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The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by at least two meteorite impacts, rather than a single strike, a new study suggests.Previously, scientists had identified a huge impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico as the event that spelled doom for the dinosaurs. Now evidence for a second impact in the Ukraine has been uncovered. This raises the possibility that the Earth may have been bombarded by a whole shower of meteorites. The new findings are published in the journal Geology by a team lead by Professor David Jolley of Aberdeen University. When first proposed in 1980, the...

An ancient dinosaur nursery - the oldest nesting site ever found - has been unearthed in an excavation at a site in South Africa. The 190-million-year-old nesting site of the prosauropod dinosaur Massospondylus reveals significant clues about the evolution of complex reproductive behaviour in early dinosaurs. It discover clutches of eggs, many with embryos, as well as tiny dinosaur footprints, providing the oldest known evidence that the hatchlings remained at the nesting site long enough to at least double in size. “This research project, which has been ongoing since 2005 continues to produce groundbreaking results and excavations continue. First it...

Source: Geological Society of America Date: October 24, 2006 Far More Than A Meteor Killed Dinos, Evidence Suggests There's growing evidence that the dinosaurs and most their contemporaries were not wiped out by the famed Chicxulub meteor impact, according to a paleontologist who says multiple meteor impacts, massive volcanism in India, and climate changes culminated in the end of the Cretaceous Period. Cottonmouth Creek waterfall over the event deposit with reworked Chicxulub impact spherules. The original Chicxulub ejecta layer was discovered in a yellow clay layer 45 cm below the base of the event deposit. The yellow clay represents a...

Caption: IU Bloomington geochemist Simon Brassell (right), Penn State sedimentologist Michael Arthur (middle), and Tohoku Univ. sedimentologist Harumasa Kano (left) inspect an ancient shale aboard the JOIDES Resolution research vessel. BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Ancient rocks from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean suggest dramatic climate changes during the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic Era, a time once thought to have been monotonously hot and humid. In this month's Geology, scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research present new evidence that ocean surface temperatures varied as much as 6 degrees Celsius (about 11 degrees Fahrenheit) during the...

A 65 million year old tsunami is still wreaking havoc in the scientific community, a New Mexico State University professor says. The 300-foot-tall tsunami - an aftereffect of the giant meteor impact that some scientists think killed off the dinosaurs - scrambled fossils and rock and has made the event very hard to date, said Timothy Lawton, head of NMSU's geology department.

Dinosaur discoveries wow Boston Sensational fossil discoveries were unveiled on Monday, including the most primitive wishbone yet found in a dinosaur. Also presented was an exquisite skull from a tiny crocodile that could help provide vital new evidence on when the landmasses of Africa and South America split to take up their current positions on the planet's surface. The finds were described by Paul Sereno, one of the world's leading dino hunters, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. Dr Sereno, from the University of Chicago, told the meeting that science was ...

Impact didn't lead to mass extinction 65 million years ago, geologists findThe enduringly popular theory that the Chicxulub crater holds the clue to the demise of the dinosaurs, along with some 65 percent of all species 65 million years ago, is challenged in a paper to be published in the Journal of the Geological Society on April 27, 2009. The crater, discovered in 1978 in northern Yucutan and measuring about 180 kilometers (112 miles) in diameter, records a massive extra-terrestrial impact. When spherules from the impact were found just below the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary, it was quickly identified as the...

Volcanoes that erupted in India about 65 million years ago were instrumental in the extinction of dinosaurs, according to new research. For the last thirty years scientists have believed a giant meteorite that struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula was responsible for the mass extinction of dinosaurs, the Daily Telegraph reported on Wednesday. But now Gerta Keller, a geologist at Princeton University, New Jersey, says fossilised traces of plants and animals dug out of low lying hills at El Penon in northeast Mexico show this event happened 300,000 years after the dinosaurs disappeared. Keller suggests that the massive volcanic eruptions at the...

Scientists have discovered a macabre death scene that took place 67 million years ago. The setting was a nest, in which a baby dinosaur had just hatched from an egg, only to face an 11-foot-long snake waiting to devour it. The moment was frozen forever when, apparently, the nest was buried in a sudden avalanche of mud or sand and everything was fossilized. Scientists have discovered a macabre death scene that took place 67 million years ago. The setting was a nest, in which a baby dinosaur had just hatched from an egg, only to face an 11-foot-long snake waiting...

Dinosaur Shocker By Helen Fields Neatly dressed in blue Capri pants and a sleeveless top, long hair flowing over her bare shoulders, Mary Schweitzer sits at a microscope in a dim lab, her face lit only by a glowing computer screen showing a network of thin, branching vessels. That’s right, blood vessels. From a dinosaur. “Ho-ho-ho, I am excite-e-e-e-d,” she chuckles. “I am, like, really excited.” After 68 million years in the ground, a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North...

A dinosaur egg weighing more than five kilograms (11 pounds) and measuring 30 centimetres in diameter has been found in western India, government officials said. The egg was discovered by telecom workers digging in the town of Balasinor, in the south of Gujarat state. “Two feet from the ground, we struck an oblong stone. On breaking the stone, a football-sized egg was found. It is white with some orange spots on it,” said M.P. Patel, sub-divisional officer of the telecom department. Tara Mukundan, a collector from Kheda district, said officials from the Archaelogical Survey of India will collect the egg....

CHENNAI, India (Reuters) – Geologists have found a cluster of fossilized dinosaur eggs, said to be about 65 million years old, in a village in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, according to media reports. > The clusters were under ash from volcanic eruptions on the Deccan plateau, which geologists said could have caused the dinosaurs to become extinct. >

Boulder, CO, USA -- A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago. Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at...

More than 65 million years after they went extinct, dinosaurs are about to disappear again — at least from public view in Washington. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History said Friday that its high-traffic dinosaur hall will close April 28 for a previously announced $48 million makeover. Most of the popular specimens won’t reappear until 2019, when the Fossil Hall at the world’s second-most-visited museum is reopened.

This is just not right.

A dinosaur hobbyist who made his name as a Microsoft multimillionaire published a scientific paper on Monday alleging “serious errors and irregularities” in dinosaur research involving some of the world’s top paleontologists. The research, some of it dating to the 1990s, analyzed skeletons of different ages to estimate how quickly dinosaurs grew. For example, a 2001 paper, published in the journal Nature, estimates that the giant dinosaur Apatosaurus had a growth spurt of 12,000 pounds in a year. The papers, particularly a 2004 paper in Nature on the growth of Tyrannosaurus Rex, were influential in offering an explanation for why...

Air flows mostly in a one-way loop through the lungs of monitor lizards -- a breathing method shared by birds, alligators and presumably dinosaurs, according to a new University of Utah study. The findings -- published online Dec. 11 in the journal Nature -- raise the possibility this breathing pattern originated 270 million years ago, about 20 million years earlier than previously believed and 100 million years before the first birds. Why remains a mystery. "It appears to be much more common and ancient than anyone thought," says C.G. Farmer, the study's senior author and an associate professor of biology...

The controversial discovery of 68 million-year-old soft tissue from the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex finally has a physical explanation. According to newly published research, iron in the dinosaur's body preserved the tissue before it could decay. The research, headed by Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, explains how proteins — and possibly even DNA — can survive for millennia. Schweitzer and her colleagues first raised this question in 2005, when they found the seemingly impossible: soft tissue preserved inside the leg of an adolescent T. rex unearthed in Montana.

Each poo is a time capsule to the dawn of the dinosaurs. A gigantic "communal latrine" created at the dawn of the dinosaurs has been unearthed in Argentina. Thousands of fossilised poos left by rhino-like megaherbivores were found clustered together, scientists say. The 240-million-year-old site is the "world's oldest public toilet" and the first evidence that ancient reptiles shared collective dumping grounds. The dung contains clues to prehistoric diet, disease and vegetation says a study in Scientific Reports. Continue reading the main story [snip]

A newly discovered "King of Gore" tyrannosaur pushes back the origins of T. rex's terrifying family tree to at least 80 million years ago, report paleontologists. Lythronax argestes (which literally means "Gore King from the Southwest") once stalked the shores of western North America in search of prey. It sported the same short snout, broad teeth, front-facing eye, and unimpressive forearms as Tyrannosaurus rex, which lived around 68 million years ago. (Related: "Did the Real T. rex Resemble the One in Jurassic Park?") At 24 feet (7.3 meters) long and weighing about 2.5 tons, the 80-million-year-old Lythronax (pronounced LYE-thro-nax) lacked...