dinosaurs

The ribs of a 240 million-year-old fossil hold clues to how the first turtle shell evolved. And its skull shape seems closer to that of lizards and snakes than to an ancestor of dinosaurs and birds.

Don Lessem was the dinosaur adviser for the first Jurassic Park, a job he says sounds more impressive than it was. His real big-dinosaur break happened years later, thanks to a blurry photo of a bone.

Hoping to help trace the history of how velociraptors evolved into birds, researchers at Harvard and Yale may have tracked a key beak transformation to two genes.

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.  

It's the job of a scientist to collect data and examine evidence. But what do you do when your dinosaur research leads to a discovery that isn't possible according to conventional wisdom? Dr. Mary Higby Schweitzer, Biology faculty at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, made this kind of discovery. But instead of giving up and leaving it a mystery, she set out to disprove our common knowledge.

It was 15 feet long, with a snout shaped like a dolphin's. This newly identified meat-eater swam the seas near the Isle of Skye in the time of dinosaurs.

Discovered in Montana in 1988, the Wankel T. Rex is a prize find — a nearly complete skeleton, now bound for display at the Smithsonian, in Washington, D.C. But first, those old bones need some work.

Scientists first figured the claw-tipped, giant arm bones found in 1965 belonged to an ostrichlike dinosaur. But its recently recovered skull looks more like a dino designed by a committee — of kids.