Complete pterosaur eggs discovered in China.

 

The eggs are three-dimensional and extremely well-preserved (Picture: Rex)

 According to the famous scientific journal Current Biology on June 6, 2014, the world's largest and most well-preserved three-dimensional fossil cluster of pterosaur and its eggs were found in Hami, western China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The discovery was based on the field research of researcher Wang Youlin and his team of Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, over the past 10 years. The specimens are named Hamipterus tianshanensis. "Hami" refers to the region where the specimens were found.The pterosaurs are thought to have perished in a large storm.

The discovery in the Xinjiang Uygur Region, western China, is the world’s largest and most well-preserved cluster of three-dimensional fossils ever found with a nest containing eggs.


 

Photo by HAP/Quirky China News/REX (3792156c) Artist's impression of Crested Pterosaurs

 
Pterosaurs were flying reptiles with wingspans ranging from 25 cm to 12 metres, and they lived together in large colonies.

The discovery represents a new genus and species known as Hamipterus tianshanensis.

Speaking to the journal Current Biology, field researcher Wang Youlin described the eggs as ‘three-dimensionally’ preserved.
 

Photo by HAP/Quirky China News/REX (3792156b) Artist's impression of Crested Pterosaur

The fossils were unearthed during a study conducted by a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who have been excavating the fossil-rich region for the past 10 years.

Wang says that sediment samples in the area suggest the pterosaurs died in a large storm about 120million years ago.

Reposted from Metro

Fossils That Changed Dinosaur Brachylophosaurus (2000)

Restoration

Only three complete fossils of the hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, Brachylophosaurus have ever been found, but they're so amazingly well-preserved that (as paleontologists often do) they were immediately given nicknames: Elvis, Leonardo and Roberta. (The same research team also found a fourth, incomplete fossil of a juvenile, which they dubbed Peanut.)

Leonardo had a birdlike crop on its neck (presumably to aid in digestion) as well as different-sized scales on different parts of its body, among other unique anatomical features.
 
Although it's named for the unusually short crest on its head (short, that is, for a hadrosaur), Brachylophosaurus stood out more for its thick, downward-turning beak, which some paleontologists take as evidence that the males of this genus head-butted one another for the attention of females.

Fossils That Made History: Sinosauropteryx (1997)

The first of a spectacular series of "dino-bird" discoveries in China's Liaoning quarry, the well-preserved fossil of Sinosauropteryx betrays the unmistakable impression of primitive, hair-like feathers.

Fossil of Sinosauropteryx prima, the first “feathered” dinosaur. Its primitive feathers could be seen clearly on the head, back, and tail. The length of the fossil is about 130 cm.

The first genus of dinosaur outside of Avialae (birds and their immediate relatives) to be found with evidence of feathers. They were covered with "furry" coats of very simple filament-like feathers. Structures that indicate colouration have been preserved for some of the feathers, which also makes Sinosauropteryx the first non-avialian dinosaurs where colouration has been determined. Colouration includes a banded tail with reddish and light bands.

Fossils That Made Dinosaur History: Maiasaura (1975)

Maiasaura was discovered by Laurie Trexler and described by dinosaur paleontologist Jack Horner (paleontologic advisor for the Jurassic Park movies) and Robert Makela. 

He named the dinosaur after Marion Brandvold's discovery of a nest with remains of eggshells and babies too large to be hatchlings. These discoveries led to others, and the area became known as "Egg Mountain", in rocks of the Two Medicine Formation near Choteau in western Montana.

This was the first proof of giant dinosaurs raising and feeding their young. Over 200 specimens, in all age ranges, have been found. The announcement of Maiasaura's discovery attracted renewed scientific interest to the Two Medicine Formation and many other new kinds of dinosaurs were discovered as a result of the increased attention. 

More on the Coelophysis

Coelophysis meaning "hollow form" in reference to its hollow bones, is one of the earliest known genera of Dinosaur. It was a small, carnivorous biped that lived during the Late Triassic (Norian stage) of the southwestern United States

 

Fossils That Made Dinosaur History: Coelophysis (1947)

Although Coelophysis was named in 1889 (by the famous paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope), this early theropod didn't make a splash in the popular imagination until 1947, when Edwin H. Colbert found innumerable Coelophysis skeletons tangled together at the Ghost Ranch fossil site in New Mexico. This showed that some genera of small theropods, just like hadrosaurs and ornithopods, traveled in herds--and that large populations of dinosaurs, meat-eaters and plant-eaters alike, were regularly caught unawares by flash floods.

Fossils That Changed Dinosaur History Diplodocus (1877)

The discovery of Diplodocus in western North America's Morrison Formation ushered in the age of the giant sauropods, which have since captured the imagination of the public to a far greater extent than relatively prosaic dinosaurs like Megalosaurus and Iguanodon.

Mounted D. carnegii holotype skeleton, Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Fossils That Changed Dinosaur History: Archaeopteryx (1860-62)

In 1860, Charles Darwin published his earth-shaking treatise on evolution, The Origin of Species.

As luck would have it, the next couple of years saw a series of spectacular discoveries at the limestone deposits of Solnhofen, Germany--complete, exquisitely preserved fossils of an ancient creature, Archaeopteryx, that seemed to be the perfect "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds. 

Since then, more convincing transitional forms (such as Sinosauropteryx) have been found, but none have had as profound an impact as this pigeon-sized dinosaur. 

Archaeopteryx lithographica, specimen displayed at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. (This image shows the original fossil - not a cast.)

Fossils That Changed Dinosaur History: Hadrosaurus (1858)

The Hadrosaurus foulkii was, in fact, the first nearly complete dinosaur fossil to be found in the world.  And, it was found in Haddonfield!  In 1858, an amateur fossil hunter named William Parker Foulke was vacationing in Haddonfield and heard that workers had found giant bones in a pit of calcium carbonite type clay called marl nearby. The marl was used by local farmers as fertilizer. Foulke spent several months supervising the excavation of the pit before he and his workers found the giant bones.

The finding of a nearly complete set of bones to one of these giant creatures set the scientific world on its ear. Theories about dinosaurs had existed for years but nothing was ever found that provided definitive proof that they really existed.  That was until Mr. Foulke found his dinosaur in Haddonfield.

Fossils That Changed Dinosaur History: Iguanodon (1820)

Iguanodon was only the second dinosaur after Megalosaurus to be given a formal genus name; more important, its numerous fossils (first investigated by Gideon Mantell in 1820) precipitated a heated debate among naturalists about whether or not these ancient reptiles even existed. Georges Cuvier and William Buckland laughed away the bones as belonging to a fish or a rhinoceros, while Richard Owen (if you can overlook a few wacky details and his overbearing personality) pretty much hit the Cretaceous nail on the head.

Fossils: Megalosaurus, Buckland's Research

Engraving from William Buckland's "Notice on the Megalosaurus or great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield", 1824. Caption reads "anterior extremity of the right lower jaw of the Megalosaurus from Stonesfield near Oxford".


More discoveries were made, starting in 1815, again at the Stonesfield quarry. They were acquired by William Buckland, Professor of Geology at the University of Oxford and dean of Christ Church. He did not know to what animal the bones belonged but, in 1818, after the Napoleonic Wars, the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier visited Buckland in Oxford and realised that the bones belonged to a giant lizard-like creature. Buckland then published descriptions of the bones in Transactions of the Geological Society, in 1824 (Physician James Parkinson had described them in an article in 1822).

By 1824, Buckland had a piece of a lower jaw with teeth, some vertebrae, and fragments of pelvis, scapula and hind limbs, probably not all from the same individual. Buckland identified the organism as being a giant animal related to the Sauria (lizards) and he placed it in the new genus Megalosaurus, estimating the animal to be 12 m long in life. In 1826, Ferdinand von Ritgen gave this dinosaur a complete binomial, Megalosaurus conybeari, which was not used by later authors and is now considered a nomen oblitum. A year later, in 1827, Gideon Mantell included Megalosaurus in his geological survey of southeastern England, and assigned the species its current binomial name, Megalosaurus bucklandii. It would not be until 1842 that Richard Owen coined the term 'dinosaur'.

Fossils that Changed Dinosaur History: Megalosaurus

  

Cover of Robert Plot's Natural History of Oxfordshire, 1677 (right), and illustration of a fossilized lower extremity of a Megalosaurus femur (left) taken from that book. The bone was described by Richard Brookes in 1763 and jokingly named Scrotum humanum

Megalosaurus may have been the first dinosaur to be described in the scientific literature. Part of a bone was recovered from a limestone quarry at Cornwell near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, England in 1676. The fragment was sent to Robert Plot, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and first curator of the Ashmolean Museum, who published a description in his Natural History of Oxfordshire in 1676. He correctly identified the bone as the lower extremity of the femur of a large animal and he recognized that it was too large to belong to any known species. He therefore concluded it to be the thigh bone of a giant human, such as those mentioned in the Bible. The bone has since been lost but the illustration is detailed enough that some have since identified it as that of Megalosaurus.

150 years later--after further discoveries-- it was given its name, Greek for "great lizard," by the early paleontologist William Buckland.



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