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Tag Archive for: Paleontology
Recently discovered dinosaur, Titanosaurus, is set to fill the halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City this coming January.
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Our latest issue of Survey Notes is out! Check it out on our Survey Notes Gallery HERE.
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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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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.
nationalgeographic.com
Snakes can famously disarticulate their jaws, and open their mouths to extreme widths. David Martill from the University of Portsmouth did his best impression of this trick while walking through the Bürgermeister Müller Museum in Solnhofen, Germany. He was pointing out the museum’s fossils to a group of students. “And then my jaw just dropped,” he recalls.
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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?
dailymail.co.uk
Button-sized fossil eggs have been found to contain the remains of the world’s oldest lizard embryos.
nationalgeographic.com
From fantastical to frightening, the animals of the Cambrian Period—beginning about 540 million years ago—tantalize the imagination. And they just keep getting weirder.