Dinosaurs as big as buses or five-story buildings would not be possible if their bones were dense and heavy like ours. Like present-day birds, dinosaurs had hollow bones with inner structures known as air sacs, which made ...
Evolution
Mar 7, 2023
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10242
Spinosaurus is the biggest carnivorous dinosaur ever discovered—even bigger than T. rex—but the way it hunted has been a subject of debate for decades. It's hard to guess the behavior of an animal that we only know from ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Mar 23, 2022
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450
The fossilized remains of an immature diplodocid—a large, long-necked herbivorous sauropod dinosaur, like Brontosaurus—may provide the first evidence of a unique respiratory infection in a dinosaur, according to a study ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Feb 10, 2022
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1322
A pair of researchers with the Russian Academy of Sciences and the National Museum of Natural History in the U.S., respectively, has respectively, uncovered the first known example of a rebbachisaurid dinosaur to be found ...
A team of researchers from several institutions in Japan and one in the U.S. has identified a fossilized bone, long believed to be from a dinosaur, as belonging to a Paleoparadoxia. In their paper published in the journal ...
Dinosaurs are often depicted as fierce creatures, baring their teeth, with tongues wildly stretching from their mouths like giant, deranged lizards. But new research reveals a major problem with this classic image: Dinosaurs ...
Archaeology
Jun 20, 2018
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843
A pair of researchers has found that a dinosaur unearthed in Arizona back in 1942, had a record number of injuries and bone growth problems. In their paper published in the open access site, PLUS ONE, Phil Senter, with Fayetteville ...
Earth's earliest primates have taken a step up in the world, now that researchers have gotten a good look at their ankles.
Archaeology
Jan 19, 2015
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866
A study that has 'weighed' hundreds of dinosaurs suggests that shrinking their bodies may have helped the group that became birds to continue exploiting new ecological niches throughout their evolution, and become hugely ...
Archaeology
May 6, 2014
3
0
The great age of the embryos is unusual because almost all known dinosaur embryos are from the Cretaceous Period. The Cretaceous ended some 125 million years after the bones at the Lufeng site were buried and fossilized.
Archaeology
Apr 10, 2013
2
1
Fossils (from Latin fossus, literally "having been dug up") are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past. The totality of fossils, both discovered and undiscovered, and their placement in fossiliferous (fossil-containing) rock formations and sedimentary layers (strata) is known as the fossil record. The study of fossils across geological time, how they were formed, and the evolutionary relationships between taxa (phylogeny) are some of the most important functions of the science of paleontology. Such a preserved specimen is called a "fossil" if it is older than some minimum age, most often the arbitrary date of 10,000 years ago. Hence, fossils range in age from the youngest at the start of the Holocene Epoch to the oldest from the Archaean Eon several billion years old. The observations that certain fossils were associated with certain rock strata led early geologists to recognize a geological timescale in the 19th century. The development of radiometric dating techniques in the early 20th century allowed geologists to determine the numerical or "absolute" age of the various strata and thereby the included fossils.
Like extant organisms, fossils vary in size from microscopic, such as single bacterial cells only one micrometer in diameter, to gigantic, such as dinosaurs and trees many meters long and weighing many tons. A fossil normally preserves only a portion of the deceased organism, usually that portion that was partially mineralized during life, such as the bones and teeth of vertebrates, or the chitinous exoskeletons of invertebrates. Preservation of soft tissues is rare in the fossil record. Fossils may also consist of the marks left behind by the organism while it was alive, such as the footprint or feces (coprolites) of a reptile. These types of fossil are called trace fossils (or ichnofossils), as opposed to body fossils. Finally, past life leaves some markers that cannot be seen but can be detected in the form of biochemical signals; these are known as chemofossils or biomarkers.
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