Tyrannocentric Dinosaur Paleobiologist; Univ. Maryland Principal Lecturer in Vertebrate Paleontology; Dir. Science & Global Change Program; Random House author
#IfDinosaursStillExisted
is trending.
Folks, they do. They are called birds.
Dinosaurs = the most recent common ancestor of Megalosaurus, Diplodocus & Iguanodon. All living birds are descendants of that ancestors.
A chicken is just as much a dinosaur as is Triceratops.
"Alamotyrannus" now has a name as a new (possibly) older (probably) species of Tyrannosaurus: T. mccraensis.
Not all Tyrannosaurus papers are super controversial, folks...
#FossilFriday
The famous "Fighting Dinosaurs" specimen of Protoceratops & Velociraptor. (This is the real deal, not the artificial sculpture whose picture is often shared in social and in news articles)
A
#PrehistoricPlanet
Deinocheirus thread. For a lot of the viewers, this may have been your introduction to the duckbilled moose-camel ostrich dinosaur Deinocheirus. This guy: 1/
I know some people are lamenting an easy-to-find chart that shows birds within dinosaurs that doesn't make it look like they are the sister to Saurischia or the sister to all theropods or the like. I offer the following:
Reminder: in 2018, Millennials at universities are postdocs and junior faculty. The students are the post-Millennial generation; the children of GenX, not of the Baby Boomers. Please update your rants accordingly, Boomers... :-)
Everyone's talking about Spinosaurus, when the fact that Baryonyx has dense Spino-style bones and not normal Suchomimus-style bones (despite Bary and Sucho being morpholgically similar) is the real surprise here.
Also, an awesome database of bone density.
For those who still think that a billion is just "somewhat more than a million":
1 million hours ago there were already powered airplanes.
1 billion hours ago Neanderthals, woolly mammoths & sabretooth cats still roamed the Earth.
#IfDinosaursStillExisted
Here is a lovely Microraptor fossil. It is more closely related to a hummingbird than it is to Tyrannosaurus. Still a dinosaur.
All of you out there in paleofandom: just stop, please. The Tyranno-brain paper might be published, but just sit back and listen to the critiques by animal behavior researchers and neurobiologists before you treat it like convincing science.
Holy crap! Despite it being popularly known, and the namesake of a major group of dinosaurs, Ankylosaurus itself is known from only limited material. This looks to be a spectacular specimen.
Clayton Phipps and co have discovered what is likely a nearly complete Ankylosaurus in Hell Creek sediments. This is ironically probably the rarest thing he has ever worked on - Ankylosaurus is known from like 1 good specimen and 3 or 4 total. Look at how pristine that skull is!
Since apparently I will get no rest from colleagues and other online friends until I comment, a 🧵 about the newly published (but available as a preprint for months) paper on Nanotyrannus 1/
Next time before you wonder "how would non-human X wear human item Y?", do like the late great animator Chuck Jones would do, and map out the homologies:
Just throwing this out there for those discussing Velociraptor/Deinonychus/Utahraptor in Jurassic Park: note designer Crash Mc Creery's 1991 production concept art (and especially the name in the lower left):
Brief history of the original Tarbosaurus taxonomy, a 🧵: in a paper published in 30 April 1955, Maleev names Tyrannosaurus bataar, based on PIN 551-1, the largest skull of a tyrannosaurid found during the Soviet Mongolian Expeditions.
Cold sober take: if your excuse for all the gross inaccuracies of
#JurassicWorldDominio
dinos is "it's because the frog DNA", then you aren't allowed to call them by actual genus names.
Hi. I'm a paleontologist. You may know me from such hits as "No, not every fossil creature is a dinosaur", "Just because it was in 'Jurassic Park' doesn't mean it's real", and "No, that find didn't overturn everything we knew: it just adds new information"
Here is a nice figure: the stratigraphic succession of environments, sediments, sedimentary structures (incl. ichnofossils), and critters through the Middle Triassic Kupferzell deposits, from Schoch et al. 2022 (see my posts for paper link)
Word is coming out that Canadian dinosaur paleontologist Dale Russell passed away on Dec. 21. Obituary is still forthcoming. He was a great scientist and a good friend. Here are three of the dinosaurs he described: Daspletosaurus, Sinornithoides, Alxasaurus
Dalman, S.G., Loewen, M.A., Pyron, R.A. et al. A giant tyrannosaur from the Campanian–Maastrichtian of southern North America and the evolution of tyrannosaurid gigantism. Sci Rep 13, 22124 (2023).
(repost with a WORKING link)
September 13, 1965, birthday of American vertebrate paleontologist & author Thomas Richard Holtz Jr., formulated new theories and hypotheses about
#dinosaurs
' classification, especially theropods 🦖🍰
Artwork by Luigi Gaskell
Hey,
#CampCretaceous
production team; you actually have to do more in creating your dinosaur models than look at drawings of their outsides. Otherwise you get this atrocity:
Hattori, S., Shibata, M., Kawabe, S. et al. New theropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Japan provides critical implications for the early evolution of ornithomimosaurs. Sci Rep 13, 13842 (2023).
While I've mostly been talking about the dinosaurs in
#PrehistoricPlanet
, I want to point out these are the best marine reptiles and (esp.) pterosaurs I have ever seen animated. And it really shows there is NOTHING alive today like a pterosaur!
So... I apparently gained around 500 followers yesterday, so I've passed the 20k mark.
Yay me?!?!
New folks: welcome to your one-stop shopping site for posts of recent paleontological papers. And occasionally other stuff.
People are complaining about how the Telegraph said paleontologists aren't sexy, but I personally think that saying that it "lacks expert insight" is even more insulting! (And this is a project I wasn't on; I'm insulted for my friends and colleagues):
#FossilFriday
Today is apparently "Jura Independence Day" in Switzerland, so here are a batch of Jurassic dinosaurs
@PrehistoricMus
: clockwise from "noon" it is Stegosaurus, Camarasaurus, Camptosaurus, and Allosaurus
Could people please stop pretending that RPG taxonomy applies to legends and mythology?? Wyverns are a type of dragon, not a separate category. Here is a figure, captioned "The dragon is largest of all the serpents, or of all the animals on earth."
Grumpy Doc Holtz wants to preemptively state that if you are compelled to make April 1st fake posts about scientific topics, they should be absolutely absurd and clearly wrong. Because otherwise at least someone is going to take them seriously and repeat them.