Cretaceous
laelaps | June 15, 2010
The skull of Mosasaurus hoffmani. From Lingham-Soliar 1995.
On my first trip to the Inversand marl pit in Sewell, New Jersey, I didn't find the wonderfully preserved Dryptosaurus skeleton I had been dreaming of. I picked up a number of Cretaceous bivalve shells and Paleocene sponges, but other than a few scraps of "Chunkosaurus" my excavations didn't yield very much. Before my paleontology class left the site, though, we took a walk by the spoil piles - great green mounds of sediment that had already been mined for glauconite. It had recently rained, and little pillars of the sandy green…
laelaps | May 20, 2010
Mammal hairs preserved in amber specimen ARC2-A1-3. a - First fragment; b - Line drawing of first fragment; c - Second fragment; d - Line drawing of second fragment; e - Close-up of second fragment to show the cuticular surface.
About 100 million years ago, in a coastal forest located in what is today southwestern France, a small mammal skittered up the trunk of a conifer tree. As it did so it lost a few of its hairs, and this minor event would have been entirely unremarkable if two of those hairs had not settled in some tree sap and, in the course of time, become entombed in a piece of…
laelaps | March 22, 2010
The skull of Mosasaurus maximus, photographed at the New Jersey State Museum.
razib | April 29, 2009New Geochronologic And Stratigraphic Evidence Confirms The Paleocene Age Of the Dinosaur-Bearing Ojo Alamo Sandstone And Animas Formation In The San Juan Basin, New Mexico and Colorado:
...An assemblage of 34 skeletal elements from a single hadrosaur, found in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the southern San Juan Basin, provided conclusive evidence that this assemblage could not have been reworked from underlying Cretaceous strata. In addition, geochemical studies of 15 vertebrate bones from the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone and 15 bone samples from the underlying Kirtland Formation of Late…
grrlscientist | April 12, 2008tags: What Bugged the Dinosaurs?, dinosaurs, insects, disease, George Poinar, Roberta Poinar, book review
I grew up with a fondness for dinosaurs. Their unbelievable size, their peculiar shapes, and their undeniable absence from the world as I knew it were all sources of fascination. But never once did I think of the dinosaurs as being plagued by biting insects and other blood-sucking arthropods; mosquitoes, flies, ticks and mites were creatures that haunted camping trips, picnics and attics, not the majestic dinosaurs! But according to the new book, What Bugged the Dinosaurs? Insects,…