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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...

A handout image obtained on August 23, 2022 courtesy of the Dinosaur Valley State Park shows dinosaur tracks from around 113 million years ago. A drought in Texas dried up a river flowing through Dinosaur Valley State Park, exposing tracks from giant reptiles that lived some 113 million years ago, an official said Tuesday. Photos posted on Facebook show three-toed footprints leading down a dry tree-lined riverbed in the southern US state. It is "one of the longest dinosaur trackways in the world," a caption accompanying the images says. Stephanie Salinas Garcia of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department...

The reconstructed megadolon was 16 metres long and weighed over 61 tons. In a new 3D modeling study published this week in Science Advances, we show that the giant extinct shark, Otodus megalodon, was a true globetrotting super-predator. It was capable of covering vast distances in short order, and could eat the largest of modern living super-predators, the killer whale, in five gargantuan bites. It could have swallowed a great white shark whole. The largest shark that ever livedMegalodon was the largest shark that ever lived, and it was around for a long time—from around 23 million to 2.6...

Joe Rogan Podcast: Michio Kaku Explains Evidence For Intelligent Life In The Universe| August 9, 2022 | Joe Rogan Clips

Dinosaurs once roamed the earth. They were the kings of the land. That’s why paleontologists have been studying these majestic creatures to see how they lived. They have come across interesting discoveries that have left them stunned. While so much has already been discovered, they have recently come across the fact that these large reptiles may have had belly buttons. This is new information and one that they’re looking into more. How is that possible when these creatures laid eggs? More about the Mystery Credit must be given to an ‘incredible’ fossil that the paleontologists found. Because of this, they...

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...

Missing link feather fossils found in France By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 6:01pm GMT 20/02/2008 Primitive feathers that represent a key missing link in their evolution have been found, fossilised in 100-million-year-old amber from France. The fossils mark a step towards the shape of modern feathers As long as scientists have studied birds, they have puzzled over that most intricate of avian features - the feather. Because it is a marvellous feat of biological engineering, it has been siezed on by creationists trying to find evidence of designs that lie beyond the abilities of evolution. Scientists themselves have...

June 17, 2009—The fossil hand of a long-necked, ostrich-like dinosaur recently found in China may help solve the mystery of how bird wings evolved from dinosaur limbs, according to a new study. The ancient digits belonged to a 159-million-year-old theropod dinosaur dubbed Limusaurus inextricabilis. Theropods are two-legged dinos thought to have given rise to modern birds. Although it was a distant relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, the newfound dinosaur was a small herbivore, said study co-author James Clark, a biologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The animal was about 5.6 feet (1.7 meters) long and had relatively short, clawless...

British and Moroccan scientists said Tuesday they had found the remains of two new species of extinct animals in the Saharan desert, describing the find as one of the most important of the past 50 years. The team of paleontologists said they had unearthed a new species of pterosaur, a flying reptile from the Mesozoic era, and a new type of sauropod, a giant four-legged herbivore from the Jurassic period.

Once you know the shape of the melanosomes in a fossil, you can learn all sorts of things about the animal. For example, some dinosaurs with fearsome reputations were incredibly showy. "Many of the close relatives of Velociraptor — you know, that was chasing the kids around in the kitchen [in "Jurassic Park"]?" Vinther said. "First of all, that was covered in feathers. It was really bird-like, not like this naked thing that we see there. But furthermore, most of the relatives that we looked at that were close to it, they were iridescent. So they would have had a...

Artist reconstruction of Tupandactylus imperator. (Copyright Bob Nicholls 2022) For much of the history of paleontology, scientists thought all dinosaurs were covered in scales, like the lizards of today. That was until a spate of discoveries in recent decades revealed many of these marvelous extinct animals sported ancient feathers – just like their later descendants, birds. As for pterosaurs – the flying reptiles that reigned in the sky when the dinosaurs roamed – the issue has never been settled. Were they bald? Did they have feathers too? Scant evidence in the fossil record has never been definitive – until now,...

The limb, complete with skin, is just one of a series of remarkable finds emerging from the Tanis fossil site in the US State of North Dakota. But it's not just their exquisite condition that's turning heads - it's what these ancient specimens purport to represent. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. The day 66 million years ago when the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of mammals began. The BBC has spent three years filming at Tanis for a show to be broadcast on...

Scientists find fossil from THE DAY the dinosaurs died 66m years ago: Leg of Thescelosaurus was 'ripped off in aftermath' of huge asteroid strike that wiped out most species on Earth Dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub event - a plummeting asteroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago The asteroid more than six miles in diameter slammed into what is now Mexico, leaving a 93-mile wide crater Experts found the fossilised leg of a dinosaur killed and what appears to be a fragment of the asteroid itself Findings were made at Tanis, a renowned paleontological site in North...

More than 30 million years ago, the Peruvian sea was home to one of the largest predators to ever emerge in the ocean. Its colossal size has surprised the scientific community.Species endangered by this fearsome marine animal that remained hidden in the Peruvian sea. In 2021, one of the most important discoveries ever recorded in the country was announced. It was only at the beginning of 2022 that the first assessments of the skeletal remains of Peru's so-called 'sea monster', an ancient whale considered one of the largest predators that existed 36 million years ago, were reported. Its impressive size...

Credit: skeleton by Maurício Silva Garcia; photo and composition by Rodrigo Temp MüllerPaleontologists from the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM) published a study in the scientific periodic Gondwana Research describing the new fossilized specimen.The oldest dinosaurs have been excavated from fossiliferous layers with approximately 233 million years from Brazil and Argentina. Furthermore, some older Argentinean deposits revealed remains of dinosaur precursors, which provide crucial data on the origin of "true" dinosaurs. These creatures lived approximately 236 million years ago and were small, with no more than 1 meter in length.Whereas the fossil record of dinosaur precursors is relatively...

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...

A group of paleontologists discovered a large, well-preserved pterosaur on a rocky beach off the coast of Scotland. Boasting roughly an 8-foot wingspan, the ancient reptile is the largest of its kind to be found from the Jurassic Period. The animal’s existence was a chance find made in 2017, when paleontologist Amelia Penney stumbled across the creature’s head while photographing dinosaur footprints on a rocky beach on the Isle of Skye. The pterosaur was promptly sawed out of the rock (with a couple pauses to deal with the tides, which threatened to wash away the fossil) and exhaustively studied; the...

Creatures get trapped in amber all the time, but most prehistoric finds are insects. Amber is a great material for preserving arthropods because of their already tough shells that will hold on even if the insides disintegrate. But what about a lizard? Retinosaurus hkamentiensis is a new extinct species of lizard that was unexpectedly found trapped in Burmese amber. No one expected an entire reptile to be preserved so well, from its scaly skin down to its skeleton.

A long-necked dinosaur that roamed present-day Montana 150 million years ago likely suffered from a respiratory infection, according to a study published in Scientific Reports on Thursday, the first evidence of a respiratory infection in dinosaurs which experts believe could have caused flu-like symptoms including coughing and fever

Fox News host Laura Ingraham blasted former Vice President Dick Cheney Thursday after he visited Capitol Hill for the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. "The dinosaurs of the Pelosi-Schumer age are about to go extinct," Ingraham said. "They know their political con game is coming to an end in November, and they're so petrified that Trump or someone with similar views will win the presidency in 2024 that they're even willing to team up with an old nemesis [Dick Cheney]." [cut] The "dinosaurs" of the Cheney era "really care more about promoting democracy abroad than preserving it...