Monday, May 31, 2010

New armoured dinosaur with four foot horns on its head discovered by scientists


An armoured Dinosaur as big as a tank that was even a match for Tyrannosaurus Rex has been found out by scientists.

The giant rhino like creature, which was 22 ft long, was so formidable because it had two four foot horns sprouting from its head which could gouge even the gigantic predator.

Fossil bones of an adult animal, which weighed four to five tons and stood six to seven feet tall at the shoulder and hip, were recuperated from a site in the state of Coahuila, southern Mexico, in 2003.

The plant-eater named Coahuilaceratops magnacuerna was an ancestor of the famous three-horned Triceratops.

Like other horned dinosaurs, or ceratopsids, it had a large bony plate behind its head which would have worked as a shield.

But Coahuilaceratops' most notable features are the two enormous horns that project out from above its eyes. They are the biggest horns yet uncovered.

Scientists think the horns were most often used in mating or jousting contests rather than to fight off predators.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Island-hopping dinosaur found out in Europe


Paleontologists have discovered  Fossils in Europe that comes from a Dinosaur Species previously thought to live only in North America and Asia. How did the dinosaur get there? Island hopping, of course! Between 100 million and 65 million years before, researchers think the species was able to migrate off the Asian continent by making its way across an archipelago that now constitutes Europe. This may force a rethinking of the biogeography researchers have build up to this point, but the big picture may still be incomplete.

Scientists have assumed for a extensive time that ceratopsians, or horned Dinosaurs, occupied only the North American and Asian sides of the supercontinent Laurasia, and not the Europe section in the middle. When the supercontinent split in the Late Cretaceous, paleontologists assumed the fauna had split too; generally they have not discovered much overlap between the inhabitants of Europe and its former supercontinent brethren.

However, a innovative fossil that researchers have dug up in Hungary suggests the situation may have been more complicated. The bones are that of a ceratopsian, point out that ceratopsians did, at one point, live in Europe. The fossil is mostly alike to the Asian varieties of ceratopsians, so researchers are surmising that it, or its family, originated there.

Friday, May 28, 2010

New species of plant-eating dinosaur named: ‘Grinding mouth, wrinkle eye’

The Dinosaur, whose name translates to mean "grinding-mouth, wrinkle-eye," was most likely an herbivore that ate the ferns and conifer trees that found as Fossils in the same rock layer. A basal hadrosauroid, the discover included partial skull bones, several vertebrae and fragments of the ribs.

Jeyawati is a close relative of the duck-billed hadrosaurs, which were copious across the Northern Hemisphere for much of the Late Cretaceous Epoch, between 80 and 65 million years before. Jeyawati retains some primitive features of the teeth and jaws that stop it from being a fully-fledged hadrosaur.

Jeyawati, pronounced "HEY-a-WHAT-ee," is derived from two words in the language of the Zuni people, a Native American tribe situated around the Zuni River in western New Mexico. The name is a reference to the sophisticated chewing mechanism developed by the herbivorous lineage to which Jeyawati belongs.

The second part of the name, rugoculus, arrives from the Latin words ruga and oculus and means "wrinkle eye," describing a unique feature of the new species. One of the Dinosaur bones that forms the eye socket shows a peculiar rough or wrinkly texture on its outer side, suggesting that Jeyawati rugoculus might have sported one or more large scales above and behind its eye.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Asteroid concluded the age of dinosaurs


A group of scientists claim to have finally concluded what ended the Age of the Dinosaurs - an asteroid.The finding of a massive crater at Chicxulub in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula in 1991 strengthened that hypothesis.

The Chicxulub crater is more than 120 miles wide - about the distance from Fairbanks to the Arctic Circle - and scientists consider it was created when an asteroid more than six miles wide crashed into Earth 65 million years ago.

The cataclysmic impact - a million times more influential than the largest nuclear bomb ever tested - triggered massive earthquakes, atmospheric discharge and oceanic upheaval.

The ensuing mass extinction concluded both the reign of the Dinosaurs and the Cretaceous period, which gave way to the Paleogene period.

This theory, having steadily accumulated evidence, was thought to be a close to-consensus view.

In recent times, however, in a series of articles, researchers posed an alternate hypothesis for the mass extinction.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Dinosaurs gulped stones as digestive pills: Researcher


Dinosaurs consumed stones as digestive pills more than 6.5 crore years before in the Narmada Valley, a researcher has said.

Apart from eggs, Fossils of the extinct dinosaurs we have picked up have 120 small shining stones of 2.5 diameter, in neighboring Dhar district, Mangal Panchayatan Parishad chief Vishal Verma said yesterday.

A Physics teacher, Verma said his parishad was doing investigate for the last couple of years in Narmada Valley and they have come across evidences that dinosaurs swallowed small stones as digestive pills.

Toothless birds, too, swallow pebbles for digestion .Verma said that the stones hit each other and facilitate the food grinding process.

The herbivorous dinosaur used to swallow unique type small stones to digest food, Verma said, adding these animals were 20-30 feet tall.

The Dinosaurs' mouth is too small compared to their body. Their teeth also wasn't too long following which chewing was hard practise for them, he said.

The researcher said the female Dinosaur eggs are laid in the sand.The general impression that dinosaurs took ample food was not right. Their eating habit was alike pythons, cold blood and sluggish metabolism.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Mineral Isotopes Could Disclose Whether Dinosaurs Were Cold- or Warm-Blooded

A new method allows researchers to discover the internal body temperature of long-dead animals by examining chemical bonds in their teeth or bones.

The grand spine-chilling Tyrannosaurus rex has a reputation for having killed its prey in cold blood. But was this ancient Dinosaur truly a cold-blooded ectotherm?

Strong evolutionary links among reptiles (ectotherms), birds (mostly endothermic, or warm-blooded) and dinosaurs make it tough to terminate whether nonavian dinosaurs were also unable to regulate their own internal body temperatures.

A new method of studying the chemical bonds in a mineral set up in the teeth and bones of animals might finally suggest a way to settle the debate.

Researchers establish that heavy isotopes of carbon and oxygen bond differently in the biological version of the mineral apatite (which is a main component of bones and teeth of animals, both living and long extinct).

Friday, May 21, 2010

Evidence of Dinosaur existence in Cameroon

Five men has came forward to say that they have witnessed an existence of dinosaur like creature in Cameroon. One men drew the image of the creature which resembled a Sauropod dinosaur with dermal spikes. Another man immitated the animals call. This muscled beast eats the molombo fruit and beats the crocodile with its serpentine tail. This animal was known as Mokele Mbembe locally.


Robert Gibbons says that the animal has an air sac which makes it shout loudly. Based on the witnesses sincerity and their fear, it was confirmed that Sauropod dinosaurs still exists. Woetzel, the president and CEO of CCR Data systems believes that these creatures still exist but he couldn’t find the beast. He can only gather dozens of eye witnesses near Boumba and Loponji rivers. Woetzel and William Gibbons were the first whites to penetrate the forest along the Boumba and Loponji rivers.