Tagged: dinosaurs

Some 66 million years ago, on the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, a 12 kilometer-wide (7.5 mile-wide) asteroid crashes to Earth. The impact causes an explosion whose magnitude is hard to imagine today: several billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Most...

The unusual 66-million-year-old mammal called Adalatherium “bends and even breaks a lot of rules,” researchers say. Scientists say they’re baffled by the strange appearance of a 66-million-year-old opossum-sized mammal dubbed the Adalatherium — which translates as “crazy beast.” “Knowing what we know about the skeletal...

Tyrannosaur embryo fossil fragments are helping scientists peek into the dinosaurs’ early days. Tyrannosaur dinosaurs roamed Earth long before baby photos were a thing, so all we have is the fossil record to figure out what they looked like in their earliest days. It’s been...

The duck-billed dinosaur Parasaurolophus is best known for the tube that grows out of its head, and the well-preserved skull offers more clues about the crest’s evolution. A spectacularly preserved partial skull belonging to the rare dinosaur species Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus has been discovered and analyzed...

It sounds like the ultimate science fiction storyline: What if the dinosaurs weren’t wiped out by an asteroid impact 65 million years ago? Perhaps they’d still be alive today, in an advanced evolutionary state, developing their space program and their own asteroid impact mitigation strategies....

It’s been about 66 million years or so since dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Most of us learned most of what we think we know about the ferocious beasts from the big screen. If you were a kid in the ’90s, for example, your earliest recollection...

Paleontology is a team sport,” observes Kyle Atkins-Weltman, a fossil preparator at the University of Kansas. For years now, the school’s paleo department has been prospecting the fossil-rich Hell Creek deposits of Montana. In June 2016, Kris Super, another preparator at KU, discovered some tiny...

Here’s some information you might already know: Not very much can survive the impact of a 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) asteroid. Ask the dinosaurs. When that happens, the world catches on fire, and most terrestrial creatures buy the farm within a matter of hours. If the impact...

If you were standing at the bottom of a sheer rock face looking at a crisscrossing array of dinosaur tracks high above your head, it might seem as though you were witnessing the impossible. On top of being preserved in solid stone, the tracks run...

Beginning in the 1960s, a rising number of scientists turned to the study of dinosaurs as a career-despite the low pay. Also, more museums and universities developed dinosaur research programs. Since the ’60s, the number of known dinosaurs species has more than doubled, and our...