Tag: dinosaurs
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Smithsonian: An Ode to the World’s Most Average Dinosaurs
Smithsonian Magazine has a story about the appreciation for the average dinosaur – a duckbilled dinosaur like Edmontosaurus. To truly understand the dinosaurs, one needs to look past the flashy and embrace the average as that is where the true clues to what life was like back in the Mesozoic. Out of all these impressive…
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Deinonychus Changed Our Understanding of Dinosaurs
SciTechDaily has an interesting story about how the discovery of Deinonychus changed our view of dinosaurs. John Ostrom found the first Deinonychus back in 1960’s. In 1969, he published a paper describing Deinonychus, which means “terrible claw”. That paper raised many questions about current assumptions about dinosaurs and refueled the debate on which animals birds…
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PBS Eons: When Crocs Thrived in the Seas
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about some ferocious crocodiles that lived in the oceans during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. Check out Animal IQ: https://youtu.be/BXqGkPhU2VE While dinosaurs were dominating the land, the metriorhynchids were thriving in the seas. But taking that plunge wasn’t easy because it takes a very special…
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Paleo Nerds #32: The Hot Blooded Dinosaur Revolutionary with Bob Bakker
The podcast Paleo Nerds has the last show the their second season up. Their guest is “Dinosaur Heretic” Bob Bakker. Bob is always interesting! I heard him in person at Paleofest a number of years ago and really enjoyed it. We saved the best for last! Would you like to spend over an hour with…
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SciNews: New Species of Duck-Billed Dinosaur Unearthed in New Mexico
SciNews has an article about a new dinosaur discovery. The animal, a duck-billed dinosaur called Ornatops incantatus, lived about 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period in what is now modern day New Mexico. A paper in the journal PeerJ has all the details. Its partial skeleton, including part of the skull, was found…
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Unique Bone Structure Helped Long-Necked Pterosaurs Fly
Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article about the largest pterosaurs. These animals were very large with the wingspans of small plaines (8 meters) and necks as long as a giraffe (1.5 meters). A recent paper (April 14th, 2021) in Science Magazine details how these animals supported their large head and necks with a novel spoke…
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NYT: How Many Tyrannosaurus Rexes Ever Lived on Earth? Here’s a New Clue
The New York Tmes has a story about how many Tyrannosaurus rex ever lived. Actually, this story showed up in numerous places.. SciTechDaily, USA Today, NBC, etc. Apparently, it’s big news that about 2.5 billion total T rex roamed the Earth during the time their species existed! The original paper appeared in the journal Science.…
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Tate Geological Museum: Tuesday April 6th, 2021 8:00 PM CDT – Zoom Lecture – “The Laramida Project: New Dinosaurs from the American West”
ESCONI members have been invited by the Tate Geological Museum (Casper, Wyoming) for a fun paleo-lecture tomorrow evening (Tuesday April 6th) featuring Joe Sertich of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Joe will be speaking about Cretaceous Dinosaurs of Laramida. Laramidia Project: https://www.dmns.org/science/earth-sciences/projects/laramidia-project/ Zoom Link: https://caspercollege.zoom.us/j/99958974301?pwd=SFJranNySGdBZjNFdGhBMEZYRFJNUT09&fbclid=IwAR3I9TPGK3uShHYhO1DNygSVHEgVhkuugdhk71eEVboqQQ7rT5xn_I4flzE#success Next month, Jim Kirkland will be speaking about…
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Inverse: What Did Dinosaurs Look Like? An Unlikely Team Is Debunking Old Beliefs
Inverse has an interesting story about an effort to recreate models that show what dinosaurs really looked like. The effort is a combination of paleontology and paleoart. The work is based on a special fossil of Psittacosarurs discovered in China decades ago. That specimen had very fine preservation, included preserved soft tissues like skin and…
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NPR: Dinosaur-Killing Impact Came From Edge Of Solar System, New Theory Suggests
NPR has a story about the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. New research from Harvard University proposes that a comet and not a meteor impacted in the Yucatan peninsula. The research is detailed in a paper that was published in the journal Scientific Reports. For decades, the prevailing theory about the extinction of the…
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NPR: Utah Considers State Park Named For Utahraptor Dinosaur
NPR Morning Edition has a story about a new proposed State Park in Utah. The park, called Utahraptor State Park, would commemorate the discovery of a large block of Utahraptor fossils found back in 2001. The animals lived about 136 million years ago and would have looked similar to Deinonychus, but larger. Utah State paleontologist…
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Nature: Insects with 100 million-year-old dinosaur feathers are not ectoparasites
Nature has an open access paper which looked deeper into the discovery of insects found on dinosaur feathers preserved in amber. The amber was found in the Myanmar and dates to the mid-Cretaceous Period about 100 million years ago. The original paper “New insects feeding on dinosaur feather in mid-Cretaceous amber” was published in 2019.…
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All Dinosaurs Considered: Looking Back at Prehistoric Illinois
NPR’s All Things Considered The 21st Show has a look back at prehistoric Illinois. They interview Paleontologists Joe Devera, Senior Paleontologist at the Illinois State Geological Survey and Jingmai O’Connor, Vertebrate Paleontologist and associate curator of Fossil Reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago about what might Illinois looked like during the time of the…
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Terrible Lizards Podcast: Spinosaurus Megasode!
The Terrible Lizards podcast has an episode about all things Spinosaur. One of the hosts, David Hone, is a co-author of a recent paper in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica. That paper is entitled “Evaluating the ecology of Spinosaurus: Shoreline generalist of aquatic pursuit specialist?”. It challenges some of the theories in other recent papers that…
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Researchers Announce World’s First Dinosaur Preserved Sitting On Nest of Eggs With Fossilized Babies
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History has announced an amazing dinosaur find. The fossils are of an adult oviraptorid theropod dinosaur sitting on a nest of eggs, The eggs include fossilized baby dinosaurs. This specimen was found in the Jiangxi Providence of southern China. The animal lived about 70 million years ago. Ironically, oviraptors, whose…
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Throwback Thursday #39: Paleontological Ditty
This is Throwback Thursday #39. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! Today we have poem from the July – August 1977 edition of the ESCONI newsletter. It’s called “Paleontological…
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Terrible Lizards Podcast Season 2
Season 2 of the Terrible Lizards podcast is up over on libsyn.com. There’s eight plus a bonus episode. It’s a good way to spend your time during these winter Covid months. Terrible lizards is a podcast about dinosaurs with Dr David Hone and Iszi Lawrence. The podcast is aimed at grown ups but it is…
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Smithsonian: The Top Ten Dinosaur Discoveries of 2020
Smithsonian Magazine has a list of the top 10 dinosaur discoveries of 2020. What with the pandemic and all, 2020 has been a horrible year for most of us. However, science matches on and while the vaccine is the biggest scientific advance of 2020, there were a handful of important dinosaur discoveries this year.
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SciNews: Cretaceous Dinosaur Had Impressive Mane and Shoulder Ribbons
SciNews has a story about a new dinosaur from Brazil. The animal, named Ubirajara jubatus, lived about 110 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period in what is now Brazil. It was about the size of a chicken. This dinosaur was collected from the famous Crato Formation in Northeastern Brazil. It has been described in a…
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SciNews: Non-Avian Dinosaurs Were Not in Decline Prior to Their Extinction
SciNews has a story about the extinction of the dinosaurs. One long controversial point around the K-Pg mass extinction, which took out the non-avian dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, has been whether their diversity was in decline before the meteor struck in Chicxulub. This is often sited in arguments about whether the volcanic…
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We’ve Rarely Seen a Dinosaur Brain Like This Before
The New York Times Trilobites column has a story about a dinosaur brain. The dinosaur in the article is Buriolestes schultzi. It lived about 230 million years ago in what is now modern-day Brazil. This small bipedal animal is distantly related to the large sauropod dinosaurs of the Jurassic. In the paper, which was published…
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Throwback Thursday #35: Holiday Party 2018 With Dr. Peter Makovicky
This is Throwback Thursday #35. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! The 2018 Holiday Party featured Dr. Peter Makovicky then from the Field Museum speaking about the new Antarctic…
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Growth Rings From Fossil Bones Reveals T. rex Had Huge Growth Spurts, but Other Dinosaurs Grew “Slow and Steady”
SciTechDaily has a story about Tyrannosaurs rex and how it grew. A new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, discusses diverse growth strategies in dinosaurs and how that relates to body size. The paper’s authors include Tom Cullen of the North Carolina Museum of Natural History and Peter Makovicky of…
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Washington Post: How to dissect your Thanksgiving dinosaur
Happy Thanksgiving from ESCONI! The Washington Post has a story and video that does a good job explaining why birds are dinosaurs and how you can see that in your turkey’s skeleton this Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving, people will gather with their loved ones to share their gratitude for one another over a lavish meal.…
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LiveScience: Cretaceous cold case of ‘dueling’ T. rex and Triceratops may finally be solved
LiveScience has a story about the “Dueling Dinosaurs”. This extraordinary fossil specimen of two of the most complete dinosaurs skeletons ever discovered. One is a Triceratops and the other is a Tyrannosaurs rex and they may possibly be locked in 67 million year old mortal combat. These fossils are heading to North Carolina State University to undergo some extensive study. …
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Eos: A Little-Known Mass Extinction and the “Dawn of the Modern World”
Eos has a story about a little known mass extinction that led to the rise of the dinosaurs. New research published in the journal Science Advances shows that climate change driven by volcanic eruptions in western Canada brought about the dinosaurs and eventually the modern world. The event is called Carnian Pluvial Episode. It occurred…
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Video: ESCONI General Meeting, June 2020 – “Dino-Sores: Injury and Behavior in Cretaceous Dinosaurs”
We are pleased to present to you the video of our first zoom general meeting. It was held on June 12th, 2020. We had a remote speaker. He was Dr. Joe Peterson from the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh. Joe earned a BS Geology at SIU-C and an MS/PhD Geology from NIU. Since, then,…
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Stan the T. rex just became the most expensive fossil ever sold
LiveScience has a story about the sale of Stan the T-rex on October 6th, 2020. Stan sold for $32 million and set a new record for the sale of a fossil. SUE the T-rex, which went on sale back in 1997, had the previous record as it sold for $8.36 million. Many paleontologists are dismayed…
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NatGeo: This small dinosaur had a marvelous sense of touch, detailed fossils reveal
National Geographic has a story about Juravenator starki. This animal lived about 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period, in what is now Germany. A new paper, in the journal Current Biology, proposes that it might have used sensory scales on its tail to sense fish when it foraged at night. A CHICKEN-SIZE DINOSAUR that lived in what is now…
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National Geographic goes big on dinosaurs — and big on Yale paleontology
YaleNews has a story about the latest issue of National Geographic. The cover has a Deinonychus, discovered in the 1960 by Yale paleotologist John Ostrom. This web page on the National Geographic site has links to numerous stories about recent dinosaur discoveries. It includes the lead story in this issue of the magazine… “Reimagining Dinosaurs“.…
