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Dinosaur fossils from China help researchers describe new 'Titan' -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...140129184853.htm

scibyte118

shared by Mars Base on 30 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • paleontologists has characterized a new dinosaur based on fossil remains found in northwestern China
  • The species, a plant-eating sauropod named Yongjinglong datangi, roamed during the Early Cretaceous period, more than 100 million years ago
  • At roughly 50-60 feet long, the Yongjinglong individual discovered was a medium-sized Titanosaur
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Anatomical evidence, however, points to it being a juvenile; adults may have been larger.
  • Until very recently, the United States was the epicenter for dinosaur diversity, but China surpassed the U.S. in 2007 in terms of species found
  • The anatomical features of the bones bear some resemblance to another Titanosaur that had been discovered by paleontologists in China in 1929
  • the team was able to identify a number of unique characteristics
  • The shoulder blade was
  • nearly 2 meters, with sides that were nearly parallel, unlike many other Titanosaurs whose scapulae bow outward
  • an unfused portion of the shoulder blade indicated to the researchers that the animal under investigation was a juvenile or subadult
  • The scapula was so long, indeed, that it did not appear to fit in the animal's body
  • if placed in a horizontal or vertical orientation
  • Instead
  • suggest the bone must have been oriented at an angle of 50 degrees from the horizontal.
  • a full-grown adult might be larger than this 50-60 foot long individual
  • The ulna and radius were well preserved, enough so that the researchers could identify grooves and ridges they believe correspond with the locations of muscle attachments in the dinosaur's leg
  • the vertebrae had large cavities in the interior that the team believes provided space for air sacs in the dinosaur's body
  • It's believed that dinosaurs, like birds, had air sacs in their trunk, abdominal cavity and neck as a way of lightening the body
  • the longest tooth they found was nearly 15 centimeters long
  • the discovery point to the fact that Titanosaurs encompass a diverse group of dinosaurs,
  • it was once thought that sauropods dominated herbivorous dinosaur fauna during the Jurassic but became almost extinct during the Cretaceous
  • n other parts of the world, particularly in South America and Asia, sauropod dinosaurs continued to flourish in the Cretaceous
Mars Base

A 'chicken from hell' dinosaur: Large feathered dinosaur species discovered in North Am... - 0 views

phys.org/...-dinosaur-large-feathered.html

scibyte125 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 20 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Scientists
  • unveiled the discovery, naming and description of a sharp-clawed, 500-pound, bird-like dinosaur
  • that roamed the Dakotas with T. rex 66 million years ago
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • 11 ½-foot-long
  • "It was a giant raptor, but with a chicken-like head and presumably feathers
  • stood about 10 feet tall
  • Three partial skeletons of the dinosaur – almost making up a full skeleton – were excavated from the uppermost level of the Hell Creek rock formation in North and South Dakota
  • The new dinosaur was 11 ½ feet long, almost 5 feet tall at the hip and weighed an estimated 440 to 660 pounds
  • Anzu is the largest oviraptorosaur found in North America
  • Oviraptorosaurs are a group of dinosaurs that are closely related to birds and often have strange, cassowary-like crests on their heads
  • The researchers believe Anzu, with large sharp claws, was an omnivore, eating vegetation, small animals and perhaps eggs while living on a wet floodplain
  • One appears to have a broken and healed rib, and the other has evidence of some sort of trauma to a toe
  • Like many "new" dinosaurs, Anzu wyliei fossils were discovered some years ago, and it took more time for researchers to study the fossils and write and publish a formal scientific description
Mars Base

Joe's Fossil Skull | Joe the Dinosaur - 0 views

dinosaurjoe.org/...joes-fossil-skull

scibyte107 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The right and left halves were separated by weathering, and the left is the best preserved. The model here was created from CT scan data, and shows all of the features exactly as they are in the original specimen
Mars Base

High-School Student Finds Bumpy-Headed Baby Dino | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/2-baby-dinosaur-discovery.html

scibyte107 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A dinosaur skeleton discovered by
  • d high-school student turns out to be the smallest, youngest and most complete duck-billed dinosaur of its kind ever found.
  • This Cretaceous-era herbivore, Parasaurolophus, walked the Earth some 75 million years ago.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • dinosaurs in this genus are best known for their impressive tube-shaped head crests, which may have been used for display or perhaps to amplify the animals' calls
  • specimen
  • was so young that its crest was a mere bump on its head.
  • Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, Calif
  • is affiliated with The Webb Schools, a private high-school campus outside of Los Angeles
  • The students at the schools participate in paleontology fieldwork as part of their coursework
  • in 2009
  • a group of students were prospecting for fossils in Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, surveying ground
  • already covered
  • spotted a little sliver of bone sticking out from under a boulder and alerted
  • thought it looked like a piece of dinosaur rib — nice, but not really worth the trouble of excavating.
  • the other side of the boulder
  • what looked like a large cobblestone
  • . A dinosaur skull
  • The team had to line up permits to excavate on the public land
  • returned in 2010 to dig the bones from the ground
  • 800-pound (363 kilograms) armor of rock, the bones had to be airlifted out of the rugged backcountry by helicopter
  • After 1,300 painstaking hours of cleaning, chiseling and picking, technicians revealed the fossil buried in all that stone
  • paleontologists realized they had an amazing example of a baby Parasaurolophus
  • they were able to sample the baby's leg bone. As dinosaur bones grow, they develop ring patterns, much like trees
  • didn't have any rings at all
  • that this animal was under a year old when it died
  • The infant dinosaur was already 6 feet (1.8 meters) long
  • duck-billed dinos hatched at about the same size as a human infant
  • "Joe" was already sprouting a crest bump so young suggests that Parasaurolophus started growing its crest earlier than other duck-billed dinosaurs.
  • "Joe" will go on display at the Alf museum beginning
  • Oct. 22
  • A digital exploration of the skeleton will also be available at dinosaurjoe.com.
  • the student who found the little duck-bill,
  • now in college, studying geology
  • understand how Parasaurolophus evolved that big crest, just by shifting around events in its development
Mars Base

Lyme Disease Bacteria Found in 15-Million-Year-Old Amber | Paleontology | Sci-News.com - 0 views

www.sci-news.com/...ease-bacteria-amber-01956.html

scibyte133 LymeDidease

shared by Mars Base on 01 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • In 30 years of studying diseases revealed in the fossil record, the scientist has documented the ancient presence of such diseases as malaria, leishmania, and others.
  • Lyme disease
  • can cause problems with joints, the heart and central nervous system
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • This is the oldest fossil evidence of ticks associated with such bacteria.
Mars Base

Scarred Duckbill Dinosaur Escaped T. Rex Attack - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...us-dinosaur-wound-scar-science

scibyte85 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • A scar on the face of a duckbill dinosaur received after a close encounter with a Tyrannosaurus rex is the first clear case of a healed dinosaur wound, scientists say.
  • A teardrop-shaped patch of fossilized skin about 5 by 5 inches (12 by 14 centimeters) that was discovered with the creature's bones and is thought to have come from above its right eye
  • The lucky dinosaur was an adult Edmontosaurus annectens, a species of duckbill dinosaur that lived
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • about 65 to 67 million years ago
  • The skull
  • also showed signs of trauma
  • from the size and shape of the marks on the bone
  • paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History
  • speculate the creature was attacked by a T. rex
  • , though still unproven, that both the skin wound and the skull injury were sustained during the same attack,
  • . The wound "was large enough to have been a claw or a tooth,"
  • also compared the dinosaur wound to healed wounds on modern reptiles, including iguanas, and found the scar patterns to be nearly identical.
  • Phil Bell, a paleontologist with the Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative in Canada
  • not convinced, however, that it was caused by a predator attack
  • The size of the scar is relatively small
  • , and would also be consistent with the skin being pierced in some other accident such as a fall.
  • certainly the marks that you see on the skull, those are [more consistent] with Tyrannosaur-bitten bones,"
  • Prior to the discovery, scientists knew of one other case of a dinosaur wound.
  • But in that instance, it was an unhealed wound that scientists think was inflicted by scavengers after the creature was already dead
  • It's very likely that this particular
  • wasn't the only dinosaur to sport scars, whether from battle wounds or accidents
  • Just how Edmontosaurus survived a T. rex attack is still unclear
  • . "Escape from a T. rex is something that we wouldn't think would happen,"
  • Duckbill dinosaurs
  • were not without defenses.
  • , for example, grew up to 30 feet (9 meters) in length, and could swipe its hefty tail or kick its legs to fell predators.
  • Furthermore, they were fast
  • had very powerful [running] muscles, which would have made them difficult to catch once they'd taken flight,"
  • Duckbills were also herd animals, so maybe this one escaped with help from neighbors
  • Figuring out the details of the story is part of what makes paleontology exciting
Mars Base

Has Dark Matter Finally Been Found? Big News Soon | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/ter-found-nasa-experiment.html

scibyte82 scibyte83 DarkMatter

shared by Mars Base on 19 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle collector mounted on the outside of the International Space Station
  • first paper of results
  • in about two weeks
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • e said the results bear on the mystery of dark matter,
  • "It will not be a minor paper,"
  • important enough that the scientists rewrote the paper 30 times before they were satisfied with it
  • it represents a "small step" in figuring out what dark matter is, and perhaps not the final answer
  • Some physics theories suggest that dark matter is made of WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles), a class of particles that are their own antimatter partner particles
  • When matter and antimatter partners meet, they annihilate each other, so if two WIMPs collided, they would be destroyed, releasing a pair of daughter particles — an electron and its antimatter counterpart, the positron, in the process
  • Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has the potential to detect the positrons and electrons produced by dark matter annihilations in the Milky Way
  • was installed on the International Space Station in May 2011, and so far, it has detected 25 billion particle events, including about 8 billion electrons and positrons
  • This first science paper will report how many of each were found, and what their energies are
  • If the experiment detected an abundance of positrons peaking at a certain energy, that could indicate a detection of dark matter,
  • while electrons are abundant in the universe around us, there are fewer known processes that could give rise to positrons
  • The smoking gun signature is a rise and then a dramatic fall" in the number of positrons with respect to energy
  • he positrons produced by dark matter annihilation would have a very specific energy, depending on the mass of the WIMPs making up dark matter
  • Another telling sign will be the question of whether positrons appear to be coming from one direction in space, or from all around
  • f they're from dark matter, scientists expect them to be spread evenly through space, but if they're created by some normal astrophysical process, such as a star explosion, then they would originate in a single direction
  • There is a lot of stuff that can mimic dark matter,"
  • Regardless of whether AMS has found dark matter yet, the scientists said they expected the question of dark matter's origin to become clearer soon
Mars Base

Warm and fuzzy T. rex? New evidence surprises - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...012-04-fuzzy-rex-evidence.html

scibyte41 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 05 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Artists' depiction of Yutyrannus huali. Artwork by Lida Xing and Yi Liu.
  • discovery of a giant meat-eating dinosaur sporting a downy coat has some scientists reimagining the look of Tyrannosaurus rex.
  • making it the largest feathered dinosaur ever found.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Scientists have long debated whether gigantic dinosaurs lost their feathers the bigger they got or were just not as extensively covered.
  • this is the first direct sign of a huge, shaggy dinosaur
  • name is a blend of Latin and Mandarin, which translates to "beautiful feathered tyrant."
  • recovered from a quarry in China's Liaoning province by a private fossil dealer
  • Most striking were the remains of down-like feathers on the neck and arm
  • coverage was patchy, scientists suspected the species had feathers over much of its body
  • would have felt like touching "long, thick fur
  • compared it to the feathers of an emu.
  • Y. huali would have reached T. rex's chest.
  • dino-fuzz likely provided insulation, though camouflage or showing it off like a peacock could not be ruled out.
  • Since T. rex is related to this newfound feathery species, chances are good that T. rex was feathered as well
Mars Base

Giant Feathered Tyrannosaur Found in China | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...yutyrannus-huali-feathers

scibyte41 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 05 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Artist's impression of Yutyrannus and the smaller Beipiaosaurus. Image: Brian Choo
  • covered from head to tail in downy feathers.
  • 30 feet long and weighing 3,000 pounds, Y. huali wasn’t so large as T. rex,
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • found in the Yixian Formation, a fossil deposit in northeastern China that over the last two decades has yielded dozens of dinosaur skeletons so finely preserved that it’s possible to discern feather-like structures.
  • early feathered members of the tyrannosaur family have been found, they were very smal
  • If the primary purpose of feathers was insulation, a possibility suggested by the feathers’ down-like shape, then larger tyrannosaurs might not have needed them. Thanks to small surface-to-volume body ratios, large-bodied animals tend to maintain heat easily.
  • didn’t know whether these larger-bodied forms would show as many.”
  • significance of Y. huali is its body size and the apparent density of feather-like structures
  • Yutyrannus skull. Image: Zang Hailong
  • What were tyrannosaur feathers used for? Might the king of dinosaurs have strutted like a peacock?
  • At this point we don’t have any data on the coloration of the plumage
Mars Base

Dinosaur Debate Gets Cooking - Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...Dinosaur_debate_gets_cooking

scibyte53 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 28 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Annual growth lines etched in the femurs of 115 wild warm-blooded mammals such as giraffes, reindeer and gazelles are similar to those previously seen in the bones of reptiles and dinosaurs
  • People always said that mammals do not show these lines
  • like a myth that’s going around; you read it everywhere
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • people haven’t really studied mammals
  • In dinosaurs and reptiles, yearly cycles of growth and nutrition are stamped in the bones like the rings of a tree
  • months, animals pack on blood vessel-rich bone tissue
  • lean months they skimp, laying down only thin sheets
  • Under a microscope, the slender sheets of bone look like dark lines
  • “lines of arrested growth” or “rest lines” stripe the bones of both dinosaurs and reptiles, some scientists assumed that dinosaurs, like reptiles, were cold-bloode
  • new work shows that warm-blooded mammals have banded bones, too
  • Every mammal Köhler’s team examined showed cyclical growth
  • their specimens looked just like those seen in dinosaur fossils.
  • probably not going to close the debate whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or not
  • the argument that [rest lines] mean cold-blooded is certainly not valid any longer
  • analyzed bone slices — as thin as strands of human hair — from 41 species of ruminants — mammals with four-chambered stomachs
  • Institute of Zoology at the University of Hamburg donated most of the skeletal specimens from its Oboussier collection
  • vast bunch of now-endangered and protected African animals gathered in the 1950s through the 1970s
Mars Base

Nest Full Of Baby Dinosaurs Discovered | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...full-baby-dinosaurs-discovered

scibyte22

shared by Mars Base on 18 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • A 70-million-year-old nest of the dinosaur Protoceratops andrewsi has been found with evidence that 15 juveniles were once inside it
  • finding multiple juveniles in the same dino nest is quite rare
  • analyzed the dinosaur remains along with the nest, which measured about 2.3 feet in diameter and was round and bowl-shaped
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • found at Djadochta Formation, Tugrikinshire, Mongolia,
  • researchers conclude that the 15 dinosaurs all show juvenile characteristics
  • At least 10 of the 15 fossil sets are complete
  • nest further implies that parental care was provided.
  • Mongolia was, at the time, a place with a variety of theropod dinosaurs, some of whom likely ate babies such as these
  • The most obvious of these, found in the same deposits, is the (in)famous Velociraptor
Mars Base

Floor of oldest fossilized forest discovered: 385 million years old - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...120301102716.htm

scibyte36

shared by Mars Base on 02 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • the discovery of the floor of the world's oldest forest
  • most exciting part was finding out just how many different types of footprints there were
  • newly uncovered area was preserved in such a way that we were literally able to walk among the trees, noting what kind they were, where they had stood and how big they had grown
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • dating back about 385 million years ago
  • The complexity of the Gilboa site can teach us a lot about the original assembly of our modern day ecosystems
Mars Base

Preserved bone of Pterosaur found in stomach of Velociraptor - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...ecialized-predators-didnt.html

scibyte37

shared by Mars Base on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Scientists have discovered a bone from a pterosaur (giant flying reptile or 'pterodactyl') in the guts of the skeletal remains of a Velociraptor (small predatory theropod dinosaur) that lived in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia some 75 million years ago.
  • Preserved bone of Pterosaur found in stomach of Velociraptor
  • originally recovered from the Gobi Desert in 1994
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • difficult and probably even dangerous for the small theropod dinosaur to target a pterosaur with a wingspan of 2 metres or more, unless the pterosaur was already ill or injured
  • So the pterosaur bone we've identified in the gut of the Velociraptor was most likely scavenged from a carcass
  • Further analysis of the skeletal remains of the Velociraptor showed that it was carrying, or recovering from, an injury to its ribs when it died
  • surface of the bone is smooth and in good condition, with no unusual traces of marks or deformation that could be attributed to digestive acids
  • likely that the Velociraptor itself died not long after ingesting the bone
  • first time that bones from a pterosaur have been uncovered as gut contents from dinosaur remains
Mars Base

Ancient sea reptile with gammy jaw suggests dinosaurs got arthritis too - 0 views

phys.org/...ent-sea-reptile-gammy-jaw.html

scibyte47 dinosaur arthritis

shared by Mars Base on 16 May 12 - No Cached
  • scientists at the University of Bristol has found signs of a degenerative condition similar to human arthritis in the jaw of a pliosaur, an ancient sea reptile that lived 150 million years ago
  • Such a disease has never been described before in fossilized Jurassic reptiles.
  • has been kept since its discovery in the collections of the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • 8 metre long pliosaur was a
  • crocodile-like head, a short neck, whale-like body and four powerful flippers to propel it through water in pursuit of prey.
  • huge jaws and 20 cm long teeth
  • this particular individual was the unfortunate victim of an arthritis-like disease.
  • eroded its left jaw joint, displacing the lower jaw to one side
  • evidently lived with a crooked jaw for many years, because there are marks on the bone of the lower jaw where the teeth from the upper jaw impacted on the bone during feeding
  • the animal was still able to hunt in spite of its unfortunate condition.
  • signs on the skeleton to suggest that the animal could have been an old female who had developed the condition as part of the aging process
  • large size, and the fused skull bones
  • possibly female because its skull crest is quite low – presumed males had a higher crest.
  • In the same way that aging humans develop arthritic hips, this old lady developed an arthritic jaw, and survived with her disability for some time
  • unhealed fracture on the jaw indicates that at some time the jaw weakened and eventually broke
  • With a broken jaw, the pliosaur would not have been able to feed
  • They were at the top of their food chains, so there would not have been any predators to take advantage of an aging, disabled pliosaur – except for another pliosaur.
  • You can see these kinds of deformities in living animals, such as crocodiles or sperm whales and these animals can survive for years as long as they are still able to feed
Mars Base

Physicists create synthetic magnetic monopole predicted more than 80 years ago - 0 views

phys.org/...c-magnetic-monopole-years.html

scibyte118

shared by Mars Base on 30 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Nearly 85 years
  • physicist
  • predicted the possibility
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • identified and photographed synthetic magnetic monopoles
  • The groundbreaking accomplishment paves the way for the detection of the particles in nature
  • "The creation of a synthetic magnetic monopole should provide us with unprecedented insight into aspects of the natural magnetic monopole—if indeed it exists,"
  • To be able to confirm the work of one of the most famous physicists is probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
  • Ordinarily, magnetic poles come in pairs: they have both a north pole and a south pole
  • a magnetic monopole is a magnetic particle possessing only a single, isolated pole—a north pole without a south pole, or vice versa
  • . In 1931,
  • published a paper that explored the nature of these monopoles in the context of quantum mechanics
  • Despite extensive experimental searches since then, in everything from lunar samples—moon rock—to ancient fossilized minerals, no observation of a naturally-occurring magnetic monopole has yet been confirmed
  • team adopted an innovative approach to investigating
  • theory, creating and identifying synthetic magnetic monopoles
  • an artificial magnetic field generated by a Bose-Einstein condensate, an extremely cold atomic gas tens of billionths of a degree warmer than absolute zero.
  • The team relied upon theoretical work
  • that suggested a particular sequence of changing external magnetic fields could lead to the creation of the synthetic monopole
  • Their experiments subsequently took place in the atomic refrigerator built
  • in his basement laboratory in the Merrill Science Center
  • After resolving many technical challenges, the team was rewarded with photographs that confirmed the monopoles' presence at the ends of tiny quantum whirlpools within the ultracold gas.
  • The result proves experimentally that
  • structures do exist in nature
  • Physics Professor David S. Hall '91 and Aalto University (Finland)
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