The Wankel Tyrannosaurus Rex has lived the past 26 years of its 65-million-year existence at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. This week the colossal creature’s carcass is moving to the National Museum of Natural History in D.C., where it will eventually live in a new $35 million dinosaur hall. But how does it make the trip safely? Popular Mechanics explains.
As microbrewers continue their quest to brew beer with ever stranger ingredients
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Connecting Alaska to Argentina, the Pan-American Highway runs some 30,000 miles north to south. Construction to widen the highway briefly stopped, however, to make way for dead whales back in 2010, when workers digging through a remote stretch of the Chilean desert found a huge trove of bones millions of years old. Now, scientists think they have figured out how the extinct whales ended up on land in the first place.
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While dinosaurs have not yet been resurrected Jurassic Park-style, scientists fiddling with ancient DNA sequences have made a discovery that may turn out to be a tad more useful: a treatment for gout. That a 90 million-year-old protein could treat a modern disease is a fascinating window into evolutionary history.
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Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft exec who has since become (in)famous in patent litigation
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The New York City branch of Bonhams auction house hosted an eye-popping and widely hyped dinosaur auction in the city yesterday afternoon. At the center were the so-called "Montana Dueling Dinosaurs," a huge, combined fossil of two nearly-complete dinosaur skeletons apparently caught fighting to the death, valued as high as $9 million dollars.
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The most interesting room in the American Museum of Natural History is one you’ll never see. Its inhabitants are millions of years old, its proprietors among the brightest in their field. This is the big bone room, home to what is arguably the largest and most important collection of mammal bones in the world. And we got a first-hand look.
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Ancient myths of dragons, titans, and giants—inhuman creatures battling it out on an alien earth before mankind—are easy enough to find. Seemingly every culture has them. What’s perhaps more surprising is that many of these tales of deformed and monstrous beings, whether terrifying dragons or beneficent heroes armed for battle, often resulted from a misunderstanding of the fossil record.
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Conventional wisdom designates Los Angeles as a young, capricious metropolis—an underage drinker in the geopolitical nightclub—but it’s simply not true. L.A. is actually an ancient city, and the proof is bubbling right up to the surface at the La Brea Tar Pits, one of the richest paleontological sites in the world and the only one being actively excavated in an urban setting.
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There’s a reason that towering mammals the likes of King Kong are resigned to fiction. Our aching bones can only take so much weight before they start crumbling under the pressure. But if that’s the case, then why were dinosaurs able to reach such phenomenal heights? According to a new study, the answer isn’t so much about the bones themselves as it is the soft, squishy joints they lay between.
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