10. The Day of the Asteroid Paleontologists have just made one
of the most exciting dinosaur discoveries from the past 10 years! A team led by Dr. Robert DePalma,
uncovered the fossilized leg of a dinosaur. The leg was so immaculately preserved that it
still had skin attached! This is the first time researchers have found skin on a dinosaur, and if
there was any discovery that could contribute to cloning a dinosaur, this would be it.
Researchers believe the leg belonged to a dinosaur living in North Dakota at the exact
time the asteroid slammed into the planet. According to Paul Barrett, a researcher at
London's Natural History Museum, the leg belongs to Thescelosaurus, an herbivorous dinosaur
whose name means "wonderful lizard" in ancient Greek. Based on his examination of the fossil,
Barrett said the dinosaur's leg was likely ripped off very quickly, and the limb bears no signs of
disease or having been picked apart by scavengers. This means that this dino was roaming the land
66 million years ago until it died on that fateful day when the asteroid hit.
Unfortunately, the discovery is so new that the details haven't been worked out yet.
Some researchers are not convinced since the results haven’t been published.
The Thescelosaurus has been a bit of a mystery to scientists because they were unclear what its
skin looked like. But now that they have some of its skin, they can say for sure
the creature was scaly like a lizard and did not have feathers like raptors did.
9. The Dinosaur Flu Researchers have discovered the very
first evidence of a dinosaur coming down with the flu. Cary Woodruff from the University of Toronto,
along with her team of scientists, studied the fossil of a diplodocid. This was a type of
long-neck herbivore dinosaur, which lived all throughout what is today southwest Montana.
They named the dinosaur Dolly after Dolly Parton. What the team discovered is nothing short of
shocking. They already knew Dolly was under 20 years old when she died. This was during
the late Jurassic period 150 million years ago. What they didn't know was that Dolly had been
sick. Its fossil provided the very first evidence of a lung disease in a dinosaur.
According to Woodruff, whatever Dolly had come down with, it was consistent with respiratory
infections found in birds today. It was a lot like a respiratory disease that some birds get
when they breathe in fungal spores. This was evident by the broccoli-shaped bone growth
in the dinosaur’s neck. Even in the fossil, the researchers could see how the infection had spread
from the lungs to the bones and mutilated them, causing the broccoli-like growths.
This is arguably one of the most important dinosaur discoveries ever. It shows that dinosaurs
suffered from the same common respiratory disorders that birds, and humans, suffer
from as well. Knowing that dinosaurs were already experiencing respiratory infections, the same kind
of respiratory infections that transmit from birds to humans and cause pandemics, is monumental.
And believe it or not, dinosaurs exhibited the same symptoms as us! They would have trouble
breathing, they would get headaches, coughing, fevers, diarrhea, and sneezing. Just like us,
dinosaurs came down with nasty cases of sore throat and sniffles.
8. The Spinosaurus 100 million years ago, in what
is today the Sahara Desert, there was a ferocious predator. This predator was a titan of a dinosaur,
and the only one science knows about that had the ability to both swim and live on land.
Back in the days of the dinos, Morocco and the surrounding desert was more of a lush jungle
teeming with rivers, lakes, and all kinds of exotic life. There was one dinosaur who ruled
over the whole area, a river monster by the name of Spinosaurus. It had a tail like a fin, teeth
over 6 inches(15 cm) long, and could catch prey on land, and also slip into the river and hunt
in the water. This is a feat no other dinosaur, at least that we know of, ever managed to pull off.
And to make things even more shocking, the Spinosaurus could be over 50 feet(15 m) long
and upwards of 20 tons(18,144 kg). A recent specimen was discovered in Morocco, measuring 35
feet(10.6 m) from its snout to its tail. This one was a juvenile, only weighing about four
tons(3,629 kg). But if it had grown into an adult, it would have had no natural predators. It was
basically a T. rex that could swim, making it one of the most dangerous carnivores that ever lived!
7. Chief Dragon The oldest meat-eating
dinosaur ever discovered in the United Kingdom is a creature nicknamed “chief dragon.” Its remains
were originally discovered over 50 years ago at a Welsh quarry. Four small fragments are
all that were found, but they were enough for scientists to put the whole beast together.
Using these tiny bones, researchers at the London Natural History Museum
were able to determine that the chief dragon (scientific name Pendraig milnerae) had existed
200 million years ago. It was an apex predator, a miniature dragon about the size of a chicken
but with an exceptionally long tail. Doctor Stephen Spiekman called it a typical theropod,
a carnivorous dinosaur that wandered around on two legs. It was just like a T. rex or a Velociraptor,
but existed way earlier and was a lot smaller. But it's the age that really makes this dinosaur
so fascinating. Scientists know it's definitely 200 million years old, but it could be as old as
214 million. That would be the late Triassic period, at the very beginning dinosaur life.
To give you some idea of the timeline we're looking at here, the T. rex showed up around
81 million years ago. Between the evolution of the English chicken-sized dragon
and the beast we all know and love from pop culture, 133 million years had gone by.
6. Big John Big John is the
biggest triceratops skeleton ever found. He was a beast, a monster so big he could
have rammed through a school bus and kept on running! But according to researchers,
Big John may have been killed during a fight with another, even larger triceratops.
They started investigating after coming across a bizarre opening in its frill, the big crown on its
head above the horns. The opening appeared to be left over from some kind of battle.
After analyzing the location, shape, and size of the mysterious lesion, researchers from the G.
d’Annunzio University in Italy concluded it was left behind by the horn of another triceratops.
In life, Big John was about 26 feet(8 m) long and his skull was roughly 6.6 feet(2 m) wide.
60% of his skeleton was found in the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota in 2014.
After he was put back together and analyzed, his fossilized remains were sold at an auction
in Paris for $7.2 million. That's how big and impressive Big John is. And while his
skeleton may be gone, scientists still have all the information they need from their examination.
They believe he got into a brawl with another triceratops and suffered a major injury from
getting a horn through his frill. But this wasn't what killed him, at least not initially. His bones
show signs of healing, so he must have walked away from the fight and lived a little while longer.
But before the wound could completely heal, he died. It's likely he got infected after
the injury and then died a very slow and probably very agonizing death, spread out over six months.
5. A Fossilized Butt Now's the time for a chuckle
if you want to be immature! 120 million years ago, a Psittacosaurus was living out its days
just like any other dinosaur. It was focused on mating, eating, and not being someone else’s food.
What it couldn't have possibly known was that all these years later,
scientists would be staring right up its rear end. This is about to get gross, but remember it's all
for science. In 2021, researchers published a detailed description of this dinosaur’s cloaca.
The cloaca is the Swiss Army knife of butts. It is a hole used for expelling waste, for mating, and
for laying eggs. Lots of animals today have it, including all birds, all amphibians, all reptiles,
and a handful of mammals. Discovering the remarkably fossilized cloaca of this small,
dog-sized dinosaur gave researchers a unique look into how the ancient animals used them.
Not only that, but it showed the skin texture and color pattern of the dinosaur’s rear.
As Science Alert said, Scientists Described a Dinosaur's Butthole in Exquisite Detail!
This is the only preserved non-avian dinosaur cloaca fossil in the world.
However, nothing inside of it was preserved, only the vent opening. Because of this,
researchers were never actually able to find out much about the sex of the animal
or the biology of how its hole worked. All they could really do was look at the exit, kind of like
looking at someone who sat on a photocopier. 4. Trapped in Amber
In 2016, the tail of a dinosaur from 99 million years ago was discovered
stuck in amber. It was an unprecedented discovery that shocked scientists around the world. What's
really cool is that the fossil is further evidence that dinosaurs had feathers instead of scales.
It was Chinese paleontologist Xing Lida who came across the specimen, no bigger than a
dried apricot. Xing found it at an amber market in northern Myanmar. If the paleontologist hadn't
come by and bought it, chances are someone would have bought the piece and turned it into jewelry.
The traders thought there was a plant fragment inside, not an actual piece of a dinosaur.
It's hard to describe just how important this discovery is. Almost 100 million years ago,
a small dinosaur, a young coelurosaurian belonging to the same group of predatory dinosaurs as the
tyrannosaurus, lost its tail. Its tail was then preserved in this tiny piece of amber
in perfect condition. Scientists were able to look at the feathers of its tail in three dimensions,
something that's never been done before. It's perfectly preserved DNA is in there.
Plus, it’s real, physical evidence that the most ferocious dinosaurs were covered in bird-like
feathers and not reptile scales. 3. Owl Dinosaurs
A dinosaur an awful lot like an owl was discovered in the mid-1990s. It's a tiny bird-type dinosaur
with long legs, extremely muscular arms with sharp claws on the end, and it lived between 81
and 75 million years ago. Its name is Shuvuuia deserti, and not only did it look like an owl,
but it also had exceptional night vision and remarkable hearing like an owl. Researchers
were shocked to find that its hearing and night vision were better than that of most modern birds
and other dinosaurs that came after it. Even though the fossil of this dinosaur
was found 30 years ago, a new analysis has yielded more exciting information about it.
Researchers from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa analyzed its inner ear bones. What
they found is that it was a nocturnal hunter, yet again, just like an owl.
The dinosaur had an extremely large lagena, which is a structure responsible for hearing. The larger
this structure, the more sensitive an animal’s hearing is. In relation to the size of its skull,
this animal had a lagena bigger than any other that researchers have ever found in a dinosaur.
And this was after comparing its inner ear to over 100 species of modern birds. The only bird
they found with a lagena even remotely the same size was the barn owl. In conclusion, this tiny
dinosaur was basically the world’s first owl. 2. Murder Feet Dino
A Triassic dinosaur that lived in Australia 220 million years ago
left behind its footprints. A recent evaluation of this beast's mysterious tracks have shown
that the creature was a small vegetarian with a long neck and feet that could kill.
It was in 1964 that coal miners in Australia saw the unbelievable dinosaur tracks in the
ceiling of an underground cavern. They had no idea what to make of it, and attributed the
tracks to giant roosters. But the truth is that millions of years ago, this dinosaur squished
its toes through a swampy floor of moist silt. Sediment flowed into the tracks and hardened
to preserve the impressions. Underneath, the swampy plant life slowly turned into coal. The
sand around the tracks turned into sandstone. And much later, humans came along to tunnel underneath
and take the coal to power their trains and cars. As for the mysterious dinosaur's feet, scientists
initially believed it was a carnivore because its claws looked like sickles capable of slicing flesh
apart. And while it definitely had huge feet and thick claws, it was actually just a vegetarian.
It was a type of quadrupedal sauropod, the earliest one ever found in Australia.
1. The Tough Duck-Billed Dinosaur In the 1980s, the late paleontologist
Jaime Eduardo Powell discovered the skeleton of a duck-billed dinosaur in Argentina.
The first thing he found interesting about the dinosaur was that it showed
evidence of an injured foot. It looked like one of its feet had been fractured. The fossil was put
in storage and forgotten about until recently, when paleontologists took another look at it.
They found even more damage. This dinosaur, which lived 70 million years ago, had a fractured
tailbone and a possibly cancerous tumor on its foot. In other words, it was having a really rough
time. Scientists used computed X-ray tomography scans, also known as CT scans, to look at the bone
samples. There were fractures in two vertebrae right in the middle of the dinosaur’s tail.
They also found erosion likely caused by infection. The fractures were partially healed,
but not completely. This means they may have been responsible for the slow death of the dinosaur.
All this information was published in 2021 in the journal Cretaceous Research.
This wounded monster was a hadrosaur, a plant-eater known for having a mouth
like a duck. It was about 30 feet(9 m) long, and they could be found all across the world from 145
million years ago to 65 million years ago. It took about 500,000 years for them to die after
the asteroid wiped out most of the rest of the dinosaurs. These creatures were also fascinating
for the ornate crests on their skulls, which scientists believe they used for communication.
We don't know what injured the hadrosaur. But researchers say it was a seriously hardy animal.
After all, it probably went on living for up to a year with fractured bones and a nasty infection.
Thanks for watching! Which of these shocking dinosaur discoveries fascinated you the most?
Let me know your favorite dinosaurs in the comments below and don't forget to hit subscribe
before you go! I'll see you again soon for more prehistoric awesomeness! Bye! :)