Paleontology

Ancient Beast was part-sabretooth, part-otter

4 March, 2016 by

The extinct carnivore, Kolponomos, looked like a bear, and bit like a sabre-toothed tiger.

A group of carnivores that went extinct around 20 million years ago looked superficially like modern bears, but new research shows their bite was more similar to sabre-toothed cats. Known as Kolponomos, these extinct bears were thought to feed on shelled organisms, like modern otters, but with few fossils to go on, their diet and lifestyle has remained contentious.

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Jurassically Inaccurate

12 June, 2015 by

The time is finally here. After fourteen years, Spielberg has opened up the Jurassic World for us again, and everybody’s talking about it. In the twenty years since the release of Jurassic Park, we’ve learned a huge amount about how dinosaurs looked, moved, behaved and reproduced. We’ve learned about how their appearance changes through development, about their social behaviour and how they held themselves, and we’ve learned more from their genetics than we ever thought imaginable when Michael Crichton was writing his Jurassic novels.

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