The Palaeo Pad

A new species of plant-eating dinosaur, which sports a grapefruit sized mass of bone on the top of its skull, has been uncovered in Texas’ Big Bend National Park. The find, which would have lived 70 to 80 million years ago, is reported in the latest issue of Cretaceous Research.

The skulls of certain juvenile sauropods underwent radical alterations in their progression towards adulthood, reveals a study published in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

A partial skeleton of a new species of long necked, herbivorous dinosaur which lived 185 million years ago has been found among the red rocks of Utah. The find, which is reported in a recent edition of PLoS ONE by palaeontologists from the Universities of Stony Brook and Utah, along with the Utah Museum of Natural History, establishes the prevalence of sauropodomorph dinosaurs during the early Jurassic.

Palaeontologists have found a near complete skeleton of a new member of the bird-like dinosaur family Dromaeosauridae, reports the latest issue of the journal Zootaxa. It is hoped this species, which is a close relative of the popularly known Velociraptor, will shed light on the physical appearance of other members of its family.

The description of a new carnivorous amphibian, Fedexia striegeli, has provided the earliest evidence of widespread terrestrial invertebrates. The discovery, which is being published in today’s issue of Annals of Carnegie Museum, is around 20 million years older than its fellow land based amphibians.

A new dinosaur-like species has been uncovered from Triassic rocks in Africa – existing 10 million years before the earliest known dinosaur.

Analysis of fossilised DNA from Norway has shown that polar bears evolved rapidly during the late Pleistocene epoch. The study, which represents the oldest mitochondrial genome to be sequenced so far, was compared with modern brown and polar bear specimens.