The Dinosaur Museum News

Canadian researchers have made CT scans of several Ankylosaur tails to try to estimate how effective a weapon the tail club was. The scans were then combined and with the length of the dinosaur’s backbone and the data was fed into three dimensional computer modelling. The scientists reckon that an Ankylosaurus could swing its tail in a hundred degree arc and that the impact of a large club could crush bone. The tail club was composed of tightly interlocking vertebrae with a large bony ball at the end.
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A giant origami dinosaur has been created in Tokyo to celebrate the Dinosaur Expo 2009 being held in Japan. The Spinosaurus was formed from 25 metres of paper and required many adult and children volunteers to assist in its creation. Its creator Kazuya Matsumoto believes that it is the biggest origami dinosaur in the world. It needed a crane to lift the finished dinosaur into place. Continue Reading…

Palaeontologists have made an amazing find of a plesiosaur – a marine reptile – with 289 stones in its stomach. The discovery of the Dolichorhynchops was made in southern Utah. The stomach stones, or gastroliths, were used to help grind up food for digestion. Some dinosaurs like the sauropods used stomach stones as well, and in a similar way birds swallow grit to help break up their food.
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August Bank Holiday weekend means the Great Dinosaur Hunt is happening at the award winning Dinosaur Museum in Dorchester. The event involves the whole museum and lets children explore and search out the answers to the clues of the dinosaur mystery. The Great Dinosaur Hunt starts on Saturday 29 August and ends on Bank Holiday Monday 31 August.
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Visitors to Dorchester’s award winning Dinosaur Museum were thrilled to meet bestselling novelist Tracy Chevalier when she launched her new book Remarkable Creatures at the Museum on Tuesday 25th August.

Tracy, whose best-selling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring became an equally popular film spends a lot of her time in Dorset. Inspiration for her books often comes quite unexpectedly, in the case of the Girl with a Pearl Earring it was from one of Vermeer’s paintings, while her latest book, Remarkable Creatures was inspired by a trip to the Dinosaur Museum in Dorchester. 

“There was a gallery devoted to Mary Anning, who I’d never heard of. I was immediately drawn in, says Chevalier, “I always have Continue Reading…

Best selling author of the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, Tracy Chevalier was inspired to write her new novel ‘Remarkable Creatures’ during a visit to the Dinosaur Museum in Dorchester. Her latest novel focuses on the story of Mary Anning – a fossil hunter from Lyme Regis who lived in the early part of the 19th century. She was very much a woman in a man’s world, but despite this discovered the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur at the age of 11.
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The very first footprints of a pterosaur in the action of landing have been found in south-western France. The 140 million year old prints were discovered on Pterosaur Beach, so named because of the number of the flying reptile footprints found there. The pterosaur landed by first putting down its back feet and dragging its toes. Then it hopped into the air before again landing on its rear feet. It then lowered its wings so that its “hands” touched the ground and walked off on all fours.
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A new discovery in Spain has revealed one of the last dinosaurs that lived before the mass extinction 65 million years ago. The hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, was muscular and able to swim and has been named Arenysaurus ardevoli. It was discovered in the Pyrenees Mountains and it is thought that it would have been about 5 to 6 metres in length.
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Two new meat-eating dinosaurs have been discovered in the Sahara desert. The first is called Eocarcharia dinops, meaning ‘fierce-eyed dawn shark’, and was an ancestor of the even more fierce Carcharodontosaurus. It was about the size of an elephant and had sharp, blade-like teeth for tearing into its prey. The second species had smaller teeth and was more suited to scavenging dead animals. Paul Sereno and his team have called this dinosaur Kryptops palaios, or ‘old hidden face’, because of the horny covering on its snout that probably helped it dig for carrion.
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New research suggests that T rex, the king of the dinosaurs, hunted mainly for young and baby dinosaurs. Forget the idea of T rex attacking other large adult dinosaurs, this would now seem to be a rarity rather than the norm. Instead Tyrannosaurus rex concentrated on small, juvenile and baby dinosaurs and preferred to eat them whole or in large chunks. This allowed it to digest the minerals and nutrients stored in the bones as well the associated flesh of the dinosaur.
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