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Jade Simon, a professor at Laramie County Community College, was a critical part of a paleontologist team that discovered a new species of meat-eating dinosaur that’s best described as a giant 170-pound chicken from hell. A new prehistoric avian dinosaur, similar to this one, has been discovered. A Wyoming paleontologist helped verify it. (Cowboy State Daily Illustration) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When paleontologists found a drumstick from what can best be described as a 68-million-year-old chicken from hell, they needed expert on prehistoric hell chickens to confirm it as a new species. And they found her in Wyoming at Laramie County Community College....

Ever wonder why the dinosaurs disappeared? HHMI BioInteractive investigates the cause of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period—and the clues come from paleontology, chemistry, physics, and biology.This three-act film tells the story of the extraordinary detective work that solved one of the greatest scientific mysteries of all time. Explore the fossil evidence of these prehistoric animals, and other organisms that went extinct, through this lively educational video.The Day the Mesozoic Died: The Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs — HHMI BioInteractive Video | 33:50biointeractive | 237K subscribers | 14,149,800 views | August 26, 2014

The Wollemi pine was thought to have gone extinct 2 million years ago... In 1994, hikers discovered a group of strange trees growing in a canyon in Wollemi National Park, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Sydney, Australia. One hiker notified a park service naturalist, who then showed leaf specimens to a botanist. It was ultimately determined they represented an ancient species that had been essentially frozen in time since dinosaurs roamed Earth.Called a "living fossil" by some, the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) is nearly identical to preserved remains dating to the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million...

When Mike Poben, an opal buyer and and fossil fanatic, bought a bucket of opal from an Australian mine, he was surprised to find to find what looked like an ancient tooth in the pile. Later, he also found a fossilized jaw piece — one that was shiny and glistening with opal. After showing the two opalized specimens to paleontologists in 2014, Poben learned that they were part of a previously unknown dog-size dinosaur species, a new study finds. This dino lived about 100 million years ago in Australia, back when the landscape was lush and dotted with lakes. The...

Around 120 million years ago, four-winged dinosaurs roughly the size of crows called Microraptors stalked the ancient woodlands of what is now China.While researchers have studied several Microraptor specimens, there's still a lot we don't know about these feathered bird-like creatures – including what and how they ate.Now an incredibly rare fossil has revealed the preserved final meal of one individual: and unexpectedly, it was a mammal...The first Microraptor fossil was found in Liaoning, China, in 2000. There are three known species, which lived in the early Cretacious period, and the fossil in question belongs to Microraptor zhaoianus...The Microraptors were...

Discovered in what’s now western Romania, the Transylvanosaurus platycephalus (flatheaded reptile from Transylvania) was 2 meters (6 feet) long — a relatively small size for a dinosaur, according to a new study. Its skull bones were unearthed in 2007 in a riverbed of the Haţeg Basin. In the Cretaceous Period, this region of Romania was a tropical archipelago. Dinosaurs living there were smaller than their relatives elsewhere; paleontologists think these dinosaurs were an example of what biologists call “island rule,” where large animals isolated on islands become dwarfed or stunted in their growth over time and small animals become larger....

Lizard Skull Fossil Closeup One of the Thalassotitan skulls. (University of Bath) The discovery of incredible fossils of a giant marine lizard reveals how this ancient extinct beast would have ruled the sea 66 million years ago. The beast is a newly discovered species of mosasaur, giant marine reptiles that hunted the oceans during the Late Cretaceous. It's called Thalassotitan atrox, and wear on its teeth along with other remains found at its excavation site suggest that this intimidating animal was no gentle giant – but feasted on difficult prey such as sea turtles, plesiosaurs, and other mosasaurs. Other mosasaurs...

The fossilized skeleton of a T. rex relative that roamed the earth about 76 million years ago will be auctioned in New York this month, Sotheby’s announced Tuesday. The Gorgosaurus skeleton will highlight Sotheby’s natural history auction on July 28, the auction house said. The Gorgosaurus was an apex carnivore that lived in what is now the western United States and Canada during the late Cretaceous Period. It predated its relative the Tyrannosaurus rex by 10 million years. The specimen being sold was discovered in 2018 in the Judith River Formation near Havre, Montana, Sotheby’s said. It measures nearly 10...

Scientists have uncovered the remains of one of the largest pterosaurs on record, researchers announced in a study published Tuesday in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research. The fossils are from the largest-ever pterosaur found in South America, and one of the largest flying vertebrates in the world, according to researchers. The discovery of two separate animals was made in an outcrop in Argentina's Mendoza province and published in April. The Thanatosdrakon amaru is a new azhdarchid, a member of the pterosaur family of large, flying predators, predominantly from the Late Cretaceous Period. The name is a combination of Thanatos, the...

We’ve long known a disaster took place about 66 million years ago, where in a geological instant, 75% of the plants and animals on Earth were wiped out, including all the land-roaming dinosaurs. But here’s a new detail about that event: Even though we can’t pinpoint exactly what year this disaster took place, we now know it happened during the springtime. Most scientists agree the disaster was an asteroid impact, where an asteroid at least 10 kilometers wide struck the Chicxulub region in the present-day Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The impact released 2 million times more energy than the most...

Palaeontologists are claiming Utah officials have driven over a precious fossil site after dismantling a boardwalk nearby, possibly irreparably damaging preserved dinosaur footprints and animal tracks. These ancient remnants are extremely delicate and cannot be easily seen, according to sources speaking to Gizmodo, but contain more than 200 dinosaur tracks left by 10 distinct species. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) has since filed a cease-and-desist letter against the US Bureau of Land Management Utah office, calling for the immediate halt of the destruction of Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite near Moab. The alleged destruction comes as a result of the...

Meet Henry, the dinosaur that will go to auction during the prestigious sale of Modern and Contemporary Art at Cambi on December 14 in Milan, Italy. Henry is a Hypacrosaurus skeleton, an ornithopod dinosaur belonging to the hadrosaurid family, dating back to the Upper Cretaceous, Campanian era (75-67 million years ago). Due to the more moderate size of its skeleton compared to Tyrannosaurus, its name means "near the highest lizard" and is distinguished by the high curve of its spine and the characteristic shape of the tall and rounded crest. Henry measures 13 feet long and was collected in a...

The study, led by scientists at the University of Bath and including collaborators from Bristol, Cambridge and Germany, used fossils and analysed genetic differences between modern snakes to reconstruct snake evolution. The analyses helped to pinpoint the time that modern snakes evolved.Their results show that all living snakes trace back to just a handful of species that survived the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, the same extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.The authors argue that the ability of snakes to shelter underground and go for long periods without food helped them survive the destructive effects of the impact. In...

Paleontologists Stunning Conclusion: 2.5 Billion T. Rexes Roamed North America Over the Cretaceous Period TOPICS:DinosaursEvolutionPaleontologyPopularTyrannosaurus RexUC BerkeleyBy University of California - Berkeley April 15, 2021Analysis of what’s known about the dinosaur leads to conclusion there were 2.5 billion over time.How many Tyrannosaurus rexes roamed North America during the Cretaceous period?That’s a question Charles Marshall pestered his paleontologist colleagues with for years until he finally teamed up with his students to find an answer.What the team found, to be published this week in the journal Science, is that about 20,000 adult T. rexes probably lived at any one time, give or...

"These animals were quickly covered by fine sediment while they were still alive or just after their death," palaeontologist Pascal Godefroit of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, said.The scientist said that the effect would be very similar to what happened in Pompeii.The new species was named Changmiania liaoningensis, according to the news release.Changmian means "eternal sleep" in Chinese.Scientists deduce that the ornithopod lived during the Cretaceous period and that it was a small herbivore that could run very fast, based on the length of its tail and its leg composition. It was about 1.2 metres long.

"It's obviously still inside the rock, so we have a few more years of digging ahead of us." Paleontologists in Argentina have discovered the fossilized remains of a 98 million-year-old titanosaur that they say may be from the largest animal ever to walk the earth. A team of researchers with Naturales y Museo, Universidad de Zaragoza, and Universidad Nacional del Comahue actually found the remains in 2012, but excavation work only began in 2015, according to paleontologist Jose Luis Carballido of the Museo Egidio Feruglio. In a new report published in the journal Cretaceous Research, the group lays out what...

Several complete skeletons hint at sudden, mass extinctionResearchers from the Whiteside Museum of Natural History in Seymour are unraveling an ancient mystery. "This is life," said Coleton Caldwell, assistant director of the museum. "The first time life is living on land, solely on land, and it's still trying to figure things out, you know? What works, what doesn't work? So it's just really, really, really unique." Working southwest of Wichita Falls, near the shore of Lake Kemp in Baylor County, the researchers have uncovered the skeletal remains of seven dimetrodons. The mammal-like finback reptiles roamed parts of North Texas 60...

To understand how and why color is preserved in some amber fossils but not in others, and whether the colors seen in fossils are the same as the ones insects paraded more than 99 million years ago, the researchers used a diamond knife blades to cut through the exoskeleton of two of the colorful amber wasps and a sample of normal dull cuticle. Using electron microscopy, they were able to show that colorful amber fossils have a well-preserved exoskeleton nanostructure that scatters light. The unaltered nanostructure of colored insects suggested that the colors preserved in amber may be the same...

A 99-million-year-old beetle has been found, trapped in amber, stunning scientists. The new beetle, known as Propiestus archaicus, was found in Hukawng Valley in the northern part Myanmar, near China's southern border. P. archaicus is a distant relative of today's rove beetles, found in South America and the southern part of Arizona, revealing that the continents shifted rapidly millions of years ago to what we now see today. "This is a very rare find," Shuhei Yamamoto said, a Field Museum researcher and lead author of a paper in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, said in a statement. Thanks to the...

The newly-reported specimen was obtained from an amber deposit in the Angbamo area in Myanmar’s Kachin province.The fossil is a 1.6-inch (4.75 cm) long postcranial skeleton made up of 97 vertebrae; the snake’s head is missing. It dates from the Late Cretaceous epoch, approximately 99 million years ago.“This snake, named Xiaophis myanmarensis, is linked to ancient snakes from Argentina, Africa, India and Australia,” said University of Alberta’s Professor Michael Caldwell.“It is an important — and until now, missing — component of understanding snake evolution from southern continents, that is Gondwana, in the mid-Mesozoic.” “At 99 million years old, it dates...