April 24, 2013 | 14 notes

How Do You 3-D Scan a Dinosaur?

Using laser scanners and high-tech computer software, Vince Rossi and Adam Metallo are recreating a digital Dinosaur Hall before it’s dismantled.

Ed note: Ultimately, Rossi and Metallo dream of digitizing all 137 million of the objects in the Smithsonian’s collections. More on the “Laser Cowboys.”

December 5, 2012 | 162 notes

reuters: Researchers have found what could be the earliest known dinosaur to walk the Earth lurking in the corridors of London’s Natural History Museum. A mysterious fossil specimen that has been in the museum’s collection for decades has now been identified as most likely coming from a dinosaur that lived about 245 million years ago - 10 to 15 million years earlier than any previously discovered examples. The creature was about the size of a Labrador dog and has been named Nyasasaurus parringtoni after southern Africa’s Lake Nyasa, today called Lake Malawi, and Cambridge University’s Rex Parrington, who collected the specimen at a site near the lake in the 1930s.READ ON: Earliest known dinosaur discovered 

reuters:

Researchers have found what could be the earliest known dinosaur to walk the Earth lurking in the corridors of London’s Natural History Museum.

A mysterious fossil specimen that has been in the museum’s collection for decades has now been identified as most likely coming from a dinosaur that lived about 245 million years ago - 10 to 15 million years earlier than any previously discovered examples.

The creature was about the size of a Labrador dog and has been named Nyasasaurus parringtoni after southern Africa’s Lake Nyasa, today called Lake Malawi, and Cambridge University’s Rex Parrington, who collected the specimen at a site near the lake in the 1930s.

READ ON: Earliest known dinosaur discovered 

June 19, 2012 | 47 notes

reuters: U.S. authorities filed a lawsuit seeking to return to Mongolia a 70-million-year-old piece of its cultural heritage - fangs and all. The skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus bataar - a smaller Asian cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex - has been the subject of a months-long legal battle and is now being sought by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who announced the federal government’s lawsuit on Monday. Bharara seeks the forfeiture of the skeleton from Heritage Auctions of Texas, the auction company that sold it for more than $1 million last month to an undisclosed buyer, Bharara said in a statement. He vowed to return the skeleton to Mongolia, where it was originally “looted from the Gobi Desert.” “A piece of the country’s natural history was stolen with it, and we look forward to returning it to its rightful place,” Bharara said. READ MORE: U.S. sues to return Tyrannosaurus skeleton to Mongolia PHOTO: A worker looks at a replica of a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil on display for “The Dinosaur Expo 2011” exhibition at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo June 21, 2011. [REUTERS/Toru Hanai]

reuters:

U.S. authorities filed a lawsuit seeking to return to Mongolia a 70-million-year-old piece of its cultural heritage - fangs and all.

The skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus bataar - a smaller Asian cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex - has been the subject of a months-long legal battle and is now being sought by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who announced the federal government’s lawsuit on Monday.

Bharara seeks the forfeiture of the skeleton from Heritage Auctions of Texas, the auction company that sold it for more than $1 million last month to an undisclosed buyer, Bharara said in a statement. He vowed to return the skeleton to Mongolia, where it was originally “looted from the Gobi Desert.”

“A piece of the country’s natural history was stolen with it, and we look forward to returning it to its rightful place,” Bharara said.

READ MORE: U.S. sues to return Tyrannosaurus skeleton to Mongolia

PHOTO: A worker looks at a replica of a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil on display for “The Dinosaur Expo 2011” exhibition at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo June 21, 2011. [REUTERS/Toru Hanai]

April 6, 2012 | 18 notes

Meet Yutyrannus, the Most Cuddly Dinosaur Ever Thanks to the fine preservation of three skeletons that represent this roughly 125-million-year-old carnivore, we know that much of this dinosaur’s body was covered in fine, wispy feathers. These were not flight feathers or down that you might see on a modern bird, but simpler structures best described as dino-fuzz. Illustration by Brian Choo. Caption added by Brian Switek Ed note: Check out our entire section titled, “Birds are Dinosaurs.”

Meet Yutyrannus, the Most Cuddly Dinosaur Ever

Thanks to the fine preservation of three skeletons that represent this roughly 125-million-year-old carnivore, we know that much of this dinosaur’s body was covered in fine, wispy feathers. These were not flight feathers or down that you might see on a modern bird, but simpler structures best described as dino-fuzz.

Illustration by Brian Choo. Caption added by Brian Switek

Ed note: Check out our entire section titled, “Birds are Dinosaurs.”