Dinosaurs

Dino News

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Did dinosaurs go extinct 300,000 years AFTER the Chicxulub impact??

“We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” said Gerta Keller, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, in a release distributed by the Geological Society of London. “These are astonishing results.”

From the April 27 date I don’t think that this is another hoax but I am going to need some convincing.(And I thought the Deccan Traps eruptions were virtually simultaneous with Chicxulub).

OTOH I believe Robert Bakker had similar thoughts.

The next best thing to seeing the “fighting dinosaurs’ in Ulaan Bataar: a detailed series of photos.

Only, as I have said before, in UB you can TOUCH the fossils.

Jurassic Males?

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Carl Zimmer has a fascinating item on the ever- more- blurry line between birds and non- avian Dinosaurs. It seems the Paleognathes– the bird group commonly known as ratites, composed of the big flightless birds like Ostriches and the odd related but flying South American group known as Tinamous– have retained the brooding habits of such “true” Dinosaurs as Oviraptors and Troodonts. In all these groups, the MALES brood. As you can see by looking at the cladogram, Paleognathes are separate from all other extant birds and retain this archaic trait from a long while back. Read it all.

Feathered Dinos

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Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds— the best book on the subject yet, by Australian paleontologist John Long and magical artist Peter Schouten, best known here for his collaborations with Tim Flannery. You look at these and think: THIS is what they looked like.

A mother Troodon attends the hatching of her eggs. Much behavior here– not just predation but courting, brooding, and more. (Forgive slightly cropped image– I didn’t want to break the binding.)

The book is not yet available here or in the UK– it will be at least six months. But you can order it from Andrew Isles in Australia (it is well worth getting on his list anyway) and he’ll have it to you directly.