dinosaur
razib | April 29, 2009New Geochronologic And Stratigraphic Evidence Confirms The Paleocene Age Of the Dinosaur-Bearing Ojo Alamo Sandstone And Animas Formation In The San Juan Basin, New Mexico and Colorado:
...An assemblage of 34 skeletal elements from a single hadrosaur, found in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the southern San Juan Basin, provided conclusive evidence that this assemblage could not have been reworked from underlying Cretaceous strata. In addition, geochemical studies of 15 vertebrate bones from the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone and 15 bone samples from the underlying Kirtland Formation of Late…
bioephemera | April 4, 2009
Aquasaurus
paint, resin, steel
Jitish Kallat, 2008
At first I thought this piece by Indian artist Jitish Kallat was an oil tanker truck, and that it represented some sort of play on "fossil fuels" (and perhaps the morbidity of the behemoth domestic auto companies). But apparently that was my American bias at work.
It's actually a water tanker, entitled Aquasaurus, and it represents the rapid transformation of urban India:
Aquasaurus is a monumental seven-metre long skeletal sculpture of a water-tanker morphing to become prehistoric creature that personifies the radical transformation of…
edyong | March 18, 2009What happens when you find a feathered dinosaur that really isn't meant to have feathers? That's the question set by a spectacular new fossil that adds a confusing dimension to the origin of feathers.
The concept of dinosaurs with feathers is no longer surprising. Birds certainly have them and they are now considered to be living dinosaurs. The infamous Velociraptor and its relatives were covered in plumes, which ranged from the simple quills of Sinosauropteryx to the flight-capable plumes on Microraptor's four wings. We know about these prehistoric feathers through the beautiful fossil…
gregladen | March 10, 2009Dino spoor, that is. A recently reported finding in PLoS ONE clarifies a number of questions about how certain dinosaurs held their front limbs (zombie/Frankenstein-position palm-down vs. huggie-wuggie palms-facing-each-other). This research confirms ...
that early theropods, like later birds, held their palms facing medially, in contrast to ... prints previously attributed to theropods that have forward-pointing digits. Both the symmetrical resting posture and the medially-facing palms therefore evolved by the Early Jurassic, much earlier in the theropod lineage than previously recognized…
grrlscientist | July 24, 2008tags: dinosaurs, Tarbosaurus bataar, paleontology, fossils, Tyrannosaurs rex
The newly unveiled fossil skeleton of the juvenile Tarbosaurus bataar in its protective jacket.
Discovered in 2006, a near-perfect complete skeleton of a juvenile Tarbosaurus find was made available for public viewing for the first time today by the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Science in Okayama, western Japan. This fossil was originally unearthed from a chunk of sandstone in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia by a team of Mongolian and Japanese researchers. The fossil of the young dinosaur is roughly 70 million years…
esiegel | May 17, 2008Sometimes, you find weird stuff on the internet. But sometimes you find even weirder stuff in scientific journals. To what do I refer? A paper in the Journal of Mathematical Geology back in 2000 entitled Godzilla from a Zoological Perspective, by Per Christiansen.
This was written as a critique of the "new Godzilla" movie, arguing that it is not more biologically plausible than the "old Godzilla" of 1954.
However, calculations show that his limbs and limb muscles must have been severely undersized to move his huge bulk around at even a leisurely pace, and most other biological problems with…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, dinosaurs, birds, Tyrannosaurus rex, ornithology, paleontology
The Tyrannosaurus rex femur from which researcher Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University recovered soft tissue.
Image: Science.
It wasn't too long ago that paleontologists thought that fossilization was a process where all biological material was replaced with inert stone. However, in 2005, Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University rocked the paleontological world when she recovered a still-elastic blood vessel from inside a fractured thigh bone fossil of…
laelaps | November 5, 2007
A mother Tyrannosaurus rex and her offspring at the end of the WWD live show.
Robotic dinosaurs have long been a thorn in the side of students of paleontology; the rigid, roaring robots of the "DinoMotion" craze of the 1990's did little more than get more people into museums without providing them with any actual information about the extinct animals. Stephen Jay Gould laments this theme park treatment of dinosaurs in his essay "Dinomania" (compiled in Dinosaur in a Haystack);
As a symbol of our dilemma, consider the plight of natural history museums in the light of commercial dinomania.…
laelaps | October 30, 2007
The sculpted skull of the AMNH Deinonychus mount.
For nearly as long as I can remember, artistic depictions of Deinonychus and related dromeosaurs have featured the dinosaur as a pack hunter, often pouncing on a hapless ornithischian like Tenontosaurus (see here, here, here, and here for examples). After being confronted with such imagery time and time again I didn't think twice about the pack-hunting behavior in Deinonychus as a kid, but I started to wonder on what evidence all these gory illustrations were based. The popular books in my own library treated the behavior as a fact and gave…
laelaps | October 29, 2007Matt has put up the latest and greatest edition of The Boneyard, guiding visitors along a haunted fossil-picking tour of the best paleo-blogging from the past two weeks. Trust me, this one is not to be missed. I'm still looking for a host for the week after next (and into the foreseeable future), so if you're interested in bringing The Boneyard to your blog please contact me.
laelaps | October 25, 2007I have to admit that I've been somewhat lazy when it has come to sharing my thoughts on my current reading material since I moved to ScienceBlogs. On Laelaps Mk. 1 I would usually update every few days on what I was reading and what I thought about it, but since I've started writing here I've completed several books and haven't said very much about any of them. While this post is not going to be a massive offloading of knowledge gained from my extracurricular reading, it might at least offer up some suggestions for those looking for some new reading material;
The Horned Dinosaurs by Peter…
laelaps | October 23, 2007
Regardless of whether it was gradual or happened in a geologic instant, non-avian dinosaurs went extinct by approximately 65 million years ago, but the question of what they might be like today had they survived makes for some entertaining fiction. Most of such imaginary works are set on isolated islands or plateaus, "Lost Worlds" that have provided a refuge for dinosaurs (the most spectacular and enjoyable example being Weta Workshop's companion book to Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong entitled The World of Kong). Still, many of the dinosaurian hideaways do not take evolution into…
laelaps | October 22, 2007This past week I managed to read Peter Dodson's very helpful book The Horned Dinosaurs from cover-to-cover (in addition to finishing some books on Megalania, dinosaur reproduction, philosophy, etc. A massive book review is forthcoming), one of my most favorite sections being where Dodson walks the reader through reconstructing a Chasmosaurus skeleton bone-by-bone. Oddly enough, I came across the a YouTube video of a self-assembling Chasmosaurus skeleton (embedding was disabled for this video), although unfortunately for curators I have not known skeletons to acquiesce to fully leaving their…
laelaps | October 22, 2007Unfortunately, I didn't get to attend to the annual SVP Meeting in Austin, TX this year, and I can hardly wait to hear about all the interesting talks and papers from those who attended. My curiosity as to the proceedings has been mildly sated, however, by a news report about one of the interesting discoveries announced at the convention; a mid-Triassic (225 Ma) track found near Melbourne, Australia that has been attributed to a theropod dinosaur.
The 14cm-long tracks seem to indicate the presence of a theropod (or, as Zach has pointed out, some as-yet-unknown bipedal crurotarsian) that stood…
laelaps | October 22, 2007
An artist's reconstruction, released by the National Museum of Brazil, of the paleoecology inhabited by Futalognkosaurus (left). It is being menaced by Megaraptor, now known to be a tetanuran theropod.
For quite some time it was thought that after the Jurassic period the massive sauropods that roamed North America were all but extinct, a radiation of ankylosaurs, ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, and other ornithischians becoming the primary herbivores in place of the massive long-necked saurischians. At least one genus did hang on until the Late Cretaceous, the titanosaur Alamosaurus sanjuanensis…
laelaps | October 13, 2007What do you get when you put dinosaurs, terrorists, and Navy SEALs all in one place? The answer in "A mess," and in this case such a disaster carries the title Raptor Island. Starring Lorenzo Lamas, the film continues the long standing tradition of putting guns and monsters in the same place in the hopes that something good will come out on film. Indeed, it seems that more effort is required to serve up a plate of Hamburger Helper than was put into the story and dialog of this slice of movie cheese, and its painfully apparent from the very first scene.
We meet our hero, "Hack" (Lamas) and his…
laelaps | October 12, 2007Progress on my chosen books for this past week has been a little bit slow; I had a very busy weekend and a presentation on the paleoecology of Laetoli, Tanzania at ~3.5 mya (which will soon become a post), so I haven't been able to read as much as I would like this past week. Still, I'm about halfway through the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and hopefully I'll finish it over the weekend (I think I can polish off 300 pages before Monday). I'm also about halfway through Molnar's treatment of the huge varanid reptile Megalania prisca (Dragons in the Dust), although I probably won't get to finish it…
laelaps | October 12, 2007Everyone now and then I come across a post so good that I wish I had written it myself; Matt of the HMNH has posted on such piece of excellent science blogging all about dinosaur furculas. It might not sound very exciting to those unfamiliar with dinosaur anatomy, but the ignorance of fused clavicles in theropod dinosaurs until recently has had a major impact on concepts of evolution (especially involving birds). I'm sure it'll turn up in tomorrow's edition of The Boneyard over at microecos, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone nominated it for the next installment of The Open Laboratory,…
laelaps | October 11, 2007Part of the joy of blogging about paleo is that there's always something going on, and this year there seems to be no shortage of prehistoric news. This also seems to be a year marked by lots of IMAX paleo films, so here's a quick rundown of what's out there right now;
Dinosaurs 3D: Giants of Patagonia
South America has yielded some of the weirdest and most wonderful dinosaurs discovered in recent years, in addition to some of the biggest. The "Giants of Patagonia" have shown that sauropods didn't just disappear at the end of the Jurassic and that South America has its own fearsome theropod…
laelaps | October 11, 2007My wife merely considers it a quirk a living with a paleontologically-oriented husband; whenever I feel like my efforts are futile, I hold my hands up against my chest with two fingers extended to represent the "useless forelimbs" of Tyrannosaurus. The evolutionary narrative of how Tyrannosaurus came to have such a massive head and such small limbs is a familiar one, physical constraints determining that the development of a large, terrible head would cause a reduction in limb size. This doesn't make the relatively minuscule limbs of Tyrannosaurus and its close relatives any less puzzling,…