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Scientists investigated walking speeds, a possible family grouping, population numbers, and a large individual.
Not all tyrannosaurs were Tyrannosaurus rex. That animal was just the last and largest of a group of carnivorous dinosaurs that includes over two dozen species, some of which were no bigger than turkeys.
They first appeared in the middle of the Jurassic Period, around 161 million years ago, and culminated with Tyrannosaurus rex at the end of the Cretaceous Period 66 million years ago.
A site in southern Utah, discovered in 2014, contained the remains of four individuals of Teratophoneus curriei, a species of tyrannosaur that lived about 10 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex. Other fossils at the site included clams, fish, turtles and a young giant alligator. Over a thousand bones were mapped and collected.
Several years ago my daughter and I took a minivacation to Kelleys Island, home of the famous Glacial Grooves. While we were there the island experienced an explosion of mayflies – they were everywhere. A recent report from a famous fossil site in Brazil indicates they’ve been doing that for a long time.
The mayfly fossils were found in the Crato Formation, which formed in large lakes in what is now northeastern Brazil during the Cretaceous Period, the last period of the non-avian dinosaurs. The lakes may have been 30 miles wide and 60 miles long.
The Crato Formation is an example of what is known as a lagerstatte, a site that has a lot of fossils or fossils that are preserved exceptionally well, sometimes (but rarely) both. Another lagerstatte you might have heard of is the Burgess Shale, a 500-million-year-old Middle Cambrian site in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia. Another is the 150-million-year-old Solnhofen Limestone of the Jurassic Period from the Bava
One of the iconic animals of the Pleistocene era, or “Ice Age,” is the dire wolf. Named in 1858, the dire or “terrible” wolf averaged about five feet long and 150 pounds, a bit larger than the modern grey wolf and a bit more robust.
It ranged through most of North America, coast to coast and Florida to the Dakotas. The famous Rancho La Brea “tar pits” in Los Angeles have produced the remains of over 4,000 individuals. Several years ago some colleagues and I attended a scientific conference at the museum there, where they had installed a new exhibit – a wall with 400 dire wolf skulls. Our hosts said it was to show individual variation. We said they were just bragging.