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Esri UK have published a UK wide map detailing the locations.

The last dinosaurs died out approximately 65 million years ago but their fossilised remains have been found all over the world.

Analytics company Esri UK have mapped out all the locations in the UK where dinosaur fossils have been discovered.

Several of these fossils have been unearthed in Kent.

Chiddingstone Hoath

Saurischia

Estimated to have lived between 145 and 132.9 million years ago, birds are descended from this group of dinosaurs.

Cranbrook

Iguanodon

Found between Cranbrook and Hawkhurst, this dinosaur is estimated to have lived between 145 and 132.9 million years ago. The Iguanodon was a large herbivore which could shift between using two and four legs.

Egerton

Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis

Estimated to have lived between 125.45 and 122.46 million years ago, this herbivore's front legs were thought to be half as long as its back legs.

Folkestone

Ankylosauria

Ankylosaurs were heavily armoured with a large club at the end of their tails. This dinosaur was estimated to have lived between 99.6 and 93.5 million years ago.

Horsmonden

Baryonyx walkeri

Estimated to have lived between 130 and 122.46 million years ago, the name Baryonyx refers to the dinosaur's large, heavy claws.

Hythe

Macronaria

Estimated to have lived between 125.45 and 122.46 million years ago, Macronaria had long, strong necks, useful for eating taller plants and trees.

Langton Green

Megalosaurus

This Megalosaurus is estimated to have lived between 145 and 122.46 million years ago and spanned roughly the length of a London bus.

Source: www.kentlive.news

Phu Wiang national park is home to some of the world's oldest and most impressive dinosaur fossils.

A geologist looking for uranium discovered a giant patella bone here in 1976, and the palaeontologists who were called to investigate then unearthed a fossilised 15m-long herbivore. It was later named Phuwiangosaurus sirindhornae, after Princess Sirindhorn. Dinosaur fever followed (explaining the myriad model dinosaurs in Khon Kaen city), more remains were uncovered and Phu Wiang National Park (อุทยานแห่งชาติภูเวียง) was born.

The park covers a strange horseshoe-shaped mountain that has just a single pass to its interior. Wiang Kao, the district inside the mountain, is a fruit-growing area and is a good place to explore by car if you want to look at traditional village life.

Phu Wiang National Park (PWNP) is located in Phu Wiang District, Khon Kaen Province, northeastern Thailand. It is best known for its numerous dinosaur bone paleontological sites. The park is one of the world's largest dinosaur graveyards.[2] In 1996, the remains of Siamotyrannus isanensis, a new family of carnivorous thunder lizards, were unearthed in the park.

The Phu Wiang Dinosaur Museum is situated within the park and displays many of the park's finds. The park, measuring 325 square kilometres (125 sq mi) in size, is located approximately 85 kilometres (53 mi) northwest of Khon Kaen. The area is characterized by a central plain and the low hills of the western Phu Phan Mountains.

Representatives of the Pleistocene megafauna, the Mammoths, started to die out faster than other animals and scientists may have found the answer to why.

One of the main causes of death of these large mammals could be the systematic destruction of their habitat by prehistoric humans.

The extinction of Mammoths (that lived between 2.6 million to 12 thousand years ago) was faster than the extinction of Saber-Toothed Cats and Giant Sloths. Large animals died out simultaneously on several parts of the planet. All their population started to decline firstly in Africa, 125 thousand years ago. On this part of the world, they were about 50% less than on other continents. However, the most detrimental factor to the Mammoth habitat decline was the migration from Africa.

Prehistoric humans preferred to hunt large animals because large amount of flesh can provide longer periods of food to ensure the sustenance of a large family, moreover, most large animals are herbivores, not predators and that's why they were the most vournerable to be the main course. Due to the fact that it was impossible for one person to kill a mammoth, people from time to time, have started to join large groups of hunters. Paleontologists have determined that these prehistoric hunters were the main cause and are accused for the accelerated extinction of large animal species. According to these researchers, humans continue to destroy large animal's habitats even today and very soon might not be a single animal larger than a cow.

A man in an inflatable Tyrannosaurus rex costume took a break from the London Marathon to propose to his human girlfriend.

"Roary" the dinosaur, aka Bristol resident Chris Jones, 26, ran the London Marathon in a T. rex costume to raise money for the Evelina London Children's Hospital.

Chris Jones used the opportunity to propose to his girlfriend, Katie, and the big moment was captured on camera.

Jones was running alongside his future father-in-law, who was dressed as a Jurassic Park ranger and handed the dinosaur the ring for the moment of the proposal.

"She's just the best, she has supported me for so long, she has been so great with this as well and everything that I have done, I love her so much," Jones told a BBC reporter after Katie accepted his proposal.

Source: www.upi.com

French auction house Binoche et Giquello has sold two dinosaur skeletons at top dollar.

If you’re searching for that perfect new statement piece for your living room or foyer, you might find your answer not in the flagship boutiques of luxury design brands, but in the halls of natural history museums.

Big spenders
Auction houses have found that dinosaur fossils are swiftly becoming increasingly popular objects of desire among collectors—particularly French auction house Binoche et Giquello, who put two dinosaur skeletons on the block as part of their Natural History auction in early April.

The skeletons of an Allosaurus and Diplodocus sold for €1,150,000 and €1,180,000 respectively, massively overshooting their estimated prices of €650,000 and €450,000 to €500,000.

Cult favourites
While the majority of dinosaur enthusiasts have usually been Europeans and Americans, including Hollywood actors Nicholas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio, interest has picked up among Chinese buyers over the last few years. Large specimens are often on show in key spots in the owners’ homes, while smaller ones can more easily be whisked away into storage.

Sharon Kwok-Pong, conservationist and wife of Tatler 500 lister Stanley Pong, is an avid fossil collector in Hong Kong. She started collecting amber at the age of 14 and now has a Pterodactyl, Triceratops and T-Rex claws in her personal collection. Certain buyers have also been known to purchase fossils with the purpose of donating them to science museums.

Still, the dinosaur market remains comparatively small compared to other treasures more typically found under the hammer—possibly due to their unwieldy sizes. (The skeletons that Binoche et Giquello sold measured 3.8m and 12m long.) Only around five dinosaurs are sold globally every year.

Source: https://hk.asiatatler.com

Paleontologists have finally known that the last of the dodos, which has been kept in an Oxford museum, did not die of natural causes but by a gunshot.

Researchers at Oxford University Museum of Natural History and WGM at the University of Warwick used a CT scanning technology to analyze the bird’s head and foot, the only remaining dodo soft tissue in the world.

Results of the 3D software analysis showed that the bird’s skull had particles of t’1 shot pellets that were used to hunt wildfowls in the 1700s. Scientists reported that the shot affected both the head and neck. However, the bullet did not penetrate the skull, which was later found to be very thick.

“The shot is consistent with it being very fine caliber fowling shot – the sort of shot that was used to down birds,” Prof. Paul Smith, director of Oxford University Museum of Natural History told The Guardian.

This new finding refutes the popular theory that the Oxford Dodo was kept alive in London as a “money-spinning curiosity.”

“Although the results were initially shocking, it was exciting to be able to reveal such an important part of the story in the life of the world’s most famous extinct bird. It just goes to show that when you are carrying out investigative research, you never quite know what you are going to find,” said Prof. Mark Williams, head of the Product Evaluation Technologies and Metrology Research Group at WMG, University of Warwick.

Many would know the dodo as an iconic character in Lewis Carroll’s classic novel Alice in Wonderland. Yet, the history of the dodo goes all the way back to the early 1600s when Dutch explorers discovered the bird in Mauritius Island in the Indian Ocean.

Experts said that the extinction of dodos is most likely due to the proliferation of rats and other animals brought by ships, which theoretically ate dodo eggs and competed for food.

Another theory suggested that the bird was hunted by Dutch explorers. However, no bones were found when scientists excavated the remains of an early Mauritian settlement.

It was only in 1796 that the extinction of dodo was known to the public through the French paleontologist Georges Cuvier. In 1848, Victorian researchers Hugh Edwin Strickland and Alexander Gordon Melville published the book The Dodo and Its Kindred.

“It’s based mostly on what they could discover from the Oxford and British Museum specimens, and it helped make dodos rather hot in the Victorian period,” said Leon Claessens, an associate professor of vertebrate paleontology and anatomy at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The Oxford Dodo has been housed at Oxford University since the original Ashmolean Museum was established in the 17th century. In 1828, the British Museum received one of the earliest casts commissioned by the Ashmolean Museum keeper John Duncan.

Currently, models of the Oxford Dodo are kept in the various museums including the American Museum of Natural History, Bradford Museums and Galleries, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Canterbury Museum in New Zealand, Great North Museum Hancock, and the National Geological Repository British Geological Survey, among others.

Source: http://en.brinkwire.com

Ankylosaurs are a large group of herbivorous armored dinosaurs that lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The typical ankylosaur had a wide armored body and a flexible tail. But one group – ankylosaurids – also had a distinctive tail club composed of stiff, interlocking vertebrae (the handle) and large, bulbous osteoderms (the knob) – a special kind of bone formed in the skin that’s unique to armored dinosaurs. According to a new study published in the Journal of Anatomy, the handle arrived first on the scene, and the knob followed.

In this study, Prof Philip Currie from the University of Alberta, Canada, and Dr Victoria Arbour of North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences compared Jurassic ankylosaurs to those from the early and late Cretaceous, tracing the tail’s evolution from flexible to fearsome.

The paleontologists looked at a number of early ankylosaurids including: Liaoningosaurus which lived 122 million years ago; Gobisaurus, which lived 90 million years ago; and Pinacosaurus, which lived 75 million years ago and is the earliest specimen with a complete tail club, to determine which of three possible evolutionary paths was most likely.

“There are three ways the tail could have evolved,” said Dr Arbour, who is the lead author on the study.

“The knob could have evolved first, in which case you’d see ankylosaurids with osteoderms enveloping the end of the tail, but with the tail remaining flexible,” she added.

“The handle could have evolved first, meaning you would see early ankylosaurids with overlapping or fused tail vertebrae.”

“Or the knob and handle could have evolved in tandem, in which case you’d see ankylosaurids with both structures, but there could have been other differences like shorter handles or smaller knobs.”

By comparing the tails of the specimens, the scientists saw that by the early Cretaceous, ankylosaurs had begun to develop stiff tails with fused vertebrae. The knob appeared in the late Cretaceous.

“While it’s possible that some of the species could still have developed the handle and knob in tandem, it seems most likely that the tail stiffened prior to the growth of the osteoderm knob, in order to maximize the tail’s effectiveness as a weapon,” Dr Arbour said.

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Victoria Arbour & Philip Currie. Ankylosaurid dinosaur tail clubs evolved through stepwise acquisition of key features. Journal of Anatomy, published online August 21, 2015; doi: 10.1111/joa.12363

Source: www.sci-news.com

Shell fossils were the first evidence that the construction workers needed to call in a paleontologist.

An international team of paleontologists from the Natural History Museum, London, the University of Birmingham and Virginia Tech has formally given an ancient carnivorous reptile a name, over several decades since its fossils were found in Tanzania. The formal species description of Mandasuchus tanyauchen is published in a special memoir of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

A cousin of modern-day crocodiles, Mandasuchus tanyauchen was an archosaur — the lineage of reptiles that include dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds.

The ancient reptile lived around 245 million years ago (Triassic period) and grew up to 10 feet (3 m) in length.

The fossilized remains of Mandasuchus tanyauchen were first discovered in the 1930s as part of a major paleontological expedition to East Africa, which included work on a geological formation in Tanzania called the Manda Beds.

The fossils in these beds date from the Middle Triassic epoch. This was a time when the archosaurs began their rise to dominance.

English paleontologist Alan Charig proposed the name Mandasuchus for this species in the 1950s, when he studied the Tanzanian fossils as part of his PhD thesis. Charig continued his career in paleontology, but never completed his work on this reptile.

In recent years, new expeditions to Tanzania have found additional fossils, which have remained in Tanzania.

Combined with the older discoveries, these are shedding light on exciting topics such as early dinosaur evolution.

“Studies like these highlight the important role that museums play as storehouses of information of the natural world,” said senior author Professor Paul Barrett, a paleontologist in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum, London.

“Although it took decades to complete this work, the specimens remained safe and accessible in our collections and now form the basis of this amazing new species.”

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Richard J. Butler et al. 2018. Mandasuchus tanyauchen, gen. et sp. nov., a pseudosuchian archosaur from the Manda Beds (Middle Triassic) of Tanzania; pp. 96–121 in C. A. Sidor and S. J. Nesbitt (eds.), Vertebrate and Climatic Evolution in the Triassic Rift Basins of Tanzania and Zambia. Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir 17. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 37 (6); doi: 10.1080/02724634.2017.1343728

Source: http://www.sci-news.com

A real-world Jurassic Park is never going to happen, but shooting for a more recent prehistoric era might be more achievable. The Pleistocene Park project is aiming to rebuild a lost Ice Age ecosystem in Siberia, and its directors, the father-and-son team of Sergey and Nikita Zimov, say it could help slow the effects of climate change. Now, the initiative is running a crowdfunding campaign to help transport a new herd of animals to the park.