Dinosaurs News

April 18, 2024

Top Headlines

Do Some Mysterious Bones Belong to Gigantic Ichthyosaurs?

Apr. 9, 2024 — Several similar large, fossilized bone fragments have been discovered in various regions across Western and Central Europe since the 19th century. The animal group to which they belonged is still the subject of much debate to this day. A study could ...

Dinosaur Study Challenges Bergmann's Rule

Apr. 5, 2024 — A new study calls into question Bergmann's rule, an 1800s-era scientific principle stating that animals in high-latitude, cooler climates tend to be larger than close relatives living in warmer ...

Early Dinosaurs Grew Up Fast, but They Weren't the Only Ones

Apr. 3, 2024 — The earliest dinosaurs had rapid growth rates, but so did many of the other animals living alongside them, according to a new ...

Alaska Dinosaur Tracks Reveal a Lush, Wet Environment

Mar. 12, 2024 — A large find of dinosaur tracks and fossilized plants and tree stumps in far northwestern Alaska provides new information about the climate and movement of animals near the time when they began traveling between the Asian and North American ...

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Higher Carnivorous Dinosaur Biodiversity of Famous Kem Kem Beds, Morocco

Mar. 12, 2024 — An international team of palaeontologists applied recently developed methods to measure theropod (carnivorous) dinosaur species diversity. The newly applied method uses both traditional phylogenetic ...

Fossils of Giant Sea Lizard With Dagger-Like Teeth Show How Our Oceans Have Fundamentally Changed Since the Dinosaur Era

Mar. 5, 2024 — Fossils of a strange new species of marine lizard with dagger-like teeth that lived 66 million years ago, show a dramatically more biodiverse ocean ...

Fossil Named 'Attenborough's Strange Bird' Was the First in Its Kind Without Teeth

Mar. 5, 2024 — A new fossil, named 'Attenborough's strange bird' after naturalist and documentarian Sir David Attenborough, is the first of its kind to evolve a ...

A Lighthouse in the Gobi Desert

Feb. 14, 2024 — A new study explores the weight great fossil sites have on our understanding of evolutionary relationships between fossil groups and quantified the power these sites have on our understanding of ...

The Hidden Rule for Flight Feathers -- And How It Could Reveal Which Dinosaurs Could Fly

Feb. 12, 2024 — Scientists examined hundreds of birds in museum collections and discovered a suite of feather characteristics that all flying birds have in common. ...

Dinosaurs' Success Helped by Specialized Stance and Gait, Study Finds

Feb. 7, 2024 — Dinosaurs' range of locomotion made them incredibly adaptable, researchers have ...

Scientists Pinpoint Growth of Brain's Cerebellum as Key to Evolution of Bird Flight

Jan. 30, 2024 — Evolutionary biologists report they have combined PET scans of modern pigeons along with studies of dinosaur fossils to help answer an enduring ...

Student Discovers 200-Million-Year-Old Flying Reptile

Jan. 22, 2024 — Gliding winged-reptiles were amongst the ancient crocodile residents of the Mendip Hills in Somerset, England, researchers at the have ...

New Research Sheds Light on an Old Fossil Solving an Evolutionary Mystery

Jan. 10, 2024 — Picrodontids -- an extinct family of placental mammals that lived several million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs -- are not primates as previously ...

'Juvenile T. Rex' Fossils Are a Distinct Species of Small Tyrannosaur

Jan. 2, 2024 — A new analysis of fossils believed to be juveniles of T. rex now shows they were adults of a small tyrannosaur, with narrower jaws, longer legs, and bigger arms than T. rex. The species, Nanotyrannus ...

This Japanese 'Dragon' Terrorized Ancient Seas

Dec. 12, 2023 — Researchers have described a Japanese mosasaur the size of a great white shark that terrorized Pacific seas 72 million years ago. The mosasaur was named for the place where it was found, Wakayama ...

More Than a Meteorite: New Clues About the Demise of Dinosaurs

Dec. 4, 2023 — What wiped out the dinosaurs? A meteorite plummeting to Earth is only part of the story, a new study suggests. Climate change triggered by massive volcanic eruptions may have ultimately set the stage ...

Unknown Animals Were Leaving Bird-Like Footprints in Late Triassic Southern Africa

Nov. 29, 2023 — Ancient animals were walking around on bird-like feet over 210 million years ago, according to a new ...

New Study Reveals Surprising Insights Into Feeding Habits of Carnivorous Dinosaurs in North America

Nov. 14, 2023 — New research sheds light on the dining habits of ancient carnivorous dinosaurs from Jurassic rocks of the USA. A recent study explores the bite marks left on the ancient bones of the giant ...

Giant Dinosaur Carcasses Might Have Been Important Food Sources for Jurassic Predators

Nov. 1, 2023 — Carnivorous dinosaurs might have evolved to take advantage of giant carcasses, according to a new ...

Survival of the Newest: The Mammals That Survive Mass Extinctions Aren't as 'Boring' as Scientists Thought

Oct. 5, 2023 — For decades, scientists have assumed that mammals and their relatives that survived challenging times (like those during mass extinctions) made it because they were generalists that were able to eat ...

A Turtle Time Capsule: DNA Found in Ancient Shell

Sep. 28, 2023 — Paleontologists discover possible DNA remains in fossil turtle that lived 6 million years ago in Panama, where continents ...

Dinosaur Feathers Reveal Traces of Ancient Proteins

Sep. 21, 2023 — Palaeontologists have discovered X-ray evidence of proteins in fossil feathers that sheds new light on feather ...

Slow Growth in Crocodile Ancestors Pre-Dated Their Semi-Aquatic Lifestyle

Sep. 20, 2023 — A groundbreaking study is reshaping our understanding of crocodile evolution by pinpointing the onset of slow growth rates to the Late Triassic period, much earlier than the previously assumed Early ...

Nature's Great Survivors: Flowering Plants Survived the Mass Extinction That Killed the Dinosaurs

Sep. 12, 2023 — A new study by researchers from the University of Bath (UK) and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico) shows that flowering plants escaped relatively unscathed from the mass extinction ...

Europe's Very Own Dinosaurs -- The Enigmatic Late Cretaceous Rhabdodontids

Sep. 1, 2023 — A new study brings together intriguing details about the little-known Rhabdodontidae dinosaurs of Late Cretaceous Europe. These gregarious herbivores, characterized by robust builds and beaks ...

Newly Discovered 'Primitive Cousins of T Rex' Shed Light on the End of the Age of Dinosaurs in Africa

Aug. 23, 2023 — Researchers have discovered the fossils of two new abelisaurs in Morocco, showing the diversity of dinosaurs in this region at the end of the Cretaceous ...

Scientists Explore Dinosaur 'Coliseum' in Denali National Park

Aug. 14, 2023 — Scientists have discovered and documented the largest known single dinosaur track site in Alaska. The site, located in Denali National Park and Preserve, has been dubbed 'The Coliseum' by ...

New Archosaur Species Shows That Precursor of Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs Was Armored

July 26, 2023 — Researchers have described a new species of armored reptile that lived near the time of the first appearance of dinosaurs. With bony plates on its backbone, this archosaur fossil reveals that armor ...

Unusual Fossil Shows Rare Evidence of a Mammal Attacking a Dinosaur

July 18, 2023 — Scientists have described an unusual fossil from around 125 million years ago in China that shows a dramatic moment in time when a carnivorous mammal attacked a larger plant-eating dinosaur. The two ...

Fossils Reveal How Ancient Birds Molted Their Feathers -- Which Could Help Explain Why Ancestors of Modern Birds Survived When All the Other Dinosaurs Died

July 5, 2023 — Birds are the only group of dinosaurs that survived the asteroid-induced mass extinction 66 million years ago. But not all the birds alive at the time made it. Why the ancestors of modern birds lived ...

Newly Discovered Jurassic Fossils in Texas

June 27, 2023 — Scientists have filled a major gap in the state's fossil record -- describing the first known Jurassic vertebrate fossils in Texas. The weathered bone fragments are from the limbs and backbone ...

Humans' Ancestors Survived the Asteroid Impact That Killed the Dinosaurs

June 27, 2023 — A Cretaceous origin for placental mammals, the group that includes humans, dogs and bats, has been revealed by in-depth analysis of the fossil record, showing they co-existed with dinosaurs for a ...

New Dinosaur Discovered: Ankylosaurs May Have Been Far More Diverse Than Originally Thought

June 16, 2023 — First armoured dinosaur to be described from the Isle of Wight in 142 years, shows Ankylosaurs may have been far more diverse than originally ...

First Side-Necked Turtle Ever Discovered in UK

June 13, 2023 — The first side-necked turtle ever to be found in the UK has been discovered by an amateur fossil collector and ...