Utah Geological Survey

Why are dinosaurs extinct? You asked Google – here’s the answer

Why are dinosaurs extinct? Let me google that for you.

theguardian.com

Let’s clear something up right away. Dinosaurs aren’t extinct. Not entirely. Every magpie, pigeon, penguin, and ostrich alive today – every single bird – is a dinosaur. They’re all descendants of small, toothy, feathery dinosaurs that hopped and fluttered around from the Jurassic era onwards, meaning that birds are dinosaurs in the same way that bats are mammals. The Archaeopteryx laid out under glass at London’s Natural History Museum was the first of its ilk, and the only reason today’s birds seem so different is because the last of their close dinosaurian relatives trailed off into extinction about 66 million years ago.

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John Good

Fossilized Poop is Rare, Fossilized Poop Inside a Fossilized Dinosaur is Even Rarer

smithsonianmag.com

Paleontologists get really excited when they find poop — or at least, fossilized feces, called coprolites. They are not alone in the research world in this regard. Finding coprolites still within the animal that created it is rare indeed, but that may be exactly what a newly discovered specimen of Rhamphorhynchus, a winged reptile, contains.

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John Good
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Paleo Profile: Nothronychus graffami

nationalgeographic.com

Claim to fame: In 2001, paleontologists Jim Kirkland and Doug Wolfe named a very strange dinosaur. Relatively little of its skeleton was known – a few vertebrae, part of an arm, part of a leg, and a piece of hip bone found in northern New Mexico – but it was enough to identify the animal as one of the tubby, fuzzy, long-necked, large-clawed herbivores called therizinosaurs. They named the species Nothronychus mckinleyi.

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John Good

Ankylosaurs Slurped Food With Powerful Tongues

nationalgeographic.com

Over eight decades ago, while pondering the heavily-armored dinosaur Scolosaurus, the eccentric paleontologist Franz Nopcsa proposed what is probably one of the oddest ideas in the annals of paleobiological speculation. Scolosaurus was a low-slung quadruped that shuffled around what were then thought to be parched sand dunes. Even though its close ankylosaurian relatives had been interpreted as herbivores from the very start, the Cretaceous desert may have been nearly devoid of low-lying vegetation. But there was another source of food. Perhaps Scolosaurus was an insectivore, Nopcsa suggested, nabbing little arthropods as if the dinosaur were an overgrown horned toad.

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John Good
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Bryce Canyon announces 6th annual Geology Festival on July 31

kcsg.com

Have you ever seen a living dinosaur? You might be surprised. If dinosaurs were ‘cold-blooded’ would you expect to find a dinosaur skeleton in Antarctica? Have you ever wondered how the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon formed?

John Good
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World’s oldest lizard embryo discovered: 125-million-year-old ‘baby’ found inside fossil

dailymail.co.uk

Button-sized fossil eggs have been found to contain the remains of the world’s oldest lizard embryos.

John Good
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I Know Dino: The Big Dinosaur Podcast, Utahraptor-Episode 34

itunes.apple.com

Interview with Dr. Jim Kirkland, the paleontologist who named Utahraptor ostrommaysorum, a dinosaur (or raptor) with nine-inch claws.

LISTEN HERE

Utah Geological Survey
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Study: Tropical climate extremes kept dinosaurs at bay

deseretnews.com

Intense heat. Drought. Wildly extreme weather accompanied by wildfires.

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Utah Geological Survey
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Moab Giants museum will feature dinosaur footprints

Big things are happening in Moab. Have you heard of the Moab Giants Museum? Read more to find out about this wonderful new addition to southern Utah!

deseretnews.com

With the summer blockbuster “Jurassic World” opening in theaters, there’s plenty of opportunity to be entertained — or frightened — by dinosaurs.

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Utah Geological Survey
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What Killed the Dinosaurs in Utah’s Giant Jurassic Death Pit?

smithsonianmag.com

Utah is dinosaur country—so much so that the state has a scenic byway system called the Dinosaur Diamond that connects ancient final resting places across the desert. But among the sites holding preserved tracks and dusty fossils, one boneyard stands out as a 148-million-year-old mystery: the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry.

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