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The tusk, several teeth, and some bones of a Deinotherium giganteum, which, loosely translated means really huge terrible beast, have been found on the Greek island Crete. A distant relative to today's elephants, the giant mammal stood 15 feet (4.6 meters) tall at the shoulder, and had tusks that were 4.5 feet (1.3 meters) long. It was one of the largest mammals ever to walk the face of the Earth... To paleontologists today, the large hole in the center of the skull suggests a pronounced trunk. To the ancient Greeks, Deinotherium skulls could well be the foundation for their...

Inner Mongolia Yields New Discoveries More than 80 leading archeological experts are participating in an international conference in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, to exchange the latest information on Hongshan, a prehistoric relics site. Relics excavated at the Hongshan ("Red Mountain") site originated around 5000 BC to 6500 BC. Now a part of Chifeng City, the site was discovered in 1935. Some of the relics found at Hongshan have led archeologists to conclude that the heads of Chinese dragons may have been inspired by boars in addition to horses and cattle. Primitive people who struggled to survive by fishing and...

Cyclops Myth Spurred by One-Eyed Fossils? Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News February 5, 2003 Ever wonder where our worst nightmares come from? For the ancient Greeks, it may have been the fossils of giant prehistoric animals. The tusk, several teeth, and some bones of a Deinotherium giganteum, which, loosely translated means really huge terrible beast, have been found on the Greek island Crete. A distant relative to today's elephants, the giant mammal stood 15 feet (4.6 meters) tall at the shoulder, and had tusks that were 4.5 feet (1.3 meters) long. It was one of the largest mammals ever...

<p>Skull of an elephant. The animal's European ancestors had similar anatomies.</p> <p>IRAKLIO, Greece (AP) -- Researchers on the southern Greek island of Crete have unearthed the fossilized tusk, teeth and bones of a Deinotherium Gigantisimum, a fearsome elephant-like creature that might have given rise to ancient legends of one-eyed cyclops monsters.</p>

<p>IRAKLIO, Greece (AP) -- Researchers on the southern Greek island of Crete have unearthed the fossilized tusk, teeth and bones of a Deinotherium Gigantisimum, a fearsome elephant-like creature that might have given rise to ancient legends of one-eyed cyclops monsters.</p>

Dubbed Ambopteryx longibrachium, the blue jay-sized theropod lived 163 million years ago during the Jurassic period. Its wings were made of a soft membrane attached to long arm bones which, when spread, resembled those of a bat. ..." The researchers first thought it was a bird when they saw it in the rock, but after they dug it out, it became clear that Ambopteryx was a dinosaur. The researchers aren’t sure exactly how the dinosaur, which also had feathers, looked as it took flight. It couldn’t flap its wings, so it’s believed the creatures would simply glide. According to the...

The newly named tyrannosauroid dinosaur, Suskityrannus hazelae, stood around 3 feet tall at the hip and was about 9 feet long, according to Virginia Tech. “My discovery of a partial skeleton of Suskityrannus put me onto a scientific journey that has framed my career,” said Nesbitt, the lead author of the study in the journal “Nature Ecology and Evolution.” But for about two decades, scientists weren’t certain what it was, until other small cousins of T. rex were discovered. “The small group of tyrannosauroid dinosaurs would give rise to some of the biggest predators that we’ve ever seen,” Nesbitt said....

No, Dinosaurs Aren’t in the Bible: Part 3 How Young Earth Creationists Get Dinosaurs Wrong By Philip Cottraux For part 3 of this series, I want to critique Young Earth Creationism from a viewpoint that doesn’t get much attention; its scientifically incorrect portrayal of dinosaurs and the clumsy way it tries to factor them into the creation account. Let me disclaim once again; this has nothing to do with the age of the earth and although I’m personally an Old Earth Creationist, I’m not at all trying to prove that the planet is older than 6,000 years. One of the...

No, Dinosaurs Aren’t in the Bible: Part 2 Leviathan By Philip Cottraux Last week I wrote about how the infamous passage in Job 40 about the Behemoth is often misconstrued as a dinosaur. In the very next chapter, God describes a monstrous fire-breathing sea dragon, the Leviathan, which Young Earth Creationists speculate was a real-life marine reptile, even citing this passage as evidence that dragons from ancient lore must have been based on an actual animal. I pointed out that dual references of a cow-like fertility deity and a fire-breathing dragon of chaos often appear in ancient literature in conjunction,...

By Philip Cottraux It’s been a long time since I’ve weighed in on the creation controversy, mostly because I hate how divisive it is. But I want to start a series critiquing Young Earth Creationism on a particular aspect that doesn’t get a lot of attention: the clumsy and unscientific way it tries to factor dinosaurs into the creation account. Smart aleck atheists sometimes demand explanations why the Bible doesn’t mention dinosaurs, implying Genesis is an ancient fairy-tale that gets Earth’s origins wrong. This isn’t a problem for old-earth interpretations, but the Young Earth Creationist claims that adding up the...

Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass. Ancient fish caught glass blobs in their gills as they swam, gape-mouthed, beneath the strange rain. Large, sloshing waves threw animals onto dry land, then more waves buried them in silt. Scientists working in North Dakota recently dug up fossils of these fish: They died within the first minutes or hours after the asteroid hit, according to a paper...

The most immediate effects of the terminal-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact, essential to understanding the global-scale environmental and biotic collapses that mark the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, are poorly resolved despite extensive previous work. Here, we help to resolve this by describing a rapidly emplaced, high-energy onshore surge deposit from the terrestrial Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Associated ejecta and a cap of iridium-rich impactite reveal that its emplacement coincided with the Chicxulub event. Acipenseriform fish, densely packed in the deposit, contain ejecta spherules in their gills and were buried by an inland-directed surge that inundated a deeply incised river channel before accretion of...

Dr. Stephen Brusatte, a Palaeontologist at University of Edinburgh and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, is among those that have questions around the extraordinary claims made by the team that have... ... said he was “very excited about this discovery” but noted aside from a single partial dinosaur hip bone mentioned in the paper, ideas of a dinosaur graveyard being reported in the media lack any real evidence so far. “The New Yorker article reports a dinosaur graveyard with bones of many types of dinosaurs, along with feathers, eggs, and even embryos,” he said. “I’m afraid...

The researchers say they found evidence in North Dakota of the asteroid hit in Mexico, including fish with hot glass in their gills from flaming debris that showered back down on Earth. They also reported the discovery of charred trees, evidence of an inland tsunami and melted amber. Additionally, University of Amsterdam professor Jan Smit said he and his colleagues found footsteps from dinosaurs moments before they met their untimely death. Smit said the footprints — one from a plant-eating hadrosaur and the other of a meat eater, maybe a small Tyrannosaurus Rex — is "definite proof that the dinosaurs...

66 million-year-old deathbed linked to dinosaur-killing meteor By Robert Sanders, Media relations| March 29, 2019March 29, 2019 Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window) A meteor impact 66 million years ago generated a tsunami-like wave in an inland sea that killed and buried fish, mammals, insects and a dinosaur, the first victims of Earth’s last mass extinction event. The death scene from within an hour of...

Scientists have debated whether the dinosaurs were already in decline before a massive asteroid impact finished them off 66 million years ago. New research shows they were thriving in their final days. Help EarthSky keep going! Please donate what you can to our annual crowd-funding campaign.Dinosaurs once reigned on Earth, until a cataclysmic event – now thought to have been a massive asteroid impact, or possibly intense volcanic activity – wiped them out about 66 million years ago during the Maastrichtian age at the end the Late Cretaceous epoch. This mass extinction event was sudden and brutal, powerful enough to...

It is the closest we may ever get to being face to face with a T. rex. The American Museum of Natural History has unveiled a new exhibition showing the giant through its life with a series of models it boasts are 'the most accurate ever created'. They range from a fluffy hatchling to a gigantic 43-foot-long model of the full grown killer - complete with feathers and 'useless' arms.

The Tyrannosaurus rex may be among the most well-known and terrifying dinosaurs to walk the Earth, but a newly discovered 4-foot cousin was likely just as scary. Known as Moros Intrepidus (which means "harbinger of doom"), this tiny tyrannosaur lived 100 million years ago. Despite its diminutive size, it was still lethal, North Carolina State University paleontoloist Lindsay Zanno said. “Moros was lightweight and exceptionally fast,” Zanno said in a statement. “These adaptations, together with advanced sensory capabilities, are the mark of a formidable predator. It could easily have run down prey, while avoiding confrontation with the top predators of...

Titanosaurs were the most speciose and widespread group of sauropod dinosaurs, the largest terrestrial animals in Earth history. They reached their peak diversity in the Late Cretaceous after all other sauropod groups vanished, but their early evolution is poorly understood due to a scarcity of well-preserved titanosaur fossils from before the Late Cretaceous, especially outside of South America. In this study, the authors describe a newly-discovered middle Cretaceous titanosaur from southern Africa. The researchers named the new dinosaur Mnyamawamtuka moyowamkia. It is known from a single specimen excavated from a quarry along the Mtuka River in southwest Tanzania. It is...

A new oviraptorosaur species from the Late Cretaceous was discovered in Mongolia... Oviraptorosaurs were a diverse group of feathered, bird-like dinosaurs from the Cretaceous of Asia and North America. Despite the abundance of nearly complete oviraptorosaur skeletons discovered in southern China and Mongolia, the diet and feeding strategies of these toothless dinosaurs are still unclear. In this study, Lee and colleagues described an incomplete skeleton of an oviraptorosaur found in the Nemegt Formation of the Gobi desert of Mongolia. The new species, named Gobiraptor minutus, can be distinguished from other oviraptorosaurs in having unusual thickened jaws. This unique morphology suggests...