Scientists in the UK have discovered an entirely new species of dinosaur in Wales. And it's from a period at the beginning of the Jurassic era that still baffles scientists.

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Get ready to hang out with a dinosaur!

If you're a nature documentary fan, you're probably used to having David Attenborough narrate your journey through wondrous sights. But in the BBC video below, Attenborough shows us something we've never seen before: a walking, full-sized titanosaur, the largest dinosaur ever discovered.

But this is no ordinary video. It's a 360 degree immersive recording, meaning that you can "look" around yourself, as if the camera were attached to your eyes. The effect is pretty incredible.

If you watch it on a desktop or laptop, you can click and drag on the video to move the camera, but if you watch on mobile in the YouTube app, just moving your phone allows you to look around — which makes it seem like you are looking at an actual titanosaur through your phone's camera. Try to watch on WiFi so you can crank the quality settings up to at least 1080s60.

If you are an Android user in possession of a Google Cardboard kit, you can enable Cardboard viewing for an especially awesome immersive virtual reality-like experience (hey Google, can this feature come to iOS already?).

Here's the vid (the dino doesn't show up right away, and when it does it'll be behind Attenborough on your left):

Pretty fun, yeah?

But — amazingness of hanging out with the biggest dinosaur ever known aside — there's a lot more to take away from this video than, "hey, cool titanosaur."

First, let's admit: Immersive 360 degree video isn't perfect yet. The first time I tried to get someone else to watch this, there was some confusion about where to find the dinosaur — and the fact that you can look all over the place and not see it at first is a bit confusing.

This could have to do with understanding the grammar of 360 degree video. Up to this point, we just knew to look at a screen and see what it showed us. But with this new form of video, we can look anywhere, which is empowering and exciting, but also not something that viewers or filmmakers intuitively get — yet. I imagine we'll get better at giving and interpreting the visual cues for viewing this type of content over time, though more people will have to experiment with it first.

Now let's talk about why this is amazing.

It's immersive in ways that other videos are not. Watching this, it's fascinating to be able to look up and down the length of this massive creature as it walks past.

Why click away to another tab when you can glance around the screen? Check out the powerful legs on that creature, or take a glance at its massive heart as you contemplate how that organ powers a 122-foot-long body.

If you're viewing this on a Cardboard headset (or a Gear VR), you're getting a glimpse of the ways new technology is going to transform how we experience so much of the world — in ways that matter for understanding science, for entertainment, for travel, for education, and more.

It's important to note that, as a Wired story rightly points out, 360 degree videos seen with Google Cardboard devices aren't actually real VR. They're a taste of what real VR is like, but they don't communicate the same feeling of presence that an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive setup does, that full feeling of "I am actually here."

Still, videos like this are a new way that people will be able to experience parts of the world they can't get to. Students will be able to follow along in a biology class and look around to feel what it's like to be surrounded by an eroding coastline. People will be able to read about the Syrian refugee crisis and then actually see a refugee camp.

When people are doing this with actual, full-on VR headsets, these experiences will be even more powerful.

As Dr. Albert "Skip" Rizzo of the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (where Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey previously worked on VR) recently explained to Tech Insider, the potential here for educational content is incredible.

"You'll be able to visualize the structure of an atom as you fly around it," he says — something that sounds like a far more immersive experience than seeing an atom on a textbook page. "You can put kids in a human body and navigate to the heart," just a like a real-life Magic Schoolbus.

And for those of us who've always dreamed of it, we'll be able to walk along beside a dinosaur.

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NOW WATCH: Scientists have discovered a terrifying new dinosaur from a mysterious period in history

Tyrannosaurus rex is an icon, a dinosaur known to nearly everyone on the planet.

It doesn’t get much more awesome than a 13-metre long, seven-ton superpredator that could bite through the bones of its prey.

T. rex may be the undisputed king of the dinosaurs, but how did evolution produce such a marvelous creature, the biggest predator ever to live on land?

It’s been a mystery for a long time, but a new species of tyrannosaur from Uzbekistan – a smaller and earlier cousin of T. rex– provides some valuable clues.

Meet Timurlengia euotica, a horse-sized tyrannosaur that lived about 90m years ago when Uzbekistan was a sweltering maze of forests and rivers bordering a vast inland sea.

Small and smart

The bones of Timurlengia were collected during a decade of field expeditions to Uzbekistan’s desolate Kyzylkum Desert, one of the driest areas of the world, led by my colleagues Alexander Averianov and Hans-Dieter Sues. They invited me to help study the fossils, and we have described the new species in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Timurlengia is particularly important because it is the first tyrannosaur known from the middle part of the Cretaceous period. Previously this was a dark interval of tyrannosaur history: a 20-30 million year gap in the fossil record concealing the moment when tyrannosaurs switched from fairly marginal hunters living in the underbrush to the colossal tyrants that fuel our nightmares.

Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, we have various bits of Timurlengia’s skeleton, including part of the snout and jaws, some teeth, various vertebrae of the neck, back and tail, and fragments of the hands and feet. These bones tell us that Timurlengia was about 3-4 metres long and weighed about 170-270 kilograms, roughly the size of a big horse.

Timurlengia would have been a nasty critter, but nowhere near the brutish size of T. rex. In fact, it wasn’t at the top of the food chain at all. It was still living in fear of other, more primitive carnivorous dinosaurs called allosaurs, which were the apex predators of the day.

But there’s also another part of Timurlengia’s skeleton that we were able to study: the braincase, the fused bones at the back of the skull that surround the brain, ear, and sinuses. We put it into a CT scanner, which allowed us to digitally peer inside and see what the brain and sensory organs looked like.

This gave us quite a surprise: Timurlengia had the same type of brain and ear as the giant tyrannosaurs such as T. rex. It was very smart, and had an ear attuned to hearing low frequency sounds. Previously, these features were thought to be unique to the big tyrannosaurs, part of that toolkit of predatory superpowers that evolved as they turned into giants.

Evolution story

So our new Uzbek tyrannosaur helps to tell a story, about how evolution turns seemingly ordinary animals into extraordinary freaks of nature. It goes something like this.

Tyrannosaurs originated around 170m years ago during the Jurassic period, as human-sized, fast-running stalkers who used their long arms to grab prey. For about 80m years they stayed this way, far from spectacular, but eking out a living in the shadows.

Then some of these small tyrannosaurs developed sophisticated brains and senses, probably to help them better track their prey. Little did they know that, eventually, these neurosensory features would come in handy, when the allosaurs went extinct around 80-90m years ago and a new niche at the top of the food pyramid suddenly opened up. Their intelligence and sharp senses made tyrannosaurs perfectly equipped to swoop into the top-predator role.

And swoop they did. Very quickly the human-to-horse-sized tyrannosaurs grew into supersized monsters, longer than a bus and weighing more than a ton. Their heads became giant killing machines and their arms, now unnecessary, shrunk down to nubbins. By 80m years ago these mega tyrannosaurs were terrorizing what is now North America and Asia, spreading into all ecosystems on land, displacing smaller predators, and eating whatever they wanted.

It would remain this way for another 15m years or so, until the day, when T. rex was at the peak of its success rampaging across western North America, that a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid fell out of the sky and the world changed in an flash.

Stephen Brusatte, Chancellor's Fellow in Vertebrate Palaeontology, University of Edinburgh

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

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We know that birds are the last remaining avian dinosaurs, descendants of the theropod dinosaurs like the velociraptor.

Still, closely related as they might be, a chicken doesn't look much like how we picture a velociraptor.

But researchers have been trying to figure out which genetic changes caused dinos to change in appearance into modern birds, losing their arms, snouts, tails, and powerful legs.

Now, a group of researchers led by Joao Francisco Botelho of the University of Chile has solved another piece of that puzzle.

They've figured out why the fibula bone in birds — one of the two twin thin bones that sit side by side in a chicken leg — is too short and not as well developed as the fibula of their theropod ancestors.

And by tweaking certain genes to change bone growth, the researchers have shown they can reverse this process in chicken embryos and cause their legs to start to form in the more dinosaur-like structure.

The researchers didn't actually let these embryos grow to the hatching phase, but they did show that they've figured out how to reverse another step in evolution, able to make birds express throwback dinosaur traits.

They published these results in the journal Evolution.

Building a 'chickenosaurus'

These same researchers have done similar work in the past too, when they figured out how to make birds lose the opposable toe that lets them cling to branches to grow a more dinosaur-like foot.

Eventually, if someone can figure out how to reverse all the differences between modern birds and dinosaurs, we might be able to actually be able to make a sort of dino-bird, something with the legs, tail, and snout of a dinosaur.

It would be a dino-chicken, or a "chickenosaurus,"in the words of Jack Horner, the paleontologist who worked on "Jurassic World" (and the rest of the "Jurassic Park" films).

The group in Chile isn't trying to do that, they just want to figure out if they can explain the genetic changes that made modern birds look the way they do, compared to their ancestors.

"The experiments are focused on single traits to test specific hypotheses," Alexander Vargas of the University of Chile said in a press release announcing the finding. "Not only do we know a great deal about bird development, but also about the dinosaur-bird transition, which is well-documented by the fossil record. This leads naturally to hypotheses on the evolution of development, that can be explored in the lab."

Others, including Horner, are still interested in seeing if they can actually create a new little dinosaur.

It would be a small, feathered creature, with a tail that helps it balance, small arms with claws, and a toothy snout, instead of a beak.

"If we can make a dino-chicken, it's pretty cool,"Horner told Tech Insider in 2015.

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Scientists recently announced the discovery of Timurlengia euotica, an early ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus rex that was much smaller than its famous large-fanged cousin.

Produced by Matt Stuart. Video courtesy AP and Reuters.

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For the first time in history, a team of international scientists are drilling into the center of the underwater crater created by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Produced by Jenner Deal. Original Reporting by Jessica Orwig.

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Dinosaurs were in decline long before an asteroid strike polished them off about 66 million years ago, a study says.

It's the latest contribution to a long-running debate: Did the asteroid reverse the fortune of a thriving group of animals?

Or were dinosaurs already struggling, and the disruptive effects of the asteroid pushed them over the edge to extinction? Or were the dinosaurs headed for oblivion anyway?

While some have argued that dinosaurs began petering out some 5 million or 10 million years before their final doom, the new paper suggests it started happening much earlier, maybe 50 million years before the asteroid catastrophe.

In terms of species, "they were going extinct faster than they could replace themselves," said paleontologist Manabu Sakamoto of the University of Reading in England.

He led a team of British scientists who analyzed three large dinosaur family trees, looking for evidence of when extinctions began to outnumber the appearances of new species.

They found that starting to happen about 50 million years before the asteroid for most groups of dinosaurs. Two other groups showed increases rather than declines; if their results are included, the overall time for the start of dinosaur decline shrinks to 24 million years before the final demise.

Declining groups include two-legged carnivores like T. rex and the immense, long-necked, four-legged plant eaters known as sauropods. In contrast, another familiar dinosaur, triceratops, belonged to a group that was on the rise.

The results appear in a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Sakamoto said it's not clear what caused the long-term declines.

The results support the idea that the asteroid strike pushed a struggling group into extinction, rather than the idea that dinosaurs were doomed anyway, he said. He also noted that one group in decline still lives on in its descendants, today's birds.

The killer asteroid is thought to have struck the coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, creating widespread wildfires and lingering smoke that blocked sunlight, and changing climate.

Mark Norell, chair of the paleontology division at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, called Sakamoto's analysis "the best you can do" given the lack of available fossils from that time.

Most data came from North America with some from Asia and western Europe he said, and the conclusion would be firmer if fossils could be included from a wider geographical distribution.

David Fastovsky, chair of the geosciences department at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, said placing the seeds of the decline so early in time is striking and unexpected. Paleontologists will no doubt examine the study "quite closely," he said.

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British research discovered the disappearance of dinosaurs millions of years before they went extinct. Populations weren't multiplying as fast as they were dying off. What could have been the cause?

Produced by Emmanuel Ocbazghi. Original reporting by Jessica Orwig.

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BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A novice fossil collector's lucky find in a remote Montana badlands more than a decade ago has turned out to be a new kind of spectacularly-horned dinosaur, researchers announced Wednesday.

The bones unearthed near Winifred, Montana represent a previously-unknown species of dinosaur that lived 76 million years ago.

It's scientific name is Spiclypeus shipporum (spi-CLIP-ee-us ship-OR-um) but it's been nicknamed "Judith," after the Judith River rock formation where it was found in 2005 by retired nuclear physicist Bill Shipp.

Canadian Museum of Nature paleontologist Jordan Mallon says Judith is closely-related to the well-known Triceratops. Both had horned faces and elaborate head frills, although Judith's horns stick out sideway instead of over the eyes.

Like Triceratops, Judith was a plant-eater, approximately 15-feet long and weighing up to four tons, Mallon said.

Shipp told The Associated Press that he stumbled across what turned out to be Judith's femur bone in 2005.

He had hired an amateur paleontologist to give him an introduction to fossil hunting on a ranch Shipp owned near the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. As Shipp worked his way around an eroded rocky outcropping on the property, he saw a piece of bone sticking several inches out of the ground.

"I found it accidentally on purpose," Shipp said. "I was actually looking for dinosaur bones, but with no expectation of actually finding any."

After recovering six bones during an initial dig, Shipp brought in a team the next summer that spent two years excavating and cleaning the bones.

They ended up with half of Judith's skull and parts of its legs, hips and backbone. It wasn't until last year, after the bones were acquired by the Canadian Museum of Nature, that Mallon formally identified them as belonging to a new genus and species of dinosaur.

Judith was at least 10 years old when it died.

An examination of its bones by Edward Iuliano, a radiologist at Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland, Washington, revealed evidence of a severe leg infection that would have left the animal hobbled. The injury made Judith potentially vulnerable to Tyrannosaurus rex-like predators that lived around the same period, Mallon said.

"It's an exciting story, because it's a new species, and yet we have this sort of pathetic individual that suffered throughout its lifetime," Mallon said. "If you're hobbling along on three limbs, you're probably not going to be able to keep up with the herd."

Details on the find were published in the online scientific journal PLOS ONE.

A public exhibit featuring a reconstruction of Judith's skull and other bones from the find on Bill Shipp's ranch opens May 24 at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottowa.

Fewer than a dozen dinosaur species have been discovered in the Judith formation despite more than a century of exploration in the area, said John Scannella, manager of paleontology collections at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.

"This new animal provides another piece in the puzzle of our view of what the ecosystem of central Montana 76 million years ago was like," Scannella said. "It really is our first glimpse of a whole new animal that we weren't aware of. That's inherently cool."

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A new species of dinosaur, called Spiclypeus Shipporum, was discovered in the Montana badlands. The dinosaur likely led a difficult life due to osteoarthritis in one of its forelimbs. 

Produced by Jacqui Frank. Original reporting by Jessica Orwig. 

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Scientists have discovered that the Stegosaurus had a stronger bite than previously thought.

Researchers from the National History Museum in London found the bite was similar to that of a sheep or a cow. Its bite was still only around half as powerful as that of a human being.

The 9-metre long dinosaur had tiny teeth and only ate plants. 

Produced by Claudia Romeo

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It's a beautiful day in ancient Burma. The sun warms the earth under your birdlike dinosaur feet. You scratch a bit at the ground with the sharp little claws that still protrude from your transitional dinosaur-bird wings. You're still young, a fledgling, and it feels great to wander around a bit.

Then something catches your attention — maybe a predator. You turn and move, not paying close attention to where you're going. And then splat. Your wing sticks deep into a pile of tree resin. You're tiny, standing just several inches high, and not strong enough to pull yourself free. Yet you're still alive, terrified. You squirm, leaving scratch marks in the hard, sucking sap. But you can't pull yourself free. So that's where you die. Maybe it happens fast, as some larger creature takes advantage of your mistake for a quick snack. Or maybe it's a slow death by exhaustion.

Ninety-nine million years later only your wing remains.

Some version of that scene — we don't know the details — likely played out for some young enantiornithes. Enantiornithes are a kind of transitional birdlike dinosaur. An amazing paper published Tuesday examines two baby dinosaur wings found trapped in amber with their feathers, and skin still attached. And its most interesting detail is that one of the two creatures was still alive when it got trapped, and seems to have scratched at the goop as it died.

Amber is fossilized tree sap, which can preserve biomass much better than common fossils. That's incredibly useful for researchers, because it means nearly-complete dino wings can travel 99 million years through time for their examination. But for some poor little baby dino-bird, it meant catching its wing in some sticky goop that held it fast, squirming and scratching until it died.

Kind of a dark little nugget to stick in a science paper, but it offers a rare glimpse into a 99-million-year old moment of high drama. It makes you realize that all these old bones we're used to seeing in museums represent real living things that roamed the planet and lived full lives of their own, before passing their bodies into posterity.

The signs of this young dinosaur's squirmings are hard to see with the naked eye. But the researchers who studied the well-preserved dinosaur wings found "bidirectional claw marks" in the amber, along with other evidence that this creature was still moving when it died. The photo labeled "k" in the image above shows some of these marks, with the yellow arrows indicating the direction the claws moved.

Poor little 99-million-year-old dino-bird. Thanks for unwittingly donating your body to science.

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Scientists just published their findings from two 99 million-year-old baby dinosaur wings — with feathers still attached — found encased in amber. I'm going to repeat that: We've got two dinosaur wings so well-preserved in amber that scientists can study their feathers.

No, you aren't living in the first ten minutes of an unpublished "Jurassic Park" sequel.

The wings seem to come from enantiornithes, a group of transitional dinosaurs with teeth and claws on their wings but that otherwise resembled modern birds. The wings got trapped in tree sap, which — as it turned to amber — encased them and preserved them more effectively than the more common fossilization process would have.

The amber in which the wings were found comes from Myanmar (Burma) and was originally prepared as jewelry, reports Kristin Romey for National Geographic. (National Geographic helped fund the project that uncovered the wings.)

In their paper revealing their findings, the researchers "tentatively" suggest that the two wings come from the same species of enantiornithes. And they're so well-preserved that they show how similar the feathering is to that of modern birds.

Modern birds are understood to be the last surviving dinosaurs, so any glimpse at how they emerged is fascinating.

Preserved coloring in the feathers reveals layers of brown and white feathers in one of the wings, in patterns similar to those we still see today. In fact, almost everything the researchers examined from the skin and muscle to the microstructures of the individual feathers resembles the wing structure of today's avians.

These findings are special because it's incredibly rare to find fossils this old and well-preserved. In normal fossilization processes, feathers tend to disappear, leaving behind only difficult-to-interpret impressions on surrounding rock. And when feathers do turn up in amber, it's usually alone and without much context. These wings though are astonishingly complete.

One more amazing fact from the paper: It looks like the ancient dino-bird baby might have still been alive when it got buried in the tree sap. Preserved claw marks around the wings suggest some kind of struggle happened before the sap hardened.

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NOW WATCH: This is how big dinosaurs actually were in real life

Fossils of a carnivorous dinosaur unearthed in Argentina are shedding new light on an intriguing group of predators that apparently were just as happy to slash victims to death with sickle-shaped hand claws as to chomp them into an early grave.

Scientists said on Wednesday the creature, called Murusraptor barrosaensis, lived about 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period, measured about 21 feet (6.5 meters) long and was a pursuit hunter more lightly built than some other predatory dinosaurs.

Murusraptor was a member of a group of meat-eaters called megaraptors, meaning "giant thieves," that prowled Patagonia, although fossils of relatives have been discovered in Australia and Japan.

"Most of the different species known from this clade are based on rather fragmentary specimens. The Murusraptor specimen preserved the complete posterior half of the skull, several vertebrae and pelvis bones, unveiling unknown areas of the skeleton of this group," said paleontologist Rodolfo Coria of Argentina's Universidad Nacional de Río Negro.

"The braincase is complete, and is the only known among megaraptors," Coria added. "It brings a unique opportunity to search for characteristics of neurological development in these dinosaurs."

Megaraptors were medium-sized predators compared to some of Argentina's giant Cretaceous meat-eaters, like the roughly 41-foot-long (12.5 meters) Giganotosaurus, and likely hunted in a different way. Giganotosaurus, which lived about 17 million years before Murusraptor, had a massively built skull and large teeth for killing prey, along with puny arms that would have done little good in hunting.

Other scientists last week announced the discovery of fossils of another Argentine carnivorous dinosaur, called Gualicho, a bit larger than Murusraptor that had feeble arms, akin in size to a human child's.

In contrast, megaraptors possessed strong arms that wielded sickle-like claws that could inflict fatal wounds on prey, along with a more lightly built skull and jaws studded with smaller teeth. They also had air-filled, bird-like bones.

But that certainly did not mean an encounter with Murusraptor in prehistoric Patagonia would end well.

"A person might say, 'Oh my god, a megaraptor!' And then he would die," Coria added.

Murusraptor means "thief from the wall," because its fossils were collected from the wall of a creek in Argentina's Neuquen Province.

The research was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Alan Crosby)

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NOW WATCH: A leading Harvard physicist has a radical explanation for what sparked the chain of events that killed the dinosaurs

What killed the dinosaurs? It’s a question as old as – well the dinosaurs themselves, and one that everyone from school children to scientists have been asking for decades. Movies like Jurassic Park and the Land Before Time only heighten that sense of wonder and raise the stakes behind that question. Now according to a new scientific study, it seems that black gold may have been the source of the dinos’ demise.

Japanese researchers at Tohuku University and the Meteorological Research Institute authored a recent study in the research journal Scientific Reports suggesting that a meteor impact 66 million years ago on an oil rich region of Yucatan Peninsula led to the death of the dinosaurs. When the asteroid hit the vast oil deposits of Mexico, it sent thick black smoke into the atmosphere, changing the climate around the world. That soot blocked out the sun leading to a significant cooling of the planet. Equally importantly, it also led to a substantial drought around the world.

The asteroid in question was roughly 6 miles wide and its impacted created the 110 mile wide crater that exists in the Yucatan today – the third largest crater on Earth. The impact was the equivalent of roughly 1 billion atomic bombs of the equivalent power to what struck Hiroshima at the end of World War 2.

The researchers calculate that the amount of soot released would have lowered sunlight exposure by 85 percent and reduced rainfall by 80 percent. That would have had a significant impact on plant growth, which in turn would have limited food options for most dinosaurs. In addition, the soot cooled the Earth by 16 degrees Celsius (about 28.8 degrees Fahrenheit) over the course of just 3 years. Think of the event as the reverse of global warming – and on steroids.

Against this backdrop it is not surprising that dinosaurs all died out. Only smaller mammals that could live underground would have survived. In fact, the fossil record suggests that only 12 percent of the pre-asteroid life was able to survive after the impact. It was not just dinosaurs that died either, contrary to myths about the Ice Age – around 93 percent of mammal species were killed off as well, according to a separate research study by scientists at the University of Bath. The largest animals that would have survived the extinction event were about the size of a house cat.

Still, life bounced back “fairly quickly” researchers say, with about twice as many species existing 300,000 years after the event versus before it. Of course, given that the course of human history only goes back around 25,000 years, three-hundred thousand years is still a long period of time. It reflects the reality that the asteroid strike had a significant enough impact that its effects took tens of thousands of years to dissipate. It was the adaptability of mammals after the strike versus various reptiles that led the mammals to ultimately come to dominate the planet. Dinosaurs were in decline for millions of years before the asteroid strike, but that event aided by the oil rich soil of the Yucatan finished them off.

It’s ironic that oil, so fundamental for modern human life was ultimately the catalyst that wiped out the dinosaurs. Had the asteroid stuck in a less oil rich region, back of the envelope calculations suggest its impact would have only been around one-third as devastating. It’s impossible to say if that would have allowed any of the dinosaurs to live or not, but it is at least a possibility. Perhaps if not for the existence of oil, none of us would have cars, but maybe we would all have a pet brontosaurus.

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This giant footprint is thought to have belonged to the Abelisaurus, a meat-eating dinosaur from the same group of dinosaurs as the T-Rex.

Paleontologists think the dinosaur could have been up to 12 metres long.

Produced by Claudia Romeo

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In Hell Creek Formation, Montana, paleontologists have uncovered a 66.3-million-year-old T-rex fossil with the skull still intact.

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Paleontologists have teamed up with a paleoartist to create a model which challenges everything you thought you knew about the typical dinosaur.

Research led by Dr Jakob Vinther of the University of Bristol and published in a paper in the journal Current Biology showed that a Psittacosaurus — nicknamed a "parrot-lizard"— is about the size of a turkey, has bristles on its tail and a birdlike beak. In other words, a bit weird, but also pretty cute.

It's also quite likely that the animal had feathers and a horn on each cheek, the experts say. Quite aptly, Psittacosaurus belongs to the group ceratopsians, which basically means "horned faces" in Greek. It's the same group that contains Triceratops.

The scientists say Psittacosaurus would have lived in what is now China roughly 100-123 million years ago in what may have been a forested region, where several other feathered dinosaur fossils have also been found.

The model that brought Psittacosaurus to life

Some limited information could be gathered about the colouring of Psittacosaurus from preserved melanin patterns inside the fossil, but to get a more accurate glimpse, the team asked paleoartist Bob Nicholls to create a real size 3D model of the animal.

Vinther said that the dark colouring and light belly of Psittacosaurus indicates that it probably lives in forests with dappled lighting, where it could blend into its surroundings and hide from predators.

"The fossil preserves clear countershading, which has been shown to function by counter-illuminating shadows on a body, thus making an animal appear optically flat to the eye of the beholder," he said. "We were amazed to see how well these color patterns actually worked to camouflage this little dinosaur."

Dinosaurs were probably feathery, not scaled like in Jurassic Park.

Vinther’s research with pigmentation began while he was at Yale University, where his studies revealed that structures previously believed to be dead bacteria were actually things called melanosomes; small structures that carry melanin pigments, which are found in skin and feathers.

There have been growing theories over the past few decades that dinosaurs were probably more bird-like than lizard. In 1964, Yale Professor John Ostrom discovered a fossil called Deinonychus and hypothesised that it might be warm-blooded and covered in feathers. Several years later, paleontologist Robert Bakker described the famous T-rex as "the 20,000 pound roadrunner from Hell."

Since 1983 hundreds of feathered fossils have been found around the world, but mostly in China. Each new fossil finding provides clues about previously discovered ones, and brings up new questions about whether dinosaurs were scaled at all. For example, new ideas about where feathers could have been attached on arm bones of theropods such as velociraptors.

The researchers now want to explore more types of fossils to further understand how other species might have been pigmented to be able to camouflage themselves.

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One of the biggest-ever dinosaur footprints has just been uncovered in the Gobi Desert, an arid region that spans Northern China and Southern Mongolia. Researchers unearthed the giant 77 cm-wide prints on a Mongolian-Japanese expedition, and they say that it could offer new information about its owner. 

The footprint is believed to have belonged to a Titanosaur, a long-necked plant-eating dinosaur. They were some of the heaviest animals ever to walk the earth, weighing up to 90 tonnes. Titanosaurs were the last group of sauropods — the same group as the Brachiosaurus — who roamed the earth 90 to 66 million years ago. 

The desert where the print was found is now covered in sand, but when dinosaurs were around, researchers suspect it would have been soft and muddy. Those conditions are likely why the print was preserved.

"This is a very rare discovery as it's a well-preserved fossil footprint that is more than a metre long with imprints of its claws," said the researchers in a statement from Okayama University of Science.

But this isn't the first time in recent years that such a giant dinosaur print has been uncovered.  

Several massive dinosaur tracks have been discovered around the world. 

In 2015, large footprints were found on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, which are believed to have also been made by sauropods. They measured 70 cm in diameter and were the first sauropod tracks to be found in Scotland. 

And last August, researchers found the largest-ever carnivorous dinosaur prints in Bolivia. The prints were 115 cm wide and believed to be tracks from an Abelisaurus — a cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex. These dinosaurs could grow to be over a whopping 12 meters tall and are thought to have lived around 70 million years ago. 

The largest prints ever found were uncovered in France in 2009. They were nearly 2 meters wide and belonged to sauropods, the same species as the most recent discovery. 

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Dinosaur fossils aren’t always the mineralized remnants of bones. Every now and then, you get an impression of a footprint, or the trace outlines of a feathered arm or “wing.”

Sometimes, paleontologists strike proverbial gold and find a segment of dinosaur tissue, including skin, capillaries, and – as revealed in an incredible special publication by the Geological Society of London– even a brain.

A fossil hunter, searching around Sussex in southeastern England almost a decade ago, stumbled across a small brown pebble. After being analyzed by a group of paleontologists, it was dramatically revealed to have been the fossilized soft brain tissue of an Iguanodon, a plant-eating dinosaur that lived around 133 million years ago at the start of the Cretaceous.

Significantly, this is the first ever example of fossilized brain tissue from a dinosaur. Although the original biological tissue itself no longer exists, the immaculate, complex detail of its structures have been incredibly well-preserved by what the researchers have referred to as “mineralized ghosts.”

Detailed CT scans also revealed that the fossilized remnants of strands of blood vessels, collagen networks, capillaries and even the outer layers of neural tissues were also brilliantly preserved by the natural pickling process.

Co-author Dr Alex Liu, a palaeobiologist at the University of Cambridge, told IFLScience that brain tissues “are amongst the least likely tissues we would expect to ever be found in a fossilized terrestrial vertebrate.”

This unfortunate dinosaur appears to have died near a bog or swamp, one containing a soup of highly acidic, oxygen depleted disgustingness. Having taken a tumble into it, its brain was essentially “pickled” by the bacteria-unfriendly mess, and its soft tissue was mineralized before it decayed away.

Turning up around 20 million years after the docile, quadrupedal Stegosaurus and the bird-like, raven-sized Archaeopteryx made their debut, Iguanodons were lumbering, bulky, bipedal beasts that fed off low-lying vegetation and fought off predators with their unusual thumb spikes.

It belonged to the Ornithischians, the group of dinosaurs that did not contain the true ancestral forms of birds. Despite this, Liu notes that this herbivore’s sausage-shaped brain appears to be very bird-like, as well as showing some morphological similarities to that of modern-day crocodiles.

Modern reptiles have relatively small brains, with half of the cranial cavity’s space being taken up by sinuses that serve as a blood drainage system. Curiously, the tissue in this Iguanodon brain appears to have been pressing up right against the skeletal structure, hinting that the brains of dinosaurs could have been far larger than many have previously assumed.

“It seems that the brain in this dinosaur was therefore more similar to that of modern birds, in that it filled a greater proportion of the braincase,” Liu added.

However, it’s possible that the dramatic death of the dinosaur may have dislodged the brain somewhat, causing it to have been preserved against the skull when it reality it may have been positioned further away. Without seeing the lobes of the brain itself, the team cannot be certain about the true size of its brain.

The lead author of the study, Professor Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford, died in a car crash in 2014 while in the middle of researching this incredible fossil, and this special publication is dedicated to his life’s remarkable work.

“Professor Brasier was a very supportive colleague, and it's been a privilege to work towards publishing a paper on this very special object, in a book in his memory,” co-author Dr Russell Garwood, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester, told IFLScience.

He would no doubt have been thrilled to have been part of a discovery that has turned out to be truly revelatory. After all, there’s arguably no better way to determine a dinosaur’s intelligence than by looking at its brain.

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