CBC’s Quirks & Quarks has an interview with Dr. David Hone.  He’s a paleontologist and lecturer in Zoology at Queen Mary, University of London.  He’s been studying scarring on a Daspletosaurus skull, which was found in Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park.  He and his colleague, Darren Tanke, have concluded that the wounds were caused by other Daspletosaurs.  The original paper appeared in the journal PeerJ.  Dr. Hone has a post that details the findings on his blog, Archosaur Musings.  

Science Daily has an interesting article on the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.  The K-T extinction event has been thought to be caused by a large meteor impact off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula.  However, at the same time, there were massive volcanic eruptions occurring in the middle of the Indian sub-continent.  This volcanic deposit is called the Deccan Traps.  The deposit formed over a period of a million years, and the source is believed to be a mantle plume.  That mantle plume existed and was flowing before the impact.  Now, a group headed by Mark Richards at…

Livescience has a story of a new dinosaur, Chilesaurus diegosuarezi.  The name is in honor of both Chile and the discoverer, Diego Suarez.  It was discovered by the 7-year-old son of two geologists in 2010.  A few dinosaur vertebrae were spotted by the observant boy during an expedition with his family in Aysen, a region of southern Chile.  The 9.8 foot long animal lived about 145 million years ago during the late Jurassic period.  It is a rare case of a plant eating  theropod.  The original paper appeared in the journal Nature. Since Diego’s discovery, collaborating Chilean and Argentinian scientists…

Yi qi. Credit: Dinostar Co. Ltd The week’s episode of the CBC’s Quirks & Quarks has a segment on a very strange new dinosaur from China.  The animal is named Yi qi, pronounced “ee chee”), which comes from Mandarin for “strange wing”.  The fossil dates to the late Jurassic about 160 million years ago.  Original paper in the journal Nature. Canadian paleontologist Dr. Corwin Sullivan calls it the strangest specimen he’s ever seen. He and a team of Chinese colleagues have determined that a small, bipedal, dinosaur fossil, dating back 160 million years, had a bat-like membrane wing, which means…

The new palaeocast episode is about ancient DNA.  Over the last few years, more and more biologic material is being found associated with fossils.  The main reason why we find it now is because we weren’t looking previously. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is a molecule that encodes the genetic information within every species of life on earth. The information contained within the sequence of base pairs determines how any given organism develops and biologically functions. DNA is not just limited to the biological study, but is also now being utilised in palaeontology. But why is DNA not normally preserved? What’s the…

Credit: Photographer: Dierk Blomeier. For David P.G. Bond and colleagues, GSA Bulletin, 2015. Science Daily  has a story about the Capitanian Extinction event.  This event occurred in the mid-Permian, around 10 million years before the end Permian mass extinction, otherwise known as the “Great Dying”.   At first it was thought to be a more local event, but now evidence from the high latitudes shows it to be global.  The original paper appeared in the journal Geological Society of America Bulletin. Until now, this Capitanian extinction was known only from equatorial settings, and its status as a global crisis was controversial.…