Will you have this dance? Research may point to behaviors and mating rituals of dinosaurs.
smithsonianmag.com
A dino article to contemplate over your lunch break—evidence of paleoenvironments and how they may have existed.
nature.com
Relationships between non-avian theropod dinosaurs and extant and fossil birds are a major focus of current paleobiological research. Despite extensive phylogenetic and morphological support, behavioural evidence is mostly ambiguous and does not usually fossilize. Thus, inferences that dinosaurs, especially theropods displayed behaviour analogous to modern birds are intriguing but speculative. Here we present extensive and geographically widespread physical evidence of substrate scraping behavior by large theropods considered as compelling evidence of “display arenas” or leks, and consistent with “nest scrape display” behaviour among many extant ground-nesting birds. Large scrapes, up to 2 m in diameter, occur abundantly at several Cretaceous sites in Colorado. They constitute a previously unknown category of large dinosaurian trace fossil, inferred to fill gaps in our understanding of early phases in the breeding cycle of theropods. The trace makers were probably lekking species that were seasonally active at large display arena sites. Such scrapes indicate stereotypical avian behaviour hitherto unknown among Cretaceous theropods, and most likely associated with terrirorial activity in the breeding season. The scrapes most probably occur near nesting colonies, as yet unknown or no longer preserved in the immediate study areas. Thus, they provide clues to paleoenvironments where such nesting sites occurred.
nytimes.com
On a dry, chilly morning in the Southern Colorado grasslands, Bruce Schumacher led a group of AmeriCorps volunteers across the narrow, shallow Purgatoire River to an out-of-place bump in the landscape.
It’s a sail boat! It’s a scooner! It’s….Morelladon beltrani! This recently discovered dinosaur was its own captain, wandering the open Spanish horizons of the Early Cretaceous period.
news.discovery.com
A distinctive new dinosaur with a “sail” on its back has just been unearthed in Spain.
news.nationalgeographic.com
A newly discovered dog-sized relative to Triceratops had a showy skull covered with mysterious bumps of bone.
ksl.com
A photographer who discovered thousands of dinosaur tracks at Lake Powell says it’s time to start rescuing them before his spectacular finds are destroyed.
unews.utah.edu
A new study by a team of scientists from Argentina, Brazil, California and the Natural History Museum of Utah at the University of Utah has determined that the time elapsed between the emergence of early dinosaur relatives and the origin of the first dinosaurs is much shorter than previously believed. The discovery not only places a new timeline on the connection between early dinosaur relatives and the first dinosaurs in this particular geologic formation, but also in other formations across the world.
livescience.com
Two lumpy pieces of fossilized poop show that some dinosaurs ate flowering plants during the Late Cretaceous period, about 75 million years ago, new research finds.
Huge Trove of Dinosaur Footprints Discovered in Scotland
news.nationalgeographic.com
Hundreds of tracks discovered along Scotland’s coast show that huge, long-necked dinosaurs once trod there.
gjsentinel.com
Some of the most ferocious meat-eating dinosaurs that trod the earth over what is now Utah also were hunting on land that now is known as Spain, the discovery of a track in Utah suggests.
The Utah Geological Survey (UGS) is a division of the Utah Department of Natural Resources. Several specialized programs comprise the UGS: Data Management, Energy & Minerals, Geologic Hazards, Geologic Information & Outreach, Geologic Mapping, Groundwater & Wetlands, and Paleontology.
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