All posts by LL

Crested dinosaur pushes back dawn of feathers

A predatory dinosaur with bony bumps on its arms and a strange hump on its back provides evidence that feathers began to appear earlier than researchers thought, according to a report in Nature today.

The new species, named Concavenator corcovatus, was about 4 metres long from nose to tail and lived during the Early Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago.

Read the rest of this news story on Nature News [html] or here [pdf].

This story got a mention on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker: here.

Iceland’s Monster Bares Its Heart

This past spring’s eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland was a nightmare for travelers, but it gave scientists in Europe unprecedented access to a complex eruption right in their backyard. Old workhorses of volcanology–seismometers and GPS sensors, which detect movement of the ground–first picked up Eyjafjallajökull’s stirrings in early January. (For the record: The name is pronounced “AY-yah-fyah-lah-YOH-kuul.”) But when the volcano turned volatile in mid-April, scientists took to the skies, enlisting specially equipped planes to study the eruption and its effects on the overlying glacier. Continue reading Iceland’s Monster Bares Its Heart