Heterodontosaurus

Heterodontosaurus, meaning "different toothed lizard", look like ferocious carnivores, but were only the size of a chicken and ate plants with their three different kinds of teeth. They had nipping teeth in the front which they bit against their beak, tusks on the side like a canine that fit into sockets and grinding teeth at the back to chew their food. It is unknown what the tusks were for, but some believe that only the male Heterodontosaurus had them and were maybe used during the mating season to compete against rivals for a mate.
From fossils that have been found, tooth wear shows that the Heterodontosaurus could chew from side to side as well as up and down. It looked fierce so it could scare away its predators and if their fierce show didn't scare the enemy away, it could run away quite quickly due to its small size and weight. Its front hands had five fingers all with claws; two of the fingers were tiny and seem to be opposable. Their hind legs, which were larger then its front arms, had three toes that also had claws. The Heterodontosaurus had a long narrow pelvis and a long stiff tail.

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Birds are baby dinosaurs-Harvard scientists

Birds and dinosaurs are more closely related than previously thought, say scientists who claim that modern birds are, essentially, living juvenile dinosaurs. According to Harvard's Arkhat Abzhanov, Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, the evolution of birds is the result of a drastic change in how dinosaurs developed. Rather than taking years to reach sexual maturity, as many dinosaurs did, birds sped up the developmental clock, allowing them to retain the physical characteristics of baby dinosaurs.
Abzhanov says the research, appearing in Nature, illustrates evolution as a developmental phenomenon. "By changing the developmental biology in early species, nature has produced the modern bird - an entirely new creature - and one that, with approximately 10,000 species, is today the most successful group of land vertebrates on the planet."
Harvard co-researcher Bhart-Anjan Bhullar explained how it was the realization that the skulls of modern birds and juvenile dinosaurs are surprisingly similar that sparked the study. "No one had told the big story of the evolution of the bird head before," said Bhullar. "There had been a number of smaller studies that focused on particular points of the anatomy, but no one had looked at the entire picture. What's interesting is that when you do that, you see the origins of the features that make the bird head special lie deep in the history of the evolution of Archosaurs, a group of animals that were the dominant, meat-eating animals for millions of years."
For modern birds, Abzhanov says, the change is the result of a process known as progenesis, which causes an animal to reach sexual maturity earlier. Unlike their dinosaurian ancestors, modern birds take dramatically less time - just 12 weeks in some species - to reach maturity, allowing birds to retain the characteristics of their juvenile ancestors into adulthood. How the bird skull evolved through changes in the developmental timeline highlights the diversity of evolutionary strategies, Abzhanov claims. "That you can have such dramatic success simply by changing the relative timing of events in a creature's development is remarkable. We now understand the relationship between birds and dinosaurs that much better, and we can say that, when we look at birds, we are actually looking at juvenile dinosaurs."
"There's so much for evolution to act upon," Bhullar added. "When we think of an organism, especially a complex organism, we often think of it as a static entity, but to really study something you have to look at its whole existence, and understand that one portion of its life can be parceled out and made into the entire lifespan of a new, and in this case, radically successful organism."

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Animatronic dinosaurs park opens in NJ for Memorial Day weekend

A new family attraction featuring 31 animatronics dinosaurs opens this holiday weekend on a 20-acre wooded and grassy site in northern New Jersey, not far from the Turnpike.
Field Station: Dinosaurs in Secaucus includes a base camp and four learning stations along a three-quarter-mile trail.
Its moving dinosaurs include a 90-foot Argentinosaurus that park operators say will be visible from the Empire State Building in Manhattan, which is about 10 miles away.
The dinosaur attraction was designed in partnership with the New Jersey State Museum. It's located of the Turnpike's Exit 15X on land next to Laurel Hill Park. It will be open each year from Memorial Day weekend to mid-November.

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Scientists Clone Dinosaur

Scientists at the University of Florida have successfully cloned a dinosaur, a spokesman from the university said yesterday.
The dinosaur, a baby Apatosaurus nicknamed “Spot,” is currently being incubated at the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
The scientists extracted DNA from preserved Apatosaurus fossils, which were on display at the university’s museum of natural science. Once the DNA was harvested, scientists injected it into a fertile ostrich womb.
“Ostriches share a lot of genetic traits with dinosaurs,” said Dr. Norman Trudell, a biology professor at UF and the project’s leading scientist. “Their eggshell microstructures are almost identical to those of the Apatosaurus. That’s why the cloning worked so perfectly.”

Those in the scientific community say the dinosaur cloning – the first ever of its kind – is a milestone for genetic engineering.
“I used to think this kind of thing could only happen in the movies,” said Dr. Sven Bjornsen, a UF chemistry professor. “But we’re making it happen right here in our lab. It’s astounding.”
The cloning attracted the attention of a wide variety of animal rights activists and religious groups. They claim that animal cloning is unethical and immoral.
PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk criticized the scientists for performing potentially life threatening threats on a new species.
“These scientists brought an animal from the Jurassic age back to life – just to watch it suffer!” she said.
But Dr. Trudell doesn’t seem to be bothered by the activists’ quibbling. He says that the opportunities afforded by dinosaur cloning are endless.
Within ten years, we could repopulate the world with dinosaurs,” he said. “We could harvest them for civic service, law enforcement, or even mass transportation.”
“Imagine riding to work on a dinosaur,” he continued. “Wouldn’t that be incredible?”
As of press time, the dinosaur is in stable condition. Scientists plan to run more tests on him today.

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Giraffatitan Brancai

Giraffatitan Brancai is a dinosaur that many people have seen, but many are unaware of the dinosaur. For 70 years it was known as a species of Brachiosaurus, & most illustrations of Brachiosaurus are based on a skeleton of Giraffatitan.

Brachiosaurus Altithorax by Elmer Riggs in 1903. Werner Janensch then found a similar fossil in 1914, which he named B. Brancai. In 1988, Gregory Paul realized that B. Altithorax & B. Brancai were not as closely related to each other as previously thought. He elected them to be two subgenera, & in 1917 George Olshevsky proposed B. Brancai to be separated into an entirely new genus, Giraffatitan. It is still widely known as Brachiosaurus, since some argue about the number of differences between fossil finds that necessitate separate genera.

Giraffatitan & its family took a decidedly different shape from most Sauropods. Their front legs were taller than their hind legs, indicating that they held their neck upright. This however, poses the question of whether they were warm-blooded or cold-blooded creatures; multiple hearts would have been required to push cold blood up the neck against gravity, but the head was very small, suggesting it could not have a high enough food-intake for a warm-blooded animal, which would only require one heart.

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Camptosaurus

Camptosaurus, meaning "bent lizard", were plant eating dinosaurs that spent most of their time on their hind legs. The larger ones were too heavy and probably had to move around on all fours. Their front arms, which had five fingers, were smaller than their hind feet, which had four toes. All of the fingers and toes were like hooves. It had a long snout with a horned beak at the front and hundreds of grinding teeth in the back of its mouth.

One of the most interesting facts about the Camptosaurus is that it had cheeks much like humans. This means that they could hold food in their mouths and chew it unlike other herbivores that had to swallow their food whole. The Camptosaurus lived in thick forests close to rivers. It probably lived in herds and this would have given it protection from their main meat eating predators, such as the Allosaurus.

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New dinosaur discoveries ruffle feathers

Many dinosaur fans picture Tyrannosaurus rex as a massive, scaly, lumbering, upright monster. So, the recent discovery that he had a distant relative with feathers—the newly named Yutyrannus huali, or “beautiful feathered tyrant”—has left some experts disappointed. “Those of us who like our dinosaurs scaly appear to be frowned upon,” paleontologist Mark Wildman wrote on his blog, “as if we ought to rejoice that the dinosaurs are covered in fuzz and feathers. Well, that isn’t going to happen.”

Canadian paleontologist Corwin Sullivan, who was on the team that discovered Y. huali in northeastern China, says it was probably a “shaggy” dinosaur whose feathers provided insulation, “like walking around in a thick fur coat.” (Weighing 1½ tons, Y. huali is 40 times larger than the biggest previously known feathered dinosaur.) “We don’t know what colour they were, which is unfortunate,” Sullivan told Maclean’s from Beijing, where he’s an associate professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. “If they were brightly coloured, the feathers might have some role in display or attracting a mate.”

A massive, bright, feathery dinosaur is an exciting thought to some, but to others, it can be jarring. “I’m not that old, but when I grew up, it was all slow, dumb dinosaurs, dragging their tails, outwitted by the clever little mammals,” says Sean Bell, general manager of the T. rex Discovery Centre in Eastend, Sask. “Now, for young people, I don’t think the toys I had as a kid would make sense.” Our understanding of dinosaurs has changed immensely. We now see carnivorous theropod dinosaurs like T. rex as more “active and agile,” Sullivan says. Instead of the “kangaroo-like pose” of the animal rearing up and dragging its tail, they’re depicted more horizontally, with the tail off the ground—for speed.

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Smallest Mammoth Exposed

The smallest dwarf mammoth, footing at under 4 feet (about 1 meter) at the shoulders, has been exposed on the Greek island of Crete, researchers say. These conclusions might facilitate succumb insights as to how giant animals can shrink to miniature sizes above evolutionary time, scientists added.

Dwarfism frequently happens to species of large animals when they get fascinated on islands, including dinosaurs. Scientists think dwarfism helps giants endure within the limits forced by islands.

Ancient Mediterranean dwarf elephants are particularly great examples of island dwarfism. Over the course of less than 800,000 years -- a short stretch on an evolutionary scale -- these dwarfs are thought to have tumbled down from larger European elephants, weighing 100 times as much, which lived on mainland Europe.

Teeth discovered more newly in the same area in Crete now propose the animal was in fact a mammoth, Mammuthus creticus. A pristine foreleg bone suggests it was the smallest mammoth known, standing only about 3 feet 8 inches (1.13 m) high at the shoulders and weighing only approximately 680 pounds (310 kilograms), making it about the size of a modern baby African or Asian elephant.

Mammuthus creticusis the first evidence for extreme island dwarfism in mammoths. It would have been comparable in size to the smallest dwarf elephant known, the extinct species Palaeoloxodon falconeri from Sicily and Malta, which stood only about 3 feet 5 inches (1.04 m) high at the shoulder and weighed only approximately 525 lbs. (238 kg).

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Barosaurus

Barosaurus being of the Sauropoda group shares a lot of the same features as many other of the same category. Others that are in this group consist of many very large herbivores such as the Brachiosaurus, Brontosaurus, and others that were very close to identical.

The first Barosaurus fossil was found by Mrs. E. R. Ellerman in 1890. The Fossil was only a part of a tail and was actually collected by Charles Marsh. This was in South Dakota , USA . It wasn't until 1898 a man named George Wieland went back to the site and found the remainder of the full body of the original first Barosaurus ever found. Since then there has been many discoveries in a long list of areas. In 1922, Earl Douglas ran a dinosaur discovery expedition in Utah , because of a previous finding of an Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus). He found 3 near complete skeletons of Barosaurus'.

The name Barosaurus means "heavy lizard". Barosaurus got its name because of its size and it's very long neck. It had a long tail as well. Its total length was roughly 89 feet.

It is very hard to determine the look of the Barosaurus head because there has never been a skull discovered yet. This was very typical for the larger Sauropods because their heads were commonly small for the size of their bodies.

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Allosaurus

The Allosaurus, meaning "different lizard", was the largest land-living carnivore and the fiercest other than the famous T-rex. It was named different lizard because its vertebrae were different from the other dinosaurs known at the time of its discovery. It had a huge skull that was balanced by its long and heavy tail. It had very large and powerful rear legs and its front arms were short with three fingers and claws. Even though the Allosaurus was huge it actually had a lot in common with birds of today. The claws look very much like an eagle, large mouth more for swallowing than chewing, a wishbone, and a neck with vertebrae that was hollow for air sacs.

With an amazing finding in UTAH brought over 40 complete skeletons. If you ever see one in a museum then now you know where it came from. Also in the same land area lots of Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, and Apatosaurus species. Utah must have been one hot spot for fossils. The allosaurus also was found in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Colorado, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.

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Acrocanthosaurus

A member of either the allosauridae or possibly chacarodontisauridae family, Acrocanthosaurus was originally classified in 1950 into the allosauridae, but was reclassified in 1956 to Megalosaurus by Alfred Romer, however many paleontologists took it to be a spinosaurid due to the small spines attached to its vertebrae.

The thought that it was a spinosaurid was further held until the 1980s, when it was accepted as an allosaurid. The belief that it may be a chacarodontisaurid arose due to discoveries in the teeth & lower jaw that bear similarities to Giganotosaurus.

Acrocanthosaurus is also lacking in eye crests, a main feature of many allosaurids. The debate over the purpose of Acrocanthosaurus' spines is divided into two main groups, one with two smaller subdivisions. There are those who believe that Acrocanthosaurus' spines acted as a support for a sail & those who think they were support for muscles in the back that strengthened the dinosaur.

Between the group who opt for the sail, one half think it was used as a temperature regulating device & the other half think it was used as a display & could be flushed with blood. If the purpose of the spines is support for a sail, then it may be a mixture of the two. It was most likely the apex predator of its area.

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Abrosaurus

The Abrosaurus name means "delicate lizard". This sauropod was a herbivore from the mid Jurassic Period. The nickname refers to the large openings separated by thin boney struts. The Abrosaurus was discovered in 1984 in Asia. It was first described in 1986 by Ouyang Hui, but there are continuous debates on the dinosaur because was described under the camarasaurid and many think it shouldn't be part of that family. The only remains found for this dinosaur is a skull which is in very good shape. Currently its located in Zigong in China dinosaur museum.

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Abrictosaurus

The Abrictosaurus was a small herbivore from the early Jurassic Period. Its estimated weight was less than 100lbs and was about 4 feet in long. This dinosaur had large caniniforms in both its upper and lower jaws measuring .4 inches for the top and .7inches for the bottom.

Suggestions have been made that the Abrictosaurus lacked tusks and it was just a primitive feature. The Abrictosaurus also had smaller, less powerful forelimbs its closely related dinosaur Heterondosaurus and one less phalanx bone in both the fourth and fifth digits of the forelimb.

The Abrictosaurus is known from remains of two seperate cases. Both were found in Lesotho and Cape Province in South Africa. One skull was found in 1974 and dinosaur was described at that time by Richard Thulborn, thus named Lycorhinus. A second skull was found in Africa by James Hopson in 1975. It was redescribed and named Abrictosaurus.

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Adasaurus

The Adasaurus name means Ada's Lizard. It was a smaller Carnivore from the late Cretaceous Period. According to Mongolia mythology "Ada" means evil spirit, and in Greek sauros means lizard, which is a very common ending to a dinosaur's name. There were a total of two different fossils discovered in the Nenegt Formation, in Bayankhonger, Mongolia (Central Asia).

Formation is famous for the discoveries of many dinosaurs such as the Tarbosaurus, Anserimimus, and the Saurolophus. It is also known for many other types of findings of fossils with turtles, reptiles, fish, and birds. The area is thought to be a Late Cretaceous dated region, but it’s not 100% proven yet.

The one species Adasaurus Mongoliensis was obviously named after the country. Both fossil skeletons were found and described by Barsbold in 1983. The first discovery consisted of a skull, all three pelvises, along with many misalainious body bone parts. The second discovery was the lower half of its body including the hindlimbs and feet etc.

Adasaurus is part of the Dromaeosaurinae family making it closely related to the Deinonychus, Velociraptor, Microraptor, and Buitreaptor. So they have much in common. They are smaller, have sharp claws, a long tail, feathers possibly, etc.

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The Achelousaurus was a herbivore Discovered in North America, Montana at the two Medicine Formation. Since it was found at the highest level its considered to be from the late Cretaceous Period. This was a very famous region for dinosaurs as the Daspletosaurus, Bambiraptor, Euoplocephalus, Maiasaura, and Einiosaurus.

The species was named after Scott Sampson after he discovered three skull fossils of the dinosaur. This was in 1995. It is part of the Ceratopsidae family. It was named in reference to a river deity from ancient Greek myth called Achelous. In the Greek Myth it says that Hercules was fighting an Arhelousaurus and Hercules ripped off its horns.

The Achelousaurus was about 20 feet long, and could weigh up to 6 tons. One skull found was 5 feet long. It had a beak for a mouth that somewhat resembled a parrot, a raised bony area on the snout and two behind the eyes, two horns on the end of the neck frill.

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Afrovenator

The Afrovenator was discovered in Tiouraren Formation located in Nigar, Abaka, and Africa. There has been only one almost complete skeleton fossil ever found. This includes most of the skull (except the mandible, or lower jaw), parts of the spinal column, hands, and forelimbs, a nearly complete pelvis, and complete hind limbs.

This carnivore moved on two hind legs with a lot of teeth and three claws on each hand. This dinosaur was about 9 meters long.

Originally the Afrovenator is in the Megalosauridae family. This is a family of theropods that are very hard to classify. In 2002 the dinosaur was defined into a different family called Sponosauridae although still it is formally classified in the Megalosauridae family.

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Agujaceratops

The Agujaceratops was a herbivore from the Cretaceous period. It lived from 70 to 83 million years ago. The name means horn face from Aguja. In 1938 the dinosaur was first discovered at the Big Bend national park by William Strain. It was not until 1989 a man named Lehman studied the fossils and described it under the Casmosaurus species.

At that time there was no skull. In 1991 Paul Sereno, led an expedition at the Aguja Formation, Texas and discovered an almost complete fossil skeleton of the Agujaceatops (still named Casmosaurus). After a short study in 2006, Lucas, Sullivan and Hunt re-described it and realized that it should be its own genus and named it Agujaceratops.

The Agujaceratops is lately not considered to be an ancestor of the Pentaceratops or Casmosaurus even though they do share a fair bit of obvious body features. The Agujaceratops has a very short frill unlike the other.

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Alamosaurus

The Alamosaurus name means Alamo Lizard. Fossils were mostly found in New Mexico. The Alamosaurus is classifed as a Titanosauria. In 1922, Charles Gilmore first discoveried a few fossils. In 1946 he found a more complete specimen in Utah, consisting of a complete tail, a right forelimb complete except for the tips of the toes, and both ischia.

There has been many findings over time including a juvenile skeleton from Texas. There has not been a skull discovered yet, though. Only a few teeth. The herbivore Alamosaurus is about 69 feet long with the estimated weight of 33 tons. Much like other Sauropods it had a very long neck and tail. It also walked on all four legs.

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