Paleontology

400 Million Year Old Penis And 4 Other Bizarre Fossils That Changed Science

From trilobites to tyrannosaurs, most fossils are of creatures with hard shells or bones. These materials don’t easily biodegrade and sediment has time to build up around them and turn them into a record of the creature that is still with us millions of y ...

Article - The Conversation - Jul 18 2015 - 8:00am

Horse-Like Fetus From 48 Million Years Ago Discovered

A 48 million year-old horse-like equoid fetus has been discovered at the Messel pit near Frankfurt, Germany according to a study in PLOS ONE.  Jens Lorenz Franzen from Senckenberg Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany, and Naturhistorisches Museum Basel, ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 9 2015 - 6:30am

Saurolophus Found At Dragon's Tomb

Scientists describe a perinatal group of Saurolophus angustirostris, a giant hadrosaur dinosaur, all likely from the same nest, found at the Dragon's Tomb in Mongolia, in a new study. The Dragon's Tomb is a location famous for finding Late Creta ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 19 2015 - 5:26am

The 150 Year-Old Dinosaur Temperature Debate

Were dinosaurs fast, aggressive hunters like those in the movie "Jurassic World", or did they have lower metabolic rates that made them more like today's alligators and crocodiles? For 150 years, scientists have debated the nature of dinosa ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 19 2015 - 7:00am

How To Keep Massive Herbivores In Check- Hypercarnivores

When the largest modern-day plant-eaters, elephants, are in an area, they devastate the vegetation, like has happened in a South African nature reserve. So 15,000 years ago, when the herbivores like the Columbian mammoth, mastodons and giant ground sloths ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2015 - 7:22am

Wilding: Violent Animal Packs Shaped Pleistocene Ecosystems

For years, evolutionary biologists have wondered how ecosystems during the Pleistocene epoch survived despite the presence of many species of huge, hungry herbivores, such as mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths. Observations on modern elephants su ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 27 2015 - 6:00am

How Dinosaurs' Jaws Influenced Their Diet

Just how bad was the bite of Tyrannosaurus rex? Pretty bad, because the feeding style and dietary preferences of dinosaurs was closely linked to how wide they could open their jaws and T. rex could open quite wide. Using digital models and computer analys ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 4 2015 - 2:18pm

Dinosaur Ankle Re-Evolved Amphibian-Like Development In Birds

In the 19th century, Darwin’s most vocal scientific advocate was Thomas Henry Huxley, who is also remembered as a pioneer of the hypotheses that birds are living dinosaurs. He noticed several similarities of the skeleton of living birds and extinct dinosau ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 15 2015 - 7:30am

Canuckosaur! Not The Name Of The First Canadian Dinosaur, But It Should Be

A "dinosaur" fossil originally discovered on Prince Edward Island has been shown to have steak knife-like teeth, and researchers from U of T Mississauga, Carleton University and the Royal Ontario Museum have changed its name to Dimetrodon boreal ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 24 2015 - 2:00pm

Preserved Embryos From 130 Million Years Ago Show Seed Dormancy In Early Angiosperms

The discovery of exceptionally well-preserved, tiny fossil seeds dating back to the Early Cretaceous corroborates that flowering plants were small opportunistic colonizers at that time, according to a new study. Angiosperms, or flowering plants, diversifi ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 27 2015 - 8:30am