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This is a video of a dinosaur on the loose in the LA Museum of Natural History. No computer effects used here, folks: it's all real. Well, I mean, it's not a real dinosaur of course or those kids would be totally devoured, but you know what I mean. If you look closely at the dinosaur you can see what's going on here. One thing's for certain: I want one, and I want one bad. No trick or treaters will have anything on me this year, mark my words. Watch the video here.

Deep inside the dusty university store room, three scientists struggle to lift a huge fossilised bone. It is from the leg of a dinosaur. For many years, this chunky specimen has languished cryptically on a shelf. Interesting but useless — a forgotten relic of a lost age. Now, with hammer and chisel poised, the academics from Montana State University in America gather round. They are about to shatter this rare vestige of the past. Why would they do such a thing? Dinosaurs from When Dinosaurs Roamed Lost age: Scientists now believe it is possible to resurrect the dinosaur after the...

Saturday, July 05, 2008 By LOU BRANCACCIO, Columbian editor “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” William Edwards Deming, the guy largely credited with improving production during World War II, had this somewhat sarcastic comment about change. Hey, it’s no big deal if you don’t want to change. Dead isn’t a bad alternative. Well, wait just one second. Most of us aren’t all that enamored with this dead option. So we change. In the 1940s, it was critical to produce war materiel in a much more efficient way. The changes Deming suggested were very important to the...

Myth of Dwarf Dinos in Dracula Country Confirmed Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News June 13, 2008 -- In 1900, the sister of an eccentric Austro-Hungarian aristocrat named Baron von Nopsca found a tiny bone on the baron's family estate in Transylvania, a historical region in present-day Romania. The baron, who was a dinosaur buff, identified the bone as belonging to a dwarf dino that likely once lived on an island in the region. The motorcycle-riding baron's outrageous theories were ridiculed and largely dismissed, but now new evidence suggests his proposed island of dwarf dinosaurs did indeed exist in the land of...

A newly discovered batch of well-preserved dinosaur bones, petrified trees and even freshwater clams in southeastern Utah may provide fresh clues about life in the region some 150 million years ago. The Bureau of Land Management announced the find Monday, calling the quarry near Hanksville "a major dinosaur fossil discovery." Several weeks of excavation have revealed at least four long-necked sauropods, two carnivorous dinosaurs and possibly a stegosaurus, according to the BLM. Nearby, there are also animal burrows and petrified tree trunks six feet in diameter. It doesn't contain any new species - at least not yet - but offers...

A dinosaur bone discovered in Australia has defied prevailing wisdom about how the world's continents separated from a super-continent millions of years ago, a new study published on Tuesday said. The 19-centimetre (eight-inch) bone was found in southeastern Australia but it comes from a very close cousin to Megaraptor, a flesh-ripping monster that lorded over swathes of South American some 90 million years ago. The extraordinary similarity between the two giant theropods adds weight to a dissident view about the breakup of a super-continent, known as Gondwana, that formed the continents of the southern hemisphere, the authors say. Gondwana broke...

It wasn't the dinosaurs' fault the asteroid hit them. Okay, let's back up a bit. I am alluding to an hypothesis, first advanced by Luis Alvarez and son, that a large asteroid hit the earth, causing the mass die-off of dinosaur and many other species, at what we used to call "the K-T boundary" (the end of the Cretaceous geological period) about 65 million years ago. This was proposed in 1980, and given apparent confirmation by the discovery of traces of a huge impact crater in the Yucatan around 1990. It then quickly became Al-Gorey "settled science" - before being...

T. rex confirmed as great granddaddy of all birds 19:00 24 April 2008 NewScientist.com news service Ewen Callaway John Asara, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Mary Schweitzer, North Carolina State University Thomas Holtz, University of Maryland Tyrannosaurus rex, meet the chicken – your third cousin more than 100 million years removed. A new family tree based on protein sequences recovered from dinosaur fossils firms up the dinosaur's avian lineage. "Palaeontologists have known this overall connection. We have now confirmed it with molecular data," says John Asara, a biochemist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who led the study....

"Dino Killer" Asteroid Was Half the Size Predicted? Ker Than for National Geographic NewsApril 10, 2008 The meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs might have been less than half the size of what previous models predicted. That's the finding of a new technique being developed to estimate the size of ancient impactors that left little or no remaining physical evidence of themselves after they collided with Earth. Scientists working on the technique used chemical signatures in seawater and ocean sediments to study the dino-killing impact that occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago. They...

AREQUIPA, Peru (March 25) - Officials found the fossil of a giant dinosaur jawbone while investigating a suspicious package on a bus in the mountains of Peru on Tuesday. The fossil, weighing some 19 pounds, was found in the cargo hold of the bus, which was headed for the capital of Lima, and had been sent on the bus company's package service. "They began to check the package because it didn't have anything to indicate what was inside. They were worried about its weight, opened it and found the fossil," said Kleber Jimenez, a local police officer. Peru has struggled...

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish- black rock in the basement of North Dakota's state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all. Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It's among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65- million-year-old rock tomb. "This is the closest many people will...

He is 91 and still cranks out his National Public Radio commentaries on an IBM typewriter. He eschews the Internet, openly disdains some bloggers and dismisses the whole "citizen journalism" idea. But don't accuse Daniel Schorr, a disciple of Edward R. Murrow and dean of NPR pundits, of being hopelessly out of touch. If anything, Schorr has been prescient when it comes to news analysis. His new book, "Come to Think of It" ($24.95, Viking, 382 pages), a collection of Schorr's radio commentaries from the past 17 years, shows that he often has been ahead of the cultural and political...

Roger Highfield reports new work that shows feathery dinosaurs might not have been as common as experts thought Feathers are flying once again over Chinese fossils used to back the theory that birds descended from dinosaurs. Prof Theagarten Lingham-Soliar at the University of KwaZulu Natal, claims today to have "refuted" a suggestion that primitive bristle-like structures that adorn the tail of Psittacosaurus are prototype feathers, as claimed by those seeking evidence to back the widely accepted idea of avian origins. Psittacosaurus (the "parrot-lizard", named after its strong beak), stood about 4ft tall, was a plant-eater with strong back legs and...

Sun-Times wrestles with new reality Planned newsroom layoffs and other cost cuts highlight shifts in the industry's business model, and readers in Chicago -- a notoriously competitive news town -- may ultimately suffer By Barbara Rose and Robert Manor Tribune staff reporters January 9, 2008 Readers of the Chicago Sun-Times picked up a smaller paper Tuesday, the latest tangible sign of the economic struggles engaging metropolitan newspapers around the country. The tabloid's physical shrinkage, by about 1 inch to save newsprint costs, is more easily accomplished than the pending staff cuts that will pare editorial positions by 19 percent, the...

Amazing find of dinosaur 'mummy' Scientists now think these dinosaurs were more muscular than previously thought Fossil hunters have uncovered the remains of a dinosaur that has much of its soft tissue still intact. Skin, muscle, tendons and other tissue that rarely survive fossilisation have all been preserved in the specimen unearthed in North Dakota, US. The 67 million-year-old dinosaur is one of the duck-billed hadrosaur group. The preservation allowed scientists to estimate that it was more muscular than thought, perhaps giving it the ability to outrun predators like T. rex. The researchers propose that the dinosaur's rump was 25%...

Eighteen-year-old Jamie Jordan, nicknamed the Fossil Kid, made the exciting discovery in a hunt around the disused quarries in Yaxley. And Jamie, of Canwell, Werrington, Peterborough, was amazed to also find the bones of a younger creature just 25 feet below the ground. After months of studying with a palaeontologist, the bigger bones have been confirmed as those of a Plesiosaur -- one of the first kinds of extinct animal known to science... Jamie said: "It was a very rare discovery to find so many different skeletons right next to each other. "After more research, we are hoping to donate...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House Thursday struggled to defend the dire warnings about Iran made by US President George W. Bush even after he had learned that Tehran had likely frozen its atomic weapons program in 2003. A new US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released on Monday formally endorsed that conclusion, which Bush had first heard about in August from US Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell. On August 28, Bush warned of a "nuclear holocaust" if the Islamic republic developed nuclear weapons, and on October 17 he warned that anyone interested in avoiding "World War III" should support...

WASHINGTON - One of the most complete dinosaur mummies ever found is revealing secrets locked away for millions of years, bringing researchers as close as they will ever get to touching a live dino. The fossilized duckbilled hadrosaur is so well preserved that scientists have been able to calculate its muscle mass and learn that it was more muscular than thought, probably giving it the ability to outrun predators such as T. rex. While they call it a mummy, the dinosaur is not really preserved like King Tut was. The dinosaur body has been fossilized into stone. Unlike the collections...

November 29, 2007 Dinosaur graveyard may unearth new reasons for their extinction Thomas Catᮠin Madrid Spanish scientists have unearthed what could be Europe’s largest dinosaur boneyard, finding the remains of 65ft plant-eaters never before discovered on the continent. The palaeontologists believe they have found eight different species amid the 8,000 fossils discovered so far. The range of species they are finding at the 80 million-year-old site and their state of conservation is virtually unparalleled in Europe and challenges long-held beliefs about the way in which dinosaurs became extinct. “This is completely beyond what we expected to find,” Francisco Ortega, co-director...

Perhaps it was one of those eureka moments, when the scientists realized they had discovered a new dinosaur with mouth parts designed to vacuum up food...

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, October 15, 2007 (AP) The skeleton of what's believed to be a new dinosaur species - a 105-foot plant-eater that is among the largest dinosaurs ever found - has been uncovered in Argentina, scientists said Monday. Scientists from Argentina and Brazil said the Patagonian dinosaur appears to represent a previously unknown species of Titanosaur because of the unique structure of its neck. They named it Futalognkosaurus dukei after the Mapuche Indian words for "giant" and "chief," and for Duke Energy Argentina, which helped fund the skeleton's excavation.

NEW YORK, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Moody's Investors Service on Wednesday cut its ratings on Belo Corp (BLC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) into junk territory, and said it may cut them again, citing the newspaper publisher's limited ability to improve free cash flow in a challenging environment for newspapers. Belo's use of a bank facility with a material adverse change (MAC) clause to pay out a maturing bond issue is also consistent with a junk-rated company, Moody's said in a statement. Moody's cut Belo's senior unsecured debt one notch to "Ba1," one level below investment grade, from "Baa3." "The long-term ratings...

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) — The skeleton of what is believed to be a new dinosaur species — a 105-foot plant-eater that is among the largest dinosaurs ever found — has been uncovered in Argentina, scientists said Monday.Standing alongside a replica of a neck vertebra more than 3 feet high, scientists from Argentina and Brazil said the find was remarkable because they have recovered the most complete skeletons one of one of these "giants" found so far.They said the Patagonian dinosaur appears to represent a previously unknown species of Titanosaur because of the unique structure of its neck. They...

LONDON (AFP) - A Britain-based palaeontologist believes he has found the world's first known Tyrannosaurus rex footprint, he told a BBC television documentary Wednesday. Phil Manning said he has high hopes the one square metre (about 11 square feet) print, from the famed Hell Creek area of the northwest US state of Montana, is from the flesh-eating giant, although 100 percent certainty is impossible. "People have been trying to find T.rex tracks for a hundred years," Manning, who specialises in Jurassic and Cretaceous period dinosaur tracks, told the BBC. "Unless you come across an animal dead in its tracks you...

The barosaurus did not see the meteor hit. That's because he was at a watering hole on Tucker Boulevard. But even from inside the saloon, he could hear it. Kaboom! It was like thunder. The glasses on the bar shook. A little beer slopped out of the glass that the bartender had put in front of the barosaurus. "Hey, Athena. I ought to get a free beer," said the barosaurus. "Hahaha." Later, the barosaurus went back to the newspaper. From a fifth-floor window, he could not see the actual point of impact, but a dust cloud was visible, rising slowly...

LONDON (Reuters) - The smallest dinosaur could reach speeds of nearly 40 mph (64 kph) and even the lumbering Tyrannosaurus rex would have been able to outrun most modern-day sportsmen, according to research published on Wednesday.

ZURICH (Reuters) - An amateur paleontologist in Switzerland may have unearthed Europe's largest dinosaur mass grave after he dug up the remains of two Plateosaurus. The dinosaurs' bones came to light during house-building in the village of Frick, near the German border. "A hobby paleontologist looked at a construction site for a house and happened to discover the bones," said Monica Ruembeli from the Frick dinosaur museum. The finds show that an area known for Plateosaurus finds for decades may be much larger than originally thought. "It could be that the area extends for 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) and in...

Dinosaur bones: the latest status symbol By Philip Sherwell, Sunday Telegraph in Hulett, Wyoming, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 4:29pm BST 29/07/2007 The bidding war between the two Hollywood stars was intense as the price soared for the 67 million-year-old dinosaur skull. The Black Hills Institute of Geological Research has unearthed a jumble of dinosaur remains Only when it reached $276,000 did Leonardo DiCaprio blink - and Nicolas Cage walked away from the Beverley Hills auction with a ferocious-looking addition to his fossil collection. As this recent battle of the celebrities for the head of a tyrannosauras bataar — the Asian...

Dinosaur fossils found in New Mexico are challenging the idea that when dinosaurs appeared on the scene some 235 million years ago, they quickly rose to dominate the landscape. Buried among the dinosaur bones, a team led by UC Berkeley paleontologists discovered the remnants of the dinosaurs' predecessors, dinosauromorphs, that lived 15-20 million years after the first dinosaur showed up. "It was very exciting because we knew this was a type of animal that no one thought you'd find anywhere at any time in North America," said paleontologist Randall Irmis, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and lead author of...

HONG KONG/BEIJING (Reuters) - China has uncovered the skeletal remains of a gigantic, surprisingly bird-like dinosaur, which has been classed as a new species.Eight meters (26 ft) long and standing at twice the height of a man at the shoulder, the fossil of the feathered but flightless Gigantoraptor erlianensis was found in the Erlian basin in Inner Mongolia, researchers wrote in the latest issue of Nature.The researchers said the dinosaur, discovered in April 2005, weighed about 1.4 tonnes and lived some 85 million years ago.According to lines of arrested growth detected on its bones, it died as a young adult...

PARIS (AFP) - Twelve footprints found in the bed of an ancient lake in northern Spain have thrown up the first compelling evidence that some land dinosaurs could swim, researchers reported Thursday. The 15-metre (48.75-feet) -long track in sandstone "strongly suggests a floating animal clawing the sediment" as it swam against a current, they say. The swimmer is believed to have been a therapod -- the vast family of carnivorous dinos that included the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex -- which lived in the Early Cretaceous, some 125 million years ago. The trackway in the former lakebed consists of six asymmetrical pairs...

A paleo-bully of sorts, Tyrannosaurus rex could chomp down on prey with the force needed to lift a semitrailer, tearing apart a victim's bones. Now researchers have discovered the dino's secret weapon: It was hard-headed. "Fused, archlike nasal bones are a unique feature of tyrannosaurids," said lead scientist Eric Snively of the University of Alberta. "This adaptation, for instance, was keeping the T. rexes from breaking their own skull while breaking the bones of their prey."

WASHINGTON - Researchers have decoded proteins from a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, the oldest such material ever found. The unprecedented step, once thought impossible, adds new weight to the idea that today's birds are descendants of the mighty dinosaurs. "The door just opens up to a whole avenue of research that involves anything extinct," said Matthew T. Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. While dinosaur bones have long been studied, "it's always been assumed that preservation does not extend to the cellular or molecular level," said Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University....

Close window Published online: 12 April 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070409-11 Dinosaur protein sequencedLucky find shows up record-breaking fossil.Heidi Ledford Digging through the rock in Montana yielded the surprise find. Science Palaeontologists have sequenced some protein from a 68-million-year-old fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex bone. The protein — a key component of bone and connective tissue called collagen — blasts the record for the oldest protein ever sequenced. Before this, the oldest sequenced protein (also collagen) came from a mammoth fossil that was 100,000-300,000 years old. So the new find, reported this week in the journal Science1, is quite a surprise. Scientists hope...

In 1898, according to legend, the Pennsylvania steel magnate Andrew Carnegie saw a newspaper story about great prehistoric monsters called dinosaurs. He scrawled a note: "Get one for Pittsburgh." That is why Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History has one of the world's leading collections of dinosaur fossils. The problem is that even though the newest of the dinosaurs are 65 million years old, scientists' understanding of them has been racing along, changing with each new find. So the Carnegie staff has decided to dismantle -- and rethink -- its entire collection. Our image of dinosaurs comes mostly from what...

Scientists have unveiled the first evidence of burrowing dinosaurs... They comprise the preserved remains of a dinosaur family, found in an underground den in Montana in the US. They are the first burrowing dinosaurs ever discovered. Scientists say the 2.1 metre-long lizard would have raised its young in burrows and used them to shelter from extreme weather, so they could live in harsh environments such as the Arctic regions and deserts. The find also casts doubt on the theory that a giant asteroid from space that crashed into the earth wiped out the dinosaurs.

I hate to play Valleywag, but I'm hearing rumors that the San Francisco Chronicle is in big trouble. Apparently, Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent "emergency meeting" that the news business "is broken, and no one knows how to fix it." ("And if any other paper says they do, they're lying.") Reportedly, the paper plans to announce more layoffs before the year is out. It's clear that the news business as we knew it is in trouble. Bringing it home, Peter Lewis and Phil Elmer Dewitt, both well-known tech journalists, were both part of layoffs at Time...

They might be gi­ants, but many di­no­saurs ap­par­ent­ly had ge­nomes no larg­er than that of a mod­ern hum­ming­bird. So say bio­lo­g­ists who’ve gauged the ge­nome sizes of 31 spe­cies of ex­tinct di­no­saurs and birds, their de­scen­dants. This sug­gests a stripped-down ge­nome may have been one fea­ture that helped birds take flight, by sav­ing them en­er­gy, ac­cord­ing to the re­search­ers. They estimated ge­nome sizes us­ing a pre­v­i­ous­ly not­ed re­la­tion­ship be­t­ween those, and the size of bone cells. “We see dis­tinct dif­fer­ences be­t­ween two ma­jor lin­e­ages of di­no­saurs,” said Chris Or­gan of Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty in Cam­b­ridge, Mass., one of the sci­en­tists, who...

Attention Fred Flintstone and the Geico cave guys: "Stone Age" is no longer acceptable, joining the list of other words and terms deemed offensive in polite society.

CLEVELAND - A new dinosaur species was a plant-eater with yard-long horns over its eyebrows, suggesting an evolutionary middle step between older dinosaurs with even larger horns and the small-horned creatures that followed, experts said. The dinosaur's horns, thick as a human arm, are like those of triceratops — which came 10 million years later. However, this animal belonged to a subfamily that usually had bony nubbins a few inches long above their eyes. Michael Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, published the discovery in this month's Journal of Paleontology. He dug up the...

January 19, 2007 -- THE bloodbath at Time Inc. turned out to be worse than many had anticipated, with the final number of staff cuts swelling to 289 workers and Time, People and Sports Illustrated taking the heaviest hits.

Link Only: Dino-mite discovery: Rare double discovery fuels debate over fossil sales

The New York Times Co. has agreed to sell WNEP-TV and its eight other stations to a private equity firm for $575 million. Oak Hill Capital Partners and New York Times Co. are expected to close the deal within the first six months of 2007. “We believe that our focus should now be on the development of our newspapers and our rapidly growing digital businesses and the increasing synergies between them,” said Janet Robinson, president and CEO of the New York Times Co., in a statement. Catherine Mathis, spokeswoman for the New York Times Co., said she could not disclose...

WASHINGTON - The fossil bones of what may have been Europe's largest animal ever, a new type of dinosaur, have been discovered in Spain. Discovery of the sauropod, estimated to have weighed between 40 and 48 tons, is reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Named Turiasaurus riodevensis, the animal lived in the Teruel area of what is now Spain in the late Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago. The remains were found by a team led by Rafael Royo-Torres of the Joint Paleontology Foundation Teruel-Dinopolis. In the past such large dinosaurs have primarily been found in Africa...

Palaeontologists have unveiled the fossilised skeleton of a two-headed dinosaur that roamed the earth about 100 million years ago (MYA). But before it gets added to the pantheon of prehistoric beasts occupied by luminaries such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops, scientists point out the dinosaur was only 70mm tall and died at a very young age. Publishing their findings in the Royal Society journal, the Chinese palaeontologists discovered the specimen in the famed dinosaur stamping grounds of Yixian Formation in the north-east of the country, with its mixture of volcanic and sedimentary rocks an ideal place for fossils to be...

The number of illnesses connected to the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Syracuse is now up to more than 600. Initial complaints came from people who ate at the restaurant either last Friday or Saturday night. But now, people who ate leftovers taken from the Dinosaur on those nights and others who may have come into contact with those that were ill are coming forward. In excess of 600 cases have been reported to the county health department of people claiming they fell ill after eating food from the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que over the weekend. Preliminary tests show that the illness was not...

In the past, what we've learned about dinosaurs has been mostly based on bones. That might soon change with the recent discovery of an extremely well preserved, 67-million-year-old duckbilled dinosaur found with fossilized skin in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana, according to a North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences press release. The near-complete remains may yield precious soft tissue, thanks to a technique that recovered structures resembling blood cells in a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton last year. "We've only been looking at one thing in the past, the dinosaur skeletal system, but we could learn so much more if we...

DISCOVERING a rare, 100 million-year-old fossil is amazing enough. But not as surprising as the way Queensland Museum palaeontologist Alex Cook found it. Keen for a break after more than three hours of driving, Dr Cook thought he would stretch his legs at the northwest Queensland town of Hughenden - and literally stumbled over the fossil. "I found it literally on the side of the road. It's serendipity, a happy accident," Dr Cook said today. It is the third jaw fragment of a pterosaur - a winged, fish-eating reptile that lived in the time of the dinosaurs - found in...

University of Colorado at Boulder researchers have discovered what appears to be the first evidence of parasites in the gut contents of a dinosaur, indicating even the giants that roamed Earth 75 million years ago were beset by stomach worms. The evidence was found in an exceptionally well preserved duck-billed dinosaur dug from the rocks of the Judith River Formation near Malta, Mont. Assistant Professor Karen Chin of CU-Boulder's geological sciences department and former graduate student Justin Tweet identified more than 200 suspected parasite burrows in 17 samples of gut material from the dinosaur that most likely were made by...

A US study has bruised the fearsome reputation of a popular dinosaur. Coelophysis, a carnivore that lived more than 200 million years ago, has often been presented in books and museum exhibits as a cannibal. The view is based on Coelophysis fossils that have preserved stomach contents interpreted as being the chewed up remains of its own kind. But now a re-examination has suggested those contents may be crocodile, a Royal Society journal reports. Indeed, one purported meal could even be an accident of geology - one Coelophysis simply dying on top of another, giving the impression the underlying animal's...