It has also been suggested - originally many years ago - that T rex and other large theropods were principally ambush hunters, for which a good sense of smell and/or night vision would certainly not be disadvantageous. So like modern leopards or komodo dragons, they just found a bit of cover next to a well-used trail, hid, and waited ...  and then when some suitable prey passed, all that was needed was a short burst of speed and a quick killing bite, or even just a disabling bite. No great stamina for the chase, nor speedy ability to outrun the prey, was ever needed as it all depended on the sudden lunge and devastating bite. And you cannot deny that T rex was apparently capable of a quick, very powerful bite. Modern komodo dragons are easily outrun by adult humans if pitted in a straight race, yet komodo dragons regularly catch and kill flighty animals like wild deer, goats, pigs and wild fowl ... and indeed sometimes even humans.

Meles meles wrote:

It has also been suggested - originally many years ago - that T rex and other large theropods were principally ambush hunters, for which a good sense of smell and/or night vision would certainly not be disadvantageous. So like modern leopards or komodo dragons, they just found a bit of cover next to a well-used trail, hid, and waited ...  and then when some suitable prey passed, all that was needed was a short burst of speed and a quick killing bite, or even just a disabling bite. No great stamina for the chase, nor speedy ability to outrun the prey, was ever needed as it all depended on the sudden lunge and devastating bite. And you cannot deny that T rex was apparently capable of a quick, very powerful bite. Modern komodo dragons are easily outrun by adult humans if pitted in a straight race, yet komodo dragons regularly catch and kill flighty animals like wild deer, goats, pigs and wild fowl ... and indeed sometimes even humans.

Meles meles,

occasionally wanted to post yesterday something about the T-Rex for Triceratops. Just seen on BBC World:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40632751


Kind regards to both from Paul.

Footprints of 200 million year old Mega-carnivore found in Lesotho:

Lesotho Dinosaur

This morning's In Our Time;

Featherd Dinosaurs

I've let my BBC membership lapse. Can't play it.

Thanks none the less, Ferval.

215 fossilised Pterosaur eggs found in China:

Pterosaur Eden

Swan like dinosaur with duck bill and croc teeth:

Halszkaraptor

Check this for a marsupial:

kangaroo-lion

Ground dwelling birds survived the Asteroid Event 66m years ago:

Dino-Birds



However, others say that the mass deforestation only applied to North America;

Dino-Birds II

You'll be relieved to know that your ancestors suffered from the dreaded powdered shoulder syndrome, Trike, so you can blame them if you've inherited same!

Well, at least the Cork ones did ...

UCC discover dinosaur dandruff

Fully covered:



Seriously though, the skin shedding does make Dinosaurs more closely related to Birds and Mammals than to Reptiles.

Triceratops wrote:

Fully covered:



Seriously though, the skin shedding does make Dinosaurs more closely related to Birds and Mammals than to Reptiles.

Triceratops,

somewhere we two made a whole survey of the evolution from dinosaurs to birds...but don't know anymore under what rubrique...historical photos?...in any case here another link to this evolution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAzGC89n0S4&t=4s

Kind regards from Paul.

Triceratops wrote:

Ground dwelling birds survived the Asteroid Event 66m years ago:

Dino-Birds

However, others say that the mass deforestation only applied to North America;

Dino-Birds II

Triceratops and nordmann,

you don't believe it, but I read these two subjects in our Belgian Dutch language newspaper this afternoon. And the Dino-Birds and the skin thingie. Even on my computer start pagina of BBC World news I didn't see it. Yes each afternoon the newspapers in the "café" as in the time in Vienna...but not the Vienna café discussions...each one at his own table...

Kind regards from Paul.

Baby Green Heron or a  velociraptor

I think of velociraprors - or at least Spielberg's 'Jurassic Park' type ones - whenever I see a group of magpies. 

My original three cats (mother and two daughters) had mastered the frontal lure "come on then" tactic, with the other two attacking simultaneously from the sides/rear. Using this fairly simple strategy they very successfully dealt with a large male fox that once dared wander up into their territory near the house (he never came back). But when you see a group of magpies in operation, it is even more brutally efficient and so intelligently coordinated that their group strategy does seem to be at an even higher level. I once saw a group of six or seven magpies tackle an adult alsatian dog ... they not only drove him off whatever tasty-something he'd found and even forced him to drop the few morsels he'd already picked up, but they then remorselessly hounded the poor dog until he was simply desperate to get away ... and even then they wouldn't let him go without a few extra pecks, for remembrance, as he fled down the road. But then although having successfully seem him off, they continued to keep posting lookouts - which they changed from time to time - to keep an eye on him just in case he dared to try his luck again.

As I say, Jurassic Park's velocirapters ("Clever girl") does rather come to mind.

Also remember that while all modern birds, including magpies, have lost the long bony tail of their dinosaur ancestors - which in velociraptors was actually stiffened by a cross-braced network of tendons to form a fairly inflexible but very practical stiff 'balancing-pole' - it has been closely re-evolved with the stiff quills of a bird's feathered tail.

But further to your baby Green Heron ... young Hoatzin birds even have claws/nails/talons on their muscular hands/wings (ie in addition to the normal claws on the toes of their feet) which they use to climb amongst tress branches:



That said I think that the DNA of all birds' still contains the genes to make structures such as nailed claws on their forehand/wings (ie not just on their feet), and also true teeth (with dentine) in their jaws. Usually the genetic code is 'turned off' but it can be reactivated ... such as during the hoatzin's natural development (for claws on its hand), or in the laboratory when embryonic chickens have been raised with teeth in their jaws.

Velociraptors themselves are fairly small. Utahraptors on the other hand.

A selection of dromaeosaurids:

Pictures of various (1365) dinosaurs:

Dinosaur Database

Short video of a new type of Ankylosaurid discovered in Chilean Patagonia:

Fossil of of giant millipede found on Northumberland beach.

The fossilised exoskeleton of Arthropleura, estimated at 8 feet in length and weighing 7 stones, dates from around 326 million years ago:

Fossilised millipede

Looks like we're gonna need a bigger bug-swatter!

I assume you've also seen this recent news: ‘Part-time adventurers’: amateur fossil hunters get record haul in Cotswolds ... and Five ice-age mammoths unearthed in Cotswolds after 220,000 years, all about a group of well-preserved mammoth skeletons, discovered a few months ago but only just now being widely announced.

I bought a mammoth tooth years ago (mid 1990's) for cash, there and then on the quay after almost no discussion or any haggling - for just £30 as I recall - from a Lowestoft fisherman after I'd watched him unload his catch of fish and saw that he'd netted a few extra things. I assume the tooth is still in a box my attic ... albeit now in my house in France.

I've also (again somewhere in the attic) got a fairly large part (the lower spine, hind quarters, pelvis and rear paddles) of a fossil ichthyosaur that I excavated from the cliffs of Pinhay Bay near Lyme Regis; some fish bones and teeth, plus a beautifully-preserved Cretaceous prawn, from the Isle of Wight; numerous dino, crocodile and fish bits, as well as some delicate insect fossils, from the Surrey clay-quarry close to where I once lived; and from the beaches of Sussex and Hampshire parts of several Eocene turtle carapaces, bird bones, a crocodile tooth and hundreds of perfectly-preserved sharks' teeth, plus hundreds if not thousands of various fossil mollusc shells. I really must look them all out and check they're all OK, particularly as some of these fossils might now be quite rare as many of the inland quarry sites that they came from (collected when I was in my teens, twenties and thirties) are now completely inaccessible, filled-in, redeveloped and covered over by modern housing developments.

Meles meles wrote:

Looks like we're gonna need a bigger bug-swatter!

I assume you've also seen this recent news: ‘Part-time adventurers’: amateur fossil hunters get record haul in Cotswolds ... and Five ice-age mammoths unearthed in Cotswolds after 220,000 years, all about a group of well-preserved mammoth skeletons, discovered a few months ago but only just now being widely announced.

 Yes, I did Meles................ always something new.

Your own collection might be worth a few pennies. You should inventory it.

Perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo found in China:

Oviraptorosaur Embryo

Ichthyosaur found in Rutland reservoir.

Ichthyosaur

Jurassic Pterosaur found in Skye. The 170 million year old fossil is the largest flying reptile of the period uncovered to date:

National Geographic Skye Pterosaur

POPULAR CULTURE.

The latest instalment of the Jurassic franchise; Jurassic World Dominion.



Pesky Martians have invaded the Earth again! Fortunately, someone is on hand to deal with the situation;

This is quite good fun. Short story about a time traveller made by an amateur film team.

Dinosaurs are a little before my time, but I'm sure I read somewhere that there was no such thing as grass when dinosaurs roamed the Earth! Surely that can't be true, what vegetation covered open spaces back then? What did they eat?
At least if I crack the art of time travel I won't need to take my lawnmower.

I suppose no one has toyed with the thought that meat eating dinasaurs survived on  a constant supply time travellers?

Flowering plants (angiosperms), the group which includes most of what people typically think of by "plants", evolved in the Early Cretaceous and rapidly diversified to become common by the end of the Cretaceous. However true grasses, which are a sub group of flowering plants, seem to have evolved only towards the very end of the Cretaceous and it has been suggested that they and other low growing flowering plants actually co-evolved with more advanced dinosaurs that had evolved to be grazers rather than browsers (while as a group flowering plants co-evolved their flowers with pollinating insects, like bees). Grasses only really became dominant in the Tertiary (after the dinosaur extinction). The 'Hell Creek' film presumably represents a time in the very late Upper Cretaceous just before (in relative terms) the KT extinction event, as the Hell Creek formation is a well-studied geological division of this age in North America, named for rock exposures along Hell Creek in Montana.

Before grasses and flowering plants the flora was primarily of gymnosperms - that is conifers (pines, cypresses, cedars, redwoods, yews and their relatives), ginkgos and cycads -  plus ferns, horsetails, mosses, liverworts and green algae. I have a small fragmentary fossil of an ancestral type of flowering plant (Bevhalstia pebja) from the same clay quarry in Surrey which has yielded many Iguanodon remains as well as the first Baryonyx bones (it is Early Cretaceous, circa 130 million years bp). In life Bevhalstia would probably have resembled something like common chickweed (albeit without such well developed flowers) and so not really the sort of thing to sustain a large hungry Iguanodon - big herbivorous dinosaurs would still have to rely on the leaves of conifers and ferns (both also preserved in the quarry) for quite some time yet.

This is quite an interesting general article about flowering plants and which also mentions both Bevhalstia and the Smokejacks quarry in Surrey: The National Geographic - The big bloom, how flowering plants changed the world.

MarkUK wrote:

Dinosaurs are a little before my time, but I'm sure I read somewhere that there was no such thing as grass when dinosaurs roamed the Earth! Surely that can't be true, what vegetation covered open spaces back then? What did they eat?
At least if I crack the art of time travel I won't need to take my lawnmower.

That's a interesting point. Mark.

Checked on wiki and found this:

Before 2005, fossil findings indicated that grasses evolved around 55 million years ago. Finds of grass-like phytoliths in Cretaceous dinosaur coprolites from the latest Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) aged Lameta Formation of India have pushed this date back to 66 million years ago. In 2011, fossils from the same deposit suggested a date as early as 107 to 129 Mya for the origin of the rice tribe Oryzeae
Wu, You & Li (2018) described grass microfossils extracted from a specimen of the hadrosauroid dinosaur Equijubus normani from the Early Cretaceous (Albian) Zhonggou Formation (China), which were found to belong to primitive lineages within Poaceae, similar in position to the Anomochlooideae. The authors noted that India became separated from Antarctica, and therefore also all other continents, approximately at the beginning of late Aptian, so the presence of grasses in both India and China during the Cretaceous indicates that the ancestor of Indian grasses must have existed before late Aptian. Wu, You & Li considered the Barremian* origin for grasses to be probable.


*approx 125 million years ago




Edit: re the angiosperms. Wiki has bees beginning in the Late Cretaceous as well.


The oldest non-compression bee fossil is found in New Jersey amber, Cretotrigona prisca, a corbiculate bee of Cretaceous age (~65 mya)

Although the relationship between flowers and bees is often cited as an example of long-developed symbiosis ... it is clear that one doesn't actually need flowers to pre-date bees, nor visa versa. While most gymnosperms (that's non flowering plants) use wind or water to transport their pollen, nevertheless some modern conifers and many (most?) cycads, rely on beetles, ants or flies to do it. Conifers, cycads, beetles and flies are all very ancient groups that are known from at least the Permian, but which became much more diverse during the Jurassic. Significantly perhaps that's also just when the earliest proto-flowering plants were appearing (ie in the late Jurassic/early Cretaceous). Ants too are closely related to bees and wasps - they are thought to have evolved from wasp ancestors in the early Cretaceous period - but again they only really diversified after the rise of flowering plants. Accordingly the co-evolution of insects and plants is inevitably much more complex and subtle than just "flowers and bees evolved together".

And talking about actual fossils ... I also have a paleoptinid fossil- that's an early type of woodworm beetle - preserved with wings open, flattened between two layers of fine-grained silt-stone. I found it in the same Smokejacks quarry, alongside dinosaur bones, crocodile teeth and scutes, plant debris, mollusc shells, fish scales and shark teeth.

Cretaceous flora comprised largely of cycads and conifers (gymnosperms) 

Artist interpretation of Cretaceous scenery.




Fossils from Antarctica:

British Antarctic Survey

A horse eats about 2.5% of its' body weight daily. Given the same parameters, a Triceratops weighing in at 12,000 lbs would need 300lbs of food each day. The closest modern equivalent would be the African Bush Elephant. Whether Triceratops operated with similar social structures to ABEs is of course unknown, but might be a reasonable guess.

Ah, but how efficient was Triceratops at processing all that food when compared to a modern horse or elephant?

Dinosaurs, like all other vertebrates, lacked the ability to digest cellulose, and so to make efficient use of plants they have to rely on gut bacteria to breakdown the cell walls, to get at the nutritious stuff inside the plants cells and also to transform the cellulose into simpler molecules (sugars etc) that the vertebrate stomach can absorb. It takes time and space for these bacteria to act, so it generally requires a large or long gut - or techniques such as a cow's ability to regurgitate from separate stomach compartments for re-chewing (chewing the cud), or a rabbit's technique of eating their own partially-digested droppings and so processing the whole lot twice over. The gut fermentation process is also made quicker and more efficient when the eaten plant material is physically broken down and shredded as small as possible. Hence a key question is, could dinosaurs like Triceratops, chew their food?

Most modern reptiles have teeth that are used principally for seizing food – whether plant or animal – and then simply crushing it. Their teeth are often simple stabbing points, and the the jaws open and close vertically with no ability for any side-to-side movement. By contrast the teeth of most herbivorous mammals self wear with use to create complex surfaces ideal for mincing plant fibres, meanwhile the mammalian jaw structure allows for a considerable side-to-side grinding movement. In essence modern reptiles - even those few that eat plants - cannot chew, but mammals can. However it is generally accepted that dinosaurs often didn’t do things the same way as mammals. When compared to its archosaur ancestors Triceratops certainly had complex teeth that wore during feeding to create fullers - recessed central regions between cutting blades - on the chewing surfaces. But could they actually chew or did they use some other mechanism?


Diagram taken from 'Wear biomechanics in the slicing dentition of the giant horned dinosaur Triceratops' Science Advances 5 June 2015

Studies on Iguanodon remains have suggested that while the jaws lacked the muscles and bone structure to permit a side-to-side chewing action, the upper jaw had a lateral hinge that, as the creature bit down on a mouthful of food, allowed the upper teeth to flex outward over the fixed lower teeth thereby creating a shearing action. It wasn't chewing in the way a cow does but the effect was much the same. There's a detailed discussion on the physiology and feeding of Iguanodon here, A new light on Iguanodon.

Meanwhile sauropods - which as a group include the most massive of herbivorous dinosaurs and so with the greatest food requirement - have teeth that are essentially simple pegs and located only in the tip of the jaws in a sort of comb arrangement.



These would seem to have evolved for stripping the leaves from conifers, tree-ferns and cycads, but the question then is however did they process this mass of un-chewed and rather tough foliage. The answer would seem to be gastroliths. These are stones that were ingested into the stomach or gizzard where they act as grinders - in exactly the way that many birds (themselves lacking suitable teeth, nor indeed any teeth at all) swallow small stones and gravel which they retain in the crop to aid in grinding up their food. Crocodiles sometimes do the same. Gastroliths are quite often found where there are dinosaur remains; the one pictured below is from the rich fossil beds of North America. In the Smokejacks quarry in Surrey (mentioned above) they are sometimes found although I've never found one. Here they stand out from the soft clays, silts and sandstones (lacustrine and shallow marine deposits) as unusually smoothed and rounded pebbles, composed of hard rocks which in Cretaceous times were only found far away. They are clearly alien to the area having been transported there during the Cretaceous in a dinosaur's guts, although exactly which species is unknown unless they are found associated with a particular identifiable skeleton.

Fascinating stuff, Meles, thanks.


Came across this, Paleoartist Mark Wittons' blog arguing that Ceratopsians indulged in meat eating to supplement their diet.

Controversial Ceratopsids

Interesting Trike, although I suppose not really surprising as instances of herbivores eating meat - whether just as opportunistic scavengers or even at times as active hunters - are well recorded.



PS

Meles meles wrote:

The 'Hell Creek' film presumably represents a time in the very late Upper Cretaceous just before (in relative terms) the KT extinction event, as the Hell Creek formation is a well-studied geological division of this age in North America, named for rock exposures along Hell Creek in Montana.

Actually the dinosaur seems to be an Allosaurus (or Saurophaganax) a genus of large allosaurid dinosaur from the Morrison Formation of the Late Jurassic in Oklahoma, United States. However that's not a mistake by the film's makers; the clip is apparently a prologue to a feature length version that does take place in the Cretaceous.

Hippos I can understand. But that deer eating a rabbit, wonder if Bambi and Thumper are aware of this.

Time travelling Dinos. From what I've read, the Late Cretaceous was Oxygen rich, any animals from that time period arriving in todays world, would be permanently out of breath, while a Human travelling back there would be as high as a kite.

Triceratops wrote:

Hippos I can understand. But that deer eating a rabbit, wonder if Bambi and Thumper are aware of this.

Oh they know right enough but it's a big unspoken secret between them, so don't ask and don't tell ...



... because those cute little bunnies know that they ain't completely innocent themselves.

Triceratops wrote:

Hippos I can understand. But that deer eating a rabbit, wonder if Bambi and Thumper are aware of this.

Time travelling Dinos. From what I've read, the Late Cretaceous was Oxygen rich, any animals from that time period arriving in todays world, would be permanently out of breath, while a Human travelling back there would be as high as a kite.

Along with hearing about the absence of grass in the era of the dinosaurs I'd also heard about the air being different, more oxygenated you say, why was that?

To be perfectly honest, Mark, I don't know. I'm assuming that the plant life of the time was so abundant that photosynthesis reduced the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, while increasing the Oxygen levels.

Widespread vulcanism would release CO2 into the atmosphere. Then along comes an asteroid, releasing all sorts of stuff.

This is more like it:

I'm not sure it is known with certainty why the atmospheric oxygen was so high in the Cretaceous but there are two main chemical processes that generally govern changes in the atmosphere. Firstly plants use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, releasing oxygen and removing carbon to be stored (possibly long-term) as wood/charcoal, and secondly the breakdown of pyrite and volcanic eruptions, which both release sulphur into the atmosphere, where it oxidizes and thus reduces the amount of atmospheric oxygen (volcanic eruptions also release carbon dioxide that plants again convert to oxygen). There's also the Milankovitch cycle which describes the long-term collective effects in solar radiation at the Earth's surface arising from changes in the Earth's eccentricity, axial tilt and precession, as it revolves around the sun, due to gravitational interactions of the sun and earth with other bodies in the solar system.

Of course looking backwards in time there was no free atmospheric oxygen before the evolution of organisms capable of photosynthesis. The first simple photosynthetic organisms (cyanobacteria) that produced oxygen as a waste product evolved perhaps as early as 3.5 billion years ago. However the oxygen they produced was rapidly removed from the oceans by the weathering of minerals, most notably iron, as is evidenced by formations of banded iron oxide which was deposited on what was then the ocean floor. The so-called Great Oxidation Event occurred about 2 billion years ago when, with all mineral sinks for oxygen now used up, the biologically-produced molecular oxygen started to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere. The atmosphere rapidly changed from a weakly reducing atmosphere practically free of oxygen, into an oxidizing atmosphere containing abundant oxygen. The injection of chemically active and toxic oxygen into an anaerobic biosphere caused the extinction of many existing anaerobic species. However the new oxygen-tolerant organisms could store more chemical energy and thus enable the subsequent development of multicellular life-forms.

Algae-like plants might have evolved as early as 1 billion years ago and while microbial organisms capable of photosynthesis were likely already living on the land about this time, true land plants only appeared around the early Silurian (440 million years ago). The establishment of a land-based flora further increased the rate of accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere as well as effecting erosion, sedimentation and the development of nutrient- and water–retentive soils, again with huge implications in terms of the global cycles of nutrients and of atmospheric gasses. Atmospheric oxygen reached a peak at about 35% in the Carboniferous period (starting about 360 million years ago) when fully developed terrestrial forest eco-systems appeared for the first time, composed of tall woody plants, but crucially before any bacteria had evolved the capability of breaking down plant lignin. Thus huge deposits of carbon-rich material were deposited and subsequently buried (ultimately forming coal). Carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere while oxygen levels rose. It is this ancient carbon dioxide, gradually taken out of the atmosphere over many millions of years, that we have been releasing back into the atmosphere as we burn the remains of those ancient Carboniferous forests, but now over a period of just hundreds of years, rather than the many millions that it took to form.

Then there was that other peak in atmospheric oxygen in the Cretaceous, which incidentally has been directly observed by analysis of bubbles of Cretaceous air trapped in amber. I'm not sure what caused this oxygen high but at the time the Earth's land masses were fairly evenly distributed around the globe (no super large continents) which were often separated by shallow seas (much more biologically active than deep oceans) and with no, or only small, desert areas within land masses. Global temperatures were generally higher than today and more uniform pole-to-equator. There were no permanent ice caps at the poles and vegetation covered nearly the whole globe, even the poles. So there was, as Trike says, a lot of carbon tied up, if perhaps only temporarily, in all the living plants.

More vegetation producing more oxygen seems the obvious answer.

Some must watch television for Easter Friday:

Dinosaurs: The Last Day. David Attenborough

Sir David's narrating another one. Prehistoric Planet, running from 23rd to 27th May.

This one's on Apple TV 

Meles meles wrote:

I have a small fragmentary fossil of an ancestral type of flowering plant (Bevhalstia pebja) from the same clay quarry in Surrey which has yielded many Iguanodon remains as well as the first Baryonyx bones (it is Early Cretaceous, circa 130 million years bp). In life Bevhalstia would probably have resembled something like common chickweed (albeit without such well developed flowers) and so not really the sort of thing to sustain a large hungry Iguanodon - big herbivorous dinosaurs would still have to rely on the leaves of conifers and ferns (both also preserved in the quarry) for quite some time yet.

The March 2022 edition of the Geologists' Magazine (Vol.21, No.1) arrived yesterday in which there is a short article about recent discoveries in the same Surrey quarry (Smokejacks). These include a dinosaur (an igunanodontid) footprint which is in association with Bevhalstia remains, which together seem to indicate that at times iguanodon waded out into the fresh/brackish lagoons attracted by floating mats of Bevhalstia, the dense clumps of plants also providing food and shelter for various insects, crustaceans and clam shrimps, as well being nurseries for baby hybodontic sharks and other fish. So bevhalstia plants may well have supported browsing dinosaurs if they were prepared to get their feet wet.

Triceratops wrote:

Some must watch television for Easter Friday:

Dinosaurs: The Last Day. David Attenborough

What I didn't realise is that the program is based around the Tanis fossil assemblage that includes a mummified dinosaur leg in association with distinctive glassy debris that would appear to have come from the famous Chicxulub impact crater. Accordingly the dinosaur, plus the fossil remains of fish and turtles, would appears to come from exactly the day of the extinction event - hence the "Last Day" title. An amazing fossil find if it's true.

Yes, the Tanis Site in North Dakota, Meles.

This is the wiki link:

Tanis (fossil site)

• fossils of hatchlings and intact eggs with embryo fossils
  
  
• fossil pterosaurs for which no other fossils exist at that time
  
  
• drowned ant nests with ants inside and chambers filled with asteroid debris, and
  
  
• tiny inhabited burrows from some of the first mammals in the area after the impact
  
  

The hundreds of fish remains are distributed by size, and generally show evidence of tetany (a body posture related to suffocation in fish), suggesting strongly that they were all killed indiscriminately by a common suffocating cause that affected the entire population. Fragile remains spanning the layers of debris show that the site was laid down in a single event over a short timespan. A Triceratops or other ceratopsian ilium (hip bone) was found at the high water mark, in circumstances hinting that the dinosaur might speculatively have been a floating carcass and possibly alive at or just before impact, but the paper describing such remains was still in progress as of 2019 – the initial papers only include a photograph and its location within Tanis. In 2022, a partial mummified Thescelosaurus was unearthed here with its skin still intact.
The exceptional nature of the findings and conclusions have led some scientists to await further scrutiny by the scientific community before agreeing that the discoveries at Tanis have been correctly understood. The site continues to be explored.

Thescelosaurus

Trike - knowing your love of dinosaurs as well as your interest in sci-fi films, I wonder if you'd seen this article in today's Guardian, and what you thought of it? It's mostly a silly "puff piece", and as ever the public comments and suggestions posted below the article (btl), are generally more informative, erudite and amusing than the article itself, but it did nevertheless bring back some memories ... especially of Raquel Welch's furry bikini and Harryhausen's superb (for the time) animated dinosaurs in the absolutely preposterous but no less iconic 'One Million Years BC' (1966).

The Guardian (26 May 2022) - the top 20 dinosaur movies ranked

Good little article, Meles. I would have missed it as I gave up buying newspapers years ago.

The first Dinosaur film I can recall seeing was this. Makes One Million Years BC look like a masterpiece;



From roughly the same time, a nuclear powered dino runs amok in Denmark:



Speaking of fur bikinis, Victoria Vetri in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

And of course Caroline Munro in At The Earth's Core.

One of the creatures that appears in At The Earth's Core is a parrot beaked animal, presumably based on a Psittacosaurus. The film version being a good deal larger than the real thing. Psittacosaurus is one of the best known dinosaurs as a large number of specimens have been discovered.







model based on skin samples of specimen SMF R 4970

SMF R 4970

I am very disappointed that the psittacosaurus looked nothing like a man in a rubber dinosaur suit. You'll be telling me next that prehistoric women looked nothing like Caroline Munro.