* Astronomy

Title: Biology of the sauropod dinosaurs: the evolution of gigantism
Authors: P. Martin Sander, Andreas Christian, Marcus Clauss, Regina Fechner, Carole T. Gee, Eva-Maria Griebeler, Hanns-Christian Gunga, Jürgen Hummel, Heinrich Mallison, Steven F. Perry, Holger Preuschoft, Oliver W. M. Rauhut, Kristian Remes, Thomas Tütken, Oliver Wings and Ulrich Witzel

The herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods were the largest terrestrial animals ever, surpassing the largest herbivorous mammals by an order of magnitude in body mass. Several evolutionary lineages among Sauropoda produced giants with body masses in excess of 50 metric tonnes by conservative estimates. With body mass increase driven by the selective advantages of large body size, animal lineages will increase in body size until they reach the limit determined by the interplay of bauplan, biology, and resource availability. There is no evidence, however, that resource availability and global physicochemical parameters were different enough in the Mesozoic to have led to sauropod gigantism.

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Dinosaur skull changed shape during growth

The skull of a juvenile sauropod dinosaur, rediscovered in the collections of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History, illustrates that some sauropod species went through drastic changes in skull shape during normal growth.
University of Michigan paleontologists John Whitlock and Jeffrey Wilson, along with Matthew Lamanna from the Carnegie Museum, describe their find in the March issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
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Dinosaurs came to rule the world as a direct result of a mass extinction similar to the one that killed them off and allowed mammals to take over the planet, research has shown.

Before the dinosaurs came to prominence, the world was ruled by armour-plated crocodile-like creatures called crurotarsans.
At that time most of the planet's land was concentrated into one super-continent called Pangaea, and there was no Atlantic Ocean.
Then, just over 200 million years ago, Pangaea was broken up by mighty forces within the Earth's crust.
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Volcanoes that spewed out lava and noxious gases for more than half a million years paved the way for dinosaurs to rule the Earth by wiping out their competitors, scientists say.
The environmental devastation wrought by relentless volcanic activity at the end of the Triassic period 200m years ago laid waste to animal species that lived alongside the early dinosaurs, giving them the upper hand in the Jurassic period that followed.
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Dinosaurlike creature spread in Triassic times

It looked like a dinosaur, walked  like a dinosaur, and ate  like, well, some dinosaurs, but a newly discovered species of archosaur, which lived 240 million years ago, was not a dinosaur.
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