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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Winged dinosaur wore black feather boa

From Fox News: Winged dinosaur wore black feather boa
The raven-size creature long thought of as the earliest bird, Archaeopteryx, may have been adorned with black feathers, researchers have found.

The structures that held the black pigment may have strengthened wing feathers, perhaps helping Archaeopteryx fly, scientists added.

Archaeopteryxlived about 150 million years ago in what is now Bavaria in Germany. First unearthed 150 years ago, the fossil of this carnivore, with its blend of avian and reptilian features, seemed an iconic evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.

One recent study has called into question whether Archaeopteryx was a true bird or just one of many birdlike dinosaurs. To learn more about whether birds and birdlike dinosaurs might have evolved flight, and if so, why, researchers often turn to the animals' feathers. Illustrations of the creature are often colorful, but such depictions of its plumage until now had little else but artistic license to draw on.

"Being able to reconstruct the colors of feathers can help us gain more knowledge about the organisms and more responsibly reconstruct what they looked like," researcher Ryan Carney, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University, told LiveScience.

Black feathers

An international team of scientists now finds that a well-preserved feather on Archaeopteryx's wing was black. The color-generating structures within the creature's feather, known as melanosomes, "would have given the feathers additional structural support," Carney said. "This would have been advantageous during this early evolutionary stage of dinosaur flight." [Images: Dinosaurs That Learned to Fly]

The Archaeopteryx feather was discovered in a limestone deposit in Germany in 1861. After two unsuccessful attempts to pinpoint any melanosomes within the feather, the investigators tried a more powerful type of scanning electron microscope.

"The third time was the charm, and we finally found the keys to unlocking the feather's original color, hidden in the rock for the past 150 million years," Carney said.

The group located patches of hundreds of melanosomes encased within the fossil. The sausage-shape melanosomes were about 1 millionth of a meter long and 250 billionths of a meter wide — that is, about one-hundredth the diameter of a human hair in length and less than a wavelength of visible light in width. To determine the color of these melanosomes, researchers compared the fossilized structures with those found in 87 species of living birds that represented four classes of feathers — black, gray, brown and ones found in penguins, which have unusually large melanosomes compared with other birds.

"What we found was that the feather was predicted to be black with 95 percent certainty," Carney said.

Did Archaeopteryxfly?

To better pin down the structure of the feather, they analyzed its barbules — tiny, riblike appendages that overlap and interlock like zippers to give a feather rigidity and strength. The barbules and the way melanosomes are lined up within them are identical to those found in modern birds, Carney said.

This analysis revealed the feather is a covert, one that covers the primary wing feathers that birds use in flight. Its feather structure is identical to that of living birds, suggesting "that completely modern bird feathers evolved as early as 150 million years ago," Carney said.

Color may serve many functions in modern birds, and it remains unclear what use or uses this pigment had in Archaeopteryx. Black feathers may have helped the creature absorb sunlight for heat, acted as camouflage, served in courtship displays or assisted with flight.

"We can't say it's proof that Archaeopteryx was a flier, but what we can say is that in modern bird feathers, these melanosomes provide additional strength and resistance to abrasion from flight, which is why wing feathers and their tips are the most likely areas to be pigmented," Carney said. "With Archaeopteryx, as with birds today, the melanosomes we found would have provided similar structural advantages, regardless of whether the pigmentation initially evolved for another purpose."

More feathers will need to be tested across Archaeopteryx to see how the animal was colored overall, researchers said. Unfortunately, this is the only Archaeopteryx feather discovered with the kind of residues one can test for color.

Still, this one feather is enough to leave an indelible mark on Carney. "I got a tattoo of the feather on the 150th anniversary that Archaeopteryx's scientific name was published," he said.

The scientists detailed their findings online today (Jan. 24) in the journal Nature Communications. Their work was funded by the National Geographic Society and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

It never ends

My mom is having some major health issues...so much so that I'm not going to be able to post here for another couple of days while we get it straightened out.

Note to all my readers: If you have high blood pressure, make damn sure you take your medication or 20 years later you'll have congestive heart failure and wham, bam goes your quality of life.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Dinosaur Expert Becomes Most December-y Husband Ever [Updated]

From Jezebel: Dinosaur Expert Becomes Most December-y Husband Ever [Updated]
It looks like renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has gone all Doug Hutchison and married a teenager. His nineteen-year-old wife Vanessa Shiann Weaver was an intern in his lab, and calls herself his "protege." Their age difference: 46 years.

Horner is probably the country's most famous dinosaur expert (unless you count Ross on Friends). He served as a consultant on the Jurassic Park movies and now advises the show Terra Nova. He gave this cool TED talk on how to make a "Chickenosaurus." And on January 15, at the Bellagio in Vegas, he married a woman young enough to be his granddaughter.

According to the awesomely-named Bozeman Magpie, Weaver was Horner's intern at the Museum of the Rockies, where he's curator of paleontology. She's also apparently a student at Montana State University, where Horner teaches, but it's not clear whether she was ever his student. However, she does describe herself on Twitter as "Referred to by Dr. Jack Horner as his 'protege.'" The passive voice makes this bio line a little creepy — that may be what he calls her, but what does she call herself?

Beyond that, though, there's a difference between Weaver's Twitter and that of fellow May-December bride Courtney Stodden — Weaver's is actually pretty cool. She talks about processing a Triceratops ("trike") tibia. She writes, "Are you aware that there is a Leonard Nimoy signed graphic novel in my bag? I about choked on air when I saw it." She says she's going to be in Jurassic Park 4. Basically, she sounds like a huge nerd, which means that a) she and Horner obviously share interests and b) she's a lot more appealing than a certain siren who tweets about sunning herself sensuously all the goddamn time.

Of course, her Twitter handle is Dinogirl2010 — which might be the year she graduated from high school (that year, Jack Horner would've been 63). And her Twitter account is almost totally devoted to comments about him — her very first tweet is "Paleontologist, Dr. Jack Horner (JP advisor), likes this poster and I'm going to get it for him." Weaver seems to idolize Horner. Frankly, lots of people do — he's a dinosaur expert. But in a marriage, that could lead to some difficult power dynamics — especially when one spouse has 46 years on the other.

That said, the people who know best about their marriage are Horner and Weaver themselves. Neither has responded yet to my request for comment, but Weaver does say this on her Facebook page:

It is true, I am married. What people don't know is the reason I got married. I love him and he is my best friend. Judge all you want about the age difference. It wont matter. He is not my advisor, teacher, employer, and has no say in my grades at MSU. Aside from all of that, I've taken the semester off to do my research and let things simmer down. There is no reason to 'lose respect' for him. He is still the great paleontologist he has always been. If you want to know why I married him, send me a messege and I'll reply in private. If you could all just be happy for us instead of judging with your negativity, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Good luck, you crazy kid — and old guy.

Update: Horner has responded thus to my questions about his marriage:

I have no idea what you mean by the "May-December nature" of the relationship.

Vanessa's grandparents attended the wedding and her grandfather gave her away. I don't really keep tabs on my family other than my son who supports the decisions of his father.

Vanessa is not, and was not my student, and she did not work for me or the museum as an intern. She is a volunteer at the museum.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Oldest dinosaur nursery found in South Africa

From Fox News: Oldest dinosaur nursery found in South Africa
The oldest known dinosaur nesting site, dating to 190 million years ago, has been unearthed in Golden Gate Highlands National Park, South Africa.

The extraordinary site, described in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, includes multiple dinosaur nests, eggs, hatchlings and the remains of adults for this species, Massospondylus.

Project leader Robert Reisz, a professor of biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, told Discovery News that the dinosaur was herbivorous. Like its sauropod relatives, it had a very small head and an extremely long neck. The hatchlings walked on all fours, but adults were bipedal.

"The transition from four legs to two during an individual's lifetime is a very unusual growth pattern that we rarely see in animals, but we do see it in humans," Reisz said. "The largest articulated skeleton of this animal was about 6 meters (19.7 feet) in length, but they probably grew even larger."

The discovery provides evidence for "nesting site fidelity," according to Reisz, "as it looks like these dinosaurs liked this place and returned to it repeatedly to lay their eggs."

It's also the oldest evidence in the fossil record for a highly organized nest, with eggs carefully laid in a single layer.

Reisz said clues about the nest are difficult to interpret, but what's known so far is that "the nests seem to be fairly shallow because all the eggs are in one layer," he said. "We do not know if the nests were covered by vegetation or if they were buried because the nature of the sediments preclude the preservation of plant fossil remains. It is quite possible that the mother guarded the nests."

Nest guarding today is fairly common among living reptiles, such as crocodiles. It's also now known "that the hatchlings stayed around the nesting area long enough to at least grow to double in size."

The researchers believe each Massospondylus mother laid a lot of small eggs, at least 35, which was a probable survival strategy.

"There were large and small meat-eating theropod dinosaurs around at the time Massospondylus lived,” Evans told Discovery News. "The smaller, more agile predator called Coelophysis, was much smaller than adult Massospondylus, but would have been a threat to the hatchlings and juveniles."

So far, the researchers have found 10 dinosaur nests at the site, but they suspect many more are still embedded within the South African cliff. They predict many other nests will be eroded out in time, as the natural weathering process continues.

One close-up of a Massospondylus embryonic skeleton reveals that the head was pushed out of the egg after death. The scientists suspect gases produced by decay caused this to happen. They also think the site was so well preserved because the dinosaur moms chose to lay their eggs in what was then, back in the Early Jurassic Period, a wet spot at the edge of a river.

Reisz explained, "Periodically there was an unusually wet season and this area was flooded, drowning the unhatched eggs and embryos, and covering the nests with very fine sediment. Yet this turned out not to be such a horrible disaster for paleontologists."

South Africa appears to have been a hotspot for Massospondylus, with other possible nesting sites for this dinosaur probably in existence. So far, however, the one at Golden Gate Highlands National Park is the only nursery to yield complete clutches, with eggs containing embryos, Evans said.

He added that similar evidence for large-scale nesting among dinosaurs exists, for dinos such as duck bills and sauropods, but that evidence is about 100 million years younger than this South African site.

he discovery provides the world's oldest clear evidence for baby dinosaur footprints at a nesting site. Handprints as well as other excavated baby prints indicate that the infants stayed near the nest site after hatching and walked on all four limbs at first.

Reisz said, "The overall body shape of the hatchlings with a large, toothless head, relatively long neck, and general look of helplessness suggests that parental care was very likely in Massospondylus. We think that the mother may have guarded the nest and the hatchlings, but may have also fed the babies with plant material."

The paleontologists are now in the process of testing this hypothesis by preparing more embryos from different nests, to see if any of them have teeth. This ongoing research would be the first study of different embryological stages in a dinosaur.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Fossil hunter campaigns for dinosaur dig

From This is Cornwall: Fossil hunter campaigns for dinosaur dig
A professional fossil hunter is claiming he may have found the "biggest and best" dinosaur skeleton to have been discovered on the Jurassic coastline, after stumbling across its tail on the beach at Lyme Regis.

But Chris Moore said he has been battling "red tape" in his bid to excavate the rest of a 200 million-year-old ichthyosaur from the nearby cliffs.

Mr Moore, discovered the one-and-a-half metre-long ichthyosaur's coiled tail while walking on the beach at Lyme Regis in December 2009. He has estimated that the entire fossil could measure eight metres long.

Now, more than three years since he made the discovery, he says officials are refusing to let him dig the rest.

He said: "There is a risk it could fall into the sea very soon if left unexcavated. We need to rescue it before it falls from the cliff. If we didn't it would be a loss to the nation."

Mr Moore has already discovered two new species of ichthyosaur at Lyme Regis, one of which is displayed in the Natural History Museum. The giant marine reptiles resembled dolphins and thrived during much of the Mesozoic era, but disappeared about 90 million years ago – some 25 million years before the dinosaurs became extinct. They were particularly abundant in the Jurassic Period, but were replaced as the top aquatic predators by plesiosaurs during the Cretaceous Period.

The Lyme Regis cliffs form part of the Jurassic coastline, which is a protected World Heritage site, managed by Natural England.

Mr Moore will now put forward a proposal to all stakeholders to excavate the cliff using specialist machinery, in the hope of rescuing the remains. The organisations who will take part in the consultation are Natural England, the World Heritage Site steering group, Dorset County Council and the private landowner of the clifftop, who Mr Moore said had given their "full support".

Lyme Regis senior reserve manager Tom Sunderland, said there were a number of "complicated" reasons why Mr Moore might not be able to excavate the dinosaur. These included health and safety as well as European legislation protecting areas of specific scientific interest.

However, he said: "I am not prepared to go into the issue until the full proposal is submitted."

Mr Moore added that it would be "very sad" if the proposal was refused.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Iowa: Putnam Museum prepares for prehistoric invasion

From the Quad City Times: Putnam Museum prepares for prehistoric invasion
Dinosaurs will roam the Putnam Museum in Davenport for four months this spring and summer, including some that will be making their world debut.

"Dinosaurs Unearthed," which opens March 3 and continues through July 8, will include 14 animatronic dinosaurs, two full-size dinosaur skeletons, 22 fossils and a dig pit for children.

Tickets go on sale beginning today.

Kim Findlay, the Putnam's president and CEO, said the exhibit, which will take up 5,000 square feet in the museum's two largest halls, is the same caliber as the Titanic exhibit that drew huge crowds last year to see artifacts from the doomed ship that were brought off the Atlantic Ocean floor.

"As Titanic was closing, I had so many people saying ... ‘What are you going to do now?' As I stood at the podium, I said I was open to suggestions," she said. "Over the years, people have asked me (for this)."

The exhibit's new attractions include a feathered dinosaur, just completed and based on recent fossil finds in China.

"It's up to now as far as current understandings of dinosaurs at this point in time," Findlay said. "That's a bonus, to get to be the first place in the world to see a couple of these dinosaurs."

Jennifer Chow, the business development manager for the British Columbia-based company that owns the dinosaur exhibit, said that since it began in 2009, it has visited museums in Hawaii, San Antonio, Dallas and Berkeley, Calif.

"It's bringing alive the story," she said in a telephone interview. "What they'll see is the dig trap and one of the quarries and how they discovered the dinosaurs and how the discovery affected the dinosaurs that they found."

The animatronics used in the exhibit - which includes one that can be controlled by visitors - use new motorized technology.

"You'll see a lot smoother movements," she said. "Everything was designed in North America, and if you look at the dinosaurs, they are hand-built and painted and checked by a paleontologist."

Findlay said many educational and family-friendly activities will go along with the exhibit, including a "Supersaurus Sleepover" one night at the museum.

"Unearthed" is meant for a greater range of ages than Titanic, she said.

"While I was honestly surprised by the number of children who came to and enjoyed and knew a lot about the Titanic, I thought it was going to be a lot more adult-based visitation audience," she said. "This one, obviously, is just made for a family experience."

Findlay said the largest dinosaur in the exhibit, a 39-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex, will be outdoors in the storytelling garden near the north side of the museum.

"He's going to be the special guest greeter," she said.

Dinosaur Nat'l Monument Sees Increasing Visitation

From KJCT News: Dinosaur Nat'l Monument Sees Increasing Visitation
DINOSAUR, Colo. -- Park visitation numbers are rising at Dinosaur National Monument.

From 2010 to 2011, roughly 16,000 more people took in the sights at the new Quarry Visitor Center.

“Visitation increased from 198,544 visits in 2010 to 214,291 in 2011, a 7.93% increase," announced Superintendent Mary Risser. "For just the month of December, we recorded 1,629 visitors at the new Quarry Visitor Center, compared to 144 at our temporary facility the previous year."

"Many of these visits came during the weeks around the holiday, as area residents brought family and friends visiting from out of town to the new facility.”

Dinosaur National Monument covers more than 210,000 acres along the border of Colorado and Utah. In addition to the world famous dinosaur fossils, the monument also features two rivers renown for white-water rafting and boating, numerous petroglyph sites and other evidence of human habitation extending back over 7,000 years.

It also boasts an array of plant and animal life, campgrounds, trails and scenic drives.

“While there is no way to predict what the monument’s visitation may be in the future, having the dinosaur quarry open to visitors again definitely increases the monument’s draw,” commented Risser. “We are preparing for what we hope will be a busy summer.”

For more information about Dinosaur National Monument, visit its website. You can also find the monument on Facebook and Twitter or call (435) 781-7702 with any questions.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Sago Palm - the dinosaur of the garden


From the Hattiesburg American: Sago Palm - the dinosaur of the garden
There is a dinosaur in our garden! No, I'm not referring to our out-dated weedeater with its stubborn starter, nor to my favorite old gardening tool (my father's more than 60-year old cement trowel).

Our dinosaur is a Sago Palm tree which descended from primitive plants dating back to and flourishing when real dinosaurs roamed the earth. While other species in this family have become extinct (like the dinosaurs), botanists report that the Sago palm has evolved only slightly during the millions of years of its existence.

Although the Sago palm was first described in the 1800's as a native to Southern Japan, this fossilized tree has now been located on several continents. These early fossils show characteristics nearly identical to today's Sago palms, giving scientists reason to refer to the ancient plant as a living fossil.

At first glance the Sago palm may appear similar to palm trees; however, the Sago palm is not really a palm. This cultivar belongs to a completely different genus of plants known as Cycads.

When children visit our garden, I explain to them that all parts of the plant are poisonous. I am careful to point out the sharp spikes on the Sago's curling leaves as I wonder aloud if these helped defend the Sago from the plant-devouring dinosaurs?

Thick dark green leaves on the plant support a crown from which a cone usually sprouts by its fourth year. The slow growing ever expanding trunk hugs the ground during the plant's early years.

It takes a hundred years for this plant to reach maturity. In this time it often forms several crown producing branches.

Although the dinosaurs no longer grace our world, there is little danger of the Sago palm becoming extinct. It is the most often propagated and marketed Cycad in the world. Propagated by seed and sucker plants, its distinctive male or female cones are usually pollinated by insects.

Plants are carried locally by garden centers and may be planted in late winter. It adapts well to various types of soil and thrives in tropical and temperate gardens.

In South Mississippi the Sago palm performs better when planted in the ground in quick draining humus soil under full sun and allowed to dry out between watering times. Gardeners should fertilize it in the spring with a topical mixture which includes micro-elements.

It is hardy down to 17 degrees, but lower temperatures usually only discolor and damage its leaves which are normally replaced in the spring.

We've named our Sago palm Rex in honor the giant plant-devouring dinosaurs which once thrived in North America, not only to impress my young friends, but to remind them of the Sago palm's ancient history.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Dinosaurs of a Feather

From Smithsonian Blog Dinosaur Tracking: Dinosaurs of a Feather
Poet Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” To fossil bird expert Alan Feduccia, however, anything with feathers is a bird and emphatically not a feathered dinosaur.

For decades Feduccia has been one of the most prominent members of a small and steadfast group of researchers who reject the growing body of evidence that birds are the descendants of one lineage of feather-covered coelurosaurian dinosaurs (the large and varied group which included tyrannosaurs, oviraptorosaurs, deinonychosaurs, therizinosaurs and others). Feduccia and like-minded peers have been provided no solid alternate hypotheses about where, when, why and how birds originated—they point to some yet-unknown lineage of creatures that might have lived more than 200 million years ago—but they insist that birds cannot be dinosaurs. Yet Feduccia’s argument in his new book Riddle of the Feathered Dragons is not quite that simple. Near the book’s conclusion, Feduccia writes “if [a creature] has avian feathers, it is a bird”—a view popular among dinobird denialists that some dinosaurs were, in fact, “hidden birds.”

Non-avian, feathered dinosaurs have been known to paleontologists since 1996. In the 16 years since the first such creature was found—a small theropod dinosaur preserved with fuzzy protofeathers and named Sinosauropteryx—scores of plumage-bearing dinosaur specimens have been discovered. These creatures exhibit a variety of different feather types, which has helped paleontologists, ornithologists and developmental biologists understand how feathers went from simple, wispy structures to complex, asymmetrical feathers that allow birds to fly.

Feduccia disagrees. He says that the protofeathers on Sinosauropteryx and other dinosaurs are, instead, collagen fibers from inside the animal’s body. This would keep dinosaurs comfortably scaly for those who don’t like the idea that birds are derived dinosaurs. But a number of coelurosaurian dinosaurs, such as Anchironis, Microraptor and others, have been preserved with more complex feathers that more closely approximate those seen on living birds. These structures cannot be simply cast off as collagen fibers or other quirks of preservation, and so Feduccia makes a strange argument. Microraptor and kin are not dinosaurs, Feduccia argues, but are instead birds that lost the ability to fly and were molded into the form of dinosaurs through a circuitous evolutionary pathway. By employing a very narrow definition of what a feather is, and by asserting that only birds can have feathers, Feduccia tries to rearrange evolutionary relationships through semantics.

When Sinosauropteryx was discovered, the dinosaur seemed to be an enigma. Paleontologists were not optimistic about the prospect of finding dinosaurs with feathers. Such intricate structures would only be recovered in instances of exceptional preservation. But additional discoveries since 1996 have confirmed that the find was not a fluke. And the fuzzy structures preserved along the backs of these dinosaurs contain an important clue that they are, in fact, protofeathers. In 2010 a pair of papers was published regarding the reconstructed feather colors of dinosaurs. These findings were based on melanosomes—microscopic organelles found in feathers that, depending on their shape and distribution, create different colors and sheens. Such structures would be expected in feathers, but not collagen, and so when paleontologists were able to identify melanosomes in the fuzz of Sinosauropteryx, they provided new evidence that the dinosaur carried protofeathers.

Perhaps more importantly, however, there is no indication that creatures such as Oviraptor and Velociraptor were birds. Analysis after analysis has found them to be unequivocal, non-avian dinosaurs within the coelurosaur subgroup. Although Feduccia hypothesizes that birds originated from some mysterious Triassic ancestor, and then bird-like dinosaurs evolved from early birds, there is not a shred of evidence that such an evolutionary repeat ever took place. The idea is an attempt to remove uncomfortable facts in the way of a preconceived view.

Many of the book’s arguments take on a “because I said so” tone. Feduccia states that dinosaurs could not have been covered in protofeathers at any point because their archaic plumage would have gotten wet and mucky in the rain. Likewise, Feduccia argues that dinosaurs could not have evolved the long arms necessary for flight, and he casts dinosaurs as relatively sluggish ectotherms that had more in common with lizards and crocodiles than birds. None of these points are discussed in detail or backed up with sufficient evidence. Readers are left to take Feduccia at his word.

Ultimately, though, many of Feduccia’s objections boil down to a rejection of a methodology known as cladistics. This method of determining relationships among organisms is based on the analysis of shared derived characteristics—specialized features found in two organisms or lineages and their most recent common ancestor. Researchers look for numerous traits, record whether the traits in question are present or absent, and then insert that mass of data into a computer program that produces a hypothesis about the relationships among the various organisms included in the study. The point is not to find direct ancestors and descendants, but to figure out who is most closely related to whom. The method is not perfect—which organisms are included, the choice of traits for comparison and the way those traits are scored all affect the outcome. Still, this process has the benefit of requiring researchers to show their work. Each evolutionary tree resulting from such methods is a hypothesis that will be tested according to new evidence and analyses. If someone disagrees with a particular result, they can sift through the collected data to see if an inappropriate trait was included, an essential organism was left out, or if there was some other problem. Cladistics is useful not because it results in a perfect reflection of nature each time, but because it allows researchers to effectively examine, test and improve ideas about relationships.

Cladistic analyses have repeatedly found that birds are nested within a subgroup of coelurosaurian dinosaurs called maniraptorans. The result has only become more robust as additional archaic birds and non-avian feathered dinosaurs have been found. Feduccia argues that such results are deeply flawed, but he does not provide a viable alternative for how we should identify the relationship of birds to other organisms (an essential task if we are to figure out how birds originated). Categorizing organisms on general appearances, or making feathers synonymous with birds alone, will only confuse our understanding of prehistoric life. And, contrary to his protests, Feduccia seems to welcome cladistic results that support his own views. In a section of the book on the weird oviraptorosaurs, Feduccia plays up the importance of a 2002 paper that used a cladistic analysis to support the conclusion that these creatures were archaic, secondarily-flightless birds, even though additional studies have not supported this interpretation.

Riddle of the Feathered Dragons is an intensely frustrating read. The tome is a 290-page position piece that ultimately leaves the reader stranded. Feduccia is so concerned with turning feathered dinosaurs into birds that he ultimately neglects to present any reasonable hypothesis for where birds came from. The poor production of the volume only makes things worse (the illustrations are so tightly packed in places that they make it difficult to find where the captions end and the regular flow of the chapter picks up again.)

Although I wholly disagree with Feduccia, I had hoped that Riddle of the Feathered Dragons would explicate what opponents of the dinosaurian origin of birds believe about where avians came from. Simply repeating “birds are not dinosaurs” is not enough—positive evidence must play a role in forming an alternative hypothesis. The riddle of the “feathered dragons” is not where birds came from. The puzzle is why some scientists continue to insist that birds cannot be dinosaurs.

Bones to pick at China's Dinosaur Valley


From New Strait Times: Bones to pick atChina's Dinosaur Valley
Paleontologists are still mulling on the mystery of how China’s dinosaurs reproduce as well as the reason behind their extinction.

IN Chinese culture, the dragon is a symbol of the highest greatness.

The Chinese proudly identify themselves as long de chuan ren, or descendants of the dragon.

Perhaps this fascination for the creature is derived from a true legend from ancient times instead of a myth.

The idea does not seem as far-fetched after a visit to the Lufeng Dinosaur Valley in Chuxiong, Yunnan, China.

At 10,000 sq metres, the Lufeng Dinosaur Valley is world's largest conservation site of dinosaur fossils, also known as dragon bones to the Chinese.

Located 60km from Yunnan province capital Kunming, the Dinosaur Valley offers visitors an experience not unlike Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park.

On arrival, visitors are greeted by four 28m high marble columns engraved with dinosaur motifs.

A five-minute tramcar ride offers a scenic view before reaching the Dinosaur Base Camp.

Visitors are then led into an air-conditioned exhibition hall with a guided tour on China's pre-historic fossils.

Inside, over 60 genuine skeletons are on display, with the largest fossil being that of Chuanjiesaurus.

Measuring 27m in length, the remains are considered the tallest and largest found in Asia.

The guide also provides interesting facts on these ancient giants.

For example, a carnivorous dinosaur skeleton can be differentiated from a herbivorous one by the claws and teeth.

The herbivore usually has blunt and flat teeth.

A plexi-glass floor built over a massive site, where more than 400 fossils are believed to be buried, allows visitors a glimpse of the fossils in their original condition.

The grand discovery of the fossils, which date back over 240 million years however, still harbour some unsolved mysteries such as how the numerous fossils were found in the same spot and were so well preserved.

Also, not a single egg was found amid the numerous skeletons of various predatory and herbivorous species,

Researchers are still mulling on the mystery of how China's dinosaurs reproduce as well as the reason behind their extinction.

The guide also revealed that the local tribes were known to collect certain bones, such as the vertebrae of a Chuanjiesaurus to use it as an oil lamp.

Some of the fossils were also used to make beads as well as treat diseases.

These practices persisted until Dr Yang Zhongjian (1897-1979), considered the founder of Chinese paleontology and dinosaur studies, excavated China's first dinosaur fossils in Shawan, north west of Lufeng in 1938.

From then, Dr Yang dedicated his life to research and paleontology in China. He has taken charge at the excavation site of the Peking Man in Zhoukoudian.

At the end of the tour, visitors are taken on a 10-minute tram tour of the compound to witness a panoramic view of the surrounding valleys and hills. Life-sized replicas of dinosaurs are strategically placed to demonstrate how the ancient "dragons" may once have roamed the earth

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Downtown Exhibit Features Prehistoric Crocodile That Ate Dinosaurs

From NewsChannel 9: Downtown Exhibit Features Prehistoric Crocodile That Ate Dinosaurs
One-hundred-and-ten million years ago, a crocodile the size of a school bus that ate dinosaurs used to roam in Africa. The Sarcosuchus Imperator, or Supercroc, was one of the largest crocodilians to ever walk the earth. And now a Downtown museum is giving you the opportunity to find out about this incredible creature up close and personal.

"The dinosaurs were afraid of them because these guys lived in marshy areas and so when a dino got in a marshy area they were at a disadvantage," said Lynx Exhibits co-owner Mike Churchman.

Lynxs Exhibit in Downtown El Paso is bringing a prehistoric creature to life. We were there as staff members began putting the display together. "It's been about 12-15 years ago that they discovered the fossils and then they've done a lot of studies on crocodilians. They've done a lot of study on crocodilians to try and determine what he looked like," said Churchman.

And now you can learn about this reptile that weighed 16,000 lbs., measured 40 feet and ate about 500 lbs. in one sitting. "This is an opportunity that's never been here before. It's not your dinosaurs done over again. It's very fun, very interesting, very scientific," said Churchman.

Supercroc's strength was able to take on dinosaurs that were two or three times his size.
One of one of the rooms feature a model of a real-life super croc. "Our visitors can come and lay along the wall, on the bench, they can see how many it would take to fit inside the length of a super croc," said Churchman.

Churchman says he's proud to bring this latest display to the Sun City. "Lynx Exhibits prides itself in bringing world-class exhibits to the El Paso area, something we don't always have the opportunity to see," said Churchman.

Besides have the skeleton and flesh models to look at there's plenty of interactive activities. "An archeological tent where you can actually do archeological experiments and digs. Of course we've got rubbing stations where they can do real fossils," said Churchman.

And something else you can do while you're there is check out the alligator pit. Staff members will retrieve one of the reptiles from the water and even let you pet them. At another station you can meet the Sachymos - a dinosaur that hunted Super Croc. "We'll have a full-size skeleton that people will be able to manipulate him with a controller and move him in various poses," said Churchman.

Mike is hopes people in the Borderland take advantage of this opportunity to see a world-class exhibit that's one-of-a-kind. "You hear so often, there's nothing to do here and we're kind of like a hidden gem. People don't realize we're right here," said Churchman.

Lynx Exhibits is located at 300 West San Antonio. The exhibit is open monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and Sunday from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for military, students and seniors, $6 dollars for children 4 to 11 years old and free for children under 3 years of age.

The exhibit will be on display through May 28th. For more information, visit lynxexhibits.com.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Phil Currie continues to break ground in his hunt for dinosaurs

From Calgary Herald: Phil Currie continues to break ground in his hunt for dinosaurs
DINOSAUR PROVINCIAL PARK - Phil Currie has climbed up and down the sandstone cliffs of Alberta’s badlands so many times over the past 30 years that even on this icy day in December, the lanky 62-year-old paleontologist nimbly leaps from one slippery slope to another without breaking stride.

Seemingly fit students and colleagues quickly fall behind rather than risk breaking a leg in one of the many hidden sinkholes that make this hike hazardous, even when there is no snow.

Currie hasn’t had time to put on fat or lose his agility since he named his first newly discovered dinosaurs in 1979 (Amblydactylus kortmeyeri was a hadrasaurid that had left its footprints in the mud of a now-submerged section of the Peace River canyon).

In 2010, he and his wife Eva Koppelhus, a palynologist who studies pollen spores and other organic matter that can provide insights into the dinosaur’s environment, found themselves on every continent, including Antarctica, where they were part of a team that unearthed a new species of bird-hipped dinosaur dating back 190 million to 200 million years.

Neither Currie nor Koppelhus can remember a year when they weren’t in the field for weeks — sometimes months — at a time, fending off masked fossil poachers in the deserts of Mongolia, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes in Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park, assessing the relationship between dinosaurs and Komodo dragons in Indonesia or rubbing shoulders with celebrity volunteers such as Dan Aykroyd and Bobby Kennedy Jr. in the fossil-rich Pipestone Creek region of northwestern Alberta where a new dinosaur museum will soon bear Currie’s name.

“I figure we’re on the road about 50 per cent of the time on digs, attending conferences or giving lectures,” says Currie, who is looking tanned and relaxed after a 10-day visit to Thailand that resulted from an invitation from the country’s queen. “It can be wearing at times, but it’s a life that we’re used to. I still enjoy it.”

Currie is here today to meet a Calgary-based helicopter pilot who is going to airlift the 350-kilogram hip bone of a Daspletosaur that had to be left behind last summer because it was too heavy to carry out with the skull, ribs and other fossilized bones that went with it. The dinosaur was discovered by a podiatrist from New York who spotted the foot of the creature protruding from the sand.

Daspletosaur is a direct ancestor of Tyrannosaurus. Although not quite as big, it was still at the top of the food chain when it lived in western North America between 74 million and 77 million years ago. Currie is especially pleased about this discovery because it is only the second Daspletosaur ever found in the Oldman Formation of Dinosaur Provincial Park. Few articulated dinosaur fossils are found in this formation close to the river bed.

With a little time to spare before the chopper arrives, Currie leads me to the site of another extraordinary find I saw a few days earlier when I visited his lab at the University of Alberta. The specimen is so rare and so exquisitely preserved that even Currie, modest as he is, acknowledges it will make a huge splash when he reveals its identity in a leading scientific journal in a year or two.

Currie ranks it right up there with the dinosaur eggs that were found in southern Alberta and with the rare, 10-metre-long Gorgosaur unearthed in Dinosaur Provincial Park and now displayed at the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller.

When reminded about the herd of tyrannosaurs he dug up at Dry Island in the Alberta badlands in the late 1990s, Currie pauses and smiles; the discovery of as many as 15 Albertasaurus specimens bunched in one spot all but confirmed his then-controversial theory that some tyrannosaurs were not necessarily solitary creatures, as many people had thought.

Many were very social animals that travelled and hunted together, as this herd apparently did before they all died unexpectedly in some natural catastrophe.

“That was memorable,” Currie acknowledges. “But it was Barnum Brown who made the discovery in 1910. All I did was the detective work at the Museum of Natural History in New York that led us back to that forgotten quarry in 1996.”

Currie says he’s a lucky man who tends to be in the right place at the right time. But a theologian might argue there must have been some divine intervention in his becoming one of the world’s leading paleontologists.

How to account for the dinosaur he found in a cereal box when he was six years old? Could a cheap plastic model such as that really inspire a child like him to regularly visit the dinosaur galleries at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto? And would those visits explain why he subsequently scrambled up and down the cliffs of Sixteen Mile Creek near his hometown of Brampton, Ont., collecting marine invertebrate fossils? Was it just good luck that brought him to the Provincial Museum in Edmonton in 1976, when the situation was ripening for him to become vice-chairman of planning for the creation of the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller? And who could imagine luck playing a role in his meeting and marrying an attractive Danish palynologist who is as adventurous as he is and thrives in doing the administrative and organizational things that Currie hates to do?

Currie, however, has another explanation for his fascination with dinosaurs.

“I constantly fantasized about discovering dinosaurs, reading and often re-reading every book I could find on the subject,” he says. “But it was the American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews who really turned me on. I was 11 years old when I read his book All About Dinosaurs. The power of the written word was what really made me want to be a dinosaur hunter. Extraordinary when you think about it in this day of video games and tweeting.”

Currie doesn’t dispute the idea that he sometimes models himself after Andrews, who is often but wrongly cited as the inspiration for the Indiana Jones character in Steven Spielberg’s famous dinosaur films. In the 1920s, the zoologist trekked through uncharted jungles of Asia and the deserts of Outer Mongolia, risking his life many times in a search for fossils he collected for the American Museum of Natural History.

Like Currie, he claimed to be “born under a lucky star.”

Currie, however, is quick to point out that with a few notable exceptions, such as the time when a gun-toting, horse-riding fossil poacher tried to drive him and his expedition away from a rich fossil bed in Mongolia, he is risk-averse.

“Sometimes, you have no control over what happens,” he says after describing matter-of-factly how difficult it was working in the mountains of Antarctica, where the only way to get to the frigid high-altitude site was by helicopter.

“A few years back, we applied to go into a remote part of China near the Mongolian border. The army said no because it was a demilitarized zone. But when we reapplied to the central government, they gave us the go-ahead. Unfortunately, no one bothered to tell the army. So when the army found us there digging, they checked our permits to see what we were up to. Then suddenly, they took us by the arm and marched us to a small village in the middle of the desert where we were lined up against a wall. You can imagine what we were thinking. But then the general stepped in beside us and ordered pictures to be taken of him with us.”

Dinosaurs, of course, aren’t what they used to be in Roy Chapman Andrews’ day or during the half century that followed when new discoveries, better forensic tools and multi-disciplinary thinking gave us a more accurate view of what dinosaurs looked and sounded like, how they behaved and how they interacted.

Gone, for example, is the Velociraptor in Stephen Spielberg’s film Jurassic Park. Studies have shown that although the real Velociraptor was a vicious killer, as portrayed in the movie, it had feathers and was no bigger than a dog.

We also know that the gentle Brontosaurus in The Land Before Time and other films was not the smooth-skinned, 50-tonne swamp creature that was easy prey for any large predator that came along. Now more accurately referred to as Apatosaurus or its close cousin Diplodocus, this dinosaur was even bigger than depicted earlier. It also lived on land rather than in swamps and was often capable of putting up a good fight.

And then there is T. rex, the most famous dinosaur of all. Several recent groundbreaking studies have shown that the king of dinosaurs was a lot faster than previously thought and even more frightening looking than portrayed in those early films.

Currie is one of a small group of contemporary paleontologists who have played key roles in reshaping our thinking of dinosaurs.

He was, for example, right in hypothesizing that some tyrannosaurs were very social. And most people agree he is onto something in suggesting some new species may actually be previously identified dinosaurs that were at different stages of their growth cycle or of the opposite sex.

“The fossil evidence suggests that baby or juvenile dinosaurs were not simply a smaller version of adults,” he says. “As they mature, their anatomy sometimes changes in such a radical way that it might be easy to conclude that they represented a different species.”

Still, Currie has a soft spot for those early images of dinosaurs like the ones that were on display at the Crystal Palace in London in the 1850s.

One of the images he likes best is one that colleague Dale Russell created when he speculated how a bipedal predator such as Troodon would have evolved if a meteorite hadn’t triggered the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Russell’s Dinosauroid still had large eyes and three fingers on each hand, and it might have sounded like a bird. But in many others ways, it resembled an intelligent human in the way that Spielberg’s alien did in the film ET: The Extra-Terrestrial.

Many paleontologists were repulsed by the anthropomorphism they saw in the model. What the critics failed to appreciate, says Currie, is that it was an important thought experiment. Underlying the effort was the recognition that the brain of Troodon was unusually large for a dinosaur. Had this creature survived and retained the same body size, he points out, it would only be slightly smaller than the brain of a human.

Currie credits Bob Carroll, his PhD supervisor at McGill University, for encouraging him to look at dinosaurs as animals instead of fossils.

It was that kind of thinking that inspired him and a new generation of paleontologists to successfully challenge the long-held view that some dinosaurs were physiologically closer to birds and other modern animals than to reptiles.

Despite the misguided theories of the past, Currie has nothing but admiration for those pioneers of paleontology.

“The fact is that even today we rarely find an entire dinosaur,” he says. “So more often than not in the past, especially in the days when we didn’t have CT scans and other technologies, there was a lot of guessing that went into building dinosaur models.”

Currie has a lot of admirers, but the circumstances surrounding his move from the Tyrrell Museum to the University of Alberta in 1995 say a lot about how he views himself.

In 1994, the U of A’s Michael Caldwell joined Currie and Koppelhus in the field, hoping to convince Currie to consider making the move from the museum to an academic life in which he would mentor students and continue to do field work.

Koppelhus says her husband just didn’t get what Caldwell was up to.

“It couldn’t have been more clear. Michael was doing everything to get Phil to accept. But Phil thought he was thinking of someone else until I took him aside and told him what was going on.”

Currie says he misses the Tyrrell in many ways because he was there from the beginning and accomplished a lot. But he acknowledges that being out of government makes it easier for him to do what he likes, especially now that he has a Canada Research chair that provides funding and resources to continue his cutting-edge research.

“I guess it was luck that made this happen,” he says.

But Currie hasn’t always been lucky.

A trip to the Arctic in the 1980s yielded just one tiny fossil. On that trip, Russell left their tents behind in a helicopter transfer, thinking they could sleep under the midnight sun. None of them had any idea there could be so many mosquitoes on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic.

Then there’s the time 12 years ago when Currie asked the British military if it would transport the 300-kilogram backbone of a duck-billed dinosaur from the Dry Island site in southern Alberta. All seemed to be going well when the helicopter began carrying the fossil out on a sling. But when the load began swaying dangerously, the pilot was forced to jettison it.

“It was surreal,” says Currie. “We could see the dust rising from the ground before we heard the thud. There was nothing left to salvage but dust.”

Now in his 63rd year of life, Currie doesn’t envision himself slowing down soon, although he and Koppelhus are determined to spend more time working in their garden in Edmonton, listening to music and sitting by the fire.

Next year, they plan to be back in the badlands of Alberta, possibly in the deserts of Patagonia, at a field site in Edmonton and in the Pipestone Creek region of Grande Prairie. He’d like to go back to the Arctic, Antarctica and Mongolia.

“I don’t see myself retiring ever,” he says. “I see myself disappearing in a puff of smoke.”

Monday, January 16, 2012

Science rewrites assumptions about pre-historic animals

From the Edmonton Journal: Science rewrites assumptions about pre-historic animals
Paleontologists borrow medical diagnostic tools to rebuild dinosaurs

DINOSAUR PROVINCIAL PARK - Paleontologist Phil Currie was walking along the sandstone cliffs of the badlands in southern Alberta when he spotted something sticking out of the side of the hill.

It appeared to be the fossil of an ancient turtle. But as he began to clear away the sand, he could see that it was the skull of a dinosaur.

There is nothing extraordinary about finding fossils in Dinosaur Provincial Park. In fact, there is no better place to find the remains of these so-called “terrible lizards” that walked the earth for more than 165 million years.

But in the days that followed in that summer of 2010, Currie suspected he may have found something extraordinary indeed. This specimen appeared to be so rare and so exquisitely preserved that he instructed his students and colleagues to go slow with the excavation when he had to leave base camp for a few days.

“I just didn’t want to miss out on this one,” he recalls. “It’s extremely rare to find a dinosaur such as this, and almost as rare to find one that is so complete. I wanted to be there to see what we had by the time we were done with it.”

Currie likes to say that building a dinosaur from fossils found in sand or embedded in rock is both an art and a science. Having a skull and a nearly complete skeleton such as this one, which he plans to reveal to the public in a year or two, makes it relatively simple.

It’s far more common for paleontologists to find a carcass that has been scattered, scavenged or partially swept away by a flood before it fossilized. In many cases, the bones are mineralized or deformed and sometimes crushed.

As a result, art and imagination often trumped science when it came to building models from scattered bones that were found in the past.

In the first recorded reference to a dinosaur, British naturalist Robert Plot mistook the thigh bones that formed the knee of a Meglosaurus for those of an elephant brought to England by the Romans. Nearly a century later, Richard Brookes examined the same specimen and concluded they were the fossilized testicles of a giant man who lived in Biblical times — between the creation of Earth and the flood that destroyed all life except for that which survived on Noah’s Ark.

He named it “Scrotum humanum.”

Constrained by religion, scientists in his day couldn’t even contemplate the notion that enormous creatures might have lived on Earth more than 65-million years ago, before an asteroid plowed into the planet and triggered their rapid extinction.

Thanks to Charles Darwin and others, a handful of 19th century geologists finally recognized fossilized elements as those of giant extinct animals.

But the assumption that they were cold-blooded lizards, dull-witted, slow moving and not particularly well-suited to their environment prevented many scientists from accepting the possibility that contemporary birds might be related to a group of maniraptoran theropods, or that tyrannosaurs might have been highly social, warm-blooded creatures that hunted in packs.

The situation has changed dramatically. Since the early 1990s, a new wave of fossil discoveries and the use of powerful tools, such as CT scans, X-rays and engineering software, has provided paleontologists with sophisticated ways of testing those early evolutionary ideas.

Now, thanks to a mathematical simulation done by Currie and Nathan P. Myhrvold of Microsoft Research, we know, for instance, that the enormous tail of Apatosaurus was not so much a way of counterbalancing this dinosaur’s long neck, as it was a giant whip that could theoretically break the speed of sound and create a sonic boom that would scare the heck out of a large predator, or at least make it take pause.

We also know from research done by Currie and his team that some tyrannosaurs experienced rapid growth spurts at fairly advanced stages of their lives, and this may have led some scientists to misidentify young animals as different species.

“Science is not only allowing us to rewrite the history of dinosaurs, science and new fossil discoveries are giving us the data that is needed to add several new chapters,” says Currie, who has authored several books.

Currie’s collection of students and colleagues in the field of science reflects this cutting edge approach to paleontology.

PhD student Lisa Buckley, for example, is an avid birder who is also curator of collections at the Peace Region Paleontology Research Centre in British Columbia.

In the contemporary world of avian science, biologists look at plumage, songs and behaviour to separate and identify closely related and morphologically similar bird species.

“If you take away those attributes, and strip the specimen down to its bare bones, would they come to the same conclusions?” she wondered when she joined Currie’s team.

It’s an important question in the world of paleontology because contemporary birds are closely related to some dinosaurs.

Buckley hopes to use her results as a guide to determine what paleontologists might be missing when they don’t have the data to determine colour, sound and behaviour of the dinosaurs they have identified and studied.

“It is possible that one skeleton of a bird, or small theropod, for example, might represent multiple species that would distinguish among themselves using colour, audio cues and behaviour,” she says.

Victoria Arbour, on the other hand, is much more of a techno-geek about her research.

She uses CT scanning data, shape-building computer software and other engineering tools to determine whether tail clubs, such as those in the family of armoured dinosaurs that includes Ankylosaurus, could be used as weapons, as some scientists have speculated.

In one experiment that was published in a scientific journal recently, Arbour concluded that a large tail club could generate between 364 and 718 megapascals of impact stress, which may not have been enough to kill a T-rex, she says, but it could certainly break its ankle, for instance.

One of the problems that Arbour is confronting is how to identify which dinosaurs had the big tail club and which ones had the small one. Tail clubs are rarely found with the rest of the dinosaur skeleton, so it’s hard to know with certainty whether a small one came from a young dinosaur or from a different species altogether.

That’s where Michael Burns comes in. The PhD student studies the microstructure of dinosaur bones and armour to determine whether an animal is young or fully grown. Fortunately for him, bone tissue is often layered, analogous to tree rings in that it records the growth of the animal.

“In the past,” says Burns, “scientists would often look at a metre-long bone, for example, and assume that it must have come from an adult. But we know that some dinosaurs have much larger bones than that. So it’s very possible that this long bone they were looking at actually came from a juvenile that had a lot more growing to do.”

What distinguishes Currie’s team from those in other North American universities is that the youngest members are routinely getting their research results published in peer-reviewed papers and seeing or hearing their names printed or broadcast in the media.

Part of it is has to do with the never ending allure of the subject, but a lot of it has to do with the science.

Scott Persons got pretty good at it since he appeared on CBC’s Quirks and Quarks, the venerable radio show that tracks the best breaking science stories in the world. But he still makes fun of the fact that his investigation of the posteriors of theropods has left his family lamenting that he hadn’t picked a different research topic, such as researching the origin of birds.

It has, however, given him a pretty good story to tell about how the enormous tail of T-rex and other tyrannosaurs was much more than one end of a see-saw that balanced the predator’s huge head so that it wouldn’t fall flat on its face.

The first step in his research was to cut into the tail of a caiman, a South American crocodile, which is anatomically similar to T-rex and other tyrannosaurs. To his surprise, he discovered that a single muscle — the caudofemoralis — which is attached to the upper leg by a long tendon, is responsible for the pull that helps drives the crocodile’s locomotion.

Persons then looked at theropods such as T-rex to see if they had a similar muscle that might have also have given them added “forward thrust.”

“I was surprised when I did the computer simulations,” he says. “I expected to find the caudofemoralis of Tyrannosaurs rex to be comparable to what you would find in a modern crocodile. As it turned out, it wasn’t as big as that of a modern croc, it was bigger, much bigger than I imagined. That’s because a T-rex has a different setup in its tail that allowed for the formation of a super-sized muscle.

“When you think about it,” he says, noting that an Albertosaursus might be able to run at speeds of up to 50 kilometres per hour, “it makes sense. T-rex was a large predatory animal that needed to be able to move fast in order to catch its prey. It would not have been successful if it was as slow moving and clumsy as paleontologists once thought.”

As much as new technologies and computer programs are key to understanding what dinosaurs looked like, how fast they grew and moved and how they interacted with each other, there is no getting past the down and dirty ways that technician Clive Coy routinely gets into in the first stages of building a dinosaur.

He’s the one that puts the fossil in plaster after it’s dug out of the field site. When he carefully removes the plaster jacket back in the lab at the University of Alberta, he may use glue and a steel frame to stabilize it.

“That’s when the fun begins,” he says.

Using what is essentially a miniature jack hammer or a hand tool with a tungsten carbide bit, Coy carefully cuts away the rock, dirt and sediment that is embedded in every crack and orifice of the fossil, much in the same way dentists do when they prepare a tooth for a filling.

Only in Coy’s case, it can take a year or two to get the job done.

“It’s not a job for people who don’t have patience,” he says. “My day can be measured by the centimetres or inches that I have scraped off a fossil. For me, it’s a form of meditation. For others, it can be hell.”

Given all that has changed in the world of paleontology in the past two decades, what with the blood vessels that scientist Mary Schweitzer found in a dinosaur five years ago and the development of new tools that can detect colours of some dinosaurs, Currie is convinced that the book of paleontology will have a lot more revisions and new chapters in the next decade.

“You know, thirty years ago, it was almost unfathomable to think that we would some day extract soft tissue from dinosaurs as Mary Schweitzer did. Now the talk is about recovering DNA from dinosaurs. I used to be a skeptic, but given how the game is changing so dramatically, I wouldn’t bet against it. Very little in the field of paleontology is written in stone.”

Phil Currie and Eva Koppelhus are always looking for volunteers to work in their lab at the University of Alberta, if you think have what it takes to work on fossils. Young and old are welcome. Eva would love to hear from you. Send her an email at ebk@ualberta.ca

Sunday, January 15, 2012

New dinosaur species discovered in E. China

From Xinhuanet: New dinosaur species discovered in E. China
HANGZHOU, Jan. 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese and Japanese scientists have announced the discovery of a new dinosaur species in the eastern province of Zhejiang, 13 years after the prehistoric creature's skeleton was unearthed during highway construction.

The dinosaur is a new species of Ornithischians, also known as "bird-hipped" dinosaurs because of their bird-like hip structure. They lived in the Cretaceous period about 100 million years ago.

Scientists made their conclusion after more than three years of intensive study of a partial but well-preserved skeleton, said Zheng Wenjie, a geoscientist with the Zhejiang Museum of Natural History, where the skeleton has been preserved since it was discovered during construction of a highway in 1998 in Tiantai county, eastern Zhejiang province.

They named the new species "Yueosaurus Tiantaiensis", or "Tiantai Yue Dinosaur" in Chinese, as it was discovered in the present-day Tiantai county and the region used to be the territory of the ancient State of Yue during the Spring and Autumn Period over 2,500 years ago, according to Zheng.

The new species represents the southernmost basal ornithopod dinosaur from Asia, also the first one from southeastern China, according to the paper written by Zheng and his four co-researchers, two from China and two from Japan.

The paper was published this month by British magazine Cretaceous Research and the two Japanese scientists, Masateru Shibata and Yoichi Azuma, are from the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum.

Ornithopods are a group of ornithischian dinosaurs that started out as small, bipedal running grazers, and grew in size and numbers until they became one of the most successful groups of herbivores in the Cretaceous world.

Though the species dominated the North American landscape, they were rare in Asia.

Before Yueosaurus, only four Ornithopod species had been found in Asia - in northeastern China's Liaoning and Jilin provinces, the Republic of Korea and Mongolia.

The beaked, herbivorous creature, only 1.5 meters long and one meter tall, is the smallest dinosaur ever found in the province, according to Zheng.

"They were great runners. They are really small, so they had to run away fast from those ferocious meat-eating dinosaurs," Zheng said.

Latest research has showed that some of them even burrowed and lived in holes in the ground, he added.

Zhejiang boasts vast areas of land rich in dinosaur and dinosaur egg fossils. Four new dinosaur species, three herbivorous and one carnivorous, had been discovered in the province before Yueosaurus, according the museum, which is located in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Big Mean Dinosaur Had Stubby Little Arms and Fat Fingers

From LiveScience: Big Mean Dinosaur Had Stubby Little Arms and Fat Fingers
A fearsome carnivorous dinosaur known for eating its own kind probably wasn't holding onto its meal as it ate: Its arms were far too short and stubby, a new fossil find suggests.

Majungasaurus crenatissimus was a 21-foot-long (6.4 meters) predator that was "pretty much the top dog" in what is now Madagascar 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period, said Stony Brook University graduate student Sara Burch. Burch analyzed a recently discovered, nearly complete forelimb of this ancient animal, the first ever found preserved. In contrast to the dinosaur's bulky body, Burch found that its arms weren't even a foot (0.3 meters) long.

"When you get to the lower arm and the hand, it's really weird," Burch told LiveScience. "The lower arm is very short but thick, and the bones are pretty robust. So it's not necessarily a thin, wimpy arm, it's just very, very short."

The fingers of Majungasaurus were so stumpy, in fact, that the researchers aren't sure they were separated; the hands may have been more like paddles than like human hands.

"Even if they were separate, they'd be very short," Burch said. "Imagine if your hand just had the first knuckles sticking out."
Majungosaurus arms and shoulders.

Though many Majungasaurus fossils have been found, the dinosaur's forelimb is rarely preserved in the fossil record. Burch was able to unravel the mysteries of this body part thanks to a nearly complete Majungasaurus skeleton unearthed in Madagascar in 2005. She also cataloged other partial Majungasaurus arm bones from Madagascar.

The researchers don't know what Majungasaurus used its stubby arms for, though the unusual shape suggests they did have a specific purpose, Burch said. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn't for grasping prey, she said.

The forelimb find helps researchers understand the huge diversity of limbs of theropod dinosaurs like Majungasaurus, Burch said. Because the dinosaurs walked on their back two legs, their front limbs were free to evolve for a multitude of tasks. Last year, researchers even found a one-fingered dinosaur in Mongolia.

"Majungasaurus really typifies how bizarre, how crazy they can really go and still have a forelimb," Burch said.

West Hartford, CT: Jurassic Treehouse at Children's Museum

From West Hartford News: Jurassic Treehouse at Children's Museum
West Hartford, — From the opening of Dinosaurs Alive—Jurassic Treehouse, to special programs that are anything but ordinary, there’s something for everyone at The Children’s Museum over the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday Weekend. The Children’s Museum is located at 950 Trout Brook Drive, West Hartford.

Saturday brings the opening of a new pre-historic experience: Dinosaurs Alive—Jurassic Treehouse. An immersive experience awaits children and parents alike as they walk through dramatic multimedia scenarios featuring animatronic dinosaur families of various species including Stegosaurus, T-Rex, Parasaurolophus and Apatosaurus. Children get a Pterodactyl’s eye view of these prehistoric families as they make their way through the Jurassic Treehouse overlooking the dinosaurs. The exhibit will run through the end of May and is included in general admission.

How did technology look in the past? Remember rotary phones and ham radios? Old School Sunday on January 15 is the latest offering in The Children’s Museum’s Family Science Sunday series. Among the fun demonstrations and activities, visitors can

• Check out 19th century gadgets from The Mark Twain House and artifacts from the CT Historical Society and Noah Webster House;

• Experience colonial era education with Old Sturbridge Village;

• Play with retro toys from the Noah Webster House;

• Examine old school technology: rotary phones, phonographs, the stomach churning history of airplane travel and more; and

• See what used to be the cutting edge of video games and movie special effects.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Antarctic fossil shows sauropod dinosaurs were global

From New Scientist.com: Antarctic fossil shows sauropod dinosaurs were global
ANTARCTICA has yielded its first sauropod fossil. The long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs are already known to have plodded across the six other continents.

The 70 to 80-million-year-old fossil is too incomplete to be given an exact name, but it is distinctive enough to identify as belonging to a branch of sauropods called titanosaurs.

Ignacio Cerda from the National University of Comahue in Argentina uncovered the fossil on James Ross Island. Excavation is difficult, but the site has yielded other important dinosaur fossils over the past two decades. The beast may have reached Antarctica via an ancient isthmus that linked it to South America. "This specimen is at the highest palaeolatitude of any late Cretaceous sauropod in either hemisphere," says Tom Rich at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.

Dinosaur footprints discovered in Beijing

From China Daily: Dinosaur footprints discovered in Beijing
BEIJING - Paleontologists say several hundred fossilized footprints in a Beijing suburb are those of dinosaurs.

The footprints, unearthed in a geological park in Yanqing county, are the first dinosaur traces the city has found, according to Zhang Jianping, researcher at the China University of Geosciences.

They were left by dinosaurs that lived some 140 to 150 million years ago in the late Jurassic period, said Zhang.

A group of scientists from Zhang's university first discovered the footprints in July 2011 in the Guihuamu Geological Park, which is known for its concentration of petrified ancient woods.

In one spot where most of the footprints are concentrated, the paleontologists counted several hundred footprints as well as seven to eight lines formed by consecutive steps.

Thyreophoras, theropods, ornithopods, and probably sauropods are believed to have left the footprints. The discovery will benefit the study of China's dinosaur categories at late Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods, Zhang said.

"It's the first time China has found thyreophora, ornithopod, and sauropod footprints of that period, which provides us with more knowledge on how such species spread across China," said Zhang.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

West Hartford, CT: Children's Museum Gets Dinosaurs Alive-Jurassic Treehouse

From Courant.com: Children's Museum Gets Dinosaurs Alive-Jurassic Treehouse
It was just about time for lunch.

But Peter Claffey, of Plainville, director of facilities and exhibits at the Children's Museum in West Hartford, and the rest of the crew pushed dinosaurs and background art into position Monday after the dinosaurs arrived for the new exhibit, Dinosaurs Alive-Jurassic Treehouse which is due to open Saturday Jan. 14.

Visitors to the museum will take part in a multimedia exhibit featuring animatronic dinosaur families of various species including Stegosaurus, T-Rex, Parasaurolophus and Apatosaurus.

Children will get a Pterodactyl's eye view of the dinosaurs as they make their way through the Jurrassic treehouse overlooking the dinosaurs.

The exhibit will run through the end of May.

'Bone-A-Fide’ hobbyist moves to Gulf Breeze

From Splash.com (Florida) 'Bone-A-Fide’ hobbyist moves to Gulf Breeze
or Cameron O’Connor, a successful road trip is one where none of his bones break; and by “bones” he means his collection of 250 dinosaur bones from his 18 years of paleontological digs.

The 61-year-old said he made one of those successful trips when he moved from New York to join his wife, Stephanie, in Gulf Breeze last year with zero breaks in his bone collection.

“I’ve been interested in dinosaurs and paleontology since I was a kid,” O’Connor said of his hobby. “I think all kids are, most just grow out of it. I didn’t.” Collections are realizations of people’s passions, he said. “This is mine.”

Since 1993, O’Connor has funded his own paleontological digs with a team of six other friends on privately owned land in Harding County, South Dakota and has also had three digs in Montana.

“A lot of people believe paleontology is this great romantic endeavor,” he said. “But, it’s backbreaking work. We’re all digging by hand. There are no machines helping, and in South Dakota the weather can be unbelievably hot and change in what seems like an instant.”

During one trip to South Dakota, he said it was 103 degrees the first day his team went to dig, but by the tenth day it had plummeted to 11 degrees.

The bones from all of O’Connor’s digs are on display in a freshly built shed, which his wife had someone build for him in their backyard. Featured highlights include Edmontosaurus bones, Tyrannosaurus Rex teeth, a Triceratops skull and horn, fossilized footprints and even dinosaur dung. He laughed and said that not all of his digging partners are as lucky when it comes to showcasing their finds.

“How and where and what gets displayed from our digs depends entirely on the wife,” he joked. “But, my wife is very supportive of me. She’s even the one who said, ‘If you like dinosaurs so much, why don’t you go learn how to dig for them?’”

O’Connor said he hasn’t found anything quite as satisfying as being out on a dig, and that it’s the stories behind the bones he uncovers that he finds the most intriguing.

“Without the science or story behind it, it’s just a bone,” he mused. “Everyone wants to find a T-Rex. Everyone wants to find a Raptor. But, for me, if I can have a successful dig and find bones with a story to tell, I’m happy.”

“These are the kinds of finds I love,” O’Connor said as he picked up an Edmontosaurus tail vertebrae that had broken and healed before becoming fossilized and compared it to one that was normal. “Dinosaurs had tumors and injuries just like everything else and you can see it right here. That’s cool.”

After working 32 years with the New York State Department of Health where he helped assess health effects from waste sites and plan the proper cleanup methods, O’Connor said he wants to enjoy his retirement and focus on his hobby.

“I’m 61 years old and it’s not going to get any easier,” he said. “But as long as I can dig, I’ll do it.”

Currently, O’Connor’s dinosaur bones aren’t open to the public but he plans to complete some new displays and update his presentation materials so he can start offering educational presentations for schools and groups in the community.

“What good are they if I keep them all to myself and just stare at them?” he laughed. “It’s much better if I can use them to get a laugh or teach someone something new that they’ll want to remember.”

Monday, January 9, 2012

UC Berkeley Scientists Study Dinosaurs and Lizards to Develop Better Robot Design

From AZRobotics: UC Berkeley Scientists Study Dinosaurs and Lizards to Develop Better Robot Design
Engineers, biologists, graduate and undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, have observed how lizards remain upright even when they stumble in mid-air. The team has discovered that lizards swing their tails in the upward direction and this keeps them from falling forward.

To test this theory, the scientists added a tail to a robotic car called Tailbot and drew a conclusion that throwing the tail in the air is not as simple as it sounds. In fact, lizards and robots have to alter the angle of their tail to offset the rotation of their body, thus protecting themselves from falling. If an actively controlled tail is used, even robots can jump and yet remain upright.

Team leader Robert J. Full, at the UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, said that applying this theory could help develop dexterous search-and-rescue robots as well as robots that are capable of quickly detecting biological, chemical or nuclear hazards.

Full further said that the therapod dinosaurs shown in the movie Jurassic Park could have used their tails to stabilize their bodies and this would have prevented them from falling. In fact, the dinosaur could be more effective in stabilizing its body than the lizards.

In a research-based teaching lab, Full and his students utilized a high-speed motion capture and videography to record how an African Agama lizard managed jumps from a platform that had varying degrees of traction, ranging from slippery to easily gripped sandpaper.

Full will report the discoveries online on January 5, 2012. The study will be published in the January 12 edition of the journal Nature.

Source: http://www.berkeley.edu/

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Book: Charles R. Knight’s Prehistoric Visions


From Smithsonian.com: Dinosaur Tracking Blog: Charles R. Knight’s Prehistoric Visions
There has never been a more influential paleoartist than Charles R. Knight. He wasn’t the first to illustrate prehistoric life, and he certainly was not the last to do so with great skill, but, for a time, he envisioned dinosaurs and other ancient creatures with such loving detail that he seemed to be sending back snapshots from lost eras only he could visit.

Science writer Richard Milner recounted Knight’s story in his visual and textual mix-tape of the artist’s work, Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time. The book is not a straight biography. Even though Milner composed a detailed summary of Knight’s life for the book’s introductory section, the bulk of the glossy volume is a showroom of Knight’s art and quotes from his books and articles. A set of closing chapters covers Knight’s legacy, from efforts to restore cracking murals to the artist’s dream of a scientifically accurate dinosaur theme park, but the greater portion of the volume is a portfolio of Knight’s range and skill.

I did not know much about Knight before reading Milner’s biographical section. I imagined that Knight was simply a passionate observer of nature who committed his imagination to canvas and paper. As Milner ably demonstrates, Knight’s cherished body of work is the fruit of multiple struggles, both physical and vocational, from the time of his birth in 1874. Born with severe nearsightedness, a playtime accident when Knight was a young boy virtually robbed him of sight in his right eye. His vision continued to deteriorate during his entire life. Knight was legally blind by the end of his career, and he had to hold his face only inches from the canvas to see what he was painting.

Knight was also a finicky and often cantankerous artist who had a difficult relationship with his primary sponsor, the American Museum of Natural History. Although Knight’s initial love was illustrating living animals—he designed a bison for a 30 cent stamp and created sculptured visages of animals for the Bronx Zoo that can still be seen on some of the old buildings—in 1894 he was asked to restore the fossil mammal Entelodon for AMNH scientist Jacob Wortman. Wortman and his colleagues were thrilled with the result. It was a triumph for Knight, who had learned a great deal of anatomy from taxidermists at the museum, and paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn desperately wanted Knight to be the museum’s chief restorer of prehistoric creatures.

Neither Knight nor Osborn were easy men to work with. Knight refused to have collaborators and rejected almost all criticism. He wanted to hear only scientific corrections from Osborn, and he frequently argued with Osborn about critiques others made of his paintings. And, despite Osborn’s wishes, Knight repeatedly refused to become a museum employee. He wanted to stay a freelance artist, and this created new problems. Osborn had to raise additional funding for Knight’s work, and to do this he often wanted sketches or samples to convince patrons. Knight, however, would not budge on the work until funding was secured and his terms regarding criticism were agreed upon. Knight needed Osborn because the artist was almost perpetually broke or in debt due to poor money handling, and Osborn needed Knight because there was no finer animal artist anywhere. This was a tense alliance that almost completely broke down when Knight created a series of prehistoric murals for the better-funded Field Museum—a project similar to one Osborn had been planning to execute with Knight for the AMNH dinosaur halls. Still, the two eventually overcome their pride and remained friends, albeit ones frequently frustrated by each other.

Knight also showed off his cantankerous nature in numerous editorials. He hated news and magazine articles that made animals seem overly cute or especially vicious, although Knight probably reserved most of his hatred for modern art. Knight loathed the popularity of artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Knight thought their works were “monstrous and inexplicable creations masquerading in the name of art.” Matisse, according to Knight, couldn’t even accurately draw a bird. Knight believed that the modern art movement was primarily the product of savvy art dealers and advertisers. There was a bit of sour grapes about this. As modern art gained in popularity, Knight had an increasingly difficult time selling his own work. People were just not interested in realistic paintings of animals.

Knight’s successes were hard-won, but, as Milner’s biography illustrates, the artist could not have done anything else. Knight’s undeniable passion was painting prehistory into life. A few snippets in the book provide some insights into Knight’s process. For dinosaurs, at least, Knight would often study the mounted skeletons of the animals and then, on the basis of this framework, create a sculpture. He could then study this three-dimensional representation for the play of shadow across the body under different conditions, and from this model Knight would then begin painting. In the case of his murals, though, Knight designed the art but did not paint the actual, full-size pieces himself as Rudolph Zallinger did with the Age of Reptiles. Instead, Knight created a smaller version of the mural which was then expanded according to a grid system by painters. Knight added only touch-up details to the murals.

Those murals and various other paintings continued to inspire artists and scientists after Knight’s death in 1953. After seeing images of absolutely atrocious, cut-rate dinosaur sculptures at a park in South Dakota, Knight wanted to create his own, scientifically accurate garden of dinosaurs and appropriate, Mesozoic-type flora somewhere in Florida. Knight never attracted the investors necessary to create the park, but the idea was carried on by his friend Louis Paul Jones in the form of Sinclair Dinoland at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. Likewise, Knight’s cutting comments about prehistoric mammal sculptures at the La Brea asphalt seeps in Los Angeles led the institution to eventually commission new, better sculptures after Knight’s style. Even ripoffs of Knight’s work influenced culture. When Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World initially ran in serial form, illustrations based heavily on Knight’s paintings accompanied the text, and the film version of the story featured a now-defunct horned dinosaur genus, Agathaumas, that was clearly based on a painting Knight created with some tips from an ailing Edward Drinker Cope.

Knight was a brilliant and taciturn artist. He constantly battled his boss, artistic society and his own eyesight to create intricate scenes inspired by old bones. In doing so, he elevated realistic, scientific representations of life through the ages into a lovely artistic hybrid. Even as new discoveries about dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and other creatures make some of Knight’s illustrations seem dated, his paintings still carry the reflection of someone who joyfully reveled in the story of life.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Tasmania: Dinosaur adventure begins


From the Mercury (Tasmania, Australia): Dinosaur adventure begins
A bit like this, says Tasmania Zoo manager Robert Warren sticking his head between the jaws of a 250 million-year-old giant crocodile.

Mr Warren and his father Richard are confident that Jurassic Swamp, Australia's largest outdoor dinosaur experience, will super-size the successful zoo's tourist pulling power.

Stomping through the gum trees are all of the usual suspects - triceratops, stegosaurus, brachiosaurus, apatosaurus (brontosaurus), dimetrodon, allosaurus, velociraptor, the tiny iguanodon and the mighty tyrannosaurus rex. A hidden loudspeaker emits eerie swamp noises.

"You can see them coming out of the bushes and they will scare the absolute pants off you," Mr Warren said.

Jurassic Swamp was opened yesterday by Environment, Parks and Heritage Minister Brian Wightman.

"It requires investments such as this to encourage people back to Tasmania," he said.

Rapid City, SD: Fire chars Dinosaur Hill gift shop porch

From the Rapid City Journal: Fire chars Dinosaur Hill gift shop porch
A fire that destroyed the deck of the Dinosaur Hill gift shop and damaged the building looked spectacular for a few frightening minutes Thursday night.

It took firefighters less than 15 minutes to contain the fire that was called in at about 8:47 p.m. by someone driving by, according to Lt. Brent Long of the Rapid City Fire Department.

The deck was fully engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived at the scene. The fire followed the outside wall of the building up to the overhang and into the roof, Long said.

"They got it quick, which was good thing because water supply up here is an issue," he said.

Although it was windy up on Skyline Drive, the fire did not spread to nearby vegetation.

Firefighters managed to work from the inside of the building searching for burning embers in the attic area of the gift shop. They tore down ceiling tiles rather than opening the roof.

The gift shop is closed for the season and the inventory was apparently removed, according to Long.

The cause of the fire was unknown last night, but investigators were expected to begin looking for a cause last night.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

A keen-eyed kid paleontologist

In one sense this is a great story, in another sense its worry-making. This 4 year old kid has been in the newspaper! She's famous! And we all know that her peers in school will be jealous and will start teasing her mercilessly about it.

Well...maybe not her current peers - other 4 year olds might not know anything. BUt when she gets older and her peers get older, and if some misguided parent says something about her being in a newspaper article - I fear the vultures will attack and try to cut her down to size.

From the Ottawa Citizen: A keen-eyed kid paleontologist
Don't go telling Stella Hatton that a plastic toy is a triceratops unless you get the horns right.

The four-year-old from Chelsea has a sharp eye and a love of dinosaurs. And her devastating critique of a sloppy model triceratops, found on YouTube, has brought her special attention from the Canadian Museum of Nature.

Stella's mother, Sarah Hatton, tells it this way.

Back in December, Stella was in a toy store with Sarah's partner, Peter Laporte.

"She was pointing up to these dinosaur model kits, because of course that's what she wants, and saying, 'I want the styracosaurus,' " her mother said.

All the boxes were labelled "triceratops." Laporte took one and handed it over.

"As soon as she started to point out the flaws he thought, 'Oooohh, this might be different,' " Sarah said. He grabbed his camera. The resulting video shows Stella cheerfully enumerating the major flaws in what's supposed to be a triceratops, but clearly isn't. The horn on the nose is too big; the horns over the eyes have been reduced to small bumps, and the frill - the big, bony plate behind the head - is a mess, too. Only the beak (mouth area) is right.

Stella insisted the whole thing still looked like a styracosaurus.

And when her mother put the video on Facebook for friends to enjoy, staff at the Museum of Nature noticed it. They kindly sent Stella a correct triceratops model, the buildit-yourself kind, along with some dinosaur books and trading cards.

"That was really charming, that they would still attend to just one kid out of all the kids they see every day," her mother said.

Sarah Hatton is a professional artist. She also paints the occasional landscape background for what she calls the "prehistoric soap operas" at home. (A recent diorama took 30 minutes for the paint to dry, as Stella wailed: "The herbivores are staaaarrrrviing!")

Her daughter has always been interested in nature because the family spends a lot of time exploring the Gatineau Hills. But about six months ago Sarah starting noticing that Stella had absorbed a surprising amount of knowledge from dinosaur books even though she can't read them. For instance, she can classify dinosaurs by skull type.

"So I thought oh, this is by observation alone. It's an eye for detail. I think that's how the video happened."

Stella's books were once her mother's, suggesting that these things may run deep.

"The biggest problem I have now is that she has kind of picked every dinosaur model there is in the stores, but she's interested in these really obscure ones," Sarah said.

"She comes to me with sad eyes and says 'Mummy I don't have a hesperornis!' "

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Books: A tale of Oklahoma dinosaur-hunters

From NewsOK.com: Books: A tale of Oklahoma dinosaur-hunters
Oklahoma's state dinosaur — yes, the state has an official dinosaur — is the acrocanthosaurus, a carnivore and apex predator from the early Cretaceous period, roughly 110 million years ago.

Standing 16 feet tall and with a 40-foot-long body, the dinosaur sported razor teeth and raised spines all along its back that likely supported powerful muscles.

It wasn't the biggest dinosaur of its time, but it was the tyrannosaurus rex of its era — and for decades, little evidence of it was known.

That changed in the early 1980s, when the most complete fossil remains of the dinosaur to date were unearthed by two amateur paleontologists in southeastern Oklahoma. Cephis Hall and Sid Love dug up the dinosaur one bone at a time, excavating it from a dirt bank on land owned by the Weyerhaeuser timber company.

“This is one of the greatest dinosaur discoveries and excavations in history,” said Russell Ferrell, who has written a book about the find and the legal battles that followed.

“It's the first time in history that a couple of rockhounds ... had taken on a major dinosaur excavation totally independent of any outside financial or logistical support from a paleontology department at a major university or in conjunction with a major fossil company.”

The bulk of Ferrell's book, “Acrocanthosaurus: The Bones of Contention,” discusses what happened after the discovery.

“Digging it up was a big chore in itself,” he said, “but Cephis and Sid had to battle a number of powerful people and institutions to retain ownership rights to it and eventually get the thing into the proper hands.”

The bones were rare. Previous acrocanthosaurus finds were scattered and incomplete, 20 to 30 percent of the animal at most. Until Hall and Love, no one had seen an acrocanthosaurus head, and estimates of its size and brain capacity were way off.

The rarity made the bones valuable — financially and scientifically. Hall and Love faced criticism from academics and legal fights to retain ownership of their find. Although the bones ultimately sold for more than $3 million, Hall and Love earned only $285,000.

The dinosaur, nicknamed Fran after a woman who helped preserve it, now resides at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. A cast of the skeleton can be seen at the Museum of the Red River in Idabel.

Ferrell learned of the story about four years ago. A semiretired Oklahoma cattleman, he lives south of Dallas and had been working on a couple book projects.

After interviewing Hall, Ferrell set aside his other work. Here was a story he wanted to tell.

Love had died long before Ferrell started the book. Hall wasn't a young man, and others with firsthand knowledge of the dig were aged and infirm.

“The story had to be told,” Ferrell said. “There wasn't time to wait. ... So I went ahead and did the research and wrote the story and had it published myself.”

Ferrell said the tale is unlike any other.

“I call this the greatest dinosaur story ever told, and I believe that,” he said. “I've read a number of other dinosaur books, but I've never come across another like this.”