Home

On:

Poor dinosaurs?their time really was up. Scientists now think that cold was killing them off long before that asteroid wiped them out 65 million years ago. Half of all dinosaurs were gone by then and the impact was just the final straw.

Fossil evidence from the Drumheller valley in Alberta, Canada, laid down 7 million years before the asteroid hit, shows that average temperatures had dropped enough to kill off cold-blooded reptiles such as crocodiles, turtles and dinosaurs. Oxygen isotope readings from fossils show the temperatures at which they formed, so scientists can track climate change over time.
read more

On:

Scientists are planning to hatch dinosaurs from chicken eggs by turning back the evolutionary clock to when birds were dinosaurs. They believe advances in DNA technology could make such a feat possible in 60 to 100 years.

Modern birds are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex, and some say that structurally birds are dinosaurs. Major differences between species can already be created or removed with surprising ease. Already one team at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has succeeded in getting the beaks of chicken embryos to grow budding teeth. This is a feature bird ancestors lost 60 million years ago, soon after the death of the dinosaurs. Researchers have partially restored legs to snakes and eyes to eyeless cave fish. read more