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
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,…
Read More July 2, 2019
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…
Read More June 17, 2019