Fuzzy dinosaur's last meal hints its species was adept at hunting

From MSNBC News:  Fuzzy dinosaur's last meal hints its species was adept at hunting

 

Dinosaur fossils found with the bones of birds and small dinosaurs in their stomachs reveal the beasts may have been adept hunters capable of downing prey more than a third their own size, researchers say.

Fossils are occasionally found with the remains of animals and plants inside what were once their guts. These tummy contents can shed light on what they once ate — for instance, past research showed a mammal predator apparently had a tiny dinosaur as its last meal.

Scientists investigated two specimens of a carnivorous dinosaur from Liaoning, China, known as Sinocalliopteryx gigas. The predator was roughly the size of a wolf, about 6 feet (2 meters) long, and had feathers or hairlike fuzz covering its body to help keep it warm.

Back when this dinosaur was alive, about 120 million years ago, the area was a warm, wet forest, with a diverse fauna of dinosaurs, birds and crocodilians. "It was kind of a quintessential dinosaur environment, with lots of volcanic activity that periodically inundated the landscape and buried things within it with exquisite preservation," said researcher Phil Bell, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative in Canada. "Today the area is pretty much farmland, although the farmers all understand the importance of fossils and the interest they create, and a lot have turned to farming for dinosaurs."
One of the Sinocalliopteryx specimens, a complete and remarkably well-preserved skeleton, apparently dined on a birdlike, cat-size feathered dinosaur known as Sinornithosaurus, judging by the partial leg found in its gut. [See Images of the Dinosaur Guts]

The other Sinocalliopteryx specimen, an incomplete skeleton, held the remains of at least two primitive crow-size birds known as Confuciusornis, as well as acid-etched bones from a dinosaur. (Confuciusornis was probably limited to slow takeoffs and short flights.)

"Stomach remains are evidence of actual interactions between animals, which is extremely rare in the fossil record," Bell told LiveScience. "We're lucky to find one or two bones of anything; to get a specimen with the remains of its last meal or meals is pretty cool."

It remains uncertain whether the dinosaurs actively hunted or scavenged these meals. Still, the fact that Sinocalliopteryx gobbled at least two birds of the same species at about the same time "says chances are very good it was actively selecting its prey; that makes it a predator," Bell said.

And capturing flying prey points to a stealthy, capable hunter, the researchers added.

"What I think is coolest about these findings is that it starts to bring these animals to life," Bell said. "A lot of people look at fossils as just dead things — it's hard for them to imagine them as living, breathing animals. When you get something like this, it really brings them to life."

The scientists detailed their findings online Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE.




 

Alt Text: Dinosaurs With Dumb Names Are a Pox on Paleontology

From Wired: Alt Text: Dinosaurs With Dumb Names Are a Pox on Paleontology

In zoology, whoever discovers a new species gets to name it. Normally this isn’t a big deal; at this point, the only living animal species being discovered are either some isolated sea slug or some type of antelope that everyone thought was the same as another type of antelope, but it turns out they can’t interbreed so — two different antelopes. In the latter case, everyone’s just going to keep calling it “an antelope” and in the former case, who cares?

However, there is one situation where animals are being given names that people are actually going to use, and that’s dinosaurs. Paleontologists have an awesome responsibility, as well as an awesome job. Whatever they name their long-extinct terrible lizards, that’s the name, and there’s a decent chance it’s going to show up on film or as a stuffed animal in a museum gift shop.
Some dinosaur names are ideal. Tyrannosaurus rex, for instance, is objectively the best name that anything has ever had, with Wolf Blitzer coming in a distant second. And there’s the Triceratops, which sounds cool and means “three-horned face,” and also Pentaceratops, which is, OK, kind of derivative, but I’m still hoping they eventually discover a Hexaceratops.
Sadly, however, not all scientists are equally inspired. Here are a few dinosaurs that, international rules for nomenclature be damned, need new names.

Spinosaurus

As arguably the largest bipedal dinosaur, Spinosaurus should have had a much better name. First off, it looks like it might be pronounced “spin-o-saurus,” which sounds like playground equipment. Secondly, it doesn’t sound Latin enough. I mean, it is Latin, but it doesn’t sound Latin. It sounds like it belongs with Neckosaurus and Littletinyarmsosaurus in the Museum of Unimaginative Nomenclature.

Albertosaurus

Speaking of phoning it in, a disturbing number of dinosaurs are named after the place where they were found, which speaks to me of a paleontologist who has lost all joie de vivre. This leads to names like Utahraptor, Denversaurus and the worst of all, Albertosaurus, a species discovered in Alberta, Canada. Szechuanosaurus, however, sounds delicious.

Iguanodon

Dinosaur names should not include the word “guano.” End of story.

Bruhathkayosaurus

The Bruhathkayosaurus was possibly the largest vertebrate ever to walk upon the earth, and the name sounds like a two-pack-a-day smoker getting up in the morning. And the name means “huge-bodied lizard,” which is accurate but boring. Surely there’s still some room for poetry in dinosaur naming — what about “mountain-shaming lizard” or “sun-blocking lizard”? I don’t know the Latin for those, but I assume they’re less phlegmy.

Achillobator

Sometimes poetry can go awry. While the name of this raptor-like dinosaur is cool in theory — it means “Achilles’ warrior” — in practice, Achillobator sounds like a very specific form of ankle fetish.

Giraffatitan

Sweet bottle of bourbon, this is terrible. Giraffatitan means “giant giraffe,” to begin with. But this creature was not a giraffe, it was a dinosaur. Calling a dinosaur a giant giraffe is like calling the Colossus of Rhodes a giant Hummel figurine. And “giraffatitan” is a terrible name, not only for a dinosaur, but for anything. It would be a terrible name for a giant giraffe. It would be a terrible name for a ska band. And as we all know, you can call a ska band any damn thing.

Gasosaurus

I was expecting to find that the “gas” in this dinosaur’s name was a coincidence, that the name meant, I dunno, “gazing lizard” or suchlike. But no, it’s named Gasosaurus after the Chinese gasoline company that discovered it. Someone needs to explain to Chinese paleontologists that science teachers have a hard enough time explaining Uranus and titmice to first graders without introducing a Gasosaurus into the educational mix.

 

WALES: Archaeologist says dinosaur footprints have been stolen from coastline at Barry

From Barry&District News:  Archaeologist says dinosaur footprints have been stolen from coastline at Barry

 

STOLEN: Dinosuar footprints, which were previously seen at the Bendricks, have disappeared. 

 

A LOCAL archaeologist says dinosaur footprints have been stolen from the Bendricks coastline - an area famed for its geological significance.
Karl-James Langford said: "We were horrified that in an area where we had previously examined several footprints, they have since been taken.
"As readers can see from the picture, cutting instruments have been used on the 200 million-year-old Triassic rock, in an area where footprints and the fossilised remains of wave ridges had existed a few weeks ago.
"This part of the coastline is protected as an SSSI, and as such is meant to offer protection and restriction (with a licence) from anyone removing any of the rare geological formations - whether they are footprints, fossils or even any of the rock," he added.
"There are only 12 Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Wales."

 

6-ton feathered dinosaurs once flocked in Alaskan Denali region

From McClatchey:  6-ton feathered dinosaurs once flocked in Alaska

Therizinosaurs weighed six tons, had a giraffe-length neck, claws like scimitars -- and feathers. Alaska once had a lot of them, said paleontologist Anthony Fiorillo.
Fiorillo, curator of earth sciences at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, and his colleague Thomas Adams published a paper in the June online edition of the scholarly journal Palaios identifying a single track found in Denali National Park as belonging to the odd plant-eating dinosaur related to Tyrannosaurus rex and the modern chickadee.
In an interview last week, Fiorillo said several more therizinosaur tracks were found in the park over the course of this summer.
Scientists have been baffled by this family of dinosaurs, originally thinking they were something like turtles. The first incomplete specimens came from Mongolia. More fossils were then found in China and North America. The Denali tracks are the first evidence that they were among the ancient reptiles that lived in high latitudes, sometimes called "polar dinosaurs."
The biggest Therizinosaurus is estimated to have stretched 40 feet. Even the smallest member of the family was 7 feet from the tip of its tail to its tiny head. They walked on their hind legs -- very well, as it turns out. Despite those ferocious front-limb talons, which could be a yard long, they seem to have come from a meat-eating species that turned vegetarian.
The purpose of the Edward Scissorhands-like claws is something of a mystery. They could have been used to scythe leaves or stalks, Fiorillo said. Therizinosaur is Greek for "reaping lizard."
Likewise, "The feathers are the source of a lot of speculation," Fiorillo said. Perhaps they were for display. Perhaps they helped the animal control its body temperature.
For purposes of identifying the Alaska animal as a therizinosaur, however, the important feature is its feet.
In their paper, Fiorillo and Adams document the configuration of the original Denali track, saying, "Four-toed theropod tracks are decidedly uncommon." Theropods are the suborder of dinosaurs to which therizinosaurs belonged. Only two groups have all four toes facing forward, the researchers note as they meticulously eliminate other possibilities.
In the case of therizinosaurs, all four toes bear some weight. It's a design not unlike the human foot, built for walking rather then springing, perching, swimming or other things feet do.
And walk they did. The Palaios article includes a map showing a possible therizinosaur highway from Lake Baikal in Central Asia to central Canada by way of the Bering Land Bridge. It likely took generations for the clan to travel that far.
The Denali region, on the other hand, may have been a major seasonal migration corridor, similar to those used by the birds and fish that swarm into Alaska during the summer nowadays. It was a place where different species fed and mingled; the therizinosaur tracks were found in the same layer of "bedding plains" as a number of duck-billed dinosaur tracks. It was a family place; different-size prints show adults and juveniles traveling together.
The abundant signs of various dinosaurs and prehistoric birds in Denali suggest to Fiorillo a scene not unlike the African savannah, with the Cretaceous versions of wildebeest and zebra herds eying each other across the plain.
"Alaska is the best place on the planet to study a high latitude ecosystem in deeper geologic time," he said. "We have something we can contribute to the discussion of what a warming Arctic might look like."
"There's so much (paleontological) potential in this state," Fiorillo said. "You never know what's around the corner."
The Denali footprints supply something like a photograph of what was happening in the far North 70 million years ago or more, he said. "We don't have bones. But the tracks give us a component to the biodiversity of the area that we didn't have before."
The therizinosaur isn't the first feathered dinosaur found in Alaska. That honor probably belongs to the small, wide-eyed, big-brained carnivore Troodon, fossils of which were previously found on the North Slope.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/08/21/162962/6-ton-feathered-dinosaurs-once.html#storylink=cpy

Dinosaur cosplay in the 1930s was fantastic, creepy as hell

From IOS09: Dinosaur cosplay in the 1930s was fantastic, creepy as hell

In 1938, Birmingham, England held a 5,000-performer pageant to celebrate the centennial of the city's designation as a municipal borough. But that milestone's barely germane to today's discussion.
No, what is noteworthy here is that Birmingham built three terrifying dinosaur costumes out of automobiles and chased one-hundred caveman around a field, which — to be perfectly honest — is how every anniversary should be commemorated, regardless of the occasion.
The pageant's theme was Birmingham's transition from prehistoric hellhole to modern industrial powerhouse. These wonderful dinosaurs (which straddled "semi-crappy" and "complete magnificence" with equal aplomb) were built for the prehistoric portion of the pageant. As Birmingham Archives and Heritage Blog elaborates:

In the opening episode, three dinosaurs, hacked together from the chassis of small cars, ply wood and paint and powered by men hidden inside would maraud across the field chasing, and being chased by hundreds of fur clothed cavemen.

Here's footage of the three dinosaurs, Egbert, Ogbert, and the triceratops Little Sidney ("who could move his head independently and had his own baby's pacifier"). As for Egbert, he was positively massive and could belch fog. (Historical veracity was not at a premium here). Connecting Histories describes the construction process as follows:  (GO TO THE ORIGINAL LINK VIA A COPUTER TO SEE THE VIDEOS)

Egbert was described by the Pageant Master, Gwen Lally, as being sixty feet long, almost as tall as a church, with great motor lamps for eyes and the ability to waggle his head. He could also roar and emit yellow smoke from his nostrils. The Birmingham Mail revealed that the monster was made from 3,000 plywood strips, a ton of paint, 200 yards of canvas, motive power supplied by twelve men, and was mounted on a chassis incorporating the axles and wheels of a light car.

And once the dinosaurs were done chasing their quarry, the audience delighted in a Druidic human sacrifice and a cart full of dead knights.

Florida Fossils Dealer Seeks Dinosaur's NY Return

From HuffPost: Florida Fossils Dealer Seeks Dinosaur's NY Return 

NEW YORK — A Florida fossils dealer whose dinosaur was seized by the U.S. government so it could be given to the government of Mongolia wants it back.

Lawyers for Eric Prokopi, of Gainesville, Fla., said in court papers filed Monday that he was victim of a media campaign stirred up by academic paleontologists.

The government seized the Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton, known as Ty, in June. It had sued to obtain the bones, which had been sold at an auction for $1.05 million.

According to the court papers, Prokopi and Dallas-based auction house Heritage Auctions were in negotiations with Mongolia's president to settle the dispute when the U.S. filed a seizure lawsuit to obtain the dinosaur.

The government had no immediate comment on Monday. The auction house has said it wants a "fair and just resolution."

A judge had ordered the U.S. government to seize the dinosaur from a storage facility in New York after the U.S. claimed it had been brought into the country with bogus documents. The U.S. said the documents disguised the dinosaur skeleton, which originated in Mongolia, as reptile bones from Great Britain.

Prokopi has said in a statement that he brought the bones into the country in March 2010 when they were just chunks of rocks and broken bones. He said he turned them into "an impressive skeleton."

According to the court papers, about 25 percent of the dinosaur is made of inorganic, plastic material molded from other fossil specimens while 50 percent is from one bataar specimen and the rest is from other specimens.

The court papers called the effort to return the 70 million-year-old skeleton to Mongolia unprecedented, saying fossils from China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia have been openly sold on the international market and collected in the United States by people and museums for generations.

Apparent dinosaur track found where scientists reach for the stars

From CNN.com: Apparent dinosaur track found where scientists reach for the stars
Goddard Space Flight Center scientists trying to unlock secrets of the universe have had clues to the prehistoric past resting literally beneath their feet.

Dinosaur tracker Ray Stanford this summer discovered on the center's campus the apparent footprint of a nodosaur, a plant-eater that roamed suburban Washington, D.C., about 110 million years ago.

The track, almost 14 inches wide, is near a sidewalk at the Goddard complex in Greenbelt, Maryland, home to 7,000 employees engaged in astrophysics, heliophysics and planetary science.

"It is sheer poetry," Stanford said on Tuesday. "It is because of the juxtaposition that evokes so much interest." Stanford late last week gave NASA officials a firsthand look at the print, which was hiding in plain sight all these years.

"It's something that if you knew what you were looking for you would have seen," said Alan Binstock, in charge of cultural and archaeological matters at the facility. "That's what's so amazing."

A paleontologist will do a survey to confirm the find, Binstock said, and will help determine what areas on the fenced campus may need further protection.

"I said this is not the only one," Stanford said. "There has to be many here." Officials are staying mum on the footprint's exact location.

Stanford, who says he has found about 1,000 dinosaur tracks over the years, said he and a Johns Hopkins University expert are convinced it is an authentic find.

The nodosaur, which hails from the Early Cretaceous period, is named for the bony nodes found on its head, shoulders and body edges.

"They were basically an armored tank with relatively short legs," said Stanford. "They had plates reminiscent of what you would see on the crocodile."

The nodosaur, perhaps 15 feet long from snout to tail, left a print of its right rear foot in thick mud.

"You see the back of the foot, what we call a heel, is lifted up," Stanford said. "It was moving as fast as one of these guys could go. I suggest it was running."

Stanford, 74, of College Park, Maryland, moved to the area in 1986, shortly after he retired in Texas from a nonprofit research group.

In 1994, he and his children found the footprint of an Iguanodon dinosaur near the College Park airport.

"I spotted this thing and I called them over," Stanford said. "I asked 'what does it look like?' In one voice, they said, 'It looks like a dinosaur track.'"

Stanford has since worked with professionals and academics. In September 2011, he co-authored a Journal of Paleontology paper on a new nodosaur species.

Stanford often has lunch with his wife, who works at Goddard.

Several years ago, while driving there, he noticed material he thought might be indicative of the Cretaceous period. In June, after having lunch at Goddard, Stanford returned to an area where he had found the 3-inch track of a theropod. He came upon the nodosaur track.

Goddard's Binstock gave his own description of the discovery.

"If someone said, 'What's that?' I would have said an elephant that needs a manicure."

News of the discovery has swept the Goddard campus in recent days.

"Everybody's excited about it," Binstock said. "We're all about discovering new things."

UNC professor, students piece together model of prehistoric reptile

From News Observer: UNC professor, students piece together model of prehistoric reptile

Alison the rauisuchian was a reptile to be reckoned with in her day, the Late Triassic, and in her neighborhood – the spot in supercontinent Pangea that became southern Durham County.

She weighed nearly a ton, and she and her fellow rauisuchians prowled at the top of the food chain until they disappeared at the end of the Triassic, to be succeeded by dinosaurs.

She’s no small shakes in the annals of North Carolina fossil-dom, either. Since her discovery in a Durham County brick quarry by two UNC-Chapel Hill students in 1994, she’s been hailed as one of the state’s most important finds.

She’s the first rauisuchian (“raw ih SOO kee un”) found in eastern North America, though there have been others in the U.S. West and elsewhere. She’s the only one of her particular species ever found.

Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues, Smithsonian Institution senior scientist and curator of vertebrate paleontology, helped with early research carried out by Dr. Joseph G. Carter, paleontology professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Geological Sciences.

The rauisuchian’s discovery, along with its captured prey, “provided unexpected new insights into Late Triassic life in what is now eastern North America,” Sues says.

At work in the lab
Now, some of Carter’s students are finishing the first complete rendition of Alison in polyurethane, readying her for a broad public debut. It’s expected to be finished during the fall semester and hopefully will go on display within this next year, perhaps at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. The actual bones are already there, under lock and key.

Though there’s no way to determine sex, in scientific parlance, she’s Portosuchus (genus) alisonae (species), named by students for the late Alison L. Chambers, their companion on many a paleontology field trip.
To students bending her ribs and putting her tailbone together like a jigsaw puzzle, she’s just plain Alison.
Student Maria Connolly asked the assembled heads bent over the polyurethane skeleton one recent morning if they knew why Alison is so trim.

It’s her metabolism, Connolly cracks. She’s dead!

That’s not all, chimes in Carter, a transplanted Kansan who echoes the Coroner’s pronouncement on the Wicked Witch in “The Wizard of Oz.”

“Not only merely dead,” he quotes. “But really most sincerely dead.”

Two-hundred-and-twenty-one million years dead, give or take 5 million.

Ah, but when she was alive! She wore armor plates on her neck, back and breast, was about 11 feet long, and likely stood upright at least part of the time.

A nickname for a rauisuchian is “bear croc” – it looks like a crocodile, prowls like a bear. Though they’re not ancestors of the dinosaur, Carter says, “It was Nature’s first attempt to build a dinosaur-like predator.”
Head uplifted, massive jaws open, eye sockets unseeing, she looms above her builders. On a table nearby, her yet-unattached hands are lifted in an unintended but touching gesture of supplication.

Previous students did an incomplete reconstruction in 2000; it substituted painted Plexiglas for the bones missing when Alison was unearthed. After a campus showing, this first replica was relegated to the lab while Carter and students researched Alison’s rauisuchian relatives and used their findings to create the missing parts .

A determination to keep Alison in North Carolina led Carter to take on the arduous task of overseeing her reassembly 18 years ago, even though his specialty is invertebrates. (He’s currently coordinator of an international effort to create the most complete family tree ever assembled for bivalves – clams, oysters, and the like.)

But no way, he says, was he going to send Alison out-of-state. “This is part of North Carolina’s heritage.”
Had her bones left, she’d be as unknown to most North Carolinians as the state’s other big vertebrate fossil find – a Late Triassic crocodile-like creature, a rutiodon, found in the 1800s in Durham County. It’s in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Quarry discovery

Alison came to light when Carter student Brian Coffey and roommate Marco Brewer spotted some bone chips, then an anklebone, as they hiked the quarry. They felt that this was something big, and when they hauled the anklebone in to Carter, he agreed.

“When I saw it, I thought it must be another rutiodon,” he says.

A large part of the class went back to the quarry, and subsequently found part of the skull, a couple of teeth, the entire neck, most of the shoulders, two arms complete with hands, the collarbone, breastplate, part of the hip, part of the back, most of both legs including the feet, part of the tail, and many ribs.

“It was one of the most complete rauisuchians ever discovered,” says Carter. And it was articulated – the bones positioned just as they’d been in life.

The crab-like hand with a locked-together thumb and forefinger ending in a sharp claw meant that they had stumbled upon an entirely new species.

The creature was found lying in what was once a lake, on top of captured prey. The spenosuchian crocodylomorph beneath her “looked like an alligator in its head, long skinny legs like a greyhound,” Carter says. Subsequently researched by the Smithsonian’s Sues, it was yet another new species, grallator, this one of the genus Dromicosuchus.

Not only that, Alison’s stomach area contained remains of four other small Triassic creatures, one of which, Carter says, was “second, second, second cousin” to a reptile thought to be an ancestor of mammals.
Carter theorizes that having killed its dinner, the rauisuchian was trying to drag it out of the lake when it got stuck in the mud and died.

To test his cause-of-death theory, he tried to walk in the similar sediment of nearby Jordan Lake when the water was low. “I tried to see how sticky it was. If you got both legs stuck in there, you’re in deep trouble.”
‘Show and tell’

Carter wears Hawaiian shirts to class, has a poster of Indiana Jones in his office and, like his students, appreciates but is not overwhelmed by their weighty task. Teaching paleontology, he says, “is like having ‘show and tell’ every day.”

“It’s just fun to talk about new discoveries. People have an inherent desire to know about the world they live in.”

Usually, he says, reconstructing a major fossil find is undertaken only by experts in museums. But Alison’s promise of being “a really marvelous teaching tool” prompted him to break tradition and involve undergraduates, even his freshman-seminar students planning to study English, philosophy and the like.
Other experts like Sues and Dr. Paul E. Olsen of Columbia University joined in the research and subsequent paper-writing, as did graduate students Karen Peyer and Stephanie E. Novak.

But it was undergraduates who hauled Alison’s skeleton, surrounded by petrified mud, out of the quarry in chunks. “It’s like these bones were encased in concrete,” Carter says.

Some of them, compressed by millions of years’ worth of sand, fell into pieces. “You have to know where they were, and then glue them back together again.”

Sure, the 300 students who’ve worked on Alison have made some mistakes, he says in a later conversation. “Just like today,” when a rib being bent broke instead.

“Sometimes, you’ve got to break a bone to build a skeleton,” he says.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/08/19/2269590/unc-professor-and-students-piece.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/08/19/2269590/unc-professor-and-students-piece.html#storylink=cpy

 

Canada: Dinosaur unearthed just 30 minutes from Alberta museum

From the Globe ans Mail:  Dinosaur unearthed just 30 minutes from Alberta museum 

A former employee of Alberta’s world-renowned dinosaur museum didn’t have to venture far to discover the remains of a Triceratops.

The dinosaur’s remains were found just 30 minutes east of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller.

The bones of the triple-horned herbivore that roamed the land 65 million years ago had become exposed through erosion.

“We always say we don’t choose where we find fossils,” curator François Therrien said. “They’re just where they are and most of the time they’re stuck in the middle of the Badlands. And they’re kilometres away from the road and the only way to get the big block out is to use a helicopter.

“Here in this case it was just by the side of the road, I’d say less than 30 metres.”

Mr. Therrien said the other thing that made the find so exciting was that triceratops remains are more often found in Saskatchewan and Montana. The museum only had fragments of bones, even though Alberta is a hotbed for other dinosaur discoveries.

“Triceratops is the most common dinosaur found, but for some reason in Alberta it is very rare. There’s just a handful of specimens that have been collected since the 20th century and the Royal Tyrrell does not have a good specimen in its collection.”

That’s all changed now. A team from the museum worked for 12 days and uncovered a large “log jam” of vertebrae, ribs and other bones belonging to the prehistoric creature.

The vertebrae are more than 60 centimetres tall and the ribs are nearly two metres long. The specimen was transported in six protective casings, or field jackets. The main jacket measured 2.5 metres by 1.3 metres and weighed more than 2,000 kilograms.

But a dinosaur hunter’s work is never done. Mr. Therrien said he was poking around another site Friday morning and found some Tyrannosaurus rex material.

“There’s always new discoveries to be made.”

 

Noah's Ark is a fairy tale!

A Christian website called Opposing Views received a question, presumably yesterday, about Noah's Ark. The person who answered the question explained that Noah did save the dinosaurs on the ark.

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/religion/feedback-dinosaur-extinction

Okay, here's the problem.

There are over a 100 million species of creatures alive today. That's not counting the ones that have gone extinct, of course. If Noah took 2 animals of each kind - or 7, or whatever...how in heck did they all fit on the Ark. You could say he brought dinosaur eggs...(and that could be why they went extinct, by the way - he didn't care for them properly so they never hatched, wham, goodbye dinosaurs)...

So he's got all these carnivorous animals on board the ark with a lot of non-carnivorous animals. What did they all eat? How did he handle their defecations and their urinations?  More importantly - what about drinking water? For 100 million species of animals? What did they eat when they eventually got off the ark?

Then there's the fact that many animals are endemic to only one area. Australia's kangaroo, playpus, etc.. no where else do you find these animals. What did Noah do, carry animals around and deposit them on their own continents - building another boat to do so (since remember THE ark had grounded on Mt. Ararat and would not be moving anymore.)

If you want to believe the Noah's Ark story, that's fine... but it's beyond the bounds of reality that Noah had dinosaurs on the ark as well as mammals.

There are lots of "flood stories" in people's mythologies. That's not because there was one world flood, but because every country has low-lying areas that have a propensity to flood. And since it wasn't until the 1800s that people could easily travel just 10 miles away from home, to ancient folks, what happened in their neck of the woods was happening all over the world.

Likely footprint of spiky dinosaur has NASA’s Md. campus on cloud nine

From the Washington Post: Likely footprint of spiky dinosaur has NASA’s Md. campus on cloud nine

Eons before man dreamed of exploring the heavens, dinosaur tracker Ray Stanford is convinced, a low-slung armored beast roamed what is now a NASA campus in Greenbelt, stamping a huge footprint that went unnoticed until he spied it this summer.

A scalloped mini-crater with four pointy toe prints pressed into ruddy rock, the putative dinosaur track juts out from a scruffy slope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, home to 7,000 scientists, engineers and other workers with their eyes firmly turned skyward.

Maryland’s signature dinosaur, an armored browser known as a nodosaur, made the track with its back left foot 112 million years ago, Stanford said as he led an entourage of NASA officials to the print Friday morning.
Sticking out of the grass in plain view, the elephant-foot-size impression — nearly 14 inches wide — elicited gasps. “Unbelievable!” said a NASA photographer. Someone else said, “Oh, my!”

NASA officials said they accept the discovery for now as an authentic dinosaur footprint. They are moving to call in experts to confirm the find and search the area for other dinosaur calling cards.

Last week, Stanford showed the print to noted Johns Hopkins University expert David Weishampel, author of the book “Dinosaurs of the East Coast” and a consultant on the 1993 film “Jurassic Park.”
 
Weishampel said that the track, pressed into the bedrock undergirding the campus, is real.

“Ray showed it to me, and I was overwhelmed,” Weishampel said in a phone interview. “As a scientist, I’m skeptical of things like this. But it has all the detail you want. It’s got toe prints and sort of a heel print that’s starting to erode away.”

Added Weishampel: “It looks like a nodosaur.”

On Friday morning, Stanford pulled out a paintbrush and dabbed dirt from around the edges of the print, highlighting where he says four sharp toes once pressed into mud that eventually hardened into stone.
“These guys were like four-footed tanks,” Stanford said of the beast that left the track. Nodo­saurs grew thick, spiky armor knobbed with big “nodes,” the origin of their name. They browsed vegetation and hunkered low to survive toothy attacks.

Stanford speculated that the nodosaur was running when it laid down the presumed track, possibly fleeing a predator.

“I love the paradox,” said Stanford, 74. “Space scientists walk along here, and they’re walking where this big, bungling, heavy-armored dinosaur walked maybe 110, 112 million years ago. It’s just so poetic.”

A Goddard official, Alan Binstock, said the agency considers the footprint and its location “sensitive but unclassified.”

He grew nervous as Stanford set a small plastic nodosaur inside the print for a photograph. “Maybe put the toy dinosaur away so it isn’t so obvious to people,” said Binstock, scanning for passers-by.

As Goddard’s architect and facility manager, Binstock said he would quickly move to protect the footprint. He proposed temporarily covering it and lamented that it looked as if a “big gang mower” had recently chipped its edges.

In his 20 years at NASA, Binstock said, he’s never heard of dinosaur footprints or fossils being found at any of the space agency’s 13 nationwide campuses.

Don’t plan a visit yet
Jennifer Groman, NASA’s federal preservation officer, who typically safeguards spacesuits, satellites and other man-made detritus of the space-age, viewed the imprint Friday.

“It’s not something I want to make a tourist attraction at this point,” she said. “We don’t want people barreling down there with shovels. We can’t have anyone pick it up and take it off property.”

Groman added that “ultimately, we want people to be able to see it, because it’s very exciting.” An interpretation station could be built at the site, Groman said.

Because the impression is on federal land, three laws may apply: the Antiquities Act, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act and the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act.
Groman and Binstock asked The Washington Post not to reveal the track’s location on the 1,270-acre Goddard campus.

Nodosaurs were not known to roam what is now Maryland until Stanford uncovered a fossilized baby nodosaur near the University of Maryland campus. Stanford and two academic colleagues from Johns Hopkins dubbed the species Propanoplosaurus marylandicus in a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in September in the Journal of Paleontology.

Stanford donated that fossil — the first hatchling nodosaur fossil found anywhere — to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where it sits under lights in the “Dinosaurs in Our Backyard” display.
That doomed baby nodosaur measures just six inches long, but the relative that made the Goddard footprint was “huge,” said Stanford — 15 to 20 feet long. Like all dinosaur tracks in the region, the one at Goddard probably hails from the early Cretaceous period, about 112 million years ago, he said.

A keen eye
Stanford has earned a reputation as a footprint-finder extraordinaire. Since 1994, he has collected about 1,400 dinosaur footprints and other fossils from the streambeds of Prince George’s County, adding to the scientific record a menagerie of at least 20 new Maryland dinosaurs. In contrast, the bones of just three or four species of Maryland dinosaurs have been found, experts say.

With piles of dinosaur tracks filling his living room, Stanford’s home in College Park holds “the best collection of footprints we have from early Cretaceous era of the East Coast,” Weishampel said. “Ray has unleashed upon us a whole new, and quite diverse, fauna. He’s found tracks for animals we don’t have bones for yet.”

Stanford’s most recent discovery was made June 25. He and his wife, Sheila, were having lunch at the Goddard cafeteria when Ray got one of his “hunches.” If he returned to a spot where six years before he had found a small triangular chunk of stone stamped with a scrawny three-toed footprint — likely from a two-legged meat-eating theropod, Stanford said — there might be more to find.

“I drove by and said, ‘There’s something sticking out of the ground there,’ ” he said. “It’s a matter of knowing what to look for.”

As word of the find filtered out across the Goddard campus, incredulous reactions ensued.
Told of the apparent discovery, Piers Sellers, a Goddard scientist and former astronaut, said with bemused surprise: “I don’t believe it. We have no exposed rock anywhere on campus.”
Even as NASA’s Groman viewed the big nodosaur print, she picked up a flat, hand-size piece of yellow stone from nearby.

Groman showed it to Stanford, who grew even more animated.

“That’s from an iguanodon,” he said, pointing to three rounded, fat toe prints. Iguanodons were bipedal plant-chewers.

Within 20 minutes, the Stanfords and two NASA employees picked up three more small track-tredded rocks.
Stanford then swept his arm across Goddard’s asphalt parking lots and square brick government buildings and the white, 100-foot-tall Delta rocket jutting above the trees in the distance. “This must have been a nodosaur’s paradise,” he said. “Imagine all these nesting dinosaurs living in here. There have got to be dinosaur tracks all over this place.”
 

New Study Suggests Humans, Not Climate, Killed Off Neanderthals

From Smithsonian.com:  New Study Suggests Humans, Not Climate, Killed Off Neanderthals

Roughly 40,000 years ago, the Neanderthals that lived in the Mediterranean disappeared. Whether they simply up and left, or died off, is anybody’s guess. They were still a common sight in western Europe for another 10,000 years, so outright extinction is off the table.
In trying to understand what lead to the Neanderthal’s decline, archaeologists favor three ideas, either: climate change did it, humans did it, or a catastrophic volcanic eruption did it. A new study lead by John Lowe and described by the journal Science suggests two of the three are now off the table.
The researchers collected incredibly small particles of volcanic glass, known as cyrptotephra, that were produced by a massive eruption of the Campi Flegrei supervolcano in southern Italy. That event, which took place 40,000 years ago and is known as the Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) eruption, sent volcanic ash far and wide across the region. It also caused the temperature to drop by a couple of degrees, which had been held up as a potential cause for the Neanderthal’s decline.
According to Science, Lowe’s research found that the shift from the Neanderthal’s stone tools to the modern human’s more complex equipment lay underneath the supervolcano’s ash layer at research sites on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea, meaning that “modern humans had replaced Neandertals before the catastrophic events of 40,000 years ago.”
The authors also found that the marks left behind by a sudden global cooling, known as a Heinrich Event, happened at the same time as the supervolcanic eruption—aka, it also occurred after the Neanderthals were already on their way out.
With the eruption and climate change crossed off their list, Lowe and his team put the blame on the only other remaining suspect: humans. Even in the court of law, though, this charge probably wouldn’t hold. Kate Wong for Scientific American, interviewing Clive Finlayson, explains:

The authors claim evidence of competition from modern humans as the cause of the Neanderthal extinction. This is the default argument – we think we didn’t find evidence of climate or volcanic activity on the Neanderthal extinction, therefore it must have been modern people. Why? Show it!

 

Banjo Gets a Hand

From Smithsonian Dinosaur Tracking:  Banjo Gets a Hand

Australia isn’t well-known for exceptional dinosaur fossils. Even though the continent contains some spectacular tracksites, such as the “Dinosaur Stampede,” many of the dinosaurs discovered in Australia over the past few years are only known from scraps. Among the exceptions are a trio of dinosaurs first described in 2009 from remains found in Queensland–a pair of sauropods and a theropod nicknamed “Banjo.” These roughly 110-million-year-old dinosaurs were all represented by partial skeletons, and there is even more material from these animals than was originally detailed. Paleontologists are continuing to prepare and study dinosaur bones from the site. The latest tidbit from the site concerns Banjo’s arm.

Banjo’s official name is Australovenator wintonensis. This roughly 20-foot-long carnivore belonged to a group of Allosaurus-like theropods called Neovenatorids. Judging by the anatomy of their skulls and forelimbs, these dinosaurs used both jaws and claws to bring down prey, and a recent paper by Matt White and colleagues provides a detailed look at the formidable arms of Australovenator.

As mentioned by White and co-authors, the new bones include elements from the dinosaur’s upper arm, lower arm and hand. Together, these bones give paleontologists a near-complete view of Banjo’s arms. Like its close relatives, Australovenator had a stout thumb tipped with a large claw, while the other two fingers were more slender and bore smaller curved weapons. From a more detailed perspective, the paleontologists also suggest that the arms of Australovenator and its close relatives might be useful in parsing the evolutionary relationships among these predatory dinosaurs.

Exactly how Australovenator used its arms is unknown. White and collaborators mention that a biomechanical analysis of the dinosaur’s arm is underway, and that study will hopefully outline how Banjo and other Neovenatorids combined teeth and claws in their hunting strategy. The new paper is primarily a detailed inventory of Banjo’s hand, and even though behavioral interpretations are sexy–it’s hard to look at theropod claws and not wonder about the damage they could inflict–we need papers that fully reconstruct a dinosaur’s anatomy first. Once we know what’s we’re looking at, then we can investigate the amazing things dinosaurs were capable of.

Reference:
White MA, Cook AG, Hocknull SA, Sloan T, Sinapius GH & Elliott DA (2012). New Forearm Elements Discovered of Holotype Specimen Australovenator wintonensis from Winton, Queensland, Australia. PloS One, 7 (6) PMID: 22761772

 

Explore, Discover, Share, Preserve, Sustain... Plunder?

From the Huffington Post:  Explore, Discover, Share, Preserve, Sustain... Plunder?

Scrambling along the muddy banks of Alberta Canada's Red Willow River, a team of expectant explorers eagerly followed the lead of paleontologist Phil Bell. Only the week before Bell had discovered and partially excavated what promised to represent a fully intact fossilized hadrosaur. Although unable to unearth the dinosaur in its entirety Bell had carefully preserved the partially exposed vertebrate, wrapping this securely in a protective layer of burlap and plaster over which a blue tarpaulin was laid. To completely conceal the telltale tarp, loose soil was scattered, camouflaging the site until Bell's projected return a few days later.
While hadrosaur remains are among the more prevalent of fossil finds, the discovery of a pristine skeleton is an extremely rare circumstance and one that proffers a unique glimpse towards expanding the understanding of what transpired within the dinosaur realm. When the group reached the location however, instead of the anticipated opportunity to garner a wealth of information, Bell and the others encountered a scene of senseless desecration. The protective materials so painstakingly applied lay wantonly strewn about, the fossil itself maliciously defaced, fractured remnants of the once nearly perfect specimen lay littered amongst the debris. The vandalism yielded a devastating blow not just to Bell personally but to scientific discovery overall.

The hadrosaur, noted for its duck-like bill and often ornate crest is categorized as a gentle herbivore believed to have ambled capably on either two or four legs throughout Asian, European and North American plains and wooded regions including Canada's Grand Prairie during the Cretaceous period. Beginning at the end of the Jurassic period approximately 144 million years ago, the Cretaceous timeframe was the longest running period in the Mesozoic era signaling at its closure approximately 65 million years ago an abrupt end of the majority of non-avian dinosaurs. The plenitude of hadrosaur evidence since disclosed seemingly indicates that these creatures were among the most abundant at the time of this mass extinction. A fully represented skeleton offered a unique opportunity to glean clues that could help piece together the puzzle of events that led to this large scale species death but also more about the hadrosaur's little known activities in the region.
Unfortunately the recent incidence of pillage encountered by the young paleontologist and his team is a scenario that continues to be replicated in various formats the world over. Dinosaur remains have proven particularly popular targets as they can be especially lucrative. When in the early 1920s Roy Chapman Andrews came up with the idea of auctioning off an "extra" dinosaur egg to ostensibly help raise the profile as well as fund his next expedition, he unwittingly opened the door to what has developed into new avenues for trade in natural and cultural artifacts. Although the auction proved successful as a novel fundraising tool, it unleashed unanticipated consequences, highlighting natural finds as valued commodities it engendered distrust as to whether the motivations of the Chapman Andrews expeditions were truly scientific or monetary in nature. As a result, permits from the Chinese were no longer forthcoming and subsequent planned expeditions had to be abandoned. In 1923 the discovery of dinosaur eggs represented the first such known to the modern world. The renowned insurance group Lloyds of London was asked to insure their safekeeping in transit from China to the U.S. When asked the value of the eggs, Chapman Andrews reportedly replied "scientifically they are priceless, commercially they would be worth what someone would pay for them." Commercial price level was ascertained shortly thereafter when the egg was auctioned for $5,000, an astronomical amount for the time.
It continues to be the high prices that the markets are willing to pay that fuels trade for relics. The voracity of demand has encouraged product inventory obtained through questionable or illicit practices. This past June the Mongolian Government tried to stop a sale at at New York auction of an approximately 70 million year old Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton alleged to have been illegally sourced from Mongolia's Nemegt Basin. The skeleton, which under the auction hammer fetched over $1 million, was promptly seized by the U.S. government and sequestered in a warehouse pending verification of its origins and mode of derivation.
The sensational nature of the specimen, and the hefty price tag that it generated, helped in this case to attract sufficient notice to elicit government intervention, however the burgeoning plethora of Internet auction and other sites has added dimensionally to avenues for dispensing goods. The sheer volume, global reach and ability to quickly remove or recalibrate information makes these virtually impossible to monitor. Information can be rapidly dispersed at minimum cost, offering relative anonymity for sellers, providing regulators scant windows of opportunity to disseminate, investigate and pursue offenders. Therefore the largely unregulated Internet has provided vast, inexpensive means to quickly and profitably offload fossils, archeological objects and antiquities of dubious provenance. The haste to capitalize on the desirability of fossilized dinosaur remains and other ancient finds has led to these being in some instances literally bulldozed out of the ground. Meanwhile underwater treasure seekers scour the seabeds seeking out and claiming shipwrecks to recoup and sell off valuable artifacts. Such negligent carnage inevitably destroys critical information important to science.
With so many questions as yet unanswered, it is undoubtedly remiss to irretrievably disturb or destroy potential transmissions that the past has to offer. Scientists today continuously ponder and wrestle with only incomplete information, juggling this to piece together more conclusive pictures of an overall puzzle. The important communications proffered by historical vestiges and artifacts in their natural settings can provide windows of understanding into past circumstances and events which significantly contribute towards comprehending current situations as well as yield critical clues towards preventing and warding off similar future calamities. Protection of these is essential. However, while the scientific community imposes and seeks to strictly adhere to exacting regulations governing the treatment of natural and historical sites, it is those beyond this that seek to spoil for profit or pure sport that have little regard for scientific method. Monetary incentives have fostered a growing realm of profit seekers including a host of for profit enterprise operating under the banner of "historical preservation." These profitably augment excavation and scavenging activities via the sale of retrieved relics deemed "redundant" thus forever eradicating a chapter of the world's ongoing scientific story offered through systematic in situ observation.
As such the mantra of the explorer/scientist to explore, discover, share, preserve, sustain is being infringed upon by plunder. It is unlikely that stricter laws and regulations on their own will provide sufficient remedy to counter illicit behavior or questionable treatment of scientific finds. Alberta, Canada, the jurisdiction where Phil Bell's hadrosaur fossil discovery was vandalized, counts among the strictest of anti-poaching regulations and yet the region has experienced numerous destructive episodes involving protected scientific field research sites. More critically in tangent with stringent enforcement of sanctions and penalties, is the need to infuse a greater respect for the natural world and what it offers. The recognition of the past and the value of its lessons towards present and future. Through education and the appreciation that we are among the first to potentially glean the benefits of an historical understanding of former conditions and their consequences will help secure the protection of field research and history's time capsules. As Roy Chapman Adams so aptly stated "scientifically they are priceless."

 

BCC professor, students creating "dino room" for Children's Museum

From the Herald News: BCC professor, students creating "dino room" for Children's Museum

FALL RIVER - Students of Erik Durant, a Bristol Community College fine arts teacher, were mixing designs and laying strips of fiberglass over chicken-wire frames for a tunnel in what has been dubbed the “dino room” at the soon-to-open Children’s Museum.

The layering process was akin to building a fiberglass boat, the instructor said.

On a windowsill sat a series of hardened and finely detailed clay bones, which will be used to create molded casts for pterodactyls and other dinosaurs. The bones of half a dozen dinosaurs will have color-coded magnets attached to them and will be stuck to a wall of sheet metal for visitors to pick and choose.

In another area, the bones will be buried for kids to dig up.

Durant has made his mark with sculptors in New Bedford, among other places. He designed and made the giant pink squid hanging outside the Whaling Museum. He was asked which age group might best appreciate the dinosaur room his eight students planned, designed, bought materials for and have started building.

“Sometimes you and I think, ‘Oh, 3 to 8.’ But I think it’s more like toddlers to ... adults. Adults have to play, right?” Durant said. His BCC students, most in their early 20s, laughed.

Handling one of the intricate pieces of pterodactyl bones he made, Enzo Cruz, 21, showed obvious pride. “It’s really incredible. We’re learning a lot of great practice.”

Cruz, an aspiring sculptor from Fairhaven, anticipated the fun kids will have with the dino bones. “It’s really cool to have your stuff be used and be interactive,” Cruz said.

Another student, a young painter who also likes mixed media and uses the alias Nived, said, “It’s just interesting to me to build a setting.”

Will the kids like it?

“The kids, they’re going to love it,” said Nived, whose real name is Devin McLaughlin, 24, of New Bedford. “What we’re trying to do with this is you come into an environment.”

Durant, who speaks with childlike enthusiasm, shared the genesis of his “Intro into Museum Fabrication” course at BCC.

“I wrote the course for this project,” Durant said. “I want my sculpturing students to be fabricating exhibits. This seemed very logical.”

It was personal, too.

Durant, from New Bedford, has a 3-year-old son. He gets caught up when they go to a children’s museum and his son might exclaim, “I woulda done this. I woulda done that.”

 The idea here is not building exhibits to elicit certain responses, Durant said. It’s to let the children find out what they want to do and learn. He said it will likely produce some more “I woulda done that” moments.

He took his fabrication class to the Providence Children’s Museum for them to get ideas and a feel for the project.

After taking this course — which Durant plans to continue teaching — he sees his students being able to tout their exhibit-building experience.

During a Friday class, BCC’s president, Jack Sbrega, was present. Not coincidentally, he was there with his wife, Jo-Anne, who is executive director of this newly minted Children’s Museum of Greater Fall River.

A soft opening — when the public can make a $10 donation and paint tiles for the museum — is scheduled for Sept. 8, with the first phase of eight rooms planned “by the holidays,” according to Jo-Anne Sbrega.

Sbrega said he was impressed by how the dino room was taking shape.

“The theoretical becomes the practical under Professor Durant’s leadership,” Sbrega said. He said the room blends what the community needs in a museum with an opportunity for a teacher and his students.

“Things are moving,” Jo-Anne Sbrega said. “We’re saying by the holidays we’ll have a grand opening.”

She encourages the public to stop by the former courthouse at 441 N. Main St. There, they can see progress on the first floor, with eight rooms being re-painted and new flooring being installed.

Bristol County Commissioner Paul Kitchen was among the visitors on Friday. He sounded certain to come back. “I have three children under 7,” he told Durant.

Durant, using the small model they built, described to visitors how children enter the dino environment.

Along the embankment was a familiar object, but one that paleontologists would have been hard-pressed to identify. Lying along a small cliff, it had four wheels and a short, bulky body.

What professed dinosaur lover and follower of “Jurassic Park” would expect a dino room without a jeep in it?

Monrovia woman's dinosaur bone mystery solved on reality TV show

Courtesy photo of Janie Duncan's father, Karl George, with the dinosaur bone he discovered in 1943. 

From Pasadena Star-News:  Monrovia woman's dinosaur bone mystery solved on reality TV show 

MONROVIA - Rockhound Janie Duncan may not have won the top prize for her roughly 150 million-year-old dinosaur bone featured recently on the National Geographic Channel's "America's Lost Treasures." But the jewelry maker, whose late father dug up the 3-foot-long bone in northern Wyoming 74 years ago, discovered something far more precious during the taping of the new reality TV show.
"I didn't get the big prize - the $10,000 - but I don't really care," said Duncan, who is president of the Monrovia Rockhounds. "I got to find out what kind of bone I had. That's priceless to me because my family has never known."

Duncan, 59, learned that the dinosaur bone was a femur, hailed from the late Jurassic period and was about 100 million years older than she previously thought. 


She considered that a strange coincidence since she named her jewelry business, which she started five years ago, Jurassic Jewelry by Janie.

But the bigger surprise came when a a paleontologist from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles took the bone to the "Dino Lab" and determined it belonged to a stegosaurus, her favorite dinosaur for as long as she could remember.

"When I was a little kid ... I had this book called `The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek,"' she said.
"I read that book in the little town I lived in, in Laurel, Mont., in the public library so many times that ... they had to buy a new book because I wore it out."

She said she loved the book partly because the dinosaur's name was George, which is her maiden name.
Duncan's bone was one of the top picks of "America's Lost Treasures" host Curt Doussett, who along with co-host Kinga Phillips scours the country for museum-worthy artifacts that have been forgotten.
In the episode that first aired July 18, the dinosaur bone competed with a range of artifacts including a 34-star Civil War-era flag, a C-melody saxophone, an ancient fish fossil and a light bulb that was believed to be tied to inventor Thomas Edison.

The winner of each episode, in addition to winning $10,000, has his or her artifact placed in the Natural Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C., for one year.

The stegosaurus bone is one of thousands of fossils, minerals, stones and other natural and man-made items that Duncan keeps in her musty basement labeled "The Good Old Days Museum."

The wife, mother of two sons and cat enthusiast calls herself a "third-generation rockhound." Her impressive collection includes items not only garnered by her and her father, Karl George, but by her grandfather as well.
Her collection also boasts a beautiful fossil sea snail, also discovered in northern Wyoming, that is probably about 50million years old, she said. Her father found half of the fossil in 1938 and spoke to another rockhound who had found the second half on the same hillside. 

When the two finally got together five years later, George had to trade a quarter of his entire collection to acquire the other half, she said. He then glued the two pieces together in his gas station office, which also served as a rock museum, in Montana.

Duncan, who has spoken to about 5,000 local Scouts over the years, said her father took the fossil to the Smithsonian Institution in his pick-up truck in 1943. There, he was informed that it was the sixth largest of that species found at the time, she said.

She has no idea about the worth of these items as they are family heirlooms that will never be sold, she said.
As for the dinosaur bone, Duncan was told during the show that it was "not a museum-quality specimen." It broke into three pieces when she was transporting it from Montana to California in a semi-truck some 25 years ago.

But falling short of first place is just fine with her.

"I don't want them to take the bone," Duncan said. "I enjoy showing it to people."

Half snake, half lizard: Strange new dinosaur which slithered beneath feet of T-Rex shows how reptiles lost their legs

From DailyMail Online:  Half snake, half lizard: Strange new dinosaur which slithered beneath feet of T-Rex shows how reptiles lost their legs

A prehistoric reptile, half snake and half lizard, which lived 70 million years ago, has been unveiled by scientists.

The two foot-long creature, known as Coniophis, was a ‘transitional snake’ with a snake’s body and a lizard’s head. 


New analysis of its fossilized remains shows snakes evolved their modern skulls on land - reigniting a long running dispute over whether they are marine or terrestrial animals.

It was discovered over a century ago embedded in rocks in mountainous Wyoming in the west of the US but palaeontologists took another look at long neglected remains to get new clues to how it looked and lived.

Dr Nick Longrich, of Yale University in Connecticut, said: ‘The snake would have been about two feet long - so it was fairly small. It was non-venomous - venomous snakes evolved after the dinosaurs went extinct.

‘But it’s possible it constricted its prey like many primitive snakes do today.
‘Coniophis lived alongside a number of familiar dinosaurs - it would have slithered beneath the feet of animals like T. rex and Triceratops.

‘However it probably wasn’t hunted by dinosaurs. It was a burrower and so it would have spent much of its time hidden.’

The researchers said the lizard-like head suggests early snakes were burrowers that had long bodies before evolving the highly flexible skull characteristic of modern snakes.

Dr Longrich said: ‘Snakes are the most diverse group of lizards, but their origins and early evolution remain poorly understood owing to a lack of transitional forms.

‘Several major issues remain outstanding, such as whether snakes originated in a marine or terrestrial environment and how their unique feeding mechanism evolved.’

Coniophis emerged from a period known geologically as the Late Cretaceous and was among the first snakes discovered.

 

But until now only an isolated vertebra has been described and it has been overlooked in discussions of snake evolution.

The researchers, whose findings are published in Nature, looked at previously undescribed material from the ancient snake including two upper jaw bones known as the maxilla and the lower jawbone where the teeth formed, along with some additional vertebrae.

Dr Longrich said: ‘Coniophis occurs in a continental floodplain environment, consistent with a terrestrial rather than a marine origin; furthermore, its small size and reduced neural spines indicate fossorial habits, suggesting that snakes evolved from burrowing lizards.

‘The skull is intermediate between that of lizards and snakes.’

Something underfoot? Coniophis lived alongside a number of familiar dinosaurs - it would have slithered beneath the feet of animals like T. rex and Triceratops

The researchers also provided insight into the evolution of snake feeding. Considering its small size, hooked teeth and skull structure - unlike modern snakes, Coniophis lacks the ability to swallow large prey whole - they propose it fed on relatively large, soft-bodied prey.

The upper jaw was firmly united with the skull, indicating a motionless snout.

Dr Longrich said: ‘Coniophis therefore represents a transitional snake, combining a snake-like body and a lizard-like head.’

Evolution of a new method of locomotion, and adaptations that facilitate the ingestion of larger prey were probably a key evolutionary step that promoted the diversification of snakes, added the researchers.

 

Smithsonian Picks Paleontologist to Lead DC Museum

From ABC News:  Smithsonian Picks Paleontologist to Lead DC Museum

A paleontologist who undertook a major excavation of ice age fossils of mammoths and mastodons in Colorado was named the next director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History on Thursday.
Kirk Johnson, currently chief curator and vice president of research at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, will take command of one of the nation's most visited museums in late October.

As the Smithsonian's largest museum on the National Mall, the natural history museum has about 300 resident scientists and holds more than 126 million specimens and artifacts, making it the largest natural history collection in the world. It draws about 7 million yearly visitors on average.

Johnson said he is a "longtime museum guy" and that reaching so many visitors makes this a dream job.
"In 10 years in Washington, we'll see 60 to 70 million people," he said in an interview. "It's breathtaking to imagine that because really that's what a museum is about is communicating with people about the natural world."

Johnson, 51, joined the Denver museum in 1991. It draws about 1.4 million visitors a year, mostly from the Denver area. In 2010 and 2011, Johnson led an excavation near Snowmass Village, Colo., that unearthed more than 5,400 of bones of mammoths, mastodons and other ice age animals in a construction zone for a new reservoir.

The Yale-educated expert in geology and paleobotany has written nine books, including "Digging Snowmastodon: Discovering an Ice Age World in the Colorado Rockies."

In May, the Smithsonian announced plans to build a new dinosaur hall on the National Mall over the next seven years, which ties in closely with Johnson's background. Businessman David H. Koch donated a record $35 million for the project.

Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough said Johnson's expertise in paleontology was a factor, but not the deciding one in his selection from a wide pool of applicants.

"Kirk stood out for his ability to communicate his passion about education, his passion about people learning whether they're young at heart or just a young person," Clough said. "I know he's interested in using digital outreach as a means to expand the number of people that museum impacts."

Beyond the dinosaur hall, the museum also plans to add an education center and a DNA-based research lab. Johnson will oversee about 460 employees and a federal budget of $68 million.

Johnson said the museum doesn't "need to be fixed, but it needs to be optimized." He was drawn by the rare opportunity to overhaul the dinosaur hall and to help the museum evolve in the way it communicates and engages people.

"The visiting audience is changing dramatically and rapidly. There's lots more competition for their time," he said. "One of the things I would love to do is take the national museum to a position of national leadership ... and help museums in general face the challenges that are coming at us."

Johnson succeeds Cristian Samper, a biologist who has led the museum since 2003 and who served as the Smithsonian's acting secretary in 2007 and 2008. He is leaving to become the president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, which includes the Bronx Zoo, Central Park Zoo and New York Aquarium.

While Johnson is used to spending months digging for fossils in the field each year, he said he has been moving toward museum management. He still plans to visit Smithsonian scientists working around the world.
"My priority is going to be running the museum, but you can't take that shovel out of my hands," he said. "That'll happen when I die."
———
National Museum of Natural History: http://www.mnh.si.edu/

 

Illinois: Discovery Center: Fossils aren't just bones to dinosaur detectives

From Rockford Register Star : Discovery Center: Fossils aren't just bones to dinosaur detectives

The job of a detective is not so different from that of a paleontologist. Just as detectives discover and then connect clues to weave the story of what really happened, paleontologists puzzle over a Cretaceous crime scene looking at more than just the “bare bones” to get a sense of what life and death was like tens of millions of years ago.

“Fossils” are not just bones. And fossils may or may not have completely turned to rock. Fossils can be of shells or teeth or claws; imprints of leaves or skin or feathers; footprints; even petrified droppings.

And just as investigators are trained to spot otherwise invisible clues like a bit of thread or a single hair, dinosaur detectives know how to distinguish bumps on a rock from the three-fingered handprints left behind by a flock of pteranodons (tuh RAN uh dons) when examining a sandstone slab that was once a Jurassic beach.

Pteranodons were flying reptiles. Walking required that these creatures lean heavily on their wing joints. Their wings stretched along their arms and between their fingertips, similar to those of today’s bats. Unlike bats (that have only a thumb exposed), pteranodons had a thumb and two fingers protruding from the wing joint that took most of their weight when they walked.

What does a pteranodon handprint look like? Find out.

1. Dunk your hand in water.
2. Splay out your wet fingers and thumb so each is as far from the other as you can stretch it.
3. Use that stretched-out hand to lean on a paper towel or piece of newspaper, but touch it only with your thumb, index finger, and middle finger. Keep your ring finger and pinky in the air.
Does the handprint you made look sort of like a curvy letter “F”?  So does the handprint of a pteranodon.
Sandstone slabs exposed on some of the islands in Glendo State Park in Wyoming contain pteranodon (and other dinosaur) prints. Our team uncovered, circled, and numbered some of them before making a latex cast of the site.

Unlike what you see on TV or in the movies, dinosaur bones at a dig site are A.) probably not all there, and B.) usually jumbled up instead of in perfect anatomical order (scientists use the word “disarticulated” to describe that jumbled heap of bones). Several things can contribute to disarticulation, including having the carcass of a dead dino eaten or scavenged prior to being covered by sediments. Any detective can tell you that evidence found at the crime scene does not necessarily all belong to the victim. The same is true for fossils at a dinosaur dig. How do paleontologists sort out a pile of bones and teeth to figure out who was eaten and who was eating? The teeth will tell.

To decipher Mesozoic mastication, think about how you lost your “baby teeth.” When a child loses a “baby tooth,” the tooth underneath it is already growing. The growth of that other tooth triggers the release of a chemical, which dissolves the roots of the baby tooth. Without its roots, the baby tooth is no longer attached to the jaw. The baby tooth becomes loose and wiggly and ready to fall out as the other tooth gets bigger and pushes the baby tooth up from below. Once a baby tooth falls out, the new tooth can grow in and take its place.

Modern-day sharks and crocodiles (like dinosaurs and unlike people), rely on sharp teeth for survival. They have many, many more than two sets of teeth. These predators shed their worn-down teeth as they chew. Fossil skulls of adult carnivorous dinosaurs such as T-rex reveal short barely-protruding teeth next to long sharp teeth — new sharp teeth growing in to replace shed teeth.

Shed dinosaur teeth are the spent “bullets” or “shell casings” that a paleo-detective examines. If a tooth is found that still has the root (and sometimes part of the bone) connected to it, that dinosaur was already dead when the tooth broke away. If a tooth is found with no root, a dinosaur shed that tooth while chewing.

Each species of meat-eating dinosaur has distinctive teeth. When Tyrannosaurus rex bones are uncovered, the shed teeth found nearby belong to dinosaurs like the tiny tyrannosaur found by the Burpee diggers. Paleo-detectives argue that little “Janes” gnawed away at the biggest meat-eater in the Cretaceous.

 

If you go

Discovery Center Museum, 711 N. Main St., Rockford, is “Diggin’ Dinos” from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Friday. Amateur paleontologists can get a one-day permit to unearth some dinosaurs in the outdoor Science Park dig site. Learn how to plaster a fossil, make dinosaur hats and puppets, take part in a prehistoric game show, and more. Come dressed for dirt and sun. Activities are ongoing and included with Discovery Center admission of $7 per person; children ages 1 and younger and members are free. For more information, call 815-963-6769 or visit discoverycentermuseum.org

St. Louisans present when vandalized dinosaur skeleton discovered in Alberta

From St. Louis Beacon:  St. Louisans present when vandalized dinosaur skeleton discovered in Alberta 

When members of the St. Louis Explorers Club purchased a trip to Alberta, Canada, with paleontologist Phil Bell, they expected fascinating dinosaur excavations. Instead, they came face to face with a paleontologist's worst nightmare: the destruction of a once-perfect dinosaur skeleton.

On July 15, paleontologist Phil Bell and a team from the University of Alberta discovered a complete fossilized skeleton of a hadrosaur, a plant-eating dinosaur that once roamed the Grande Prairie region of Alberta.
Bell said hadrosaurs were a common type of dinosaur, but little is known about those from the Grande Prairie region.

After the discovery, Bell said he ran out of time to complete the excavation. He covered the bones in plastic, wrapped them in burlap and reburied them to protect them, planning to return the following week. He said this is a standard practice for preserving fossils.

The following Thursday, Bell returned to the site with St. Louis residents Sandy Peters, his wife Cindy, their son Turner and daughter-in-law Julie, who purchased the trip at an auction hosted by the local Explorers Club. When he returned to the site, the skeleton had been completely destroyed.
As they approached the site, "Bell stopped dead in his tracks and said 'Oh, no! It's been poached,'"Peters said.

"I'd never run across anything like this in my life," Peters said.

Bell said the site had been completely exhumed. The plaster jacket had been torn off and the bones were destroyed and scattered down the hill. It was evident to Bell that the vandals had spent a lot of time at the site.

It looked as though someone "took sledgehammers to it," Peters said.

Bell said this shows a complete lack of respect for the natural world.

The whole afternoon was spent picking up bones that had been scattered around the site. The skeleton can be partially reconstructed, but even the best reconstruction is not the same as a complete skeleton, Bell said.
This discovery was important because it would have given paleontologists an insight into a different ecology of dinosaurs. Finding a complete skeleton is very rare, and most of the time only a bone or a piece of a bone is found.

"This was a scientific gold mine," Bell said. "It was a real treat for us."

Peters said he and his family were devastated for Bell. "We saw a man's life focus and work ripped out from under him."
Since the discovery of the vandalism, leads have emerged. When Bell and the Peters family were walking to the site, they came across a remote campground littered with cans, bottles and even some bones, one of which had plaster on it. An article by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said a liquor-store receipt  found at the campsite could help lead to the discovery of the culprits.

Bell said there have been a number of fossils in the area vandalized in the last month. He said one fossil in the Grande Prairie region was available for view to the public through a plexiglass cover. The cover was smashed, but luckily no harm was done to the bones.

Alberta has some of the strictest laws against fossil poaching. Those found illegally poaching or vandalizing fossils can face a fine up to $400,000 and a year in prison.

No one has yet been identified as the culprit, but Bell said, "Hopefully there is another ending to this story."

 

Colorado Springs: Dinosaur track tours offered

From KOAA.com:  Dinosaur track tours offered

The U.S. Forest Service will offer guided tours into Picket Wire Canyonlands south of La Junta on the Comanche National Grassland. Fall tours begin the first Saturday of September and run through October 20, 2012. These primitive canyons are home to the largest dinosaur track site in North America.

Guided auto tours are the easiest way to visit Picket Wire Canyonlands and learn about its rich, colorful past. During the tour, knowledgeable guides show visitors difficult to find dinosaur tracks and point out the interesting prehistoric, historic and natural features of the canyons.

All day tours (8:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.) are offered on Saturdays in May, June, September and October for a small fee. Due to rough roads, visitors will need their own four-wheel drive vehicle.

For additional information or to make reservations, call the U.S. Forest Service at 719-384-2181.

Dino Trail underscores Connecticut's varied offerings

From CtPost: Dino Trail underscores Connecticut's varied offerings

When folks consider Connecticut's arts and tourism offerings, dinosaurs don't usually come to mind.
"Dinosaurs! Really?" one might ask.

"Absolutely," said Melanie Brigockas, spokeswoman for the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. The Connecticut River Valley was apparently a favored spot for dinos, she added.

Brigockas said that Connecticut's dinosaur-related sites have joined forces to create the CT Dino Trail with the goal of getting the word out and promoting tourism.

As Brigockas noted, the new Dino Trail brochure and website (ctdinotrail.com) are urging folks to "roar through Connecticut (where) amazing adventures await at our dinosaur-themed attractions."

Collaborating on the project are the Connecticut Science Center, Dinosaur State Park, Nature's Art: The Dinosaur Place and the Peabody Museum.

Trail promotion is made possible by a $25,000 Marketing Challenge Grant from the state Department of Economic and Community Development and the Connecticut Office of Tourism to "encourage family trips ... as part of their summer vacation plans and beyond," according to the state agencies.

"There's a renewed interest in dinosaurs and dinosaur science with all the major research in the past few decades that has revealed a wealth of new information" about how they lived as the dominant terrestrial vertebrates from the Jurassic age (about 200 million years ago) to the end of the Cretaceous period (65.5 million years ago), and how they became extinct, she said. "Both children and adults find the topic fascinating."

Among the offerings:
The Connecticut Science Center, in downtown Hartford, is hosting the traveling exhibit "Dinosaurs Unearthed," in which visitors are invited to interact with more than a dozen life-size animatronic specimens that move and roar in a setting with real fossils and full-scale skeletons.

The center says that two 3-D movies will "take visitors back millions of years to when these beasts roamed the planet." A permanent dinosaur exhibit will be created when the traveling show closes on Sept. 2, the center adds.

The 60-acre Dinosaur State Park, in Rocky Hill, a registered National Natural Landmark, is home to more than 2,000 Theropod dinosaur footprints from 200 million years ago during the early Jurassic period.

Inside the museum, visitors may view about 600 of the footprints, while outside offerings include track casting, a mining activity, about two miles of hiking trails and a picnic area.

Nature's Art: The Dinosaur Place, Oakdale section of Montville, is a family owned and operated interactive science, nature and shopping complex.

Visitors are invited to explore outdoor nature trails, on which they will find more than 30 life-sized dinosaur replicas and educational exhibits.

Other features include: a state-of-the-art playground, maze and New England's largest Splashpad, described as "a dinosaur-themed zero-depth water playground." Indoors, visitors are invited to "pan for gold in a running creek, dig for gems in a man-made cave or unearth fossils in a replica fossil quarry," according to the brochure.

Peabody Museum, in New Haven, for decades a center of dinosaur research, offers a vertebrate paleontology collection that is described among the largest in the nation.

In the Great Hall, visitors will find dinosaur fossils, including Stegosaurus, Triceratops and a 70-foot-long Apatosaurus ("Brontosaurus"). Here too is Rudolph Zallinger's noted mural "The Age of Reptiles," described as the world's largest dinosaur painting.

pasboros@ctpost.com; 203-330-6284; http://twitter.com/PhyllisASBoros

Dino doings
Here is information for Dino Trail planning.
Connecticut Science Center
150 Columbus Boulevard, Hartford, 860-SCIENCE (724-3623), CTScienceCenter.org. Open daily through Sept. 2. $19; $14 for 17 to 4 years of age; free for 3 and younger.
Nature's Art: The Dinosaur Place
1650 Hartford-New London Turnpike, Oakdale section of Montville, 860-443-4367, thedinosaurplace.com. Open daily through Sept 3. $18.99 from age 2 to 59; $15.99 senior citizens, free for under age 2.
Dinosaur State Park
400 West St., Rocky Hill, 860-520-5816, www.ct.gov/deep/dinosaurstatepark. Closed Mondays. $6; $2 for age 6 through 12; free age 5 and younger.
Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
170 Whitney Ave., New Haven, 203-432-5050, peabody.yale.edu. Open daily year round. $9; $8 seniors, $5 age 3 to 18 years and college students.