Fossil Shop to Go Way of Dinosaurs

The Upper West Side's Maxilla & Mandible will soon have something in common with the dinosaur bones it sells — it will be a thing of the past.

The fossil dealer and natural history emporium at 451 Columbus Ave. will close at the end of August, owner Henry Galiano told DNAinfo.

Galiano, a self-trained paleontologist, opened the store in 1984, after working for 12 years in the American Museum of Natural History's department of vertebrate paleontology. At the museum he fielded countless phone calls from the public asking where they could buy or rent dinosaur skeletons and the like.

"After a while, I was like, duh, there's a business here," Galiano said. "It was a no brainer."

He selected the Columbus Avenue and West 81st Street location because it's only one block north of the museum.

Today, the shop functions as an unofficial retail offshoot of the museum, a place where shoppers who've just visited the world's premiere natural history institution can interact with — and buy — fossils, shells, minerals and other specimens.

Walking into Maxilla & Mandible feels like stumbling into an attic where an explorer has stashed a lifetime of discoveries. A toothy crocodile skull smiles at visitors from the front display window, a stuffed boar's head stares down from one wall, and moths the size of an adult's hand are pinned inside nearby display cases. A basket of "assorted bones" sits on one shelf (six bones for $1.)

The store's oldest items are Ice Age-era squid fossils, 450 million- to 500 million-year-old specimens that sell for $7 each.

But customers who need a fossil verified for authenticity and appraised will also find what they need at Maxilla & Mandible, Galiano said.

"Yes, we do retail, but we're really scientific contractors," Galiano said. "You can walk in with any problem in the world of natural history and we can help you."

Galiano also operates a dinosaur quarry in Wyoming which digs up and assembles sauropod skeletons, and he consults with museums and auction houses worldwide that need expert advice on all matters prehistoric. In a basement work studio tucked behind the store, Galiano and a team of palentologists, osteologists and others work on special projects such as reconstructing a prehistoric deer skeleton and preparing dinosaur bones to be donated to the American Museum of Natural History.

Store employee Stephen Finch, 20, said Maxilla & Mandible's closure would be a "tremendous loss," not just for shoppers who walk in off the street but for people like him who discovered the world of natural history through the store.

Finch started visiting Maxilla & Mandible as a 5-year-old when his grandfather took him there as a treat — an hour-and-a-half trip from Finch's home in Queens. He started working at the store three years ago, and because of connections he's made there, he spent three months in Wyoming at Galiano's dinosaur quarry and worked at a fossil lab in Salt Lake City this past summer. Now he's planning to become a research paleontologist.

"For a lot of people, myself included, this store is what inspired them to do what they're doing with their lives," said Finch, a Queens College geology major.

The same goes for 14-year-old Jake Johnson, an Upper West Sider who's been shopping at the store since he was 6, during a phase when he was fascinated by shark teeth. Since then he's amassed a collection of Maxilla & Mandible purchases that includes a stuffed barracuda, a boar skull, and a trilobite fossil (ancestors of today's insects).

Johnson, who will be a freshman at Beacon High School this fall, also developed a love of science at the store and says his experiences at Maxilla & Mandible inspired him to pursue a career as a marine biologist.

"I'm disappointed, "Johnson said. "Everyone here knows so much about what they're selling. In other stores, they know hardly anything. It's a great store and I wish it could stay open."

Galiano said keeping Maxilla & Mandible afloat during the economic downturn has been a challenge, in large part because the new bike lane on Columbus Avenue dealt a serious blow to his business.

At first Galiano thought the bike lane, which was installed in August 2010, would be a "minor inconvenience" that would make it more difficult for delivery trucks to pull up to the curb, he said.

But the bike lane also removed 67 parking spots from Columbus Avenue, and Galiano said he believes the lack of parking cost him at least 10 percent in sales this year.

He felt the impact at Christmas. That's when big-spending customers from across the tri-state area used to pull up in limos or cars, hop out, and peruse the store's special collections of unique — and expensive — fossils that weren't available to the general public.

But last Christmas those high-end buyers didn't show up at all. Many called to tell him they skipped visiting the store because they couldn't find parking, Galiano said.

"It was very discouraging," said Galiano, 60. "After a while, you say, I give up."

As word has spread of the impending closure, some longtime customers have broken down in tears, Galiano said. For some, Maxilla & Mandible is an Upper West Side landmark on par with Zabar's or the recently closed H&H Bagels.

Shoppers and science lovers alike flock to Maxilla & Mandible because it offers an escape from the city, Galiano said.

"New York is rough," Galiano, who's lived on the Upper West Side since 1971, said. "The only way to live in a city is to be able to get away from the city. People from the Upper West Side, they catch some fresh air by coming into our shop."

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20110824/upper-west-side/uws-fossil-shop-go-way-of-dinosaurs#ixzz1Wa6wmYj4


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

Dinosaur fossils make fun day for local children, parents

"I love science and this is so exciting; it's the first time I've seen dinosaur bones," exclaimed Dennise Collins, 9, following a presentation Saturday by the Dino Seekers, Joe and Frona Fileccia. The couple hosted a free educational exhibit of their fossil and dinosaur bone collection at Frontier Fitness in Benson, an event that attracted several youngsters and adults.

"A fossil hunter does not kill - he resurrects," said Frona during the event's introduction. "We always try to bring a piece of each part of the dinosaur while we're out on our digs. We've discovered some rare dinosaurs and some common ones. You're going to see some of our collection here today and take something home with you."

The couple talked about sea creatures, fossils, a rare T-Rex wishbone found on one of their digs, huge bison skulls, and a 68-pound T-Rex corpulite, or poop, that they have in storage.

The presentation featured a small sampling of the Fileccias' extensive collection, as the majority of their larger pieces are in storage in Michigan.

"We live in a fifth wheel, so we don't have room for our largest bones," Frona told the group. "Most of our collection is in storage, but the samples we brought with us today are a nice range of the kinds of things that we find on our digs."

In their search for bones and fossils, the couple digs primarily on ranches in eastern Montana in a fossil-rich area called the Hell Creek Formation.

Several school-aged children attended Saturday's presentation, where they learned about different bones as well as what part of a dinosaur they came from and their function. Following the presentation, the youngsters were invited to touch the bones on display and ask questions. The exhibit included a duckbill jawbone, a 30-million-year-old turtle shell, a giant occipital condoyle, a T-Rex rib and much more.

The event made quite an impression on Collins, who says she loves all areas of science and wants to be a paleontologist when she grows up.

"If my parents ever take me to Montana, I really want to dig for dinosaur bones," she said, holding out the bone shard she picked out to take home. "They said this is from a triceratops frill. I think it's awesome."

"In the Hell Creek Formation where we dig, we find T-Rex, duckbill, triceratops and some raptors, (to name a few)" said Joe while talking to 12-year-old Bryce Petrey. "The dinosaurs we find are from the 65- to 70-million-year-old range."

Petrey, a seventh-grader at St. David middle school, said, "I really liked the display and presentation. I learned a lot about fossils and dinosaur bones." She, too, was taking home a piece of triceratops frill for her dinosaur bone sample. "My favorite bone was the T-Rex rib - it's huge," she said.

While the event was primarily geared for children, several adults attended as well. Tom Olson, a local geologist who collects fossils in Arizona, has a non-profit organization called "Geology for Kids" where he teaches fossil collection and science classes to children of all ages. "My goal is to introduce kids to the world of geology and paleontology." When asked what he thought of the Fileccias' presentation, Olson said, "I thought it was great. This gets the kids excited because they were able to see the real bones and touch them. And then they got to take a bone with them, and that really got them excited. We need more activities like this for kids."

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

Haplocheirus

I started writing this post before I checked my photos and was rather dismayed to see that pretty much everything I took at the Dino Expo was out of focus. Whoops. I do have my own photos from the IVPP, but obviously I wanted to stick to the exhibit on the Musings. Obviously in this case that rather means that I’m limited to one rather less than exciting image of the postcranium.

In an effort to make this post marginally more readable / interesting, it’s perhaps worth adding a few lines about the nature of the bones here, and indeed a number of things from the Shishugou Formation. While you do tend to get whole articulated skeletons from this area (and for that we really must be grateful) the bones are often rather bashed up and look like they’ve been broken in situ but preserved in the correct aspect and orientation. It makes for an unusual combination of complete articulated specimens which are not always very nice in terms of preservation. But they do at least keep coming.

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

what about Carcharodontosaurus?

Unsurprisingly, this proved to be a rather popular post. But what about other theropods – could they have chowed down on humans effectively? Here’s a couple of photos of the skull of Carcharodontosaurus (well, a cast) in Toyko. While, this much read post does a fair job of comparing the skulls of a tyrannosaur and carcharodontosaur, I was there only talking about the lateral view, and below you can see a head-on anterior shot that shows a very different picture. The skull as a whole and the mouth as a result is really rather narrow. This is a rather smaller specimen than the rex I showed the other day, but the proportional difference in gape laterally should be quite clear.

That of course means that it would have much greater trouble in clearing the head-shoulders of a human when attempting full-body consumption. While clearly things like Mapusaurus were rather bigger, based on this I’d be surprised if even the biggest ones had a space at the back of the mouth that is comparable to T. rex. In short, if you need your hominids swallowed without processing in your upcoming sci-fi piece then stick to a giant tyrannosaurine.
For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Sauropod Jaws

While there is obviously some variation in the teeth and jaws of sauropods, they are on the whole pretty conservative when compared to the theropods or ornithischians (none of them have beaks for starters!). Rather peg-like clippers of one form or another seem to be the main theme. This nice set of jaw piece though does show that if nothing else, the size and number of the teeth can be dramatically different across a jaw of otherwise similar size.

Here we have the multiple and very small teeth of Nigersaurus (top), rather more robust, but still ultimately long, thin and quite numerous teeth of Apatosaurus (middle), and finally the much larger and more robust teeth of Camarasaurus (bottom). Nigersaurus is especially nice and odd as you can see the huge numbers of replacement teeth sitting in situ the gives this an appearance that’s something like a dental battery of a derived ornithischian.

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

Yinlong skull

The basal ceratopsid Yinlong made a fleeting appearance on here quite some time ago when I was talking about ossified tendons. Here’s the skull of this lovely specimen, yet another of the taxa to have been unearthed at Wucaiwan in the last decade that fills in a gap of various Cretaceous lineages into the Jurassic. The skull has been on loan for some time, so this is photo from the Tokyo Expo was actually the first time I’d seen it.

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

'Daddy Long Legs' Fossil Unearthed in 3D

Next time you're out picking tomatoes in your garden and you come across a 'daddy long legs,' realize that you are looking at a species whose body design hasn't changed much in 300 million years. Need proof? How about a 3-D model?

Researchers from the Imperial College London and an international team of scientists have developed 3-D models of two ancient types of harvestmen, also know as 'daddy long legs'. The two fossilized species, Dyspnoi and Eupnoi, skittered across the earth before the dinosaurs during the Carboniferous period.

Harvestmen were found on all continental landmasses, except Antarctica. Despite being the third most-diverse arachnid order, their itinerant life on earth and their poorly mineralized exoskeleton made many fossils unfit for preservation.

As a solution, the team relied on high-resolution X ray micro-tomography to reveal the two new harvestmen from the Carboniferous of France. The researchers took 3,142 X rays of the fossils and compiled them into 3-D models, using custom designed software. The models provided the first evolutionary analysis of any Paleozoic harvestmen, yielding fresh insight into how these tiny arachnids with 1-cm bodies survived and evolved in the ancient forests of Earth.

By comparing the 3-D models of the two specimens to modern 'daddy long legs,' the researchers found that the appearance of the ancient and modern species have changed very little over millions of years.

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

Dino-era Mammal the "Jurassic Mother" of Us All?

Named the "Jurassic mother from China" (Juramaia sinensis), the newfound fossil species is the earliest known ancestor of placental mammals—animals, such as humans, that give birth to relatively mature, live young—according to a new study.

The 160-million-year-old specimen pushes back fossil evidence for the evolutionary split between the placental and marsupial lineages by 35 million years. Although it's unclear if the creature is a direct ancestor of modern placentals, it's "either a great grand-aunt or a great grandmother," the study authors say.

Placentals—including creatures from mice to whales—are all that remain of the so-called eutherian mammals, of which J. sinensis is the oldest known specimen.

The first eutherians evolved from the ancestors of marsupials, which have pouches and give birth to comparatively immature offspring. (A third type of mammal, the monotremes, includes platypuses and lays eggs.)

(See "Platypus Genome Reveals Secrets of Mammal Evolution.")

With forepaws adapted to climbing trees, the newfound eutherian scurried about temperate Jurassic forests feasting on insects under the cover of darkness. This diet allowed J. sinensis to tip the scales at around half an ounce (15 grams), making the creature lighter than a chipmunk.

"The great evolutionary lineage that includes us had a very humble beginning, in terms of body mass," said Zhe-Xi Luo, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, who led the team that discovered the fossil.

Lucky Breaks for Placentals and Marsupials

Eutherians arose from metatherians, the mammal lineage that led to marsupials such as kangaroos. (See: "Earliest Known Ancestor of Placental Mammals Discovered.")

Both lineages started out small and got lucky breaks when they moved up into the forest canopy, out of reach of most dinosaurs and other mammals that stalked the ground, Luo said.

"Once you get out on a tree, you have all the different ecological opportunities that weren't available for the terrestrial animals," he said.

The main physical differences between eutherians and metatherians are in their wrist bones and teeth. In particular, eutherians have fewer molars than metatherians.

J. sinensis' teeth "really jumped out" at Luo and indicated "it was a eutherian."

Placental Split Still a Mystery

The discovery brings the fossil record in line with DNA evidence, which had indicated that the split between ancestral marsupials and placentals occurred around 160 million years ago, Luo added.

What was happening during this epoch to force the evolutionary split, however, remains a mystery.

"What is clear is that—beside the fact that marsupials and placentals start to differentiate—we also have the other mammals that diversified as well," he said. "But we don't know what would be the specific environmental trigger for that."

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

Exclusive Canine Tooth from 'Peking Man' Found in Swedish Museum Collection

This is an extremely incredible find. We and our Chinese colleagues are weighed down. With latest technology, a canine tooth that has not been handled can inform us so much more than in the long-ago, such as what they eat," says Per Ahlberg, professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Uppsala University.

Swedish paleontologists were the earliest scientists to go to China in the early on 20th century, and they conceded out a series of expeditions in teamwork with Chinese colleagues. They establish huge numbers of fossils of dinosaurs and further vertebrates. The material was sent to Sweden and the recognized paleontologist Carl Wiman, who known and described the fossils. But when the direction of research altered after Wiman's death, 40 cartons were left unopened and forgotten until they recognize. In recent weeks, they have been open by Per Ahlberg, his colleague Martin Kundrát, and Museum Director Jan Ove Ebbestad, who had strained attention to the cartons in the storeroom at the Museum of Evolution.


Recently, they have left through the material mutually with foremost Chinese paleontologists commencing the Beijing Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, who be animated when their Swedish colleagues contacted them. The Museum of development has the most excellent collection of Chinese fossils of dinosaurs and further vertebrates external of China, and the stuffing of the 40 cartons more enhance the value of the collection.

The fossil material comes from various different areas in China. In Zhoukoudian, southwest of Beijing, a canine tooth was originating from Homo erectus that is, Peking man. Then wealthy finds were complete of skulls and other skeletal parts, but all of this left in a strange way through World War II. All that leftovers in China at the moment are five teeth and an only some pieces of skull bone that were found in the 1950s and 1960s. So the three teeth as of Peking man at the Museum of Evolution have be regard as being between the most expensive parts of the collection. And now they have exposed a fourth tooth and it is untouched.

According to Professor Liu Wu from the Chinese college of Sciences, it is a cracked, but or else well-preserved canine tooth. "This is a tremendously essential find. It is the only canine tooth in maintenance. It can give up significant information about how Homo erectus lives in China," he says. The tooth is to be examining with recent technology. By studying how the tooth was damaged down and looking at probable microscopic mineral granules from plant leftovers, it may be likely to problem out what Peking man ate. Combining this with the extra material in the cartons, these scientists trust to be capable to rebuild some of the plant and animal life that existed in Peking man's environment.
For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

Huge Bird live along with Dinosaurs

A huge prehistoric bird, which might have resembled a very big ostrich, lived along with dinosaurs around 83 million years ago, according to new research. The detection confirms "that big birds were alive alongside Cretaceous non-avian dinosaurs," guide author Darren Naish said. "In truth, these big birds fit into the thought that the Cretaceous wasn't 'a non-avian dinosaurs-only theme park.' Sure, non-avian dinosaurs were significant and large in ecological terms, but there was smallest amount and some space for extra land animals."

All that's left of this large bird is its powerless lower jaw. The organization and characteristics of the jaw are connected with birds and not non-avian dinosaurs, the researchers consider. They end that the skull of the bird throughout its lifetime would have been regarding a foot long. If flightless, it must have stood close to 10 feet tall. If it flew, its wingspan is probable to have exceeded 13 feet. The big bird is now the subsequent known big avian from the dinosaur era. The initial to be recognized was Gargantuavis philoinos, which lived in southern France about 70 million years ago. It too may contain been flightless and ostrich-like.

"So we can now be actually sure that Mesozoic earthly birds weren't all thrush-sized or crow-sized animals," Naish said. "Huge size certainly evolved in these animals, and enormous forms were living in at least two separate regions. This fits into a larger, rising picture: Mesozoic birds were not wastefully varied, with plenty of be related between them and modern groups." At some stage in its day, Samrukia exist in a network that integrated armored dinosaurs, duckbilled dinosaurs, and tyrannosaurs -- along with other grasping dinos. Smaller birds are too known from this site, called the Bostobynskaya configuration. Sharks, turtles and salamanders starting the bird's time period contain also been establish in the region.
At current, the site is dried up and hot. It's dominated by semi-desert or wash. Back in the dinosaur period, it was additional of floodplain surroundings, with a level simple crisscrossed by big, approximately rivers. Fossils wood recommend forests were nearby. It leftovers unclear what the large bird hunted, but the researchers might not find any proof for clear specialization, such as enthusiasm to plant use or water prey. They consequently believe it was a generalist, per many latest birds today. The bird almost certainly also exhausted a lot of time organization or flying away from the various meat-eating dinosaurs from the area.

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

Low Tide Reveals Rare Dinosaur Fossil

A team from the University of Alaska Museum of the North has succeeded in excavating the fossil of a rare, ancient marine reptile from rock that's usually covered by the tide.

Eugene Primaky, working for the USDA Forest Service Heritage Program out of Petersburg, spotted what he thought might be the bones of a fish or a branch while looking over an intertidal outcropping near Kake in Southeast Alaska in May. He gave it a kick. It didn't move.

Photos were sent to the museum's earth sciences curator, Patrick Druckenmiller, who quickly determined that it was the back end of a little-known sea-going reptile from the age of the dinosaurs called a thalattosaur, Greek for "sea lizard."

The dinosaurs fossil was found in a formation estimated to be 220 million years old. "Based on the age of the rocks and what I could see in the picture, I was 99 percent sure that's what it was," Druckenmiller said.

Druckenmiller and a colleague, Kevin May, traveled to the site in mid-June to collect the specimen. The site was exposed only during extreme low tides at certain times of year. The team faced a two-day window in which they had just four hours each day to remove the fossil. The next chance to do so wouldn't come until October.

Rock saws were used to hack into the layers surrounding the fossil. The workers managed to complete the excavation just five minutes before the site went underwater on the first day. But Druckenmiller spotted yet more bone penetrating the rock. A larger section was removed on the second day in hopes that it would contain the rest of the skeleton.

The two slabs, weighing 500 pounds, were shipped to Fairbanks. There, at the museum's fossil preparation lab at the museum, rock will be slowly chipped away to expose as much of the complete skeleton as still exists. The process will take several months.

Druckenmiller thinks that when the rock is finally removed it will reveal one of the best thalattosaur specimens ever found in North America and possibly anywhere else in the world. He hopes that the rest of the bones, including the skull, will be in the second chunk of rock and as well-preserved as the tail and hind bones first spotted by Primaky.

As it stands, the specimen is one of Alaska's most compete fossil vertebrates, according to a museum press release.

"This is the best preserved and the most articulated specimen of Triassic reptile I have been involved with," said Jim Baichtal, the Tongass National Forest geologist who sent the first photos to Fairbanks and participated in the fossil's extraction.

Inspecting the rest of the skeleton may reveal new information about reptiles of the era.

"It's reasonably complete and once we reveal more of the skeleton, we will be able to compare it to other thalattosaurs to see if it is a new species," said Druckenmiller. "We don't know what kind we have yet."

There are few available images of what a live one may have looked like, Druckenmiller said. But he compared it to an Endennosaurus, one of the 10 types of thalattosaurs so far identified.

An image at reptileevolution.com, a collaborative website created by paleontologists and museum personnel from around the world, shows the Endennosaurus as having a long eel-like tail, a long neck, a narrow, toothless, birdlike head and four short legs with clawed, possibly webbed, feet. The picture at the website of a skull of a Thalattosaurus -- the genus name for North American thalattosaurs -- shows a more robust head and small teeth.

At the website, the Endennosaurus is depicted in a posture that calls to mind a sea otter on land. Druckenmiller likens it to "a marine iguana or a crocodilian," living a "mostly aquatic" life. However, it appears that such creatures would have had no trouble going ashore and moving about on solid ground, even if they appeared somewhat clumsy.

A big thalattosaur might have stretched out to nine feet. Druckenmiller suspects this specimen will prove to be about half that size.

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

Age of the Dinosaur: Thrilling Exhibition Comes to World Museum this Autumn

Amazing life-sized moving dinosaurs will terrify Liverpool when a blockbuster exhibition roars into the city this autumn. In a major coup for World Museum, Age of the Dinosaur opens on 22 October and runs until 15 April 2012.

Age of the Dinosaur will make its first appearance outside London after being created by the Natural History Museum where it had a successful run. The exhibition will give all the family an experience not to be missed. Six life-size dinosaurs will emerge out of the darkness as visitors immerse themselves in the vanished world of 65-million-years-ago.

The admission charge for Age of the Dinosaur is £6 adults, £3 children and concessions, under 5s free, £14 families.

Steve Judd, Director of World Museum, said: “This will be a blockbuster show that brings alive the prehistoric world. It will be the nearest you’ll get to walking with real dinosaurs. This is the first chance you will get to see an exhibition of this calibre outside of London where it has already been a big hit.

“It is fantastic to bring such a dramatic spectacle to World Museum. Dinosaurs are very popular with our visitors and we were keen to build on that with a world class dinosaur experience. This will be one of the most amazing exhibitions World Museum has ever seen.”

The exhibition combines stunning imagery, animatronic dinosaurs and film footage with more than 60 specimens including real dinosaur bones. Visitors travel from beneath Jurassic waves, walk through a Jurassic forest, and finish their journey in a Cretaceous desert, passing fossil specimens along the way as they journey through time.

People will come face-to-face with the animatronic dinosaurs in their natural habitat. Visitors will also see a life-sized replica of a T-rex jawbone and even dinosaur poo.

In addition to the exhibition a free dinosaur trail takes visitors around World Museum’s own collections. Age of the Dinosaur has already thrilled and terrified thousands of people at the National History Museum, London. The exhibition will also feature:

• Two theatrical, immersive areas where visitors step into the environment of 65 to 250 million years ago to see, smell and hear the habitats of dinosaurs

• Jurassic underwater zones reveal marine monsters called Ichthyosaur, Plesiosaurs and Pliosaurs which ruled the seas.

• Seventy five specimens from London’s Natural History Museum collections including fossils and dinosaur poo.

• Hands-on exhibits where visitors can touch specimens and learn about the latest scientific research in a special laboratory.

• A life-sized replica of a T-rex jawbone. The jaw muscles were so big that its skull was extra wide to accommodate them.

• A small animatronic, bird-like Archaeopteryx which lived in modern–day Germany about 147 million years ago. It was probably carnivorous, eating insects and other small prey.

• A timeline charts the rise and fall of the dinosaurs while other interactives help to bring the past to life.

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

Therizinosaur embryo

All things considered, dinosaur embryos are not actually that rare. The issue with many however, is working out what taxon they might belong to. After all, a very young ceratopsian is not going to have much of a crest or horns which is generally how we identify them.

In fact the skull is often the weakest and most disintegrated part of even a great embryo and as such quite a few are left as simply ‘indet’ on their designations. This is, sadly, another one, but the identification is quite specific – it belongs to a therizinosaur. These are not especially common taxa and aside from this. I’m not aware of any other eggs assigned to the group which makes one with an embryo in rather special.

Of course there’s not too much to see here, the bones are tiny and (shooting through glass a distance away) it’s not the greatest of photos. Still, it is nice to see just what detail can preserve on occasion, and if you look carefully, you should be able to see an associated premaxilla and maxilla that make up the snout and outline the naris and antorbital fenestra. Cool!


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

Haplocheirus

I started writing this post before I checked my photos and was rather dismayed to see that pretty much everything I took at the Dino Expo was out of focus. Whoops. I do have my own photos from the IVPP, but obviously I wanted to stick to the exhibit on the Musings. Obviously in this case that rather means that I’m limited to one rather less than exciting image of the postcranium.

In an effort to make this post marginally more readable / interesting, it’s perhaps worth adding a few lines about the nature of the bones here, and indeed a number of things from the Shishugou Formation. While you do tend to get whole articulated skeletons from this area (and for that we really must be grateful) the bones are often rather bashed up and look like they’ve been broken in situ but preserved in the correct aspect and orientation. It makes for an unusual combination of complete articulated specimens which are not always very nice in terms of preservation. But they do at least keep coming.

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

Plesiosaur dinosaur fossil solves breeding puzzle

The fossil bones of a giant, long-necked swimming reptile from the age of the dinosaurs have resolved a long-held mystery about the animals and how they reproduced.

Those denizens of ancient seas - like modern whales and dolphins - apparently gave birth to their infants beneath the water one at a time, and could have cared for them much as modern whales do, scientists say.

The unique water-living animal, known as a plesiosaur, lived about 78 million years ago, and while fossils of many other creatures in the marine reptile world of that era show they gave birth to a dozen or more young at a time, this one is the first to show evidence of a single birth and only in the water, according to the paleontologists.

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

‘Living Fossil’ Eel Swam at Dawn of Dinosaur Age

Video: ‘Living Fossil’ Eel Swam at Dawn of Dinosaur Age

By Brandon Keim Email Author
August 17, 2011 |
6:30 am |
Categories: Animals

In an undersea cavern off the coast of Palau, biologists have discovered an eel unlike any other.

Called Protoanguilla palau, its last common ancestor with any other living creature swam 200 million years ago. Not only is there nothing like it alive, there’s nothing like it in the fossil record. Protoanguilla means “first eel.”

“There hasn’t been anything comparable to this since the coelacanth was discovered,” said Smithsonian Institution ichthyologist Dave Johnson, referring to a fish thought to have gone extinct 70 million years ago and famously rediscovered in the 1930s.

“But coelacanths were known from fossils. In this case, there’s no representation in the fossil record of this form,” he said.

First spotted by Jiro Sakue of Palau’s Southern Marine Laboratory and described in an Aug. 16 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B paper, the 6-inch-long P. palau has certain characteristics, such as a fringed gill collar, unseen in any living member of the eel order.

Other features, such as its jaw structure and relatively small number of vertebrae, are found only in fossils of the earliest eels, which were thought to have split from other fishes about 100 million years ago.

Still other traits are unique to P. palau. Its gill rakers resemble those found in bony fishes.

From anatomy alone, P. palau thus appeared ancient, but this could have been a recent, coincidental development. (Hagfish, for example, were thought to represent an ancient link between invertebrates and vertebrates, but turned out to be relatively modern creatures that lost their jaws.)

Final proof of primitiveness would come from mitochondrial DNA, which accumulates mutations at a steady rate and is used by evolutionary biologists as a molecular clock. P. palau’s clock started 200 million years ago. In a computer-generated family tree of all eels, it’s the sole occupant of an entire branch.

“Eels known from fossils go back to the Cretaceous,” said Johnson. “P. palau takes that back 100 million years earlier.” At the time, life was finally flourishing after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. The age of dinosaurs hadn’t yet begun.

Many questions remain about P. palau. Its basic life history, the tricks that helped it survive so long — coelacanths, for example, have fantastically slow metabolisms adapted to low-nutrient environments — are unknown. Johnson and the other researchers have yet to see a baby.

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Anchiornis & Microraptor

As noted on here before, an increasing number of dinosaur species from China are known from multiple good specimens, but have yet to enter the literature. When there is a mountain of new species to describe, new material of well (and not so well) established taxa tends to fall to the bottom of the to-do list.
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It was then pleasing to see a new specimen each of Microraptor (above) and Anchiornis (well, the two were labelled as such) on display at the Dino Expo. Both species are apparently very well represented in collections but only when they start being described and catalogued and their identities confirmed can we start to work on major areas of their biology that are limited to taxa with large pools of specimens – sexual dimorphism, ontogeny, intraspecific variation. Still, at least I have some photos….

Source from : http://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/anchiornis-microraptor/

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Tianyulong

Although I have seen this specimen before (and indeed others) this is the first time it’s been ‘out’ and available. Like many things published in Nature and Science and similar journals, the specimens might be very interesting ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnd important, but the restrictions of space means you may only get a small photo of the material and a couple of close-ups: no lavish 10 colour plates or multiple views of important elements for you (though the supplementary data increasingly helps out).

Not that I can do much more here as the damned thing was quite some way from the glass and at an odd angle, but hey, at least it’s a couple of new images of this interesting and potentially profoundly important specimen.

Source from : http://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/tiayulong/

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Allosaurus fossil invent in NE Thailand

A dig in Thailand's Northeast has discovered fossils of different dinosaurs, along with them those of allosaurus, the largest sized carnivorous dinosaur group that have been invent in Thailand.

Dig at Ban Saphan Hin village in Muang district of Nakhon Ratchasima Province discovered allosaurus, iguanodon, and duckbilled dinosaur and pterosaurs fossils in corporation layers dating back 100 million years.

Allosaurus is a tardy Jurassic carnivorous dinosaur. It is related to but a bit smaller than the tyrannosaurus. However allosaurus used to position as tall as ten meters. Since what we have invented, some of its teeth are ten centimeters long.

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Huge Bird live along with Dinosaurs

A huge prehistoric bird, which might have resembled a very big ostrich, lived along with dinosaurs around 83 million years ago, according to new research. The detection confirms "that big birds were alive alongside Cretaceous non-avian dinosaurs," guide author Darren Naish said. "In truth, these big birds fit into the thought that the Cretaceous wasn't 'a non-avian dinosaurs-only theme park.' Sure, non-avian dinosaurs were significant and large in ecological terms, but there was smallest amount and some space for extra land animals."

All that's left of this large bird is its powerless lower jaw. The organization and characteristics of the jaw are connected with birds and not non-avian dinosaurs, the researchers consider. They end that the skull of the bird throughout its lifetime would have been regarding a foot long. If flightless, it must have stood close to 10 feet tall. If it flew, its wingspan is probable to have exceeded 13 feet. The big bird is now the subsequent known big avian from the dinosaur era. The initial to be recognized was Gargantuavis philoinos, which lived in southern France about 70 million years ago. It too may contain been flightless and ostrich-like.

"So we can now be actually sure that Mesozoic earthly birds weren't all thrush-sized or crow-sized animals," Naish said. "Huge size certainly evolved in these animals, and enormous forms were living in at least two separate regions. This fits into a larger, rising picture: Mesozoic birds were not wastefully varied, with plenty of be related between them and modern groups." At some stage in its day, Samrukia exist in a network that integrated armored dinosaurs, duckbilled dinosaurs, and tyrannosaurs -- along with other grasping dinos. Smaller birds are too known from this site, called the Bostobynskaya configuration. Sharks, turtles and salamanders starting the bird's time period contain also been establish in the region.

At current, the site is dried up and hot. It's dominated by semi-desert or wash. Back in the dinosaur period, it was additional of floodplain surroundings, with a level simple crisscrossed by big, approximately rivers. Fossils wood recommend forests were nearby. It leftovers unclear what the large bird hunted, but the researchers might not find any proof for clear specialization, such as enthusiasm to plant use or water prey. They consequently believe it was a generalist, per many latest birds today. The bird almost certainly also exhausted a lot of time organization or flying away from the various meat-eating dinosaurs from the area.

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Youngest Dinosaur Fossil originate in Montana: Huge evidence for death Theory

A dinosaur fossil supposed to be the youngest ever found was discovered by Yale scientists in Montana's Hell Creek formation, a study published in Biology Letters exposed. The detection of the fossil provided unprecedented maintain for the theory that dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge meteor or related cosmic body that struck the earth.

Subscribers to the challenging theory - that dinosaurs slowly became destroyed before the cosmic impact - have piercing to the absence of any non-avian dinosaur fossils hidden within 10 feet of the K-T boundary, a geological signature in the earth's outer layer that represents the metro’s supposed point of crash. "To all of our shock the border line was no more than 13 centimeters higher than this horn, and the meaning is this indicates that at least some dinosaurs were doing rather well in this environment at the time of the meteor impact," Tyler Lyson, the study's lead author, says CTV.ca. Avian dinosaurs are thought to have survived the cosmic occasion and evolved into modern-day birds.

The innovation does not completely rule out the option that dinosaurs were previously on their way to becoming destroyed - fossil proceedings specify that dinosaurs were in refuse prior to the cosmic event. Having found "one dinosaur in the gap doesn't essentially fake the idea that dinosaurs were slowly declining in numbers," Tyler Lyson told Live Science. "However, this locate indicates that at least some dinosaurs were burden fine right up to the K-T boundary." Even though the researchers have been incapable to decide the fossils exact age, they are confident it is the youngest non-avian dinosaur fossil originates thus far, and consider that it lived between "tens of thousands of years to just a few thousand years before the crash." The research group is ongoing to investigate for more fossils in that area.

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The Period of Dinosaurs until Today

There were several different kinds of dinosaurs and it occurred to me that they are all Carnivores (Meat-Eaters). Later on in a university geology class, I struggled to be familiar with words like “Mesozoic” and “paleontology” memorizing various theories about epochs, era’s and periods. But I wasn’t all that concerned in thoughtful the association of natural things. Reasonable, why did dinosaurs became extinct: Had this happened slowly as temperatures grew warmer? As mammals developed and eat their eggs? Or were they wiped away by something? A new finding in the fossil record provides physical confirmation that there was a meteor impact 65 million years ago.

That’s almost certainly why the Cretaceous Period ends where it does and the Paleocene Period (the rise of mammals) begins—this periohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifd immediately followed the asteroid crash that destroyed the dinosaurs and the Cretaceous world. In recent times scientists originate a fossil in the Hell Creek formation in Montana, someplace other Triceratops dinosaurs fossils have been originate just five inches less the Cretaceous–Tertiary layer, which is the geological layer that script the boundary commencing the Cretaceous Period to the Tertiary Period 65 million years ago—the time that the group extinction of dinosaurs is out-of-date. Investigation of mud samples helped scientists recognize the exact location of the boundary, based on a “relative great quantity of sure types of fossilized pollen and additional geological indicators other than is difficult to determine visually though in the field.”

Earlier, scientists had relied on a chart examination of the real rock formations in the field to decide the boundary’s location; Soil investigation provides for a additional accurate intelligence of where the boundary is really located. My childhood attraction doesn’t get much of an exercises living in the Holocene Epoch (11,700 years ago to today) of the Quaternary Period. In Collier County, the most excellent we can do with plant life is look at some cloud enclosed aerials dating from 1947. At some point, and now may be perfect, we require deciding what tomorrow must look like and put our money into creation it happen. After all, a reasonable number of folks living in Collier County these days were born before 1947 and they keep in mind how nice Florida was. But everyone can understand Collier County of the 1940s with a heavy trip on our interior roads.

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Bird like Dinosaur Fossil May tremble up the Avian Family Tree

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In the 150 years while its discovery in Germany; Archaeopteryx has balanced high on the avian family tree as the earliest and most ancient bird, somewhere close to the evolutionary instant when some dinosaurs gave increase to birds. But latest fossil finds shed doubt on this explanation: Archaeopteryx may be just a birdlike dinosaur relatively than a dinosaur like true bird. Chinese paleontologists reported in the up to date issue of the journal Nature that a before unknown chicken-size 155-million-year-old dinosaur with fine hair, named Xiaotingia zhengi, “challenges the centrality of Archaeopteryx in the evolution to birds.”

Like a lot of dinosaur’s fossil and other life from the delayed Jurassic period, Xiaotingia was found in Liaoning region, a happy hunting ground for paleontologists. The bones were embedded in shale, next to with the understandable imitation of feathers. Scientists who studied the example said it was not as outstanding in look as several of the 10 known Archaeopteryx remains, but fine enough it seems that to disagree with conventional wisdom about proto-birds. The innovation team and other scientists emphasized that the latest findings, if established by additional research, would not challenge the current assumption that modern birds descended from dinosaurs. The question now is, if not Archaeopteryx, which of a lot of feathered dinosaurs or dinosaur like birds being established is closest to the first bird? Additional assumptions about the early growth of birds, they said, would also require being re-evaluated.

Dr. Xu’s team completed that “the majority significant effect of our analysis” is that the anatomies of the Chinese sample and Archaeopteryx were extraordinarily similar; meaning that together belonged to the extraction of the meat-eating deinonychosaurs, not the plant-eating early birds. In small, Archaeopteryx most probably was not a family bird. The latest discovery of a tenth Archaeopteryx specimen “seriously improved our knowledge” of its similarity to the dinosaur collection and its differences from birds, the paleontologists said. “It may appear deviating to say that Archaeopteryx isn’t a bird, but this thought has surfaced occasionally because as far back as the 1940s,” Lawrence M. Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio University, wrote in a comments supplementary the magazine piece of writing. “Additionally, there has been increasing nervousness about the avian status of Archaeopteryx as, one by one, its ‘avian’ attributes (feathers, wishbone, and three-fingered hand) in progress showing up in non-avian dinosaurs.”

The researchers themselves, in the middle of the most important dinosaur specialists in China, recognized that their understanding was sure to be contentious. They accepted that some of their conclusions are “only weakly supported by the obtainable data.” At such an early period in the dinosaur-bird transition, distinctions surrounded by species were frequently slight, or “rather messy relationships,” as Dr. Witmer said. Scientists are predictable to take an additional, deeper look at lots of feathered fossil animals that have been exposed in China in the last 15 years. Numerous of these avian dinosaur species, as well as Epidexipteryx, Jeholornis and Sapeornis, may then obtain wing as the innovative early birds. And persistent fossil hunters are sure to turn up new species.

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Land of the Scary Dragon

Inside an air hangar in the middle of the countryside in China’s Shandong province, 600 kilometers southeast of Beijing, paleontologist Xu Xing is absently watching a tipsy, red-faced tourist. The man has taken off his shoes and plopped down for a photo in front of the fossilized femur of a gigantic hadrosaur—a duck-billed dinosaur that roamed the earth 99 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period. The bone is nestled in a pile of gold fabric and stands about 1.5 meters tall. A sign in Chinese encourages visitors to give it a poke. “Rub, rub a dinosaur bone,” says the ditty, evoking a common local belief that stroking dinosaur bones can bring good fortune.

Chinese paleontologists have handled a lot of fossils in recent years—the field is flush with new finds in Central Asia. Zhucheng, where Xu does fieldwork, is home to the country’s freshest and most spectacular quarry of skeletons. In a trench not far from the hangar, large fossilized bones are scattered across the surface of the sandstone rock, mixed up haphazardly in a way that suggests a mega-catastrophe happened here nearly 10 millennia ago.

The trove of fossils at Zhucheng is probably the largest single deposit of dinosaur bones in the world. And it’s just the latest in a string of spectacular discoveries by the 42-year-old Xu, who’s arguably helped uncover more important finds than any other dinosaur hunter on the planet. “I am quite certain that Xu Xing has described more new kinds of dinosaurs than anyone in the history of dinosaur paleontology,” says Peter Dodson, professor of paleontology at the University of Pennsylvania and coeditor of the book The Dinosauria. While Xu forgets precisely how many new species he’s discovered, he believes he’s at “around 30.” In the last 15 years, Xu has contributed to the discovery of feathered dromaeosaurs in Liaoning, theropods in Xinjiang, and the ostrichlike Sinornithomimus in Inner Mongolia—all of which are helping to change the way scientists around the world understand the life and evolution of dinosaurs.

“China is a very big country with an awful lot of rocks of just the right kind,” explains David Hone, a British paleontologist who spent three years working at Zhucheng. While North America is home to dinosaurs from the late Triassic (228 million to 199.6 million years ago), late Jurassic (161.1 million to 145.5 million years ago), and late Cretaceous periods (99.5 million to 65.5 million years ago), scientists were finding little in between. China, Hone says, is helping to fill in the gaps in the timeline of dinosaur development and in their geographical movements. Similarities between species in North Americahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif, Asia, and Europe can help scientists trace dinosaur migration across land masses that no longer exist. Discoveries in Liaoning and Xinjiang are also helping scientists unravel the evolution of modern-day birds, a lineage Xu believes begins with dinosaurs. One of Xu’s most recent discoveries, the chicken-size Xiaotingia zhengi, is giving scientists cause to rethink the classification of the Archaeopteryx, long considered the oldest-known bird. The Xiaotingia zhengi, Xu argues, provides evidence that both species were, in fact, feathered dinosaurs, not full-fledged birds.

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Birdlike Dinosaur Fossil May Shake Up the Avian Family Tree

In the 150 years since its discovery in Germany, Archaeophttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifteryx has perched high on the avian family tree as the earliest and most primitive bird, somewhere near the evolutionary moment when some dinosaurs gave rise to birds. But recent fossil finds cast doubt on this interpretation: Archaeopteryx may be only a birdlike dinosaur rather than a dinosaurlike true bird.

Chinese paleontologists reported in the current issue of the journal Nature that a previously unknown chicken-size 155-million-year-old dinosaur with feathers, named Xiaotingia zhengi, “challenges the centrality of Archaeopteryx in the transition to birds.”

Like so many fossil dinosaurs and other life from the late Jurassic period, Xiaotingia was found in Liaoning Province, a happy hunting ground for paleontologists. The skeleton was embedded in shale, along with the clear impressions of feathers. Scientists who studied the specimen said it was not as striking in appearance as several of the 10 known Archaeopteryx remains, but good enough apparently to contradict conventional wisdom about proto-birds.

The discovery team and other scientists emphasized that the new findings, if confirmed by additional research, would not undermine the prevailing theory that modern birds descended from dinosaurs. The question now is, if not Archaeopteryx, which of many feathered dinosaurs or dinosaurlike birds being found is closest to the first bird? Other assumptions about the early evolution of birds, they said, would also need to be re-evaluated.

Xing Xu and his colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing said that their examination of Xiaotingia, in comparison with more recognizably bird skeletons from the same period as well as the 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx, showed that the new fossils fell short of a place in the avian family. Several of its anatomical traits, like the long and robust forelimbs once thought to be diagnostic of birds, were actually common to a group of dinosaurs known as deinonychosaurs.

Dr. Xu’s team concluded that “the most important result of our analysis” is that the anatomies of the Chinese specimen and Archaeopteryx were remarkably similar, meaning that both belonged to the lineage of the meat-eating deinonychosaurs, not the plant-eating early birds. In short, Archaeopteryx presumably was not an ancestral bird. The recent discovery of a tenth Archaeopteryx specimen “greatly improved our knowledge” of its similarities to the dinosaur group and its differences from birds, the paleontologists said.

Several scientists who were not involved in the research said they were not especially surprised by the findings.

“It may seem heretical to say that Archaeopteryx isn’t a bird, but this idea has surfaced occasionally since as far back as the 1940s,” Lawrence M. Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio University, wrote in a commentary accompanying the journal article. “Moreover, there has been growing unease about the avian status of Archaeopteryx as, one by one, its ‘avian’ attributes (feathers, wishbone, three-fingered hand) started showing up in non-avian dinosaurs.”

Nor was this report likely to be the last word on the subject. The researchers themselves, among the leading dinosaur specialists in China, acknowledged that their interpretation was sure to be controversial. They conceded that some of their conclusions are “only weakly supported by the available data.” At such an early stage in the dinosaur-bird transition, distinctions among species were often subtle, or “rather messy affairs,” as Dr. Witmer said.

Scientists are expected to take another, deeper look at many feathered fossil animals that have been uncovered in China in the last 15 years. Several of these avian dinosaur species, including Epidexipteryx, Jeholornis and Sapeornis, may then take wing as the new early birds. And relentless fossil hunters are certain to turn up new species.

“This will be frustrating and exciting,” Dr. Witmer said in an interview, noting that — who knows? — the next discovery might tempt scientists to restore Archaeopteryx to its place in the proto-bird flock. “Some of these things may never be entirely conclusive,” he said. “It drives us nuts.”

Since “virtually all our notions about early avian evolution have previously been viewed through the lens of Archaeopteryx,” Dr. Witmer said, “the impact of losing Archaeopteryx from the avian clan is likely to rock the paleontological community for years to come.”

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The Footsteps of Dinosaurs

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Low Tide Reveals Rare Dinosaur Fossil

A team from the University of Alaska Museum of the North has succeeded in excavating the fossil of a rare, ancient marine reptile from rock that's usually covered by the tide.

Eugene Primaky, working for the USDA Forest Service Heritage Program out of Petersburg, spotted what he thought might be the bones of a fish or a branch while looking over an intertidal outcropping near Kake in Southeast Alaska in May. He gave it a kick. It didn't move.

Photos were sent to the museum's earth sciences curator, Patrick Druckenmiller, who quickly determined that it was the back end of a little-known sea-going reptile from the age of the dinosaurs called a thalattosaur, Greek for "sea lizard."

The fossil was found in a formation estimated to be 220 million years old. "Based on the age of the rocks and what I could see in the picture, I was 99 percent sure that's what it was," Druckenmiller said.

Druckenmiller and a colleague, Kevin May, traveled to the site in mid-June to collect the specimen. The site was exposed only during extreme low tides at certain times of year. The team faced a two-day window in which they had just four hours each day to remove the fossil. The next chance to do so wouldn't come until October.

Rock saws were used to hack into the layers surrounding the fossil. The workers managed to complete the excavation just five minutes before the site went underwater on the first day. But Druckenmiller spotted yet more bone penetrating the rock. A larger section was removed on the second day in hopes that it would contain the rest of the skeleton.

The two slabs, weighing 500 pounds, were shipped to Fairbanks. There, at the museum's fossil preparation lab at the museum, rock will be slowly chipped away to expose as much of the complete skeleton as still exists. The process will take several months.

Druckenmiller thinks that when the rock is finally removed it will reveal one of the best thalattosaur specimens ever found in North America and possibly anywhere else in the world. He hopes that the rest of the bones, including the skull, will be in the second chunk of rock and as well-preserved as the tail and hind bones first spotted by Primaky.

As it stands, the specimen is one of Alaska's most compete fossil vertebrates, according to a museum press release.

"This is the best preserved and the most articulated specimen of Triassic reptile I have been involved with," said Jim Baichtal, the Tongass National Forest geologist who sent the first photos to Fairbanks and participated in the fossil's extraction.

Inspecting the rest of the skeleton may reveal new information about reptiles of the era.

"It's reasonably complete and once we reveal more of the skeleton, we will be able to compare it to other thalattosaurs to see if it is a new species," said Druckenmiller. "We don't know what kind we have yet."

There are few available images of what a live one may have looked like, Druckenmiller said. But he compared it to an Endennosaurus, one of the 10 types of thalattosaurs so far identified.

An image at reptileevolution.com, a collaborative website created by paleontologists and museum personnel from around the world, shows the Endennosaurus as having a long eel-like tail, a long neck, a narrow, toothless, birdlike head and four short legs with clawed, possibly webbed, feet. The picture at the website of a skull of a Thalattosaurus -- the genus name for North American thalahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifttosaurs -- shows a more robust head and small teeth.

At the website, the Endennosaurus is depicted in a posture that calls to mind a sea otter on land. Druckenmiller likens it to "a marine iguana or a crocodilian," living a "mostly aquatic" life. However, it appears that such creatures would have had no trouble going ashore and moving about on solid ground, even if they appeared somewhat clumsy.

A big thalattosaur might have stretched out to nine feet. Druckenmiller suspects this dinosaur specimen will prove to be about half that size.



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Functional feet

It is of course inevitable that similar features undergoing similar evolutionary pressures will convergently acquire similar form. Here’s a nice example from the theropods. Above is the foot of Tyrannosaurus which is a pretty classic ‘running’ foot.

The metatarsals are compressed into a single main spar (which will add efficiency), and the toes are quite well spread (giving grip and stability). And below we have the foot of a moa. Despite the fact that there’s quite an evolutionary distance between the two, and of course that after the tyrannosaurs came long theropods had kinda become birds and been living in trees and flying for a good few million years before coming back down. But again we see similar adaptations, the metatarsals are now fused fully into a single unit, and the toes are rather well spread out.



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Suitable for ages 3 and up

Another photo from the IVPP outstation though this one was taken back in 2006 during my first trip to China. This box was tucked away in a storage room and was basically full of left over cast parts from various exhibitions and displays. I know Hollywood stores most of it’s props from films in case they want to be reused, but I doubt even Jurassic Park left bits like this behind.

I’m not even sure what’s in there, I think it’s mostly Sinraptor, but there appears to be an ornithopod foot in the lower left and one bone certainly looks like a pterosaur femur. It would certainly make for an interesting anatomy lesson – a jigsaw puzzle with no picture, and probably parts missing and others added incorrectly. Oh, and you need about 3 tons of steel to hold it up while you work out the details. Now, where did I put that welding mask?

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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.

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Strange New Dinosaur Discovered in Utah

A seven foot tall, two legged bird-like creature has been discovered in a remote area of southern Utah.

Meet Hagryphus giganteus, an odd but ominous dinosaur that certainly looks more like a bird than a dino.

Scott Sampson, Chief Curator, Utah Museum of Natural History: "This specimen in front of me is the only one in the world. This is the only specimen from hagryphus giganteus anywhere on the planet. So it's very rare and very special."

Special in many ways because the well preserved bones were found in our own backyard, in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Though a dedicated egg sitting, toothless dino with a beak, this animal was something you would not want to mess with.

Scott Sampson: "This particular animal was almost certainly a carnivore. To have claws like this generally suggests this is a meat eating animal."

UMNH_new dinosaur discoveryHagryphus Giganeteus lived 75 million years ago, very near the end of the dinosaur times we're most familiar with. If this was another part of a long and grand transition period, it would explain the oddity.

Scott Sampson: "We know birds are dinosaurs, direct descendants of dinosaurs. If you like eating chicken, you like eating dinosaurs. These particular animals, these overraptors, are closely related to birds; they're closely related to dinosaurs that led to the rise of birds."

For paleontologists, Grand Staircase is turning out to be a gold mine for dinosaur specimens and new dinos never discovered before."

Scott Sampson: "Grand Staircase represents the last major dinosaur bone yard in the 48 states that hasn't been explored yet."

Hagryphus is just one of many new dinos discovered so far in a five year collaborative project between Grand Staircase and the University of Utah.

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Dinosaur Coloration: Primary, Secondary or Pastel Colors?

The color of dinosaurs is not something that most of us ever think about.

Off the top of most heads, the ubiquitous gray above and below sharp and gleaming incisors has always seemed to fit the essence of ancient raptors. But now things are different, and for the first time in history, scientists can now determine the full body color patterns of dinosaurs. The results of this new study were published in the journal, Science.

If you think there is an echo in here, you are almost right. While there was some previous very recent research concerning the first scientifically verified dinosaur color scheme, the pigments first discovered, which were published in Nature, were contained to a few isolated dinosaur parts. In addition, according to the authors of that report “they had used less rigorous methods for assigning colors to the fossilized, filament-like proto-feathers found on some dinosaur specimens.”


According to Derek Briggs, a co-author of the new study, “the other team’s report is based on isolated samples from several different taxa, so they can’t paint an entire animal.”

Both studies are important because they raise questions and offer significant insights concerning the behavior of dinosaurs and the mystery of why feathers evolved in the first place. The 155-million-year-old is the subject of the newest study, which is amazing considering that Anchiornis huxleyi was totally unknown to modern science only a short time ago.

This creature resembles a chicken-sized woodpecker with black and white wings and a red crown. Color patterns were decoded by a scanning electron microscope, which focused on the pigments from fossil feathers, which were then compared to those from modern birds. The team behind the study was led by paleontologist, Li Quanguo of the Beijing Museum of Natural History and Jakob Vinther, a graduate student in molecular paleo-biology at Yale University.

“Anchiornis shows that when elongate feathers first appear, they are already distinctively spotted and striped. We now have patterns within individual feathers in dinosaurs long before we get some kind of aerial locomotion. The new find’s implications for the evolution of feathering and flight are striking,” states study co-author, Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas in Austin.

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Willo, dinosaur with a heart

Scientists Discover 66-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur with a Heart

Scientists at North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have discovered the world's first dinosaur specimen with a fossilized heart. They report the historic finding in the April 21 issue of the journal Science. The fossil is on display in the museum's new $71-million building, which opened April 7.

"Not only does this specimen have a heart, but computer-enhanced images of its chest strongly suggest it is a four-chambered, double-pump heart with a single systemic aorta, more like the heart of a mammal or bird than a reptile," says Dr. Dale Russell, a paleontologist at NC State University and a senior research curator at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences.

The finding suggests the dinosaur's circulatory system was more advanced than that of reptiles, and supports the hypothesis that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, Russell says. "This challenges some of our most fundamental theories about how and when dinosaurs developed," he says. Russell is director of the newly created Center for the Exploration of the Dinosaurian World, a joint project of the museum and the university.

The dinosaur, a 66-million-year-old Thescelosaurus (THESS-uh-loh-SAWR-us) about the size of a short-legged pony, was found in 1993 in northwest South Dakota. It was acquired by the museum in 1996 and is on permanent display in the museum's new "Prehistoric North Carolina" exhibit.

Scientists have nicknamed the 663-pound, 13-foot-long herbivore Willo, after the wife of the rancher on whose property it was found. Images of the fossil, a video, and further information is available on the Web at www.dinoheart.org, a free site maintained jointly by the university and museum.

"Willo's ventricles and aorta indicate it had completely separate pulmonary and body circulation systems, which suggests it had a metabolic rate higher than we generally see in living reptiles," explains Dr. Michael Stoskopf, professor of wildlife and aquatic medicine and environmental toxicology at NC State, and an expert on the comparative anatomy of mammals, reptiles and birds.

College of Veterinary Medicine Biomedical Imaging Resource FacilityWorking with Russell and Stoskopf, imaging specialists at NC State's College of Veterinary Medicine created enhanced 3-D composite images of Willo's thoracic cavity from a series of two-dimensional computerized tomography (CT) scans. These images confirmed that a grapefruit-sized reddish-brown clump visible in Willo's partially exposed chest was, indeed, a fossilized heart.

"When we looked at the two-dimensional images, there was something in the thoracic cavity that resembled a heart, but we couldn't tell for certain. The skeleton was compressed and not in precise anatomical order due to being buried for 66 million years in sandstone," says Paul Fisher, director of the vet school's Biomedical Imaging Resource Facility. "But once the computer software put all the 2-D images together into a 3-D model, it became very apparent that, yeah ? this was the real deal. You could see both ventricles and the aorta." Dr. Reese Barrick, an NC State paleobiologist, and graduate student William Straight conducted X-ray diffraction analyses that confirmed the presence of iron in Willo's heart but not in the sediments surrounding the heart or skeleton.

This corroborated Russell, Stoskopf and Fisher's findings that the fossilized concretion in Willo's chest was a heart. The research team's co-authors on the Science paper are Michael Hammer of Hammer & Hammer Paleotek of Jacksonville, Ore., and Dr. Andrew Kuzmitz of Ashland, Ore. Hammer and his son Jeff found Willo in the Hell Creek Formation near Buffalo, South Dakota, in 1993.

Kuzmitz, a family practitioner and amateur paleontologist, did the first CT scans on the fossil. Thescelosaurus means "marvelous lizard." Scientists have not yet conclusively identified which species of Thescelosaurus Willo is, but Russell and Hammer believe it is most likely T. neglectus. Neglectus translates as "neglected one" -- so named because though the first fossil was found in 1891, it was considered so unremarkable that it sat, unidentified and unstudied, in its packing crate at the Smithsonian Institution for 22 years.

It wasn't until 1913 that paleontologist Charles Gilmore examined the fossil and discovered it to be a previously undescribed type. "Thescelosaurus neglectus, the marvelous neglected lizard," Russell says. "Marvelous -- Yes. But I don't think this one is going to be neglected any more."

Remarkably well-preserved, Willo is the only Thescelosaurus ever found with a complete skull and with soft tissues usually lost to decay. Tendons are still connected to its spine, and fossilized cartilage remains attached to its ribs. Shadows and shapes revealed by the 3-D images suggest Willo may contain other fossilized organs as well, Russell notes.

Because of the dinosaur's scientific importance and fragile condition, the museum is displaying it in its original posture, still embedded in the sandstone in which it has rested for 66 million years. The right side of its skull, spinal column, ribs and sections of the tail are partially exposed. The left side and extremities were lost to erosion. "We got lucky. If it hadn't been discovered when it was, it could all have eroded within six months," Russell says. He speculates Willo's soft tissues were preserved by a process called saponification, in which soft tissues are converted into a soap-like substance when submerged in wet, oxygen-free environments, allowing them to petrify rather than decay. "This specimen was apparently buried in waterlogged sand," he says. "The cellular structure of the soft tissue was lost but its form was retained."

Thescelosaurus was an ornithischian, or "bird-hipped," dinosaur that lived at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 1 million years before the end of the dinosaur era. Native to North America, its range extended from Wyoming and the Dakotas northward into Alberta, Canada. Since using the 3-D software to reveal Willo's heart, Fisher has also used it to create 3-D images of the fossil's skull, and of remains from other specimens in the museum's collection.

It's the first time the software -- developed for medical imaging at the Mayo Clinic -- has been used on dinosaurs, he says, but likely not the last time. "This gives us a nondestructive way to look inside specimens that are still embedded, as two-thirds of Willo is, in stone," he says. "It's an amazing use of the technology."

The Willo research team will collaborate with scientists and educators from NC State, the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences and other institutions worldwide to conduct continuing research on dinosaurs and dinosaurian ecosystems through the newly formed Center for the Exploration of the Dinosaurian World.

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