Posts tagged dinosaurs

Jeanne Timmons for Science Alert:

A never-before-seen mosasaur species first described in 2021 may be based on forged fossils, a new study suggests.

Researchers are now calling for computed tomography (CT) scans of the remains to verify whether the 72.1 to 66 million-year-old jaw is real after finding a number of discrepancies that indicate it is a fake.

If this fossil is indeed a forgery, it “should be established in the published literature that this is a fake,” study lead author Henry Sharpe, a researcher at the University of Alberta, told Live science.

The scientists behind the original study described the species, named Xenodens calminechari, from a partial jaw bone and four sharp teeth unearthed in a phosphate mine in Morocco’s Khouribga province. Those teeth prompted the team in 2021 to make claims about its uniqueness, and these are key to the doubts raised in the new study, which was published Dec. 16, 2024, in the journal The Anatomical Record.

[hastily searches the NS archives for “Xenodens” and finds no results] Phew

Katie Hunt for CNN:

To better understand the extinct giants, Qvarnström and his colleagues investigated overlooked fossils known as bromalites: remnants from the digestive system — aka dinosaur poop and vomit.

They studied more than 500 fossils gathered over a 25-year period from around 10 sites in the Polish Basin, an area in the south of Poland. The remains dated back to a range of time spanning the Late Triassic to early Jurassic Period, from around 247 million years ago to 200 million years ago.

“(Bromalites) contain so much paleoecological information, but I don’t think paleontologists really have acknowledged that and have seen them mostly as like a joke; you collect a few coprolites because it’s funny,” [Martin] Qvarnström said, referring to fossilized feces. They found that the fossilized poop and vomit — scientifically known as coprolites and regurgitalites, respectively — increased in size and variety over time, indicating the emergence of larger animals and different diets.

Imagine you make a bad life decision and eat eight hot dogs in a row and then throw up, and then 200 million years later some scientist does science on your puke

Karina Tsui for CNN:

Dinosaur fossils have been discovered in Hong Kong for the first time, on a remote island in the financial center’s countryside.

The fossils were found on Port Island, an uninhabitable expanse of rocks in the northeastern waters of the city, by Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department in March, the government said in a statement Wednesday.

Damn well there goes my lifelong dream to be the first person to discover dinosaur fossils in Hong Kong

Anthony Robledo for USA TODAY:

Across opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean more than 3,700 miles apart, researchers have uncovered footprints left by dinosaurs that could have roamed from Africa to South America when the continents were joined in a supercontinent.

The more than 260 footprints, located in Brazil and in Cameroon, are believed to be part of the Early Cretaceous period, according to a study published Monday by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science.

The tracks were originally created about 621 miles apart over a thin sandstone layer of silt and mud on the former supercontinent Gondwanan, which later separated and formed the south Atlantic Ocean.

The study shared photos of the footprints with identical shapes that appeared to be from similiar age and geological contexts, Southern Methodist University paleontologist and lead study author Louis L. Jacobs found.

Though we can’t rule out that I moved the footprints, as a goof

Jordan-Marie Smith for NPR:

Found in Utah by North Carolina State University researchers and paleontologists, the Fona herzogae was a small-framed, plant-eating dinosaur that lived in the Cenomanian age — about 100-66 million years ago.

“If you took, like, a Komodo dragon tail and attached it to the back of an ostrich, that’s kind of what Fona would have looked like,” researcher Haviv Avrahami told NPR.

…

Avrahami and his team also believe this new dino was a burrowing species, spending at least part of its life underground.

The dinosaur can come live in the Moon cave with me

Alexander Smith for NBC News:

Anyone wandering 78 million years ago through the swamplands of modern day Montana may have come across a dinosaur so unusual that scientists have likened it to the god of mischief himself.

At more than 20 feet long and weighing 5 tons, this hulking herbivore had a pair of 2 footlong blade-shaped horns on its majestic, frill-shaped head. It also had two more 16-inch horns above its eyes, and perhaps more than a dozen others dotted around its face like some sort of spiky crown.

Lokiceratops rangiformis — named after the Norse god Loki, popularized recently in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — is an entirely new dinosaur previously undiscovered by paleontologists, scientists said in a journal Thursday.

Not everyone agrees. Some peers have questioned whether it’s just a variation on another type of ceratopsidae, the family of dinosaurs that includes the iconic triceratops.

Fight fight fight fight fight

Patty Wetli for WTTW (PBS of Chicago):

In front of gathered dignitaries and the press, the Field formally announced to the world what had become a not-so-well-kept secret: The museum had acquired just the 13th specimen known to exist of Archaeopteryx (ar-key-AHP-ter-icks), a fossil often described as the “missing link” between dinosaurs and birds.

“It’s a spectacular example … teeth like a dinosaur, a tail like a dinosaur, but it’s a bird,” said Julian Siggers, Field Museum president and CEO. “The top-level message is that dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, they actually evolved into birds.”

The acquisition is a coup not just for the museum and O'Connor, but for Chicago, with the Field becoming the only public institution outside of Europe to have an Archaeopteryx in its collection.

The article has a fantastic artist’s rendition of two Archaeopteryx saying “come at me bro” to each other

University of Bath news release:

Scientists have discovered a new species of small plant-eating dinosaur on the Isle of Wight in southern England (UK). The new species, Vectidromeus insularis, is the second member of the hypsilophodont family to be found on the island, suggesting that Europe had its own family of small herbivorous dinosaurs, distinct from those found in Asia and North America.

Hypsilophodonts were a group of nimble, bipedal herbivores that lived around 125 million years ago. The animals lived alongside early tyrannosaurs, spinosaurs, and Iguanodon. The new fossil represents an animal about the size of a chicken but was a juvenile and may have grown much larger.

Bird guys

Marah Eakin for WIRED:

To launch Jurassic Park: The Ride, Universal Studios enlisted the help of several of the world’s biggest amusement park attraction experts, including Landmark Entertainment Group and Sarcos Robotics. Here’s how it went from a movie, to a phenomenon, to a wet and wild theme park mainstay.

Fraser Smith, chief innovation officer, Sarcos: The T. rex we made was larger than a real T. rex, because we really wanted to scare people, but most of the others were actually quite faithful to the scale. There were even a couple of paleontologists involved at the beginning to try and keep everybody honest, especially about how the figures would look and sound.

Actually, if you look at the full-body T. rex on the ride, you will notice that the head doesn’t move side to side too much. It actually could move side to side very rapidly, but when they started testing it out and exercising the lateral motion, the whole building started to move, because the figure weighs 80,000 pounds and the builders hadn’t really anticipated just how dynamic these robots were. In the end, they had to tone down that motion.

I think they should’ve made the T. rex move its head as quickly as possible, as a bit