
Drumheller is a scrappy old coal-mining town that hugs Alberta’s Red Deer River, situated in a parched valley peppered with dino kitsch. Cartoonish cement dinosaurs stand amidst a smattering of dive bars, motels, souvenir shops, and places with names like “Dinosaur RV Park” and “Jurassic Laser Tag & Arcade.” Right next to the visitor centre, there’s a fibreglass and steel T-Rex they call the “World’s Largest Dinosaur.” It’s about four times the size of the real thing, and you can pay $3 to climb some stairs to look out at the weatherbeaten town and surrounding badlands from its toothy mouth.
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This adult duck-billed dinosaur, she says, was probably between eight and nine metres long, and weighed between three to four tonnes. The species roamed in large herds, clipping vegetation with their sharp beaks, then grinding it to a pulp with thousands of teeth aligned in the back of their jaws.“It’s going to take the rest of the summer to get it out,” Zelenitsky says of the metre-long skull. “It’ll be technically challenging because the sandstone is so hard, but the bones are very well-preserved, and no one’s found a skull like this in decades.”
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Since their initial discovery in northeastern China in the mid-1990s, feathered non-avian dinosaurs have revolutionized the field of paleontology. Many researchers now believe that most —ndash; if not all – dinosaurs had feathers (soft tissues like skin and feathers are rarely preserved), and that they evolved for purposes other than flight (such as courtship, insulation, and/or camouflage). That’s right. Those murderous packs of Velociraptors in JP (which were actually Utahraptors, because a Velociraptor would have only been slightly larger than a turkey) could have had brilliant multi-coloured macaw plumes—