Dinos

As the go-to digital storefront for many PC gamers, Steam has dominated the market for the better part of 20 years. Aside from the fact that it has millions of games in its growing selection, regular sales and events continue to be a mild threat to a lot of people’s finances. With that in mind, the latest Steam event will commence today and, much like the Pirates vs. Ninjas sale that took place in January, this one also pits one foe against another. In this case, the Dinos vs. Robots Fest will have the large, scaly…

January 25, 20243min readScientists built a robotic dinosaur to terrify grasshoppers, all in hopes of understanding how truly pathetic wings could offer prehistoric animals an evolutionary advantageBy Meghan BartelsA grasshopper flees in response to the folding movement of Robopteryx’s hypothetical proto-wing display. The grasshopper’s escape behaviour is triggered by the hypothetical flush-display executed by the robot. The white arrow in the video indicates the grasshopper’s position before the jump. This is a 960 fps…

How can you tell if a dinosaur is female or male? It’s one of the most basic aspects of biology and yet, for the most part, it continues to be a mystery in paleontology. We don’t yet know the sex of most extinct species, even if those in museum displays have gender-specific names like Sue the T.rex or Cliff the Triceratops. But this past October at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists, one scientist offered insight into the work he and his team are doing to uncover hormones in fossil bones.…

Was Tyrannosaurus rex as smart as a baboon? Scientists don’t like to compare intelligence between species (everyone has their own talents, after all), but a controversial new study suggests some dino brains were as densely packed with neurons as those of modern primates. If so, that would mean they were very smart—more than researchers previously thought—and could have achieved feats only humans and other very intelligent animals have, such as using tools. The…

During the late Triassic period, when the terrestrial world was a single sprawling land mass called Pangaea, a dog-size plant-eating dinosaur perished near a river in the southern part of the continent. When the river flooded, its body was buried by sediment, with some bones still articulated as in life. About 230 million years later, paleontologist Chris Griffin, then a doctoral student at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, spotted a thigh bone sticking…

In the rolling hills of Argentina’s Patagonian Desert, Juan Canale struck paleontological gold. Within half the length of a soccer pitch, his team discovered five dinosaur skeletons, including a new species that’s a Tyrannosaurus rex doppelgänger—the third known giant dinosaur to evolve stubby arms and cartoonishly large heads. In a new study, Canale’s team suggests the forelimbs shrank as a consequence of skull growth, not for any function of their own. “The fact that you see it…

The Jurassic World franchise has done a great job introducing audiences to a number of different dinosaurs. You’ve got your T-Rex, velociraptor and brachiosaurus, and let's not forget the terrifying hybrid dinosaur Indominus Rex. In order to close out the Jurassic World franchise, director Colin Trevorrow knew he had to go out with a bang by introducing ten new dinosaurs in Jurassic World Dominion that have never been seen before. However, there was one dinosaur in particular that was “really hard” to create.It seems…

Life, uh, finds a way Another wave of games is headed to Xbox Game Pass this month, and a good number of them hit today. The back-half of May has some pretty interesting offerings; not as many big AAA hits, but some indie gems that are very worth your time. Leading the charge is Jurassic World Evolution 2, the sequel to Frontier’s original dino-park management sim. It’s got a new campaign and, of course, plenty of new dinosaurs to keep in their pens. You’re going to keep them in their pens, right? The indies are…