Paleontologists uncovered a strange new dinosaur a few years ago—a crazy, patchwork quilt of a creature dubbed Chilesaurus diegosuarezi. Its bizarre and often conflicting characteristics defied classification, forcing scientists to make an educated guess about its place on the dino family tree. New research suggests the initial attempt to classify Chilesaurus was wrong, and that this animal represents an important transitional species within a different group of dinosaurs. Read More >>
The origin of flight remains a perplexing topic in the scientific community, as tends to be the case with any origin story. Flight probably evolved multiple times in different groups. Insects probably started flying over 300 million years ago, and pterosaurs, large flying reptiles, evolved 230 million years ago. Add gliding and the complex origins of mammals into the mix, and the story becomes even more confusing. Read More >>
Lemmy, former frontman of Motorhead, has been posthumously immortalised in the natural kingdom, with scientists naming a ferocious Jurassic-era crocodile after the growling hellraiser. Read More >>
Charlie is 10 years old and loves palaeontology. According to his mum, he has Asperger's syndrome, so when he likes something he will “try and find out everything about it”. Recently, he visited the Natural History Museum and schooled the curators on their dino-knowledge. Read More >>
As virtually every school-aged child knows, birds are descended from dinosaurs. But holy toledo, does this newly discovered oviratporid ever look like a modern cassowary—right from the dramatic crest atop its head through to its long neck and ostrich-like shape. The palaeontologists who discovered the dino are now studying modern cassowaries to get a better sense of its potential behaviour. Read More >>
Films like Jurassic Park have led us to believe that Tyrannosaurus rex was capable of chasing down its prey at full tilt. New research done with simulations suggest this dino was no sprinter, and that it couldn’t move any faster than a brisk walk. Well, a brisk walk for a nine tonne carnivore. At a top speed of 12 miles per hour, you’d still have a hard time outrunning this prehistoric beast. Read More >>
The fossilised remains of a tiny bird that lived 62 million years ago suggests that birds burst out of the evolutionary gates once their dinosaur cousins were gone, rapidly diversifying into most of the lineages we see today. Read More >>
Frogs have been around for nearly 200 million years, but it wasn’t until a 10-mile-wide asteroid struck our planet, wiping out three-quarters of all life on Earth — including the dinosaurs — that these crafty amphibians were able to make their big evolutionary move, according to new research. Read More >>
Yes. The genius illustrator Jen Lewis has taken the two pinnacles of dinosaur entertainment — Jurassic Park and that disturbing ‘90s sitcom about prehistoric suburban dino-puppets — and combined their DNA to create something both wonderful and terrifying. Life truly has found a way! Read More >>
Roughly 165 million years ago during the mid-Jurassic, Madagascar was an alien place. The famously large island has yet to fully cleave itself tectonically from India and Africa, still crammed together with the rest of the southern supercontinent of Gondwana. Primates have yet to evolve, and flowers aren’t even a thing yet. This Madagascar is instead alive with a spectacular diversity of dinosaurs and reptiles, racing along the dirt and soaring above the forests. But everything that slinks, bounds, and lumbers across this sun-baked, proto-Madagascan theatre is united in unshakeable wariness over the region’s most feared apex predator: Razanandrongobe sakalavae, an enormous, land-striding relative of crocodiles with a nightmare where its face ought to go. Read More >>
The estate of M.C. Escher may have just lost its lucrative stranglehold on the student poster market thanks to artist Chris Rodley, who used a deep learning algorithm to merge a book of dinosaurs with a book of flower paintings. The results are magnificent, and deserve a spot on the walls of our finest art galleries. Read More >>
There’s something about dinosaurs that makes them strangely endearing, despite murdering humans in an umpteen number of films, having big teeth, and being related to one of the meanest types of living animal, birds. So lots of people (us, mainly) got excited about evidence showing that Tyrannosaurus rex might look more like an angry, feathered chicken. But a new study is swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction. Read More >>
Shit’s wild. No, seriously, there’s so much you can learn about animals, their lifestyles, and the world they interacted with based on what shows up in their poo. Especially if the poo is over 200 million years old. Read More >>
In the 1993 cult classic Jurassic Park, a T-rex manages to scare the living shit out of kid heroes Lex and Tim Murphy by casually ripping apart their Ford Explorer like it’s a scrap of meat. It’s a scene that crystallised the destructive power of this extinct apex predator in the public consciousness — and as a new study highlights, it might not have been that hyperbolic. Read More >>
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