Friday, February 15, 2008

Two new dinosaur species have been revealed recently. Both are therapods, which is awesome because carnivores are much rarer than herbivores. One of the species, Kryptops (or 'old hidden face'--you gotta love dino names!) had a snout covered in beak-like texture. More evidence that these fellas turned into birds!

Illustrations by fellow dino-enthusiast Todd Marshall

3 comments:

Vi said...

Your blog format - Fresh new look, same disgusting taste. ;)

ll-_-ll

Unknown said...

hor hor hor

Dicing with Dragons said...

Actually, given the fact that Kryptops is an Abelisaurid, the bit of a beak it may have had is probably not homologous to avian beaks.

Beaks have actually evolved independently a number of times: some dromeosaur theropods (note spelling) had beak material (which was homologous with birds), but so did many ornithischian dinosaurs (which definitely weren't).

In fact, beaks crop up numerous times through the tetrapod lineage: turtles have them, and apparently, so did some synapsids!

Kryptops is pretty fragmentary, though. Perhaps more will turn up in the future at another dig...

(Vectored in from http://kambodiahotel.blogspot.com/ )