Here's a round-up of some recent Dinosaur News stories you may have missed!
Have a hot dinosaur news tip? Send it to dinosaurs@thestranger.com

archaeopteryx.jpg

Archaeopteryx was probably actually a dinosaur:

Archaeopteryx, widely regarded as being the world's oldest known bird, has just been knocked off its scientific perch, since new research concludes this feathered animal was, in fact, a dinosaur...

..."Epidexipteryx and Epidentrosaurus, two species we described years ago, are probably the most primitive and oldest known birds," lead author Xing Xu told Discovery News, adding that they lived about 160 million years ago at what is now Dahugou Locality in eastern Inner Mongolia.

More here and here and here.

Triceratops discovery supports astroid-impact extinction theory:

A Triceratops may have been the last dinosaur standing, according to a new study that determined a fossil from Montana's Hell Creek Formation is "the youngest dinosaur known to science."...

"Our paper suggests that dinosaurs did not go extinct prior to the impact," lead author Tyler Lyson told Discovery News. "The fact that this dinosaur is so close to the K-T boundary lends support to the idea that they went extinct as a result of a meteorite impact."

More here and here.

And finally, adorable baby ankylosaur discovered in Maryland:

The latest find to be announced, just published in the Journal of Paleontology, offers some insight into what armored dinosaurs looked like shortly after they hatched from their eggs...

[Ray] Stanford [who discovered the fossil] and colleagues have given this tiny dinosaur a name: Propanoplosaurus marylandicus. The name is a tribute to the fact that the arrangement of skull bones in the small specimen closely resembles that seen in Panoplosaurus, which was a later armored dinosaur that belonged to a subgroup called the nodosaurids. Nodosaurids lacked the famous tail clubs seen in some other ankylosaurs, but the backs of many species were decked with arrays of spiky armor.

Standford points out in his comment on this story that the nodosaur is "the only dinosaur hatchling of any kind ever reported from the eastern USA." AWESOME. Stanford's study is here, and a Baltimore Sun article that includes a great image of the fossil is here.