Courtesy of Brian Switek

Dinosaur enthusiast Brian Switek surveys Utah's landscape during a road trip — and surveys the state of dinosaur lore in "My Beloved Brontosaurus."

When it comes to dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters, even the experts can get things wrong — as dino-fanatic Brian Switek explains in his tour guide to the paleontological frontier.

The righting of wrongness begins with the title of Switek's book: "My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road With Old Bones, New Science and Our Favorite Dinosaurs." As most 9-year-olds could probably tell you, there's officially no such thing as a Brontosaurus. That name for the quintessential long-tailed, long-necked sauropod went out of fashion when scientists figured out that the Jurassic giant had already been dubbed Apatosaurus.

Nevertheless, the brontosaur serves as a totem for Switek, a prolific science writer whose work has appeared in Wired, Smithsonian, Slate, Scientific American and now most frequently on National Geographic's Phenomena blog network (as Laelaps). His earlier book, "Written in Stone," laid out the broad sweep of stories told by the fossil record — and in "My Beloved Brontosaurus," he focuses in on the what, where and when of the dinosaurs' heyday in the Mesozoic Era.

As you page through the book, you'll learn that not all dinosaurs have gone extinct. (Birds are dinosaurs.) You'll find out that the dinosaurs didn't start out as the rulers of the reptiles. (Crocodilians came first.) You'll delve into the back-and-forth debates that have occupied paleontologists for decades. (Was T. rex a hunter or a scavenger? Almost certainly both.) And you'll also get some great tips for future road trips in the American West.

Misconceptions and marvels
Switek talked about dinosaurs and tour directions during an interview last week. Here's an edited version of the Q&A that will whet your appetite for "My Beloved Brontosaurus":

Q: So many myths about dinosaurs are exploded in your book, but is there one big misconception that you want to set people straight about?

A: There’s one misconception that has a flip side to it, and that’s that dinosaurs are totally extinct. Birds are living dinosaurs. We figured that out about 20 years ago. So whenever we talk about the age of dinosaurs millions of years ago, and how all the dinosaurs are gone, that’s demonstrably not true. At least one lineage is still with us today.

The flip side of that is that dinosaurs became dominant as soon as they appeared — that the dawn of the dinosaurs sparked an immediate rise to ascendancy. The fact is that dinosaurs started out relatively small. They were relatively marginal. They really weren’t all that important until the extinction at the end of the Triassic period, about 200 million years ago, wiped away all the weird crocodile relatives that were the dominant land animals at the time. So the dinosaurian reign was made possible by, and then winnowed back by, extinction. It’s these wonderful extinction bookends that explain not only their origin, but their ultimate destination, bringing us to the birds that live today.

Q: Another issue is the appeal of dinosaurs: For some kids, dino-mania is almost a rite of passage. I love the idea that the book jacket for “My Beloved Brontosaurus” is also a fold-out dinosaur poster — what dinosaur fan wouldn’t love that? What is it about dinosaurs that makes them so appealing, particularly to kids?

A: I think they’re appealing because they demand answers of us. People have been wondering about dinosaurs, pondering what they were and what they were like, even before there was a name for them. I don’t just mean European naturalists. I mean Native Americans, people in ancient Greece and Rome, people in ancient China and India. People in all those cultures found dinosaur bones. They knew that these were the remains of once-living animals, and they created stories of monsters and heroes, myths and legends about creatures from distant times. So we were wondering about the dinosaurs before we even knew what they were.

That continues now, because there’s nothing quite like the dinosaurs. Yes, birds are living dinosaurs – but there’s so much more. There’s nothing like Apatosaurus, or Triceratops, or Tyrannosaurus rex around right now. When you look at their bones, questions immediately come to mind: What did they look like? What did they sound like? How quickly did they move? What did their environment look like? To me, it’s impossible to hear the dinosaur story without wondering about these questions.

Answering these questions puts our own existence in context. You can say all this happened 66 million years ago – but wait a second: What was America like back then? How did it all change? That brings up some very powerful truths about extinction, evolution and survival.  It’s these clues from our own distant past and our planet’s distant past that act as milestones by which we can understand our own existence.

J. Brougham / AMNH file

Experts say Tyrannosaurus rex may have had a downy layer of feathers, and probably had a coloration that was more varied than the stereotypical green.

Q: Another way that the book could be read is as a travelogue. It’s almost structured as a series of road trips that you’ve taken to explore all these fantastic fossils. And in fact, that’s what you’re doing along with your book tour. If there’s one dream trip that dinosaur fanatics should take, where would you tell them to go?

A: This is sort of a plug for my home state of Utah: There’s a byway system called the Dinosaur Diamond that runs through a good part of the state and includes the Dinosaur National Monument, where 150 million-year-old fossils are preserved in place; and the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, a place where over 46 individual allosaurs and other dinosaurs have been found. You can head up to Salt Lake City, where the Natural History Museum of Utah opened this last year. As you drive along those highways, there are various dinosaur trackways, lots of attractions, lots of dinosaur celebrities. So if anyone’s looking for a weeklong trip in the American West, that’s the best pre-planned tour there is for a dino fan.

Q: in terms of the frontiers for dinosaur research, there’s been talk about Jack Horner’s "Chickenosaurus" project, and there are always new perspectives on how dinosaurs lived and died. What do you see as the next big thing for dinosaur research?

A: Researchers are finding ways to draw out clues about how dinosaurs actually lived, through new technologies that can be applied to a variety of animals. So we’re looking at the development of better CT scanning technology. Improved CT technology is helping paleontologists get down to a degree of resolution they’ve never had before — and they’re finding clues about bone structure to a degree that was just not possible before.

What’s really exciting to me is the study of dinosaur color. It’s a field that’s moving forward by comparing fossil feathers to modern ones. Paleontologists are starting to reconstruct what colors the dinosaurs actually were. They might be able to identify the evolutionary advantages of colors, degrees of coloration, and maybe some aspects of sexual dimorphism. Everything we’re learning about dinosaur biology is filling in the picture of how they lived in a much more meaningful way.

Q: You mentioned that dinosaurs are appealing to us in part because they tell us how extinction works, and how our own distant past might have unfolded. That suggests that the study of dinosaurs can hold lessons for the 21st century. How can the dinosaur experience best be applied to our own human experience?

A: Dinosaurs shaped our evolution. People often say that the rise of mammals was made possible by the disappearance of all those non-avian dinosaurs. That's true, but it's not just that. Mammals lived alongside the dinosaurs — things like Stegosaurus and Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus. By keeping our furry little ancestors in the shadows, the dinosaurs set the stage for the later evolution of primates.

Yes, those dinosaurs disappeared. But beyond that, we know that we’re changing the global climate in drastic ways. We know we’re distributing invasive species around the world. By looking back at the fossil record, and seeing how dinosaurs reacted to drastic changes, we can begin to outline how organisms today and in the future are going to react to the same sorts of changes. Dinosaurs might hold clues about our future. The past isn't just a static monument to what once was. The fossil record also carries lessons about what will be. 

For much, much more about dinosaur wrongness and rightness, check out the latest 'Virtually Speaking Science' podcast with Switek and University of Maryland paleontologist Tom Holtz. You can download a variety of VSS podcasts from BlogTalkRadio or iTunes.

More 'Virtually Speaking Science' podcasts:

• George Djorgovski on the Internet and education
• Doug Griffith and Taber MacCallum on moon and Mars trips
• Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler on physics' X Files
• Ig Nobel's Marc Abrahams on weird science in 2012
• Paul Doherty on Curiosity and the year in science
• Shawn Lawrence Otto on climate change and the 2012 election
• Sean Carroll on what lies beyond the Higgs boson
• Alan Stern on the Uwingu mystery space venture
• George Djorgovski on the future of immersive virtual reality
• JPL's Dave Beaty previews Curiosity's mission on Mars
• SETI Institute's Seth Shostak about aliens and UFOs
• Paul Doherty on solar eclipses and the transit of Venus
• Veronica Ann Zabala-Aliberto on spaceflight and Yuri's Night
• JPL's Dave Beaty on the search for life on Mars
• Shawn Lawrence Otto on science and politics
• Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams on silly science in 2011
• Rocket scientist Robert Zubrin on Mars exploration
• Propulsion expert Marc Millis on interstellar spaceflight
• Sean Carroll on the puzzles facing physicists
• Rand Simberg on the private-enterprise vision for spaceflight
• Martin Hoffert on the future of energy policy
• George Djorgovski on science in virtual worlds
• Alan Stern on suborbital research and NASA's mission to Pluto
• Col. 'Coyote' Smith on the outlook for space solar power
• Tim Pickens on rocket ventures and the Google Lunar X Prize

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Wed May 1, 2013 4:50 PM EDT

Raul Martin / National Geographic

An artist's conception shows the ichthyosaur known as Thalattoarchon saurophagis.

A fossil skeleton found in central Nevada's desert years ago has been identified as belonging to a 30-foot-long sea monster that ruled beneath the waves 244 million years ago.

The ferociousness of the creature's teeth suggests that it was at the top of the food chain at the time — and that the time frame for its rise to the top was incredibly quick. The ichthyosaur has been dubbed Thalattoarchon saurophagis (from the Greek for "lizard-eating sovereign of the sea"), and it must have entered its reign just a few million years after one of Earths' biggest die-offs, known as the Permian-Triassic extinction event.

"It is a remarkable biotic recovery that appears to have proceeded faster in the marine than in the terrestrial biota," said Olivier Rieppel, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago who is a co-author of a paper on Thalattoarchon published online today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers said Thalattoarchon was apparently the first top predator to emerge in the marine environment after the Permian-Triassic extinction, which is thought to have killed off more than 90 percent of Earth's species. The cause of the extinction is the subject of a long-running debate, with catastrophic climate change among the prime suspects.

Previous studies have suggested that it took 10 million years for Earth's ecosystems to bounce back — but the latest research seems to provide evidence that the comeback was quicker under the sea.

"Ecosystems rebuild from the bottom up, and its appearance in the fossil record indicates the full recovery was reached only 8 million years after the P-T mass extinction," lead author Nadia Fröbisch, a paleontologist at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity's Museum für Naturkunde in Germany, said in an email. "The macropredator niche has been occupied ever since Thalattoarchon appeared — with different players, but the ecosystem structure was essentially modern."

John Weinstein / Field Museum

A jaw full of 5-inch, knife-edged teeth let this ichthyosaur tear into prey.

Nicole Klein / University of Bonn

The shape of Thalattoarchon's tooth crown with its two cutting edges, as seen here in the field, indicates that the ichthyosaur was a meat eater, not a fish eater.

The empire that this sea monster ruled was far different from present-day Nevada.

"At the time, all land masses were united in the supercontinent Pangea," Fröbisch explained. "Nevada was located in the Panthalassian Ocean, to the west of the supercontinent. The climate was very warm at the time, especially in the equatorial region, though this was slightly farther north. However, the climate would still be considered tropical. The Rockies started to rise in the late Cretaceous [66 million to 100 million years ago] and ended in the Eocene, about 35 million years ago."

The Thalattoarchon fossil was discovered in Nevada's Augusta Mountains in 1997 during a field expedition led by Rieppel and Martin Sander of the University of Bonn's Steinmann Institute — and since then, paleontologists have excavated a partial skeleton, including most of the skull, parts of the pelvic girdle and pieces from the hind fins.

The 5-inch-long (12-centimeter-long) teeth served as the tip-off for the creature's top-predator status. "The cutting edges were previously unknown for ichthyosaurs of that age," Fröbisch said. "The teeth are very large and sit in very robust and strong jaws, which overall indicate high biting force. This ichthyosaur was able to seize and cut prey similar in size to its own."

In a Field Museum news release, Rieppel said the discovery was "a good example of how we study the past in order to illuminate the future." So does this research suggest that a new top predator might emerge relatively quickly after the next mass extinction?

"Hmm — not really," Rieppel replied in an email. "History is inherently contingent — i.e., not predictive  — and, as they say, it does not need to repeat itself."

But by studying how species recovered after past extinctions, "one hopes that certain patterns or generalities would become apparent that would reveal rules about the way a biota reconstitutes itself after a catastrophic impact," he said.

In today's news release, Fröbisch also emphasized the lessons that the distant past can teach us about the present and future.

"Every day, we learn more about the biodiversity of our planet, including living and fossil species and their ecosystems," she said. "The new find characterizes the establishment of a new and more advanced level of ecosystem structure. Findings like Thalattoarchon help us to understand the dynamics of our evolving planet, and ultimately the impact humans have on today's environment."

More about ancient sea monsters:

• Huge sea monster ruled ancient rivers
• 'Predator X' sea monster gets a name
• Fossilized blob mystifies scientists
• Shark vs. sea monster: Who won?

In addition to Nadia Fröbisch, Sander and Rieppel, the authors of "Macropredatory Ichthyosaur From the Middle Triassic and the Origin of Modern Trophic Networks" include Jörg Fröbisch and Lars Schmitz. The fieldwork was funded by grants from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration, the Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Bonn.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Long-ago lore still has the power to ignite modern-day controversies: Witness the tempests that were stirred up this year over the Maya calendar, the purported "Gospel of Jesus' Wife," a bone box linked to early Christians, a disputed dinosaur skeleton and the plan to clone a woolly mammoth.

It turned out that there was much more to each of these cases than met the eye. Or sometimes much less. Either way, we'll be hearing more about ancient mysteries in the year to come. Here's a status report on six of 2012's most controversial mysteries (and missteps) in the realms of archaeology, anthropology and paleontology.

Gospel of Jesus' Wife: Harvard historian Karen King stirred up a sensation in September with the unveiling of a papyrus that apparently quotes Jesus talking about "my wife." The claims quickly sparked questions about the murky origins of the papyrus, and the Vatican suggested that the controversial text was faked. Most other experts on textual analysis were similarly skeptical.

The Harvard Theological Review withdrew plans to publish a scholarly article about the papyrus in its January issue, and this month a spokesman for the journal said tests to authenticate the document were not yet complete. The Smithsonian Channel has delayed broadcasting a documentary on the find, pending further testing. Status: In limbo.

The Jonah box: In February, researchers announced that they used a camera-equipped robotic arm to study an ossuary, or funerary bone box, within a sealed underground tomb in Jerusalem. They said the box was engraved with a picture of a fish, as well as allusions to "Jonah" and resurrection. Their conclusion was that the inscriptions served as evidence that early Christians were buried in the tomb — but skeptics disputed that interpretation. Did the picture really show a fish, or was it an upside-down tower, or an urn? The controversy was stoked by the fact that the "Jonah box" team was also behind the even more hotly debated "Jesus Tomb" project a couple of years earlier.

Months later, the findings are still in dispute. One of the researchers behind the find is James Tabor, a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  He says some experts have told him privately that they agree with his interpretation, but they're reluctant to speak out because of the acrimony surrounding the original reports. One expert who has voiced cautious support for the "Jonah and the fish" interpretation is Princeton Theological Seminary's James Charlesworth. (That support, too, has come under criticism.) Tabor acknowledges that more evidence is needed. "What we really need to do is enter the tomb and bring those ossuaries out. ... But that would have to be maybe next year," he said today. Status: In limbo.

Maya calendar: 2012's most publicized ancient mystery has to do with the Maya calendar, and the fact that Dec. 21 apparently marked the end of a series of cycles — including the 394-year baktun cycle as well as the 5,126-year "cycle of creation." Somehow, those calendrical cycles got mixed up with worries about the end of the world. Did the ancient Maya really think the cosmos would blink out of existence when the calendar ended? And if they did, why should we believe them?

Nothing happened on Dec. 21, other than some New Age-style celebrations of the new age. But the controversy did attract some extra attention for archaeological finds — including the discovery of a calendar workshop that clearly referred to dates beyond 2012, and an inscription that refers to the end of a calendar cycle in 2012, but not the end of the world. Status: Case closed.

Heritage Auctions via Reuters

An 8-foot-tall dinosaur skeleton is tied up in federal court proceedings.

Disputed dinosaur: You could argue that the world's hottest dinosaur fossil is currently in federal custody in New York. The 24-foot-long skeleton, nicknamed Ty, was said to come from a tyrannosaur-like species known as Tarbosaurus bataar. Fossil dealer Eric Prokopi sold it for more than $1 million in May, but experts claimed that the bones must have been smuggled out of Mongolia years earlier. Federal authorities seized the skeleton and filed criminal charges against Prokopi.

The civil and criminal proceedings yielded some surprises: Prokopi's lawyers said the skeleton was assembled from bones that were gathered up from various sources, leading to a new nickname: "Franken-saurus." Government prosecutors, meanwhile, said they have photos and forms to back up their claims that the dealer was "a participant in the black market" in Mongolia. Just today, Prokopi pleaded guilty to the smuggling charges and agreed to give up the dinosaur skeleton. That means Ty will eventually be sent back to Mongolia. Prokopi could be sentenced to up to 17 years in prison, but today's plea may win him leniency from the court. Status: Case essentially closed.

Pyramids on Google Earth: Researcher Angela Micol made a splash in August with claims that Google Earth imagery appeared to show pyramid-type structures in the Egyptian desert. She suggested that these were previously unknown sites — but it turns out that archaeologists have known about them for decades, and have studied them up close. The most intriguing formations are natural mounds, topped by structures that may have served as watchtowers and/or wells, said Italian Egyptologist Paola Davoli.

Another formation that Micol saw in the imagery is thought to be an oddly shaped natural butte. Micol told me in September that she was working with contacts in Egypt to get a closer look, but there haven't been any new revelations lately. Status: Case close to being closed.

Cloning a woolly mammoth: Is it really possible to bring the woolly mammoth back to life, tens of thousands of years after the species went extinct? It's highly doubtful, but Korean and Russian researchers are still trying. The project, unveiled in March, would involve recovering viable cells from a mammoth specimen pulled from the Siberian permafrost, implanting the cells' genetic material into an elephant egg, creating a cloned embryo, then transferring the embryo to an elephant womb for gestation. Each of those steps is fraught with difficulty — and the South Korea scientist in charge of the project is none other than Hwang Woo-Suk, who was disgraced several years ago in a scandal surrounding faked cloning results.

Last month, The Siberian Times reported that samples of mammoth bone marrow, hair, muscles and fat tissue were taken from Yakutsk to Seoul, to find out whether living cells could be extracted. Sources at the lab in Seoul did not respond to phone or email inquiries this week, but even if the cells turn out to be viable, don't expect to see a mammoth resurrection anytime soon. Russian researcher Semyon Grigoriev said it would be "years before we learn to choose the suitable cells or to re-create an extinct DNA molecule." Status: Case not yet closed. Or should that be, "not yet cloned"?

Dinosaurs ... and more: Science writer Brian Switek (a.k.a. @Laelaps) rounded up the year's top stories in paleontology at his "Dinosaur Tracking" blog, just before shifting over to Phenomena, National Geographic's new online science salon. In an email, he highlighted a few of his favorite stories:

"I was particularly interested by Nyasasaurus (confirming an earlier origin for dinosaurs), Yutyrannus (showing that feathers were not just for small dinosaurs) and mammal bones adding new evidence that dinosaurs may have been endothermic," he told me. "In other fossil news, the two that jump to mind are: fossil turtles caught in the act of mating; and a new fossil shark species which shows that Carcharocles megalodon was not a giant ancestor of today's white shark, but a member of a different lineage altogether."

I've included the fossil turtle-sex tale in our annual roundup for the Weird Science Awards, but here are 30 more ancient mysteries that should keep you clicking into the new year:

Ten top paleontology tales from Cosmic Log and NBC News:

• Earliest-known dinosaur to walk the earth identified
• Four-winged flying dinosaur sported glossy black feathers
• Paleontologists find the king of the feathered dinosaurs
• Researchers re-create the love song of the Jurassic katydid
• This mammal-like predator reigned long before the dinosaurs
• Methane-emitting dinosaurs could have warmed the earth
• World's oldest panda fossils found, and not in China
• Researchers decide to downsize the dinosaurs
• Scientists say dinosaurs' feathers were meant for mating
• Ancient lizard that died with the dinos is named after Obama

Ten top anthropology tales from Cosmic Log and NBC News:

• New technique clears up Denisovan DNA mysteries
• Australopithecus sediba: This pre-human ate like a chimp
• Cave art is so old the Neanderthals could have done it
• Hunter-gatherers were 'friending' long before Facebook
• Ancient Lucy's kin could have swung from the trees
• Researchers reconstruct the real-life face of a 'Hobbit'
• Foot bones could help reveal origins of upright walking
• Tools suggest early humans were smarter than we thought
• New flat-faced human species possibly discovered
• China's Red Deer Cave People may have been different species

Top 10 discoveries from Archaeology magazine:

• Maya sun god masks (more from Brown University)
• Neanderthal medicine chest (more from Cosmic Log)
• First use of poison (more from LiveScience on NBC News)
• Aztec ritual burial (more from Discovery News)
• Caesar's Gallic outpost (more from LiveScience on NBC News)
• Europe's oldest engraving (more from Discovery News on NBC News)
• First pots in China (more from Harvard University)
• Scottish 'Frankenstein' mummies (more from LiveScience on NBC News)
• 2,000-year-old stash in Israel (more from LiveScience on NBC News)
• Oldest Egyptian funerary boat (more from Ahram Online)

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Carl Buell

In this artist's conception, the carnivorous lizard Palaeosaniwa stalks a pair of hatchling Edmontosaurus dinosaurs as the snake Cerberophis looks on from above, and the lizard Obamadon watches from below. Meanwhile, in the background, a Tyrannosaurus rex encounters a Triceratops troop while an asteroid streaks down to Earth.

The mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago also did in lots of lizards — including a newly identified creature that's been named Obamadon gracilis in honor of President Barack Obama.

Obama already has a type of fish (Ethiostoma obama) and lichen (Caloplaca obamae) named after him, and now the recently re-elected leader of the free world can add a foot-long, slender-toothed casualty of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction to the list.

Yale paleontologist Nicholas Longrich, the lead author of a paper announcing the find in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, told me that the name arose from a conversation he had with a friend in late 2008, when folks were wondering how Obama's election would change the political scene.

"I said, yeah, we should name a dinosaur after him," Longrich said. "It was sort of a smart-ass comment."

But the idea stuck. After all, this is the guy who named a different fossil "Mojoceratops."

"It was catchy, and it seemed like a fun thing to do," he said.

There's a serious point behind the paper, of course: Longrich and his colleagues analyzed at fossils representing 30 different types of snakes and lizards, previously collected from locales in western North America ranging from New Mexico to Alberta. Nine of the species, including Obamadon, were previously unrecognized.

"Lizards and snakes rivaled the dinosaurs in terms of diversity, making it just as much an 'Age of Lizards' as an 'Age of Dinosaurs,'" Longrich said in a Yale news release.

Previous studies had suggested that some snake and lizard species went extinct, along with the dinosaurs and many types of mammals, birds, insects and plants. The extinction was presumably due to a catastrophic asteroid strike on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

The new survey suggests that snakes and lizards were hit much harder than previously thought. Longrich and his colleagues estimate that up to 83 percent of all snake and lizard species were killed off. The bigger the creature, the more likely it was to become extinct: The researchers concluded that no species weighing more than a pound survived.

Obamadon was part of a group of creatures known as polyglyphanodonts, which accounted for up to 40 percent of the lizards living in North America before the extinction. Obama's namesake was identified on the basis of jaw fossils from Montana's Hell Creek Formation, with "tall, slender teeth with large central cusps separated from small accessory cusps by lingual grooves."

The lizard was less than a foot long and probably caught insects in its teeth, Longrich said.

The discovery of Obamadon just goes to show how new discoveries can come from old specimens — including fossils that were collected years ago, by paleontologists who were focusing dinosaurs or early mammals rather than snakes or lizards. "There hasn't been a heck of a lot of interest in these specimens," Longrich said. "Here we have all this data that's there, waiting to be studied."

Two of the newly recognized fossil species don't yet have scientific names, but when it comes time for the naming, rest assured that Longrich won't come up with anything too wild and crazy.

"We decided not to do the Hitlerosaurus," he said.

More about celebrity species:

• Lady Gaga immortalized in ferns
• Parasite named after reggae star Bob Marley
• 'Bootylicious' fly named after Beyonce
• 'Venus Rat-Trap' named after TV naturalist
• 'The Hoff' loves his celebrity crabs
• What's in a scientific name? (Scroll down)

In addition to Longrich, the authors of the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "Mass Extinction of Lizards and Snakes at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary," include Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar and Jacques A. Gauthier. Longrich says the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary is a more recent term that applies to the mass extinction also known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

CSIC Comunicacion

Researchers work inside Spain's El Sidron cave, where plaque scraped from the teeth of Neanderthals suggests that at least one of them was chewing medicinal plants.

Tooth scrapings from tens of thousands of years ago suggest that Neanderthals chewed on medicinal plants to soothe their upsets.

That's the conclusion drawn by an international team of researchers who conducted a chemical analysis on dental calculus from five sets of Neanderthal remains that were excavated inside El Sidron Cave in northern Spain. The calcified crud contained microscopic bits of plant material as well as chemicals associated with wood smoke.

The analysis indicated that the Neanderthals ate cooked plant food that was high in starch, and perhaps also nuts, grasses and green vegetables. One case was particularly intriguing: The scrapings from an individual known as Adult 4 contained chemicals known as azulenes and coumarins. Those are the sorts of chemicals that are found in yarrow and chamomile, two types of herbal remedies.

Yarrow is an astringent that's long been used to cleanse wounds when used externally, or counter internal bleeding when ingested. Chamomile may be best-known today as a soothing tea, but that's because it has a settling effect on colds, headaches, intestinal distress and menstrual cramping. Both plants have anti-inflammatory properties.

The researchers say this is the first molecular-scale evidence supporting the idea that Neanderthals ingested medicinal plants. Their findings — which are based on a high-tech method of analysis known as pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, plus the study of plant microfossils — were published online today in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

Neanderthals had a varied diet
"The varied use of plants we identified suggests that the Neanderthal occupants of El Sidron had a sophisticated knowledge of their natural surroundings, which included the ability to select and use certain plants for their nutritional value and for self-medication. While meat was clearly important, our research points to an even more complex diet than has previously been supposed," the study's lead author, Karen Hardy, said in a news release from the University of York.

Hardy is a research professor at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona's Catalan Institute of Research and Advanced Studies as well as an honorary research associate at the University of York.

CSIC Comunicacion

Neanderthal teeth are among the remains found in Spain's El Sidron Cave.

One of Hardy's colleagues, Stephen Buckley of the University of York's BioArCh research facility, said the team was surprised to find evidence that this particular Neanderthal was chewing on plants that had no nutritional value. "We know that Neanderthals would find these plants bitter, so it is likely these plants must have been selected for reasons other than taste," Buckley said in the news release.

But in retrospect, Hardy now thinks it's not as surprising as it seems. She pointed out that chimpanzees and other animals chew on non-nutritional plants that have medicinal effects. Why shouldn't it have been the same for Neanderthals?

"We have identified these plants ... we feel the most likely use is for self-medication," Hardy told me in an email. "In fact, I would find it harder to argue that they did not use medicinal plants than that they did, particularly as this fits so well with the extensive evidence for self-medication among higher primates and many other animals. So we have a behavioral context for this use."

Where's the beef?
Previous research has suggested that Neanderthals ate a meat-heavy diet, but Hardy and her colleagues found no evidence of meat consumption in the tooth crud they analyzed. That doesn't necessarily mean these particular Neanderthals were vegetarians. The lack of evidence could be due to the way chemicals in the crud were preserved, or it could suggest that Neanderthals shifted their diet due to seasonal changes or migratory habits.

The findings released today hint at even closer kinship between modern humans and our Neanderthal cousins, who first settled in Europe at least 300,000 years ago but went extinct about 24,000 years ago. The Neanderthals whose teeth were examined for the study were part of a community of at least 13 individuals who lived in the El Sidron Cave somewhere between 47,300 and 50,600 years ago.

"El Sidron has allowed us to banish many of the preconceptions we had of Neanderthals," said Antonio Rosas of the Museum of Natural History in Madrid-CSIC. "Thanks to previous studies, we know that they looked after the sick, buried their dead and decorated their bodies. Now another dimension has been added, relating to their diet and self-medication."

More about ancient humans and their relatives:

• Tooth crud shows that pre-humans ate like chimps
• Why Neanderthals had arms like Popeye
• Neanderthals had sex with humans, DNA says
• Did Neanderthals create cave art?

In addition to Hardy, Buckley and Rosas, the authors of "Neanderthal Medics? Evidence for Food, Cooking and Medicinal Plants Entrapped in Dental Calculus" include Matthew J. Collins, Almudena Estalrrich, Don Brothwell, Les Copeland, Antonio Garcia-Tabernero, Samuel Garcia-Vargas, Marco de la Rasilla, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Rosa Huguet, Markus Bastir, David Santamaria, Marco Madella, Julie Wilson and Angel Fernandez Cortes.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

U.S. Attorney's Office

This photo, attached as an exhibit to the complaint filed by federal attorneys, shows the tyrannosaur skeleton that has stirred up an international legal dispute.

Federal attorneys today filed a civil lawsuit that seeks to wrest a tyrannosaur skeleton valued at more than $1 million away from its sellers and return it to the Mongolian government.

The skeleton was sold at a New York auction last month for $1.05 million to an unidentified buyer, even though a federal district judge in Texas issued a restraining order to hold up the sale. The auction house behind the offering, Texas-based Heritage Auctions, made the sale contingent on the outcome of Mongolia's court challenge — and since then, the skeleton has been held in legal limbo.

Earlier this month, a panel of paleontologists declared that the skeleton represented a Tyrannosaurus bataar, also known as a Tarbosaurus bataar, which was probably smuggled out of Mongolia sometime in the past 15 years or so. Today's complaint, filed by the U.S. attorney for Manhattan in New York federal district court, follows up on that determination and lays out the authorities' version of a tangled tyrannosaur tale.

"The skeletal remains of this dinosaur are of tremendous cultural and historical significance to the people of Mongolia, and provide a connection to the country's prehistoric past," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. "When the skeleton was allegedly looted, a piece of the country's natural history was stolen with it, and we look forward to returning it to its rightful place."

Mongolia has had laws on the books forbidding the export of dinosaur fossils since 1924. The complaint says the nearly complete skeleton was brought into the United States illegally, and thus should be forfeited by the sellers and returned to Mongolia.

James Hayes, a special agent-in-charge for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations, said the complaint alleges that "criminal smugglers misrepresented this fossil to customs officials."

When the skeleton was imported into the United States from Britain in 2010, the country of origin was listed as Britain — even though, according to the paleontologists, nearly complete tyrannosaur skeletons of this type have been found only in Mongolia. The experts cited a dozen features of the bones, as well as their light color and even the dirt stuck in the cracks in the fossils, as characteristic of Tyrannosaurus bataar rather than the larger T. rex or other members of the tyrannosaur tribe.

Federal attorneys said that the importers set the skeleton's value at $15,000, but that a value of $950,000 to $1.5 million was listed in this year's auction catalog. They also said the 8-foot-tall (2.4-meter-tall), 24-foot-long (7.3-meter-long) skeleton was incorrectly listed on customs forms as consisting of assorted fossilized reptiles and skulls.

The complaint names Florida Fossils as the ultimate consignee for the imported goods, and notes that the company was owned at the time of importation by Eric Prokopi. The skeleton was shipped from Florida to Texas, and then on to New York in preparation for the May 20 sale. Soon after word spread that a million-dollar tyrannosaur was coming up for auction, representatives of the Mongolian government became interested and sought unsuccessfully to stop the sale.

The dinosaur skeleton is currently in the custody of Cadogan Tate Fine Art in Sunnyside, N.Y. In the weeks since the controversial sale took place, the auction house has let paleontologists and representatives of the Mongolian government examine the fossil.

"I thank and applaud the United States Attorney's office in this action to recover the Tyrannosaurus bataar, an important piece of the cultural heritage of the Mongolian people," Mongolian President Tsakhia Elbegdorj was quoted as saying in the U.S. government's news release about the case. "Cultural looting and profiteering cannot be tolerated anywhere, and this cooperation between our governments is a large step forward to stopping it."

My efforts to contact Prokopi today were unsuccessful, but representatives of Heritage Auctions issued this statement from the company's co-chairman, Jim Halperin:

"We auctioned the Tyrannosaurus bataar conditionally, subject to future court rulings, so this matter is now in the hands of lawyers and politicians. We believe our consignor purchased fossils in good faith, then spent a year of his life and considerable expense identifying, restoring, mounting and preparing what had previously been a much less valuable matrix of unassembled, underlying bones. We sincerely hope there will be a just and fair outcome for all parties."

More about the tyrannosaur:

• May 18: Auction stirs up a tussle over tyrannosaur
• May 21: Despite challenge, fossil sells for $1 million
• May 24: Auctioned dino skeleton believed to be smuggled
• June 8: Experts say tyrannosaur is definitely from Mongolia

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

British physicist Stephen Hawking jokes about the future discoveries that could earn him a Nobel Prize.

British physicist Stephen Hawking has lived longer and achieved more than most quadriplegics have, but he's not done yet: The 70-year-old theoretician is still waiting for experimental evidence to launch him toward a Nobel Prize.

Hawking used his Nobel aspirations as a punch line more than once during his Saturday-night talk at Seattle's Paramount Theater, during a Seattle Science Festival symposium that also featured systems biology pioneer Leroy Hood and paleontologist Jack Horner. The "Luminaries Series" presentation also featured evolutionary rap and modern dance, but Hawking was clearly the headliner.

Part of Hawking's appeal is that he just keeps going, and going, and going, despite his disability. He's lived for decades with a progressively paralyzing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. His entourage includes a nurse practitioner and an aide who looks after the high-tech system that translates his cheek twitches into speech. (He and his team have been testing a more advanced system that can turn brain-wave patterns into words.)

All this work to overcome adversity wouldn't have taken Hawking so far, however, if it weren't for his crazy smarts and his sharp wit. Both were in evidence during Saturday's talk, titled "Brane New World." Hawking laid out his perspective on what he thinks could be the ultimate theory of the universe, known as M-theory.

"We have been searching for the Theory of Everything for the past 30 years, and now we think that we have found a candidate," he said.

M-theory is a "mother" theory that fuses together several strains of string theory, and allows for dimensions of space beyond the three we're familiar with. For a long time, Hawking was reluctant to accept the idea of unseen extra dimensions, but on Saturday he said everything else about M-theory made so much sense that he couldn't resist.

Ted S. Warren / AP

Stephen Hawking composes his conversations with face movements, aided by a sophisticated sensor and computer system hooked up to his wheelchair.

"I feel to ignore it would be like claiming that God put fossils in the rocks to trick Darwin into believing in evolution," Hawking said.

The big question is, why haven't we detected those darn dimensions? M-theory's proponents suggest that some forms of energy, such as light, are confined to our three-dimensional space (known as a "brane," as in membrane). Gravity, however, just might leak out of our brane — and that effect could be theoretically be detected.

The key word is "theoretically." Picking up evidence of the extradimensional effect would require high-resolution measurements of high-energy phenomena, such as the clash of binary pulsars in outer space or the smash of subatomic particles at velocities near the speed of light. No such evidence has yet come to light, despite the best efforts of gravitational-wave observatories in the U.S. and elsewhere, as well as the Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border.

If astronomers were ever able to observe the behavior of black holes, that could point to the effect of extra dimensions, Hawking said. One of the biggest achievements of his career was to lay out the theory for how black holes can eventually fizzle out, due to a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation. If black holes emitted part of their energy into extra dimensions, in a form Hawking called "dark radiation," that could explain why astronomers have not yet seen the expected gamma-ray burst from a dying black hole. The alternative would be that low-mass black holes are so rare that virtually none of them have gotten small enough to die out.

"That would be a pity," he said, "because if a low-mass black hole were discovered, I would get a Nobel Prize." At that point, a giant image of the Nobel Prize medallion flashed above the stage.

It might also be possible to detect the leakage of energy into extra dimensions by creating microscopic black holes at the Large Hadron Collider, Hawking said. That phenomenon hasn't yet been observed at the LHC. Before the collider started up, there was a huge flap (and a federal court case) over fears that such micro-black holes, if created, might gobble up the planet. But Hawking said that would never happen.

"Instead, the black hole would disappear in a puff of Hawking radiation — and I would get a Nobel Prize," he said.

Before his talk, Hawking answered a few questions that were submitted by journalists (including yours truly) in advance. The topics covered some of the physicist's favorite topics, including time travel and the potential threat of an alien invasion. He also referred to his family life, which was a big part of his agenda in Seattle. One of his three children lives in the area, and over the past few days, Hawking and his family took in the King Tut exhibit at the Pacific Science Center, a boat cruise on Elliott Bay and a circus-dinner performance at Teatro Zinzanni. It all made for a great Father's Day visit to the Emerald City.

Here's the Q&A from the pre-talk press conference:

Q: What would it take to make time travel a reality, and how would that affect our present reality?

A: "We are all traveling forward in time anyway. We can fast-forward by going off in a rocket at high speed, and returning to find everyone on Earth much older or dead. Einstein's general theory of relativity seems to offer the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that we could travel back in time. However, it is likely that the warping would trigger a bolt of radiation that would destroy the spaceship, and maybe the space-time itself.

"I have experimental evidence that [backward] time travel is not possible. I gave a party for time travelers, but I didn't send out the invitation until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came."

Ted S. Warren / AP

Physicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking, right, answers questions from reporters as people waiting for his public appearance look on at left at Seattle's Paramount Theater on Saturday. Hawking was taking part in a Seattle Science Festival symposium focusing on the topic of evolution. Science editor Alan Boyle ... or at least the back of his balding pate ... can be seen in the foreground.

Q: If M-theory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe, what’s the best evidence that you think will be found to support the theory? Lacking that evidence, isn’t M-theory merely another kind of religion?

A: "M-theory is the only theory that seems to have all the properties that we would expect of a complete and consistent theory of everything, but that may just reflect our lack of imagination. If M-theory is correct, it predicts that every particle should have a superpartner. So far we have not observed any superpartners, but the hope is that they will be found at the LHC. If they are discovered, that will be strong evidence for M-theory. On the other hand, if they are shown not to exist, that will be exciting, because then we'll learn something new."

Q: How would you describe your quality of life? What do you miss most from before the onset of ALS?

A: "Although I'm severely disabled and on a ventilator, my quality of life is pretty good. I have been very successful in my scientific work, and have become one of the best-known scientists in the world. I have three children, and three grandchildren so far. I travel widely, have been to Antarctica and have met the presidents of Korea, China, India, Ireland, Chile and the United States. I have been down in a submarine, and up in a zero-gravity flight in preparation for the flight into space that I'm hoping to make on Virgin Galactic. 

"Despite my disability, I have managed to do most things I want. My main regret is that it has prevented me from playing with my children and grandchildren as fully as I want." 

Q: John Gribbin recently argued that we are almost certainly the only intelligent life in the Milky Way –  do you think he’s right or wrong, and why? Also, SETI astronomer Seth Shostak argues that even if there are other intelligent civilizations out there, it’s too late for us to keep quiet about our existence, because it’s possible to pick up the signals we’ve sent out over the past 70 years. So isn’t it too late for us to keep quiet, and shouldn’t we be thinking about upgrading our defenses against the alien hordes?

A: "We think that life developed spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere such as the Earth. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life. If it is very low, we may well be the only intelligent life in the galaxy. Another frightening possibility is, intelligent life is fairly common, but that it destroys itself when it reaches the stage of advanced technology.

"Evidence that intelligent life is rare or short-lived is that we don't seem to have been visited by extraterrestrials.I am discounting claims that UFOs contain aliens. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos? Nor do I believe that there is some government conspiracy to conceal the evidence, and keep for themselves the advanced technologies the aliens have. If that were the case, they aren't making much use of it. Further evidence that there isn't any intelligent life within a few hundred light-years comes from the fact that SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, hasn't picked up their television quiz shows. 

"It is true that we advertise our presence by our broadcasts. But given that we haven't been visited for 4 billion years, it is unlikely that aliens will come anytime soon." 

Updates on the 'Chicken-saurus'
Hawking may have been the headliner, but he wasn't the only luminary at Saturday's "Luminaries Series" symposium on the theme of evolution. Jack Horner, who's based in Bozeman at Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies and has served as an adviser for the "Jurassic Park" movies and the "Terra Nova" TV series, brought the sellout crowd at the Paramount up to date on his quest to create a "Chicken-saurus."

"We're basically going to turn a chicken into a dinosaur," Horner said.

The idea is that the genetic code in chicken cells may still carry the instructions for producing traits that are associated with the dinosaurs from which they descended. "Birds are dinosaurs, so we don't have to 'make' a dinosaur — we already have them," Horner said. He and his colleagues are looking for ways to express those long-buried traits, known as atavisms. Even humans can express atavisms. For example, there have been cases of children born with tails.

"You don't have to do any magic," Horner told me. "You just have to find the atavisms in the genes."

Some researchers have already found the genes to produce chicken teeth, and Horner and his colleagues are methodically checking chicken embryos for avenues that could be used to create birds with long, dino-like tails or three-fingered claws like the ones sported by the velociraptors in "Jurassic Park." Horner told me that one of his students compared the effort to the Apollo moonshots.

"It's more than possible," Horner said. "It's just going to take a lot of money."

The future of medicine
In his talk, biologist Leroy Hood outlined his vision of the medical frontier. As the founder of Seattle's Institute for Systems Biology, Hood champions an approach to health care he calls P4 — predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory medicine. He said P4 medicine will arise from the convergence of revolutions in genetic analysis and data processing.

"Ten years in the future, each and every one of you will have your complete genome sequenced," Hood said. If quintillions of bytes' worth of genomic data can be used to nail down the linkages to disease factors as well as the factors that lead to wellness, it should be possible to get health care that's better as well as cheaper.

But getting the payoff from that promise depends on making the genomic data available to researchers, most likely on an anonymized basis, as well as developing the computational firepower to make sense out of a massive cloud of that data. "None of the IT companies have looked at this seriously," Hood said.

To get the ball rolling, Hood said he and his colleagues are talking with four small countries to implement P4 health-care programs in the next two or three years. Although Hood didn't name the countries, his institute already has a partnership with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg to work on P4 initiatives.

"I have thought about going to small countries because I think the health-care system in the U.S. is too fragmented and disjointed to have any coordinated kind of change, but if you see that another country has done it very well, then that will be quite convincing," he said.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Mariana Ruiz Villareal

Calculations of dinosaur biomass suggest that plant-eating sauropods like the ones pictured here in an artist's conception could have contributed enough methane to warm Earth's climate 150 million years ago.

Some scientific findings are just too good to leave alone, even if you don't know if they can ever be confirmed: Such is the case for a study saying that plant-eating dinosaurs could have emitted enough digestive methane to warm Earth's climate 150 million years ago.

"It is known that the time of these dinosaurs was warmer than now," said David Wilkinson, an environmental scientist at Liverpool John Moores University who's the lead author of a paper on the subject appearing in the journal Current Biology. "This is explained usually by an enhanced greenhouse effect, mainly carbon dioxide. If we are correct, then methane from sauropods may have been a contributor to this greenhouse effect."

Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and modern-day livestock are thought to be responsible for about a quarter of the methane released in the United States. Some say that the belches and flatulence of cattle, pigs and sheep are a significant contributor to the warming effect caused by greenhouse-gas emissions. So why wouldn't it have been the same in the age of giant plant-eating dinosaurs, when global biomass density was at least several times what it is today?

"All vertebrates that feed on leaves, etc., use microbes to help digest these, and usually give off methane," Wilkinson told me in an email. "This includes both mammals and reptiles. ... Although details vary within groups, everything around today does this, so the assumption is [that] larger herbivorous dinosaurs did as well."

He and his colleagues ran the numbers, using what they saw as conservative estimates for the total amount of dinosaur biomass and methane production rates per kilogram of body mass. They came up with a figure of 520 million tons of methane emitted per year, which is more than total modern-day methane emissions from all sources, natural and industrial. The current estimate for total methane emission is around 500 million tons a year, with 50 to 100 milllion tons of that coming from ruminant animals such as cows and goats, Wilkinson said.

"Our work certainly suggests biology and climate were involved in a feedback loop," he said.

Biologists have found that most of the modern-day methane emissions from livestock come from belching rather than flatulence. Was it the same for dinosaurs? "We have no particular view which end of the sauropod the methane came out," Wilkinson told me. "Could be either or both."

Chemical analysis of ancient marine sediments has found that greenhouse-gas levels went through a huge rise 201 million years ago, around the time of a mass extinction that set the stage for the rise of the dinosaurs. Scientists suspect that the atmospheric methane levels at that time were pumped up by a massive release of methane from the seafloor. Such evidence suggests that plant-eating dinosaurs weren't responsible for starting the upswing in Mesozoic methane. But did they help preserve the methane-rich atmosphere and toasty temperatures until they were killed off by an asteroid strike?

Wilkinson noted that his paper was titled "Could Methane Produced by Sauropod Dinosaurs Have Helped Drive Mesozoic Climate Warmth?" — not "Did Methane Produced by Dinosaurs Help Drive Climate Warmth."

"What our simple calculations show is that, yes, it could. It's a real possibility. But we don't show that it did happen," he said. "That would require much more work, and indeed it may be impossible to completely prove this without a time machine."

Extra credit: A dozen years ago, the BBC quoted a Chinese news report that quoted an unnamed French scientist as saying the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago not by an asteroid, but by their own flatulence. This hypothesis proposed that the methane emissions from the giant beasts became so great that the climate changed, the vegetation withered and the dinosaurs all starved. But that's just too silly to consider. Or is it?

More about methane:

• U.S. claims success in fuel source test
• Herb quells cows' methane-laden belches
• Did methane 'burp' clear way for dinosaurs?
• Methane seeping from ice becomes climate concern

In addition to Wilkinson, authors of the Current Biology paper include the University of London's Euan G. Nisbet and the University of Glasgow's Graeme D. Ruxton.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

HBO

A freshly hatched dragon perches on the shoulder of Daenerys in "Game of Thrones."

This the Year of the Dragon, and not just because of the Chinese calendar: Dragons play big roles in HBO's "Game of Thrones" TV series as well as the upcoming film version of "The Hobbit." Those fire-breathing, leathery-winged reptiles have been gripping the human imagination with their sharp talons for millennia, and it's worth wondering why.

Some folklorists trace the dragon myth back to a variety of sources in ancient China, Rome, Greece and India, and speculate that it had its genesis in the discovery of fossil bones from the strange creatures we now know as dinosaurs:

• Scythian lore described griffins with lionlike bodies and birdlike beaks. In the year 77, Pliny the Elder passed down the Scythian stories of gold-guarding griffins with peculiar ears and wings.
• During his travels in northern India, the first-century Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana reported that "no mountain ridge was without" a dragon to its name. The locals said they used magic to lure the dragons out of the earth and pry out the gems embedded in their skulls.
• Chinese accounts of "dragon bones" go back thousands of years — and as recently as 2006, ground-up dinosaur bones were being used in traditional medicine by villagers who believed they came from dragons. (The hard-to-crack dragon eggs depicted in "Game of Thrones" may well trace their lineage back to fossilized dinosaur eggs.)

Classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor, who relates all these tales in her book "The First Fossil Hunters," ascribes the reports to discoveries in fossil-rich regions such as the Altai Mountains in Central Asia, the Gobi Desert in China and Mongolia, or the Siwalik Hills in the Himalayas. Not knowing any better, adventurers interpreted the dinosaur bones as representing the remains of dragons, griffins and other mythical monsters.

The gold hoarding? That may have arisen because gold deposits were found close to the fossil beds along ancient Issedonian trade routes.

And the gems? "I think the Indian lore about special gems prised out of dragon skulls alludes to the crystals that can form on mineralized bones," Mayor wrote. "The detailed observations of the first modern investigator of the Siwalik fossils confirm my theory: large, glittering calcite crystals and tubular selenite crystals are common in the Siwalik fossils."

Hard-wired for dragons?
Anthropologist David Jones went even further in his book "An Instinct for Dragons," published in 2000: He proposed that the fables about winged, poison-spewing, fanged and clawed creatures combined three of the top threats to ancient pre-human primates: raptors like the one that may have preyed on a now-fossilized ape-boy known as the Taung child nearly 2 million years ago; poisonous snakes like the ones that may have driven the evolution of big brains and improved vision in primates millions of years ago; and big cats like the ones our pre-human ancestors had to watch out for in Africa.

"The world-dragon was formed by the nature of our own shadowy progenitors' encounters with the creatures who hunted them over millions of years," Jones wrote. The way he sees it, our brain came to be hard-wired with an instinctive fear of dragons.

Paul Jordan-Smith, a folklorist and storyteller who wrote a fiery critique of Jones' book for the journal Western Folklore, thinks the idea that our ancestors somehow evolved a dragon instinct just doesn't hold up. For one thing, Jones' claim that multiple cultures had the same conception of dragons as dangerous beasts is "demonstrably untrue," he said.

"My take on the mythic image of the dragon is that there is no one 'authentic' image, and no one 'true' meaning," Jordan-Smith told me in an email. "The dragon has been a guardian, a thief, a hoarder (like Smaug, in 'The Hobbit') and a dispenser of wisdom (especially in Chinese tales)."

For another thing, the dragon doesn't show up fully formed in ancient tales.

"It's interesting that dragons do not appear in cave paintings," Jordan-Smith wrote. "What does appear are the beasts that they hunted or that were dangerous. ... Where you do see constructs that aren't literal depictions, they're of humans merged with animals. And when you get civilization, you don't see dragons until much later. ... You don't get dragons until you get stories that have dragons in them."

Who's gripping whom?
But once dragons become part of a culture's mythic milieu, they don't fade away. Perhaps that explains why dragons hang around, in Chinese New Year festivals, in European fairy tales, and in American movies and TV shows. Here's what Jordan-Smith had to say about that:

"A dragon, like most mythic imagery, is 'plastic,' in the sense of being adaptable. It can look like whatever the singer of tales wants it to, can serve whatever purpose needed, and can mean just about anything. And some of the traditional qualities may not be incompatible with one another. A dragon that guards a treasure (or an abducted maiden) may be waiting for the right hero that will liberate it from its responsibility. A dragon that threatens to destroy a village may be a wake-up call to rectify misdeeds. Some dragons are enchanted and must be slain to regain their true form. But not all dragons are meant to be slain.

"And what of the hero? He must be changed somehow by the encounter, or else the game is not worth the candle. But what kind of change? In some cultures, to slay a fearsome beast was tantamount to assimilating its powers. ... In Tolkien's books, the Ring exerts its power so thoroughly that its wearer little by little becomes like Gollum. Perhaps there's a particular kind of danger, much more deadly than merely being killed. And perhaps when the hero slays the dragon, he himself is slain, to be reborn as the human incarnation of the dragon. For good or ill? Ask the storyteller."

Maybe it's not the dragon that has a grip on us. Maybe we're the ones who are hanging onto the dragon — and we don't want to let go.

More about dragons and 'Game of Thrones':

• Origin of Komodo dragons revealed
• Chinese villagers ate dinosaur 'dragon bones'
• Sword science plays a role in 'Game of Thrones'
• All about 'Game of Thrones' on The Clicker

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Researchers have re-created the love song of a katydid from 165 million years ago, based on an analysis of fossilized wings found in northwest China. They say the chirp adds an aural dimension to our picture of the forests of the Jurassic Era.

"The Jurassic forest was already packed with many animals singing at night," Fernando Montealegre-Zapata, a University of Bristol biologist who specializes in insect sounds, told me today. "I'm not just talking about the crickets but the frogs. That would create a noisy environment, and in a noisy environment the best way to communicate is with a single frequency, and loudly."

That assumption fits with the analysis conducted by Montealegre-Zapata and his colleagues, which appears in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They started with a well-preserved Middle Jurassic fossil, one of several found by Chinese paleontologists at Inner Mongolia's Jiulongshan Formation. This particular fossil revealed the wing structure for a long-extinct species of katydid, also known as a bushcricket, which has been dubbed Archabolilus musicus.

In life, the bug would have had relatively large wings, measuring more than 2.8 inches (7 centimeters) in length, with broad stripes of color. Its closest living relatives include katydids (Tettigonidae) and grigs (Prophalangopsidae).

The researchers made detailed measurements of the fossil wing's parts, including the organs that katydids use to produce their mating calls. Scientists believe that ancient katydid, like their modern-day descendants, strummed their songs by rubbing the tiny teeth of one wing against a plectrum on the other wing.

For comparison's sake, Montealegre-Zapata and a colleague of his at the University of Bristol, Daniel Robert, analyzed the wing structures of 59 modern-day katydid species. They fed all those readings and the characteristics of the insects' songs into a mathematical model. Then they looked at where A. musicus would fit in that model.

Their conclusion, based on the size of the wing and the precise spacing of the teeth, was that the Jurassic katydid would emit a steady tone at a frequency of 6.4 kHz for 16 milliseconds. That was enough information to reconstruct the sound, which you can hear by clicking on the video button above.

T.J. Walker / Univ. of Fla.

Some of the closest modern analogs of the ancient katydid known as Archaboilus musicus are in the Cyphoderris insect family. This male specimen of the species Cyphoderris monstrosa was collected in Douglas County, Oregon.

The researchers' reconstruction has the calls coming less than a second apart, because that would be the typical frequency for species of katydids that are not threatened by bats. Paleontologists say bats were not a threat to Jurassic bugs because they didn't exist during that period.

The single-tone call would have come through loud and clear to other katydids, Montealegre-Zapata said in a news release.

"For Archaboilus, as for living bushcricket species, singing constitutes a key component of mate attraction," he said. "Singing loud and clear advertises the presence, location and quality of the singer, a message that females choose to respond to — or not. Using a single tone, the male's call carries further and better, and therefore is likely to serenade more females. However, it also makes the male more conspicuous to predators if they have also evolved ears to eavesdrop on these mating calls."

His guess is that the Jurassic katydid was a nocturnal creature, since all present-day katydids that use musical calls are nocturnal. That would have kept the crickets from being picked off by daytime predators such as the feathered, flying Archaeopteryx. But Montealegre-Zapata said they may have made tasty morsels for bug-eating Jurassic mammals such as Morganucodon and Dryolestes (which could conceivably hear the cricket calls).

The findings strongly suggest that katydids were well-adapted for music-making during the Middle Jurassic, 165 million years ago. That led the researchers to speculate that the katydid's distant ancestors might have begun chirping more than 50 million years earlier, during the Triassic Period, thanks to "the formation of random teeth across several veins on the forewings, and the associated production of noisy sounds."

Reconstructing the ancient song of a katydid could also help answer questions about modern-day insect communications, Montealegre-Zapata said. There's quite a bit of variation to the chirps of katydids and crickets, as you'll find out if you listen to the audio clips on this webpage. Over time, musical bugs may well change their tune to suit their biggest fans and frustrate their worst foes.

Montealegre-Zapata said the reconstruction of the Jurassic katydid's love song "suggests the evolutionary mechanisms that drove modern bushcrickets to develop ultrasonic signals for sexual pairing and for avoiding an increasingly relevant echolocating predator — but that only happened 100 million years later, possibly with the appearance of bats."

More about prehistoric sounds:

•  Duck-billed dinos had built-in sound systems
• Fossil shows traces of first modern ears
• Listen to the music of prehistoric flutes
• Interactive: When was the Jurassic Period?

In addition to Montealegre-Zapata and Robert, authors of the PNAS study, "Wing Stridulation in a Jurassic Katydid (Insect, Orthoptera) Produced Low-Pitched Musical Calls to Attract Females," include Jun-Jie Gu, Michael S. Engel, Ge-Xia Qiao and Dong Ren.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Voltaire Neto

The mammal-like creature known as Pampophoneus biccai takes on a plant-eating Paleozoic creature called a pareiasaur in this artist's conception.

Paleontologists have found the skull of a weird but deadly mammal-like monster that terrorized Brazil long before dinosaurs ruled the earth.

The specimen is from the Permian period, more than 260 million years ago. The complete skull measures about 13 inches (35 centimeters) in length and was discovered in 2008 during a scientific excavation on a farm in the pampas region of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil. The skull came from a creature that was part of a class of long-extinct vertebrates called dinocephalian therapsids, which predated the dinosaurs and were distantly related to mammals.

In an interview with Discovery News, lead researcher Juan Carlos Cisneros of Brazil's Federal University of Piaui said the critter was a cross between "a tiger and a Komodo dragon, if you can imagine that." A report about the fossil was published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The creature has been dubbed Pampaphoneus biccai: The Latin-derived genus name roughly translates as "pampas killer," and the species name pays tribute to Jose Bicca, the landlord of the farm where the skull was found. The fossil site was identified through an analysis of satellite imagery from Google Earth.

Juan Carlos Cisneros

A photo and a drawing show the skull discovered on a Brazilian farm.

Cisneros told me in an emailed statement that the find is important for two reasons: First, Pampaphoneus is the first Paleozoic terrestrial carnivore discovered in South America. Combining this find with earlier discoveries of plant-eaters from the same time frame will help paleontologists "picture a more complete ecosystem during the Permian period," the statement said.

Second, the skull suggests that this South American species was a close relative to similar dinocephalians previously found in Russia and South Africa. That supports the idea that therapsids were able to disperse easily from one part of the Pangaea supercontinent to the other, during an age when most of Earth's modern-day land masses were linked together.

The therapsids were dealt a heavy blow 250 million years ago in an extinction event known as the "Great Dying." During the Triassic period that followed, they gave way to the dinosaurs — but their distant relatives in the mammalian tribe once again rule the earth.

Update for 7:51 p.m. ET: Brian Switek adds to the Permian picture in his Wired Science posting on the "Terrible Heads."

More about the days before the dinosaurs:

• What big teeth that plant-eater had!
• Mammals' family tree predates the dinosaurs
• Cat-sized reptiles roamed ancient Antarctica
• Flash interactive: Earth's timeline

In addition to Cisneros, the authors of "Carnivorous Dinocephalian from the Middle Permian of Brazil and Tetrapod Dispersal in Pangaea" include Fernando Abdala, Saniye Atayman-Güven, Bruce Rubidge, A.M. Selâl Sengör and Cesar Schultz.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.