Is this the world's oldest dinosaur? Sure, why the hell not.
It's always funny to read about the discovery of "new dinosaurs." It's like when the original incarnation of Spinal Tap then called "The Originals" found out there was another band called "The Originals," and so they had to change their name to "The New Originals." (Which is a much better names, really.) Anyway, a new, or at least, heretofore undiscovered, type of dinosaur has indeed been found in Utah.
Scientists have named it Kosmocerotops. It's a close relative of the Triceratops, the famous rhinoceros-like plant-eater that has the big, armor-plated head with three horns. ("Cerotops" is Greek for "horned face.") But the Kosmocerotops, which lived around the Great [...]
Crack bit of paleontological detective work detailed in a new Nature article about Anomalocaris, a three-foot-long shrimp-like creature widely believed to have dominated the seas of the Paleozoic era's Cambrian period by "hunting and eating hard-shelled prey such as trilobites." In a recent computer-assisted analysis of fossilized Anomalocaris mouth parts, Amherst College's Whitey Hagadorn determined that the "Tyranosaurus rex of the Cambrian" lacked the chomping power to match its reputation. "Everyone shows it grabbing trilobites and munching them. Like a cookie monster," Hagadorn says. "Not possible." Hagadorn suggests Anomalocaris subsisted on a softer diet of jellyfish and worms, or maybe just filtered plankton. In turn, Hagedorn's colleagues insist [...]
