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Along a lush river delta in what is now northeastern Spain, a herd of dinosaurs munched on ferns and conifers similar to modern-day cypresses 125 million years ago. These creatures stood out from the others in this Cretaceous Period landscape by virtue of the unusual sail-like structure on their backs, and experts today can only hypothesize about its function.

TORONTO — Dark matter inspires many strange theories, but until now few have involved giant lizards and the origins of humanity. If physicist Lisa Randall’s theory is correct, however, there is a clear link between dark matter, the great unknown majority of universal stuff and the extinction of the dinosaurs, which cleared the path for the rise of mammals, including that special species, homo sapiens. Roughly, her idea is that the rotation of a vast disc of dark matter through our solar system dislodged an asteroid from a weak and distant orbit, and sent it hurtling toward Earth, where it...

Here, for the first time (to our knowledge), we are able to demonstrate unambiguously that the impact at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg, ∼66 Mya) was followed by a so-called “impact winter.” This impact winter was the result of the injection of large amounts of dust and aerosols into the stratosphere and significantly reduced incoming solar radiation for decades. Therefore, this phase will have been a key contributory element in the extinctions of many biological clades, including the dinosaurs. The K–Pg boundary impact presents a unique event in Earth history because it caused global change at an unparalleled rate. This detailed...

Skeleton of the Cretaceous mammal Spinolestes with preserved fur shadows. The outer ear can be seen at the upper edge of the photo (arrow). During preparation, the skeleton was transferred to a plastic matrix. Credit: Georg Oleschinski. With permission of Nature Publishing Group ====================================================================================================================== The discovery of a new 125-million-year-old fossil mammal in Spain has pushed back the earliest record of preserved mammalian hair structures and inner organs by more than 60 million years. The specimen, named Spinolestes xenarthrosus, was fossilized with remarkably intact guard hairs, underfur, tiny hedgehog-like spines and even evidence of a fungal hair infection. The unusually...

“Cold dinosaur” fossils have paleontologists questioning everything they thought they knew about dinosaur physiology. What else is up for grabs?How did dinosaurs survive far north in Alaska? That’s what researchers are asking about dinosaur bones excavated along the Colville River. The 30-foot hadrosaur is the northernmost dinosaur skeleton discovered so far. Science Daily quotes one of the researchers:“The finding of dinosaurs this far north challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur’s physiology,” said FSU Professor of Biological Science Greg Erickson. “It creates this natural question. How did they survive up here?” The Prince Creek Formation is said to be...

Dinosaur Footprints in Dallas by Brian Thomas, M.S., and Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * Spring rains flooded the Dallas area this year, including Lake Grapevine which is about 10 miles west of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) campus. Record water levels submerged entire lakeside parks and adjacent roads. As the water slowly receded, it revealed a reshaped shoreline—and dinosaur tracks. What kinds of creatures made these marks?

Elasmosaurs had extremely long necks, small heads and paddle-shaped limbs for swimming Photo: Nobu Tamura Researchers in Alaska have uncovered the bones of a prehistoric marine reptile dating back 70 million years. This is the first time an elasmosaur has ever been unearthed in this state. Its vertebrae were discovered embedded in an eroding cliff. Curvin Metzler (left) and Dr Patrick Druckenmiller on the cliff face where the elasmosaur was discovered  Photo: University of Alaska Museum of the North Elasmosaurs had extremely long necks, small heads and paddle-shaped limbs for swimming. • Scientists study remains of massive Dreadnoughtus dinosaur, in pics...

LONDON – The discovery of well-preserved blood and proteins in a supposedly 75-million-year-old dinosaur fossil has stumped secular scientists and led one Christian apologist to herald the findings as evidence of a young Earth. A team of scientists at the U.K.’s Imperial College London carefully examined eight Cretaceous dinosaur bones discovered in North America, scrutinizing the bones’ interiors with an electron microscope. The researchers were stunned when they discovered what appeared to be red blood cells in one of the specimens. Upon closer examination, the British scientists identified an internal structure within the dinosaur cells, complete with nuclei and amino...

Carbon-14 Found in Dinosaur Fossils by Brian Thomas, M.S. * New science directly challenges the millions-of-years dogma scattered throughout the blockbuster movie Jurassic World. The spring 2015 edition of the Creation Research Society Quarterly (CRSQ) is a special issue that focuses on the investigation of dinosaur proteins inside fossil bones. The last article in the issue presents never-before-seen carbon dates for 14 different fossils, including dinosaurs. Because radiocarbon decays relatively quickly, fossils that are even 100,000 years old should have virtually no radiocarbon left in them.1 But they do. Jurassic World characters repeatedly mention "million years ago" in the context...

Tracking Down Leviathan by Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * What exactly was the leviathan described so vividly in Job 41? Was it a swimming reptile like a plesiosaur or a mosasaur, or something we have yet to unearth? We may never know the answer for certain, but the latest discovery of a large, semiaquatic dinosaur offers another possibility.1 Most specimens of the large theropod dinosaur Spinosaurus, made famous by the Jurassic Park movies as the dinosaur that defeated T. rex, are found in North Africa. Whether an encounter between the two would have had the same result in reality is highly...

Dinosaur proteins and radiocarbon wreak ‘Jurassic World’ havoc Latest creationist research demolishes dinosaur dogma by Brian Thomas Published: 25 June 2015 (GMT+10) The record-earning movie Jurassic World continuously reminds its viewing audience that dinosaurs went extinct tens of millions of years ago. Most agree with this, of course, because it is the standard view of the evolutionary establishment. But just days after the movie hit big screens around the world, six technical papers in a special, groundbreaking, dinosaur issue of the journal Creation Research Society1 Quarterly (CRSQ) presented evidence that directly confronts the millions-of-years concept.2 I wrote one paper that...

Some viewers of Jurassic World are taking offense to the film, calling one of the lines in the movie "racist." Specifically, the abbreviation of the dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus. During the course of the film, the Pachycephalosaurus escape from their enclosures, leading one character to shout, "The Pachys are out of containment!" This has led news outlets and Twitter users to call the film "racist." A British comedian originally brought attention to the line, offering a tongue-in-cheek rant against the dinosaur's name. However, people did not get the joke, and are actually calling the film racist. The Independent called the line "very...

New research has revealed why it took more than 30 million years for large Triassic dinosaurs to populate the tropics after they first appeared on Earth, ending a mystery that has kept researchers baffled for decades. Using new geological evidence culled from Ghost Ranch, N.M., researchers from the University of Southampton in the U.K. have found that an extremely unpredictable hot and arid climate due to elevated carbon dioxide levels (four to six times of what they are today) kept large herbivorous dinos at bay until after 200 million years ago.

The cupboards of the Natural History Museum in London hold spectacular dinosaur fossils, from 10-centimeter, serrated Tyrannosaurus rex teeth to a 4-meter-long hadrosaur tail. Now, researchers are reporting another spectacular find, buried in eight nondescript fossils from the same collection: what appear to be ancient red blood cells and fibers of ancient protein. Using new methods to peer deep inside fossils, the study in this week’s issue of Nature Communications backs up previous, controversial reports of such structures in dinosaur bones. It also suggests that soft tissue preservation may be more common than anyone had guessed. “It’s encouraging,” especially because...

Abstract Exceptionally preserved organic remains are known throughout the vertebrate fossil record, and recently, evidence has emerged that such soft tissue might contain original components. We examined samples from eight Cretaceous dinosaur bones using nano-analytical techniques; the bones are not exceptionally preserved and show no external indication of soft tissue. In one sample, we observe structures consistent with endogenous collagen fibre remains displaying ~67 nm banding, indicating the possible preservation of the original quaternary structure. Using ToF-SIMS, we identify amino-acid fragments typical of collagen fibrils. Furthermore, we observe structures consistent with putative erythrocyte remains that exhibit mass spectra similar to emu...

About 10 years ago, Peter Hews stumbled across some bones sticking out of a cliff along the Oldman River in southeastern Alberta, Canada. Now, scientists describe in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on June 4 that those bones belonged to a nearly intact skull of a very unusual horned dinosaur—a close relative of the familiar Triceratops that had been unknown to science until now. "The specimen comes from a geographic region of Alberta where we have not found horned dinosaurs before, so from the onset we knew it was important," says Dr. Caleb Brown of the Royal Tyrrell Museum...

That glass of water in your hand is dinosaur pee, apparently. Not like it's unfiltered, but a science YouTube video posted this week raises the interesting tidbit that, since dinosaurs were around for 186 million years and water molecules are everlasting, it's a foregone conclusion that every drop of water on the planet passed through the prehistoric species once upon a time. "While most of the water molecules in your 8 ounce glass have never been drunk by another human, almost every single molecule has been drunk by a dinosaur," the video by CuriousMinds says. "So drink up and enjoy...

Birds are thought to have evolved from dinosaurs, but have very different jaws. Bird-like dinosaurs such as the velociraptor have two bones at the tip of their upper jaws. In birds, those bones are fused to form a beak. By blocking two proteins that are activated when chicken embryos grow their beaks, U.S. researchers caused their jaws to "revert" to a velociraptor-like snout. The changes were observed in chick embryos that developed until they were close to hatching. To their surprise, the birds' palates, on the roof of their mouths, also became dinosaur-like. "This was unexpected and demonstrates the way...

A dinosaur with bat-like wings once soared through the skies of what is now China, The Jurassic dinosaur, named Yi qi, has the shortest name ever given to a dino: Yi qi, pronounced "ee chee," means "strange wing." It also appears to be the earliest known flying non-avian dinosaur. At 160 million years old, it is older than the first known birds, such as Archaeopteryx. ... He and his colleagues unearthed the remains for Yi qi at Hebei Province in China. At first, the scientists puzzled over rod-like bones that extended from each wrist of the tiny dinosaur that weighed...

Some of the largest animals to ever walk on Earth were the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as the sauropods—and the most famous of these giants is probably Brontosaurus, the "thunder lizard." Deeply rooted as this titan is in the popular imagination, however, for more than a century scientists thought it never existed. The first of the Brontosaurus genus was named in 1879 by famed paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The specimen still stands on display in the Great Hall of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. In 1903, however, paleontologist Elmer Riggs found that Brontosaurus was apparently the same as the...