Jeanne Timmons

Illustration: Hank SharpeYou wouldn’t want to swim in Late Cretaceous seas. If you’ve seen the first Jurassic World movie, you’ll recognize a mosasaur as the creature that leapt from the water to eat a great white shark. That film may have exaggerated the real size of mosasaurs, but the effect is genuine: some species could reach terrifying lengths. These reptiles spent their lives in the water, but they breathed air. They had fins, long tails, mouths full of teeth, and could be anywhere from 10 to 50 feet in length.…

Juvenile Lystrosaurus murrayi skeleton with enveloping layer interpreted as mummified skin. Photo: Courtesy Roger SmithIt was a time of catastrophic change. Most of life on Earth had been wiped out, global temperatures had increased dramatically, and the weather raged in extremes. That anything survived in this hostile environment is remarkable, and yet, some plants and animals persisted. One such survivor was Lystrosaurus, a four-legged herbivore with a beaked snout and two pointy tusk-like teeth. And now, over 250…

She’s over 30,000 years old, and yet her preservation is astounding: She has her skin, her tiny tusk nubs, her toenails, and her little tail. She still has tufts of fur, and her trunk—with its prehensile tip—is complete and malleable. Looking at the initial photograph from where she was found at a Yukon gold mine, she looks like she only recently met her demise.Her name is Nun cho ga, a name decided upon by Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Elders.“‘Nun go’ is ‘baby,’” Debbie Nagano, heritage director of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Government…

Rendering of a reclining Psittacosaurus, with insert showing the umbilical scar.Illustration: Jagged Fang DesignsForget dinosaurs engaged in vicious combat. Put aside terrifying fangs and claws. Scientists have discovered a softer side to dinosaurs: the reptilian equivalent of a belly button.For the first time ever, scientists have identified an umbilical scar on a non-avian dinosaur. The paper announcing this find is published in BMC Biology, and it’s yet another exciting discovery from a particularly rare and…