For 20 privileged Victorians, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins held a lavish New Year’s dinner party in 1853 inside a model of a dinosaur that was created for the Great Exhibition held two years earlier. Hawkins’s…
Researchers have figured out for the first time what one dinosaur’s fleshy ‘crest’ looked like.
Julius Csotonyi
The discovery of soft-tissue comb remnants on a fossil could change the way we visualise dinosaurs. The findings, published today in Current Biology, concern the fossilised remains of an Edmontosaurus…
Accurate copies of fossilised bones can now be made from the combined use of computed tomography (CT) scans and 3D printers, according to a paper published today in the journal Radiology. The technique…
Pachycephalosaurus is famous for its appearance in the movie Jurassic Park: The Lost World, where one is shown battering a man and his car. To achieve the feat the dinosaur used its greatly-thickened skull…
Sauropods were huge animals, but why were they so massive - and did they really hold their necks like this?
Mark Witton
Alongside Tyrannosaurus rex, the basic sauropod dinosaur is one of the most iconic and instantly recognisable of prehistoric animals. Not only is their elegant shape with four columnar limbs, a long muscular…
On the same day that the latest instalment of the Jurassic Park film series has been confirmed, a study published in the journal PLOS One has detailed experiments that seem to demonstrate once and for…
Australia will be the first country in the world to display publicly specimens of Guanlong wucaii, a relative of Tyrannosaurus rex that helped confirm the link between dinosaurs and birds. The specimens…
The prevailing picture of dinosaurs as dull, lumbering creatures may be wrong.
FlickrDelusions
Birds are some of the brainiest creatures on earth, while their direct ancestors - the dinosaurs - are often stereotyped as dull and doomed. But a new study published today in Nature challenges this notion…
Was Tyrannosaurus rex a deadly predator or a scavenger?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/landahlauts
Tyrannosaurux rex was a terrifying predator and not primarily a scavenger after all, according to researchers who analysed a crown tooth embedded in the tail of a lucky dinosaur that survived a T. rex…
Debate continues over how dinosaurs did the deed.
Miroslav Petrasko (blog.hdrshooter.net)
Dinosaurs were the largest animals to ever walk Earth, and they ruled the planet for more than 160 million years. The long-necked Argentinosaurus, with back vertebrae almost two metres high, possibly grew…
A new feathered fossil, Aurornis – introduced in today’s Nature – has the potential to resolve a debate about bird evolution that’s had evolutionary biologists in a bit of a flap in recent years. The origin…
Soon after revealing his plans to build a replica Titanic, Clive Palmer has set his sights on becoming Australian Prime Minister.
EPA/Jason Szenes
Queensland has a habit of raising the eyebrows of our southern cousins when it comes to politics “our way”. Visits to friends and family down south always have required explanations about Joh Bjelke-Petersen…
Semitransparent flesh reconstruction of an embryonic dinosaur inside an egg, with skeleton shown.
D Mazierski
We should forget about ever finding something as small and delicate as a dinosaur embryo, right? A few months ago I would have agreed – but now, well, things have changed. When my colleague, palaeontologist…
The giant river lizard Pannoniasaurus inexpectus (top) was roughly six metres long. In life, the animal would have resembled the smaller, related Aigialosaurus (bottom).
FunkMonk/Wikimedia Commons
An aquatic lizard twice the length of a Komodo dragon once lurked in rivers during the age of dinosaurs, according to a team of Hungarian-Canadian researchers. The 85 million-year-old Pannoniasaurus is…
A 240 million-year-old dinosaur was the size of a golden retriever with a very long tail.
Natural History Museum Mark Witton
Before this week, palaeontologists believed the earliest known dinosaurs were small bipedal creatures that lived 230 million years ago in South America. This “oldest known dinosaur” floor proved quite…
DNA in bone appears to decay at a rate almost 400-times slower than previously thought.
M.Bunce
Moa birds disappeared from New Zealand following the arrival of human settlers in the 13th century, but their fossils now provide us with a valuable clues about long-term DNA survival and how DNA decays…