Did you know that dinosaur bones contain growth rings, like the rings in tree trunks, which reveal yearly periods of rapid and slow growth? Or that sauropods, the largest known dinosaurs, probably survived on a diet of plants? This is your chance to learn about dinosaurs — and to tweet all about it!
Join us on Thursday, March 3, at 6 pm for the Museum’s next tweetup, which will focus on some of the most fascinating animals ever to walk the Earth. Learn about dinosaurs, meet paleontologists, go behind the scenes to see how fossils are stored, and get a sneak preview of The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, a new exhibition that opens April 16. Enjoy refreshments in the Museum’s famous fossil halls and meet other @AMNH followers and staff.
Visit the registration page to sign up today. The Museum will notify all selected participants on February 23. The Museum’s January tweetup focused on Brain: The Inside Story. To learn more, check out these photos or read this post.
Looking for the perfect way to fit a dinosaur under the tree?
Today, the American Museum of Natural History launched DINOSAURS iPAD:The American Museum of Natural History Collections, the Museum’s first app designed specifically for the iPad. DINOSAURS: iPAD expands on the Museum’s inaugural app, DINOSAURS:The American Museum of Natural History Collectionsfor iPhone® and iPod®, by offering even more in-depth information and larger images of eight favorite dinosaurs: Allosaurus, Anatotitan, Apatosaurus, Edmontosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus, Protoceratops Stegosaurus, and Styracosaurus, as well as accounts of their discovery by such famed dinosaur hunters as Barnum Brown, Walter Granger, and Peter Kaisen. Over time, the app will be updated with new chapters to cover all 36 dinosaurs in the Museum’s collection.
DINOSAURS: iPAD also features an opening screen mosaic of nearly 1,000 separate high-resolution images and unique social networking functionality, encouraging aspiring paleontologists of all ages to explore the Museum’s world-famous fossil collection and to engage in real-time conversations with other users from home, in the field, or in the classroom.
The latest in a series of apps that highlight the Museum’s storied collections and bring its world-class holdings to a global audience, DINOSAURS: iPAD can be purchased for $2.99 at the iTunes Store. All proceeds will directly benefit the Museum’s scientific and educational programs.
DINOSAURS iPAD is also a fun, interactive way to expand and refresh dinosaur knowledge in advance of the Museum’s major new exhibition, The World’s Largest Dinosaurs (April 16, 2011–January 2, 2012), which will take visitors beyond the bones and into the amazing anatomy of a uniquely super-sized group of dinosaurs who thrived for 140 million years: the long-necked and long-tailed sauropods, which ranged in size from 15 to 150 feet long. With innovative, interactive exhibits–including a life-sized, detailed model of a 60-foot Mamenchisaurus–The World’s Largest Dinosaurs will draw on the latest science to take visitors inside these giants’ bodies and answer the intriguing questions of how such extremely large animals breathed, ate, moved, and survived.
On Friday, October 22, two of the American Museum of Natural History’s Moveable Museums — 37-foot-long customized recreational vehicles outfitted as mobile exhibition spaces with specimens, videos, and interactive activities — made their way to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for a two-day science Expo, the culmination of the inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival.
The Expo featured some 550 science and engineering companies, museums, science centers, colleges and universities, and 200 K–12 schools presenting more than 1,500 free, hands-on activities and over 75 stage shows featuring scientists, celebrities, magicians, jugglers, rappers, and more.
Reconstruction of cat-sized stem dinosaur Prorotodactylus isp. found in Stryczowice, Poland that was a quadruped with a dinosaur-like gait and orientation of the toes.
A researcher affiliated with the Museum has just described the oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage: 250 million year-old fossilized tracks that are a few centimeters long.
“The oldest dinosaurs and their immediate relatives were small and rare,” says Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student affiliated with the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History.
Just one or two million years after the massive Permian-Triassic extinction, a four-legged animal smaller than a house cat walked across fine mud in what is now central Poland. The prints of Prorotodactylus isp. show distinctive dinosaur-like features, including three prominent central toes parallel in alignment. The back edge of the print is straight, evidence of the simple hinged ankle that distinguishes dinosaurs from relatives like lizards and crocodiles.
The paper also describes 246-million-year-old Sphingopus isp. footprints, the oldest evidence of a bipedal and large-bodied dinosaur. This trackway–from a different but nearby site–may be the earliest evidence of moderately large-bodied and bipedal true dinosaurs. These tracks are larger at 15 centimeters long.
“The biggest crisis in the history of life also created one of the greatest opportunities in the history of life by emptying the landscape and making it possible for dinosaurs to evolve,” says Brusatte.
For more information, please see the official press release.
Near the Holy Cross Mountains of Poland where the oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage is found are the three authors of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper (l to r): Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki, Stephen Brusatte, and Richard Butler. Credit: Marian Dziewiński
T. rex teeth on display in the Museum. Credit: D. Finnin
We’ve all heard this story — about 65 million years ago several large-headed, tiny-armed, bipedal predators, like Tyrannosaurus rex and Tarbosaurus, dominated Asia and North America.
But a decade of new fossil discoveries that have more than doubled the number of known tyrannosaur species has changed this tale. Older and smaller tyrannosaurs have made the evolutionary tree of this group richer and more complex. Furthermore, a series of innovative research projects on topics like bone growth and biomechanics have added an enormous amount of information about tyrannosaurs, so much so that the group could now be considered an exemplar for studying many themes in paleontology research. A new paper describing recent research and a new evolutionary tree appears in Science this week.
“We know more about tyrannosaurs than any other group of dinosaurs—even more than some groups of living organisms,” says Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History.
“T. rex is the most iconic of all dinosaurs,” says Mark Norell, curator in the Division of Paleontology at the Museum. “The work on tyrannosaurs underscores how much can be done using modern techniques to understand the biology of fossil organisms. Many of us in the field now look at ourselves as biologists who just happen to work on dinosaurs.”
