Paleontology

Torvosaurus: Robust Carnivores of the Jurassic

This specimen of the theropod dinosaur Torvosaurus tanneri is on display in Madrid, Spain. The genus Torvosaurus includes a unique species of megalosaurid theropod dinosaur. They are found in the Morrison Formation, western United States but spread widely ...

Blog Post - Heidi Henderson - Jul 9 2019 - 4:49pm

540 Million Years: Oldest Footprints On Earth Discovered

Pond scums were an animal’s best friend. 540 million years ago, oxygen was scarce in the atmosphere and ocean, and animals needed to find oxygen to make a livi ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 18 2018 - 10:29am

Dinosaurs Couldn’t Stick Out Their Tongues

Einstein could stick out his tongue but dinosaurs could not, according to a new paper. Instead of being like modern day lizards or legendary physicists, their tongues were probably rooted to the bottoms of their mouths like alligators.  The discovery was m ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 23 2018 - 10:15pm

Paleontology Challenge: Zombie Fossils

A key part of palaeontology is reconstructing long-extinct creatures to understand what they were like when they were alive. Such knowledge allows us to answer fundamental questions about how they moved and interacted with their environment. How did they ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 13 2018 - 8:48am

Jurassic Ichthyosaur Fossil So Well-preserved The Skin Is Still Soft

The ichthyosaur (literally ‘fish-lizard’) lived in what is today southern Germany during the Jurassic Period some 180 million years ago. The two-meter long reptile swam in the vast ocean that is now, after climate and geological changes, Europe. Researche ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 10 2018 - 1:14pm

More Like Modules: T. Rex Had A Flexible Skull

Senckenberg scientist Ingmar Werneburg, together with an international team, re-examined the An examination of the skull structure of Tyrannosaurus rex using “anatomical network analysis” found that the carnivorous dinosaur had an extremely flexible skull ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 6 2019 - 5:16pm

70 Million Years Ago: Earliest Example Of Nest Sharing Discovered

Fossilized eggshells unearthed in western Romania represent the earliest known nest site shared by multiple animals. The shells – some complete and others broken into thousands of pieces – are densely packed and encased in mudstone which formed part of the ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 20 2019 - 11:38am

Newest Largest T. Rex Weighs In At 20,000 Pounds

The largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton discovered so far, and therefore the largest carnivore on land currently known to science, was discovered in 1991 in Saskatchewan, Canada, but the extremely hard matrix surrounding the bones, in combination with the s ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 29 2019 - 1:54pm

You'll Have The Chance To Buy A Dodo Skeleton At Christie's On May 24th

Cows and chickens will never go extinct because they are food, and some useless critters like Aedes aegypti have managed to tough it all despite being just disease vectors. For everything else, it can be a crap shoot. Nature is out to kill us all. ...

Article - Hank Campbell - May 27 2019 - 12:15pm

Cryptodiran Fossil Turtle

An Eocene Cryptodiran Fossil Turtle, Baena arenosa, reveals the design of the last of his lineage in finds from fine-grained lime mud outcrops in the Green River Formation, Wyoming, USA. The Baena's with their extra long tails marks the last of their ...

Blog Post - Heidi Henderson - Jul 9 2019 - 4:20pm