* Astronomy

The dinosaurs might have gone out with a sudden bang, but their rise to dominance was a gradual ascent, not a sudden takeover, a study suggests.
It shows that dinosaurs co-existed with a more primitive group of reptiles for millions of years before becoming the most common land animals on Earth.
Experts had assumed that once dinosaurs emerged, they swiftly replaced their predecessors the dinosauromorphs.
But the latest study in Science journal questions this theory.

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After nearly two years of efforts, the tallest, heaviest and largest dinosaur fossil - of the Ruyang Yellow River dinosaur- has been found by geological excavators in Ruyang County, Henan Province.
Archaeologists in central China's Henan Province unearthed  the heaviest dinosaur fossils in Asia in an area where local residents kept on digging up what they called "dragon's bones" to use as traditional Chinese medicine.
The calcium-rich 'Dragon bones' were sometimes boiled with other ingredients and fed to children as a treatment for dizziness and leg cramps. Other times they were ground up and made into a paste that was applied directly to fractures and other injuries.
Scientists studied the "dragon's bones" and identified them as fossils of dinosaurs that lived between 85 to 100 million years ago in the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic Era.
The Ruyang Yellow River Dinosaur (Huanghetitan liujiaxiaensis) measures 18 meters long and its sacrum - part of the vertebrae in the lower back - is as broad as 1.31 meters, making it broader than that of the dinosaur fossil unearthed in Gansu in 2006, which was then identified as Asia's heaviest dinosaur.
Experts from The Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, believe that discovery of this dinosaur fossil not only incorrectly identified the Ruyang Basin area as being of the early Cainozoic stratum, but also has important scientific value for the study of the huge, sauropod dinosaurs' distribution, migration patterns and evolution.

Qingdaonews

Down three miles of dirt road, on a farm outside Ten Sleep lay the final resting place of several dinosaurs that met their end in a mud hole 140 million years ago.
Today, palaeontologists are slowly and carefully scratching away at the dinosaur graveyard and have recently unearthed the fossilised remains of an apatosaurus, better known as brontosaurus. The specimen has been endearingly nicknamed "Einstein, the brontosaurus with a brain," because of the complete and intact braincase.
Henry Galiano, founder and owner of Maxilla & Mandible International, LLC, the company responsible for the dig site, said this is a rare and exciting find. The Ten Sleep specimen is 80 percent complete, and 70 feet in length. It has been gathered over the past two years by palaeontologists from around the world. Two from Germany are at the site now.
Generally speaking, apatosaurus skeletons more than 50 percent complete are rare, Galiano said. There exist only 10 unearthed adult skeletons and two other fragmentary skulls, making this find an "extreme rarity."

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Scientists have described a new primitive dinosaur species, Eocursor parvus, which lived in the Late Triassic - about 210 million years ago.
Unearthed in South Africa's Free State, the creature appears to have been a small, agile plant-eater.
The team tells a Royal Society journal that Eocursor sheds light on the early evolution of the Ornithischia.
This important group included the well known herbivororous dinosaurs Triceratops and Stegosaurus.
The fossil specimen was first identified in 1993 but only recently appraised.

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