Here’s a round-up of some recent Dinosaur News stories you may have missed!
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Archaeopteryx was probably actually a dinosaur:
Archaeopteryx, widely regarded as being the world’s oldest known bird, has just been knocked off its scientific perch, since new research concludes this feathered animal was, in fact, a dinosaur…
…”Epidexipteryx and Epidentrosaurus, two species we described years ago, are probably the most primitive and oldest known birds,” lead author Xing Xu told Discovery News, adding that they lived about 160 million years ago at what is now Dahugou Locality in eastern Inner Mongolia.
Triceratops discovery supports astroid-impact extinction theory:
A Triceratops may have been the last dinosaur standing, according to a new study that determined a fossil from Montana’s Hell Creek Formation is “the youngest dinosaur known to science.”…
“Our paper suggests that dinosaurs did not go extinct prior to the impact,” lead author Tyler Lyson told Discovery News. “The fact that this dinosaur is so close to the K-T boundary lends support to the idea that they went extinct as a result of a meteorite impact.”
And finally, adorable baby ankylosaur discovered in Maryland:
The latest find to be announced, just published in the Journal of Paleontology, offers some insight into what armored dinosaurs looked like shortly after they hatched from their eggs…
[Ray] Stanford [who discovered the fossil] and colleagues have given this tiny dinosaur a name: Propanoplosaurus marylandicus. The name is a tribute to the fact that the arrangement of skull bones in the small specimen closely resembles that seen in Panoplosaurus, which was a later armored dinosaur that belonged to a subgroup called the nodosaurids. Nodosaurids lacked the famous tail clubs seen in some other ankylosaurs, but the backs of many species were decked with arrays of spiky armor.
Standford points out in his comment on this story that the nodosaur is “the only dinosaur hatchling of any kind ever reported from the eastern USA.” AWESOME. Stanford’s study is here, and a Baltimore Sun article that includes a great image of the fossil is here.
Seen this yet?
Hi, Mary!
@1 Jesse: YES! Coming soon to Dinosaur News! Spoilers! 😀
Archaeopteryx is like the Lindsay Lohan of fossils. These reporters are just a little too eager to see it fail.
And just when the Plutophiles had started to settle down. *sigh*
That poor thing looks like road kill.
Go Hoyle, go Hoyle, go Hoyle!!!
Two things come to mind. One is theropods might have been warm blooded. Two is I’m thinking baby dinosaurs were predators and prey of each other. In other words, it looks a lot like the babies were doing all the same things the adults were doing from the look of those teeth and claws.
It’s apparently been going on in China for a long, long, long time, @5.
What the Archeopteryx story really shows is that it has become pretty pointless to differentiate between dinosaurs and birds. Sorry, Triceratops, you weren’t the last; little dinosaurs are still everywhere, all around us (YAY).
Birds ARE dinosaurs. Sciencey types have already been referring to “non-avian dinosaurs” as a way to specify the lineages that didn’t lead to birds for a while now.
Fact.
@10: I KNOW RIGHT?
TAXONOMYRAEG!
Also in dinosaur news, my fossil prep skills have been steadily improving. Today I carefully removed about a millimeter-thick layer of matrix from a piece of scrap bone, barely touching the bone beneath the rock.