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Categories: Mathematics: Statistics, Paleontology: Dinosaurs

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A fossil discovery from Scotland has provided new information on the early evolution of lizards, during the time of the dinosaurs.

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Piecing together the crushed skull of a fossil bird that lived alongside the dinosaurs helped researchers extrapolate what its brain would have looked like: big olfactory bulbs would have meant that this bird, the earliest known animal to eat fruit, had a better sense of smell than most modern birds. And the bones around its eye sockets revealed that it would have been better at seeing by day than at night.

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Ostrich-like dinosaurs called ornithomimosaurs grew to enormous sizes in ancient eastern North America, according to a new study.

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People often wonder why one nutritional study tells them that eating too many eggs, for instance, will lead to heart disease and another tells them the opposite. The answer to this and other conflicting food studies may lie in the use of statistics, according to a new report.

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A process of desiccation and deflation explains why dinosaur 'mummies' aren't as exceptional as we might expect, according to a study.

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Researchers followed the birth and death of tens of thousands of nematode worms using the 'Lifespan Machine', which collects lifespan data at unprecedented statistical resolution. They found that worms have at least two distinct 'biological ages', and that these have consistent correlations between each other, suggesting the existence of an invisible hierarchical structure that regulates the ageing process. The findings challenge the idea of living organisms having a single, universal biological age. It also means mean that biomarkers used to assess biological age can be changed by interventions such as diet, exercise, or drug treatments without actually turning a 'fast ager' into a 'slow ager'. The study calls into question the use of ageing biomarkers -- what exactly are they measuring?

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Researchers have conducted a new analysis of the origins of 'bird-hipped' dinosaurs -- the group which includes iconic species such as Triceratops -- and found that they likely evolved from a group of animals known as silesaurs, which were first identified two decades ago.

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The contact.engineering platform enables users to create a digital twin of a surface and thus to help predict, for example, how quickly it wears out, how well it conducts heat, or how well it adheres to other materials.

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Researchers have discovered a new extinct species of lizard-like reptile that belongs to the same ancient lineage as New Zealand's living tuatara. A team of scientists describe the new species Opisthiamimus gregori, which once inhabited Jurassic North America about 150 million years ago alongside dinosaurs like Stegosaurus and Allosaurus. In life, this prehistoric reptile would have been about 16 centimeters (about 6 inches) from nose to tail -- and would fit curled up in the palm of an adult human hand -- and likely survived on a diet of insects and other invertebrates.

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A commentary advocates the proper application of artificial intelligence in healthcare and warns of the dangers when machine learning algorithms are misused.

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Scientists have developed a method to identify symmetries in multi-dimensional data using Bayesian statistical techniques. Bayesian statistics has been in the spotlight in recent years due to improvements in computer performance and its potential applications in artificial intelligence. However, this statistical approach requires complex calculations of integrals, which are often considered approximations only. In their new study, the research team successfully derived new exact integral formulas. Their findings contribute to improving the accuracy of methods to identify data symmetries, possibly extending their applications to wider areas of interest, such as genetic analysis.

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Determining what killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period has long been the topic of debate, as scientists set out to determine what caused the five mass extinction events that reshaped life on planet Earth in a geological instant. Some scientists argue that comets or asteroids that crashed into Earth were the most likely agents of mass destruction, while others argue that large volcanic eruptions were the cause. A new study reports that volcanic activity appears to have been the key driver of mass extinctions.

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An international team of paleontologists has discovered and named a new, early dinosaur. The skeleton -- incredibly, mostly intact -- was found over the course of two digs, in 2017 and 2019.

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Fossils of a giant killer mosasaur have been discovered, along with the fossilized remains of its prey.

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Large dinosaur predators, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, evolved different shapes of eye sockets to better deal with high bite forces, new research has shown.

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Scientists have cracked an enduring mystery, discovering how sauropod dinosaurs -- like Brontosaurus and Diplodocus -- supported their gigantic bodies on land.

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Spinosaurid dinosaurs were able to develop up to three generations of teeth at the same time, a high replacement rate that explains why so many teeth of this type have been found in Cretaceous sites.

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Fossils of small plesiosaurs, long-necked marine reptiles from the age of dinosaurs, have been found in a 100-million year old river system that is now Morocco's Sahara Desert. This discovery suggests some species of plesiosaur, traditionally thought to be sea creatures, may have lived in freshwater.

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A new study refutes a provocative claim made earlier this year that fossils classified as the dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex represent three separate species. The rebuttal finds that the earlier proposal lacks sufficient evidence to split up the iconic species.

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A groundbreaking Bayesian method and new statistical analyses of genomic data from geckos in the Philippines shows that during the ice ages, the timing of gecko diversification gives strong statistical support for the first time to the Pleistocene aggregate island complex (PAIC) model of diversification, or 'species pump.'