Visitors passing by the skeletons of dinosaurs in the Humboldt Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany. Photograph by VPC Photo, Alamy   Laelaps has an interesting post about the discovery of new dinosaur species over on the Phenomena blog at National Geographic.  We don’t know how many different dinosaur species existed during the reign of non-avian dinosaurs from about 235 million years ago to the mass extinction some 65 million years ago.  New dinosaurs are being described all the time, at a rate of about one every 2 weeks.  The latest was a new tiny, tyrannosaur from Uzbekistan was introduced…

Tyrannosaurs Rex fossil cast at the Royal Tyrell Museum (Pierre Camateros, cc-by-sa-3.0) CBC Radio’s Quicks & Quarks has a segment on the first pregnant Tyrannosaurus rex.  Dr. Mary Higby Schweitzer, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University, has confirmed that a 68 million year old T-rex, found in 2005, is, in fact, female and pregnant.  The paper appeared in Nature Scientific Reports. She and her team found medullary bone tissue in the dinosaur’s femur. Medullary bone is found in modern female birds that are in the process of preparing to lay eggs. It is…

Palaeocast has a new episode on the Tully Monster!  Dave interviews the principal author on the Nature paper, that was published earlier this week.  There’s quite a bit of information in the podcast.   The coverage on the this Tully Monster paper has been truly amazing. Tullimonstrum gregarium, better known as the ‘Tully Monster’ is a problematic fossil from the Late Carboniferous Mazon Creek lagerstätte, Illinois, USA. The identity of this fossil has been the subject of much debate, due to its peculiar form. Several competing hypotheses have placed it within the arthropods, fish, worms or even molluscs. Joining us in this interview is…

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, went extinct in 1936 and is known both from fossils and human documentation.  © The Lighthouse/Visuals Unlimited/Corbis Science Magazine has an interesting article about a study co-authored by UIC professor (and ESCONI member) Roy Plotnick.   In it, he and his co-authors postulate that future paleontologists will have trouble following the progression of the current mass extinction, which is the sixth in Earth’s history.  Here’s a link to the paper. Millions of years from now, paleontologists may dig into Earth and uncover fossils from our own time. They may, like scientists today, construct a chronology of…

  New online virtual museum on the minerals of Missouri.  The website can be found at http://www.virtualmuseumofgeology.com/. Enjoy!  

At the American Museum of Natural History, the trilobite of the week is Placoparina sedgewickii (McCoy, 1849).  It was alive during the Middle Ordovician.