BLOGOSAUR

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…

Read More February 11, 2020

The Weird Dinosaurs Saga: Deinocheirus

Dinosaurs have become so popular that it’s easy to forget just how weird they are as animals. Many were huge, and depending on the family some had long necks, plates, spikes, horns, frills, domed heads, and other such things. Some were the size of elephants but with heads the size of a horse’s. That isn’t…

Read More January 28, 2020

How Many Kinds of Dinosaurs Were There?

It seems like, back in the good old pre-Dinosaur Renaissance days, the number of dinosaur species known to science was a pretty self-contained thing. You had your Tyrannosaurus, your Triceratops, your Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, ‘Monoclonius’, and all the other classics. It was kind of like a baseball team of fossil animals. This was never really true,…

Read More December 17, 2019

The Real Mosasaurus

With the release of the recent Jurassic World movies and their memorable inclusion of the marine reptile Mosasaurus, it wouldn’t be surprising if this species and its mosasaurid relatives are experiencing a real uptick in popularity with the general public right now. However, like all things relating to movie depictions of extinct creatures, what you…

Read More November 28, 2019

All About Baby Dinosaurs

Like all animals, dinosaurs had to have babies to ensure the survival of their genes, and all known baby dinosaurs came from eggs. This might seem obvious, but when you stop and think about the trials and challenges of producing and tending to eggs with viable offspring inside, the more interesting and alive extinct dinosaurs…

Read More November 4, 2019

The Story of Megalosaurus

All over the world, as long as different people have been looking down at the ground and recognizing shapes in the rock, we were probably seeing dinosaur bones. Whether certain ancient cultures had some idea that they were looking at the remains of long-dead animals, and whether these remains influenced the creation of mythological creatures,…

Read More October 7, 2019

Alberta’s Best Dromaeosaur

Everybody loves dromaeosaurs. With their sickle-claws, deadly teeth, and sleek build it’s hard not to find them cool. The very image of these dinosaurs has turned them into movie stars, but they weren’t always so beloved by kids and monster fans worldwide. Around the time that Jurassic Park turned ‘raptors’ (the popular term for dromaeosaurs,…

Read More September 24, 2019

Turbulent Taxonomy

In 1842  the Victorian anatomist Sir Richard Owen established the taxon ‘Dinosauria’ to describe a group of distinct fossil reptile species from England. The term ‘dinosaur’ is a combination of two Ancient Greek words which are ‘deinos’ meaning ‘fearfully great’ and ‘sauros’ meaning ‘lizard’. You’ll often see ‘deinos’ translated as ‘terrible’, but it’s meant more…

Read More September 10, 2019

The Life Appearance of Dinosaurs, and Common Myths Surrounding It

Let’s face it, we might not ever fully and completely know what every species of non-avian dinosaur looked like when it was alive. Heck, we probably won’t even discover every dinosaur that ever lived. Fossilizing is all about dying in the right place at the right time, and entire species probably came and went without…

Read More August 27, 2019

When Dinosaurs “Ruled” the Earth

There’s this idea that, from about 233 to 66 million years ago, the planet belonged to the dinosaurs. That from the late Triassic till the end of the Cretaceous the world was exclusively the domain of this lineage of reptiles. Some even think that all the other types of animals that inhabited Earth during this…

Read More July 30, 2019