Paleontogly

Preserved Pterosaur Fossil

A nearly complete skeleton of a tapejarid pterosaur that lived during the Cretaceous period was intercepted during a police raid at Santos Harbour in the Brazilian state of São Paulo and confiscated together with several other exceptionally well-preserved fossils. Living interpretative reconstruction of Tupandactylus navigans. Image credit: Beccari et al., …

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Appalachian Dinosaurs

Chase Doran Brownstein from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and the Stamford Museum and Nature Center has described two new dinosaurs — a herbivorous hadrosaur and a carnivorous tyrannosaur — that lived in the North American paleolandmass Appalachia during the Late Cretaceous epoch, some 85 …

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Tyrannosaurus Rex’s Jaw

Paleontologists have analyzed the morphology of the neurovascular canal in the well-preserved jaw of Tyrannosaurus rex using computed tomography techniques. Their results show that the dinosaur’s neurovascular canal had a rather complex branching amongst the dinosaurs and that its complexity was comparable to that of living crocodiles and tactile-foraging birds. …

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Cambrian Comb Jellies

Paleontologists have described two new species from the Cambrian period of Utah, which illuminate the early evolution of nervous and sensory features in ctenophores (comb jellies). An artist’s reconstruction of Ctenorhabdotus campanelliformis (top) and Thalassostaphylos elegans (bottom). Image credit: Holly Sullivan. Ctenophores are a group of over 200 living species …

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Turtle Embryonic Remains

The new specimen from the Upper Cretaceous Xiaguan Formation in the Chinese province of Henan is one of the few known fossilized turtle eggs containing an embryo with anatomical details. An artist’s impression of baby nanhsiungchelyid turtles. Image credit: Masato Hattori. “Fossilized turtles from the Mesozoic are known from a …

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Three New Species

Paleontologists have identified three new species of placental mammals called condylarths (archaic ungulates) from fossils found in Wyoming, the United States. Left to right: Conacodon hettingeri, Miniconus jeanninae, and Beornus honeyi. Image credit: Banana Art Studio. The newly-discovered archaic ungulates are Miniconus jeanninae, Conacodon hettingeri, and Beornus honeyi. These animals …

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Plants Found in Australia

Until now, the first fossil evidence of land plants was from the Devonian period (420 million years ago). However, molecular evidence suggests an earlier origin in the Cambrian period. In a new paper in the journal Science, paleontologists described an assemblage of spore-like microfossils from Early Ordivician (480 million years …

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Avian Brain Shape

A team of paleontologists has digitally reconstructed the facial skeleton and brain endocast of Ichthyornis dispar, a toothed stem bird that lived in North America during the Late Cretaceous epoch and has traditionally been considered the nearest known well-understood relative of living birds. The ancestors of living birds had a …

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Arctic Woolly Mammoth

Scientists have examined isotopes collected from the tusk of a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) that lived in Alaska approximately 17,100 years ago, during the latest Ice Age, to elucidate its movements and diet; this included its time — likely with a herd — as an infant and juvenile, then as …

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New Feathered Dinosaur

Paleontologists in Brazil have unveiled a new species of unenlagiine dromaeosaurid dinosaur from the Maastrichtian age of the Cretaceous period. An artist’s reconstruction of two individuals of Ypupiara lopai foraging in an alluvial river, the setting of the Marilia Formation during the Maastrichtian age of the Cretaceous period. Image credit: …

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