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#paleobiology
sinosauropteryxjuice · 11 months
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Short post of paleontologists absolutely slaying photo shoots with their discoveries. Please add more such images if you have them.
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bogleech · 7 months
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I've never forgotten this bit from Brunching.com's dinosaur reviews back in 2002
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wayward-delver · 1 year
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Creature of the Night: 
“Feathered Dinosaurs aren’t scary,” is false, it’s about how it is presented and nothing is more terrifying than a bitter truth. 
by Jayson Duria/WobblyWorks
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a-mastroeni · 2 months
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Get in the water. It’s perfectly safe.
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nemfrog · 2 months
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Fossilized dragonflies. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. 1953.
Internet Archive
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thicc-astronaut · 1 year
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I get so giddy looking at life restorations of Tiktaalik. Look at this thing. A proper Wet Beast. God’s purest creation. A pioneer and an entrepreneur and the progenitor of all terrestrial vertebrates. Is it a fish? An amphibian? A reptile? Something else entirely? Tiktaalik isn’t going to tell you, it doesn’t owe you an explanation. Tiktaalik is just Tiktaalik. It eats bugs, it lives in the shallows, it likes long walks on the beaches and longer walks in the water. 
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blueiskewl · 4 months
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Gigantic Skull of Prehistoric Sea Monster Found on England’s ‘Jurassic Coast’
The remarkably well-preserved skull of a gigantic pliosaur, a prehistoric sea monster, has been discovered on a beach in the county of Dorset in southern England, and it could reveal secrets about these awe-inspiring creatures.
Pliosaurs dominated the oceans at a time when dinosaurs roamed the land. The unearthed fossil is about 150 million years old, almost 3 million years younger than any other pliosaur find. Researchers are analyzing the specimen to determine whether it could even be a species new to science.
Originally spotted in spring 2022, the fossil, along with its complicated excavation and ongoing scientific investigation, are now detailed in the upcoming BBC documentary “Attenborough and the Jurassic Sea Monster,” presented by legendary naturalist Sir David Attenborough, that will air February 14 on PBS.
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Such was the enormous size of the carnivorous marine reptile that the skull, excavated from a cliff along Dorset’s “Jurassic Coast,” is almost 2 meters (6.6 feet) long. In its fossilized form, the specimen weighs over half a metric ton. Pliosaurs species could grow to 15 meters (50 feet) in length, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The fossil was buried deep in the cliff, about 11 meters (36 feet) above the ground and 15 meters (49 feet) down the cliff, local paleontologist Steve Etches, who helped uncover it, said in a video call.
Extracting it proved a perilous task, one fraught with danger as a crew raced against the clock during a window of good weather before summer storms closed in and the cliff eroded, possibly taking the rare and significant fossil with it.
Etches first learned of the fossil’s existence when his friend Philip Jacobs called him after coming across the pliosaur’s snout on the beach. Right from the start, they were “quite excited, because its jaws closed together which indicates (the fossil) is complete,” Etches said.
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After using drones to map the cliff and identify the rest of the pliosaur’s precise position, Etches and his team embarked on a three-week operation, chiseling into the cliff while suspended in midair.
“It’s a miracle we got it out,” he said, “because we had one last day to get this thing out, which we did at 9:30 p.m.”
Etches took on the task of painstakingly restoring the skull. There was a time he found “very disillusioning” as the mud, and bone, had cracked, but “over the following days and weeks, it was a case of …, like a jigsaw, putting it all back. It took a long time but every bit of bone we got back in.”
It’s a “freak of nature” that this fossil remains in such good condition, Etches added. “It died in the right environment, there was a lot of sedimentation … so when it died and went down to the seafloor, it got buried quite quickly.”
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Fearsome top predator of the seas
The nearly intact fossil illuminates the characteristics that made the pliosaur a truly fearsome predator, hunting prey such as the dolphinlike ichthyosaur. The apex predator with huge razor-sharp teeth used a variety of senses, including sensory pits still visible on its skull that may have allowed it to detect changes in water pressure, according to the documentary.
The pliosaur had a bite twice as powerful as a saltwater crocodile, which has the world’s most powerful jaws today, according to Emily Rayfield, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom who appeared in the documentary. The prehistoric marine predator would have been able to cut into a car, she said.
Andre Rowe, a postdoctoral research associate of paleobiology at the University of Bristol, added that “the animal would have been so massive that I think it would have been able to prey effectively on anything that was unfortunate enough to be in its space.”
By Issy Ronald.
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incognitopolls · 6 months
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Images are from Nobu Tamura and Nevermind 08, respectively, via Wikimedia Commons.
We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.
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makairodonx · 24 days
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Spinosaurus aegyticus hunts for Onchopristis 95 million years ago in what is now the Kem Kem Beds of Morocco
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anomallite · 1 year
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In the morning rain
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pocketseizure · 10 months
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sturgeonposting · 4 months
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May I receive a sturgeon in these trying times? Any sturgeon!
African Sturgeon
If you know anything about Acipenseriformes you might be thinking, “but sturgeonposting, there ARE no sturgeons in Africa!” And you would be right — if you only counted live sturgeon. In November of 2022, however, David Martill discovered a fossilized sturgeon scute at a well known dig site in Morocco. Martill, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Portsmouth, recognized the fossil as that of a sturgeon immediately. The fossil is currently believed to be from the Upper Cretaceous period. This is a groundbreaking discovery on the front of sturgeon evolution as it suggests that they once swam in the waters around supercontinent Gondwana, of which Africa was a part — waters that were, until last year, considered too warm to support a sturgeon population.
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Here’s the paper if anyone wants it
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bogleech · 7 months
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TOP TEN DINOSAURUSES
maybe you're wondering my most tenned favorite dinosauruses??? The science study of dinasacacers is called "dinosaurusology" by leading experts like myself, and it is constantly changing as we make new uncoveries almost every tuesday when we find new bones in my cousin rob's garage (he hasn't thrown anything out since the 90's!) As such bear in mind that up to two facts I am about to share could become dated over the course of the next century, however as both the king and queen of science this will only be true if I'm still available to approve the new facts. If I'm dead or kind of tired then nobody will ever know what's true anymore so you should be nice to me. #10: OVIRAPTOR
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OVIRAPTOR was a good model for what all dinosacans were like: it was a wrinkly lizard that slithered in filthy dirt and had difficulty standing upright because its bones were made of rocks. This is why we have the term "the stone age," so be grateful you're living in "the bone age!" Oviraptor's name means "eggs velociraptor" because it was a kind of velociraptor that stole eggs. It didn't know what to do with them because nobody invented cooking yet and raw dinosaur eggs were disgusting, so every oviraptor starved to death.
#9: IGUANADON
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This was the last known photograph of IGUANA DON (not to be confused with his cousin iguana dan) when george washington invented photographs 2 million years ago. Don was an ugly disgusting hilarious lizard monster with one horn on its nose and he died because he evolved a dining room in his torso exactly the right size for 21 cavemen to walk in and eat his kidneys. This was not helped by don's instinct to sleep on a big porch under a chandelier.
#9 DIMETRODON
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DIMETRODON was the most common dinosaur of jurassic, which was the fifth and final era of dinosaurs after the ice age but before the ediacaran. In fact dimetrodon was the very last dinosaur to ever exist on earth before they were all eaten to death by the ediacaran's dominant predator: a species of swirly looking weird rock. Nobody knows why these swirly looking weird rocks died out, but it's most likely because dimetrodon was so poisonous from its diet of entirely pufferfish. You can tell it was a sea dinosaur because of its fish fin! #8: PTERADACTYL
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PTERODACTYL was a regular dinosaur until it got married to a species of bat and its bat wife laid a bunch of pterodactyl eggs! This woodcut is however inaccurate: flying would not be invented until president obama discovered the first airplane in 1998, so pterodactyl couldn't possibly have stayed in the air and just immediately fell. The long 900 million year reign of the pterodactyl abruptly ended when the last one finally hit the ground (it took longer in those days because the oxygen disaster made so much more air) #7 SNORKASAURUS
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SNORKASAURUS was completely unique among all dinocaurs by having a really long neck. It was one of the largest creatures to ever roam the earth at over 7 feet tall, or exactly 12 meters to those of you living in Liberia or Myanmar! This is the last known photograph of snorkasaurus, giving birth to the first cavemen. Snorkasaurus went extinct because all of them did this instead of making baby snorkasauruses. This is because like all dinosaurii they had only a tiny peanut for a brain, and nobody was around to give them 'the talk' because that wasn't invented yet.
#6 SMILODON
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SMILODON was a very special dinosaurn because it was the first one to stand up on its hind legs after years of rigorous exercise and weight training. By inventing this new way of walking, Smilodon made it possible for the first monkeys to evolve! This is called "convergent" evolution.
#5 BULBASAUR
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BULBASAUR was a majestic and beautiful species of neopet unfortunately disliked by the scientific community because it is the reason there are no flying dinosuars. Bulbasaur was the first ever flying dyanasar ever invented, 19 billion years ago on September 10, 2001, but the project was discontinued when its first test flight ended in a tragic accident. That's right: on September 11, 2001, Bulbasaur crashed into the stock market, causing the great depression that lead to the civil war :'( now to this very day, flying dinosarers are against the law.
#4 YOSHI
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YOSHI is a type of dinersaulophus called a "bird," which was actually the second attempt by early neanderthal alchemists to manufacture a street legal flying dinnersauran, but the New Zealand government realized if dinophlofbuses can fly, then bats would no longer be special, and since bats are New Zealand's only major export it would have been an economic disaster. The queen of Australia (New Zealand's largest city) ordered the CIA to sand all of the wings off of these early prototype birds. Every bird tragically went extinct when it looked down, noticed how high up it was and remembered it could not fly, activating the effects of Earth's gravitational field.
#3 ANOMALOCARIS
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ANOMALOCARIS was the dinosorcerous that discovered the first primitive cave painting of a modern day crab and invented carcinisation. All the other dinanders laughed at Anomalocaris for wanting to turn into a crab, but guess what??? Every single kind of dinosaur is dead but there's a crab still alive at 29, making it the oldest person in the world. Who's FUCKING laughing now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
#2 EARL SINCLAIR
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This is the last known photograph of Earl Sinclair, seen here as an uncredited extra in "Avatar 3: Lost in New York." Earl Sinclair was a sindonaur species that could disguise itself as a human by putting on sunglasses, a necessary adaptation in order to hide from the largest predator dancasore to ever live: Mellisuga helenae. However, near the end of the coal age, M. Helenae finally remembered that sunglasses hadn't even been invented yet. Look carefully, and you'll notice nobody is wearing sunglasses at all in this scene, making Earl Sinclair stick out like a sore thumb! If you're still having difficulty, here's a zoomed in image of this majestic thunder lizard:
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Unfortunately......this wardrobe malfunction made Mr. Sinclair just as obvious to his ancient enemy, and the last Earl Sinclair's brains were sucked out on September 11, 2001, the darkest day in British history because he was the only one who knew the recipe to chicken mcnuggets (the only british food.) To this day all british people are extinct but you can still see their fossilized skeletons waiting in line at the department of motor vehicles.
#1 CONCAVENATOR
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Concavenator was an Early Cretaceous carcharodontosaurid up to six meters in length with an unusual pointed crest on its back.
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wayward-delver · 10 months
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Prehistoric Planet season 2 just aired and taught me the abject terror being pursued by a flock of giraffe-sized azhdarchid pterosaurs would be. 
(Each large enough swallow a person whole.)
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mindblowingscience · 7 days
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The human brain, it turns out, can be surprisingly resistant to the ravages of time. A new study has cataloged human brains that have been found on the archaeological record around the world and discovered that this remarkable organ resists decomposition far more than we thought – even when the rest of the body's soft tissues have completely melted away.
Continue Reading.
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nemfrog · 1 month
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Fossils of fish fins, showing their evolution. La terre avant le déluge. 1874.
Internet Archive
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