10.
Pack Hunters One of the most infamous types of dinosaur
in history just got a lot more interesting.
The legendary tyrannosaur wasn't only a voracious killer of other dinosaurs, but apparently
a pack animal.
The new discovery of an ancient tyrannosaur mass grave has revealed that these prehistoric
predators likely hunted in packs.
It wasn't just one gigantic tyrannosaur that would have tracked down its victim, but four
or five of them together, working like modern wolves.
The discovery came in the form of a group of teratophoneus fossils.
The name translates roughly to monstrous murderer.
And although these ancient dinosaurs aren't as popular as their relatives the tyrannosaurus
rex, they were still tyrannosaurs.
And judging by how many of them were discovered fossilized in sediment from 76 million years
ago in the desert of Utah, they liked to hang out in a gang.
They were essentially giant lizards with teeth like steak knives that hunted in packs!
Paleontologist Alan Titus says the teratophoneus got together to form mobs, with each member
having a specialized role in the group.
But keep in mind the only evidence we have of this comes from a single pile of bones.
First a single ankle bone was found in the rock formation in Utah, then a whole pile
of bones.
Either a whole group of these monsters died coincidentally in the exact same place, or
a cataclysmic event killed them all at the same time while they were roaming in a murderous
clique looking for fresh meat.
9.
The Armless Dinosaur A new dinosaur was discovered in Argentina
with some very unusual characteristics.
Actually, it had one characteristic specifically that is highly unusual.
This dinosaur ran around with pretty much no arms!
We're all familiar with the T. rex and its stubby little arms.
But the newly named Guemesia ochoai had even smaller arms!
Researchers believe it's the closest known relative to armless dinosaurs that dominated
the southern hemisphere 70 million years ago.
A single, only partially complete skull was found in Argentina, dating back to the Late
Cretaceous period.
It was a species of abelisaurid, and it was dramatically different from others of its
kind in Africa and India.
The abelisaurid, despite the fact it had tiny nubs for arms, was so ferocious that it could
take down dinosaurs much larger than itself, like the titanosaur.
What's really weird is that their arms were essentially useless.
Researchers are still trying to figure out why the creature even had the tiny arms at
all.
And to make this dinosaur even more bizarre, it had a very small brain.
I'm not saying that to be rude, it really did.
Researchers say it had a remarkably small brain case, about 70% smaller than its relatives.
It had a minuscule brain, arms that didn’t work, yet a jaw so powerful it could kill
things nearly twice its size!
8.
The Dinosaur with Whale Blubber The ichthyosaur is an ancient prehistoric
monster that lived 150 million years ago.
It looked an awful lot like a dolphin, yet it was deadlier than a shark and crocodile
combined!
This marine reptile swam through the ocean and hunted anything that got near it.
These monsters could grow to be the size of vehicles, and they had jaws filled with teeth
specifically designed for ripping flesh apart.
But here's something scientists just learned.
The ichthyosaur also had a layer of blubber!
There are plenty of modern animals with blubber, like seals and whales.
It's a thick layer of fat under the skin to keep them insulated.
But for the first time in history, scientists from the Natural History Museum in Oslo have
confirmed prehistoric reptiles also had blubber.
The discovery came when studying the remains of an ichthyosaur’s skeleton.
The skeleton was shockingly well preserved, and one of the only complete bone sets ever
found of this type of animal.
Researchers think it died and then floated down to the seafloor, where it came to rest
on its back and was slowly covered over by sediment.
The reason its skeleton was so perfectly preserved was because of its blubber, which covered
all of its body except for its fins and flippers.
This raises the question of just how many other prehistoric marine animals may have
had blubber.
So far, this is the only one we know about.
It was basically a prehistoric killer whale with the appetite of a shark and the insulation
of a walrus. 7.
The Super Long-Necked Dinosaur If you've ever laid in bed at night and wondered
to yourself where dragons came from – or rather, why every ancient culture in the world
invented some form of dragon – you’re in luck.
As it turns out, the myth of the mighty dragon was most likely inspired by the accidental
discovery of long-necked dinosaur bones.
The outrageous suggestion has been put forth by a team of paleontologists with the University
of Alberta Canada.
They recently identified a new species of sauropod with a neck over 22 feet(6.7 m) long,
making up half the length of its entire body.
Its fossil was found in China back in 2006 during construction work, and amazingly still
had its neck attached.
The beast was named Qijianglong, which in English means Dragon of Qijiang.
PhD student Tetsuto Miyashita says that because China is home to the original myth of dragons,
and because so many long-necked dinosaurs have been dug up in the country, it only makes
sense to put two and two together.
It's highly likely that everyone's favorite dragon on Game of Thrones was originally inspired
by prehistoric people in China.
They came across the fossils of long-necked dinosaurs and didn't know what to think of
them.
If there are real bones there must be a real animal lurking around!
Then, over the centuries, the rumor spread, cultures came up with their own versions of
dragons, and the myth persists today.
6.
The Penguin Dino Paleontologists have discovered a dinosaur
unlike anything you’ve ever heard of.
Fossils have revealed a bizarre combination of features that made up this semi-aquatic
monster, a totally new species of prehistoric predator.
It had flippers, killer claws shaped like sickles, and the long skinny neck of a swan.
It’s a relative of the velociraptor, but it lived and hunted primarily in the ocean.
It also has an extremely long and hard to pronounce name: Halszkaraptor escuilliei.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the dinosaur is that it maneuvered in the water
like a penguin!
That's right, you probably had no idea there were other types of raptors that lived in
the water and looked more like penguins than the reptilian beasts from Jurassic Park.
This discovery is actually the first evidence that predatory raptors abandoned dry land
and started looking for food in the water.
The bizarre combination of traits was so unusual that when it was first discovered, professional
paleontologists thought it was a hoax.
It took years for scientists to actually analyze the fossil, and only recently could they announce
their discovery as legitimate.
Dennis Voeten from the European Synchrotron says the penguin dinosaur was presumably amphibious,
yet still capable of walking on land.
It had flat bones and used its limbs to fly underwater just like modern penguins!
It also had an unusual nerve infrastructure in its snout similar to what crocodiles have
that allow them to detect prey while swimming.
5.
Dinosaurs Wagged Their Tails Researchers at the Royal Veterinary College
in London have discovered that much like the way humans swing their arms when they walk,
dinosaurs wagged their tails side to side as they walked.
Using computer simulations to look at how bipedal dinosaurs moved around, researchers
discovered that as dinosaurs ran, their tails likely wagged so that they could keep their
balance.
And in case you didn't know, it's actually the same reason people move their arms when
they walk.
The swinging of our limbs helps to counterbalance our movement and control our momentum.
It’s the same reason things that spin continue to spin until something stops them.
If we ran around without moving our arms, we’d probably fall over!
Unfortunately, the scientists found no evidence that dinosaurs wagged their tails when happy
like dogs do, but it’s still pretty fascinating.
4.
Dino Communication One of the biggest questions that keeps scientists
up at night is this: How did dinosaurs communicate?
Every animal in the world has some way of communicating, and so dinosaurs must have
as well.
They definitely didn't talk to one another, they had no language, but they did have ways
of communicating information.
The truth is that dinosaurs were individual beings just like how every dog is an individual
animal with its own life, its own motives, and its own personality.
One way scientists say dinosaurs communicated is through visual display.
Sauropsids, meaning reptiles and birds, were likely vision oriented.
They could see color and shape better than other animals, and so they communicated using
body language.
As for dinosaurs, they were also pretty visually intuitive.
Prey species of dinosaurs often had eyes on the sides of their heads so that they could
see everything around them.
Whereas species of predators like Tyrannosaurus had giant eyes on their faces looking directly
forward, able to capture the slightest movement.
What you might not know is that the Tyrannosaurus had giant optic lobes that gave them vision
comparable to modern eagles!
Dinosaurs were bright, many of them were covered in feathers, and researchers believe they
primarily communicated in the same way colorful birds do today.
However, there is evidence that some dinosaurs engaged in auditory communication.
In other words, they made noises at one another.
But this is shifty science, as paleontologists have a difficult time reconstructing the organs
responsible for producing sound, such as the larynx.
What researchers do know is that if dinosaurs could create sound, it was without doubt unlike
anything we can imagine.
The truth is that they were almost certainly incapable of making similar noises as mammals.
That means that unlike in the movies, dinosaurs wouldn't have been able to roar.
They instead would have made low-frequency noises, like hoots and booms while their mouths
were closed.
3.
The Conquest of the Frogs The extinction of the dinosaurs had a lot
of consequences for the planet.
One of the weirder things that happened when the dinosaurs all died was that the planet
was taken over briefly by an army of frogs!
Yes, slimy amphibians ruled the globe in the vacuum left behind by the extinction of the
dinosaurs.
A new study has found that frogs exploded in number and diversified into thousands of
different subspecies in the first few million years after the asteroid hit the Earth.
We already knew that frogs have been around for over 200 million years.
But this new study, undertaken by researcher David Blackburn and his team at the Florida
Museum of Natural History, found that they didn't really take off until the dinosaurs
were gone.
It was their extinction that resulted in the huge majority of frogs still living on our
planet today.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers analyzed 95 genes from over 150 different
frog species.
They then combined that data with another 145 species, creating a massive evolutionary
tree of all frog families.
They found that pretty much all frogs came from three major families that all branched
out at the same time, right at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
Within just a few million years, frogs were some of the most abundant animals in the world,
spread out to all corners of the globe.
2.
Early Primates & Their Dinosaur Friends Scientists recently identified the earliest
primate ever after discovering the tiny teeth of a creature no bigger than a rat.
The discovery has revealed something quite shocking.
As it turns out, our most ancient ancestors were miniscule primates the size of rodents
that lived with dinosaurs.
The primates are called Plesiadapiforms, and they were found in Montana.
The primates represent the very beginnings of what would eventually become human life.
They appeared about 66 million years ago, roughly 100,000 years after the extinction
event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
However, researchers say the primates had an even older ancestor that lived alongside
dinosaurs.
What that means is that technically, the very creatures we evolved from over millions of
years were around at the same time as dinos, strolling across the planet together.
Of course, early primates and dinosaurs probably weren't actually friends.
Truth be told, early primates were likely victims of dinosaurs, probably eaten by tiny
raptors.
The true shock is that the ancestors of all modern primates, including humans, managed
to survive the great extinction event and diversify when every last dinosaur was wiped
out.
Humans have technically already survived the greatest extinction event in planetary history,
and so chances are that even if another one comes along, human life will find a way to
survive.
1.
Dinosaurs Were Already Doomed What most people don't realize is that the
dinosaurs were already doomed to extinction long before an asteroid wiped them out.
The asteroid definitely quickened the deadline, no pun intended, but scientists say dinosaurs
were already in a steep decline.
To prove that theory, researchers took a look at three families of carnivores: the Tyrannosauridae,
the Dromaeosauridae, and the Troodontidae.
These families survived until the end of the Cretaceous and were some of the most diversified
in the 40 years before the asteroid.
Researchers compiled all the information they could about the dinosaur families to figure
out what was happening to them 66 million years ago.
Their conclusion was shocking.
They found that the species were in a massive decline starting 10 million years before the
asteroid strike.
What this means is that the dinosaurs were already going extinct worldwide, with dinosaur
groups like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops already under the threat of extinction.
But what was causing it?
The main theory right now has to do with climate change.
We know the Earth was undergoing a period of cooling, with the mean global temperature
dropping about 8 degrees Celsius or 46 degrees Fahrenheit.
And because dinosaurs needed a warm climate for their metabolism to work properly, they
slowly started dying.
Even without the asteroid, they would have gone extinct because of climate change.
And here's another couple of facts to back up the theory.
Reptiles who didn't depend on a warm climate, along with mammals and birds who also didn't
require extremely hot temperatures to remain alive, survived past the extinction event.
Most have survived even until modern times in one form or another.
In simple terms, the dinosaurs didn't die because of an asteroid.
They went extinct because they couldn’t handle the cold!
Which of these amazing dinosaur facts shocked you the most?
Let me know all about it in the comments and thanks for watching!
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