Ancient asteroids kept on coming http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-asteroids-kept-on-coming-1.10504 Dinosaurs were declining before asteroid struck, say scientists http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0501/Dinosaurs-were-declining-before-asteroid-struck-say-scientists-video Triceratops was already on road to extinction before asteroid wiped out dinosaurs http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/dinosaurs/9238658/Triceratops-was-already-on-road-to-exctinction-before-asteroid-wiped-out-dinosaurs.html BBC Nature: Prehistoric Life: Dinosaurs http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Dinosaur Dinobase http://dinobase.gly.bris.ac.uk/ It is generally believed that a massive asteroid impact some 65 million years ago killed off the dinosaurs, ending their long reign as the dominant vertebrates on the planet. However, a recent pair of studies has revealed that such occurrences were much more common than previously thought. Before now, scientists thought that the intense period of asteroid impacts ended almost 3.7 billion years ago. Both of these new studies seem to indicate that over 70 asteroid impacts at least as severe as the one that likely killed off the dinosaurs continued over an additional period of 2 billion years. The scientists think that the potential culprits were asteroids originating from the E belt, which is quite small in the present day. Of course, there is some dissent between the two studies about the range of speeds at which the asteroids were traveling before impact, and both groups of scientists will continue to compare their respective findings. The first link leads to a podcast and article on this recent discovery from the Scientific American's "60-Second Space" series. The second link will whisk users away to a detailed piece by Nature's Helen Thompson which provides additional insights into the recently published studies on the asteroids. The third link takes interested parties to a nice piece from The Christian Science Monitor about those groups of dinosaurs that were already in decline before a massive meteor struck the Earth's surface some 65 million years ago. Moving on, the fourth link leads to a piece from this Tuesday's Telegraph about this steady decline, with a focus on the Hadrosaurs and the Triceratops. The fifth link leads to a site created by the BBC about the world of the dinosaurs. Here visitors can look over renderings of these fabulous creatures, and learn more about them in sections such as When they lived, What their world was like, and Behaviours. The final link leads to a wonderful database of photos, blogs, forums and so on (annotated in this week's Scout Report) from the University of Bristol on the subject of dinosaurs.