In 2011, an excavator operator working in a Canadian mine uncovered a group of unusual looking rocks. The rocks turned out to be the remains of a dinosaur called a nodosaur that died about 110 million years ago. The nodosaur was so well preserved that it looks like a stone statue of a dinosaur instead of just fossilized remains.

The more I look at it, the more mind-boggling it becomes. Fossilized remnants of skin still cover the bumpy armor plates dotting the animal’s skull. Its right forefoot lies by its side, its five digits splayed upward. I can count the scales on its sole. Caleb Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the museum, grins at my astonishment. “We don’t just have a skeleton,” he tells me later. “We have a dinosaur as it would have been.”

The photos are amazing…it really does look like a statue.

• dinosaurs
• paleontology
• science

The Paleobiology Database Navigator is a world map that shows where hundreds of thousands of fossils have been found. The data is maintained by an international group of paleontologists and you can filter the map by type of fossil and when it was found. There’s even a toggle to flip back and forth between the current placement of the continents and much earlier Pangea-like configurations. (via @srikardr)

• maps
• paleontology
• science

Paleontologist Lida Xing found the feathered tail of a tiny dinosaur trapped in a piece of amber for sale at a market in Myanmar.

As soon as Xing saw it, he knew it wasn’t a plant. It was the delicate, feathered tail of a tiny dinosaur.

“I have studied paleontology for more than 10 years and have been interested in dinosaurs for more than 30 years. But I never expected we could find a dinosaur in amber. This may be the coolest find in my life,” says Xing, a paleontologist at China University of Geosciences in Beijing. “The feathers on the tail are so dense and regular, this is really wonderful.”

• dinosaurs
• Lida Xing
• paleontology
• science

There’s a new king of the dinosaurs: Dreadnoughtus schrani. A skeleton of the species was unearthed in Argentina in 2005 and the results of the recently released analysis show this Dreadnoughtus was 85 feet long, weighed around 65 tons, and had a powerful “weaponized tail”. The kicker? It was not yet an adult and still growing when it died.

While other giants from Patagonia are known from a handful of bones, almost half of the Dreadnoughtus skeleton has been recovered. What’s more, the fossilised bones are in such good condition — even revealing where muscles attached — that the skeleton could provide unprecedented insights into the biology, movement and evolution of the group of huge plant-eating dinosaurs it belonged to, called the titanosaurian sauropods.

By comparison, an Apatosaurus (née Brontosaurus) is ~75 feet long and weighed 22 tons while a Boeing 737-900 weights around 50 tons. Here’s some more background on the Dreadnoughtus and a video showing some of the fossils:

• dinosaurs
• paleontology
• science

An Elvis taxon is the apparent rediscovery of an animal that has vanished from the fossil record, but that is really the discovery of a look-alike animal. “The term Elvis taxon is used because of the large number of sightings of Elvis Presley long after his death, as well as for his many impersonators.”

• elvispresley
• language
• paleontology

A paleontology grad student, while idly inspecting a bronze cast of a dinosaur skeleton on the wall of the subway station, notices that the dinosaur in question was not cannibalistic as previously believed. Man, good science can be done *anywhere*.

• dinosaurs
• NYC
• paleontology
• science
• subway

According to paleontologist Gareth Dyke, “fossil evidence that [predatory] dinosaurs were feathered is now ‘irrefutable’”. Digitally remastered Jurassic Park can’t be too far down the road.

• biology
• birds
• dinosaurs
• jurassicpark
• movies
• paleontology
• science