ScienceDaily (Dec. 30, 2010) - Researchers have unearthed a mysterious link between bones of an ancient lizard found in Africa and the biggest, baddest modern-day lizard of them all, the Komodo dragon, half a world away in Indonesia - (Credit: iStockphoto/Alan Tobey).
www.fossilscience.com - (Dec/24/2010) - A major new fossil site in south-west China has filled in a sizeable gap in our understanding of how life on this planet recovered from the greatest mass extinction of all time, according to a paper co-authored by Professor Mike Benton, in the School of Earth Sciences, and published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The work is led by scientists from the Chengdu Geological Center in China - Photo: Eugnathid fish, FossilScience.com
news.nationalgeographic.com - December 30, 2010 - Fossils of a new species of ancient crocodile cousin have been found in limestone once destined for Italian kitchen countertops, a new study says. The fossils were originally discovered in a limestone quarry in Ferrara, Italy, in 1955 after workers sliced a huge block into four slabs and found the bones trapped inside - The ancient reptile's dolphin-like body. Illustration credit: Davide Bonadonna.
Lufkin man claims to own world's only known in-egg Pterodactyl embryo The Lufkin Dailynews - December 26, 2010 - Ancient eggs gave dinosaur enthusiast Dr. Neal Naranjo a surprise when he had a CT scan done to view their contents. To his surprise, five of the six eggs brought in for scans had embryos inside - Image: JOEL ANDREWS - Neal Naranjo examines some of the many dinosaur egg CT scan images produced at the Diagnostic Center at Woodland Heights Medical Center.
news.discovery.com - Dec 20, 2010 - According to new research, beaks were "an evolutionary innovation" for dinosaurs. The beak was like a Swiss Army knife for dinosaurs because it provided many tools in one unit. Dinosaurs and their later bird relatives used their beaks for grooming and for seeking out different types of food. Most predatory theropods were actually herbivores, so carnivores like T. rex were rare and primitive - Iimage: Dennis Finnin and Roderick Mickens, copyright American Museum of Natural History.
New Scientist - 27 November 2010 - A set of 200-million-year-old teeth from a beast related to dinosaurs and crocodiles has shed light on how snake fangs evolved. Snakes and other creatures have been menacing the world with venomous fangs since the early days of the dinosaurs, but until now nobody quite knew how they got their most fearsome weapon. Now a paleontologist has solved this evolutionary mystery - (Image: Kendall McMinimy/Getty)
www.theage.com.au - December 4, 2010 - Walk the windswept Bass Coast around Inverloch and you are literally walking with dinosaurs. Dinosaur Dreaming, a book detailing the coastline's scientific wealth, has just been published in concomitance with the latest discovery: the first intact dinosaur skeleton to be found on the Bass Coast. The rare specimen, found by geologist Mike Cleeland on the Inverloch foreshore, is believed to be a small ornithopod or plant-eating dinosaur - Qantassaurus might have looked like this illustation by artist Peter Trusler.
news.xinhuanet.com - 04-12-2010 - Experts in Chongqing said they had found a complete sauropod dinosaur fossil that dates back to the Jurassic Period of 150 million years ago. The fossil was first discovered by villager Cai Changming and his son in Qijiang County when they dug a pond. (Xinhua/Zhou Hengyi)
Color of Dinosaur Feathers Identified (ScienceDaily Jan. 28, 2010) - The color of some feathers on dinosaurs and early birds has been identified for the first time. The research found that the theropod dinosaur Sinosauropteryx had simple bristles -- precursors of feathers -- in alternate orange and white rings down its tail...
(Photo Credit: Copyright Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing)
Tyrannosaurus rex and related large carnivorous dinosaurs together form the family Tyrannosauridae. A long forgotten fossil skull in the collections of the Natural History Museum in London has now provided crucial clues to the early stages of the lengthy evolutionary history of these fearsome predators. Almost a century after its discovery, the specimen, named Proceratosaurus, has now been recognized as the oldest known relative of the Tyrannosauridae.
The discovery of fossil footprints from early backboned land animals in Poland leads to the sensational conclusion that our ancestors left the water at least 18 million years earlier than previously thought. This results force us to reconsider our whole picture of the transition from fish to land animals," says Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, one of the two leaders of the study.
Recently the first dinosaur fossil from Bulgaria was described. A single bone 10 cm long and 5 cm wide interpreted as the left humerous-the upper bone in the forelimb--of a Late Cretaceous Theropod- is the first dinosaur from Bulgaria. The bone was found in limestone-a sedimentary rock usually deposited in a marine environment, but the isotopic signature of the bone differs from that of the limestone, indicating that the bone was probably transported into the shallow sea after burial and fossilization.
The Triassic dinosaur Coelophysis bauri is well-known from hundreds of fossils unearthed at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, at a famous quarry first discovered by George Whitaker in 1947. Excavations at the quarry-initially by the American Museum of Natural History in the 1940s & 1950s, and subsequently by the Carnegie Museum in the 1980s-sent about thirty large blocks, each containing dozens of fossils, to museums across North America. Although it has been more than 25 years since the last major excavation, new discoveries continue to be made (e.g.: Nesbitt & Norell 2006, Heckert et al. 2008, Nesbitt et al. 2009) as fossils from the quarry are slowly prepared and interpreted.
A team of paleontologists has discovered a new dinosaur species they're calling Abydosaurus, which belongs to the group of gigantic, long-necked, long-tailed, four-legged, plant-eating dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus. In a rare twist, they recovered four heads -- two still fully intact -- from a quarry in Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah. Complete skulls have been recovered for only eight of more than 120 known varieties of sauropod.
