Researchers at Yale University have named a newly discovered dinosaur 'Obamadon gracilis' in honor of the US president's toothy grin.

The small, insect-eating lizard was first discovered in eastern Montana in 1974 but a recent re-examination showed the fossil had been wrongly classified as a Leptochamops denticulatus and was, in fact, a new species, researchers said.

Obamadon gracilis was one of nine newly discovered species reported on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In naming the new species, Yale scientists combined the Latin "Obamadon" for "Obama's teeth" and "gracilis," which means slender.

"The lizard has these very tall, straight teeth and Obama has these tall, straight incisors and a great smile," said Nick Longrich, a paleontologist at the school in New Haven, Connecticut.

Like many other dinosaurs, the lizard died out about 65 million years ago when a giant asteroid struck earth, scientists say.

Mr Longrich said he waited until after the recent US election to name the dinosaur.

"It would look like we were kicking him when he's down if he lost and we named this extinct lizard after him," he said in an interview.

"Romneydon" was never under consideration and "Clintondon" didn't sound good, said Mr Longrich, who supported Hillary Clinton's failed run against Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary.

Mr Obama is not the first politician whose name has been used to help classify organisms. Megalonyxx jeffersonii, an extinct species of plant-eating ground sloth, was named in honor of President Thomas Jefferson, an amateur paleontologist who studied the mammal.

In 2005, entomologists named three species of North American slime-mold beetles agathidium bushi, agathidium cheneyi and agathidium rumsfeldi in honor of the then-president, vice president and secretary of defense.

Other celebrity names also have been used to name new species. A small Caribbean crustacean has been named after reggae icon Bob Marley, an Australian horsefly has been named in honor of hip-hop star Beyonce, and an endangered species of marsh rabbit has been named after Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner.

Source: Reuters

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Dinosaurs as a group may have been skewed more toward giant species than modern-day creatures are, researchers say.

The findings, based on comparisons of size ranges among extinct and current species, shed light on just how different the world was during the age of dinosaurs, scientists added.

Dinosaurs included the largest animals ever to walk the Earth.

The giants developed early within the dinosaur lineage, with massive, long-necked, long-tailed sauropods evolving by about 200 million years ago.

Although scientists have discovered many giant dinosaurs over the years, many researchers, including, paleontologist David Hone at Queen Mary University of London, assumed dinosaurs came in the same range of small and large species as modern animals do, "and it was just my familiarity with the larger ones that distorted my perception."

"Turns out, nope, there really were tons and tons of big guys out there and not many little ones," Hone told LiveScience.

Hone and his Queen Mary colleague Eoin O'Gorman, a community ecologist, analyzed the sizes of modern birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and terrestrial mammals. They also looked at dinosaurs, the prehistoric winged reptiles known as pterosaurs, and terrestrial mammals that vanished before the modern era. [Gallery: Stunning Illustrations of Dinosaurs]

Skew toward giant

The investigators scanned past research on the sizes of thousands of animal species, including approximately 330 dinosaur species. They found that dinosaurs were dramatically skewed toward large sizes, a pattern significantly different from all other groups of animals they studied.

The most obvious question regarding this work is whether or not large dinosaur fossils survived more successfully than smaller ones, influencing the analysis.

"Indeed, large things do tend to be more readily preserved and smaller ones harder to find, so we would expect there to be a bias in the results towards larger species," Hone said. "The question is, is that enough to affect our results?"

They don't think so.

"First off, the differences are so colossal that the amount of small species missing would be truly enormous, and it's unlikely we, as in the scientific community, have missed that many," Hone said.

Indeed, paleontologists would have had to miss 99.99 percent of dinosaur diversity to explain the huge skew toward giant sizes that O'Gorman and Hone found.

In addition, this skew is not seen with the other extinct groups of animals the scientists examined, including. This includes the pterosaurs, which were close relatives of the dinosaurs and lived alongside them in similar environments.

Bigger is better?

Rather, the environments and biology of dinosaurs might explain this unique skew.

"As you get bigger, you get more energetically efficient, as being big gives you a longer digestion time and returns more energy from eaten food," Hone said. "But mammals can't get that huge or they would overheat."

Mammals are endotherms, or "warm-blooded," meaning they constantly generate their own heat. In contrast, big dinosaurs probably stayed warm because their enormous mass helped retain heat, just as large pots of hot water would take longer to cool down than smaller ones.

In addition, while mammals can have bigger and bigger young as they get larger, often growing their offspring inside themselves, "you can't lay larger and larger eggs," Hone said.

The embryos inside eggs need the shells of eggs to be thin enough to allow them to breathe in oxygen and get rid of carbon dioxide, and if eggs grow too massive, the shells will not be strong enough to protect the eggs.

"So large dinosaurs still laid small eggs. That meant small babies." The large number of eggs and small babies that big dinosaurs likely had suggests the roles that small species often play in environments may have been filled by the young of large species.

If these findings are true, they suggest the age of dinosaurs behaved in ways fundamentally different from the modern world.

"These must have been very harsh environments to live in, with some of the most efficient predators the planet has known," O'Gorman said. Survival amid predators that preyed on the small likely involved producing many young with very rapid growth rates. [Image Gallery: Dinosaur Daycare]

O'Gorman noted this pattern of size ranges they discovered was different between herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs. The sizes of herbivorous dinosaur species were biased toward giants, while carnivorous dinosaurs had nearly as many smaller species as large ones.

That is likely because the herbivorous lifestyle allows a larger size limit, so that the larger they get, the more energy they can get from digested food. The same apparently did not hold true of a carnivorous lifestyle — they could only get so big before they reached a maximum in terms of benefits.

In addition, this skew toward giant sizes generally happened toward the end of major time periods, such as the Late Triassic, Late Jurassic and Late Cretaceous. The researchers suggest the evolution of large body sizes among dinosaurs was the result of long exposures to stable environments, and was reset by the mass extinctions that occurred at the end of these periods.

A mystery that remains is why the researchers did not find this pattern in reptiles, amphibians or fish, which are like the giant dinosaurs were not endoderms. Although the vast majority of modern reptiles and amphibians are carnivores, many fish are herbivores.

"I would be very interested to explore the fish data more thoroughly, subdividing by herbivorous and carnivorous groups as we have done for the dinosaurs," O'Gorman told LiveScience. "This may help to validate the dinosaur results further if we find a consistent trend."

The scientists detailed their findings online Dec. 19 in the journal PLoS ONE.

SEE ALSO: See The Five Freakiest Dinosaurs Ever Dug Up

SEE ALSO:  A Large Dinosaur Footprint Was Found On NASA's Campus

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If you could chow down on any dinosaur meat, which species would you chose?

My first thought was definitely a T. Rex, but I've changed my mind now, after reading this article by  Erin Berger of Popular Science.

They spoke with David Varricchio, a paleontologist at Montana State University, who said:

"When people ask me if a T-Rex would be good, well, I don't think so."

He explained: "They've found jaw abnormalities that suggests they were eating fetid meat and had diseases that came about from prey items. They would be pretty parasite-laden."

The article suggests that people should avoid meat-eaters, since animal fat gives meat a gamey flavor (which is why we love beef, from the plant-eating cow). Dinosaurs that ate marine animals would also be a no-no: Aside from the fishy taste, the high amount of oil from fish would make the meat more likely to oxidize and taste rancid.

The type of muscle an animal has is also important, Berger writes:

The kind of activity an animal does determines what kind of meat it yields. Red meat is composed of slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are built for sustained periods of activity, so animals that are active for longer amounts of time throughout the day would be composed of mostly red meat.

Those who ambush their prey or move quickly for short periods of time would have white meat, which is composed of fast-twitch muscles that allow for quick bursts of activity. So dinosaurs taking part in extended periods of activity would probably have muscles less like a chicken (or even a fast-acting predator like a cheetah) and more like a steady-moving cow.

Varricchio concluded that Ornithomimosaurs, a species of theropod dinosaurs that looked like ancient ostriches, would taste the best: "I think it would be a lean, slightly wild-tasting red meat."

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A man accused of smuggling 70-million-year-old dinosaur skeletons, including a Tyrannosaur, into the United States pleaded guilty in court Thursday.

Eric Prokopi, 38, who is to be sentenced on April 25, faces up to 17 years in jail and a $250,000 fine on charges of conspiring to smuggle illegal goods, transporting goods taken by fraud and using false statements to import goods.

New York chief federal prosecutor Preet Bharara said "black marketers" who illegally export and sell fossils and ancient skeletons "steal a slice" of history.

Prokopi tried to sell a Tyrannosaurus Bataar — a toothy relative of the larger Tyrannosaurus Rex — at auction in New York in May this year, when bids reached $1.05 million.

But Mongolia's government claimed the bones were illegally removed from the Central Asian country and should not be sold. US officials impounded the remains shortly after.

As part of his plea bargain, Prokopi forfeited his rights to the Tyrannosaurus skeleton as well as to a number of others seized by authorities.

Prokopi, who has denied trafficking, spent a year restoring and remounting what had been a loose collection of bones to recreate the skeleton, according to Heritage Auctions, which had attempted to sell the dinosaur on his behalf.

The Florida dealer was also accused of illegally importing from Mongolia a second, nearly complete Tyrannosaurus Bataar skeleton, two Saurolophus skeletons and two Oviraptor skeletons.

He was also accused of smuggling a Microraptor skeleton from China.

One of the Saurolophus skeletons was also sold at an auction, in California, for $75,000 and later confiscated by authorities. The other, along with the Oviraptors, were seized from Prokopi's home.

When he was arrested at his Florida home, a truck arrived carrying some 440 pounds (200 kilograms) of fossils.

Since 1924, Mongolia has banned the export of fossils, which it considers to be national property.

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Newfound fossils of a giant dolphin-shaped reptilian predator are now shedding light on how the world recovered after the most devastating mass extinction in history, researchers say.

This prehistoric sea monster could provide information on how the planet might deal with the mass extinction humans are causing now, scientists added.

The giant marine predator was at least 28 feet (8.6 meters) long, fossils showed.

The carnivore was recovered over a course of three weeks in 2008 from what is today a mountain range in central Nevada, and is now kept at the Field Museum in Chicago.

This new species, formally named Thalattoarchon saurophagis— which means "lizard-eating ruler of the sea"— was an early member of the ichthyosaurs, marine reptiles that evolved from land reptiles just as modern whales did from land mammals. Ichthyosaurs cruised the oceans for 160 million years, apparently going extinct about 90 million years ago, some 25 million years before the age of dinosaurs ended.

"They were the most highly adapted of all marine reptiles, acquiring a fishlike shape and giving birth to live young," said researcher Martin Sander, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bonn in Germany.

Thalattoarchon possessed a massive skull and jaws armed with large teeth with cutting edges used to seize and slice prey. The researchers say it probably could have tackled victims as large as itself or larger. [See Images of the Prehistoric Sea Monster]

"Our new carnivorous ichthyosaur was a top predator, meaning that it had the same role as killer whales in the sea and Tyrannosaurus or the big cats of today on land," Sander said. "This is the first predator in a long row of predators down to this day. The players have changed, but not the game."

Most of the animal was preserved, including the skull — except the front of the snout — parts of the fins, and the complete vertebral column up to the tip of the tail. The fossil was christened "Jim" after its discoverer, Jim Holstein, of the Field Museum.

The newfound carnivore apparently lived 244 million years ago, just 8 million years after the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history, a die-off at the end of the Permian period that killed as many as 80 to 96 percent of all ocean species. Relatively small species were the main survivors.

"Our 'Jim' was thus the first in a long row of T. rexes of the sea, which is why we named him Thalattoarchon, 'ruler of the seas,'" Sander said.

The fact that a giant predator capable of tackling similarly large prey arose so soon after the end-Permian mass extinction reveals that ecosystems recovered rapidly after the die-off.

"A top predator is a very good indicator that the ecosystem was complete, because if the highest level in the food web is there, the lower levels must have been there as well. Otherwise it won't work," Sander said.

Ichthyosaurs diversified very rapidly. "We hope that by studying this group we can better understand the processes of evolution at the grand scale," researcher Lars Schmitz, an evolutionary biologist at Claremont McKenna College, told LiveScience.

The finding could give scientists a sense of what's to come of Earth in the future.

"Ecosystem recovery has been a big topic of research for a while, partially because we as humans are causing one of the biggest extinctions right now," Sander said. "People thus have a keen interest in knowing how long it takes to rebuild things once you have destroyed them."

The scientists, who were supported by the National Geographic Society, detailed their findings online today (Jan. 7) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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An advanced member of the largest group of dinosaurs ever to walk the Earth still had a relatively puny brain, researchers say.

The scientists analyzed the skull of 70-million-year-old fossils of the giant dinosaur Ampelosaurus, discovered in 2007 in Cuenca, Spain, in the course of the construction of a high-speed rail track connecting Madrid with Valencia.

The reptile was a sauropod, long-necked, long-tailed herbivores that were the largest creatures ever to stride the Earth.

More specifically, Ampelosaurus was a kind of sauropod known as a titanosaur, many if not all of which had armor-like scales covering their bodies.

Sauropod skulls are typically fragile, and few have survived intact enough for scientists to learn much about their brains. By scanning the interior of the skull via CT imaging, the researchers developed a 3-D reconstruction of Ampelosaurus' brain, which was not much bigger than a tennis ball.

"This saurian may have reached 15 meters (49 feet) in length; nonetheless its brain was not in excess of 8 centimeters (3 inches)," study researcher Fabien Knoll, a paleontologist at Spain's National Museum of Natural Sciences, said in a statement. [Gallery: Stunning Illustrations of Dinosaurs]

The first sauropods appeared about 160 million years earlier than this fossil.

"We don't see much expansion of brain size in this group of animals as they go through time, unlike a lot of mammalian and bird groups, where you see increases in brain size over time," researcher Lawrence Witmer, an anatomist and paleontologist at Ohio University, told LiveScience. "They apparently hit on something and stuck with it — expansion of brain size over time wasn't a major focus of theirs."

For years, scientists have wondered how the largest land animals ever lived with such tiny brains. "Maybe we should flip that question on their end — maybe we shouldn't ask how they could function with tiny brains, but what are many modern animals doing with such ridiculously large brains. Cows may be triple-Einsteins compared to most dinosaurs, but why?" Witmer said.

Their computer model also revealed the ampelosaur had a small inner ear.

"Part of the inner ear is associated with hearing, so the fact it had a small inner ear means it probably wasn't all that good at hearing airborne sounds," Witmer said. "It probably used a kind of hearing we don't think much about, which depends on sounds transmitted through the ground."

The inner ear is also responsible for balance and equilibrium, Witmer said.

"Given what we know about its inner ear, Ampelosaurus probably didn't put a real premium on rapid, quick jerky eye or head movements, which makes sense — these are relatively large, slow-moving, plant-eating animals," he said.

Knoll and his colleagues had previously developed 3-D reconstructions of another sauropod, Spinophorosaurus nigeriensis. In contrast to Ampelosaurus, Spinophorosaurus had a fairly developed inner ear.

"It is quite enigmatic that sauropods show such a diverse inner ear morphology whereas they have a very homogeneous body shape," Knoll said. "More investigation is definitely required."

Currently scientists are debating whether sauropods held their heads near the ground, grazing on low vegetation, or high up like giraffes to browse on high leaves. "It could be that learning more about the inner ear could tell us what sauropod neck posture was like," Witmer said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 23 in the journal PLOS ONE.

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Researchers have discovered a new species of feathered but flightless little dinosaur from the Jurassic period.

Remains of the tiny beast, dubbed Eosinopteryx brevipenna, found in northeastern China suggest it was slightly less than a foot long (30 centimeters) and had a short snout and a short tail. Based on the dinosaur's small wingspan and bone structure, researchers believe it would have been able to run around quite easily, but likely couldn't whip up enough of a wing-beat to fly. The dinosaur also sported toes that would have been suitable for walking along the ground, the researchers added.

This birdlike dinosaur's plumage was much more reduced compared with the feathers on some of its contemporaries, which suggests that feathering was already diversified by the Late Jurassic, adapted to different ecological niches and purposes, the researchers said. (The Jurassic period lasted from about 199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago.)

"This discovery sheds further doubt on the theory that the famous fossil Archaeopteryx— or 'first bird' as it is sometimes referred to — was pivotal in the evolution of modern birds," researcher Gareth Dyke, a senior lecturer in paleontology at the U.K.'s University of Southampton, said in a statement.

"Our findings suggest that the origin of flight was much more complex than previously thought."

Archaeopteryx was long thought by many to have been the earliest bird. Discovered in 1860 in Germany, it is sometimes referred to as Urvogel, the German word for "original bird" or "first bird." But recent findings suggest late-stage Jurassic Archaeopteryx was actually just a relative of the lineage that ultimately gave rise to birds.

The new research was detailed in the Jan. 22 issue of the journal Nature Communications.

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The idea that a cosmic impact ended the age of dinosaurs in what is now Mexico now has fresh new support, researchers say.

The most recent and most familiar mass extinction is the one that finished the reign of the dinosaurs — the end-Cretaceous or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, often known as K-T. The only survivors among the dinosaurs are the birds.

Currently, the main suspect behind this catastrophe is a cosmic impact from an asteroid or comet, an idea first proposed by physicist Luis Alvarez and his son geologist Walter Alvarez. Scientists later found that signs of this collision seemed evident near the town of Chicxulub (CHEEK-sheh-loob) in Mexico in the form of a gargantuan crater more than 110 miles (180 kilometers) wide. The explosion, likely caused by an object about 6 miles (10 km) across, would have released as much energy as 100 trillion tons of TNT, more than a billion times more than the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, further work suggested the Chicxulub impact occurred either 300,000 years before or 180,000 years after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. As such, researchers have explored other possibilities, including other impact sites, such as the controversial Shiva crater in India, or even massive volcanic eruptions, such as those creating the Deccan Flats in India.

Timing of an impact

New findings using high-precision radiometric dating analysis of debris kicked up by the impact now suggest the K-T event and the Chicxulub collision happened no more than 33,000 years apart. In radiometric dating, scientists estimate the ages of samples based on the relative proportions of specific radioactive materials within them. [Wipe Out: History's Most Mysterious Mass Extinctions]

"We've shown the impact and the mass extinction coincided as much as one can possibly demonstrate with existing dating techniques," researcher Paul Renne, a geochronologist and director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California, told LiveScience.

"It's gratifying to see these results, for those of us who've been arguing a long time that there was an impact at the time of this mass extinction," geologist Walter Alvarez at the University of California at Berkeley, who did not participate in this study, told LiveScience. "This research is just a tour de force, a demonstration of really skillful geochronology to resolve time that well."

The fact the impact and mass extinction may have been virtually simultaneous in time supports the idea that the cosmic impact dealt the age of dinosaurs its deathblow.

"The impact was clearly the final straw that pushed Earth past the tipping point," Renne said. "We have shown that these events are synchronous to within a gnat's eyebrow, and therefore, the impact clearly played a major role in extinctions, but it probably wasn't just the impact."

The new extinction date is precise to within 11,000 years.

"When I got started in the field, the error bars on these events were plus or minus a million years," added paleontologist William Clemens at the University of California at Berkeley, who did not participate in this research. "It's an exciting time right now, a lot of which we can attribute to the work that Paul and his colleagues are doing in refining the precision of the time scale with which we work."

Final blow

Although the cosmic impact and mass extinction coincided in time, Renne cautioned this does not mean the impact was the only cause of the die-offs. For instance, dramatic climate swings in the preceding million years, including long cold snaps in the general hothouse environment of the Cretaceous, probably brought many creatures to the brink of extinction. The volcanic eruptions behind the Deccan Traps might be one cause of these climate variations.

"These precursory phenomena made the global ecosystem much more sensitive to even relatively small triggers, so that what otherwise might have been a fairly minor effect shifted the ecosystem into a new state," Renne said.

The cosmic impact then proved the deathblow.

"What we really need to do is to understand better what was going on before the impact — what was the level of ecological stress that existed that allowed the impact to be the straw that broke the camel's back?" Renne said. "We also need better dates for the massive volcanism at the Deccan Flats to better understand when it first started and how fast it occurred."

The scientists detailed their findings in the Feb. 8 issue of the journal Science.

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Some birds, like flamingos and penguins, make a special substance called "crop milk" to feed their young. A new theory suggests that some dinosaurs may have done the same to keep their young healthy.

Keep this in mind, though, there's no actual evidence that dinosaurs did make "milk" for their offspring. They aren't mammals (who have breasts and lactate real milk). The link, suggested by Paul Else, of the University of Wollongong, is through the dinosaurs' avian descendants.

The theory was published as a commentary in the February issue of the Journal Of Experimental Biology.

He suggests that duck-billed dinosaurs known as hadrosaurs would have been a good candidate for "milk" producers. These dinosaurs wouldn't have been able to break down plant foods until they grew teeth and acquired the right gut microbes, but they still grew relatively quickly. This could be because of a nutritional milk-like boost from their parents, Else suggests.

Brian Switek, of the National Geographic blog Laelaps doesn't put to much faith into the theory:

... his hypothesis is undermined by the relationships of birds that produce milk-like products.

All of the birds Else mentions in his study belong to a group called Neo aves, and each of the mentioned avian species produce the milk-like substance in different ways. Pigeons generate the fluid in their crop, for example, whereas emperor penguins secrete the liquid from the lining of their esophagus. This hints that the ability to produce such substances evolved multiple times within Neoaves, rather than being a shared feature that goes back to non-avian dinosaurs.

He also says that since alligators and crocodiles don't show this, it's unlikely that the trait comes from their shared ancestor with birds, Hadrosaurs and other dinosaurs — an early archosaur that lived about 249 million years ago.

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Researchers in northeastern Spain say they've uncovered hundreds of dinosaur egg fossils, including four kinds that had never been found before in the region. The eggs likely were left behind by sauropods millions of years ago.

Eggs, eggshell fragments and dozens of clutches were nestled in the stratigraphic layers of the Tremp geological formation at the site of Coll de Nargó in the Spanish province of Lleida, which was a marshy region during the Late Cretaceous Period, the researchers said.

"Eggshells, eggs and nests were found in abundance and they all belong to dinosaurs, sauropods in particular," the study's leader, Albert García Sellés from the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Palaeontology Institute, told Spanish news agency SINC this week.

"Up until now, only one type of dinosaur egg had been documented in the region: Megaloolithus siruguei," Sellés added. His team found evidence of at least four other species: Cairanoolithus roussetensis, Megaloolithus aureliensis,Megaloolithus siruguei and Megaloolithus baghensis. Megaloolithus eggs are thought to be associated with sauropods, long-necked dinosaurs that were among some of the largest to roam the planet.

The Coll de Nargó area is considered one of the most important dinosaur nesting areas in Europe, the researchers said, adding that their study shows it was used by several dinosaurs from the Late Campanian age (around 71 million years ago) to the Late Maastrichtian age (around 67 million years ago).

"We had never found so many nests in the one area before. In addition, the presence of various oospecies (eggs species) at the same level suggests that different types of dinosaurs shared the same nesting area," Sellés said, adding that thedinosaur eggs could help scientists determine the date of future findings at the site.

"It has come to light that the different types of eggs are located at very specific time intervals," Sellés explained to SINC. "This allows us to create biochronological scales with a precise dating capacity. In short, thanks to the collection of oospecies found in Coll de Nargó we have been able to determine the age of the site at between 71 and 67 million years."

The findings are published in the March issue of the journal Cretaceous Research.

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Prominent creationist Dr. Joseph Mastropaolo, the man who wagered $10,000 that the literal interpretation of the book of Genesis cannot be disproved, does not deny that dinosaurs roamed the earth.

But given that he believes that the universe is about 7,000 years old, he posits that dinosaurs became extinct relatively recently.

"If we go back a thousand years, we probably had these so-called dragons roaming the earth,"Mastropaolo told BI."But they couldn't be called 'dinosaurs' because that word hadn't been invented yet."

Radiometric dating indicates that some dinosaur fossils are about 65 million years old, but Mastropaolo believes that the technique is "grossly biased, not valid, unreliable, and uncalibrated."

Scientists argue that radiometric dating techniques to be reliable and firmly grounded in physics while considering Mastropaolo's arguments to be ludicrous.

He said that before the mid-19th century, dinosaurs were identified with a different name such as dragon, behemoth, or Leviathan.

"You have some historical accounts of who killed the dragon," the former biomechanics professor said. "In the book of Job, he talks about Leviathan having a tail like a cedar tree. When you try to make an animal with a tail that big, then you're in the process of creating something like one of those big dinosaurs in ancient times."

As for how human beings were able to survive in the same neighborhood as a Tyrannosaurus rex, Mastropaolo said that humans beings would have been able to trick them.

"Human beings were smarter the further back we go in time because they have been less degenerated by the pollutants that we've been putting into the air, water, and soil,"he said. "T. rex … could be herded into a blind canyon and have rocks dropped on their heads from above. And they'd soon be done in."

Furthermore, Mastropaolo believes that they could even have been domesticated the "way we have domesticated cattle and elephants."

"I can't imagine that they wouldn't be able to do it with [a dinosaur]," he said. "We know that animal husbandry goes back thousands of years. Why not? If people found out that there was a dinosaur that they were able to feed and domesticate, why not expect that they used that knowledge to better their standard of living?"

Nearly half of Americans claim, like Mastropaolo, to believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, rejecting the evidence regarding the age of the Earth "would mean rejecting not just biological evolution but also also fundamental discoveries of modern physics, chemistry, astrophysics, and geology."

SEE ALSO: Prominent Creationist Explains Plan To Win $10,000 Wager About Genesis

SEE ALSO: Modern Birds Are Essentially Living Baby Dinosaurs

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Embryonic dinosaurs kicked and wiggled in the egg, a new discovery of a baby-dino-bone bed suggests.

The bones, all from not-yet-hatched embryonic dinosaurs, are among the oldest dinosaur-embryo fossils ever found. What's more, the embryo fossils came from separate nests and the dino embryos were at different stages of development when they died — two discoveries that will enable researchers to study how dinosaurs developed before hatching.

"It tells us quite a bit about early embryonic stages and changes that occur in the embryonic life of these animals — something we haven't really seen before," said study researcher Robert Reisz, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto.

In addition to discovering evidence of in-egg kicking, the researchers found that the embryos, which probably belonged to the long-necked Lufengosaurus, grew faster than the embryos of any birds or mammals alive today. [See Images of the Tiny Dino Embryos]

Tiny-bone find

Timothy Huang, a chemist at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan and an amateur archaeologist, discovered the embryonic bones about three years ago in Yunnan Province, China. The bone bed has an area of about 3 square feet (1 square meter) and a thickness of about 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters). In this small patch, the researchers eventually uncovered more than 200 itsy-bitsy bones.

A geological analysis of the spot revealed that slow flooding probably smothered the eggs, which seem to have been laid in a colonial nesting site. After the flood, the embryos and eggs rotted and fell apart, leaving a mound of disarticulated bones. The bones date to the Lower Jurassic period, or between 199.6 million and 175.6 million years ago. That makes them just as ancient as the oldest known embryos ever found, which were discovered at a nesting site of long-neckedMassospondylus dinosaurs in South Africa. 

It was a boon for science that the dino embryos had fallen apart, instead of fossilizing inside their eggs, Reisz told LiveScience.

"People are extremely possessive and fond of their embryos inside their eggs — imagine us asking them to take pieces out and do the sections on them and cut them, and essentially do damage to them," he said. "These bones are completely disarticulated, and we have a lot of them — so it's not unreasonable to be able to take a few and cut them, and see what their internal anatomy is like."

How baby dinos grew

The bone bed contained spinal bones, limb bones, shoulder blades and even a few fragments of skull, but Reisz and his team focused their analysis on the most prevalent and best-preserved bones: femurs, or thigh bones. These little leg bones ranged from 0.5 to 0.9 inches (12 to 22 millimeters) in length, shorter than matchsticks.

The bones were porous, filled with cavities that would have once allowed blood to flow to the growing tissue. The size of the cavities is determined by how fast the animal grows — which made researchers realize these embryos got big quickly.

"They grow very fast — faster than we expected, and faster than most other dinosaurs that have been studied this way," Reisz said.

The fast growth rate makes sense, given that Lufengosaurus grew to 20 feet (6 meters) in length.

The researchers also found an asymmetrical thickening in the femurs associated with muscle action on the bone. The finding suggests the little dinos were kicking and twitching inside their eggs.

The team also discovered evidence of organic material — probably collagen, part of the connective tissue that forms ligaments and tendons. If the material isn't too deteriorated, it could be compared to collagen in living animals, thus providing a new way to look at relationships between modern creatures and the extinct dinosaurs, Reisz said.

"We're setting a new benchmark as to what can be done in dinosaur embryology," Reisz said. He and his colleagues report their findings Thursday (April 11) in the journal Nature. An upcoming goal, Reisz said, is to give the embryos their first dental exam.

"One of the things we may try in the near future is to look at the embryonic teeth themselves," he said. "They're very cool."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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A prehistoric beast the size of a pheasant has become a contender for the title of oldest bird to stalk the Earth.

The small, feathered "Dawn" bird lived around 160m years ago, about 10m years before Archaeopteryx, that holds the official title of the earliest bird known to science.

The new species, which scientists have named Aurornis xui, had claws and a long tail, with front and hind legs similar to those of Archaeopteryx, but some features of its bones were more primitive. It measured 50cm from its beak to the tip of its tail.

Encased in sedimentary rock, the fossil preserved traces of downy feathers along the animal's tail, neck and chest, but the absence of larger feathers suggests it was not able to fly.

When scientists reconstructed the evolutionary tree of similar beasts using measurements from their skeletons, A xui appeared on the bird lineage, but closer to the base of the tree than Archaeopteryx.

"It's an important fossil," said Gareth Dyke, a senior palaeontologist involved in the study at Southampton University. "Aurornis pushes Archaeopteryx off its perch as the oldest member of the bird lineage."

Archaeopteryx holds a prized position in evolutionary history. The fossil, discovered in Germany in 1861, proved that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs, and was the first fossil to support Darwin's theory of evolution, which had been published only two years earlier.

Researchers named the new species Aurornis xui because it marks the earliest days of the evolutionary path that led to modern birds. Aurornis combines aurora, the Latin for dawn, and ornis, the Greek for bird. The second part of the name, xui, honours Xu Xing, a Chinese palaeontologist, according to a report in Nature.

Scientists at the Yizhou Fossil and Geology Park in north-eastern China bought the remains from a local fossil dealer, who claimed they had been unearthed in Yaoluguo in western Liaoning, where sedimentary rock was laid down 153m to 165m years ago.

It is not uncommon for scientists to work with fossil dealers, but it can be a risky business. Unless experts can confirm where a fossil came from, it can be impossible to gauge their age.

The high value of exotic fossils has led to a flood of fakes onto the market that have duped scientists in the past. In 2009, researchers retracted a paper that claimed cheetahs originated in China, after the fossil they studied was found to be glued together from less interesting remains.

When it was bought, the latest specimen was only partially prepared, but further work by Pascal Godefroit and others at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels revealed the intricate details of the skeleton. They saw no signs of forgery and said the chances of it being a fake were low.

Analysis of the sediments proved that the fossil came from the Tiaojishan formation as the dealer claimed, and not younger deposits nearby.

Though the remains themselves are stunning, scientists are more interested in what the new species means for the evolution of birds and bird flight. In 2011, Xu Xing claimed that Archaeopteryx was not an ancient ancestor of modern birds after all. The latest study overturns that claim, and returns Archaeopteryx to the avian lineage.

"This work makes Archaeopteryx a bird again, and given that we have the original specimen here in London, we're very pleased to have it reinstated," said Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum in London. "It makes life simpler. If Archaeopteryx was an early bird, we only have to worry about one origin of flight."

Dawn is only the latest small-bodied, bird-like creature from the Jurassic to be unearthed by fossil hunters. The picture emerging is of a time when scores of bird-like dinosaurs and dinosaur-like birds lived side-by-side, with only minor differences separating one species from another.

"This emphasizes how grey the dividing line is between birds and dinosaurs. There's such a gradation in features between them that it's very difficult to tell them apart. It only takes relatively small changes in our knowledge of these to flip around some of the evolutionary relationships between them," said Barrett.

Though the Dawn bird is older than Archaeopteryx, claiming the title of oldest known bird is no simple matter. Features of Archaeopteryx are used to define what a bird is, so species that lived beforehand are in murky territory.

"The new species is certainly an older member of the bird lineage than Archaeopteryx, and it's fair to call it a very primitive bird. But what you call a bird comes down to what you call a bird, and a lot of definitions depend on Archaeopteryx," said Barrett.

Fossils that captured evolution in action:

Tiktaalik
Better known as the "fishapod," Tiktaalik was discovered in the Canadian Arctic in 2004. This 375m-year-old creature lived at a crucial time in history, when fish first left the oceans and became land dwellers. Tiktaalik looked like a primitive fish crossed with early four-legged animals. It had lungs and gills, and fins that could support much of its weight.

Archaeopteryx
The classic transitional fossil, Archaeopteryx had feathers like a bird, but teeth, claws and a bony tail like a dinosaur. The first remains were discovered in Germany in 1861, only two years after Darwin published his theory of evolution. In 1868, Thomas Huxley suggested that Archaeopteryx was an evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. The animal became central to the evolution debate.

Amphistium
Amphistium is a 50m-year-old relative of the flatfish. While modern flatfish, like flounder, plaice and sole, have both eyes on one side of the head, the shift in eye position is incomplete in Amphistium. One eye has begun to move towards the other. Specimens of Amphistium had lain in museums for more than two centuries before their importance became clear.

Ambulocetus
The evolutionary leap from land to marine mammals was a problem for Darwin, but Ambulocetus gave a snapshot of the process in action. Known as the walking whale, Ambulocetus was an early whale discovered in Pakistan in 1992. It could walk on four legs on land and in water, and heard by picking up vibrations through its jawbone, just as modern whales do.

Thrinaxodon
Known from fossils unearthed in Antarctica and South Africa, this creature lived 245m years ago. It captures the extraordinary transition from reptile to mammal. Descended from reptiles, it had scales and laid eggs, but like mammals, had whiskers, warm blood and perhaps a fur coat.

Ian Sample

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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A transitional species that represents a link between dinosaurs and birds may have sported pale feathers that were dark at the tips, a new study suggests.

For the study, detailed in the June 13 issue of the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, researchers used an X-ray beam to identify ancient traces of pigment in fossils of Archaeopteryx, a winged creature that lived about 150 million years ago.

"This work refines our understanding of pigment patterning in perhaps the most important known fossil. Our technique shows that complex patterns were present even at the very earliest steps in the evolution of birds," said study co-author Roy Wogelius, an earth scientist at Manchester University in the United Kingdom, in a statement.

Rare bird

Archaeopteryx was a transitional species between dinosaurs and birds that lived in what is now Germany. Scientists believe birds evolved from theropods, a group of carnivorous dinosaurs that includes the Tyrannosaurus rex, during the Jurassic Era, about 150 million years ago.

Only 11 fossils specimens of the elusive creature have been found, and scientists thought any traces of the dinobird's feathers had long since vanished. [Avian Ancestors: Dinosaurs That Learned to Fly]

But recently, researchers discovered that some fossilized feathers contained traces of melanosomes, pigment-making structures. Last year, researchers analyzed some of these melanosomes and determined that Archaeopteryx sported black feathers.

However, the team sampled just a few spots on the feather, meaning the dinobird's full plumage pattern was still unknown.

To get a more complete picture of the dinobird, Wogelius and his colleagues used an X-ray beam from a synchrotron radiation light source to do a complete scan of a fossilized Archaeopteryx feather, as well as pigmentation found in the surrounding rock.

The team discovered trace amounts of chemicals associated with pigments, which enabled a reconstruction of the animals' feather pattern.

Instead of being all black, it turns out Archaeopteryx sported light-and-dark patterned plumage.

"The fact that these compounds have been preserved in-place for 150 million years is extraordinary," said study co-author Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester, in a statement. "Together, these chemical traces show that the feather was light in color with areas of darker pigment along one edge and on the tip. Scans of a second fossilizedArchaeopteryx, known as the Berlin counterpart, also show that the trace-metal inventory supported the same plumage pigmentation pattern."

Understanding the plumage patterns could provide insights into courtship rituals, as well as the health and eating habits of these ancient creatures.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Analysis of bones 100 million years old showed baby Psittacosaurus had long arms and short legs, which were used to scuttle around shortly after hatching.

The arms grew quickly between the ages of one and three, suggesting that the Psittacosaurus continued to move on all fours during their 'toddler' years.

But aged four, Psittacosaurus - known as the 'parrot dinosaur' - experienced a massive growth spurt in their legs, while the development of their arms slowed.

This meant legs grew to twice the size of arms - causing the dinosaurs to spend their adult life on two feet.

Palaeontologists from Beijing, Bristol and Bonn discovered the differences in limb growth through a combination of biomechanical analysis and bone histology.

Dr Qi Zhao, from the Institute for Vertebrate Palaeontology in Beijing, carried out the intricate study on bones of babies, juveniles and adults.

Dr Zhao, who conducted the research as part of his PhD thesis at the University of Bristol, said: "Some of the bones from baby Psittacosaurus were only a few millimetres across, so I had to handle them extremely carefully to be able to make useful bone sections.

"I also had to be sure to cause as little damage to these valuable specimens as possible."

There are more than 1,000 specimens of Psittacosaurus from the Cretaceous period of China and other parts of east Asia, around 100 million years ago.

Dr Zhao sought special permission from the Beijing Institute to section two arm and two leg bones from 16 individual dinosaurs, aged from less than one year to 10 years old, or fully grown.

He carried out intricate sectioning work in a special palaeohistology laboratory in Bonn in Germany.

The one-year-olds had long arms and short legs and scuttled about on all fours soon after hatching.

Bone sections showed that the arm bones grew fastest when the dinosaurs were aged between one and three.

From four to six years, arm growth slowed down and the leg bones showed a massive growth spurt, meaning they ended up twice as long as the arms.

Professor Xing Xu of the Beijing Institute, who supervised Dr Zhao's thesis, said: "This remarkable study, the first of its kind, shows how much information is locked in the bones of dinosaurs.

"We are delighted the study worked so well, and see many ways to use the new methods to understand even more about the astonishing lives of the dinosaurs."

Professor Mike Benton, of the University of Bristol, who also supervised Dr Zhao's PhD, said: "These kinds of studies can also throw light on the evolution of a dinosaur like Psittacosaurus."

"Having four-legged babies and juveniles suggests that at some time in their ancestry, both juveniles and adults were also four-legged, and Psittacosaurus and dinosaurs in general became secondarily bipedal."

The paper, 'Histology and postural change during the growth of the ceratopsian dinosaur Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis', is published today in Nature Communications.

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As most anyone who went through the "dinosaur phase" in childhood already guessed Tyrannosaurus rex was a fearsome predator.

A plant-eating dinosaur found with a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth lodged in its the tail of a plant-eating dinosaur has confirmed what scientists long suspected: T. rex was a predator.

The tooth was discovered in the tail of a hadrosaur that lived about 66 million years ago.

"It's the Holy Grail for a paleontologist," said study co-author David Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas. "Not only was the tooth broken off, but the tail had healed around it. That means that Tyrannosaurus rex attacked that other dinosaur." [Image Gallery: See the T. rex bite wound]

The findings were published today (July 15) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Circumstantial evidence

Although T. rex has been portrayed as the deadliest dino predator, the case for predation wasn't airtight. Even though stomach remains, a fearsome bite and body plan all suggested the imposing dinosaur attacked and ate other prey, some paleontologists proposed that T. rex was a scavenger, feasting on already dead animals but not killing its prey itself.

A few other herbivore fossils had been found with traces of T. rex bite wounds, but the evidence wasn't conclusive.

Burnham and his colleagues were excavating in the Hell Creek formation in South Dakota. During the Cretaceous Period, the area was a vast network of forested rivers, and the formation now contains myriad fossils of dinosaurs and small mammals from the period.

'Beyond a reasonable doubt'

Burnham's graduate student, Robert DePalma, uncovered two fused vertebrae from the tail of a hadrosaur, likely Edmontosaurus annectens, a plant eater that munched on pine needles using scissorlike teeth.

Lodged inside the vertebrae was part of a tooth, and the area around it showed signs of healing. When the team analyzed the serrations on the tooth, they confirmed it belonged to a T. rex.

"We were able to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that that is a T.rex tooth," Burnham told LiveScience.

The T. rex likely attacked the hadrosaur, but the herbivore was able to escape, Burnham said. The healing over the tooth indicates that the hadrosaur lived awhile after the attack.

The new findings prove that the iconic dinosaur preyed on hadrosaurs.

"This is the first time we have physical evidence, and without physical evidence for predation, people always said, 'Oh yeah, T.rex could have been a scavenger,'" Burnham said.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. FollowLiveScience @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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A new species of horned dinosaur, Nasutoceratops titusi, was dug up in southern Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

It looks a lot like the infamous Triceratops, but has a narrower, more beak-like horn over its nose.

The finding was announced on Wednesday, July 17, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

During the Late Cretaceous Period, which ended around 65 million years ago with the extinction of dinosaurs, this horned creature roamed Laramidia, the western landmass formed when rising global sea levels flooded and divided North America.

Utah is located in the southern part of Laramidia. It has historically been home to far fewer dinosaur fossils than northwestern parts of the continent, like Alberta, Montana, and Alaska, according to the study.

The previously unknown dinosaur belongs to the same family as the Triceratops — ceratopsids. These large-bodied herbivores are known to have giant skulls with a single horn over the nose and horns above each eye.

According to a press release: "The newly discovered species, Nasutoceratops titusi, possesses several unique features, including an oversized nose relative to other members of the family, and exceptionally long, curving, forward-oriented horns over the eyes. The bony frill, rather than possessing elaborate ornamentations such as hooks or spikes, is relatively unadorned, with a simple, scalloped margin."

The Nasutoceratops was about 15 meters (49 feet) long and weighed 2.5 tonnes (5,511 pounds).

The dinosaur lived about 76 million years ago during the Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous period.

A skeletal reconstruction of the Nasutoceratops is shown below:

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MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A team of archaeologists have discovered the fossilized remains of a 72 million-year-old dinosaur tail in a desert in northern Mexico, the country's National Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH) said on Monday.

Apart from being unusually well preserved, the 5 meter (16 foot) tail was the first ever found in Mexico, said Francisco Aguilar, INAH's director in the border state of Coahuila.

The team, made up of archaeologists and students from INAH and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), identified the fossil as a hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur.

The tail, found near the small town of General Cepeda, likely made up half the dinosaur's length, Aguilar said.

Archaeologists found the 50 vertebrae of the tail completely intact after spending 20 days in the desert slowly lifting a sedimentary rock covering the creature's bones.

Strewn around the tail were other fossilized bones, including one of the dinosaur's hips, INAH said.

Dinosaur tail finds are relatively rare, according to INAH. The new discovery could further understanding of the hadrosaur family and aid research on diseases that afflicted dinosaur bones, which resembled those of humans, Aguilar said.

Scientists have already determined that dinosaurs suffered from tumors and arthritis, for example.

Dinosaur remains have been found in many parts of the state of Coahuila, in addition to Mexico's other northern desert states.

"We have a very rich history of paleontology," Aguilar said.

He noted that during the Cretaceous period, which ended about 65 million years ago, much of what is now central northern Mexico was on the coast. This has enabled researchers to unearth remains of both marine and land-based dinosaurs.

The presence of the remains was reported to INAH by locals in June 2012. After initial inspections, excavation began earlier this month. The remains of the tail will be transferred to General Cepeda for cleaning and further investigation.

(Editing by Dave Graham and Philip Barbara)

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"First, we're assuming that the T. rex won't just eat the person, right?" asks Jack Conrad, a vertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Right.

This is a sanctioned match, and killing your opponent is strictly against the rules. Who's coming out on top?

"Doesn't matter," Conrad says. "There's no chance that any human alive could win." The T. rex's arms might have looked wimpy, but they were extremely strong.

Each was about three feet long and, based on the size of the arm bones and analysis of the spots where muscle attached to the bone, they were jacked. "The bicep alone-and this is a conservative estimate-could curl 430 pounds," Conrad says. Even the beefiest humans max out at around an embarrassing 260 pounds.

Surely an Over the Top-era Sylvester Stallone would put up a good fight? "Not even Lou Ferrigno in his prime would stand a chance," Conrad says. "They didn't just have big biceps. Their chest and shoulder muscles were huge too. They had huge arms and shoulders-bigger than my leg. They had the strength to rip a human's arm right out of its socket."

There is a chance, however, that your competition might not be able to put all that beefy muscle to use. There are dozens of hypotheses about what the T. rex used its arms for, Conrad explains, but the ones taken most seriously involve pushing itself up if it was lying on its belly, tossing big chunks of meat into its mouth, or holding onto females during what scientists suspect was a very vigorous mating routine. These ideas are favored because such actions required Barbie doll-like up-and-down motions of the arm, and fossil evidence indicates that the dino king was incapable of rotating or twisting its arms. "The T. rex probably couldn't have done the arm-wrestling move," Conrad says. "So maybe you could get him on a technicality."

This article originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Popular Science magazine.

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Eccentric Australian mining magnate Clive Palmer was Thursday given the green light to build "the world's biggest" park of giant robotic dinosaurs, despite hundreds of objections filed by local residents.

A spokeswoman for the Sunshine Coast Regional Council said Palmer's plan to erect up to 160 animatronic dinosaurs at his Coolum Resort was approved "unanimously by council this morning", with local officials hoping for a tourism boost.

The exhibit will include five Tyrannosaurus rex robots, the largest towering at 8.5 metres (28 feet) in height, as well as a 10-metre Ruyangosaurus. The creatures, which are on order from China, will move their tails and chests and blink their eyes.

There are already two specimens on display at Coolum, north of Brisbane, and a third under construction, a Palmer spokesman told AFP.

"Jeff the T-rex (is) near the golf course pro shop, (there is) Bones the Skeleton and a giant crocodile is being installed," the spokesman said.

"More dinosaurs (are) coming in (the) next few weeks."

Palmer, a larger-than-life character who has made a fortune in mining and is currently building a replica of the Titanic to re-enact the ill-fated ship's Atlantic voyage in 2016, has described Coolum as the world's biggest dinosaur exhibit.

Asked earlier this year why he was building the Titanic replica, Palmer said: "I want to spend the money I've got before I die".

The council said Coolum "has the potential to attract new patronage and maintain the economic viability of the resort", rejecting local resident concerns about noise and fears the dinosaurs would lessen the resort's reputation and image.

"The additional attractions form a minor part (approximately 1.3 hectares) of the 150 hectare resort," it said.

It said the exhibits would be motion-sensor controlled and have a predetermined performance time, minimising noise, with a master volume control able to be adjusted "to ensure that they do not disturb either resort patrons or nearby residents".

Palmer is also running for office in Australia's national elections this year in an audacious and unlikely bid for the prime ministership.

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