Paleontologists digging in a brickyard in southern Poland have discovered the remains of a dinosaur they say is a previously unknown ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The predator dinosaur, given the working name "the Dragon", lived around 200 million years ago, team member Doctor Tomasz Sulej of the Polish Science Academy
An amateur fossil hunter has unearthed what might be the largest domestic fossil of a dinosaur tooth in Hakusan, Ishikawa Prefecture. Satoshi Utsunomiya, a 38-year-old company employee from Kanazawa, found the fossil in June on red rock in the lower Cretaceous strata of the earth. Experts believe the time-worn tusk belonged to a therapod, a group of carnivorous dinosaurs that include the Tyrannosaurus rex, which roamed the Earth 130 million years ago.
Dinosaur footprints from Ardley Quarry near Bicester have been moved to a new home at the Oxfordshire Museum as part of a £127,000 project. The fossilised prints, found by workmen in 1997, were made 170 million years ago by a ferocious meat-eating megalosaurus, a smaller cousin of the mighty tyrannosaurus rex.
Two new 110 million-year-old dinosaurs unearthed in the Sahara Desert highlight the unusual meat-eaters that prowled southern continents during the Cretaceous Period. Named Kryptops and Eocarcharia in a paper appearing this month in the scientific journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, the fossils were discovered in 2000 on an expedition led by University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno. Sereno and co-author paleontologist Stephen Brusatte of the University of Bristol say the new fossils provide a glimpse of an earlier stage in the evolution of the bizarre meat-eaters of Gondwana, the southern landmass.
An unusual British dinosaur has been shown to have a skull that functioned like a fish-eating crocodile, despite looking like a dinosaur. It also possessed two huge hand claws, perhaps used as grappling hooks to lift fish from the water.
Engineering techniques have show an unusual British dinosaur Baryonyx walkeri fed on fish, despite it looking like a meat-eater. The dino's skull bent and stretched in the same way as the skull of today's fish-eating crocodiles, even though it had clear differences in structure. The early Cretaceous dinosaur was found in Surrey and lived at a time when the area was warmer and had lagoons. The research is published in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology.
Fossil remains from one of the largest meat-eating dinosaurs ever found have been identified as belonging to a new species. Student Steve Brusatte, now at the University of Bristol, made the identification from several pieces of the skull found by Paul Sereno in the Republic of Niger in 1997. The new dinosaur is called Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis and belongs to the meat-eating theropod dinosaurs - a group that also includes Tyrannosaurus rex - although it is more closely related to Allosaurus The enormous beast would have been 13-14m long and was taller than a double-decker bus. Its skull was about 1.75m long and it had teeth as big as bananas.
Australia has yielded relatively few remains of the prehistoric creatures, but that has not dampened our enthusiasm for Allosaurus and friends. In 1903, geologist William Ferguson was mapping the rocky coast near Inverloch, looking for potential coal mining sites. An able palaeontologist, he spotted a five-centimetre-long clawbone embedded in rock one so unusual he had it shipped to experts at London's Natural History Museum. It confirmed what Ferguson had suspected: he had found, decades after they were first discovered in Europe and America, a dinosaur fossil Australia's first.
United States researchers have confirmed a fossil footprint found this year in South Gippsland, in south-east Victoria, is that of a large carnivorous dinosaur similar to the tyrannosaurus. Monash University geologist Patricia Vickers-Rich says the area around Inverloch is rich with archaeological treasures. Professor Vickers-Rich says the bones of a number of ancient mammals have also been found in the rocks. She says the find dates back more than 100 million years ago when there was no ocean and Australia was joined to Antarctica.
Newly discovered footprints made by carnivorous dinosaurs in Australia reveal the ancient beasts survived in polar climes when the outback was still joined to Antarctica and close to the South Pole. The discovery of the three fossil tracks, each about 36 centimetres long and showing two to three partial toe-prints, was presented by Anthony Martin, senior lecturer in environmental studies at Emory University, today at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology in Austin, Texas. The researchers estimate the tracks were made 115 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period by theropod dinosaurs, a group of bipedal carnivores that includes Tyrannosaurus rex. And based on the tracks' size, Martin and his colleagues estimate the beasts stood 1.4 to 1.5 meters at the hip. While not half-pints, the dinosaurs would've been about 20 percent smaller than Allosaurus, a large theropod from the Jurassic Period.