Quite a few Jurassic World plot details have leaked out across the Internet in recent weeks, along with a map that offered a look at the new dinosaurs and attractions housed within the Isla Nublar underwater theme park.

Director Colin Trevorrow wants to set the record straight, and in an exclusive interview with /film, helped clear up any confusion there may have been. Specifically that there is a war brewing between good and evil dinosaurs, which isn't true by definition.

First, he does confirm what we've heard in terms of the overall plot, and the film's main backdrop.

He compares the thematic push in the film to our current relationship with technology and movies themselves.

More than anything, Colin Trevorrow wants you to know that there are no such thing as 'good and bad' dinosaurs. They're all just animals in a wild kingdom that has been roped off by man.

He did confirm that there will be a new dinosaur in the film, which was earlier rumored to be created from the DNA of a T-Rex, a raptor, a snake and a cuttlefish.

Jurassic World comes to theaters June 12th, 2015 and stars Ty Simpkins, Bryce Dallas Howard, Nick Robinson, Chris Pratt, Vincent D'Onofrio, Irrfan Khan, B.D. Wong, Omar Sy. The film is directed by Colin Trevorrow.

SEE ALSO: Awesome Parody Video Replaces The 'Jurassic Park' Velociraptors With Cats

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NEW YORK (AP) — A Virginia fossils dealer was sentenced Tuesday to three months in prison even after a prosecutor described his cooperation with law enforcement in heroic terms, saying he enabled more than 18 largely complete dinosaur fossils to be located, enough for Mongolia to open its first dinosaur museum.

Eric Prokopi, 39, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein for smuggling a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus skeleton from Mongolia into the United States by making false statements to U.S. officials, including that the then-unassembled bones were merely reptile fossils from Great Britain.

Once assembled, the skeleton was sold by Dallas-based Heritage Auctions for more than $1 million before it was seized by the U.S. government and returned to Mongolia.

Hellerstein also ordered Prokopi to serve three months community confinement and 100 hours of community service.

Hellerstein said Prokopi was to be commended for his cooperation and for working as a commercial paleontologist to enhance the world's knowledge of the origins of man.

But the judge said Prokopi had "done a bad thing" and needed punishment.

Prokopi apologized and said he hoped to rebuild his business with an emphasis on getting proper documentation for bones he purchases.

"I sincerely love fossils," said Prokopi, of Williamsburg, Virginia. He was living in Gainesville, Florida, when he was charged with importing multiple shipments of dinosaur bones between 2010 and 2012 that had been stolen from the Gobi Desert region of Mongolia.

Prokopi also said he hoped to repair any damage to the field of paleontology caused by his case.

Defense attorney Georges Lederman had asked the judge to spare Prokopi from prison, citing his cooperation and noting that the charges had led to his divorce, the loss of his home and a stigma that had caused others in his profession to resist working with him.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Martin S. Bell said Prokopi's knowledge had aided investigations into the dinosaur fossil trade that were continuing in Wyoming, California and New York.

He said his cooperation "has been useful, has been fruitful, has been important."

In a letter to the judge, the prosecutor "it is safe to say that there is not an active fossil investigation that has not been informed, to some degree, by information given by Prokopi in this case."

He said Prokopi had met with agents and representatives of the Department of Homeland Security as well as prosecutors in four offices, providing information crucial to law enforcement's "revitalized efforts to police what had essentially become a black market in stolen national treasuries that operated in plain sight."

Bell said Prokopi had "developed their knowledge of the players in the trade of not only dinosaur fossils, but other natural treasures."

As a result of Prokopi's work, he wrote, Mongolia is opening a museum based on dinosaurs "recovered in this case alone."

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Paleontologists have discovered nearly 50 entire ichthyosaur dinosaur fossils in southern Chile, one of the best finds of its kind to date, they said on Tuesday.

The fossils of the dolphin-like creature were unearthed in the country's Torres del Paine National Park, whose spiky peaks and brilliant turquoise lakes make it a magnet for trekkers and nature lovers.

Researchers said the dinosaurs, buried by rocks from the huge Tyndall Glacier, lived between the Triassic and Cretaceous periods, which extended from 250 million to 66 million years ago.

"This great ichthyosaur cemetery, the way the remains are deposited, is unique," Christian Salazar, paleontologist researcher and natural history museum curator, said on Tuesday.

"It's the most recent great find in their history. That's going to answer a lot of questions about how they became extinct, where they migrated to, how they lived," he said.

The 46 fossils were found in about three months of excavating, Salazar added, and more were likely to be found. 

(Reporting by Rosalba O'Brien, editing by G Crosse)

SEE ALSO: A Giant T. Rex Skeleton Is About To Start A Cross-Country Road Trip

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The cataclysm that ended the Age of Dinosaurs not only drove land animals to migrate into the water, but also pushed aquatic creatures to colonize the land, a new study reveals.

The shifts between land and water in the animal kingdom are among the most pivotal in evolution. The most famous example is that of fish that made the switch from water to land — the first tetrapods, or four-legged animals, which gave rise to amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Animals also moved from land to water — for example, the ancestors of seafaring whales appear to have been deer-like ungulates, or hoofed mammals.

Scientists reason the shifts between the aquatic and terrestrial realms might relate to environmental upheaval. For instance, mass extinctions usually leave many open roles within ecosystems, niches that survivors might evolve to fill. [Wipe Out! History's 7 Most Mysterious Mass Extinctions]

To investigate these shifts, researchers looked at the aftermath of the most recent cataclysm, the end-Cretaceous mass extinction about 65 million years ago that ended the dominance of the dinosaurs on Earth. The researchers focused on the family trees of existing tetrapods — amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals — examining when lineages of animals within those family trees began diverging from one another.

The scientists demonstrated the end-Cretaceous mass extinction was instrumental to the emergence of tetrapod lineages that shifted between the realms of land and water, either in terms of where they fed as adults or where they developed when young. The study revealed five lineages that shifted from land to water and eight that moved from water to land, all occurring after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

Examples of shifts from land to water include "cetaceans — whales and dolphins — together with their relatives the hippos, [evolving] from terrestrial ungulates," said lead study author Serban Proches, a naturalist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Other examples include ducks from land birds, and "some fully aquatic legless amphibians from typically amphibious ones," Proches noted.

Cases of shifts from water to land include the emergence of tortoises from turtles and terrapins, and "several fully terrestrial frog lineages from typical amphibious ones," Proches told Live Science.

The researchers had expected to find "lots of land-to-water transitions following the end-Cretaceous extinction," Proches said. "This was the time when life on land was becoming more diverse than life in the sea. We thought we'd see the land pouring animals into the sea."

Finding so many animals shifting from water to the land surprised the investigators. The number of such shifts could be due to how widespread aquatic lineages of animals were — "they were more likely to find a suitable piece of land to move onto, in terms of available niches, somewhere within their geographic range," Proches said.

Proches and his colleagues noted their analysis left out animal groups that had fewer than 10 living species. This means that the findings exclude very recent transitions that have had little opportunity to branch out into many species. Still, the pattern of shifts between realms associated with the end-Cretaceous mass extinction remains clear, they said.

The scientists detailed their findings online June 11 in the journal Biology Letters.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The hot question of whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded like birds and mammals or cold blooded like reptiles, fish and amphibians finally has a good answer.

Dinosaurs, for eons Earth's dominant land animals until being wiped out by an asteroid 65 million years ago, were in fact somewhere in between.

Scientists said on Thursday they evaluated the metabolism of numerous dinosaurs using a formula based on their body mass as revealed by the bulk of their thigh bones and their growth rates as shown by growth rings in fossil bones akin to those in trees.

The study, published in the journal Science, assessed 21 species of dinosaurs including super predators Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus, long-necked Apatosaurus, duckbilled Tenontosaurus and bird-like Troodon as well as a range of mammals, birds, bony fish, sharks, lizards, snakes and crocodiles.

"Our results showed that dinosaurs had growth and metabolic rates that were actually not characteristic of warm-blooded or even cold-blooded organisms. They did not act like mammals or birds nor did they act like reptiles or fish," said University of Arizona evolutionary biologist and ecologist Brian Enquist.

"Instead, they had growth rates and metabolisms intermediate to warm-blooded and cold-blooded organisms of today. In short, they had physiologies that are not common in today's world."

There has been a long-standing debate about whether dinosaurs were slow, lumbering cold-blooded animals - as scientists first proposed in the 19th century - or had a uniquely advanced, more warm-blooded physiology.

As scientists unearthed remains of more and more fast-looking dinosaurs like Velociraptor, some championed the idea dinosaurs were as active and warm–blooded as mammals and birds. The realization that birds arose from small feathered dinosaurs seemed to support that view.

University of New Mexico biologist John Grady said the idea that creatures must be either warm-blooded or cold-blooded is too simplistic when looking over the vast expanse of time. Like dinosaurs, some animals alive today like the great white shark, leatherback sea turtle and tuna do not fit easily into either category, Grady added.

"A better answer would be 'in the middle.' By examining animal growth and rates of energy use, we were able to reconstruct a metabolic continuum, and place dinosaurs along that continuum. Somewhat surprisingly, dinosaurs fell right in the middle," Grady said.

The researchers called creatures with this medium-powered metabolism mesotherms, as contrasted to ectotherms (cold–blooded animals with low metabolic rates that do not produce much heat and bask in the sun to warm up) and endotherms (warm–blooded animals that use heat from metabolic reactions to maintain a high, stable body temperature).

Grady said an intermediate metabolism may have allowed dinosaurs to get much bigger than any mammal ever could. Warm–blooded animals need to eat a lot so they are frequently hunting or munching on plants. "It is doubtful that a lion the size of T. rex could eat enough to survive," Grady said.

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

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Move over Triceratops: There's a new horned dinosaur in town, and its cranial ornamentation is even more impressive than the three-horned dinosaur the world has come to know and love.

A study of the recently discovered species, Mercuriceratops gemini, provides more details on this flashy dinosaur, which possessed not only the standard trifecta of facial horns, but also a giant, winglike frill protruding from the back of its skull.

"The butterfly-shaped frill, or neck shield, of Mercuriceratops is unlike anything we have seen before," said David Evans, co-author of the new study and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada, in a statement. "Mercuriceratops shows that evolution gave rise to much greater variation in horned dinosaur headgear than we had previously suspected." [See Images of a Flashy Horned Dinosaur]

The research describing the new species is based on fossil evidence collected from Montana as well as Alberta, Canada. Mercuriceratops gemini lived about 77 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period, and was approximately 20 feet (6 meters) long and weighed more than 2 tons. Like Triceratops and other ceratopsid dinosaurs, Mercuriceratops was a plant-eating dinosaur, and researchers believe it had a parrotlike beak, as well as two long brow horns above its eyes.

Its headgear, though, is in a league all its own.

"Mercuriceratops took a unique evolutionary path that shaped the large frill on the back of its skull into protruding wings like the decorative fins on classic 1950s cars," said Michael Ryan, lead author of the study and curator of vertebrate paleontology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio, in the statement. "It definitively would have stood out from the herd during the Late Cretaceous."

The dinosaur's name, Mercuriceratops, is a combination of "Mercury"— the Roman God best known for his winged helmet — and "ceratops," a Greek word meaning "horned face." The second part of its name "gemini," is Latin for "twins" and refers to the fact that paleontologists uncovered two nearly identical specimens of the species, the first in north-central Montana and the second at the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Dinosaur Provincial Park, in Alberta, Canada.

The study detailing the two findings, published online in the journal Naturwissenschaften, focuses on skull fragments of Mercuriceratops found at each site. Originally, scientists believed the specimen they had uncovered at the Judith River Formation of Montana was simply a distorted fossil from the remains of a more common ceratopsid species. But the discovery of a nearly identical specimen collected from the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta suggested otherwise.

"The Alberta specimen confirmed that the fossil from Montana was not a pathological specimen, nor had it somehow been distorted during the process of fossilization," said Philip Currie, professor and Canada research chair in dinosaur paleobiology at the University of Alberta, in the statement. "The two fossils — squamosal bones from the side of the frill — have all the features you would expect, just presented in a unique shape." (The squamosal bone is located in the skull of vertebrates.)

As to the question of why Mercuriceratops developed such a prominent skull ornament, the researchers presented a number of possibilities.

"Horned dinosaurs in North America used their elaborate skull ornamentation to identify each other and to attract mates — not just for protection from predators," Ryan said. "The winglike protrusions on the sides of its frill may have offered male Mercuriceratops a competitive advantage in attracting mates.”

Follow Elizabeth Palermo on Twitter @techEpalermo, Facebook or Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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As production continues on Universal Pictures' Jurassic World in Hawaii, director Colin Trevorrow has revealed the latest behind-the-scenes photo from the set.

While no cast members are featured in this image, it does tease a gruesome death, with a sole, bloody hand print left on a veterinary vehicle.

Who do you think met with their bloody demise on the Jurassic World set last night? Take a look at the photo, and offer your best guesses below.

Saturday, 4AM. pic.twitter.com/yxSOMp3V1f

— Colin Trevorrow (@colintrevorrow) June 29, 2014

Jurassic World takes place on Isla Nublar, 22 years after the original Jurassic Park, where a fully-functioning dinosaur theme park has become one of the hottest tourist destinations, attracting millions of visitors per year.

The story will reportedly feature a number of dinosaurs fans haven't seen before, although no other plot details have been confirmed at this time.

Jurassic World comes to theaters June 12th, 2015 and stars Ty Simpkins, Bryce Dallas Howard, Nick Robinson, Chris Pratt, Vincent D'Onofrio, Irrfan Khan, B.D. Wong, Omar Sy. The film is directed by Colin Trevorrow.

SEE ALSO: 'Jurassic World' Set Photo Teases A New Dinosaur

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Before the 1990s, most visual effects in movies consisted of stop motion and people in suits. 

While computer animation was used in “Star Wars” and “Tron” and in title sequences like 1978’s “Superman,” it wasn't until "Terminator 2" (1991) and Steven Spielberg’s "Jurassic Park" (1993) that a movie used lots of computer-generated imagery, or CGI, and mixed it with live action. 

There are only 14 minutes of dinosaur visual effects in "Jurassic Park," about four of which were made with a computer, but its lasting effect on movies has been monumental. 

Two years later, 1995's "Toy Story" was the first full-length computer-animated movie.

Today just about every film — from James Cameron's "Avatar" to summer blockbusters like Michael Bay's "Transformers" series — owes credit to CGI.

But what is CGI, and how is it used in movies? 

The simplest way to explain computer graphics without getting overly technical is to think of typical hand-drawn animation or stop motion, which consists of a series of drawings or photographs to create the illusion of movement.

Similarly, a lot of CGI animation in movies involves series of drawings or renderings on a computer screen. These are used to create that same illusion to make something look photo-realistic.

Business Insider recently spoke with Steve “Spaz” Williams, who was a CG Animator at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the visual-effects studio that helped bring “Jurassic Park” to life.

Here, with Business Insider, Williams breaks down the steps it took to bring the dinosaurs from paper and pad to the big screen in CGI.

1. They begin with drawn designs and prosthetics of the different dinosaurs. 

The production used CG for velociraptors, brachiosauruses, and the tyrannosaurus rex, which Williams worked on primarily.

2. Next, those renderings needed to make their way into the computer.

They scanned models, including ones for the T. rex and the velociraptors, into the computers."In order to get it into the computer we actually fire a laser at the three-dimensional rubber prosthetic model and extract the data so the computer had it essentially," says Williams.

Williams explains it's like the opposite of 3-D printing with them taking an object and turning it into data.

3. They then reconstruct the data to make it work in the computer.

These are two images of T. rex data from Williams' monitor using software called Alias.

4. An animation piece of software called SoftImage 3D is used to figure out the joint placement on the dinosaurs. 

Here, you can see one of the Brachiosauruses in the beginning of the film.

5. After that, the data has to be "rigged" with a digital armature in wireframes. 

This is the framework for the dinosaur that helps provide its structure allowing it to stand up, move, and run.

"This is the first shot I animated for the movie after I built all of the T. rex data," says Williams. "It took me months to get this run right, but once done, we reused the run data for the rest of the jeep-chase shots and ultimately for the following two 'Jurassic Park' movies."Below is another wireframe for one of the raptors in a kitchen scene where the two children are trying to outsmart the dinosaurs.

6. Next, the dinosaurs get their skin. 

"We used a program called Viewpaint, which allowed us to actually paint the texture of the skin in the computer so now we have this textured map," says Williams.

7. To put all of the separate images together, they needed to be rendered by massive graphics computers.

"Now we substitute in this high-resolution mesh data into a low resolution wireframe. That's all being done in computer," says Williams. "It pretty much took 10 hours to calculate one frame. You have to remember film is 24 frames per second. So it would sit there and crunch all night."

Williams built and animated the image below of the first fully rendered T. rex test. It was this video that convinced the producer Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg that "Jurassic Park" should be made in CGI rather than stop motion.

Williams also animated all of the shots in a famous T. rex Jeep-chase sequence. He says each frame in the entire sequence took an estimated 12 hours to render. 

The point where the T. rex breaks through the log is 75 frames long. 

"I animated all those shots where the T. rex is chasing the jeep. It took me four months to animate it, just to get the running to work properly," says Williams.

8. From there, the dinosaur needs to be put into a scene through a process called compositing.

This is where all the pieces to the puzzle are assembled together. CGI shots are combined together with live-action shots and any background and foreground imagery referred to as plate photography.

In this case, live-action shots of actors were combined with photography shoots in Kauai and ILM's work on the brachiosauruses and birds.

Here's the final shot with the added dinosaurs:

9. Once it's put together, the images are reviewed to make sure they work. When everything looks good, the scene is put to film.

Final images are reviewed on a high-concentrated projector before translated to film.

All together, Williams says it took about a year to bring the dinosaurs to life.

“Basically May of ’92 to May of ’93 was the entire build and composite time for probably 40 shots,” says Williams. 

After $1 billion at the box office, you can't argue with the result.

You can watch Williams and others from ILM speak more about the creation of the dinosaurs in a featurette from the Academy of Motion Pictures below:

SEE ALSO: Find out why 'Age of Extinction" was the most difficult "Transformers" movie to make

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The largest "four-winged" dinosaur known has been found, and this predator has the longest feathers yet outside of birds, researchers say. This new finding yields insights on how dinosaurs may have flown, the scientists added.

The 125-million-year-old feathered dinosaur, named Changyuraptor yangi, sported feathers over its body, including its arms and legs, which made it look as if it had two pairs of wings. Its fossil was unearthed in 2012 in Liaoning province in northeastern China, which has been the center of a surge of discoveries of feathered dinosaurs over the last decade.

"The vast majority of feathered dinosaurs in Liaoning are collected by farmers who live there," said study author Luis Chiappe, a paleontologist and director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

The newfound dinosaur is a microraptorine, a group of predatory, feathered dinosaurs related to Velociraptor and other well-known raptor dinosaurs. Analysis of the microscopic structure of this fossil's bones reveal it was a fully grown adult — a younger specimen's bones would have signs they were still developing.

"Microraptorines are thought to be very close cousins of birds, sharing a common raptor ancestor," Chiappe told Live Science. "It's not known yet whether a four-wing body is something unique to microraptorines, or something the common ancestor of birds and microraptorines had, that was later lost in the bird lineage." [Image Gallery: Dinosaur Fossils]

The researchers estimate 4-foot-long (1.2 meter) Changyuraptor weighed about 9 lbs. (4 kilograms), making it the largest four-winged dinosaur found yet, and at least 60 percent larger than the largest microraptorine specimen found previously, Chiappe said.

When Changyuraptor was alive, the area in which it lived "was a broad peninsula or wedge into the ocean, with volcanoes," Chiappe said. "It was a moist temperate forest, mostly of conifer trees and gingkos, with dry hot summers and pretty cold winters. There were a variety of meat-eating and plant-eating dinosaurs in the area, including Yutyrannus, a feathered relative of Tyrannosaurus maybe 27 to 30 feet (8.2 to 9.1 m) long."

The area was also home to a great diversity of birds and insects, along with some very primitive mammals, and some of the earliest flowering plants, he said. Lakes in the region held fish, frogs and salamanders.

It was uncertain what Changyuraptor ate, but other microraptorine fossils have been found with the bones of fish and birds in what used to be their guts. "We think Changyuraptor may have gone after small prey like birds, lizards, salamanders, fish and mammals," Chiappe said.

The fossil revealed Changyuraptor had extraordinarily long tail feathers. "The tail is really the crown jewel of the specimen," Chiappe said. "At about 12 inches (0.3 m) long, Changyuraptor had the longest feathers seen outside of birds." Until now, the longest known microraptorine tail feathers were only about 7 inches (0.18 m) long, Chiappe said.

The long feathers seen on both the arms and legs of four-winged dinosaurs suggest they were capable of flying. "It's surprising to think of Changyuraptor flying because it's so large, maybe the size of a peacock," Chiappe said.

But the scientists' aerodynamic calculations suggest Changyuraptor's long tail feathers helped slow its fall, assuring safe landings. "The tail tells us Changyuraptor could have generated a fair amount of lift to slow its flying or gliding speed," Chiappe said. "That's certainly an advantage given Changyuraptor's size — being fairly large, it could easily injure itself during landing."

If more specimens are found in the future, they may add to researchers understanding of the animal's flying capabilities, Chiappe said. "And who knows, maybe its forelimbs had even longer feathers than its hindlimbs."

Chiappe and his colleagues detailed their findings online today (July 15) in the journal Nature Communications.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

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Some 70 million years ago, three tyrannosaurs stalked together across a mud flat in Canada, possibly searching for prey.

The new insight comes from several parallel tyrannosaur tracks unearthed in Canada. The dinosaur tracks provide stronger evidence for a controversial theory: That the fearsome mega-predators hunted in packs.

The ferocious beasts may have "stuck together as a pack to increase their chances of bringing down prey and individually surviving," said study co-author Richard McCrea, a curator at the Peace Region Palaeontology Center in Canada. [See Images of the Giant Tyrannosaur Tracks]

Tyrannosaur hunting

Paleontologists have long debated whether Tyrannosaurus rex and its cousins, such as Albertosaurus, hunted alone or in groups.

While most researchers believe the predators were lone wolves, so to speak, multiple Albertosaurus specimens found in a single bone bed in Canada's Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park have led some to propose that tyrannosaurs were pack animals.

But finding groups of bones together isn't definitive evidence for pack hunting, because bones can move after death. Other circumstances can cause fossil skeletons to accumulate in one location. For instance, many carnivores wandered individually into classic predator traps, such as the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, but probably didn't hunt together in life, McCrea said.

Track marks unearthed

In 2011, a local hunting outfitter and guide, Aaron Fredlund, unearthed two tyrannosaur track marks in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia and then told McCrea's team about the discovery.

The team eventually discovered a patch 197 feet (60 meters) long by 13 feet (4 m) wide filled with footprints from multiple dinosaurs, including tyrannosaurs, other small theropods, and duck-billed dinosaurs called hadrosaurs. These dinosaurs were apparently walking in the silty sediments from an overflowing river and formed the track marks about 70 million years ago. A thick layer of volcanic ash then preserved the marks, McCrea said.

In total, the team found seven tracks that were made by three tyrannosaurs. Though the researchers couldn't identify the specific species, it's likely given the period and location where they were found that Albertosaurus,Gorgosaurus or Daspletosaurus left the tracks, McCrea said.

Though the other dinosaur tracks there are all pointing in random directions, the tyrannosaur footprints are parallel with each other. The tyrannosaurs also left prints of about the same depth in the wet sediments, suggesting they crossed through the area at the same time. (As the mud dries, the depth of footprints becomes shallower.)

The new find may be one of the world's oldest examples of a missed connection. "The hadrosaur footprints are much more shallow, indicating that they came later," possibly just a few hours or days after the tyrannosaurs, McCrea told Live Science.

Pack animals

The new tracks suggest that the tyrannosaurs may have hunted in packs to take down large prey, just as wolves do today.

"An individual wolf would not be able to take out a moose, but a pack of them would," McCrea said.

Similarly, pack hunting could explain how tyrannosaurs could kill hadrosaurs, which are almost as large as the predators, without sustaining horrific injuries, he said.

That doesn't mean tyrannosaurs would have been friendly to one another. In fact, other fossils reveal that the dinosaurs liked to head-bite each other. But the tyrannosaurs may have stuck together to hunt because it increased their odds of survival, McCrea said.

The new discovery also highlights the rough life of these hunters. One of the beasts was missing bones in its left foot, which is in keeping with many of the injuries found on other tyrannosaur specimens, McCrea said.

The track marks were described today (July 22) in the journal PLOS ONE.

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

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A supermassive dinosaur that would have weighed as much as 60 small cars has been found in Argentina, where it likely perished in a bog some 77 million years ago, palaeontologists said Thursday.

Dubbed Dreadnoughtus (from "fear nothing" in old English), the long-necked lizard would have measured 26 metres (85 feet) from nose to tail and weighed some 60 tonnes -- about as much as seven Tyrannosaurus rex put together.

And the giant wasn't even fully grown when it got bogged down in a flooded plain, where it died next to a smaller companion, researchers reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

"With a body the size of a house, the weight of a herd of elephants, and a weaponised (nine-metre, muscled) tail, Dreadnoughtus would have feared nothing," study co-author Kenneth Lacovara of Drexel University in Philadelphia said of the mighty beast.

The dinosaur's strength evoked Europe's early 20th-century battleships, the dreadnoughts, "which were huge, thickly clad and virtually impervious," Lacovara said.

The fossilised skeleton is the most complete yet found in the category of super-sized, plant-eating dinosaurs called Titanosaurs -- which makes it the largest land animal for which a weight has been calculated with such a degree of accuracy.

The find comprised over 70 percent of the types of bones in the dinosaur's body -- 45 percent of its total skeleton. There were no skull bones.

Palaeontologists uncovered most of the vertebrae from the lizard's tail, a neck vertebra with a diameter of over one yard (0.9 metres), ribs, toes, a claw, a section of jaw and a tooth, and nearly all the bones from its four limbs, including a humerus (upper arm bone) and a femur (thigh bone) over six feet tall.

The femur and humerus are key to calculating the mass of extinct four-legged animals.

"Because the Dreadnoughtus type specimen includes both these bones, its weight can be estimated with confidence," said a Drexel University statement.

"It is by far the best example we have of any of the most giant creatures to ever walk the planet," added Lacovara, who discovered the skeleton in southern Patagonia in 2005 and oversaw its four-year excavation.

Dino misfortune, science's luck

To sustain its massive bulk, Dreadnoughtus would have had to eat vast quantities of plants growing in the temperate forest on the continent's southern tip.

"I imagine their day consists largely of standing in one place," said Lacovara.

"You have this 37-foot-long (11-metre) neck balanced by a 30-foot-long (nine-metre) tail in the back. Without moving your legs, you have access to a giant feeding envelope of trees and green ferns. You spend an hour or so clearing out this patch that has had thousands of calories in it, and then you take three steps over to the right and spend the next hour clearing out that patch."

The dimensions of all previously discovered supermassive dinosaurs had been pieced together from relatively fragmentary fossil remains.

Prior to Dreadnoughtus, another Patagonian giant, Elaltitan, held the title for the dinosaur with the greatest calculable weight, at 43 tonnes.

Argentinosaurus, also from Argentina, was thought to be of a comparable or even greater mass than Dreadnoughtus, and longer, at about 37m.

But Argentinosaurus is known only from a half-dozen vertebrae in its mid-back, a shinbone and a few other fragments but no upper limb bones, said the researchers.

An adult Dreadnoughtus would likely have been too large to fear any predators, but would have made a great feast for scavengers after their death, the team added.

They discovered several teeth of small predatory and scavenging dinosaurs at the excavation site, which also included a second Dreadnoughtus skeleton, though smaller and much less complete.

From the preservation of the skeletons, the team concluded the Dreadnoughtus pair was buried soon after death, but not before their carnivore cousins took a few bites.

"These two animals were buried quickly after a river flooded and broke through its natural levee, turning the ground into something like quicksand," said Lacovara.

"The rapid and deep burial of the Dreadnoughtus type specimen accounts for its extraordinary completeness.

"Its misfortune was our luck."

SEE ALSO: Scientists Crown The World Heavyweight Champion Of Dinosaurs

READ MORE: Giant Dinosaur Graveyard Will Answer A Lot Of Questions

DON'T MISS: Weird 'Chicken From Hell' Dinosaur Lived Alongside The T. Rex

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The fearsome Spinosaurus is one of the icons of the dinosaur pantheon. It was larger than T. rex (and larger than all other carnivorous dinosaurs, in fact), and on its back it sported a sail taller than an adult man.

Now, researchers have discovered something even more astonishing about this ancient beast. Spinosaurus was the only known dinosaur adapted to living almost entirely in the water.

Around 97 million years ago, in a river system in what is now Africa, the enormous Spinosaurus aegyptiacus sliced through the water, snaring fish in its cone-shaped, interlocking teeth, researchers report today (Sept. 11) in the journal Science. New fossils reveal that the 50-foot-long (15 meters) dinosaur had a host of adaptations for an aquatic lifestyle, including flat, possibly webbed feet and nostrils high up on its head.

"The animal we are resurrecting is so bizarre that it is going to force dinosaur experts to rethink many things they thought they knew about dinosaurs," said Nizar Ibrahim, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Chicago who led the new study of Spinosaurus. [See Images of the Bones and Reconstructed Spinosaurus]

The tale of how this sail-backed beast came to be recognized as the first-known semi-aquatic dinosaur spans more than a century and involves the tragedy of war as well as incredible good luck.

A dinosaur tale

Spinosaurus was first described in 1915 by a German paleontologist named Ernst Stromer, who found some of the animal's bones — including backbones with spines up to 7 feet (2.1 m) tall — in Egypt. Stromer produced detailed illustrations and descriptions of his discovery, but in April 1944, his entire collection, including Spinosaurus, was destroyed in an Allied Royal Air Force bombing of Munich.

Other people found fragments of Spinosaurus bones after Stromer's collection was destroyed, but none were as complete as the skeleton lost to Allied bombs. That is, until April 2008.

In that month, Ibrahim and his colleagues were returning from fieldwork in the Kem Kem Beds of Morocco when they stopped in a desert town where locals often brought them fossils to identify. A local fossil hunter approached with a cardboard box fill of sediment and several bones. [Photos: One of the World's Biggest Dinosaurs Discovered]

One bone caught Ibrahim's eye. It was long and blade-shaped, perhaps a rib, but with an odd red line running through its cross section.

"I thought, 'Maybe this is a rib, but maybe, just maybe, this is a spine of Spinosaurus,'" Ibrahim told reporters during a teleconference this week. He arranged to have the bones kept in the university collection in Casablanca, hoping he'd one day be able to identify them.

Not long after, Ibrahim was visiting the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano when paleontologists there showed him some commercially acquired bones they believed to be from Spinosaurus. There, on one of the spines, was the same red line Ibrahim had seen in a cardboard box in Morocco.

Unfortunately, the bones had been taken out of context, and the researchers in Milan couldn't say where they were found. The moment launched what Ibrahim called "Mission Impossible." He had to go back to Morocco, find the man with the cardboard box and learn where the Spinosaurus bones had come from.

One problem: The only thing Ibrahim knew about the man with the cardboard box was that he had a mustache. Still, he and his colleagues returned to the village and asked around, to no avail. Near the end of the failed mission, Ibrahim sat in a cafe drinking mint tea and envisioning his dreams going down the drain. At that moment, in a twist worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, the mustached man walked by his table.

Aquatic adaptations

With a guide to lead them to the Spinosaurus site, the researchers discovered even more bones, all from the same individual dinosaur. They soon realized that these bones were very strange indeed. They were very dense, without the hollow medullary cavity found at the center of the long bones of the arms and legs in most animals. Dense bones like these are found in marine animals and function as a sort of buoyancy control.

The research team combined the new bones with Stromer's drawings and other Spinosaurus bones from a half dozen museums worldwide to create a digital model of the animal's skeleton. Evidence from the skeleton pointed to a watery lifestyle: the interlocking, crocodilelike teeth, ideal for catching swimming prey; the nostrils in the middle of the snout, high on the head; the flexible, rudderlike tail and small hind limbs, common in aquatic animals; and the flat, paddlelike feet, which Ibrahim and his colleagues suspect may have been webbed. The dinosaur even had a network of holes and channels, called foramina, in its snout, identical to structures that modern-day crocodiles use to detect pressure changes in the water made by swimming prey. [Paleo-Art: Stunning Dinosaur Illustrations]

What's more, when researchers analyzed the skeleton, they found that Spinosaurus aegyptiacus had a center of mass far forward on its body, which would have suited it very well in the water. On land, however, the dinosaur would have had to use its front limbs to balance rather than striding around on its hind limbs like a T. rex.

"You would not want to meet this animal on land, but it was not gallivanting across the landscape," said study researcher Paul Sereno, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Chicago.

Other Spinosaurus species ate fish, Sereno said, but Spinosaurus aegyptiacus is apparently the only one that took the lifestyle to the next level, spending most of its time in the water.

Questions remain about the species, however. Spinosaurus' enormous sail remains something of a mystery, though the researchers suspect it was used as a display structure and was probably often visible as the animal swam. The researchers are also very interested in learning more about how Spinosaurus moved through the water. Sereno said it most likely propelled itself with both legs and tail.

"It's a chimera. It's half-duck, half-crocodile," Sereno said. "We don't have anything alive that looks like this animal."Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

• Image Gallery: 25 Amazing Ancient Beasts
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• In Images: A Baby Dinosaur Unearthed

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Extinct squirrel-like creatures from China suggest the earliest mammals originated more than 200 million years ago, much earlier than often previously thought, researchers say.

The fossils were discovered in the last three years by private collectors and amateur paleontologists in a Liaoning province cornfield in northeastern China. Liaoning has become famous for the trove of feathered dinosaurs and winged reptiles known as pterosaurs unearthed there over the last decade. The province is also known for a fossil of a baby dinosaur inside a mammal's gut, the first direct proof that mammals dined on dinosaurs.

The newfound fossils are about 160 million years old, dating back to the Triassic Period. Back then, the area was a warm, wet forest populated by dinosaurs, mammals and pterosaurs, all living on the lost supercontinent Laurasia, which once included what are today's northern continents. [See Images of Squirrel-Like Creatures and Other Ancient Mammals]

The six well-preserved fossil specimens are from three different extinct species. The animals ranged in size from 1 to 10 ounces, or from "a house mouse to a small squirrel," said study co-author Jin Meng, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Their teeth suggest "they were most likely omnivorous, eating insects, nuts and fruits," he said.

The largest of the three species is named Shenshou lui, with "shenshou" meaning "divine beast" in Chinese and "lui" referring to the collector of the specimen, Lu Jianhua. The other two species are named Xianshou songae and Xianshou linglong, with "xianshou" meaning "celestial beast" in Chinese, "songae" referring to Rufeng Song, the collector of the specimen, and "linglong" meaning "exquisite" in Chinese and also referring to the town of Linglongta, where the specimen came from.

Judging from their slender builds, long tails, hands and feet adapted for grasping and climbing, and enlarged incisor teeth, these animals would have been tree-dwellers that looked similar to squirrels. However, "don't confuse these new animals with any living species," Meng said. Any similarities between these creatures and squirrels are due toconvergent evolution, just as fish and dolphins both have streamlined bodies to better swim in the water but are only distantly related.

The bones were of mysterious animals known as haramiyids. Scientists learned of haramiyids back in Darwin's time, but researchers knew about them only from their teeth and fragments of their jaws. "For over a century, paleontologists were puzzled as to whether these creatures were mammals or animals closely related to mammals," Meng told Live Science.

These fossils reveal new details about the skulls, teeth and skeletons of three previously unknown species of haramiyid, revealing that haramiyids were probably mammals. For example, the fossils show evidence of a typical mammalian middle ear, the area just inside the eardrum that turns vibrations in the air into electrical signals that get transmitted to the brain. The middle ears of mammals are unique in that they have three bones.

The new findings suggest their closest known relatives were rodentlike creatures known as multituberculates. Both of these groups have no living descendants, having long ago separated from the lineage leading to modern mammals.

The oldest known haramiyids date to the Late Triassic period about 220 million to 200 million years ago. This suggests mammals are at least that old, "earlier than much previous research predicted," Meng said.

Many scientists had suggested that mammals originated in the Middle Jurassic, which ranged from 174 million to 164 million years ago. "Haramiyids are one of the oldest group of mammals, if not the oldest," Meng said.

The scientists detail their findings in the Sept. 11 issue of the journal Nature.

SEE ALSO: Scientists Have Found An Ancient Fossilized Mosquito Full Of Blood

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A sprawling ancient flying reptile looked so much like a dragon that could have flown alongside the aerial predators called "ikran" in the film "Avatar" that its discoverers named the newfound beast after these mountain banshees.

The pterosaur, now called Ikrandraco avatar ("draco" means "dragon" in Latin), may have stored food in a throat pouch like a pelican does, the researchers said.

Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates (animals with backbones) to flap wings to fly. Before pterosaurs went extinct in the catastrophic impact that also ended the Age of Dinosaurs, they were the biggest animals that ever flew, with wingspans measuring up to 39 feet (12 meters). (Although pterosaurs lived alongside dinosaurs, these flying reptiles were not dinosaurs.)

Scientists investigated two partial skeletons of Ikrandraco dating back about 120 million years ago to the Early Cretaceous Period. They unearthed these fossils in arid hills in northeastern China's Liaoning province, which has become famous for the trove of feathered dinosaurs unearthed there over the last decade. Back when this reptile was alive, the area where it was found was a large freshwater lake with a warm climate that was home to many kinds of animals, such as fish, frogs, turtles, other pterosaurs, feathered dinosaurs, birds and mammals, as well as many plants, such as ferns, conifers, gingkos, cycads and some flowering plants. [Images of Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs]

The pterosaur was about 2.3 feet (0.7 m) long and had a wingspan of about 4.9 feet (1.5 m). It had an elongated skull and a unique crest or bladelike bulge of bone on the tip of its lower jaw. The head of this newfound pterosaur is different from that of any other known pterosaurs, "but similar to [the head on] a flying creature, 'ikran,' in the movie 'Avatar,'" said lead study author Xiaolin Wang, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

The back of Ikrandraco's jaw crest had a little hooklike structure. The researchers suggested this notch may have served as an anchor for soft tissue, and they proposed that Ikrandraco had a throat pouch like the one a pelican uses to store food.

The researchers said that Ikrandraco might have sometimes foraged for food by hovering over water and scooping up prey near the surface. However, Ikrandraco is larger than modern skimming birds, so it may not have skimmed regularly, instead usually standing in shallow water to hunt, Wang said.

The researchers plan to conduct experiments to see whether Ikrandraco's jaw crest might have supported a throat pouch.

The scientists detailed their findings online on Sept. 11 in the journal Scientific Reports.

SEE ALSO: A 23-Million-Year Old Lizard Fossil Was Found Preserved In Amber

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A buried tooth has rewritten our thinking about how the apex predators of the Triassic interacted. Modern clashes between crocodiles and lions have nothing on what occurred where land met sea more than 200 million years ago. This discovery could help explain a mystery of the era's ecology.

Just as the extinction of the dinosaurs gave mammals a chance to flourish, a previous extinction event removed dominant species and allowed the dinosaurs to take over the planet. Before the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event, Rauisuchians topped the food chain in most terrestrial environments. Meanwhile, "Phytosaurs were thought to be dominant aquatic predators because of their large size and similarity to modern crocodylians," says Dr Michelle Stocker of Virginia Tech.

Paleontologists doubted these two giants interacted much.

In Naturwissenschaften, Stocker and Dr Stephanie Drumheller of the University of Tennessee report finding a phytosaur tooth lodged in the thigh bone of a rauisuchid they estimate at 8m long. 

"Finding teeth embedded directly in fossil bone is very, very rare," Drumheller says. "This is the first time it's been identified among phytosaurs, and it gives us a smoking gun for interpreting this set of bite marks."

The tooth broke off in the battle and embedded 5cm deep into the bone, which then healed over, indicating the rauisuchid lived for a long time after surviving the attack. Other puncture marks can also be detected.

The discovery is a reminder of the value of specimens waiting to be studied in museums, in this case the University of California Museum of Paleontology. "There are many bones that get dug up, not all are immediately processed, prepared, and studied. No one had recognized the importance of this specimen before but we were able to borrow it and make our study,” says co-author Dr Sterling Nesbitt of Virginia Tech. The team used CT scans and a 3-D printer to replicate the bone, concluding that the rauisuchid was attacked by a phytosaur on at least one other occasion.

The same paper also reports another specimen from the same 220-210 million year old formation that provides insight into feeding behavior. A second femur shows unhealed bite marks, which the authors write, indicates “the animal either did not survive the attack or was scavenged soon after death.” The shape and spacing of the marks indicate a phytosaur was responsible in this case as well.

The authors add, “These marks provide an opportunity to start exploring the seemingly unbalanced terrestrial ecosystems from the Late Triassic of North America, in which large carnivores far outnumber herbivores in terms of both abundance and diversity.”

“Both of the femora we examined came from some of the physically largest carnivorous species present at both locations. Yet they were targeted by other members of the region—specifically phytosaurs,” says Drumheller. “Thus, size cannot be the only factor in determining who is at the top of the food chain.” 

SEE ALSO: Supermassive Dinosaur Fossils Found In Argentina

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In July 1965, two gigantic fossilized dinosaur arms replete with menacing claws were unearthed in the remote southern Gobi desert of Mongolia. Measuring 8 feet (2.4 meters), they were the longest arms of any known bipedal creature in Earth's history.

But nearly everything else was missing, leaving experts baffled about the nature of this beast with the behemoth arms. Half a century later, the mystery has been solved.

Scientists said on Wednesday two almost complete skeletons of the bizarre 70-million-year-old creature, Deinocheirus mirificus (meaning "unusual horrible hand"), show it boasted a combination of unorthodox traits, including the famous arms, never before seen in a single dinosaur.

At 36-feet-long (11 meters) and 6.4 tons, it was the largest known member of a group of bird-like dinosaurs called ornithomimosaurs ("ostrich mimics"), the researchers said.

Its back was topped with long spines that supported a sail-like structure whose function remains enigmatic. It had fused tail vertebrae to support tail feathers.

Thriving in an river region, it was an omnivore, eating fish and plants with a beaked, toothless snout that flared out to the sides like the herbivorous duckbilled dinosaurs. It had broad feet with toes ending in squared-off hooves that may have helped it stand on wet ground.

Deinocheirus had wide hips and moved slowly but was capable of defending itself thanks to its sheer size and its three ripping claws on each hand. It was virtually as big as the apex predator in the neighborhood, Tyrannosaurus rex's cousin Tarbosaurus.

Scientists had speculated for decades about Deinocheirus. It was accurately recognized as a type of theropod, the dinosaur branch that includes giants like T. rex but also the lineage that evolved into birds - but what type?

"Deinocheirus has remained one the most mysterious dinosaurs in the world. We found almost (complete) skeletons of Deinocheirus and know now how it looked, how big it was and what it ate," said paleontologist Yuong-Nam Lee, director of Geological Museum at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources in Daejeon, South Korea.

University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz, who wrote a commentary accompanying the study in the journal Nature, said no one could have predicted its astonishing array of attributes.

"I've literally waited my whole life to see Deinocheirus finally unveiled," Holtz said.

Some bad luck almost prevented the unveiling. The two new skeletons were found in 2006 and 2009 at Gobi sites in Mongolia. Both suspiciously were missing their heads and other key parts. The scientists realized those had been poached by illegal fossil collectors, with parts sold off to private collectors.

The missing parts from the 2009 excavation ended up with a collector in Germany but fortuitously were seen by Belgian paleontologist Pascal Godefroit, who recognized what they were and informed Lee and other scientists.

Lee said the researchers persuaded the collector to donate the fossils because of their importance to science. The fossils were returned to Mongolia in May. But Lee said the 2006 fossils remain missing.

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Tom Brown)

SEE ALSO: Supermassive Dinosaur Fossils Found In Argentina

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Everywhere scientists look it seems like they are finding dinosaurs. A new species is emerging at the astounding pace of one per week. And this continues with the announcement of perhaps the strangest dinosaur find over the past few years: the toothless, hump-backed, super-clawed omnivore Deinocheirus mirificus that lived about 70m years ago in what is now Mongolia.

Deinocheirus may even become a household name, thanks to spectacular new fossils from the Gobi Desert reported by South Korean paleontologist Young-Nam Lee and colleagues, who published their results in Nature. It is a one-of-a kind dinosaur – a creature so astoundingly weird that the world just can’t help take notice.

Half A Century Of Wild Speculation

It has been a banner year for dinosaur discoveries. First it was the “chicken from hell” and a dwarf tyrannosaur announced in the spring, then the long-snouted carnivore “Pinocchio rex” and the feathery glider Changyuraptor in the summer – and, over the past couple of months, we have been awed by the 65-ton, long-necked behemoth Dreadnoughtus and wowed by remarkable new fossils of the sail-backed, shark-eating Spinosaurus from Africa.

But Deinocheirus isn’t actually a new dinosaur. It has been known about for more than 50 years. As is often the case with dinosaurs, Deinocheirus was first reported based on a couple of bones that were enough to show scientists that they had found a new species, but not nearly enough to give a complete picture of where this species fit into the family tree, what it ate and how it interacted with other dinosaurs.

Although the original fossils of Deinocheirus were fragmentary, they were epic. In fact, they were some of the most puzzling bits of a dinosaur that had ever been found. They weren’t a couple of ribs, or a few tail bones, or a small portion of the skull. No, they were a nearly complete set of forelimbs, measuring more than 2.4m in length, capped with scythe-like claws. These arms not only dwarfed an adult human in size, but they were the largest arms of a bipedal animal ever discovered, fossil or living.

What kind of body did these monstrous arms belong to? Over the past half century this has been one of the biggest mysteries in dinosaur paleontology. Cast copies of the record-breaking arms are popular museum exhibits worldwide, inspiring children to let their imaginations run wild and dream up what the rest of this bizarre creature would have looked like. Scientists have dreamt too – and over the past few decades countless expeditions to the Gobi have set out to find a complete skeleton of Deinocheirus.

It took a while, but Lee and his international squad of Korean, Mongolian, Japanese, Belgian, French and Canadian scientists have finally cracked the code. They found two partial skeletons that together reveal exactly what kind of head and body match the long arms. A mystery dating back to the darkest days of the Cold War, when such an international team had no hope of working in communist-controlled Mongolia, is no more.

It would have been a great disappointment if Deinocheirus was just some boring old dinosaur with long arms. But that is not the case. The rest of its body has a weirdness befitting of its strange arms. It turns out that Deinocheirus was an 11-metre-long, six-ton, long-snouted, duck-billed, toothless, hump-backed, bi-pedal plodder, which lived alongside a menagerie of other dinosaurs during the final few million years before all dinosaurs – except for birds – were snuffed out by an asteroid.

Puts A T. Rex To Shame

Deinocheirus was nearly the size of T. rex, and was a member of the subgroup of dinosaurs called theropods, which like T. rex were mostly carnivorous. But Deinocheirus was no bloodthirsty flesh eater. Fish scales and gastroliths – smooth stones that living birds use to grind plants – were found in its gut. It seems to have been a six-ton dinosaur garbage disposal – eating basically whatever it wanted.

Deinocheirus was no normal dinosaur, and that is a good thing. Because while it is always fun to solve puzzles in paleontology, I must admit a little bit of sadness that we no longer have the mystery of Deinocheirus to ponder. I didn’t like science very much as a kid and had little interest in dinosaurs, but I remember reading in school about this strange set of 70m-year-old arms, bigger than a human, found without a body in the far reaches of one of the world’s most hospitable deserts. It was the type of enigma that makes dinosaurs fun.

Today’s dinosaur-obsessed kids can no longer dream about solving the riddle of Deinocheirus, but there are still other mysteries out there. Like this one: how did a creature as big and bizarre as Deinocheirus function as a living animal – and why are there no such mind-bending six-ton, death-clawed, camel-humped omnivores around today?

Stephen Brusatte does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The most fearsome land predator of the early Permian Era 290 million years ago fed on sharks, according to new fossil evidence.

Dimetrodon was a terror of the pre-dinosaur era, the first common large predator on land.

Dimetrodons were four-legged creatures, walking on land and sporting huge sails that form their most recognizable feature. The largest species grew to four meters long and boasted the first saw-like teeth. They also sported fangs, leading to their name, which translates to "two measures of teeth."However, it had a problem – a shortage of food.

Paleontologist Dr. Robert Bakker of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, known for developing the theory that dinosaurs were warm blooded, told Live Science that at the time, "There was a meat deficit all over the world."

With those jaws, Dimetrodon would have been unsuited to a plant-based diet. However, the era appears to have been marked by a shortage of terrestrial herbivores on which the various Dimetrodon species could prey. While digging at Craddock Ranch, in the Dimetrodon Texas heartland, Bakker told the Geological Society of America (GSA) that he found 8.5 of the predators for every one herbivore. They just didn't seem like a sustainable diet.

Paleontologists have been puzzling over this for some time. Was there some prey that didn't fossilize? The answer, Bakker concluded, was right under their noses. Mixed in with the Dimetrodon remains were remnants of 60 freshwater Xenacanth sharks, which—unusually for creatures with cartilage rather than bone—have fossilized well.

Whatever benefits drove Dimetrodon onto land, Bakker proposes they continued to hunt in the water, accounting for most of their diet. He draws on the work of distinguished paleontologist Everett Olson who proposed that aquatic plants were still the major primary producers of the era, providing food for fish and amphibians.

The feeding frenzy didn't all run one way. Some Dimetrodon bones have bites in them that match the shape of shark teeth, and coprolites formed from shark dung contain fragments of Dimetrodon bone. "The long, deeply incised marks show that carnivores had twisted limb bones around as if employing a body roll to dismember the Dimetrodon carcass," Bakker and his colleagues told the GSA.

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Universal Pictures unveiled the first trailer for next summer's "Jurassic World" movie Tuesday starring Chris Pratt. 

From the looks of it, the fourth installment in the series will be filled with plenty of computer-generated (CG) dinosaurs and Velociraptors. 

When the first "Jurassic Park" came out in 1993, it contained very little CG. Director Steven Spielberg originally wanted the dinosaurs in the film to be done through practical effects with stop motion.

It wasn't until producer Kathleen Kennedy spotted CG test footage of a T-Rex on a computer screen at visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), that it was decided to mix CG dinosaurs in with the live action film.

There are only 14 minutes of dinosaur visual effects in "Jurassic Park," about four of which were made with a computer, but its lasting effect on movies has been monumental. 

Two years later, 1995's "Toy Story" was the first full-length computer-animated movie.

Today just about every film — from James Cameron's "Avatar" to summer blockbusters like Michael Bay's "Transformers" series — owes credit to CG.

Business Insider spoke with Steve “Spaz” Williams, who was a CG Animator at ILM, the visual-effects studio that helped bring “Jurassic Park” to life.

Williams broke down the steps it took to bring the dinosaurs from paper and pad to the big screen in CG.

1. They begin with drawn designs and prosthetics of the different dinosaurs. 

The production used CG for velociraptors, brachiosauruses, and the tyrannosaurus rex, which Williams worked on primarily.

2. Next, those renderings needed to make their way into the computer.

They scanned models, including ones for the T. rex and the velociraptors, into the computers."In order to get it into the computer we actually fire a laser at the three-dimensional rubber prosthetic model and extract the data so the computer had it essentially," says Williams.

Williams explains it's like the opposite of 3-D printing with them taking an object and turning it into data.

3. They then reconstruct the data to make it work in the computer.

These are two images of T. rex data from Williams' monitor using software called Alias.

4. An animation piece of software called SoftImage 3D is used to figure out the joint placement on the dinosaurs. 

Here, you can see one of the Brachiosauruses in the beginning of the film.

5. After that, the data has to be "rigged" with a digital armature in wireframes. 

This is the framework for the dinosaur that helps provide its structure allowing it to stand up, move, and run.

"This is the first shot I animated for the movie after I built all of the T. rex data," says Williams. "It took me months to get this run right, but once done, we reused the run data for the rest of the jeep-chase shots and ultimately for the following two 'Jurassic Park' movies."Below is another wireframe for one of the raptors in a kitchen scene where the two children are trying to outsmart the dinosaurs.

6. Next, the dinosaurs get their skin. 

"We used a program called Viewpaint, which allowed us to actually paint the texture of the skin in the computer so now we have this textured map," says Williams.

7. To put all of the separate images together, they needed to be rendered by massive graphics computers.

"Now we substitute in this high-resolution mesh data into a low resolution wireframe. That's all being done in computer," says Williams. "It pretty much took 10 hours to calculate one frame. You have to remember film is 24 frames per second. So it would sit there and crunch all night."

Williams built and animated the image below of the first fully rendered T. rex test. It was this video that convinced the producer Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg that "Jurassic Park" should be made in CG rather than stop motion.

Williams also animated all of the shots in a famous T. rex Jeep-chase sequence. He says each frame in the entire sequence took an estimated 12 hours to render. 

The point where the T. rex breaks through the log is 75 frames long. 

"I animated all those shots where the T. rex is chasing the jeep. It took me four months to animate it, just to get the running to work properly," says Williams.

8. From there, the dinosaur needs to be put into a scene through a process called compositing.

This is where all the pieces to the puzzle are assembled together. CG shots are combined together with live-action shots and any background and foreground imagery referred to as plate photography.

In this case, live-action shots of actors were combined with photography shoots in Kauai and ILM's work on the brachiosauruses and birds.

Here's the final shot with the added dinosaurs:

9. Once it's put together, the images are reviewed to make sure they work. When everything looks good, the scene is put to film.

Final images are reviewed on a high-concentrated projector before translated to film.

All together, Williams says it took about a year to bring the dinosaurs to life.

“Basically May of ’92 to May of ’93 was the entire build and composite time for probably 40 shots,” says Williams. 

After $1 billion at the box office, you can't argue with the result.

You can watch Williams and others from ILM speak more about the creation of the dinosaurs in a featurette from the Academy of Motion Pictures below:

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The building was promptly evacuated, a spokesperson for the museum told NBC. 

While there are no reports of any injuries, the extent of the damage is still unknown.

Witnesses, however, reported heavy smoke.

We just got evacuated from @AMNH Came down smoky stairs. Real fire.

— Susan Perkins (@NYCuratrix) December 12, 2014

OMG the @AMNH is on fire!! We were evacuated & it was crazy! #americanmuseumofnaturalhistorypic.twitter.com/VOJaqgF6ZL

— Margot G (@Margotjg) December 12, 2014 

Of course the one day I want to visit the Museum of Natural History it catches on fire. pic.twitter.com/rIjetYzgz2

— Natalie (@natalielovestv) December 12, 2014

Eyewitness News, still covering the situation, shows smoke pouring out of the building's first floor. 

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