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:
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.
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.”
The first complete skeleton of a theropod dinosaur discovered in South Korea. Yonhap)
The South Korean National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage announced that a complete skeleton of a small carnivorous dinosaur has been found in southern South Korea.
The fossil has a 5.7-centimeter-long and a 2.6-cm-wide skull and is about 28 cm tall, making it one of the smallest dinosaurs to have ever been discovered in South Korea.
Link to photograph of new fossil is here
More information is here.
A new study study suggests that plumage evolved in dinosaurs because its bright coloration facilitated communication and mate selection.
“If you look at a cladogram (tree of life) for a group of animals for which the relationships are well known and you find a feature that is shared by all of them, it’s pretty safe to assume that this feature was present at the base of the tree and kept throughout the evolution of the last common ancestor into the different species,” Dr. Marie-Claire Koschowitz, of the University’s Steinmann Institute for Geology, Mineralogy and Paleontology told The Huffington Post. “So I looked at the morphology and general color vision in reptilia and birds and lo and behold, it turned out that tetrachromacy is present in every single branch of todays reptiles.”
Link to article here.