About 200 million years ago, a leech released a slimy mucous cocoon that unwittingly encased and trapped a bizarre animal with a springy tail, preserving it until researchers discovered the teardrop-shaped creature in Antarctica recently. The cocoon looks like those produced by living leeches, such as the medicinal leech Hirudo medicinalis. Encased inside was a…
Watch American Ninja contestant, Reko Rivera, tear through a training course wearing a T-Rex costume! Kudos on the old-school song selection (Walk the Dinosaur by Was Not Was). Read more: http://twistedsifter.com/videos/guy-in-trex-costume-tears-through-american-ninja-training-course/
Ruling our planet as the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million years, dinosaurs were the largest creatures that ever inhabited Earth. The biggest sauropod dinosaurs may have achieved lengths of 190 feet and heights of over 30 feet, which is, in modern terms, an incredible size. Not all dinosaurs were that large; there were creatures…
The end-Cretaceous mass extinction event 66 million years ago is well known to have caused the death of the non-avian dinosaurs, along with at least 50 percentof all plant and animal life on Earth. Most scientists point to a massive asteroid impact as the primary antagonist, but it is true that huge floods of lava…
Researchers now believe dinosaurs with large horns and frills didn’t just use them to fight or scare predators. According to The Washington Post, scientistsfrom Queen Mary University of London determined these “exaggerated” features were likely used to attract the opposite sex. The team arrived at this conclusion after studying the fossils of 37 Protoceratops andrewsi,…
NSFW if you work with dinosaurs. 1. Male Pelecanimimus dinos apparently liked to hitch a ride on females during sex. View this image › Jose Antonio Penas/Science Photo Library The ostrich-like Pelecanimimus dinosaur lived around 120 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, and was 2 metres from head to tail. Historically, scientists have sidestepped…
Featuring a whale with legs and a vegetarian crocodile. From Julius Csotonyi’s new book of paleoart. 1. This creature that was mostly neck. View this image › Julius Csotonyi We have seven vertebrae in our necks, but fish-eating plesiosaur Albertonectes had an amazing 76. It lived in the Bearpaw Sea, which covered most of Alberta,…
Fossilization is an incredibly difficult process. Conditions need to be very specific for a deceased organism to last for tens of millions of years. Finding even large bones can be extremely difficult, while finding imprints of soft tissue is the equivalent of hitting the paleontological jackpot. Phil Bell and his team from the University of…