2014-05-10

the pinocchio rex?

who gets to name new dinos?
it sure as hell isn't me!
if i had my way, this new long-snouted rex would have been called the chimaera rex after this narrow nosed fish...


one for the arctic!

yay nunavut! the most northerly fossil found to date was found INSIDE YOU!!


arctic-hadrosaur-vertebra (Courtesy Matthew Vavrek)

if you found this, would you know that it wasn't just a rock?

it is a vertebra from a type of duck-billed dinosaur called a hadrosaur that was recently found way up north. we now know that these herbivores lived in the high arctic year-round despite harsh climates and lack of plants to eat.
                        they basically survived off of the fungi found in rotting wood. hard core.

how do we know that they lived up there year-round, you ask?

well, during the late cretaceous period (100-66 billion years ago - seriously, the bible, get your shit together) the high arctic was separated from the rest of (what we now know as) canada by a vast sea. this is the period that the "arctic hadrosaur" hung out there and this explains how we know that it couldn't have migrated south.


2014-02-21

drumheller remains one of the coolest places ever

recently, in drumheller, alberta, a "gargantuan" pachyrhinosaurus skull was found.
indeed, it's huge-mongous…

photo poached from wikipedia

to here to read the whole article.

also, an entire baby dino skeleton was found in dinosaur national park in alberta! how cute.

(Courtesy of Philip J. Currie, Robert Holmes, Michael Ryan Clive Coy, Eva B. Koppelhus)
click here to read about this one.

2014-02-08

1978 was a good year

first - it was the year i was born

second - that was the year that the Micropachycephalosaurus was named.

pronounced: my-kro-pak-ee-SEF-uh-lo-SAWR-us 

an incomplete skeleton was found in the Shandong Province in China and given the longest generic name of any dinosaur. its' name means "small thick headed lizard".

image by Kippopot

2014-01-26

king of gore

my pal, crane, sent me this article when i was recently on vacation. it touches on the top 10 new species discovered in 2013. if you scroll down to the bottom of this website you'll find Lythronax Argestes; the "great uncle of the T.Rex". Lythronxax means KING OF GORE. how badass is that? the specimen found has been dated at 80 million years old. 
here's another article by national geographic on this new discovery. yay, science!!!

2013-07-17

t.rex tooth found in duckbill dinosaurs' butt!

so there's this hungry t.rex cruising for a meal and it sees potential dinner. it sneakily sneaks up behind a duckbill dino and bites its' butt so hard that one of it's teeth falls out. the lucky duckbill gets away with a t.rex tooth forever lodged between it's tailbones! 67 million years later (that's right, the bible) scientists find the duckbill fossil with the t.rex tooth grown into its' butt which proves that t.rex's ate live prey.

BOOM.

here's the whole story on the cbc.