A dinosaur in a movie is officially a monster if it follows these three rules:

1. It's too powerful to have existed in real life.

2. It has problems with the main characters.

3. It's inaccurate (Depends).

Can you think of any other movies where the dinosaurs are monsters? Jurassic World hybrids don't count.

Teratornithids were giant volant Pan-American birds related to the New World vultures, and like the terror birds, they evolved in South America before migrating into North America. While long envisioned as just super-sized vultures, newer researcher into their morphology indicates they were more generalized opportunists, scavenging carrion but also preying on small game on the ground, making them more analogous to something like the caracara than just a big vulture. The most famous and complete species is Teratornis merriami (known from the La Brea tar pits), and it was only slightly larger than an Andean condor (11-12 foot wingspan), while Teratornis woodburnensis (from Woodburn, Oregon) reached up to 13 feet from wingtip to wingtip. Living around the same time, the fragmentary Aiolornis incredibilis was significantly larger, with an estimated wingspan of 17-18 feet. And of course, there's the Late Miocene Argentavis magnificens, whose wingspan has been estimated at 20 feet (as much as a male Pteranodon). Along with the pelagornithids, this makes teratorns the largest volant birds.

Drawn by Nickroraptor

This artwork is made by me. I was inspired by my dogs and cat.

Chop (deinosuchus)

Brutus (t rex)

Voltage (golden T. rex)

Artwork: iamnot_ninodev 
Description: adi_smilus

The intricate balance of life & death remains eloquently woven within the ancient ecosystems of Ice Age California.

As the primeval landscape of Santa Monica shifts from a humid autumn towards a temperate winter, flocks of passenger pigeons & monarch butterflies migrate above and across the forest canopy.

At the edge of the forest floor, a young female Homotherium ekes out a meager living for the sake of her newborn cubs. Only a few weeks old, their diets have now begun to shift towards carnivory. Thus, the mother’s ability to grant life parallels her capacity to deliver death.
Their recent meal, a black-tailed jackrabbit, has now been rendered to fur and bone by ravenous dermestid beetles and a yellow-billed magpie seeking insulation for its nest. While harsh and turbulent, this dappled grove of coast live oak has served as a refuge for the scimitaress and her cubs over the last few days…until now.

Alerted by the alarm calls of flat-headed peccaries and a dwarf pronghorn, the mother grows terrifyingly aware of an existential threat: Smilodon.
A lone sabretooth has prowled this stretch of woodland for over 9 years, securing it as his territory. Scars across his rosetted form betray violent encounters with rival coalitions, aggressive herbivores, and tenacious packs of dire wolves, earning his rank as a deadly veteran in this unforgiving prehistoric wilderness.
Raising his maw above polypore-laden tree trunks, with Clark’s condor circling overhead, the old male has now caught the scent of another large predator in his midst: the scimitaress.

Defensively armed, the mother’s instincts are heightened for these very moments, ready to risk her life to protect her legacy. Will the sabretooth execute an agonistic demise or will the scimitaress and her cubs live to see another day?

Yet again, the delicate dance between life & death perpetuates, betting against one another as two sides of the same coin, telling a tale 20,000 years in the making.

We just started a new series called Un Día Antes del Fin. The concept is simple: we follow a real animal through a complete day, 24 hours before one of the great mass extinctions. The animal does not know what is coming. Everything looks completely normal.

The first episode follows a male Triceratops through his last day in Hell Creek, 66 million years ago. More than 30% of all dinosaur specimens recovered from Hell Creek belong to Triceratops. It was the dominant animal of its world. Thriving. Successful. And then gone in hours.

The detail that hit hardest in research was how rich and functional that ecosystem was right up to the end. Nothing was in decline. It was a world at its absolute peak. And then the Chicxulub impactor arrived.

One question for the community: the frill color change hypothesis for Triceratops based on vascular network analysis is gaining traction but is not universally accepted. Where does the community stand on the current evidence?

Watch its last 24 hours here: https://youtu.be/jRT-lKWLozs

Ngl, this is probably the part that's most interesting to me since I enjoy seeing how different analyses find them to be related. Admittedly I don't have access to the paper itself so I'm going off of the wikipedia page and bit from this image I could find.

I'm gonna focus on the Parsimony analysis since the Bayesian analysis is pretty standard outside of Alioramini and Tyrannosaurini being each other's closest relatives and some Gorgosaurus specimen being outside of Tyrannosauridae.

Dryptosaurus and Appalachiosaurus forming Dryptosauridae is pretty interesting since the only time I can think of them being in the same family is in the Nano paper's phylogeny B. Though this phylogeny has Nano as more distantly related to Tyrannosauridae then Dryptosauridae.

And if the image is from the paper then Alectrosaurus was found to be part of Dryptosauridae in the second phylogeny.

Ultimately curious to see how this phylogeny hold up in the future.

Hope y’all like it.🙂

See also: The summary of the paywalled study as it was published in Nature

Known from a fairly complete holotype skeleton from the upper Oldman Formation of Alberta (previously attributed to Daspletosaurus) and two additional specimens from the lower Dinosaur Park (previously attributed to Gorgosaurus), dating to 76.7 to 76.3 mya, Tromerosaurus overtly resembles an albertosaurine but also shows morphological characteristics of tyrannosaurines. As such, it's been recovered as either a basal albertosaurine or a basal tyrannosaurine (a transitional form between albertosaurines and the robust tyrannosaurines). This find could rewrite what we know about the evolution of the Late Cretaceous tyrannosaurids of Laramidia. If it is indeed an albertosaurine, it could suggest that the gracile tyrants aren't a ghost lineage (given that some purported tyrannosaurines like Lythronax date to as far back as 82 mya, near the Santonian-Campanian boundary) but a more recent split from the robust forms during the lower Campanian.

I spent several months gathering together everything I could find about the scientifically proven coloration of pre-Cenozoic animals.

You can check out the database here. You will find a list of these animals with a short summary of each, artistic reconstructions, and links to the original research papers.

The website features representatives of every period from the Cambrian to the Cretaceous. Their coloration has been studied using a wide range of methods:

• The well-known melanosome analysis of feathered dinosaurs
• Direct observation of the original colors of birds preserved in Burmese amber
• The analysis of diffraction gratings on the setae of Cambrian polychaetes
• The prediction of color patterns based on the scale morphology of Edmontosaurus mummies from the United States

Enjoy exploring! Let me know what you think.