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About 67 million years ago, two dinosaurs clashed in battle in what is now Montana before being buried together in a single grave.
It is unclear which dinosaur won the battle. Triceratops horridus and Tyrannosaurus rex each died of battle scars.
A Triceratops fossil first appeared when it eroded from Hell Creek Formation rock in 2006. Then a T. rex fossil was spotted overlying it.
When commercial paleontologist Mark Eatman found the tangled fossils, the discovery was like something out of the Jurassic Park movies.
The “dueling dinosaurs” went on display at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh in April.
And now Eatman has struck dino gold again.
Sergey Krasovskiy / Museum of Evolution
An artist’s illustration depicts what Lokiceratops might have looked like 78 million years ago, living in the swamps of present-day northern Montana.
This specimen may be a dinosaur rock star.
After more than a year on display at the Museum of Evolution in Marib, Denmark, a horned dinosaur fossil is finally being recognized as a previously unknown species.
Named in part after the Norse god of mischief, Lokiceratops rangiformis was a cousin of Triceratops and lived in a swampy environment alongside other horned dinosaur species about 78 million years ago.
Lokiceratops had a flamboyant, ferocious appearance fit for a metalhead that helped it defend territory and woo mates: an ornate skull with a shield collar, horns over its eyes, and blade-like horns on its back.
When NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams took off on a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule on June 5, they were expected to return from their visit to the International Space Station about eight days later.
Now, the duo is likely set to return sometime in July, according to the space agency.
The return date is constantly being pushed back as Boeing and NASA work to understand the various problems that arose during the crewed spacecraft’s first voyage, such as helium leaks and thruster failures.
Since the capsule’s service module, which experienced problems, will not return, engineers are trying to understand as much as possible before the Starliner departs.
M. Kornmesser/ESO
An artist’s illustration shows a supermassive black hole awakening at the center of a distant galaxy. The black hole pulls in the accreting disk of material as it feeds on the surrounding gas, causing the galaxy to brighten.
For the first time, astronomers observe the awakening of a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy.
The telescope’s detection of an unusually bright glow in 2019 initially tipped off scientists that something unusual was going on in a galaxy 300 million light-years away.
Now, an international team has an unprecedented view of the sleeping giant coming to life and consuming all the space material it can.
Meanwhile, researchers may have uncovered a primordial type of black hole as they re-examined the late British physicist Stephen Hawking’s popular theory in search of elusive direct evidence of the universe’s missing matter.
A 246-million-year-old fossil found in an unexpected place reveals what some ancient creatures were like.
The late paleontologist Robert Erwan Fordyce, professor emeritus of the University of Otago, first spotted a fossil that belonged to a nothosaurus in New Zealand. This discovery marked the rare occurrence of a marine reptile to be discovered in the Southern Hemisphere.
The astonishing find prompted researchers to question how the reptiles moved from one side of the Earth, which at the time was dominated by a supercontinent called Pangea, to the other.
It’s likely that nothosaurs, which paddled in the water with their limbs, swam all the way around Pangea using the global ocean as a coastal highway, said Benjamin Kear, a paleontologist at Uppsala University’s Museum of Evolution in Sweden.
Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images
The giant stone statues, known as moai in the indigenous language of Rapa Nui, erupt in 2005 on the slopes of the Rano Raraku volcano on Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile.
Mapping the remains of the rockeries could help researchers piece together exactly what happened to the Polynesian seafarers who originally inhabited Easter Island.
Researchers are divided into two camps as they study a remote Pacific island, also known as Rapa Nui, which is dotted with hundreds of monumental stone heads called moai.
Some experts believe that limited resources have led to a catastrophic population decline. Others believe that the isolated group lived a sustainable life until European settlers brought disease to the island in the 18th century.
New research using satellite imagery and machine learning suggests the island had a much smaller and more stable population, and the islanders were able to live off sweet potatoes and other crops grown using ancient farming techniques.
Dive into these findings:
— As Voyager 1 explores uncharted space territory, the probe is sending back valuable science data for the first time since a computer glitch sidelined the spacecraft seven months ago.
— Scientists have discovered microplastics in human penises, adding to a growing list of potential health concerns surrounding the tiny particles.
— A 3,300-year-old ship filled with hundreds of intact vessels uncovered at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is one of the oldest shipwrecks ever found.
— Meet Colombian marine biologist Fernando Trujillo, who went to the Amazon decades ago with a mission: to save the mysterious pink river dolphins.
— For years, astronomers thought that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was first observed on the planet more than 350 years ago. New analysis shows that the 1665 sightings belonged to something else.
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