BLOGOSAUR - Page 3 of 7 - Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum

The Other Tyrants

The fame and glory of Tyrannosaurus rex has been repeatedly hyped endlessly ever since it was first described in 1905. Once T. rex stormed into the public consciousness, no other predatory dinosaur found before or since could measure up to its legacy, though a few came close. It might be news to many people, though,…

The Calls of the Past: How Dinosaurs Might Have Communicated

Looking at a dinosaur skeleton in a museum display mount or its isolated bones in a collections drawer, it can sometimes be hard to think of these animals as living creatures. Individual beings who had lives, motives, and interactions with each other. So much of paleontology focuses on fossil animals separate from the world they…

In the Footsteps of Giants

It’s a commonly (and incorrectly) held belief that all we’ll ever know about dinosaurs comes from their bones, and that people will never be able to get an understanding of dinosaur behavior and lifestyle. Dinosaurs left many different traces of their existence other than their fossilized skeletons, and one of the coolest has to be…

Dinosaurs in the Frost

Dinosaur paleontology is full of apparent contradictions. One of the biggest of these is not only the very presence, but abundance, of these reptiles in and around Polar Regions. For animals long thought to have had metabolisms and bodies ill-suited for bearing the cold of prehistoric winters, the fact that a wide variety of dinosaur…

Your Brachiosaurus Is Not a Brachiosaurus

Brachiosaurus. The towering, graceful, giraffe-like sauropod with its skyward-stretching neck grazing the heavens, representing the peak of dinosaurian spectacle in the Jurassic. While the elongate Diplodocus and chunky Brontosaurus probably make it into dinosaur books to represent sauropods more often, and it hasn’t been considered the biggest dinosaur for several decades now, Brachiosaurus still stands…

The Real Dilophosaurus

Many people are at least vaguely familiar with Dilophosaurus thanks to its bit-part in the first Jurassic Park movie. It was that small-ish, cooing theropod with a pair of crests on its blunt head and that turned out to have a shocking extendible neck-frill and the ability to spit venom like a cobra. A classic…

A Brief History of Birds

It’s now widely accepted amongst paleontologists that birds are living dinosaurs. This idea is actually not nearly as new as it appears, and was thrown around by paleontologists as far back as the late 19th century. It took a long time to catch on though, over 100 years in fact. Yet for the past decade…

An Introduction to Pterosaurs

Anyone who’s ever heard of a dinosaur almost certainly also knows about the pterosaurs- the flying reptiles that often serve as window dressing or to give a sense of scale to depictions of dinosaurs in prehistoric artwork. They also, to the eternal exasperation of paleontologists, get labeled by the media as ‘flying dinosaurs’. But the…

Big Carnivores

Have you ever encountered a big predatory dinosaur in a book, museum, movie, etc., and ventured to identify said dinosaur as a Tyrannosaurus, only to be informed by some dino-obsessed little know-it-all (like your humble author) that what you thought was good old T. rex is actually Carcharodontosaurus saharicus, or Tarbosaurus baatar, or some other…

The Dinosaur of Champions

In the last article, we talked about the taxonomic confusion surrounding North American troodontids, and how this uncertainty is just now being resolved. What might come as a surprise to many readers is that the common hadrosaurid dinosaur Edmontosaurus, also known since the early days of paleontology in North America, has just as convoluted a…