A vast bone bed of dinosaur bones from about the right time (66 million years ago) has been discovered in New Jersey that may be from the Great Extinction (the comet hitting the Earth).
Read more about it here:
This illustration shows theropods engaged in scrape ceremony display activity, based on trace fossil evidence from Colorado. Photograph: Lida Xing/AP
Geologist Martin Lockley reports that there is now evidence that some dinosaurs engaged in ritual ‘scraping’ dances as foreplay to mating. “We know they had feathers and crests and good vision,” Lockley said, speaking of theropods… They were visual animals, but there’s never been any actual physical evidence that their anatomy and behavior was co-opted for fairly energetic display. This is physical evidence.”
In a paper published on Thursday in Scientific Reports, Lockley and his co-authors compared the patterns to those left by puffins and ostriches, and deduced that the marks did not represent nests or digging for water or food.
Link to full story: Dinosaurs performed dances to woo mates, according to new evidence .
A sixty-six million year old T-Rex bone (click here) shows conclusive evidence that the T. Rex was cannibalistic. Dinosaur Island has supported cannibalistic T-Rexes since April (see screen shot below).
Dinosaur Island supports cannibalistic dinosaurs! Just click on the ‘cannibal’ box.
Dinosaur Island supports cannibalistic dinosaurs! Just click on the ‘cannibal’ box.
As recently reported in Science Magazine (here), “[t]he group of ferocious meat-eating dinosaurs known as tyrannosaurs—of which the most famous member is Tyrannosaurus rex—may have sometimes turned their sharp teeth on each other.” In other words, they were cannibals! “In a study published online this week in PeerJ, the researchers conclude from both the spacing and shape of the puncture marks on its skull that it was bitten by another tyrannosaur—quite possibly another Daspletosaurus—while it was still alive, probably as the result of a dino-on-dino fight.”
Dinosaur Island supports such behavior. When creating a dinosaur species in the simulation, just click on the ‘cannibal’ box in the ‘diet’ section.
A new paper, “A Ceratopsian Dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Western North America, and the Biogeography of Neoceratopsia,” link here reports the discovery of a new dinosaur with a ‘super bizarre beak’.
Pictures are at this link here.
There are similarities to the newly discovered dinosaur – named Aquilops americanus – and Asian dinosaurs. “Aquilops lived nearly 20 million years before the next oldest horned dinosaur named from North America,” Dr. Andrew Farke, a researcher at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, Calif. and the paper’s lead author, said in a written statement. “Even so, we were surprised that it was more closely related to Asian animals than those from North America.”