksepka from North Carolina State University because of the unusual shape of the body. “Kairuku was an elegant bird by penguin standards, with a slender body and long flippers, but short, thick legs and feet,” said Ksepka in a press release. “If we had done a reconstruction by extrapolating from the length of its flippers, it would have stood over six-feet tall. In reality, Kairuku was around four feet-and-two-inches tall or so.” Image: Two Kairuku penguins come ashore, passing a stranded Waipatia dolphin. Was there really a vampire who fed on dinosaur blood? This story has been told rather incorrectly.
DP's 'publication' in 'the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology' was NOT peer reviewed: it was a short abstract for the SVP 2003 annual conference. I am confident as a 'professional' pterosaur worker myself that this paper would not have made it into any scientific journal, and it was rightly condemned by the pterosaur community as soon as it was made public. Along with the Bennett article mentioned here, a body of literature exists demonstrating that most, if not all, of David Peter's methods of reconstruction and image interpretation are flawed. The extraneous features he reconstructs for fossil animals (which have included, at one time or another, fantastic frills, sails, additional bones and teeth, long tails on short-tailed taxa, hatchlings clinging to their parent's body and others) have never been found on fossil specimens despite CT scanning, UV investigation and other investigative methods.
Popular write up: The Craziest Facts About Dinosaurs. Lifespan Source: Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years before becoming extinct. Can you imagine the human civilization, around for only some thousands of years, actually sustaining itself for that long? Craziest Dinosaur Facts: The Dinosaur Kingdom Source: There are two types of dinosaurs – the lizard-hipped saurischian and the bird-hipped ornithischian, rather than herbivores and carnivores. Source: Evolution Source: Despite popular opinion, dinosaurs were not the first reptiles to rule the earth. Source: Craziest Dinosaur Facts: Dinosaurs Grew Wings. The Dinosaurs We Used to Know | Dinosaur Tracking. Tetrapod Zoology: Dinosauroids revisited.
Pretty much everyone interested in dinosaurs, in the history of life, or in such matters as the evolution of intelligence and/or brain size, will be familiar with the various speculations on ‘humanoid dinosaurs’ that have made their way into the literature. During the 1970s it became widely accepted that one group of Cretaceous theropods – the troodontids (known at the time as saurornithoidids) – were relatively big-brained, with encephalisation quotients overlapping those of modern birds and mammals. In reality, troodontids might therefore have been as ‘smart’ as bustards, emus or opossums. The notion that these dinosaurs were ‘big brained’ and therefore ‘intelligent’ seems to have given rise to a myth however: that these were really smart dinosaurs, approaching the anthropoid level in terms of their ability to solve problems and understand the world around them. All in all, the dinosauroid is disturbingly human-like and, I think, too human-like.
Refs - - Mayor, A. 2000. Norman, D. Pampadromaeus: Brazil's Triassic Plains Runner | Dinosaur Tracking. Non-Avian Dinosaur Eats Avian Dinosaur | Dinosaur Tracking. Who Wrote the First Dinosaur Novel? | Dinosaur Tracking. Nemo-ramjet's deviantART gallery. A Juvenile Apatosaurus Makes Its Debut | Dinosaur Tracking. The Dinosaurs That Never Were | Dinosaur Tracking. The Terrible Dinosaurs of the 1970s | Dinosaur Tracking. How Little Tyrants Grew Up | Dinosaur Tracking. The Mysterious Torosaurus | Dinosaur Tracking. Fearsome Dinosaur Had Ridiculously Short Arms | Dinosaur Tracking. Sex and Dinosaur Necks | Dinosaur Tracking. The Anatomy of Dinosaur Sex | Dinosaur Tracking. A pair of Tyrannosaurus restored in the act at Spain’s Jurassic Museum of Asturias.
Photo by Mario Modesto, from Wikipedia. Over the past few days I have written about the dinosaurian Kama Sutra, the idea that sauropods had sexy necks, and how to sex a Tyrannosaurus rex (Answer: very carefully). But there is one topic that I have saved for last: what the Tab A, Slot B reproductive anatomy of dinosaurs actually looked like. Whenever I bring up dinosaur sex in conversation—which is probably far too often—questions about the anatomy of the dinosaurian penis arise almost immediately. Male dinosaurs must have had the equipment for internal fertilization. A different set of evolutionary brackets is needed to narrow down what a dinosaurian penis might have looked like.
And that brings us to the thrilling details of size and shape. Things are not so varied on the other branch of our evolutionary bracket. We will probably never know the full range of dinosaurian penis variation. References: Why Do We Keep Going Back to Jurassic Park? | Dinosaur Tracking. GRAWR! Dinosaurs As They Never Were | Dinosaur Tracking. Don Glut's Dinosaurs | A Prehistoric Collection. Hunting Dinosaurs on Venus | Paleofuture. How Did the Biggest Dinosaurs Get it On? | Dinosaur Tracking. Avian Ancestors: Dinosaurs That Learned to Fly | Dinosaurs, Avian Evolution & Flying Animals | Image Gallery.
The Dinosaur That Wasn't | Dinosaur Tracking. Oldest fossils show early life was a beach - life - 26 August 2011. THE oldest compelling fossil evidence for cellular life has been discovered on a 3.43-billion-year-old beach in western Australia. Its grains of sand provided a home for cells that dined on sulphur in a largely oxygen-free world. The rounded, elongated and hollow tubular cells - probably bacteria - were found to have clumped together, formed chains and coated sand grains. Similar sulphur-processing bacteria are alive today, forming stagnant black layers beneath the surface of sandy beaches. The remarkably well-preserved three-dimensional microbes could help resolve a fierce and long-running debate about what is the oldest known fossil - or at least add to it.
The current record is held by fossils that are 35 million years older than the present find in nearby deposits known as the Apex chert. But in 2002 a team led by Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford showed that the bacteria-like shapes could have formed in a mineral process that had nothing to do with life. More from the web. First Detailed Look Inside the Childhood of a Lost Species. Predator ruled before dinosaurs. Voltaire Neto The mammal-like creature known as Pampophoneus biccai takes on a plant-eating Paleozoic creature called a pareiasaur in this artist's conception. By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News Paleontologists have found the skull of a weird but deadly mammal-like monster that terrorized Brazil long before dinosaurs ruled the earth.
The specimen is from the Permian period, more than 260 million years ago. The complete skull measures about 13 inches (35 centimeters) in length and was discovered in 2008 during a scientific excavation on a farm in the pampas region of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil. In an interview with Discovery News, lead researcher Juan Carlos Cisneros of Brazil's Federal University of Piaui said the critter was a cross between "a tiger and a Komodo dragon, if you can imagine that. " Juan Carlos Cisneros A photo and a drawing show the skull discovered on a Brazilian farm. Update for 7:51 p.m.
More about the days before the dinosaurs: Mosasaurs: Masters of the Bronx Cheer | Wired Science. [Author's Note: After months of fieldwork, museum visits, and other research, A Date With a Dinosaur is finally coming together. And not a moment too soon - my deadline is rapidly approaching. New essays will continue to surface here, but I'm also going to dredge up some favorite posts from years past to help keep things going while I get the book into shape. Today's essay, originally posted in August of 2011, is about the tongues of the magnificent mosasaurs.] Fastened to the wall of the College of Eastern Utah’s Prehistoric Museum, there’s an Allosaurus doing an excellent Gene Simmons impression. The bust was created by David A.
Thomas – perhaps best known for his Albertosaurus and Pentaceratops mounts at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History – and he gave the Jurassic predator a frozen rictus in which a forked tongue flails over the recurved teeth of the dinosaur’s lower jaw. All I could think of when I saw the sculpture was “I sure hope that Allosaurus doesn’t bite its tongue!” Tiniest Baby Dinosaur Discovered by Amateur Fossil Hunter | Baby Dinosaur, Armored Dinosaurs & Fossils.
On a midafternoon stroll with his wife on a Sunday in January 1997, amateur dinosaur hunter Ray Stanford stumbled upon something extraordinary. While walking in the riverbed near his home in College Park, Md., he found the tiniest example of an armored dinosaur anyone has ever seen. It took awhile for Stanford to realize the find he had on his hands. The impression left by the 5-inch (13 centimeter) baby dinosaur was covered in silt from the riverbed. One night, when a dim overhead kitchen light hit the stone in the right way, the shadows highlighted what was really there, the impression of a tiny dinosaur. [See images of the tiny fossil] "The little guy was lying on its back, kind of curved,and the depression was filled with silt. " Making an impression Impression of a hatchling armored dinosaur that was found in a riverbed near College Park, Md. When he examined the impressions from the arm bones, he knew he had a nodosaurus on his hands.
New species. Tyrannosaurs Were Power-Walkers. How Dinosaurs Grew So Huge | Dinosaurs' Birdlike Lungs & Dinosaur Egg-Laying | Dinosaur Growth. How did some dinosaurs reach such soaring heights -- up to 100 feet high in some cases? Efficient lungs and respiration, along with egg laying, might have given dinos a growth edge when compared to other animals, suggests new research. The study also negates a popular theory that animals tended to become bigger over the course of their evolution. While some dinosaurs grew ever larger over subsequent generations, not all did. NEWS: New Dino May Be World's Smallest "We look at the early history of archosaurs, including some early dinosaurs," said Roger Benson who co-authored the study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Benson, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge, explained that "pterosaurs, the flying reptiles, are a good example of a lineage that remained small during our study interval. Benson and colleagues Roland Sookias and Richard Butler analyzed more than 400 species spanning the Late Permian to Middle Jurassic periods. Into the mind of a Neanderthal - life - 18 January 2012. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2 What would have made them laugh? Or cry? Did they love home more than we do? A NEANDERTHAL walks into a bar and says... well, not a lot, probably. So does that mean our Neanderthal had no sense of humour? Humour is just one aspect of Neanderthal life we have been plotting for some years in our mission to make sense of their cognitive life. Skeletal evidence shows that Neanderthal men, women and children led very strenuous lives, preoccupied with hunting large mammals.
The Neanderthal style of hunting often resulted in injuries, and the victims were often nursed back to health by others. Looking closely at the choices Neanderthals made when they manufactured and used tools shows that they organised their technical activities much as artisans, such as blacksmiths, organise their production. The only obvious difference between Neanderthal technical thinking and ours lay in innovation.
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