The Hill Originally Posted: April 27, 2021 A new type of duck-billed dinosaur has been identified on one of Japan’s southern islands. In 2004, an amatuer fossil hunter found the preserved lower jaw, teeth, neck vertebrae, shoulder bone and tail vertebra in an approximately 72-million-year-old layer of sediment on Japan’s Awaji island. The fossil was given to Japan’s Museum of Nature and Human Activities where it was stored before being studied by an international team of researchers from Southern Methodist University (SMU) and Japan. In a study recently published in Scientific Reports, researchers now say the specimen is that of a new genus and species of hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, they’ve dubbed Yamatosaurus izanagii. The plant-eating hadrosaurs roamed the Earth during the Late Cretaceous period [...]

Washington Post Originally Posted: April 5, 2021 Sixty-six million years ago, a gigantic asteroid crashed into Earth, wiping out all kinds of life and changing the trajectory of the planet. It was bad news for dinosaurs. But in the tropical rainforest, their loss was flowers’ gain, a new study in the journal Science suggests. An international team of researchers used tens of thousands of fossils to explore what happened to plant life in what is now Colombia after the impact. Their work reveals that the crash was probably responsible for the modern makeup of tropical rainforests. Video: Investigating the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs The fiery crash is thought to have generated massive heat, triggered tidal waves and clouded over the sky. In the aftermath, as much [...]