A team of Chinese and American scientists excavated some well-preserved fossils in the Gobi Desert. The team says the herd of ostrich-like sinornithomimus lived some 90 million years ago.

“This is a very exciting discovery, because 99.9 percent of the time, we find a group of skeletons that died at different periods due to unknown causes,” said Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago professor on the excavation team. “The other 0.1 percent of the time, scientists consider themselves lucky to find small herds that have been well-preserved after floods or volcanic eruptions, similar to that of Pompeii.”

Twenty five young sinornithomimus were found near Suhongtu, a tiny, remote village in the Gobi desert about 370 miles (600 kilometers) west of Hohhot.

The scientists concocted a story saying the position of the dinosaur bones suggest the animals were looking for water at the edge of a lake, got stuck in mud and drowned in the mud.

Another paleontologist says the youngsters were left behind by their parents.

I like a good story as much as the next guy … but how do they know these things?

There’s a city in Japan called Oyashirazu. Oya = parent. Shirazu = don’t know. The city is named because a high tide came in as a parent and child were swimming together. The mother hurried to safety but forgot about her child as if she didn’t know she had a child to take care of.

Did these sinornithomimus (Chinese bird mimic) leave us a story to tell, too?

Image by pnp

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Geologists have come across a bewildering multitude of dinosaur footprints and tail-drag marks, of at least a 1,000 dinosaurs, on the Arizona-Utah border in the US. It is believed that 190 million years ago, the area, then in the tropics as part of the Pangaea continent, was a sandy oasis much like the Sahara Desert.

The tracks reveal that there must have been four species of dinosaurs ranging from the young to the adults that traveled all the way to the watering hole to quench their thirst. When Dr. Chan first saw these footprints in 2005, she thought that they were probably potholes created by erosion but on closer examination she noticed some prominent signs of claw, toe and heel marks.

These tracks had been hidden all these years under shifting dunes that later turned to Navajo Sandstone which then slowly eroded to reveal the fascinating footprints. But to the disappointment of Dr. Chan and all other geologists, these marvelous footprints too will slowly erode with time.

I wonder if Sarah Palin knows these interesting facts about dinosaurs … – via DailyMail