New Evidence in Dinosaurs' Extinction

What's the Latest Development?

In Montana, a team of scientists led by Yale palaeontologist Tyler Lyson have found a new dinosaur bone closer to the Earth's surface than ever before. They say the find supports the hypothesis that an asteroid collision is responsible for the dinosaurs' sudden disappearance about 65 million years ago. Scientists are relatively confident an asteroid did collide with Earth some 65 million years ago because large deposits of iridium have been found in the fossil record. Iridium is an element common in asteroids but rare in the Earth's crust. What is less sure is that the asteroid killed the dinosaurs.

What's the Big Idea?

Why are some scientists hesitant to blame an asteroid for the dinosaurs' disappearance? Because of a gap in the fossil record. Had an asteroid clearly ended the dinosaurs' reign, their bones should be found just below the iridium deposits, they say. Instead, the first evidence to support the asteroid theory was found three meters below the iridium, equal to approximately 100,000 years. Scientists who emphasize this gap suggest dinosaurs began dying off gradually before the asteroid hit. Before Lyson's recent find, the fossil gap had been narrowed to 60 centimetres in 1991 when a large dig in Montana and North Dakota unearthed dinosaur fossils.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Dino days: A Grande celebration

Grande Prairie's first Aykroyd Family and Friends Dinosaur Ball and Celebrity Dino Dig is now underway.

The dig, which is taking place at Pipestone Creek near the town of Wembley, is only one of a variety of events that will take place over the weekend.

The event, which plays host to a number of high-profile celebrities from across North America, is to raise money for the Phillip J Currie Dinosaur Museum. The stars will be taking part in the digging and excavation of dinosaur bones, as well as a red carpet ball and silent auction. The celebrities will also enjoy local entertainment in the evenings.

Excitement was rampant as the celebrities took to the bone beds Thursday, after a few weather-related mishaps, flight delays and luggage misplacement.

Dr. Currie, who was on the bone beds is really digging the event.

"It sounds a little cliché, but it's really exciting," he said. "And for me, I find it a little hard to believe. My life has kind of gone like a dream."

The facility will highlight the region's dinosaurs fossils and serve as a space for learning, science and fun.

Dr. Currie said that he is not so much excited about the "glory" of having the museum named after him, but instead for the opportunities it will present. He hopes the museum will be able to put the region on the map and finally give the area's numerous fossils, dinosaur bones and other paleontological treasures a place to call home. Not to mention the chance to expand the digging in a region that is notorious for its wealth of dinosaur bones and fossils.

"It gives us an opportunity to develop (the site) further and show that we've got something pretty special here," he said. "There should be something bigger and better here."

Canadian star Dan Aykroyd and his wife Donna Dixon Aykroyd were approached to help organize the fundraiser and get other celebrities interested in the site. The family had visited the paleontological site last year, and were happy to return.

"Even now, going back for another time, it is so hard to fathom, that we're actually digging up these huge creatures from 70-million years ago," said the couple's daughter Stella Aykroyd, 13. "It's great to be back."

The fundraiser is off to a great start. Tables for the Dinosaur Ball were sponsored from $5,000 to $25,000, and all 70 of them were sold by April. The waiting list for next year is already growing.

Pipestone Creek is approximately 30km southwest of Grande Prairie.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Prehistoric Time Line

Humans have walked the Earth for 190,000 years, a mere blip in Earth's 4.5-billion-year history. A lot has happened in that time. Earth formed and oxygen levels rose in the foundational years of the Precambrian. The productive Paleozoic era gave rise to hard-shelled organisms, vertebrates, amphibians, and reptiles. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth in the mighty Mesozoic. And 64 million years after dinosaurs went extinct, modern humans emerged in the Cenozoic era. The planet has seen an incredible series of changes—discover them for yourself.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Did dinosaurs display sexual dimorphism?

Sometimes the male and female of a species look quite different from one another: this is called sexual dimorphism. A common example is the startling difference between the showy male peacock and the very plain peahen. Some paleontologists think dinosaurs may also have had sexual dimorphism.

Perhaps features like the "frill" of a Triceratops were adornments for attracting a mate, for example. Differences in body size, meanwhile, may have also been sex-related: Paleobiologist Phil Senter has suggested that sexual selection plays a part in the evolution of long necks of some dinosaurs - the longest-necked Apatosaurus and Diplodocus might have gotten the best partners [source: Atkinson]. However, the problem of determining which gender is which remains. If the Triceratops frill is indeed a sexual decoration, we don't know whether the male or the female was doing the decorating.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Jurassic Period

The Jurassic period (199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago) was characterized by a warm, wet climate that gave rise to lush vegetation and abundant life. Many new dinosaurs emerged—in great numbers. Among them were stegosaurs, brachiosaurs, allosaurs, and many others.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

John Hammond's Island of Diminishing Returns?

At this year's San Diego Comic-con, Steven Spielberg made the odd decision to somewhat undercut the buzz around Terra Nova to announce that Jurassic Park 4 is, finally, close to production. Today at Saurian, Mark Wildman posts about this, and expresses a sentiment I share:

What has surprised me, however, is the amount of people demonstrating their opposition to the film being made at all, and that is without the criticism of the project that has been demonstrated on social networking sites, blogs and also by the paleocommunity at sites such as the DML. I understand people wanting to protect the legend of the original Jurassic Park but it was inevitable that sequels would be made and that the franchise would escalate. Incidentally, I don’t think the sequels were bad films anyway – they were good fun and entertained people, which brings me too the main point of this post.

Read more of his musings on this reaction, and why it might be so, at Saurian.

While I'm a fan of the franchise, I'm by no means emotionally invested in it. I'll be thrilled if Jurassic Park 4 is a quality piece of cinema. If it's not, though, I don't think I'll lose any sleep. The negative knee-jerk reaction to its production somewhat baffles me. On Twitter, Myspace boldly tweets, "Jurassic Park 4 in the works. Ironic that they are reviving something extinct. Does anyone even remember 3??" Buzzfeed tweets, "It hurts me to have to tell you that Steven Spielberg announced today he's making JURASSIC PARK 4." The Dinosaur Mailing list hasn't seen an overwhelming response to the news, with only a few people expressing their distaste. Reaction at IGN has ranged from "give it up already" to mockery. The AV Club's commenters deal in their usual snark. Variety readers seem uniformly stoked by it - one commenter reminds people of JP3's poor quality, then immediately leaves another comment about being excited by the JP4 news. I imagine that the Variety commenters reflect the general public, who will likely be happy for another installment of the franchise. While the third movie did about half of the total domestic gross of the original, their opening weekend grosses compare favorably. With more than a decade having passed since the third movie, and having been primed by Terra Nova, Dinosaur Planet, and Dinosaur Revolution, I could see it at least matching The Lost World's numbers.

There will always be harsher criticism for prehistorically-inspired entertainment from paleontology enthusiasts and the scientists who feed our obsessions. As Mark Wildman notes in his post, fidelity to the research done with such painstaking care by paleontologists is ideal, but it may be a pipe dream. It's akin to the dilemma faced by the journalistic media, as discussed in Marc Vincent's final entry in his Prehistory and the Press series on this blog.


That is, money. Every day, we are surrounded by people who don't share our passion for paleontology, who may simply see it as a scientific backwater that only interests eccentrics and children. Add the business interests of a studio to that, and it's easy to understand why sauropod biomechanics or integumentary structures of dromaeosaurs may be lost in the noise.

I'll continue to argue that attention to such considerations deserve a place in the creative process, as they can result in more believable, beautiful, and surprising creatures for the cinema, but I'm not naïve about it. I'm ready to be entertained again by the franchise, and each bit that reflects the revolutionary insights of the last couple decades will be icing on the cake.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

New Species Of Prehistoric Giants Discovered In The Sahara

Dinosaur hunters on a month-long expedition to the Sahara desert have returned home in time for Christmas with more than they ever dreamed of finding. They have unearthed not one but two possible new species of extinct animals. Their success marks one of the most exciting discoveries to come out of Africa for 50 years.
'The team have discovered what appears to be a new type of pterosaur and a previously unknown sauropod, a species of giant plant-eating dinosaur. Both would have lived almost one hundred million years ago.

The palaeontologists discovered a large fragment of beak from a giant flying reptile and a more than one metre long bone from a sauropod, which indicates an animal of almost 20 metres (65 feet) in length. The discovery of both is extremely rare.
The expedition was composed of scientists from the University of Portsmouth, University College Dublin (UCD) and the Université Hassan II in Casablanca and was led by UCD palaeontologist, Nizar Ibrahim.

Ibrahim, who is an expert on North African dinosaurs, said: ““Finding two specimens in one expedition is remarkable, especially as both might well represent completely new species.”

Dr David Martill, a reader in Palaeobiology at the University of Portsmouth, said: “Plant eaters are uncommon in this deposit, extremely rare in this region and to find one this large is very exciting. It’s a major discovery.”

For Martill it was also significant because it marked a successful conclusion to a quest begun almost 25 years ago. In 1984, driven back by sandstorms, his original mission to find a sauropod came to a halt just 20 miles away from the area of desert he had pinpointed as ripe for excavation. He returned empty handed but was left itching to retrace his steps.
A quarter of a century later he unearthed the dinosaur that eluded him so long ago, together with fellow enthusiast, Ibrahim to whom he is passing the baton.
Ibrahim will undertake the detailed analysis of the sauropod bone, which both scientists expect is a new species and genus of the sauropod family.
“From our initial examination on site, we’re almost certain that we have a new species on our hands,” said Ibrahim, who will spend the next six months examining all of the fossils and writing about them for his PhD thesis.

He will also examine the pterosaur remains which are particularly uncommon because their bones, optimised for flight, were light and flimsy and seldom well preserved.
He said: “Most pterosaur discoveries are just fragments of teeth and bone so it was thrilling to find a large part of a beak and this was enough to tell us we probably have a new species.”

The team spent a month in the desert and travelled over five thousand miles by Landrover in an epic overland trip which has taken them through the Atlas mountains and has seen them battling sandstorms and floods in an Indiana Jones-style quest.
Having discovered the giant sauropod bone they had to return to the nearest town to get more water and plaster with which to protect it, a trip which involved crossing flooded rivers in their Landrover at night with water coming in through the doors.
During their fieldwork they were cut off from civilisation for 4 days when heavy rain in the Atlas mountains flooded the river Ziz.

To retrieve the bone they had to manhandle the fossil in its plaster jacket down the side of a mountain, clearing thousands of stones to make a safe path to carry it on a wooden stretcher.

“There was a point when we wondered if we would make it out of the desert with the bone, but we had worked so hard to find it so there was no way I was leaving it behind. It took us 5 days to get the bone out of the ground and down the mountain – and that was not the end of our problems,” said Ibrahim.

Dr Martill added: “When we had managed to get the bone in the Landrover the extra weight meant we kept sinking in the sand dunes and on several occasions everybody except the driver had to walk while we negotiated difficult terrain. Our journey home was equally eventful. While crossing the Atlas mountains we got caught in a snowstorm and total whiteout. But it’s all been worth it.”

The team were also excited to discover some rare dinosaur footprints, including some that record several animals walking along the same trail.
As well as discovering hundreds of dinosaur teeth, they also unearthed bits of giant crocodiles and some new species of fish.

Ibrahim said: “It’s amazing to think that millions of years ago the Sahara was in fact a lush green tropical paradise, home to giant dinosaurs and crocodiles and nothing like the dusty desert we see today. Even to a palaeontologist dealing in millions of years it gives one an overwhelming sense of deep time.”
The team also included Moroccan scientists Prof Samir Zouhri and Dr Lahssen Baidder as well as Portsmouth researchers Dr Darren Naish, Dr Robert Loveridge and Richard Hing.

Prof Samir Zouhri, head of the Department of Geology at the Université Hassan II in Casablanca said: “Nizar Ibrahim is a very determined researcher and I knew that he would have success on this trip, but these fossils exceeded our expectations. It is wonderful that we have made these siginficant discoveries and that they will return to Morocco for display after study in Dublin.”

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Dinosaurs, Fossils, and Feathers

144 million years ago, the beginning of the Cretaceous Perihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifod. South America, Antarctica, Australia, Africa and India are starting to break away from the supercontinent Gondwana. Consequent changes in climate plunge the world into a cold period. Only a few flowering plants grow in the temperate forests of coniferous trees and the plains of ferns that cover the northern and southern parts of the globe, and there are correspondingly few pollinating insects. During this period, dinosaurs apparently grew feathers.

Finding feathers on dinosaurs is now becoming a relatively common occurrence. In China's Liaoning Province, fine-grained sedimentary rocks often contain fossils of dino-feathers with exquisite details still intact. But all of these feathered fossils have been of the bipedal, carnivorous lineage, which includes Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. Tyrannosaurs are actually closer cousins to birds than they are to the large plant-eating Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus. A few years ago, there was even a movement to make T. rex the state bird of Montana.

Dinosaurs are divided into two main orders: saurischians, which have forward-pointing pubic bones, and ornithischians, which have backward-pointing pubic bones. "Ornithischian" literally means "bird-hipped," but the resemblance is in fact superficial and confusing, as birds actually descended from the saurischians, and all feathered dinosaurs discovered to date have belonged to the saurischian order. Only one ornithischian fossil has suggested the presence of anything that even approximates feathers: Psittacosaurus, which has bristlehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif-like structures on its tail that have been hotly debated.

However, Chinese paleontologists have recently discovered a dinosaur fossil in Liaoning that has long feather-like structures sticking up from its body. The species has been identified as a heterodontosaurid, an ornithischian from the Early Cretaceous period. This in itself is remarkable, as heterodontosaurids are exceptionally rare, and previously unknown from Asia. They were most widespread during Late Triassic times, more than 65 million years earlier, and animal groups rarely survive for such long periods of geological time. This fossil confirms that heterodontosaurids, one of the oldest groups of dinosaurs, survived into the Cretaceous. Dubbed Tianyulong confuciusi, it was likely small, active, and agile based on the bones found, and probably ate a mix of insects, small vertebrates and plants.

The feathery structures found on T. confuciusi are not like those found on modern birds or even on some of the smaller, more bird-like dinosaurs. Whereas modern feathers are flexible and have a central shaft with vanes that run off either side at angles, the feathers on T. confuciusi are all relatively stiff and lack vanes.

The fossil supports the idea of a single evolution of feathers. If both saurischians and at least some ornithischians had feather-like structures, the origin of feathers must have occurred back in the Triassic, when the saurischian and ornithischian lineages split. There are still gaps in the fossil record between T. confuciusi and the feathered dinosaurs, but future discoveries may fill these gaps. If so, then many dinosaurs may once have sported feather-like structures, with descendant species losing the characteristic later on.

At present, no one is sure of the function of the protofeathers. If they were indeed protofeathers, then they were not related in any way to flight. The fact that the filaments over the tail are so long and stiff suggests a possible display function, not unlike the peacock.

Dinosaurs were clearly highly visual animals that not only modified their skeletons for show, but exaggerated their effect through external structures. It doesn't take that much to imagine dinosaurs as colorful as birds, their evolutionary descendants.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Meet the family of crocs that ate dinosaurs 100million years ago

Their remains were uncovered in the Sahara by one of the world's greatest fossil hunters, Dr Paul Sereno of Chicago University, who in 2001 discovered the ' supercroc' - an eight ton, 40ft monster that lived at the time of the dinosaurs.

The latest haul includes new species with an astonishing array of snouts and teeth. The most ferocious is the 'Boar Croc', a 20ft meat eater with an armoured snout for ramming its prey and three sets of daggershaped fangs for slicing up meat.

Similarly long was the 'Pancake Croc', a squat fish eater with a 3ft-long pancakeflat head which rested motionless for hours, its jaws open, waiting for prey.

There were three other snappy little devils, each about three feet long.

The 'Rat Croc' was a plant and grub eater whose buckteeth were used to dig for food, while the 'Duck Croc' had a broad, overhanging snout with which it rooted around in shallow water and mudbanks for fish and grubs.

Finally, the 'Dog Croc' ate plants and grubs, had a soft dog-like nose and was probably a good swimmer and fast runner.

Most of the crocodiles were found lying on the surface of a remote, windswept stretch of rock and dunes.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Jurassic Park comes true

Deep inside the dusty university store room, three scientists struggle to lift a huge fossilised bone.It is from the leg of a dinosaur.

The answer is that they believe that this single fragment of a beast which stalked the earth untold millions of years ago could hold the key which will unlock the secrets of the dinosaurs.

Extraordinarily, they contend that it could lead to a real life Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs are once again unleashed on the world by scientists.

For just like in the hit Steven Spielberg movie, these men and women are intent on cracking the genetic code of the dinosaurs and opening the possibility of bringing them back to life.

Their remarkable quest will be revealed in a TV documentary, Dinosaurs: Return To Life, to be screened tomorrow.

It poses the question: will scientists ever be able to resurrect the dinosaur?

According to Jack Horner, professor of palaeontology at Montana State University, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

He says: ‘Of course we can bring them back to life. Their ancestral DNA is still present.

'The science is there. I don’t think there are any barriers, other than the philosophical.’

So just how have these scientists arrived at the point where they believe they might unleash the mysteries of a prehistoric lost world?

In order to understand their journey, we have to travel back a little less time — to 1992.

This was when Raul Cano, professor of microbiology at California Polytechnic State University, made the first attempt to extract DNA from insects almost as old as the dinosaurs that had been embedded in amber, a sticky tree sap which hardens into transparent orange stone.

Speculation about this possibility inspired the Jurassic Park story, in which an amber-trapped mosquito which sucked dinosaur blood unleashes its victims’ genetic code, allowing an obsessed billionaire to clone the species — with terrifying consequences.

In his real-life laboratory, Cano cracked the amber open with freezing cold liquid nitrogen, obtaining a sample of the insect inside.

Amazingly, he soon had a DNA sample from a 40 million-year-old bee.

Soon afterwards, academics at the American Museum of Natural History recovered DNA from an ancient termite.

It seemed that dinosaur DNA could soon be within reach of modern-day scientists.

But these early experiments ended in failure.

The scientists could not replicate their results, leading to the suspicion that the tiny recovered fragments were actually contaminants, perhaps from the researchers’ hair or clothing.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

The 70million-year-old crocodile with huge teeth and a dog's head

A newly-identified, 70million-year-old species of crocodile with huge teeth and a dog-shaped head has been found in a small town in Brazil.

The dinosaurs fossil of Pissarrachampsa sera, which scientists believe ate dinosaurs, was discovered in Cretaceous sediments in Minas Gerais by a municipal worker.

Dating back to the end of the dinosaur era, the strange head of this remarkable terrestrial crocodile has revealed much about the extinct Baurusuchia breed of crocodiles.

Given the number and size of their teeth, the researchers believe these carnivorous crocodiles fed on animals of the same 15ft to 20ft size range - that is dinosaurs and fellow crocs.

They would have used stereoscopic vision to track prey and, rather than scramble like today's crocodiles, they galloped on elongated limbs.

A sketch drawn by Dr Larsson imagines how the species would have appeared in predatory motion.

Though the body might seem more dinosaur in shape than a contemporary crocodile, the fossil head carries the definitive characteristics of crocodiles from that era, including a well-developed secondary palate, socketed teeth, advanced cranial air spaces, roughened bone surfaces, plated armour, and massive attachments for jaw closing muscles.

Recent CT scans have revealed fascinating aspects of the fossil, such as its brain size and shape and hearing abilities.

Baurusuchian crocs are characterised by a significant number of unique anatomical features such as low tooth counts, tall, thin skulls, forward facing nostrils, and derived jaw-closing muscle attachments.

After comparing the new species to other Baurusuchids and their relatives, the researchers noticed large gaps on either side of the fossil's morphology.

Researcher Felipe Montefeltro, of McGill University, said: 'We are dealing with an exceptionally divergent lineage of extinct crocodile diversity. There are many dinosaur fossils that still need to be found to link this crocodile to those who came before and after.'

A digital reconstruction of the fossil's brain cavity is in the works and will be presented later this year at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

New fossils demonstrate that powerful eyes evolved in a twinkling

Palaeontologists have uncovered half-a-billion-year-old fossils demonstrating that primitive animals had excellent vision.

An international team led by scientists from the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide found the exquisite fossils, which look like squashed eyes from a recently swatted fly.

This discovery will be published tomorrow in the journal Nature.

The lead author is Associate Professor Michael Lee from the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide's School of Earth & Environmental Sciences.

Compound Eyes

Modern insects and crustaceans have "compound eyes" consisting of hundreds or even thousands of separate lenses. They see their world as pixels – each lens produces a pixel of vision. More lenses mean more pixels and better visual resolution. (Each lens does not form a miniature image – a myth often perpetuated by Hollywood.)

Evolutionary Advantage

The fossil compound eyes were found on Kangaroo Island, South Australia and are 515 million years old. They have over 3000 lenses, making them more powerful than anything from that era, and probably belonged to an active predator that was capable of seeing in dim light.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Fossil forensics reveals how wasps populated rotting dinosaur eggs

Exceptionally preserved fossils of insect cocoons have allowed researchers in Argentina to describe how wasps played an important role in food webs devoted to consuming rotting dinosaur eggs. The research is published in the scientific journal Palaeontology.

The approximately 70 million year old eggs, from gigantic titanosaur sauropod dinosaurs were discovered in 1989 in the Patagonia region of Argentina, well known for yielding fossils of sauropod dinosaur eggs and even embryonic dinosaurs. Only recently it was discovered that one of the broken eggs contained tiny sausage-shaped structures, 2-3cm long and 1cm wide. The structures closely resembled fossilised insect cocoons, and were most similar in size and shape to the cocoons of some species of modern wasp.

There are many records of fossilised dinosaur eggs, and even several records of fossil cocoons, but, as author Dr Jorge Genise of the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales states "this is the first time that these cocoons are found closely associated with an egg". Such a study of organismal behaviour (e.g. burrows, footprints) is known as ichnology.

The results indicate "that wasps probably participated in the food web, mostly composed of scavenging insects, which developed on the rotten egg". The make-up of carrion communities – spiders, beetles and other creatures populating rotting organic matter – is more familiar to us from the screens of crime scene investigation documentaries.

The numbers and different types of creatures indicate the length of deposition and the time since death. In this particular CSI, it appears that the dinosaur egg was broken by force, and subsequent fractures in the egg shell allowed scavenging creatures to feed upon the contents. At egg sizes of around 20cm, this represents a sizable amount of yolk! Other creatures later appeared to feed not upon the egg contents, but on the initial scavengers themselves. The wasps represent the top of the food web, and could have been feeding on insects or spiders gorging on rotting egg contents.

These scavengers also played an important role in cleaning up nest sites. Palaeontologists believe that some dinosaurs revisited nest sites year after year to lay new clutches of eggs. Carrion communities were essential to removing decaying material in advance of new nesting seasons. This new discovery gives us an insight into the murky world of insect communities that thrived at the feet of gigantic dinosaurs.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Last dinosaur before mass extinction discovered

A team of scientists has discovered the youngest dinosaur preserved in the fossil record before the catastrophic meteor impact 65 million years ago. The finding indicates that dinosaurs did not go extinct prior to the impact and provides further evidence as to whether the impact was in fact the cause of their extinction.

Researchers from Yale University discovered the fossilized horn of a ceratopsian – likely a Triceratops, which are common to the area – in the Hell Creek formation in Montana last year. They found the fossil buried just fivehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif inches below the K-T boundary, the geological layer that marks the transition from the Cretaceous period to the Tertiary period at the time of the mass extinction that took place 65 million years ago.

Since the impact hypothesis for the demise of the dinosaurs was first proposed more than 30 years ago, many scientists have come to believe the meteor caused the mass extinction and wiped out the dinosaurs, but a sticking point has been an apparent lack of fossils buried within the 10 feet of rock below the K-T boundary. The seeming anomaly has come to be known as the "three-meter gap." Until now, this gap has caused some paleontologists to question whether the non-avian dinosaurs of the era – which included Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Torosaurus and the duckbilled dinosaurs – gradually went extinct sometime before the meteor struck. (Avian dinosaurs survived the impact, and eventually gave rise to modern-day birds.)

Yale graduate student Stephen Chester discovered the last known dinosaur before the catastrophic meteor impact 65 million years ago. Credit: Tim Webster
"This discovery suggests the three-meter gap doesn't exist," said Yale graduate student Tyler Lyson, director of the Marmarth Research Foundation and lead author of the study, published online July 12 in the journal Biology Letters. "The fact that this specimen was so close to the boundary indicates that at least some dinosaurs were doing fine right up until the impact."

While the team can't determine the exact age of the dinosaur, Lyson said it likely lived tens of thousands to just a few thousand years before the impact. "This discovery provides some evidence that dinosaurs didn't slowly die out before the meteor struck," he said.

Eric Sargis, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and graduate student Stephen Chester discovered the ceratopsian last year while searching for fossilized mammals that evolved after the meteor impact. At first, Lyson said, the team thought it was buried within about three feet of the K-T boundary, but were surprised to learn just how close to the boundary – and hence, how close in time to the impact – it was. They sent soil samples to a laboratory to determine the exact location of the boundary, which is marked by the relative abundance of certain types of fossilized pollen and other geological indicators but is difficult to determine visually while in the field.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Dinosaurs in the Southland and from the Pleistocene to Pop Culture

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened its new Dinosaur Hall, a permanent exhibition featuring hundreds of dinosaur fossils and 20 complete mounts of dinosaurs and other Mesozoic creatures. The new display marks an important milestone in a seven-year, $135 million transformation of the museum, and it also brings new attention to the prehistory of Southern California.

In 1901, Union Oil geologist William Orcutt was surveying an area then known as Hancock Ranch when he discovered fossilized bones in pools of asphalt. The pools--today known as the La Brea Tar Pits--have since proven to be one of the world's richest paleontological sites, yielding more than 1 million fossils since excavation began in 1906.

The bones and fossilized plants preserved in the tar revealed to scientists a starkly different L.A. landscape than what we see today. Southern California in the Pleistocene--a geologic epoch that ended roughly 11,700 years ago--was inhabited by large mammals that bore a striking resemblance to the animals today seen in zoos or on safaris. Two species of elephant--the Columbian mammoth and imperial mammoth--grazed the Southern California grasslands. Their cousin, the American mastodon, joined a host of other now-extinct herbivores, from camels to ground sloths. These animals provided plenty of reasons for large carnivores, which included American lions, dire wolves, and saber-toothed cats, to roam prehistoric Los Angeles. The largest of them--the short-faced bear--would dwarf modern grizzlies, standing over 11 feet tall on its hind legs.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Aykroyd pals dig deep for Alberta dinosaur museum

Actor Dan Aykroyd joined famed paleontologist Philip Currie on a dinosaur dig Friday to raise money for a new museum in northern Alberta.

Currie is leading the dig in a remote bone bed near Pipestone Creek Park, 40 minutes west of Grande Prairie.

Dan Aykroyd and his wife Donna Dixon, supporters of the museum since meeting Currie last year, invited fellow celebrities including mystery writer Patricia Cornell, Bobby Kennedy Jr. and others along for a two-day dig capped by a celebrity ball and private auction.

"Celebrity is good for getting a good table at a restaurant maybe, or occasionally getting out of a speeding ticket," said Aykroyd. "And this kind of thing where you're trying to raise awareness for a cause. So that's what we're doing."

The excavation site, known as the the River of Death in recognition of a flood that wiped out a massive herd of horned dinosaurs 73 million years ago, was discovered in 1974 by Grade 8 science teacher Al Lakusta.

Almost all of the 3,500 bones and 14 skulls removed so far belong to a previously unknown species, later named Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai (thick-nosed lizard).

Paleontologists describe the largely unknown bone bed as one of the richest they've ever seen.

"Grande Prairie is in fact a much richer area than you would guess by the amount of fossils on display anywhere," said Currie.

"But with the new museum coming into the Grande Prairie region, it means we're now going to be a lot more capable of going out there and looking," he said.

"It is a Canadian treasurehouse, and I want to bring people from all over the world to Canada to help display what's here and show the world we have this incredible resource right here in this province," said Aykroyd.

Organizers are still short $5.5 million towards the $26-million Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum which they're hoping will be completed next year.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Celebs go dinosaur-hunting, Alberta style

Donna Dixon Aykroyd has starred in hit movies, gone to the Academy Awards and had a Kiss song written about her. With her husband, Dan Aykroyd, she has travelled around the world seeking adventure, including tracking tigers in India, living with an African tribe and journeying to Antarctica.

But it was being in Pipestone Creek pulling a prehistoric dinosaur skull out of the earth that the actress describes as the most exciting moment of her life.

“When I got home, it felt like I had taken a time machine back 65 million years ago to the Cretaceous period, and I thought, ‘Was I really where I was, doing what I was doing?’” she says. “When you see things and touch what no man has ever seen, it is absolutely thrilling. The sense of scientific discovery is one that you really can’t put into words.”

Dixon Aykroyd was so grateful for the experience she had at the paleontological dig site near Grande Prairie last summer, that she decided she would do what she could to help build a new museum in the area.

A year later, the Aykroyds brought a group of their celebrity friends to the Pipestone Creek site, to spend three days digging dinosaur bones with paleontologists then take part in a gala fundraising dinner on Saturday night.

Robert Kennedy Jr. said he was happy to accept the Aykroyds’ invitation to visit the area with his children.

“For me, this was a big treat, and it was a special privilege to be able to bring my children up here to show them history being made in Alberta,” Kennedy said, adding that his 10-year-old son now wants to be a paleontologist.

“I think everybody loves dinosaurs. I really think it’s like travelling into another world, exploring another planet; it’s like going to the bottom of the ocean. Getting a glimpse back in time, 65 million years, about what this place looked like. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than that.”

Dan Aykroyd, a self-professed dinosaur buff like his wife, got the day’s events started on Friday by crashing out of the bushes near the camp’s cookhouse roaring like a dinosaur.

“That’s an ankylosaurus that’s had it’s armoured plate pierced,” he said jokingly, as he lumbered out of the trees toward his laughing guests at their Pipestone Creek campsite.

Speaking to the media around the campfire before heading out to one of the dig sites, Aykroyd said it wasn’t hard to convince the couple’s friends to take on the adventurous trip to northwestern Alberta, where the high-profile guests are not only helping raise money for the museum, but are also raising the profile of the Pipestone Creek site.

“This is the perfect use of celebrity,” Aykroyd said, adding that his family has a sense of “commitment and obligation” to the area and to the new museum.

The Pipestone Creek area contains one of the densest deposits of dinosaur bones in the world, most of which have not yet been uncovered. The majority of the bones are from pachyrhinosaurus dinosaurs, and are believed to be at least 70 million years old.

Aykroyd said he is struck by the passion of the young paleontologists working at the site, and was a bit star-struck after spending time with Philip Currie, a renowned Alberta paleontologist and namesake of the new museum.

“He’s brilliant,” Aykroyd said, of Currie. “Just to be around a guy like that is a privilege and a pleasure.”

For Currie, the feelings were mutual.

The paleontologist said he was honoured to have the high-profile visitors at the site, and was happy to have so many extra hands for the laborious, time-consuming work of finding and slowly exposing the buried bones.

He said he was also impressed by the interest shown by the celebrity guests.

“I’m impressed they were willing to adapt, to get muddy, and to get down on their knees and scrape,” he said. “There’s certainly a lot of people out here that wouldn’t do that.”

Currie said he also hopes the well-connected group will spread the word about what the site has to offer, and that interest in the Pipestone Creek area will continue to grow long after the celebrities depart.

“They’ll talk to people in Hollywood, I’m sure, and then maybe we’ll hear from those people,” he said.

Given the guest list, the Pipestone Creek site could become a celebrity itself at some point.

As she prepared for a day out on the dig site, bestselling mystery writer Patricia Cornwell was already thinking about potential new plots for her character, Kay Scarpetta.

“Maybe I’ll dig up a caveman and Scarpetta will have to discover what happened to him,” she said. “I’m always open for new things because I get ideas for my books.”

Cornwell donated a rare signed collection of first edition books, which will be auctioned off to help raise money for the project.

She said preserving sites like Pipestone Creek is a priority.

“If we don’t really cherish and respect our past, no matter how long ago that past is, we cannot take care of the present or the future,” she said. “It’s all about preserving our world, our planet, having respect for life forms, even ones we don’t completely understand. This is what makes us special as creatures, is that we care about what went before us, and want to make an impact on what comes after us.”

Movie executive John Goldwyn said he, too, was struck by the importance of preserving the Pipestone site — though he said he would not be turning his dinosaur experience into a movie.

‘I think that’s been pretty much covered. I think Steven Spielberg did that about as good as you could do it,” he said, laughing. “Part of the joy of this is that I don’t feel I have to make it part of a movie or a TV show, that I can appreciate this experience on its own terms.”

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Meteor Wiped Out Dinosaurs, New Fossil Finding Suggests

Fourth grade in Mrs. Allio’s class was when I first learned about dinosaurs. We learned the different types (for some reason, I favored the Brontosaurus) and what they ate, struggled to understand words like “Mesozoic” and “paleontology” and memorized the various theories for why the dinosaurs became extinct (had this happened gradually as temperatures grew warmer? as mammals developed and ate their eggs? Or had a massive meteor hit the earth and wiped the dinosaurs out?).

A new finding in the fossil record provides physical evidence for the latter theory. Scientists have found the the fossilized horn of a ceratopsian — most likely of a Triceratops — that must have lived before the catastrophic meteor impact 65 million years ago. The finding lends weight to the asteroid impact theory, as it suggests that dinosaurs did not slowly die out, but became extinct just prior to the impact.

The fossil was found in the Hell Creek formation in Montana, where other Triceratops fossils have been found. It was found just five inches below the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K–T) layer, which is the geological layer that marks the boundary from the Cretaceous period to the Tertiary period 65 million years ago, which is the time the mass extinction of dinosaurs is dated. The discovery suggests that something called the “three-meter gap” — which has been used to support the theory that dinosaurs died out slowly before the meteor impact — does not exist, as noted in Science Daily:

Since the impact hypothesis for the demise of the dinosaurs was first proposed more than 30 years ago, many scientists have come to believe the meteor caused the mass extinction and wiped out the dinosaurs, but a sticking point has been an apparent lack of fossils buried within the 10 feet of rock below the K-T boundary. The seeming anomaly has come to be known as the “three-meter gap.” Until now, this gap has caused some paleontologists to question whether the non-avian dinosaurs of the era — which included Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Torosaurus and the duckbilled dinosaurs — gradually went extinct sometime before the meteor struck. (Avian dinosaurs survived the impact, and eventually gave rise to modern-day birds.)

As Yale graduate student Tyler Lyson, director of the Marmarth Research Foundation and lead author of the study, says,

“The fact that this specimen was so close to the boundary indicates that at least some dinosaurs were doing fine right up until the impact.”

Lyson and his team at first thought the specimen was buried within the K-T boundary by about three feet. Analysis of soil samples helped them to identify the exact location of the boundary, based on a “relative abundance of certain types of fossilized pollen and other geological indicators but is difficult to determine visually while in the field.” Previously, scientists had relied on a visual examination of the actual rock formations in the field to determine the boundary’s location; the soil analysis provides for a more precise sense of where the boundary is. Lyson and his team are now using similar soil analysis to examine other specimens found close to the K-T boundary. He now “suspects that other fossils discovered in the past may have been closer to the boundary than originally thought and that the so-called three-meter gap never existed.”

Which would mean the non-avian dinosaurs did not go extinct prior to a meteor hitting the earth — or whatever happened 65 million years ago.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

New Duck-Billed Dinosaur Gives Clues To Ancient Flair

Scientists hope to shed light on dinosaur evolution with the naming of a new hadrosaur -- the oldest duck-billed dinosaur known from North America.

Called Acristavus gagslarsoni, this new dinosaur is unique because it lacked the distinctive head ornamentation common to its later relatives -- all other hadrosaur fossils have come with some kind of adornment on their skulls. (With one exception from the end of the Cretaceous Period, the time just before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.)

As such, the discovery gives a clue into how hadrosaur headgear evolved over time. Scientists now believe that two different styles of ornamentation evolved independently from an ancestor that had none.

And these new dinos, it seems, also liked to travel.

"To find two specimens 650 miles apart that lived at virtually the same time, and were discovered within one year of one another is extremely rare in dinosaur paleontology," said Terry Gates, a research associate at Chicago's Field Museum, and a member of the team that documents the discovery in the July issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The first fossil specimen was found in Montana in 1999 by the Old Trail Museum staff and volunteers, including a group of "junior paleontologists" from the University of Chicago and was excavated in 2001 and 2002 by study coauthor Rebecca Hanna for the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., where it now resides.

The Utah specimen was found in the year 2000 in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument by study coauthor C. Riley Nelson, an entomologist from Brigham Young University, who reported his finding to a local paleontologist.

Hadrosaurs are known as the duck-billed dinosaurs due to the similarity of their head to that of modern ducks.



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Luis Rey follow-up picture

In my last post Luis Rey noted that one of his favourite images was of “Daspletosaurus being fend-off by a herd of defending Parasaurolophus” which drew some comment. Here is that image now courtesy of Luis (well the version that hangs on the wall of his studio at least).

I’m back from the field now, but ‘Flugsaurier’ starts tomorrow so no time to rest and little to post, though I hope to have a few bits up soon.

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Museum Models

Not everyone is a fan of life-reconstructions in museums (or indeed in general) but I think that they are fundamentally interesting in their own right and can provide a key learning / education tool.

They can be used to explain what fossils and evidence is known (footprints, skin, bones) how this can be added to from extant animals (muscles, etc.) and completed with educated and informed guesswork (colours and patterns) with missing bits taken from relatives or other specimens. These are not just cobbled together (well, they shouldn’t be!) to make something the looks nice, but shows a chain of information and different levels on confidence in that information to make the complete sculpture.

I’m also generally fond of the idea that science is great, but a little bit of art mixed in is no bad thing from time to time and these can provide a perfect measure of this. This is true of murals and paintings as much as models and sculptures, though the latter seem to be more common in the museums I have visited, I assume because they can be cheaper and easily moved with the specimens and don’t necessarily require a large amount of space or wall support. The ones shown here are from (inevitably) the Oxford Museum.

These can also provide particular enhancement to certain exhibits by drawing in the audience or providing a frame of reference (like this superb sign). Many dinosaurs are instantly recognisable to the public as ‘live’ animals, who might struggle with a piles of bones or even a mounted skeleton. These can then form part of the draw of the museum, to get people interested and involved in a way in which they might not otherwise be. Assuming that’s the case (and it would be fascinating to study this properly and see what people like and don’t and what they get from it) then aside from the obvious aesthetics, they can be an important part of a museum display.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Interview with Brett Booth

Following on from the increasingly successful palaeoart interviews, Brett Booth of Carnosauria has kindly answered a few questions as well. He considers himself only a semi-pro palaeoartist, but as you might guess from his style Brett is a comicbook artist of note and if he want’s to say the dinosaurside is only semi-professional then who am I to argue? Certainly his work is interesting and not of the style of most other dino artists and none the worse for it. As before, images are his property blah blah etc. Take it away Brett (who you should remember for this little effort):

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Tiny Tarbosaurus

By now I’m sure most readers will have picked up on the new paper describing the skull of a tiny Tarbosaurus. It’s estimated to have been just 2 years old when it died and was around 2 m in length – that’s rather smaller than the 10-12m long adults! A few images of this hit the news when the specimen was first announced around three years ago and can be hunted down if you look. There is one above of me with a cast of the specimen as it was when discovered (it’s now been fully prepared out) which gives you a pretty good idea of just how small it was.

While above is just the cast, I was lucky enough to see some of the material while it was undergoing preparation. Even better I was allowed to take some pictures for my own research and have been told I can show off a couple of them here now that the paper is finally out. My thanks for this to Mahito Watabe and his team for this generosity. Though perhaps inevitably with Larry Witmer on the team, there are even better pictures and 3D animated scans of the skull out there too!

This is post is (a little) more than just a couple of photos though as the paper itself has some interesting things to say about tyrannosaur ontogeny. This is the smallest / youngest tyrannosaur we have and coming from an especially big genus makes the size discrepancy even greater. This is pretty handy as there are a variety of problematic tyrannosaurs specimens out there that may or may not represent distinct taxa but being known only from juveniles make this hard to work out. However, if you have a really good handle on how some characters do (or do not) change as individuals get older and bigger then you know what you can and cannot rely on when looking for unique characters in other juveniles.

For me the most interesting characteristic was that of the number of teeth. While there is a little intraspecific variation in tooth numbers, there are also some discreet differences between taxa too – the big tyrannosaurines like Tarbosaurs and Tyrannosaurus have fewer teeth than do smaller ones like Daspletosaurs or Alioramus. In the past it’s been suggested that this number actually changed during ontogeny with the number starting relatively high and the number of teeth reducing as the animal got bigger. However this little guy has exactly the same number of teeth as an adult Tarbosaurus. While this doesn’t exactly disprove the hypothesis, it does at least show that at best it’s not always true, and so a smaller tyrannosaurine skull with lots of teeth could grow into a big adult with lots too.

All in all a very revealing paper (and superbly illustrated I should add) and with more to come on the postcranium, this is going to be an important specimen for many a long year. Sadly, it’s parent institution may not be able to say the same as I will talk about tomorrow.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

More bones and the difficulties of finding new dinosaur sites

I have had the privilege of working a number of dinosaur dig sites here in the United States and in South Africa. My involvement with the Burpee Museum and our site in Hanksville, Utah, has been one of the biggest privileges of my paleontological career. When you are this close to the bones and to a site that yields years and probably decades worth of well-preserved specimens, you sometimes lose sight of how special this all is.

Below is just a recent example of one small segment of the Hanksville-Burpee quarry and what we are finding — bones to most of the skeleton of a juvenile Diplodocus.

Today, Utah paleontologists Dr. Jim Kirkland and Scott Madsen joined up with the WIU and Burpee crews and volunteers to go prospecting for new sites. We had good information and a lot of hope for some good sites … but, as often happens in field paleontology, we ended up empty-handed. This is not the fault of these paleontologists or anyone else — but it goes to show that finding fossils in the field is difficult work and holds no guarantees.

What these sorts of experiences cement for me is how fortunate we are to find sites like the Hanksville-Burpee quarry, to have a community that supports our efforts, and to have the privilege to see the bones of some of the most remarkable animals to have lived on earth.


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Sarcosuchus

Normally on here the word ‘archosaur’ is pretty much synonymous with ‘dinosaur’ and ‘pterosaur’, since that is primarily what I work on and what I am most interested in and thus know most about. However, there is the odd occasion when I can bring something different and a bit more generally archosaurian. So here is a mediocre photo of a mediocre specimen (though admittedly it is the holotype) of Sarcosuchus, the giant crocodilian for the North African Cretaceous. This specimen is on display in the fantastic Muséum National d’ Histoire Naturelle in Paris, a place well worth a few hours of anyone’s time, and is quite a small one at just 4m or so, these things got really big (though just how big is another question entirely).

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A list of things that looked like fossil bone from a distance, but on closer examination turned out not to be

Well after that title, this should really be pretty self explanatory. One thing that is worth noting as it applies to almost every one of these things is just how amazingly convincing some things are. More than once I took pieces to people with years and even decades of field experience and a couple of times a debate ensured over whether or not it really was fossil bone.

When you see something at a distance, even just a few metres away, you go and check it out, and while its mostly easy to tell almost instantly once you have picked up the item in question, it is still a pain. When that means a long walk or a tricky climb to get to some inaccessible smudge that might just be bone, it can get very annoying and waste a lot of your time. And of course it is very easy to do, since you are actively looking for bones that might be broken, eroded, distorted and stained or bleached and thus not look mch like what you might expect, meaning you have to check out something that looks only very vaguely like bone, just in case it is. Add to that the huge range of shapes that one does expect (think teeth, jaws, ribs, bits of vertebrae, parts of skulls etc.) and of course pretty much anything white on the surface becomes worth checking out.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Neck multifunctionality

Following on from my post on sauropod neck lengths (and indeed that of the SV-POW! boys and Tet Zoo too), at the end I made the inevitable comment that necks (and indeed other structures) can be multifunctional. A long neck can be an indicator of sexual selection at the same time as providing increased reach for food. As noted before, analogy plays an important role in working out (or at least hypothesising) palaeo behaviour, so are there any animals out there that seem to do this. Indeed there are, so step forward, the Galapagos giant tortoise.

Research shows that those animals with longer necks do gain a distinct advantage in reaching higher placed food. The neck provides a genuine basis for natural selection based on neck length. However, it has also been shown that when tortoises stand off in dominance battles, the individual with the longer neck tends to win. So, necks would also appear to be under some measure of sexual selection / dominance as well.

So what about the giraffes? They have long necks and the males fight with their heads, so what’s going on there. Well males do have longer necks than females, but there’s not really anything to say that longer necked males do better. Bigger males do better (no surprise) but not through a longer neck per se. Plus of course the males are actively fighting with their heads. (And tortoises can be quite vicious if you’ve ever seen them fight, then bite and butt with their shells).

Posturing only gets you so far in nature. Sure, there are cheats out there (false cleaner fish, milk snakes, female mimic salmon etc.), but they can only prosper as long as they are in the minority. This is because sooner or later someone is going to square up to you in one way or another and find out if you really can back the bark with bite. If you can’t, you’re going to lose. And if say most of the population were lying, once a dominant animal (or predator etc.) finds out, then that is going to take over damned fast. So lying only works when there are few liars, and most things are honest. In other words, if they are advertising that they can win a fight, it’s because they can and will.

What does this mean for sauropods? Well is has been suggested in the past that sauropods might fight one another, with their necks. Now if this was going to happen you’d expect to see some evidence of this in sauropods. Like the especially tough and thick skulls of male giraffe, or the prow-shaped rams of some tortoises, or robust necks and heads in male sauropods and you’d see injuries from some serious sauropod neck-on-neck action. Only of course there aren’t any.

Instead sauropod skulls are incredibly weak and fall apart if you look at them funny, let alone ram them into something else at speed. And while the neck as a single unit might be quite tough, it has those lovely wafer-like lamina and those oh-so-thin cervical ribs. If they were fighting we’d see breaks, pathologies, healed bones and the rest. And you can’t cheat by just having a big neck and expecting the others to back down, you have to back that up or someone will realise it’s all talk.

I’m sure sauropods did fight on occasion, sooner or later animals of pretty much any species will come into competition and of course it is members of the same species that tend towards the fiercest competition. There will come times when accessing that water hole, or harem, or territory is critical and combat becomes inevitable. But was it with the neck? No. The neck might have been a *symbol* of the power of the individual even if it wasn’t used (pheasants and cockerels show off their colours to demonstrate their fitness, but they fight with their spurs).

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Mongolian ceratopsids

Although the Cretaceous beds of the Gobi contain far more ceratopsids than is good for them, it’s actually rare that I get to see Protoceratops in all it’s glory. In short, there are a ton of these in various museums, so most people prefer not to collect them anymore when time and money is limited. Or if they do pick them up, they end up at the bottom of the preparation ‘to do’ pile. So despite my own work in the field (where you can find a dozen ceratopsid teeth a day in places and dozens of partial skeletons over a season), specimens like these are still a novelty for me.

Above is Protoceratops and below Bagaceratops. I really can’t tell you why, these are the assignments I was told and I don’t know enough about the distinctions to confirm this and don’t have the time to go digging into the literature (and remember this?). Anyway, nice material, enjoy.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Biggest bones?

I’ll be keeping this one short as there is really not much to say, however the photo is a really nice example of how extreme some bits of soem organisms get. While obviously there are some huge bones out there in various organisms (typically revolving around whale and ceratopsian skulls and the odd sauropod humerus) there are also some less likely candidates for biggest (well, OK, longest) bone of the vertebrate world – step forward the cervical rib.

This particular one is on display at the IVPP in Beijing and is to my knowldge the best and most complete of its kind. It comes from a specimen of Mamenchisaurs and is a staggering, wait for it, 3.2 m long! Thats right, over three metres and close on 11 feet. For a rib. That fits in the neck.

Not surprisingly things like this are not the easiest to find and preserve badly, you can’t see it in the photo, but there is a huge amount of glue holding it together (though it is definitely one piece) as it was essentially shattered when found. Still, it is a real demonstration of pushing simple bones to extremes and raises some interesting questions about the most basic mechanics of these animals. Mamenchisaurs has one of the most extreme necks of sauropods as it is, and support is an obvious function for a rib of this kind (you can see how straight it is, and that it would be held alongside the neck, and presumeably would overlap with the ribs of other cervicals).

Still, it begs the question, how on earth did the neck flex with that buried in it, and if the neck did bend, was the rib pliable enough to bend itself? It is a complex question associated with a single simple rod of bone – science can be damned frustrating at times, but half the fun is finding out.

Incidentally, the feet in the frame are those of Mamenchisaurs, not the same animal but a reconstruction of one that was probably similar in size, which gives you a feel for just how big that thing is.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

What bugged the dinosaurs? Poor research

Thanks to Jonah Choiniere who is currently on a long term trip to the IVPP I was able to get my hands on “What bugged the dinosaurs?” this week. A recent book by husband and wife team George & Roberta Poinar, it puports to show how insects and diseases wiped out the dinosaurs (or so the hype went). I have wanted to read this for a while as the premise seemed intriguing, if very far fetched. However, as you may have guessed from the title above, I was far from impressed.

The book is a myriad of overstated and / or unsupported claims, poor English (they might be non-native speakers, but both work in the US and this is their third book in the language!), and most startlingly a frightening lack of knowledge about dinosaurs. Some 27 people are listed in the acknowledgements and not one do I recognise as working on dinosaurs, and it shows.

Worse than that, it seems like even the authors did not bother to do any research on the subject and the errors are numerous and obvious. If you are working well outside your field, you need to do the work, or get help and there is no evidence that either occured.

The thrust of the book is of course about ancient insects (and other parasites) and pathogens something the authors do work on, but of course in order to relate it to the dinosaurs, they will need to know about them and get their facts right, and here they fail badly. In most cases, I doubt the corrections would have made much difference to their arguments, but the errors are so frequent and obvious, it makes one wonder about how the rest of it was put together, and some of the arguements are incredibly tenuous.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Is it Authentic? The Analysis Begins

Without further ado, Mark and Mick began their work. For fourteen hours a day, for a whole week, they toiled in the basement of the Geological Museum of China. While Mark identified characters on one slab, Mick photographed the other slab to document the specimen. They were on an emotional rollercoaster, one minute amazed with such a remarkable specimen, and the next minute disappointed that it was split in two.

In order to determine the specimen's authenticity, Mark needed to look at it closely. Did anything look wrong? Were the two slabs mirror images? Did all of the specimen's characters match up? After a close examination, without even using a microscope, Mark determined that Dave was an authentic dinosaur specimen because everything matched up.

Mark then looked more closely at Dave's feathers to determine their authenticity. He put Dave under a standard dissecting microscope and looked for stains of feathers. As feathers fossilize, they stain the rock, without looking carved or painted. Nothing unusual turned up, which was a good sign. Then Mark did one last check -- he thought he might be able to see the feathers' micro fibers. When Mark saw the subtle structures of the feathers, which are impossible to recreate, he knew he had an authentic and priceless feathered specimen on his hands.

Then the real fun began -- the systematic study of the characteristics that would tell Mark what species Dave belongs to. Mark had a hunch that it might be a new taxon (a new group of organisms), but had to run through an extensive checklist before he would know for sure.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Smithsonian classic dinosaur specimens

For their honors option project in EARTH 150H (Dinosaur Extinction and Other Controversies), Alyce DiLauro and Teron Meyers explored the classic specimens in the dinosaur collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Why are some dinosaursmore unique than others in the Smithsonian's collection? Which dinosaurs are the 'classic specimens'? Tune in to the photo and audio tour put together by these scholars to find out!

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Camarasaurus (Sauropod)

Camarasaurus front leg and shoulder. This is cast from a complete front leg
of a Camarasaurus from Wyoming. It includes all phalanges and is articulated based upon current knowledge of the construction of the foot.

It includes the scapula and is 2.9 meters (9.5 feet) high. The scapula-coracoid is 1.4 meters (4.5 feet) long. It comes complete with stand and is built modularly for easy transport. Of course the limbs of our other sauropods are much larger, but are also available as individual units. Not everyone has room for a complete sauropod skeleton!

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Darren Tanke’s Gorgosaurus preparation

A very hard and strong plaster called FGR 95 is mixed up. This is incredibly strong stuff- used alot to make hollywood sets (building frontages) I’ve heard. The damp burlap is lowered into the pan of mixed plaster and dragged through the creamy mix so both sides are liberally coated. The burlap is removed and gently squeezed or wrung out over the pan- usually it is squeezed by being pulled through a hole created by the index finger touching the thumb tip.

The “bandage” is put on the toilet papered specimen and starting at the middle, the bandage pressed down into the specimen, adhering to its contours and any air underneath is pushed out to the edges if necessary. Then another bandage is put next to the first one with a good bit of overlap. Three thick FGR 95 and burlap layers (with heavy overlap) were put on the Gorgosaurus. A final coat of thick FGR 95 was put on top of that and as it cured, it was smoothed out by hand, which was frequently dipped into a pan of clean water. Plaster and burlaping took about 1 hour.

Once done the just made support jacket was allowed to sit, cure and dry. The jacket gets quite warm as the chemical reaction in the plaster occurs. Alowed to sit and dry, much water evaporates out reducing the weight of the specimen. The final picture shows the new support jacket finished; scale bar = 10 cm.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Darwinopterus robustodens

Since the description of the amazing Darwinopterus modularis there has suddenly been a huge rash (or even rush) of new Darwinopterus-like taxa to be described from the Middle Jurassic Chinese beds. A few of them I’ve managed to get hold of photos for and pictured in my great Chinese pterosaur roundup earlier this year.

Clearly at least some taxonomic revision is going to be needed here as, even assuming every named genus and species is valid (which I rather doubt), some of the current descriptions and definitions don’t really overlap. So many taxa have come out so fast (and from two different research groups) that inevitably things have been published without any kind of real comparison to the others which were unpublished at the time.

Into this maelstrom comes Darwinopterus robustodens which as you might have already guessed has rather robust teeth, but otherwise is incredibly similar to the other taxa in this little assortment. What makes this stand out in at least one way is the simply magnificent condition of the holotype (shown here thanks to Lu Junchang). Every one of the others so far has a bit missing (like most of the skull of Wukongopterus) or is not actually that well preserved (like the referred specimen of D. modularis) or is a bit disarticulated (like Kunpengopterus) or some combination of these.

This on the other hand is all but perfect. It’s complete (right down to the end of the tail) it’s articulated, and it’s in great condition. There is more to see in this specimen than any of the other dozen or so that have already been refereed to this group of pterosaurs. That will be most helpful when it comes to sorting out the taxonomy of these animals and makes for a near perfect display piece.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.