The fossilised teeth of a carnivorous dinosaur that is believed be an ancestor of the greatest of its kind, tyrannosaurus, were found in Tamba, Hyogo Prefecture, museum officials said Saturday. The dinosaur, whose teeth were exhumed from strata dating back 140 million to 136 million years ago in the city, is estimated to have been about 5 metres long, said the Museum of Nature and Human Activities, Hyogo. The size is much larger than other 1- to 3-metre-long dinosaurs found in similarly old stratum at home and abroad, the museum said.
The discovery of a gruesome feeding frenzy that played out 73 million years ago in north-western Alberta may also lead to the discovery of new dinosaur species in north-western Alberta. University of Alberta student Tetsuto Miya****a and Frederico Fanti, a palaeontology graduate student from Italy, made the discovery near Grande Prairie, 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton. Miya****a and Fanti came across a nesting site and found the remains of baby, plant-eating dinosaurs and the teeth of a predator. The researchers matched the teeth to a Troodon, a raptor-like dinosaur about two metres in length. This finding has opened new doors in dinosaur research on this part of the continent
"It established that dinosaurs were nesting at this high latitude. It also shows for the first time a significant number of Troodons in the area hunted hatchling dinosaurs" - Tetsuto Miya****a.
Fossils found in China may give clues to the evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex. Uncovered near the city of Jiayuguan, the fossil finds come from a novel tyrannosaur dubbed Xiongguanlong baimoensis. The fossils date from the middle of the Cretaceous period, and may be a "missing link", tying the familiar big T rex to its much smaller ancestors.
New research suggests that some meat-eating dinosaurs were super dads and possibly polygamists. A Montana State University study published in the Dec. 19 issue of Science says that males from three types of dinosaurs were sole care givers for their mate's eggs. They may even have had multiple mates and watched all their eggs at once. The dinosaurs in the study were close ancestors of birds, and their fossils were found on top of unusually large clutches, said David Varricchio, an MSU palaeontologist and lead author of the paper. It's possible, he said, that the males mated with several females who laid their eggs in one large clutch. When the females left, the males incubated and protected the eggs on their own.
Solving A 77 Million-Year Old Dinosaur Mystery It has all the hallmarks of a Cretaceous melodrama. A dinosaur sits on her nest of a dozen eggs on a sandy river beach. Water levels rise, and the mother is faced with a dilemma: Stay or abandon her unhatched offspring to the flood and scramble to safety? Seventy-seven million years later, scientific detective work conducted by University of Calgary and Royal Tyrrell Museum researchers used this unique fossil nest and eggs to learn more about how nest building, brooding and eggs evolved. But there is a big unresolved question: Who was the egg-layer?
New Argentine Dinosaur Had Bird-like Breathing System The remains of a new 10-meter-long predatory dinosaur discovered along the banks of Argentinas Rio Colorado is helping to unravel how birds evolved their unusual breathing system. Palaeontologists led by the University of Chicagos Paul Sereno, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, will publish their discovery Sept. 29 in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE. Joining Sereno to announce the discovery at a news conference in Mendoza, Argentina, today were Ricardo Martinez and Oscar Alcober, both of the Universidad Nacional de San Juan, Argentina.
Vandals have struck a rich dinosaur quarry outside Hanksville, where Illinois palaeontologists this summer began excavating several nearly complete specimens of Jurassic-era species. An allosaurus was the main target of the thieves, who made hack work of bones that scientists had painstakingly exposed, then encased in plaster at the conclusion of digging season in June, according to a palaeontologist with the Bureau of Land Management.
A Malta palaeontologist who helped discover one of the world's best preserved dinosaurs has been charged with stealing a turkey-sized raptor fossil from land in the Malta area.
A palaeontologist working near Sparwood is celebrating the discovery of a series of dinosaur footprints indicating a dinosaur as big as a T-Rex but even older lived in British Columbia 135 million years ago. Rich McCrea travelled to the Kootenay region after he heard coal miners had exposed a near-vertical slab of rock containing more than 100 footprints of at least three different kinds of dinosaurs that lived during the Jurassic-Cretaceous period.
Poland is to open a secretly built museum to exhibit the remains of a newly discovered carnivorous dinosaur, nicknamed the dragon, the Daily Telegraph has reported. The 200-million-year-old reptile, an ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, was unearthed two years ago from a village in southern Poland, according to the London-based daily. The dinosaur is about five yards long and believed to have been bipedal and had teeth that measured two inches. The 1920s brickyard in Lipie Slaskie village, from where the predator dinosaurs remains were found, had been a place of attraction for palaeontologists from around the globe until the official announcement of the findings Saturday.