blacksundae

By way of explanation. Via the always fascinating VRTPALEO mailing list.

The Gary Owens / Eric Boardman dinosaur documentaries that aired on the Disney Channel during the 80s were a big part of my childhood. When I recently found them on YouTube (via Laelaps) I discovered that I could almost recite them from heart. These things are wonderful. Enjoy them in their entirety after the jump.
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Reuters:

Palaeontologists digging in a brickyard in southern Poland have discovered the fossilised remains of a dinosaur that they say is a previously unknown ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The predator dinosaur, given the working name “Dragon”, lived around 200 million years ago, team member Dr Tomasz Sulej of the Polish Science Academy told Reuters.

Read on.

UPDATE: According to the posters in the VRTPALEO mailing list,

“An ancestor of _Tyrannosaurus rex_” is popular media shorthand for “an unbeaked pre-Maastrichtian non-avialan theropod”.

The age of 200 million years should have tipped me off.

Mark Witton/PA Wire

Interesting article on azhdarchids. By the way, it’s gratifying (?) to see that America doesn’t have a monopoly on shitty science journalism. Pterosaurs are not, in fact, dinosaurs. That’s something I’ll bet a lot of school-kids know.

Laelaps has an interesting interview with paleontologist Robert Bakker. I literally wore out my copy of The Dinosaur Heresies as a kid (I patched it back together with packing tape), and got to meet him at an orientation meeting when I was a volunteer for Dinamation.* Cool guy. Interesting interview. I don’t agree with his last answer, but he’s a religious fellow. Whatcha gonna do?

*According to Wikipedia, it no longer exists! Well, that sucks!

Science News:

Paleontologists have unearthed an ancient, sediment-filled burrow that holds remains of the creatures that dug it. The find is the first indisputable evidence that some dinosaurs maintained an underground lifestyle for at least part of their lives.

Read on. [via Boing Boing]

Discovery Channel:

“It’s unquestionably the metacarpal,” Quinlan told Discovery News. No previous T. rex remains have ever been found with a third metacarpal, despite the fact that the other bones suggested its presence. “There is a notch in the side of the second metacarpal that was just begging to have something fit into it.”

The revised anatomy of the hand suggests there was a very strong tendon that attached to second metacarpal, giving the hand a pretty decent grip, she said. Still, the puny limbs were almost certainly not used by T. rex to grapple with prey or kill.

[edit]

That said, the new finger bone is not going to cause much change to reconstructions of T. rex, says Hartman. Throughout the evolution of meat-eating dinosaurs there was a trend towards fewer fingers, with the earliest having five fingers and the T. rex having two. This newfound nubbin of a third finger was already on its way out, and did not stick out much, he said.

“In another 10 million years they would have lost (the third finger) completely,” said Hartman. Unfortunately for them, however, the age of dinosaurs ended before that could happen.

Read on.