Some dinosaurs were utterly bizarre. You may have heard of them before, but one particular group called therizinosaurs belonged to the meat-eating theropod dinosaurs (those that led to birds), were really awesome. However, they actually at some point made a conscious evolutionary decision to stop being badasses, and become Cretaceous-cauliflower* munching pansies.
Teeth
Theropod dinosaurs were waaay more diverse than previously thought
Dinosaurs! What image sprang to your mind then? There’s a reasonable chance, I’d hazard, that your brain just conjured an image of ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex, a nimble and intelligent Velociraptor mongoliensis, or any one of the other meat-eating theropods, notoriously infamous thanks to a certain eccentric millionaire with a passion for splicing genes. These two species of dinosaur a ...[Read More]
Did dinosaurs lactate..?
The fossil record is brutally frustrating; it mostly preserves only vestiges of deaths long past as body fossils, with occasional glimpses of life being gleaned from their surroundings and any trace fossils, or activity fossils that we might find. One question palaeontologists have long been seeking the answer for is how good were dinosaurs as parents? Modern birds are descended from dinosaurs, an ...[Read More]
Horsedrosaurus, the dinosaur that wanted to be an equid.
The title of this makes no sense, but kind of emphasises the main point of this post. It’s pretty much a summary of a new paper, one on the feeding habits of hadrosaurid dinosaurs. These are the big advanced ornithopods, often considered to be the ‘bland’ lineage of ornithischians, and referred to as the ‘cows of the Cretaceous’. They also happen to be my favourite group of dinosaurs, simply becau ...[Read More]
Ancient crocodiles were a bit like killer whales. Go figure.
When you cast your mind back to the Mesozoic and think of the predators of the time, your mind goes to dinosaurs. You just thought of a T. rex didn’t you? Didn’t you. Crocodiles are the unsung heroes of the past, probably due to the fact that they’re still around today, so not considered as exotic as many of the extinct species we all know and love. But how similar were they to modern species? Or, ...[Read More]