Lizards are ancient creatures. They were around before the dinosaurs and persisted long after dinosaurs went extinct. We’ve now found they are 35 million years older than we thought they were. Cryptovaranoides microlanius was a tiny lizard that skittered around what is now southern England during the late Triassic, around 205 million years ago. It […]
December 6, 2024 | Biology, fossils, lizards, paleontology, reptiles, Science | No comments
Paleontologists have long puzzled over how the dinosaurs—originally relatively small and of minor importance to the broader ecosystem—evolved to become the dominant species some 30 million years later. Fossilized feces and vomit from dinosaurs might hold important clues to how and why this evolutionary milestone came about, according to a new paper published in the […]
November 27, 2024 | coprolites, dinosaurs, evolutionary biology, food webs, fossilized feces, Jurassic, paleontology, Science, Triassic | No comments
A “near-crested lizard” Reconstruction of the environment where Parasaurolophus walkeri lived during the Cretaceous. Credit: Marco Antonio Pineda/CC BY-SA 4.0 The most intriguing hypothesis is that the crest served as a resonating chamber, first proposed in 1931 by Swedish paleontologist Carl Wiman, who noted that the crest’s structure was similar to that of a swan […]
November 21, 2024 | acoustics, dinosaurs, paleontology, Science | No comments