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About 67 million years ago, two dinosaurs faced off in a confrontation 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 from battle scars.
The Triceratops fossil first emerged when it eroded from the rock of the Hell Creek Formation in 2006. The T. rex fossil was then seen overlapping.
When commercial paleontologist Mark Eatman found the entangled fossils, it was like something from the “Jurassic Park” movies come to life.
The “dueling dinosaurs” were put on display at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh in April.
And now Eatman has won dinosaur gold again.
Dino-mite!
This specimen could be the rock star of dinosaurs.
After more than a year on display at the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark, the horned dinosaur fossil is finally gaining recognition as a previously unknown species.
Lokiceratops rangiformis, named in part after the Norse god of mischief, was a cousin of Triceratops and lived in a swampy environment alongside other horned dinosaur species about 78 million years ago.
Lokiceratops had a flashy, fierce look befitting a metalhead that helped it defend territory and woo friends: an ornate skull with a shield-like fringe, horns over its eyes, and paddle-shaped horns at the back.
Defying gravity
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 a visit to the International Space Station about eight days later.
According to the space agency, the duo is likely to return sometime in July.
The return date continues to slide as Boeing and NASA try to understand the various issues that have cropped up during the spacecraft’s first crewed voyage, such as helium leaks and thruster malfunctions.
Since the capsule’s service module that experienced the problems is not coming back, engineers are rushing to understand as much as possible before Starliner’s departure.
Throughout the universe
Astronomers see for the first time a supermassive black hole awakening in the center of a distant galaxy.
The 2019 detection of an unusually bright glow through a telescope initially tipped scientists that something unusual was going on in the galaxy, which is 300 million light-years away.
Now the international team has an unprecedented view as the sleeping giant comes to life and consumes all the cosmic material it can.
Meanwhile, researchers may have discovered a primordial type of black hole as they re-examine a popular theory by the late British physicist Stephen Hawking in their search for elusive direct evidence of missing matter in the universe.
Ocean secrets
A 246-million-year-old fossil found in an unexpected place reveals what kind of world travelers some ancient creatures were.
The late paleontologist Robert Erwan Fordyce, professor emeritus at the University of Otago, first saw the fossil, which belonged to a nothosaur, in New Zealand. The discovery marked a rare occurrence of the marine reptile being unearthed in the Southern Hemisphere.
The astonishing find left researchers wondering 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 the nothosaurs, which paddled through the water with their limbs, swam all the way around Pangea by using the global ocean as a coastal path, said Benjamin Kear, a paleontologist at the Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Once upon a time there was a planet
Mapping the remains of rock gardens could help researchers figure out what exactly happened to the Polynesian sailors who originally inhabited Easter Island.
Researchers are divided into two camps as they study the remote Pacific island also known as Rapa Nui, which is littered with hundreds of monumental stone heads called moai.
Some experts suspect that limited resources have led to a catastrophic population decline. Others believe the isolated group lived a sustainable life until European settlers brought diseases to the island in the 18th century.
New research using satellite images and machine learning suggests that the island had a much smaller and more stable population, and that the islanders lived off sweet potatoes and other crops grown using a centuries-old agricultural technique.
Explorations
Dive into these findings:
As Voyager 1 explores uncharted cosmic territory, the probe will return valuable scientific data for the first time since a computer glitch sidelined the spacecraft seven months ago.
– Scientists have discovered microplastics in human penises, adding to the growing list of potential health concerns surrounding the tiny particles.
— A 3,300-year-old ship filled with hundreds of intact jars, uncovered at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, is one of the oldest shipwrecks ever found.
– Meet Colombian marine biologist Fernando Trujillo, who ventured into the Amazon decades ago on a mission: to save mysterious pink river dolphins.
— For years, astronomers thought Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was first spotted on the planet more than 350 years ago. A new analysis reveals that the 1665 observations belonged to something else.
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