The Dinosaur Museum News

The award winning Dinosaur Museum has launched a new competition in conjunction with Dorling Kindersley the publisher of superb children’s books. During October visitors to the museum can enter the competition for the chance of winning a fantastic prize.
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Xu Xing, a Chinese palaeontologist has presented information about Anchiornis huxleyi, a spectacularly preserved feathered dinosaur, at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology in Bristol. Two specimens of Anchiornis have been discovered and they have plumage covering the arms, feet and tail in a four winged arrangement. This feathered dinosaur has been classified as a Troodontid, a bird-like group of theropods. Continue Reading…

In May this year the science world was rocked by the news of Ida, one of the most complete primate fossils ever found. Scientists believe that it is a unique missing link between our evolutionary branch of life and the rest of the animal kingdom. Nicknamed Ida, she was originally discovered in 1983 at the world renowned fossil site of Messel, in Germany. It was not until 20 years later that Dr Jorn Hurum of Oslo’s University’s Natural History Museum took possession of the fossil and assembled an international team to study it.
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For the first time in its 69 year history the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology is meeting outside of the USA. The society started with just 34 members in 1940 and now has over 2000 worldwide. This reflects both the diversity of palaeontological finds and their worldwide nature. Continue Reading…

Work on the new Weymouth relief road has revealed a huge cutting from the Ridgeway through to the south side of Southdown Ridge, south of Littlemoor. The area has offered up a rich array of fossil finds from a land of 150 million years ago. These range from small insects to bones from Ichthyosaurs, marine reptiles that inhabited the sea during the time of the dinosaurs.
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Discovered by German palaeontologists in the deserts of Niger, this new sauropod is unusual in that it has spines on its tail, similar to those of a Stegosaurus. Consequently the 170 million year old dinosaur from the early Jurassic was named Spinophosaurus nigeris, meaning ‘spiny lizard from the Niger’. This puts the dinosaur right at the early phase of sauropod evolution. Local people from the Tuareg assisted with locating the remains.
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An early prototype of tyrannosaurus rex that lived in the early Cretaceous 125 million years ago, 34 million years earlier than T rex, has been discovered in China. The dinosaur called Raptorex kriegsteini only weighed 68kg but has a large head, powerful jaw and small, weak arms. T rex was about 5 times longer and nearly 100 times heavier than its forbearer. The specimen is of a young adult, about 5 or 6 years old, that is coming to the end of its growth period.
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Customs officials from the USA returned prehistoric fossils to China earlier this week. The fossils are of a partial skull of a Psittacosaurus, 24 dinosaur eggs, and bones from a sabre–toothed tiger. The smuggled fossils were confiscated in Chicago in 2006 after X-ray scans did not match the manifest. The Chinese Consulate resolved Continue Reading…

A new study by Phillip Manning of the University of Manchester suggests that Velociraptor might well have been able to climb trees and perch on branches. Having studied the claws of Velociraptor with x-ray CT scans Manning has made a reproduction of the claws based on those of Continue Reading…

Qiaowanlong kangxii, nicknamed the ‘giraffe of the Mesozoic’ is the first early Cretaceous brachiosaur to be found in China. It lived 100 million years ago, and derives its name from a Chinese emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Emperor Kangxi. There are also allusions to the words “bridge”, “bend in a stream” and Continue Reading…