Tag: Dinosaurs

ScienceDaily (Aug. 4, 2011) Dog-sized dinosaurs that lived near the South Pole, sometimes in the dark for months at a time, had bone tissue very similar to dinosaurs that lived everywhere on the planet, according to a doctoral candidate at Montana State University.

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ScienceDaily (Jan. 28, 2011) University of Alberta researchers determined that a fossilized dinosaur bone found in New Mexico confounds the long established paradigm that the age of dinosaurs ended between 65.5 and 66 million years ago.

The U of A team, led by Larry Heaman from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, determined the femur bone of a hadrosaur as being only 64.8 million years old. That means this particular plant eater was alive about 700,000 years after the mass extinction event many paleontologists believe wiped all non-avian dinosaurs off the face of earth, forever.

ScienceDaily (May 31, 2010) More than 100 years ago paleontologist E. D. Cope of "Dinosaur Wars" fame found a few fragmentary bones of a reptile in the deserts of New Mexico.
He named the reptile Typothorax. A century later Typothorax, which belongs to a group of reptiles called aetosaurs, remained something of a mystery, known mainly from pieces of armor, a few limb bones, and some sections of tail.

ScienceDaily (May 25, 2010) Was Tyrannosaurus rex cold-blooded? Did birds regulate their body temperatures before or after they began to grow feathers? Why would evolution favor warm-bloodedness when it has such a high energy cost?

Questions like these -- about when, why, and how vertebrates stopped relying on external factors to regulate their body temperatures and began heating themselves internally -- have long intrigued scientists.