ReportWire

Tag: Dinosaurs

  • This dinosaur skull is one of just a few of its kind — and it’s going on display in DC – WTOP News

    Eric and Wendy Schmidt purchased and donated the “remarkably complete” skull of Pachycephalosaurus, a dinosaur the Smithsonian said is famed for its domed head.

    Left lateral view of catalog number USNM PAL 803273, a Pachycephalosaurus skull, from the Late Cretaceous Period, Maastrichtian stage (approximately 68 to 66 million years ago), Hell Creek Formation, Perkins County, South Dakota. The skull is largely complete with missing areas restored, while the lower jaw – not photographed – is reconstructed. This specimen is from the Department of Paleobiology collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.(Courtesy Smithsonian Institution)

    The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has received a gift that will be hard to outdo this holiday season — a nearly complete dinosaur skull.

    It’s a gift that will keep on giving, as the public has a chance to see the approximately 67-million-year-old fossil from Dec. 22 to Dec. 28 (minus Christmas Day, when the museum is closed).

    Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and his wife Wendy purchased and donated the “remarkably complete” skull of Pachycephalosaurus, a dinosaur the Smithsonian said is famed for its domed head. The species roamed the earth alongside the most renowned dinosaurs, such as the Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, at the end of the Cretaceous Period.

    The skull will make its temporary debut at the museum before it joins the permanent fossil exhibition in the coming years, the Smithsonian said in a news release.

    “This skull is by far the most spectacular specimen of this type of dinosaur that we have at the museum,” paleontologist Matthew Carrano, the museum’s curator of Dinosauria, said in the release. “We almost never get to see the animal’s face or the teeth or other parts of the head because they usually have broken away.”

    Researchers unearthed the skull in South Dakota in 2024, before the Schmidts purchased it at auction and donated it to the museum. According to Carrano, it’s one of very few known Pachycephalosaurus skulls that’s nearly complete and it probably represents a dinosaur that was not quite fully grown when it died.

    “Examining this skull and comparing it to other pachycephalosaur skulls will provide insights into how these dinosaurs changed as they grew,” the museum said in its news release.

    The scientific name Pachycephalosaurus means “thickheaded lizard.” The animals grew up to 15 feet in length.

    Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.

    © 2025 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

    Source link

  • A Juvenile Triceratops and Francis Bacon Heat Up Phillips’s $67.3 Million Evening Sale

    Phillips’s New York Evening Sale closed at $67.3 million—a 24 percent increase from last November. Photo: Jean Bourbon

    The auction results of the past few years have confirmed it: dinosaurs are on trend. And not just as prehistoric relics or tools of scientific inquiry, but as symbols of timelessness and taste. More and more, fossil skeletons are being treated as investments—something that is, in some cases, more emotionally and symbolically resonant than contemporary art with which it might share the auction block. Is it the return of Jurassic Park? Or perhaps simply that most of us are captivated by dinosaurs in childhood? In any case, as nostalgia increasingly drives purchasing decisions across collectibles markets, dinos are unquestionably riding the wave.

    Phillips has been strategically attuned to this shift—likely thanks to a younger cohort of specialists in its ranks. Instead of competing head-to-head with Sotheby’s and Christie’s single-owner sale narratives, the house has leaned into a different storytelling and marketing strategy, enhancing the symbolic power of artworks not through tales of glamorous collectors but by connecting the works to deep time.

    Last night, CERA—a juvenile Triceratops skeleton dated to 66 million years ago and the first of its species ever to appear at auction—fetched $5,377,000 in the Out of This World auction (a specially curated section of the house’s November Modern & Contemporary sales). While that figure may seem modest when measured against the marquee masterpieces of the season, spirited bidding pushed it far beyond its $2,500,000-3,500,000 estimate and confirmed demand for this type of collectible. It also brought Phillips an audience that may never have engaged with the auction house otherwise; representatives confirmed that the skeleton sold to a private American collector new to the house, though global interest had poured in ahead of the sale from both private buyers and international institutions.

    According to Miety Heiden, Phillips’ chairman for private sales, the result is a powerful testament to collectors’ evolving tastes. “More than ever, we’re seeing a desire for works that spark curiosity and transcend traditional categories. People are looking for objects that bring wonder and dialogue into a collection,” she said. “This result underscores the appetite for rare and extraordinary pieces that challenge convention and expand the boundaries of what collecting can be.”

    At this year’s Frieze Masters—the only segment of the global brand typically reserved for million-dollar modernist and Old Masters works—two of the opening day’s first sales were paleontological. David Aaron placed a Triceratops head from the Late Cretaceous (circa 68 million years ago) within the first hour, followed later by a complete saber-toothed Nimravidae skeleton from the Oligocene (circa 33.7-23.8 million years ago), which sold for a strong six-figure sum. And no one has forgotten the Stegosaurus Apex, which shattered records at Sotheby’s in July 2024, hammering at $44.6 million—more than seven times its $4-6 million estimate—to billionaire Ken Griffin.

    Phillips’s Evening Sale on November 19 achieved $67,307,850 across 33 lots, with a robust 94 percent sold by lot (only two passed) and 97 percent sold by value. It was a strong result, particularly considering the momentum already shown by Sotheby’s and Christie’s earlier in the week.

    Leaving behind the cutting-edge but highly speculative ultra-contemporary works that once dominated its auction offerings, the evening’s turnout—up 24 percent from last November—was driven by a pairing of institutionally recognized blue-chip artists of the past century with recent market consolidations, presented for the first time alongside natural history highlights under the Out of This World label. The top lot was the highly anticipated Francis Bacon Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer (1967), which sold for $16,015,000—neatly within its $13-18 million estimate. Just after came Joan Mitchell’s monumental Untitled (1957-1958), a densely gestural canopy of color from her New York years, which brought in $14,290,000.

    Another high-profile lot, Jackson Pollock’s dynamic 1947 work on paper, sold for $3,486,000—just below its high estimate. Mark Tansey’s Revelever (2012) sparked a competitive seven-minute bidding war that carried it to $4,645,000 against its $2,500,000-3,500,000 estimate. The hypnotic, conceptually loaded composition creates an optical push-pull that immerses viewers in a moment of driving toward a mountainous horizon, almost tasting the crisp air in its ultramarine haze.

    Meanwhile, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Exercise (1984), a loosely composed, surreal tangle of hallucination and paint, achieved $3,852,000 after a $3-4 million estimate. Another Basquiat from 1982 followed close behind, selling for $1,225,500. Camille Pissarro’s late Impressionist Le pré et la maison d’Éragny, femme jardinant, printemps (1901) surpassed its high estimate, closing at $1,900,000. Max Ernst’s Dans les rues d’Athènes (1960) doubled its expectations with a $1,534,000 result, riding the continued momentum for Surrealism. Rising Colombian artist Olga de Amaral also saw strong results. Her luminous golden textile Alquimia 62 (1987) soared to $748,200, well above its $300,000-500,000 estimate. A few lots later, a red composition from the same series met its estimate midpoint, hammering at $516,000.

    Firelei Báez set a new auction record—if only briefly. Her Daughter of Revolutions brought in $645,000 over a $300,000-500,000 estimate before being surpassed by a $1,111,250 result at Christie’s later that evening.

    Women artists once again delivered some of the evening’s most compelling results. Amid growing recognition for Alma Thomas, her Untitled collage from 1968—a blueprint for her signature mosaic-like abstractions—sold for $477,300 over a $250,000-350,000 estimate. Ruth Asawa’s Untitled (S.230, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form) opened the sale with a burst of energy, doubling its $400,000-600,000 estimate to achieve $1,006,200 as her MoMA retrospective opened. Others performed well too: a Martha Jungwirth fetched $516,000 (estimate $200,000-300,000), and Lucy Bull’s Light Rain (2019) exceeded its high estimate at $490,200.

    One of the night’s more surprising passed lots was a vivid 2022 abstraction by record-setting enfant prodige Jadé Fadojutimi, whose $800,000-1,200,000 estimate may have been too ambitious. Also unsold, despite its uniqueness and luxuriousness, was The Thunderbolt, the longest gold nugget ever discovered. Weighing 3,565 grams and measuring 50 centimeters, the 114.6-troy-ounce gold formation was estimated at $1.25-1.5 million but failed to find a buyer. Dug up by accident at Hogan’s Find in Western Australia, the rare natural formation was revealed by sheer chance.

    According to Robert Manley, Phillips’s chairman for modern and contemporary art, the success of the evening was due in part to the house’s new priority bidding system, which helped secure early commitments and interest on most lots. That contributed to 91 percent of works selling within or above estimate. “The enthusiasm was made especially clear by the fact that we had 27 times the number of early selling bids for this sale as we had last November, partly a result of our introduction of Priority Bidding,” he told Observer. The results, he said, confirmed not only the enduring draw of blue-chip artists but also the market’s resilience and ongoing global demand. “With strong participation from collectors worldwide and competitive bidding across Impressionist, Postwar, Contemporary and Natural History offerings, tonight’s outcome reaffirms confidence in the long-term strength of this market.”

    A Juvenile Triceratops and Francis Bacon Heat Up Phillips’s $67.3 Million Evening Sale

    Elisa Carollo

    Source link

  • PHOTOS: 66 million-year-old dinosaur ‘mummy’ skin was actually a perfect clay mask

    In the badlands of eastern Wyoming, the Lance Formation is a trove of prehistoric fossils. And one area in particular — a region less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) across — has provided scientists with at least half a dozen remarkably well-preserved dinosaur specimens complete with details of scaly skin, hooves and spikes.The paleontologist Dr. Paul Sereno and his colleagues dub it “the mummy zone” in a new study that aims to explain why this particular area has given rise to so many amazing finds and define exactly what a dinosaur “mummy” is.In the early 1900s, a fossil hunter named Charles Sternberg found two specimens of a large duck-billed dinosaur, Edmontosaurus annectens, in the Lance Formation. The skeletons were so pristine that Sternberg, along with H.F. Osborn, a paleontologist at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, could make out what appeared to be large swaths of skin with discernible scales and a fleshy crest that seemed to run along the reptile’s neck.Sereno, lead study author and a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, described the initial discovery as “the greatest dinosaur mummy — until maybe the juvenile that we found” in the year 2000.Separated by nearly a century, Sereno and his team’s find shared common traits with Sternberg’s: The skeletons were preserved in three-dimensional poses and showed clear evidence of skin and other attributes that don’t usually survive 66 million years in the ground. “Osborn said in 1912 he knew that it wasn’t actual, dehydrated skin, like in Egyptian mummies,” Sereno said. “But what was it?”Whatever it was, “we actually didn’t know how it was preserved,” he said. “It was a mystery.”The new research puts that mystery to rest and can help paleontologists find, recognize and analyze future mummy finds for tiny clues into how giant dinosaurs really looked.A dinosaur death cast in claySereno and his collaborators used CT scanning, 3D imaging, electron microscopy and X-ray spectroscopy to analyze two Edmontosaurus mummies they discovered in the Lance Formation in 2000 and 2001 — a juvenile and a young adult. “We looked and we looked and we looked, we sampled and we tested, and we didn’t find any” remnants of soft tissue, Sereno said.What the team found instead was a thin layer of clay, less than one-hundredth of an inch thick, which had formed on top of the animals’ skin. “It’s so real-looking, it’s unbelievable,” he said.Whereas Sternberg and Osborn referred to the “impression” of skin in their specimens, Sereno’s paper proposes an alternate term — “rendering” — which he argues is more precise.The study lays out the conditions that would produce such a rendering. In the Late Cretaceous Period, when Edmontosaurus roamed what is now the American West, the climate cycled between drought and monsoon rains. Drought has been determined to have been the cause of death of the original mummy found by Sternberg and described by Osborn, and of other animals whose fossils were found nearby. Assuming the same is true of the new specimens, the carcasses would have dried in the sun in a week or two.Then, a flash flood buried the bodies in sediment. The decaying carcasses would have been covered by a film of bacteria, which can electrostatically attract clay found in the surrounding sediment. The wafer-thin coating of clay remained long after the underlying tissues decayed completely, retaining their detailed morphology and forming a perfect clay mask.“Clay minerals have a way of attracting to and sticking onto biological surfaces, ensuring a molding that can faithfully reproduce the outermost surfaces of a body, such as skin and other soft tissues,” said Dr. Anthony Martin, professor of practice in the department of environmental sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved in the research. “So it makes sense that these clays would have formed such fine portraits of dinosaurs’ scales, spikes and hooves.”Dr. Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who also was not involved in the study, is an expert in taphonomy, which she described as “the study of everything that happens to an organism from when it dies until when we find it.” She is particularly interested in how these fossils formed.“Dinosaur mummies have been known for over one hundred years, but there has definitely been more emphasis on describing their skin and less on understanding how they fossilized in the first place,” she said via email. “If we can understand how and why these fossils form, we can better target where to look to potentially find more of them.”A detailed portrait of a duck-billed dinosaurTogether, the two more recently unearthed mummies allowed Sereno and his team to create a detailed update of what Edmontosaurus probably looked like.According to their analyses, the dinosaur, which could grow to over 12 meters (40 feet) long, had a fleshy crest along the neck and back and a row of spikes running down the tail. The creature’s skin was thin enough to produce delicate wrinkles over the rib cage and was dotted with small, pebble-like scales.The clay mask revealed that the animal had hooves, a trait previously preserved only in mammals. That makes it the oldest land animal proven to have hooves and the first known example of a hoofed reptile, Sereno said. “Sorry, mammals, you didn’t invent it,” he joked. “Did we suspect it? Yeah, we suspected it had a hoof from the footprints, but seeing it is believing.”

    In the badlands of eastern Wyoming, the Lance Formation is a trove of prehistoric fossils. And one area in particular — a region less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) across — has provided scientists with at least half a dozen remarkably well-preserved dinosaur specimens complete with details of scaly skin, hooves and spikes.

    The paleontologist Dr. Paul Sereno and his colleagues dub it “the mummy zone” in a new study that aims to explain why this particular area has given rise to so many amazing finds and define exactly what a dinosaur “mummy” is.

    In the early 1900s, a fossil hunter named Charles Sternberg found two specimens of a large duck-billed dinosaur, Edmontosaurus annectens, in the Lance Formation. The skeletons were so pristine that Sternberg, along with H.F. Osborn, a paleontologist at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, could make out what appeared to be large swaths of skin with discernible scales and a fleshy crest that seemed to run along the reptile’s neck.

    Sereno, lead study author and a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, described the initial discovery as “the greatest dinosaur mummy — until maybe the juvenile that we found” in the year 2000.

    Separated by nearly a century, Sereno and his team’s find shared common traits with Sternberg’s: The skeletons were preserved in three-dimensional poses and showed clear evidence of skin and other attributes that don’t usually survive 66 million years in the ground. “Osborn said in 1912 he knew that it wasn’t actual, dehydrated skin, like in Egyptian mummies,” Sereno said. “But what was it?”

    Whatever it was, “we actually didn’t know how it was preserved,” he said. “It was a mystery.”

    The new research puts that mystery to rest and can help paleontologists find, recognize and analyze future mummy finds for tiny clues into how giant dinosaurs really looked.

    A dinosaur death cast in clay

    Sereno and his collaborators used CT scanning, 3D imaging, electron microscopy and X-ray spectroscopy to analyze two Edmontosaurus mummies they discovered in the Lance Formation in 2000 and 2001 — a juvenile and a young adult. “We looked and we looked and we looked, we sampled and we tested, and we didn’t find any” remnants of soft tissue, Sereno said.

    What the team found instead was a thin layer of clay, less than one-hundredth of an inch thick, which had formed on top of the animals’ skin. “It’s so real-looking, it’s unbelievable,” he said.

    Whereas Sternberg and Osborn referred to the “impression” of skin in their specimens, Sereno’s paper proposes an alternate term — “rendering” — which he argues is more precise.

    The study lays out the conditions that would produce such a rendering. In the Late Cretaceous Period, when Edmontosaurus roamed what is now the American West, the climate cycled between drought and monsoon rains. Drought has been determined to have been the cause of death of the original mummy found by Sternberg and described by Osborn, and of other animals whose fossils were found nearby. Assuming the same is true of the new specimens, the carcasses would have dried in the sun in a week or two.

    Then, a flash flood buried the bodies in sediment. The decaying carcasses would have been covered by a film of bacteria, which can electrostatically attract clay found in the surrounding sediment. The wafer-thin coating of clay remained long after the underlying tissues decayed completely, retaining their detailed morphology and forming a perfect clay mask.

    “Clay minerals have a way of attracting to and sticking onto biological surfaces, ensuring a molding that can faithfully reproduce the outermost surfaces of a body, such as skin and other soft tissues,” said Dr. Anthony Martin, professor of practice in the department of environmental sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved in the research. “So it makes sense that these clays would have formed such fine portraits of dinosaurs’ scales, spikes and hooves.”

    Dr. Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who also was not involved in the study, is an expert in taphonomy, which she described as “the study of everything that happens to an organism from when it dies until when we find it.” She is particularly interested in how these fossils formed.

    “Dinosaur mummies have been known for over one hundred years, but there has definitely been more emphasis on describing their skin and less on understanding how they fossilized in the first place,” she said via email. “If we can understand how and why these fossils form, we can better target where to look to potentially find more of them.”

    A detailed portrait of a duck-billed dinosaur

    Together, the two more recently unearthed mummies allowed Sereno and his team to create a detailed update of what Edmontosaurus probably looked like.

    According to their analyses, the dinosaur, which could grow to over 12 meters (40 feet) long, had a fleshy crest along the neck and back and a row of spikes running down the tail. The creature’s skin was thin enough to produce delicate wrinkles over the rib cage and was dotted with small, pebble-like scales.

    mummified dinosaur

    The clay mask revealed that the animal had hooves, a trait previously preserved only in mammals. That makes it the oldest land animal proven to have hooves and the first known example of a hoofed reptile, Sereno said. “Sorry, mammals, you didn’t invent it,” he joked. “Did we suspect it? Yeah, we suspected it had a hoof from the footprints, but seeing it is believing.”

    Source link

  • New Jersey Theme Park Puts Animatronic Dinosaurs on Facebook Marketplace as It Shuts Down

    Have you ever wanted to own gigantic, realistic-looking dinosaurs for your backyard? Now might be your chance to scoop some up. Provided you have a few thousand dollars lying around.

    The New Jersey theme park Field Station: Dinosaurs is closing Nov. 9, and they’re listing all their dinos on Facebook Marketplace. There are plenty to choose from, including a 52-foot-long Spinosaurus ($2,900), a Hadrosaurus with eggs and nest ($2,450), and a bright blue Parasaurolophus ($2,410).

    Some of the dinosaurs have limited movement and voice boxes, along with controls. And everything must go, according to the park.

    © Field Station: Dinosaurs / Facebook

    “Where do 30 plus dinosaurs go when their park closes?” Guy Gsell, the park’s executive producer, told NewJersey.com. “Hopefully to a good home — or maybe a few unexpected places. We’re ready to let the public make their best offers. Just be sure you’ve got a big backyard.”

    The theme park opened in Secaucus in 2012 but had to close down in 2015 to make way for a new high school that was being built. Field Station: Dinosaurs moved to the Henry Hoebel Area of Overpeck Park in Leonia, New Jersey, in 2016.

    The dinosaurs range in price from about $500 to almost $3,000, depending on the size. Listings for the dinosaurs note that “Buyers are responsible for all deinstallation and shipping/transportation costs,” while explaining that the theme park “will arrange to have all necessary equipment on site. Dinosaurs available for pick-up after November 9.”

    The theme park recently appeared on a Fox reality show called The Fixer, where struggling small businesses get help, but it obviously wasn’t enough to keep this New Jersey attraction around.

    Anyone who wants to see the theme park for its last hurrah still has an opportunity. There’s the “Jurassic Petting Zoo” Sept. 27 and 28, where visitors can get up-close encounters and “amazing photo ops” next to the dinos.

    And there’s a special “Dinosaurs After Dark” event happening Friday and Saturday nights from Oct. 3-25 between 7:00 and 9:30 pm.

    From the theme park’s website:

    A spooky, funny and thrilling adventure for the whole family featuring a lantern lit tour of the park, games and activities where everyone is a winner, and The Dinosaur Séance, a mysterious thrill ride into the shadowy realm of dinosaur ghosts. America’s only Mesozoic medium and Cretaceous conjurer will be our guide as we journey into the Jurassic (Spirit) World and summon the long-lost spectres of the prehistoric dearly departed. Sometimes scary, sometimes funny but always surprising, the show features new puppets created by the acclaimed fabricators at Palmieri Puppets.

    At the end of the night, everyone will gather around the campfire for a dinosaur song-a-long with the Dinosaur Troubadour. A thrilling adventure you don’t want to miss. Limited tickets; reservations highly recommended.

    The park is also hosting a “Dogs & Dinos” day on Monday, October 13, from 10 am-5 pm, where visitors are allowed to bring their dogs.

    Matt Novak

    Source link

  • When Non-Avian Dinosaurs Went Extinct, the Earth Changed—Literally. Scientists Think They Finally Know Why

    Rocks formed immediately before and after non-avian dinosaurs went extinct are strikingly different, and now, tens of millions of years later, scientists think they’ve identified the culprit—and it wasn’t the Chicxulub asteroid impact.

    In a study published Monday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, researchers argue that dinosaurs physically influenced their surroundings so dramatically that their disappearance led to stark changes to the Earth’s landscape, and, in turn, the geologic record.

    Specifically, their mass extinction—an event known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (or K-Pg) mass extinction—enabled dense forests to grow, stabilizing sediments, and shaping rivers with broad meanders, or curves.

    “Very often when we’re thinking about how life has changed through time and how environments change through time, it’s usually that the climate changes and, therefore, it has a specific effect on life, or this mountain has grown and, therefore, it has a specific effect on life,” Luke Weaver, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, said in a statement.

    “It’s rarely thought that life itself could actually alter the climate and the landscape. The arrow doesn’t just go in one direction.”

    An artistic rendering of how a landscape may have changed after most dinosaurs went extinct. © Julius Csotonyi

    River deposits, not pond deposits

    Weaver and his colleagues concentrated their studies on the Williston Basin, which spreads throughout parts of Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota; and the Bighorn Basin, in north-central Wyoming. Williston Basin’s Fort Union Formation dates to after non-avian dinosaurs went extinct, and features colorful rock layers that Weaver described as resembling pajama stripes. Beneath the Fort Union Formation are water-rich soils similar to a floodplain’s outer edges.

    Past research has posited that the colorful layers are evidence of pond deposits from rising sea levels. But the team’s new investigation, however, revealed that “the pajama stripes actually weren’t pond deposits at all. They’re point bar deposits, or deposits that form the inside of a big meander in a river,” Weaver said.

    “So instead of looking at a stillwater, quiet setting, what we’re actually looking at is a very active inside of a meander,” he explained.

    Above and below these river deposits were layers of a kind of coal created by plant matter, which the team thinks formed thanks to the stabilizing effect of thick forests, which can prevent rivers from frequent flooding. Stable rivers don’t distribute clay, silt, and sand across a floodplain, so the organic remains mostly pile up instead.

    The iridium anomaly

    The researchers then turned to what is called the iridium anomaly—a layer of rock rich in the element iridium—which deposited over parts of our planet when the Chicxulub asteroid struck Earth. As such, the iridium anomaly represents the K-Pg boundary.

    At Bighorn Basin, Weaver analyzed samples from a thin line of red clay between the dinosaur-era formation and the subsequent mammal-era formation. “Lo and behold, the iridium anomaly was right at the contact between those two formations, right where the geology changes,” Weaver said.

    “That discovery convinced us that this isn’t just a phenomenon in the Williston Basin. It’s probably true everywhere throughout the Western Interior of North America.”

    Iridium Anomaly
    Weaver pointing out the iridium anomaly in layers of rock. © Luke Weaver/University of Michigan

    Still, the researchers were puzzled as to why. They suspected that dinosaurs had somehow shaped their environment such that it influenced the geology, but it was only after weaver stumbled across a series of talks about how living animals like elephants shape their ecosystems that the team finally had its “lightbulb moment.” These ancient reptiles must have been the “ecosystem engineers” of their time.

    “Dinosaurs are huge. They must have had some sort of impact on this vegetation,” Weaver said.

    He and his colleagues argue that when non-avian dinosaurs were alive, they flattened vegetation and, as a result of their sheer size, affected the tree cover, likely shaping sparse, weedy landscapes with scattered trees. This would have meant that rivers without wide meanders may have flooded frequently. In the wake of their mass extinction, however, forests thrived, stabilized sediments, built point bars, and structured rivers.

    “To me, the most exciting part of our work is evidence that dinosaurs may have had a direct impact on their ecosystems,” said Courtney Sprain, a co-author on the study.

    “Specifically, the impact of their extinction may not just be observable by the disappearance of their fossils in the rock record, but also by changes in the sediments themselves.”

    Earth clearly felt the loss of the dinosaurs in more ways than one. I, however, am glad that Tyrannosaurus Rex doesn’t exist anymore (and don’t even get me started on the Meraxes Gigas).

    Margherita Bassi

    Source link

  • Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs Has a Bizarre Origin Story

    Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs Has a Bizarre Origin Story

    Around 66 million years ago, a rock over 6 miles wide collided with Earth, triggering the mass extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs and leaving a giant impact crater off the coast of Mexico, which to this day contains clues to the cataclysmic event. However, little has been known about where the space rock came from and what it was made of.

    To learn more about the Chicxulub impactor, a group of researchers analyzed samples from the crater and compared them with samples from other impact craters that formed between 36 million and 470 million years ago. They found traces of a rare element called ruthenium, which matched the composition of carbon-based asteroids in the asteroid belt that sits between Mars and Jupiter. However, the new study, published in Science, suggests the dino-killing rock may have originated much farther away, in the outer regions of the solar system. Around 4.5 billion years ago, Jupiter’s extreme movements nudged it into the main asteroid belt, and it eventually met its fate on Earth.

    “This was a cosmic coincidence 66 million years ago,” Mario Fischer-Gödde, a scientist at the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy at the University of Cologne in Germany, and lead author of the study, told Gizmodo. “We don’t know exactly what triggered it, but it is very likely that it came from the asteroid belt.”

    The study suggests that the asteroid may have formed farther out in the solar system and migrated toward the inner solar system due to a disturbance of the orbits of the outer planets. Before settling into its position as the fifth planet from the Sun, Jupiter moved around quite a bit, traveling toward the center of the solar system, then back out again, and at some point coming as close as Mars. Jupiter may have stopped migrating toward the Sun because of Saturn’s gravitational field. But by then, the gas giant’s movement had influenced the solar system in a big way, causing some far-out asteroids to travel toward the inner planets.

    Although it was known that the Chicxulub impactor came from our solar system, its exact origin has been debated. Fischer-Gödde believed that ruthenium could help scientists find out, and he developed a new technique that breaks down the chemical bonds of rock samples to find the rare element.

    Ruthenium is one of the rarest metals on Earth, originally formed within ancient stars before making its way into the building blocks of planetary objects across the universe. The element was buried deep within Earth, way before the dinosaur-killing impact. Finding ruthenium in the Chicxulub crater samples eliminates other meteorite types and supports the hypothesis that the Chicxulub asteroid came from the outer reaches of the solar system.

    Inner solar system asteroids contain less ruthenium isotopes. That’s probably because, when the planets were still forming, the inner solar system likely had higher temperatures. As a result, inner solar system asteroids are made of metal and silicates and contain less water, said Fischer-Gödde. The outer solar system asteroids, on the other hand, contain more volatile elements like carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen.

    The researchers behind the new study say these huge asteroid impacts are less likely today, under the current, more stable conditions of the solar system. “So the good news is, there are not many bodies straying around wildly in our solar system,” Fischer-Gödde said. “Everything is in a stable configuration; there would have to be some kind of disturbance, like a collision, to produce an Earth-crossing asteroid.”

    For his next investigation, Fischer-Gödde wants to analyze samples from the Moon to identify the culprits behind the craters that litter the lunar surface. “The Moon’s crust provides a record of impacting bodies that were hitting both the Moon and Earth,” he said. “So, if we want to know about the type of asteroid material that impacted the Earth very early on in its history, like 4 billion years ago, we have to go to the Moon.”

    More: Dust Doomed the Dinos, Scientists Say

    Passant Rabie

    Source link

  • Some mosquitoes like it hot

    Some mosquitoes like it hot

    Newswise — Certain populations of mosquitoes are more heat tolerant and better equipped to survive heat waves than others, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

    This is bad news in a world where vector-borne diseases are an increasingly global health concern. Most models that scientists use to estimate vector-borne disease risk currently assume that mosquito heat tolerances do not vary. As a result, these models may underestimate mosquitoes’ ability to spread diseases in a warming world.

    Researchers led by Katie M. Westby, a senior scientist at Tyson Research Center, Washington University’s environmental field station, conducted a new study that measured the critical thermal maximum (CTmax), an organism’s upper thermal tolerance limit, of eight populations of the globally invasive tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus. The tiger mosquito is a known vector for many viruses including West Nile, chikungunya and dengue.

    “We found significant differences across populations for both adults and larvae, and these differences were more pronounced for adults,” Westby said. The new study is published Jan. 8 in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

    Westby’s team sampled mosquitoes from eight different populations spanning four climate zones across the eastern United States, including mosquitoes from locations in New Orleans; St. Augustine, Fla.; Huntsville, Ala.; Stillwater, Okla.; St. Louis; Urbana, Ill.; College Park, Md.; and Allegheny County, Pa.

    The scientists collected eggs in the wild and raised larvae from the different geographic locations to adult stages in the lab, tending the mosquito populations separately as they continued to breed and grow. The scientists then used adults and larvae from subsequent generations of these captive-raised mosquitoes in trials to determine CTmax values, ramping up air and water temperatures at a rate of 1 degree Celsius per minute using established research protocols.

    The team then tested the relationship between climatic variables measured near each population source and the CTmax of adults and larvae. The scientists found significant differences among the mosquito populations.

    The differences did not appear to follow a simple latitudinal or temperature-dependent pattern, but there were some important trends. Mosquito populations from locations with higher precipitation had higher CTmax values. Overall, the results reveal that mean and maximum seasonal temperatures, relative humidity and annual precipitation may all be important climatic factors in determining CTmax.

    “Larvae had significantly higher thermal limits than adults, and this likely results from different selection pressures for terrestrial adults and aquatic larvae,” said Benjamin Orlinick, first author of the paper and a former undergraduate research fellow at Tyson Research Center. “It appears that adult Ae. albopictus are experiencing temperatures closer to their CTmax than larvae, possibly explaining why there are more differences among adult populations.”

    “The overall trend is for increased heat tolerance with increasing precipitation,” Westby said. “It could be that wetter climates allow mosquitoes to endure hotter temperatures due to decreases in desiccation, as humidity and temperature are known to interact and influence mosquito survival.”

    Little is known about how different vector populations, like those of this kind of mosquito, are adapted to their local climate, nor the potential for vectors to adapt to a rapidly changing climate. This study is one of the few to consider the upper limits of survivability in high temperatures — akin to heat waves — as opposed to the limits imposed by cold winters.

    “Standing genetic variation in heat tolerance is necessary for organisms to adapt to higher temperatures,” Westby said. “That’s why it was important for us to experimentally determine if this mosquito exhibits variation before we can begin to test how, or if, it will adapt to a warmer world.”

    Future research in the lab aims to determine the upper limits that mosquitoes will seek out hosts for blood meals in the field, where they spend the hottest parts of the day when temperatures get above those thresholds, and if they are already adapting to higher temperatures. “Determining this is key to understanding how climate change will impact disease transmission in the real world,” Westby said. “Mosquitoes in the wild experience fluctuating daily temperatures and humidity that we cannot fully replicate in the lab.”

    Washington University in St. Louis

    Source link

  • New pterosaur nicknamed ‘Elvis’ takes flight

    New pterosaur nicknamed ‘Elvis’ takes flight

    Newswise — A new 145-million-year-old pterosaur (extinct flying reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs) was named today by a team of British, American and German researchers. The animal was nicknamed ‘Elvis’ when the fossil was first unearthed in Bavaria, Germany because of the giant pompadour-like bony crest on its skull. 

    Now the animal has been given a formal scientific name of Petrodactyle wellnhoferi. The name translates as ‘Wellnhofer’s stone-finger’ honouring legendary German palaeontologist Peter Wellnhofer who spent his career working on German pterosaurs. Petrodactyle is a member of a group of pterosaurs called the ctenochasmatids that were mostly small filter feeders. Petrodactyle is a very complete skeleton with nearly every bone preserved and in remarkable detail.  

    Many pterosaurs are known with bony crests which they used primarily as sexual signals to other members of the species, but Pterodactyle has by far the largest crest even seen in a ctenochasmatid. Dr David Hone of Queen Mary University of London was the lead author on the study said, “Big though this crest is, we know that these pterosaurs had skin-like extensions attached to it, so in life Petrodactyle would have had an even larger crest”. 

    The details of the specimen are especially clear under UV light which helps show the difference between the bones and the rock in which they are embedded, which under natural light are a very similar colour. René Lauer of the Lauer Foundation, an author on the study said, “The use of UV Induced Fluorescence digital photography provided the ability to discern fine structures small bones and provided additional information regarding the structures of the bony crest which aided in the interpretations and conclusions of this unique new species”. 

    Petrodactyle was unusually large too. It has a wingspan of around 2 meters, but it was still an older ‘teenager’ by pterosaur standards and would have been even larger as a fully mature animal. Even so, it is one of the largest pterosaurs known from the Late Jurassic period. Bruce Lauer of the Lauer Foundation, an author on the study said “The specimen was located in a quarry which is producing scientifically important fossils that provide additional insights into Late Jurassic Pterosaurs.  This research is a great example of the benefits of cooperation between amateur collectors, commercial fossil dealers, our Foundation and research scientists to advance science.” 

    Like other ctenochasmatids, Petrodactyle was at home on the shore of shallow seas but might have ventured into estuaries or to lakes. It’s long jaw with many small teeth would have been good for grabbing at small fish, shrimp and other aquatic prey. However, unlike most other ctenochasmatids, it had an expansion at the back of the skull to attach large jaw muscles and give it a stronger bite than many of its contemporaries. Frederik Spindler of the Dinosaurier Museum in Germany, an author on the study said, “It is amazing to document an increasingly wide range of adaptations.  Pterosaurs were a fundamental part of the Jurassic ecology”. 

    Dr Hone concluded “Peter Wellnhofer is long overdue having a species of German pterosaur named after him to honour his lifelong contribution to the study of these amazing animals”.  

    The Lauer Foundation acquires, curates, and provides access to a collection of scientifically important Palaeontological specimens.  The collection is available to the scientific community for research, publication, exhibition and educational outreach.

    Queen Mary University of London

    Source link

  • Ancient herbivore’s diet weakened teeth leading to eventual starvation, study suggests

    Ancient herbivore’s diet weakened teeth leading to eventual starvation, study suggests

    BYLINE: Laura Thomas

    Newswise — A team of researchers from the University of Bristol have shed light on the life of the ancient reptile Rhynchosaur, which walked the earth between 250-225 million years ago, before being replaced by the dinosaurs.

    Rhynchosaurs are a little-understood group of roughly sheep-sized ancient reptiles that thrived during the Triassic Period, a time of generally warm climates and tough vegetation.  

    In the new study, the researchers studied specimens found in Devon and used CT scanning to see how the teeth wore down as they fed, and how new teeth were added at the backs of the tooth rows as the animals grew in size.

    The findings, published today in Palaeontology, show that these early herbivores likely eventually starved to death in old age, the vegetation taking its toll on their teeth.

    “I first studied the rhynchosaurs years ago,” said team-leader Professor Mike Benton from Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, “and I was amazed to find that in many cases they dominated their ecosystems. If you found one fossil, you found hundreds. They were the sheep or antelopes of their day, and yet they had specialized dental systems that were apparently adapted for dealing with masses of tough plant food.”

    Dr Rob Coram, who discovered the Devon fossils, said: “The fossils are rare, but occasionally individuals were entombed during river floods. This has made it possible to put together a series of jaw bones of rhynchosaurs that ranged in age from quite young, maybe even babies, through adults, and including one particularly old animal, a Triassic old-timer whose teeth had worn right down and probably struggled to get enough nutrition each day.”

    “Comparing the sequence of fossils through their lifetime, we could see that as the animals aged, the area of the jaws under wear at any time moved backwards relative to the front of the skull, bringing new teeth and new bone into wear,” said Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul who studied the jaws as part of his MSc in Palaeobiology. “They were clearly eating really tough food such as ferns, that wore the teeth down to the bone of the jaw, meaning that they were basically chopping their meals by a mix of teeth and bone.”

    “Eventually, though, after a certain age – we’re not sure quite how many years – their growth slowed down and the area of wear was fixed and just got deeper and deeper,” added Dr Coram. “It’s like elephants today – they have a fixed number of teeth that come into use from the back, and after the age of seventy or so they’re on their last tooth, and then that’s that.

    “We don’t think the rhynchosaurs lived that long, but their plant food was so testing that their jaws simply wore out and presumably they eventually starved to death.”

    The rhynchosaurs were an important part of the ecosystems on land during the Triassic, when life was recovering from the world’s greatest mass extinction, at the end of the preceding Permian Period. These animals were part of this recovery and setting the scene for new types of ecologies when first dinosaurs, and later mammals became dominant, as the modern world was being slowly constructed.

    By comparing examples of earlier rhynchosaurs, such as those from Devon, with later-occurring examples from Scotland and Argentina, the team were also able to show how their dentitions evolved through time, and how their unique teeth enabled them to diversify twice, in the Middle and then in the Late Triassic. But in the end, climate change, and especially changes of available plants, seem to have enabled the dinosaurs to take over as the rhynchosaurs died out.

    The paper

    ‘Unique dentition of rhynchosaurs and their two-phase success as herbivores in the Triassic’ By Sethapanichsakul, T., Coram, R.A. and Benton, M.J. Palaeontology. Doi: 10.1111/pala.12654

    University of Bristol

    Source link

  • Feathered Dinosaurs & Feather-Feeding Beetles: A Long-Term Bond

    Feathered Dinosaurs & Feather-Feeding Beetles: A Long-Term Bond

    Newswise — New fossils in amber have revealed that beetles fed on the feathers of dinosaurs about 105 million years ago, showing a symbiotic relationship of one-sided or mutual benefit, according to an article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America today*. 

    The main amber fragments studied, from the Spanish locality of San Just (Teruel), contain larval moults of small beetle larvae tightly surrounded by portions of downy feathers. The feathers belonged to an unknown theropod dinosaur, either avian (a term referring to “birds” in wide sense) or non-avian, as both types of theropods lived during the Early Cretaceous and shared often indistinguishable feather types. However, the studied feathers did not belong to modern birds since the group appeared about 30 million years later in the fossil record, during the Late Cretaceous. 

    When looking at modern ecosystems, we see how ticks infest cattle, frogs capture insects with acrobatic tongues, or some barnacles grow on the skin of whales. These are just a few of the diverse and complex ecological relationships between vertebrates and arthropods, which have coexisted for more than 500 million years. The way that these two groups have interacted throughout deep time is thought to have critically shaped their evolutionary history, leading to coevolution. Nevertheless, evidence of arthropod-vertebrate relationships is extremely rare in the fossil record. 

    The larval moults preserved in the amber were identified as related to modern skin beetles, or dermestids. Dermestid beetles are infamous pests of stored products or dried museum collections, feeding on organic materials that are hard for other organisms to decay such as natural fibres. However, dermestids also play a key role in the recycling of organic matter in the natural environment, commonly inhabiting nests of birds and mammals, where feathers, hair, or skin accumulate. 

    “In our samples, some of the feather portions and other remains – including minute fossil faeces, or coprolites – are in intimate contact with the moults attributed to dermestid beetles and show occasional damage and/or signs of decay. This is hard evidence that the fossil beetles almost certainly fed on the feathers and that these were detached from its host,” explains Dr Enrique Peñalver, from the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain of the Spanish National Research Council (CN IGME-CSIC) and lead author of the study. 

    “The beetle larvae lived −feeding, defecating, moulting− in accumulated feathers on or close to a resin-producing tree, probably in a nest setting. A flow of resin serendipitously captured that association and preserved it for millions of years.” 

    “Three additional amber pieces each containing an isolated beetle moult of a different maturity stage but assigned to the same species were also studied, allowing a better understanding of these minute insects than what is usually possible in palaeontology,” says Dr David Peris, from the Botanical Institute of Barcelona (CSIC-Barcelona City Council) and co-author of the study. The most impressive, complete specimen was found in the amber deposit of Rábago/El Soplao in the northern Spain, roughly of the same age as San Just. 

    “It is unclear whether the feathered theropod host also benefitted from the beetle larvae feeding on its detached feathers in this plausible nest setting,” says Dr Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, from Oxford University Museum of Natural History and co-lead author of the study. “However, the theropod was most likely unharmed by the activity of the larvae since our data show these did not feed on living plumage and lacked defensive structures which among modern dermestids can irritate the skin of nest hosts, even killing them.” 

    ** 

    Notes 

    • The international and multidisciplinary team comprised researchers from the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain of the Spanish National Research Council (CN IGME-CSIC), the Botanical Institute of Barcelona (IBB-CSIC), the University of Barcelona and the Institute for Research on Biodiversity (IRBio), the Complutense University of Madrid, the ‘Parque de las Ciencias’ of Andalusia, the Autonomous University of Madrid, and the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences (Spain); the American Museum of Natural History and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (United States of America); the Senckenberg Research Institute (Germany); and Oxford University Museum of Natural History (United Kingdom). 

    • Funding bodies: the project CRE, funded by the Spanish AEI/FEDER, UE Grant CGL2017-84419, the project PGC2018-094034-B-C22 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE), the project CGL2014-52163, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness, the Secretary of Universities and Research of the Government of Catalonia and European Social Fund (2021FI_B2 00003), and the Consejería de Industria, Turismo, Innovación, Transporte y Comercio of the Gobierno de Cantabria through the public enterprise EL SOPLAO S.L. 

     

     

    About Oxford University Museum of Natural History   

    Founded in 1860 as the centre for scientific study at the University of Oxford, the Museum of Natural History now holds the University’s internationally significant collections of entomological, geological and zoological specimens. Housed in a stunning Pre-Raphaelite-inspired example of neo-Gothic architecture, the Museum’s growing collections underpin a broad programme of natural environment research, teaching and public engagement.  

    www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk  

    www.morethanadodo.com  

    University of Oxford

    Source link

  • Meet the titanosaur: Dinosaur giant goes on display in Europe for the first time | CNN

    Meet the titanosaur: Dinosaur giant goes on display in Europe for the first time | CNN


    London
    CNN
     — 

    In the venerated halls of London’s Natural History Museum, one of the largest animals ever to walk the Earth is about to make its debut.

    Patagotitan mayorum, a dinosaur giant belonging to a group known as titanosaurs, is visiting Europe for the first time since its discovery in Argentina in 2010. Over five meters (16 feet) tall and weighing over two and a half metric tons, its skeleton will give visitors an idea of what this gentle giant, which could have weighed as much as 57 metric tons and stretched over 120 feet, would have looked like when it lived on Earth around 100 million years ago.

    A team of technicians is putting the finishing touches to the star exhibit, which arrived in the UK in January and has been reconstructed in a room with a specially reinforced floor, said Sinead Marron, exhibition and interpretation manager at the museum.

    Displayed alongside the skeleton, which is a cast, are real fossils, including a 2.4-meter-long (8 feet) femur that weighs around half a metric ton.

    “The idea of the exhibition has been in the works for a few years now,” said Marron, explaining that it was disrupted by the Covid pandemic. “We’re so excited to finally introduce Patagotitan to the UK.”

    When Patagotitan mayorum was first excavated, it rocked the world of palaeontology. More than nine times heavier than the African elephant and longer than a blue whale, the giant herbivore may have been the largest terrestrial animal of all time.

    The first evidence of the Patagotitan emerged in 2010 with the discovery of a single bone, before a more extensive dig in 2013 yielded more than 180 bones from seven partial skeletons. Evidence suggests the dinosaurs were buried in floods.

    A graphic illustrating the titanosaur's size relative to a diploducus and an African elephant.

    The fossils were 3-D scanned and used by the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio (MEF) in Argentina as the basis of a whole skeleton cast comprising nearly 300 bones. The cast comprises a shell of fiberglass and polyester resin, filled with expanding foam, displayed on a steel framework.

    “The replica is a composite – it incorporates bones from at least six different individuals found at the site,” explained Marron. “For the bones that weren’t found, the specialist team at MEF have filled in the gaps using what we know from closely related dinosaurs.”

    Replicas of Patagotitan mayorum reside in the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, but the dinosaur hadn’t been exhibited in Europe before the Natural History Museum took loan of the MEF’s cast.

    A specialist department of freight company IAG Cargo was tasked with transporting the dinosaur from Argentina.

    CEO David Shepherd told CNN the department has transported items including terracotta soldiers, Egyptian mummies and Assyrian treasures to the UK, which, due to their value and delicate nature, means staff and customers go through strict screening requirements to ensure items’ safety. “Cargo is stored in state-of-the-art vaults that are constantly monitored using CCTV and active human surveillance,” he said.

    The cast and fossils were stored in more than 40 specially designed crates. These were placed in the belly hold of two British Airways Boeing 787 Dreamliners and flown 7,000 miles from Ezeiza Airport, Buenos Aires, to London Heathrow, before they were taken to a special facility ahead of transportation to the museum.

    Unboxing the 2.4 meter (8 foot) long femur fossil, which weighs around half a ton.

    “The fossils are significantly heavier than the replicas which makes storing, moving and displaying them more complicated than for the replicas,” said Marron. “In addition, the original fossils are of immense value to scientific research.”

    “For this move, every single bone required a temporary export permit for paleontological heritage,” Shepherd explained. “This is very similar to a passport and includes details such as the name and code of the collection, its weight, size and a photograph, as well as insurance and a visa-like document, giving it permission to be out of the country for a specified time.”

    Clearing customs and security checks took four days, he added.

    Workers reconstruct the cast inside the Natural History Museum.

    Assembly inside the museum’s Waterhouse Gallery has happened away from the public eye. “There was a lot of measurement-checking to ensure that we could actually get the specimens into our Victorian, grade II listed building,” said Marron.

    The official unveiling on Friday March 31 is timed to coincide with the start of UK school holidays, and huge crowds are expected.

    “We hope visitors will experience a sense of awe at the sheer scale of the titanosaur. It’s an incredible experience to stand underneath it, to be dwarfed by this immense creature,” said Marron.

    But with the new addition, has the museum considered Dippy’s feelings? The beloved diplodocus skeleton, until 2015 a stalwart of the museum and currently on tour in the UK, is not in London to defend its patch.

    The two dinosaurs won’t be having a meeting of minds, however “we’re pretty sure Dippy is excited that a big cousin has come to visit,” Marron said.

    Source link

  • Barney the purple dinosaur is back and he has a new look | CNN Business

    Barney the purple dinosaur is back and he has a new look | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Barney is back, and while Mattel has not yet officially confirmed it, we’re guessing he still loves you.

    Toy giant Mattel

    (MAT)     announced Monday that Barney, the friendly (and, let’s be honest, cringe-worthy to a large group of Millennials who watched him as pre-schoolers, and to their parents) purple dinosaur is making a triumphant return to TVs and toy shelves next year. Thanks to the switch from live-action to animation, he’s now also got great big eyes.

    The “Barney & Friends” show, featuring the titular violet-hued T-Rex, aired on PBS in the United States from 1992 until 2010. Mattel said Monday that the new show, unlike the original, will be animated. So no beleaguered actor dressed up in a dinosaur costume marching around and singing to young kids.

    A spokesperson for Mattel told CNN that it has no specific news to announce yet about whether the relaunched Barney will be on PBS, but added that the company has “confirmed streaming and broadcast partners that we’ll be announcing later in the year.” PBS was not immediately available for comment.

    Mattel did say that the new franchise will include TV, film and Alphabet

    (GOOGL)    -owned YouTube content as well as music and a vast array of merchandising, including toys (of course), clothing and books. The company’s Mattel Studios unit is working with Nelvana, a studio owned by Canadian media company Corus Entertainment

    (CJREF)    , to co-produce the new series.

    “In creating the new series, it was important to us that we properly reflect the world that kids today live in so that the series can deliver meaningful lessons about navigating it,” said Fred Soulie, general manager of Mattel Television, in the news release.

    “With our modern take on Barney, we hope to inspire the next generation to listen, care, and dream big,” Soulie added.

    Mattel’s television unit, which has also recently brought back its Monster High and Masters of the Universe franchises, is hoping to cash in once again on young and middle-aged adults yearning for the days of their childhood.

    So for anyone who grew up on the original Barney show and actually would admit to enjoying him and friends like BJ the yellow protoceratops and Baby Bop the green triceratops, Mattel is hoping they’ll want to buy old school Barney toys and swag.

    The company said in its news release that “apparel and accessories for adult fans, featuring classic Barney, are also in development.”

    “We will tap into the nostalgia of the generations who grew up with Barney, now parents themselves, and introduce the iconic purple dinosaur to a new generation of kids and families around the world across content,” said Josh Silverman, chief franchise officer and global head of consumer products at Mattel, in the release.

    Mattel could use some more big hit toys. The company announced disappointing earnings and sales for the holidays as well as a sluggish outlook last week and its stock plunged more than 10% on the news. Rival Hasbro

    (HAS)     has also been hurt by weak demand for toys.

    Source link

  • Unusual dinosaur fossil discovery made in India | CNN

    Unusual dinosaur fossil discovery made in India | CNN

    Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



    CNN
     — 

    Paleontologists working in central India have made a rare discovery — a fossilized dinosaur hatchery with 92 nests and 256 eggs belonging to colonies of giant plant-eating titanosaurs.

    A study of the nests and their bowling ball-size eggs has revealed intimate details about the lives of the colossal, long-necked sauropods that lumbered across what’s now central India more than 66 million years ago.

    The eggs, which ranged between 15 centimeters and 17 centimeters (6 inches and 6.7 inches) in diameter, likely belonged to a number of titanosaur species. The number of eggs in each nest ranged from one to 20, said lead study author Guntupalli Prasad, a paleontologist in the department of geology at the University of Delhi. Many of the nests were found close together.

    The findings suggested titanosaurs, among the largest dinosaurs to have lived, were not always the most attentive parents, Prasad said.

    “Since titanosaurs were huge in size, closely spaced nests would not have allowed them to visit the nests to maneuver and incubate the eggs or feed the hatchlings … as the parents would step on the eggs and trample them.”

    Finding a very large number of dinosaur nests is unusual, as preservation conditions have to be “just so” to have turned all the delicate eggs to fossils, said Dr. Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor of dinosaur paleobiology at the University of Calgary in Canada, who studies dinosaur eggs. Zelenitsky was not involved in the research.

    The nests were close together, suggesting that the dinosaurs laid eggs in groups, similar to many present-day birds that form colonies.

    The first dinosaur eggs in the region were discovered in the 1990s, but the latest study focused on a nesting site in Dhar district in the state of Madhya Pradesh, where excavations and fieldwork took place in 2017, 2018 and 2020.

    The eggs discovered there were so well preserved that the team was able to detect degraded protein fragments from the eggshells.

    Titanosaurs’ nesting behaviors shared characteristics with that of today’s birds and crocodiles, the research suggested.

    From the close proximity of the nests, researchers inferred the dinosaurs laid eggs together in colonies or rookeries, as many birds do in the present day.

    “Such nesting colonies would have been a sight to see back in the Cretaceous where the landscape would have been dotted by a huge number of large dinosaur nests,” Zelenitsky said.

    Prasad said one particular egg — known as an ovum-in-ovo, or egg-in-egg — the team had studied showed birdlike reproductive behavior and indicated that, similar to birds, some dinosaurs may have laid eggs sequentially. Ovum-in-ovo forms happen in birds when an egg becomes embedded in another egg still in the process of forming before they are laid.

    “Sequential laying is the release of eggs one by one with some time gap in between two laying events. This is seen in birds. Modern reptiles, for example turtles and crocodiles, on the other hand, lay all eggs together as a clutch,” he said.

    The eggs would have been laid in marshy flatlands and buried in shallow pits, akin to the nesting sites of modern-day crocodiles, Prasad said. Similar to crocodile hatcheries, nesting close to water may have been important to prevent the eggs from drying out and offspring dying prior to hatching, Zelenitsky added.

    The titanosaur eggs measured 6 inches to 7 inches in diameter.

    But unlike birds and crocodiles, which both incubate their eggs, Prasad said that, based on the physical characteristics of the nests, titanosaurs likely laid their eggs and then left the baby dinos to fend for themselves — although more data is needed to be sure.

    Other dinosaurs were thought to be more attentive parents. A dinosaur was discovered in Mongolia in the 1920s, for example, lying near a nest of eggs thought to belong to a rival. Paleontologists at the time assumed the animal had died while attempting to plunder the nest — and named the creature oviraptor, or “egg thief.”

    The so-called dinosaur thief’s reputation wasn’t restored until the 1990s, when another discovery revealed the eggs were, in fact, its own and that the creature likely sat upon them in a neatly arranged nest.

    Source link

  • Climate change played key role in dinosaur success story

    Climate change played key role in dinosaur success story

    Newswise — Climate change, rather than competition, played a key role in the ascendancy of dinosaurs through the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic periods.

    According to new research, changes in global climate associated with the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction – which wiped out many large terrestrial vertebrates such as the giant armadillo-like aetosaurs – actually benefitted the earliest dinosaurs.

    In particular, sauropod-like dinosaurs, which became the giant herbivore species of the later Jurassic like Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus, were able to thrive and expand across new territories as the planet warmed up after the extinction event, 201 million years ago.

    The new evidence is published in Current Biology, by an international team of palaeontologists led by the Universities of Birmingham and Bristol, in the UK, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), in Germany, and the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

    The team compared computer models of prehistoric global climate conditions such as temperature and rainfall with data on the different locations of dinosaurs taken from sources such as the Paleobiology Database. They showed how the sauropods, and sauropod-like animals, with their long tails and necks and small heads, were the runaway success story of a turbulent period of evolution.

    Dr Emma Dunne, now a lecturer in palaeontology at FAU, carried out the research while at the University of Birmingham. She said: “What we see in the data suggests that instead of dinosaurs being outcompeted by other large vertebrates, it was variations in climate conditions that were restricting their diversity. But once these conditions changed across the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, they were able to flourish.

    “The results were somewhat surprising, because it turns out that sauropods were really fussy from the get-go: later in their evolution they continue to stay in warmer areas and avoid polar regions.”

    Co-author on the paper, Professor Richard Butler, at the University of Birmingham, said: “Climate change appears to have been really important in driving the evolution of early dinosaurs. What we want to do next is use the same techniques to understand the role of climate in the next 120 million years of the dinosaur story”.

    The research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the European Research Council.

    University of Birmingham

    Source link

  • Scientists discover what was on the menu of the first dinosaurs

    Scientists discover what was on the menu of the first dinosaurs

    Newswise — The earliest dinosaurs included carnivorous, omnivorous and herbivorous species, according to a team of University of Bristol palaeobiologists.

    By looking at the tooth shapes of the earliest dinosaurs and simulating their tooth function with computational modelling, experts were able to compare them to living reptiles and their diets. Their findings, published today in Science Advances, show that many groups of plant-eating dinosaurs were ancestrally omnivorous and that the ancestors of our famous long-necked herbivores, such as Diplodocus, ate meat. This ability to diversify their diets early in their evolution likely explains their evolutionary and ecological success.

    The earliest dinosaurs are enigmatic: they were much smaller than their later relatives and for most of the Triassic they were in the shadow of the crocodile-like reptiles. It is unknown how diverse they were in terms of diets and ecology, but scientists know something must have happened in the Triassic that allowed dinosaurs to endure the Triassic–Jurassic mass extinction and adapt in its aftermath, becoming the dominant group for the rest of the Mesozoic.

    Lead author Dr. Antonio Ballell from the University of Bristol said “Soon after their origin, dinosaurs start to show an interesting diversity of skull and tooth shapes. For decades, this has made palaeontologists suspect that different species were already experimenting with different kinds of diets. They have compared them to modern lizard species and tried to infer what they ate based on the similarities in their teeth.

    “We investigated this by applying a set of computational methods to quantify the shape and function of the teeth of early dinosaurs and compare them to living reptiles that have different diets. This included mathematically modelling their tooth shapes and simulating their mechanical responses to biting forces with engineering software.”

    Professor Mike Benton, co-author of the study, said: “With this battery of methods, we were able to numerically quantify how similar early dinosaurs were to modern animals, providing solid evidence for our inferences of diets. Theropod dinosaurs have pointy, curved and blade-like teeth with tiny serrations, which behaved like those of modern monitor lizards. In contrast, the denticulated teeth of ornithischians and sauropodomorphs are more similar to modern omnivores and herbivores, like iguanas.”

    The study is also innovative in using machine learning models to classify the earliest dinosaurs in different diet categories based on their tooth shape and mechanics. For instance, Thecodontosaurus, the Bristol dinosaur, had teeth well adapted for a diet of plants.

    Professor Emily Rayfield, senior co-author, said: “Our analyses reveal that ornithischians – the group that includes many plant-eating species like the horned dinosaurs, the armoured ankylosaurs and the duck-billed dinosaurs – started off as omnivores. And another interesting finding is that the earliest sauropodomorphs, ancestors of the veggie long-necked sauropods like Diplodocus, were carnivores. This shows that herbivory was not ancestral for any of these two lineages, countering traditional hypotheses, and that the diets of early dinosaurs were quite diverse.”

    Dr. Ballell concluded: “It seems that one of the things that made the first dinosaurs special is that they evolved different diets throughout the Triassic, and we think this might have been key for their evolutionary and ecological success.”

    Dinosaurs dominated the land during the Mesozoic era until their extinction 66 million years ago. They included giant veggie groups like the long-necked sauropods and meat-eating species like Tyrannosaurus rex and its relatives. However, their origins were much humbler and date back to the Triassic period, with the first definitive dinosaurs appearing approximately 235 million years ago.

     

    Paper:

    ‘Dental form and function in the early feeding diversification of dinosaurs’ by Antonio Ballell, Michael J. Benton and Emily J. Rayfield in Science Advances.

    DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq5201

    University of Bristol

    Source link

  • New pterosaur species found in sub-Saharan Africa

    New pterosaur species found in sub-Saharan Africa

    Newswise — DALLAS (SMU) – With wings spanning nearly 16 feet, a new species of pterosaurs has been identified from the Atlantic coast of Angola. 

    An international team, including two vertebrate paleontologists from SMU, named the new genus and species Epapatelo otyikokolo. This flying reptile of the dinosaur age was found in the same region of Angola as fossils from large marine animals currently on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. 

    Pterosaur fossils that date back to the Late Cretaceous are extremely rare in sub-Saharan Africa, said team member Michael J. Polcyn, research associate in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences and senior research fellow, ISEM at SMU (Southern Methodist University). 

    “This new discovery gives us a much better understanding of the ecological role of the creatures that were flying above the waves of Bentiaba, on the west coast of Africa, approximately 71.5 million years ago,” Polcyn said.

    Renowned paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, SMU professor emeritus of earth sciences and president of ISEM, an interdisciplinary institute at the university, also collaborated on the research. The team’s findings were published in the journal Diversity. 

    Epapatelo otyikokolo is believed to have been a fish-eating pterosaur that behaved similarly to large modern-day seabirds.

    “They likely spent time flying above open-water environments and diving to feed, like gannets and brown pelicans do today,” Jacobs said. “Epapatelo otyikokolo was not a small animal, and its wingspan was approximately 4.8 m, or nearly 16 feet.” 

    But fossils discovered since the study suggest that some of the newly identified pterosaur species could have been even larger creatures, Polcyn said. Pterosaurs were impressive creatures, with some of the largest species having wingspans of nearly 35 feet.

    The genus name ‘Epapatelo’ is the translation of the word from the Angolan Nhaneca dialect meaning “wing”, and the species name “otyikokolo” is the translation of ‘lizard.’ The Nhaneca or Nyaneka people are an Indigenous group from Angola’s Namibe Province, the region where the fossils were found.

    The lead author of the study was Alexandra E. Fernandes, of Museu da Lourinhã, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and The Bavarian State Collection for Paleontology and Geology. Other co-authors include Octávio Mateus of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and Museu da Lourinhã; Brian Andres of the University of Sheffield; Anne S. Schulp of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Utrecht University in the Netherlands; and Antonio Olímpio Gonçalves of the Universidade Agostinho Neto in Angola.

    Jacobs and Polcyn forged the Projecto PaleoAngola partnership with collaborators in Angola, Portugal, and the Netherlands to explore and excavate Angola’s rich fossil history, and began laying the groundwork for returning the fossils to the West African nation. Back in Dallas, Jacobs, Polcyn, and research associate Diana Vineyard went to work over a period of 13 years with a small army of SMU students to prepare the fossils excavated by Projecto PaleoAngola.

    This international team discovered and collected the fourteen bones from Epapatelo otyikokolo in Bentiaba, Angola, starting in 2005. Bentiaba is located on a section of Angola coastline that Jacobs has called a “museum in the ground” because so many fossils have been found in the rocks there. 

    Many of those fossils are currently on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History “Sea Monsters Unearthed” exhibit, which was co-produced with SMU. It features large marine reptiles from the Cretaceous Period — mosasaurs, turtles, and plesiosaurs.

    About SMU

    SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

    Southern Methodist University

    Source link

  • New Scottish Fossil Sheds Light on the Origins of Lizards

    New Scottish Fossil Sheds Light on the Origins of Lizards

    Newswise — A fossil discovery from Scotland has provided new information on the early evolution of lizards, during the time of the dinosaurs.

    The tiny skeleton discovered on the Isle of Skye, called Bellairsia gracilis, is only 6 cm long and dates from the Middle Jurassic, 166 million years ago. The exceptional new fossil comprises a near-complete skeleton in life-like articulation, missing only the snout and tail. This makes it the most complete fossil lizard of this age anywhere in the world.

    Bellairsia has a mixture of ancestral and modern features in its skeleton, providing evidence of what the ancestor of today’s lizards (which are part of the wider animal group known as ‘squamates’) might have looked like.

    The research, a joint project between researchers at the universities of Warsaw, Oxford and UCL, is reported in the journal Nature. First author Dr Mateusz Tałanda (University of Warsaw and UCL) said: ‘This little fossil lets us see evolution in action. In palaeontology you rarely have the opportunity to work with such complete, well-preserved fossils coming from a time about which we know so little.’

    The fossil was found in 2016 by a team led by Oxford University and National Museums Scotland. It is one of several new fossil discoveries from the island, including early amphibians and mammals, which are revealing evolution of important animal groups that persist to the present day.

    Dr Tałanda commented: ‘Bellairsia has some modern lizard features, like traits related to cranial kinesis – that’s the movement of the skull bones in relation to one another. This is an important functional feature of many living squamates.’

    Co-author Dr Elsa Panciroli (Oxford University Museum of Natural History and National Museums Scotland) who discovered the fossil, said: ‘It was one of the first fossils I found when I began working on Skye. The little black skull was poking out from the pale limestone, but it was so small I was lucky to spot it. Looking closer I saw the tiny teeth, and realised I’d found something important, but we had no idea until later that almost the whole skeleton was in there.’

    Squamates are the living group that includes lizards and snakes, and comprises more than 10,000 species today, making them one of the most species-rich living vertebrate animal groups. They include animals as diverse as snakes, chameleons, and geckos, found around the world. The group is characterised by numerous specialised features of the skull and rest of the skeleton.

    Although we know the earliest origins of squamates lie 240 million years ago in the Triassic, a lack of fossils from the Triassic and Jurassic has made their early evolution and anatomy difficult to trace.

    Analysing the new fossil alongside living and extinct fossil squamates confirms Bellairsia belongs to the ‘stem’ of the squamate family tree. This means that it split from other lizards just before the origin of modern groups. The research also supports the finding that geckos are a very early branching lineage, and that the enigmatic fossil Oculudentavis, previously suggested to be a dinosaur, is also a stem squamate.

    To study the specimen, the team used X-ray computed tomography (CT) which, like medical CT, allows for non-invasive 3D imaging. This allowed the researchers to image the entire fossil, even though most of the specimen is still hidden by surrounding rock. Whereas medical scanners work at the millimetre scale, the Oxford University CT scanner revealed details down to a few tens of micrometres.

    Parts of the skeleton were then imaged in even greater detail, including the skull, hindlimbs and pelvis, at the European Synchrotron (ESRF, Grenoble, France). The intensity of the synchrotron beam permits a resolution of 4 micrometres, revealing details of the smallest bones in the skeleton.

    Co-author Professor Roger Benson (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford), said: ‘Fossils like this Bellairsia specimen have huge value in filling gaps in our understanding of evolution and the history of life on Earth. It used to be almost impossible to study such tiny fossils like this, but this study shows the power of new techniques including CT scanning to image these non-destructively and in great detail.’

    Co-author Professor Susan Evans (UCL), who first described and named Bellairsia from a few jaw and skull bones from Oxfordshire 25 years ago, added: ‘It is wonderful to have a complete specimen of this tantalising little lizard, and to see where it fits in the evolutionary tree. Through fossils like Bellairsia we are gaining a better understanding of early lizard anatomy. Angus Bellairs, the lizard embryologist after which Bellairsia was originally named, would have been delighted.’

    The study was led by Dr Mateusz Tałanda (University of Warsaw) and involved researchers from the University of Oxford’s Earth Sciences Department, Oxford University Museum of Natural History, UCL (University College London), the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, the Natural History Museum in London and National Museums of Scotland.

    Funding was provided by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland. The John Muir Trust provided access to the Elgol Coast Site of Special Scientific Interest, and NatureScot granted permits for fossil collection.

     

    Notes to Editors

    The study will be published in Nature. The DOI number for this paper will be 10.1038/s41586-022-05332-6. Once the paper has been published online, it will be available at the following URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05332-6

     

    About the University of Oxford

    Oxford University has been placed number 1 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the seventh year running, and ​number 2 in the QS World Rankings 2022. At the heart of this success are the twin-pillars of our ground-breaking research and innovation and our distinctive educational offer.

    Oxford is world-famous for research and teaching excellence and home to some of the most talented people from across the globe. Our work helps the lives of millions, solving real-world problems through a huge network of partnerships and collaborations. The breadth and interdisciplinary nature of our research alongside our personalised approach to teaching sparks imaginative and inventive insights and solutions.

    Through its research commercialisation arm, Oxford University Innovation, Oxford is the highest university patent filer in the UK and is ranked first in the UK for university spinouts, having created more than 200 new companies since 1988. Over a third of these companies have been created in the past three years. The university is a catalyst for prosperity in Oxfordshire and the United Kingdom, contributing £15.7 billion to the UK economy in 2018/19, and supports more than 28,000 full time jobs.

    About UCL – London’s Global University

    UCL is a diverse global community of world-class academics, students, industry links, external partners, and alumni. Our powerful collective of individuals and institutions work together to explore new possibilities.

    Since 1826, we have championed independent thought by attracting and nurturing the world’s best minds. Our community of more than 43,800 students from 150 countries and over 14,300 staff pursues academic excellence, breaks boundaries and makes a positive impact on real world problems.

    We are consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the world and are one of only a handful of institutions rated as having the strongest academic reputation and the broadest research impact.

    We have a progressive and integrated approach to our teaching and research – championing innovation, creativity and cross-disciplinary working. We teach our students how to think, not what to think, and see them as partners, collaborators and contributors.  

    For almost 200 years, we are proud to have opened higher education to students from a wide range of backgrounds and to change the way we create and share knowledge.

    We were the first in England to welcome women to university education and that courageous attitude and disruptive spirit is still alive today. We are UCL.

    www.ucl.ac.uk | Follow @uclnews on Twitter | Read news at www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ | Listen to UCL podcasts on SoundCloud | Find out what’s on at UCL Minds

    About the Natural History Museum

    The Natural History Museum is both a world-leading science research centre and the most-visited indoor attraction in the UK last year. With a vision of a future in which both people and the planet thrive, it is uniquely positioned to be a powerful champion for balancing humanity’s needs with those of the natural world. It is custodian of one of the world’s most important scientific collections comprising over 80 million specimens accessed by researchers from all over the world both in person and via over 30 billion digital data downloads to date. The Museum’s 350 scientists are finding solutions to the planetary emergency from biodiversity loss through to the sustainable extraction of natural resources. The Museum uses its global reach and influence to meet its mission to create advocates for the planet – to inform, inspire and empower everyone to make a difference for nature. We welcome millions of visitors through our doors each year, our website has had 17 million visits in the last year and our touring exhibitions have been seen by around 20 million people in the last 10 years. 

    University of Oxford

    Source link

  • What caused the holes in SUE the T. rex’s jaw? Probably not an infection

    What caused the holes in SUE the T. rex’s jaw? Probably not an infection

    Newswise — SUE the T. rex is one of the most complete, best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever found. That level of preservation helps reveal details about SUE’s life. For instance, SUE lived to a ripe old age of about thirty-three, and in those years, suffered their fair share of injuries. SUE’s most mysterious ailment might be the holes in their jawbone. These holes, some the diameter of a golf ball, dot the back half of the left lower jaw. It’s not clear what caused them, but similar injuries have been found in other T. rex fossils. In a new study published in Cretaceous Research, scientists showed that one of the popular theories– that SUE had suffered an infection from a protozoan parasite– couldn’t be true.

    “These holes in SUE’s jaw have been a mystery for decades,” says Jingmai O’Connor, the associate curator of fossil reptiles at Chicago’s Field Museum and a co-author of the study. “Nobody knows how they formed, and there have been lots of guesses.”

    One early hypothesis was that SUE suffered from a fungus-like bacterial infection, but that was later shown to be unlikely. It was re-hypothesized that SUE had a protozoan infection. Protozoans are microbes with more complex cell structures than bacteria. There are lots of protozoan-caused maladies out there; one common such disease is called trichomoniasis, caused by a microbe called Trichomonas vaginalis. Humans can get infected with trichomoniasis as an STD, but other animals can catch it too.

    “Trichomoniasis is found in birds, and there’s a falcon specimen with damage to its jaw, so some paleontologists thought that a Trichomonas-like protozoan might have caused similar damage to SUE,” says O’Connor. “So for this study, we wanted to compare the damage in SUE’s jaw with Trichomonas damage in other animals to see if the hypothesis fit.”

    Bruce Rothschild, a medical doctor whose application of scientific medical approaches to paleontology earned him a role as a research associate at the Carnegie Museum, enlisted O’Connor’s assistance in analyzing SUE’s injuries. In March of 2021, O’Connor took high-resolution photos of the holes in SUE’s jaw, and the researchers analyzed them for signs of bone regrowth.

    “This was the first time I’ve worked on a T. rex. I usually work on smaller fossil birds, and I have to admit, I was pretty excited,” says O’Connor. “It really is an incredible animal.”

    The researchers compared the holes in SUE’s jaw to healed breaks in other fossil skeletons. In collaboration with Field Museum bioarcheologist Stacy Drake and co-author anthropologist María Cecilia Lozada from the University of Chicago, O’Connor and Rothschild also examined the healed bones around trepanation holes made in skulls by Inca surgeons and healers in ancient Peru.

    “We found that SUE’s injuries were consistent with these other examples of bone injury and healing. There are similar little spurs of bone reforming,” says O’Connor. “Whatever caused these holes didn’t kill SUE, and the animal survived long enough for the bones to begin repairing themselves.”

    O’Connor then worked with Field Museum assistant collections manager of birds Mary Hennen to find a bird skeleton in the Field’s collections with history of trichomoniasis. “She found me one, and you don’t see jaw holes,” says O’Connor. “You do see signs of infection, and they are in the back of the throat, but there aren’t holes bored through the jaw like we see in SUE.” Trichomonas, or a similar protozoan, doesn’t seem to fit.

    So what did cause these holes, if not an infection? “We still don’t know. My co-author Bruce Rothschild thinks they’re bite or more likely claw marks, but I don’t think that makes sense,” says O’Connor. “The holes are only found in the back of the jaw. So if they are bite marks, why are there not also holes at the front of the jaw? And you don’t see rows of holes, or indentations, like you’d see from a row of teeth, even a row where the teeth are different heights. They’re just random, all over the place.”

    Rothschild’s hypothesis suggests that the claw marks are the result of courtship behavior, possibly even between two male T. rex specimens. Scientists don’t know SUE’s sex, but the fossil’s size makes some paleontologists think SUE was male, and there are lots of examples of homosexual activity in nature. “The ‘gay T. rex’ hypothesis is fun, but I don’t think there’s enough evidence to support it one way or the other,” says O’Connor.

    But if bite or claw marks (love bites or otherwise) are off the table, O’Connor says there are lots of possibilities remaining to explain the holes– some of which we maybe haven’t thought of yet. But she’s keen to help figure it out.

    “The more I started learning about these jaw holes, the more I was like, ‘This is really weird,’” says O’Connor. “What I love about paleontology is trying to solve mysteries, so my interest is definitely piqued.”

     

    ###

    Field Museum

    Source link

  • Witte Museum Paleontologist Names New Species of Fossil Crocodile

    Witte Museum Paleontologist Names New Species of Fossil Crocodile

    Press Release
    –


    updated: Sep 14, 2017


    SAN ANTONIO, Texas, September 14, 2017 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Dr. Thomas Adams, Witte Museum Curator of Paleontology and Geology, has described and named a new species of fossil crocodile discovered in North Texas. Dr. Adams, the lead author of a paper outlining the find, describes Deltasuchus motherali as one of the “top predators in its ecosystem.”

    As Curator of Paleontology and Geology, Dr. Adams developed the content for the Naylor Family Dinosaur Gallery at the Witte Museum which includes Deinocuchus riograndensis, another prehistoric crocodile that lived in what we now call Texas. The giant prehistoric crocodile is one of the most popular ancient animals in the dinosaur gallery.

    Dr. Thomas Adams, Witte Museum Curator of Paleontology and Geology, has described and named a new species of fossil crocodile discovered in North Texas. Dr. Adams, the lead author of a paper outlining the find, describes Deltasuchus motherali as one of the ‘top predators in its ecosystem.’

    Dr. Thomas Adams, Curator of Paleontology and Geology

    Deltasuchus, a relative of modern crocodiles, lived around 95 million years ago, and ruled the coastlines and waterways of what would one day become north-central Texas. Adults of the newly discovered and described species Deltasuchus motherali grew up to 20 feet (6 meters) long, and left behind bite marks on the fossilized bones of prey animals, suggesting that it was an opportunistic animal, eating much of what was in its environment, from turtles to dinosaurs.

    Dr. Adams, along with co-authors Drs. Chris Noto, at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, at the University of Tennessee, published the description of the new croc species in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. A unique aspect of the find is that it was discovered in the heart of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, a place that normally is not associated with ancient fossils.

    The site that produced the new species was discovered in Arlington, Texas, in 2003 by amateur fossil hunters Art Sahlstein, Bill Walker and Phil Kirchoff. Dubbed the Arlington Archosaur Site (AAS), the area is undergoing rapid residential development, and paleontologists have been working with local volunteers and fossil enthusiasts to excavate the site over the last decade. Deltasuchus motherali is named for one of those volunteers, Austin Motheral, who first uncovered the fossils of this particular croc with a small tractor when he was 15 years old. Work on the site is supported by a grant from the National Geographic Society, which is funding continued excavations and study of this unique fossil locality. Fossils from the site, including the Deltasuchus motherali bones, are part of the collections of the nearby Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas.

    Deltasuchus is the first of what may prove to be several new species described from this prolific fossil site. The locality preserves a surprisingly complete ancient ecosystem ranging from 95 million to 100 million years old, and its fossils are filling in an important gap in our understanding of ancient North American land and freshwater ecosystems. While most of Texas was covered by a shallow sea at this time, the Dallas-Fort Worth area was part of a large peninsula that jutted out into this sea from the northeast. This peninsula was a lush environment of river deltas and swamps that teemed with wildlife, including dinosaurs, crocodiles, turtles, mammals, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, as well as plants.

    ###

    About the Witte Museum:

    Founded in 1926, the Witte Museum is where Science, Nature and Culture Meet, through the lens of Texas Deep Time, and the themes of Land, Water, Sky. Located on the banks of the San Antonio River in Brackenridge Park, the Witte Museum is San Antonio’s premier museum promoting lifelong learning through innovative exhibitions, programs and collections in natural history, science and South Texas heritage.

    Source: Witte Museum

    Source link