sauropod
edyong | March 1, 2010
Snakes have been around for nearly 100 million years and scientists have found many fossils of extinct species. But this astonishing specimen is different. This serpent is Sanajeh indicus. It is sitting in a dinosaur nest and its coils surround three eggs and the body of a hatchling.
There are many reasons to think that this prehistoric tableau represented a predator caught in the act of hunting, rather than a mash-up of unconnected players thrown together by chance. The snake is perfectly posed, with its head resting atop a coil and its body encircling a crushed egg. All the pieces are…
laelaps | October 22, 2007
An artist's reconstruction, released by the National Museum of Brazil, of the paleoecology inhabited by Futalognkosaurus (left). It is being menaced by Megaraptor, now known to be a tetanuran theropod.
For quite some time it was thought that after the Jurassic period the massive sauropods that roamed North America were all but extinct, a radiation of ankylosaurs, ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, and other ornithischians becoming the primary herbivores in place of the massive long-necked saurischians. At least one genus did hang on until the Late Cretaceous, the titanosaur Alamosaurus sanjuanensis…