Friday 14 January 2011

Did Dinosaurs live longer than first thought?


This is an old article but those interested in cryptozoology will find it interesting. Did dinosaurs survive longer than first thought?

"Lost World" of Dinosaurs Survived Mass Extinction?Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News May 1, 2009
An isolated group of dinosaurs somehow survived the catastrophic event that wiped out most of their kind some 65.5 million years ago, a new study suggests.Dinosaurs of this "lost world," in a remote region of the U.S. West, may have outlived their doomed relatives by as much as half a million years, according to James Fassett, an emeritus scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Fe, New Mexico.Fassett, who has argued for years that some dinosaurs survived the mass extinction, based his latest work on fossils from the San Juan Basin in what is now Colorado and New Mexico.There, the bones of hadrosaurs, tyrannosaurs, anklyosaurs, and several other species were found together in a sandstone formation that dates to the Paleocene epoch—the time period after the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction event, which is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs.As with his past research, Fassett's latest find is likely to continue sparking controversy among paleontologists."Every few years someone claims to have [found] Paleocene 'surviving' dinosaurs," said Hans-Dieter Sues, associate director for research and collections at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.But so far, such fossils have eventually turned out to be older remains.In his new study, appearing in the April 2009 issue of the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, Fassett argues that a single hadrosaur fossil helps prove that the San Juan dinos really are from the Paleocene.
Read rest here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090501-dinosaur-lost-world.html

A Living Dinosaur: In Search of Mokele-Mbembe
Drums Along the Congo: On the Trail of Mokele-Mbembe, the Last Living Dinosaur
Dinosaurs Living Relatives (Natural History Series)
Living Dinosaurs: Fact or Fiction

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