Extinct Species, features and articles | Educational Science

Jul 7, 2022

Giant meat-eating dinosaur had a fancy skull and wee arms like T. rex

A newfound species of carnivorous dinosaur had disproportionately small arms, suggesting that this particular anatomical quirk — shared by the mighty but flimsy-armed Tyrannosaurus rex — may have been more common among large predatory dinosaurs than previously thought. The newly described species, Meraxes gigas, is named after the dragon Meraxes...

Jul 26, 2022

Cretaceous period: Animals, plants and extinction event

The Cretaceous period was the last and longest segment of the Mesozoic era. It lasted approximately 79 million years, from the minor extinction event that closed the Jurassic period about 145 million years ago to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event 66 million years ago. The name comes from creta, the...

Jul 26, 2022

Sharks are older than the dinosaurs. What's the secret to their success?

Sharks are hardly newbies on our planet. As a group, they have existed for at least 450 million years, surviving four of the big five mass extinctions, including the catastrophe that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period. For context, that...

Jul 27, 2022

'Bold theory' that Tyrannosaurus rex is 3 species gets stomped to pieces

Is the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex really three dinosaur species, as a study claimed earlier this year? Fuggedaboutit, research from a new study says. The rebuttal, published online today (July 25) in the journal Evolutionary Biology, shows that the T. rex trio study does not have the evidence to support its...

Jul 28, 2022

Cretaceous dinosaurs come to life in stunning footage from 'Prehistoric Planet'

Tyrannosaurus rex youngsters paddle through shallow ocean water near a sandy shore, their powerful legs working hard to make up for their disproportionately tiny arms. Long-necked sauropods nuzzle their heads together in affectionate mating displays. And packs of duck-billed dinosaurs raise dust clouds as they migrate across vast deserts. These...

Jul 28, 2022

Cretaceous 'terror crocodile' crushed dinosaurs with banana-size teeth

An enormous Cretaceous crocodile relative hunted dinosaurs, ripping them apart using powerful jaws lined with teeth the size of bananas, researchers say. Known as Deinosuchus, which means terrible crocodile in Greek, this lineage of semiaquatic reptiles certainly lived up to its name. They were among the biggest predators in their...

Jul 28, 2022

School bus-size 'Reaper of death' was an apex predator. Here's why that matters.

The top predator of the Jurassic and Cretaceous landscapes was usually a species of meat-eating dinosaur. These predators walked on two legs, had powerful jaws lined with sharp teeth and included species from groups known as tyrannosaurs, spinosaurs and carcharodontosaurs. Tyrannosaurus rex, the goat-eating, jeep-chasing tyrannosaur from the movie Jurassic...

Aug 11, 2022

Not just tiny arms: T. rex also had super small eyes to accommodate its big bite

The powerful jaws of Tyrannosaurus rex snapped together with such force that they would splinter the bones of the dinosaur's prey. But to gain such a powerful bite, the king of the dinosaurs had to make an evolutionary trade-off: It had to settle for smaller eyes. Based on an analysis...

Aug 12, 2022

Small, prickly dinosaur discovered in South America reveals an unknown lineage

Fossils of a small, prickly dinosaur recently discovered in South America may represent an entire lineage of armored dinosaurs previously unknown to science. The newly discovered species, Jakapil kaniukura, looks like a primitive relative of armored dinosaurs like Ankylosaurus or Stegosaurus, but it came from the Cretaceous, the last era...

Aug 17, 2022

'Very weird' ankylosaur's tail looked like an Aztec war club

Paleontologists in subantarctic Chile have discovered the remains of a very weird ankylosaur that had a deadly armored tail like no other known dinosaur, the researchers said. The tail would have looked like a sword; it's so flat, study co-lead researcher Alexander Vargas, a vertebrate paleontologist in the Department of...

Aug 17, 2022

Did the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs have a sibling? Crater in West Africa hints maybe.

A likely asteroid impact crater from the latter days of the dinosaurs has been discovered off the coast of West Africa, raising questions about whether the asteroid that wiped out the dinos may have had a smaller sibling that struck around the same time. The crater, hidden under about 3,000...

Aug 31, 2022

Oldest African dinosaur ever found unearthed in Zimbabwe

The oldest definitive dinosaur species ever discovered in Africa — and one of the oldest dino species to walk Earth — has been unearthed in Zimbabwe, a new study finds. The finding sheds new light on dinosaur evolution, and on one of the most fundamental questions of Triassic paleontology: Why...

Sep 6, 2022

Rare fossils reveal basketball-like skin on duck-billed dinosaur

Finding a dinosaur fossil with preserved soft tissue is incredibly rare, so when a team of researchers in Alberta, Canada, unearthed a hadrosaur — a duck-billed herbivorous dinosaur — with not only a near-complete skeleton but also with patches of pebbly-textured skin still intact, they knew they had stumbled upon...

Sep 7, 2022

Ginormous Jurassic fossil in Portugal may be the biggest dinosaur ever found in Europe

The remains of what appears to be the largest dinosaur ever discovered in Europe were recently unearthed in Portugal. So far, scientists have excavated a gigantic rib cage belonging to a long-necked sauropod, possibly a brachiosaurid, that lived about 150 million years ago during the latter part of the Jurassic...

Sep 21, 2022

Crystal-stuffed dinosaur eggs the size of cannonballs discovered in China

Two cannonball-size dinosaur eggs filled with crystals have been discovered by paleontologists in China. The fossilized, spherical eggs belong to a previously unknown dinosaur species and were found packed with calcite crystals. They were unearthed in the Qianshan Basin in East China's Anhui province. Three eggs were dug up from...