Fossil Sheds
Light on Emergence of Mammals
T. rex
tissue shows they are related to chickens
Ancient Mammal May Show How
Hearing Developed
Carnegie
Museum of Natural History Shows Off Dinosaur Exhibit
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Gold can cause allergy, says
German scientist
Gold can cause allergy, says German scientist
- PakTribune
Europe's First Stegosaurus
Boosts Pangaea Theory
FOXNews.com
- Europe's First Stegosaurus
Boosts Pangaea Theory
- Science News | Current
Articles
Scientists unearth treasure
trove of Australian fossils
ContraCostaTimes.com
| 01/28/2007 | Scientists
unearth treasure trove of Australian fossils
8 Year Old Finds Fossils
WRCB
TV - Channel 3 -
Chattanooga, Tennessee
Mastodon's Smile Found
The Academy of Natural
Sciences' sells donated mineral stashes worth millions. Mineral
historians upset.
Philadelphia Inquirer | 10/22/2006 | Museum
will sell a dusty legacy
Between rocks and a hard place: Institutions
consider value vs. maintenance of precious gem collections
Humans and
Neanderthals interbred?
Humans and Neanderthals interbred | COSMOS
magazine
Ancestor
of Modern Tree Holds Record of Ancient Climate Change
Ancestor of Modern Trees Preserves Record of
Ancient Climate Change
Giant Camel Fossils Discovered
in Syria
(Click
here)
Bits of News - Ancient Dromedary Bones found
in Syria
Montana Geology School Detected Korean Nuclear Test
(Click here)
Great Falls Tribune -
www.greatfallstribune.com - Great Falls, MT
Oldest Embryo Fossils
Provide Picture of Early Animal Life
(Click here)
Science & Technology at
Scientific American.com
Crystal-filled cave found in
Sequoia Park
From
Press-Telegram wire reports
SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK - A just-unearthed cave formed more than 1
million years ago could yield new insight into the geological
history of the American West, according to scientists, who called
the discovery a major find.
Four amateur cave explorers uncovered the vast caverns,
stretching more than 1,000 feet into a remote mountainside in
Sequoia National Park, in August.
Visitors to the cave, dubbed Ursa Minor, described seeing
millions of crystals that shimmered like diamonds lodged in its
walls. Translucent mineral curtains hung from the ceiling, and a
lake possibly 20 feet deep filled one of the cave's five known
rooms.
Passages leading into darkness suggested there was still much
more to see.
Geologists and cave explorers said although caves are discovered
often, it is rare to find one so grand.
"There are things in this cave that could really open windows
into our knowledge of geologic history and the formation of caves
throughout the West," said Joel Despain, the park's cave manager.
"We're just beginning to understand the scientific ramifications of
Park officials would not pinpoint the location, saying only that
it is in the Kaweah River
watershed and will probably never be open to the public.
Scientists report dinosaur find near Salt Lake City
(Associated Press) SALT LAKE CITY - The remains of two dinosaurs
believed to be millions of years old were discovered in southern
Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
They have been covered in plaster jackets
and will be flown out of the remote area to the Utah Museum of
Natural History in Salt Lake City.
"It's been a dream summer for
paleontologists," Alan Titus, paleontologist at the 1.9 million-acre
monument, told The Salt Lake Tribune.
A 6-foot-long skull found Aug. 21 appears
to have characteristics of the ceratoid family. Researchers also
found the full skeleton of a ceratop-like dinosaur.
Scott Richardson, who found the skull, had
finished a 12-week internship and was visiting the paleontologist
camp before departing for the summer.
"I'd only gone about 200 yards away and
found a few pieces of bone sticking above the ground," Richardson
said from Flagstaff, Ariz.
Dinosaur cleared of
cannibalism
Fossil hunters have
unearthed what they believe to be the oldest example of defamation
of character amid a collection of bones dating back 210 million
years. The victim of the slur is the earliest well-known dinosaur,
the slender biped Coelophysis bauri, which gained notoriety in the
1950s as a cannibal content to feed even on its own young.
The dinosaur's dietary
behaviour emerged when paleontologists working in Ghost Ranch, New
Mexico, uncovered an enormous bonebed containing the skeletons
of hundreds of Coelophysis. Some appeared to have remnants of
their own kind in their stomach regions.
The tale has become one
of the most widely covered from prehistory and has been
perpetuated in children's books and museum exhibitions. At the
Natural History Museum in London, the Dino Jaws display shows a
Coelophysis tucking into a juvenile shortly after it has clambered
from an egg.
But in research published
yesterday, paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York claim the Coelophysis has been badly wronged.
They re-examined the
fossils found in New Mexico and concluded that although
Coelophysis was a meat eater, there was no evidence it was a
cannibal after all.
Two skeletons in
particular cleared the Coelophysis' name. One, a near complete
adult lying on its left side, was previously believed to have a
leg bone from its own species in its stomach. But the latest study
in Biology Letters shows the size of the leg and the positioning
of the adult makes it almost certain the adult merely died on top
of the limb rather than ingested it.
A second adult skeleton
added further evidence of Coelophysis' good character. Bones
confirmed to be inside the dinosaur's stomach were analyzed and
found to be from an entirely different species, with bone details
indistinguishable from those of early crocodilians.
"Coelophysis is held up
as the foremost example of cannibalistic behaviour in dinosaurs,
but our work suggests that isn't true," said Sterling Nesbitt who
led the study.
Because there is little
other evidence that dinosaurs engaged in cannibalism, the
researchers conclude it may have been extremely rare or
non-existent.
The discovery will not
only require a more sympathetic update of the dinosaur's behaviour
in textbooks. It is causing ripples through the world of museums.
"We've got a Coelophysis eating one of its own at our museum, so
we'll be looking at changing that pretty soon," said Mr Nesbitt.
Source: China Daily
Argentina
may get stolen fossils back
By A.J. FLICK
Tucson
Citizen
Three rare dinosaur
eggs and 4 tons of other fossils soon may be headed back to their
homeland in Argentina. The U.S. Attorney's Office on Monday took the
first formal step to repatriate the stolen fossils, which were
seized in February from dealer Jose Lopez of Argentina-based Rhodo
Co. during the Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase. Assistant U.S.
Attorney Reese Bostwick and Richard B. Jones, Lopez's attorney,
reached an agreement to return the fossils.
Argentina enacted a
law in 2003 forbidding the sale of its fossils.
While the country
may soon have its fossils back, valuable information was stolen with
the treasures, according to Interpol archaeologist Tammy R. Hilburn.
Hilburn, who examined photographs of the fossils for federal
officials, noted that one dinosaur egg suffered much damage when it
was crudely - and likely, hurriedly - cut out of the earth.
"If a scientist or
even reasonably seasoned amateur had excavated the item, then this
damage would have been less likely," she wrote.
Scientists also
gain much knowledge from the area surrounding fossils, which also is
absent in this case, she said. "The items with which it lay for
millennia would have revealed a great amount of information, but
that information is now lost forever," Hilburn wrote. "If it can be
determined through investigation where these items were extracted,
then more information related to the scientific record can be
recovered - a rare occurrence."
The fossils were
examined by experts and determined to have come from Argentina,
according to Special Agent Jolanta B. Armstrong of the Department of
Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Armstrong
and another agent posed as buyers at Lopez's gem show displays after
Interpol relayed a tip that Argentina fossils were being sold there.
After the fossils
were seized Feb. 10, Lopez told agents he got them through a barter
with another dealer, Hans Koser. On April 4, ICE agents and ASU
paleontologists sorted through a Nogales warehouse and found barrels
and boxes of crab fossils, each of which was wrapped in Argentine
newspapers. In all, the U.S. government seized the three sauropod
eggs and 8,177 pounds of other fossils. No criminal charges have
been filed, said Wyn Hornbuckle, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's
Office. Jones, Lopez and Koser could not be reached for comment.
Reuters
Asia's
largest dinosaur found in China
Beijing - Chinese paleontologists said Tuesday they had found the
remains of the largest dinosaur ever to be unearthed in Asia,
measuring an estimated 35m.
The dinosaur fossil is located in Changji Prefecture, part of
northwest China's Xinjiang region, Xu Xing, a researcher at the
Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, told AFP.
"We have so far only excavated the neck of the dinosaur, but
extrapolating from it, we can determine it to be 35m long," Xu said.
China has emerged as a treasure trove of dinosaur fossils,
especially the northern desert regions, where the absence of
vegetation makes them easier to find. - Sapa-AFP
Reuters
By Julio Villaverde
Rio de Janeiro - Brazilian paleontologists have discovered a new
giant dinosaur species based on fossilised fragments of the
herbivorous reptile that lived 80 million years ago.
The Maxakalisaurus topai, of the Titanosauria group, was 13m long
and weighed about nine tons.
It had a large body, long tail and neck with a relatively small
head. Some of the bones found had the marks of teeth on them, which
led scientists to believe that the specimen was devoured by
carnivorous dinosaurs after its death.
The fossils date back to the Late Cretaceous period. They were found
during excavations between 1998 and 2002 next to a highway in a
place called Serra da Boa Vista in central-southern Minas Gerais
state. It then took some time for the scientists to categorise the
species and reconstruct the skeleton.
The name of the species, Maxakalisaurus topai, derives from an
Indian tribe, Maxakali, which lives in the area. Topa is a divinity
that the tribe worships. It is a custom in Brazil to give native
Indian names to palaeontological finds.
The find is extremely important as Maxakalisaurus topai is closely
related to a highly evolved group of dinosaurs, called the
Saltasaurinae, researcher Alexander Kellner said on Monday after
presenting a reconstructed skeleton of the reptile in the National
Museum in Rio de Janeiro.
The Saltasaurinae lived 70 million years ago and the fossils have
only been found in Argentina.
"Among its specific traits are some peculiarities that we found in
the vertebrae, especially a protuberant sacral vertebra. It also has
teeth with carinae (ridges), which we think served to better process
the food," Kellner said.
Dinosaurs from the Titanosauria group were the main herbivorous
dinosaurs of the ancient super-continent known as Gondwana, which
grouped Australia, India, Africa, South America and Antarctica
200-million years ago.
Some scientists believe a connection still existed between what is
now South America, Antarctica, India and possibly Australia until
about 70 million years ago.
Vast
Majority of Dinosaurs Still to Be Found, Scientists Say
Sean Markey
for National Geographic
Dinosaur fans still have a lot to look forward
to.
According to a new estimate of dinosaur diversity, the 21st
century will bring an avalanche of new discoveries.
Click
here for the story from the
National Geographic
"FOSSIL FIND LEADS TO
DISCOVERY OF UNKNOWN DINOSAUR"
The Children's Museum of
Indianapolis on Monday announced the discovery of a fossil in South
Dakota that belongs to a never before seen species of dinosaur. The
skull fossil belonged to a member of the pachycephalosaur family
that was a horse-sized plant eater and had spikes on a bony flat
head. According to the Children's Museum, the pachycephalosaur
family is marked by dinosaurs with dragon-like heads covered with
horns, knobs and bumps. The fossil was donated to the museum by
three amateur fossil hunters who found it in 2003 in central South
Dakota, and it will become part of its dinosaur exhibit.
"Other
Planets in Galaxy May Have Layer of Diamonds"
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some
planets in our galaxy could harbor an unexpected treasure: a thick
layer of diamonds hiding under the surface, astronomers reported on
Monday.
No diamond planet exists
in our solar system, but some planets orbiting other stars in the
Milky Way might have enough carbon to produce a diamond layer,
Princeton University astronomer Marc Kuchner said in a telephone
news conference.
That kind of planet
would have to develop differently from Earth, Mars and Venus,
so-called silicate planets made up mostly of silicon-oxygen
compounds.
Carbon planets might
form more like some meteorites than like Earth, which is believed to
have condensed from a disk of gas orbiting the sun.
In gas with extra carbon
or too little oxygen, carbon compounds like carbides and graphite
could form instead of silicates, Kuchner said at a conference on
extrasolar planets in Aspen, Colorado.
Any condensed graphite
would change into diamond under the high pressures inside carbon
planets, potentially forming diamond layers inside the planets many
miles thick.
Carbon planets would be
made mostly of carbides, although they might have iron cores and
atmospheres. Carbides are a kind of ceramic used to line the
cylinders of motorcycle engines among other things, Kuchner said.
Planets orbiting the
pulsar PSR 1257+12 may be carbon planets, possibly forming from the
disruption of a star that produced carbon as it aged, he said.
Other good candidates
for carbon planets might be those located near the galaxy's center,
where stars have more carbon than the sun. In fact, the galaxy as a
whole is becoming richer in carbon as it gets older, raising the
possibility all planets in the future may be carbon planets, Kuchner
said.
Mars
Rover Discovers Meteorite
NASA's Opportunity rover discovered something scientists didn't
expect it to find -- a meteorite on Mars. Scientists say while the
meteorite's origin is of interest, the idea of if there are other
meteorites in the area is more intriguing. If there are other
meteorites, and if the Martian sand smoothed them out, scientists
will be able to determine the erosion rate of the planet.
Rover mission scientist Steve Squyres told AP,
"On a mission of exploration, some things you're going to find
because you went looking for them, you planned for 'em and you did
your job right, and sometimes you're just going to get lucky. And
this one was just luck."
The Spirit and Opportunity rovers are part
of an $820 million mission aimed at examining the dry rocks and
soil on Mars for evidence that life could exist on the planet.
Opportunity landed January 24, 2004, on the Meridiani plains,
halfway around the planet from where its twin, Spirit, set down in
the Gusev Crater region on January 3, 2004.
"Petrified Wood Made In Laboratory"
YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) — Researchers at a national
science laboratory in south-central Washington have found a way to
achieve in days what takes Mother Nature millions of years —
converting wood to mineral.
The
ability to make petrified wood could hold promise for separating
industrial chemicals, filtering pollutants and soaking up
contamination, said Yongsoon Shin, research scientist at the Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory.
"Wood petrified is very hard and very porous material — it's not
really a wood component," Shin said Monday in a telephone interview.
As a mineral product, petrified wood has a large, hard surface and a
porous inside, making it ideal to soak up or separate substances or
act as a catalyst in other processes, he said.
Natural petrified wood occurs when trees are buried without oxygen,
then leach their wood components and soak up the soil's minerals.
For instance, at the Ginkgo Petrified Forest, a state park on the
west shore of the Columbia River in central Washington, trees were
believed to have been buried without oxygen beneath molten lava
millions of years ago.
To
create petrified wood, the researchers bought pine and poplar boards
at a lumber yard. They gave a half-inch cube of wood an acid bath,
then soaked it in a silica solution for days. The wood was
air-dried, cooked in an argon-filled furnace at temperatures as high
as 1,400 degrees and cooled in argon to room temperature.
The
colorless, odorless element argon is sometimes used as a protective
atmosphere for growing certain crystals.
The
result was a new silicon carbide that exactly replicates petrified
wood, Shin said.
The
results of the research were published in the latest edition of the
journal Advanced Materials.
The
researchers now are focused on trying to create narrow, ordered
pores in the silicon carbide to make the material even more porous,
which would make it even more useful in the industrial world, Shin
said.
"If
pores are too big or too small, it's not too useful," he said.
The
Richland lab is a research center operated by the U.S. Department of
Energy. It works on complex problems in energy, national security,
the environment and life sciences. The laboratory employees nearly
4,000 people and has a $650 million annual budget.
"Both Coasts of Americas
Seen Vulnerable to Tsunamis"
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
Both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the Americas are vulnerable
to tsunamis like the one that devastated Indian Ocean shorelines in
December and experts said on Tuesday they are scrambling to try to
get warning system in place before politicians lose interest.
"It's not if but when,"
said Laura Kong, director of the International Tsunami Information
Center run by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization.
She and other experts
want to use momentum from the Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami that
killed or left missing nearly 300,000 people to press for a global
warning system.
Experts have been trying
since a tsunami hit Chile's coast in 1960, but the disasters occur
so infrequently that it is difficult to keep the attention of
governments, she said.
The magnitude 9
earthquake off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra lifted
the sea floor 15 feet and displaced trillions of gallons of water,
causing the monster wave that swamped coastlines as far away as
Somalia.
The quake registered
right away, but it took several hours for instruments to show just
how large it was, Kong told a news conference arranged by the
Smithsonian Institution's magazine.
"What they didn't have
information on was whether a real tsunami had been generated," she
said. There were no underwater monitoring stations to measure the
displacement of water.
There are such stations
in the Pacific, where 85 percent of tsunamis occur, but not in other
vulnerable areas.
George Maul, a professor
of Oceanography at the Florida Institute of Technology, has been
trying to organize a tsunami warning system for the Atlantic and
Caribbean for years.
THREATS FROM VOLCANOES
There are several active
Caribbean volcanoes that could set off an inundating wave, he said.
There are also active zones in the Canary Islands off the coast of
Africa and off the coasts of Spain and Portugal that could generate
tsunamis.
The best protection, he
said, is a program to inform people about the warning signs of a
tsunami so they can flee.
In January U.S.
officials said they would spend $37.5 million over two years to set
up new deep-sea warning systems aimed at giving near-total coverage
for the U.S. coastline.
"We estimate that within
100 km (50 miles) of the coastline globally, there will be 600
million more people by 2025," Maul said.
The best system may be
based on old air-alert sirens, said Timothy Walsh of the Washington
Department of Natural Resources. He foresees a system of
loudspeakers on poles hooked directly into the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration's weather warning system.
Many communities will
have to be evacuated within half an hour or less of a big quake in
the Northwest's Cascadia subduction zone, but roads could be
damaged.
"The evacuation will
have to be made by foot and right away," said Walsh.
It might also be
possible to build earthquake- and tsunami-proof buildings, tall
enough to survive inundation and strong enough to survive the
battering they would take.
"Dinosaur News"
By Kevin Dermody
Almost 30 skulls of
Tyrannosaurus rex exist in the world. Most are incomplete or
distorted. One exception is a skull named “Samson” that was dug up
on a South Dakota ranch in 1992. It was acquired by international
businessman Graham Lacey, who selected the Carnegie Museum to remove
the dirt and matrix from it. Chris Beard, the Carnegie’s curator of
paleontology, says this skull is the most complete and undistorted
one known. One of the surprises such a skull is already showing is
that T. rex’s eye sockets were more on the side of its head
rather than right on the front of its face, indicating its vision
was more peripheral than stereoscopic. This might indicate T.
rex was more of a scavenger than an active hunter, but most
other theropods that were definite hunters had peripheral vision,
too.
It will take two years to
clean up “Samson.” After that, a cast will be made of the skull to
be included in the Carnegie’s “Dinosaurs in Their World” project,
while the skull itself will be reunited with its skeleton that was
also dug up. The skeleton is being prepared elsewhere.
A theropod dinosaur named
Rugops primus (first wrinkle-face) was discovered in Niger in
West Africa. It was 30 feet long with a skull covered with grooves
and a short, rounded snout. It was a carnivore, but its jaws were
not built for hunting, so it might have been a scavenger. What is
interesting about Rugops is that it belonged to a group of
theropods called abeliosaurs, and lived 95 million years ago.
Previously, abeliosaurs had been found in Madagascar, South America,
and India, but not mainland Africa. Al of these landmasses once
formed the super continent of Gondwana. It was thought Africa broke
away from Gondwana 120 million years ago. But Rugops shows
that Africa was still connected much later than that.
