Baseball Bat-Sized Horns

A tubby dinosaur sporting two horns each the length of a baseball bat roamed Mexico 72 million years ago.
That’s what paleontologists have discovered since digging up the remains of the plant-eating dinosaur, Coahuilaceratops magnacuerna, in Coahuila, Mexico.

This newly unearthed dinosaur had the longest horns of any ceratopsids – longer even than the famous Triceratops.

It would have been about the size of a rhinoceros with horns about 3 to 4 feet (1 metre) long.

As one of the largest herbivores in this area, the Coahuilaceratops probably didn’t have to worry about attack from other predator dinosaurs. It could have enjoyed the lush vegetation of Mexico as it was 97 to 65 million years ago – very different to the desert terrain of today.

Would You Like Stones With That?

Paleontologists have discovered a giant sea creature from the dinosaur era with 289 stones in its gut. How did they get there? The plesiosaur swallowed them.

Ouch, that must hurt! Not for a Dolichorhynchops plesiosaur apparently.

It seems as though the stones served some sort of digestive purpose, helping to grind up bits of shell or bony material within the gut, according to scientists.

Stomach stones, technically known as "gastroliths," are fairly common, but, even the scientists agree, 289 is an exceptionally large number! Some dinosaurs like sauropods also swallowed gastroliths.
Plesiosaurs were NOT dinosaurs, even though they looked a bit like underwater dinosaurs. Plesiosaur behaviour was more comparable to that of modern day sea turtles and seals, but the prehistoric animals weren't at all related to turtles and seals.

Spinosaurus Vs Tyrannosaurus

It’s been touted as one of the great battles of history. The epic fights that must have occurred between the giant meat-eaters, Spinosaurus and T-Rex. Who would have won is a question scientists have been asking for decades.

But what if they didn’t actually fight? A recent French study suggests these two deadly dinosaurs may have lived quite separate lives that kept them apart from each other.

Evidence from the study shows Spinosaurs could have actually spent a lot of their time in the water, thus avoiding clashes with Tyrannosaurs which lived on the land.

Earlier fossilized skeletons of Spinosaurs showed they had long snouts like crocodiles and that they ate fish.

But this new study also shows that the Spinosaurs teeth were smooth and cone-shaped like a crocodiles too. It also studied the amount of oxygen in their teeth because animals that live in water have different proportions of oxygen than those that live on land. The researchers found the oxygen in the Spinosaurs teeth resembles crocodiles and turtles more than land animals like Tyrannosaurs.

So the Spinosaurus probably spent part of their days in lakes and rivers feeding on fish leaving the terrible T-Rex to roam the land feasting on other dinosaurs to its heart content.