Extinct Animals

Extinct animals are those species which are no longer living. This group includes prehistoric animals like dinosaurs and ice-age mammals, as well as moden species like the Dodo.

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The basic idea of "Jurassic Park" — minus the carnage — is both appealing and approaching reality. But reintroducing extinct species requires some careful consideration.

By Karen Kirkpatrick

Centuries ago, people didn't just sit on park benches and feed pigeons bread -- they ate the birds, too. Needless to say, passenger pigeons did not respond well to humans' voracious appetite.

By Karen Kirkpatrick

A lot of prehistoric animals were massive, but do we really know why? And is there a larger animal roaming the planet today?

By Karen Kirkpatrick & Sarah Gleim

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A mysterious wild horse called the tarpan eluded hunters for centuries until succumbing to extinction. What made it special?

By Karen Kirkpatrick

They were creatures of the air, but they aren't part of the avian family tree — and don't call them dinosaurs. What was life like for the pterosaurs, and what has sparked renewed interest in these flying reptiles?

By Clint Pumphrey

A stunning array of strange and ferocious aquatic beasts patrolled Earth's waters long before they became the stuff of legends and "Jurassic Park" movies. One could eat a great white shark in one gulp.

By Chris Opfer

If you thought sea monsters were just the stuff of myth, you thought wrong. With giant, razor-sharp teeth, ancient cetaceans — the ancestors to modern whales, dolphins and porpoises — make even nightmares seem dull.

By Oisin Curran

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Hop in your time machine, set the clock back a few thousand years and meet some woolly wonders. They even have a few things to teach us about the fate of modern elephants.

By Nicholas Gerbis

OK, hop in your time machine and go back 67 million years or so to the Cretaceous period. Then find a Tyrannosaurus rex and challenge it to a race. Sounds crazy, huh? Could you really outrun a Tyrannosaurus rex?

By Alison Cooper

Learn more about the top 10 most mysterious creatures to disappear from the earth.

The megalodon was born as big as an adult great white and grew to weigh as much as 7 Tyrannosaurus rex. Learn all about the megalodon.

By Joy H. Montgomery

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The oldest record of a fossil dinosaur bones discovery is in a Chinese book written between 265 and 317 A.D. Learn more about dinosaur discoveries and the places they were made in this article.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

Dinosaur evolution looks at how dinosaurs developed and changed over the course of time. Paleontologists study the different types of dinosaurs and how they are related to each other. How else is dinosaur evolution studied?

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

Dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period. How and why is a puzzle that paleontologists are trying to solve by studying fossils and rock formations. Learn more about the different extinction theories.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

Interest in dinosaurs soared to new heights in the 1990s, thanks largely to the blockbuster film Jurassic Park. So too did dinosaur discoveries. Since 1990, more than 100 new dinosaur genera have been described and named. Learn more about recent dinosaur discoveries.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

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Bagaceratops rozhdestvenskyi was a small protoceratopsian with a big name: "baga" is the Mongolian word for "small," "ceratops" means "horned face," and the species name is in honor of Russian paleontologist A. K. Rozhdestvensky. Learn more about Late Cretaceous dinosaurs.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

Centrosaurus, which means "sharp-point reptile," was named by Lawrence Lambe in 1902 from specimens found along the Red Deer River in Alberta. A number of complete skulls and skeletons have since been discovered. Learn more about the Centrosaurus.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

Corythosaurus, the "corinthian helmet reptile," was one of the most abundant duckbilled dinosaurs from the Late Cretaceous of western North America. Originally found and named by Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History, Corythosaurus is also one of the best known of all dinosaurs.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

Dromiceiomimus ("emu mimic") has been found both in the Late Cretaceous Horseshoe Canyon and the Judith River Formation of Alberta. It is very similar to Struthiomimus and Ornithomimus, but had much larger eyes and longer, more slender arms. Learn more about the Dromiceiomimus.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

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Since it was named in 1979 by John Horner and Robert Makela, Maiasaura has become one of the most famous dinosaurs. It has provided information about how it cared for its young and the early development of dinosaurs. Learn more about the Maiasaura.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

Known from only a single skull and jaw from Montana and three teeth from South Dakota, Nanotyrannus was first thought to be an Albertosaurus. But it was recently redescribed because it was different in many ways from Albertosaurus.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

Panoplosaurus is known only from two partial skeletons, one of which preserves some of the armor the way it was in life. This skeleton shows that Panoplosaurus was unusual among nodosaurids because it did not have spikes on the sides of its neck.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

Parasaurolophus was an interesting-looking dinosaur. While it looked normal from the neck down, it looked almost as if it had a trombone on its head. And in a way, it did.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

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Pinacosaurus was one of the first armored dinosaurs found in Asia. An expedition from the American Museum of Natural History went to Mongolia to search for traces of early man; instead they found dinosaur eggs and skeletons.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.

An almost complete skull and most of the skeleton were found for Prenocephale. It was collected during the Joint Polish-Mongolian Expeditions to the Gobi Desert. The animal was named and described in 1974.

By the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.