* Astronomy

Holes in fossil bones reveal dinosaur activity

New research from the University of Adelaide has added to the debate about whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded and sluggish or warm-blooded and active.
Human thigh bones have tiny holes - known as the 'nutrient foramen' - on the shaft that supply blood to living bone cells inside.  New research has shown that the size of those holes is related to the maximum rate that a person can be active during aerobic exercise.  Professor Seymour has used this principle to evaluate the activity levels of dinosaurs.
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Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken

Renowned palaeontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He's found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he's taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits - including teeth, tails, and even hands - to make a "Chickenosaurus".
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Dinosaur Skin Scraps Are a Jurassic Mystery

Though not nearly as common as the bone fragments and bits of tooth found at dinosaur fossil sites, remnants and impressions of dinosaur skin are not as rare as you might think. Palaeontologists have been finding them for more than a century. The delicate fossil traces are often easy to miss - fossil hunters may even unintentionally destroy them in the process of excavating a skeleton or bone - but palaeontologists have slowly been accumulating a collection of dinosaur skin traces. The newest specimens, reported by scientists John Foster and Rebecca Hunt-Foster in the new issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology, come from the Jurassic rock of Colorado's Morrison Formation.
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How Did Sauropods Get So Big?

Until about 65 million years ago, giants lumbered across rocky ravines and pushed their way through humid forests of conifer and fern.
These were long-necked, quadrupedal sauropods, a group of dinosaurs well-known to American Museum of Natural History visitors from the Barosaurus that rears up to greet them in the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda to the Apatosaurus that has been on display in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs since 1905. (Sauropods are also the focus of the major new exhibition, The World's Largest Dinosaurs, which opens Saturday, April 16). Sauropods maxed out in size with Argentinosaurus, an animal that perhaps weighed up to 90 tons, or as much as 18 adult male African elephants.
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