Canada has a glow-in-the-dark dinosaur coin. Is the Canadian mint full of 10 year old boys?
This 70 mya dinosaur egg is from a titanosaur, considered one of the most massive of all dinosaur species ever. It contains the fossilized cocoons of wasps! Modern day wasps are well known for laying their eggs inside dead animals, but this is the first piece of evidence of similar behavior in ancient wasps.
Read more about it in the July issue of Paleontology: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4983.2011.01064.x/abstract
The end of the Cretaceous was marked by a catastrophic meteor impact that wiped out the non-bird dinosaurs (called the K-T boundary). Turtles also survived the mass extinction because of their slow metabolisms and aquatic lifestyles (land turtles did not survive the extinction). The tough little turtles can survive by eating almost nothing and go into a state of near suspended animation until food opportunities present themselves.
This is a photograph of the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota where fossils of dinosaurs and turtles have been collected. The K-T boundary is located where the yellow sand meets the gray mudstone.
Velociraptors were nocturnal, from a report out today in the journal Science. The researchers examined the scleral rings of more than 160 living species, including birds and reptiles, each with known activity patterns — some that are active at night, others during the day and still others that can swing either way. The structure of the velociraptor’s ring matches up to those that are nocturnal. Surprising, but makes total sense. Read the study here : http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/04/13/science.1200043
