dinosaurs
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Central Park’s Rare Snowy Owl Visitor Shows Why We Must Conserve Land Everywhere
Central Park is prime bird real estate, and on Wednesday, a prime bird showed up. Birders flocked to the park to check out a snowy owl, the first recorded sighting of the bird in more than a century in the park. There’s something wildly incongruous about a stark-white owl on a baseball diamond in the heart…
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Seemingly Ordinary Fossils May Be Hiding Some Major Clues to the Past
Paleontologists are lucky to find complete sets of fossilised bones. Sometimes, they get even luckier, finding preserved impressions of delicate features like feathers. Beyond those clues, though, most of the biology of extinct species — their DNA, internal organs, and unique chemistry — has been totally destroyed by the many millions of years that separate…
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Colourful Opal Fossils Point to a Diverse Group of Giant Dinosaurs that Shared Australia’s Terrain
North-central New South Wales today is known for its arid, drought-prone climate. During the Cretaceous period, however, it was a lush coastal floodplain with a high diversity of vertebrates including dinosaurs, crocodiles, turtles and soaring pterosaurs. New insights gleaned from opalised teeth, found near the town of Lightning Ridge, are now helping paint a picture…
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Newly Discovered Mass Extinction Event Triggered the Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Huge volcanic eruptions 233 million years ago pumped carbon dioxide, methane and water vapour into the atmosphere. This series of violent explosions, on what we now know as the west coast of Canada, led to massive global warming. Our new research has revealed that this was a planet-changing mass extinction event that killed off many…