BLOGOSAUR - Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum

(R)Evolution!

(R)Evolution! ‘Chickenosaurus’ and the Science of ‘Evo-Devo’ Occasionally in nature, animals are born with mutations that cause them to exhibit ancestral traits. For example, snakes can be born with legs, whales with tiny hindlimbs, horses with toes, and even humans with tails. These traits, which occur in both plants and animals, are called ‘atavisms’ or…

Cretaceous Groundhog Day

Cretaceous Groundhog Day: Paleo-prognosticating! February 2nd is Groundhog Day, a day when we listen anxiously to hear whether local rodent celebrities like Punxsutawney Phil or Wiarton Willie will see their shadows when they emerge from their burrows. If they spy their shadow, six more weeks of winter are on the way! Here in northern Alberta,…

Under the Roof of Stegosaurus

How have we not talked about Stegosaurus here yet? Simply unreasonable. It goes without saying that Stegosaurus is one of the most recognizable dinosaurs ever. Every kid who knows what a dinosaur is knows about Stegosaurus. That said, many people don’t know Stegosaurus as well as they think they do. There’s a lot of pop…

The Real Parasaurolophus

It’s safe to say that Parasaurolophus is easily one of, if not the most, popular hadrosaurs amongst the general public. It’s as iconic as it is weird looking, with that long, backward-curving, tube-shaped crest. It’s an almost alien creature in a way. Despite its popularity though (which seems to have arisen around the time of…

Amber: Big Info From the Smallest Fossils

Many of us are familiar with amber thanks to, of course, Jurassic Park. It’s often thought of as that yellowish, cloudy rock made of fossilized tree sap often containing prehistoric insects with the potential to bear the incredible resource of preserved dinosaur DNA. However, as with most things dealing with palaeontology in pop culture, the…

Swimming Dinosaurs

In late April 2020, a description of the tail vertebrae of Spinosaurus was published in the journal Nature (Ibrahim et al., 2020). Most publications on the slowly-unveiled anatomy of this enigmatic giant theropod tend to get a lot of attention, and shocks. The Ibrahim et al., 2020 paper was par for the course in this,…

The Real Allosaurus

Try to imagine, if you can, a world before Tyrannosaurus was the definitive carnivorous dinosaur. There was actually a time when that was indeed the case. Dinosaurs were first defined as a group in 1842, and Tyrannosaurus wasn’t described until 1905. That’s over sixty years of scientists and the public being aware of dinosaurs, but…

The Weird Dinosaurs Saga: Carnotaurus

Imagine the world roughly 70 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period. Global temperatures overall are quite warm, and the continents have yet to take the configuration we know them in today. Unbeknownst to them, the non-avian dinosaurs only have about four million years left. An endless expanse of time to us humans, but…

The Real Pachycephalosaurus

Everyone knows Pachycephalosaurus, that bipedal dome-head that ran around head-butting other dinosaurs all day long, but few people ever stop and give it much thought beyond that. The history and biology of Pachycephalosaurus and its relatives is complex, and for a family of dinosaurs that’s been a pop culture staple for so long we still…

A Brief History of Mammals Part 1: The Early Synapsids

To many people, mammals seem like very modern animals. Palaeontologists of the mid-20th Century often framed the story of life on Earth into overly-simplified chapters, with the earlier Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras being the ‘Age of Fish’ and ‘Age of Reptiles’ respectively, and the current Cenozoic being the ‘Age of Mammals’. This might make for…