A small feathered dinosaur from China's Liaoning province, about 120 million years old, suggests the flight equipment of birds and their closest relatives evolved separately.
Paleontologists have long tried to explain how the carbon isotopes of some dinosaur's teeth were so much higher than others. They have recently solved this dietary puzzle.
Scientists have identified a giant new dinosaur from a construction site in Brazil that reached about 20 meters long and lived 120 million years ago. Its surprising evolutionary ties to a Spanish dinosaur suggest its ancestors crossed ancient land connections between Europe, Africa, and South America.
Imagine the Western Plains of North America, from Texas to Alaska, submerged under a broad, shallow seaway. To the west lay the ancestral Rocky Mountains. To the east were low-lying plains traversed by large, sluggish rivers.
The first thing that the expedition team found in peeking from the rocks and sands of the Gobi Desert was a tiny tip of a large pelvis. The international team descended on the exposed fossil, and chipped and brushed away to reveal more and more bones. Eventually, they exposed an exceptionally rare find: the virtually complete skeleton of a new dinosaur species.
