These are the days of miracle and wonder, especially for all you right-minded people out there who are lovers of fine brachiosaurs. I heard yesterday evening about a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: You and Li’s (2009, duh) description of a new brachiosaur, the first one known from the Cretaceous of Asia: Qiaowanlong kangxii.
Blog: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

I know it’s a bit soon to follow up my own post, but I’ve been in correspondence with You Hai-Lu, lead author of the Proc. B paper describing the new putative brachiosaurid Qiaowanlong. He’s been very gracious in response to my questioning the new taxon, and I wanted to pass on the fruits of that exchange.
Blog: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Dr. Richard Butler (Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie, Munich), Dr. Octavio Mateus (University of Lisbon) and Steven Brusatte (American Museum of Natural History) have initiated a new field project to study terrestrial strata (Grès de Silves Formation) spanning the Triassic-Jurassic boundary in Portugal in hopes of recovering late surviving temnospondyls and possibly other Late Triassic vertebrates.
Blog: Chinleana

She’s not the weightiest herbivore in her Jurassic world. Her close kin Apatosaurus would be twice as heavy. Her neighbor Brachiosaurus would be four times her bulk. But no other dinosaur can exceed our Diplodocus in the combination of length and delicacy of architecture.
Blog: BEYONDbones

Could the African nation of Angola be the next hot spot for paleontology? According to the BBC, the recent cessation of Angola’s civil war has allowed paleontologists to start working in the country again. As the news company states, the country seems to be a new “fossil frontier” that is brimming with the petrified remains of ancient creatures as yet unknown to scientists.
Blog: Dinosaur Tracking

Here’s a skeletal reconstruction of Alamosaurus modified from Lehman and Coulson. I cloned the neck and rotated it a few degrees to see where it would put the head.
Blog: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

As soon as I arrived at the temporary visitor’s center in Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument two weeks ago, a ranger asked if I would like to go on a hike to an active fossil dig. “Sure!” I said, to which the ranger replied “Well then you had better get ready. We’re leaving in five minutes.”
Blog: Dinosaur Tracking

There are actually quite a few places out there where you can experience the Triassic. I've already briefly covered Ghost Ranch, New Mexico and of course the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Another great place is Dinosaur State Park (DSP) in Rocky Hill Connecticut. Now before somebody shouts it out I am aware that the main feature, the track bed, is Early Jurassic in age; however, when I visited as a kid in the 1970s they still thought it was Triassic (I've just dated myself I think). Anyhow, DSP also has a Triassic mural and obviously the Triassic-Jurassic transition is an important topic for them.
Blog: Chinleana

Every dinosaur picture book aimed at kids comes with a disclaimer /slash/ incentive: "We don't really know what colors dinosaurs were." They were often depicted as green and drab, camouflage suited to their 1930s-era stint as lethargic reptilian swamp dwellers. But, the kid's books tantalizingly continue, "they could have been any color, with any pattern, even bright fuscha with purple polka dots!" (I'm guessing these books are to blame for Barney...).
Blog: DinoGoss

Today, Victoria Arbour published a paper in PLoS ONE on ankylosaur tail club function, resulting from her M.Sc. thesis work at University of Alberta. As a quick reminder, ankylosaurs are those tank-like herbivorous dinosaurs, famous for having a big old lump of bone at the end of the tail (see picture at end of this post). Ms. Arbour estimated the impact force resulting from the tail clubs of several different ankylosaur specimens (belonging to the genera Euoplocephalus and Dyoplosaurus).
Blog: Open Source Paleontologist

It makes a profound impression – our Houston Diplodocus. She’s a giant – ninety feet long. But she’s elegant – the neck curving forward in a graceful S-curve. The tail extending up and away from the hips. When you look from the balcony at our Diplodocus, her double-arched construction reminds you of the most beautifully-designed cantilever bridge across some wild Wyoming river.
Blog: Beyond Bones

Since I covered pachycephalosaurs the other day, it seem pertinent to put up a picture of a ceratopsian – the other group of dinosaurs that comprise the Marginocephalia.
Blog: Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings

Despite my interests in dinosaur behaviour I have rather managed to avoid the question of pachycephalosaurs so far and with a couple of nice photos on cue it seemed a good time to discuss this at least superficially. I don’t think this clade has actually even been mentioned here at any point so this is longer overdue.
Blog: Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings

Earlier this summer I asked readers to decide which city deserved the title of “Dinosaur Capital of the World.” Glen Rose, Texas took an early lead, but Drumheller, in Alberta, Canada, is now sitting comfortably in the top spot. A more contentious question, though, is “What is top museum to visit if you want to see dinosaurs?”
Blog: Dinosaur Tracking

And now, from the archives: a neat little video interview with paleontologist Pete Larson! Pete was in town during the opening of our recent Dinosaur Mummy CSI: Cretaceous Science Investigation exhibition, which featured the mummified dinosaur fossil Leonardo. It also featured cast fossils of several other Cretaceous beasts – like Triceratops, Struthiomimus, Nodosaur – and Gorgosaurus.
Blog: Beyond Bones

I love old books and papers. It is important to stay on top of the latest peer-reviewed articles and symposium volumes, but every now and then I like to pull a yellowing old science book from the shelf and see what scientists of centuries past had to say.
Blog: Dinosaur Tracking

We really should have covered this ages ago … Here we are, blithering on about brachiosaurids and diplodocoids and all, and we’ve never really spelled out what these terms mean. Sorry! The family tree of a group of animals (or plants, or fungi, or what have you) is called its phylogeny. The science of figuring out a phylogeny is called systematics. And once you’ve got a phylogeny, the business of naming the parts of it (and of course choosing which parts to name) is taxonomy.
Blog: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

As I walked through the traveling exhibit “Chinasaurs: Dinosaur Dynasty” in the Maryland Science Center, I felt like I was inside a giant typewriter. Scattered through the exhibit were animatronic versions of Protoceratops, Oviraptor and Velociraptor, and the hall was filled with the clipping and tapping of their internal workings. I was not there to see the rubberized robots, though, but the skeletons of dinosaurs that roamed the part of the world that is now China millions of years in the past.
Blog: Dinosaur Tracking

Have a look at the cover of the latest newsletter of the PSSA (Palaeontological Society of South Africa). This is one of two new skulls of Heterodontosaurus that Billy De Klerk has found in the Elliot Formation of South Africa.
Blog: Dracovenator

Back in 1999 or 2000 Jaime Headden sent me his skeletal reconstruction of what was then known as Titanosaurus colberti (Jain and Bandyopadhyay 1997), but which has recently been renamed Isisaurus colberti by Upchurch and Wilson (2004). Jaime’s skeletal reconstruction and life restoration are here. Somebody threw a skin over the recon to produce this life restoration.
Blog: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

The extinction of the dinosaurs has long been a mystery. Generation after generation of paleontologists have proposed different mechanisms that could have sent the dinosaurs into oblivion. Today much of the debate over their extinction centers around the damage done by a large hunk of rock from outer space that struck the earth about 65 million years ago, but it can be fun to look back at some other hypotheses that were abandoned by scientists years ago.
Blog: Dinosaur Tracking

Hollywood movies make fossil-collecting looks easy. A prospector or paleontologist finds a fossil, digs it up, and then takes it away for sale or study. Yet this is a far cry from what actually happened when the first remains of a skeleton of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus that would come to be nicknamed “Tinker” were discovered in South Dakota 11 years ago.
Blog: Dinosaur Tracking

In an email, Vladimir Socha drew my attention to the fact that Tom Holtz’s dinosaur encyclopaedia estimates the maximum height of Sauroposeidon as 20 meters plus, and asked whether that was really possible. Here’s what Tom actually wrote: “Sauroposeidon was one of the largest of all dinosaurs. At perhaps 98 to 107 feet (30 to 32.5 meters) long and weighing 70 to 80 tons [...] Sauroposeidon would have been the tallest of all dinosaurs. [...] If it could crane its neck up, it might have been able to hold its head 66 to 69 feet (20 to 21 meters) high or more” (Holtz and Rey 2007:207). Vladimir was understandably skeptical. But can it be true?
Blog: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

A few weeks ago I had the chance to look at a feathered dinosaur that was found in China. I was pretty amazed at the quality of the fossil; especially the feather impressions. As you can see from these images, it is an incredible piece. It was identified as a Jinfengopteryx, a Cretaceous Troodont.
Blog: Dinosaur George

I was contacted recently by the Maryland Science Center and asked to share with you all the news that they are hosting the traveling exhibit "Chinasaurs: Dinosaur Dynasty" at the Maryland Science Center. I saw this exhibit at the Field Museum a few summers ago.
Blog: Dinochick