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Friday, July 29, 2011

Rare Dinosaur Fossil Found Complete in Alaska

From International Business Times: Rare Dinosaur Fossil Found Complete in Alaska
Scientists in Alaska have discovered the most complete leftovers of rare dinosaur fossil ever found in North American excavation history.

The fossil, almost in its entirety, is that of a thalattosaur, a prehistoric marine reptile which went extinct 200 million years ago in the Triassic Period. It was found on a beach in Anchorage back in June by scientists from the Museum of the North and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

The most astonishing detail of the discovery: Nearly the entire skeleton was present.

"In North America, this may be the most articulated specimen that we have right now," said Jim Baichtal, U.S. Forest Service's Tongass geologist, who was part of the discovery team.

Geologists were conducting field surveys during extreme low tide at Tongass National Forest when stumbling upon the fossil, according to Baichtal, that the team thought was a fish.

"We were just having our morning coffee out on the outcropping when somebody said, 'What's that?'' he said.

Since its extraction in June, a team of scientists have been studying the findings to verify the species. Only about a dozen other thalattosaurs have been found in the world, with the most complete fossils found in China,

This particular fossil, according to Reuters, contains an outline of the soft-body tissue surrounding the bone, which can possibly give scientists a clue on what the actual shape of the thalattosaur body was, which measured from three to ten feet long.

The team under Baichtal will return to excavate the area it was found for additional pieces of the fossil.

Archaeopteryx may not have been a bird, but just a feathery dinosaur


From The Christian Science Monitor: Archaeopteryx may not have been a bird, but just a feathery dinosaur
The legendary winged creature long known as the earliest bird, Archaeopteryx, might have just been dethroned, scientists reveal.

Instead, a newfound fossil from China suggests Archaeopteryx was not a bird after all, but one of many birdlike dinosaurs, a finding that could force scientists to rethink much of what they thought they knew about the origin and evolution of birds.

Archaeopteryx lived about 150 million years ago in what is now Bavaria in Germany, back when Europe was an archipelago of islands in a warm shallow tropical sea. First discovered 150 years ago, the carnivorous fossil, with its blend of avian and reptilian features, seemed an iconic evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds, bolstering Darwin's theory of evolution published just two years before the fossil discovery. Its place as the earliest and most primitive known bird made it central to the scientific understanding of the evolution of birds and flight.

Still, for decades, there have been doubts as to whether Archaeopteryx was really a bird.

"What's happened over the past 15 or 20 years is that so many of the seemingly uniquely birdlike characteristicsof Archaeopteryx, such as feathers, a wishbone and a three-fingered hand, became a lot less unique," anatomist and paleontologist Lawrence Witmer at Ohio University told LiveScience. "We've started finding a lot of dinosaurs with feathers, and lots and lots have a wishbone, even T. rex, for this progressive erosion of the avian status of Archaeopteryx."

Trading places

Now scientists have uncovered a new fossil in China whose combination of features unexpectedly suggests Archaeopteryx was actually just a relative of the lineage that ultimately gave rise to birds.

The novel chicken-size fossil in question, Xiaotingia zhengi, dates back about 155 million years. The carnivore was found in Liaoning in China, where many other extraordinary specimens of feathered dinosaurs and early birds have been unearthed. (The species is named after Zheng Xiaoting, who helped establish the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature as a repository for vertebrate fossils from China.) [See image of Xiaotingia zhengi]

To see where X. zhengi belonged evolutionarily, paleontologist Xing Xu at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues tallied up all of its birdlike and dinosaurlike features, such as long robust forearms, and compared them with other species. These species included avialans, a group containing ancestors of modern birds, and deinonychosaurs, close relatives of avialans, which together are known as paravians. Avialans include dinosaurlike birds, while deinonychosaurs include birdlike dinosaurs — a blurry distinction that has led scientists to often bounce species around between the groups.

When the researchers analyzed features of Xiaotingia and Archaeopteryx, the resulting family tree clustered them together. Unexpectedly, it also yanked them out of the avialan category and placed the duo with the deinonychosaurs.

New bird on the block
Now their analysis suggests the earliest known avialan is currently a pigeon-size feathered creature known as Epidexipteryx hui recently discovered in Inner Mongolia, China.

"This has a huge impact about how we view the early evolution of birds," said Witmer, who did not take part in this study. "For 150 years, scientists have tended to view their early evolution through the lens of Archaeopteryx, and how much of what they thought now needs to be re-examined?"

Still, these findings remain tentative.

"As we try to tease apart what's going on, we're left with slight differences between species, and each new find reshuffles the deck — Xiaotingia might have moved Archaeopteryx out of the birds, but the next find could move it back into birds or somewhere else," Witmer said. "That's how it should be, how science works — new evidence changes our conclusions."

Xing and his colleagues detailed their findings in the July 28 issue of the journal Nature, and Witmer wrote an accompanying commentary.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Los Angeles: A Modern Prehistoric Winner

Los Angeles Downtown News: A Modern Prehistoric Winner
OPINION: DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - Today’s entertainment scene is dominated by the loud, fast and eye-popping. It’s a culture where celebrities and faux celebrities rule, where over-processed pop music generates huge buzz and where comic book adaptations and three-dimensional technology ensure mammoth press and buckets of money.

There’s nothing wrong with this system per se — it is what it is. However, it is interesting that amidst this cultural moment, the Natural History Museum has pulled off a modern prehistoric winner. The Exposition Park facility recently opened the Dinosaur Hall, which may prove to be, at least for the Downtown area, the most important debut during the summer of 2011. The benefits for the community will last much longer than any Hollywood blockbuster.

It looks like the NHM has a winner in the exhibit that includes more than 300 fossils and 20 full-body specimens. It’s an extraordinary accomplishment, one completed when the economy has been weak and nonprofits across the country have been suffering.

Dinosaur Hall, which Los Angeles Downtown News wrote about last week, has been in the works for a long time. It is also only a mid-point in a seven-year, $135 million upgrade of a facility that had grown fairly worn around the edges. Last year the museum restored a nearly century-old edifice and debuted its The Age of Mammals exhibit. Other additions will take place through 2013, and will change the main entrance and the area in front of the museum.

The past and the future changes are important, but as most anyone will tell you, there’s something special about dinosaurs. The NHM aimed big with a 14,000-square-foot display (double the previous dinosaur exhibition space) and has a ready audience of school groups, families and tourists. They’ll traipse through the galleries to see the three Tyrannosaurus rex specimens. They’ll ogle the Triceratops, the armor-plated Stegosaurus and the Mamenchisaurus, a creature with an impossibly long neck. They’ll spend hours wandering through the museum.

The upgrades dovetail with recent improvements at the neighboring California Science Center. Last year, that institution completed a $165 million renovation, the highlight of which was a 45,000-square-foot permanent exhibition titled Ecosystems. Suddenly, the park at the southern end of the Figueroa Corridor has a double bang. The combined $300 million worth of upgrades will ensure a steady stream of visitors for years.

Nothing moves quickly in the museum world, especially when dealing with dinosaurs. NHM staff spent a decade uncovering fossils in places like Montana and Wyoming. More time and money was spent in Los Angeles assembling the bones and then creating interactive displays that would appeal to children and adults.

Whatever it took was worth it. Dinosaur Hall is fascinating. The NHM should be proud of a job well done.

WesternU Team Creates T. Rex Bone Slide for New Dinosaur Hall

PR: WesternU Team Creates T. Rex Bone Slide for New Dinosaur Hall
POMONA, CA--(Marketwire - Jul 21, 2011) - A team of Western University of Health Sciences faculty, staff and students created what could be the "world's largest microscope slide" of a Tyrannosaurus rex femur for the recently opened Dinosaur Hall at the Natural History Museum (NHM) of Los Angeles County.

Led by Elizabeth Rega, PhD, WesternU associate professor of anatomy and assistant vice provost for academic development, the team spent about a year and more than 170 hours cutting, mounting and sanding a paper-thin histological cross-section from a T. rex femur.

The team began with a bone that weighed about 130 pounds. At mid-shaft, they cut the bone about three-fourths of an inch thick, in what's described as looking like a slice of prime rib.

The section, mounted on custom-cut tempered glass and measuring 9 inches by 9 inches, is housed in the new, 14,000-square-foot permanent dinosaur exhibit at NHM.

"It's unprecedented to do a section this big," said Rega. "We had to do things very differently than before, and developed new techniques for the cutting, mounting, and the grinding of this enormous section. These are difficult techniques, and the entire team physically worked very hard."

College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) anatomy instructor Ken Noriega, third-year CVM students Beth Liebeck and Valerie Cantrell, second-year CVM student Christine DePompeo, College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific-Northwest (COMP-Northwest) faculty assistant Jaime Servin, and COMP graduate Laura Rush, DO '09, contributed to the effort, along with several others.

In early 2010, Dinosaur Hall exhibit lead curator Luis Chiappe, PhD, contacted Rega, who is an expert in histology and ancient animals, looking to tap into local partners and scientists in Los Angeles' outlying communities and have them share and invest in the museum's exhibit.

Rega says Chiappe's vision was to be able to show the cut bone, then show the entire section because it's much more dramatic and accessible to the general public.

"I'm very grateful to Dr. Rega and her team for the collaboration they provided," Chiappe said. "It is a great example of how our local academic institutions are supporting our cultural and educational institutions."

The exhibit contains the world's only T. rex growth series, showing specimens from the youngest known baby, a rare juvenile, and a 70 percent-complete young adult known as Thomas the T. rex, according to a museum press release.

The T. rex attached to this bone was at least 25 feet in length when it died. The bone is approximately 65 million to 68 million years old, dating to the late Cretaceous period. It likely comes from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana and portions of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, according to Rega.

Five additional histological slides were created from the T. rex femur and will be used for research, Rega said. She described identifying things that look like tree rings on the histological sections, as well as what might be osteoporosis, uncovering what is likely a pathological bone.

"As a health sciences university, it's a very interesting section we ended up cutting," said Rega. "We are going to work with the curator at NHM and researchers at UC Berkeley to further describe this for an academic publication."

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Bone wars chronicles race between paleontologists

From the Billings Gazette: Bone wars chronicles race between paleontologists

CASPER, Wyo. — It’s known as the Great Dinosaur Rush, the frenzied, 15-year race between two egotistical paleontologists to discover, dig and name dinosaurs from Wyoming and surrounding states.

You could say it started with a single mistake.

It was a big mistake, sure. But everyone was making them in those early days of American science.

And, true, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh would almost certainly have found other excuses to bicker and spy and blow up bones rather than allow the other to catch a glimpse of their latest finds.

But the rivals didn’t need another reason. Copes’ misplaced skull was the bone that broke the pleiosaur’s back.

In 1863, the word “dinosaur” was just 30 years old. In America, science was considered a pursuit for those with time to kill or money to burn. Cope and Marsh started out friendly, two pioneers in a brand new field.

They met in Berlin where Marsh, 32, was studying and Cope, 23, was touring. (Then, Europe was the natural science mecca. Cope arrived to see museums, meet scientists and escape from girl trouble and the Civil War.)

After the meeting, Cope and Marsh exchanged letters, fossils and “kind regards.” They named fossilized amphibians and serpents after one another, says author Mark Jaffe in “The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science.”

In 1869, a plesiosaur arrived at Cope’s office. He assembled the bones and presented his findings to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia: The specimen’s tail was longer than other plesiosauruses while its neck was shorter, Cope reported. He named it Elasmosaurus platypus and, after more than a year, showed his project to Marsh.

It was, Marsh would say years later, “like Barnum’s famous woolly horse, the head was where its tail should be.” Marsh pointed out the mistake — gently he claimed.

Cope, deeply embarrassed, disagreed. It was the beginning of the end for amicable pretense. By 1872, they were full-fledged enemies.

“They hated each other so much, but out of that conflict came a huge boon to science,” said Tom Rea of Casper, author of “Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie’s Dinosaur.”

And when reports of big fossilized bones came from Kansas, Nebraska and other states, the two paleontologists set their sights westward.

The race to publish resulted in the discovery of some 1,600 species of previously unknown extinct vertebrates — mammals, reptiles and dinosaurs. But it made for sometimes sloppy science.

Once, at Bridger Basin near Green River, Cope reportedly spied on a Marsh dig, then snuck in to examine the site. Cope found a skull and teeth of a new animal and described it in papers.

The problem was Marsh had left the skull on purpose, alongside teeth from another animal altogether. Cope fell for the trick and his mistake wasn’t corrected for 20 more years.

Cope and Marsh paid for summer exhibitions for the next 15 years, spending the winters describing what had been found. Mule-drawn wagons and train cars shipped tons of fossils east. Men spied on the other camps, sabotaged quarries, destroyed fossils they couldn’t collect and the two teams even resorted to throwing rocks at one another when their digs got too close.

When the dust cleared, other Eastern museums had arrived at Como Bluff and Cope and Marsh were on their way to being broke. Some of the bones their teams collected weren’t examined until years later, including an almost complete Allosaurus not unpacked until after Cope’s death.

“It really divided the natural sciences for a long time. Either you were a Cope man or you were a Marsh man,” Rea said.

“It was also a great window into the changing nature of the natural sciences at that time.”

Before Marsh and Cope, there were nine named North American dinosaur species. After, Marsh had named 80 new species and Cope 56.

More importantly, the dinosaurs they found would be written about, mounted and drawn for books and movies. The public had fallen in love with the “terrible lizards,” a love affair that continues today.

So why all the fuss? Why do creatures like Diplodocus and Triceratops still inspire imagination as they did 100 years ago?

“Well, they are big, but they are dead. If you are a kid, that’s a delightful combination,” Rea said.

“They aren’t going to eat you.”

UK: Facebook campaign launched to save vandalised dinosaur

From the Telegraph: Facebook campaign launched to save vandalised dinosaur
The 20ft tall T-Rex lurks in a field overlooking the motorway near Bridgwater, Somerset, but he's been targetted by vandals and he's been knocked flat - he's had a leg ripped off and he's lying on his side in the grass.

Today his owner has vowed to get him up and roaring again.

Benjamin Slade said he would â not surrenderâ to the vandals who wrecked the £7,000 sculpture.

His announcement comes days after a 'Save the M5 Dinosaur'Facebook group was set up to get the monster back on his feet.

Mr Slade, who owns a large country house near Bridgwater, said "We have got to get a new monster. I'm going to get one specially made, with sharper teeth."

The dinosaur is not far from another iconic landmark for motorway travellers - the Wicker Man, a giant figure of a running man made of wicker, who was also damaged by vandals who set him on fire a year or two back.

Parents grinding out the thankless journey down the M5 to their holiday destination in Devon or Cornwall are always pleased to see the dinosaur and the Wicker Man, which are useful distractions for bored "Are we there yet?" children in the back seat.

The campaign to save the dinosaur has even seen a Facebook page set up, and it's already got more than 300 supporters.

One of them, signing in on Facebook as Karly Minky Rayner, write "I am so upset by the ruination of the poor M5 dino. He has made me smile since I was a tiny kid. I love how there was something so ridiculously eccentric on such a drab unappealing road. I would deffo put in some voluntary time to save the beast even though I now live in London. I'm pretty damned good at papier mache!"

The campaign to save the monster, near junction 24, was launched by Philip Tyrannosaurus Rex Cooke who wants people to help him get the "landmark of Somerset" back on its feet.

He wrote "We need to restore poor old T-Rex to full health to bring pleasure back to people using the M5. I want to get as many members as possible to lend their support to getting T-Rex back."

Alexander Belassie, of North Petherton, Somerset, said he frequently drives past the dinosaur and confessed "it used to cheer me up while I travelled to work".

The monster has even got a new online nickname - Facebook campaigners are calling him Fluffy Rexford.

Even local residents have been upset by the attack...someone calling himself Milkeymike wrote on the Bridgwater Mercury's website "Just goes to show what to million years of evolution has spawned."

North Newton resident Alison Bradford said her four-year-old son Harrison had been upset by the attack.

She said "He used to wave at Rex every morning, and now he's asking what's happened and why."

Monday, July 25, 2011

Dinosaur hunter: The 70million-year-old crocodile with huge teeth and a dog's head

From The Daily Mail: Dinosaur hunter: The 70million-year-old crocodile with huge teeth and a dog's head
A newly-identified, 70million-year-old species of crocodile with huge teeth and a dog-shaped head has been found in a small town in Brazil.
The fossil of Pissarrachampsa sera, which scientists believe ate dinosaurs, was discovered in Cretaceous sediments in Minas Gerais by a municipal worker.
Dating back to the end of the dinosaur era, the strange head of this remarkable terrestrial crocodile has revealed much about the extinct Baurusuchia breed of crocodiles.

Lead researcher Hans Larsson, of McGill University in Quebec, said: 'Whereas modern-day amphibious crocodiles have low and flat heads, this new find gives us one of the first detailed insights into the head anatomy of this weird group of extinct crocs called Baurusuchia that feature tall, dog-like skulls with enlarged canines, and long-limbed body proportions.'
Their ecology was probably similar to that of wild dogs living today.

Given the number and size of their teeth, the researchers believe these carnivorous crocodiles fed on animals of the same 15ft to 20ft size range - that is dinosaurs and fellow crocs.
They would have used stereoscopic vision to track prey and, rather than scramble like today's crocodiles, they galloped on elongated limbs.
A sketch drawn by Dr Larsson imagines how the species would have appeared in predatory motion.

Though the body might seem more dinosaur in shape than a contemporary crocodile, the fossil head carries the definitive characteristics of crocodiles from that era, including a well-developed secondary palate, socketed teeth, advanced cranial air spaces, roughened bone surfaces, plated armour, and massive attachments for jaw closing muscles.

Recent CT scans have revealed fascinating aspects of the fossil, such as its brain size and shape and hearing abilities.
Baurusuchian crocs are characterised by a significant number of unique anatomical features such as low tooth counts, tall, thin skulls, forward facing nostrils, and derived jaw-closing muscle attachments.

After comparing the new species to other Baurusuchids and their relatives, the researchers noticed large gaps on either side of the fossil's morphology.
Researcher Felipe Montefeltro, of McGill University, said: 'We are dealing with an exceptionally divergent lineage of extinct crocodile diversity. There are many fossils that still need to be found to link this crocodile to those who came before and after.'

A digital reconstruction of the fossil's brain cavity is in the works and will be presented later this year at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting.
The research is published in the journal PLoS One.

Did Brothers Unearth New Kind Of Dinosaur?

From KCCI Ch 8, Des Moines: Did Brothers Unearth New Kind Of Dinosaur?
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Two fossil hunters from Kansas think they've found something new while digging in Montana.

Utah paleontologist Jim Kirkland has examined photos of the fossil that Robert Detrich, of Wichita, Kan., and his brother, Alan Detrich, of Lawrence, Kan., are uncovering and thinks it's a new kind of ankylosaur.

The low-slung heavily armored type of dinosaur lived 188 to 65 million years ago.

Kirkland said the fossil was probably about 30 feet long, making it twice as big as a typical ankylosaur.

If the dinosaur does prove to be something new, Robert Detrich said he and his brother would like to call it "enormasaurus."

The brothers have been digging since May in a fossil rich area near the town of Jordan. They've uncovered the fossil's skull, part of its leg and some vertebrae.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Dinosaur Valley State Park makes an impression with prints, river for swimming


From Statesman.com: Dinosaur Valley State Park makes an impression with prints, river for swimming
GLEN ROSE — After negotiating a steep trail, sofa-sized boulders and slippery mud, I did what most folks do when they finally spy the footlong dinosaur tracks stamped into the Paluxy riverbed: I stuck my hand in one to see how it measured up.

Yep, the Acrocanthosaurus that made them could have squashed me pretty easily.

That 20- to 30-foot beast, a smaller relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex, made the prints millions of years ago. They remained hidden until 1908, when a 9-year-old boy named George Adams happened upon some of the three-toed tracks in a tributary of the Paluxy River, then reported them to his school principal. About the same time, Charlie Moss, who was looking for the perfect spot to plant a moonshine still, found some more tracks in the main bed of the river.

Can you imagine?

Other than some impressed school kids and moonshiners, and a report by a paleontologist from Southern Methodist University a few years later, the initial reaction to the discovery was relatively subdued.

It wasn't until fossil hunter R.T. Bird found the dinner plate-sized prints of a bigger dinosaur now called the Paluxysaurus jonesi in 1937 that Glen Rose became famous for its dinosaur tracks. Bird theorized that the Acrocanthosaurus was stalking the lumbering, long-necked, plant-eating Paluxysaurus as it strolled along the shoreline, nibbling palm-like trees and conifers.

Lucky for us, the chase (which remains just a theory but makes for fun pondering) was preserved in the mud of a shallow sea that covered Texas 113 million years ago.

Today, you can splash in the Paluxy River at Dinosaur Valley State Park while you ogle some tracks that look like they were made by a gigantic chicken and others that look like someone pressed the sawed-off end of a telephone pole into the ground. Then you can camp, picnic, hike or ride your mountain bike through the 1,525-acre park, which opened in 1972.

The grounds are home to some of the best preserved dinosaur tracks in the world. Some of them were removed and are on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where I saw them during a visit last month. (Other tracks from Glen Rose are on display in a building outside the Texas Memorial Museum on the University of Texas campus.)

Rangers note that the park's collection of trackways is constantly changing — as the river erodes dinosaur prints that are already exposed, it carves away softer stone, revealing new ones.

The trackways — series of prints made by the animals as they moved along the shore — changed a lot of what scientists thought they knew about certain types of dinosaurs.

For one, they learned that sauropods like the Paluxysaurus, a 20-ton, 70-foot school bus of a dinosaur, traveled in groups, with adults on the outside and younger ones in the middle. They also learned that the towering creatures, which had necks up to 26 feet long, walked on all four feet on land. Until then, they assumed they stayed in the surf, where the water could help support the weight of their massive bodies. It's all so perfectly Texan, isn't it?

Things are always bigger in the Lone Star State, so it's no wonder the Texas Legislature proclaimed the Paluxysaurus jonesi the official dinosaur of Texas in 2009.

If you visit the park, don't be fooled by the 70-foot avocado green Apatosaurus and 45-foot mud brown Tyrannosaurus rex that stand guard outside the park's headquarters building.

They aren't exactly native.

They're refugees from the 1964 World's Fair in New York City.

pleblanc@statesman.com; 445-3994


If you go...

Dinosaur Valley State Park is just northwest of Glen Rose at 1629 Park Road 59; 254-897-4588. Entry fee is $5 per day, per adult; free for children 12 and younger. Camping is $25 per night for sites with electric and water hookups; $15 per night for primitive hike-in sites.

What Killed the Dinosaurs? The Mystery Continues to Deepen...

From Big Think: What Killed the Dinosaurs? The Mystery Continues to Deepen...
Many scientists believe that a rock about 6 miles across plowed into Mexico 65 million years ago, killing the dinosaurs. But a minority of scientists are critical of this theory, citing the possibility of volanic eruptions, climate change, disease, etc. which might have wiped them out. A recent find of a new fossil may shed new light on this puzzle. If verified, it might help to resolve the controversy.

For generations, the rich history of the dinosaur has been the topic of many stories, books and films and has essentially become a part of our culture. Most children, at least in the US are first introduced to the life of dinosaurs through story and picture books which usually result in parents purchasing figurines and toys of their favorite kind. There has been a long fascination with the sheer number of various dinosaur species with estimates ranging in the hundreds and other research pushing that number to 500,000. It's quite difficult however to provide an exact number because the overall fossil record isn't complete as various species have been identified only from a very small number of fragments. Whether that number is in the hundreds or thousands, there is surely no one doubting that the diversity of this group is nothing short of spectacular.

For purposes of example, here is a small number of the various types that we've discovered thus far:

Carnivorous (Meat-Eaters): Aublysodon, Albertosaurus, Velociraptor & The Tyrannosaurus
RexBird-Like Dinosaurs: Toodon, Byronosaurus & Microraptor
Long-Necked Browsing Dinosaurs: Saltasaurus, Apatosaurus, Barosaurus
Armored Dinosaurs: Stegosaurus, Kentrosaurus, Nodosaurus
Herbivorous: Brontosaurus, Clasaurus, Anchisaurus, Norhronychus, Sauropodomorphas
Horned: Triceratops, Styracosaurus, Pentaceratops
Duck-Billed: Diclonius, Parasaurolophus, Maiasaura
Feathered: dilong paradoxus, Sinornithosaurus, Sinosauropteryx
Sautopods: Ultrasauros, Titanosaurids, Parvicursor
The ultimate story of the lives and eventual extinction of the dinosaurs have been one considered as one of the greatest mysteries of our time. Many cultures and ancient peoples throughout history have all had their own sets of stories and legends that have been carried through generations. For example, many historians believe that the Roman and Greek discovery of fossils eventually gave rise to their legends and stories of ogre's and griffin's. Another great example is how imagery of Dragon's are so prominent in the Chinese culture with first recorded proofs of such dating back to 300 BC. It was Chang Qu, a very prominent historian at the time first documented a "proof" for the existence of dragons after finding what he felt were dragon bones in the Sichuan Province of Wuchen. The Chinese Dragon is now a cultural sign rich in both history and of great importance not to mention the symbol of the nation and something that has became an insignia of strength over the period of many centuries and carried throughout many generations.

For decades, there has been a civil war among scientists, historians, paleontologists and researchers to ultimately explain the reason for dinosaur extinction after roaming the planet for millions of years. Some argue that it was volcanic eruptions while others argue germs or climate change.

The critics of the meteor/comet theory say that, if you dig down to the layer of rock corresponding to when the dinosaurs died (the KY boundary) you find that the dinosaur fossils actually disappear before 65 million years ago. In fact, there is, in some parts of the earth, an 8 feet "dead zone" below the KT boundary which is devoid of dinosaur fossils. The critics claim, therefore, that the dinosaurs died out before the impact. But a new fossil find (probably the horn of a Triceratops) suggests otherwise. It was found right in the middle of this dead zone, indicatingthat the dinosaurs still lived perhaps right up to the time of the impact.

If other such fossils are found, it would lend even more credibility of the impact theory. Personally, I like the theory that it was a 1-2 punch (impact plus volanic eruption in India) which killed the dinosaurs.Perhaps the impact was so great the shock wave went through the earth, and disrupted the crust of the earth in India, creating massive volano eruptions. (Sometimes on the moon, we see craters on opposite sides, indicating that this may be a common occurance withmeteor impacts).

This debate will surely continue to rage. But right now, the impact theory has gotten a new boost.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Celebrities join hunt at dino dig

From the Edmonton Journal: Celebrities join hunt at dino dig
Philip Currie is a man perfectly at home on the side of a steep and muddy hill in the pouring rain, with 73-million-year-old dinosaur bones beneath his feet and a cadre of celebrity guests arriving in a matter of hours.

"Anyone who thinks paleontology is a dry and boring subject, they should take a look again, because it's definitely not boring," the renowned Alberta paleontologist said with a laugh Thursday as he attempted to secure a large tarp along the side of a fossil site outside Grande Prairie in mud he rightly described as "as slick as oil." Indeed.

Once the inspiration for a character in the movie Jurassic Park, Currie is the namesake of a new museum being created at the renowned Pipestone Creek fossil site, an area considered to be one of the world's richest dinosaur bonebeds.

The project found unexpected allies last summer after catching the attention of actors Dan Aykroyd and his wife, Donna Dixon Aykroyd, when the family visited the area.

On Thursday, the couple flew a group of their celebrity friends to the Pipestone Creek site for a threeday dinosaur dig.

That will be followed by a gala fundraiser Saturday night that will help secure the remaining funding required to build the $26.4million museum.

The diverse group of guests at the event includes Robert Kennedy Jr., Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, Roots Canada founder Michael Budman, Criminal Minds star Matthew Gray Gubler and mystery writer Patricia Cornwell.

Taking a break from digging dinosaur bones to get the site ready for the celebrities, Currie said he was humbled to host the high-profile guests.

"It's pretty amazing to think that they would come all the way up to Alberta when I'm sure there are other places they could be that would be the envy of everybody," he said.

It will certainly be a rustic experience for the guests, whose arrival was delayed by small funnel clouds in the area and a tornado watch, and who will now face the rain, mud and mosquitoes during their dinosaur digs.

The celebrities are staying in trailers at a scenic forest campsite, along with Currie and other paleontologists and laboratory technicians working on the Pipestone Creek site.

RCMP officers and an ambulance are also stationed at the site while the guests are in the area.

The guests were slated to have a fireside talk with Currie on Thursday night, and are expected to be out at the two excavation sites Friday. One site is only accessible by a 15-minute hike into the forest. The other can be reached only by jet boat.

With the remains of hundreds of dinosaurs, the Pipestone Creek site west of Grande Prairie has the densest deposit of horned dinosaur remains in the world. Most in the bone bed are from the Pachyrhinosaurus, but there are signs of other species, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, in the area as well.

Phil Bell, a paleontologist for the Pipestone Creek site, said he hopes the guests will bring new excitement to the area sometimes dubbed the River of Death.

"To bring people in of this calibre is a fantastic opportunity to advertise what paleontology is in this region," he said. "Bringing in these guests will raise awareness more than we could perhaps do in a lifetime."

Currie said he, too, was thrilled to have the high-profile guests at the site, in large part because he knows they will bring attention to the bonebed, the museum and paleontology.

He said he hopes increased attention to the site will also mean the area will continue to be studied for years.

"I think it's getting what it deserves now," he said. "We always knew that this was a very special site."

Although most of his excitement is reserved for the Pachyrhinosaurus, Currie said he was particularly excited to meet Dan Aykroyd.

"I am a big fan of The Blues Brothers and especially Ghostbusters," he said.

"It's pretty amazing we're going to be in the same room, never mind the same campground."

Did Giant Earth Fart Give Rise to the Dinosaurs?

Of all the headlines the International Business Times could have written, they chose to go with one that had "fart"? Sheesh!

From International Business Time: Did Giant Earth Fart Give Rise to the Dinosaurs?

A huge release of methane gas may have triggered the prehistoric mass extinctions that allowed dinosaurs to become the dominant life form on earth, according to a new study.

About 201 million years ago, half of known species vanished in an event that signaled the end of the Triassic period and created the lack of natural competition necessary for the ascendance of dinosaurs. The oldest known dinosaur fossiles date back Fto about 230 million years ago, but they do not take over until about 30 million years later

Scientists had attributed the mass extinctions to 600,000 years of rampant volcanic activity, but a team of researchers at the University of Copenhagen's Nordic Center for Earth Evolution develop that theory further by arguing that a surge in volcanic activity released methane trapped in the sea floor, sending temperatures soaring.

"A small release of carbon monoxide from volcanism initiated global warming of the atmosphere, increasing temperatures in the oceans," lead researcher Micha Ruhl told FoxNews.com. "Methane is stored in the sea floor -- it's a molecule which is caught in some kind of ice structure. As soon as the temperatures got above a certain threshold, the ice melted and that methane was released."

Ruhl and his team studied the chemical remains of plants that had lived on the ocean floor and found a dramatic spike in carbon levels that lasted for a much shorter time than the period of volcanic eruptions, suggesting a shorter, more intense release of methane gases. Methane is more powerful than the carbon monoxide released by the volcanoes, and could have created a period of intense warming.

Most of the methane on earth is trapped in soil and seabeds. Ruhl said that it is possible that sharply rising carbon dioxide levels caused by burning fossile fuels might free some of that methane, but he cautioned that conditions are too different today -- given, for example, the lack of glaciers in the Triassic period -- to speculate too much.

"We could potentially trigger a small increase in ocean temperatures, which triggers methane release," said Ruhl. "But it's difficult to quantify how much methane is in the ocean these days. Maybe we have less methane in seafloors now. Maybe we have more."

Thursday, July 21, 2011

New species of duck-billed dinosaur gives clues on evolution of their ornamentation

From Daily India.com: New species of duck-billed dinosaur gives clues on evolution of their ornamentation

Washington, July 21: A new species of the hadrosaur - the oldest duck-billed dinosaur known from North America has been discovered, and named by scientists.

The most striking feature of Acristavus gagslarsoni, the name given to the new dinosaur, is that its head lacked the distinctive ornamentation common to later duck-billed relatives. Acristavus means "non-crested grandfather." The genus name is symbolic of the animal's unadorned skull and the fact that it preceded later hadrosaurs.

All other hadrosaur fossils come with some kind of adornment on their skulls (with one exception from the end of the Cretaceous Period, the time just before the K-T extinction.) Ornamentation varied among hadrosaurs.

Some adornments were hollow and part of the creatures' breathing apparatus, whereas others were solid. Scientists speculate the crests played a role in species recognition where one species could tell another apart by unique embellishments.

The new fossil hints that the two different styles of hadrosaur headgear evolved independently from an ancestor that did not possess ornamentation.

Especially exciting is that the two fossils of the 79.3 million-year-old dinosaurs were discovered in different locations, suggesting that earlier species of duck-billed dinosaurs roamed over a much larger region of North America than their successors four million years later.

The study has been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Making a Home in a Dinosaur Egg

From Smithsonian.com: Making a Home in a Dinosaur Egg
Dinosaur eggs were wonderful things. For the dinosaurs, reproducing by laying eggs may have played an important role in why many species reached enormous sizes. And for the animals that fed on them, dinosaur eggs were tasty packages of protein. Early last year, for example, researchers announced the discovery of a prehistoric snake that probably crushed sauropod eggs to reach the dinosaur embryos inside. Now paleontologists Jorge Genise and Laura Sarzetti have proposed that wasps may have made the most of dinosaur eggs, too.

The Cretaceous rock of Argentina has yielded many dinosaur eggs. The egg at the center of the new study was part of a clutch found in rock dating between about 77 million and 67 million years ago. There were five spherical eggs altogether, but one was special. Cracked in half, the fossil preserved eight cocoons inside. These were delicate structures—the sort that could not be transported without damaging or destroying the cocoons—and so it seems that the association between the egg and cocoons is real and not attributable to some accident of preservation. Invertebrates had been using this dinosaur egg, but what sort of creatures, and why?

As reconstructed by Genise and Sarzetti, the cocoon-containing egg was probably broken by some kind of force which did not affect the other eggs in the clutch. (If the egg had been crushed during burial in sediment, for example, the other eggs in the clutch would have been similarly broken, yet they were not.) Exactly what cracked the egg is unknown, but as the paleontologists point out, the egg would have filled in with sediment while still decaying. This turned the egg into a food source and place where insect scavengers could burrow into the soil filling the structure.

Exactly what species of insect the cocoons belonged to is unknown, but the structure of the preserved cocoons most closely resembles that of wasp cocoons. This finding helps flesh out the story of what happened to the egg after it was crushed. The location and orientation of the cocoons seems to fit a pattern for parasitoid wasps that track down spiders and crickets in their own burrows, immobilize them, and then lay eggs on them. If correct, this means that the wasps were relatively late arrivals at the rotten dinosaur egg—the wasps were there to take advantage of the other invertebrates that had come to feed on and burrow into the impromptu home. Still, even though they did not directly feed on the dead dinosaur egg, the wasps would have been part of a prehistoric cleaning crew—a temporary ecosystem whose existence we now know of thanks to the chance preservation of a special egg.

References:
GENISE, J., & SARZETTI, L. (2011). Fossil cocoons associated with a dinosaur egg from Patagonia, Argentina Palaeontology, 54 (4), 815-823 DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2011.01064.x

Meteor Wiped Out Dinosaurs, New Fossil Finding Suggests

From Care2.com: Meteor Wiped Out Dinosaurs, New Fossil Finding Suggests
by Christina C.

Fourth grade in Mrs. Allio’s class was when I first learned about dinosaurs. We learned the different types (for some reason, I favored the Brontosaurus), what the ate, struggled to understand words like “Mesozoic” and “paleontology” memorized the various theories for why the dinosaurs became extinct: Had this happened gradually as temperatures grew warmer? as mammals developed and ate their eggs? Or had a massive meteor hit the earth and wiped the dinosaurs out?

A new finding in the fossil record provides physical evidence for the latter theory. Scientists have found the the fossilized horn of a ceratopsian — most likely of a Triceratops — that must have lived before the catastrophic meteor impact 65 million years ago. The finding lends weight to the asteroid impact theory, as it suggests that dinosaurs did not slowly die out, but became extinct prior to the impact.

The fossil was found in the in the Hell Creek formation in Montana, where other Triceratops fossils have been found. It was found just five inches below the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) layer, which is the geological layer that marks the boundary from the Cretaceous period to the Tertiary period 65 million years ago, which is the time the mass extinction of dinosaurs is dated. The discovery suggests that something called the “three-meter gap” — which has been used to support the theory that dinosaurs died out slowly before the meteor impact — does not exist, as noted in Science Daily:

Since the impact hypothesis for the demise of the dinosaurs was first proposed more than 30 years ago, many scientists have come to believe the meteor caused the mass extinction and wiped out the dinosaurs, but a sticking point has been an apparent lack of fossils buried within the 10 feet of rock below the K-T boundary. The seeming anomaly has come to be known as the “three-meter gap.” Until now, this gap has caused some paleontologists to question whether the non-avian dinosaurs of the era — which included Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Torosaurus and the duckbilled dinosaurs — gradually went extinct sometime before the meteor struck. (Avian dinosaurs survived the impact, and eventually gave rise to modern-day birds.)

As Yale graduate student Tyler Lyson, director of the Marmarth Research Foundation and lead author of the study, says,

“The fact that this specimen was so close to the boundary indicates that at least some dinosaurs were doing fine right up until the impact.”

Lyson and his team at first thought the specimen was buried within the K-T boundary by about three feet. Analysis of soil samples helped them to identify the exact location of the boundary, based on a “relative abundance of certain types of fossilized pollen and other geological indicators but is difficult to determine visually while in the field.” Previously, scientists had relied on a visual examination of the actual rock formations in the field to determine the boundary’s location; the soil analysis provides for a more precise sense of where the boundary is. Lyson and his team are now using similar soil analysis to examine other specimens found close to the K-T boundary. He now “suspects that other fossils discovered in the past may have been closer to the boundary than originally thought and that the so-called three-meter gap never existed.”

Which would mean, the non-avian dinosaurs did not go extinct prior to a meteor hitting the earth — or whatever happened 65 million years ago.

The study was published in the July 12 issue of Biology Letters.

Friday, July 15, 2011

T-Rex exhumed: Local dinosaur dig could be ‘huge find’


This article is from June 24, from the Lusk Herald. Lusk, in Wyoming, is where the T-Rex, that is now at the Tate Museum in Casper, was found.

T-Rex exhumed: Local dinosaur dig could be ‘huge find’
It’s looking to be an archeological find of a lifetime.

A small group of workers are dusting and digging up the remains of a Tyrannosaurus Rex on a ranch near Lusk. This find is one of about 50 T-rex skeletons ever found and could be one of the most complete. Casper College’s Tate Geological Museum field operations specialist J.P. Cavigelli discovered the remains.

Casper College director of museums Deanne Schaff said Cavigelli had been digging on a ranch near Lusk as he did every summer for six years when he came across the dinosaur.

“It’s pretty exciting,” Schaff said. “(Cavigelli) knew there was something there and waited until he had time to go back and dig, and he uncovered enough to realize they were T-rex bones.”

The crew started digging up the dinosaur, dubbed “Lee Rex.” Thus far, areas of the dinosaur’s mid-section, such as vertebrae, a femur and pelvis, have been uncovered. Schaff believes they may find a complete or nearly complete skeleton.

“It’s definitely proving to be the case so far,” Schaff added.

The crew is currently working in the softer dirt surrounding an 18-foot-long, eight-and-a-half foot wide slab of rock where the main part of the skeleton is believed to be. Once work in the softer soil is complete, workers will transport the stone to Casper College, where they will work for between two to four years to extract and restore the skeleton. Cavigelli believes since some of the dinosaur’s remains are embedded in rock, skin impressions may be found.

“Finding skin impressions would be a huge find and would put the Tate on the map,” he said in a statement.

The T-rex lived in the western states during the Cretaceous period between 65 and 67 million years ago, and has been found in Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana and possibly North Dakota. “Lee” is possibly the sixth specimen from Wyoming, not including isolated parts.

The site opened to visitors last Saturday, and will be open every Saturday until about mid-July, and possibly later if the dig continues. Those interested in visiting the site should meet at the Lady Bird Rest Area, two miles west of Lusk, at 10 a.m. A representative from the crew will meet visitors and lead them to the site. Visitors are advised to bring plenty of water, a hat, sunscreen, sunglasses, a camera and a sack lunch. Fossil collecting, pets, firearms and fireworks are prohibited.

For more information, call the Tate Geological Museum at 268-2447, or 800-442-2963.

The Paleon Project

The Paleon Musuem is a small dinosaur museum in Glen Rock, Wyoming, about a 2 and a half hour drive from where I live. I am going to start volunteering my time there. Whether I do it once a week, once every two weeks or once a month remains to be worked out (assuming I'm accepted as a volunteer, I haven't approached anyone in authority yet - I'm just saying I want to volunteer there.)

The Paleon Museum does restoration work on bones for Robert Bakker, and all the restorers are elderly women. Bakker calls them the "Bone Biddies". There's apparently a documentary about them that aired on PBS a few years ago - I'll have to find it.

In addition to the Paleon Museum, just about twenty minutes further up the road in Casper is the Tate Museum - which yesterday received shipment of a block of ....whatever they wrap dinosaur bones in these days - inside which are T-rex bones. So I'll be going up there frequently as well.

So - lots of current news from me should be coming in this blog in the days, weeks, months and years ahead.

Dynamosaurus: the first T. rex

From Trib.com: Dynamosaurus: the first T. rex
Remember that scene in "Jurassic Park?" The one where the cars won't start, when ripples in a glass of water alert the passengers that something is coming?

Something big. Something with eyes as big as tea saucers and teeth strong enough to pop the tires.

Well, had two pages been reversed in a 106-year-old scientific paper, Tyrannosaurus rex wouldn't have been stalking those kids and scientists. Dynamosaurus imperiosus would have.

Let's go back to the beginning.

In the fall of 1900, near Seven Mile Creek in Weston County, legendary paleontologist Barnum Brown should have been packing up camp and shipping his fossil finds to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Instead, he kept digging. The museum wanted a Triceratops skull to razzle and dazzle a public hungry for dinosaurs.

Barnum did find bones that October -- seven ribs, three vertebrae, a limb bone, parts of a pelvis, a lower jaw, 40 bones in all. But they weren't from a Triceratops, according to "Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex" by Lowell Dingus and Mark A. Norell.

Barnum had found a large carnivore, something new to science. He wrote a letter to his boss, Henry Fairfield Osborn: "... Among the bones were the teeth of Hadrosaur, Palaeoniscus, the most numerous a species undetermined, scales of fish and small bones -- all evidences of the animal's last meal." Barnum dug until a blizzard in November chased away his horses and he spent five days tracking them down.

Two years later, Barnum went to Montana and discovered another large carnivore.

Osborn described both specimens in his 1905 paper, "Tyrannosaurus and Other Cretaceous Carnivorous Dinosaurs," in the Bulletin of the AMNH . He described the Montana specimen on page 262, naming it Tyrannosaurus rex. He described the Wyoming specimen on page 263, and, believing that the bones came from two different types of dinosaurs, named the Wyoming find Dynamosaurus imperiosus (imperial powerful lizard).

By 1906, Osborn was convinced that the specimens were synonymous -- that is, they were parts of the same type. Protocol says that whichever name appears first in scientific papers is the proper name.

That's why it was T. rex's footsteps crashing through the jungle, making the water tremble. And why Tyrannosaurus rex is probably the only full scientific name recognized by children who can't yet read.

In "Dinosaur Heresies," paleontologist and "Jurassic Park" consultant Dr. Robert Bakker writes that a name like "Tryannosaurus rex is just irresistible to the tongue."

Would it be as irresistible if we knew the beast as D. imperiosus? One more question: Who wants to talk about how T. rex didn't live in the Jurassic, but the Cretaceous?

Thursday, July 14, 2011

T. rex specimen is a coup for Casper College's Tate Geological Museum

Trib.com: T. rex specimen is a coup for Casper College's Tate Geological Museum
LANCE CREEK -- Dwaine Wagoner has found tyrannosaurid bones before.

In 1997, he traveled with famed paleontologist Phil Currie, retracing the trail of the legendary Barnum Brown up the Red Deer River near Alberta, Canada. Brown, the man who discovered the first T. rex, took lousy notes, and the location of the Dry Island bone bed had been lost.

Brown's old photographs led the men to the site, which had produced the feet of several distinct specimens of Albertosaurus, a smaller version of a T. rex. Wagoner collected the first bone -- a toe -- from the quarry that would produce 13 more Albertasaurus specimens.

Wagoner later found six tyrannosaurid teeth along the same route, part of a fairly complete skull.

But on June 14, digging for a Tyrannosaurus rex north of Lusk, Wagoner's hole was empty. Cleanly dug, perfectly square, but empty.

"You got the square with the skull underneath," Wagoner said to fellow Tate Geological Museum volunteer Steve Pfaff, who was digging in the meter-square grid section beside him.

The Tate announced the discovery of the Tyrannosaurus rex specimen named Lee Rex in February, and the excitement has mounted since. Lee is the first T. rex specimen found in Wyoming in 13 years. Joining Dee the Mammoth, it could be another dinosaur-sized feather in the cap of the small museum at Casper College.

Within days of the announcement, more than 70 people volunteered to dig Lee out of the prairie. The discovery of two small cervical rib bones -- small bones behind the head that stick out of the neck vertebrae of most reptiles -- gave hope that a skull was buried nearby.

The first two days in the pit produced rock, scraposaurus, a tooth of a plant-eating dinosaur and more rock. Little of Lee Rex.

The crew had 28 days left, lots of time. But J.P. Cavigelli, the one who discovered the site, would have liked to see more actual bones. What they needed was a little of Wagoner's luck.

***

As he is -- encased in a rock 18 feet long and 8 feet wide -- Lee Rex already offers much to be excited about.

Every book you've read about T. rex, every movie you've seen, has been based on just about 50 discovered specimens, most of them in Montana, South Dakota and Canada. Lee is the seventh Tyrannosaurus rex unearthed in Wyoming, and none of those are more than 20 percent complete. That means, out of 300 or so bones in a full skeleton, the most found for a Wyoming specimen is 60 bones.

Lee will be the first T. rex that stays in Wyoming.

Cavigelli has so far counted 34 bones from Lee, most of them in the rock.

These kinds of rocks -- or concretions as paleontologists call them -- are where tissue is found, if there's any to find.

"There is potential for skin, maybe even the potential for muscle tissue or shapes of muscle around the bones," said Peter Larson, president and founder of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, S.D.

"We won't know until it comes out of the ground, is turned over and is being prepared."

Only one other specimen of T. rex has been found with skin, and it had just a dozen or so patches, none more than a few centimeters across, Larson said. Meat-eating dinosaur skin is rare, and these patches showed finely textured skin, like skin found between the toes of an emu. Scientists don't know if this pattern would have covered all of T. rex, or just bits of him.

Larson has unearthed eight T. rex specimens. He led the team that discovered Sue, the largest, most complete specimen ever found. The institute mounted Dee the Mammoth for the Tate, and Larson is proud of their association. He drove to Lusk to see Lee early last month.

"For a small museum, (the Tate has) found great fossils, and I expect more significant finds from them," he said.

On Friday, Lee's rock -- all 5,000 or so pounds of it -- will be packed with foam, hoisted, boxed and trucked to the Tate. With, 1,000 pounds of plaster already laid down and 4,000 pounds of steel for the frame, the cargo will weigh 10,000 pounds, give or take a ton.

"Everybody's going to be waiting with bated breath to see what happens on the other side of that concretion," Larson said.

Then, Tate crews will flip it over and begin looking at the secrets hidden inside.

***

Lee Rex is 35 to 40 feet long, and "18 of them are here," Cavigelli said, pointing to the rock during an in-the-field pep talk. His long dark hair had been braided into a couple dozen strands, easier to manage at a dusty dig site.

"It's pretty cool articulation, so let's keep going. If things go really, really well, we'll find another rock over here with the front half.

"We could be done in a week!"

Cavigelli considers himself a mammal man, but Lee is a big find for him.

He grew up in the suburbs of Boston and studied biology in college. On a break, he studied prairie dogs from February to June at Wind Cave in South Dakota. He went to Badlands on a day off and found the skull of an oreodont, a sheep-sized mammal that lived around 30 million years ago.

"It was beautiful," he said. And he was hooked.

Cavigelli finished his biology degree, but built his career around fossils, digging here and abroad. He developed a reputation for his skills in fossil preparation.

Cavigelli went to work for the Tate in 2004. He discovered Lee in 2005, though he didn't know it was Tyrannosaurus until 2010.

Lee is not his first T. rex.

In 1997, he was working in Laramie when a Montana colleague called. They needed someone to clean the fossils of Peck's Rex, now on display at Fort Peck Interpretive Center in Montana.

"It's an impressive animal," Cavigelli said. "As much as I say I'm not too fond of dinosaurs -- there are so many other interesting fossil remains out there -- a mounted T. rex is pretty darn cool."

***

T. rexes are formidable animals. The public pays attention. Attention brings donations, donations lead to grants, and grants pay for more discoveries in the field.

The Tate's purpose is to bring people into paleontology, said curator Kent A. Sundell, also head of the Casper College geology department.

Dee the Mammoth did that. He hopes Lee Rex will too.

On July 2, a caravan 15 cars long drove through Lusk and along an hour's worth of gravel roads. It was Visitors Day and 47 people showed up, almost double the number who came the previous two Saturdays the site opened to spectators.

Darrell Lake of Denver was driving his kids, Mackenzie and Conner, to Mount Rushmore when he heard about Lee. They spent the night in Lusk and happened to meet Steve Pfaff, Cavigelli's right-hand man, at the hotel's breakfast nook.

What are you doing for the Fourth? Lake asked.

I'm digging a T. rex, Pfaff answered. Lake joined the caravan.

"How's that for fortune?" Lake said.

"Who wouldn't want to see a T. rex, as long as they aren't alive?"

The pit was hardly recognizable after three weeks of digging. The sagebrush and cactus were removed, a black widow with an egg sac relocated, a rattlesnake killed. The hole was chest deep instead of shin deep.

Lee's rock, covered with plaster, gleamed snow white even from a mile or so away.

Few new bones had been uncovered, but the visitors crowded around the hole to see anyway.

"Hi, I'm J.P.," Cavigelli announced into the microphone. "Where you are standing is often referred to as ‘The Middle of Nowhere.'"

In the late Cretaceous, when Lee used his binocular-like vision to spot his dinner, big Mississippi-sized rivers flowed slowly through the area. There was an ocean 100 to 200 miles to the east, growing mountain chains to the west.

For whatever reason, Lee fell down dead. A flood probably caught him and moved him, "floated and bloated, as we like to say," until he lodged against a natural levy, Sundell told the crowd. Debris covered Lee Rex. He might have stayed lodged there for 10 years, maybe 100, sloughing off bones laterally.

That's why more aren't sitting there next to the rock, waiting to be uncovered, Sundell said.

It means crews will just have to dig farther and farther out, until nothing new is discovered.

"Do you think the skull is nearby?" A visitor asked.

"Ah!" Cavigelli answered. The million-dollar question.

"I was hoping the skull would be in this area," he said, pointing to a wide hole in the pit, near the discovery of the two cervical ribs, those small neck bones close to the head. But no skull bones have been found there.

"We hope it's nearer by than farther by," Cavigelli said.

Sundell hopes Lee's head hit the levy first and, under the weight of its massive body, snapped off at the neck. That would mean the skull could be on the underside of that rock.

Not so pleasant for Lee. Awesome for those who'd like to see the king of the dinosaurs sneering at us from the Tate's showroom.

Explore 'Dinoshore': Showboat exhibit features dinosaur bones

Press of Atlantic City: Explore 'Dinoshore': Showboat exhibit features dinosaur bones

http://www.showboatac.com/casinos/showboat-atlantic-city/hotel-casino/property-home.shtml
By VERONICA DUDO, For At The Shore pressofAtlanticCity.com | 0 comments

Dinosaurs have hit the shore and are taking guests on a wild ride through history. Debuting Sunday, July 17, at the Showboat Casino-Hotel in Atlantic City, Dinoshore will take patrons back in time for an ancient adventure featuring full-size robotic dinosaurs, molds of prehistoric skeletons and 250-million-year-old dinosaur bones.

"It's fascinating to think that they haven't been here in 65 million years and some of these bones are as old as 250 million years," says Lou Scheinfeld, president of Science & Entertainment Strategies, the company producing the show.

This summer, guests will have the opportunity to check out dozens of Earth's earliest inhabitants, such as the Triceratops, Megalodon and Nanotyrannus. Scheinfeld says the massive creatures from the ancient world will captivate and delight visitors.

"I think people will be amazed because not only is it fun, but it's educational, it's something the whole family can go to. When we put it on in other cities, we found it doesn't matter who you were, what color you were, how old you were, what your educational background was - everybody was fascinated by dinosaurs because these things lived and some of these things you can actually touch."

Joe Domenico, senior vice president and general manager of Showboat and Bally's Atlantic City, says his property was interested in bringing Dinoshore to the casino because it appeals to a variety of customers.

"It's going to be pretty neat for families and everyone of all ages that garner an appreciation of history," he says.

The event will run daily through Labor Day. Other attractions on display include prehistoric eggs and babies, flying reptiles, a Tyrannosaurus Rex attack scene and a special sea exhibit.

"We also have something called Savages of the Seas. These are dinosaurs that swam," Scheinfeld says. "We don't have the full-size ones but some of them were 10 times the size of a Great White Shark, just huge, huge dinosaurs that were predators that swam. We have some smaller ones, we have a huge prehistoric sea turtle that right now we're planning to hang from the ceiling and it's just as big as a Volkswagen."

The highlight of the exhibit is the display revealing the "feathered" dinosaurs, known as the Deinonychus and Pterorhynchus. Scheinfeld says the winged creatures continue to spark theories that modern-day birds evolving from these feathered dinosaurs.

"No one really knows what happened to them," Scheinfeld says of the winged dinosaurs. "There's a lot of theories. ... We have an amazing display of these feathered dinosaurs. One of them is 14 feet high (and) quite menacing looking."

As guests explore the paleontology fine arts, children can participate in the Fossil Dig, which has fossils hidden at the bottom of the sand for kids to discover. Scheinfeld says the interactive exhibit also features special robotic dinosaurs, which create a unique atmosphere at the show.

"We have some animatronics that growl and move," he says. "Some are huge, some are little."

Although gaming is the major focus of the resort, Atlantic City is making efforts to become a true destination. Domenico says events like Dinoshore are ways to introduce new customers to the city.

WHEN: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, Sunday, July 17, through Labor Day.

WHERE: Showboat Casino-Hotel, 801 Boardwalk, Atlantic City

HOW MUCH: $15.50 adults, $10.50 seniors and kids younger than 12; $7.50 for groups of 10 or more. Family packs $42.

Reporter meant *suspect*, not *culprit*....

Christian Science Monitor: Last known dinosaur: Fossil find suggests meteor caused extinction
A dinosaur horn is now pointing to a catastrophic end for the Age of Dinosaurs, not a gradual one as some researchers have claimed.

The leading culprit [no - the leading suspect. No one knows for sure, therefore the use of the word culprit is misleading!] for the end of the Age of Dinosaurs is a catastrophic meteor strike about 65 million years ago. Although it is now widely accepted that a cosmic impact took place about then — a time known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T boundary — it was unclear if the mass extinctions started gradually before the hit, perhaps due to volcanoes or other factors.

Helping drive this controversy was a zone spanning 10 feet (3 meters) wide in the earth right below the K-T boundary that purportedly lacked dinosaur fossils. A number of scientists have claimed this gap, seen in the western interior of North America, was evidence that dinosaurs might have died off well before any impact. Other researchers have contested the notion, suggesting this layer only appeared devoid of fossils because fossils can get easily destroyed over millions of years. Also, the placement of the K-T boundary can be uncertain, meaning that dinosaurs might have actually been found in this zone before but not reported as such. [Image Gallery: Dinosaur Fossils]

Now scientists have discovered a fossil in this supposedly barren zone — a dinosaur horn no more than 5 inches (13 centimeters) below the impact layer, making it the specimen closest to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs found yet. The horn, nearly 18 inches (45 cm) long, most likely belonged to a Triceratops, the most common dinosaur in the layer of rock in which it was found last year, called the Hell Creek Formation of southeastern Montana.

Just because "we have one dinosaur in the gap doesn't necessarily falsify the idea that dinosaurs were gradually declining in numbers," researcher Tyler Lyson, a vertebrate paleontologist at Yale University, told LiveScience. "However, this find indicates that at least some dinosaurs were doing fine right up to the K-T boundary."

"We need to do more field work to find more dinosaurs within the 3-meter gap," Lyson said. "I'm confident that with more field work, we will find more dinosaurs within this interval."

The scientists detail their findings July 13 in the journal Biology Letters.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Singapore museum raises funds to buy three dinosaur fossils

Xinhuanet.com: Singapore museum raises funds to buy three dinosaur fossils
SINGAPORE, July 10 (Xinhua) -- The upcoming Natural History Museum in Singapore launched a drive on Sunday to raise 12 million Singapore dollars (9.8 million U.S. dollars) by the end of the month to buy three dinosaur fossils from a company in Wyoming, the United States.

The three dinosaurs on offer from the company Dinosauria International, thought to be a family, were found between 2007 and last year in the United States, the Straits Times reported on Sunday.

Appollo and Prince, the two adult diplodocid sauropods, is about 24 meters long, while the baby Twinky is about 12 meters.

The natural history museum is expected to be completed by 2014. The three dinosaur fossils will cost 870 million Singapore dollars, and an additional 370 million Singapore dollars will be spent to set up the exhibition.

"They wanted the museum to tell the story of the history of life and evolution. Dinosaurs are the history of life," said Professor Peter Ng, director of the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, referring to the approval from the scientific advisory committee for the acquisition.

The Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research of the National University of Singapore went on an intensive fund raising campaign last year to build the dedicated Natural History Museum.

The museum said it has found the amount to be challenging. It is therefore appealing for help from the public through the media.

"The idea was always to have a central gallery and put something there that would make people go 'Whoa!,'" said Ng.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Style gets serious; the social life of dinosaurs

From SouthCoastToday: Style gets serious; the social life of dinosaurs
By Kevin McDonough

A challenging combination of high fashion and personal tragedy, “Baring it All” (9 p.m., Saturday, Style) is the first of several thought-provoking documentaries from the network best known for “Clean House.”

“Baring it All” follows fashion photographer David Jay, who began a photographic series, “The Scar Project,” to draw attention to breast cancer survivors in their 20s and 30s. At a time when most of their contemporaries were still carefree, these women received a life-altering diagnosis, followed by treatments that robbed them of their hair, their breasts and much of their sense of vitality and femininity.

Jay has gone on to photograph women in various states of their treatment and recovery, offering stark, unforgettable images of powerful, resilient women who refuse to become invisible victims.

– What's scarier than a dinosaur? Dinosaurs! Lots of them. The special “Dino Gangs” (8 p.m., Saturday, Discovery) blends expert paleontology and computer animation to speculate on the social lives of giant reptiles and the dire implication of cold-blooded monsters joining forces for the kill.

We tend to think of dinosaurs as solitary creatures because so many of their skeletons have been found alone. Paleontologist Phil Currie combed the dinosaur boneyards of the Gobi Desert to discover the mingled remains of 90 Tarbosaurus. Using computer graphics and 3-D modeling, he shares his theories on how they might have lived, roamed and killed as a social organization.

– Combining computer graphics and live-action performances, “A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner!” (8 p.m., Saturday, Nickelodeon) celebrates the series' 10th anniversary. It features network regulars Drake Bell (“Drake & Josh”) and Daniella Monet (“Victorious”) as it explores the not-so grown-up life of 23-year-old Timmy Turner (Bell), who just can't let the fairy godparents go. Perhaps he should just watch “Toy Story 3” for some pointers.

– A cause for celebration for many, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (10 p.m., Sunday, HBO, TV-MA) returns for its eighth season. As we've come to expect from this series and the “Seinfeld” series that “Curb” star Larry David co-created, the comedy here is all about radical selfishness taken to absurd extremes. And if a theme emerges from these brilliantly small, tightly written minuets of pure silliness, it's that selfish pursuits can sometimes result in moments of nobility -- no matter how unintended.

In an upcoming episode, Larry and his sidekick manager Jeff Garlin develop a taste for Palestinian chicken sold at a restaurant festooned with posters condemning Israel. Torn between his appetites and his ethnic loyalties, Larry ups the ante and embarks on a wild affair with an anti-Semitic Palestinian waitress.

Not to give too much away, but he ends up torn between his new lover and his gang of friends, who join a noisy mob protesting the right of a Palestinian chicken joint to open up next to the “sacred ground” of a Jewish deli. However slight the story, this clearly echoes recent efforts in New York to keep a mosque from opening near the site of the old World Trade Center. Just as “Seinfeld” could turn issues as thorny as abortion into pure comedy, “Curb” manages to blend the ridiculous and profound in ways that will leave you breathless from laughing and amazed that comedy so petty could also be so audacious. And we expect no less from the mind of Larry David.

– The new series “The Indestructibles” (10 p.m., Sunday, National Geographic) revisits news footage of horrific accidents and offers theories about how some victims survived. First up: the crash of a local news helicopter on a Brooklyn roof.

West Coast's Largest Dino Hall to Open in LA

NBC Los Angeles: West Coast's Largest Dino Hall to Open in LA
Los Angeles Natural History Museum will unveil Dinosaur Hall, the west coast's largest dinosaur exhibit featuring a 70 percent complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, one of the 10 most complete specimens in the world.

Unfortunately it's on July 16, right in the middle of Carmageddon.

Situated evenly between the 110 and 10 freeways, the Natural History Museum may have to compete for visitors with snarled roads from the 405 weekend closure, but they see a silver lining.

"We're not too bummed because it's a permanent exhibit," said Kristin Friedrich, director of communications for the museum. "We're going to post alternate routes on our site and suggest people come at us from the east."

The 14,000 square-foot Dinosaur Hall exhibit, twice as large as the museum's last dinosaur installation, is expected to draw enough visitors that the museum has established a reservation policy.

Visitors are not asked for additional fees but they are required to sign up for a specific time to view the specimens. The hall's capacity is about 800 visitors per hour.

"We don't want any bottlenecks or crowds," Friedrich said. "We want visitors to enjoy their experience."

The first three and a half hours of the hall's opening are booked so far, with 2,800 tickets already reserved.

The exhibit has taken five years to complete and its creators spanned the globe to gather its specimens. The most anticipated of which is a Tyrannosaurus rex, named Thomas, whose construction was performed in public through a lab visible from the former exhibit and still contained in the new one.

It took a team at the Dinosaur Institute three summers to transport the fossils from Montana after an amateur fossil hunter discovered what he thought might be a T-rex bone.

"He called a museum in Montana but they weren't interested, so he called us," Friedrich said. "We knew it was a T-rex, but we didn't know it would be a super awesome T-rex."

Thomas, whose piecing together began in 2008, is one of the top 10 most complete T-rex specimens ever found. A rare 70 percent of his skeleton has been found, with the remaining 30 percent sculpted from casts of existing fossils.

"The number one question we get is, 'Is this real?'" Friedrich said. "The majority of what we have is real. To see these 65 million year old bones in front of you is trippy."

She added that the museum remounted its specimens on platforms that allow visitors to get close enough to the bones that changes in hue and scratches from tectonic movement is visible.

Friedrich said the exhibit's construction, including colorful murals that display four major questions about the history of dinosaurs and summarize portions of the exhibit, caters to day-tripping moms as well as serious museum goers.

"A stroller mom can glean the main ideas (from the murals) and we now have interactive touch screen stations that allow users to excavate fossils and see the behind the scenes science of paleontology," she said.

The thirst for knowledge and education has played a major role in the creation of LA's major dinosaur exhibit, Friedrich said.

"Kids come through our museum and they know more about dinosaurs than their parents," she said. "We were missing a proper hall."

New US exhibit probes dinosaur mysteries

GoogleNews: New US exhibit probes dinosaur mysteries
LOS ANGELES — Dinosaurs have captivated the public for decades, but a new US exhibit aims to show that there is still much about the giant reptiles that baffles experts and amateurs alike.

The 1,300 square meter (14,000 square foot) gallery at the Los Angeles natural history museum is set to open on July 16 and is seen as an important step in upgrading the museum ahead of its 100th anniversary in 2013.

The gallery will feature some 300 fossils and 20 skeletons accompanied by detailed signs explaining some of the questions experts wrestle with, like what dinosaurs ate, how they reproduced and why they disappeared.

"The emphasis (is) on how do we know what we know," chief curator Luis Chiappe, who heads the museum's dinosaur institute, told AFP.

"It's the nature of science. We know a lot about dinosaurs, but we also don't know a lot about them."

The exhibit -- which uses the specimens to illustrate how scientists pose questions and sometimes answer them -- is in part aimed at instilling wonder in visitors who have grown up watching dinosaurs on television and in movies.

"When you turn on the television and you watch some of the dinosaurs documentaries, they make you feel as if we knew everything about that, and that's not the case. There is so much that we need to discover," Chiappe said.

The gallery includes several large specimens, including a group of three skeletons of Tyrannosaurus rex -- the feared giant carnivore from Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" -- at different ages.

The skeleton of a two-year-old T. rex -- believed to be the youngest specimen in the world -- is mostly a reconstruction, as all that was found were parts of the skull.

But the oldest in the group is "Thomas," one of the most complete T. rex skeletons in the world.

The gallery also features a horned Triceratops, a plate-backed Stegosaurus, and a Carnotaur -- a ferocious-looking carnivore only found in Argentina -- as well as prehistoric marine life from the time when oceans covered California.

"This is an excellent and incredibly dynamic period for the study of dinosaurs," Chiappe said.

"Not only we are finding spectacular dinosaurs in many places... it's a period in which we are experimenting a lot with modern technologies that are allowing us to learn a lot more about dinosaurs."

Alongside the popular giant dinosaurs the gallery also includes some smaller creatures like Fruitadens haagarorum, which resembles a T. rex but was not much larger than a housecat.

The little dinosaur was found in the western state of Colorado in the early 1970s, and the Los Angeles museum houses the only known specimens.

With such a diversity of species, Chiappe says it is easy to see why the long-extinct creatures are still so popular.

He says we are fascinated by "their enormous size, their weirdness, the fact that animals like these ones were alive, walked right there, in our own backyard in a way, millions of years ago."

"The fact that they're not animals that live in our imagination -- they are real animals, and yet they were almost magical because of their appearance -- all this makes them very popular," he said.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Burpee group finds new dinosaur

13 WREX (Rockford, IL): Burpee group finds new dinosaur
It looks like Jane and Homer will have a new friend to keep them company at the Burpee Museum.

A group from Rockford's Burpee Museum are exploring in Utah. Joe Mongan is one of the people on this trip, he's been volunteering on expeditions for Burpee for five years. He uncovered dozens of new bones that belong to a juvenile Diplodocus. That includes an upper arm bone, shoulder blade, hip material, about 15 chest ribs, the lower leg bones and other pieces of the neck back and tail. Based on the size of the dinosaur, expedition crews think the animal was probably around 30 to 35 feet long. The find is about 40% complete and the bones are in good condition. That'll allow Burpee fossil experts to clean them and eventually mount them for exhibit. Crews are calling this new find, Jimmy.

Another group of explorers will leave for expeditions in Montana at the end of July and in August. If you're interested in going along, call the Burpee Museum (815) 965-3433.

Holes in fossil bones reveal dinosaur activity

Holes in fossil bones reveal dinosaur activity
New research from the University of Adelaide has added to the debate about whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded and sluggish or warm-blooded and active.

Professor Roger Seymour from the University's School of Earth & Environmental Sciences has applied the latest theories of human and animal anatomy and physiology to provide insight into the lives of dinosaurs. The results will be published this month in Proceedings B, the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences), and can now be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2011.0968

Human thigh bones have tiny holes – known as the 'nutrient foramen' – on the shaft that supply blood to living bone cells inside. New research has shown that the size of those holes is related to the maximum rate that a person can be active during aerobic exercise. Professor Seymour has used this principle to evaluate the activity levels of dinosaurs.

"Far from being lifeless, bone cells have a relatively high metabolic rate and they therefore require a large blood supply to deliver oxygen. On the inside of the bone, the blood supply comes usually from a single artery and vein that pass through a hole on the shaft – the nutrient foramen," he says.

Professor Seymour wondered whether the size of the nutrient foramen might indicate how much blood was necessary to keep the bones in good repair. For example, highly active animals might cause more bone 'microfractures', requiring more frequent repairs by the bone cells and therefore a greater blood supply.

"My aim was to see whether we could use fossil bones of dinosaurs to indicate the level of bone metabolic rate and possibly extend it to the whole body's metabolic rate," he says. "One of the big controversies among paleobiologists is whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded and sluggish or warm-blooded and active. Could the size of the foramen be a possible gauge for dinosaur metabolic rate?"

Comparisons were made with the sizes of the holes in living mammals and reptiles, and their metabolic rates. Measuring mammals ranging from mice to elephants, and reptiles from lizards to crocodiles, one of Professor Seymour's Honours students, Sarah Smith, combed the collections of Australian museums, photographing and measuring hundreds of tiny holes in thigh bones.

"The results were unequivocal. The sizes of the holes were related closely to the maximum metabolic rates during peak movement in mammals and reptiles," Professor Seymour says. "The holes found in mammals were about 10 times larger than those in reptiles."

These holes were compared to those of fossil dinosaurs. Dr Don Henderson, Curator of Dinosaurs from the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, and Daniela Schwarz-Wings from the Museum für Naturkunde and Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, measured the holes in 10 species of dinosaur from five different groups, including bipedal and quadrupedal carnivores and herbivores, weighing 50kg to 20,000kg.

"On a relative comparison to eliminate the differences in body size, all of the dinosaurs had holes in their thigh bones larger than those of mammals," Professor Seymour says.

"The dinosaurs appeared to be even more active than the mammals. We certainly didn't expect to see that. These results provide additional weight to theories that dinosaurs were warm-blooded and highly active creatures, rather than cold-blooded and sluggish."

Professor Seymour says following the results of this study, it's likely that a simple measurement of foramen size could be used to evaluate maximum activity levels in other vertebrate animal groups, both living and fossils.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Tyrannosaurus rex trio headline new LA museum show

Google news: Tyrannosaurus rex trio headline new LA museum show


LOS ANGELES (AP) — A trio of Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons is the main attraction in the new Dinosaur Hall at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles.

The exhibit opens July 16.

The three T's include an 11-foot-tall 2-year-old, the youngest known T fossil in the world.

A 20-foot-tall 13-year-old T weighed about 4,000 pounds when it died. Thomas is the oldest at 17 and was 34 feet long and weighed nearly 7,000 pounds. It is about 70 percent complete and has never been on exhibit before.

All three fossils were found in the badlands of Montana.

Three hundred fossils and 17 other dinosaur skeletons will be on display in the hall, which nearly doubles the museum's dinosaur display space.

Admission ranges from $5 to $12. Members and children under 4 are free.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

UT campaign aims to save dinosaur tracks

Statesman.com: UT campaign aims to save dinosaur tracks
Let's face it: Dinosaurs are old news. So millions of years ago. And therein lies the fascination.

Consider that along an ancient sea near present-day Fort Worth, two behemoth beasts, tipping the scales at a combined 26 tons or so, tramped through coastal mud, leaving enormous tracks — now celebrated around the world — and a dinosaur mystery that endures 112 million years later.

Housed in a small building outside the Texas Memorial Museum on the University of Texas campus, the fossilized tracks tell us that one dinosaur, a three-toed meat-eater, stepped inside the footprints of the other, a much larger plant-eater. From the impressions, scientists know they made the prints roughly around the same time.

Was the meat-eater stalking the other? Were they doing a prehistoric Texas two-step?

"We've got just enough of the story to spark a lot of questions," said Ed Theriot, director of the Texas Natural Science Center, which encompasses the museum and research labs and collections at the Pickle Research Campus.

The tracks are gems because they are considered among the best-preserved ever found and because they include the first sauropod (plant-eater) tracks to be documented. But they are deteriorating. A new $1 million science center fundraising campaign aims to save them and move them inside the museum.

Known as the Glen Rose Dinosaur Tracks — for the present-day location about 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth where they were discovered in 1940 — the imprints aren't so much showing their age as they are showing the effects of the conditions in which they have been housed for 70 years.

Because the building that contains the tracks isn't air-conditioned, nor suited for their preservation, moisture equivalent to seven gallons of water a day percolates through the trackway rocks, Theriot said. The moisture and fluctuating humidity are weakening the stone, causing flaking and crumbling.

In 2009, experts determined that the tracks lay on a cracked slab of cement that wasn't reinforced and lacked a moisture barrier between the trackway stone and the ground.

"We want to keep it from becoming a catastrophe," Theriot said. "There's obviously problems."

The science center wants "to go Cadillac on this," Theriot said, not just solve short-term problems. If the campaign raises $1 million, the center intends to remove the rocks — actually, there are some 400 pieces that make up the trackway — clean the plaster that holds them together and chemically treat, reassemble and move them into a climate-controlled exhibit space inside the museum. There they can be preserved, better seen and used for education, Theriot said.

According to the science center, more than 85,000 people visit the museum's exhibit hall each year, including 40,000 schoolchildren.

In its current location — a stone building with a small sign — the roughly 12-by-36-foot trackway can be seen through a glass front wall at about a 30-degree angle for most people, worse for children. Were it not for the sign inside, which briefly tells the dinosaurs' saga, the tracks could appear to be merely dirt holes.

But "you can read that (sign) a hundred times" and not fully appreciate the story the tracks tell — of the dinosaurs' behavior, their paths, the length of their strides and the size of their tracks, Theriot said. "Between the glare, the diffuse lighting, the angle and the (window) thumbprints and palm prints, you just don't get the impact."

The science center wants to display the tracks at a strongly tilted angle, affording everyone, including children, a better view.

Theriot said he could find no documentation explaining why the current site was chosen but noted that these were among the first sets of tracks of their kind ever found, and there likely was no real practical experience on which to base a decision.

"It would not be unreasonable to assume that footprints safe in the ground for 100 million years would be OK for a long, long time placed on top of the ground and in a covered building," he said.

Debra Warren, who with her sons Brandon, 10, and Logan, 7, traveled recently from Spring Branch to visit the museum, said she didn't know of the Glen Rose exhibit and only stumbled upon it, nor did she know that the tracks were deteriorating. She agreed that having the exhibit inside the museum would allow more people to appreciate the tracks.

"Unless the glass is kept in immaculate condition, you wouldn't get as great a view as you would" in the museum, Warren said.

Still, she and her sons thought the prints were phenomenal.

"It was a pleasant surprise," Warren said.

The prints befit what one would imagine from a sauropod dinosaur that scientists think was about 60 feet long and a therapod that was probably 30 feet long. Their strides were 9 to 10 feet long.

So, was the meat-eater stalking prey?

"The therapod is the predator in this ecosystem, so perhaps it was," said Pamela Owen, a paleontologist with the science center. "You do have that potential interaction because of that small amount of time (when the therapod and the sauropod left the tracks). That's the closest we're really going to get in getting some behavioral information."

Sunday, July 3, 2011

New Jersey fossil dig endangered by development plan

Reuters.com: New Jersey fossil dig endangered by development plan


(Reuters) - Paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara is looking deep in a New Jersey silt mine for the exact moment, 65 million years ago, when all dinosaurs perished.

That secret could be harder to uncover if the fossils here can no longer be unearthed after a housing and retail development is built on this open pit.

Lacovara, an associate professor of biology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, looks at this 40-foot deep hole at the end of a dirt road and sees a line in the sand where the Cretaceous period begins and ends. Below that line are dinosaurs, above it, not a single one.

He thinks that the creatures his team has been uncovering here all died en masse when a meteor struck the earth and changed the course of geologic history. If his theory proves correct, it would be the only burial ground of its kind and provide scientists with a living laboratory to study how the dinosaurs became extinct.

New Jersey is the birthplace of dinosaur paleontology. The first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton ever discovered was a Hadrosauraus found in Haddonfield in 1858. But over the years, the numerous silt mines that made for great dinosaur digging were replaced with housing developments and strip malls.

Today, this site in a southwestern corner of the state is the only remaining mine for greensand, a silt used for fertilizer and water softener. It's also the only access to the late Cretaceous period on the entire eastern seaboard.

Scientists have been digging here for nearly a century, uncovering prehistoric sharks, crocodiles and even saber tooth herring. Two weeks ago, the team uncovered an 800-pound sea turtle estimated to be 65 million years old.

"This site is the last existing window into the ancient Cretaceous period in the eastern half of the United States. It's extraordinary," said Lacovara, who recently discovered a new species of dinosaur in Patagonia that is believed to be the second largest dinosaur ever found.

But the township of Mantua, a community of 15,000 people, has other plans for the site. Township officials would like to see the mine closed and a retail and lower cost housing development built in its place. A developer has drawn up plans that include shops and affordable housing.

At a meeting scheduled for July 15, they will discuss, among other things, the historic nature of the site and steps toward development.

Inversand, the mine's owner, has been operating the site since 1926, digging greensand. For years, the company has had a close relationship with paleontologists, alerting them when they came across large fossils.

"If we find something beyond the routine shark tooth or clam, we call them up," said Inversand president Alan Davis.

The biggest find he recalls happened in the 1960s, when workers came across the skull of a Mosasaurus, a giant sea lizard, that now resides at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton.

Mining for greensand is no longer economically viable for Inversand and the company would like to end operations. If the mine were to shut down and the pump that continuously clears groundwater out of the area were to turn off, the hole would completely fill with water in a matter of weeks, transforming it into a lake. Davis says the mine could shut within three years.

Facing a looming deadline, Lacovara and his team have stepped up their efforts to dig, applying for grants and enlisting students and amateur paleontologists to shovel the gray, muddy sand for pieces of natural history.

"I love it. It's instant gratification," said Aja Carter, a freshman at Drexel University, who was volunteering at the site. She recently found a shark vertebra.

The scientists worry that without this pit, they'll lose a historic treasure trove.

"It will be devastating. It will be the end of an era for so many different reasons," said Jason Schein, assistant curator of natural history at the state museum and one of the lead scientists on the dig.

"Every season we find things here that are new to science."