Exciting news for fans of Flying Dinosaurs, my new book – Weird Dinosaurs: The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew – is coming very soon. Advance copies are hot off the press and have just arrived from my publisher NewSouth. It goes on sale in Australia on 1 November. The US/UK version … [Read more…]
Yi qi – China, Late Jurassic (160 million years ago), described 2015 This astonishing, 60-cm long dinosaur left experts gobsmacked when it was announced in April. A single fossil reveals that its very long fingers had a membrane of skin stretched between them, and attached to its body. This gave it wings akin to … [Read more…]
“I’ve never before assembled a formal end-of-year-list of what I consider to be the best bird books published but, inspired by Ian ‘Birdbooker’ Paulsen’s recent blog piece, “The Best Bird Books of 2014”, I decided to share my bird books choices for this year, too,” says Guardian blogger GrrlScientist. “Ian’s choices are aimed at ornithologists, … [Read more…]
Come along to one of these events to hear Australian Geographic editor John Pickrell talking about all the latest dinosaur science: BENDIGO Spotlight on Flying Dinosaurs 9 August, 12pm, The Hub (next to the Capital). Free entry. Part of the Bendigo Writers Festival. More information. The Truth About Dinosaurs 9 August, 2pm, Discovery Science and … [Read more…]
Last week a new teaser poster for 2015’s Jurassic World (Jurassic Park IV) was released at the Comic-Con event in San Diego, California. It’s a moody looking image featuring a lone and disappointingly featherless Velociraptor (to see what a Velociraptor would really have looked like, click here) It’s caused some ripples of excitement across the … [Read more…]
Do you have backyard chooks? Have you ever looked at them and wondered if they were dinosaurs? New discoveries has found the humble chook, and it’s bird brothers, are closely related to dinosaurs. John Pickrell is the author of Flying Dinosaurs and ABC Central West Presenter Kia Handley spoke with him about this incredible connection
New dinosaur discoveries (such as four-winged Changyuraptor) seem to come nearly every week these days, but few are this exciting. Fossils of a new species from Siberia may be some of the best evidence yet that feathers were not restricted to the carnivorous theropods but were in fact a trait shared by all groups … [Read more…]
Anzu wyliei – United States, Late Cretaceous (66 million years ago), described 2014 From the Hell Creek formation of the Dakotas, Anzu has been described by the Smithsonian Institution and Carnegie Museum scientists who found it as the ‘chicken from hell’ and a cross between an emu and a lizard. Only the second feathered … [Read more…]
The fourth installation of the Jurassic Park movie series, Jurassic World, is being filmed in Hawaii and New Orleans right now, and is due to hit cinemas in June 2015. But the film has courted controversy for a number of reasons, not least for the suggestion that its representations of dinosaurs are inaccurate and … [Read more…]
Source: Information from M Benton (2014), Vertebrate Palaentology, 4th edn, Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell; and personal communication with Professor Mike Benton.