— Earthquakes: Water as a lubricant — Geophysicists from Potsdam have established a mode of action that can explain the irregular distribution of strong earthquakes at the San Andreas Fault in California. As the science…
— Ancient environment found to drive marine biodiversity — Much of our knowledge about past life has come from the fossil record - but how accurately does that reflect the true history and drivers of biodiversity on Earth?…
— Earth's core deprived of oxygen — The composition of the Earth's core remains a mystery. Scientists know that the liquid outer core consists mainly of iron, but it is believed that small amounts of some other elements…
— Human, artificial intelligence join forces to pinpoint fossil locations — In 1991, a team led by Washington University in St. Louis palaeoanthropologist Glenn Conroy, PhD, discovered the fossils of the first - and still the only - known pre-human ape ever…
— Palaeontologist describes large nest of juvenile dinosaurs, first of their genus ever found — A nest containing the fossilised remains of 15 juvenile Protoceratops andrewsi dinosaurs from Mongolia has been described by a University of Rhode Island palaeontologist, revealing…
— Researchers pinpoint date and rate of Earth's most extreme extinction — It's well known that Earth's most severe mass extinction occurred about 250 million years ago. What's not well known is the specific time when the extinctions occurred. A team of researchers…
— Archeologists investigate Ice Age hominins' adaptability to climate change — Computational modelling that examines evidence of how hominin groups evolved culturally and biologically in response to climate change during the last Ice Age also bears new insights…
— Research suggests strong Indian crust thrust beneath the Tibetan Plateau — For many years, most scientists studying Tibet have thought that a very hot and very weak lower and middle crust underlies its plateau, flowing like a fluid. Now, a team of researchers…
— Did dinosaurs have lice? Researchers say it's possible — A new study louses up a popular theory of animal evolution and opens up the possibility that dinosaurs were early - perhaps even the first - animal hosts of lice…
New bony-skulled dinosaur species discovered in Texas
Palaeontologists have discovered a new species of dinosaur with a softball-sized lump of solid bone on top of its skull, according to a paper published in the April issue of the journal Cretaceous Research.
The species was a plant-eating dinosaur about as big as a medium-sized dog that lived 70 to 80 million years ago, said Nicholas Longrich of Yale University, lead author of the paper. The team discovered two skull fragments in Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas in 2008. They compared them to dozens of fossils from related species found in Canada and Montana before confirming that the fossils represented a new genus of pachycephalosaur, a group of bipedal, thick-skulled dinosaurs.
The researchers named the new species Texacephale langstoni. ('Texacephale' means 'Texas head' and 'langstoni' is in honour of Wann Langston, a fellow palaeontologist.) The new species is one of about a dozen known to have solid lumps of bone on top of their skulls, which Longrich speculates was probably used to ram one another head-on in a manner similar to modern-day musk oxen and cape buffalo.
The discovery of the new species lends further weight to the idea, which has gained popularity in recent years, that dinosaurs found in Canada and the northern United States were distinct from their southern neighbours.
'Instead of roaming across the North American continent, we see pockets of different dinosaurs that are pretty isolated from one another,' Longrich said. 'Every time we get good fossils from Texas, they end up looking very different from those to the north.'
Because fossils from the Big Bend region are rare and tend to be poorly preserved, scientists do not have a complete picture of the different species that once inhabited the area, Longrich said.
But the team may have uncovered an important piece of the puzzle with their discovery. They found that this particular group of dinosaurs, which was previously thought to have originated in Asia, likely evolved in North America.
Longrich expects more related species to be discovered in the future as fossils from the Texas site and elsewhere continue to be examined.
'I think we underestimate how many different species there were,' he says.
Or subscribe for our Newsletter, a free e-mail publication. It is published practically every day.
New pterodactyl discovered in Sahara
New skeletons from the age of dinosaurs answer century-old questions
Ordovician faunas of Burgess Shale type
Dinosaur research: Chew and stay small