Dinosaur Discovery Chronicles

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

2012-01-27T10:03:00.000-07:00

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.

Oldest dinosaur nursery found in South Africa

2012-01-25T10:15:00.000-07:00

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.

Fossil hunter campaigns for dinosaur dig

2012-01-24T01:23:00.001-07:00

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.

Iowa: Putnam Museum prepares for prehistoric invasion

2012-01-23T09:22:00.001-07:00

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

2012-01-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

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.

Sago Palm - the dinosaur of the garden

2012-01-20T10:33:00.001-07:00

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.

Dinosaurs of a Feather

2012-01-19T01:11:00.001-07:00

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

2012-01-19T01:10:00.002-07:00

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

Downtown Exhibit Features Prehistoric Crocodile That Ate Dinosaurs

2012-01-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Phil Currie continues to break ground in his hunt for dinosaurs

2012-01-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

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.”

Science rewrites assumptions about pre-historic animals

2012-01-16T00:34:00.000-07:00

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

New dinosaur species discovered in E. China

2012-01-15T12:26:00.001-07:00

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.

Big Mean Dinosaur Had Stubby Little Arms and Fat Fingers

2012-01-13T01:56:00.002-07:00

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

2012-01-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Antarctic fossil shows sauropod dinosaurs were global

2012-01-11T01:24:00.001-07:00

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

2012-01-11T01:22:00.001-07:00

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.

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

2012-01-10T16:05:00.000-07:00

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

2012-01-10T01:45:00.000-07:00

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.”

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

2012-01-09T13:41:00.001-07:00

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/

Book: Charles R. Knight’s Prehistoric Visions

2012-01-08T01:37:00.003-07:00

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.

Tasmania: Dinosaur adventure begins

2012-01-07T11:34:00.003-07:00

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

2012-01-07T11:32:00.001-07:00

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.

A keen-eyed kid paleontologist

2012-01-04T01:18:00.001-07:00

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!' "

Books: A tale of Oklahoma dinosaur-hunters

2012-01-03T13:10:00.000-07:00

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.”

Workers making repairs to aging dinosaurs in Rapid City's Dinosaur Park

2012-01-02T01:29:00.002-07:00

From The Republic (Columbus, Indina): Workers making repairs to aging dinosaurs in Rapid City's Dinosaur Park
RAPID CITY, S.D. — Rapid City parks officials are doing some work refurbishing the concrete creatures in the city's Dinosaur Park.

KNBN television reports that the park on Skyline Drive has been around since the 1930s, and the prehistoric creatures are aging even more.

Parks and Recreation workers have been refurbishing the big dinosaur, they and noticed that the paint and concrete is wearing on the top of the big dinosaur's head.

Parks Division manager Lon Vandeusen says the concrete has been exposed since 1936 and it has had to endure freezing and thawing temperatures, hail storms and wind storms.

They hope to complete repairs and have it restored by Memorial Day next spring.

Dinosaur Park is also establishing a foundation to help keep the park alive for future generations.

Made in China – The Evolutionary Origins of Multi-cellular Life Forms

2012-01-02T01:27:00.000-07:00

From the blog Everything Dinosaur: Made in China – The Evolutionary Origins of Multi-cellular Life Forms
Chinese Fossils shed Light on Single-celled Ancestry of Animals

An international team of scientists have published a remarkable paper detailing their research into an amazing, microscopic fossil that provides evidence of the single-celled ancestor of all complex animal life forms. The fossil shows an amoeba-like organism dividing in asexual cycles, first to produce two cells, then four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two and so on. The pattern of cell division is very similar to that found in animal embryos, including our own human embryo – but the fossil dates from approximately 570 million years ago, from a geological period known as the Ediacaran (Proterozoic Eon).

The term Proterozoic means “earlier life” in Greek, and this eon covers the time between 2.5 billion years ago up to the beginning of the Cambrian geological period around 542 million years ago. Scientists know that over this immense period of time, life on Earth slowly became more diverse and complex – although all life remained on the microscopic scale up until almost the end of this eon, a time referred to as Neoproterozoic era.

The activity of photosynthetic microbes, transformed our planet providing it with an oxygenated atmosphere, this had first begun in the Archean Eon, but this process continued and in conjunction with climatic changes, simple life forms started to become more abundant. Although, Natural History museums, focus on vertebrate life forms such as Dinosaurs and Woolly Mammoths for example, the evolutionary events taking place during the Proterozoic era had a much more significant impact on life on Earth.

During the Proterozoic, cells gradually became larger, more diverse and specialised. Eukaryotes (cells with a nucleus) began to dominate and feeding by ingestion that would eventually lead to the evolution of a gut and digestive system took place for the first time. The transformation of simple cells into these more advanced, specialised cells was probably the longest and hardest step in evolution – demonstrated by the fact that as the Proterozoic gave way to the Phanerozoic (visible life) Eon, there was to be a huge acceleration in evolution – known as the Cambrian explosion.

Fossil evidence of the single-celled ancestors of animals are extremely rare. However, an international team of scientists have discovered such a set of fossils in rocks dating to around 570 million years ago – Mid Ediacaran Period. The fossils were unearthed in southern China. The paper on this discovery has just been published in the journal “Science”. The research team was made up of scientists from the Paul Scherrer Institute, the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, Bristol University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

The computer generated and enhanced image shows 570 million year old multi-cellular spore body undergoing vegetative nuclear and cell division (foreground) based on synchrotron x-ray tomographic microscopy of fossils recovered from rocks in South China. The background shows a cut surface through the rock – every grain (about 1 mm diameter) is an exceptionally preserved gooey ball of dividing cells turned to stone.

One theory as to the origins of complex life on our planet, proposes that sophisticated eukaryotic cells evolved by the symbiotic fusing of different kinds of bacteria. For example, bacteria capable of fermenting substances merged with swimming, mobile bacteria and the resultant life forms, over hundreds of millions of years merged with oxygenating bacteria and some of these life forms were to become the ancestors of the Animal Kingdom.

However, fossil evidence of these major evolutionary transitions is extremely rare.

The fossils, studied by the international team show in remarkable detail the stages the life cycle of an amoeba-like organism dividing in asexual cycles. Ultimately resulting in hundreds of thousands of spore-like cells that were then released to start the cycle over again. The pattern of cell division is so similar to the early stages of animal (including human) embryology that until now they were thought to represent the embryos of the earliest animals.

Using advanced sophisticated X-ray scanning techniques the scientists were able to view the organisation of cell structures within their protective cell walls. These delicate structures should not have been fossilised but within their marine environment, they became buried in sediments rich in phosphates and it was these phosphates that impregnated the cell membranes, turning them into stone.

Imagine a 570 million-year-old tomb, within which can be found microscopic evidence of cell division.

Lead author on the subsequent research paper Therese Huldtgren, a doctoral student at the Department of Palaeozoology, at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, Sweden commented:

“The fossils are so amazing that even their nuclei have been preserved.”

The powerful X-ray microscopy methodology used by the team revealed that the fossils had features that multi-cellular embryos did not This led the researchers to the conclusion that the fossils were neither animals nor embryos but rather the reproductive spore bodies of single-celled ancestors of animals.

The team used a gigantic microscope in Switzerland to see inside the fossils. This machine is called the Synchrotron, and it is housed in a building the size of a football stadium. It is the one of only a handful of machines of its kind that can produce X-ray images of the magnification and clarity to permit scientists to study micro-fossils in great detail. Powerful generators fire high-energy electrons around a circular tube, at phenomenal speeds (close to the speed of light). As they travel, they emit X-rays that are so strong that they can penetrate solid rock, and the tiny microscopic fossils, allowing scientists to build up a three-dimensional image of the primitive organism represented by the fossil material.

Professor Philip Donoghue, Professor of Palaeobiology at the School of Earth Sciences, (University of Bristol), stated:

“We were very surprised by our results. We have been convinced for so long that these fossils represented the embryos of the earliest animals, much of what has been written about the fossils for the last ten years is flat wrong. Our colleagues are not going to like the result.”

Professor Stefen Bengtson, Professor of Palaeozoology, at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm added:

“These fossils force us to rethink our ideas of how animals learned to make large bodies out of cells.”

Prior to this research such images were interpreted as being the embryos of early animals, sponges or perhaps even the cells of sulphur-oxidising bacteria. Looking at and interpreting the preserved remains of organisms more than 550 million years old which measure just a few microns across is at the cutting edge of palaeobiology, but the team are confident about their findings.

Found in British waters: The sea creature that lights up like a Christmas decoration

2012-01-01T15:11:00.001-07:00

From the Daily Mail Online: Found in British waters: The sea creature that lights up like a Christmas decoration
This phosphorescent sea pen was literally the highlight of a series of finds marine surveyors off the coast of Scotland announced in their annual report today.

The studies, using acoustic multi-beam scanners and hi-def cameras, captured several rare and elusive species, including the sea pen - so named because resembles a writer's quill as well as a Christmas tree. The sea pen is a colony of seabed dwelling polyps that lights up when touched.

Other finds included the prehistoric 'faceless and brainless fish' Amphioxus - a modern representative of the first animals that evolved a backbone half a billion years ago.

The elusive, rarely seen Amphioxus was found in the waters off Tankerness in Orkney by marine surveyors this year. Instead of a brain - or face - the fish has a nerve cord running down its back.

One species of Amphioxus recently had its genome sequenced in an attempt to understand the origins of vertebrate life.

Vertebrate life and amphioxus are thought to have descended from a single common ancestor around 550 million years ago.

The species was unearthed in series of 15 marine surveys in 2011, covering over 2,000 square miles using acoustic multi-beam scanners and hi-def cameras.

Dozens of rare, strange species were found in Scottish waters.

he largest Horse Mussel bed in Scotland was revealed in waters near Noss Head, Caithness.

Known as 'Clabbydhhu' in Gaelic (translates as 'enormous black mouth') these slow-growing molluscs can live to nearly 50 years old.

Off the west coast, very rare Fan Mussels were found - at up to 48 cm long, this is Scotland's largest sea shell.

Around the Small Isles more than 100 specimens were discovered, the largest aggregation in UK waters.

With golden threads likened to human hair so fine they can attach to a single grain of sand, seamen once believed they fed on drowned sailors.

Other finds included Flame Shell beds in Loch Linnhe, Argyll, a cryptic species only found in a very few west coast locations with bright orange feeding tentacles.

Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead said: 'In an age where the lands of the world have been mapped out and recorded, it's amazing how many discoveries are waiting to be found under the waves'

'The waters around Scotland are rich in such fascinating biodiversity and it's our responsibility to protect this fragile environment,' said Lochhead.

'That's why we have ramped up our marine survey work, with plans being prepared for new surveys in 2012 to further our knowledge of what lies beneath Scotland's seas.'

The survey this year benefited from the use of the latest technology, with acoustic multi-beam scanners used to create 3D images of the seabed.

As a result, first-ever marine maps of many new areas was possible, including waters around Rockall, to the west of the Outer Hebrides, around the Isle of Canna and within Sinclair Bay in Caithness.

How to Name a Dinosaur

2012-01-01T10:22:00.001-07:00

From the blog Love in the Time of the Chasmosaurus: How to Name a Dinosaur

How to Name a Dinosaur (SciAm Guest Blog repost)
Posted by David Orr at 8:00 AM
A year ago, I wrote a guest post for the Scientific American guest blog, called "How to Name a Dinosaur." Still kind of tickles me that I have my name associated with SciAm, even if it's such a minor way. So, here it is again.

You had no reason to expect a good weekend as you began a long-dreaded yard project. Come Monday morning’s office discussions of sporting events and parties, you would be nursing an aching back. But with a single strike of your shovel, your yard gave you a story to top any tale of drunken debauchery recounted over cubicle partitions: waiting less than 20 inches under the sod was a fossilized femur that hadn’t seen the sun in 120 million years.

Since plausibility has already been pretty well throttled, let’s say that in the kind of radically simplified form of paleontology children’s books employ, scientists from a local museum immediately recognize the bone as belonging to a dinosaur that is brand new to science. In a savvy move thought up by the museum’s public relations office, you will be given the honor of naming the beast. It’s a heavy burden, and you recognize quickly that it’s going to require careful deliberation. You don’t want your dinosaur to be laughed off of the paleontological stage, after all.

The name a dinosaur is given is subjected to the same scrutiny as the description of its skeletal remains. It’s a minefield, and there are many ways the unwary can go astray. A shaky grasp of latin might result in incorrect pluralization or an awkward suffix. Noble dedications to local culture and language can be misspelled. Worse yet, it might just sound silly. Avoid all of these, and your name still might be brushed off because you were too conservative.

As a first step, you might narrow down your choices depending on the kind of dinosaur you're naming. No matter what kind you've got on your hands, there is likely an informal signifier in the form of a suffix to its generic name. For an ostrich-mimic, you might choose -mimus. A herbivore with a beaked, horned, frilled skull receives a -ceratops. For a dromaeosaur, -raptor works nicely. To get across the tenacity of a predatory theropod, -venator sounds really cool. A relative of Baryonyx or Spinosaurus might pay tribute to the crocodiles its snout resembles with -suchus. Sauropods work well with -titan. To play it safe, choose the truly classic dinosaurian suffix, -saurus.

Generous fellow that I am, I’ll provide further guidance in the form of three broad categories which apply to most dinosaur names. Individual examples can bleed between them, of course. Since we’re about to turn the corner into 2011, I’ll also use the opportunity to employ some of my favorite dinosaur names of 2010 as examples. One note before I start: for brevity’s sake, I'm only giving advice for the generic half of the Linnaean binomial, in other words, the Tyrannosaurus but not the rex. You're on your own when deciding on a specific name. If you're stuck, name it for your mom, and you'll do alright.

Stick with Tradition
The 19th century scientists who founded the discipline of paleontology as we know it often stuck to simple anatomical descriptions of the fossilized creatures they examined. Gideon Mantell kept it basic with his Iguanodon, “iguana tooth.” Since he only had teeth to go on, we can’t fault him for lack of imagination. 1838’s Poekilopleuron simply means “varied ribs.” Joseph Leidy, the founder of American paleontology, chose Hadrosaurus as the name of the world’s first mountable dinosaur skeleton. It means “bulky lizard,” which is accurate, if not terribly evocative. 2010 saw the introduction of a few anatomically-named dinosaurs, such as the abelisaur Austrocheirus, the “southern claw.” Pneumatoraptor, from Hungary, was named for the tiny air pockets infusing its scapulocoracoid.

Considering the classical training of the early paleontologists, many of them had a firm grasp of mythology. Edward Drinker Cope’s Laelaps was named for a tenacious dog of Greek mythology - unfortunately, a mite had already been given the name, and it’s now the “tearing lizard,” Dryptosaurus. One of my favorite mythologically themed dinosaur names of recent years is the brachiosaur Abydosaurus, whose skull was found with four cervical vertebrae near the Green River at Dinosaur National Monument. Its name refers to the town of Abydos in ancient Egypt, where the god Osiris’ own head and neck were buried in the Nile. Instead of providing insight into the anatomy of the great beast it was given to, the name tells a story about its discovery millions of years after it walked.

A third subset of traditional names is to pay tribute to another researcher, fossil hunter, or someone else who was instrumental in the discovery of the dinosaur or the field in general. This is normally done in the specific name, but entire genera are occasionally dedicated to one person, as in the ornithischians Othnelia and Drinker, honoring the prolific rivals of the Bone Wars. Just this month, a North American troodontid named Geminiraptor saurezorum was announced, and both halves of the binomial are dedicated to a pair of scientist sisters named Suarez. If you’re familiar with matters astrological, you might correctly guess that they’re twins.

Go Native
If you want to be cutting edge, jump on to the growing trend of paying tribute to local places, culture, and history. It’s a heartening trend, as paleontologists often rely on locals for support of their work, and it counteracts the old stereotype of paleontologists ripping fossils from the ground for the enrichment of far-off institutions. And it engages cultures in ways that sticking stubbornly to Latin and Greek can’t. While the names of new dinosaurs coming out of China may confound the tongue of someone from Helsinki, Buenos Aires, or Des Moines, Chinese kids probably appreciate having dinosaurs of their own, such as Mei long, the “sleeping dragon.” On the other hand, local tributes can result in clunkers like this year’s dynamic duo Koreanosaurus or Koreaceratops, which recieved a fair amount of web snark.

This year has seen plenty of good newcomers in this category, though. A few of them paid tribute to the cultures who first inhabited the American West. Two of these derive from the Navajo language. Seitaad is named for a mythological beast that swallowed its prey in sand dunes, which also alludes to the manner of the small sauropodomorph's death. Bistahieversor’s name is derived from a Navajo description of local geography. The Zuni people have their own dinosaur as well, a duckbill named Jeyawati, which means “grinding tooth” in their language.

One of the most inspired members of this class of dinosaur names comes from Romania. When I first read about it, it sounded like some beast out of Tolkein’s Middle-Earth. But the island-dwelling theropod Balaur bondoc refers to actual mythology with a decidedly local flavor. It’s standard for descriptions of dinosaurs to include sections on the etymology of their names, but Balaur’s is exceptional, exploring the twisting roots of the word’s various meanings that approach the evolutionary tree of life for richness and complexity. Lead author Zoltan Csiki writes that Balaur’s name is “motivated both by the classical association between dinosaurs (especially theropods) and dragon-like creatures, as well as by the fact that balaur is a mythological creature with links to both reptiles (snakes) and birds (wings)...” Who knew that reading the description of a dinosaur could also be a lesson in Romanian mythology?

Make a Splash
It’s part of a paleontologist’s job to focus on the deep past, but some also think forward to the public impact of their discoveries. Lately, University of Chicago’s Paul Sereno has seemed especially focused on the public-relations side of paleontology; in 2009, he unveiled the controversial Raptorex, which might be mistaken for the name of a Pokemon character, as well as a slew of Mesozoic crocodilians with nicknames like BoarCroc, DogCroc, RatCroc, and the unfortunate PancakeCroc.

This year, even a mild-mannered iguanodont received an impactful name in Iguanacolossus. But 2010 will truly be remembered as the Year of Ceratopsians, and some of the catchiest new names come from the beak-and-horns set, including Medusaceratops, Kosmoceratops, and Mojoceratops.
One of my favorite dinosaur names of this year or any other is Diabloceratops, which describes the fierce twin horns protruding from the back of its frill and is just plain fun to say. If he was writing Jurassic Park today, I imagine that Michael Crichton would be strongly tempted to include a Diabloceratops paddock on the island.

A Final Word of Advice
Go bold. Shoot for a word that will make some emotional impact. A dinosaur’s name is often the first impression it will present to the public. Though the standard pantheon of the most popular dinosaurs - you know, the ones even my grandmother can name - has been in place for a century, it’s always susceptible to invasion by a charismatic newcomer, as was proven by Velociraptor’s leap into the public consciousness in the 1990’s. If a novelist, comic artist, or screenwriter latches onto the name of your dinosaur, it could very well be fast-tracked for celebrity.

Above all, remember that the name you choose for your backyard discovery will say as much about you as it does about the bones in the museum

Distinctive dino bones discovered

2011-12-30T01:29:00.002-07:00

From ABC27 (Pennsylvania): Distinctive dino bones discovered
Dr. Robert Sullivan, the curator paleontologist at the state museum, has parts of a huge dinosaur - the alamasorous.

He discovered them with his then -research assistant Denver Fowler (now a doctorial student at Montana State University) while on an expedition on some federal wilderness lands in New Mexico from 2003-2006.

"You walk these badlands and you look for these tell-tale signs of bones emerging from the rock... and then when you see some of the bone coming through [you] start digging around it," Sullivan said.

The bones discussed in Dr. Sullivan's latest research published earlier this month were parts of two vertebrae and a femur. They belong to an alamosaurus about 69 million years old.

But it wasn't easy finding them. One bone was still encased in rock, and no cars are allowed on the federal wilderness land.

"It took a while to clean it up because we were trying to make sure that we didn't destroy the external service...but because it is so weathered and poorish it's very difficult to deal with," Sullivan said.

Its size was the major breakthrough - larger than some of the largest sauropod bones found in South America.

The findings will help researchers better understand dinosaurs.

Colorado: By Nature Gallery moves to new space in Beaver Creek

2011-12-30T01:28:00.000-07:00

From Vail Daily: By Nature Gallery moves to new space in Beaver Creek
BEAVER CREEK, Colorado — Over 150 million years ago, dinosaurs like the Stegosaurus stenops, the state dinosaur of Colorado, roamed the state along with many other of their now-extinct relatives. While they're not roaming anymore, some are still lingering above the Beaver Creek ice rink in their new home at By Nature Gallery, having been moved into a new, and much roomier location. If you look up to the feature window in the new store, you will see fossils and dinosaurs looking down at you, including a 12-foot-tall giant sloth skeleton and a Tyrannosaurus bataar skull that came all the way from Mongolia.

But this isn't just about dinosaurs. By Nature Gallery features petrified wood slabs, fossil fish from the Green River Formation in Wyoming, butterflies and bugs, mineral specimens, and jewelry. There are museum-quality fossils for serious collectors as well as a wide selection of special offerings for serious nature lovers.

Having grown the business over the last eight years in Beaver Creek Village, By Nature Gallery eventually outgrew the original spot, and needed to spread out. The new store is located up the flight of stairs from the ice rink area of the village, and across from the Children's Ski School in Gerald R. Ford Hall.

By Nature Gallery is owned by Rick and Frances Rolater and their partners, Jim and Kim Godwin. Rick started the original Discovery Store in the early '90s, which was a retail store featuring everything from nature. These stores were eventually sold to the Discovery Channel and formed the basis for their entire retail operation. When Rick and Frances moved to the mountains and the Vail Valley in 2003, they opened a much smaller version specializing in things from nature that little and “big” kids really enjoyed. Since the beginning, they have continued to offer the very best fossils available, as well as other fun and inspiring things to incorporate into our lives.

Their tag line is “At Home With Nature” because, according to Rick Rolater, “We want people to know that they can actually own some of the pieces that fascinate them so much as children and adults. I've never met someone who isn't intrigued by our natural heritage. These things are reminders of the incredible history of our Earth, and our place in it, and we can live with and be inspired by them every day. Children are our most enthusiastic customers, and we have a special place set aside for them, where touching is not only allowed, but encouraged!"

Their store hours are from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day except for Sunday, when they close at 6 p.m. Go take a look, right up the stairs toward the mountain from the Beaver Creek ice rink.

A Mysterious Thumb

2011-12-29T01:26:00.001-07:00

From Smithsonian.com, Dinosaur Tracking Blog: A Mysterious Thumb
There is much we still don’t know about dinosaurs. In fact, some aspects of dinosaurs have puzzled paleontologists for well over a century. Among the most frustrating is why the great herbivore Iguanodon had prominent thumb spikes. Despite all the possibly explanations provided for this appendage, none are especially satisfying.

The peculiar false thumb of Iguanodon was originally thought to set into the dinosaur’s nose. When Gideon Mantell first described the animal in 1825, the various bits and pieces of the dinosaur were thought to represent the remains of an enormous, iguana-like reptile. As a result, it seemed reasonable that a conical, bony spike corresponded to the same structure on the snouts of rhinoceros iguanas. This placement made sense within the prevailing view that creatures like Iguanodon were lizards writ large, but the idea was tossed when a series of more complete Iguanodon were found in a Belgian coal mine in 1878. The “horn” actually belonged on a mitten-like hand, opposite a prehensile finger.

But why should Iguanodon have a hand spike? The most popular idea is that the dinosaur used the appendage for defense—an illustration by John Sibbick in The Book of Dinosaurs shows and Iguanodon stabbing its spike into the neck of an attacking allosaurid. The restoration looks more than a little ridiculous. In order to get within poking range, the defending Iguanodon would have to place itself right in front of its assailant, perfectly within the range of the slicing dental cutlery of the carnivore. Such maneuvers would require the attacker to hold still while being prodded. One popular-audience book suggested that the spike might house a venom gland, but there is no evidence for this and, furthermore, the Iguanodon would still have to get within biting range of the attacking theropod to use the weapon.

There are a few other speculative hypotheses. Maybe Iguanodon used the spikes in combat with one another. Or perhaps, as David Norman briefly suggested in his section on basal iguanodontia in the second edition of The Dinosauria, the spike was used for “breaking into seeds and fruits.” These are not unreasonable notions, but there is also no positive evidence to suggest that they are correct, either. The Iguanodon thumb spike is a strange specialization that must have originated for a reason. The question is whether we can test any of these ideas.

Though my own suggestion is not any better than those I have been disappointed by, I wonder if the Iguanodon spike is a Mesozoic equivalent of another false thumb seen among animals today—the enlarged wrist bones of red and giant pandas. Perhaps the Iguanodon thumb spike was an adaptation for stripping foliage from tree branches. The dinosaur could have grasped the branch with the prehensile finger, or flexed the main fingers of the palm around a bough, and run the spike down the branch to remove the greens without having to chew through the less-nutritious twigs. But this hypothesis has problems, too. The false thumbs of pandas flex so that they help the mammals grip bamboo, whereas the Iguanodon spike was rigid. And why would an Iguanodon preferentially select greener browse, especially when supplied with a formidable battery or self-replacing teeth? Furthermore, this idea is difficult to test—a preserved thumb spike wouldn’t show wear from use the same way a fossil tooth would. The Iguanodon spike was surrounded by a tough, keratinous sheath, so the actual wear wouldn’t be seen on the bone itself. A functional model of an Iguanodon hand could help investigate this idea, but even then, direct evidence would be lacking.

Perhaps there isn’t a good modern analog for the Iguanodon spikes. The bones look like they could be used for any number of things, from defense to feeding, but frustratingly, there isn’t any unambiguous indication of what they were used for or why they evolved. Perhaps, to solve this mystery, we need to go beyond the obvious and try to think like a dinosaur.

Prof seeks prehistoric environments in fossils

2011-12-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

From CTV.TV: Prof seeks prehistoric environments in fossils

REGINA — A University of Regina physics professor is using modern technology to examine some really old bones -- and it all started with his child's fascination with dinosaurs.

Prof. Mauricio Barbi is using a synchrotron to take a deeper look inside fossils. The machine can look for traces of the original elements that were in the animal while it was alive.

"If I can measure not only the chemistry, but the concentration of elements in bones, different bones, and I can associate that to the environment, maybe I'm going to be able to tell about ... the impact of environment on those animals," Barbi said recently in an interview with The Canadian Press.

"Maybe I can look at how those concentrations of elements in the bone changed along the time.

"With the synchrotron we can look at these details hopefully and can understand our past, what happened in the past, because those things can happen again."

A synchrotron is a source of brilliant light that lets scientists study the microstructure and chemical properties of materials. The device at the Canadian Light Source centre at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon is one of the most powerful in the world. According to the centre's website, the machine can produce synchrotron light that is a million times brighter than sunlight.

It would make sense for a man with a background in high energy physics to use a synchrotron. But why use it to study dinosaur bones?

"That was, let's put it this way, an accident. The reason for that was my daughter. She loves paleontology. She loves dinosaurs," Barbi said as he proudly held up a drawing by Laura, 6, of bright green dinosaurs.

Camping trips to Dinosaur Provincial Park in southeastern Alberta and visits to the T. rex Discovery Centre in the community of Eastend, Sask., rekindled Barbi's own childhood love of the extinct creatures. His initial idea was to volunteer to dust off fossils.

But the head of paleontology for the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, Tim Tokaryk, wrote back suggesting they work together instead.

That's when Barbi started thinking about using the synchrotron.

"The synchrotron has some advantages over the electron microscope because...the data that we collect is much cleaner than with an electron microscope," explained Barbi.

"And we can scan a sample...in just one run using some specific synchrotron beams."

The machine can also help scientists look at the interaction between bones and the surrounding environment and how outside minerals ended up in the bone.

Barbi said it's also a lot less invasive because there's minimal alteration to the sample than with other techniques. That's in part because the fossils don't have to be cleaned. In fact, he wants them dirty.

"With the synchrotron we can actually look at those things with different eyes, without being so destructive."

Some of the fossils he'll be looking at are from "Scotty," a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Saskatchewan in 1991. Scotty is one of the most complete T-rex skeletons ever found and one of the biggest, said museum director Harold Bryant, who is also a paleontologist.

Bryant said he didn't immediately think of using the synchrotron to examine the beast.

"But one thing you learn in this business is never to assume and that one of the really neat things about research is there's always that opportunity ... to take you in directions that you never imagined," he said.

"It's often bringing new methods and new techniques to the study of materials that you've had around for a long time and it's just a new way to look at those items, in this case fossils."

Bryant said the work could increase the knowledge of Scotty, in particular, and fossils in general.

Barbi said the research is one of the first of its kind in the world. Only five papers have been published on the topic since 2009, although the synchrotron has been used to look at bones for at least 10 years, maybe more.

"It was more about imaging, having nice pictures, beautiful pictures that tell a lot," said Barbi.

"But not about chemistry, about the constitution of those bones, and ... about an association between those elements in the bone and the environment.

"If I can prove that, that's going to be a big step forward."

Dinosaurs (1915)

2011-12-26T15:42:00.002-07:00

DINOSAURS:
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE AMERICAN MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
BY
W. D. MATTHEW
CURATOR OF VERTEBRATE PALÆONTOLOGY

NEW YORK
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
1915

... 'Dragons of the prime
That tare each other in their slime'

PREFACE.
This volume is in large part a reprint of various popular descriptions and notices in the American Museum Journal and elsewhere by Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, Mr. Barnum Brown, and the writer. There has been a considerable demand for these articles which are now mostly out of print. In reprinting it seemed best to combine and supplement them so as to make a consecutive and intelligible account of the Dinosaur collections in the Museum. The original notices are quoted verbatim; for the remainder of the text the present writer is responsible. Professor S.W. Williston of Chicago University has kindly contributed a chapter—all too brief—describing the first discoveries of dinosaurs in the Western formations that have since yielded so large a harvest.

W. D. M.

Chapter I.

THE AGE OF REPTILES.
Its Antiquity, Duration and Significance in Geologic History.

Palæontology deals with the History of Life. Its time is measured in geologic epochs and periods, in millions of years instead of centuries. Man, by this measure, is but a creature of yesterday—his "forty centuries of civilization" (The records of Egypt and Chaldaea extend back at least sixty centuries.) but a passing episode. It is by no means easy for us to adjust our perspective to the immensely long spaces of time involved in geological evolution. We are apt to think of all these extinct animals merely as prehistoric—to imagine them all living at the same time and contending with our cave-dwelling ancestors for the mastery of the earth.

In order to understand the place of the Dinosaurs in world-history, we must first get some idea of the length of geologic periods and the immense space of time separating one extinct fauna from another.

The Age of Man. Prehistoric time, as it is commonly understood, is the time when barbaric and savage tribes of men inhabited the world but before civilization began, and earlier than the written records on which history is based. This corresponds roughly to the Pleistocene epoch of geology; it is included along with the much shorter time during which civilization has existed, in the latest and shortest of the geological periods, the Quaternary. It was the age of the mammoth and the mastodon, the megatherium and Irish deer and of other quadrupeds large and small which are now extinct; but most of its animals were the same species as now exist. It was marked by the great episode of the Ice Age, when considerable parts of the earth's surface were buried under immense accumulations of ice, remnants of which are still with us in the icy covering of Greenland and Antarctica.

The Age of Mammals. Before this period was a very much longer one—at least thirty times as long—during which modern quadrupeds were slowly evolving from small and primitive ancestors into their present variety of form and size. This is the Tertiary Period or Age of Mammals. Through this long period we can trace step by step the successive stages through which the ancestors of horses, camels, elephants, rhinoceroses, etc., were gradually converted into their present form in adaptation to their various habits and environment. And with them were slowly evolved various kinds of quadrupeds whose descendants do not now exist, the Titanotheres, Elotheres, Oreodonts, etc., extinct races which have not survived to our time. Man, as such, had not yet come into existence, nor are we able to trace any direct and complete line of ancestry among the fossil species known to us; but his collateral ancestors were represented by the fossil species of monkeys and lemurs of the Tertiary period.

Fig. 1.—The Later Ages of Geologic Time.

The Age of Reptiles. Preceding the Age of Mammals lies a long vista of geologic periods of which the later ones are marked by the dominance of Reptiles, and are grouped together as the Age of Reptiles or Mesozoic Era. This was the reign of the Dinosaurs, and in it we are introduced to a world of life so different from that of today that we might well imagine ourselves upon another planet.

None of the ordinary quadrupeds with which we are familiar then existed, nor any related to nor resembling them. But in their place were reptiles large and small, carnivorous and herbivorous, walking, swimming and even flying.

Crocodiles, Turtles and Sea Reptiles. The Crocodiles and Turtles of the swamps were not so very different from their modern descendants; there were also sea-crocodiles, sea-turtles, huge marine lizards (Mosasaurs) with flippers instead of feet; and another group of great marine reptiles (Plesiosaurs) somewhat like sea-turtles but with long neck and toothed jaws and without any carapace. These various kinds of sea-reptiles took the place of the great sea mammals of modern times (which were evolved during the Age of Mammals); of whales and dolphins, seals and walruses, and manatees.

Pterodactyls. The flying Reptiles or Pterosaurians, partly took the place of birds, and most of them were of small size. Strange bat-winged creatures, the wing membrane stretched on the enormously elongated fourth finger, they are of all extinct reptiles the least understood, the most difficult to reconstruct and visualize as they were in life.

Dinosaurs. The land reptiles were chiefly Dinosaurs, a group which flourished throughout the Age of Reptiles and became extinct at its close. "Dinosaur" is a general term which covers as wide a variety in size and appearance as "Quadruped" among modern animals. And the Dinosaurs in the Age of Reptiles occupied about the same place in nature as the larger quadrupeds do today. They have been called the Giant Reptiles, for those we know most about were gigantic in size, but there were also numerous smaller kinds, the smallest no larger than a cat. All of them had short, compact bodies, long tails, and long legs for a reptile, and instead of crawling, they walked or ran, sometimes upon all fours, more generally upon the hind limbs, like ostriches, the long tail balancing the weight of the body. Some modern lizards run this way on occasion, especially if they are in a hurry. But the bodies of lizards are too long and their limbs too small and slender for this to be the usual mode of progress, as it seems to have been among the Dinosaurs.

ANIMALS OF THE AGE OF REPTILES.
LAND REPTILES.
DINOSAURS corresponding to the larger quadrupeds or land mammals of today.
CROCODILES, LIZARDS AND TURTLES still surviving.
SEA REPTILES.
PLESIOSAURS
ICHTHYOSAURS
MOSASAURS corresponding to whales, dolphins, seals, etc., or sea-mammals of today.
FLYING REPTILES OR PTEROSAURS.
BIRDS WITH TEETH (scarce and little known).
PRIMITIVE MAMMALS of minute size (scarce and little known).
FISHES and INVERTEBRATES many of them of extinct races, all more or less different from modern kinds.

Fishes, large and small, were common in the seas and rivers of the Age of Reptiles but all of them were more or less different from modern kinds, and many belonged to ancient races now rare or extinct.

The lower animals or Invertebrates were also different from those of today, although some would not be very noticeably so at first glance. Among molluscs, the Ammonites, related to the modern Pearly Nautilus, are an example of a race very numerous and varied during all the periods of the Reptilian Era, but disappearing at its close, leaving only a few collateral descendants in the squids, cuttlefish and nautili of the modern seas. The Brachiopods were another group of molluscs, or rather molluscoids for they were not true molluscs, less abundant even then than in previous ages and now surviving only in a few rare and little known types such as the lamp-shell (Terebratulina).

Insects. The Insect life of the earlier part of the Age of Reptiles was notable for the absence of all the higher groups and orders, especially those adapted to feed on flowers. There were no butterflies or moths, no bees or wasps or ants although there were plenty of dragonflies, cockroaches, bugs and beetles. But in the latter part of this era, all these higher orders appeared along with the flowering plants and trees.

Plants. The vegetation in the early part of the era was very different both from the gloomy forests of the more ancient Coal Era and from that which prevails today. Cycads, ferns and fern-like plants, coniferous trees, especially related to the modern Araucaria or Norfolk Island Pine, Ginkgos still surviving in China, and huge equisetae or horsetail rushes, still surviving in South American swamps and with dwarfed relatives throughout the world, were the dominant plant types of that era. The flowering plants and deciduous trees had not appeared. But in the latter half of the era these appeared in ever increasing multitudes, displacing the lower types and relegating them to a subordinate position. Unlike the more rapidly changing higher animals these ancient Mesozoic groups of plants have not wholly disappeared, but still survive, mostly in tropical and southern regions or as a scanty remnant in contrast with their once varied and dominant role.

There is every reason to believe that upon the appearance of these higher plants whose flower and fruit afforded a more concentrated and nourishing food, depended largely the evolution of the higher animal life both vertebrate and insect, of the Cenozoic or modern era.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

2011-12-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

Regular blog postings begin on DECEMBER 26, Monday.

Museum of the Rockies Museum Ball auction items added

2011-12-24T01:39:00.002-07:00

From KBZK.com: Museum of the Rockies Museum Ball auction items added

The Museum of the Rockies has just announced three new live auction items that will be auctioned off at this year's Museum Ball. There will be a dinosaur dig with Jack Horner, a behind-the-scenes tour of Sports Illustrated in New York City, and a private dinner with MSU Football Head Coach, Rob Ash and legendary football player and coach, Sonny Holland.

The Museum will host its twenty-second annual Museum Ball on Saturday, February 11, 2012 from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. This year, the event theme is "Winter Wonderland," and the honorary chairs are Dean and Penny Hatten. Co-chairing the event are Lauren Cummings and Julianne Williams. Major sponsorship this year is by IMERYS Talc.

In addition to the live and silent auctions, the Museum will continue its tradition of raising money for the Opening Doors for Schoolchildren fund, which provides free Museum admission and bus transportation stipends for organized school groups from public, private, tribal and home schools across the state. Since 2005, the Museum has raised nearly $250,000 and has welcomed 50,000 schoolchildren as a result of the generosity of those who have donated to this fund.

To help raise money for the Opening Doors for Montana Schoolchildren fund, raffle tickets are on sale again this year for an "Overnight at the Museum." Raffle tickets are now available for purchase online or by calling 406.994.7460, and the cost is $10 per ticket or $25 for three tickets. The winner will be announced at the Ball. The raffle prize includes:
• A sleepover in one of the permanent exhibit halls at the Museum of the Rockies
• Accommodations at the Museum for up to 15 children ages 7-12 years old
• Accommodations at the Museum for up to 10 adult chaperones
• Dinosaur exhibit viewing, planetarium showing, laser show, or movie screening of Night at the Museum!
• Dinner and breakfast at the Museum
All proceeds from this raffle will go to the Opening Doors for Schoolchildren fund.

Museum Ball tickets are on sale now. They are $150 for members, $175 for non-members (included in the price is a one-year Museum membership). Sponsorship opportunities are also available. For more information and to purchase tickets visit our website, call 406-994-1998 or email events@montana.edu.

About the Museum of the Rockies (MOR)

The Museum of the Rockies is both a college-level division of Montana State University and an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit institution. Accredited by the American Association of Museums, MOR is one of just 776 museums to hold this distinction from the more than 17,500 museums nationwide. The Museum is also a Smithsonian Institution affiliate and a federal repository for fossils.
MOR Mission

The Museum of the Rockies inspires visitors to explore the rich natural and cultural history of America's Northern Rocky Mountains. In partnership with Montana State University, the Museum reaches diverse communities with engaging exhibits, educational programs, and original research that advance public understanding of the collections.

For more information and to purchase tickets visit www.museumoftherockies.org or call 406-994-1998.

Huxley’s Apocryphal Dinosaur Dinner

2011-12-23T10:32:00.002-07:00

From Smithsonian.com, Dinosaur Tracking Blog: Huxley’s Apocryphal Dinosaur Dinner

Winter is the season for dinosaur dinners. Both Thanksgiving and Christmas traditionally feature avian dinosaurs as the main gustatory event, and according to paleontological legend, it was this custom that inspired one 19th century naturalist to realize the connection between roasted birds and Jurassic dinosaurs.

Mark Norell, Lowell Dingus and Eugene Gaffney recounted the story in their book Discovering Dinosaurs. “One Christmas Day,” they wrote, “[Thomas Henry] Huxley was carving a turkey for his annual feast. As he dissected the drumstick he was struck by an unmistakable similarity between his Christmas dinner and the fossils of the theropod Megalosaurus back in his office.” From that day on, the story goes, Huxley was convinced that there was a deep genetic connection between dinosaurs and birds. I heard to same story from my Paleontology 101 professor at Rutgers University. It is a charming bit of lore. And it’s also wrong.

I don’t know where the story about Huxley and the Christmas turkey came from. It is one of those stories that seems simply to exist in the academic ether. (Even the Discovering Dinosaurs authors voiced their uncertainty about the tale in their book.) Fortunately for us, though, Huxley’s many scientific papers trace the development of his thoughts about birds and dinosaurs.

Huxley began associating reptiles—including dinosaurs—with birds on the basis of their anatomy in the early 1860s. Both groups appeared to be different variations of a common skeletal blueprint. But Huxley wasn’t thinking about this in evolutionary terms yet. He was primarily interested in the commonalities of structure and did not immediately start drawing evolutionary implications from the anatomical correspondences he recorded. That changed in 1866, when Huxley read the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel’s book Generelle Morphologie, an influential volume that connected organisms in a tangled “tree of life.” In regard to birds and reptiles, at least, Huxley realized that he had already established the basic outline of an evolutionary transition from a dinosaur-like creature—something resembling Compsognathus—to flightless birds and culminating in flying birds.

Huxley did not suggest that birds were the direct descendants of dinosaurs. So much geologic time was unaccounted for, and so few dinosaurs were known, that Huxley could not point to any known fossil creature as the forerunner of birds. Instead he made his argument on anatomical grounds and removed the issue of time. Dinosaurs were proxies for what the actual bird ancestor would have been like, and flightless birds (such as the ostrich and emu) stood in for what Huxley thought was the most archaic bird type. (We now know that Huxley got this backwards—the earliest birds could fly, and flightless birds represent a secondary loss of that ability.) As Huxley went about collecting evidence for his case, though, he also gave dinosaurs an overhaul. They were not the bloated, plodding, rhinoceros-like creatures that Richard Owen had envisioned. Dinosaurs were more bird-like than anyone had imagined.

In October of 1867, Huxley met with John Philips, an English geologist and a curator of Oxford’s museum. As Huxley related in his 1870 paper “Further Evidence of the Affinity Between the Dinosaurian Reptiles and Birds,” Philips wanted to discuss details of marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs in his museum’s collection, but as he and Huxley made their way over toward the displays they stopped to look at the bones of the carnivorous dinosaur Megalosaurus. Then Huxley spotted something peculiar:

As Prof. Phillips directed my attention to one after the other of the precious relics, my eye was suddenly caught by what I had never before seen, namely, the complete pectoral arch of the great reptile, consisting of a scapula and a coracoid ankylosed together. Here was a tangle at once unravelled. The coracoid was totally different from the bone described by Cuvier, and by all subsequent anatomists, under that name. What then was the latter bone? Clearly, if it did not belong to the shoulder-girdle it must form a part of the pelvis; and, in the pelvis, the ilium at once suggested itself as the only possible homologue. Comparison with skeletons of reptiles and of birds, close at hand, showed it to be not only an ilium, but an ilium which, though peculiar in its form and proportions, was eminently ornithic in its chief peculiarities.

Earlier naturalists had made a mistake. They had misidentified the shoulder girdle, and one part of what was thought to be part of the shoulder was actually part of the hip. Another strange piece, previously thought to be a clavicle, also turned out to belong to the pelvis. This rearrangement immediately gave the dinosaur a more bird-like character. It wasn’t only the small, gracile forms such as Compsognathus that shared skeletal features with birds. Philips himself had been pondering the bird-like characteristics of Megalosaurus even before Huxley arrived, and Huxley’s visit confirmed what Philips had previously suspected. The resulting, updated conception of Megalosaurus was closer to the animal as we know it today—a theropod dinosaur with a short forelimbs, long legs, a long tail for balance and a deep head filled with sharp, recurved teeth.

Huxley’s Christmas revelation is apocryphal. Rather than being instantly struck by the idea that birds and dinosaurs were closely related, Huxley carefully built up an argument over many years that birds evolved from something dinosaur-like. As far as I know, his only sudden realization regarding Megalosaurus involved the rearrangement of bones in Philips’ care at Oxford. And I think this brings up a crucial point often missed or glossed over in accounts of Huxley’s work. Through his efforts to untangle bird origins, Huxley was pivotal in revising the image of dinosaurs into active, bird-like animals. New fossil finds, as well as a new anatomical framework, changed dinosaurs from ugly beasts into graceful, unique creatures during the 1870s, thanks at least in part to Huxley’s efforts. (Too bad that succeeding generations of paleontologists would unravel this vision by casting dinosaurs as dumb, cold-blooded reptiles.) Even if Huxley didn’t say birds are dinosaurs, he certainly made dinosaurs more bird-like.

For more information on Huxley’s thoughts on dinosaurs and birds, please see my paper “Thomas Henry Huxley and the Reptile to Bird Transition” and chapter 5 of my book Written in Stone.

References:

Huxley, T.H. 1870. Further Evidence of the Affinity Between the Dinosaurian Reptiles and Birds. The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. xxvi. 12-31

Norell, M., Dingus, L., Gaffney, E. 2000. Discovering Dinosaurs: Expanded and Updated. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 11

The Second International Workshop on the Biology of Sauropod Dinosaurs (part I)

2011-12-20T01:29:00.001-07:00

Scientific American: The Second International Workshop on the Biology of Sauropod Dinosaurs (part 1)
Darren Naish

Sauropod dinosaurs are – in my somewhat biased opinion – among the most fascinating tetrapods that ever evolved. Exceeding all other terrestrial animals by an order of magnitude and famous for their extreme and often ridiculous necks, they were also remarkable in possessing an often elaborate degree of skeletal pneumatisation. Remember that sauropods were incredibly successful and were a persistent and obvious group of animals over a huge span of time. Sauropods pose a huge number of questions concerning behaviour, physiology, soft-tissue anatomy, reproduction, ecology and so on. Naturally, many of the questions we’d like to have answered just can’t be, given the limitations of the fossil record.

But in recent years a large number of diverse scientists have worked together in an concerted effort to better understand sauropod biology and determine the causes of their gigantism.

This research consortium, titled Research Unit 533 ‘Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs: the Evolution of Gigantism’ and funded by the German Research Foundation, is truly multidisciplinary, involving botanists, physiologists, biomechanists and other experts on living organisms – not just palaeontologists. A large number of technical papers have been produced by this research group, as has a very handsome multi-authored volume (Klein et al. 2011) [cover shown here]. Note that the group’s most influential publication – the major review of sauropod biology and evolution that is Sander et al. (2011) – is open-access and available free to all.

Palaeontologists near-universally agree on several aspects of sauropod biology. Sauropods were herbivores; they didn’t masticate their food or use gastroliths but almost certainly relied on rapid cropping and swallowing and hindgut fermentation; they possessed heterogenous, ‘bird-like’ lungs and a bird-like pneumatic system; and they laid clutches of hard-shelled eggs. There are some other ideas that are not exactly universally agreed on, but look increasingly well supported. One is that sauropods grew quickly (on par with precocial birds) and reached sexual maturity in their second decade. In modern animals, high growth rates like those seen in sauropods are only present in endothermic mammals and birds, and recent reviews of sauropod biology argue that – like mammals and birds – sauropods were most likely tachymetabolic endotherms (Sander & Clauss 2008, Sander et al. 2011). Another mostly accepted idea is that sauropods did not practise post-hatching parental care and that juvenile mortality was high.

One aim of the sauropod research group has been to determine how sauropods were able to grow so large. Clearly, no single factor led to gigantism in sauropods: numerous features were added piecemeal to produce the ultimate recipe for gigantism. These include a long neck, lack of reliance on mastication, avian-style lung, and production of numerous small young (Rauhut et al. 2011, Sander et al. 2011). The presence of the dinosaur bauplan contributed in some way to sauropod gigantism, since traits common to all dinosaurs (like parasagittal gaits and high growth rates) obviously allowed members of all dinosaurian lineages to evolve large body size with comparative ease.

Flow chart depicting evolutionary events that, combined, led to sauropod gigantism. From Sander et al. (2011).

With both our evolving understanding of sauropods, and the significant progress of the sauropod research group as required background knowledge, we now turn to the fact that the group recently hosted the second of its international workshops. Held at the University of Bonn, Germany, the meeting featured over 40 presentations on sauropods, given by researchers from all over the world. I wasn’t able to make the previous meeting (held in 2008), but am very pleased to report that I attended, and spoke at, this second one.

So – - three entire days devoted specifically to sauropod biology, physiology, reproduction, biomechanics and so on. As I said above, we can’t presently answer questions about such things as sauropod swallowing mechanics, pigmentation patterns, vocal abilities or mating postures, but – by the end of the meeting – we had certainly discussed, speculated about, and commented on, the majority of such issues.

Because the meeting was billed as a workshop – not just as a conference or seminar – discussion sessions followed each and every talk. This worked really well and it was typically all too easy to use up the 20 or so minutes of discussion allotted to each talk. In the text that follows, I haven’t discussed or even mentioned all the talks, but (as per usual) have mostly covered the ones that I found the most interesting, most enjoyable, or most memorable.

Reconstruction of a Massospondylus hatchling, from Reisz et al. (2005).

During the very first talk of the meeting, Robert Reisz discussed the large amount of new information he and his colleagues now have on the ontogeny and nesting behaviour of Massospondylus (note: not a sauropod, but a close relative of Sauropoda within the more inclusive clade Sauropodomorpha. A ‘prosauropod’). Much of this is unpublished so I won’t share it, but we’ve known for a while that juvenile Massospondylus are toothless, quadrupedal little animals, very different from the toothed, bipedal adults (Reisz et al. 2005). Does the association of those tiny babies with adults imply parental care? And what were the babies eating – were they provisioned by their parents or were they just eating something completely different?

Even at this very early stage of the conference, comments and questions were arising about neck posture, in particular because Robert said that Massospondylus most likely had a horizontal neck posture (a conclusion he reached following direct articulation of the fossil neck vertebrae). However, when you plug cervical vertebrae together in living animals, you never get the normal alert posture. I seem to remember a 2009 paper that took the trouble to point this out… we’ll be coming back to this issue later.

Photo of Tyrannosaurus by Scott Robert Anselmo, from wikipedia.

There followed a number of talks on sauropod growth rates, thermophysiology, digestion and feeding strategies. Chris Carbone spoke about his work on the ecology of Tyrannosaurus: a peculiar topic for a sauropod conference perhaps, but one with implications for several Mesozoic environments and foodwebs (Chris comes from a background in modelling energetic constraints in terrestrial predators and other animals: see Carbone et al. (1999)). You might think that the whole silly idea of the ‘scavenger rex’ is either dead or a non-issue, but it seems not to be so: one member of the audience implied strongly in the discussion section after the talk that T. rex’s morphology is inconsistent with hunting and only consistent with obligate scavenging. Err, what? The bottom line of Carbone et al. (2011) is that a hypothetical Maastrichtian habitat, realistically scattered with the carcasses of contemporaneous herbivores, would not provide enough available prey mass for a foraging T. rex, given physiological constraints. As I said to Chris after his talk, even this model is a best-case scenario, since there’s no one place in western North America where all the species listed in the analysis actually lived together. Sure, T. rex occurs from New Mexico all the way north to Saskatchewan, but Alamosaurus and various of the other dinosaurs included in the study don’t.

Reconstruction of Mamenchisaurus youngi by Steveoc 86, from wikipedia.

Two talks focused on the incredible Chinese mamenchisaurids, famous for their ridiculous necks (consisting of 16-17 vertebrae and, in cases, being four times as long as the body). In recent years a large number of new mamenchisaurid taxa have been named, and even the genus Mamenchisaurus itself now contains eight species. While these Mamenchisaurus species are superficially similar, it’s generally agreed that they likely aren’t close relatives. So it wasn’t really a surprise when a new cladistic analysis presented by Toru Sekiya scattered Mamenchisaurus to the four winds, though this was preliminary (one Mamenchisaurus species was recovered in a very counter-intuitive/startling position). It’s not as appreciated as it should be that some mamenchisaurids were truly enormous – there are mass estimates for some of the species that exceed 70 tons.

Europasaurus holgeri; photo by Ghedoghedo. It's perhaps not obvious from the photo how small this animal is (for a sauropod): about 6 m long.

José Carbadillo discussed the growth changes that occur in the vertebrae of the dwarf European titanosauriform Europasaurus [adjacent photo by Ghedoghedo]. For those who don’t know, this was an island-endemic dwarf sauropod, at most 6 m long and less than 1.5 m tall at the shoulder. The Europasaurus situation has become more complicated now that some animals reach skeletal maturity at much smaller body size than others – this seems to show that there are actually two europasaur taxa in the assemblage, both of which are dwarfs. Also on axial morphology, Francisco Gascó discussed the vertebral anatomy of the Spanish sauropods Losillasaurus and Turiasaurus, both of which seem to be part of the recently recognised non-neosauropod clade Turiasauria. You probably know that Francisco (aka Paco) blogs at El Pakozoico.

Francisco Gascó's opening slide, showing his excellent reconstructions of the Spanish turiasaurian sauropods Turiasaurus and Losillasaurus.

Three talks used computer modelling techniques (primarily finite element techniques) to analyse sauropod (and Plateosaurus) skull or pelvic structure. Phil Manning discussed synchrotron-based imaging work done on the skin of the famous Auca Mahuevo titanosaur embryo. I’ll hold off on saying anything further about this work, since the results are (understandably) embargoed.

Day two included sessions on the constraints of gigantism, feeding and digestion, and on reproduction and life history. Andreas Christian discussed something dear to my heart – the allometry of intraspecific fighting behaviour in animals and what it might mean for sauropods. Small animals can roll around and literally throw each other into the air [fighting cats from here], but this doesn’t work for big ones. They have to rely on body-barging or pushing. If sauropods did fight, it’s likely that this is what they did. Andreas has been a strong proponent of elevated neck postures in sauropods (his papers include useful work on neck posture and neck anatomy in ostriches, camels and other living animals) and his talks always include numerous amusing cartoons about the Necks Wars (an area we’ll return to in part II).

Digital reconstruction of a race-walking plateosaur, by Heinrich Mallison.

Heinrich Mallison discussed his new ideas about limb kinematics in long-tailed dinosaurs. Heinrich argues that we need to think anew about the importance of femoral retraction and protraction in dinosaurs and what it might mean for locomotion. Basically, he argues for speed-walking/race-walking dinosaurs where it’s the heavily muscled thigh and tail that provides the main power during fast movement, with the ankle being less important than traditionally thought. It all sounds pretty compelling but we know that some biomechanists who specialise on dinosaurs see problems with the idea. You can read all the details on Heinrich’s blog (dinosaurpalaeo), starting here. Heinrich also discussed possible resting postures for sauropods.

"Are fast-moving elephants really running?". Yes, it seems.

Bill Sellers also looked at the locomotor capabilities of sauropods, discussing evolutionary robotics and the construction of computer-generated models derived from laser scanning of mounted skeletons. John Hutchinson reviewed recent work on biomechanics in elephants, dinosaurs and other animals to see how animals cope with the challenges of gigantism. Various preconceptions and assumptions are false and unreliable (such as that limb joints are always ‘more columnar’ in big animals than smaller ones). New work on elephant foot dynamics and the stresses transmitted through limb bone shafts paint an increasingly complex picture as goes the biomechanics and abilities of giant quadrupeds [adjacent running elephant image from RVC page here; used with permission]. And John was also interested in testing that age-old question of how big a land animal can become. His answer? Hmm, vaguer than you might like (unless you’re a big fan of Godzilla).

A session on food uptake and digestion included several talks by botanists working on the diversity and growth physiology of Mesozoic plants. Controversies over the composition of the Mesozoic atmospheric mean that radically different models need to be explored (some workers argue for high oxygen levels, others for much lower ones). Jennifer McElwain spoke about her fascinating work on plant-atmosphere interactions. Specially constructed greenhouses allow plants to be grown in simulated ‘prehistoric’ atmospheres.

Carole Gee discussed the plant foods available to sauropods and the nutritional values of those plants (see Gee 2011). Among the many plants available to sauropods, Araucaria species are particularly interesting in that they release a large amount of energy when retained for a long period in the hindgut. They are also particularly good at regenerating broken branches and tree-tops.

Baby diplodocids foraging on ferns, from Walking With Dinosaurs. (c) BBC.

Equisetum is also of special interest in the context of sauropod biology given that it was widespread across the Mesozoic world and is also energy-rich. Indeed, juvenile geese can fuel their growth demands on an Equisetum diet. I mentioned earlier that we think that sauropods grew at rates comparable to those of precocial birds. For some time now, those of us particularly interested in sauropod biology have regarded the apparently rapid growth of sauropods as a bit of an enigma. Surely, we mused, low-quality vegetation (ferns and the like) just can’t provide enough energy to fuel this sort of thing? So, we wondered, is it plausible that sauropods were somehow provisioned by their parents? Were babies provided with some sort of secretion produced by the mother, or did they feed from regurgitated, pre-digested plant slop or something? Such ideas are not ridiculous, since parental provisioning of babies is hardly unique to mammals: members of several bird groups produce ‘milk’ for their young, and there are frogs and caecilians that feed their young with special skin, eggs, or cloacal secretions. Yum. Regardless, it seems that these speculations (note: unpublished and technically off-the-record) are now unwarranted. Baby sauropods could apparently fuel their growth just fine on a diet of Mesozoic plants. And, yes, of course there is always the possibility that juveniles were omnivorous, snacking on insects and such on occasion.

L to r: Mike Taylor, Darren Naish, Vanessa Graff and Matt Wedel at Bonn. Also, the largest saurischian skull we could find.

On that note, time to call it quits. The remainder of my thoughts to appear in part II. You can read further thoughts on the meeting here at SV-POW! and note also that both Heinrich Mallison and John Hutchinson tweeted continually throughout the meeting under #SauroBonn. For previous Tet Zoo articles on sauropod biology and behaviour see…

* The hands of sauropods: horseshoes, spiky columns, stumps and banana shapes
* Junk in the trunk: why sauropod dinosaurs did not possess trunks
* Sauropod dinosaurs held their necks in high, raised postures
* Getting scansoriopterygids, terrestrial-stalking azhdarchids, sauropod pneumaticity and the word palaeontography into a kid’s book
* Necks for sex? No thank you, we’re sauropod dinosaurs
* The sauropod viviparity meme

Refs – -

Carbone, C., Mace, G. M., Roberts, S. C. & Macdonald, D. W. 1999. Energetic constraints on the diet of terrestrial carnivores. Nature 402, 286-288.

Carbone C, Turvey ST, & Bielby J (2011). Intra-guild competition and its implications for one of the biggest terrestrial predators, Tyrannosaurus rex. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 278 (1718), 2682-90 PMID: 21270037

Gee, C. T. 2011. Dietary options for the sauropod dinosaurs from an integrated botanical and paleobotanical perspective. In Klein, N., Remes, K., Gee, C. T. & Sander, P. M. (eds). Biology of Sauropod Dinosaurs: Understanding the Life of Giants. Indiana University Press (Bloomington & Indianapolis), pp. 34-56.

Klein, N., Remes, K., Gee, C. T. & Sander, P. M. 2011. Biology of Sauropod Dinosaurs: Understanding the Life of Giants. Indiana University Press (Bloomington & Indianapolis).

Rauhut, O. W. M., Fechner, R., Remes, K. & Reis, K. 2011. How to get big in the Mesozoic: the evolution of the sauropodomorph body plan. In Klein, N., Remes, K., Gee, C. T. & Sander, P. M. (eds). Biology of Sauropod Dinosaurs: Understanding the Life of Giants. Indiana University Press (Bloomington & Indianapolis), pp. 119-149.

Reisz, R. R., Scott, D., Sues, H.-D., Evans, D. C. & Raath, M. A. 2005. Embryos of an Early Jurassic prosauropod dinosaur and their evolutionary significance. Science 309, 761-764.

Sander, P. M., Christian, A., Clauss, M., Fechner, R., Gee, C. T., Griebeler, E.-M., Gunga, H.-C., Hummel, J., Heinrich, M., Perry, S. F., Preuschoft, H., Rauhut, O. W. M., Remes, K., Tütken, T., Wings, O. & Witzel, U. 2011. Biology of the sauropod dinosaurs: the evolution of gigantism. Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 86, 117-155.

- . & Clauss, M. 2008. Sauropod gigantism. Science 322, 200-201.
Darren NaishAbout the Author: Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006.

Titanosaur bone found in Antarctica

2011-12-19T09:27:00.000-07:00

From Google News: Titanosaur bone found in Antarctica
Long before the arrival of penguins, giant plant-eating dinosaurs roamed Antarctica.

Scientists discovered a fossil tail bone belonging to a titanosaur, a family that included the largest land animals ever to walk the Earth.

Titanosaurs were sauropods, four-legged herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and tails.

Sauropods included some 150 species whose remains have been found around the world, but never in Antarctica until now.

The new specimen was discovered on James Ross Island by an Argentinian-led team and it consists of section of vertebrae almost 20cm long believed to have come from the middle third of the dinosaur's tail.

Scientists identified it as belonging to a "lithostrotian titanosaur" from the Late Cretaceous period around 70 million years ago.

The discovery is reported in the German journal Naturwissenschaften - The Science of Nature.

Authors Dr Ignacio Alejandro Cerda, from the Conicet research institute in Argentina, and colleagues wrote: "Our finding indicates that advanced titanosaurs achieved a global distribution at least by the Late Cretaceous."

Titanosaurs included the mighty Argentinosaurus, which may have reached 100ft in length.

However, the discovery of a single vertebrae fossil yielded too little information to allow speculation about the dinosaur's species.

New Evidence Says Three Dinosaurs Are Actually One

2011-12-17T01:17:00.000-07:00

From RedOrbit: New Evidence Says Three Dinosaurs Are Actually One
Researchers report that they have found further evidence that genera of the Triceratops actually represent different individuals that all belong to the Triceratops genus.

The three genera, Triceratops, Torosaurus, and Nedoceratops, were thought at one time or another thought to be distinct.

However, the work by John Scanella of Montana State University and colleagues shows that these dinosaurs are actually the result of maturity. They focused on a single skull that has been the subject of controversy during their study.

Some believe the skull to be a Triceratops, while others say it is a different genus.

The researchers new analysis provides evidence that this specimen is in fact a Triceratops, and that both Torosaurus and Nedoceratops both fall into the same genus.

The authors said that these factors result in specimens with some features that are considerably different, but are nonetheless all Triceratops.

They believe that the size and shape of the dinosaur’s skull and head ornaments changed as it matured.

In the new study, the researchers suggests that the Triceratops is the younger version of the dinosaur, while the Nedoceratops is in an intermediate stage. The Torosaurus would be the “elderly” version of the group of dinosaur.

The main difference that sets these dinosaur skulls apart is a set of large holes in the crown of Torosaurus.

These holes are smaller in Nedoceratops, and in Triceratops some thought they seem to be absent. However, examination by Scanella showed evidence of the beginnings of these holes in some Triceratops.

Another difference between the dinosaurs is that the Torosaurus have extra spikes around the edges of its crown.

The researchers believe these extra spikes are the result of the bony protrusions on a Triceratop’s skull splitting later on in life as the animal matured.

The research was published in the December 14th edition of the journal PLoS ONE.

Dinosaurs with killer claws yield new theory about flight Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/dinosaurs-with-killer

2011-12-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

From the Billings Gazette: Dinosaurs with killer claws yield new theory about flight
BOZEMAN -- New research from Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies has revealed how dinosaurs like Velociraptor and Deinonychus used their famous killer claws, leading to a new hypothesis on the evolution of flight in birds.

In a paper published Dec. 14 in PLoS ONE, MSU researchers Denver W. Fowler, Elizabeth A. Freedman, John B. Scannella and Robert E. Kambic, who is now at Brown University in Rhode Island, describe how comparing modern birds of prey helped develop a new behavior model for sickle-clawed carnivorous dinosaurs, such as the Velociraptor.

"This study is a real game-changer," said lead author Fowler. "It completely overhauls our perception of these little predatory dinosaurs, changing the way we think about their ecology and evolution."

The study focuses on dromaeosaurids; a group of small predatory dinosaurs that include the famous Velociraptor and its larger relative, Deinonychus. Dromaeosaurids are closely related to birds and are most famous for possessing an enlarged sickle-claw on the second digit, or inside toe, of the foot. Previous researchers suggested that this claw was used to slash at prey or help to climb up their hides, but the new study suggests a different behavior.

"Modern hawks and eagles possess a similar enlarged claw on their digit 2's, something that hadn't been noted before we published on it back in 2009," Fowler said. "We showed that the enlarged D-2 claws are used as anchors, latching into the prey, preventing their escape. We interpret the sickle claw of dromaeosaurids as having evolved to do the same thing: latching in and holding on."

As in modern birds of prey, precise use of the claw is related to relative prey size.

"This strategy is only really needed for prey that are about the same size as the predator -- large enough that they might struggle and escape from the feet," Fowler said.

"Smaller prey are just squeezed to death, but, with large prey, all the predator can do is hold on and stop it from escaping, then basically just eat it alive. Dromaeosaurs lack any obvious adaptations for dispatching their victims, so, just like hawks and eagles, they probably ate their prey alive, too."

Other features of the feet of bird of prey gave clues to the functional anatomy of their ancient relatives. Toe proportions of dromaeosaurids seemed more suited for grasping than running, and the metatarsus bones between the ankles and the toes are more adapted for strength than speed.

"Unlike humans, most dinosaurs and birds only walk on their toes, so the metatarsus forms part of the leg itself," Fowler said. "A long metatarsus lets you take bigger strides to run faster; but, in dromaeosaurids, the metatarsus is very short, which is odd."

Fowler thinks that this indicates that Velociraptor and its kin were adapted for a strategy other than simply running after prey.

"When we look at modern birds of prey, a relatively short metatarsus is one feature that gives the bird additional strength in its feet," Fowler said. "Velociraptor and Deinonychus also have a very short, stout metatarsus, suggesting that they had great strength but wouldn't have been very fast runners."

The ecological implications become especially interesting when dromaeosaurids are contrasted with their closest relatives -- a very similar group of small carnivorous dinosaurs called troodontids, Fowler said.

"Troodontids and dromaeosaurids started out looking very similar, but, over about 60 million years, they evolved in opposite directions, adapting to different niches," Fowler said.

"Dromaeosaurids evolved towards stronger, slower feet; suggesting a stealthy ambush predatory strategy, adapted for relatively large prey. By contrast, troodontids evolved a longer metatarsus for speed and a more precise, but weaker grip, suggesting they were swift but probably took relatively smaller prey."

The study also has implications for birds, the next-closest relatives of troodontids and dromaeosaurids. An important step in the origin of modern birds was the evolution of the perching foot.

"A grasping foot is present in the closest relatives of birds, but also in the earliest birds like Archaeopteryx," Fowler said. "We suggest that this originally evolved for predation, but would also have been available for use in perching. This is what we call ‘exaptation': a structure evolved originally for one purpose that can later be appropriated for a different use."

The new study proposes that a similar mechanism may be responsible for the evolution of flight.

"When a modern hawk has latched its enlarged claws into its prey, it can no longer use the feet for stabilization and positioning," Fowler said. "Instead, the predator flaps its wings so that the prey stays underneath its feet, where it can be pinned down by the predator's bodyweight."

The researchers suggest that this "stability flapping" uses less energy than flight, making it an intermediate flapping behavior that may be key to understanding how flight evolved.

"The predator's flapping just maintains its position and does not need to be as powerful or vigorous as full flight would require. Get on top, stay on top; it's not trying to fly away," Fowler said.

"We see fully formed wings in exquisitely preserved dromaeosaurid fossils, and, from biomechanical studies, we can show that they were also able to perform a rudimentary flapping stroke. Most researchers think that they weren't powerful enough to fly. We propose that the less-demanding stability flapping would be a viable use for such a wing, and this behavior would be consistent with the unusual adaptations of the feet."

Another group of researchers has proposed that understanding flapping behaviors is key to understanding the evolution of flight, a view with which Fowler agrees.

"If we look at modern birds, we see flapping being used for all sorts of behaviors outside of flight. In our paper, we are formally proposing the ‘flapping first' model, where flapping evolved for other behaviors first and was only later exapted for flight by birds.

The researchers think their new ideas will open new lines of investigation into dinosaur paleobiology and the evolution of novel anatomical structures.

"As with other research conducted at the Jack Horner paleo lab, we're looking at old paleontological questions with a fresh perspective, taking a different angle," Fowler said.

"Just as you have to get beyond the idea that feet are used just for walking, so we are coming to realize that many unusual structures in modern animals originally evolved for quite different purposes. Revealing the selection pathways that mold and produce these structures helps us to better understand the major evolutionary transitions that shaped life on this planet.

The biggest dinosaur yet?

2011-12-14T22:43:00.000-07:00

From All Voices: The biggest dinosaur yet?

Those colossal lizards that lived millions of years ago have always been of infinite interest to armchair enthusiasts and paleontologists alike. But nearly everyone knows the names of some dinosaurs; most are able to name the T-Rex and if they were paying attention during “Jurassic park”, Velociraptors then. Even those with the faintest idea know that dinosaurs were big, car-big, house-big, and even building-big.

Of course, when it comes to size, bipedal or just two legs wouldn’t cut it. Sure, the T-Rex was almost 15 foot tall, but its height pales in comparison to the sauropods, the largest dinosaurs to have roamed prehistoric earth. This group of dinosaurs was massive; the Brachiosaurus for example, measured 26 meters and weighed almost 30 metric tons, and the largest known sauropod, the Argentinosaurus, weighed in at a phenomenal 70 tons. But a recent discovery in America may just unseat the Argentinosaurus.

In a joint discovery by the Museum of Rockies in Montana State and the State Museum of Pennsylvania, the paleontologist teams discovered fragments, two vertebrae and a femur to be exact, of the Alamosaurus sanjuanensis.

The fossil remains were discovered in New Mexico, where it is believed the Alamosaurus roamed around 69 million years ago. The dinosaur was discovered back around the 1920s and its size was considered to be around 60 feet, weighing 30 tons. But on the new dig, the paleontologists were surprised to discover that the Alamosaurus remains were much larger than expected, hinting at an even greater size. It was believed that the Alamosaurus adult, to whom the bones belonged, was still growing, possibly indicating that the known measurements of the dinosaur were transitory.

Dr. W. Fowler of Montana State University explained the find as, “This (the find) told us that Alamosaurus got even bigger, but we didn't imagine that it could get quite this big. Over the past 20 years, Argentinean and Brazilian palaeontologists have been unearthing bigger and bigger dinosaurs, putting the rest of the world in the shade,” adding, “Our findings show that Alamosaurus was originally described based on immature material and this is a problem as characteristics that define a species are typically only fully gained at adult size. This means that we might be misinterpreting the relationships of Alamosaurus and possibly other sauropod dinosaurs too.”

Finding complete fossil remains of the sauropods has been rare and most of those have unearthed only bits and pieces. This has stymied work on this group of the dinosaurs, something that has affected the Alamosaurus’ standing. But Dr. Fowler is confident that more remains can be found, helping paint a more complete picture of the dinosaur, especially because the Naashoibito region of New Mexico, where the bones were found, are known to have revealed many Alamosaurus remains in the past.

Smithsonian’s scan man in high demand

2011-12-13T11:15:00.002-07:00

From Washington Post: Smithsonian’s scan man in high demand
By Brian Vastag, Published: December 12

Oh, the things Bruno Frohlich can scan.

Ancient whale skulls. Smashed human ones. Stradivarius violins. Violas. Cellos. Guitars. Stringed instruments from Mongolia. Apollo spacesuits. Eagle feathers. Mummified birds from Egypt oddly missing their heads. Dinosaur leg bones, fossilized. Thigh bones, hip bones, arms bones, teeth. An infant’s iron casket dug up in the District. Live turtles. Dead crocodiles. Mummy after mummy from Egypt. And one from Peru.

The Smithsonian Institution owns 137 million things. Over the past 15 years, Frohlich, it seems, has scanned them all.

Okay, not quite. But if he had enough time, he would.

“This is my hobby,” Frohlich says of his job.

In 1996, Siemens Corp. donated a used medical CT scanner to the National Museum of Natural History. Understanding the machine’s potential to reveal ancient secrets, Frohlich took charge of it.

“In the old days, 20 years ago, we would do an autopsy, cut the body open,” Frohlich says of studying mummies. No need for such destructive science now. Just scan an object, and a three-dimensional image of its innards appears.

Frohlich said few other museums own full-size CT machines. And now the Smithsonian owns two. A faster, higher-resolution scanner arrived in September, again a used model (again donated by Siemens) that retails for about $250,000. It’s a gleaming white five-foot-tall vertical doughnut with a sliding table attached, squeezed into Frohlich’s third-floor laboratory.

In a hospital, the scanner’s penetrating X-rays might spot a tumor. At the museum, they reveal that what appears to be a small mummy of a sacred kitten is, in fact, hollow — a 2,500-year-old Egyptian con job.

“You never know what you’ll find,” says the 60-something Danish native, perhaps a little impishly.

A small rectangular box hangs above the lab door. It reads “X-RAYS” and flashes red when the scanner is on. People walk in anyway, interrupting. This annoys Frohlich. There’s so much to scan.

Frohlich enjoys the solitude of it. “I’m not a give-me-attention kind of guy,” he says as he briskly leads a visitor past a mob of tourists in the museum’s entrance hall. “I’m more of a leave-me-alone type.”

Sometimes this happens: A colleague wheels up to the lab a behemoth chunk of dinosaur skeleton. It is mineralized bone — a fossil — so it is hard. X-rays scatter off such items, bouncing all over the joint and possibly exposing the unwary to tiny doses of radiation. So when confronted with hard targets, Frohlich waits until everyone in the vast museum has left.

In the 2 a.m. quiet, he scans.

“My workdays keep going; they are 24 hours,” he says. “I love it.”

Scanmaster of the Smithsonian is Frohlich’s second job at the museum. He arrived in 1978 as a forensic anthropologist, a career that still carries him around the world. In the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and the deserts of Mongolia, he helps solve ancient murder mysteries. When he’s not traveling, he spends half his time in Vermont, where he aids the state police there and in Connecticut in solving more-recent homicides.

At the museum, though, it’s all about the scans. As Frohlich works, he sits behind a leaded-glass window with a view of the CT machine. A dosimeter stays clipped to his shirt pocket, measuring his radiation exposure.

The CT machine whirs in a wash of white noise. On the screen of the control station, a three-dimensional image appears, a high-resolution peek inside rock, or metal, or wood, or tissue. It’s technology; may as well be magic.

Coming back to life

One recent morning, the museum showed off its new scanner. Three reporters, a TV camera and four high school interns clad in red polo shirts crowd around the scanner table. It’s warm. Sweat appears on Frohlich’s brow. As he expounds on the machine’s value to science, he talks a little too fast, excitedly.

As he does so, a 700-year-old Peruvian rests on the scanning table. She is on her side with her legs crossed, one knee sticking up. She is tiny. She has seen better days. Her bones are bony. She is missing a lot of teeth and some of her skin. Ragged cloth strips still wrap her head. Decades ago in the Andes, she was found in a cold, dry cave, good for preservation. She’s a natural mummy.

Scans revealed that the woman was in her 40s when she died, her organs still intact. She may have been a sacrifice, Frohlich says. Other scientists can now read the images and learn more about the woman’s health, search for hints as to what diseases she may have had, whether she had any broken bones. They can piece together her story.

As Frohlich talks, a phalanx of Siemens executives and the museum’s director, Cristian Samper, wait in the hallway. They are on a schedule. Someone tells Frohlich to wrap it up.

“They expect me to describe 20 years of work in 20 minutes,” he scoffs.

He keeps talking, faster.

He pulls a human skull from a shelf behind him. Yes, there are human skulls on his shelves, in cardboard boxes numbered 39, 233, 787. The Smithsonian flies Frohlich to Mongolia frequently to collaborate with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. And so, here is a skull he brought back.

Frohlich turns it over, points to a triangular hole gaping in the rounded back of the skull. Something like a baseball bat could have done it. A real good thwack. Who killed this centuries-old Mongolian, and why?

“We’re not out there just to pick up mummies and skeletons,” Frohlich says later of his expeditions. “We’re there to learn about the people. We make them come alive.”

Scanning helps. It can show, for instance, whether bone healed after a trauma, indicating survival. The hole-in-the-head guy, he did not survive the whack. His face is smashed, too. “Someone made sure he was dead,” Frohlich says.

The sounds of music

Frohlich enjoys the forensics, unraveling these mysteries. Even more, he loves scanning.

After the first machine arrived, Frohlich sent word to staff at the Smithsonian’s 19 museums and galleries: Bring me your scannables. And so they did.

Some Air and Space Museum curators carried over a spacesuit once worn by a moon-walking astronaut. The scans revealed weak spots in the suit’s latex and neoprene, guiding conservation efforts.

UK: Brace yourself for a spot of fossil hunting

2011-12-05T01:29:00.001-07:00

From The Independent: Brace yourself for a spot of fossil hunting
As any budding palaeontologist knows, a bucket and spade are handy for more than just building sandcastles on the Isle of Wight.

They are useful for rooting around in the sand along the base of the cliffs at Yaverland, where every rock you pick up seems to contain a fossil. When I visited, the autumnal gales had kicked in, hurling spray and waves at the battered cliffs, loosening the soil and releasing more fossils for hardy amateur collectors.

I'd dropped down to Yaverland beach, north of Sandown, as part of a walk that takes in the rich wildlife and history of a strangely enigmatic easterly point of the island. Starting in Brading, south of Ryde, I was immediately struck by how diligently the island waymarks its paths. Almost all footpath signs come with a number as well as the destination. And so, I dutifully took footpath number SS44 through the Brading Marshes nature reserve.

The landscape is being restored and already teal and widgeon are among the ducks returning, while the rarer snipe – twitchy, mottled brown, long bill – may flutter around in the ditches, and flocks of lapwing should by now have arrived for the winter. The area feels like an island within an island, which until a few hundred years ago was the case, when the Isle of Bembridge was separated from the main island by a tidal channel that now forms the course of the River Yar.

After collecting several modest fossils – 65 million-year-old oyster shells, according to Alex, a passionately knowledgeable guide at the nearby Dinosaur Isle museum – I clambered up the heathland that runs above the beach. Cattle graze randomly here and vigorous clumps of gorse still in flower had colonised the narrow, fractured valleys that lead down to the sea. Out on the Channel, tankers were queuing up to dock at south-coast ports, while windsurfers scuttled along the water in a stiffening breeze.

The top of the climb is marked by Culver Down and the Yarborough Monument, which you could argue form something of an imposition, because on either side there are superb views in all directions – south back towards the hills above Shanklin, the fetching rolling hills of the hinterland, and northwards to Bembridge and Ryde.

I made for the coast path and Bembridge, with useful information boards filling me in on the age and character of the sandstone and chalk cliffs I walked upon. Many of the fossils are freshwater, and date back to a time when the Isle of Wight was closer to modern-day North Africa. Just out to sea, was Bembridge ledge, at low tide its exposed skerries and rock pools resembling a reef. Elsewhere, the sea has taken sizeable chunks out of the cliffs. The coastline around Bembridge – the pebbles make for a rather painstaking plod on the beach – is attractive, too, with woodland groves, now bare of their leaves, acting as a scaffold through which to view the sea.

Beyond Bembridge, striking out into the interior of the island, the landscape changes yet again in the form of Brading Marshes, a silent, open expanse of land that has a touch of a magic about it. Above the marshes stands a lonely 17th-century windmill, the last remaining windmill on the island, but the land then tumbles away to become spirit-level flat, with paths threading through reedbeds and clumps of woodland thick with old oak, ash and hazel and home to buzzards, yellowhammers, red squirrels and the embattled green woodpecker. Gazing down on this enchanting landscape is the chalk edifice of Bembridge Down and the Victorian era Palmerston fort.

Arriving back in Brading, I had time to visit the truly excellent remains of the Roman villa – one of the best, when it comes to interpretation, in the UK. The Romans, I learnt, favoured the east of the island for its more sheltered climate, fertile lands and easy access to the continent. I was particularly struck by a map of the Roman perspective from Wight – the east, and the Isle of Bembridge, are positioned north, and the direction and flow of trade to London, France, the Low Countries and, via the Rhine, to the heartland of Germany – and then Italy – was obvious.

Whether it is fossils, Romans, wildlife or, indeed, the prevailing 1970s bucket-and-spade charm that draws you here, the Isle of Wight is a walking destination for all seasons.

Compact Facts

How to get there

Mark Rowe travelled to the Isle of Wight with Wightlink Green Getaways (0871 376 0013; wightlink.co.uk/ greengetaways), which offers three-night weekend breaks at Niton Barns in the village of Niton from £121 per person, including return Wightlink ferry crossings from Portsmouth or Lymington. Wightlink publishes a free walking brochure, Wight Safaris (wightlink.co.uk/wightsafaris).

Further information

Brading Roman Villa (01983 406223; bradingromanvilla.org.uk)

Dinosaur Isle (01983 404344; dinosaurisle.com)

Directions

OS Map: OL29.

Distance: 9 miles.

Time: Four hours.

Start at Brading railway station. Head for the B3395 (Bembridge Road). Take footpath on right (SS44) across fields and turn left to follow the path in front of houses and down to B3395. Turn right and then left on to beach before walking up the grassy slopes to Culver Down and the Yarborough Monument. Follow coast-path signs – including diversion behind Foreland Fields – to Bembridge and take the beach route around the town. At Bembridge Point take footpath BB33 to Dulcie Avenue and turn right along unpaved road to the T-junction. Turn left, then right up Bembridge high street. At the bend, take the footpath ahead to Bembridge Windmill and follow waymarkers to Brading via Centurion's Copse. Cross railway back to train station.

New dinosaur species found

2011-12-05T01:28:00.001-07:00

From the Halifax Herald: New dinosaur species found
REGINA — A 66-million-year-old partial skeleton discovered in Saskatchewan has been confirmed as a new species of plant-eating dinosaur.

The new species has been named Thescelosaurus assiniboiensis after theAssiniboia district where it was found.

"It is small, but there are features in the cranium, the back end of the skull, and a few features in the pelvis that are quite distinct amongst all other known species of Thescelosaurus," said Tim Tokaryk, head of palaeontology for the Royal Saskatchewan Museum Monday.

"So based on those central features, that’s what made it a new species."

Tokaryk said the dinosaur is about the size of a white-tailed deer.

"That’s pretty small for a dinosaur in general. I mean T. Rex, which this thing would have had to avoid, was quite large.

"We know there were small dinosaurs around at that time because we found fragments, we find teeth and such like that. But to find a partial skeleton of one individual, that makes it interesting and also makes it more useful to be able to identify it as a new species or a species in general."

The specimen was collected from the Frenchman River Valley near Eastend in 1968 but was only identified recently when Caleb Brown, a master’s student from the University of Calgary, studied the bones for his thesis.

Dinosaur fossils in Singapore: Get ready for Twinky & friends

2011-12-04T11:24:00.001-07:00

Prof Leo Tan with Apollo, and with Mr Joe Gentry as well. Twinky the baby stands in the background. The dinosaur fossils are being prepared in the Fossilogic lab, in Utah, the United States. They could come to Singapore as early as next year, two years before their new home, the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, is slated to open. -- ST PHOTOS: TAN DAWN WEI

From the Singpore Times: Dinosaur fossils in Singapore: Get ready for Twinky & friends
Singapore's heftiest immigrants are moving here as early as next year - two years before their new home will even be ready.

The team behind the Republic's new natural history museum hopes to have two of the family of three dinosaurs here first, as soon as their 'citizenship' papers are settled.

Between now and then, the new Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum needs to sort out the legal papers, collect the money pledged by donors and authenticate the bones.

The last involves a 'health check' by palaeontologists to verify they are no fake fossils. To be sure, the dinosaur fossils will also have to go through CT scans and carbon dating.

Mastodon bones found in Daytona Beach

2011-11-30T09:45:00.002-07:00

From 13News: Mastodon bones found in Daytona Beach
DAYTONA BEACH --

The digging will continue in a residential area where archaeologists are making a pre-historic discovery.

Workers digging a hole for a retention pond in Daytona Beach earlier this week found what appeared to be pieces of a mastodon.

Archaeologists say they believe it belongs to an American mastodon, an elephant-like animal which lived in Florida thousands of years ago.

On Wednesday archaeologists found part of a mastodon's rib. On Thursday, however, they uncovered two tusks -- about five and a half feet long each.

Part of the jaw, skull, leg and vertebrae were also found.

The dig is bringing out curious locals, excited to see what is being unearthed underneath Daytona Beach. For one boy, it will be quite a story to share with his classmates Monday.

"I'm gonna tell them that right up the street from my house they found dinosaur bones," Jeremy Gilbraide said.

The president of the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach says it will be a while before they can carbon date the remains found, but they could be as many as 100,000 years old.

But they want to eventually exhibit their find next to remains of a prehistoric sloth found just a few miles away from the Mastodon

Buffalo, NY: Science museum goes prehistoric, revealing ‘BIG’ new residents

2011-11-29T01:33:00.001-07:00

From Buffalo News.com: Science museum goes prehistoric, revealing ‘BIG’ new residents
For weeks, the Buffalo Science Museum tantalized its members and fans with clues about an exciting surprise to be revealed Thanksgiving weekend.

“Something BIG is coming,” the museum’s website teased, urging people to send in guesses as to what that big something was through Facebook and Twitter.

At least 600 people were waiting Saturday morning outside the East Side museum’s door to find out.

They were not disappointed.

The museum unveiled two new “residents,” as museum president Mark Mortenson likes to call them: towering life-size casts of a 12-foot-tall mastodon and a 26- foot-long Albertosaurus.

“I love dinosaurs!” declared Arianna Pocobello, 10, of North Tonawanda, as she gazed up at the bones of the Albertosaurus, a relative of the Tyrannosaurus that walked the planet 70 million years ago.

Arianna, who was accompanied by her grandmother Suzanne Pocobello, acknowledged she wasn’t too surprised by the museum’s secret.

“We kind of figured it out,” the grandmother said.

But they, and seemingly everyone else, seemed thrilled to be a part of the welcoming celebration.

Sam Leaderstorf, 7, of the Town of Tonawanda, came with his little brother Max, 6, and friend Bryan Crispin, 7. Bryan had never visited the museum before.

“I didn’t really know what would be here,” he said.

The boys enjoyed “looking at bones,” Sam said, and were excited by all the paleontological activities that were available Saturday, including making fossils out of play-dough.

The dinosaur and the ancient mammal will be permanently displayed in Hamlin Hall on the second floor of the Buffalo Science Museum.

They will be the first of a series of new exhibits planned for the museum, said Mortenson, president and CEO of the museum.

“This is the trigger of a major transformation at the Buffalo Science Museum,” he said.

Over the next four to five years, he said, the museum plans to open a new exhibit area. The next to open will be a hands-on health sciences studio in March, and then an earth sciences studio in October.

“We’re going to essentially transform the entire museum,” he said.

The former dinosaur exhibit at the museum will be dismantled, but the pieces from the collection will be used in other areas, Mortenson said.

The giant casts of bones were funded in part by a donation from Lise Buyer, a Buffalo native who runs an IPO advisory firm in Silicon Valley. Her late father, Bob Buyer, was a reporter at The Buffalo News and she attended Nichols School, where she now serves as a trustee.

Buyer named the mastodon Seymour after a beloved childhood pet dog.

But the Albertosaurus so far is unnamed, and the museum is sponsoring a naming contest. Name suggestions can be submitted through the museum’s Facebook page or through forms available at the museum. The names must be submitted by Dec. 19. Buyer will choose the top 10 names, and the community will vote on the winner, which will be announced Jan. 19.

NY: Dino dreams spark kids' imaginations

2011-11-29T01:29:00.002-07:00

From RecordOnline, Wayne's World Blog: Wayne's World: Dino dreams spark kids' imaginations

By Wayne Hall
Published: 2:00 AM - 11/27/11

Here's a 200-million-year-old-user's-guide warning for overexposure to dinosaur Christmas presents.

Too much dino dreaming can turn you into a paleontologist – the people who study dinosaurs.

“That's what happened to me,” says Richard Kissel, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Ithaca-based Museum of the Earth.

He's not fooling.

Listen to Brianna Cockshuttle, 10, of Sullivan County:
“I want to be a paleontologist,” says this 4-H Club kid whose rabbits, chickens, turkeys and hermit crab got her animal love stoked. “The first time I watched a movie about this I thought this is awesome and I came to love it.”

And so could anyone, now that there's even more reason to get excited about dinosaurs.

Turns out they're as local around here as the neighborhood diner.

“There's no reason to believe they weren't here,” says Kissel.

Which isn't something a lot of people know.

Dinosaurs so big they could peer into your second-story bedroom shook the ground right here in Orange and Ulster counties and maybe even Sullivan.

We're talking a big bruiser, something like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, located just down the road in Pennsylvania. And maybe in our region, too.

“We had our fair share of top predators,” says Kissel.

“No reason they wouldn't have been there,” says Robert Ross, a vertebrate paleontologist with the Museum of the Earth.

And the New York State Museum's curator of vertebrate paleontology, Robert S. Feranec, points out there's always something new about dinosaurs.

Right next door in Rockland County, footprints were found of a meat-eating small dinosaur hunting in packs – called the wolves of their day.

Gigantic bones of a huge duck-billed plant-eating dinosaur with 2,000 teeth were found in the gray slime of a marl pit in nearby New Jersey.

And found along the Hudson and Connecticut rivers were primitive crocodilian teeth, bones of meat-eating toothed flying reptiles, and intriguing bits and pieces still under study.

In fact, this ancient world is endlessly fascinating – new stuff's always getting found like a 230-million-year-old petit dinosaur found in Argentina.

So it's not a surprise that kids love dinosaurs because they're “so cool, so unusual and different,” says Balmville Elementary School third-grade teacher Kris Campbell-Defoe, whose student, Stephen Justino, 8, just chose a new dinosaur favorite – one that flew – over his old choice – one that walked. “I just love Jurassic Park,' Stephen says .

So popular are these reptilians that the Museum of the Hudson Highlands' “dino pit,” where the great beasts' feet are measured, comes alive in the imagination, says museum educator Carl Heitmuller. Even for him. If he was a dinosaur, Heitmuller says, he'd be one of the plant-eaters “with a club on its tail and armor on its body” to fend off the carnivores like T-Rex.

In other words, dinosaurs tell us about life before we existed and ask us to use our imaginations. Amazing.
Check out dinosaurs

- You can see the world of dinosaurs at the New York State Museum's Ancient Life exhibit at 222 Madison Ave., Albany, 518 474-5877;

- The Museum of the Earth, 1259 Trumansburg Road, Ithaca, 607-273-6623;

- The American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West, New York, 212-769-5100.

Australia: Dinosaurs on show in Apollo Bay

2011-11-28T10:27:00.001-07:00

From Weekly Times Now (Melbourne, Victoria): Dinosaurs on show in Apollo Bay
THE dinosaurs of the Otways are back.

An exhibition created by some of the world's leading palaeontologists, and comprising more than 300 individual and cast fossils, including full skeletons discovered in the Great Southern Continent of Gondwana, opens in Apollo Bay this week.

Gondwana was made up from what are now known as Australia, South America, Antarctica, Africa and India.

"Wildlife of Gondwana" will focus on the dinosaurs of the Otways, some from more than 3.8 billion years ago.

The dinosaurs found in Apollo Bay are from the Cretaceous period, 106 million years ago.

Fossils of these fascinating creatures were blasted from rocks on the Otway coast between 1984 and 1994, and some are still being discovered.

The first "trackway" of footprints was found recently and scientists don't know what else may be in the area.

One of the original palaeontologists, Professor Pat Vickers-Rich of Monash University, put the final touches on the exhibition on Monday. Prof Vickers-Rich and her husband, Tom Rich, a fellow paleontologist and senior curator at Museum Victoria, started digging around Apollo Bay in the 1990s.

The original discovery of the first bone at Dinosaur Cove was made by Tom, along with Tim Flannery and Mike Archer, in 1981.

"It's special because this is the first time the exhibition has come to a regional venue," Prof Vickers-Rich said. "It's fitting because what was found here has really impacted on the world view of how tough dinosaurs could be."

* The exhibition, at 313 Barham River Rd, will run until April 15.

NZ: Preserve dinosaur discovery - scientist

2011-11-28T10:19:00.001-07:00

From Nelson Mail, New Zealand: Preserve dinosaur discovery - scientist
The need to preserve the Golden Bay area where dinosaur footprints were discovered will be highlighted in a public talk tomorrow as part of a Geosciences conference.

About 330 earth scientists will be in Nelson next week for the week-long 2011 Geosciences conference.

The event is the annual showcase of geological and geophysical research being undertaken in New Zealand. As well as presentations, it includes a wide range of field trips to areas of geological interest in the Nelson region.

Among the themes speakers will address will be the Christchurch earthquake sequence, the Alpine Fault, the latest research on New Zealand's volcanoes, understanding the plate boundary beneath New Zealand, petroleum basin research, the role of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in driving global climate, and the influences of tectonism, climate and ocean processes on New Zealand's coast.

A major conference session will be devoted to the role of geoscience in studying the earthquakes and rebuilding Christchurch.

As part of the conference GNS Science sedimentologist Greg Browne will give a public talk about his discovery of dinosaur footprints at Whanganui Inlet which was announced two years ago.

The discovery marks the first time dinosaur footprints have been recognised in New Zealand, and is the first evidence of dinosaurs in the South Island.

The footprints, estimated to be 70 million years old, occur at six locations in northwest Nelson and are as much as 60cm in diameter.

Dr Browne found the footprints while examining rock and sediment formations.

They are likely to have been formed by sauropods – large plant-eating dinosaurs with long necks and tails, and pillar-like legs.

Most of the footprints were formed on exposed tidal flats, but at one location there is evidence that the animals may have been swimming or wading when they produced the structures.

"What makes these footprints special is their unique preservation in an environment where they could easily have been destroyed by waves, tides or wind," Dr Browne said.

Dr Browne said his talk would illustrate the variety and nature of the footprints and the need to preserve the area where they were found.

He would also comment on the possibility that such structures might exist in other parts of New Zealand.

The illustrated talk will be held in the Maitai Room at the Rutherford Hotel at 7.30pm tomorrow.

Australia: Funding plea to make dinosaur site safe

2011-11-21T10:13:00.000-07:00

From ABCNet: Funding plea to make dinosaur site safe

A western Queensland council says it does not have the capacity to fix a building over world-renowned dinosaur site, Lark Quarry near Winton, and it will need state or federal support.

Lark Quarry is known as the only recorded dinosaur stampede on Earth, with thousands of dinosaur footprints dating back about 95 million years.

Winton Mayor Ed Warren says the site has been closed because of concerns about a building constructed over the footprints.

He says safety needs to be guaranteed for the thousands of people who visit.

"It is somewhere in the vicinity of 12 or 13,000 [visitors] per year," he said.

"We believe those numbers will grow, hence we should be doing something about this building now and the infrastructure that is there, rather than leave it until some actual event happens and the wall falls in.

"That could be this national monument lost forever."

He says it is too early to say when the conservation park will reopen.

"These are the sorts of things we need to discuss with [the] State Government in particular, form a partnership with them and probably move onto the Federal Government," he said.

"Because this is a national icon and we don't have the capacity to carry forward what needs to happen to that building.

"The soil and the rock that's there is very fragile and it needs to be preserved."

Plankton research adds to controversy over cause, chronology of dinosaur extinction

2011-11-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

From the Daily Princeton: Plankton research adds to controversy over cause, chronology of dinosaur extinction

A recent study led by geosciences professor Gerta Keller challenges the most commonly-held belief for the mass-extinction of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago.

The prevailing extinction theory — part of an ongoing 30-year controversy — holds that the dinosaurs’ destruction was caused by the Chicxulub impact, a crater buried underneath the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

However, Keller and her team dated a specific species of plankton, planktonic Foraminifera, that has trails nearly half a million years old, and found chronological links between the mass extinction and volcanic eruptions of the Deccan Plateau of western India.

Keller’s close analysis of Deccan volcanism indicates that the formation of the Deccan Traps — layers of solidified flood basalt that resulted from the eruptions — caused a huge temperature drop, deteriorating environmental conditions and acid rain.

These effects altered the climate and put a strain on biodiversity, cutting off the dinosaurs’ food source and eventually killing them, Keller said.

The species of plankton that Keller studied is “very sensitive to environmental changes in temperature oxygen, salinity, nutrients and toxins,” she said. “They not only record the environmental changes over the past 150 million years but are also our best measure for reconstructing the climatic history and the conditions that led to the [dinosaurs’] mass extinction.”

Keller also wrote a paper with her former student Brian Gertsch GS ’10 investigating the same species of plankton in Meghalaya, a region in northeastern India. Gertsch, now a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, spent several years conducting lab analyses and hypothesizing about the environmental conditions that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

“In Meghalaya, blooms of planktonic foraminifera and high chemical weathering indices are indicative of the very high stress conditions and correlate well with the main phase two of Deccan volcanism,” Gertsch explained. “Our study clearly shows that Deccan volcanic activity ... triggered increasingly stressful environmental conditions, both marine and continental.

As such, it has become increasingly clear that Deccan volcanism is a major factor in understanding the disappearance of dinosaurs, he said.

Keller spent over 15 years trying to confirm the commonly-held meteorite hypothesis, but instead found increasing evidence against it.

During an undergraduate field trip to Mexico in 2000, Keller’s students discovered layers of impact spherules — tiny rock glass particles that resulted from the Chicxulub meteor impact — that were over a dozen meters below the mass extinction horizon, suggesting that the meteorite hit before the mass dinosaur extinction.

Indeed, further analysis and several other trips to different regions near the Yucatan site confirmed that the meteorite hit about 300,000 years before the dinosaurs died out. Later results “spectacularly confirmed the earlier findings that the Chicxulub impact predates the mass extinction,” Keller said. The only other natural disaster that occurred during the dinosaurs’ extinction period was the Deccan volcanism on the other side of the world, which prompted Keller’s research in India.

The results of Keller’s study are “far-reaching,” she said.

“The implications go beyond the mass extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous,” she said. “Large volcanic eruptions occurred at four of the five major mass extinctions in Earth’s history; our studies in India show that volcanism can cause mass extinctions, and it is now up to other researchers to conduct similar studies for all other mass extinctions.”

Keller’s project in India was recently approved to continue for another two years. She has already begun evaluating the detrimental effects of Deccan volcanism on a global scale.

She said she hopes to find the underlying causes of the climate and environmental changes that led to the mass extinction, as well as the primary “killing mechanism” for the dinosaurs and the timeline of their extinction.

County Selects Hemet Museum to Handle Dinosaur Bones Found Locally

2011-11-18T10:21:00.001-07:00

From The Guardian: County Selects Hemet Museum to Handle Dinosaur Bones Found Locally
Archaeopteryx, the famous feathered fossil, was probably the oldest and most primitive bird after all.

For 150 years the creature occupied top spot on the avian evolutionary tree until this summer when the discovery of a close relative suggested it was a mere bird-like dinosaur. Now it looks to have regained its previous perch thanks to a more sophisticated anatomical analysis.

"This shows that when you look at the data with a higher degree of analytical rigour it supports the traditional view that Archaeopteryx is a bird," said Dr Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher at London's Natural History Museum.

The first complete specimen of Archaeopteryx was discovered in Germany in 1861, two years after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

It lived around 150 million years ago, had sharp teeth, three fingers with claws, a long bony tail, feathers, broad wings, could grow to about 0.5 metres in length and could fly.

This combination of avian and reptilian characteristics saw it positioned at a key spot in the branching off of birds from dinosaurs in the tree of life, and provided hard evidence to back Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

Since then palaeontologists have largely taken it as the starting point for bird life.

But in July, researchers led by Xing Xu at Linyi University, China, announced the unearthing of Xiaotingia zhengi, a previously unknown chicken-sized dinosaur. The group carried out a statistical analysis of its anatomical traits that placed it in a group of bird-like dinosaurs called deinonychosaurs.

Archaeopteryx was so closely related to the new arrival that the consequent tweaking of the tree of life saw it shifted into this grouping as well.

Now Dr Michael Lee of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, Australia, has repeated the exercise using the same technique, known as phylogenetic analysis, only this time applying a more sophisticated statistical method.

Instead of considering all anatomical traits he examined as equally informative, Dr Lee placed greater weight on slow-evolving characteristics, in order to minimise the effect of biological traits that evolve independently in unrelated lineages.

"When we did this for Archaeopteryx we found this pulled it away from dinosaurs such as Velociraptor and nestled it back with the birds," said Dr Lee.

The research was published on Wednesday in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

As a greater number of related species and specimens have been discovered, the distinctions between them have become smaller, leading to several species flipping between groups.

"There is now a very fine line between birds and bird-like dinosaurs, with only some subtle differences between them," added Dr Barrett. "As a result it's not surprising that the positions of these animals will occasionally flip around in the tree as they are really very similar."

County Selects Hemet CA: Museum to Handle Dinosaur Bones Found Locally

2011-11-18T10:15:00.001-07:00

From My Valley News, Fallbrook, CA: County Selects Hemet Museum to Handle Dinosaur Bones Found Locally

RIVERSIDE - Dinosaur bones unearthed in Riverside County will have a home at the Western Science Center in Hemet, in accordance with a policy enacted today by the Board of Supervisors.

Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone, in whose district the museum is located, won unanimous board support to direct all future fossil finds to the repository instead of the San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands, which has received paleontological artifacts recovered locally for years under the Riverside County general plan.

The Western Science Center, located near Diamond Valley Lake, opened in 2006 and now has the resources to study, catalogue and showcase fossils located within the county, according to museum spokesman Bill Marshal.

"We're ready, willing and able -- with 7,000 square feet of storage space -- to help in any way we can," Marshal told the supervisors.

Stone introduced his "Safeguard Artifacts Being Excavated in Riverside County" or SABER policy in recognition of the facility's curating successes, including the recovery last year of the skeletal remains of a saber-toothed tiger in San Timoteo Canyon, where a construction crew stumbled onto them while laying the foundation for a building.

"The Western Science Center has been very proactive in getting collections from other museums," Stone said. "It's a magnificent museum for our county."

Supervisor John Benoit and board Chairman Bob Buster both questioned whether the center could end up overloaded by too many artifacts. Though noting the museum was a "great asset," Benoit raised concerns that a recent cut in staffing could slow down the curative process.

"We did lay off one of three qualified curators," replied Marshal. "But we have a qualified archaeologist and a paleontologist. It kind of saddens me when people say we're not qualified when we are."

Buster underscored that the change in county policy would not imply public funding to support the center in the future, and Marshal acknowledged there were no strings attached.

Dan Aykroyd - Ghostbuster Dan Aykroyd Digging For Dinosaurs

2011-11-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

From ContactMudsic.com: Dan Aykroyd - Ghostbuster Dan Aykroyd Digging For Dinosaurs
Actor Dan Aykroyd has turned explorer by teaming up with palaeontologists to search for dinosaur bones in his native Canada.

The Ghostbusters star will feature in upcoming U.S. TV show Born to Explore to scour for fossils in Alberta and help excavate a new species of dinosaur, the hadrosaur, which was discovered in September (11).

Programme host Richard Wiese says, "The natural beauty of Alberta took our crew's breath away. Filming in the dinosaur bone bed was a rare opportunity and to discover a new dinosaur species was sensational."

Wayne's World actress Donna Dixon and Criminal Minds star Matthew Gray Gubler will also join Aykroyd at the site.

The celebrity dig, which aired on 5 November (11), will also help raise funds for the creation of the Phillip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum.

Dallas scientists discover dinosaur in northern Alaska

2011-11-17T09:40:00.001-07:00

From Pegasus News: Dallas scientists discover dinosaur in northern Alaska
The Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, a dinosaur named partially after Ross Perot and his family, was carefully removed from the ground recently by two Dallas paleontologists who work at the Museum of Nature & Science in Dallas. Coincidentally, the TV series NOVA on PBS was filming as Anthony Fiorillo, Ph.D., and Ronald Tykoski, Ph.D., made the finding in Alaska.

The dinosaur lived about 70 million years ago and was an herbivore, Fiorillo said. The skull they found was about three meters tall, and it will eventually find its home in Dallas.

Excavating a quarry above the Arctic Circle – which they toiled at for about three months over the course of three years – proved to be no easy task. “It was challenging,” said Fiorillo. “The weather was a little uncooperative.”

While working in frigid conditions, the team encountered permafrost, which is frozen ground that required extra time, and ultimately patience, in removing the dinosaur remains. In order to reach the skeleton layered in ice, Fiorillo explained that the crew would use their tools to scrape off pieces, then wait for the ice to melt. The skull itself was excavated patiently “over the course of one field season” – or about a month.

On November 2, the scientists' hard work will be explained in Las Vegas at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's 71st Annual Meeting. The dinosaur will then be on display after the Perot Museum of Nature & Science opens its doors in 2013. The skeletal remains of Pachyrhinosaurus will be part of a “featured exhibition.” There, visitors will be able to experience up close what was once a large, roaming dinosaur.

Ice Skating Dinosaur in Central Park

2011-11-11T01:23:00.003-07:00

Denver Museum of Science "Dino" from Smoke & Mirrors on Vimeo.

There's a video - which my Kindle readers can only see if they visit the original page via a computer - of a brontosaurus ice skating.

It actually looks really cool - it's not a childish thing - and its an advertisemet for the Denver Science Musuem.

Smoke & Mirrors was responsible for this from concept through to execution. The CG team modeled, textured, animated and lit this ice skating dinosaur, seamlessly integrating it into footage shot by the team in Central Park and transposing it, through the magic of CGI to Denver, where you can see the Rocky Mountains in the background.

http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/11/ice-skating-dinosaur-in-central-park.html

2nd coelacanth population found off Tanzania coast

2011-11-10T23:03:00.001-07:00

From Daily Yomiuri: 2nd coelacanth population found off Tanzania coast
A team of Japanese researchers has discovered a hitherto unknown population of coelacanths, a fish species known as a "living fossil," off southeast Africa.

The researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology and other entities said the newly found breeding group of coelacanths linked to the site has existed for more than 200,000 years without genetic contact with other groups.

Researchers had believed there was only one breeding group of the species off Africa.

The team published the results in an online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

Coelacanths have been found only in the sea off Africa and Indonesia. In Africa, an area in the sea around the Comoros Islands near Madagascar is home to the only previously known population of the fish.

Tokyo Institute of Technology Prof. Norihiro Okada and his colleagues analyzed genes of more than 20 coelacanths caught off Tanga, northern Tanzania, and nearby sites. The areas are nearly 1,000 kilometers north-northwest of the Comoros Islands.

The results showed the fish belong to a population genetically distinct from that off Comoros Islands.

The two groups seem to have separated 200,000 to 2 million years ago, the researchers said.

Considering the number of fish caught, the researchers assume the newly discovered population may comprise hundreds of coelacanths near the site.

Buns of Prehistoric Steel May Have Graced the Backside of T. Rex, Sez Paleontologist

2011-11-10T09:21:00.000-07:00

Discover Magazine: Buns of Prehistoric Steel May Have Graced the Backside of T. Rex, Sez Paleontologist
Instead of a loping, lunging Tyrannosaurus rex, imagine the thunder lizard doing more of a power-walk: the clenched bum, the stiff legs, the whole shebang.

Pretty evocative mental image, right? For that, you have a recent presentation at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting to thank. Dinosaur gaits are right up there with “how did flight evolve?” and “what makes us human?” on the list of fascinating, but intangible, things scientists wish we understood, and this particular scientist, Heinrich Mallison, a palaeontologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, was leveling a criticism at traditional efforts to figure out how dinosaurs perambulated. Basically, he says that dinosaurs had such big butts that our usual method of comparing dinosaurs to small-cheeked modern animals is doomed to failure.

Dinosaurs, unfortunately, are not available for gait analysis today, and scientists have to depend on rare sets of tracks preserved in mud to study their movement. They usually assume that the faster a dinosaur is going, the longer their stride, which is how it works with modern animals, and most estimates find that dinosaurs, despite our sense of them as speedy predators, would have topped out at about 27 mph.

Another way scientists look at the problem is to examine the marks muscles left on dinosaurs’ bones and the way muscles are laid out in their closest living relatives, aka birds, to develop a biomechanical model of how they might have moved. One analysis of this sort, published in 2002, curtailed dinosaurs’ top speed even more, arguing that T. rex could not have run faster than a human, because of its extremely weak ankles.

Mallison’s biomechanical analysis has found that despite their ankles, T. rex could have gone quite fast (though the Nature News writeup doesn’t say how fast), not by running, but by speed-walking. Their large buttocks would have made that kind of gait possible, even though running was out of the question, due to the constraints of their skeletons.

There’s a lot of fuzziness in even the most detailed and labor-intensive attempts to reconstruct dinosaur movement, so this is by no means turning the present understanding on its head (the research is also not published yet). But thank you, Heinrich, for that picture of dino heinies.

Dinosaur bones an untapped market for luxury set

2011-11-10T09:17:00.001-07:00

From SFGate: Dinosaur bones an untapped market for luxury set
The Standard & Poor's global luxury index fails to reflect the escalating demand for dinosaurs.

"Investability is a key criterion for index selection," says Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC public-relations manager Dave Guarino. "While luxury dealers exist in dinosaur skin and bones, they're not typically the large and liquid companies we look for."

Hal Prandi, one of the two guys at Two Guys Fossils Inc., shrugs off S&P's evaluation of his trade.

"Market value comes down to what a person is willing to shell out for a dinosaur," says the 60-year-old dino dealer, who has been in the business since 1985, selling Jurassic ribs for $350 each, Cretaceous toes at $295 a digit and a 16-foot-long Camarasaurus tail for $20,000.

Wall Street recognition will be fast and furious once he can supply the market with dinosaur genitalia, says Prandi.

"There's never been a fossilized penis or vagina found on a dinosaur," he says. "The first person who finds one is going to make bundles of cash, but who knows how much," says Prandi.

"This isn't like the used-car business. We don't have a Blue Book, though T. rex teeth go for $1,000 an inch."

From Two Guys headquarters in East Bridgewater, Mass., to the stylish auction houses along Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore in Paris, French art promoter Sylvie Lajotte-Robaglia says affluent trendsetters are on the prowl for trophy dinosaurs.

Indeed, Hollywood stars Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio in 2007 entered into a spirited bidding war at I.M. Chait auctioneers in Beverly Hills over who would go home with a 67 million-year-old T. rex skull. Cage's $276,000 bid won the day.

'Fancy market'
"That's the fancy market," Prandi says. "With me it's first come, first serve, and you can find good business in selling dinosaurs to emerging countries. The first thing those guys want to do is build a museum and put a dinosaur in it."

Lajotte-Robaglia, director of Art & Communication SA, caters to a more discreet and established clientele. She has helped Christie's International sell a mammoth for about $423,000 and played a role in auctioning off a complete Triceratops skeleton for about $802,000.

Over at Sotheby's Paris, France's first lady of dinosaurs last year facilitated the sale of a $379,000 Triceratops skull to an anonymous bidder and is currently involved in moving a Prosaurolophus Maximus with mummified skin for $2 million, a giant 483 million-year-old French lobster from the Silurian Period at 12,000 euros ($16,000) and a 12-foot-long Xiphactinus Audax fish for $203,000.

"Whether a Brontosaurus looks good in your salon is a matter of taste, Lajotte-Robaglia says, "but these customers are young wealthy people who grew up mesmerized by Spielberg's Jurassic Park and find the aesthetics of a dinosaur more interesting than a Picasso."

U.S. a dino leader
Prandi says confirming a dinosaur's provenance is just as tricky as verifying the authenticity of a work by the Spanish master.

"A lot of people call me up from all over the country and say, 'I found a dinosaur in my backyard,' but it turns out to be a rock that looks like a dinosaur," Prandi says.

Even so, the United States remains the world leader in mining luxury dinosaurs.

"It's one of the few things we're still No. 1 in," says Prandi. "Countries rich in dinosaurs, places like China and Morocco, have slapped moratoriums on fossil sales, but not America.

"So long as the dinosaur is found on private property, Washington gives you an export license."

Still, Lajotte-Robaglia says Sotheby's was the first to offer dinosaur-market elegance.

"Our first dinosaur auction was in 1997," she says, leafing through Sotheby's 112-page October natural-history sale catalog. Lot 38 is an 85 million-year-old flying Pteranodon Longiceps that comes from what's now Kansas.

Translated roughly from Latin, the "creature with no teeth able to steal and who bears an outstretched head" had a 30-foot wingspan and now has a $339,000 price tag. "Given its age, this is not a very expensive dinosaur," Lajotte-Robaglia says.

Back in East Bridgewater, Prandi says he has no plans to turn Two Guys into an up-market auction house and get in on the luxury-dinosaur action.

"Most of my clients are average run-of-the-mill guys," he says. "For now, my most unique sale was a fossilized organic dinosaur brain. Sold it for $2,000."

Dinosaur Market Thrives on Jurassic Ribs, Luxury T-Rex Molars

2011-11-09T09:59:00.001-07:00

From Bloomberg Business Week: Dinosaur Market Thrives on Jurassic Ribs, Luxury T-Rex Molars
Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The Standard & Poor’s Global Luxury Index fails to reflect the escalating demand for dinosaurs.

“Investability is a key criterion for index selection,” says Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC public-relations manager Dave Guarino. “While luxury dealers exist in dinosaur skin and bones, they’re not typically the large and liquid companies we look for.”

Hal Prandi, one of the two guys at Two Guys Fossils Inc., shrugs off S&P’s evaluation of his trade. “Market value comes down to what a person is willing to shell out for a dinosaur,” says the 60-year-old dino dealer, who has been in the business since 1985, selling Jurassic ribs for $350 each, Cretaceous toes at $295 a digit and a 16-foot-long Camarasurus tail for $20,000.

Wall Street recognition will be fast and furious once he can supply the market with dinosaur genitalia, says Prandi.

“There’s never been a fossilized penis or vagina found on a dinosaur,” he says. “The first person who finds one is going to make bundles of cash, but who knows how much,” says Prandi. “This isn’t like the used-car business. We don’t have a Blue Book, though T-Rex teeth go for $1,000 an inch.”

From Two Guys headquarters near Johnny Macaroni’s restaurant in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to the stylish auction houses along Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore in Paris, French art promoter Sylvie Lajotte-Robaglia says affluent trendsetters are on the prowl for trophy dinosaurs. Indeed, Hollywood stars Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio in 2007 entered into a spirited bidding war at I.M. Chait auctioneers in Beverly Hills over who would go home with a 67-million-year-old T-Rex skull. Cage’s $276,000 bid won the day.

Emerging Buyers
“That’s the fancy market,” Prandi says. “With me it’s first come, first serve, and you can find good business in selling dinosaurs to emerging countries. The first thing those guys want to do is build a museum and put a dinosaur in it.”

Lajotte-Robaglia, director of Art & Communication SA, caters to a more discreet and established clientele. She has helped Christie’s International sell a mammoth for 312,000 euros ($440,000) and played a role in auctioning off a complete Triceratops skeleton for 592,000 euros.

Over at Sotheby’s Paris, France’s first lady of dinosaurs last year facilitated the sale of a 280,000 euro Triceratops skull to an anonymous bidder and is currently involved in moving a Prosaurolophus Maximus with mummified skin for 1.5 million euros, a giant 483-million-year-old French lobster from the Silurian Period at 12,000 euros and a 12-foot-long Xiphactinus Audax fish for 150,000 euros.

Dinosaur Aesthetics
“We once sold a mammoth to a French winemaker for 150,000 euros,” Lajotte-Robaglia says. “He put it in the reception room of his chateau. Whether a Brontosaurus looks good in your salon is a matter of taste, but these customers are young wealthy people who grew up mesmerized by Spielberg’s ‘Jurassic Park’ and find the aesthetics of a dinosaur more interesting than a Picasso.”

Prandi says confirming a dinosaur’s provenance is just as tricky as verifying the authenticity of a work by the Spanish master. “A lot of people call me up from all over the country and say, ‘I found a dinosaur in my backyard,’ but it turns out to be a rock that looks like a dinosaur,” Prandi says.

Even so, the U.S. remains the world leader in mining luxury dinosaurs.

“It’s one of the few things we’re still No. 1 in,” says Prandi. “Countries rich in dinosaurs, places like China and Morocco, have slapped moratoriums on fossil sales, but not America. So long as the dinosaur is found on private property, Washington gives you an export license.”

Bargain Pteranodon
Still, Lajotte-Robaglia says Sotheby’s was the first to offer dinosaur-market elegance.

“Our first dinosaur auction was in 1997,” she says, leafing through Sotheby’s 112-page October natural-history sale catalog. Lot 38 is an 85-million-year-old flying Pteranodon Longiceps that comes from what’s now Kansas.

Translated roughly from Latin, the “creature with no teeth able to steal and who bears an outstretched head” had a 30-foot wingspan and now has a 250,000 euro price tag. “Given its age, this is not a very expensive dinosaur,” Lajotte-Robaglia says.

Back in East Bridgewater, Prandi says he has no plans to turn Two Guys into an upmarket auction house and get in on the luxury-dinosaur action. “Most of my clients are average run-of- the-mill guys,” he says. “For now, my most unique sale was a fossilized organic dinosaur brain. Sold it for $2,000.”

Prandi says that will change if he can beat the competition in finding a T-Rex penis, which according to paleontologists at the Discovery Channel should measure 12 feet long and 1 foot wide. “Only guys on Wall Street can afford something like that,” he says.

Dinosaurs strike a pose for Eagle Rock’s painter of light

2011-11-08T09:39:00.001-07:00

From the Eastside LA: Dinosaurs strike a pose for Eagle Rock’s painter of light
Eagle Rock graphic artist and photographer Darren Pearson has combined his fascination with prehistoric creatures and a relatively new art form called light painting to create images of dinosaurs posed across modern-day Los Angeles. The 28-year-old Pearson uses the LED light emitted by a key chain to “paint” or “draw” lines in the air as a digital single-lens reflex camera set at a very slow shutter speed captures images of the neon-like drawings that emerge. The results are light paintings of dinosaurs poised on the hills overlooking the 2 and 5 freeways in Elysian Valley, blocking the entrance to an Atwater Village bridge and roaming across a parking lot in Glassell Park. Pearson shot a video showing how he creates his “light fossils.” Said Pearson via email:

As an artist, I love the blend of realism/surrealism and the challenge of imagining what you are creating as you go along in the dark. It’s a lot like sketching a mural into the air; an organic drawing process.

Click on the link below for images and a Q&A with Pearson.

Q: How did you get involved in light painting? What attracted you to it as an artist and business?
A: I got involved with light painting three years ago after seeing an image called ‘Picasso Draws a Centaur‘ by Jon Mili and Picasso taken in 1949. A photographer friend told me it was created by using ‘long exposure’ and that we could do it fairly easily with a DSLR camera, I got him to show me how to set up the camera and we did a few light drawing experiments in my living room. I’ve bought a few cameras since then, some lenses, a few tripods, and lots of lights.

As an artist, I love the blend of realism/surrealism and the challenge of imagining what you are creating as you go along in the dark.. It’s a lot like sketching a mural into the air; an organic drawing process. As a business, I just think it’s an interesting medium to work with. It gets people’s attention and has a bit of a magic factor.

Q: In the case of the dinosaurs, do you draw and photograph them in a “dark room” and then overlay them on a landscape photo? How long is the shutter exposure? What do you use for lights?
A: The images are not over-layed, they are all drawn within their respective environments. I’ve began to shoot videos to illustrate the process because I’ve had people accuse me of photoshopping them together.. which is understandable if you don’t know how the process works. The shutter is exposing for 5 minutes or more during most shots. I use press-on keychain LED lights.

Q: What lead you to the dinosaur images?
A: I’ve always loved dinosaurs and bringing the past to the present is always an interesting concept to think about for me. Sometimes I’ll sketch ideas out while I’m getting coffee, it helps to imagine how to arrange the shot. I post the photos on instagram and reference them from my phone as well. The images can take many tries to get right, sometimes I’m lucky and get it on the first or second try. Other times I get so tired from trying to get it right that I just give up and try again another day!

Mostly, the landscape inspires the drawing. I’m always looking out for interesting areas; if I see something that strikes me, I like to shoot a picture with my cell and mill it over for a few days until I have an idea. Sometimes I just go out wandering until I find some place cool.

Q: Have you sold any of your lighting paintings? Where is this project going for you?
A: I sell prints of my photo/illustrations through my etsy shop for $35-60 depending on the size. I’d like to see this evolve into a fine art thing eventually and do some international shows. Until then, I will be developing photo sets based on themes like fossils, mythology, and zodiacs.

Top 10 free things to do in London

2011-11-07T19:30:00.001-07:00

From Telegraph Journal: Top 10 free things to do in London
LONDON - Dinosaurs and Damien Hirst, evensong and observatories - the best things in London life really are free. See the city with this guide from online travel adviser Hotels.com (www.hotels.com) to the top 10 things to do for free in London.

1. Evensong at Westminster Abbey: The pomp and history of Westminster Abbey put it on most visitors' must-see lists, but during the day it can be crowded and expensive. Come at Evensong to catch the church at its best - alive with ceremony and song, and free.

www.westminster-abbey.org home

2. Star-gazing and city views at Greenwich Observatory:

Stand with one leg in the western hemisphere and one in the east - the Prime Meridian runs through Greenwich Observatory in south-east London. The elegant red-brick building is also home to interactive displays, a huge domed telescope and great views.

www.nmm.ac.uk places royal-observatory/

3. Cutting-edge art on First Thursdays: On the first Thursday of every month, a host of East End galleries throw their doors open for free events and exhibitions.

www.firstthursdays.co.uk/

4. Dinosaur Days at the Natural History Museum: An awesome 26-metre skeleton of a Diplodocus gazes down on the armies of families milling round the vaulted entrance hall of the Natural History Museum in Kensington. www.nhm.ac.uk/

5. Archive films at Mediatheque: The long sweep of the South Bank is packed with free things to do - from watching the wild rides of skateboarders to the free exhibitions at the British Film Institute.

www.bfi.org.uk/

6. Legal history at the Inns of Court: When location scouts for movies like Harry Potter want a London location, they head for the Inns of Court in Holborn. www.barcouncil.org.uk about innsofcourt/

7. Wonderful window-shopping at Sotheby's: It's not just buyers who can browse the lots at one of the world's most famous auction houses.

www.sothebys.com

8. An open party invite at Cargo: Free Fridays.

The Cargo club is an unofficial HQ for east London's hipsters - the first stop on any self-respecting Shoreditch night out.

www.cargo-london.com

9. Cockney culture at Columbia Road Flower Market:

A nondescript street in busy Hackney comes alive every Sunday as armies of flower-sellers turn the area into a riot of colour, fragrance and boisterous banter. www.columbiaroad.info/

10. A British master at Tate Britain: Many of the world's most famous artworks are on display for free in London's art galleries.

www.tate.org.uk britain

Pittsburgh’s happy to show off its riches

2011-11-07T01:27:00.001-07:00

From The Miami Herald: Pittsburgh’s happy to show off its riches
By Eleanor Berman
Travel Arts Syndicate

PITTSBURGH -- Call it the Cinderella City. Like the fairy tale heroine, Pittsburgh has scrubbed away its ashes, the industrial grime and smog of its past steel-making days, to emerge as an American beauty — and a great town for visitors.

Now you can see clearly the awesome vistas in a town ringed by steep, green hills and laced by three rivers and more than 800 bridges. Many days are needed to fully appreciate the legacy of the fortunes made by the likes of the Carnegie, Mellon, Frick and Phipps families when this was the nation’s steel-making center. The riches include world-class museums for art and science and a glorious, art-filled conservatory. The Heinz family, whose food business is still going strong, is a supporter in many areas from art, a history center and concert hall to one of the city’s two fabulous sports stadiums offering river and skyline views. Andy Warhol, a Pittsburgh native, is honored with his own museum.

Pittsburgh remains a major business center, with some 15 skyscrapers rising as high as 60 stories. Three department stores, lots of dining choices, a growing cultural district of theaters and galleries and plenty of green oases are good reasons for a downtown stroll. A multi-ethnic population that came in the past for steel mill jobs created colorful neighborhoods that are full of good eating.

Add a day trip to Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater, just 50 miles away, and there’s every good reason to plan a trip.

To appreciate Pittsburgh, start by boarding the restored 1877 Duquesne Cable Car for its 400-foot ascent to a hilltop where you can get a full perspective on the city. The triangular center is bordered by the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, which merge at the tip to form the Ohio River. The confluence is marked with a handsome park; scenic walking trails border most of the riverfronts.

Next stop is Andrew Carnegie’s grand domain, the free public library, museum and concert hall opened in 1895. The next year, the ongoing Carnegie International was inaugurated, the first showing of contemporary art in the United States. The art museum has grown to include treasures like one of Monet’s Water Lilies plus works by Rembrandt, Hals, Cezanne, Sisley, Cassatt, Klimt, Homer and Hopper, and a fine decorative arts collection.

Carnegie sponsored early expeditions searching for dinosaurs that in 1904 came up with the nearly complete skeleton of an 84-foot saropaud, which was named “Diplodocus carnegii” in his honor. Fondly known as “Dippy,” the huge skeleton warranted an expanded dinosaur hall in 1907. That hall, completely redone in 2007, now is one of the country’s best, featuring 19 skeletons, many of them enormous and in dramatic poses like the fierce fighting tableau featuring a giant T-Rex. The science museum has other excellent displays featuring gems and minerals, American Indians and objects from Egypt.

The expanded 1907 museum also allowed space for a remarkable Hall of Architecture, with cast models of some of the world’s great buildings and sculptures. The Apollo Belvedere, the Venus de Milo and the Nike of Samothrace are just a few of the replicas, fulfilling Carnegie’s goal of allowing those who could not travel to appreciate great works.

The original Carnegie Museums are in the Oakland neighborhood that is also home to the Phipps Conservatory, with 19 indoor and outdoor gardens highlighted by glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly, as well as the impressive campuses of Carnegie-Mellon and Pittsburgh Universities. Two popular newer institutions are in other parts of the city. The Carnegie Science Center and Buhl Planetarium, a modernistic marvel on the Allegheny River with up-to-the-minute interactive displays, opened in 1991

Bermuda Author Celebrates Lyme Regis Ties

2011-11-07T01:23:00.001-07:00

From Bernews: Bermuda Author Celebrates Lyme Regis Ties
The 400-year-old links between the Bermuda and the British coastal town of Lyme Regis – birthplace of the “Sea Venture’s” Admiral Sir George Somers– are celebrated in a new children’s book by Bermudian artist/writer Betsy Mulderig.

The Bermudian children’s author honour Bermuda’s connections with Lyme Regis in her latest release “Toppy Tours the Dinosaurs”, set in the West Dorset town.

Bermuda was settled by former Lyme Regis mayor Sir George when he was shipwrecked on the islands on his way to help the starving in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1609. When he later died, his heart was buried in Bermuda and his body returned to Lyme Regis and buried nearby in Whitchurch Cononicorum.

The historic link led to an official twinning between Lyme Regis and St. George’s in Bermuda, which is celebrated with annual trips.

Ms Mulderigg — author of the long-running Bermudian children’s book series about the adventures of Tiny The Tree Frog — introduces a new character in her latest book. In In the new volume, tourist dinosaur Toppy visits Lyme Regis’ Jurassic Coast, where he discovers how he gained all of his personality traits from his ancestors.

The spectacular Jurassic Coast in Dorset and East Devon wa England’s first natural World Heritage Site. This unique stretch of coastline has joined the ranks of the Great Barrier Reef and the Grand Canyon as one of the wonders of the natural world.

The site was granted its status for its outstanding geology, which represents 185 million years of earth history in just 95 miles, covering from Exmouth in East Devon to Old Harry Rocks at Studland Bay on the Dorset coast. It displays not just superb Jurassic, but older Triassic and younger Cretaceous rocks too.

“Toppy Tours the Dinosaurs” is now on sale in Lyme Regis.

It is the first book in a series that will see Toppy touring dinosaur touring children around Palma, Paris, Venice and London in the near future. Toppy will show a child various sights in different cities and teach them, as well, to speak a few words of thoset cities’ languages.

11 Nov 2011: Rockland, Maine: Celebrate all things prehistoric at Dinosaur Day

2011-11-06T19:20:00.003-07:00

From Village Soup: Celebrate all things prehistoric at Dinosaur Day
Rockland — What diverse group of animals populated the earth for more than160 million years? Stumped? Ask a 7 year old and he or she will be sure to say, “dinosaurs!” On Saturday, Nov. 11 the Rockland Public Library invites individuals to come and celebrate all things prehistoric on “Dinosaur Day.”

Scheduled programs are an exciting “Roar! Storytime” at 10:30 a.m. and a showing of the PG rated Disney movie, Dinosaur, at 2:00 p.m. " Dinosaur" tells the story of Aladar, an abandoned iguanodon adopted by lemurs. When a meteor shower plunges their world into chaos, Aladar and his family follow a herd of dinosaurs heading for the safety of the "nesting grounds." Viewers will be able to feast upon treats during the film.

All-day activities include a scavenger hunt for dinosaur facts. There will be a prize drawing for all who have finished the hunt at the end of the day. Participants will also be able to dig for fossils (and other surprises) at the indoor dig site. Others include activity stations throughout the children’s room and a dinosaur art wall where all are invited to get creative and add their art. Activities will wind down at 4 p.m.

This month the library is also featuring a display of bones, which includes a casting of a saber-toothed cat. Although there are no dinosaur fossils in the display, it is sure to appeal to dino fans. The Rockland Public Library located at 80 Union St. and is open Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Please call 594-0310 for more information.

Setting hearts aflutter: The bird-like dinosaur that acted like a Vegas showgirl to attract mates

2011-11-05T17:01:00.002-06:00

From Daily Mail Online: Setting hearts aflutter: The bird-like dinosaur that acted like a Vegas showgirl to attract mates
With just a flirty swish of a feathered fan, Vegas showgirls can quicken any man’s pulse.
But it seems it's a centuries-old trick.

Scientists believe a species of dinosaur may have acted like a showy Vegas diva to attract mates.

Oviraptor dinosaurs had a fan of feathers, similar to the fan of a flamenco dancer, attached to a flexible tail, according to a new study.

They may have flashed these feathers to attract attention in a similar way to the modern-day peacock – or a Vegas showgirl.

Scott Persons, a doctoral student at the University of Alberta, presented the research at the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting.

He found that Oviraptors, which lived about 75 million years ago, had tails with a peculiarly dense arrangement of bones.

‘The tail of an Oviraptor by comparison to the tail of most other dinosaurs is pretty darn short,’ he told LiveScience.

‘But it's not short in that it's missing a whole bunch of vertebrae, it's short in that the individual vertebra within the tail themselves are sort of squashed together. So they're densely packed.’

This dense arrangement of bones would have made the tails flexible, Parsons said.

The bird-like dinosaurs also had tails that were much more muscly than those belonging to modern-day reptiles.

Fossil impressions show they also boasted a fan of feathers at the end of their tails, attached to fused vertebrae similar to that found in the tails of today’s birds.

‘If you combine that with having a muscular, very flexible tail, what you have is a tail that could, potentially at least, have been used to flaunt, to wave that tail-feather fan,’ Persons said.

And just like modern-day birds, the dinosaurs may well have waved their tail fans to impress potential mates.

Persons added: ‘If you think about things like peacocks, they often use their tails in courtship displays.'

Oviraptors lived in the late Cretaceous Period.

Their name is Latin for ‘egg thief’ as the first specimen was found near a pile of eggs as if it had stolen them.
Subsequent discoveries revealed they were likely dinosaur’s own, though scientists are still unsure of whether its diet would have included eggs.

Museum's paleontologists discover new dinosaur species above the Arctic in far north Alaska

2011-11-02T08:17:00.000-06:00

From Art Daily: Museum's paleontologists discover new dinosaur species above the Arctic in far north Alaska

DALLAS, TX.- Paleontologists from the Museum of Nature & Science will announce their discovery of a new species of the ceratopsid dinosaur Pachyrhinosaurus at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology 71st Annual Meeting to be held Nov. 2 – 5, 2011 in Las Vegas. The new species will be formally named the Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, in recognition of the Perot family (Margot and H. Ross Perot and their children), who have demonstrated a long history of supporting science and science education for the public and for their support of the Museum of Nature & Science, located in Dallas, Texas.

In conjunction with the announcement, a draft of the paper that describes the find was posted recently at the website of Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, an international quarterly journal that features papers of general interest from all areas of paleontology. Jointly submitted by Anthony R. Fiorillo, Ph.D., the Museum’s chief curator and director of research, and Ronald S. Tykoski, Ph.D., chief fossil preparator at the Museum, the paper is entitled “A new species of the centrosaurine ceratopsid Pachyrhinosaurus from the North Slope (Prince Creek Formation: Maastrichtian) of Alaska.” The new dinosaur was discovered on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and the research was funded by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. The final paper will be published by the end of this year.

An excerpt from the report: The Cretaceous rocks of the Prince Creek Formation contain the richest record of polar dinosaurs found anywhere in the world. Here we describe a new species of horned dinosaur, Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum that exhibits an apomorphic character in the frill, as well as a unique combination of other characters. Phylogenetic analysis of 16 taxa of ceratopsians failed to resolve relationships between P. perotorum and other Pachyrhinosaurus species (P.canadensis and P. lakustai). P. perotorum shares characters with each of the previously known species that are not present in the other, including very large nasal and supraorbital bosses that are nearly in contact and separated only by a narrow groove as in P. canadensis, and a rostral comb formed by the nasals and premaxillae as in P. lakustai. P. perotorum is the youngest centrosaurine known (70-69 Ma), and the locality that produced the taxon, the Kikak-Tegoseak Quarry, is close to the highest latitude for recovery of ceratopsid remains.

“Discovering hundreds of bones from all these pachyrhinosaurs in one spot was unbelievably exciting, and we really thought the expedition was an incredible success. To later realize that we had unearthed a whole new species was one of the best days of my career,” said Dr. Fiorillo.

Dr. Fiorillo discovered the Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum during a return excavation in 2006 in far north Alaska, many miles north of the Arctic Circle. Incidentally, because of Dr. Fiorillo’s stature as an internationally renowned authority on polar dinosaurs, a film crew from PBS’ NOVA series was documenting his team’s work at the site.

The film crew fortuitously captured the unearthing of the skull and hundreds of surrounding fossils that came from at least ten Pachyrhinosaurus individuals. Those exciting moments were featured in an hour-long NOVA program entitled Arctic Dinosaurs, which debuted in 2008 on PBS (view the segment at http://video.pbs.org/video/1022686073/).

The NOVA segment followed the perils of working in Alaska – from operating a base camp in frigid temperatures, to the daily crossing of the precariously frigid river and the climbing of a steep bluff to get the site, to other researchers’ use of dynamite to access the hidden layers of the Earth. According to PBS, the segment also explored “how dinosaurs – long believed to be cold-blooded animals -- endured the bleak polar environment and navigate in near-total darkness during the long winter months.”

Once the dig was completed, Fiorillo and his team meticulously packaged the precious cargo in plaster-burlap jackets (although getting plaster to harden in sub-zero temperatures proved challenging), then painstakingly airlifted them by helicopter – encased only in heavy-duty netting attached to a clevis. They were then taken to a nearby airstrip, where they were flown to Fairbanks. Placed in wooden crates and marked “Dallas or bust,” the carefully padded treasures traveled to Dallas by truck.

Upon their arrival in the paleontology lab at the Museum of Nature & Science, the jackets were handed over to Dr. Tykoski, who spent the next several years meticulously whittling away the 70 million-year-old sediment that entombed the dinosaur bones.

“It’s as if someone took 15 Pachyrhinosaurs, dumped them into a blender for 30 seconds, poured all the mess out into a ball of concrete, then let it solidify for 70 million years,” said Dr. Tykoski describing his experience.

In early 2011, Dr. Tykoski and Dr. Fiorillo were stunned and excited when newly cleaned and reassembled pieces clearly showed they had found a new species of the Pachyrhinosaurus.

Dr. Fiorillo gives credit to field crewmembers that collected data for this project, including David Norton, Paul McCarthy, Peter Flaig, Kent Newman, Thomas Adams, Christopher Strganac, and Jason Petula.

A reconstruction of the Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum will be installed in the Life: Then and Now Hall, a 14,000-square-foot hall that will be part of the new Perot Museum of Nature & Science, which is currently under construction and slated to open in Dallas’ Victory Park in early 2013. The Life: Then and Now hall will showcase the Museum’s paleontological research, mounted animals, and highly regarded ornithological book collection, The Mudge Collection.

Illustrating their strong support of science, in May 2008 the Perot children made a $50 million gift to the museum campaign in honor of their parents, Margot and Ross Perot. The Victory Park facility has been named in their honor. The Perot children are Katherine Reeves, Carolyn Rathjen, Suzanne McGee, Nancy Perot Mulford and Ross Perot, Jr.

“Science has been a cornerstone in the lives and careers of the Perot family. They have also been longtime supporters of science education, especially in the area of making science exciting and relevant to young people. We’re truly thrilled to name this discovery in their honor,” said Dr. Fiorillo. “And we can’t wait for the world and everyone who loves dinosaurs to this see this life-sized reconstruction of the Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum when it debuts at the new Perot Museum.”

To read a draft of Dr. Fiorillo and Dr. Tykoski’s entire paper, go to http://www.app.pan.pl/archive/published/app56/app20110033_acc.pdf.

Nov 5, Delaware: Dinosaur Museum set to open at Granite Run Mall

2011-11-01T20:26:00.002-06:00

From Delaware County News Network: Dinosaur Museum set to open at Granite Run Mall
Granite Run Mall is set to become the first shopping Mall in the region to house a museum.

Dino Don’s Dinosaurium, the brainchild of explorer, author and television personality, Don Lessem, opens to the public Saturday, Nov. 5. Meet the creative team behind this unique new museum via a series of exclusive videos on DelcoNewsNetwork.com.

Advisor to the Jurassic Park film, excavator of the world's largest dinosaurs, and owner of America's largest private collection of dinosaurs, “Dino Don,” has teamed with Media's Granite Run Mall to create the Dinosaurium, transforming a Mall store space into a hybrid museum / under-the-Big-Top-show and providing kids, families and students of all ages the opportunity to see dinosaurs up close and experience dinosaurs as never before. Visitors to the carnival-styled mall museum will not only see dinosaurs, but hear them and smell them.

The exhibit will include a dozen rare dinosaurs up to 30 feet long, including the infamous Velociraptor from the original Jurassic Park film. The Granite Run Mall will be the only place to see this terrifying 15-foot-long villain of Steven Spielberg's classic film outside of Universal Studios.

Dinosaur fans will be able to learn about the evolution of dinosaurs across the Mesozoic World. “I want everyone – kids and adults – to share in the wonder of the greatest creatures ever to grace the Earth.” says Dino Don. “Not only are these dinosaurs far more awesome than any movie, but from an educational perspective, dinosaurs are a child's window into the world of science. And by making it hands-on with surprises around every corner, the Dino-saurium opens that window wider than ever.”

“We’re committed to making Granite Run Mall a safe, clean and family-focused destination, and projects such as this are a perfect way to fulfill our commitment,” said Aubrey Proud, Director of Marketing for the Granite Run Mall.

Via his company ExhibitsRex, Inc. based in Media, Dino Don has created the most popular touring dinosaur exhibitions in science museums across North America. A long-time resident of Delaware County, Lessem is delighted that Granite Run Mall is behind this collaborative venture. “I love sharing the wonder of dinosaurs with my friends and neighbors. And as an overgrown eight-year-old myself, I can’t think of anything cooler than seeing giant dinosaurs in my local mall.”

Located on the lower level of the Mall adjacent to Center Court, Dino Don’s Dinosaurium will open to the public on Saturday, Nov. 5. Museum hours are 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 11a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $4 for children, $8 for adults. $1 from each admission ticket will be donated to Delaware County schools.

For more information, visit www.dinodonsdinosaurium.com.

"Dino Don” Lessem is the author of more than 50 books on dinosaurs and natural history. He's dug up the world's largest dinosaurs. He's hosted and written NOVA and Discovery Channel documentaries, founded the world’s largest paleontological charities, and served as advisor to the Jurassic Park film, and to Universal Studios and Disney films and attractions.

He has answered more than 11,000 letters to his "Ask Dino Don" column in Highlights Magazine, the nation’s largest-circulation children’s magazine, and has been a profile subject as well as a frequent guest on such national broadcasts as The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS Morning News, and NPR’s All Things Considered and Science Friday.

Via his company, Dinodon, Inc., Lessem is also the creator of the world’s most popular touring dinosaur exhibitions, including Jurassic Park and The Lost World seen by more than 4 million people worldwide. Those exhibitions raised more than 2 million dollars for dinosaur research via the nonprofit Dinosaur Society, founded by Lessem. In recognition of his support, "Dino" Don is one of the few people still alive with a dinosaur named after him -- the Argentine planteater dinosaur Lessemsaurus. As a vegetarian he's pleased, though not with the fact that it was a particularly big-bellied and dim-witted animal.

"Dino" Don's work extends beyond dinosaurs. Lessem’s current international touring exhibition projects include Genghis Khan in cooperation with the government of Mongolia and the forthcoming The Great Wall Exhibition with the government of China.

Lessem is a degreed animal behaviorist and former Knight Journalism Fellow at M.I.T. University while a science correspondent for The Boston Globe. He was a Jeopardy contestant and winner on other network quiz shows.

He and his partner Val Jones live in an 18th century Philadelphia area mansion surrounded by the original dinosaurs from The Jurassic Park film. He has two adult daughters and is a frequent visitor to China, and Mongolia.

What you'll find inside:

Filled with hands-on, participatory activities, the 6500 square foot exhibit will allow visitors to:

• Feel the floor-shaking asteroid impact that may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

• Behold a Dinosaur “boxing match,” as an ancient 20-foot-long relative of Stegosaurus faces off with its archenemy, the equally big and far more nasty, Monolophosaurus.

• Unscramble the Wacky Dinosaur – A confused 20 foot-plant-eater posed as no museum ever would.

• Dig for a Dinosaur – Excavate fossils as paleontologists do on a Dinosaur Dig in an actual DIG PIT.

• Come face to face with killer dinosaur skulls and compare the deadly heads of Allosaurus, and the last, smartest and deadliest of the carnivores, the tyrannosaurs - Albertosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex.

New Zealand: Christmas just around the corner as Top Toys revealed

2011-11-01T00:42:00.001-06:00

From Scoop.co.nz: Christmas just around the corner as Top Toys revealed
The official start of the holiday season is almost upon us and to help parents to navigate the world of play … Toyworld has released its Top 10 hottest toys list for this Christmas.
Toyworld is New Zealand’s largest toy retailer and compiles the annual list of favourite toys from sales trends from its 39 stores around the country.
This year’s Toyworld Top 10 Hot Toys for Christmas list includes the latest and greatest in international toy trends and some old favourites too.
Toy Buyer for Toyworld Repeka Haurua who travels around the world sourcing and buying toys for New Zealand kids says, “This year we are seeing innovation, creation, construction and interaction in the new toys like we’ve never seen before.”
“Dinosaur Train uses SmartTalk technology to give its toy dinosaur range the ability for the different toy characters to recognize and interact with each other,” she says.
“The dinosaurs can all have roaring contests with the children playing with them; it’s really amazing what these toys can do!”
Old favourites that have returned to the Toyworld Top 10 Hot Toys for Christmas 2011 list include the ever popular collectible range Sylvanian Families and Lego.
“These popular favourite ranges are offer good present options as they have so many different price points meaning there’s a toy for every budget,” says Haurua.
“Traditional play patterns such as toys that allow for creative, interactive and outdoor play remain consistently popular such as the 3 Unit Swing Set,” she says.
“The most popular toys tend to sell out before Christmas every year so we always advise parents to act quickly if their children want a toy from the Top 10 list to avoid disappointment.”

The Toyworld Top 10 Hot Toys for Christmas 2011 are listed below in alphabetical order:
1/BEYBLADE METAL FUSION XTS BATTLE SET: - The Beyblade Metal Fusion Battle Set is an engaging, twenty-first century version of the classic game Battling Tops. Modern details and rules of engagement, along with customizable designs and a concave playing field, will have kids aged eight years and up at the top of their game in no time. Ages 8+

2/ COOKIE PIE PUP: - The most loveable and huggable puppy yet, Cookie will be a girl’s best friend! Cookie will respond to the sound of your voice and the sound of her squeaker toy by turning her head towards you, blinking her eyes and barking! She will even “talk” back to you just like a real puppy would. Ages 4+

3/ DINOSAUR TRAIN:-Boris Tyrannosaurus InterAction Figure is based on the iconic character from Jim Henson's Dinosaur Train television series. SmartTalk technology gives Boris the ability to recognize and interact with other dinosaurs in the line and have roaring contests with YOU! Press his back button for big chomping action! Press his interactive button, and he shares tons of fun dino data! Chomping sounds are triggered in Boris' mouth, huge roaring sounds are activated when Boris' tale is pressed down; and when Boris walks on the ground, he makes stomping sounds! Boris features a fully pose-able head, legs, arms, and tail. It's truly an interactive dinosaur experience! Ages 3+

4/ ELMO ROCK: - It’s music time! Rock out with LET’S ROCK Elmo! Dressed in a concert-style tee, Elmo takes the stage singing and making music - and pre-schoolers can too! Elmo comes with his very own microphone and two instruments – a tambourine and a drum set. Pre-schoolers can choose which instrument Elmo plays, and he "magically" recognizes which one you give him. Kids can also play along on Elmo’s instruments - they’re perfectly sized for little hands! For even more rockin’ fun, Elmo also interacts with other LET’S ROCK instruments (each sold separately); he knows when you’re playing the LET’S ROCK Guitar, Keyboard or Microphone and plays along with you! The LET’S ROCK Elmo toy sings six rockin’ songs, so grab an instrument and join Elmo’s band. Ages 18mths +

5/GLITTER LAVA DESK:-Everything you need to create colourfully sparkly stickers is included for hours of creative fun. Take the special, new Glitter Lava Ice compound, spread it over one of the special project cards, then colour it in with the special markers. Finally, peel and stick your masterpiece wherever you like. Decorate your room, your books or share with friends. It stretches and shines to make the coolest designs and decoration. Ages 4+

6/ LEGO:-Lego is great ways for kids to develop new skill and improve their development. The fine dexterity it takes to make a complete Lego toy is something quite difficult. The imagination that takes place alongside building is something most every parent can praise and the time spent in building and playing with such a simple toy that transitions into complex works of art just cannot be replaced. Kids take such great pride in the creations they make and they building they come up with. All ages

7/ NERF VORTEX NITRON BLASTER: - The VORTEX NITRON disc blaster is the ultimate in VORTEX innovation and technology! The NITRON blaster’s cutting-edge acceleration trigger propels a full-auto storm of discs toward targets at extreme range for an all-out assault. Its Centerfire Tech electronic scope features pulsing targeting lights. Offering long-range, high-powered disc-blasting technology, NERF VORTEX blasters hurl ultra-distance discs for the ultimate battle experience! NITRON blaster comes with electronic scope. Ages 8+

8/ TRANSFORMER LEADER: - Get ready for action with this exciting vehicle-to-robot hero! Convert this mighty Transformer figure from vehicle mode to battle-ready robot mode and back again so he’s ready for anything. His light-up pop-out weapons and blaster sounds are sure to scare off his opponents. As the battle rages on, keep switching him back and forth and prepare to face whatever his enemies throw at him! Ages 5+

9/ SYLVANIAN FAMILIES:-Sylvanian Families is a unique and adorable range of distinctive animal characters with charming beautifully detailed homes, furniture and accessories. They live work and play in the idyllic and wonderful land of Sylvania. Ages 4+

10/ 3 UNIT GYM SET:-It will be hard to get your kids back inside for dinner when they're having such a good time on this 3 Unit Swing Set. This durable metal frame features a classic A-frame style and supports all the play equipment your kids need for an afternoon of fun. A compact design for safe play for up to four children. It includes dual glide ride, roman rings/trapeze bar and single swing. Set up space: 3.25m(L) x 2.8m(w) Ages Junior

For more information visit www.toyworld.co.nz

Jurassic consultant plans 'chickenosaurus'

2011-10-31T09:48:00.000-06:00

From the Edmonton Sun: Jurassic consultant plans 'chickenosaurus'

Jack Horner is building his own living dinosaur, as a pet and as a legitimate science project. Creating what has been dubbed “the chickenosaurus” has not happened yet but Horner is confident it will as he continues his research.

Does this sound crazy? Maybe a little. Does this sound eccentric? A lot. Does it all seem rather exciting? Absolutely.

Horner is the famed Montana-born, American paleontologist Dr. John R. Horner. Based at the Museum of the Rockies, Horner is known in science circles for — among many significant breakthroughs — co-discovering the colonial nesting site of a new species he and research partner Bob Makela called maiasaura, or good mother lizard. One of Horner’s specialities is dinosaur behaviour. He has helped to radically change the science of paleontology and mainstream understanding of evolution and the age of dinosaurs.

Horner is known in popular entertainment as the science consultant to producer-director Steven Spielberg on the Jurassic Park franchise (Spielberg has indicated there will be a fourth instalment soon). Horner was the real-life role model for Sam Neill’s character, paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant. Meanwhile, Horner is currently working with the television series Terra Nova, also a Spielberg production. While he sighs over the fact the dinosaurs he consults on spend most of their time in the Jurassic Park movies and in Terry Nova chasing and eating people — something the scientist in him finds ridiculous and unrealistic, especially when the T-rex in the original Jurassic Park chews through metal to get at the human prey — he is proud his dino actors look more realistic each time out. Including getting more feathery and more colourful. Horner’s Hollywood connection also keeps him in the public eye, which helps in raising private funding for his research, not least the chickenosaurus project.

“If I’m going to raise private funds, then people have to know what I do,” Horner tells Sun Media.

My interview with Horner is timed with this week’s Blu-ray debut of Jurassic Park: Ultimate Trilogy. We talk movies and dinosaurs. Interesting enough for my other home entertainment story. But I find it impossible to ignore the chickenosaurus project.

First though, I amuse Horner when I tell him I am a bird watcher — and therefore a watcher of living dinosaurs. “That you are!” he says with a deep chuckle. Birds evolved from feathered dinosaurs. This is popularly accepted now as science fact (unless you are a creationist, in which case you should probably not read this article nor watch any of the Jurassic Park movies, and certainly not Terra Nova). But, at the time that the first Jurassic Park was released in 1993, bird ancestry was not widely appreciated by the public. Hence the scene in which Neill, as Dr. Alan Grant, explains it to snickering students at his Montana dig.

There is other good science in Jurassic Park, such as the introductory animation. Most of the dino behaviour, however, is just Hollywood invention that grew out of Michael Crichton’s fantastical novel. Also dubious is the notion that dino DNA can be extracted from insects trapped in amber. Doesn’t work at all, as Horner’s team has proven. Instead, to realize a boyhood dream of owning his own pet dinosaur, and to forward the legitimate science of paleontology, Horner and his chickenosaurus collaborators are exploring other avenues to create a living dinosaur out of the jungle fowl or domestic chicken.

“We have a lot of what we would call biological modification tools, ways of changing organisms,” Horner explains. “One that we’ve used for years is just selective breeding, and you could probably make a chickenosaurus doing just that. You could probably select the characters and get a long tail and hands instead of wings. But it would take a long time and I just don’t have that much time.” Horner is 65. “I would just as soon get it done.”

That leaves other more urgent biological modification tools to work with. “There are a couple of different ways you can do it,” Horner says. “You can either find the genes that extend the tail or find the atavistic genes that produce it. Or you can find the genes that absorb the tail during embryoic genesis. “So that’s basically what we’re doing. We’re looking for any one of them (the genes).”

Why?

Horner has been answering that question repeatedly ever since the chickenosaurus project was first made public. As a media-friendly scientist with a droll sense of humour, he has been playful, yet scientifically rigourous, about his answers.

“Well, first off, it would be cool,” Horner says with another booming laugh. “And I don’t think many people would argue with that, just left alone (to contemplate the notion).” That is the playful side of Horner.

“But, once it can be done, if you can re-activate ancestral characters, you’ve demonstrated that it had ancestors. And that is one of the proofs of evolution.” If those characters in the chicken, or jungle fowl, are shown to be traced back to dinosaurs, that would indeed be proof of this aspect of evolutionary science.

There are more why answers here, Horner says. “It certainly has an educational purpose, besides being cool, but it also has the potential for a lot of medical applications once we understand how these genes operate. So the ‘why’ depends (on the interests of the person engaging the project). One of these reasons has to be good for somebody.”

Keeping the funding for the chickenosaurus project 100 percent private, and not public, is important to Horner. It gives him the freedom to develop pure science for its own sake, with no strings attached.

“It’s hard to convince governments to spend money on something they don’t want to spend money on, because governments are made up of people and people have their opinions and politicians definitely have their opinions. If they happen to be a little more on the creationist side rather than on the science side, then they’re not going to put much money into it.

“But the nice thing is that all of the research that I’m doing — whether it be on dinosaur growth or behaviour or building a chickenosaurus — All the funding is coming from private donations.”

Track dinosaurs at natural area

2011-10-31T09:39:00.001-06:00

From The Coloradoan, Xplore Section: Track dinosaurs at natural area

Leave only footprints. Take only pictures."

This mantra adorns signs and brochures at parks throughout the U.S. This statement encourages people to leave little trace when enjoying the outdoors.

At Dinosaur Ridge near Morrison, this phrase takes on an entirely different meaning because here visitors can take pictures of the footprints left by dinosaurs more than 100 million years ago for a unique step back in time.

Dinosaur bones were discovered at Dinosaur Ridge in 1877 by Arthur Lakes, a teacher at the new Colorado School of Mines. This discovery led to the identification of stegosaurus, Apatosaurus, allosaurus and the crocodile goniopholis.

Today, the area is considered one of the best preserved representations of dinosaur fossils, bones and tracks. This significance was recognized when it was designated as the Morrison Fossil Area National Natural Landmark by the National Park Service in 1973. It also was designated a State Natural Area by Colorado in 2002 for its scientific, historical and educational significance.

Dinosaur Ridge, which is part of the Dakota Hogback, includes three different formations: the Morrison Formation of the Jurassic period on the west side and the Dakota Formation of the Cretaceous period and the Benton Formation on the east side.

The Morrison Formation is where visitors will see fossilized dinosaur bones. These 150-million-year-old bones came from the bodies of apatosaurus, stegosaurus, allosaurus and diplodocus. The apatosaurus bones were the first bones of a mega-sized dinosaur ever discovered. Commonly called the brontosaurus, this animal weighed up to 33 tons. Cross-sections of the foot imprints of these massive animals can be seen in the rocks.

In 1937, construction started on Alameda Parkway to provide access to Red Rocks Park. This construction exposed hundreds of dinosaur tracks in the Dakota Sandstone. These tracks were later identified as part of the "Dinosaur Freeway," an expanse of megatrack sites that extends from Boulder to eastern New Mexico. Most of these tracks are believed to be made by iguanodons, which lived 120 to 130 million years ago. This plant-eater had a unique thumb spike, which can be seen in the tracks.

The Benton Formation was at one time the bottom of the Western Interior Seaway, an inland sea that covered all of Colorado. In the gray shale, visitors may see 92-million-year-old fossilized fish scales and shark teeth.

There is a 2-mile trail along Dinosaur Ridge, which includes many interpretive signs detailing the history of this unique area.

NJ, November 2, 2011: Around The Towns: Children to search for dinosaurs at Trailside

2011-10-31T00:45:00.000-06:00

From NJ.com: Around The Towns: Children to search for dinosaurs at Trailside
MOUNTAINSIDE — Children who attend the “Discover Dinosaurs” program at the Trailside Nature and Science Center on Wednesday (November 2) will have an opportunity to become paleontologists for an evening.

At the interactive family program, children will have an opportunity to search the visitors center for dinosaur bones, put together a large dinosaur puzzle and measure the sizes of a Stegosaur, Tyrannosaurus and Ultrasaur.

The hour-long program, which will begin at 6 p.m., is recommended for children ages 4 to 5.

The center is located at 452 New Providence Road in Mountainside. There is a $6 fee, $7 for out-of-county residents. Pre-registration is required. To register, visit ucnj.org/trailside or call (908) 789-3670.

California Adopts Cap-and-Trade System, Serves as Greenhouse Guinea Pig

2011-10-30T01:10:00.000-06:00

From National Geographic, The Great Energy Challenge: California Adopts Cap-and-Trade System, Serves as Greenhouse Guinea Pig

After a unanimous vote by the California Air Resources Board, the state adopted the most comprehensive cap-and-trade system in the country, a key part of a 2006 global warming law that had yet to be implemented. The system will cover 85 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the state, and allows businesses to counterbalance up to 8 percent of their emissions by buying offset credits.

The state is making itself a guinea pig for climate legislation and hopes to inspire other states to follow suit—a precedent the state has set with other environmental legislation.

At first, most of the emissions credits will be given out free, but it’s expected by 2016 to be a $10 billion market.

Slow Growth

After the economic crash of 2008, the growth of clean energy slowed—and the outlook for the rest of the decade is single-digit growth, according to analyses by IHS Emerging Energy Research and others. A major factor has been that cash-strapped governments have cut back on subsidies that helped drive the growth in renewables.

The U.K. reshuffled its renewable subsidies, taking away from onshore wind and hydro power, and giving more to tidal and biomass power plants. Scotland—which sets its subsidies separately from the rest of the U.K., and which boasts some of the world’s best wind and tidal resources—also made subsidy support adjustments.

Industry experts fear the U.K. may soon slash solar subsidies by half—after already cutting them earlier this year—so they are encouraging people to install solar systems now.

But the World Wildlife Fund argues that high growth of renewables is still possible, and the U.K. could get nearly all of its energy from renewables by 2030.

In the U.S., solar industry jobs grew about 7 percent in the past year—much faster than job growth in the whole economy, but only about a quarter of the rate that the industry had expected, according to the Solar Foundation’s newly released National Jobs Census.

High-Tech Efficiency

In Europe, “business as usual will not be an option for most energy utilities,” according to McKinsey analysts who argued that energy demand is reaching a peak, and existing technologies could drastically cut consumption. In response, utilities should look to other services to keep their revenue up, such as selling solar panels, insulation, or central control units that track and manage a building’s electricity consumption.

One company is already trying to make such products cool. Nest Labs, a well funded start up founded by former Apple employees, have created a thermostat that studies your habits to help adjust the temperature to save energy.

Climate Change Conundrum

Climate change could exceed dangerous levels in some parts of the world during the lifetime of many people alive today, according to research papers published in the journal Nature.

University of Washington Professor of Philosophy Stephen Gardiner argued in Yale Environment 360 that humanity’s institutions aren’t up to the ethical challenge presented by environmental change. As these problems get worse, he argues, we might see a push for technological fixes such as geoengineering.

Some scientists are looking into such methods, and a U.K. group had planned a test flight of a balloon tethered to a hose—the kind that could shoot reflective aerosols into the atmosphere, scatter sunlight and potentially cool the planet. But that group postponed its test until spring to allow “more engagement with stakeholders”—which New Scientist argued is crucial.

Most of the public is not against such research on “solar radiation management” according to a new survey. But critics say the survey may be some biased toward geoengineering research.

Skeptic Changes Mind

A study led by a self-described climate change skeptic—physicist Richard Muller of the University of California, Berkeley—released results from a re-analysis of temperature records. The “biggest surprise,” Muller said, was how closely his study matched earlier assessments, such as those by NASA and the U.K.’s Hadley Centre. Muller’s study had been hailed by climate change skeptics since it took seriously many of their criticisms.

But in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Muller said “global warming is real,” and argued no one should be a skeptic about this warming any longer.

The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday for National Geographic’s News Watch by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

Ancient Toothy Fish Found in Arctic—Giant Prowled Rivers

2011-10-30T01:09:00.001-06:00

From National Geographic Daily News: Ancient Toothy Fish Found in Arctic—Giant Prowled Rivers
Fossils of a new species of carnivorous fish that prowled ancient rivers have been discovered in the Canadian Arctic, a new study says.

The 6-foot-long (1.8-meter-long) Laccognathus embryi was "the kind of fish that was waiting to lunge out to grab whatever was in front of it," said study co-author Ted Daeschler, a vertebrate zoologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

The fish's 1.5-inch-long (3.8-centimeter-long) fangs would have definitely sunk into flesh, he added.

In addition, the 375-million-year-old fish had thick, quarter-size scales; tiny eyes; a flat head; and a wide mouth—sort of like a modern-day grouper.

The fossil head "looks like a big, smiling face looking up at you," added Daeschler, who received funding for his research from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)

(See pictures of today's fish giants.)

Newfound Giant Swam With "Missing Link" Fish

Daeschler and colleagues found the new fish fossils during several excavations in a siltstone flood deposit on Ellesmere Island (see map) in Nunavut, Canada. The name L. embryi is a nod to Canadian geologist Ashton Embry, whose Arctic research helped prepare the scientists for their fieldwork.

In 2004 the same "incredibly productive" Arctic site had yielded Tiktaalik roseae, a fossil creature that lived during the same period as L. embryi and is considered to be a crucial link between fish and early limbed animals.

(See "Fossil Fish With 'Limbs' Is Missing Link, Study Says.")

Both Tiktaalik and L. embryi were lobe-finned fish, a group with rounded, limb-like fins. The group was beginning to blink out in the Devonian period, 415 to 360 million years ago—its only surviving members are the "living fossil" fish, the coelacanth, and the lungfish.

The Devonian "was a fish-eats-fish kind of world," Daeschler said. "There was a real arms race going. If you [were a smaller fish and] didn't have good armor on your body, you were very vulnerable."

The period was also "a very watershed time in the history of life on Earth, because you're seeing the dwindling—the end—of many of the more archaic groups ... including many of the lobe-finned fish," Daeschler said.

At the same time, "you're seeing the beginnings of the groups that go on to dominate the vertebrate fauna for the next 375 million years ... the upstarts if you want."

For example, ray-finned fish—the typical body plan we associate with modern fish—had begun to take over the seas.

(Also see "Goliath Tiger Fish: 'Evolution on Steroids' in Congo.")

Devonian World Still a Mystery

Though the Tiktaalik and L. embryi discoveries are valuable in and of themselves, "it's not just finding the animal—it's also placing the animal in its evolutionary crucible," Daeschler added.

For instance, finding the "cast of characters" that once occupied the Arctic site may begin to provide clues about who ate who and may help answer a big question: What environmental conditions drove fish onto land, where they eventually evolved into limbed animals, including us?

"We want to know," Daeschler said, "what that world was like."

The new predatory-fish study was published in September in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Montreal, Canada: Dinosaur exhibit Halloween treat for the kids

2011-10-28T10:12:00.001-06:00

From the Montreal Gazette: Dinosaur exhibit Halloween treat for the kids
ONTREAL - It’s Halloween weekend and the children are clamouring for treats. Time to distract them from candy gobbling.

A roar from the Apatosaurus standing guard at the entrance to the Montreal Science Centre might do the trick.

The ginormous herbivore whose name means “deceptive lizard” is from the Late Jurassic period 150 million years ago and is one of 14, real-size animatronic dinosaurs inhabiting the Dinosaurs Unearthed exhibit, at the science centre until March, 2012.

How do they all fit?

“When we think dinosaur, we think huge, but most dinosaurs were small,” Michel Groulx said. Groulx is the head of research and content at the Montreal Science Centre and was impressed with the quality of the exhibit when he visited it in Texas two years ago. The well travelled exhibit was produced in Vancouver.

The biggest discoveries in the field of dinosaur research have taken place in China over the last two decades and these recent discoveries play a major role in the exhibit. Digs have established the fact that some dinosaurs were covered with down feathers when born – including the ferocious velociraptor made famous in the Jurassic Park movies – and that birds are the direct descendants of these dinosaurs.

“The wishbone you find in the turkey carcass has also been found in dinosaur skeletons, Groulx said. “Even the adolescent T. Rex was covered with down.”

Everything included in the exhibition is based on scientific fact except for the colours used. That’s guesswork.

Dinosaurs lived between 225 and 65 million years ago. The common theory among scientists is that an enormous meteor hit earth and changed the environment so much, the dinosaurs could not adapt.

A handy plasticized exhibit guide about the size of a placemat is available at the entrance to the exhibit. There are questions for the children to answer and clues to search for. It must be returned at the end of the tour.

The dinosaurs in the exhibit are motion activated, with a one-minute lag between activations. They roar and move body parts. This could be frightening for some children.

There are fossils to see and some interactive elements to try, but the main focus is on the animated creatures, which cannot be touched.

You see giant Allosaurus, which predates the T. Rex and was just as ferocious, and you see the large, down-covered Gigantoraptor, the largest dinosaur without teeth. He looks like a gargantuan chicken and didn’t last long in the dino scheme of things.

“Scientists’ perceptions of dinosaurs have changed over the last 30 years,” Groulx said. “We used to think they were cold-blooded and stupid. We now know they were warm-blooded and quite social, with maternal instincts.”

While you are in the building, there is a new IMAX 3D movie to check out, just steps away from the dinosaur exhibit. It’s called Tornado Alley 3D.

Questions anyone?

Dinosaurs Unearthed is at the Montreal Science Centre, bottom of St. Laurent Blvd. off de la Commune St., until March 11. For IMAX and exhibit ticket details, 514-496-4724 or www.montrealsciencecentre.com.

Halloween is also up and running at the Botanical Garden, Insectarium and Biodôme. The Little Monsters Courtyard adjacent to the gardens (an outside activity) offers games and challenges for little ones. Host Esmeralda the friendly witch and her sidekick Abracadabra the cat are back as is the playful decorated-pumpkin exhibit in the main exhibition hall.

Learn about jumping spiders at the Insectarium and check out the insects dressed for the Halloween occasion.

And carved pumpkins have been transformed into feeders for the golden lion tamarin monkey at the Biodôme.

For details, www.montrealspaceforlife.ca.

Friday is International Animation Day, and the NFB-organized, Canada-wide event Get Animated! is up and running. The NFB CinéRobothèque, 1564 St. Denis St., offers a free, family oriented animation workshop with Co Hoedeman, Saturday at 10 a.m. (no reservations, first come, first served) and free screenings of some of the latest family-friendly animated short films, Saturday and Sunday at 3:30 p.m.

For more information, 514-496-6887 or www.nfb.ca/cinerobotheque.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/travel/Dinosaur+exhibit+Halloween+treat+kids/5617409/story.html#ixzz1c5rxM2sS

Evidence for huge dinosaur migrations that once took place in ancient America

2011-10-28T10:08:00.001-06:00

From IO9: Evidence for huge dinosaur migrations that once took place in ancient America

How dinosaurs spent their lives remains a great mystery of paleontology. We know they ate a lot, and presumably they had sex somehow. But it's almost impossible to prove the existence of more complex dinosaur behaviors...until now.

Thanks to some teeth from the Jurassic period dinosaur Camarasaurus, we have the first clear evidence that dinosaurs migrated over great distances. A slightly smaller relative of plant-eating sauropods like Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus grew up to fifty feet long and lived in what is now Wyoming and Utah.

Colorado College researcher Henry Fricke examined the oxygen isotopes levels in 32 Camarasaurus fossil teeth.The specific ratio of different isotopes can provide an exact signature of where the dinosaurs drank, and that can be compared to rock samples that date to the same time and place. He found the teeth were not an exact match for the rocks, which means Camarasaurus must have left its natural habitat on occasion.

Teeth build up multiple layers over the life of their owner, and each layer preserves the isotopic signature of where the owner was drinking at that given time. Fricke discovered that the layers changed in Camarasaurus over a five month period, which strongly suggests the dinosaurs migrated seasonally. It's the best proof yet that some dinosaurs did indeed move around on a regular basis.

Fricke explains:

"In a theoretical sense, it's not hugely surprising. They are huge - they would probably have eaten themselves out of house and home if they stayed in one place. Now we have evidence that demonstrates that, and a method to move forward and study other dinosaurs."

Camarasaurus likely had to migrate because its regular home was a low-lying floodplain that could easily enter extreme dry periods. Since this was a fairly large population, Camarasaurus wouldn't be able to cope with any research shortages, and the fossil teeth suggest they solved this by moving to higher altitudes. This would have involved migrating at least 200 miles, and it's possible some migrations were much longer.

Now that we know one species migrated, Fricke is hopeful he can find evidence that others did as well. In particular, modern predators often follow migrating herbivores, and it stands to reason that carnivorous dinosaurs like Allosaurus would have done the same, since it would have been ridiculously easy to pick off a Camarasaurus as it was slowly moving towards it new home.

Meet the two-horned cousin of triceratops

2011-10-26T00:14:00.002-06:00

From I09: Meet the two-horned cousin of triceratops
(Also at: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2011/10/new-mexicos-peculiar-two-horned-dinosaur/
Triceratops has captured the public imagination ever since the first fossils were discovered in 1887. But it's hardly the only horned dinosaur that once roamed the Earth. Meet the two-horned zuniceratops, oldest of the American relatives of triceratops.

Compared to its more famous cousin, zuniceratops was a tiny dinosaur. The fossil record indicates that triceratops could reach up to thirty feet in length, ten feet in height, and weight over 25,000 pounds. Zuniceratops, on the other hand, was a puny ten feet long and three feet tall, and a very mild 200 to 250 pounds. The creature is named for the Zuni people, a Native American tribe that lives in the area of New Mexico where the dinosaur was discovered in 1996.

Relative to other horned dinosaurs like it - known collectively as the ceratopsians - zuniceratops was both much smaller and much older, dating back at least 90 million years ago. That makes it much older than triceratops, which emerged a mere three million years before the final extinction of the dinosaurs. This two-horned little guy was the earliest known ceratopsian in North America, though he wasn't the grandfather of triceratops - their evolutionary relationship is more like distant cousins once or twice removed, though they do look very similar.

The remains of Zuniceratops exhibit a mosaic of features shared with both earlier ceratopsians (such as Protoceratops) and the later, more familiar ceratopsids (such as Triceratops). While the body of Zuniceratops appeared to retain a more archaic, lightly built form, the prominent brow horns, the arrangement of the teeth (set up like a pair of scissors to shear vertically through food), a curved part of the hip called the ischium, and other characteristics underlined a close relationship to the ceratopsid dinosaurs that would eventually become so common on the continent.

But Zuniceratops was not a “missing link” or an ancestor to any of the ceratopsid dinosaurs. Instead, it is a peculiar dinosaur with a suite of features that may help us understand the transition between the more archaic ceratopsians and the early ceratopsids. The arrangement of anatomical characters in Zuniceratops gives us a general picture of what was happening among the horned dinosaurs at the time. After all, the grand pattern of evolution is a wildly branching tree of life, and in technical terms, Zuniceratops falls on a branch just outside the ceratopsid group—a relatively close cousin—but it did not share some of the telltale characteristics of the famous dinosaur group. Hopefully, as more dinosaurs like Zuniceratops are found, paleontologists will gain a clearer picture of how the greatest of the horned dinosaurs evolved.

References:

Farke, A., Sampson, S., Forster, C., & Loewen, M. (2009). Turanoceratops tardabilis—sister taxon, but not a ceratopsid Naturwissenschaften, 96 (7), 869-870 DOI: 10.1007/s00114-009-0543-8

Wolfe, D.G. & Kirkland, J.I. (1998). “Zuniceratops christopheri n. gen. & n. sp., a ceratopsian dinosaur from the Moreno Hill Formation (Cretaceous, Turonian) of west-central New Mexico”. Lower and Middle Cretaceous Terrestrial Ecosystems, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 24: 307–317.

Wolfe, D. G. (2000). New information on the skull of Zuniceratops christopheri, a neoceratopsian dinosaur from the Cretaceous Moreno Hill Formation, New Mexico. pp. 93–94, in S. G. Lucas and A. B. Heckert, eds. Dinosaurs of New Mexico. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin No. 17.

The ‘dinosaur plant’ not quite Jurassic

2011-10-25T01:10:00.001-06:00

From The Conversation: The ‘dinosaur plant’ not quite Jurassic
The widely believed theory that cycad plants, or “dinosaur plants”, are living fossils has been debunked.

Using genetic analyses, researchers found that the current cycad species is different to its Jurassic counterpart even though they look much the same.

The computer-automated analyses and nuclear DNA sequence of the cycad found the current biological species evolved 10 million years ago.

“It goes against what we think about cycads – we thought that there were some new and some old ones, but to find out that they’re all new is astonishing. It shows we shouldn’t take things for granted,” lead author Nathalie Nagalingum told Cosmos Magazine.

Cycads originated more than 270 million years ago and are currently listed as the most endangered plants in the world. The are 70 species of the plant in Australia.

New clues into mass dinosaur extinction

2011-10-25T01:07:00.001-06:00

From the Daily Princetonian: New clues into mass dinosaur extinction

To test an alternative theory explaining the 65-million-year-old mass extinction that led to the demise of the dinosaurs, Princeton University researchers developed a model that more accurately accounts for the Earth’s heterogeneities and offers different interpretations from previous models.

The researchers, who were based in the lab of geoscience and applied and computational mathematics professor Jeroen Tromp GS ’92, focused on a theory that explained the mass extinction as the result of a long volcanic eruption triggered by a meteorite strike near Chicxulub on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. This theory suggested that the strike could trigger volcanic activity on the opposite side of the globe.

The project started in May 2010 and was the result of a collaboration between the first author, Matthias Meschede of the University of Munich, and co-authors Conor Myhrvold ’11 and Tromp. Myhrvold was previously a staff photographer for the ‘Prince.’

Meschede, who got involved through the University’s Visiting Student Research Collaborators program, said that the project was interesting for him because it focused on an unconventional source of earthquakes.

The original calculation for a link between the meteorite strike and the catastrophic volcanic eruptions included an analytical approximation based on a spherical earth model that failed to account for the heterogeneities of the Earth. The Princeton research showed the model to be very inaccurate.

“The Princeton group could simulate earthquakes on a global scale better than anybody else could before, and so we could take into account all the heterogeneities of the earth and make a much more accurate calculation,” Meschede said.

The Princeton model showed that, while a symmetric Earth focused seismic waves more strongly on a single point, a non-spherical Earth with heterogeneities spread waves over large areas that decreased the amplitude of earthquakes on the other side of the planet.

As a result, the amplitude of the Earth’s maximum ground displacement in the previous model was decreased by a factor of five; moreover, the Princeton model showed that heterogeneities basically filtered out the highest wave frequencies so that these frequencies became scattered and didn’t interfere constructively.

“This is basically the main difference, and so we think it’s a very important effect that you have to account for,” Meschede said.

Meschede also noted that, based on their findings, a relation between the meteorite strike and volcanic eruptions large enough to cause a mass extinction is unlikely.

In addition to providing more information on the possible connection between the eruption and the meteorite strike, the research has also created a model that could offer insight on the surface of other planets based on past collisions.

“For every meteorite impact, when you want to figure out what’s going to happen on the Earth, the moon, Mercury or Mars you have to consider the focusing effect on the other side, and if you want to see how large this is going to be, then you have to model it like we did,” Meschede said.

Because the Princeton model showed that the focusing factor was decreased by a factor of five when heterogeneities and the Earth’s asymmetry were taken into account, Meschede noted that vast improvements are possible with this more accurate model.

“Apart from that, just being able to simulate the heterogeneities, not just for the meteorite but also for other impacts and other planets — this is the development from the last five to 10 years,” Meschede said.

Dino Dan and Other Kids

2011-10-24T19:20:00.002-06:00

I thought the post below was going to talk about the fact that although both girls and boys love dinosaurs, TV shows that cater to children only have the boy as the lead character - as evidenced in Dino Dan.

Cartoons really do girls a dis-service. Boys can be "take charge" kind of kids and get things done, but let a girl have that "can do" attitude, and she's just a bossy bitch. [And, sadly, girls - and when they grow older, women, feel the same way about their female bosses! Because we've been ingrained since childhood that only guys have the right to tell women what they should be doing, presumably.]

But as you see below, the post is rather more concerned about teaching kids that imagination and "wishing" can accomplish things, rather than buckling down to work and making things happen on your own.
From BlogHer.com: Dino Dan and Other Kids Shows Miss the Mark

When Kids Shows Just Miss the Mark:

You know him. You might have been him -- there’s always one in a class. The little boy that’s obsessed with dinosaurs and knows everything about them. No matter what you try to talk about, they find a way to link it to dinosaurs.

That’s Dan. And because this is a show about him, his classmates tolerate him and even think he’s cool.

But there’s a problem. You see, Dan doesn’t just know everything about dinosaurs -- he sees them all around Toronto. The show commits itself to having Dan believe this, even convincing his best friend it’s real. But nobody else believes him, and there are hints all around that it is Dan’s imagination. What could have been a very entertaining show about the power of imagination instead feels more like a little boy who is so desperate for his father that he creates the one scenario that’s guaranteed to bring him home -- real dinosaurs.

Judge orders talks in Montana dinosaur dispute

2011-10-24T19:06:00.000-06:00

From Canadian Business: Judge orders talks in Montana dinosaur dispute
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A federal judge has ordered settlement talks in a multi-million-dollar dispute over bone castings from three famed tyrannosaurus rex specimens.

Attorneys say the case is the first of its kind involving a copyright fight over dinosaur castings — fossil replicas often used in museum displays. It pits a South Dakota research company against a Montana nonprofit that allegedly made unauthorized copies of castings from two t-rexes, dubbed Stan and Sue.

The Black Hills Institute of Geological Research claims Fort Peck Paleontology, Inc. of eastern Montana used the castings to fill out incomplete portions of a third tyrannosaurus rex, known as Peck's Rex, and then profited from sales of replicas.

Through a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in federal court in Montana, Black Hills is seeking $7.4 million in damages — a figure that could be tripled to more than $22 million under federal copyright law, said the South Dakota company's attorney, Luke Santangelo.

But Antoinette Tease, a Billings attorney representing Fort Peck Paleontology, says her client made "negligible profits" off the castings and offered to return them but was turned down.

U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon in Great Falls last week sent the case to settlement talks at the request of the two parties. The talks will be overseen by U.S. Magistrate Judge Keith Strong and are expected to convene in January, attorneys said.

Both sides indicated they were hopeful a deal could be reached to resolve the case. Yet they offered sharply different interpretations on whether copyright restrictions were broken and how much damage was done.

"The total number of bones we're talking about, it's an absolute minuscule percentage of the entire t-rex skeleton," Tease said. "They want $22 million for not even the real bones but casts of the bones that are inside the skull."

Replicas of Peck's Rex are in museums including the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the Wyoming Dinosaur Center and the Maryland Science Center, according to court documents.

Santangelo said Fort Peck Paleontology had taken actions that were "blatantly wrong" and should be held accountable.

"They're not going to get a complete free pass," he said. "They basically just copied Stan. We don't own a copyright to the t-rex, but we own a copyright to Stan because we created that. They just used it and tried to hide that fact."

The original Sue is a permanent feature at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which bought the specimen at auction for almost $8.4 million. The sale came after an ownership dispute in which the federal government took the dinosaur from the Black Hills Institute following its 1990 discovery, saying it had been taken from Indian land held under federal trust.

Tease says that as a result of losing ownership of Sue, Black Hills' had no right to file for a copyright on the castings it made from the specimen. As for the other castings in question, from the t-rex Stan, Tease says those were given by Black Hills to a paleontologist who worked with — but not for — Fort Peck Paleontology.

Tease said that the employee who used the casts to mold the head of Peck's Rex did so at the direction of that outside paleontologist. Subsequent profits off Peck's Rex totaled "five figures, max," Tease said, adding that her client remained willing to give up the casts still in its possession.

John Rabenberg, an eastern Montana wheat and barley farmer and chairman of Fort Peck Paleontology, said the organization has been shut down until the lawsuit is resolved.

Paleontologists Unveil the 11th Archaeopteryx

2011-10-22T01:51:00.002-06:00

From the Smithsonian.com: Dinosaur Trackign Blog: Paleontologists Unveil the 11th Archaeopteryx

For Archaeopteryx, 2011 has been a year of ups and downs. Paleontologists celebrated the 150th anniversary of when the iconic feathered dinosaur was named. But shortly afterwards, a controversial paper in Nature in July proposed that the creature—widely hailed as the first bird—was further removed from avian ancestry than previously thought. Now Archaeopteryx is back on the upswing. According to a press release circulated by the New Munich Trade Fair Centre in Germany, paleontologists now have an 11th specimen of the famous fossil creature to study.

Until this week, ten Archaeopteryx skeletons were known to paleontologists, not including the fossil feather the German paleontologist Hermann von Meyer used to give the animal its name. Peter Wellnhofer, the world’s foremost expert on the “urvogel,” detailed the backstory of each fossil in his comprehensive book Archaeopteryx: The Icon of Evolution. The London specimen and the Berlin specimen are the best known—particularly the latter, arguably one of the most visually stunning fossils ever found—but there’s also the busted-up Maxberg specimen, another that was initially confused for a pterosaur (the Haarlem specimen) and a slab known as the Solnhofen specimen that was originally thought to contain the skeleton of the small coelurosaurian dinosaur Compsognathus.

As far as I am aware, the new specimen does not have a name and has yet to be described in the literature, but this Archaeopteryx appears to be one of the more complete and well preserved of the lot. In fact, the preservation and position of the bones are reminiscent of the Thermopolis specimen I saw in Wyoming this past year, although this new Archaeopteryx is missing one forelimb and the skull. Don’t be fooled by the fact that, at first glance, the fossil looks a little jumbled up. If you start by following the tip of the tail (on the right), the articulated vertebral column leads to the hips and splayed legs before curving up and back in the classic dinosaur death pose. The arm is displaced below the hips but remains articulated.

We will have to wait for the descriptive paper to learn the important characteristics of this new find, as well as where the slab came from. But if you happen to be in the vicinity of the New Munich Trade Fair Centre in Germany, you can see the 11th Archaeopteryx for a limited engagement at “The Munich Show” from October 28-30.

The Living Dinosaur

2011-10-21T01:42:00.003-06:00

Ginkgo specimens in their ancestral setting: Shan Jiang village, Guizhou Province, in the People’s Republic of China
From Harvard Spring: The Living Dinosaur

In early october 1989, Peter Del Tredici of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum was high on the slopes of Tian Mu Mountain Nature Reserve in western Zhejiang Province, counting ginkgo trees with two Chinese collaborators. For 1,500 years, visiting pilgrims had journeyed to this sacred mountain, where Buddhist monks in the late thirteenth century built the famous Kaishan Temple, the largest of many picturesque shrines scattered about the steep hillsides. In the cool fall weather, wrote Del Tredici, then 43, “we walked all the paths and trails in the reserve and measured and mapped the locations of all the ginkgos that we could locate. Ginkgo leaves were turning yellow, making it easy to locate the trees even at some distance.” All told, they found “167 spontaneously growing Ginkgos.” In the world of trees and botany, the finding of wild ginkgos was big news.

The Ginkgo biloba is one of the wonders of the natural world, a “living fossil” whose arboreal ancestors date back to the Jurassic period. “How or why the ginkgo managed to survive when all of its relatives went extinct is an unsolved botanical mystery,” wrote Del Tredici in Horticulture back in 1983—a mystery he would spend two decades helping to partially unravel. The term “living fossil” was coined by Darwin; in Del Tredici’s words, it refers to a living species “with a long evolutionary history and no close living relatives.” An average plant species may have an evolutionary run of a few million years; Ginkgo biloba has been around, with minimal changes, for about 56 million years.

Sharing the earth with dinosaurs, the ginkgos—often a dominant forest species—grew across the Northern Hemisphere along disturbed stream beds and levees. Then, about seven million years ago, the glaciers pushed out the last of the ginkgos in America; two million years ago, the ice pushed out the last of the ginkgos in Europe. Ultimately, Ginkgo biloba survived only in Asia.

Today, the dinosaurs are long since extinct but the ginkgo, thanks to gardeners and urban foresters, has recolonized the very continents where it once thrived, a ubiquitous, super-hardy city-tree species. Also known as the maidenhair tree, it has long been admired for its distinctive, elegant, fan-shaped leaves, and valued for its delicate nuts—but it is infamous, too, for the foul odor of its fruits, whose “fleshy outer covering [the sarcotesta],” noted Arboretum founder Charles Sprague Sargent in 1877, “exhales an extremely disagreeable smell of rancid butter.” (Others describe it as “vomitous.”) Having long outlived the pests and diseases that may have afflicted it, a ginkgo is young at 100, when most other street trees have long since died of old age or disease. This is an amazing botanical conquest and comeback.

In the late nineteenth century, when Western plant explorers descended upon China and Japan seeking botanical treasure, they were amazed at the size and antiquity of certain ginkgos: 100-foot-tall trees with 50-foot girths that were 1,000 or even 2,000 years old, growing around temples and monasteries. One of those plant men was collector Ernest H. “Chinese” Wilson, whose two China expeditions from 1907 to 1911 amassed 65,000 botanical specimens for Harvard’s arboretum. (Artfully laid out on 265 acres in Jamaica Plain, the arboretum was conceived in 1872 as both a Boston public park and a Harvard research institution, where the “Living Collections” would serve as a “Tree Museum” and a research resource. Harvard purchased the land for the arboretum and then donated it to the city of Boston, which constructed the park and leased it back to the University for a thousand years for $1 a year.)

In 1930, not long before Wilson’s death in a car accident in Worcester, this legendary botanical explorer declared in no uncertain terms that the ginkgo “no longer exists [in Asia] in a wild state, and there is no authentic record of its ever having been seen growing spontaneously. Travelers of repute of many nationalities have searched for it far and wide in the Orient but none has succeeded in solving the secret of its home….In Japan, Korea, southern Manchuria, and in China proper it is known as a planted tree only, and usually in association with religious buildings, palaces, tombs, and old historic or geomantic sites….What caused its disappearance [in the wild] we shall never know.” Such was Wilson’s clout, reported Del Tredici, that this romantic story of venerable monks preserving this ancient tree “had become dogma.” In 1967 a professor wrote in Science, “It is doubtful, however, whether a natural stand of ginkgo trees is to be found anywhere in the world today.”

Wandering the woods of Tian Mu more than two decades later, Del Tredici, who is today a senior research scientist at the arboretum, believed he had found the elusive and long-sought wild ginkgos. Locating them could help address some of the tree’s evolutionary mysteries. For Del Tredici, the ginkgo offered botanists “a unique window on the past—sort of like having a living dinosaur available to study.” He hoped to learn how this amazing species had managed to survive in the wild since the dinosaurs. How had some ginkgos lived more than a thousand years when few tree species live even hundreds of years? What served as the dispersal agent for its seeds? And what evolutionary purpose caused their fruits to smell so god-awful?

The 600 species of trees that grow in temperate North America today fall into three divisions: Pinophyta, which includes all the hundreds of conifers, or cone-bearing seed plants; Magnoliophyta, including the hundreds of broadleaf trees, whose reproduction is tied to their flowers and fruits; and Ginkgophyta, which includes only one tree, Ginkgo biloba, with a reproductive system unlike that of other trees. Although the fact that ginkgo trees are either male or female is not unusual in the tree world, this gender distinction is considered evolutionarily primitive.

“The order to which the tree belongs, the Ginkgoales,” wrote Del Tredici in Arnoldia, “can be traced back to the Permian era, almost 250 million years ago,” thanks to the study of many ginkgo fossils found in the Northern Hemisphere. “The genus Ginkgo made its first appearance in the middle Jurassic period, 170 million years ago….At least four different species of Ginkgo coexisted with the dinosaurs during the Lower Cretaceous.” One of the four species, G. adiantoides, possessed leaves and female ovules that are similar to, but smaller than, those of G. biloba, the species that exists today. In short, the ginkgo has probably existed on earth longer than any other tree now living.

The first ginkgo to grow in Europe after the Ice Age was raised from seed brought from Japan around 1730 by German physician-botanist Engelbert Kaempfer. Planted at the Botanic Garden in Utrecht, Holland, that ginkgo (which thrives to this day) was viewed simply as another rare and exotic tree from the land of the shoguns. In the ensuing decades, botanists at Kew Gardens in England, the Botanic Garden in Montpelier, France, and elsewhere on the continent planted their own rare specimens. In 1784, Philadelphian William Hamilton was delighted to be the first in his young nation to have one of these “Oriental” trees on his Woodlands estate. Naturalist William Bartram planted one nearby in his garden. Today it is the oldest ginkgo in America. But until 1896, botanists, who knew ginkgos were ancient thanks to fossilized specimens, had no idea just how old Ginkgo biloba was.

That year, on September 9 in Tokyo, Japanese botanist Sakugoro Hirase peered through his microscope at the inside of a female ginkgo tree’s ovule. The previous spring, a male ginkgo’s pollen had wafted on the wind toward a female ginkgo with many dangling pairs of round ovules. On the tip of an ovule, a secreted drop of gooey fluid captured and absorbed the pollen into an interior pollen chamber. The pollen had grown all through the summer and, as Hirase was astounded to observe, it had become a multiflagellated ginkgo sperm (three times larger than human sperm) that was swimming to fertilize a waiting egg cell.

“This was really momentous,” according to Del Tredici. “The discovery of motile sperm captured people’s attention. From the scientific point of view, motile sperm was considered to be a trait associated with evolutionarily primitive, non-seed plants such as mosses and ferns. And yet here was the ginkgo tree—clearly a seed-producing plant—with its motile sperm that linked non-seed plants to the more evolutionarily advanced conifers and angiosperms with pollen tubes and non-motile sperm. People realized, ‘My God! Ginkgo is a missing link—a living fossil.’ ”

The ginkgo tree has the same archaic reproductive system as the cycads, which predate the dinosaurs. It takes about 133 days for the ginkgo pollen to develop into sperm that then flails its way to the egg and creates a growing embryo. Soon thereafter, in the fall, the fleshy seeds, containing a hard-shelled nut with a tiny embryo, drop to the ground. Not until the next spring will the seeds germinate. Ginkgo fossils showed that the tree’s reproductive system has been largely unchanged since the Cretaceous. This “direct link with ancient fossil plants,” from before the age of flowering plants, wrote Del Tredici, “gives the modern Ginkgo biloba a pedigree unmatched by any living tree.” Thus Ginkgo was catapulted to a new status of “living fossil”—but a fossil, it was believed, that had survived only through human cultivation, whether for its delicious nuts or its status as a revered “elder.”

When Del Tredici began stalking the wild ginkgo in China in 1989, he was resuming a plant-hunting tradition at the Arnold Arboretum that had ended when “the Bamboo Curtain came down in 1949.” He worked with Nanjing Botanical Garden director Yang Guang and Chinese forester Ling Hsieh. What was hard to ignore as the three men located and measured the golden-leaved ginkgos on Tian Mu Mountain was the paucity of young trees. “Clearly,” wrote Del Tredici, “the Ginkgo population was not actively reproducing from seed under the shady, mature forest conditions that currently prevail on the mountain.” Then they learned that the local populace (and the red-bellied squirrels) had already played “an important factor limiting seedling establishment”: they had collected most of the foul-smelling fruits for the seed-kernel inside. In fact, many Chinese farmers had established ginkgo orchards in order to harvest these nuts as a cash crop.

But Del Tredici did observe something exciting and unfamiliar on Tian Mu: “[M]ost of the larger Ginkgos were reproducing vigorously from suckers arising near the base of their trunks….Wherever the base of the trunk of a large Ginkgo came into direct contact with a large rock or where its base was exposed by erosion, these structures developed…When these growths reach friable soil, they produce lateral roots, develop vigorous growing shoots, and continue their downward growth.” Where conditions were disturbed or tough, ginkgos responded by sending up new shoots from their roots that began growing into new trees. As a result, many old ginkgos have multiple trunks.

Very old ginkgos had long been observed to grow “air roots” from their upper branches. These were known in Japan as chichi (nipples, or breasts), harking back to a Japanese folk tale about an ancient ginkgo in Sendai that grew over the tomb of an emperor’s wet nurse, who vowed to Buddha that mothers who failed to lactate could pray there and would then be able to nurse their babies. Del Tredici was not seeing the aerial “breasts,” but basal chichi (lignotubers). “They had never before been described in the English literature,” he says. This helped explain how ginkgos could live so many millennia. Not only had they outlived pests and diseases, but they resprouted when under stress.

“Going to China was really a leap of faith, but that’s what science is all about,” said Del Tredici during a recent conversation in his arboretum office—an airy space of exposed brick walls, large windows overlooking many trees, two desks and two computers, his collection of old herbal medicine bottles, drawings and photos of ginkgos, and bookcases crammed with titles like Design in Nature: Learning from Trees. “When I came back I did experiments on reproduction and morphology in the lab and the greenhouse on this survival mechanism that ginkgo had evolved.” In the greenhouse, he was able to demonstrate that “basal chichi develop from suppressed cotyledonary [embryonic leaf] buds.

“To my great relief, on that first trip to China,” he said, “I found and explained the ability of ginkgos to survive so long. Even though their sexual reproduction system is archaic and doesn’t work all that well, the tree has this ability to resprout. I call it ecological immortality. Ginkgo became my case study for integrating ecological knowledge with botanical knowledge with horticultural knowledge. I was able to bring all these pieces together into a unified picture.” He was well launched on helping to unravel some of Ginkgo’s evolutionary mystery. The basal chichi helped explain the persistence of the species into the modern era and the extraordinary age of individual trees. Del Tredici’s discovery established a mechanism that has allowed this “living fossil” to survive in the wild in the face of massive ecological change.

Del Tredici’s passion for ginkgos advanced in fits and starts. A native Californian from Marin County, one of his distinct childhood memories is of 10 ginkgos planted across a neighbor’s front yard. “The thing about ginkgos,” in his view, “is you can be totally illiterate about trees and you still know what a ginkgo is.” With a B.S. in zoology from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.S. in biology from the University of Oregon, he came East to be with his girlfriend (and later, wife) while she finished Radcliffe College.

After five years at the Harvard Forest greenhouses, running what is now the Torrey Research Lab, he joined the arboretum in 1979 as an assistant plant propagator. “I was working on Sargent’s Weeping Hemlock, an old Victorian plant with a mysterious history,” he said. “I started visiting old estates and inevitably there would be these old ginkgos—100, 200 years old. So I ended up writing this article about old ginkgos.” The arboreal infatuation was heating up. Then Del Tredici discovered that just a few years earlier, in 1977, the Boston Common had lost Gardiner Greene’s ginkgo, an eighteenth-century tree so beloved it had been moved at great expense, when already 40 feet tall, from Beacon Hill to the Common in 1835.

“Believing that it is sometimes good to repeat history,” wrote Del Tredici, “I thought it would be nice to get a public-spirited Bostonian to donate a 40-foot male ginkgo [no smelly fruits!]…to fill the empty space where the tree had been.” On Arbor Day 1982, he and like-minded citizens welcomed the ginkgo to its new home. “It’s been my comeuppance,” he said ruefully of this romantic episode. “I visualized this beautiful ginkgo. Thirty years later and it’s maybe five feet taller. The site conditions are really difficult—compacted soil, on a slope, some extreme drought conditions.”

“In 1985, I had just turned 40,” said Del Tredici, “and felt I needed a new strategy, because I was getting too old to make a living with my back in the greenhouses.” He enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Boston University the next year, intending to write about black cherries. This turned out to be a somewhat more complicated subject than anticipated and one of his committee members, Lynn Margulis, impressed by a paper he had written for her evolution class about the dispersal of ginkgo seeds, suggested, “ Why don’t you do your dissertation on Ginkgo?”

“A light bulb went off,” recalled Del Tredici. “Ginkgos. Probe every little evolutionary detail and you find something unique.” At that time, many posited that dinosaurs ate ginkgo fruits and excreted the seeds, and the beasts’ demise partly explained the disappearance of wild ginkgo—but no dinosaur droppings with ginkgo seeds had ever been found.

In 1988, not long after that Ph.D. light bulb went off, Del Tredici happened to read in the Harvard Gazette that Emery professor of organic chemistry Elias J. Corey (who soon thereafter won the Nobel Prize) had just isolated a compound—ginkgolide B—that might have a medical aspect. He decided on a lark to call Corey, who said, “Come on over.” “I told him I was working on Ginkgo,” Del Tredici continued, “and that I thought it probably existed in the wild, but my question was: ‘What ecological role did Ginkgo play? How had the species survived so many millions of years? What would it look like as a wild plant? Is it a pioneer species?’ I wanted to go to China, but I didn’t know what I would find. Despite what Wilson said, there were plant hunters—including Chinese botanists—who had reported it in remote valleys, little wild remnants.

“Corey said, ‘That sounds like a great idea.’ He was working with a French pharmaceutical company that was providing ginkgo leaves for him to work on. He said, ‘Write your letter describing your project and I’ll write one in support and we’ll put them in the mail at the same time.’ In a month or so, I had a check for $5,000. That was a lot of money in those days. All the French wanted was that I write a book chapter for them.”

While working on Tian Mu in 1989, Del Tredici was persuaded he was seeing wild ginkgos because the trees were mixed in with the natural forest, the sex ratios were normal (half female, half male), and the trees were single or multistemmed and looked as if they had grown from seed. Equally exciting was his discovery of basal chichi.

And then there was the mystery of the stinky fruits. On that trip to China, he learned that local nocturnal scavengers and carnivores like Chinese leopard cats and the masked palm civet ate the ginkgo’s fruit. He hypothesized that the stinky flesh mimicked the smell of rotting meat, a successful strategy to attract these creatures. The ginkgo nuts, in turn, were eventually excreted, and were far likelier to sprout and grow if dropped in sunny sites. Back in Boston, in various experiments and field trials, Del Tredici confirmed that ginkgo seed germination rates soared (71 percent versus 15 percent) minus the smelly sarcotesta (as would happen when eaten and excreted). “During the Cretaceous,” he wrote, “potential dispersal agents included mammals, birds, and carnivorous dinosaurs.”

As cumbersome as G. biloba’s sex life is, it, too, has served an evolutionary purpose. As Del Tredici and other botanists studied the tree’s reproductive cycle, he began conducting experiments at the arboretum—both in the greenhouse and outdoors—growing seeds from Guizhou and Boston ginkgos, further confirming that all “aspects of Ginkgo’s sexual reproductive cycle are strongly influenced by temperature.” During the Ice Age, he wrote in a review paper, “Such a trait would have allowed this species to reproduce successfully in regions of the Northern Hemisphere that were undergoing dramatic cooling after a long period of stable warm conditions…Ginkgo biloba’s temperature-sensitive embryo developmental-delay mechanism could well have been another climate-induced Cretaceous innovation—an evolutionarily primitive, but ecologically functional, form of seed dormancy.” Ginkgo seeds do not try to grow until the weather favors their survival. Between 1953 and 2000 in Japan, the temperature-sensitive Ginkgo adjusted to the warming climate by extending its growing period: four days earlier each spring and eight days longer in the fall.

Like “Chinese” Wilson, Peter Del Tredici loved botanizing in China, a place he has visited eight more times and calls “Horticultural Heaven.” He has worked with many Chinese colleagues, and said they have now taken the lead in researching ginkgo, a national symbol of their botanical heritage. Ginkgo DNA is three times larger than human DNA and is unlikely to be fully sequenced anytime soon, but by using smaller snippets for DNA testing in 2008, botanist Wei Gong and her colleagues confirmed Del Tredici’s 1989 find of wild ginkgo growing on the slopes of Tian Mu Mountain. The Chinese also confirmed that several other small wild ginkgo remnants displayed “a significantly higher degree of genetic diversity than populations in other parts of the country.” In some of these forests, growing near peoples with no history of gathering ginkgo fruits, there are young ginkgos growing. Although no one knows for sure where Ginkgo originated, it’s now clear that during the Ice Age, the southwest mountains of China served as refugia. Subsequent DNA studies have also shown that China is the ultimate source of all the world’s cultivated ginkgos.

Many of Ginkgo’s mysteries are probably unsolvable. Did it once have a pollinator? We will never truly know, said Del Tredici, “why Ginkgo is still around when all of its relatives have gone extinct…many of its life-history traits evolved under conditions that no longer exist, which makes reconstructing its ecological niche difficult to establish.” What, for instance, he continued, were “its original dispersal agents? What role did the medically active chemicals it produces play in its evolution? Were they feeding deterrents? I assume Ginkgo survived because it was somehow able to remain competitive with flowering plants, but in what ways was it different from species that went extinct? For all intents and purposes, Ginkgo has stopped evolving.”

For decades now, Del Tredici has been gathering ginkgo seeds and cuttings from historic and unusual trees, and he recently planted a large hillside in the arboretum with some of his more prized specimens, part of a larger grove of young trees that are all deciduous gymnosperms: larches, golden larches, dawn redwoods, and bald cypresses. He expects that when Harvard has to renegotiate the lease for the arboretum in 861 years, the ginkgos will be looking pretty magnificent.

Until then, when next you pass a ginkgo on a busy street, remember you are looking at a mysterious species that shared the earth with dinosaurs. “As remarkable as Ginkgo’s evolutionary survival is,” said Del Tredici, “the fact that it grows vigorously in the modern urban environment is no less dramatic. Having survived the climatic vicissitudes of the past 120 million years, ginkgo is clearly well prepared—or, more precisely, preadapted—to handle the climatic uncertainties that seem to be looming in the not-too-distant future. Indeed, should the human race succeed in wiping itself out over the course of the next few centuries, we can take some comfort in the knowledge that the ginkgo tree will survive.”

Historian Jill Jonnes, author of Eiffel’s Tower, Conquering Gotham, and Empires of Light, is a scholar this fall at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, working on trees as green infrastructure.

22 and 23 Oct, Denver Museum of Nature and Science

2011-10-20T23:02:00.002-06:00

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science invites families and visitors of all ages to enjoy a Cretaceous Dinosaur Carnival from 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 22, and Sunday, Oct. 23. The event celebrates the Museum’s new temporary exhibition T. Rex Encounter, which features robotic, interactive dinosaurs and a fossil cast of the most complete T. Rex ever discovered. Participants will experience dinosaur fun throughout the Museum, including dinosaur-themed carnival games, dinosaur art projects, life-size dinosaur skeleton puppets and more. For details visit www.dmns.org/t-rex.