Shaena Montanari, a graduate student in the Museum’s Richard Gilder Graduate School, has carried out fieldwork in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. Photo courtesy of Shaena Montanari. Click to enlarge.
Fourth-year Richard Gilder Graduate School (RGGS) doctoral student Shaena Montanari uses her geology training and subtle clues left by dinosaurs to reconstruct the environment of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert as it was 70 million years ago. Based on an innovative approach that takes cues from the geochemistry of dinosaur eggshells, Montanari’s latest findings—that late in the Mesozoic “age of the dinosaurs” the Gobi desert was a much wetter and warmer place than today—were presented this week at a poster session of the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
Montanari is a member of the inaugural 2008 RGGS class in comparative biology. In 2006, the American Museum of Natural History became the first museum in the Western Hemisphere with the authority to grant the Ph.D. degree. Montanari, who received her undergraduate degree in geological sciences from the University of North Carolina, is planning to graduate from RGGS next year. Read more »
In a corner of the exhibition The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, an elegant wire outline of the head of Diplodocus longus, a sauropod that lived in the Late Jurassic period about 156 million years ago, anchors a fascinating fossil: one half of a bony braincase, its interior carefully color-coded to denote various functional structures once within it.
One’s first impression is how very small the brain must have been, especially given that the brain itself probably took up about only 70 percent of the bony case, with protective outer layers called meninges taking up the other 30 percent. Despite the dinosaur’s massive size—it was 80 feet long and weighed 20,000 pounds—its brain weighed about 4 ounces. By comparison, the average adult human brain weighs 48 ounces. Read more »
There’s new evidence that dinosaurs, once thought to resemble scaly lizards, were in fact fluffy, colorful animals. In the video below, Curator Mark Norell, who is chair of the Museum’s Division of Paleontology and studies important feathered dinosaurs from Liaoning, China, shares his thoughts on the significance of two new studies about fossilized feathers reported in the current issue of Science magazine.
If you missed the live Twitter chat with Dr. Mark Norell about fossilized feathers on Friday, Sept. 16, click here to read the discussion. Add your own comments using the hashtag#DinoFeathers.
The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, goes beyond traditional fossil shows to reveal how dinosaurs actually lived by taking visitors into the amazing biology of a uniquely super-sized group of dinosaurs: the long-necked and long-tailed sauropods, which ranged in size from 15 to 150 feet long.
In this video, go behind the scenes with The World’s Largest Dinosaurs curators Mark Norell and Martin Sander and as they explain the science behind the exhibition. Learn how dinosaur fossils are stored and cataloged from Carl Mehling, a scientific assistant at the Museum.
On Wednesday, September 29, the American Museum of Natural History reopened the famous display featuring the skeletons of two long-time combatants—an Allosaurus and a towering Barosaurus protecting her young—after a separation process that began in early August. The reopening introduced a new feature to this iconic display: an eight-foot-wide pathway that allows visitors to walk between the dinosaurs for the first time.
For nearly two months, the Barosaurus, which soars 100 feet above the floor,and Allosaurus in the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda had been surrounded by scaffolding while necessary structural work was performed. By cutting a swath through the fiberglass and steel platform which forms the bottom of the mount, the Museum has provided visitors with a fascinating new perspective on these two old favorites.
