By BRIAN SWITEK - SMITHSONIAN.COM
Added: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:41:18 UTC

Via Not Exactly Rocket Science

A restoration of Anchiornis by Michael DiGiorgio, showing the color patterns detected in the dinosaur's fossil feathers. This was arguably the most important dinosaur discovery of 2010.

2010 has been a good year for dinosaurs. Numerous new species have been named, long-awaited conference proceedings have been published, new techniques for studying the past have been devised, and scientists finally allowed us to answer one of the most confounding questions in dinosaur science. There was so much new dinosaur science that it was impossible to cover it all here (in fact, an accepted manuscript describing a new, giant horned dinosaur from New Mexico called Titanoceratops was just made available while this post was being prepared), but here is a breakdown of the top discoveries discussed here at Dinosaur Tracking over the past 12 months.

Before the Dinosaurs

There is much that remains unknown about the origin and early evolution of dinosaurs, but several discoveries announced this year have helped to fill in the early history of dinosaurs and their close relatives. Tracks made by the precursors of dinosaurs – the dinosauromorphs – found in the 249-million-year-old rock of Poland suggest that the ancestors and close relatives of the first dinosaurs originated not long after the great Permian mass extinction 251 million years ago. Creatures of this antiquity can be tricky to identify. Azendohsaurus, once thought to be an early dinosaur, was reclassified this year as being only a distant cousin, and the newly-described creature Asilisaurus was somewhat dinosaur-like but not a dinosaur itself.

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TAGGED: EVOLUTION, PALEONTOLOGY