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About 67 million years ago, two dinosaurs faced off in what is now Montana before being buried together in a single grave.
It is not clear which dino won the battle. Triceratops horridus and Tyrannosaurus Rex each died sporting battle scars.
The Triceratops fossil first emerged when it was eroded from Hell Creek Formation rock in 2006. The T. rex fossil was then seen overlying it.
When commercial paleontologist Mark Eatman found the fossils stuck, the discovery was like something from the “Jurassic Park” movies come to life.
The “dueling dinosaurs” went on display in April at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.
And now, Eatman has struck dino gold again.
Dino-mite!
This specimen may be the rock star of the dinosaurs.
After being on display for more than a year at the Evolution Museum in Maribo, Denmark, a horned dinosaur fossil is being recognized as a previously unknown species.
Named in part for the Norse god of the sea, Lokiceratops rangiformis was a cousin of Triceratops and lived in a swampy environment alongside other horned dinosaur species around 78 million years ago.
Lokiceratops had a ferocious look befitting a metal head that helped protect territory and its friends: an ornate skull with a shield-like frill, horns over its eyes and paddle-shaped horns in the back.
Defying gravity
When NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams took off on a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule on June 5, they were expected to return from a visit to the International Space Station about eight days later.
Now, the duo will likely aim to come back sometime in July, according to the space agency.
The return date is changing as Boeing and NASA work to understand the various issues that arose during the spacecraft’s first crewed trip, such as helium leaks and thruster failure.
Since the capsule’s service module, which experienced the issues, will not be coming back, engineers are racing to understand as much as they can before the Starliner’s departure.
Around the globe
Astronomers are observing a supermassive black hole being awakened at the center of a distant galaxy for the first time.
When an unusually bright glow was detected by a telescope in 2019, it first alerted scientists that something unusual was happening in the galaxy, which is located 300 million light years away.
Now, the international team has an unprecedented view of how the sleeping giant comes to life and consumes all the cosmic matter it can.
Meanwhile, researchers reexamining a popular theory by the late British physicist Stephen Hawking may have discovered a primordial black hole in their search for elusive direct evidence of matter missing from the universe .
Secrets of the sea
A 246-million-year-old fossil found in an unexpected place reveals exactly what some ancient creatures were like.
The late paleontologist Robert Erwan Fordyce, professor emeritus at the University of Otago, saw the first fossil, related to a nothosaur, in New Zealand. This discovery of a marine reptile was rarely observed in the Southern Hemisphere.
This amazing discovery made researchers question how the reptiles moved from one side of the Earth, which was then dominated by a supercontinent called Pangaea, to the other side.
The nothosaurs, which moved through the water with their limbs, probably swam all the way around Pangaea using the global ocean as a coastal highway, said Benjamin Kear, a paleontologist at Uppsala University’s Museum of Evolution in Sweden.
Once upon a planet
Mapping the remains of the rock gardens could help researchers piece together what exactly happened to the Polynesian sailors who first inhabited Easter Island.
The researchers are divided into two camps as they study the remote Pacific island, also known as Rapa Nui, which has hundreds of monumental stone heads called moai.
Some experts suspect that limited resources led to a catastrophic population decline. Others believe that the isolated group lived a sustainable life until 18th century European settlers brought disease to the island.
New research using satellite imagery and machine learning suggests that the island had a much smaller and more stable population, and that the islanders were able to survive on sweet potatoes and other crops grown using an ancient farming technique.
Explorations
Dive into these results:
— As Voyager 1 explores uncharted cosmic territory, the probe is sending back valuable science data for the first time since the spacecraft’s computer glitch seven months ago.
– Scientists have found microplastics in human urine, adding to the growing list of potential health concerns related to the tiny particles.
— A 3,300-year-old ship filled with hundreds of intact jars uncovered at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is one of the oldest shipwrecks ever discovered.
– Meet Colombian marine biologist Fernando Trujillo, who entered the Amazon decades ago with a mission: to save the mysterious pink river dolphins.
— For years, astronomers thought that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was observed on the planet more than 350 years ago. New analysis shows that the comments made in 1665 were about something else.
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