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Monday, March 7, 2011

Englishman hunts dinosaurs for hobby

SFGate: Englishman hunts dinosaurs for hobby
Last week, Mike Taylor identified a new dinosaur called Brontomerus mcintoshi, a sauropod with uncommonly large, powerful thighs.

It is the second dinosaur he has named in five years and his 13th paleontology publication.

That would be impressive, although not unusual, for a hardworking full-time paleontologist. But Mike Taylor is a 42-year-old British computer programmer who writes code for a living in a quaint English village called Ruardean.

Hunting for dinosaurs is merely a hobby, albeit one he pursues seriously.

One day 10 years ago, while reading a paleontology paper on a long plane trip, he had an epiphany.

"I thought, well, blimey, I could do better than that," he said. "And then I decided, why shouldn't I? What's stopping me?"

His childhood interest in dinosaurs was rekindled in 2000, and he got hold of classic books like "The Dinosaur Heresies," "The Complete Dinosaur" and the "Dinosaur Encyclopedia." He amassed a collection of paleontology journals and studied them with the intensity of a graduate student.

Taylor, whose numerous papers earned him a formal doctorate in paleontology in 2009 from the University of Portsmouth, is not alone in his love for dinosaurs. The public has long had a fascination for the magnificent creatures that lived millions of years ago, some dwarfing elephants in size.

"There are many dino fan boys out there," Taylor said. "And I was just another one of them."

His latest discovery, Brontomerus mcintoshi, is named after John McIntosh, one other such "fan boy."

McIntosh spent his career as a physics professor at Wesleyan. He spent his spare hours poring over bones in museums around the world. And when he retired 20 years ago, he devoted himself to the study of sauropods, the order of large, plant-eating dinosaurs that Taylor also favors.

Over the course of more than 30 years, McIntosh made major contributions to the field, writing many papers and several books. In 1979, he helped prove that paleontologists had mounted the wrong head on a sauropod named apatosaurus. "Even a minor paleontologist can make a major contribution," Taylor said.

Other scientific disciplines, like physics and genetics, require fancy equipment, large labs and major funding. Although paleontology has come to depend more and more on CT scans and even molecular analyses, it still has plenty of room for the time-honored pursuit of puzzling through bones and piecing them together.

"You just need a decent camera, a little time and money to travel to museums, some experience, a good eye," said Nicholas Longrich, a paleontologist at Yale. "It's still hard - not just anybody can do it - but the barrier to entry is a lot lower than for other fields."

Taylor has not participated in an excavation, instead choosing to study the scores of unnamed fossils that are collecting dust in the basements of museums. He takes pictures from many angles and makes detailed measurements that he studies.

"Given the limited time I have available for paleo, conferences and museum visits are more important," he said.

His first discovery, a bone belonging to an elephant-size herbivorous dinosaur called xenoposeidon, was excavated in the early 1890s. It was acquired by the Natural History Museum in London and remained unidentified until Taylor began studying it.

And the dinosaur he recently named was found at a site in Utah in 1995 and housed in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, unidentified.

"Our museums are chock-full of things that have never been studied, or explained at all," said Mathew Wedel, a paleontologist and anatomist at Western University of Health Sciences and Taylor's co-author on the Brontomerus paper.

He and Taylor became pen pals 10 years ago, when Taylor sent him an e-mail about one of his publications.

They then began brainstorming and sharing ideas. The two are now best friends and usually meet about once a year at paleontology conferences and museums to collaborate.

Could today's plants and animals go the way of dinosaurs? New study says yes

Medill Reports: Could today's plants and animals go the way of dinosaurs? New study says yes
by Michelle M. Schaefer
March 04, 2011


The Earth may be on the verge of a sixth mass extinction, a new study finds. That means more than 75 percent of the world’s creatures could disappear in as little as 300 years.

The cause for this Armageddon isn’t an asteroid, believed to have driven the dinosaurs to extinction 65 million years ago. Human land use and climate change are directly to blame, according to study researchers.

“What we discovered is both good news and bad news. We have not caused so much extinction that we should lose hope. But the bad news is that, if we don’t slow down the highly elevated rates of extinction today, we could be looking at the sixth mass extinction in as little as three to 22 centuries,” said Tony Barnosky, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkley, who led the study. The findings were reported this week in the journal Nature online.

“The cause of this mass extinction is clearly us. And the way we’re doing that is by fragmenting habitats, by climate change that is largely human caused, by moving species around the Earth so that invasive species take over places where the endemic species of an area would normally live," said Barnosky. Add to that the growing population on the planet and the resources we consume, he said.

A mass extinction is characterized by a short period of time when the Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species. The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions over the last 540 million years, the most commonly known being the extinction of the dinosaurs and other species in the fifth mass extinction.

The other four mass extinctions all occurred before the dinosaurs became extinct. Creatures lost during these extinctions impacted invertebrate marine animals, similar to clams, snails, coral and relatives of starfish.

Barnosky said no group of organisms is safe from the current extinction. Some of the current animals on the endangered species list include rhinoceros, elephants, giant pandas, whales, dolphins, tigers, marine turtles and tree kangaroos.

“There are species in just about every category of plants and animals that you are familiar with, so mammals reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish, many different kinds of plants. It seems like no matter what kind of group of organisms we do this assessment on, we come up with numbers that threatened species are in the range of 20 percent to 50 percent,” he said.

David Jablonski, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, who was not involved with the study, explained that this is one of the first rigorous attempts to compare the current extinction to that of the fossil record.

Researchers completed a mathematical analysis of the existing data for the modern record of species and the fossil record to compare the current rate of extinction to past mass extinctions.

“That’s actually a very difficult thing to do. The fossil record involves courser time frames and it involves a different kind of spatial coverage and at the same time of course it shows much more extreme extinction then we have so far. So the question is: What would it look like? What would today’s patterns look like if we extended them through a block of geological time?” Jablonski said.

The study estimated that four billion species have evolved on Earth over the last 3.5 billion years and about 99 percent of them are extinct. This shows that extinction is actually a common occurrence.

“So far we haven’t hit the massive amount of loss that we’d see in the fossil record, which is a very fortunate thing for all of us. But, at the same time, we’re doing our darndest to push the biosphere over into that kind of extinction spasm and that’s bad news,” he said.

A natural disaster could easily cause another mass extinction. However, current elevated extinction levels are linked to human activity and that gives people a choice, Barnosky said. He said the good news is, if people change their habits and implement effective conservation methods, there’s still time to save potentially threatened species.

“We still have most of earth’s biodiversity left to save and that’s actually in our grasp to do that. We can avoid this sixth mass extinction,” said Barnosky.

Friday, March 4, 2011

REDLANDS: Learn how some dinosaurs got so big

The Press Enterprise (San Bernardino, CA): REDLANDS: Learn how some dinosaurs got so big
Ever wonder why dinosaurs were so big?

Guest speaker Matt Wedel, a paleontologist who has studied giant dinosaurs for the last 15 years, will answer that question and more in his lecture, "All-time Giants: How the Largest Dinosaurs Got So Big" at 7:30 p.m. March 23.

The lecture at the San Bernardino County Museum is free.

The immense size of some dinosaurs has been a source of popular fascination -- and a scientific puzzle -- since the earliest discoveries were made. In recent years, paleontologists have unearthed more fossils of record-breaking animals, and discovered some answers to the questions of how and why they got so big.

Wedel, an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, will explain why some dinosaurs stopped chewing their food, got pregnant as teenagers and abandoned their babies so they could go big.

Air-filled bones, buried eggs, elephant poop and sheep that eat seaweed all are part of the scientific quest to understand the world's largest land animals.


Joan Marcus / Special to The Press-Enterprise
Fascination of large dinosaurs has inspired shows like "Walking With Dinosaurs."
In addition to teaching, Wedel frequently appears in documentaries on the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and the History Channel.

The program is part of a series of free guest lectures at the museum. Upcoming speakers are David Earle on "Mission Baskets," April 27, Mark Springer on "Tooth Loss and Molecular Cavities in Placental Mammals," May 25, and Anthony Metcalk on "Processes That Affect Genetic Diversity," June 22.

TED 2011: Hatching Dinosaurs, One Egg at a Time

Wired: TED 2011: Hatching Dinosaurs, One Egg at a Time

LONG BEACH, California — You know the scene in Jurassic Park. Sam Neil’s character Dr. Alan Grant and a group of naïve visitors enter the dinosaur island’s birthing lab just at the moment a large egg begins to wobble and crack. The determined creature inside pecks its way out of the shell, and suddenly a velociraptor is born – more than 70 million years after its species was supposed to have become extinct.

Only in the movies, right?

Not if you’re paleontologist Jack Horner, the inspiration for Neil’s character, who is on a mission to bring dinosaurs back – or at least the modern-day version of one.

Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and regent’s professor at Montana State University, has been working with researchers to produce a dino-chicken or chickensaurus — a chicken with prehistoric features such as a tail and hands. The research has been featured on 60 Minutes and elsewhere.

Chickens, and other birds, are descendants of dinosaurs and carry the dino DNA. In the embryo stage, chickens actually have a tail, which disappears before the bird hatches. Horner believes that if researchers can find the gene that turns off the tail — and turn it back on — they can hatch a chicken that resembles a dinosaur.

Horner will be speaking about his work at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference on Friday. He talked about his dino project with Wired.com in advance of his presentation.

Wired.com: Why did you choose a chicken for your experiment and not an ostrich or some other bird? Is there a reason a chicken is more suitable?

Jack Horner: They’re easier to come by. Ostriches cost a lot of money. That really is the only reason. And the generation time is quicker. A chicken grows up in a little less time than an ostrich. An ostrich takes a whole year. A chicken takes a few months. You’d probably be better off using a smaller bird, but there gets to be some logistical problems with them. You can go and get plenty of eggs of chickens, but it’s pretty hard to go and get plenty of eggs of robins.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Dinosaur Bones Dating Back 72 Million Years Found in Mexico

Fox News Latino: Dinosaur Bones Dating Back 72 Million Years Found in Mexico
Paleontologists have found in the desert of Coahuila, a state in northern Mexico, fragments of vertebrae and long bones that could have belonged to a species of dinosaur that lived in the region 72 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period, officials said.

The fossils could come from species that once inhabited the area, such as the Hadrosauridae, or duck-billed dinosaur, the Ornitomimidae, a biped similar to the ostrich, and Tyrannosaurus, said the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH.

The bones were discovered by INAH paleontologists at the city of General Cepeda in the Coahuila desert, which is on the border with the United States.

The remains of prehistoric fauna were found in a paleontological deposit called Las Aguilas while tasks of cleaning and conservation of the site were being performed.

The fossils were fragments of vertebrae and long bones, probably femurs, which were found at several points on the site that covers some 53,750 sq. feet, said INAH-Coahuila Center paleontologist Felisa Aguilar, who is in charge of conservation and research at the deposit.



Related Links
New Species of Dinosaur Discovered in Argentina Some 207 footprints have been found in the area, left by dinosaurs that lived around 72 million years ago.

"It is not yet possible to provide details of the type of species these bones belonged to, since their state of fragmentation requires more detailed study," Aguilar said.

It's very probable the fossils belong to individuals of the duck-billed dinosaur, Ornitomimidae and Tyrannosaurus families, because "from the footprints at the site, we know that they lived there," Aguilar said.

Following this discovery, the paleontologists did a study of the area surrounding Las Aguilas and came up with another three places where dinosaurs had left their footprints.

"Those places are still hidden under vegetation and won't be opened to the public until they are registered so that their future conservation can be guaranteed," Agilar said.

Paleontological remains more than 70 million years old have been found on 90 percent of the site at General Cepeda, and on 5 percent of it have been discovered vestiges of the Pleistocene, a geological period dating from 2.5 million years to 10,000 years ago.