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.
