LOS ANGELES — Ever looked up into the night sky and seen the ancient face of the “man on the moon”? Well, turns out he may have had some recent work done.

Scientists thought the moon has been cold and dead for roughly a billion years. But strange small features on the surface discovered by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal there could have been volcanic activity during the time of the dinosaurs. That’s practically just last week, by geological time scales.

The findings, described in the journal Nature Geoscience, could force researchers to reconsider established theories on the moon’s evolution.

The large dark patches on the lunar surface that give shape to the moon’s “face” are called maria, and they’re thought to be the remains of volcanic activity on the moon that started 3.5 billion years ago. Scientists thought the moon cooled quickly, and this period of volcanism ended abruptly, around a billion years back.

There were some anomalies — for example a strange feature called Ina, imaged from orbit by Apollo 15 astronauts in 1971, that seemed to be very young. But Ina was thought to be an exception.

Now, using the NASA orbiter, a team led by Arizona State University scientists picked out 70 of these strange features — round, smooth areas, surrounded by rough, choppy terrain. They’re called “irregular mare patches,” and they’re too small to be distinguished with the naked eye from Earth. Though they range in size from 328 feet to 3.1 miles, the average is 1,591 feet, or 0.3 miles.

Because the scientists have no way to bring this rock back to the lab to study, they relied on a commonly used method to date these strange features. Essentially, the more craters that pock their surfaces, the older they are. These crater counts have been calibrated using the laboratory-measured ages of moon rock samples brought back by Apollo astronauts.