Tag: NatGeo
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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“.…
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NatGeo: ‘Jurassic Park’ got almost everything wrong about this iconic dinosaur
National Geographic has a post about the “best worst-known” dinosaur – Dilophosaurus. Adam Marsh, a paleontologist at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, led an effort to redescribe Dilophosaurus. That paper was published recently in the Journal of Paleontology. Now, the new analysis includes two previously unstudied fossil specimens from Arizona, providing the first…
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NatGeo: Earth has had more major mass extinctions than we realized
National Geographic has a story about Earth’s mass extinctions. The current biodiversity crisis is usually referred to as the “sixth mass extinction”. There is even a book by that name. Of the five previous extinctions, the worst was the one at the end of the Permian. In a paper in the journal Historical Biology, Michael…
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Laelaps: Strange Fossil Filter Feeder Was an Ancient Survivor
Over on the Laelaps blog on National Geographic, there’s an interesting post about a new Anomalocaridids – “anomalous shrimp”. The group was named originally by Joseph Frederick Whiteaves, because he only had the front appendages. Much later, the rest of the body of the large arthropod was described by Conway Morris and Harry B. Whittington. …
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Ancient Girl’s Parents Were Two Different Human Species – Neanderthal and Denisovans
National Geographic has a story about the first direct evidence of interbreeding among Neanderthal and Denisovans. A paper in this week’s Nature has all the details. When the results first popped up, paleogeneticist Viviane Slon didn’t believe it. “What went wrong?” she recalls asking herself at the time. Her mind immediately turned to the analysis.…
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Five New Fossil Forests Found in Antarctica
National Geographic has a story about multiple new fossil forests which were recently found in Antarctica. Back in the Permian, Antarctica was covered in prehistoric greenery. The team of scientists, which included Erik Gulbranson from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, that discovered these forests were there to look for clues to what caused the Permian Mass…
