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Those in the "birds are dinosaurs" camp will not be surprised at new evidence of migratory sauropods. A study of Camarasaurus teeth strongly suggests that the animals moved around seasonally:

Palaeontologists have long suspected that some dinosaurs migrated, but this is the first solid evidence of it, says Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London. Camarasaurus must have put a lot of pressure on food resources, so it makes sense that they moved around. Barrett suspects rarer sauropods such as Haplocanthosaurus didn't need to migrate.

And if the herbivores are migrating, the carnivores probably are as well:

When modern herbivores migrate, they are followed by predators, so the same may have happened in the Jurassic. The most common local predator was Allosaurus, a distant cousin of T. Rex. Fricke is trying to find out if they tracked Camarasaurus. It would make sense if they did: "A mass migration," says Barrett, "is basically a huge walking supermarket."

More on this story here, here and here.

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It's really not a good interview, but it's the first one that came up on YouTube, and the books talked about are the good ones, and the lines the interviewer quotes are good ones (with close-ups of the paragraphs! SWOON!), and after 11:50 minutes of stilted, hilarious example upon stilted, hilarious example of why great writers should never do television—seriously, just read the essays—the interviewer LITERALLY says: "Joan Didion is going to be with us for three hours today."

If you listen closely—even though she's not onscreen—you can hear Joan Didion's heart stop.

First, you may remember me talking about the Dinosaur Mailing List... I thought you might enjoy their discussion of Terra Nova. Spoiler: these same folks who are stoked about JP4 are less excited about TN. (following the discussion is slightly convoluted, to read the next reply you'll want to click "Next by thread")

Second, Slog-tipper Tracy sent this article about a sweet art show in Anchorage, AK: Dinosaurs & Robots! Thanks, Tracy!!

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FIRST: Dinosaur feathers found in amber! (YES, Cienna mentioned last month in The Morning News, but I'm repeating because I didn't get a chance to post about it at the time and OMG-dino-feathers!)

[P]aleontologists have found 70-million-year-old amber preserving 11 specimens showing a wide diversity of feather types at that time.

One specimen of so-called proto-feathers had a single bristlelike filament and some simple clusters. Others were complex structures with hooklike barbules that act like Velcro; in modern birds, this keeps feathers in place during dives. Still other specimens revealed feather patterns for flight and underwater diving.

Preserved pigment cells encased in the amber, along with other evidence, suggested that the feathered animals had an array of mottled patterns and diffuse colors like modern birds...

More articles on the dino-feathers here, here, here and here.

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Here's a round-up of some recent Dinosaur News stories you may have missed!
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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.

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You guys: screw kittens, baby hippos, and corgi puppies. THIS is the cutest animal post EVER!

An adorable juvenile theropod skeleton was discovered in Bavaria, and seriously, click the link, it is freakin' CUTE.

Originally reported in the German newspaper Der Spiegel and later mentioned by the Nature news blog, the new specimen is a nearly complete juvenile theropod dinosaur. Even better, traces of skin and possible feathers can be seen on the fossil. Contrary to those reports, though, the specimen is geologically older than the 135 million years attributed to it in the press. The geological and preservational qualities of the fossil look identical to those from the famous Jurassic limestones that have yielded so many other exceptional fossils.

I wanna get that baby tattooed on my shoulder. SQUEEEE!

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• "Check it, bitches! I killed this muthafucka and made a sculpture out of his bones. You wanna piece of this?"

UPDATE 1: Apparently no ancient krakens made self-portraits with shonisaur bones, and the guy who came up with this theory is a nutter. According to this article:

This "Triassic kraken" has not been found; no fossils, no remains at all, no evidence of its existence. It is postulated to have been large enough to hunt and kill ichthyosaurs, which is remarkable—comparison to modern giant squid is invalid, since they are prey, not predator. This fossil bed is being over-interpreted as a trace fossil, with the bones arranged by intent, by an intelligent cephalopod, which they have not seen. Furthermore, a line of discs is being seen as a picture of a cephalopod tentacle, classic pareidolia. This is trivial: dump a pile of Necco wafers on a table, and I'll see a picture of squid suckers. This is a whole series of tenuous and unlikely speculations stacked together to make an ultimately ridiculous hypothesis.

More "facts" and shit here. Whatever. Thanks for ruining my day, ACTUAL science. *SOB*

Original post after the jump.

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Who will win? Lando Calrissian riding an Allosaurus or Lego Darth Vader riding a Triceratops? Show your work.

Have a tip for Dinosaur News? Send it to dinosaurs@thestranger.com!

"The point is... you are alive when they start to eat you. So you know... try to show a little respect."

Raptor from Tal Moskovich on Vimeo.

via.

Greetings, dino-nerds!!! In celebration of the Jimmy Hendricks Manpurse Happy Hour, today marks the triumphant return of Dinosaur News (which has been on hiatus cuz I was busy watching Misfits and stuff!) Please read up and be prepared to discuss.

Here are some bits of news sent to me by you, Slog-tippers! Thank you as always!! (Have a dino-tip? Send it to dinosaurs@thestranger.com!)

Slog-tipper Bill invites us to meet the Dorset pliosaur:

The beast, which is called a pliosaur, has been described as the most fearsome predator the Earth has seen.

The fossil was found in Dorset, but it has taken 18 months to remove the skull from its rocky casing, revealing the monster in remarkable detail.

Scientists suspect the creature, which is on show at the Dorset County Museum, may be a new species or even genus.

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This is not a(n intentional) joke.

And I say this in full agreement with Charles's post of yesterday.

Thanks, Slog-tipper Vic!

I can almost never stand the use of the word, which Merriam-Webster defines as:

carried to the utmost point or highest degree : absolute, total

Maybe it's the people who use it too much that bothers me. Or maybe because it reminds me of udders. Either way:

• Natural History Museum
• The badass Baryonyx may be related to the new Australian speciman. Click the above thumbnail to see the full image.

A 5cm-wide (2in) fossil may have something big to say about how dinosaurs ranged across the Earth.

The 125-million-year-old neck vertebra belonged to a spinosaurid - an animal with a crocodile-like snout that it probably used to prey on fish.

The specimen is the first such dinosaur identified in Australia but one that is nearly identical to a UK creature.

More about the discovery here and here!

No, say all the articles on this topic, we can't build a dinosaur from dino-DNA extracted from a mosquito trapped in amber. In fact, we can't build a true dinosaur at all. But paleontologist Jack Horner has been working on a project that's still pretty awesome:

But even though we didn't find DNA in an extinct dinosaur, I decided to see if we could retro-engineer a living dinosaur — all birds are living dinosaurs — and make it look like an extinct dinosaur.

That quote is from his recent TED talk, which can be viewed here along with a transcript. You can read more about the Chickensaurus project here and here and here.

After the jump: tinosaurs and disappointment.

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• rohfilmverleih/film still from "Catapult"
• I guess a ferris wheel killed the dinosaurs. Or made them sleepy.

Second, Jack Horner (rock-star paleontologist) discusses duplicates in our labeling of dinosaurs in his TED talk, which the Smithsonian posted on their dinosaur blog:

Over the past several years, Horner has been picking over the skeletons of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs from North America in an attempt to figure out whether some of the dinosaurs labeled as distinct species are actually growth stages of a single species.

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Slog-reader Dan Rouse has made this gorgeous dinosaur quilt! Above is just a detail, click through to see the whole thing and read about his process, as well as see his other quilts. The quilt is now available for sale on Etsy.

Thanks so much for sharing this with us, Dan!

Today's news comes via the Dinosaur Mailing List!

Are you aware that Iceland has its own names for dinosaurs?! I was not aware! Apparently, "There are a whole bunch named after gods and goddesses (Apatosaurus/Þórseðla, Maiasaura/Freyjueðla)". A (short) blog entry about it is here.

According to the rest of the thread on the DML, the Chinese and the Swedes also translate the Latin/Greek names into their native tongue.

So there you go. The More You Know®